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

by M. Dobbs

Kennedy drafted a letter to Khrushchev welcoming his "statesmanlike decision" to withdraw the missiles. He instructed Pierre Salinger to tell the television networks not to play the story up as "a victory for us." He was worried that the mercurial Soviet leader "will be so humiliated and angered that he will change his mind."

  Exercising restraint proved difficult for the networks. That evening, CBS News broadcast a special report on the crisis "brought to you by the makers of Geritol, a high potency vitamin, iron-rich tonic that makes you feel stronger." Seated in front of a map of Cuba, correspondent Charles Collingwood tried to put the latest developments in perspective. "This is the day we have every reason to believe the world came out from under the most terrible threat of nuclear holocaust since World War II," he told viewers. He described Khrushchev's letter to Kennedy as a "humiliating defeat for Soviet policy."

  Bobby Kennedy had missed the early part of the ExComm meeting because of a hastily arranged meeting with the Soviet ambassador. Dobrynin officially conveyed Khrushchev's decision to withdraw the missiles from Cuba and passed on his "best wishes" to the president. The president's brother made no attempt to conceal his relief. "At last, I am going to see the kids," he told the ambassador. "Why, I've almost forgotten my way home." It was the first time in many days that Dobrynin had seen RFK smile.

  On instructions from Moscow, Dobrynin later attempted to formalize the understanding on removing the American missile bases in Turkey with an exchange of letters between Khrushchev and Kennedy. But Bobby refused to accept the Soviet letter, telling Dobrynin that the president would keep his word but would not engage in correspondence on the subject. He confided that he himself might run for president one day ― and his chances could be damaged if word leaked out about a secret deal with Moscow. Despite the determination of the Kennedy brothers to avoid creating a paper trail, dismantling of the Jupiters would begin as promised, five months later, on April 1, 1963.

  AFTERNOON SUNDAY, OCTOBER 28

  Khrushchev's letter to Castro explaining the reasons for his decision to withdraw the missiles reached the Soviet Embassy in Havana several hours after the Radio Moscow broadcast. When Alekseev tried to deliver the letter, he was informed that Fidel had left town and was "unavailable." In fact, Castro had no desire to meet with the Soviet ambassador. He was furious with Khrushchev for "abandoning" Cuba at the climactic moment of its showdown with America.

  Fidel did pay a brief visit to Soviet military headquarters in El Chico in an attempt to get more information. General Pliyev confirmed that he had received an order from Moscow to dismantle the missiles.

  "All of them?"

  "All."

  "Very well," Castro replied, struggling to contain his anger. He stood up. "Fine. I'm leaving now."

  To demonstrate his disapproval of the Soviet decision, Fidel drew up a list of five Cuban "demands" as a precondition for any settlement with the United States. They included an end to the economic blockade, a halt to "all subversive activities," and a U.S. withdrawal from the Guantanamo Naval Base. He also made clear that Cuba would not accept any international "inspections" of its territory.

  As news spread of the Soviet climbdown, Cubans poured into the streets to vent their anger. Once ubiquitous posters proclaiming "Cuba is not alone" disappeared from walls. There were shouts of "Russians go home" and "Jrucho' maricon" ("Khrushchev is a queer"). Soon the crowds had invented a new chant:

  Nikita, Nikita,

  Lo que se da no se quita.

  Nikita, Nikita,

  What you give, you can't take away.

  Russian soldiers in Cuba were as confused as their Cuban hosts. Many went out and got drunk. A CIA agent in Pinar del Rio described numerous cases of Soviet soldiers selling "watches, boots, and even eyeglasses to raise cash for liquor." Many were happy to be finally going home, but others broke down and cried, according to a dispatch from the Czech ambassador to Havana. "Some experts and technicians refused to work further and there were many cases of drunkenness in old Havana."

  Most bewildered of all were the commanders who had spent the last three months shipping some of the most powerful weapons known to mankind halfway around the world and targeting them on cities like Washington and New York. The commander of the missile troops, Major General Statsenko, found it difficult to understand what Moscow wanted from him. As his men labored to fulfill Khrushchev's order to dismantle the missile sites, he vented his frustration to a representative of the Soviet General Staff.

