So Johnson split the difference. He authorized 15,000 Army and other military personnel into the South, as trainers and combat advisors, giving them the authority to “take all action necessary” to defend themselves if attacked. If that meant they would be patrolling the perimeters of their bases aggressively, increasing the chances that they would engage Communist guerrillas, well, he’d take that chance. What he would not do, at least not yet, was to send American bombers to attack the North, or to insert massive numbers of combat troops. Not only would that disrupt the whole terrain of the midterm elections, it would put large numbers of Americans into harm’s way thousands of miles from home; something that the American voter was historically reluctant to support, unless it was a Pearl Harbor situation. “Johnson always, always sees foreign and military policy through a totally political prism,” one of his closest aides said at the time—which is why he was especially focused on a trouble spot far, far closer to home.
“Cuba is the bone in America’s throat,” Khrushchev had once said, and America’s political class had been choking on it ever since the Bay of Pigs fiasco. As Fidel Castro moved closer and closer to the Soviet Union—as he declared on December 2, 1961, “I am a Marxist-Leninist and shall be one until the end of my life”—the slow burn of the United States grew hotter. This bearded pipsqueak was taunting the most powerful military force on earth, and doing it, in the endlessly repeated mantra, “only ninety miles from our shores.” More ominously, Cuba’s symbol of romantic revolution, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, was promising “two, three, many Cubas,” working with insurrectionists across Latin America, from Honduras and Guatemala to Bolivia and Paraguay, and the Soviet Union had put hundreds of advisors onto the island to train the Cuban military. This was more than an ideological embarrassment; it was a frontal assault on the Monroe Doctrine itself, the 150-year-old assertion that the United States was effectively master in its own hemisphere (Monroe hadn’t exactly said that, but that’s what a succession of American Presidents and politicians had drawn from it). Running against the party in the White House at a time of widespread prosperity, Republican candidates for the House and Senate in the midterms were growing increasingly critical of the Johnson administration for its “vacillation and weakness” in the face of a Communist enemy just ninety miles, etc. Johnson was a veteran of political wars, and was not precisely shocked at the Republican attacks. What did drive him to near distraction were the shots across his bow coming from Massachusetts Senator Robert Kennedy. Ever since Kennedy’s less-than-subtle criticism of the Bay of Pigs failure, Bobby had become a hero to the increasingly vocal Cuban exile community.
They brought him stories of political repression, of Soviet influence, of Castro’s efforts at subversion in the hemisphere—some of them baseless rumors, others rooted in fact. And, while never explicitly attacking Johnson, Bobby would frequently express his “earnest hope” that the administration “would remain vigilant in the face of the clear and present danger posed by the Castro regime.” More recently, he had been raising questions about “the increasing and disturbing pace of Soviet military activity,” including what seemed to be the positioning of surface-to-air missiles across Cuba, designed to shoot down hostile aircraft. It was all phrased in politically appropriate terms, all surrounded by expressions of confidence in the President, but Johnson knew full well what the little runt was up to: Make me look weak, make him look like the toughest guy on the block, just in case there’s a chance for a nomination fight in ’64. Well, let him try; he won’t know what hit him.
So it was a reasonably content President Johnson who looked up from his morning newspapers on Tuesday, October 16, 1962, when his National Security Advisor, McGeorge Bundy, knocked on his bedroom door and entered with two oversized photographs in his hands.
“I’m afraid we have a problem, Mr. President,” Bundy said.
“How big a problem?”
“They don’t get any bigger.”
FOR NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV, the decision to place nuclear-armed weapons into Cuba was a masterstroke, the most daring decision yet in a political life defined by unpredictable, audacious decisions. It was, he thought, exactly the right move on so many fronts. Was the United States convinced of its overwhelming strategic superiority, with its 1,000+ delivery systems, compared with Moscow’s puny arsenal of 10 to 20 operational missiles and a couple of hundred mechanically suspect bombers? Then move a few dozen missiles into Cuba, with ranges of 1,000 and 2,000 miles, and the effective offensive power of the Soviet Union is doubled, putting ninety million Americans under the shadow of nuclear annihilation. Had the U.S. encircled the Soviet Union with bombers and missiles at its very doorstep, from Iran to Turkey? Then let the Americans see how they liked it, with the enemy camped at their doorstep. At the very least, it might persuade Washington to remove those missiles as part of a grand bargain, or to think twice before threatening to bring those missiles into play.
