by Tony Judt
The Americans, as we have seen, were embarrassed by a suggestion that in other circumstances would not have been unwelcome, and so it was only as part of a highly secretive deal that the removal of the Jupiters was agreed to, thereby depriving the Soviets of the propaganda advantage they had sought from a public missile “swap.” As Khrushchev would later conclude, “This agreement was primarily of moral significance and had no practical consequences. All those missiles were obsolete and America did not need them. The Americans would have removed them even if there were no conflict between us.”19
Why the secrecy, then? Why did McNamara, Rusk, Bundy, and others lie to Congress and others for years to come, insisting there was no such deal (and making Kennedy look strikingly unreasonable and uncooperative as a result)? Partly, once again, to protect the sensibilities of their allies, partly to protect JFK’s image and the record of uncompromised victory. And partly, if Anatoly Dobrynin is to be believed, to protect the future presidential ambitions of his brother. “Very privately, Robert Kennedy added that some day—who knows?—he might run for president, and his prospects could be damaged if this secret deal about the missiles in Turkey were to come out.”20 The secret was kept at least until the early eighties, when George Ball and others hinted at it in their memoirs. It is noteworthy that the Soviet leadership, who might have had an interest in making it more widely known, chose never to do so.
Two final considerations shaped and inhibited U.S. behavior in the crisis. One, of course, was the unhealthy obsession with Cuba. The Kennedys did much to fan this near-hysteria—it was John Kennedy who had once described Eisenhower’s relatively restrained approach to Cuba as “the most glaring failure of American foreign policy.” Having talked up the Cuban threat in public and (in Robert Kennedy’s case) assiduously encouraged and participated in “Mongoose” and other CIA schemes in 1961-62 to destroy Castro, they were ill-placed to minimize the danger in October. For the same reason, they did not fully grasp how much their preoccupations had made Cuba one of the Kremlin’s own major concerns. 21 Once Khrushchev had decided to place offensive missiles there, however, the visceral unacceptability to Americans of Soviet missiles being that close to home (something Europeans had lived with for many years) was itself a political element in the situation that Kennedy could hardly ignore.
Finally, there was Berlin. In retrospect it seems absurd that Kennedy and his advisers should have been so obsessed by the possibility of a Soviet move there. They were convinced that Khrushchev was engaged in a complex, Machiavellian ploy to achieve his long-standing German objectives. Hardly an hour passed during the first ten days of the crisis without ExComm reverting to the subject of West Berlin, to the need to counter Khrushchev’s anticipated countermove in the divided city. As Kennedy said on October 22 to the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan (the only foreign leader whom he consulted throughout the crisis), “I need not point out to you the possible relation of this secret and dangerous move on the part of Khrushchev to Berlin.”
The lesson of 1948 had been learned too well—“To the Kennedy administration West Berlin was indeed a vital interest of the West,” Bundy wrote, and of course the most vulnerable. Just as Truman and Acheson had seen the Korean incursion as a possible prelude to a Soviet probe across the divided frontier of Germany, so Kennedy and his colleaguessaw in the missile emplacements in Cuba a Soviet device to blackmail a vulnerable America into giving way in Berlin.22
The irony is that the Berlin crisis of the early sixties was in fact already over. Ever since 1957 Khrushchev had been pressing for a “resolution” to the unfinished business of West Berlin. On more than one occasion he had threatened to sign a separate peace treaty with the East German regime and give the latter full control of access to Berlin’s western half. At the Vienna summit meeting with Kennedy, he tried to use Soviet superiority in conventional forces as a threat to push the Americans out of West Berlin. In the summer of 1961, duly impressed, Kennedy even increased the national defense budget specifically to buttress the U.S. military presence there.
Khrushchev was bluffing—he did have a vast superiority of local conventional forces in Europe and could have occupied West Berlin (and most of Western Europe) any time he wished. But the U.S. had sworn to defend the freedom of West Berlin by all means—which in practice meant nuclear weapons—and Khrushchev had no intention of risking nuclear war for Germany. Instead, he resolved the local dilemma of the East German authorities—the thousands of their subjects who were voting with their feet and heading west—by putting up the Wall in August 1961. Two months later he withdrew his earlier “deadline” for a peace treaty, and nothing more was said of the matter. 23
But the Americans, here as elsewhere, took Soviet bluster and propaganda all too seriously and—mistakenly believing that Berlin mattered as much to the Russians as it did to the West—built their understanding of U.S.-Soviet relations around the Berlin question .24 This dramatically ratcheted up the apparent meaning of the Cuban crisis. Thus Kennedy said on October 19: “I don’t think we’ve got any satisfactory alternatives . . . . Our problem is not merely Cuba but it is also Berlin. And when we recognize the importance of Berlin to Europe, and recognize the importance of our allies to us, that’s what has made this thing be a dilemma for these days. Otherwise, our answer would be quite easy.” Give him an inch on Cuba, ran the general line, and he’ll take a mile on Berlin. Three days earlier, as the crisis began, Secretary of State Dean Rusk had summarized his own interpretation of the Soviet actions: “I think also that Berlin is very much involved in this. For the first time, I’m beginning really to wonder whether maybe Mr. Khrushchev is entirely rational about Berlin.” Today’s readers of The Kennedy Tapes may be more disposed to ask that question of Khrushchev’s American adversaries.
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:
General Wheeler: “From a military point of view, I feel that the lowest-risk course of action is the full gamut of military action by us. That’s it.”
President Kennedy: “Thank you, General.”25
In striking contrast, Kennedy’s pro
fessional 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:
Thompson: “I think it’s very highly doubtful that the Russians would resist a blockade against military weapons, particularly offensive ones, if that’s the way we pitched it before the world.”
President Kennedy: “What do we do with the weapons already there?”
Thompson: “Demand they’re dismantled, and say that we’re going to maintain constant surveillance.”
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”:
Johnson: “Bob, if you’re willing to give up your missiles in Turkey, you think you ought to defuse them, why don’t you say that to him and say we’re cutting a trade, make the trade there, [and] save all the invasion, lives, and everything else?”
McNamara: “I said I thought it was the realistic solution to the problem.”
Johnson: “Sure. Right. What we were afraid of was he would never offer this, and what he would want to do is trade Berlin.”
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:
I’ve been afraid of these damned flares ever since they mentioned them. . . .
Imagine some crazy Russian captain doing it. The damn thing [the flare] goes “blooey” and lights up the skies. He might just pull a trigger. Looks like we’re playing Fourth of July over there or something. I’m scared of that. . . .
And I don’t see what you get with that photograph that’s so much more important than what you . . . You know they’re working at night, and you can see them working at night. Now, what do you do?
Psychologically, you scare them [the Soviets]. Well, hell, it’s like the fellow telling me in Congress: “Go on and put the monkey on his back.” Every time I tried to put a monkey on somebody else’s back, I got one. If you’re going to try to psychologically scare them with a flare, you’re liable to get your bottom shot at.
The flares proposal was duly abandoned.
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.