Yet whatever the sources of the omission, it certainly colored assumptions about current events in Cuba. Even when information came in on September 21 from spies that twenty medium-range ballistic missiles, which could hit targets nearly eleven hundred miles inside the United States, had arrived on the island, intelligence analysts marked the report as only “potentially significant,” believing that Moscow was incapable or unwilling to take such action.
For Kennedy and his advisers in September and early October 1962, a Soviet buildup in Cuba, including offensive weapons posing a direct threat to U.S. territory, was an unwanted challenge. And not simply because it would compel consideration of an attack on Cuba that would undermine the Alliance for Progress; it would also threaten defeat in the November elections by Republicans blaming the president for having failed to topple Castro and head off grave dangers to the homeland.
The civil rights crisis in Mississippi in September also discouraged Kennedy from compounding his difficulties by describing events in Cuba as a national peril. Throughout 1961 and into 1962, civil rights had been a source of ongoing irritation to him rather than an opportunity to reform historic wrongs. He had refused to make good on his promise to integrate public housing with a stroke of the pen and he avoided tensions with segregationists by appointing five southern racists from Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi to federal judgeships. In November 1962, Kennedy would finally issue an executive order integrating public housing, but his slowness to act supported Martin Luther King’s observation that Kennedy lacked the “moral passion” to fight hard for racial equality.
At the beginning of October, one consequence of the Mississippi troubles was to keep public discussion of Cuba to a minimum. The mess at the state university in Oxford was bad enough without now conceding that the White House had failed to anticipate Soviet aggression in Cuba. During the night of the Mississippi crisis, Kennedy was angered by a tip that New York Times columnist James Reston was publishing an article saying that Kennedy was more eager to meet with the Soviets than they were to meet with him. Distressed at the thought of how weak it would make him look when tied to the Mississippi embarrassment and news of missiles in Cuba, Kennedy told aides, “We ought to knock it [Reston’s claim] down tonight. That’s just kicking Reston right in the balls, isn’t it?” he asked, pleased at the thought of showing some toughness.
In refocusing his attention on Cuba, Kennedy hoped that he would not be dealing with a major crisis that could threaten a war with Russia. His eagerness not to face an emergency reflected itself in resistance to a McCone recommendation for additional U-2 flights. In an October 5 meeting of national security officials, McCone described the likelihood of Soviet ground-to-ground missiles as more a “probability than a mere possibility.” Bundy, who remembered Kennedy as “always edgy about McCone,” disputed McCone’s conclusion and saw little need for new U-2 flights over Cuba. Rusk, speaking for the president, opposed more flights as threatening to produce a crisis with Moscow. Moreover, Kennedy, who told Bobby that he thought McCone was “a real bastard,” directly pressed McCone not to publicize his views on Cuba for fear it would inject the island into the campaign. As it was, press reports that Khrushchev had described the United States as “too liberal to fight” to defend Berlin or oust Castro had provoked congressional Republicans to demand that the president respond with tough talk.
Kennedy was convinced that Republican assertions in September and early October about Soviet missiles in Cuba were no more than campaign rhetoric. At the end of August, when Senator Kenneth Keating, a New York Republican, had complained that the administration had no plan for countering Soviet missile bases in Cuba, Kennedy had dismissed him as a “nut.” Despite assurances from Khrushchev and Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin in Washington that Soviet installations on the island were strictly for defense, the pressure on Kennedy to ensure that McCone and Republican critics were wrong convinced him to authorize a U-2 flight over Cuba for October 14.
The result shocked Kennedy and all his advisers—except for McCone, who had accurately assumed that the Soviets were building medium-range missile sites. On the evening of October 15, while Bundy was hosting a dinner party at his home, Ray Cline, the CIA’s deputy director of intelligence, phoned to report that new U-2 photos conclusively revealed four medium- and two intermediate-range installations along with twenty-one crated bombers capable of carrying nuclear weapons. The intermediate-range weapons could travel 2,100 miles and reach America’s most populous cities, as well as Washington, D.C.
