Thirteen Days

by Robert F. Kennedy

  Consider again the group that made fundamental choices for the United States during the missile crisis. Who were the members?

  First, there was the President as constitutional Commander in Chief, nationally elected. No other elective officer was so involved (save the Vice-President, an appropriately attentive listener). No member of the Senate or House stands astride the action channel for decisions on nuclear war. None is consulted unless the President so chooses as a matter of discretion. In October 1962, Congress remained ignorant of the Soviet missiles in Cuba during the first week of Ex Comm deliberations. Only on October 22, two hours before his broadcast to the world, did the President assemble the leaders of both houses, advise them of the missiles, and inform them that he had decided to respond with a naval quarantine. The Congressional leaders disagreed strongly with the course the President had chosen. Senator Fulbright in particular urged that the United States respond more forcefully. Senator Russell stated that “he could not live with himself if he did not say in the strongest possible terms how important it was that we act with greater strength.” The Senators insisted that the record show they had been informed, not consulted. But Congressional objections had no effect at that point. Nor was any member of Congress deeply involved in subsequent decisions during the week that followed.

  Second, there were several men whose institutional positions made them unavoidable parties to any major choice about nuclear war: the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the White House Assistant for National Security Affairs. Why were these men involved of necessity? Because each had a portion of the wherewithal for action. As the President considered possible military moves, who could specify the spectrum of feasible options except the Joint Chiefs of Staff and their subordinates? When the President chose blockade, no one but the Secretary of Defense had both the authority and the information to oversee its implementation. Who told the President about the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba? His Assistant for National Security Affairs, McGeorge Bundy. (Indeed, Bundy chose not to tell him on the evening of Monday, October 15, when the CIA informed Bundy of this fact, but rather to let the President get a good night’s sleep on the fifteenth before telling him on the morning of the sixteenth.) Bundy learned about the missiles from the CIA; the Director of the CIA, John McCone, and the machine under him served as the “eyes and ears” of the U.S. government in keeping abreast of developments in Cuba. The need for information, analysis, and assistance in implementation meant that Deputy Secretaries and even the relevant Assistant Secretaries also were included, as, for example, Paul Nitze of Defense.

  Third, there were the President’s men: his brother and campaign manager, the Attorney General, and his Special Counsel, Theodore Sorensen. Sorensen had joined JFK when he went to the Senate in 1953 and ever since had been among his closest personal and programmatic advisers as well as his principal speechwriter. The President depended on Sorensen for more than words in speeches. Sorensen, and even more Robert Kennedy, helped John Kennedy assess the full spectrum of his responsibilities as President. Having depended on the national security apparatus alone in making the fateful choice about the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy insisted thereafter that no major national security decision be made without including RFK and Sorensen in the process.

  Fourth, there were the surrogates, some of them officials, some from private life. Dean Acheson was a former Secretary of State; Robert Lovett, a former Secretary of Defense. Both had served the Truman Administration, Lovett as a Republican. They were involved because the President happened to value their judgment and also because he knew that others valued their judgment—especially in the “bipartisan foreign policy establishment”—on Capitol Hill and off. Adlai Stevenson, Ambassador to the United Nations, can be counted of their number since his position as a former Democratic presidential candidate and liberal outweighed the importance of his official role. The presence of the Secretary of the Treasury, Douglas Dillon, attests not only to the weight accorded his department in matters of foreign affairs—a vital if half-hidden feature of our government—but also to his representative character as Eisenhower’s former Undersecretary of State.

  The importance of the individuals in the circle becomes clear as one reflects on the extraordinary role they played. Decisions passed through the President’s hand but were not simply the product of his mind alone. Both the definition of the issue and the choice of the U.S. response emerged from deliberations of the group. Robert Kennedy’s account is suggestive, both about individual perceptions and preferences, and about the process by which the group came to the blockade.*

