Mary's Mosaic (45 page)

Earlier that evening, before the dinner, Jack had addressed the nation on national television. Six days earlier, on October 16, he had seen detailed photographs from a clandestine U-2 reconnaissance flight that showed a secret offensive buildup of Soviet missile sites under construction on the island of Cuba. The escalating crisis had catapulted the National Security Council into days and nights of secret meetings; it would become known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. With no resolution in sight after six days, the president informed the public of the emerging crisis. “To halt this offensive buildup,” President Kennedy said, “a strict quarantine on all offensive military equipment under shipment to Cuba is being initiated. All ships of any kind bound for Cuba from whatever nation or port will, if found to contain cargoes of offensive weapons, be turned back.”
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Behind closed doors, the president and his most senior advisers sought peaceful ways to resolve the impasse, but the Joint Chiefs of Staff resisted them. So did the CIA. Both wanted to exploit the crisis to invade Cuba to get rid of Fidel Castro, even going so far as to plan a preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union. Secretly, against the president’s orders, the American military and the CIA would engage in a number of activities to undermine and sabotage the possibility of a negotiated settlement. President Kennedy and his advisers ordered a U.S. naval blockade of the entire island of Cuba. Its purpose was to deter any further weapons and supplies from reaching the missile sites under construction. The Cold War hard-liners, however, dismissed it as another “appeasement at Munich,” wanting still to ignite a major conflagration. Finally, after nearly two weeks, masterful diplomatic pressure prevailed. The eventual removal of the Soviet missiles took place without having to bomb or invade Cuba.

In one sense, the Cuban Missile Crisis was a misnomer. It wasn’t just another international political turf war between competing superpowers vying for control. The entire future of humanity itself was hanging in the balance for thirteen days; nuclear holocaust was on the horizon. It was, as author James
Douglass rightly tagged it, “the most dangerous moment in human history,”
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as well as possibly the most dramatic event of the entire Cold War. Had it not been for some ingenious, secret back-channel communications and negotiations, the entire planet might well have become uninhabitable.

Crises, however dangerous, sometimes germinate opportunities. In spite of the horror it foreboded, the Cuban Missile Crisis and its ultimate resolution would initiate a major political shift for Kennedy’s presidency. That Jack had wanted Mary in his presence on the evening he alerted the nation to the accelerating calamity suggests a reliance on her counsel. It wasn’t the first time, nor would it be the last. Mary’s longtime commitment to world peace, coupled with Jack’s broadening insight that peace, not armed conflict, was the right path forward, inevitably made her an important asset. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, the president’s evolving political trajectory would increasingly isolate him from his own National Security apparatus.

T
he crisis had caught Jack off guard. While the Joint Chiefs and CIA pursued a more bellicose strategy vis-à-vis Cuba and the Soviet Union, Kennedy and his Soviet counterpart, Nikita Khrushchev, had been engaged in a secret correspondence that had begun several months after their June 1961 Vienna summit. Khrushchev had initiated the letter exchange.
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Georgi Bolshakov, a trusted Khrushchev aide and KGB agent who often posed as a magazine editor for cover purposes, delivered the first letter—a twenty-six-page missive hidden in a newspaper—to Kennedy’s press secretary, Pierre Salinger, in a New York City hotel room in September 1961. The letter invited a deeper understanding between the two leaders and their countries. At Vienna, Khrushchev had sounded a decidedly different note, touting nuclear war as an option to which he would turn if necessary. In reality, the Soviet leader was exploiting Kennedy’s embarrassment and weakened position since the attempted Bay of Pigs failure. Khrushchev later admitted that in the run-up to the Vienna summit, Soviet hard-liners had pushed him to grandstand. But in his first secret letter to Kennedy, Khrushchev struck a tone of conciliation: “I have given much thought of late to the development of international events since our meeting in Vienna, and I have decided to approach you with this letter. The whole world hopefully expected that our meeting and a frank exchange of views would have a soothing effect, would turn relations between our countries into the correct channel and promote the adoption of decisions which could give the peoples confidence that at last peace on earth will be secured. To my regret—and, I believe, to yours—this did not happen.”

The Soviet premier compared the state of Cold War tensions with “Noah’s Ark where both the ‘clean’ and the ‘unclean’ found sanctuary. But regardless of who lists himself with the ‘clean’ and who is considered to be ‘unclean,’ they are all equally interested in one thing and that is that the Ark should successfully continue its cruise. And we have no other alternative: either we should live in peace and cooperation so that the Ark maintains its buoyancy, or else it sinks. Therefore we must display concern for all of mankind, not to mention our own advantages, and find every possibility leading to peaceful solutions of problems.”
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Khrushchev’s approach disarmed Jack, who responded two weeks later: “I am gratified by your letter and your decision to suggest this additional means of communication. Certainly you are correct in emphasizing that this correspondence must be kept wholly private, not be hinted at in public statements, much less disclosed to the press…. I think it is very important that these letters provide us with an opportunity for a personal, informal but meaningful exchange of views.”
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Since the very beginning of the letter exchange, a full year before the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy and Khrushchev had been building mutual trust. Both leaders were adamant about their commitment to peaceful coexistence. Whether Jack told Mary about the secret correspondence with Khrushchev wasn’t known, but it may have been why Mary had been so outspoken and confrontational with Jack when he decided to resume nuclear atmospheric testing in April 1962.
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Why undo the progress that was being made, she would have argued. Mutual goodwill and hopeful intentions, however, proved no match for the progression of real-world events for both men. For his part, Khrushchev felt betrayed when he learned of the U.S. military’s aggressive planning and lobbying throughout the spring of 1962 for a second invasion of Cuba, this time by overwhelming U.S. forces. At the Vienna summit in June 1961, Khrushchev had told the president that he was “very grieved by the fact” that an attack on Cuba at the Bay of Pigs had taken place. Jack had admitted to the Soviet premier that it had been “a mistake.”

