Assuming they’d be around to say it.
Anyway, there was no point in going back and forth any longer. Kennedy made his decision. He stepped onto the balcony and looked out at the Washington Monument. It was a beautiful fall day.
* * *
Fourteen years earlier, First Lady Bess Truman had been standing in the Blue Room of the White House, welcoming guests to a formal tea, when she noticed an odd sound coming from above. A sort of glassy tinkling. She looked up.
The massive chandelier hanging from the ceiling was swaying, its crystals clinking together.
Why? The windows were closed. There was no breeze.
Mrs. Truman gestured to a White House usher, J. B. West, and whispered, “Would you please find out what is going on upstairs?”
West ran up to the living quarters. “What’s going on up here?” he asked Alonzo Fields, the head butler.
“The boss is taking a bath,” Fields said, “and he asked me to get him a book from the study.”
That’s all it took—the butler’s footsteps. The two men felt it as they walked around. The entire floor was shaking.
Bess Truman came up just after her husband got out of the tub. “I was afraid the chandelier was going to come right down on top of all those people!”
“And I would have come crashing through the ceiling,” Harry Truman chuckled, greatly amused by the image of arriving at the tea party in only his reading glasses.
It had been obvious for years that the White House needed work. Pictures on the wall tilted on their own. Dropped objects rolled down dips in the hardwood. And one evening, when Bess and Harry’s daughter, Margaret, sat down at her grand piano, a back leg of the instrument plunged through the floor, sending a snow of plaster dust into the dining room.
That did it. The Trumans moved out. Construction crews gutted the building.
The renovation provided an opportunity to add a new feature to the White House—an atomic bomb shelter. The Cold War was starting. The White House was the bull’s-eye on target America. The new basement shelter had a four-inch-thick door, Army cots and canned food, a direct phone line to the Pentagon’s bomb shelter, and a shower to wash off radioactive fallout.
John Kennedy knew about the shelter, of course, though he’d never thought much about it. Now, standing on the White House balcony, gazing out at the Washington Monument, Kennedy wondered if he would be the first president to need the bunker.
His brother and a few others came out to join him.
“We are very, very close to war,” John Kennedy said. Then, trying to cut the tension with a little dark humor, he added, “And there’s not room in the White House bomb shelter for all of us.”
* * *
At the National Photographic Interpretation Center, CIA photo interpreters continued working around the clock. On the evening of October 21, they found something new: a nuclear warhead storage bunker. There was no way to know what, if anything, was locked inside.
American tanks, artillery, and thousands of soldiers headed to Florida by truck, railroad, and airplane. The American press speculated about the meaning of these developments.
Nikita Khrushchev tried not to. He had made his move. Now it was Kennedy’s turn. As they walked in Moscow, Sergei asked his father for an update.
All Khrushchev could say was, “We have to wait.”
* * *
On October 22, at 4:00 a.m. Washington time, the White House press secretary, Pierre Salinger, packed clothes into a bag and left home without waking his wife and children. He didn’t think he’d be coming home anytime soon.
At the White House, Salinger called reporters together. He confirmed their suspicion that the country was facing a major crisis. He told them that President Kennedy would explain everything to the American people in a televised address.
“We have just submitted to the networks a request for a half hour of time at seven tonight,” Salinger said.
A reporter attempted a joke. “Do you think they will give it to you?”
Salinger was not laughing. “I have a feeling they will,” he said.
* * *
In Moscow, where it was afternoon, Sergei Khrushchev stood in the hall of the family home, watching his father talk on his direct line to the Kremlin. Sergei could not tell what the conversation was about. Only that it was unpleasant.
When the call was over, Sergei and his father went for a walk. Winter had already come to Moscow. Snow lay in drifts against the bottoms of buildings.
“In Washington they’ve announced that the president will deliver an important speech tonight,” Khrushchev said. “They’ve probably discovered our missiles.”
“What will happen?”
“I wish I knew.”
The situation was bad, even more dangerous than the Americans realized. Some of the medium-range missiles in Cuba were ready to fire. There were enough warheads already on the island to demolish several American cities. Perhaps Kennedy knew this. But he had no way of knowing that Soviet commanders in Cuba also had dozens of short-range nuclear weapons—tactical weapons, designed to devastate enemies on the battlefield. If the Americans attacked, Soviet commanders could wipe out the invading force before it got off the beach. And there were four Soviet submarines in the area, each with a nuclear torpedo that could destroy an entire enemy fleet.
When they came home from their walk, Khrushchev went to his special phone without removing his coat.
“Call the members of the Presidium,” he ordered. “Ask them to meet me in the Kremlin in one hour.”
On his way out the door the Soviet leader told his son, “Don’t wait up for me.”
* * *
“Khrushchev will not take this without a response, maybe in Berlin or maybe here,” Kennedy told ExComm members that afternoon. “I think we’ve done the best thing, at least as far as you can tell in advance.”
Secretary of State Dean Rusk urged everyone to buckle in. “This is going to go very far,” he said, “and possibly very fast.”
