NEAR THE END of that evening meeting, at which Johnson had again sat silent, Kennedy had pressed him—“Mr. Vice President, do you have any thoughts?”—but Johnson this time declined to give any. His only response was, “I don’t think I can add anything that is essential.”
His silence at the meeting did not, however, mean he was silent everywhere. Despite his statement that “I’m not much for circularizing it over the Hill,” he evidently decided to circularize it to at least one man on the Hill. Telephoning Richard Russell, he told him about the photographs—“The first word about the existence of those missiles came [in a telephone call] from Johnson,” says William H. Darden, chief clerk of Russell’s Senate Armed Services Committee. Kennedy had asked that that information be kept secret, and among those from whom he was undoubtedly most anxious it be kept secret were the members of the congressional hawks whom he called the “war party.” Johnson had given the information to the war party’s chief. (That during the next six days—before Kennedy made the information public in a television address—it remained secret was proof of the fact that coexisting with Russell’s monumental racism was what a friend called “a monumental sense of honor.” During the quarter of a century of Russell’s dominance in the Senate Armed Services Committee, he regarded his responsibility to America’s fighting men as a sacred trust: he never leaked confidential information to journalists, and members of his committee, even the most publicity hungry of them, were aware of what his attitude would be if they did. Once, after a closed committee hearing, Wayne Morse of Oregon, looking for headlines, leaked a piece of secret military information. Cornered for a comment by journalists the next day, Russell said he would give one not on the information but on the leak; the comment was a single word: “dishonorable.” He shared the information Johnson gave him about the Cuban Missile Crisis with no one, waiting for the time when he could discuss it with the President.)
DURING A BREAK in one of the meetings in the Cabinet Room that day, Kennedy inadvertently left the tape running, and it captured a private remark Johnson made to McNamara, not about the missile crisis but rather about the plane he had leased. “I have a Grumman Gulfstream that I’ve leased. I want you to lease it for MATS [the Military Air Transport Service] after the election,” he said, apparently asking for the Defense Department to pick up the cost of the plane. And he wanted better communications equipment installed on it. “I wonder if there’s any good reason why you shouldn’t go to somebody and put” better equipment on the plane, he said. McNamara appears to have had other things on his mind: “Oh, sure, sure,” he said to Johnson, brushing him off.
CAMPAIGNING IN THE WEST, Johnson was away from Washington during what Sorensen calls the first week’s “blur” of “the crucial meetings” at which “the basic decision was hammered out.”
Early in that week, the tone of ExComm’s discussions changed—and the catalyst for the change was Robert Kennedy. At some point, when the general opinion was still for a surprise bombing attack to be delivered the following Sunday, and much of ExComm was pressing the President to authorize it, Bobby passed a note to his brother: “I now know how Tojo felt when he was planning Pearl Harbor.”
Reminding the group, in what Sorensen was later to describe as “rather impassioned tones,” that the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, the day “that will live in infamy,” had occurred on a Sunday, Bobby said that the contemplated Sunday air strike on Cuba would be “a Pearl Harbor in reverse, and it would blacken the United States in the pages of history.” And it wasn’t just the Pearl Harbor comparison that bothered him, Bobby was to recall. “I could not accept the idea that the United States would rain bombs on Cuba, killing thousands and thousands of civilians in a surprise attack. Maybe the alternatives were not very palatable, but I simply did not see how we could accept that course of action for our country.” Every time opinion around the table seemed to be hardening behind the air strike, he spoke against it. “For 175 years we have not been that kind of a country,” he said. “A sneak attack is not in our traditions.” While he wanted steps that would make clear America’s determination to get the missiles out of Cuba, he felt the Russians must be allowed room for maneuver, an avenue along which to pull back without losing face. The onetime rabid anti-Communist was viewing the Cuban problem not just in military but in moral terms.
Listening to Robert Kennedy analyzing all sides of the situation, with his emphasis on the moral rather than the military—“We spent more time on this moral question during the first five days than on any single matter,” he was to say—Undersecretary of State George Ball was “very much surprised.” He had always felt that Bobby’s ideas were “much too simplistic and categorical—either you condemn something utterly or you accept it enthusiastically … and there seemed no intermediate positions,” but now “he behaved quite differently.” And, Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon was to say, Bobby spoke “with an intense and quiet passion” that swayed ExComm. “As he spoke, I felt that I was at a real turning point in history”; after listening to him, “I knew then that we should not undertake a strike without warning.” It was “Bobby Kennedy’s good sense”—his “good sense” and “his moral character”—which were, perhaps, “decisive” in ExComm’s debates, said the State Department’s U. Alexis Johnson. (Dean Acheson felt differently: he was to say with contempt that Robert Kennedy had been “moved by emotional or intuitive responses more than by the trained lawyer’s analysis.”)
