Reappraisals (53 page)

The books under review,
The Kennedy Tapes
in particular, provide the opportunity for us to think afresh about men we thought we knew; the more so since they were speaking “off the record”—only the Kennedy brothers knew they were being taped. Dean Acheson, a diplomat of considerable stature during his years as secretary of state under Truman, is here revealed as a grumpy old statesman who has learned nothing and forgotten nothing. From beginning to end he presses for an immediate air strike and more. When his advice is ignored and the moderate approach is successful he attributes it ungenerously to “just plain dumb luck.” Douglas Dillon, Kennedy’s urbane secretary of the treasury, comes across in the tapes as an unreasoning warmonger, hungry for military action.

Senators Richard Russell and William Fulbright, who were among the senior congressmen brought in on the secret before Kennedy’s October 22 press conference, express views that are quite frightening. Discussing Kennedy’s choices, Russell declares, “A war, our destiny, will hinge on it. But it’s coming someday, Mr. President. Will it ever be under more auspicious circumstances?” Likewise Fulbright—“I’m in favor, on the basis of this information, of an invasion, and an all-out one, and as quickly as possible.” Fortunately, Kennedy was not seeking the advice of these men and their congressional colleagues, merely their support, and this, at least, they gave him.

The advice Kennedy received from his service chiefs was similarly extreme. From beginning to end they pressed for immediate and large-scale air strikes and an invasion, and even after Khrushchev’s acceptance of Kennedy’s terms, they voted for military intervention nonetheless, with only General Maxwell Taylor, their chairman, dissenting. Military contempt for the young president is palpable, with General LeMay’s remarks bordering on insolence. Fortunately Kennedy only met with them once, as a group, on October 19, and their scorn for him was matched by his suspicion of them. His exchange with the head of the army, General Earle Wheeler, is characteristic:

In striking contrast, Kennedy’s professional diplomats gave him excellent advice. Llewellyn Thompson, the former ambassador to Moscow, is especially impressive. He was always perceptive (and virtually alone) in his estimates of Khrushchev’s likely motives and coming moves, and by October 18 he had accurately described to the president the course that events should and would take:

Among the inner circle of Kennedy advisers, most of whom we are predisposed to see through the dark glass of Vietnam, George Ball maintained a moderate attitude, always seeking the least provocative and most promising avenue out of the dilemma—hardly surprising to those who recall his later dissent from the Indochina policy of the Johnson years. He was one of the first, on October 18, to articulate clearly the case against a sudden surprise attack on Cuba: “It’s the kind of conduct that one might expect of the Soviet Union. It is not conduct that one expects of the United States. And I have a feeling that this 24 hours to Khrushchev is really indispensable.” This advice was based on the insightful conclusion, which Ball reached on the first day of the crisis, that the Soviets didn’t realize what they had done. McGeorge Bundy was sharp and analytical, asking hard questions about the risks of an attack, though he curiously inclined toward the end of the first week to align himself with the hardliners, whose assumptions he nevertheless clearly questioned.

Robert McNamara’s views, on the other hand, may come as a surprise to those who recall his advocacy of bombing in Indochina. Throughout the crisis he was the voice of moderate common sense. On October 16 he told his colleagues, “I would strongly urge against the air attack, to be quite frank about it, because I think the danger to this country in relation to the gain that would accrue would be excessive.” After describing the naval blockade option in some anticipatory detail on the same day, he acknowledged that “this alternative doesn’t seem to be a very acceptable one. But wait until you work on the others.” And despite having to fulfill his role as secretary of defense and assess the pros and cons of military options, he was always among the most clearheaded of the group in understanding that the crisis, and its resolution, were and must remain above all political.

Dean Rusk, too, comes across in these pages as a force for reason and calm. He spoke most emphatically on October 24 against those (among them Robert Kennedy) who wanted to capture and inspect Soviet vessels carrying arms; the point, he reminded his colleagues more than once, was not to seize Soviet ships but simply to prevent missiles from reaching Cuba with the use of minimum force. In view of his sad performance during the Vietnam War, it is worth recalling for the record that during the Cuban crisis, at least, he always favored negotiation, a role for the United Nations, and a peaceful resolution if at all possible.

Vice President Lyndon Johnson, too, displayed an unfamiliar side during these days. He spoke little and was not one of the men to whose opinion Kennedy paid very close attention. But when he did speak he was rather impressive. On Saturday, October 27, he had a revealing exchange with McNamara, as the group debated how to respond to Khrushchev’s offer of a missile “swap”:

Later the same day, when Dillon and others were suggesting nighttime photographic surveillance of Cuban missile sites with the use of flares, Johnson cut in heatedly:

IN CONTRAST, Robert Kennedy’s political reputation can only suffer from the publication of these records. To be sure, his “back channel” conversations with Ambassador Dobrynin helped draw the crisis to a close, and toward the end he was one of those, with Thompson and Bundy, who saw the advantage of accepting Khrushchev’s first communication and ignoring the more troublesome follow-up letter.
²⁶
But in the early days of the crisis Robert Kennedy’s contributions were unhelpful, to say the least. As the administration’s senior figure most intimately committed to the tactic of “dirty tricks,” he was angrily belligerent in response to the Soviet move. On the first day of the crisis he burst out, “If he [Khrushchev] wants to get into a war over this . . . . Hell, if it’s war that’s gonna come on this thing, or if he sticks those kinds of missiles after the warning, then he’s gonna get into a war six months from now, or a year from now. So . . .”