At 5:00 p.m., congressional leaders filed into the Cabinet Room for a briefing. Kennedy quickly outlined the situation and explained his planned course of action.
Senator Richard Russell objected, calling for an all-out invasion of Cuba.
“We decided that was not the wisest first move,” Kennedy said. “And you would, too, if you had more time to think about it.”
Another senator jumped in to demand an immediate invasion.
It was so easy to talk tough—when you weren’t the one who had to make the decisions. Kennedy stood up, unable to hide his irritation.
He said, “I gotta go and make this speech.”
THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS
EVELYN LINCOLN MADE HER WAY through the clutter of cameras, cables, and bright lights in the Oval Office. She stepped up to President Kennedy’s desk and held out a brush. Kennedy took it, ran it through his hair, handed it back.
“Thirty seconds,” someone said.
Kennedy stacked the papers of his speech. He sat a bit stiffly in his chair, partly due to the back brace under his freshly pressed suit. Also, he was about to take the world to the brink of nuclear war.
The director gave the on-air signal. The president looked into the camera, his face showing both strain and determination.
“Good evening, my fellow citizens.”
Kennedy explained that Soviet missiles had been discovered in Cuba. The missiles gave the Soviets the ability to strike the United States in minutes with devastating force. Those missiles, he demanded, must be removed.
“The 1930s taught us a clear lesson,” he said, referring to the way Germany and Japan had begun grabbing territory before World War II. “Aggressive conduct, if allowed to go unchecked and unchallenged, ultimately leads to war.”
All over the country, Americans were crowded around television sets in homes, in bars, in department stores. No president had ever spoken to so many people at once.
“We will not prematurely or unn
ecessarily risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth,” Kennedy told the world. “But neither will we shrink from that risk at any time it must be faced.”
The U.S. military, he continued, was going to enforce “a strict quarantine” on Soviet ships headed to Cuba. The word quarantine, he’d decided, sounded less warlike than blockade. The result was the same. “All ships of any kind bound for Cuba from whatever nation or port will, if found to contain cargoes of offensive weapons, be turned back.”
Crews aboard U.S. Navy ships listened live on the radio.
So did English-language specialists aboard four Soviet submarines in the Caribbean.
“It shall be the policy of this nation,” Kennedy warned, “to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.”
He did not specify that “full retaliatory response” meant the utter destruction of every city in the Soviet Union. He didn’t need to.
“My fellow citizens,” Kennedy said, “let no one doubt that this is a difficult and dangerous effort on which we have set out. No one can see precisely what course it will take or what costs or casualties will be incurred.”
* * *
As Kennedy spoke, the U.S. Strategic Air Command went to Defense Condition Three, or DEFCON 3.
DEFCON 5 is normal peacetime readiness, while DEFCON 4 is an increased state of readiness. At DEFCON 3, nuclear missile and bomber crews are ready to go in fifteen minutes.
DEFCON 2, one step short of war, had never been reached to this point in the Cold War.
DEFCON 1 means imminent nuclear war.
Pilots who happened to be on vacation drove through the night to get back to their bases. Flight crews were told there would be no more drills.
“If the buzzer blows,” one officer explained, “it’ll be the real McCoy.”
* * *
An aide walked into the Presidium conference room at the Kremlin with a copy of Kennedy’s speech.
“What have you got?” Khrushchev said, attempting a smile. “Read it out.”
The aide translated key passages into Russian for the officials gathered at the long table. Khrushchev’s first reaction was relief. A blockade was better than an immediate air strike, which could lead so quickly to all-out war.
Now it was his turn to move.
Should he just retreat? Bring home the missiles and let Kennedy have his way?
No, he quickly decided. That would be humiliating, both personally and for the Soviet Union. Just like Kennedy, he feared that appearing weak would only invite his enemies to attack.
Besides, the more he thought about Kennedy’s demands, the angrier he got. The United States had missiles in Turkey. Why shouldn’t the Soviet Union be able to have its own missile bases in Cuba?
Khrushchev dictated a rough draft of a defiant response to the Americans. Presidium members agreed to gather again at 10:00 a.m.
“Let’s stay here until the morning,” the premier ordered. “Foreign correspondents and intelligence agents are probably prowling around near the Kremlin. It doesn’t pay to show that we’re nervous. Let them think we’re peacefully asleep in our beds.”
* * *
“Well, it looks like war,” Fidel Castro announced after Kennedy’s speech. “I cannot conceive of any retreat.”
The Cuban leader drove to the office of the newspaper Revolución and dictated a front-page story for all of his citizens to read in the morning. “The nation has woken up on a war footing, ready to repulse any attack,” Castro declared. “Every weapon is in its place, and beside each weapon are the heroic defenders of the Revolution and the Motherland.”
At their bases in the forest, Soviet missile regiments were on full alert.
