Like FDR, President Kennedy came to realize that the very intemperance of those who spread malicious stories about him and his family was a political asset. It offended decent Americans and thus redounded to his advantage. He expected Barry Goldwater to run against him in 1964, and he wanted to be sure that the country understood the difference between his centralism and Goldwater’s extremism. In a speech he never lived to deliver—it was in his pocket when he died—he scorned those who confused “rhetoric with reality” and assumed “that vituperation is as good as victory.” And earlier he had said of them:
They look suspiciously at their neighbors and their leaders. They call for a “man on horseback” because they do not trust the people. They find treason in our churches, in our highest court, in our treatment of water…. Unwilling to face up to the danger from without [they] are convinced that the real danger is from within.
Despite C. Wright Mills and H. Stuart Hughes, Communism was then a threat to American security, and despite Robert Welch and the Christian Crusaders, the threat came from the Soviet Union and not fluoridated water. The tensions of the cold war were powerful enough to generate one more convulsion of terror. It would bring the country and the world to the very brink of nuclear oblivion, and it came, anomalously, in a month of unsurpassed autumnal glory, October 1962.
***
Ordinarily Senator Kenneth Keating of New York was not a suspicious man, but reports from Cuban refugees reaching Florida that summer had troubled him. Fidel Castro’s brother Raúl, Cuba’s war minister, was known to have been in Moscow on July 2. Late in that same month activity in Cuban harbors picked up sharply; large numbers of Soviet freighters from the Black Sea began arriving at Mariel, a deepwater port on the northern coast of Pinar del Rio province. Their cargoes were unknown, and puzzling. The ships rode high in the water and were distinguished by very wide hatches. Equally odd, each vessel brought with it large teams of Soviet technicians.
By the end of August more than five thousand Russians were in Cuba, and refugees being questioned at the CIA interrogation center at Opa-Locka, Florida, reported seeing truck convoys hauling long tubular objects swathed in tarpaulins. A CIA agent reaching Opa-Locka from Cuba had seen the tailpiece of one object and had a sketch of it. That same week Castro’s personal pilot boasted in a Havana bar that Cuba now had long-range missiles with atomic warheads. On October 3 word reached Opa-Locka of activity “probably connected with missiles” in Pinar del Rio. How much of this information reached Senator Keating is unknown, but in a series of speeches that month he warned of a Soviet military buildup. On October 10 he said that according to his informants, who had been “100 percent reliable,” six intermediate-range missile sites were being constructed on the island.
The administration was skeptical. The Soviets had never put missiles in other countries, not even in bordering eastern European satellites bound to them by the Warsaw Pact. On both sides of the Iron Curtain Castro was regarded as an unstable leader and an unreliable ally. It was inconceivable that Khrushchev would entrust such a man with weapons which could destroy the world. The Kremlin had not recognized Cuba as a member of the Soviet bloc, though Castro had so proclaimed it. Cuba was far from the Soviet Union; transportation and communication lines between them could be quickly cut by the United States. Finally, the Russians could be sure that any such move would trigger a violent reaction in Washington.
At 3 P.M. Sunday, October 14, McGeorge Bundy was interviewed on television by Edward P. Morgan and John Scali of the American Broadcasting Company. As the President’s special assistant for national security, he was asked to comment on Keating’s charges. He replied: “I know there is no present evidence, and I think there is no present likelihood, that the Cubans and the Cuban government and the Soviet government would, in combination, attempt to install a major offensive capability.” That was the opinion of almost everyone in the CIA. Keating, they thought, was being had. Cuban informants were notoriously unreliable. The tubular objects were doubtless SAMs—surface-to-air missiles of the kind that shot down Francis Gary Powers’s U-2 twelve hundred miles within the Soviet Union. The Russians had provided Egypt and Indonesia with them, and other SAMs were known to be on their way to Castro. They were defensive weapons, nothing to worry about.
