by Nancy Gibbs
“Dear General,” Kennedy wrote, this time using the title Ike preferred, “I have received these golf balls for Christmas, but regrettably because of my back, I cannot use them for many months. You are the only other golfer I know entitled to them—and I send them with my best wishes.”
Eisenhower refused to criticize Kennedy’s handling of the disaster; but he had come to realize how much less power an ex-president has than a sitting one to shape the narrative of events. He was sufficiently concerned about how his role would be remembered that just this one time, as historian Stephen Ambrose explained, he set out to have the official record emended to reflect his memory of what had happened.
It all went back to the key meeting of March 1960, when he had first approved the CIA training mission. Two months after the invasion, Ike reached out to his inner circle and asked them for their recollections of that meeting; his aide Gordon Gray replied that he actually had notes of the conversation, stored with Eisenhower’s other classified presidential papers at Fort Ritchie in Maryland. Ike sent his son John to retrieve them, and then sat with Gray in Gettysburg going over the record. The account did confirm the importance Ike had placed on there being a plausible government in exile in place before any move was made on Castro. But it was when they came across the word “planning” that Eisenhower recoiled.
“This is wrong,” he insisted. “We did no military planning.” All he had approved was the training of the Cuban exiles, not a blueprint for their deployment. “With your permission,” he told Gray, “I’m going to have this page rewritten to reflect the facts.” Gray agreed; more than a decade later, he wrote to the assistant director of the Eisenhower library explaining how the original version of the memo had been misleading, and how they had altered it.
For Kennedy, the Bay of Pigs was the low point, but hardly the only challenge of that first year. He struggled to hold back Soviet influence in Laos, Angola, and the Congo after its president was assassinated. The test ban talks in Geneva collapsed in March of 1961; the Soviets won the race to put a man in space in April; the government of South Korea was overthrown in May. In June, Khrushchev bullied and battered Kennedy at their summit in Vienna. That summer the Soviets resumed nuclear testing after a three-year moratorium. At one point Kennedy opened a National Security Council meeting asking, “Did we inherit these problems, or are these our own?”
“Oh, well,” he remarked at another meeting, “just think of what we’ll pass on to the poor fellow who comes after me.”
On the other hand, the serial challenges—even the disasters—didn’t seem to hurt him with the public. Just two weeks after the Bay of Pigs, at the end of April, Gallup pegged his approval at 83 percent.
“Jesus, it’s just like Eisenhower,” Kennedy said. “The worse I do, the more popular I get.”
Fears and Threats
Kennedy’s great fear, said his press secretary, Pierre Salinger, was “that he might have to be the President to start a nuclear war.”
In the summer of 1961, he returned from his first summit meeting with Khrushchev in Vienna feeling he had never encountered a leader so immune to reason, or so apparently indifferent to the prospect of Armageddon. “He treated me like a little boy,” Kennedy complained to Bobby. After the Bay of Pigs, he concluded, Khrushchev assumed he was weak and inexperienced, just as Eisenhower had warned. It was a dangerous impression for him to carry. Asked by a New York Times reporter how their meeting had gone, the president was blunt.
“Worst thing in my life,” Kennedy called it. “He savaged me.”
When he got back to Washington Kennedy began asking his experts: just how many Americans would die in a nuclear exchange? The answer came back: around seventy million. Eisenhower’s doctrine of massive retaliation relied on long-range missiles and Polaris missile submarines to respond to provocation with an all-out, almost indiscriminate attack on the Soviet Union, China, and Eastern Europe. In the “Single Integrated Operational Plan” or SIOP, there was no room for maneuver or margin for error, military historian Fred Kaplan notes; in a crisis, the president’s choice would be “suicide or surrender.”
The plan operated virtually on autopilot—as though there really were a single button to be pushed to signal the end of the world. Once the president gave his assent, the military would take it from there—and there was no going back. When Kennedy first got a briefing on nuclear policy by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Lyman Lemnitzer, Reeves writes, “Kennedy was gripping the arms of his chair so tightly that his knuckles showed white. He left the room with his secretary of state, muttering: ‘And we call ourselves the human race.’”
