by M. Dobbs
Reaching what he thought was the North Pole, Maultsby decided to go ahead and do a 90-270-degree turn, the standard procedure for reversing course ― "Turn left for 90 degrees, and then immediately reverse the turn for 270 degrees until you are heading back along your same track, only in the opposite direction."
A sea of packed ice and snow stretched out below him in the darkness. It felt strange and disorienting to be flying over a landmass that was pitch-dark from horizon to horizon while the sky was ablaze with dancing lights.
9:25 A.M. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27
The president arrived in the Oval Office at 9:25, after his morning exercise routine. As was often the case, his first visitors were his appointments secretary, Kenny O'Donnell, and his national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy. He had some routine business to conduct, including receiving the credentials of the ambassador of Trinidad and Tobago. He made a few telephone calls, including one to an old prep-school classmate, Lem Billings. A few minutes after ten, he walked down the hall to the Cabinet Room, where the twelve members of the ExComm were gathered.
Except when he was particularly tired, Kennedy spent at least an hour a day swimming and doing stretching routines prescribed for him by Hans Kraus, the Austrian orthopedic surgeon whom he had barely recognized on Monday after his speech. A little gymnasium had been set up for him in the basement of the West Wing, next to the swimming pool. The Situation Room was just around the corner, permitting him to check on the movements of Soviet submarines in between working on his weak abdominal muscles. Kraus warned that it was "especially important" to keep up the exercise program "in times of stress and tension."
JFK had been struggling with illness for as long as he could remember. Much of his adolescence was spent in and out of hospitals with a succession of mysterious ailments. Doctors were never able to pinpoint the cause of his problems, and were constantly arguing over how to treat him. By the time he became president, Kennedy had undergone half a dozen major operations. He was injected daily with more than a dozen different medicines, including procaine to relieve his back pain, testosterone to boost his weight, steroids to control the colitis, and antibiotics to prevent a flare-up of an old venereal infection.
Kraus was convinced that many of the president's health problems were the result of too much medication. Rival doctors had been shooting him up with novocaine and other painkillers to help him get through the day. Even though Kennedy had succeeded in cutting down on his daily intake of drugs over the last few months, he was still a walking pill cabinet. He was taking at least ten different types of medication, some of them twice a day. As concern grew that the president might have to be evacuated from the White House, his Navy doctor issued instructions for a case full of drugs to be kept permanently on station outside the Oval Office. The brown leather case was to be marked "personal effects of the president" and should be "available to move with the president's party at any time."
The extent of Kennedy's medical problems was a closely kept secret, but they had a profound impact on who he was and how he lived his life. His poor health contributed to his introspective, skeptical nature. He joked about death from an early age. At the same time, he learned early on how "to live every day like it's your last day on earth." Like his nemesis, Fidel Castro, JFK was "addicted to excitement," in the words of one of his biographers. His life was a "race against boredom."
Where Kennedy differed from Castro, and also from Khrushchev, was in his sense of detached irony, which also had a lot to do with his long illness. He was forever questioning conventional wisdom. Castro was narcissistic and self-absorbed: all that mattered were his own actions and his own will. Khrushchev reduced world affairs to crude calculations of political power. Kennedy had a knack for looking at problems through the eyes of his adversaries. His "capacity for projecting himself into other people's shoes" was at once his curse and his strength.
A lifetime of physical suffering was one of two formative influences that distinguished Kennedy from the typical scion of wealth and privilege. The other was World War II. As a lieutenant junior grade commanding a PT-boat in the Pacific, he got a front-line perspective on modern warfare that was quite different from the view from the White House or the Pentagon.
"This war here is a dirty business," he wrote his Swedish girlfriend, Inga Arvad, in 1943. It was difficult to persuade his men that they were dying for a great cause when they were fighting on "some islands belonging to the Lever Company, a British concern making soap…. I suppose if we were stockholders we would perhaps be doing better." Unlike the Japanese, who were willing to sacrifice themselves for their emperor, the typical American soldier felt a divided loyalty ― "He wants to kill but he is also trying to prevent himself from being killed." The lesson that Jack drew was that politicians had better think very carefully before they sent their children off to war. He was scornful of abstract phrases like "global war" and "all-out effort."