The President had not sat in on all ExComm’s meetings: he wanted to stay away from some of them, his brother would explain, because he didn’t want the discussions to be “inhibited”; “personalities change when the President is present.” But he was kept apprised. Returning from a campaign trip to Connecticut on Wednesday evening, the President found his brother and Sorensen waiting for him at the airport, sitting in his car to avoid reporters’ attention. “I have the most vivid memory of the smiling campaigner alighting from his plane, waving casually to onlookers at the airport, and then instantly casting off that pose and taking up the burdens of crisis as he entered his car,” Sorensen was to recall. But Johnson was not present as the tone in the group, prodded constantly by the President for new ideas, probed by him to make sure that no one was merely trying to guess his own views and agree with them, swung slowly away from the Joint Chiefs’ insistence on immediate bombings and possibly invasion and toward an intermediate step: a naval blockade, or “quarantine,” of Soviet ships heading for Cuba with new equipment.
A blockade would not necessarily lead to bloodshed, and it would be coupled with a demand that Khrushchev remove the missiles already in Cuba, and with attempts, despite the Soviet premier’s deceit in previous dealings, to find some basis for negotiations with him. And the possibility of gradual military escalation would be kept open; preparations for air strikes of varying size, and for an invasion later if necessary, would go forward. On Saturday, October 20, ExComm decided on that recommendation, and Robert Kennedy called his brother, who was campaigning in Chicago, and the President, pleading a cold, came home; Bobby, sitting on the edge of the White House pool while the President was swimming to ease the pain in his back, gave him the recommendation and the President accepted it.
LYNDON JOHNSON WAS also summoned back on Saturday, but since he was on his way to Hawaii, he did not arrive in Washington until Sunday, October 21; that evening, he was briefed at The Elms by CIA director John McCone.
Although McCone laid out for Johnson “in considerable detail” the thinking that had gone into Kennedy’s decision, the Vice President did not agree with it, according to a “Memorandum for the File” that McCone wrote the next day. A blockade, Johnson said, would be “locking the barn after the horse was gone” since missiles were already in Cuba. He was also not in favor of gradual escalation, which he called “telegraphing our punch.” Instead, he wanted “an unannounced [air] strike”—bombing Cuba without warning. (The scale of the strike he was advocating is not made clear in McC
one’s memo.) He “finally agreed reluctantly [with the blockade plan] but only after learning among other things the support indicated by General Eisenhower,” McCone wrote.
Johnson’s attitude can be partly explained by the fact that he had not been sitting in on the deliberations of the intervening days, when the pros and cons of the various options had been explored, and, of course, he was not the only member of ExComm—General Maxwell Taylor, McCone and Dillon were among the others—who were urging, in one form or another, a harder line. But during the next five days—on the first of which Kennedy went on television to tell America that Communist nuclear missile sites were being built in Cuba; that Russian bombers, capable of carrying nuclear weapons, were being assembled just ninety miles from America’s shores; that he was immediately instituting a “quarantine” under which “all ships of any kind bound for Cuba” would be halted, boarded, searched, and “if found to contain … offensive weapons, be turned back”; and that if the offensive buildup continued, “further action will be justified” (“I have directed the Armed Forces to prepare for any eventuality”)—Johnson was part of ExComm’s deliberations. There were moments when he was on the side of caution—once, when ExComm was mulling the utility of nighttime photography of the sites, which would require the use of flares, he said, “I’ve been afraid of those damned flares ever since they mentioned them.… Imagine some crazy Russian captain doing it. The damned 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.” But in general, Johnson’s attitude didn’t change.
These were days of terrible moments. Every day the photos, enlarged, placed on easels in the Cabinet Room and interpreted by CIA experts, showed that construction of the missile sites was not being halted but speeded up. “That is one launch pad there.… The conduiting goes back through this blast wall here. Here are the cables that come out of the control bunker.… This is the other launch pad over here. And here is where we think is probably one of the nuclear storage bunkers.” Work on the launch pads, by thousands of Russian technicians and soldiers, was going on day and night now; some of them would become operational in a matter of days. And when they were—if America had not attacked before then, if America had waited too long to attack—then, if America did attack, the missiles, with nuclear warheads, could be launched against American cities in retaliation. Once “nuclear warheads were in place and pointed at the United States,” the balance of power in the Cold War would have changed.
The Russian ships kept coming. A quarantine line—the line at which armed American sailors would board Cuban-bound vessels, just the type of action that could lead to escalation, and then to war—had been established five hundred miles off Cuba, and on Wednesday, October 24, two Russian ships were within a few miles of the line. And just after ExComm convened at 10 that morning came the news that a Russian submarine had moved into position to protect them. An American aircraft carrier, the Essex, with helicopters carrying anti-submarine depth charges, had been ordered into the vicinity. “It’s a very dangerous situation,” McNamara said in that hushed Cabinet Room. “We’ll declare radio silence. And therefore neither we nor the Soviets will know where our Navy ships are for much of today.”
