Then Everything Changed

by Jeff Greenfield

  That was clearly the expectation of Johnson and the men who surrounded him that evening. With the first word that the American fighter bombers were on their way to the missile sites, the White House informed the Kremlin, via cable to the Soviet Embassy, that this was a tightly controlled, limited strike to protect vital American national interests; that no further military action was underway or contemplated; and that the United States urged immediate negotiations to defuse the crisis, with every issue, including the future of U.S. missiles along the Soviet border, open for discussion. President Johnson’s speech to the nation, scheduled for nine p.m., would make the same points.

  It was a prudent, rational approach, designed by prudent, rational men. Once again, President Johnson had returned to the most deeply rooted instinct of his life: He had split the difference.

  And then, at 7:35, as the group was arguing about the points UN Ambassador Stevenson would make in the Security Council the next morning, Chuck Enright was handed a piece of teletype from the Defense Department link. He passed it to Mac Bundy, who read it twice in disbelief.

  “They’ve hit Guantánamo,” he said. “And . . . they appear to have used a nuclear weapon. They’ve obliterated the base—nothing left.”

  Johnson turned angrily to CIA Director Helms.

  “I thought we had every one of their ballistic missile sites under twenty-four-hour surveillance. I thought it was impossible for them to launch without at least a few minutes’ warning.”

  “As the Chiefs and I said,” Helms began, “we could never be certain that we had located every one of those—”

  “Maybe it wasn’t a ballistic missile,” Paul Nitze said. “Maybe it was tactical.”

  “What the hell difference does it make?” said Curtis LeMay. “We’ve been attacked by a nuclear weapon by the Soviet Union. There’ve got to be thousands of dead American boys. For all we know, there’s a missile headed right for Washington, right now. Mr. President, you need to give us the order, and we’ll hit them with everything we’ve got.”

  “It might make all the difference,” Tommy Thompson said. “Was there an order given by Khrushchev? Was it a rogue officer on the ground who panicked, or took matters into his own hands? I agree it can’t go unanswered, but we need to do everything we can—now—to find out what this represents.”

  “What do you suggest, Tommy?” the President asked. “Lodge a protest with the UN? Cancel a tour by the Philharmonic?”

  “There may be a response that will keep some options open,” Secretary McNamara said.

  From the moment he’d taken the post, he’d been intrigued by the idea of an alternative to the massive retaliation policy that was the core American strategy of the Eisenhower years. He’d devoured the monographs of the RAND Corporation, the books by young Harvard thinkers like Carl Kaysen and Kissinger. Maybe, he thought, it’s worth a try.

  “We’ve just been hit by a tactical missile launched from an ally of the Soviet Union,” he said. “What if we launched one of our Jupiters from Turkey or Iran, targeted to Sevastopol. It would destroy the Black Fleet, take out at least as many Russians as we lost at Guantánamo—but make it clear that we want no further hostilities.”

  “And then we can sit here and let ourselves be burnt to a cinder while they take out New York and Chicago and Miami,” LeMay said. “That is suicide—not to mention treason, Mr. President. Our strategy has kept the peace for a decade—they hit us anywhere, we hit them everywhere.”

  “And what if it is a rogue commander?” Vice President Humphrey asked. Every head turned in surprise. The Vice President rarely spoke up in any significant gathering; under President Johnson’s stern discipline, the once-voluble Humphrey had turned into the near mute of the Johnson administration. Now his jaw was set, his fists gripped tightly in front of him.

  “It’s not out of the question,” he continued, looking sharply at LeMay and the other generals, “that some hothead took it on himself to do this. For all we know, Khrushchev is having a fit. I can’t see us plunging into a world war if this was a ghastly mistake; and if it isn’t, then that missile’s already on the way. Yes, they’ll have to pay for this with a lot of Russian lives—but I’d rather lose a few thousand of ours and theirs than twenty or thirty million.”

  “And maybe you’d rather see our country become Soviet America,” LeMay thundered. “Mr. President, let us do what we must, or go down in history as the President who lost the United States.”

