He didn’t speak even at one meeting at which he might particularly have been expected to.
On the Monday of that week, just before his telecast, President Kennedy met in the Cabinet Room with twenty congressional leaders, hastily ferried back to Washington by Air Force planes from all over the country, to inform them of the decision he had made, and of the reasons behind it, and he had Johnson attend the meeting.
Nineteen of the leaders were learning the scope of the Russian buildup for the first time; Richard Russell, of course, was not, thanks to Johnson; he had had a week to think about what should be done,1 and he did not accept Kennedy’s reasoning. “Mr. President,” he said, “I could not stay silent under these circumstances and live with myself. I think that our responsibilities to our people demanded stronger steps than that.… We’re at the crossroads. We’re either a first-class power or we’re not.” The United States should invade, and invade immediately, he said. It would not be an invasion without warning. “You have warned these people time and again.… They can’t say they’re not on notice. You have told them not to do this thing. They’ve done it. And I think you should assemble as speedily as possible an adequate force and clean out that situation.” Why had the President been waiting so long to act if he knew work on the missiles was going forward? Russell demanded. “Why didn’t you start when you first got these notifications of all these [missiles] down there? It’s been over seven days.… I think we can die by attrition here.… Our authority and the world’s authority will hinge on this decision.”
Foreign Relations chairman agreed with Armed Services chairman. “I think a blockade is the worst of the alternatives because if you’re confronted with a Russian ship, you are actually confronting Russia,” J. William Fulbright told the President.
“What are you in favor of, Bill?” Kennedy asked him.
“I’m in favor … of an invasion, and an all-out one, and as quickly as possible,” Fulbright replied.
Every congressional leader who spoke at the meeting agreed with Russell. This was indeed the “war party,” and it included the leaders, perhaps all the leaders, of Capitol Hill.
Kennedy was jolted. Later, Robert Kennedy would write that his brother’s meeting with the congressmen had been “the most difficult meeting.… it was a tremendous strain.” And during it, he had received no help from Lyndon Johnson. Kennedy may have expected that his Vice President would help. The men in that room were his longtime allies; moreover, the Vice President had been a part of the ExComm deliberations: he knew, and could explain in terms they understood, the arguments that would temper their opposition. The meeting had lasted for an hour, and during it Lyndon Johnson had not said a word. Given a chance to help the President, he hadn’t used it.
DURING THOSE FIVE DAYS, furthermore, Jack Kennedy’s insistence that ExComm explore each option, think through the consequences of each course of action, had won most of the committee’s members over to his side, and while some, the most hawkish, still felt his response was too weak, the attitude of most of them had been softened. But Johnson was one member of ExComm the President hadn’t won over at all, whose attitude had not softened at all, as became apparent on the sixth day after the Vice President’s return from Hawaii, the twelfth—and climactic—day of the Cuban Missile Crisis: Saturday, October 27.
Hardly had ExComm convened in the Cabinet Room just after 10 a.m. that Saturday when, as Theodore Sorensen puts it, “our hopes,” raised by Khrushchev’s letter, “quickly faded.” The Soviet premier had sent a new letter, this time a public message, “raising the ante”: a no-invasion pledge was no longer all he was asking for in exchange for removing his missiles; the new letter also demanded the removal of American Jupiter missiles based in Turkey.
Since the Jupiters were, in fact, all but obsolete, the United States had been considering their removal for some time before the crisis, assuring Turkey that Polaris nuclear submarines in the Mediterranean offered far more protection, not pursuing the matter because of Turkey’s strenuous objections, and Khrushchev’s proposals immediately appealed to Kennedy. But because Khrushchev had made the demand publicly, America’s agreement to it would appear to our allies, as one of them, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, was to put it, as “a sign of weakness,” of appeasement—a sign that Khrushchev had, by putting missiles in Cuba, forced the United States to withdraw weapons from an ally. Accepting Khrushchev’s deal would appear to demonstrate that to remove a threat to itself, America had sacrificed an ally; “anything like this deal would do great injury to NATO,” Macmillan said. “All credibility in the American protection of Europe would have gone.”
