One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War

by M. Dobbs

  "He's a military man; I'm not," shrugged Ambassador Dobrynin, when asked about Dubovik's comment. "He is the one who knows what the Navy is going to do."

  Other Soviet officials displayed less bravado. At the mission to the United Nations in New York, diplomats exchanged dark jokes about the epitaph on their tombstones in the event of nuclear war.

  "Here lie the Soviet diplomats," was one suggestion. "Killed by their own bombs."

  8:15 P.M. TUESDAY, OCTOBER 23

  Trailed by military and civilian aides, Robert McNamara walked out of his third-floor suite of offices on the E-Ring, the Pentagon's power corridor, overlooking the Potomac River. He was headed for the nerve center of the quarantine operation, Navy Flag Plot, located in the adjacent wing of the complex, one floor up. The president had instructed him to keep a close watch on the Navy's plans for enforcing the blockade.

  At the age of forty-six, McNamara was the epitome of "the best and the brightest" minds that JFK had promised to bring to Washington after his election victory. With his metal spectacles and closely cropped, slicked-back hair, he looked and sounded like a human version of the computers that were beginning to transform American industry. His brain seemed to worked faster than anyone else's. He had a knack for quickly honing in on a complex problem and reducing it to an elegant mathematical formula. But he also had a more sensitive, soulful side that appealed to women. "Why is it," Bobby Kennedy once asked, "that they call him the 'computer' and yet he's the one all my sisters want to sit next to at dinner?"

  While conceding that the secretary was brilliant, the uniformed military also found him arrogant and interfering. Many senior officers disliked him intensely. They were suspicious of his entourage of precocious young civilians, known as the "whiz kids," who appeared intent on shaking up the military. In private, they accused McNamara of circumventing the regular chain of command. They hated his habit of reaching down into the inner workings of the Pentagon like no other secretary of defense before him, challenging their figures, nixing their favorite weapon systems, and questioning the traditional way of running things.

  For his part, McNamara was concerned that he wasn't getting accurate and timely information from the Navy. Neither he nor his deputy, Roswell Gilpatric, were seeing the messages that were going out to the fleet from CINCLANT, commander in chief Atlantic, in Norfolk, Virginia. They worried that a small incident ― such as an argument between a Russian and an American sailor ― could snowball into a nuclear war. In the atomic age, it was no longer enough for the president to "command" the armed forces. He also had to be able to exercise day-by-day, sometimes minute-by-minute, "control."

  Entering Navy Plot, the defense secretary and his aides confronted a huge wall map of the Atlantic, charting the locations of American and Soviet ships. Armed Marines guarded the door. Enlisted men were using long handles to push markers around the map to reflect the latest intelligence. Flags representing American aircraft carriers and destroyers were forming up along an arc, five hundred nautical miles from the eastern tip of Cuba, stretching from Puerto Rico toward the coast of Florida. Nearly two dozen arrows denoting Soviet ships were pointed across the Atlantic toward Cuba.

  In his brusque, no-nonsense fashion, McNamara began firing questions to the admiral on duty, similar to the ones JFK had been agonizing over all day at the White House. How does a U.S. warship signal a Soviet vessel to halt? Are there Russian interpreters on board? What if they refuse to reply to our signals? How do we respond if they open fire? Why are these warships out of position?

  The duty admiral was either reluctant, or unable, to respond to the barrage of questions. This sort of interrogation went beyond the bounds of Navy tradition. As a naval officer who witnessed the scene later explained, "In the Navy, the ethos is, you tell someone to do something, not how to do it." McNamara was telling the Navy how to do its job.

  Dissatisfied with the answers he was getting, McNamara asked to see the chief of naval operations, Admiral George Anderson. Known variously in the Navy as 00, CNO, and "Gorgeous George," the tall, handsome naval officer was a firm believer in the naval creed of choosing the right subordinates and letting them get on with it. His personal philosophy, he informed visitors to his E-Ring office, consisted of a few simple maxims. "Keep a firm grasp of fundamentals. Leave details to the staff. Go for morale, which is of transcending importance. Don't bellyache and don't worry." After signing off on the blockade regulations, he had sent a memo to McNamara that read, "From now on, I do not intend to interfere with…the Admirals on the scene unless we get some additional intelligence information."

