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

by M. Dobbs

  "Delay in taking further direct military action toward solving the Cuban problem is to the benefit of the Soviet Union," the chiefs warned. "Cuba will be harder to defeat. U.S. casualties will be multiplied. The direct threat of attack on the Continental United States by Cuban-based nuclear missiles and nuclear capable aircraft will be greatly increased."

  The chiefs were discussing the timing of the initial attack on Cuba when McNamara walked into the Tank. Having come straight from the ExComm meeting, he was preoccupied by the Jupiter missiles in Turkey, easy targets for the Soviets if the United States attacked Cuba. One way to reduce the temptation to Khrushchev to "knock out" the Jupiters would be to station a Polaris nuclear submarine off the coast of Turkey, and let Moscow know it was there. The invulnerable submarine, with sixteen Polaris ballistic missiles on board, was a much more effective deterrent to a Soviet attack on Turkey than the vulnerable Jupiters. Sending a nuclear submarine to Turkey would also pave the way for the withdrawal of the obsolete Jupiters.

  The defense secretary instructed the chiefs to prepare a plan for redeploying at least one nuclear sub to the eastern Mediterranean. He also wanted to know what exactly they had in mind when they talked about "early and timely execution" of the air strike plan against Cuba.

  "Attacking Sunday or Monday," LeMay replied gruffly.

  The generals made little secret of their impatience with McNamara. They had clashed with him repeatedly over the purchase of new weapons systems, and suspected him of "pacifist views." After McNamara vetoed the new B-70 bomber and insisted on limiting the Minuteman to one thousand missiles, LeMay asked his colleagues whether things could be "much worse if Khrushchev were secretary of defense." He found such squeamishness difficult to stomach. When McNamara asked whether it was possible to bomb Soviet missile sites without killing many Russians, LeMay looked at him with amazement. "You must have lost your mind."

  McNamara's feelings about his Air Force chief were more ambivalent. Their relationship went back to World War II. The brilliant statistician from Berkeley had served under LeMay in the Far East, plotting ways to maximize the devastation caused by the bombing of Japanese cities. McNamara considered his former boss "the ablest combat officer" he ever knew. LeMay was brutal, but he got the job done. He thought in the simplest of terms: loss of his own crews per unit of target destruction. McNamara had helped LeMay make the calculations that led to the burning to death of a hundred thousand residents of Tokyo ― men, women, and children ― in a single night. But his admiration for the general was mixed with revulsion. McNamara had been prepared to accept the fire-bombing of Tokyo. A nuclear war with the Soviet Union that could result in millions of American casualties was a different matter.

  "Who will win such a war?" he would ask the Air Force chief, when they debated the subject.

  "We will, of course," LeMay would reply. "The country that ends up with the greatest number of nuclear weapons wins."

  "But if we lose ten million people, what's the point of winning?"

  McNamara was tired. The last few days had been a whirlwind of meetings, conference calls, and hundreds of decisions. He slept on a cot in the dressing room of his third-floor Pentagon office overlooking the Potomac. He had only managed to get home for dinner once, on Friday evening. He ate most of his meals at a card table in his office. He rose by 6:30 a.m. and worked as late as 11:00 p.m. or midnight. His sleep was often interrupted by calls from the president or senior officials. His only relaxation was the occasional game of squash in the Officers' Club in the Pentagon basement. His mind still worked like a computer, but he was losing some of his trademark sharpness and no longer dominated ExComm meetings with his crisp analyses and multipoint options.

  In the midst of this strained conversation, McNamara received an urgent message, passed on to him by LeMay. He looked through it quickly.

  "A U-2 has been lost off Alaska."

  It had taken SAC commanders an hour and a half to report the loss of the plane to civilian authorities, despite strong evidence that Maultsby had strayed over the Soviet Union. The initial reports were fragmentary. The Pentagon told the White House that the pilot "got off course" after developing "gyro trouble," and was picked up by a "high frequency direction finder" off Wrangel Island. "Then seems to have overflown, or came close to, Soviet territory. Not clear at this time exactly what cause was. Russian fighters scrambled ― ours too."

