An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963

by Robert Dallek

  It was not clear to Kennedy why Khrushchev had reverted to such belligerence. He concluded that Khrushchev was an unstable personality, an irresponsible character carried away by delusions. He was wildly erratic and unpredictable, friendly one day and unfriendly the next. He was “like the gangsters both of us had dealt with,” Bobby said. “Khrushchev’s kind of action—what he did and how he acted—was how an immoral gangster would act and not . . . a statesman, not as a person with a sense of responsibility.” Khrushchev, Kennedy told Cyrus Sulzberger of the New York Times, reminded him of Joe McCarthy and Jimmy Hoffa—rough, tough characters who could disarm people with their politeness. Llewellyn Thompson shared Kennedy’s view. There was “a kind of hypocrisy” to the man, Thompson told Kennedy during a conversation about Khrushchev in August. “It’s like dealing with a bunch of bootleggers or gangsters.” Yet Kennedy also knew that Khrushchev was a shrewd, calculating politician who never acted without some self-serving purpose. Events in October 1962 would reveal what Khrushchev was trying to achieve.

  CHAPTER 16

  To the Brink—And Back

  When at some future date the high court of history sits in judgment on each of us, it will ask: “Were we truly men of courage—with the courage to stand up to one’s enemies—and the courage to stand up, when necessary, to one’s associates?”

  — John F. Kennedy, address to the Massachusetts Legislature, January 9, 1961

  IN THE SPRING AND SUMMER OF 1962, Khrushchev’s renewed threats against Germany and Berlin were tied to his belief that Washington was planning an invasion to topple Castro. He was wrong. In March, when Cuban exile leader José Miró Cardona asked Bundy for help with an invasion, he refused. “Decisive action [cannot] be accomplished without the open involvement of U.S. armed forces,” Bundy said. “This would mean open war against Cuba which in the U.S. judgment [is] not advisable in the present international situation.” The following month Kennedy told Cardona the same thing. But even if the United States had no immediate invasion plan, Khrushchev felt that Castro’s support of subversion would eventually persuade Kennedy to act against him. In addition, concern that Castro was moving closer to communist China gave Khrushchev another reason to strengthen Soviet-Cuban relations.

  To do this, he decided to turn Cuba into a missile base from which he could more directly threaten the United States. In May and June, Khrushchev and Soviet military and political chiefs agreed to deploy on the island twenty-four medium-range R-12 missiles, which could travel 1,050 miles, and sixteen intermediate R-14 missiles, with a range of 2,100 miles. The forty missiles would double the number in the Soviet arsenal that could reach the continental United States. The plan also called for approximately forty-four thousand support troops and thirteen hundred civilian construction workers, as well as a Soviet naval base housing surface ships and “nuclear-missile equipped submarines.”

  Khrushchev saw multiple benefits from the deployment of Soviet missiles abroad. It would deter a U.S. attack on Cuba, keep the island in Moscow’s orbit, and give him greater leverage in bargaining with Washington over Berlin. Yet such a substantial change in the balance of power seemed likely to provoke a crisis and possibly a war with the United States. Khrushchev convinced himself, however, that the “intelligent” Kennedy “would not set off a thermonuclear war if there were our warheads there, just as they put their warheads on missiles in Turkey.” These seventeen intermediate-range Jupiter missiles under U.S. command, which became operational in 1962, had indeed frightened Moscow, but Khrushchev did not anticipate using his missiles. “Every idiot can start a war,” Khrushchev told Kremlin associates, “but it is impossible to win this war. . . . Therefore the missiles have one purpose—to scare them, to restrain them . . . to give them back some of their own medicine.” The deployment would equalize “what the West likes to call ‘the balance of power.’ The Americans had surrounded our country with military bases and threatened us with nuclear weapons, and now they would learn just what it feels like to have enemy missiles pointing at[them].”