  Anderson had accepted the job of planning a naval blockade of Cuba under protest. He informed McNamara that the assignment was tantamount to "locking the barn door after the horse has already been stolen." Nuclear missiles were already on the island, so a blockade would not accomplish the objective of getting them out, and would mean a confrontation with the Soviet Union rather than Cuba. A better option, he thought, was to bomb the missile sites. Nevertheless, he would carry out his orders.

  The admiral resented McNamara's meddling in operational matters. He was also determined to protect one of the Navy's most closely guarded secrets: its ability to locate Soviet submarines through a sophisticated network of radio detection receivers. The U.S. warships that McNamara had raised questions about were tracking the Soviet Foxtrots. Though the secretary and deputy secretary were obviously cleared for the secret information, several of the civilian aides who had accompanied them to Navy Plot were not. In order to explain what was happening with the submarines, Anderson steered McNamara and Gilpatric to a smaller room next door known as Intelligence Plot.

  McNamara was less concerned about the precise location of different ships than the question of how the naval "quarantine" should be enforced. The Navy interpreted the notion of a blockade literally: banned weapons would not be allowed through. McNamara and Kennedy viewed it more as a mechanism for sending political messages to the rival superpower. The objective was to get Khrushchev to back down, not to sink Soviet ships. The defense secretary peppered the chief of naval operations with questions about how the Navy would stop the first ship to cross the quarantine line.

  "We'll hail it."

  "In what language ― English or Russian?"

  "How the hell do I know?"

  "What will you do if they don't understand?"

  "I suppose we'll use flags."

  "Well, what if they don't stop?"

  "We'll send a shot across the bow."

  "What if that doesn't work?"

  "Then we'll fire into the rudder."

  "You're not going to fire a single shot at anything without my express permission. Is that clear?"

  Earlier that afternoon, Anderson had drawn the attention of his commanders to a manual published in 1955, Law of Naval Warfare, that described procedures for boarding and searching enemy warships. He picked up a copy of the cardboard-covered booklet and waved it in McNamara's face. "It's all in there, Mr. Secretary," he told his boss. The manual authorized the "destruction" of warships "actively resisting search or capture."

  As Gilpatric later remembered the episode, Anderson could barely contain his anger as he listened to McNamara's detailed questions. "This is none of your goddamn business," he finally exploded. "We know how to do this. We've been doing it ever since the days of John Paul Jones, and if you'll just go back to your quarters, Mr. Secretary, we'll take care of this."

  Gilpatric could see the color rising in his boss's countenance. For a moment, he feared a blazing row in front of the assembled Navy brass. But McNamara simply remarked, "You heard me, Admiral, there will be no shots fired without my permission," and walked out of the room.

  "That's the end of Anderson," he told Gilpatric as they walked back to their adjoining office suites. "As far as I'm concerned, he's lost my confidence."

  The clash between the secretary of defense and the chief of naval operations would come to epitomize a much larger struggle
for influence between civilians and the uniformed military. The story has been retold so frequently that it has become encrusted with myth. Most accounts of the missile crisis claim, for example, that the confrontation took place on Wednesday evening rather than Tuesday evening ― after the quarantine had already come into effect. But a study of Pentagon diaries and other records demonstrates that this is impossible. Anderson was not even in the building on Wednesday evening at the time he is alleged to have had his acrimonious encounter with McNamara.

  9:30 P.M. TUESDAY, OCTOBER 23

  On the other side of the Potomac, an agitated Bobby Kennedy appeared at the gate of the Soviet Embassy on Sixteenth Street, NW, just as McNamara was leaving Intelligence Plot. He was met by Anatoly Dobrynin, who escorted him to his apartment on the third floor of the grandiose, turn-of-the-century mansion built by the widow of railcar magnate George Pullman. Dobrynin sat him down in the living room and offered him a cup of coffee.