“This was the moment … which we hoped would never come,” Robert Kennedy was to recall. In that moment Bobby saw only his brother. “His hand went up to his face & covered his mouth and he closed his fist. His eyes were tense, almost gray, and we just stared at each other across the table. Was the world on the brink of a holocaust and had we done something wrong?” For a few fleeting seconds, it was almost as though no one else was there, and Jack was just his brother again, not the President. “Inexplicably, I thought of when he was ill and almost died … when we learned that our oldest brother had been killed, of personal times of strain and hurt. The voices droned on, but I didn’t seem to hear anything.… I felt we were on the edge of a precipice with no way off.… One thousand miles away in the vast expanse of the Atlantic Ocean the final decisions were going to be made in the next few minutes.” Then a messenger came into the room, and handed a note to John McCone, and McCone announced that the Russian ships had stopped, and might be starting to turn around. “The meeting droned on,” Robert Kennedy said. “For a moment the world had stood still, and now it was going around again.”
The danger was far from over: some Russian ships, further from the quarantine line, were still continuing toward it at full speed; and even if no more missiles arrived, the ones already in Cuba were still there, and the work on them was continuing. But the constant in all these moments was the determination of the two brothers to give Khrushchev every chance to reconsider, to pull back; the determination to avoid war—and above all, to avoid it through miscalculation. The President had read Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August, and, sitting in the Oval Office after the ExComm meetings with his brother, Sorensen and O’Donnell, “he talked,” Robert Kennedy recalls, “about the miscalculations” that had exploded into the First World War. “They somehow seemed to tumble into war, he said, through stupidity, individual idiosyncrasies, misunderstandings and personal complexes of inferiority and grandeur.… ‘The great danger and risk in all of this,’ he said, ‘is a miscalculation—a mistake in judgment.’ ” He was determined to do anything possible to avoid one. That Wednesday, not long after the tension had been eased, it was ratcheted up again—in minutes of confusion over whether all of the Russian ships had stopped, or all but one, the Kimovsk, which might be turning back, or was simply moving in a circle, as if it still might challenge the blockade. There were American planes overhead; the Soviet sub was there—and the Essex; it was just the type of situation in which someone out in the Atlantic might make a mistake. And the time for the mistake was—“right now,” McNamara said; it was 10:40 a.m., almost the moment at which an American destroyer was scheduled to hail the Kimovsk, and demand that it halt and submit to a search. “Check first,” John Kennedy ordered. “We ought to maybe wait an hour on the Kimovsk. To see whether.… It seems to me you want to give that specific ship a chance to turn around. You don’t want to have word going out from Moscow: ‘Turn around,’ and suddenly we sink a ship.” Tell the Essex “to wait an hour and see whether that ship continues on its course,” he ordered. And in fact the Kimovsk was turning around; by Thursday, sixteen of the twenty-five Russian ships heading for Cuba had stopped dead in the water or reversed course.
The next day, Thursday, one of the nine other Russian ships, the Bucharest, was still steaming toward the quarantine line. Because it was a tanker, it almost certainly didn’t carry any missiles or other armament, but, as Robert Kennedy recalls, “there were those on the Executive Committee who felt strongly that the Bucharest should be stopped and boarded, so that Khrushchev would make no mistake of our will or interest.” John Kennedy assured them that the Navy would stop and board one of the ships. Just not this one at the moment, he said. He would make a decision by nightfall, he said. But that evening, “after further heated discussion,” Kennedy made a final decision to let the Bucharest proceed to Havana. “Against the advice of many of his advisers and of the military he had decided to give Khrushchev more time. ‘We don’t want to push him into a precipitous action—give him time to consider. I don’t want to push him into a corner from which he cannot escape.’ ” Over and over again, Kennedy delayed a decision to take a step that would require force and might be met by force—and therefore might escalate into the war that would destroy mankind. Over and over again, he tried to give Khrushchev more time to think—until on Friday night, a cable clattered over the State Department teletype, a long, rambling message from Nikita Khrushchev. It contained an offer to trade: in return for America’s pledge not to invade Cuba, the missiles and the Russian technicians and soldiers would be withdrawn. And it contained also “very personal” sentences about the Russian premier’s own fears that mankind was on the edge of the abyss o
f nuclear war, as well as a statement—“Mr. President, we and you ought not now to pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied the knots of war; because the more the two of us pull, the tighter this knot will be tied.” That message “for the first time,” Robert Kennedy said, gave his brother hope that he was not the only one of the two leaders who was trying to pull mankind back from the abyss.
DURING THESE FIVE DAYS—from Monday, October 22, through Friday, October 26—Lyndon Johnson was in the Cabinet Room hour after hour as ExComm met, but he hardly spoke, at least while the group was sitting around the Cabinet table with the President presiding. According to Robert Kennedy and Ted Sorensen, he would, however, speak after the meeting was over and the President had left the Cabinet Room, having switched off the tape recorder. “Frequently, after the meetings were finished, he would circulate and whine and complain about our being weak, but he never made … any suggestions or recommendations,” Robert Kennedy would say. “He was displeased with what we were doing, although he never made clear what he would do. He said he had the feeling that we were being too weak, and that we should be stronger.”
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