Bundy’s response was surprising. He decided to wait until the next morning to bring Kennedy the bad news. He believed it would be better for Kennedy, who had had a long day on the campaign trail, to get a good night’s sleep before confronting the greatest crisis of his presidency. But Bundy knew that they were now facing a potential disaster and that the president should be the first to know. One can speculate that Bundy also wanted the time to reflect on his own failure to have measured accurately what they were dealing with and how he could provide wiser counsel. He concluded that no one, except for McCone, whose anti-Soviet ideology led him always to expect the worst from the Kremlin, could have assumed that Khrushchev would be so reckless. And so the new challenge was to assess how they could achieve any sort of reasonable agreement on the missiles with someone as seemingly erratic as the Soviet first secretary.
McNamara was unable to explain how the administration could have been so shortsighted about Moscow’s decision to risk putting offensive weapons in Cuba. But as in the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the experts had again fallen short of providing wise counsel in the weeks and months preceding the discovery of the missiles. At the start of the crisis, McNamara was less concerned about the misreading of Soviet intentions by American intelligence than about the danger of a nuclear war. “The Pentagon is full of papers talking about the preservation of a ‘viable society’ after nuclear conflict,” he told Schlesinger. “That ‘viable society’ phrase drives me mad.” He added: “A credible deterrent cannot be based on an incredible act.” Having shared in the failure to anticipate Soviet actions in Cuba, McNamara saw it as essential to find sensible answers in the coming confrontation.
When Bobby Kennedy heard the news, he rushed in to see Bundy. After being shown the photos, he was incensed at the lies Khrushchev and Dobrynin had told them. Pacing back and forth in Bundy’s small office, he began pounding a fist in his hand and cursing, “Oh shit! Shit! Shit! Those sons a bitches Russians.”
The president was equally outraged when Bundy gave him the bad news at eight in the morning. Still in bed wearing pajamas and scanning the morning papers, Kennedy had just finished reading a front-page New York Times story headlined “Eisenhower Calls President Weak on Foreign Policy.” Bundy’s news seemed certain to encourage further attacks on Kennedy’s leadership: “He [Khrushchev] can’t do that to me,” he exclaimed. His response spoke volumes about the preoccupation with domestic politics that had contributed to his reluctance to believe Khrushchev was putting offensive weapons in Cuba. True, it was easy to assume that Khrushchev would not be so reckless. After all, he knew that the United States had a huge military advantage over the Soviet Union and that a confrontation could be a prelude to a losing war. No one in the White House could quite imagine that he was ready to take such a gamble. So it was a sinking feeling for Kennedy to realize that he had misread events again on Cuba and had been so poorly served by almost all his advisers.
The presence of the missiles now opened up a two-front conflict for Kennedy. There was the domestic political fallout from having been slower than the Republicans to anticipate the Soviet aggression. McCone, who Bobby later complained made certain that congressmen and senators saw him as blameless for the administration’s belated recognition of the missile threat, encouraged the view that the intelligence failure did not come from the CIA. Bobby countered with the argument that if McCone was so worried about the Soviet threat, why did he go off to Europe on a honeymoon? Bobby al
so asserted that McCone never put any warnings in writing, which is misleading. The contemporary record shows that McCone was assertive and emphatic about his view of the danger. But no one in the White House inner circle—the president, Bundy, McNamara, Rusk—had much liking for the self-righteous, doctrinaire McCone and that made it easier for them to set aside his predictable warnings about Cuban perils.