  The president felt personally betrayed by the Soviets, Bobby told the ambassador. He had believed Khrushchev's assurances about the absence of offensive missiles on Cuba, but had been deceived. This had "devastating implications for the peace of the world." As an afterthought, RFK added that his brother was under heavy attack from Republicans and had "staked his political career" on the Soviet assurances. Dobrynin had difficulty replying as he too had been kept in the dark by Moscow. He gamely insisted that the American information must be wrong.

  As the ambassador was escorting him back to his car, Bobby asked what instructions had been given to the captains of Soviet ships. Dobrynin replied that, as far as he knew, they were under orders to ignore "unlawful demands to stop or be searched on the open sea."

  "I don't know how this is going to end," said RFK, as they bade each other good-bye, "but we intend to stop your ships."

  "That would be an act of war," protested the ambassador.

  9:35 P.M. TUESDAY, OCTOBER 23 (8:35 P.M. HAVANA)

  Eleven hundred miles away, in Havana, a convoy of government vehicles had just pulled up outside a television studio in the exclusive Vedado section of town. Fidel Castro jumped out of a jeep in his trademark olive green fatigues, followed by ministers in military uniform. A red-and-black diamond on his shoulder epaulettes identified him as a comandante, a major, the highest rank in the Cuban army. Like JFK the previous night, Castro planned to use television to deliver one of the most important speeches of his life and prepare his people for the difficult days ahead.

  Television was as important to Castro as it was to Kennedy. It was a very personal medium, enabling Cubans to know him as "Fidel" rather than "Castro." He was not just the commander in chief; he was the professor in chief, constantly teaching, cajoling, explaining. The number of televisions per capita was low in Cuba compared to the United States, but high compared to Latin America. If one person in a neighborhood had a television set, everybody would crowd around to watch Fidel.

  The mass media had always been critical to Castro's success as a revolutionary leader. As a young man, he had listened entranced to the weekly speeches of a fiery radical named Eddy Chibas who used the radio to denounce corruption and injustice. During the war against Batista, he set up a small transmitter in the mountains known as "Radio Rebelde" to drum up support for the revolution. He used an interview with Herbert Matthews of The New York Times to disprove government claims that he was dead. Virtually every step of Fidel's victorious five-day march across Cuba after Batista's hurried departure was shown on live television, culminating in his triumphant entry into Havana on January 8, 1959.

  Like Kennedy, Castro was not a born public speaker. Both men had to overcome some initial shyness in order to find their voice. When he first ran for Congress in 1946, Kennedy would practice his speeches many times over in private until he gradually became more relaxed. Castro felt so uncomfortable in public that he had to consciously wind himself up into a lather of indignation. Some observers felt that his legendary loquacity ― he often spoke for five or six hours at a stretch ― was connected to his shyness. "Fatigued by talking, he rests by talking," the Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez would later observe of Fidel. "When he starts speaking, his voice is always hard to hear and his course is uncertain, but he takes advantage of anything to gain ground, little by little, until he takes possession of his audience." Having made the huge mental effort to begin speaking, Castro found it difficult to stop.

  After a brief introduction from a sycophantic "interviewer," he launched into a tirade against Kennedy and the United States. The speech was the usual hodgepodge of indignation, soaring oratory, long rambling asides, biting sarcasm, and the occasional non sequitur. He used his Jesuit training to dissect Kennedy's speech point by point, barely pausing for breath as he jumped directly from his "second point" to his "fourth point" with no mention of the "third point."

  Kennedy's expressions of sympathy with "the captive people of Cuba" were grist to Castro's rhetorical mill. "He is talking about a people that has hundreds of thousands of men under arms. He should have said the armed captive people of Cuba."

  "This is the statement not of a statesman, but of a pirate," he fumed. "We are not sovereign by grace of the Yanquis, but in our own right…. They can only take away our sovereignty by wiping us off the face of the earth."