  The first reports were alarming enough. An American spy plane had probably overflown Soviet territory at a time when both countries were close to nuclear war. It had almost certainly run out of fuel. McNamara rushed out of the room to call the president. The logs of the meeting show that it was 1:41 p.m.

  Worried about shutting down his engine, Maultsby had neglected to pull the cord that prevented his helmet from rising after his pressure suit inflated. The lower part of the helmet was now blocking his vision, and he had "a helluva time seeing the instrument panel" in front of him. He struggled with the helmet until he finally got it back in place.

  Shortly afterward, the windshield fogged up and condensation appeared on the faceplate of his helmet. Maultsby pushed the faceplate as close to his mouth as he could. By sticking his tongue out, he was able to lick away enough of the condensation to see the instrument panel.

  The altimeter continued to show a height of seventy thousand feet. Maultsby assumed that the needle had gotten stuck, but then he realized that the aircraft was still flying at that height, even without any power. It took at least ten minutes for the U-2 to start its slow descent. He told himself that all that remained for him to do was "keep the wings level, maintain a rate of descent for maximum range and hope my guardian angel wasn't taking a nap."

  The throbbing noise of the engine had given way to an otherworldly silence. The only sound that Maultsby was able to hear was his own labored breathing. His most pressing physical need after nearly ten hours in the air was to urinate. Under normal conditions, relieving himself in a U-2 involved laboriously unzipping his partial-pressure suit, peeling away several layers of undergarments, and aiming into a bottle. A maneuver that was complicated enough at the best of times became virtually impossible when the pressure suit was inflated, almost filling the cockpit.

  1:45 P.M. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27 (9:45 A.M. ALASKA)

  It had been a hectic morning, but the president was determined not to miss his regular swim. He usually went twice a day, just before lunch and again before dinner, with his aide, Dave Powers. His doctors had prescribed swimming exercises for his back, but it was also a way of relaxing. Originally built for Franklin Roosevelt as part of his treatment for polio, the indoor pool in the West Wing basement had been refurbished with a mural of a glorious sailing scene in the Virgin Islands donated by Joe Kennedy, Sr. The two friends engaged in light banter as they swam breast-stroke up and down the fifty-foot pool, which was kept at a constant ninety degrees.

  Returning from his swim, Kennedy passed by the Oval Office before heading up to the mansion for a light lunch. The phone rang at 1:45 p.m. It was McNamara, with news of the U-2 missing off Alaska.

  A few minutes later, the chief of intelligence from the State Department came running up the stairs from Bundy's basement office. Roger Hilsman had just heard about the scrambling of Soviet and American fighter jets. Having gone two days without sleep, he was exhausted, but instantly understood the significance of what had happened. "The implications were as obvious as they were horrendous: the Soviets might well regard this U-2 flight as a last-minute intelligence reconnaissance in preparation for nuclear war."

  Hilsman was expecting a furious outburst from the president, or at least some sign of the panic he himself was beginning to feel. But Kennedy broke the tension with a short, bitter laugh and a truism from his Navy days.

  "There's always some sonofabitch who doesn't get the word."

  The calm exterior belied a deep frustration. Unlike other members of his family, particularly his brother Bobby, Kennedy turned quiet when he was angry. His
closest aides feared his gritted teeth more than his occasional explosions. When he was truly beside himself, he would tap his front teeth with his fingernails or grip the arms of his chair so hard that his knuckles turned white.

  He was discovering the limits of presidential power. It was impossible for a commander in chief to know everything that was being done in his name. There were so many things he would never find out until "some sonofabitch" fouled everything up. The military machine operated according to its own internal logic and momentum. The Pentagon assured him that the air-sampling flights to the North Pole had been planned and approved many months in advance. Nobody had considered the possibility that a U-2 might end up over the Soviet Union on the most dangerous day of the Cold War.

