Bobby Kennedy charged into Bundy’s office demanding to see the photos.
“Oh sh**! Sh**! Sh**!” he chanted, slamming fist and palm together. “Those sons a **** Russians!”
The president, the calmer of the brothers, stuck to his planned schedule for the day. Until he figured out how to react to Khrushchev’s move, he wanted everything to appear normal. First up that morning was a visit from American astronaut Walter Schirra. Schirra was shown into the Oval Office with his wife and two kids. Kennedy took a seat in his rocking chair and smiled for the cameras. They chatted and posed, and then Kennedy led the children outside to meet his daughter Caroline’s pony, Macaroni.
It was nearly noon before he was able to duck into the Cabinet Room with his top advisers for a briefing on developments in Cuba. Arthur Lundahl, the chief photo interpreter, opened a large black case and had begun sliding out photos when Caroline burst in for a visit.
Kennedy jumped up from his chair and put his arm around his daughter.
“Caroline, have you been eating candy?”
She didn’t answer.
“Answer me,” he said, smiling. “Yes, no, or maybe?”
He led her out of the room. When he came back, the smile was gone.
“Okay,” he said, sliding into his chair. He flipped a switch under the table activating microphones hidden in the wall. A tape machine in the basement began rolling. Bobby Kennedy was the only other person in the room who knew of this secret recording system.
Lundahl set three black-and-white photos in front of the president. He handed Kennedy a magnifying glass.
“Sir,” Lundahl said, “we’ve never seen this kind of installation before.”
A football field—that was Kennedy’s first thought. The images showed a clearing in the forest. Some kind of construction in progress. Long tube-shaped objects on trailers.
The tubes were Soviet R-12 rockets, Lundahl explained. They could fly into space. Or they could carry a hydrogen bomb to a target up to 1,300 miles away. The southeastern United States, including Washington, D.C., was well within range from Cuba.
“How do we know this is a medium-range ballistic missile?” Kennedy asked.
“The length, sir.”
“The what? The length?”
“The length of it, yes.”
Lundahl explained about the binders of data on Soviet missiles. Kennedy knew about the CIA’s extraordinary source inside Soviet military intelligence. He still didn’t know Oleg Penkovsky’s name, but now, more than ever, the value of the spy’s product was clear.
Kennedy studied one of the missiles with the magnifying glass.
“Is it ready to be fired?” he asked.
“No, sir,” answered Sydney Graybeal, a CIA missile expert.
“How long have…,” Kennedy began. “We can’t tell that, can we? How long before it can be fired?”
“No, sir.”
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara asked about warheads—any sign of H-bombs to go with the rockets?
Not yet, Graybeal said. If the warheads were on the island, the missiles could be ready to fire in a couple of hours.
General Maxwell Taylor, chief of staff of the U.S. Army, informed the group that the military was working on plans for an air strike on the missile base.
“How effective can the takeout be?” Kennedy asked.
“It’ll never be 100 percent, Mr. President.”
John Kennedy had spoken often of some sort of looming showdown with the Soviet Union, some eyeball-to-eyeball moment that would shove the future one way or the other. He hadn’t realized it was going to happen so soon.
“I don’t think we’ve got much time,” Kennedy said. “We’re gonna take out these missiles.”
Still going through the motions of a normal day, Kennedy attended a White House luncheon with the crown prince of Libya, then kept an appointment to speak at a foreign policy conference for journalists at the State Department. Reporters in the audience thought the president seemed unusually tense. At the close of his remarks, Kennedy offered a glimpse into his frame of mind when he pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and recited a poem:
Bullfight critics row on row,
Crowd the enormous plaza full,
But only one is there who knows,
And he’s the one who fights the bull.
That same day, in the Allegheny Mountains of West Virginia, a five-hour drive from Washington, construction crews finished a three-year job called Project X. The teams had cut into a hill beside the Greenbrier, a luxury hotel, and built a secret underground shelter for the U.S. Congress.
A long hallway in the hotel led to a door with a warning sign: DANGER: HIGH VOLTAGE KEEP OUT.
Behind that door was room for all 535 members of Congress, with meeting chambers and rows of metal bunk beds. To brighten up the space, workers attached window frames to the solid concrete walls and painted pleasant nature scenes inside the frames.
The crews were never told what they were building, or why it needed so many urinals, but it was obviously some kind of bomb shelter. Equally obvious was the fact that in the case of nuclear war, they would not be invited in.
PRETTY BAD FIX
JOHN KENNEDY AND HIS TOP advisers gathered again in the Cabinet Room on the morning of October 18. Over the coming days, the group would become known as the Executive Committee of the National Security Council—ExComm for short.
Arthur Lundahl set out new aerial photos of Cuba. These images, he explained, showed intermediate-range missile sites. The medium-range missiles, the ones they’d already known about, could hit targets within about 1,300 miles. These new intermediate-range missiles could hit targets as far as 2,800 miles away.
In other words, every city in the continental United States.
General Maxwell Taylor pointed out that there were likely other missile sites they hadn’t found yet. An air strike could never be guaranteed to destroy them all.