It's very easy to talk about the war and beating the Japs if it takes years and a million men, but anyone who talks like that should consider well his words. We get so used to talking about billions of dollars, and millions of soldiers, that thousands of casualties sound like drops in the bucket. But if those thousands want to live as much as the ten that I saw [in his PT-boat, which was sliced in half by a Japanese destroyer], the people deciding the whys and wherefores had better make mighty sure that all this effort is headed for some definite goal, and that when we reach that goal we may say it was worth it, for if it isn't, the whole thing will turn to ashes, and we will face great trouble in the years to come after the war.
Kennedy grew even more concerned with the unintended consequences of war after becoming commander in chief. In early 1962, the historian Barbara Tuchman published a book about the start of World War I called The Guns of August, which remained on The New York Times best-seller list for forty-two consecutive weeks. Her main point was that mistakes, misunderstandings, and miscommunication can unleash an unpredictable chain of events, causing governments to go to war with little understanding of the consequences. The president was so impressed by the book that he often quoted from it, and insisted his aides read it. He wanted "every officer in the Army" to read it as well. The secretary of the Army sent copies to every U.S. military base in the world.
One of Kennedy's favorite passages was a scene in which two German statesmen are analyzing the reasons for the most destructive military confrontation up until that time.
"How did it all happen?" the younger man wanted to know.
"Ah, if only one knew."
As Kennedy tried to imagine a war with the Soviet Union over the missiles in Cuba, one thought kept returning to trouble him. He imagined a planet ravaged by "fire, poison, chaos, and catastrophe." Whatever else he did as president of the United States, he was determined to avoid an outcome in which one survivor of a nuclear war asked another, "How did it all happen?" and received the incredible reply, "Ah, if only one knew."
The nuclear strike codes were kept inside a black vinyl briefcase known as "the Football." The Football enabled the president to order the obliteration of thousands of targets in the Soviet Union, China, and Eastern Europe. Within seconds of the authentication of a presidential order, missiles would lift off from silos on the plains of Montana and North Dakota; B-52 bombers heading toward Russia would fly past their fail-safe points to their targets; Polaris submarines in the Arctic Ocean would unleash their nuclear warheads.
At first, Kennedy viewed the Football as just one more piece of presidential paraphernalia. But after a year in the White House, he started asking more pointed questions about its use. Some of his questions were prompted by a novel published recently, Seven Days in May, by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey, which described an attempted military coup against a fictional American president. He quizzed his military aide, General Chester "Ted" Clifton, about some of the details. He was interested, in particular, about the military officer who looked after the nuclear codes.
"The book says one of those men sits outside my bedroom door all night. Is that true?"
Clifton replied that the duty officer responsible for the Football remained downstairs in the office area, not upstairs in the residence. "He'll be upstairs ― we've timed it many times; he can make it even if he has to run up the stairs and not use the elevator ― in a minute and a half. If he knocks at your door some night and comes in and opens the valise, pay attention."
On another occasion, Kennedy wanted to clarify precisely how he would go about ordering "an immediate nuclear strike against the Communist Bloc," should that become necessary. He drew up a list of written questions for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, asking what would happen if he pushed "the red button on my desk phone" and to be connected to the Joint War Room at the Pentagon:
• If I called the Joint War Room without giving them advance notice, to whom would I be speaking?
• What would I say to the Joint War Room to launch an immediate nuclear strike?
• How would the person who received my instructions verify them?
These were hardly abstract questions. The president and his aides had explored the pros and cons of a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union, often in the context of a Soviet attack on Berlin. Some military leaders, such as LeMay and Power, were enthusiastic proponents of the first-strike option. The idea repelled and frightened Kennedy ― he agreed with McNamara that it was impossible to guarantee the destruction of all Soviet nuclear weapons ― but the plans were drawn up anyway. The nuclear debate was shifting from an abstract faith in deterrence through "mutual assured destruction" to practical considerations on how to fight and win a limited nuclear war.