This was consistent with the younger Kennedy’s personal obsession with the Cuban issue. In January 1962 he had informed the CIA/ Pentagon group secretly at work undermining Castro that “we are in a combat situation with Cuba.” To the incoming director of the CIA, John McCone, he announced that Cuba was “the top priority in the U.S. government—all else is secondary—no time, no money, effort or manpower is to be spared.” His older brother’s senior advisers clearly did not think much of him. George Ball, who later claimed to be “pleasantly surprised” by RFK’s caution and good sense as the crisis unfolded, conceded that “until then I had not had much respect for his judgment; he had seemed to me—particularly in comparison with his brother— immature, far too emotional, and inclined to see everything in absolute terms with too little sensitivity to nuance and qualification.”

Dean Rusk, who resented the “spin” that Robert Kennedy gave to his role in the crisis in his posthumous account of it, acidly notes in his memoirs that “the emotion that Bobby Kennedy portrayed in his book
The Thirteen Days
and that was reflected in the television program ‘The Missiles of October’ was unique to Bobby; this was his first major crisis.” Anatoly Dobrynin, who knew Robert Kennedy well and worked closely with him in these weeks, summed him up quite fairly: “He was a complex and contradictory person who often lost his temper; at such moments he behaved badly and was unpleasant to deal with. . . . He did not know the foreign policy questions in detail, but apparently thought himself to be expert in them. This at times complicated the dialogue, particularly when he spoke on behalf of the president.” Dobrynin, like everyone else, recognized the necessity of getting on with the younger Kennedy. “His clear intimacy with his brother made him a very valuable channel of communication.” But nothing in the recorded evidence or the recollections of the senior staff of either John Kennedy or Nikita Khrushchev suggests that Robert Kennedy’s ascension to the presidency would have been an asset to the U.S. in world affairs.
²⁷

How near did the world come to disaster during those two weeks thirty-five years ago? The most likely cause of a shooting war would clearly have been sheer misadventure—a missile fired, a bomb dropped, a ship sunk by accident or by some unauthorized trigger-happy officer. As it was, the U.S. went to Defense Condition 2 on October 24 (one step short of general war), and the Soviets “unintentionally” brought down a U-2 over Cuba on October 27. Either of these moves, or an attempt to stop a sensitive ship in the quarantine zone, could have been fatal, if only by misleading the other side into supposing that war was imminent. But they weren’t fatal. And if they weren’t, it was because the top leader on each side was determined they shouldn’t be.

We might also ask what would have happened if Khrushchev had not accepted within twenty-four hours Kennedy’s reply/ultimatum of Saturday the 27th. At the time, it seemed as if the U.S. had no fallback position and would have had to begin air strikes and an invasion the following week, as ExComm had agreed it must, in view of the fact that construction of the missile sites was apparently continuing apace.
²⁸
In fact, as we have only learned in recent years, Kennedy did have a secret reserve position. He would, in extremis, have authorized Dean Rusk to encourage U Thant, the UN Secretary General, to propose a
public
missile swap, which the U.S. would then have accepted. In other words, if all else failed, he would have agreed to the terms of the second, “unacceptable” Soviet letter of September 27, proposing the removal of the Jupiters and an agreement not to invade Cuba in exchange for the dismantling of the missiles there.
²⁹

But even if there really had been no fallback plan and Kennedy had authorized air strikes and an invasion of Cuba in the following days, a generalized nuclear war would probably not have happened, despite the strong Soviet military presence in Cuba (stronger than the Americans knew) and the nuclear weapons already there. The reason, once again, is very simple. In McGeorge Bundy’s words, “The largest single factor that might have led to nuclear war—the readiness of one leader or the other to regard that outcome as remotely acceptable—simply did not exist in October 1962.” Both leaders tried hard to pretend otherwise, of course, for the sake of public appearance and because their diplomatic strategies depended upon the credibility of their nuclear threats. And in
The
Glasnost Tapes
, Khrushchev does suggest that precisely because the Soviet Union could not have responded to a Cuban invasion with an effective attack on the U.S., (conventional) war might have broken out in the European theater instead.
³⁰
But even this seems unlikely. Khrushchev’s own state of mind in the crucial ninety-six hours between the start of the quarantine and his agreement to remove the missiles is now quite clear— he was horrified at the prospect of war and decided very quickly that the game was not worth the candle.

THE WHOLE CRISIS, and the degree of risk it entailed, thus hinged on a paradox. If Kennedy and his colleagues had known what Khrushchev’s real purposes were, they might have been able to defuse the whole business quietly and privately (though Bundy and other commentators always insisted that Khrushchev’s bluff required a public response, lest he suppose that the U.S. wasn’t serious about resisting him). But had the Americans also known how many armed nuclear missiles the USSR had already installed in Cuba—and how reluctant Khrushchev was actually to fire them—the temptation to act first and talk afterward might have proven irresistible. So their partial ignorance both provoked the drama and prevented a tragic denouement.