Listening In (27 page)

PRESIDENT KENNEDY WITH DAUGHTER CAROLINE IN THE OVAL OFFICE (PHOTOGRAPH BY JACQUELINE KENNEDY)

CAROLINE:
Daddy?

JFK:
Oh, excuse me. I’ll see you later, Caroline. I’ll see you later.

CAROLINE:
Know what? [I won’t let you do much?] [laughter]

JFK:
OK.

ARTHUR LUNDAHL:
¹
This is a result of the photography taken Sunday, sir. There’s a medium-range ballistic missile launch site and two new military encampments on the southern edge of Sierra del Rosario, in west-central Cuba.

JFK:
Where would that be?

LUNDAHL:
West-central, sir.

MARSHALL CARTER:
²
That’s south of Havana. I think [unclear] represents your three dots we’re talking about. Have you got the …?

[UNIDENTIFIED]:
Yes, sir.

LUNDAHL:
The President would like to see those. One site, on one of the encampments contains a total of at least fourteen canvas-covered missile trailers measuring sixty-seven feet in length, nine feet in width. The overall length of the trailers plus the tow bars is approximately eighty feet. The other encampment contains vehicles and tents, but with no missile trailers.

CARTER:
These are the launchers here. These are missile bases up the [unclear]. In this instance the missile trailer is backing up to the launch point. The launch point of this particular vehicle is here. The missile [unclear] feet long.

LUNDAHL:
The site that you have there contains at least eight canvas-covered missile trailers. Four deployed probably missile erector-launchers. These are unvetted. The probable launch positions as indicated are approximately 850 feet, 700 feet, 450 feet, for a total distance of about 2000 feet. In area two, there are at least six canvas-covered missile trailers, about seventy-five vehicles, about 18 tents. And in area number three we have thirty-five vehicles, fifteen large tents, eight small tents, seven buildings, and one building under construction. The critical one—do you see what I mean?—is this one.

CARTER:
There is, right there, see? The missile trailer is backing up to it at the moment. It’s got to be. And the missile trailer is here. Seven more have been enlarged here. Those canvas-covered objects on the trailers were sixty-seven feet long, and there’s a small billet between the two of them. The gate on that side of the particular trailer [unclear]. That looks like the most advanced one. Then the other area is about five miles away. There are no launcher-erectors over there, just missiles.

JFK:
How far advanced is this?

LUNDAHL:
Sir, we’ve never seen this kind of an installation before.

JFK:
Not even in the Soviet Union?

LUNDHAHL:
No, sir. … But from May of ’60 we have never had any U-2 coverage of the Soviet Union. So we do not know what kind of a practice they would use in connection with …

JFK:
How do you know this is a medium-range ballistic missile?

LUNDAHL:
The length, sir.

JFK:
The what? The length?

LUNDAHL:
The length of it, yes.

JFK:
The length of the missile? Which part? I mean, which …

LUNDAHL:
The missile is …

JFK:
Which one is that?

LUNDAHL:
This will show it, sir.

JFK:
That?

LUNDAHL:
Yes. Mr. Graybeal, our missile man, has some pictures of the equivalent Soviet equipment that has been dragged through the streets of Moscow. That can give you some feel for it, sir.

SIDNEY GRAYBEAL:
³
There are two missiles involved. One of them is our SS-3, which is 630-mile and on up to 700. It’s sixty-eight feet long. These missiles measure out to be sixty-seven feet long. The other missile, the 1100 one, is seventy-three feet long. The question we have in the photography is the nose itself. If the nose cone is not on that missile and it measures sixty-seven feet—the nose cone would be four to five feet longer, sir—and with this extra length we could have a missile that would have a range of 1100 miles, sir. The missile that was drawn through the Moscow parade was, from the pictures, but …

JFK:
Is this ready to be fired?

GRAYBEAL:
No, sir.

JFK:
How long have we got? We can’t tell, can we, how long before it can be fired?

GRAYBEAL:
No, sir. That depends on how ready the GSC
⁴
… how …

JFK:
But what does it have to be fired from?