  It was not just the extent of his own ignorance that disturbed Kennedy. Sometimes, he would ask for something to be done and nothing would happen. An example of this phenomenon, at least in his own mind, was the Jupiter missiles in Turkey. He had wanted to get them out of there for months, but the bureaucracy had always found a compelling reason to override his wishes. He had voiced his exasperation during a walk in the Rose Garden with Kenny O'Donnell earlier that morning. He told his aide to find out "the last time I asked to have those damned missiles taken out of Turkey. Not the first five times I asked for their removal, just the date of the last time." It turned out that the president had instructed the Pentagon to look into the removal of the Jupiters in August, but the idea had been shelved for fear of upsetting the Turks. Bundy later insisted that he never received a formal "presidential order" to remove the missiles, and the archival record appears to confirm his recollection.

  Removing the Jupiter missiles had become even more complicated now that Khrushchev was attempting to use them as a public bargaining chip. But Kennedy was sure of one thing: he was not going to go to war over a few obsolete missiles. As a young naval officer in the Pacific, he had concluded that "the people deciding the whys and wherefores" had better have a convincing motivation for going to war because otherwise "the whole thing will turn to ashes." That pretty much summed up the way he felt twenty years later, now that he himself was determining the whys and wherefores.

  But the drama that Saturday afternoon had little to do with the wishes of either Kennedy or Khrushchev. Events were moving faster than the political leaders could control.

  An American spy plane had been shot down over Cuba. Another had gone astray over Russia. A Soviet cruise missile battery had taken up position outside Guantanamo, ready to carry out Khrushchev's threat to "wipe out" the naval base. A convoy of nuclear warheads was on its way to one of the R-12 missile sites. Castro had ordered his army to open fire on low-flying American planes and was urging the Soviets to consider a nuclear first strike.

  The president did not even exercise complete control over his own forces. He had only a vague sense of a gathering confrontation in the Caribbean where American warships were attempting to force Soviet submarines to the surface and exhausted Soviet submariners were wondering if World War III had broken out.

  The paradox of the nuclear age was that American power was greater than ever before ― but it could all be jeopardized by a single, fatal miscalculation. Mistakes were an inevitable consequence of warfare, but in previous wars they had been easier to rectify. The stakes were much higher now, and the margin for error much narrower. "The possibility of the destruction of mankind" was constantly on Kennedy's mind, according to Bobby. He knew that war is "rarely intentional." What troubled him most was the thought that "if we erred, we erred not only for ourselves, our futures, our hopes, and our country," but for young people all over the world "who had no role, who had no say, who knew nothing even of the confrontation, but whose lives would be snuffed out like everyone else's."

  A faint glow appeared on the horizon off the nose of Maultsby's plane. His spirits rose for the first time in hours. He now knew for certain he was heading east, back to Alaska. The navigator at Eielson had observed the same golden glow one and a half hours earlier when it was still pitch-dark over Chukotka. Maultsby decided to hold his heading until he descended to twenty thousand feet. If there were not any clouds, he would go down to fifteen thousand and look around. If there were clouds, he would try to maintain his altitude as long as possible. He did not want to crash into a mountain.

  At twenty-five thousand feet, his pressure suit started deflating. There were no clouds and no mountains in sight. By now, there was just enough light to permit Maultsby to see the ground. It was covered with snow.

  Two F-102s with distinctive red paint on their tails and fuselage appeared on either wingtip. They seemed to be flying at "near stall speed" at a dangerously steep angle. Maultsby had just enough battery power left to contact the fighter jets on the emergency frequency of his radio. An American voice crackled through the ether.

  "Welcome home."