  "First you urged me to complete the launch sites as quickly as possible. And now you are criticizing me for dismantling them so slowly."

  Over the next few days and nights, Fidel prepared his people for a long struggle ahead. He went back to la colina, the hilltop campus of the University of Havana that had been the scene of his early struggles against Batista, to urge students "to tighten your belts and perhaps even to die" in defense of their homeland. Cuba risked becoming "an abandoned island without oil and electricity," he warned. "But we prefer to go back to primitive agriculture than accept the loss of sovereignty."

  But even as he fulminated against the Soviets, Castro remained the practical politician. "We won't make the same mistake twice," he told his youthful followers. Cuba would not "break with the Russians" so soon after "breaking with the Americans." Anything was preferable to being driven back into the arms of Uncle Sam. In order to save his revolution, Fidel was willing to make the supreme sacrifice: he would swallow his pride.

  Back at the White House, after the rest of the ExComm had left, JFK found himself alone with Bobby. Together, they reviewed the events of the previous thirteen days, and particularly the final day, Black Saturday, when the world had seemed to teeter on the brink of nuclear war. There had been many times over the last twenty-four hours when Kennedy, like Abraham Lincoln before him, had reason to ask himself whether he controlled events or events controlled him.

  History, Kennedy understood, does not always flow in predictable directions. Sometimes it can be hijacked by fanatics of various descriptions, by men with long beards, by ideologues living in caves, by assassins with rifles. At others, it can be yanked from its normal path by a combination of chance events, such as an airplane going astray, the misidentification of a missile, or a soldier losing his temper. Statesmen try to bend the chaotic forces of history to their will, with varying degrees of success. The likelihood of an unpredictable event occurring that can change the course of history is always greater at times of war and crisis, when everything is in flux.

  The question the world confronted during what came to be known as the Cuban missile crisis was who controlled history: the men in suits, the men with beards, the men in uniform, or nobody at all. In this drama, Kennedy ended up on the same side as his ideological nemesis, Nikita Khrushchev. Neither man wanted war. They both felt an obligation to future generations to rein in the dark, destructive demons they themselves had helped to unleash.

  Much of the relief felt by Kennedy on the afternoon of Sunday, October 28, was due to the fact that he and Khrushchev had succeeded in regaining control of historical events. After threatening to erupt in nuclear conflagration, the Cold War would settle back into its familiar rhythm. Men of common sense and reason had defeated the forces of destruction and chaos. The issue now was whether the victory for order and predictability would be long-lasting or fleeting.

  Casting around for an appropriate historical precedent, JFK thought of one of his predecessors. On April 14, 1865, five days after accepting the South's surrender in the Civil War, Lincoln decided to celebrate his moment of triumph by paying a visit to Ford's Theatre, to see a production of Our American Cousin.

  "This is the night I should go to the theater," said Jack.

  Unsure whether to be amused or protective, Bobby played along with his brother's macabre joke.

  "If you go, I want to go with you."

  Some of the characters in this story were quickly forgotten; others were destined for fame and notoriety. Some were disgraced;
others rose to positions of great influence. Some led long and happy lives; others had their lives cut short by tragedy. But all were marked in a lasting way by "the most dangerous moment" in history.

  The two CIA saboteurs, Miguel Orozco and Pedro Vera, spent seventeen years in Cuban jails before being sent back to the United States. The man who smuggled them into Cuba, Eugenio Rolando Martinez, was arrested at the Watergate Hotel in June 1972 while breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee.

  Charles Maultsby was forbidden by the U.S. Air Force from flying anywhere remotely near the North Pole or the Chukot Peninsula. He died of prostate cancer in 1998.

  Viktor Mikheev, the Russian soldier killed while preparing a nuclear missile attack on the Guantanamo Naval Base, was buried in Cuban military uniform in Santiago. His remains were later transferred to the Soviet military cemetery in El Chico. His family was told only that he died "performing his internationalist duty."

  George Anderson was dismissed from his position as chief of naval operations in August 1963 and appointed U.S. ambassador to Portugal.

