The President nodded, thanked Senator Russell for coming by, and walked back into the Cabinet Room.
“Mr. President,” Secretary Fulbright said, “I just want to make sure the political option isn’t off the table. If we blockade every Soviet ship heading for Cuba, and a deadline—”
“For God’s sakes,” General LeMay said, “if we hadn’t listened to you a year and a half ago, we wouldn’t be dealing with Russian missiles!”
The room was engulfed in silence. Not since Douglas MacArthur had defied President Harry Truman’s Korean strategy had a military man openly challenged civilian authority.
“I think we could use some time to think this through,” the President said after a long moment. “Let’s all be back here at nine a.m. Meanwhile, Dick,” he said to the CIA Director, “I want every reconnaissance plane we have over Cuba. We have just got to know where those missiles are. I think Dean’s right; Khrushchev can’t be wanting a nuclear war over Cuba—but I want to make sure we take out as many as we possibly can.”
It was a perfectly sensible, rational suggestion. And if events, and decisions, had proceeded along a sensible, rational course, it wouldn’t have led to what happened.
THAT TUESDAY NIGHT, President Johnson’s sleep was disturbed by dreams. All his life he had been plagued by visions of helplessness in the face of impending danger. As a young man, he’d been haunted by a recurring nightmare: He was sitting in a big straight chair, in the middle of a great open plain, helpless in the face of a cattle stampede coming straight at him. As a young Congressional aide, and into his Senate days, he saw himself chained to a desk, doomed to answer an endless stack of mail, trapped as he watched other men and women heading home to their families. In his first days as President, he dreamt that he was alone, imprisoned in a small cage, surrounded by dust-laden books, and when he looked in the mirror, he saw a twisted, bent old man. This night, he saw himself in the White House, somehow transformed into Woodrow Wilson, paralyzed by a stroke as others moved around him tending to the nation’s business—a fear fueled by the near-fatal heart attack he’d suffered in 1955. By morning, he had decided on a course of action; given his character, his experience, the lessons he had taken from his decades in public life, it would have been almost impossible for him to have taken any other path.
—He held fast to the assumption that the principal players—Khrushchev and Castro—were acting from the same fundamental set of beliefs as himself. It was simply impossible for him to believe that anyone would risk the lives of millions of people for an idea, an abstraction.
—He had never developed an interest, or much knowledge, about the wider world. He could sit in a room with a dozen lawmakers and calculate in moments how a decision on a bill or a government policy would affect their districts, their states, their political futures. But he was incapable of understanding how a leader from an utterly different political system might think or react to an American move in a genuine crisis.
—He had succeeded in life by identifying powerful elders, then emulating them, making himself indispensable to them, never by challenging them. Had John Kennedy lived to enter the White House, after besting his elders in the fight for the Presidency, he might have had a less reverential view of their wisdom. For Johnson, however, the words of Dean Acheson and Richard Russell carried enormous weight.
—He had succeeded by developing an acutely sensitive set of political receptors. He knew that a failure to act decisively would render him defenseless to attack. The midterm elections were barely three weeks away; a setback would cripple his efforts to pass his legislative program, leaving him something of a lame duck—and leaving him open to attacks from within his own party at the hands of the uncrowned Prince of the Restoration. Robert Kennedy would use his Massachusetts Senate seat as a staging area for assaults on the emasculated Lyndon Johnson.
—And he had always, always governed himself by the principle that reasonable men, sitting down together, could find a middle path. He had never been a man who thought in broad concepts or policies; in that sense, he was a classic legislator, leaving it to the man in charge to create the vision, employing his skills in fitting that vision into the practical realities of a body of men and women relentlessly pursuing their narrow interests. Now that he was the man in the cockpit, he still thought as he always had. In the welter of suggestions for what to do about the missiles in Cuba—negotiate, blockade, take them out, invade—Johnson’s most fundamental instinct was to find the middle ground. He would take the path that demonstrated resolve, one that showed the Soviets that America meant business, but that would also clearly signal his intention not to trigger a wider war, to let Khrushchev know that there was a reasonable resolution to this crisis. There were U.S. missiles in Turkey that were obsolete; they could talk about removing them. There were nuclear test ban agreements they could reach. Once those missiles were out of Cuba, there was no need for a full-scale invasion, no need to go to the brink of war. He and Khrushchev could reason together, like reasonable men.