  The men in the room waited for the President to speak. And at that moment, as it had over and over in his life, Lyndon Johnson’s body betrayed him.

  Throughout his career, at every critical moment, his primal fear of political death had triggered serious physical afflictions. As a twenty-nine-year-old candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives, he was struck by an appendicitis attack two days before Election Day; he was rushed to a hospital, underwent emergency surgery, and remained there for two weeks (his opponents accused him of faking his illness to gain sympathy). As a new member of Congress, his obsession to succeed had turned him into a nervous wreck; a severe rash broke out all over his hands, forcing him to wrap them in bandages. In his first campaign for the U.S. Senate, in 1941, he heard the devastating news that the popular Texas governor had decided to jump into the race; he was promptly hospitalized with what was labeled pneumonia, but was more likely a case of deep depression. In his second Senate campaign in 1948, Johnson was attacked by a powerful case of kidney stones, a condition he tried to conceal from the press. When his political ally John Connally insisted he come clean, he drafted and almost released a statement withdrawing from the Senate contest.

  After a contentious clash with Senate colleagues in 1955, he suffered a heart attack that almost killed him. And now, at the most critical moment any President had ever had to face, Johnson’s body betrayed him one more time. His face drained of all color, sweat covered his brow and face, and he fell forward in his chair, his face striking the table with a thud.

  “Jesus, it’s his heart!” Bundy shouted. “Get the medics in here now!” As the medical team rushed into the Situation Room to tend to him, Secretary Fulbright motioned to Humphrey.

  “We need a decision, Mr. Vice President. Do we launch? Do we wait?”

  “With respect, Mr. Secretary,” Maxwell Taylor said, “on what authority do we presume the Vice President now exercises Presidential authority?”

  “There is none,” Dean Acheson said. “At least, not in any law. The Constitution says when the President dies, his authority ‘devolves’ on the Vice President. But Lyndon—the President’s not dead—is he?” he asked the medical team, frantically working on Johnson. One of them shook his head uncertainly. “But logic suggests—”

  “Logic suggests we should be executing SIOP-62,” Lemnitzer said. “And ‘logic’ suggests we should be de-camping to Mount Weather—now!” Mount Weather was the top-secret Emergency Operations Center in Bluemont, Virginia, fifty miles west of Washington. The immense underground complex was the emergency operations center, designed to keep the Executive Branch of government functioning in the event of a disaster—or a war.

  “The helicopters are on the West Lawn now,” Bundy said. “We should—”

  “No,” Humphrey said. “If we board those ’copters, we’ll have no chance to communicate with the Kremlin. We have to see if there’s a way to keep this contained.”

  “For all we know,” Nitze said, “Khrushchev’s not even in control anymore. The hawks over there have been out to remove him ever since Vienna.”

  “I have to take that chance, General,” Humphrey said to Taylor. “I think you need to go to Mount Weather. If it turns out we need to . . . we need to move to DEFCON-1, you can execute that from there.” The generals rose to take their leave; LeMay could be heard muttering to Taylor: “If we don’t hear anything in fifteen minutes, we’re going to have to take matters—”

  “Enough, Curtis,” Taylor snapped.

  The medical team had Pres
ident Johnson on the floor, as they tried to bring breath into his body; Vice President Humphrey clutched the phone, listening for the signal that told him that a connection to the Kremlin had succeeded; Cabinet members, advisors, and military personnel scanned the teletypes, looking for reports that Soviet troops were marching into West Berlin, that Russian missiles were streaking westward, into Europe, or heading over the oceans toward the continental United States. What they did not know had, quite literally, become a matter of global life and death.

  IN THE END, it came down to blind luck. When the telephone rang in Khrushchev’s fifty-by-thirty-five-foot office in the Kremlin, he was stuffing a briefcase filled with top-secret papers as his security team was urging him, along with his highest-ranking advisors, to vacate; a helicopter was waiting in Red Square to take them to the massive underground complex just outside Moscow, one of the many facilities built to shelter top government and party leaders in the event of nuclear war.