  Khrushchev’s Cuban plan also rested on a hope of regaining political influence lost because of domestic and foreign setbacks. He had failed to achieve predicted levels of food production, which had forced increases in consumer prices. Also, he had made no appreciable headway in forcing a final Berlin settlement, or in ensuring Castro’s safety from an outside attack, or in squelching a Chinese challenge to Moscow’s leadership of world communism. Most important, he had failed to close the missile gap between Russia and the United States.

  Khrushchev’s aim was to hide the buildup in Cuba until after the American elections, when he planned to attend the U.N. General Assembly and see Kennedy. He would then reveal the existence of the Cuban missile base and extract concessions from the president over Berlin and Cuba. As historians Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali concluded, borrowing from JFK, it was “one hell of a gamble.”

  Not the least of the risk was hiding from America’s sophisticated intelligence apparatus the movement of men and equipment to Cuba. As was eventually learned from Soviet documents released in 1999, the Soviets had deployed nuclear missiles in East Germany in 1959 and managed to remove them later that year without apparent discovery by the West. Although Western intelligence agencies detected the Soviet deployment, the information apparently did not reach “top-level policymakers in the U.S. until late 1960.” Nor did any Western intelligence agency give any indication to the Soviets that they knew of Moscow’s unprecedented missile deployment. Although transporting missiles from Russia to Cuba was more difficult to hide than placing them in East Germany, Khrushchev believed that the Americans still assumed that he would never send weapons of mass destruction abroad. He acknowledged that the Americans would notice the increased shipments of men and arms to Cuba but believed that they would see them as no more than a strengthening of Cuban defenses against another invasion. By the time the Americans woke up to what was happening, the missiles would be in place.

  His reasoning had some merit. In August 1962, U.S. intelligence reported increased Soviet military equipment going to Cuba, where it was transported to the interior of the island under Soviet guards. U.S. national security officials concluded that the Soviets were installing SA-2 missiles, a modern anti-aircraft weapon with a thirty-mile range. The report noted that the SA-2s could be fit with nuclear warheads, “but there is no evidence that the Soviet government has ever provided nuclear warheads to any other state, on any terms. It seems unlikely that such a move is currently planned—but,” the analysts warned, “there is also little reason to suppose that the Soviets would refuse to introduce such weapons if the move could be controlled in the Soviet interest.”

  Soviet private and public statements also gave Kennedy assurances that the military buildup represented a change in degree but not in kind. In April 1961, after the Bay of Pigs invasion, Khrushchev had told Kennedy, “We have no bases in Cuba, and do not intend to establish any.” On July 30, 1962, in order to reduce the likelihood of exposure, Khrushchev asked Kennedy, “for the sake of better relations,” to stop reconnaissance flights over Soviet ships in the Caribbean. Eager to avoid any international crisis during the election campaign, Kennedy ostensibly agreed, on the condition that Moscow put the Berlin question “on ice.” Though Khrushchev wanted to know what the president meant by “on ice,” he agreed to Kennedy’s request. In early September, he sent word to Kennedy through Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, promising, “Nothing will be undertaken before the American congressional elections that could complicate the international situation or aggravate the tension in the relations between our two countries.” At the same time, he had Georgi Bolshakov tell Bobby that the Soviet Union was placing no more than defensive weapons in Cuba.

  Khrushchev gave Interior Secretary Stewart Udall the same message. During their September 6 conversations, Khrushchev said, “Now, as to Cuba—here is an area that could really lead to some unexpected consequences. I have been reading what some irrespons
ible Senators have been saying on this. A lot of people are making a big fuss because we are giving aid to Cuba. But you are giving aid to Japan. Just recently I was reading that you have placed atomic warheads on Japanese territory, and surely this is not something the Japanese need. So when Castro comes to us for aid, we give him what he needs for defense. He hasn’t much military equipment, so he asked us to supply some. But only for defense.”