In the waters east of Cuba, the commanders of the Soviet submarines knew Kennedy’s blockade would bring a massive U.S. naval presence to the area. America’s anti-submarine forces, known as hunter-killer groups, used planes, helicopters, warships, and nuclear-powered subs to track down enemy boats. If the Soviet subs hadn’t been spotted yet, they would be soon. The captains had their orders. If attacked, they had permission to fire their special weapons.
* * *
On Tuesday morning, October 23, Nikita Khrushchev woke from a decent night’s sleep on the couch in his office. Other Presidium members had made do with conference room chairs. The group met in the morning in wrinkled suits.
The officials approved Khrushchev’s message to Kennedy. They agreed to raise the Soviet military’s level of preparedness. Missiles based in the Soviet Union were to be armed with nuclear warheads. General Pliyev, the Soviet commander in Cuba, was authorized to use his short-range atomic bombs in the case of an American attack. The four submarines were to stay in position near Cuba. All ships on their way to Cuba were to continue to their assigned ports on that island.
The ship they were particularly anxious to get quickly into port was the Aleksandrovsk, a freighter carrying twenty-four hydrogen bomb warheads for intermediate-range missiles, along with forty-four tactical nuclear warheads. It was one sailing day from Cuba.
* * *
That morning in American schools, students practiced ducking under their desks, turning their heads away from windows. Teachers handed kids lists of items to stock in whatever shelter their families had prepared. World War III could begin at any time, teachers announced. If there was enough warning, students would be sent home.
Shoppers stripped shelves of canned food and bottled water, radios and batteries. Drivers waited in long lines at gas stations. Bank tellers noted a sharp decline in deposits. Vacationers fled from Florida. Caribbean cruise lines canceled trips. At television stations, which normally went off the air overnight, executives considered the radical idea of broadcasting news twenty-four hours a day. It wasn’t possible; they simply didn’t have the staff.
* * *
In the White House, CIA Director John McCone informed Kennedy and ExComm that the Navy was monitoring the movements of Soviet submarines east of Cuba. This was the first time Soviet subs had ever been spotted so close to the American coast.
Using sophisticated listening equipment, anti-submarine specialists were able to identify different boats by the sound of their propellers. These were Foxtrot class diesel-electric subs, fairly outdated by American standards. The Foxtrots had never been known to carry nuclear weapons.
So that was good news.
IF TIME PERMITS
KENNEDY AND HIS ADVISERS THEN turned to Nikita Khrushchev’s letter—the Soviet leader’s formal response to Kennedy’s televised speech of the night before.
“Just imagine, Mr. President,” the message began, “that we had presented you with the conditions of an ultimatum which you have presented us.”
Khrushchev angrily rejected Kennedy’s right to impose a quarantine, comparing Americans to lawless pirates. “The violation of the freedom to use international waters,” Khrushchev charged, “is an act of aggression which pushes mankind toward the abyss of a world nuclear missile war.”
It did not sound as if Soviet ships would be honoring the American blockade.
This fit with the latest intelligence. Ships were still cruising full speed toward Cuba. Eight would hit the quarantine line by tomorrow morning, just as Kennedy’s order to stop ships went into effect.
“Okay,” Kennedy said. “Now what do we do tomorrow morning, when this—these eight vessels continue to sail on?”
The CIA director said, “Shoot the rudders off ’em, don’t you?”
“This is a problem,” Secretary of Defense McNamara cautioned. “We want to be very careful.”
The point was obvious. Once the shooting started, things could escalate quickly.
When the meeting ended, John and Bobby Kennedy stayed behind to talk in private. It’s possible they forgot the tape was still rolling.
/>
“How’s it look?” Bobby asked.
“Looks real mean, doesn’t it?”
“Well, there isn’t any choice,” Bobby said. The president had to confront Khrushchev head-on. “I mean, you woulda … you woulda been impeached.”
“That’s what I think,” Kennedy said. “I woulda been impeached.”
Bobby tried to assure his brother that whatever happened in the next few days, even the outbreak of war, would not be the president’s fault. He couldn’t quite find the words.
“You can’t really … I mean, if it’s gonna come, if you … it’s gonna come.”
* * *
“Will there be war?” Sergei Khrushchev asked his father when they walked in Moscow that evening.
Nikita Khrushchev looked exhausted. “It’s one thing to threaten with nuclear weapons,” he said, “quite another to use them.”
In Havana, Fidel Castro delivered a ninety-minute televised rant against the United States and John Kennedy. “All of us, men and women, young and old, we are all united in this hour of danger,” he concluded. “All of us, revolutionaries and patriots, will share the same fate. Victory will belong to us all. Victory or death!”
Soviet officials based in New York traded jokes about the words that would appear on their tombstones. “Here lie the Soviet diplomats,” one suggested, “killed by their own bombs.”
At the Pentagon, on a wall-sized map of the Atlantic Ocean, young men used long poles to plot the latest locations of American and Soviet ships. The U.S. fleet formed a long arc stretching from Puerto Rico to the tip of Florida, blocking the path to Cuba. The Soviet ships were heading for the line.
Fallout Page 17