  William Harvey was removed as head of Operation Mongoose after the missile crisis and sent as CIA station chief to Rome, where he drank heavily.

  Dmitri Yazov became Soviet defense minister in 1987 and led a failed coup against Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev in August 1991.

  John Scali served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under President Nixon.

  Curtis LeMay was caricatured as the maniacal Air Force general Buck Turgidson in Dr. Strangelove. In 1968, he ran for vice president of the United States on a ticket headed by the segregationist George Wallace.

  Ernesto "Che" Guevara left Cuba in 1965 to pursue his dream of worldwide revolution. He was killed in the mountains of Bolivia by CIA-supported government forces in 1967.

  Robert McNamara remained secretary of defense until 1968. He later repented of his role in escalating the war in Vietnam, and came to believe that only "luck" had prevented nuclear war over Cuba.

  Nikita Khrushchev was removed from office in October 1964. His fellow Presidium members accused him of "megalomania," "adventurism," "damaging the international prestige of our government," and taking the world to "the brink of nuclear war."

  Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in California in June 1968 while campaigning to be elected president.

  John F. Kennedy was murdered in November 1963. His assassin had been active in a left-wing protest group that called itself "Fair Play for Cuba."

  Fidel Castro remained in power for another forty-five years. In February 2008, he was succeeded as president of Cuba by his brother, Raul.

  AFTERWORD

  The mythologization of the Cuban missile crisis got under way almost immediately. Kennedy loyalists seized on the removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba to burnish JFK's image as a peacemaker and a man of action. As usual on such occasions, they accentuated the positive and played down the negative, emphasizing the president's resolve and skill in managing the test of wills with Nikita Khrushchev. The relentlessly upbeat tone was established by the court historian, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., who wrote that Kennedy had "dazzled the world" through a "combination of toughness and restraint, of will, nerve and wisdom, so brilliantly controlled, so matchlessly calibrated." Bobby Kennedy, Theodore Sorensen, and many lesser acolytes reached similar starry-eyed conclusions.

  Kennedy himself contributed to the mythmaking. Soon after the crisis, he gave a long off-the-record interview to one of his closest journalist friends, Charles Bartlett. A subsequent article by Bartlett and Stewart Alsop in the Saturday Evening Post described how the president had resisted pressure from Adlai Stevenson to trade away Turkish, Italian, and British bases for the Soviet missile sites on Cuba. It quoted a rival Kennedy aide as saying that "Adlai wanted a Munich." By contrast, JFK was depicted as a tough-minded leader who "never lost his nerve" despite going "eyeball to eyeball" with Khrushchev. Bobby Kennedy was the "leading dove" on the ExComm who argued passionately that an unannounced air strike against Cuba would be "a Pearl Harbor in reverse and contrary to all American traditions."

  The official version of history omitted some inconvenient facts. The tapes of the ExComm meetings make clear that RFK's position was more ambiguous and contradictory than the early accounts suggest. He was hardly "a dove from the start," as Schlesinger claimed in his biography, Robert Kennedy and His Times (1978). On the first day of the crisis, he was one of the leading advocates for invading Cuba and even ruminated aloud about staging a "Sink the Maine"-type incident as a pretext for getting rid of Castro. He veered from one camp to another depending on the signals he was getting from his brother and from Moscow. As for JFK, the historical record shows that he was willing to go to great lengths on Black Saturday to avoid a showdown with Khrushchev. The main difference between Kennedy and Stevenson was that the president wanted to keep the missile swap idea in reserve in case there was no other way out, while the ambassador was willing to put it onto the negotiating table from the very beginning.

  The Kennedy-inspired accounts of the crisis also skipped over much of the historical background that explained why Khrushchev decided to take his great missile gamble in the first place. It was as if the Soviet missiles suddenly appeared on Cuba with no provocation on the part of the United States. Little was known about Operation Mongoose until the U.S. Senate began investigating CIA misdeeds in the 1970s in the wake of the Watergate scandal. Subsequent archival revelations demonstrated that Castro and his Soviet patrons had real reasons to fear American attempts at regime change including, as a last resort, a U.S. invasion of Cuba. Sabotage efforts were under way even during the missile crisis itself. Khrushchev's motives in sending Soviet missiles to Cuba were complex and multifaceted. He undoubtedly saw the move as a way of offsetting American nuclear superiority, but he was also sincere in his desire to defend the Cuban revolution from the mighty neighbor to the north. Cuban and Soviet fears of American intervention were not simply the result of Communist paranoia.