As that first summer unfolded, Kennedy struck people close to him as moody, withdrawn; he sat up late into the night, talking about war. How do we drain some of the drama from the Cold War, make policy more businesslike, less theological? The United States had too little “usable power,” as McNamara put it. A time of growing threats was not a time for limited options—especially after Khrushchev began rumbling about absorbing Berlin into East Germany. Khrushchev needed to halt the flow of refugees from east to west: it was a humiliating spectacle, at a time when he was trying to market this vision of a workers’ paradise to the Third World.
But Kennedy and the Western powers could not permit him to swallow a free city. The president called Berlin “the great testing place of Western courage and will” and declared that “an attack upon that city would be regarded as an attack upon us all.” Tensions rose: tanks rumbled into position.
Then on August 13, 1961, just before dawn, East German soldiers began building the wall in Berlin that would come to divide the city and define the age. That was bad news for East Germans with Western dreams, of whom more than three million—20 percent of the population—had already slipped across the border to the West. But by the perverse moral math of the Cold War, it was good news for President Kennedy.
“This is his way out of his predicament,” Kennedy said of Khrushchev to his aide Ken O’Donnell. “It’s not a very nice solution, but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”
By October, Kennedy had increased production of nuclear submarines by 50 percent and troop airlift capacity by 75 percent. He doubled the arsenal of Minuteman missiles, increased the production of M-14 rifles from 9,000 to 44,000 a month. After the Soviets resumed nuclear testing, a discouraged Kennedy felt no choice but to do the same. When he checked in with the club, Truman was particularly sympathetic. He understood how hard the decision had been. As for Ike, he declared, “Well, I thought you should have done this a long time ago.”
Cuba, Again
Khrushchev was well aware of his strategic disadvantage; the United States had far more nuclear weapons and a more nimble force to deliver them. China was gaining ground in the battle for the soul of the nonaligned world. And his standing at home was increasingly shaky as his economy stalled. Those were just some of the motives behind his gamble, in the summer of 1962, to place medium-range missiles in Cuba. “Every idiot can start a war,” Khrushchev told his followers, “but it is impossible to win this war. . . . Therefore the missiles have one purpose—to scare them, to restrain them . . . to give them back some of their own medicine.”
Though the missile installations were secret, the increase in Soviet military activity was clear and unprecedented. And since the United States was heading into the 1962 midterm elections, it was a perfect chance for Republicans to make Cuba the metaphor for Kennedy’s presidency in general. Conservative senators like Kenneth Keating attacked Kennedy as our “do nothing president” in the face of what he insisted was the buildup of offensive weapons in Cuba. An old club rivalry resurfaced at this point, when none other than Harry Truman fired back at critics, saying, “The reason we’re in trouble in Cuba is that Ike didn’t have the guts to enforce the Monroe Doctrine.” Kennedy meanwhile said that he hoped that “in this nuclear age,” the American people would “keep both their nerve and their head.”
He might as w
ell have been talking to himself.
To the extent that Ike was feeling restless, marginalized, and indirectly rejected after Nixon’s 1960 defeat, the 1962 congressional elections offered him another shot at vindication. “He missed political life,” Bobby Kennedy speculated of Eisenhower. “He missed the adulation. So he kept wanting to get back in. He said that—in 1962—he was much more interested in politics and the campaign than he had been even when he was President.”
This was especially true after Kennedy went to campaign in Harrisburg, Pennslyvania, practically Eisenhower’s backyard, in late September, and offered the country a choice: America could “step up the progress that we have already made, or return to drift and deadlock.” He reminded the audience of conditions when he took office: “The Nation’s engine was idling. . . . Nearly 5½ million Americans were out of work, the largest number since World War II. . . . Around the world the picture was dreary.”