  However much Kennedy wished to believe the Soviet professions of restraint, he could not take their assurances at face value; their deviousness in secretly preparing renewed nuclear tests had made him suspicious of anything they said. Besides, McCone and Bobby were asserting that the “defensive” buildup might presage offensive missile deployments, and even if not, they saw the expanding Soviet presence in Cuba as reason to topple Castro’s regime as quickly as possible. Complaints from Republicans about timid responses to the Cuban danger joined with the McCone-Bobby warnings to heighten Kennedy’s concerns. On August 31, New York Republican senator Kenneth Keating complained in a floor speech that the administration had no effective response to the installation of Soviet rockets in Cuba under the control of twelve hundred Soviet troops; nor, Keating added, did the administration seem prepared to deal with the troubling construction of other missile bases.

  At the beginning of September, Kennedy, trying to strike a balance between competing pressures, privately promised congressional leaders to take action against Cuba if Khrushchev was deploying surface-to-surface nuclear missiles. Therefore, it seemed prudent to issue a forceful warning to Moscow. Such a public statement would have the added benefit of blunting potential Republican political gains from assertions about White House inattentiveness to a crucial national security problem.

  ON SEPTEMBER 4, Kennedy and his advisers spent several hours preparing a statement about Soviet missiles in Cuba. To be as clear as possible, Kennedy expanded an admonition about “offensive weapons” to include a warning against “ground-to-ground missiles.” He also eliminated any mention of the Monroe Doctrine and kept references to Cuba to a minimum. He wanted the statement to focus on Soviet aggression and not on U.S. power in the Western Hemisphere or on the administration’s eagerness to topple Castro’s regime. “The major danger is the Soviet Union with missiles and nuclear warheads, not Cuba,” he said in a taped conversation.

  At six in the evening, Pierre Salinger read Kennedy’s statement to the press. He cited evidence of anti-aircraft missiles with a twenty-five-mile range and torpedo boats equipped with ship-to-ship guided missiles. He also pointed to some thirty-five hundred Soviet support technicians in Cuba or en route there to facilitate the use of these weapons. He emphasized, however, that allegations of organized Soviet combat forces were unconfirmed, as were assertions that the Soviets had introduced weapons with an offensive capability, such as ground-to-ground missiles. “Were it to be otherwise,” Kennedy declared, “the gravest issues would arise.” Castro’s regime would “not be allowed to export its aggressive purposes by force or the threat of force. It will be prevented by whatever means may be necessary from taking action against any part of the Western Hemisphere.” On September 7, Kennedy also revealed that he was calling 150,000 army reserves to active duty for twelve months.

  Kennedy balanced his public statement cautioning the Soviets with private resistance to congressional pressure for prompt action against Havana. “What is our policy in relation to Cuba?” Wisconsin Republican senator Alexander Wiley asked. “I’m just back from the hinterland and everybody is inquiring about it . . . .[Is it] just to sit still and let Cuba carry on?” Kennedy promised that any use of Cuba’s new weapons against a neighboring country would bring a U.S. intervention. But a U.S. attack on Cuba now “would be a mistake. . . . We have to keep some proportion,” Kennedy said. “We’re talking about 60 MiGs, we’re talking about some ground-to-air missiles . . . which do not threaten the United States. We are not talking about nuclear warheads. We’ve got a very difficult situation in Berlin. We’ve got a difficult situation in Southeast Asia and a lot of other places.” Wiley, who had been calling publicly for a blockade of Cuba, asked Kennedy about this possibility. “It’s an act of war,” Kennedy replied, and would likely produce a retaliatory blockade of Berlin. The danger from Cuba was “by subversion and example. There’s obviously no military threat, as yet, to the United States. . . . Even though I know a lot of people want to invade Cuba,” Kennedy added, “I would be opposed to it today.”