It was a perfectly sensible conclusion for President Johnson to reach, except for what he, and every other man in that Cabinet Room, did not know.—They did not know that there were tens of thousands of Soviet troops and support personnel who had come to Cuba that summer and early autumn, to guard the missile sites, watch over the nuclear warheads, man the tanks that had been sent to protect the island from a U.S. invasion. So any strike at the missile sites would be an attack that would inevitably kill hundreds of Soviet citizens.
—They did not know that dozens of tactical nuclear weapons had been sent to Cuba, along with the medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles, greatly increasing the likelihood that any U.S.-Soviet confrontation would “go nuclear” almost immediately. Nor did they know that dozens of nuclear warheads, for strategic and tactical weapons, were already in Cuba, hidden in caves, but capable of being moved on short notice to the launch sites.
—They did not know that Soviet commanders in Cuba had been receiving conflicting signals from Moscow about just how free they were to use these weapons, signals that a military man could read as authorizing the use of tactical nukes if there was evidence of an all-out attack on the island.
—They did not know that Fidel Castro, certain that a Yankee invasion was coming, was putting enormous pressure on the Kremlin to take strong action against any incursion of his airspace by American airplanes . . . or that Soviet military officers on the ground in Cuba would be responsive to Castro’s urgings.
All Wednesday, President Johnson and his team of officials and advisors met to hash out the details of the U.S. response. At sundown on Thursday evening, U.S. fighter-bombers would take out the missile sites in San Cristobal and Remedios, with a limited number of sorties to minimize civilian casualties. At nine p.m., the President would address the nation—and the world—to announce the discovery of the offensive missiles, the surgical strikes against them, and the tentative imposition of a blockade against Soviet ships heading to Cuba. The speech would also contain a direct appeal to Premier Khrushchev, and a pledge to stop all military activity in return for a Soviet promise to remove the missiles. The Joint Chiefs were instructed to move troops, planes, and ships in preparation for an invasion, but there would be no invasion if the Russians proved responsive to the more limited use of force. And, in response to the urgings of Secretary Fulbright, and former Soviet Ambassador Tommy Thompson, who knew more about the Russians than any other American, the President agreed to an extraordinary gambit: a direct conversation with Khrushchev. Johnson would confront the Premier with the fact that the missiles had been discovered, and offer him the chance to resolve the crisis peacefully (this gambit infuriated the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who were certain the Soviet leader would simply stall for time. “I’m giving him twenty-four hours,” Johnson said to JCS Chairman Maxwell Taylor).
Reaching Khrushchev was no easy task: There was no direct communication link between the White House and the Kremlin. Althoug
h there had been talk for years about establishing just such a “hot line” to deal with fast-moving crises, neither teletype nor telephone nor computer communications had ever been established. It was two o’clock on Wednesday afternoon—ten p.m. Moscow time—when the President, the Chairman, their aides, and their interpreters gathered around speakerphones in the Cabinet Room and the Chairman’s office.
“We have discovered the offensive weapons you have deployed in Cuba,” the President began. “We regard them as a blatant violation of international law, a deliberate act of deception, and a direct threat to the national security of the United States. If you do not begin to dismantle and remove these missiles within twenty-four hours, we will take all appropriate action to defend ourselves.”
Khrushchev’s first responses were by turns defensive and truculent. Those missiles are not there to attack you; only a madman would start a war with these monstrous weapons. They are there only to protect the Cuban people from your aggression. You are no more threatened than we are by your missiles that surround us, from Turkey to Iran to Italy.
Tommy Thompson scribbled an urgent note and passed it to the President.