  Nor was the day-to-day diplomacy as "brilliantly controlled" as the Kennedy camp would have us believe. In their desire to claim credit for Khrushchev's sudden about-face on the morning of Sunday, October 28, Kennedy aides came up with the notion of the "Trollope ploy" to describe the American diplomatic strategy on Black Saturday. The gambit was named after a recurring scene in novels by Anthony Trollope, in which a lovesick Victorian maiden chooses to interpret an innocent squeeze on the hand as an offer of marriage. By this account, accepted for many years by missile crisis scholars, it was Bobby who came up with the idea of the ploy. He suggested that his brother simply ignore Khrushchev's call on Saturday morning for a Turkey-Cuba missile swap and instead accept his ambiguously worded offer of Friday night to dismantle the missile sites in return for a U.S. guarantee not to invade Cuba. It was, wrote Schlesinger, "a thought of breathtaking ingenuity and simplicity."

  The "Trollope ploy" contains a kernel of truth. With Sorensen's help, RFK did rewrite the reply to Khrushchev to focus more on the conciliatory-sounding parts of his first letter. On the other hand, the reply was the work of many authors. Far from ignoring the second Khrushchev letter, JFK ordered Bobby to tell Dobrynin that the United States would withdraw its missiles from Turkey "within four to five months." He also began laying the diplomatic groundwork for a public Turkey-Cuba swap should one become necessary. In general, the "Trollope ploy" version of history ascribes greater coherence and logic to the tense ExComm debate of Saturday afternoon than anybody felt at the time. The meeting was a case study of government by exhaustion, in which frazzled policy-makers weighed down by heavy responsibility argued and stumbled toward an acceptable compromise.

  Looking back at the crisis decades later, participants would single out two particular moments when the world seemed to teeter on the edge of a nuclear precipice. The first occurred on the morning of Wednesday, October 24, when Kennedy and his aides braced themselves for a confrontation on the quarantine line with
Soviet ships. Bartlett and Alsop depict this as the "eyeball to eyeball" moment of the crisis, the decisive "turning point" when Kennedy held firm and Khrushchev "blinked." The anxious mood was felt half a dozen blocks away at the Soviet Embassy on Sixteenth Street. Ambassador Dobrynin would later recall "the enormous tension that gripped us at the embassy as we all watched the sequences on American television showing a Soviet tanker as it drew closer and closer to the imaginary line…Four, three, two, finally one mile was left ― would the ship stop?"

  The second moment of high drama occurred on Black Saturday with a rapid succession of bizarre incidents, any one of which might have led to nuclear war. The real danger no longer arose from a clash of wills between Kennedy and Khrushchev but over whether the two of them jointly could gain control of the war machine that they themselves had unleashed. To adapt Ralph Waldo Emerson's remark, events were in the saddle and were riding mankind. The crisis had gained a momentum of its own. An American U-2 was shot down over Cuba by a Soviet air defense unit without Khrushchev's authorization within a few moments of another U-2 blundering over the Soviet Union without Kennedy knowing anything about it. This was when JFK vented his frustration ― "There's always some sonofabitch that doesn't get the word."

  American and Soviet archival records demonstrate that the "eyeball to eyeball" moment never actually happened, at least not in the way imagined by Kennedy and his aides and depicted in numerous books and movies. Khrushchev had already decided, more than twenty-four hours before, not to risk a confrontation with the U.S. Navy on the high seas. But the imagery was easily understandable by journalists, historians, and political scientists, and lent itself naturally to dramatic re-creation. It became a staple part of the popular understanding of the missile crisis. By contrast, the much more dangerous "sonofabitch moment" has received relatively little scholarly attention. Most books on the missile crisis fail to even mention the name of Chuck Maultsby; others summarize his overflight of the Chukot Peninsula in one or two paragraphs.