  Kennedy’s counsels of restraint could not inhibit Republicans fearful of Khrushchev’s intentions and eager to exploit a political advantage from urging military action against Castro. But the Republicans were not the only ones pressing for a stronger White House response. The press chimed in with dire warnings. And the eighty-eight-year-old poet Robert Frost, after meeting Khrushchev in Russia, told a press conference in New York on September 9 that Khrushchev thought Americans were “too liberal to fight.” The comment angered Kennedy, who felt it added to the pressure on him to get tough with Castro and Khrushchev. “Why did Frost say that?” Kennedy asked Udall, who had been with the poet in Russia. Udall responded that it was Frost’s way of paraphrasing Khrushchev’s assertion that America and the West were in decline. (Khrushchev had reminded Frost of Tolstoy’s famous comment to Maxim Gorky about sex and old age: “The desire is the same, it’s the performance that’s different.”) But the damage was done.

  Democratic senators at risk in the November elections also pressed the president for stronger action. They sent word through majority leader Mike Mansfield that they might “have to leave [him] on this matter” unless there were “at least a ‘do-something’ gesture of militancy.” They urged Kennedy to consider everything from “a Congressional resolution to a ‘quarantine’ of Cuba (short of blockade) to all out war, at least with Cuba and perhaps with Russia as well.”

  The hysteria chilled Kennedy, who tried “to set the matter in perspective” at a September 13 news conference. Castro’s charges of an imminent American invasion, he said, were an attempt to divert attention from self-inflicted economic problems and to justify increased Soviet military aid. Loose talk of an invasion by some in the United States served “to give a thin color of legitimacy to the Communist pretense that such a threat exists.” Unilateral U.S. intervention, he argued, was neither required nor justified. Castro posed no direct military threat to the United States or to any of his neighbors. If any of this should change, however, the United States would not hesitate to protect its interests. He hoped that the American people would “in this nuclear age . . . keep both their nerve and their head.”

  The CIA reinforced Kennedy’s counsels of caution. On September 19, the Agency, in an updated assessment of the Cuban buildup, reiterated that deploying ballistic missiles or building a submarine base would give the Soviets considerable military advantages, but, they noted, “[It] would be incompatible with Soviet practice to date and with Soviet policy as we presently estimate it. It would indicate a far greater willingness to increase the level of risk in US-Soviet relations than the USSR has displayed thus far.”

  On September 28, Khrushchev encouraged Kennedy’s caution. In a long letter about nuclear tests and Soviet-American relations more generally, he emphasized his determination to settle the German/Berlin problem by signing a peace treaty. As Kennedy had requested, he had been willing to put the issue “on ice” until after the November elections. But the call-up of 150,000 reservists and U.S. threats to invade Cuba were forcing his hand, and Khrushchev wished the United States to be under no illusion: An American attack on Cuba would bring retaliatory action against Berlin.

  The CIA assessment and Khrushchev’s warnings outweighed arguments for direct action against Havana, but public assurances that the United States was under no new threat and private warnings to Moscow not to create one did not mute the congressional and public outcry over Cuba. On September 20, the Senate passed a resolution by 86 to 1 authorizing the president “to prevent the creation o
r use of an externally supported offensive military capability endangering the security of the United States.” Schlesinger urged that Rusk call in Dobrynin and tell him that persistence in arming Cuba would “preclude the resolution of any outstanding disagreement” between them, force an increase in the U.S. defense budget, and possibly compel action “to eliminate Castro and his regime.” One National Security Council member echoed Schlesinger’s point: “The question is no longer whether we should ‘do something about Cuba,’” William Jordan told Walt Rostow, “but rather what we should do, how, when, and where. There is urgent need for a program of action that will address itself to such things as: the great and growing sense of deep frustration on the part of millions of Americans as regards Cuban developments.”

  But as long as the Cuban buildup seemed to be defensive, Kennedy refused to go beyond warning Moscow and indirect intimidation. Secretly he ordered McNamara to put plans for military operations against Cuba into motion. There were also large-scale maneuvers, which were held on October 22 along the southern Atlantic coast and around Puerto Rico. The exercise—pointedly andobviously code-named “Ortsac” (Castro spelled backwards)—involved seventy-five hundred marines in a mock invasion of Puerto Rican beaches. Seventy thousand servicemen participated in air force maneuvers. Everything about the maneuvers seemed calculated to send Moscow signals of U.S. readiness to take military action.