Listening In (33 page)

JFK:
Good, fine, Prime Minister, and I’ll be in touch with you very shortly. Thank you and good night.

MACMILLAN:
Good night.

MEETING IN CABINET ROOM, OCTOBER 27, 1962

On October 27, President Kennedy and his team were weighing different offers from Khrushchev, and the complicated separate issue of dismantling aging Jupiter missiles in Turkey.

RFK:
You made an offer, up there now, and you also ask U Thant to find an answer to this. Now if U Thant should come back and say, number one, that they are going to continue the work on the bases, in which case, I suppose we have to move in some way. Or they are going to say that they are going to discontinue the work on the bases. If they say they are going to discontinue the work on the bases, they can either accept our proposal, or they can reject the proposal and say we still want Turkey for Cuba.

If they reject the proposal and say they want Turkey for Cuba, but they are going to discontinue the work on the bases, I would think, would be the time to bring NATO in and say, “This is the proposal, do you want to consider it?” We haven’t lost anything, and they have discontinued the work on the bases. If they say they are going to continue the work on the bases, I think then we’ve got to decide whether, if they have said by tomorrow morning that they are going to continue the work on the bases whether we are going to have a military strike.

I think if you have a meeting of NATO tomorrow morning, I don’t see that that is going to, I think it’s going to shoot this other possibility which U Thant has suggested, of going forward with this letter, and see if we can trade the non-invasion of Cuba for this, and I think we are keeping the pressure on. We don’t look like we’re weakening on the whole Turkey complex. I mean, I don’t see that you are losing anything by not having the meeting tomorrow morning, except the fact, I admit you are risking something, because some of the allies are going to say that you’re out of your mind.

MCGEORGE BUNDY:
I would prefer to let Finletter
²⁵
find out for a day what people think.

JFK:
It’s going to be … you see, they haven’t had the alternatives presented to them. They’ll say, “Well, God, we don’t want to trade them off!” They don’t realize that in two or three days, we may have a military strike which would bring perhaps the seizure of Berlin or a strike on Turkey. And then they’ll say, “My God, we should have taken it!”

CABINET MEETING, OCTOBER 18, 1962

Cabinet meeting attendees included:
Clarence Douglas Dillon; Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy; Administrator for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) James Webb; Administrator for the Housing and Home Finance Association (HHFA) Robert Weaver; Postmaster General James Edward Day; Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara; Secretary of Labor William Willard Wirtz; Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) Anthony Celebrezze; Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) Glenn Seaborg; Special Counsel to the President Theodore C. Sorensen; and Special Assistant to the President Jerome Wiesner.

CONVERSATION WITH SECRETARY OF DEFENSE ROBERT MCNAMARA, OCTOBER 27, 1962

Even at this late date in the crisis, as pressure for a peaceful solution was mounting on both leaders, there were moments of grave danger. In this conversation, JFK reiterates his desire to call up reserves.

JFK:
Let me say, I think we ought to wait till tomorrow, to see whether we get any answers if U Thant goes down there. We’re rapidly approaching a real … I don’t think that firing back at a twenty-millimeter [gun] coming off the ground is good. I think we ought to figure that Monday, if tomorrow they fire at us and we don’t have any answers from the Russians. Then Monday, it seems to me, we can, ought to, maybe, consider making a statement tomorrow about the firing and regarding [the fact that] we’ll take action now any place in Cuba, on those three areas we can fire. And then go in and take all of the SAM sites out. I’d rather take … I don’t think that it does any good to take it out, to try to fire at a twenty-millimeter on the ground. You just hazard our planes, and the people on the ground have the advantage.

On the other hand, I don’t want, I don’t think we do any good to begin to sort of half do it. I think we ought to keep tomorrow clean, do the best we can with the surveillance. If they still fire and haven’t got a satisfactory answer back from the Russians, I think we ought to put a statement out tomorrow that we are fired upon. We are therefore considering the island of Cuba as an open territory, and then take out all these SAM sites.

Otherwise, what we’re going to do is find this buildup of the protection for the SAM sites low, with guns to fire at low-flying planes, and the SAM sites high, missiles for high-flying aircraft, and we’ll find ourselves without … Our reply will be so limited that we’ll find ourselves with all the disadvantages.

I think we ought to, tomorrow, let’s get U Thant our messages. If they fire on us, tell them we’ll take them all out. And then if we don’t get some satisfaction from the Russians or U Thant or Cuba tomorrow night, figure that Monday we’re going to do something about the SAM sites. What do you think?

ROBERT MCNAMARA:
I would say only that we ought to keep some type of pressure on tonight and tomorrow night that indicates we’re firm. If we call off these air strikes tonight, I think that settles …

UNIDENTIFIED:
I have a paper here, Mr. President, that we haven’t discussed yet.

MCNAMARA:
Let me say first, I believe we should issue an order tonight calling up the twenty-four air reserve squadrons, roughly three hundred troop-carrier transports, which are required for an invasion. And this would both be a preparatory move, and also a strong indication of what lies ahead.

JFK:
I think we ought to do it.

AERIAL PHOTOGRAPH OF SOVIET MISSILE LAUNCH SITE, SAN CRISTOBAL, CUBA, OCTOBER 27, 1962

CALL TO PRESIDENT DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER, OCTOBER 28, 1962

With the crisis unwinding, President Kennedy placed a round of relieved calls to all three living former presidents: Eisenhower, Truman, and Hoover. The calls with Truman and Hoover are relatively brief, but with Eisenhower (whom Kennedy addressed as both “Mr. President” and “General”), there was more time spent on strategy, including a surprising detour into the “goddamned mountainous country” of Tibet.

JFK:
Hello?

OPERATOR:
Yes, please.

JFK:
Oh, is the general on there?

OPERATOR:
I’ll put him on, yes, sir. Ready.

JFK:
Hello?

EISENHOWER:
General Eisenhower, Mr. President.

JFK:
General, how are you?

EISENHOWER:
Pretty good, thanks.

JFK:
Oh, fine. General, I just wanted to bring you up-to-date on this matter, because I know of your concern about it. We got, Friday night, got a message from Khrushchev, which said that he would withdraw these missiles and technicians and so on, providing we did not plan to invade Cuba. We then got a message, that public one the next morning, in which he said he would do that if we withdrew our missiles from Turkey. We then, as you know, issued a statement that we couldn’t get into that deal. So we then got this message this morning. So we now have to wait to see how it unfolds, and there’s a good deal of complexities to it. If the withdrawal of these missiles, technicians, and the cessation of subversive activity by them …