However, the political tension between the White House and the CIA was decidedly muted alongside much more compelling concerns about how to remove the missiles from Cuba. Despite the poor record of his advisers on Cuba, Kennedy now turned to them for help. While he was determined to respond critically to anything his advisers told him, Kennedy’s strategy now was to broaden the group of consultants in order to ensure the widest possible judgments on how to end the Soviet threat peacefully, if possible. First, before he even addressed the external danger, he needed to guard against a domestic explosion of war fever, which meant hiding the crisis for as long as possible from the press and public. The New York Times story, however, had included a quote from Eisenhower, saying that on his watch “no threatening foreign bases were established.” It immediately heightened fears that the Soviets were building a missile base in Cuba, and this seemed likely to agitate demands in Congress and the press for a military response. A public clamor for quick action would inject a sense of urgency into White House discussions that Kennedy considered unhelpful in finding a measured response to the Soviet challenge. Consequently, he tried to counter any suggestion that a crisis was brewing by following a normal schedule.
Shortly before noon, he gathered thirteen officials in the White House Cabinet Room to inform them of the missiles and begin a response. An expert from the National Photographic Interpretation Center and the CIA’s assistant director of photographic interpretation set up easels and explained what the group was seeing on the enlarged photos, which looked like nothing more than a lot of indecipherable shapes and smudges. The president sat in the center on one side of an oblong table, flanked by Rusk and McNamara. Bobby Kennedy sat across at a discreet distance from his brother, sometimes leaving his seat to pace nervously about the room, giving a false impression of being a bit outside the inner circle.
Lyndon Johnson sat across from Kennedy uncharacteristically silent and stifling any hint of resentment at having been so largely ignored by the White House during his almost two years as vice president. Jackie Kennedy remembered that Johnson “never wanted to make any decision or do anything that would put him in any position. . . . Jack would say you can never get an opinion out of Lyndon at any cabinet or national security meeting. He’d just say, you know, that he agreed with them—with everyone—or just keep really quiet.”
Although Kennedy had largely consigned Johnson to the outer fringes of the administration, he had been sensitive to his imperious nature and had dispatched Johnson on trips abroad to temporarily boost Johnson’s standing and sense of importance. But Johnson’s barnstorming on these visits, Jackie recalled, “embarrassed” the president. She thought that Kennedy had a “steadily diminishing opinion” of his vice president. She said that Kennedy “grew more and more concerned about what would happen if LBJ ever became president. He was truly frightened at the prospect.” In the midst of the current Cuban crisis, however, Johnson was too experienced a politician to be excluded from the administration’s inner circle.
Bundy, acting CIA director Lieutenant General Marshall Carter, Taylor, who had become chairman of the Joint Chiefs in October 1962, Secretary of the Treasury C. Douglas Dillon, Undersecretary of State George Ball, Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric, and Deputy Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs U. Alexis Johnson were the other participants in the initial Executive Committee, or ExCOM, as it was called, discussions. All of them listened intently as Kennedy explained the terrible burden of responsibility facing them. No one in the room doubted that what they said and the president did could affect the world’s well-being forever. Others would eventually be included in the deliberations, but for the moment, the group gave Kennedy a broader base of opinion than he had previously consulted.
While Kennedy was eager to hear any counsel the assembled experts had to offer, he initially focused on two questions: Why was Khrushchev taking a gamble that could end in such a disaster? And second, how much time did they have before the problem became public knowledge? Kennedy made clear his eagerness to keep the crisis under wraps for the time being.
On his first question, Kennedy answered himself by saying, “It must be that they’re not satisfied with their ICBMs,” referring to intercontinental ballistic missiles. Taylor agreed, saying that missiles in Cuba would reduce the U.S. strategic advantage over the Soviet Union. Rusk chimed in: Khrushchev “knows that we have a substantial nuclear superiority, but he also knows that we don’t really live under fear of his nuclear weapons to the extent that he has to live under fear of ours.” By threatening the United States with medium-range missiles in Cuba, Rusk believed, Khrushchev was creating a power balance. As for any leeway they might have before public discussion and agitation of the Cuban threat erupted, they speculated that it could be anywhere from two days to a week.