AERIAL PHOTOGRAPH OF SOVIET MISSILE INSTALLATIONS IN CUBA, OCTOBER 14, 1962

GRAYBEAL:
It would have to be fired from a stable, hard surface. This could be packed dirt. It could be concrete, or asphalt. The surface has to be hard. Then you put a flame-deflector plate on there to direct the missile.

ROBERT MCNAMARA:
Would you care to comment on the position of nuclear warheads? This is in relation to the question from the President—when can those be fired?

GRAYBEAL:
Sir, we’ve looked very hard. We can find nothing that would spell nuclear warhead in terms of any isolated area of unique security in this particular area. The mating of the nuclear warhead to the missile from some of the other short-range missiles there would take about a couple of hours to do this.

MCNAMARA:
This is not fenced, I believe, at the moment?

LUNDAHL:
Not yet, sir.

MCNAMARA:
This is important, as it relates to whether these, today, are ready to fire, Mr. President. It seems almost impossible to me that they would be ready to fire with nuclear warheads on the site without even a fence around it. It may not take long to place them there, to erect a fence. But at least at the moment there is some reason to believe the warheads aren’t present and hence they are not ready to fire.

GRAYBEAL:
Yes, sir. We do not believe they are ready to fire.

MAXWELL TAYLOR:
⁵
However, there is no feeling that they can’t fire from this kind of field position very quickly, isn’t that true? It’s not a question of waiting for extensive concrete pads and that sort of thing.

GRAYBEAL:
The unknown factor here, sir, is the degree to which the equipment has been checked out after it’s been shipped from the Soviet Union here. It’s the readiness of the equipment. If the equipment is checked out, the site has to be accurately surveyed, the position has to be known. Once this is known, then you’re talking a matter of hours.

PRIVATE DICTATION, OCTOBER 18, 1962

On only a handful of occasions, President Kennedy used his tape-recording equipment as a device to record his own observations, presumably for his future use in writing a memoir. October 18 had obviously been a day of great strain, and as it ended, he recorded his memory of the day, and how members of his staff had lined up on the great questions that were arrayed before them.

JFK:
Secretary McNamara, Assistant Secretary Gilpatric, General Taylor, the attorney general, George Ball, Alexis Johnson, Ed Martin, McGeorge Bundy, Ted Sorensen.
⁶
During the course of the day the opinions had obviously switched from the advantages of a first strike on the missile sites and on Cuban aviation, to a blockade. Dean Acheson,
⁷
with whom I talked this afternoon, stated while he was uncertain about any of the courses, favored the first strike as being less likely to produce, being most likely to achieve our result and less likely to cause an extreme Soviet reaction, that strike to take place just against the missile sites. When I saw Robert Lovett
⁸
later after talking to Gromyko, he was not convinced that any action was desirable. He felt that the missile … the first strike would be very destructive to our alliances. The Soviets would inevitably bring about a reprisal, that we would be blamed for it and that particularly if the reprisal were to seize Berlin, and we would be regarded as having seized, brought about the loss of Berlin with inadequate provocation, they having lived with these intermediate range ballistic missiles for years. Bundy continued to argue against any action on the grounds that there would be inevitably a Soviet reprisal against Berlin and this would divide our alliance and that we would bear that responsibility. He felt it would be better off to merely take note of existence of these missiles and to wait until the crunch comes from Berlin, and not play what he thought might be the Soviet game. Everyone else felt that for us to fail to respond would throw into question our willingness to respond over Berlin, would divide our allies and our country, and we would be faced with a crunch over Berlin in two or three months, and that by that time the Soviets would have a large missile arsenal in the western hemisphere which would weaken our whole position in the hemisphere and cause us, and face us with the same problem we are going to have in Berlin anyway. The consensus was that we should go ahead with the blockade beginning on Sunday night. Originally we should begin by blockading Soviet—against the shipment of additional offensive capacity, that we could tighten the blockade as the situation requires. I was most anxious that we not have to announce the state of war existing, because it would obviously be bad to have the word go out that we were having a war rather than a limited blockade for a limited purpose. It was determined that I should go ahead with my speeches so that we don’t take the cover off this and come back Saturday night.

MEETING WITH JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF, OCTOBER 19, 1962