Kennedy understood. The riskiest move he could make would be an air strike that left some of the missile sites intact. One danger was that those weapons could be fired at the United States. Another was that once the shooting started, Khrushchev could use the opportunity to pounce elsewhere.
“What do we do when…,” Bobby Kennedy said, forming his thoughts on the fly. “I think he moves into Berlin?”
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara jumped in. “Well, when we’re talking about taking Berlin, what do we mean exactly? Do they take it with Soviet troops?”
“That’s what I would see, anyway,” President Kennedy said.
“I think there’s a real possibility of that,” McNamara agreed. “We have U.S. troops right there. What do they do?”
General Taylor said, “They fight.”
“They fight,” McNamara said. “I think that’s perfectly clear.”
“And they get overrun,” Kennedy said.
“Then what do we do?” Bobby Kennedy asked.
“Go to general war,” said General Taylor. “Assuming we have time for it.”
President Kennedy asked, “You mean nuclear exchange?”
“Guess you have to,” Taylor said.
A chilling reminder of just how quickly events could get out of control.
“Well, let me ask,” President Kennedy began. “Is there anyone here who doesn’t think that we ought to do something about this?”
This was the central question. It was followed by seven seconds of silence.
The president agreed with what the silence implied: they had to act.
He had already warned Khrushchev that the “gravest issues would arise” if the Soviets put missiles in Cuba. If he backed down now, if he just let the Cubans have their bombs ninety miles from Florida, wouldn’t that make the Soviets even bolder? Wouldn’t they want to see what else they could get away with?
And there would be another price for inaction: Kennedy’s political opponents would attack. They were already calling him soft, blaming him for ever
ything from the Bay of Pigs to the Berlin Wall. Imagine how they’d pounce if he let the Soviets keep their missiles in Cuba.
With the stakes so high, maybe worries about approval ratings and elections should have played no part in the president’s thinking. But this was the real world.
In spite of the enormous risks, Kennedy decided that the Soviet missiles had to go.
* * *
Spread out to avoid detection, the four Soviet subs reached the Sargasso Sea, off the southeast coast of the United States, on October 19. The crews had been looking forward to warm weather. This was not what they had in mind.
These boats were built for northern waters, where air-conditioning was unnecessary. They simply could not cope with tropical seas. The inside temperature rose to well over one hundred degrees, with 90 percent humidity. To conserve fresh water the men were allowed just two showers a week, and their own growing stench added a nauseating layer to the reek of diesel fuel.
As they did every day at the assigned time, the captains raised their antennas to check for messages from back home. For the first time in nearly three weeks, new orders came in: “Assume combat readiness and form a line west of the Caicos and Turks Island passages in the Caribbean Sea.”
“What does this mean?” an officer aboard B-36 asked his commander. “Are we at war?”
“I don’t know,” Captain Dubivko said.
He decided to linger near the surface long enough for his English-speaking communications specialists to listen to a few minutes of news on the radio. The Americans were still talking about baseball. The Yankees had beaten the Giants in game seven of the World Series.
* * *
Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay was once asked how he would deal with Fidel Castro’s Cuba.
“Fry it,” he said.
He was not necessarily speaking figuratively.
During World War II, General LeMay had played a key role in crushing Japan by planning the firebombing of Tokyo and dozens of other Japanese cities. During the Korean War, LeMay called for use of atomic bombs on communist North Korea—a proposal rejected by the White House. He built the U.S. Air Force’s Strategic Air Command—with its bomber fleet, flight crews, hydrogen bombs, and missiles—into the most powerful military force in human history.
LeMay’s view of the Cold War was driven by the assumption that the Soviet Union and the United States were on a collision course. At some point, he believed, the United States was going to face a choice: surrender to the Soviet Union or destroy it. The American military had the lead in planes and bombs. That lead was shrinking. Therefore, it was logical to fight sooner rather than later.
In the mid-1950s, before the U-2 flights began, LeMay had several times ordered Air Force planes to make reconnaissance flights over Soviet territory—without President Eisenhower’s knowledge or permission. It is not clear whether he was trying to gather intelligence or provoke war.
“Well,” he told the crew of one plane, “maybe if we do this overflight right, we can get World War III started.”
The pilots figured it was a joke. They hoped it was.
* * *
On October 19, at 9:45 a.m., Curtis LeMay and the chiefs of staff of the U.S. Army, Navy, and Marines met with Kennedy and his top aides in the Cabinet Room.
General Maxwell Taylor reported that the chiefs were in full agreement. They recommended an immediate air strike on the missile sites in Cuba.
Kennedy agreed that a passive response would be a mistake. But an air strike came with so many dangers. What if some of those missiles in Cuba were ready to fire? If the strike didn’t destroy all of the missiles, some could be launched at American cities. And what if, while the Americans were fighting in Cuba, the Russians rolled over U.S. forces in West Berlin? Kennedy did not have enough troops and tanks in Europe to stop a Soviet advance.
“Which leaves me only one alternative, which is to fire nuclear weapons,” Kennedy said. “Which is a hell of an alternative.”