  On the morning of Tuesday, October 16, McGeorge Bundy went to the President’s living quarters with the message: “Mr. President, there is now hard photographic evidence that the Russians have offensive missiles in Cuba.” Much has been made of Kennedy’s “expression of surprise.” But “surprise” fails to capture the character of his initial reaction. Rather it was one of startled anger, most adequately conveyed by the exclamation: “He can’t do that to me!” That exclamation in this context was triple-barreled. First, in terms of the President’s attention and priorities at the moment, Khrushchev had chosen the most unhelpful act of all. In a highly sensitive domestic political context—less than two years after the Bay of Pigs, less than two months before midterm elections—where his opponents demanded action against Soviet interests in Cuba, Kennedy was following a policy of reason and responsibility. In support of that policy, he had drawn a distinction between “defensive” and “offensive” weapons, staked his full presidential authority on the flat statement that the Soviets were not placing offensive weapons in Cuba, and warned unambiguously that offensive missiles would not be tolerated. Second, the main thrust of his Administration’s policy toward the Soviet Union had been aimed at relaxing tension and building trust through trust. At considerable political cost, he was attempting to leash the anti-Communist cold warriors and to educate officials, as well as the public, out of prevailing devil theories of Soviet Communism. He and his closest advisers had made considerable effort to guarantee that all communication between the President and the Chairman would be straightforward and accurate. Contact had been made; Khrushchev was reciprocating; mutual confidence was growing. As part of this exchange, Khrushchev had assured the President through the most direct and personal channels that he was aware of Kennedy’s domestic problem and would do nothing to complicate it. Specifically, Khrushchev had given the President solemn assurances that the Soviet Union would not put offensive missiles in Cuba. But then this—the Chairman had lied to the President.* Third, Khrushchev’s action challenged the President personally. Did he, John F. Kennedy, have the courage in the crunch to start down a path with significant probability of nuclear war? If not, Khrushchev would win this round. More important, he would gain confidence that he could win the next as well—simply by forcing Kennedy to choose between a nuclear path and acquiescense. Kennedy had worried, both after the Bay of Pigs and after his Vienna meeting with Khrushchev, that the Chairman might have misjudged his mettle. This time Kennedy was determined to stand fast. The nonforcible paths—avoiding military measures, resorting instead to diplomacy—could not have been less relevant to his problem.

  These two paths—“doing nothing” or “taking a diplomatic approach” as the alternatives were labeled in the Ex Comm—were the solutions advocated by two of his principal advisers. For Secretary of Defense McNamara, the missiles raised a specter of nuclear war. He first framed the issue as a straightforward strategic problem. To understand the issue, one had to grasp two obvious but difficult points. First, the missiles in Cuba represented an inevitable occurrence: narrowing of the missile gap between the United States and U.S.S.R. It simply happened sooner rather than later. Second, the United States could accept this occurrence since its consequences were minor: seven to one missile “superiority,” one to one missile “equality,” one t
o seven missile “inferiority”—the three positions are identical. What was identical was the unacceptability of the American casualties that could be inflicted from any of the three. McNamara’s statement of this argument at the first meeting of the Ex Comm was summed up in a phrase, “a missile is a missile.” “It makes no great difference,” he maintained, “whether you were killed by a missile from the Soviet Union or Cuba.” The implication was clear. The United States should not initiate a crisis with the Soviet Union, risking a significant probability of nuclear war, over an occurrence that had such small strategic implications.

  The perceptions of McGeorge Bundy are difficult to reconstruct. He too seems to have been impressed primarily by the potential in the proposed military actions for escalation to nuclear war, since initially he was the advocate of a diplomatic approach. Several forms of diplomatic approach were outlined, but Bundy argued most persuasively for either confronting Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko with the evidence and demanding withdrawal, or directly approaching Khrushchev in a similar manner. As he pointed out, this approach would give Khrushchev an opportunity to withdraw the missiles quietly, without humiliation. It might avoid any confrontation whatever. It reduced the length of time this secret would have to stay bottled up inside our government. Moreover, Bundy argued, consider the alternatives—each called for springing the discovery on Khrushchev when announcing to the American people and the world the chosen course of action. This amounted to a suspension of the rules of diplomacy. To make this a public issue engaging Khrushchev’s and the Soviets’ prestige in the eyes of the world, before trying traditional diplomatic channels, would be at best shortsighted. Finally, in terms of the argument that became the touchstone of these deliberations, a diplomatic approach closed no other options. If Khrushchev refused or delayed, an alternative could then be publicly announced, and the Administration would be shielded from criticisms that it had provoked the public confrontation without first attempting diplomatic negotiations.

  Bundy’s argument was powerful. But the tone of the argument and the fact that later in the week he became an advocate of the air strike leaves some doubt about his “real” reaction. Was he laboring under his acknowledged burden of responsibility in the fiasco at the Bay of Pigs? Was he playing the role of devil’s advocate in order to make the President probe his own initial reaction? As Bundy summarized his own reaction, “I almost deliberately stayed in the minority. I felt that it was very important to keep the President’s choices open.”

  Robert Kennedy saw the political wall against which Khrushchev had backed his brother. But he found himself hemmed in by two additional barriers as well. First, like McNamara, he was haunted by the prospect of nuclear doom. Was Khrushchev going to force the President into an insane act? Second, more than any other member of the group, he saw a vital issue posed by the traditions and moral position of the United States. Was his brother going to blacken the name of the United States in the pages of history? Recall his scribbled note at the first meeting of the Ex Comm: “I now know how Tojo felt when he was planning Pearl Harbor.” From the outset he probed for an alternative to the air strike.