  The two F-102 interceptors darted in and out of the clouds, circling the stricken spy plane like buzzing gnats. If they tried to match the slow-gliding speed of the U-2, they would flame out and crash. At least there was no sign of the Soviet MiGs, which had turned back toward Anadyr well before Maultsby reached international waters.

  The nearest airfield was a primitive ice strip at a place called Kotzebue Sound, a military radar station just above the Arctic Circle. It was about twenty miles back. The F-102 pilots suggested that Maultsby try to land there.

  "I'm going to make a left turn, so you'd better move out," Maultsby radioed the plane on his left wingtip.

  "No sweat, come on."

  As Maultsby banked to the left, the F-102 disappeared under his wing. The pilot radioed back to say that he had gone to look for the little airstrip.

  Roger Herman was waiting at the end of the runway at McCoy Air Force Base outside Orlando, Florida, scouring the southern sky for any sight of Rudy Anderson. A mobile officer had a crucial role in assisting the pilot of a U-2 to land his plane. A U-2 was difficult enough to fly; it was even more difficult to land. The pilot had to get its long wings to stop generating lift exactly two feet above the runway. The mobile officer would chase the aircraft down the runway in a control vehicle, calling out its altitude every two feet. If the pilot and the mobile officer were both doing their jobs properly, the plane would belly-flop onto the runway. Otherwise it would continue gliding.

  Herman had been waiting for Anderson for over an hour. He was rapidly losing hope. The pilot had failed to send a coded radio message to signal that he had crossed back into American airspace. It was possible that a navigational error had caused him to go astray. But he was only carrying enough fuel for a flight of four hours and thirty-five minutes. He had taken off at 9:09 a.m. The time was about to expire.

  Standing at the end of the runway, Herman felt like someone in a World War II movie, counting the minutes to his friend's return. He waited until he received a call from the commander of the wing, Colonel Des Portes.

  "You might as well come back."

  2:03 P.M. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27

  McNamara was increasingly troubled by the lack of information. Dramatic events were unfolding in real time, but he was learning about them many hours later, if at all. His philosophy was the opposite of Admiral Anderson's. He worried about everything and wanted to know all the details immediately. In his effort to keep informed, he reached deep down into the bureaucracy. He was able to patch himself into the communications system of the Joint Chiefs from his Pentagon suite. He personally got on the phone to low-level officials, including a radar operator in the Florida Keys, to find out what was happening in and around Cuba.

  It was unclear to McNamara whether military leaders were deliberately withholding information or whether they themselves did not know what was going on. He and his deputy, Roswell Gilpatric, had noted discrepancies between what they were told by Navy Plot and what they learned from the Defense Intelligence Agency. They were not at all sure that the Navy was "operating on the basis of the very latest information." It turned out that Air For
ce commanders had been unaware of Maultsby's flight to the North Pole until he got into trouble.

  The defense secretary learned that another U-2 had taken off on an air-sampling mission to the North Pole on the same route followed by Maultsby. He ordered its immediate recall. He would later halt all U-2 flights outside U.S. territory until the Air Force provided a full report on Maultsby's overflight.

  More startling news greeted McNamara soon after he rejoined the Joint Chiefs in the Tank. At 2:03 p.m., a grim-faced Air Force colonel burst into the room to announce that "a U-2 overflying Cuba is thirty to forty minutes overdue."

  2:25 P.M. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27 (10:25 A.M. ALASKA)

  As Maultsby descended below five thousand feet, the F-102 pilots began to get nervous. They could not understand how a plane could fly at that altitude without any power and not flame out. But they had no experience flying a U-2.

  Maultsby made an initial pass over Kotzebue airstrip at a height of one thousand feet. It was on a snow-covered peninsula jutting out to sea. A truck marked the beginning of the runway. Beyond the airstrip were a few Eskimo shacks and a military radar installation on a hill. There was barely any crosswind. This was a relief, as even small gusts of wind could blow his flimsy plane off course. As he started a low left turn out to sea, one of the F-102 pilots was convinced he was about to crash.