One man disagreed with the majority: John A. McCone, the CIA director. Returning to the capital after a wedding trip, McCone learned that there had been no aerial reconnaissance of western Cuba for a month. The reason was that SAM installations had been discovered there. No one had been willing to risk the loss of another U-2 to SAMs. McCone said that the gamble would have to be taken. On October 4 he called for the immediate photographing of the entire island, with special vigilance over its western end. After various delays because of clouds over the target areas and instructions for new U-2 pilots, October 14 dawned cloudless, and two Air Force majors took off for western Cuba. They had been told to expect ground fire, but the SAM crews were either absent or dozing; their sweep was a milk run. On their return their film magazines were dispatched to Washington and developed at processing laboratories. At the interpretation center in the Pentagon skilled specialists began studying enlargements of each frame.
By Monday afternoon they had seen enough to vindicate Keating. A field near San Cristóbal had been laid out in a trapezoidal pattern which until now had been seen only in U-2 photographs of the Soviet Union. There were SAM sites at each corner of the field, guarding a launch pad. No ballistic missiles were in sight, but the analysts had identified missile transporters, erectors, and the launchers. The evidence was not conclusive, but it certainly required immediate attention on the highest levels of the American government. Secretary McNamara had left the Pentagon earlier than usual—he was attending a seminar at Hickory Hill University—so the commanding general at the Defense Intelligence Agency put through a hot-line call to the Washington apartment of Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric. It was a few minutes after 7 P.M., Monday, October 15, 1962.
Gilpatric, dressing for dinner and overdue at General Taylor’s Fort McNair quarters, decided that he would be even later than he had expected. He said he wanted to see the photographs. Two analysts brought them. After looking at them and issuing appropriate orders he continued on to the general’s dinner, where the principal guests were already being called to the telephone, one by one, and given whispered information which, they were cautioned, could not be shared with their wives. Reports for the President would be channeled through McGeorge Bundy, who was giving another dinner for Charles E. Bohlen, the newly appointed ambassador to France. Bundy received his call, from the deputy director of the CIA, at 8:30. He decided not to tell the President until the next day. There was nothing Kennedy could do that was not already being done except lose a night’s sleep. “So,” he explained to the President in a subsequent memo, “I decided that a quiet evening and a night of sleep was the best preparation you could have in the light of what you would face in the days ahead.”
Dean Rusk, presiding at a third formal dinner on the eighth floor dining room at the State Department, was chatting with his guest of honor, Foreign Minister Gerhard Schroeder of West Germany, when he was called to a phone in the butler’s pantry. The caller was Assistant Secretary of State Roger Hilsman. Rusk listened a moment, then said, “Do you, personally, think this is it?” Hilsman replied, “There has only been a preliminary analysis, but from what I can get over the phone there doesn’t seem to be much doubt.” Any unusual behavior by the Secretary of State would set loose a flood of rumors. Rusk, though wretched, saw no alternative to observing the amenities. He returned to his guest, and the thirteen-day crisis began the next morning.
***
Tuesday, October 16, 1962
Analysts have been up all night reexamining the photographs of San Cristóbal; McNamara sees them at 7:30 A.M., Bundy at eight. Bundy goes directly to the President’s bedroom, where Kennedy is reading the morning papers, and breaks the news: “Mr. President, there
is now hard photographic evidence, which you will see a little later, that the Russians have offensive missiles in Cuba.” The President directs Bundy to summon key members of the administration to an 11:45 A.M. meeting in the Cabinet Room. Then he calls his brother.
In addition to the Kennedys, those present at the 11:45 meeting, or subsequent sessions of it, include Gilpatric, Bundy, McNamara, Rusk, O’Donnell, Lyndon Johnson, McCone, Maxwell Taylor, General Marshall Carter of the CIA, Sorensen, George Ball, Gilpatric’s counterpart at the State Department; Secretary of the Treasury Dillon; Edward Martin, Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America; Ambassadors Bohlen, Llewellyn Thompson, and Adlai Stevenson; U. Alexis Johnson, Paul Nitze, and three men no longer in the government: Dean Acheson, John J. McCloy, and Robert A. Lovett. These men will enter history as the Executive Committee of the National Security Council, or simply the Ex Comm.