  The initial reaction of Theodore Sorensen fell somewhere between the President and his brother. Like the President, Sorensen felt the sting of betrayal. If the President had been the architect of the policy the missiles punctured, Sorensen was the draftsman. Khrushchev’s deceitful move demanded a strong countermove. But like Robert Kennedy, Sorensen feared lest shock and disgrace lead to disaster. Chosen by the President to be his primary reporter on the discussions in the Ex Comm, Sorensen guarded against becoming an advocate. Instead, in the Ex Comm he conceived his role to be one of assisting in “prodding, questioning, eliciting argument and alternatives and keeping discussion concrete and moving ahead.” But because his memos posed for the President the issues, arguments, and questions, his personal reactions mattered.

  To the Joint Chiefs of Staff the issue was clear. Now was the time to do the job for which they had been preparing contingency plans. The Bay of Pigs was badly done; this round would not be. The missiles provided the occasion to deal with the issue for which they were prepared: ridding the Western Hemisphere of Castro’s Communism. The security of the United States required a massive air strike, leading to an invasion and the overthrow of Castro. As General Maxwell Taylor, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, recalls: “I was a twofold Hawk from start to finish, first as a spokesman for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, secondly from personal conviction.”* While Taylor argued his position carefully, two of the Chiefs advocated military action with an abandon that amazed other members of the Ex Comm. As Robert Kennedy notes, after Air Force Chief of Staff General Curtis LeMay had argued strongly that a military attack was essential, the President asked what the response of the Russians might be. General LeMay replied: “There would be no reaction.” The President was not convinced. As he told White House aide Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. on the day the crisis ended, “An invasion would have been a mistake—a wrong use of our power. But the military are mad. They wanted to do this. It’s lucky for us we have McNamara over there.”

  There were other, more persuasive advocates of military action. Acheson, Nitze, Dillon, and McCone found themselves of like mind. Dean Rusk, the Secretary of State, seems to have leaned in their direction. To this group the overriding issues were two: the security of the United States together with its position of leadership in the Western Hemisphere and Western Europe. The situation permitted little time for deliberation. The Soviet missiles in Cuba were fast becoming an acute danger and should be removed by military action before they become operational. In Acheson’s words:

  As I saw it at the time, and still believe, the decision to resort to the blockade was a decision to postpone the issue at the expense of time within which the nuclear weapons might be made operational. The Soviet Union did not need to bring any more weapons into Cuba…the nuclear weapons already there…were capable of killing eighty million Americans. That was enough.*

  As Nitze maintained, when starting down a path that might lead to nuclear war, any man with a responsible regard for the lives of American citizens had to distinguish sharply between the consequences of war before and after those missiles became operational.

  Thus the Soviet missiles in Cuba posed no single issue. The men who gathered at the pinnacle of the U.S. government perceived many facets of quite different issues. And in spite of efforts to classify these men simply as “hawks” and “doves”—metaphors coined during this crisis—their initial reactions were much more diverse than the metaphors suggest. The process by which the blockade emerged from these initial reactions and preferences is a story of the most subtle and intricate probing, pulling and hauling, leading, guiding and spurring. Even with the aid of Robert Kennedy’s account, reconstruction of this process can only be tentative.

  Initially the President and most of his advisers wanted a clean, surgical air strike. On the first day of the crisis, when informing Adlai Stevenson of the missiles, the President mentioned only two alternatives: “I suppose the alternatives are to go in by air and wipe them out, or to take other steps to render them inoperable.” At the end of the week a sizeable minority still favored an air strike. As Robert Kennedy once told an interviewer: “The fourteen people involved were very significant…. If six of them had been President of the U.S., I think that the world might have been blown up.” What prevented the air strike was a fortuitous coincidence of a number of factors, the absence of any one of which might have permitted that option to prevail.

  First, McNamara’s vision of holocaust set him firmly against the air strike. His initial attempt to frame the issue in strategic terms struck Kennedy as particularly inappropriate. Once McNamara realized that a strong response was required, however, he and his deputy Gilpatric chose the blockade as a fallback. When the Secretary of Defense—whose department had the action, whose reputation in the Cabinet was unequaled, in whom the President demonstrated full confidence—marshalled
the arguments for the blockade and refused to be moved, the blockade became a formidable alternative.

  Second, Robert Kennedy pressed the “Tojo” analogy. His arguments against the air strike on moral grounds struck a chord in the President. Moreover, once those arguments had been stated so forcefully, the President scarcely could have followed his initial preference without seeming to become what RFK had condemned.

  The President learned of the missiles on Tuesday morning. On Wednesday morning, in order to mask the discovery from the Russians, he flew to Connecticut to keep a campaign commitment, leaving his brother as the unofficial chairman of the group. By the time the President returned on Wednesday evening, a critical third piece had been added to the picture. McNamara had presented his argument for the blockade. Robert Kennedy and Sorensen had joined him. A powerful coalition of the advisers in whom the President had the greatest confidence, and with whom he was personally most compatible, had emerged.