The American nuclear war plan was known as the Single Integrated Operational Plan, SIOP for short. Kennedy had been horrified by the first such plan, SIOP-62, which called for the dispatch of 2,258 missiles and bombers carrying 3,423 nuclear weapons against 1,077 "military and urban-industrial targets" scattered throughout the "Sino-Soviet bloc." One adviser characterized the plan as "orgiastic, Wagnerian." Another described it as "a massive, total, comprehensive, obliterating strategic attack…on everything Red." Among other points, it envisaged the virtual annihilation of the tiny Balkan country of Albania. Even though China (and Albania) had rejected Moscow's tutelage, no distinction was made between different Communist states. All were targeted for destruction.
"And we call ourselves the human race," was Kennedy's sardonic comment, when briefed about the plan.
Appalled by the all-or-nothing choices in SIOP-62, the Kennedy administration drew up a new plan, known as SIOP-63. Despite its title, this one came into effect in the summer of 1962. It allowed the president several "withhold" options, including China and Eastern Europe, and made some attempt to distinguish between cities and military targets. Nevertheless, the plan was still built around the notion of a single devastating strike that would totally destroy the Soviet Union's ability to make war.
None of these options appealed to Kennedy at the moment of actual decision. He had asked the Pentagon how many people would die if a single Soviet missile got through and landed somewhere near an American city. The answer was six hundred thousand. "That's the total number of casualties in the Civil War," JFK exploded. "And we haven't gotten over that in a hundred years." As he later acknowledged, the twenty-four intermediate-range Soviet missiles in Cuba constituted "a substantial deterrent to me."
He had privately concluded that nuclear weapons were "only good for deterring." He thought it "insane that two men, sitting on opposite sides of the world, should be able to decide to bring an end to civilization."
CHAPTER TEN
Shootdown
10:12 A.M. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27 (9:12 A.M. HAVANA)
After taking off from McCoy Air Force Base, Rudolf Anderson flew down the east coast of Florida. Reaching his cruising height of seventy-two thousand feet, twice the altitude of a commercial airliner, he could see the earth curving away beneath him. Even though it was still midmorning, the skies began to blacken as he entered the upper layers of the stratosphere. American air defenses had been warned about the mysterious plane, but were not allowed to contact him. The U-2 pilot sent a coded signal forty-seven minutes after takeoff as he exited American airspace. He had been instructed to maintain radio silence until he reentered American airspace a few minutes after noon.
From the cockpit of the U-2, Anderson could see the sandy white beaches of Cayo Coco and Cayo Guillermo, one of Hemingway's favorite fishing spots. His flight would take him on a diagonal slant across Cuba over the town of Camaguey. He would make a left turn over the SAM site at Manzanillo on Cuba's southern coast, and follow the Sierra Maestra Mountains past Guantanamo to the eastern tip of the island. He would then make another sharp left turn, heading back toward Florida.
As Anderson entered Cuban airspace over Cayo Coco, his U-2 was picked up and tracked by Soviet air defenses. Soviet officers made a note of the time he entered ― 9:12 local time ― and alerted the rest of the air defense system.
Anderson switched on his camera as he headed for the first SAM site outside the little town of Esmeralda. He could feel a familiar series of thumps from the camera bay beneath him as the camera swung back and forth from horizon to horizon, clicking away furiously. Making a photo run was similar to making a bombing run: the pilot's main task was to keep the "platform" as steady as possible as he flew over the target. The camera was a monstrous piece of equipment, with a focal length of thirty-six inches. When fully loaded, it contained roughly a mile of film. In order to maintain the balance of the aircraft, the film was sliced into two nine-inch-wide strips that were spooled in opposite directions and later reassembled.
Thump, thump, thump went the camera, as the U-2 passed over Esmeralda at 9:17 local time. In Washington, it was 10:17.