That second letter began what Robert Kennedy was to call “the most difficult twenty-four hours of the Missile Crisis.”
All that day, the news got steadily worse. “To add to the feeling of foreboding and doom, Secretary McNamara reported increased evidence that the Russians in Cuba were now working day and night, intensifying their efforts on the missile sites.” There were indications that some missiles were being moved into ready position for firing. The Russian Ilyushin-28 bombers—the bombers capable of carrying nuclear warheads—were being uncrated and assembled. Time had all but run out for America. And nine ships were still steaming across the Atlantic; one of them, the Grozny, was less than a hundred miles from the quarantine line and heading straight for it; McNamara said the Navy was readying destroyers to board it. Joining the meeting, the Joint Chiefs delivered their recommendation: an air strike on Monday, followed by an invasion.
The President kept postponing his decision. Leaving the Cabinet Room, he and his brother would walk down the hall to the Oval Office to talk privately there, occasionally calling in Sorensen: still hopeful that Khrushchev, despite his second letter, might be searching for a way out of the crisis, they were trying to find a way to help him do so, and finally they felt they had: that the President simply ignore the second letter, including the demand about the Jupiters in Turkey, and reply to the first, accepting the deal it had offered—to withdraw the missiles in exchange for a no-invasion pledge. Returning to the Cabinet Room, he left Sorensen drafting the reply.
And then, in the evening, as Sorensen was still working, came news of an American U-2 spy plane that had been photographing the missile installations. Momentarily rattled when he heard it, the President said, “A U-2 was shot down? Well now, this is much [sic] of an escalation by them, isn’t it? How do we explain? … How do we? … I mean that must be—”
Days earlier, ExComm had decided on the actions to be taken if a U-2 was shot down—“immediate retaliation upon the most likely SAM [surface-to-air missile] site involved,” coupled with an announcement that if another U-2 was hit, “we’ll take out every SAM site”—and now a U-2 had been shot down, its pilot was lying dead in the wreckage, and from all along the long table came angry demands that that decision be carried out. “They’ve fired the first shot.” “We should retaliate against the SAM sites and announce that if any other planes … It’s what we agreed to two [sic] days ago.” “It looked good then and it still looks good to me.” Carried out immediately. “You can go against one SAM site, can’t you?” McGeorge Bundy said. “Now? Tonight?” “The hawks, dreaming of a Monday morning war, rallied behind the hard line,” Arthur Schlesinger writes, and it wasn’t only hawks who were following that line now. “I think tomorrow morning we ought to go in and take out that SAM site and send our surveillance in with proper protection immediately following it.… Shoot up that SAM site and send in—” Robert McNamara said. “There was,” in Robert Kennedy’s words, “almost unanimous agreement that we had to attack early the next morning.”
“The noose was tightening on all of us,” he says.
But again his brother pulled everyone back. The letter to Khrushchev was almost completed; it might work. “It isn’t the first step that concerns me, but both sides escalating to the fourth and fifth step—and we don’t go to the sixth because there is no one around to do so,”
the President said. He left the Cabinet Room with his brother to see how Sorensen was coming with the letter, and when he returned about ten minutes later, leaving his brother and Sorensen working on the draft, he changed the subject: “Gentlemen, come up and sit here now. Gentlemen. Let’s talk a little more about the Turks, how we’re going to handle that. NATO and the Turks, that’s the one matter we haven’t settled today.” Discussions went on, about the Jupiter trade, about how to get Turkey and NATO to agree to it.
DURING MOST OF THAT SATURDAY, Lyndon Johnson had had, as usual, little to say, but that evening, President Kennedy and his brother having left the Cabinet Room, suddenly the Vice President was talking—harshly criticizing what the President was trying to do.