  Had Lyndon Johnson been on the other end of the line, Khrushchev would very likely have refused to take the call. The attack on the Cuban missile site had convinced him that the American President was firmly in the camp of the Pentagon war-makers. Had the Soviets ever taken any military action against the nuclear missiles that were encircling the Soviet Union? Did that cowboy not understand what a provocation a U-2 overflight would look like to the Soviet military commanders in Cuba? (Thank God he’d retracted his order authorizing those commanders to use tactical nuclear weapons; there was no telling what one of those hotheads might do.)

  “It’s not the President, Mr. Chairman,” his private secretary said. “He has apparently been taken ill. It’s Vice President Humphrey.”

  Khrushchev paused. He had met Humphrey back in December 1958 when then-Senator Humphrey was on a trip to encourage cooperation in scientific and medical research. What began as a courtesy call turned into an eight-hour marathon conversation; the two men talked of everything from farm issues to family matters to diplomacy. Humphrey, the Kremlin’s American experts had explained to the Premier, was a leading figure in liberal circles, an ardent proponent of disarmament and a nuclear test ban. So what did it mean that at this moment of crisis, Humphrey, and not Lyndon Johnson, was speaking for the United States? Based on his decades of surviving Stalin’s purges and the Kremlin’s sometimes murderous office politics, Khrushchev did not believe for a minute that the American President had been “taken ill.” Clearly, the war-makers in the Pentagon, the CIA, and the military-industrial complex had, at least for now, lost power, and the American government was in the hands of progressives.

  So he took the call. Even through the interpreter, there was no mistaking the anger, and the fear, that was coming from Vice President Humphrey.

  “Mr. Chairman,” Humphrey began, “you have put the world on the brink of war . . .”

  “It is your government, Mr. Vice President, that chose to invade Cuban airspace with your spy plane. How could you think we would not defend our ally—”

  “I am talking about your decision to use a nuclear weapon that has killed thousands of Americans,” Humphrey replied.

  “What kind of bullshit is this?” Khrushchev exploded. “I have specifically forbidden my commanders on the ground to use any nuclear weapons without my personal authorization.”

  There was a brief pause; for a moment, Khrushchev feared the always-erratic electronics inside the Kremlin had failed.

  “Are you telling me,” Humphrey’s interpreter said, speaking as slowly and deliberately as Humphrey had, “that you do not know that Guantánamo has been wiped out by your tactical nuclear weapons?”

  Now it was the American’s turn to sit and wait through what seemed like endless moments of silence.

  “This is . . . . impossible,” the weak response finally came. But even as he spoke those words, Khrushchev was thinking: Those lunatics. Did they not receive my instructions—or did they simply choose to ignore them? Now Humphrey’s interpreter was speaking again, rapidly communicating the message Humphrey was delivering in between urgent consultations with Tommy Thompson.

  Mr. Chairman, if you really did not know that your commanders attacked our base at Guantánamo, if this was not your decision, we may be able to avoid a Third World War. But you must understand that we cannot allow Guantánamo to go unanswered; our military, and our people, would not stand for it. We are launching a strike at Sevastopol; it will kill thousands of people, and wipe out much of your fleet. If you do not respond, we will launch no further missiles, and will call our bombers back. But we need your answer now.

  This time, the Soviet Premier did not hesitate. His assent brought an end to what came to be called the “Sixty-Minute War.” No authoritative casualty count was ever established, because the thousands dead at Guantánamo and the tens of thousands dead at Sevastopol did not include the numberless dead who died of the effects of radiation: in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, southern Florida, the Crimea, and the nations bordering the Black Sea.