Hearing the broadside, Eisenhower was livid; Newsweek described him as “fighting mad.” The club has its rules, which generally bar former presidents from attacking sitting ones on matters of foreign policy; but there are limits to a man’s patience. He contacted a mutual friend with a warning for Kennedy: “One more attack like the one in Harrisburg and my position of bi-partisan support in foreign policy will draw to a permanent end.”
On October 15, he stood before six thousand pumped-up Boston Republicans and denounced Kennedy’s “dreary foreign record of the past 21 months.”
“It is too sad to talk about,” Ike declared, and he began hitting back; during his presidency, he said sharply, “we lost no inch of ground to tyranny. We witnessed no abdication of responsibility. . . . No walls were built. No threatening foreign bases were established.”
The back-and-forth was enough to inspire the New York Times to spank both presidents in an editorial. Ike’s attack was “no doubt prompted at least in part by President Kennedy’s recent invidious remarks about the Eisenhower record in foreign affairs,” the paper conceded. “But partisan discussions of foreign policy in sweeping vague terms perform no public service.”
By then, however, Kennedy had other things to worry about. The morning after Ike’s speech, on October 16, Bundy knocked on his bedroom door at about 8:45 with a batch of U2 surveillance photographs under his arm.
“Mr. President,” he said, “there is now hard photographic evidence . . . that the Russians have offensive missiles in Cuba.”
Kennedy called Bobby.
“We have some big trouble. I want you over here.”
The group that met that morning would come to be known as the ExComm; it would form the core of Kennedy’s decision-making apparatus this time around.
The Cuban Missile Crisis was the ultimate test of presidential game theory. Kennedy and his advisors faced an almost impossible puzzle. Do they launch an air strike to take out the missiles—knowing it almost certainly would not get them all? Or a broader air strike, possibly followed by a full-scale invasion? Do they start with diplomacy, thereby losing the element of surprise? Or a naval blockade/quarantine, with the option to escalate if it failed? The hard-liners were pushing for an all-out assault, the diplomats for diplomacy.
Until they reached agreement, secrecy was essential. Through the week, Kennedy kept up his campaign travel schedule; one night nine members, after meeting at the State Department, crammed into a single car lest a caravan of limousines tip off reporters. Bobby Kennedy rode to the White House on deputy undersecretary Alexis Johnson’s lap. The White House mess stayed open day and night; arrangements were made for staff to sleep in the sub-basement bomb shelter.
In explaining to the world his decision to impose a naval quarantine on Cuba, Kennedy needed the club’s role to be public and private at the same time. He wanted the full force of his predecessors behind him; on Monday morning, October 22, as he prepared to address the nation that evening, he called Hoover, Truman, and Eisenhower. “Facing the possibility of an imminent nuclear war, the pressure on Kennedy was unimaginable,” historian Robert Dallek argues. “It was one reason for his calls to the three ex-presidents. He thought they were the only ones who could imagine his burden.”
Eisenhower was especially helpful. He flew up to Washington over the weekend at the invitation of his old friend and now CIA director John McCone, who briefed him on what was happening. “He initially suspected Kennedy of timing the crisis to help Democratic candidates at the eleventh hour,” recalls David Eisenhower, which would remain a persistent belief among some Republicans for years. But McCone, who had been essentially acting as Kennedy’s liaison with Eisenhower, may have helped adjust his view.
“He pacified Eisenhower,” Bobby Kennedy remarked in 1964. “He was the one influence with Eisenhower which was giving him another side and moderating what Eisenhower was hearing all the time.”
McCone knew that Eisenhower was constantly hearing from people with axes to grind. “He’d just be filled with poison by all these people who would tell him things and make things up,” Bobby said, so McCone would try to correct the record. McCone told Kennedy that Eisenhower really wanted to do the right thing, “so he [McCone] could work with him or at least reason with him a little bit.”
On Sunday morning Ike went on TV and performed in full protective club uniform. He contradicted both his speech of the week before and the pronouncement of the Republican chairman that Cuba was the top issue of the campaign. “Eisenhower Bars Any Crisis Abroad as Election Issue” ran the headline in the New York Times. “He Calls Current Foreign Policy an Improper Topic for Partisan Attack.”