“Suggest that a trade for Turkey might be possible once he gets his missiles out,” he wrote.
Johnson nodded, and began to speak when Richard Helms took a note from a grim-faced aide, and signaled the President to mute the call.
“Mr. President,” he said, “we’ve just learned that one of our aircraft has been shot down over Cuba—pilot’s presumed dead.”
“Mr. Chairman,” the President said into the phone, “I think we are done talking for now.”
WHEN KHRUSHCHEV DECIDED TO dispatch tens of thousands of Soviet military personnel to Cuba, he didn’t ponder long over who would command them. Issa Pliyev was the Grand Old Man of the Soviet military, although he was only fifty-nine. He’d been in the Red Army for forty years, commanded the 50th Cavalry division in the Great Patriotic War, fought in the defense of Moscow and Stalingrad, led the invasion of Manchuria. He was a beloved figure in the Red Army, and his judgment was considered sound enough, prudent enough, to be trusted to oversee the vast arsenal of nuclear weapons that had been dispatched to Cuba. Still, the men around Khrushchev were not that confident about the possible deployment of any nuclear weapons, so they instructed Pliyev not to use any tactical nuclear weapon unless Cuba was under clear assault. Khrushchev had also given orders to avoid any “provocations” against the United States.
It is unclear what Pliyev would have ordered had he been informed that an American U-2 spy plane had been spotted near Guantánamo. But when an antiaircraft unit got word of the sighting, Pliyev was not at headquarters to answer the urgent call of Captain N. Antonyets. Pliyev’s top two deputies, Lieutenant General Grechko and Lieutenant General Garbuz, were certain that the U-2 was taking photographs in preparation for an imminent American invasion—an invasion, Castro had been insisting, that was coming within days, perhaps hours. Knowing that the aircraft would be out of range in minutes, the two Soviet generals ordered Captain Antonyets to fire his SA-2 rocket; the explosion sent the plane plunging to earth, and pilot Rudolf Andersen was killed. When General Pliyev reached his headquarters, he was told of his aides’ decision to shoot down the U-2. An “operational-strategic necessity,” General Gretchko called it. Pliyev nodded his assent. Clearly the United States was preparing to strike the island; clearly the U-2 flight was part of the pre-invasion preparation. He and his team were not about to leave the island, or for that matter the 40,000+ Soviet troops on Cuba, without protection. While the instructions from Moscow were less than crystal clear, they clearly did authorize him to use the weapons at his disposal to defend against an attack—all of his weapons. So when, a few hours later, urgent communications began to reach his headquarters about incoming American fighter-bombers, Pliyev had no hesitancy in using every weapon at his disposal.
The American attack was confined to conventional weapons, but it was massive. Squadrons of F-100 and F-101B fighter-bombers had attacked the missile sites at San Cristobal and Remedios; another squadron was minutes away from Sagua la Grande. The R-12 medium-range ballistics missiles had been destroyed, and hundreds of Soviet personnel were dead or dying. If this did not qualify as an all-out assault on the island, what did? Nor did it matter to Pliyev that the weapons he was about to deploy were nuclear in nature; the employment of battlefield nuclear weapons had been part and parcel of Soviet military planning for years. Moments after receiving word of the American assault on the missile sites, Pliyev ordered half a dozen KFR missiles—“Frogs” in the American parlance—fired at the Guantánamo Naval Base, the U.S. military installation on Cuba’s Eastern shore. Each missile carried a warhead with 5- to 10-kiloton power. The force of the attack created an immense fireball over the sky of Eastern Cuba; virtually all of the 9,500 sailors and Marines were killed instantly, as were thousands of Cuban nationals who were still working at the base, despite the steadily escalating tensions between the U.S. and Cuban governments. The blasts also killed several hundred members of the Cuban armed forces, including Raul Castro, brother of the President, who had gone to lead the forces that would resist Marines seeking to move out from the base to aid in the expected invasion. For the first time since the end of the Second World War, nuclear weapons had been employed in a military conflict. For a generation, men at the commanding heights of military and civilian power had committed tens of billions of dollars, countless thousands of hours of thinking, about the possibilities and the consequences of such an event. And now that it had happened, it was surrounded by an impenetrable fog of confusion.