  Much of the force of Castro's delivery came from his mesmerizing body language, which was made for television. The voice alone was somewhat reedy and high-pitched. But he spoke with such conviction that it was easy to be carried along on the torrent of words and gestures. The fierce look in his eyes and the thick black beard wagging back and forth were reminiscent of an Old Testament prophet. The Roman profile assumed a dozen different expressions in rapid succession: scorn, anger, humor, determination, but never the slightest trace of self-doubt. His long, bony hands sliced the air for emphasis, occasionally gripping the sides of his chair. When he made a point, he raised his right forefinger magisterially, as if challenging anyone to disagree with him.

  Speaking in front of a Cuban flag, Castro barely mentioned the Russians during his ninety-minute diatribe. Nor did he mention the missiles, except in rejecting Kennedy's various accusations against Cuba. Instead, he delivered an impassioned defense of Cuban national sovereignty, along with a warning that aggressors would inevitably be "exterminated."

  "Our country will never be inspected by anyone, because we will never give authorization for that to anyone, and we will never abdicate our sovereign prerogatives. Within our frontiers, we are the ones who rule, and we are the ones who do the inspecting."

  Castro's solo performance struck some foreign diplomats in Havana as restrained by his normal standards. But it was still riveting. As he launched into his peroration, he clutched the sides of his chair, as if struggling to stay in his seat. "All of us, men and women, young and old, we are all united in this hour of danger. All of us, revolutionaries and patriots, will share the same fate. Victory will belong to us all."

  With a final "Patria o muerte, venceremos," he jumped out of his chair and rushed from the room. There was no further time to lose.

  The streets of Havana had been deserted while Fidel spoke. When he finished, people poured into the rainswept streets, carrying candles and other improvised torches. The night sky was filled with thousands of specks of light as the crowds surged through the alleyways of old Havana singing the national anthem, celebrating an 1868 victory over the Spanish:

  No temais una muerte gloriosa,Que morir por la patria es vivir.

  Do not fear a glorious death,For to die for the Fatherland is to live.

  Maurice Halperin, a former American diplomat who found refuge in Havana after being accused of spying for the Soviet Union, noticed that many of the men in the crowd had armed themselves with meat cleavers and machetes, which they carried proudly in their belts. "They were geared up for hand-to-hand combat without the slightest suspicion that they could be blown to bits by an invisible enemy."

  The way Castro saw it, h
is ascent to power in Cuba was like a morality play. He was the hero, pitting himself against a series of much more powerful enemies, first domestic, then external. Whether his opponent was Batista or Kennedy, Castro's method was the same: uncompromising stubbornness. Since he was much weaker than his enemy, he could afford to display no weakness at all.

  To get people to follow him, Castro had to project a sense of total conviction. He talked about the future with such certainty, another Third World leader once remarked, he might have been talking about the past. Everything depended on the will of the leader. It was a philosophy adopted from Jose Marti, the "apostle of Cuban independence," who died fighting the Spaniards in 1895. After Castro came to power, he turned one of Marti's sayings into a slogan for the revolutionary regime, and had it pasted on billboards the length and breath of Cuba: "No hay cosas imposibles, sino hombres incapaces ― There are no impossible deeds, just incapable men."

  Like his role model Marti, Castro was willing to die for the cause in which he believed, and expected his followers to do the same. Patria o muerte expressed his personal philosophy. A revolution, almost by definition, was a high-stakes gamble in which there were only two possible outcomes. As his comrade-in-arms Che Guevara put it, "in a revolution, you win or you die." That did not mean taking unnecessary risks, but it did mean a willingness to gamble everything on a brilliant throw of the dice. If Fidel died, he would go down in Cuban history as a martyr, like Marti before him. If he lived, he would be a national hero.

  It was this sense of going for broke that distinguished Castro from the other two main actors in the crisis. In their different ways, both Kennedy and Khrushchev recognized the realities of the nuclear age, and understood that a nuclear war would inflict unacceptable destruction on victors and vanquished alike. Castro, by contrast, had never been swayed by conventional political calculations. He was the antipolitician with an out-sized ego. For the British ambassador to Havana, Herbert Marchant, the Cuban leader was "the prima donna of prima donnas," "a megalomaniac with paranoiac tendencies," "an astonishing character," and "a passionate, mixed-up genius." Alone among the three leaders, Fidel had the messianic ambition of a man selected by history for a unique mission.