Was the U.S. projecting its power thousands of miles from home? Now the reach of the Soviet Union would extend to one of the most consequential continents in the worldwide geopolitical chess game. If, in fact, Fidel and Che were successful in bringing revolution to other nations in the region, these new revolutionary regimes would know their socialist experiments would be protected from the counterrevolutionary machinations of Uncle Sam by a close-at-home nuclear umbrella. And then there was Cuba itself, fulfilling one of the fondest hopes of Khrushchev and the aging fathers of the October Revolution that had brought the Bolsheviks to power in 1917. For all of the betrayals of the Revolution’s ideals, for all of the horrors perpetrated by Stalin, these men still held to some of their youthful illusions. Fidel and his khaki-clad insurgents seemed proof that their hopes were still capable of fulfillment. For the first time, a Communist uprising had succeeded without the Red Army or Soviet resources as the key. At first, Moscow was highly dubious that Castro was a Marxist revolutionary at all. Now the Kremlin was determined not to let Washington crush the Cuban experiment before it had a chance to begin. It had tried once at the Bay of Pigs; and every indication, from the sabotage of Cuban mines and factories, to the ceaseless rumors in the Cuban exile community, to the military exercises up and down the East Coast of the United States, to the speeches in the American Congress, convinced Khrushchev and his intelligence services that it was only a matter of time before Washington tried again. The revolution in Cuba had to be protected, and a massive deployment of nuclear force was the only way to provide a genuine deterrent to Yankee aggression. The more he remembered President Johnson’s boasts at the summit, the more he was convinced that audacious action was imperative.
Khrushchev kept his gambit a secret from all but five of his closest advisors. Indeed, secrecy was the key to his strategy, and given the scope of the plan, secrecy was going to be very hard to maintain. Several dozen medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles would be shipped to Cuba by sea during the summer and early autumn, each missile capable of carrying a 1-megaton warhead. To protect against U.S. attacks on the missile sites by air, or an invasion by sea, Moscow would also ship surface-to-air missiles, and I1-28 light bombers. Most astonishingly, Khrushchev also decided to ship to Cuba tactical missiles with nuclear warheads, each packing a 5- to 12-kiloton punch. Each tactical missile could wipe out whole battalions of invaders. (What this meant, of course, was that any U.S. assault on Cuba was all but guaranteed to become a nuclear confrontation between the superpowers. That was something that apparently never occurred to Khrushchev or his associates.) Finally, more than 40,000 Soviet soldiers, pilots, and support forces would be deployed to Cuba to man the missiles, guard the sites, and provide protection against attack. All summer long, Soviet ships, disguising their real cargo by displaying machinery and motor vehicles on deck, sailed from ports in the Crimea and in the North. By September, the first R-11 and R-14 missiles (SS-4s and SS-5s, as they were known in the West) had arrived, along with cruise missiles and several dozen nuclear warheads.
By
October, the Soviet freighter Indigirka reached Mariel with a cargo of forty-five 1-megaton warheads, twelve 2-kiloton warheads for the tactical weapons, six 12-kiloton bombs for the I1-28 bombers, and thirty-six 23-kiloton warheads for the cruise missiles. By mid-October, the first medium-range missiles had been deployed at San Cristobal, forty miles southwest of Havana. Now only one step remained for Khrushchev’s plan to work: maintaining secrecy until the missiles were fully operational. Once they were in place, by mid-November, Khrushchev would personally reveal their existence—perhaps during a visit to Cuba, perhaps during a speech to the UN, perhaps at a summit with President Johnson. He liked that notion best; it would give him no small pleasure to watch the face of the oversized Texan when he realized the U.S. was now as fully vulnerable as the Motherland.
Unfortunately for Khrushchev, reliance on secrecy was a delusion. The sheer length of the missiles (seventy feet), and the logistics necessary to transport them from ports to their sites around Cuba, made secrecy no more possible than concealing the movement of dinosaurs. The trucks ferrying them along Cuba’s narrow, winding roads kept knocking down telephone poles and mailboxes, and riding roughshod over roadside stands and shacks. Word of these strange doings soon reached the ears of American intelligence, prompting the CIA to end the suspension of U-2 flights over Cuba, a suspension Secretary of State Fulbright had pushed for, in order to create a better atmosphere for negotiations with the Soviets on Berlin and other issues. When the U-2 returned after photographing the scene 70,000 feet below at San Cristobal, it did not take long for analysts to decipher the meaning of the photos. It was that message that National Security Advisor Bundy was bringing to President Johnson this Tuesday morning in mid-October.
AT 11:45 A.M. on October 16, fifteen men sat around the long oblong table in the Cabinet Room of the White House. In the middle, flanked by the American flag and another bearing the Presidential seal, sat President Johnson, chin cupped in his hand. Vice President Humphrey sat at his left, his face white, his hands folded over each other to keep the slight tremble hidden. From State came Secretary Fulbright and Undersecretary George Ball; from Defense came McNamara and Paul Nitze, who’d moved over from State at Johnson’s request. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Maxwell Taylor, came, accompanied by Air Force Chief Curtis LeMay, whose cigar never left his mouth. CIA Director Richard Helms, along with Mac Bundy, the National Security Advisor, sat at a far end of the table. So did a man with no public office whose judgment Johnson trusted: former Secretary of State Dean Acheson.
“There’s no doubt what these pictures show, is there, Mac?” the President asked Bundy.
“No, Mr. President,” he said, gesturing toward Helms. “Dick’s team says their length leaves no doubt.”
“Can they be launched right now?” Johnson asked.
“We simply can’t answer that,” General Taylor answered. “This type of missile can be launched very quickly. And remember, sir, these pictures come from a very small part of the island. There could well be other sites, and those could be operational right now.”