A FEW MINUTES AFTER six p.m. on Thursday, October 17, they had begun to gather in the International Situation Room, a 5,000-square-foot complex in the basement of the West Wing of the White House that had once housed a bowling alley. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco a year and a half earlier, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy had successfully lobbied for a facility to gather real-time information as quickly as possible during any international crisis. Now, in mid-October 1962, teletype machines linked to the communications systems of the State Department, Defense Department, the CIA, and the National Security Administration brought information directly into the center. President Johnson sat at the end of an oblong mahogany conference table, flanked by General Taylor and the other service chiefs, and a dozen civilians: Vice President Humphrey, Secretaries Fulbright and McNamara, Deputy Defense Secretary Nitze, and two State Department Counselors, Llewellyn “Tommy” Thompson and Chip Bohlen, who held much of the country’s institutional knowledge about the Soviet Union and its leaders.
Dean Acheson had proposed he not be included in the gathering; holding no official post, he argued, it would be inappropriate for a private citizen to be offering policy guidance on so fundamental a matter as war and peace.
“Does anyone have a Bible?” Johnson asked. Charles “Chuck” Enright, the CIA official who served as night duty officer, produced one, and Johnson promptly swore Acheson in as a Special Assistant to the President.
“We’ll get you the certificate later,” Johnson said with a smile. “Now, sit down, Dean.”
The facility was a far cry from the science-fiction-like fantasies of mid-century Hollywood: no giant video screens, no instant visual links to a worldwide reporting system, just teletype links to civilian and military centers, and, potentially most critical, to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow and the Soviet Embassy in Washington—the closest thing the two superpowers had to real-time communications.
They had come to the Situation Room with two purposes in mind: first, to follow the progress of the attacks on the Soviet missile sites in Cuba; second, to maintain communications with the Kremlin, so that there was no misunderstanding about the intentions of the United States.
“We have got to have Khrushchev understand,” Johnson said, “that this is a limited, targeted strike on their missiles; it is not the beginning of an invasion, or an attack on Russia. I know you would
prefer a different course of action,” he said to the military chiefs, “but if we can get those missiles out this way, it’s going to save a whole lot of killing.”
“Or put the United States in mortal peril,” muttered Naval Chief Lymen Lemnitzer. Joint Chiefs Chairman Taylor put a restraining hand on Lemnitzer’s shoulder. This was, he thought, not an especially good time to even hint at a military challenge to civilian control.
Over the last thirty-six hours, the military had raised its alert level from DEFCON-5 to DEFCON-2—one level short of war. Navy and Marine personnel by the thousands had been loaded onto ships on the West Coast, and were heading east, through the Panama Canal, to be positioned for a potential invasion, while destroyers, aircraft carriers, and battleships on the East Coast were steaming south. More ominously, members of the House and Senate had been told to pack bags, and ready themselves for relocation to the Greenbrier Hotel in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. There, in 1959, the government had created an underground facility to house Congress in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. It included a dormitory, kitchen, hospital, and a broadcast center for members of Congress. The convention center, used by the Greenbrier guests for business meetings, was actually built above a disguised workstation area for members of Congress, complete with hidden thirty-ton blast doors. The walls of the bunker were made of reinforced concrete designed to withstand a nuclear blast in Washington, D.C. Many of the House and Senate members rejected the notice—“If anything happens,” they said, “I’m going to stay here with my family”—but Johnson argued that if war did break out, the government had to keep running. By this Thursday evening, several dozen Congressional leaders and committee chairs had reluctantly agreed to relocate (Acheson and Nitze privately scorned the precaution as “alarmist,” insisting again that the Kremlin would never risk nuclear war over territory so far beyond their reach).
Then Everything Changed Page 13