If America agreed to trade the Turkish missiles for the Cuban missiles, he said, “Radio and TV reports will give the impression that we’re having to retreat.” And, he said, those reports would not be wrong. “We’re backing down.” In fact, he said, “I think we’ve been [backing down] gradually from the President’s speech.”
Re-entering the room at that moment, Robert Kennedy heard Johnson’s remarks. “[Who] feels we’re backing down?” he demanded.
“We’ve got a blockade, and we’re doing … this and that and the [Russian] ships are coming through,” Johnson replied.
“No, the ships aren’t coming through,” Kennedy said. “They all turned back. Ninety percent of them, they haven’t been running for twenty-four hours.”
“I don’t think we can justify, at this moment, [the argument] that it looks like we are as strong as we were the day of the President’s announcement,” Johnson replied.
Bobby left, to rejoin his brother in the Oval Office, and Bundy started trying to explain that the Navy was still “waiting for up-to-date information on” the Grozny’s position—how close it was to the quarantine line—but Johnson returned to the subject of the President’s speech of October 22, in which Kennedy had promised further action if the missiles were not removed. The public was going to start asking why the President had not carried out that pledge, Johnson said—“Since then why we … I don’t say [unclear], I don’t say it’s a lie. I just say that’s what happens [with public opinion] when it’s 101 degrees [hot]. And I think they would see this whole thing, they see the U-2 shot down, and they say, ‘What’s your response?’ ”
For the first time during the crisis, Johnson was doing a lot of talking, and he was talking—the Texas twang authoritative, insistent, overriding other voices—with a fervor that held the table, and shifted the mood of at least some of the men around it.
With both Kennedys out of the room, he was running the meeting. “Did we get off this letter of points [to Khrushchev] … ? Is that finally put in, Mr. Secretary?” “Well, then, to summarize it [the situation] … What has been done today? Let’s just see how he [Khrushchev] is looking at our performance today before he shot down this plane.” When Rusk tried to answer his questions, Johnson interrupted him.
The concept of the trade—removing the Jupiters from Turkey if Russia removed its missiles from Cuba—had a great drawback, Johnson said. The trade would leave Russian bombers and troops still in Cuba. To get them out, he said, the United States would be forced to trade again: to agree to remove our bombers from Turkey—the Jupiters might be obsolete, but the planes weren’t; and having them based close to Russia’s borders was a vital strategic advantage for the United States—and our troops as well. “I guess what he’s [Khrushchev] really saying: I’m going to dismantle the foreign policy of the United States for the last fifteen years in order [for the United States] to get those missiles out of Cuba. Then we say we’re glad and we appreciate it, and we want to discuss it with you.”
And even more important, Johnson said, accepting a trade showed weakness. “Look, the weakness of the whole thing is, you say, ‘Well, they [the Russians] shot down one plane, and they [the Americans] gave up Turkey. Then they shoot down another, and they [the Americans] give up Berlin.’ You know, like a mad dog—he tastes a little blood, he …”
Showing weakness to a mad dog was always a mistake, Lyndon Johnson said. “He’s [Khrushchev] got to get a little blood.” And now, by shooting down the U-2, “he’s got it.” And America was still not responding. “Now, when they realize that they shot down one of our pilots, we’re letting this ship go through and that ship go through …” What was needed was strength, action. The American people were going to demand action, he said. “I think you’re going to have a big problem right here, internally, in a few more hours in this country.” An American plane had been shot down, and the President was taking no action. “This ought to start the wires [coming] in now from all over the country, the states of the Union: ‘Where have you been? What are you doing? The President made a fine speech. What else have you done?’ … They see that there’s some ships coming through. There’s a great feeling of insecurity.”2
He was pounding home the idea that the time for negotiation—at least for negotiation alone—was over, that immediate military action was needed, rallying the hawks. In the midst of an exchange with two of them, Treasury Secretary Dillon and former ambassador to Russia Llewellyn Thompson, he demanded: “You just ask yourself what made the greatest impression on you today, whether it was his [Khrushchev’s] letter last night, or whether it was his letter this morning, or whether it was that U-2 boy going down?”