“How long before we get complete information about the rest of the island?”
“Could take weeks, Mr. President,” Helms said.
“Weeks?”
“For complete coverage of a cloud-covered island, yes.”
Johnson looked around the room, moving his gaze slowly from face to face.
“Do any of you,” he asked, “want to suggest any option other than taking these missiles out?”
“I think we owe it to ourselves,” Bundy said, “to think through a political track, at least for forty-eight hours: blockade the island, keep any more weapons and warheads from reaching Cuba, and be prepared to strike if we don’t have a clear signal from the Soviets that they’re prepared to get those missiles out.”
“Do we have any way of knowing whether we can take every missile out?” Fulbright asked.
“Seems to me, General Taylor, you’ve just made it awfully clear that we can’t know that . . . and if there’s a nuclear missile standing after we hit them . . . a blockade would give them time to think about what they’ve done.”
A fist slammed on the table. It belonged to Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay. LeMay had organized the incendiary B-29 bombing attacks against Japan that had devastated the island nation, killing somewhere between a quarter and a half a million civilians, and quite possibly saving millions of lives that would have been lost in an American invasion of the island. During the Cold War, he had organized the Berlin Airlift that had broken the back of the Soviet blockade of Berlin in 1948. LeMay had made no secret of his belief that nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was inevitable within a matter of months or a year or two at the outside.
“We don’t have any choice except direct military action,” he said. “If we don’t do anything to Cuba, they’re going to push on Berlin and push real hard, because they’ve got us on the run. So I see no other solution. ‘Blockade,’ ‘political action’ I see leading us into war. It’d be almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich. We need direct military intervention right now.”
“If I may . . .” The voice belonged to a man who appeared to have stepped from the pages of a magazine pictorial on the life of an upper-class Englishman. At sixty-seven, Dean Acheson was a portrait of certitude: his impeccably groomed moustache, his three-piece gray pin-striped suit set off perfectly by a tie bearing the insignia of his beloved Yale. As Truman’s Secretary of State, Acheson had been the target of withering assaults by Joseph McCarthy, Richard Nixon, and other Republican zealots who saw in him the apostle of accommodation. In fact, Acheson was wedded to the notion that he understood better than anyone what motivated the Soviet Union, and what would cause them to alter their aggressive impulses. Acheson as much as any single individual embodied the Democratic Party’s post-World War II mind-set about international relations. It was a mind-set that had been subject to hints of challenge by newer, younger Democrats, John Kennedy among them. For Lyndon Johnson, however, it was at the heart of how he saw the world. Focused on domestic concerns, he had long ago concluded that what was good enough for Harry Truman, George C. Marshall, and Dean Acheson was good enough for him. He would listen to Fulbright and Mansfield, he wanted the counsel of those who lived in the political arena, but he had a kind of reverence for the men who had led the country through the first dangerous days of the Cold War.
“Mr. President,” Acheson said, “what I propose is a prompt, measured response to this provocation. I understand the impulses for an all-out assault; it may yet come to that. My own preference would be for a surgical strike at every missile site we can identify, as soon as possible, accompanied by a clear statement by you that we expect the Soviets to remove all of their offensive weapons.”
“And if they do, in fact, have operational ballistic missiles in place?” Secretary McNamara asked.
“There isn’t a chance in the world they would use them against the United States,” Acheson replied firmly. “They are not suicidal. And they clearly understand spheres of influence. They would no more risk their survival over a country thousands of miles from their borders than we would have sent troops into Budapest in 1956. It is possible, perhaps, that they will hit our missiles in Turkey.”
“And then . . . ?”
“Then, in accordance with NATO policy, we would strike at one of their bases inside the Soviet Union. At that point, it is hoped that cooler heads will prevail and everyone will stop and talk. But the far stronger likelihood is that a swift, targeted air attack by the United States on a non-populated area of Cuba would be seen not as an attack on the Soviet Union, but on something—not people—in Cuba. This would hardly call for a reflex attack on the United States that would mean the destruction of the Soviet Union.”
The President got up from his chair.
“Excuse me for a moment,” he said, and walked back to the Oval Office. A visitor was waiting for him: the man Lyndon Johnson regarded as the wisest,
most prudent of counselors, the man who had mentored him through his rise in the U.S. Senate, whose friendship had survived even the battle over voting rights. He listened while the President sketched out the arguments he’d heard in the Cabinet Room.
“I know LeMay is a bit of a loose cannon, but I think the general’s right, Mr. President,” Senator Russell said. “It seems to me we’re at a crossroads. We’re either a first-class power or we’re not. The Secretary says, ‘Give them time to think’? Hell, they’ll just use that time to get better prepared. I think we can’t afford to stop with a strike at the missiles. I think we should assemble as speedily as possible an adequate force and clean out the situation. I don’t know whether Khrushchev will launch a nuclear war over Cuba or not, I don’t believe he will. But the more we temporize, the more surely he is to convince himself that we are afraid to make any real movement and to really fight.”
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