There was one other option to consider: a blockade. Dozens of Soviet ships were still at sea, on their way to Cuba. American ships could block access to the island. The blockade would be lifted only when Khrushchev agreed to bring his missiles back home.
But there were terrible dangers there, too. A blockade, like an air strike, was an act of war. Besides, what if a Soviet ship refused to stop? The Americans would have to fire, and events could easily escalate from there. Worst of all, the Soviets already had missiles in Cuba, and maybe nuclear warheads, too. A blockade would give the Soviets time to finish work on their missile sites.
“I don’t think we’ve got any satisfactory alternatives,” Kennedy said.
General LeMay rejected that view. Khrushchev, he argued, had blundered by picking a fight in a part of the world where America was stronger. “I’d emphasize,” LeMay told the president, “a little strongly perhaps, that we don’t have any choice except direct military action.”
Kennedy refused to accept that he had no options. He refused to accept that war with the Soviet Union was inevitable. There had to be some way to confront the Soviets, to eventually defeat them, without killing hundreds of millions of people.
Normally, LeMay at least tried to hide his contempt for the young president. That was out the window now. A blockade was weak, he charged. It would only invite the Soviets to attack. It was the act of a coward.
“In other words,” LeMay said, “you’re in a pretty bad fix at the present time.”
“What did you say?” Kennedy snapped.
“You’re in a pretty bad fix.”
The president exhaled a frosty laugh. “Well, you’re in there with me. Personally.”
* * *
The military chiefs continued talking after Kennedy and his advisers left the room. They did not realize they were being recorded.
Marine General David Shoup congratulated LeMay. “You pulled the rug right out from under him.”
At the same moment, Kennedy ranted in the Oval Office. “These brass hats have one great advantage in their favor. If we listen to them and do what they want us to do, none of us will be alive later to tell them that they were wrong.”
YOUR MOVE
UNDECIDED ON HOW TO HANDLE Cuba, John Kennedy flew to the Midwest on October 19 and gave a series of campaign speeches.
In Washington, ExComm members continued to meet in secret. Kennedy wanted a unanimous recommendation, but the team was divided between advising a blockade or an air strike. Curtis LeMay continued to push for a surprise bombing raid, followed by an invasion of Cuba.
Reporters noticed lights burning in important offices all night—a sure sign something unusual was going on.
* * *
There was still no word from Oleg Penkovsky.
Every morning an American agent checked for a fresh chalk mark on a specific lamppost on Kutuzovsky Prospekt, a busy Moscow street. Penkovsky had been told to mark the post as a signal that he’d loaded the dead-drop he suggested in his original note to the Americans.
There was nothing on the pole.
Every moment an agent sat by the phone. Penkovsky had been given an emergency number. He knew to call from a pay phone. It could be assumed that the KGB was listening. Penkovsky was to say nothing. He was to blow three times into the phone, then hang up. He was to wait one minute, then do the same thing again. He understood the seriousness of this signal. It would be taken to mean that the Soviet Union was about to launch a nuclear strike.
The phone did not ring.
* * *
On the morning of October 20, White House press secretary Pierre Salinger met with reporters outside a Chicago hotel. He reviewed the schedule of President Kennedy’s campaign speeches that day, then went up to Kennedy’s suite and was surprised to find his boss still in pajamas, unshaven. White House physician George Burkley stood beside the president’s bed.
“I have a temperature and a cold,” Kennedy announced. “Tell the press I’m returning to Washington on the
advice of Dr. Burkley.”
Salinger thought the president looked fine.
Kennedy picked up a pen and pad and wrote: “99.2 degrees temperature. Upper respiratory infection. Doctor says he should return to Washington.”
“There,” he told Salinger, holding out the paper. “Tell them that.”
The reporters were already on their buses outside the hotel. Salinger called them out to break the news. An hour later, he and Kennedy were on their way back to Washington aboard Air Force One.
“Mr. President,” Salinger asked, “you don’t have that bad a cold, do you?”
Kennedy said, “I’ve had worse.”
* * *
Hundreds of Soviet soldiers gathered in a forest clearing in central Cuba. Many of the men went shirtless in the hot sun, their military pants chopped into cutoffs.
“We have completed the assignments of the first stage,” an officer told the group. The missile base was combat ready. The crews had built concrete pads, assembled eight missile launchers, and aimed them north. On trailers, hidden under canvas sheets, lay R-12 rockets. “We may die a heroic death,” the officer proclaimed, “but we won’t abandon the people of Cuba!”
The men cheered and fired guns into the air.
* * *
“Gentlemen, today we’re going to earn our pay,” Kennedy said as he walked into the White House.
The president really had planned to give campaign speeches that day—until his brother called early that morning. ExComm was hopelessly divided, Bobby reported. The press was starting to ask questions. The president needed to get back to town and make the final decision himself. Today.
In the White House’s second-floor Oval Room, air strike and blockade proponents battled it out for three hours. Either action would push the world closer to war.
“There isn’t any good solution,” Kennedy said. “Whichever plan I choose, the ones whose plans we’re not taking are the lucky ones—they’ll be able to say ‘I told you so.’”
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