“The U-2 boy,” Dillon replied. “That’s exactly right; that’s what did it,” Johnson said. “And that [attacking a SAM site] is what’s going to make an impression on him [Khrushchev]—not all these signals [letters] that each one of us write. He is an expert on that palaver.”
Johnson was making an argument with the force—so long held in check—that carried all before it, and by the time President Kennedy returned to the Cabinet Room, about 7:20, the effect he had had on the hawks was obvious. Bundy told the President that “There is a very substantial difference between us,” and Dillon and Thompson made that clear. Dillon said, “It would probably be more effective and make more of an impression on him if we did do what we said we were going to do before, and just go in and knock out this one SAM site.… Don’t say anything. Just do that.” “They’ve upped the price and they’ve upped the action,” Thompson said. “And I think we have to bring them back by upping our action.” And Johnson for once engaged Kennedy in an exchange, which showed how substantial a difference there was between him and the President. When Kennedy tried to explain that escalation such as knocking out a SAM site might well end in invasion, and “We can’t very well invade Cuba, with all this toil and blood it’s going to be, when we could have gotten them [the Soviet missiles] out by making a deal on the same missiles in Turkey,” Johnson interrupted him.
“It doesn’t mean just missiles,” he said. To get the Russian bombers and troops out of Cuba as well, another trade would be necessary. And if America took its planes and troops out of Turkey, “Why then your whole foreign policy is gone. You take everything out of Turkey. Twenty thousand men, all your technicians, and all your planes and all your missiles. And crumble.”
“How else are we going to get those missiles out of there [Cuba] then?” Kennedy said. “That’s the problem.”
He was still playing for time—time that could bring peace, not war. He wanted to see if his letter to Khrushchev, which he had had his brother hand-deliver to Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, had any effect, and in the meantime he wasn’t taking any action. Everyone should “get a bite to eat,” he said, and reconvene at nine o’clock. Then “we’ll see what we do about the plane,” he said, and discuss “this Turkish thing.”
AS THE FIFTEEN MEMBERS of ExComm were filing out of the Cabinet Room to go to dinner, a quiet word was said to eight of them—Robert Kennedy, of course; Sorensen, Bundy, Rusk, McNamara, Ball, Thompson, and Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell L. Gilpatric—to join the President in the Oval Office for another, more private, discussion. This smaller group included hawks as well as doves—Th
ompson, Gilpatric and Bundy were, to varying degrees, in the first category—but it did not include the Vice President. “Lyndon Johnson was not invited to that meeting,” Sorensen says. Whether it was the harsh words he had spoken to the Kennedys that evening—If you do the Turkish trade, you “crumble,” he had told the President; “We’re backing down,” he had said to Robert—or his complaints during the entire week (“about our being weak”); or his silence when the President had needed his help with the congressional leaders; or the fear that he could not be trusted not to leak confidential information; or the unalloyed hawkishness he had displayed from the first day of the crisis through that very evening toward the “mad dog” in the Kremlin, whatever the reasons, he had his dinner downstairs in the White House mess.
The subject of the discussion in the Oval Office upstairs was what Robert Kennedy should say to Dobrynin, who was probably waiting for him already at the Justice Department. “One part of the oral message we discussed was simple, stern, and simply decided,” Bundy was to recall. It was the same message sent in the President’s letter to Khrushchev: remove the missiles, and there would be no invasion. “Otherwise further American action was unavoidable.” But now Dean Rusk proposed a second, very secret, part: that Bobby should tell Dobrynin “that while there could be no [public] deal over the Turkish missiles, the President was determined to get them out and would do so once the Cuban crisis was resolved.”
The Passage of Power Page 37