Kennedy welcomed the observations on Khrushchev’s motives and the timing of any release of information, but he emphasized that initial discussions should focus on what to do about the missiles. “We’re certainly going . . . to take out these missiles,” he said. But the hard question was not just how to do it, but how to do it without getting into a catastrophic nuclear war.
The meeting, which lasted for only an hour and ten minutes, touched off a divide between advocates of prompt action and those urging caution before resorting to armed attacks. As the principal military spokesman in the room, Taylor made the case for relying on the country’s armed forces to combat the Soviet threat. McNamara, his ostensible boss, took up the argument for not rushing into a conflict. Given what we know now about Kennedy’s ultimate response to the crisis, McNamara may have been speaking for the president. For while Kennedy taped all the ExCOM conversations, there are no records of what he may have said to his defense secretary before the meeting or whether they even spoke; it seems likely, however, that some kind of pre-meeting conversation revealed Kennedy’s determination to avoid precipitous action at the same time he found a means to compel a Soviet retreat from building an offensive base in Cuba.
McNamara began his remarks by questioning whether the missiles were ready to be fired. He urged more U-2 flights to obtain a clearer picture of the weapons’ state of readiness. Taylor doubted the wisdom of such caution: He believed the Soviets could fire the missiles “very quickly,” and emphasized the great importance of a surprise attack. He recommended simultaneous air strikes against airfields and nuclear sites and a naval blockade to bar any more missile deliveries. A decision on whether to invade could wait until after they completed the initial attacks.
McNamara warned against hasty action. He thought that the nuclear warheads might not yet be in Cuba. And even if they were already there, he doubted the wisdom of hitting them from the air. Not only because they had no assurances that bombing attacks would take out all the missiles but also “because, I think the danger to the country in relation to the gain that would accrue would be excessive.” In short, an air raid could lead to retaliatory strikes against the United States with nuclear weapons that would touch off a devastating all-out conflict. “It could be a very heavy price to pay in U.S. lives for the damage we did to Cuba.”
Picking up on McNamara’s warning, Kennedy asked Taylor, “How effective can the takeout be?” Taylor answered, “It’ll never be a hundred percent,” and predicted that they would need to continue air raids for as long as they believed necessary. McNamara then asked, “Should we precede the military action with political action? I would think the answer is almost certainly yes.” And the approach should be directly to Khrushchev and as soon as possible.
Listening to the discussion, Rusk tried to find a
middle ground between McNamara and Taylor. Acknowledging that the administration couldn’t sit still, he cautioned that they had to take account of their many allies and the likelihood that any measures they took would affect them. He wanted Kennedy to bring the Organization of American States (OAS) into the discussion and possibly have them press Castro to understand that Khrushchev was using him and that he would be wise to break with Moscow. To meet Taylor’s pressure for a military response, Rusk suggested calling up reserves, reinforcing Guantánamo, promoting guerrilla operations in Cuba, urging allies to suspend all trade with Cuba, and telling Khrushchev that he was risking a serious crisis. Rusk also speculated that Khrushchev might be trying to trade the missiles in Cuba for concessions on Berlin.
No one was persuaded by Rusk’s concern about consulting allies. Bundy predicted that they would object to U.S. action to remove the missiles, “saying that if they can live with Soviet MRBMs [medium-range ballistic missiles], why can’t we?” And the Germans, mindful of a possible Soviet interest in a trade, would complain “that we were jeopardizing Berlin because of our concern over Cuba.” Kennedy didn’t like the idea of warning allies because, as he said, it was tantamount to “warning everybody. And obviously you can’t sort of announce that in four days . . . you’re going to take them out.” He asked that they figure out who to tell about their plans beyond de Gaulle, who they assumed would be entirely supportive. Rusk’s comments particularly bothered Bobby Kennedy, who already considered him “rather a weak figure.” In September, when Rusk had canceled U-2 flights over Cuba out of fear that they would be shot down and cause an international incident, Bobby savaged him in a meeting: “What’s the matter, Dean?” he asked. “No guts?”
Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House Page 32