While Republicans can argue over history and long-range trends, he said, those who attacked President Kennedy’s handling of international crises weakened and divided the nation. “Any pronouncement he may make respecting an impending crisis is almost sacrosanct as far as I am concerned,” Eisenhower declared.
When Kennedy called the next morning, Eisenhower saluted. “No matter what you’re trying to do,” he promised, “I will certainly . . . do my best to support it.” He warned of the likely outcry at the U.N. and in Latin America at unilateral U.S. action. “I think you’re really making the only move you can,” Eisenhower said.
“It’s tough,” Kennedy replied. “We may get into the invasion business before many days are out.”
From a military standpoint, that was the clean-cut thing to do, Eisenhower observed. “But having to be concerned about world opinion—”
“And Berlin,” Kennedy interrupted. He was afraid that any aggression against Cuba would provoke a retaliatory move on Berlin. But here Eisenhower pushed back. He had heard all the arguments before.
“Personally, I just don’t quite go along, you know, with that thinking, Mr. President,” he argued. “The damn Soviets will do whatever they want, what they figure is good for them. And I don’t believe they relate one situation to another.” He could be all wrong, he added, but he didn’t think the two flashpoints were connected.
Then Kennedy cut to the chase. Until now the call sounded formal, dutiful; but Eisenhower’s confidence seemed to invite Kennedy’s candor. Because the whole calculation really came down to this: he was about to make a move from which there might be no return. There was only one other man on the planet who knew what that felt like.
“What about if . . . Khrushchev announces . . . that if we attack Cuba, it’s going to be nuclear war? What’s your judgment as to the chances they’ll fire these things off if we invade Cuba?”
“Oh, I don’t believe they will,” Eisenhower replied.
“You don’t think they will?” Kennedy pressed. “In other words you would take that risk if the situation seemed desirable?”
What else can you do? Ike replied. They’ve planted these missiles in our backyard, and we won’t feel safe until they are gone. “Something may make these people shoot em off,” he admitted. “I just don’t believe this will.”
And they shared an uneasy, world-weary laugh. Stay alert, Ike advised.
“Well, we’ll hang on tight,” Kennedy said.
That night Kennedy went on television to address the largest audience ever for a presidential speech. Looking tired and grim, he condemned the Soviets for lying about their offensive intentions, laid out the challenge, and announced his decision to impose a quarantine. “We no longer live in a world where only the actual firing of weapons represents a sufficient challenge to a nation’s security to constitute maximum peril,” he noted. “This sudden, clandestine decision to station strategic weapons for the first time outside of Soviet soil is a deliberately provocative and unjustified change in the status quo which cannot be accepted by this country, if our courage and our commitments are ever to be trusted again by either friend or foe.”
There was a run on rifle sales in Tampa, and hand-to-hand combat broke out in a Los Angeles grocery store over the last can of pork and beans. Senate majority leader Mike Mansfield called his wife and told her to meet him at the airport. They were flying home to Montana. “YOUR ACTION DESPERATE. THREAT TO HUMAN SURVIVAL,” philosopher Bertrand Russell cabled Kennedy. Undersecretary of state George Ball slept on the couch in his office at the State Department the night of the announcement. When the secretary of state awoke him the next morning, it was with this greeting: “We have won a considerable victory. You and I are still alive.” Meanwhile Kennedy and his advisors met to discuss how to manage a naval quarantine, to buy time while building support in Congress and the public. McCone offered to call Eisenhower again to get permission to invoke his name when talking to lawmakers and to get “his view of this thing, as a soldier.” On Wednesday morning a Gallup poll reported that a majority of Americans believed that an attack on Cuba would trigger World War III. As Bobby Kennedy described his brother in meetings, “His eyes were tense, almost gray, and we just stared at each other across the table. Was the world on the brink of a holocaust, and had we done something wrong? . . . I felt we were on the edge of a precipice and it was as if there were no way off.”