Reports from technicians indicate that the San Cristóbal site will be ready for firing in about ten days, and that completion will cut the warning time for an attack on the United States from fifteen minutes to between two and three minutes. Robert Kennedy makes a note of the dominant feeling: “shocked incredulity.” There is a general awareness that any American response might worsen the situation, but that not challenging Khrushchev would be the worst course of all.
The President orders a sharp increase in U-2 overflights. Other Ex Comm members will investigate possible choices—in Rusk’s phrase, they will “box the compass.” The State Department will explore the chances of support from Latin America and U.S. allies in Europe; the Defense Department will investigate the time factor, the kinds of units, and the number of men necessary for various military alternatives. At this point a majority feels that there is only one option: an air strike against the missile sites. Robert Kennedy passes a note to his brother: “I now know how Tojo felt when he was planning Pearl Harbor.”
***
Wednesday, October 17
To maintain an appearance of calm, the President keeps a promise to campaign for Democratic candidates in Connecticut. He is away from the capital until midnight. The Ex Comm meets all day and most of the evening in George Ball’s conference room on the seventh floor of the State Department. There is new U-2 evidence, and it is chilling. The Soviet technicians are working around the clock. Missiles are now visible in the photographs. Sixteen, and possibly thirty-two, sites may be ready for firing within a week. In addition to definite proof of medium-range missiles (1,000 miles) at San Cristóbal, there are intermediate-range sites (2,200 miles) in the Guanajay area, between San Cristóbal and Havana, and at Remedios in eastern Cuba. The intermediate-range weapons will be ready by December 1. They are what the military call “first-strike” weapons. With them, the U.S. Intelligence Board estimates, the USSR will be able to fire an initial salvo of forty nuclear warheads on targets in the United States as far west as Montana.
In the absence of his brother, Bob Kennedy emerges as the Ex Comm discussion leader. Majority opinion still favors an air attack—the euphemism for it is a “surgical operation.” Bundy and Acheson are its chief advocates. McNamara proposes an alternative: a naval blockade of Cuba. Bombing and blockading are both acts of war, but the blockade has the advantage of avoiding bloodshed, at least in its first stages. An air strike would kill about 25,000 Cubans and an undetermined number of Soviet technicians. If Russians die, total war with the Soviet Union will be almost inevitable.
During the day six options, or “tracks,” are pondered. Track A is to do nothing now. Track B would send an emissary to Khrushchev and try to settle matters quietly. Track C would hale the Russians before the U.N. Security Council. (Unfortunately Valerian Zorin of the USSR is chairman of the council this month.) Track D, known in the Ex Comm as “the slow track,” is the blockade, Track E the air attack, and Track F an invasion of Cuba. Track F is put aside for restudy later; it cannot be weighed now because it must be preceded by elaborate preparations. However, these are under way.
***
Thursday, October 18
The U.S. intelligence community estimates that the weapons now in Cuba constitute about half the ICBM capacity of the entire Soviet Union. Photo analysis indicates that they are being aimed at specific American cities. If they are fired, eighty million Americans will be dead within a few minutes. According to the latest Intelligence Board reports, presented at the 11 A.M. session of the Ex Comm, the first missiles could be ready for launching in eighteen hours. The President says to Acheson, “This is the week I better earn my salary.” While he is meeting with the Ex Comm, General Shoup says, “You are in a pretty bad fix, Mr. President.” Kennedy replies swiftly, “You are in it with me.”
The President has an appointment of long standing to receive Andrei Gromyko. He keeps it, talking with Gromyko for over two hours, giving him every opportunity to bring up the matter of missiles, but Gromyko misses all his cues. (Later there will be doubt that Gromyko knew what had been happening in Cuba.) Meanwhile, Rusk is suggesting to the Ex Comm that it regard Tuesday, October 23, as the deadline for action. If by then missile pads are still being built, he says, force should be used to remove them.
Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay joins the group and argues forcefully that a military attack is essential. The President asks LeMay what the Russian response might be. LeMay assures them that there would be none. Kennedy is skeptical: “They, no more than we, can let these things go by without doing something. They can’t, after all their statements, permit us to take out their missiles, kill a lot of Russians, and then do nothing. If they don’t take action in Cuba, they certainly will in Berlin.” McNamara continues to build support for a blockade. A legal adviser from the State Department recalls Franklin Roosevelt’s “quarantine-the-aggressor speech” and suggests it might be better if the blockade were called a quarantine. The weight of opinion is moving toward this option. Robert Kennedy is strongly in favor of it. With the memory of Pearl Harbor, he says, the United States cannot launch a surprise air attack in which thousands of innocent people would die. For a hundred and seventy-five years we have not been that kind of country, he says; surprise raids are not in the American tradition.
The evening session of the Ex Comm is held directly beneath a Rusk dinner for Gromyko on the eighth floor of the State Department Building. Reporters seeing the Secretary of Defense and the director of the CIA arriving sense something unusual. They are led to believe that McNamara and McCone are going to the dinner. To avoid another confrontation with the press, at the end of the meeting nine Ex Comm members—whose cars bear easily recognized license plates—pile into the attorney general’s limousine. Their destination is the White House, where the President learns that the trend toward a blockade is continuing. Deputy Attorney General Katzenbach, a former professor of international law, is told to explore the legal basis for a blockade of Cuba.
***
Friday, October 19
Because the security lid is still on tight, the President leaves Washington again to honor an obligation, this time a commitment to campaign in Chicago. In the capital the Joint Chiefs put the Atlantic and Caribbean commands on alert at 1:20 P.M. The Pentagon announces that McNamara has asked the Chiefs to remain in Washington for six weeks to consult on “budget planning.” Katzenbach reports that in his opinion a unilateral order for a blockade can be legally justified under the circumstances. The President decides to make a televised report to the American people Monday evening—the earliest time possible if all necessary steps are to be taken first.
The Ex Comm is in continuous session all day Friday and all Friday night. Now that there is a clear majority for the blockade, Acheson withdraws. The others split into groups to write out their recommendations and then exchange papers. Out of this the outline of a definite plan begins to emerge. The most important of Friday’s developments is the decision to ask for an endorsement of the blockade by the Organization of American States (OAS). A two-thirds majority of twenty voting American republics will b
e necessary. If achievable it will be invaluable, the Kremlinologists believe, because the Russians are impressed by legalisms. As an adjunct to this, Ball gives the bare facts of the crisis to Don Wilson, deputy to ailing Edward R. Murrow at the United States Information Agency. Wilson asks a Bell Telephone executive to clear lines to Spanish-language radio stations without telling the stations why.
***
Saturday, October 20
Robert Kennedy phones his brother at the Sheraton Blackstone Hotel in Chicago: the Ex Comm is ready with a plan of action. The President summons Salinger to the presidential suite at the Sheraton Blackstone and hands him a slip of paper: “Slight upper respiratory [infection]. 1 degree temperature. Weather raw and rainy. Recommended return to Washington.” At 9:35 Chicago time Salinger makes the announcement to the press. Aboard Air Force One he asks Kennedy, “There’s nothing wrong with your health, is there, Mr. President?” Kennedy replies, “If you know nothing about it, you’re lucky.”
Robert Kennedy meets the presidential aircraft at Andrews Field. The afternoon session of the Ex Comm begins at 2:30 in the oval study on the second floor of the Executive Mansion. The President makes the final decision in favor of the blockade. The last small lingering doubt in his mind is removed when the commanding general of the U.S. Tactical Air Command tells him that even a major surprise air attack could not be certain to destroy all the missile sites and nuclear weapons in Cuba.
Adlai Stevenson, down for the day, suggests a deal. He proposes that the President tell the Russians that if they withdraw their missiles from Cuba, the United States will withdraw its missiles from Turkey and give up the American naval base at Guantánamo Bay. The general reaction is vehemently negative, a bitter aftertaste of which will stay with Stevenson until his death.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 144