  Nor were the political effects fully clear. Barely three weeks after the Sixty-Minute War, the midterm elections in the U.S. yielded the lowest voter turnout in modern American history; barely 13 percent of the voters went to the polls, producing wildly conflicting results. In Massachusetts, Senator Robert Kennedy barely survived a third-party challenge from forty-six-year-old Harvard University professor and longtime peace activist H. Stuart Hughes. Hughes, arguing that Kennedy’s “inflammatory rhetoric” had helped push the great powers to “the brink of extinction,” wound up with 38 percent of the vote, finishing only a few points behind Kennedy. In California, by contrast, the strong foreign-policy credentials of Richard Nixon propelled him to victory in the governor’s race against incumbent Edmund “Pat” Brown, immediately lifting him into contention for the Republican Presidential nomination in 1964. There were also two prominent figures from the Right that were all but certain to run: Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater and General Curtis LeMay. The general had resigned his Air Force post with a furious denunciation at the “appeasers, the cowards” that had prevented the military from “ending the Communistic threat once and for all.”

  Those political considerations were quickly overshadowed by the clouds of confusion that surrounded the White House. President Johnson, it was clear, had suffered a major heart attack in the White House Situation Room that had left him severely weakened, physically and mentally. For years, Constitutional experts had warned of just such a possibility, had pointed back to the time when it had become reality, when a stroke-weakened Woodrow Wilson had had his Presidency taken over by his wife Edith and an advisor. For years, Constitutional amendments had been proposed, clearly spelling out the conditions under which a Vice President could assume the duties of the President, even against the wishes of a President. No such amendment had ever been adopted, or even sent to the states by the Congress. In its absence, only an informal understanding among Humphrey and the members of Johnson’s Cabinet kept the essential machinery of the Executive Branch operating. In the absence of Johnson’s formidable leadership skills, and the severe economic and emotional impact of the Sixty-Minute War, Johnson’s ambitious domestic program—“a blueprint for a Great Society,” he’d called it—withered. And, like the nation at large, the administration was divided between those like Humphrey who wanted to push for a major arms-reduction deal with the Soviets, and those who believed that only massive, unquestioned superiority could prevent another disaster. (Even if there had been unanimity on policy, the prospects for a deal with Moscow turned bleak in the spring of 1963, when Premier Khrushchev was removed from office by a coalition of Kremlin hard-liners, who accused him of temporizing in the face of “naked imperialist aggression.” The coup, in turn, brought praise from Peking, putting a rapid end to what some had seen as a widening Sino-Soviet split.)

  The hammer blows of bad news combined to make the optimism of early 1962 seem like a fantasy. So it was no surprise when the Gallup Organization in its most extensive survey
ever, found “a deep, abiding sense of national pessimism . . . a growing conviction that America’s best days are behind us. It is safe to say,” Gallup concluded, “that America has never offered up a darker picture of its national mood than the portrait we see today, November 22, 1963.”

  Reality Reset

  On December 11, 1960, Jacqueline Kennedy did come to the door of the Palm Beach mansion to bid John Kennedy off to church; she came holding her daughter Caroline.

  Richard Pavlick did not want to kill John Kennedy in front of his family, so he put the triggering device down; he would wait for another time. Four days later, as he was staking out St. Edward’s Church, local police—who had been looking for Pavlick—spotted the license plate of his car, and arrested him.

  John Kennedy was inaugurated on January 20, 1961, and guided the nation through the Cuban Missile Crisis. His decision to employ a blockade, rather than a strike against the missiles or an invasion, has been widely credited with averting a possible nuclear war. After his assassination on November 22, 1963, Lyndon Johnson’s leadership helped calm a shaken nation. In the years that followed, the Texas-born President engineered the passage of two landmark pieces of civil rights legislation, including the Voting Rights Act of 1965, that effectively ended the Second Civil War. But the escalation of the Vietnam War in early 1965, and the growing racial tensions throughout the country, turned Johnson’s White House into a beleaguered fortress. By 1968, he was being challenged for the Democratic nomination by peace candidate Eugene McCarthy, and by his longtime adversary, New York Senator Robert Kennedy. By June 1968, Johnson had withdrawn from the race; Martin Luther King, Jr., had been assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee; Vice President Hubert Humphrey was far ahead in the race for Democratic convention delegates; and Robert Kennedy was fighting for his political life in the California primary.