10:18 A.M. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27
The morning ExComm session had been under way in the Cabinet Room of the White House for just seven minutes when Anderson entered Cuban airspace. It began, as usual, with an intelligence briefing from McCone. There was a brief discussion about stopping the Grozny. McNamara then began outlining a plan for round-the-clock surveillance of the Soviet missile sites. Eight U.S. Navy Crusaders would take off shortly from Key West; another eight would be dispatched in the afternoon. These flights would be followed by the first nighttime reconnaissance mission by U.S. Air Force planes, which would illuminate the missile sites with brilliant flares.
An aide handed the president a flash news item that had just been torn off the Associated Press ticker. He scanned it quickly, and read it aloud:
BULLETIN
MOSCOW, OCT. 27 (AP) ― PREMIER KHRUSHCHEV TOLD PRESIDENT KENNEDY IN A MESSAGE TODAY HE WOULD WITHDRAW OFFENSIVE WEAPONS FROM CUBA IF THE UNITED STATES WITHDREW ITS ROCKETS FROM TURKEY.
27 OCT 1018A
"Hmmm," objected a startled Bundy, the national security adviser. "He didn't."
"That's how it's read by both of the associations that have put it out so far," said Ted Sorensen. The Reuters bulletin was timed 1015, three minutes earlier. It was worded almost identically.
"He didn't…"
"He didn't really say that, did he?"
"No, no."
As was often the case, Kennedy was one step ahead of his aides. Khrushchev had made no mention of a possible Cuba-Turkey swap in the private message that he had sent the previous day via the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. But it was quite possible that this was an entirely new proposal. The Soviets might have just upped the ante. That would change everything.
"He may be putting out another letter," Kennedy speculated. He called out to his press secretary. "Pierre? Pierre?"
Pierre Salinger stuck his head around the door.
"That wasn't in the letter we received, was it?"
"No, I read it pretty carefully. It doesn't read that way to me."
"Well, let's just sit tight on it." As the ExComm members waited for more news from the wire services, Kennedy turned his attent
ion back to the surveillance flights. He had some doubts about the nighttime mission, the first of its kind over Cuba. It was difficult to predict how the Soviets and Cubans would react to the Air Force pyrotechnics. Bundy and McNamara thought it was important to "keep the heat" on. Work on the missile sites was continuing day and night. Swayed by the arguments of his aides, JFK gave tentative approval to the proposed night flights.
"It's all right with me," he said finally.
But he quickly injected a qualification. "I think we might have one more conversation about it, however. At about six o'clock, just in case during the day we get something important."
"All right, sir," agreed McNamara.
10:22 A.M. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27 (9:22 A.M. HAVANA)
The Soviet air defense system for eastern Cuba was headquartered in Camaguey, an old colonial town known as "the Maze" because of its intricate street pattern. The division staff had moved into expropriated church buildings in the city center. Their combat command post was about a mile outside town, in a two-story mansion built as a sports and hunting club for the local business elite prior to the revolution.
The ground floor of the command post was dominated by a huge screen, about fifteen feet high and thirty feet wide. The screen had been blank for weeks. Air defense units had been instructed to keep their radars turned off in order to avoid revealing their positions and capabilities to the Americans. When the radars were finally switched on, late Friday night, the screen at the command post lit up with potential targets. Air defense officers could see U.S. Navy planes taking off and landing at Guantanamo Bay and U.S. Air Force planes patrolling the periphery of the island.
As the night wore on, the atmosphere became increasingly tense. Word had filtered down from headquarters in El Chico that an American attack was likely overnight, probably before dawn. All SAM missile sites were placed on a six-minute alert, meaning that they had to be able to launch their missiles within six minutes of receiving an order. Duty officers were issued with personal firearms, helmets, ammunition, hand grenades, and dry rations. The senior officers of the division all spent the night at the command post, ready for immediate action. Everybody was dressed in civilian clothes. Most of the officers wore white shirts, black pants, and boots; ordinary soldiers wore checkered shirts.