“I respected that explanation,” Khrushchev wrote in another secret communication to Kennedy dated October 26, 1962, toward the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis. “You repeated it to me several times, pointing out that not everybody occupying a high position would acknowledge his mistakes as you had done. I value such frankness. For my part, I told you that we too possess no less courage; we also acknowledged those mistakes which had been committed during the history of our state, and not only acknowledged, but sharply condemned them.”
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The next day, October 27, 1962, Khrushchev wrote: “But how are we, the Soviet Union, our Government, to assess your actions, which are expressed in the fact that you have surrounded the Soviet Union with military bases; surrounded our allies with military bases; placed military bases literally around our country; and stationed your missile armaments there? This is no secret. Responsible American personages openly declare that it is so. Your missiles are located in Britain, are located in Italy, and are aimed against us. Your missiles are located in Turkey.” In closing, Khrushchev pointed out:

You are disturbed over Cuba. You say that this disturbs you because it is 90 miles by sea from the coast of the United States of America. But Turkey adjoins us; our sentries patrol back and forth and see each other. Do you consider, then, that you have the right to demand security for your own country and the removal of the weapons you call offensive, but do not accord the same right to us? You have placed destructive missile weapons, which you call offensive, in Turkey, literally next to us. How then can recognition of our equal military capacities be reconciled with such unequal relations between our great states? This is irreconcilable.
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President Kennedy didn’t want to start a war over Cuba, but as Bobby Kennedy told Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin in a private meeting toward the end of the crisis, “If the situation continues much longer, the President is not sure that the military will not overthrow him and seize power.”
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The Pentagon, led by the bellicose U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff, General Curtis “Bombs Away” LeMay, had pushed aggressively during the first days of the crisis for an immediate surprise-bombing campaign against the Soviet missile sites in Cuba, during the period when the CIA estimated the medium-range nuclear-tipped missiles were not yet operational. This was later followed, within a matter of days, by Pentagon recommendations that a full-scale U.S. invasion follow the air strikes.

What their intelligence had not revealed, however, was that the Russians had more than forty thousand troops in Cuba who were prepared to fight an American invasion. They were armed not only with strategic missiles (the medium- and intermediate-range ICBMs discovered by the American U-2 photography), but, completely unknown to the American military and CIA at the time, also with ninety-eight tactical, or low-yield, nuclear warheads—along with the appropriate short-range missiles and jet bombers to deliver them—which
had been placed in Cuba with the specific intent of being actively used to oppose any U.S. invasion of the island.
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Said former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara in an interview in 1998: “We didn’t learn until nearly 30 years later, that the Soviets had roughly 162 nuclear warheads on this isle of Cuba, at a time when our CIA said they believed there were none. And included in the 162 were some 90 tactical warheads to be used against a US invasion force. Had we … attacked Cuba and invaded Cuba at the time, we almost surely would have been involved in nuclear war. And when I say “we,” I mean you—it would not have been the U.S. alone. It would have endangered the security of the West, without any question.”
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During the crisis, both the U.S. military and the CIA were secretly operating unilaterally, doing whatever they could to intensify tensions that would ignite a war. On October 28, the Air Force launched an unarmed intercontinental ballistic missile from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, destined for the Marshall Islands in the Pacific. The ICBM test further exacerbated tensions with the Soviet Union. That the president had not ordered the test further aggravated tensions with his own military. At the same time, Strategic Air Command bombers were flying toward the Soviet Union and going past their established “turn around points,” giving the impression that the United States was commencing a preemptive strike.
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In addition, General Thomas Power, head of the Strategic Air Command (and LeMay’s handpicked successor in that role), placed America’s nuclear bomber force at DEFCON-2, one step away from nuclear war, by transmitting two such orders, one a voice command and one a telegram,
in the clear, unencrypted
, without President Kennedy’s knowledge or permission.
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This open-threat display was intended to provoke the USR into responses that would justify a preemptive nuclear first strike by the United States. Also in the midst of this, the CIA was operating independently, in contravention of the president’s order. Under the command of the CIA’s William K. Harvey, three commando teams of sixty men each were sent into Cuba to destabilize the country in preparation for an invasion. The Agency continued these operations in spite of Kennedy’s order that such destabilization efforts immediately cease and desist.

Eventually, the cooler heads of the two leaders prevailed: Khrushchev agreed to remove the missiles from Cuba, and Kennedy agreed that the United States would not invade the island. Secretly, Kennedy also promised the removal of U.S. missiles in Turkey. The American military establishment was furious with the negotiated compromise, while Kennedy’s opinion of the American military establishment hit an all-time low.

The day after the Cuban Missile Crisis ended on October 28, 1962, Kennedy told senior White House adviser Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “The military are mad. They wanted to do this.”
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Two weeks later, the president told Schlesinger, “The first advice I’m going to give my successor is to watch the generals and to avoid feeling that just because they were military men their opinions on military matters were worth a damn.”
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There were no winners or losers in this crisis. “The only victory was avoiding war. For that reason alone,” noted author James Douglass, “Kennedy believed, there must never be another missile crisis, for it would only repeat pressures for terrible choices that had very nearly resulted in total war.”
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