by Ted Sorensen
Other: Attorney General Robert Kennedy, Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon, White House aides Bundy and Sorensen. (Also sitting in on the earlier and later meetings in the White House were the Vice President and Kenneth O’Donnell. Others—such as Dean Acheson, Adlai Stevenson and Robert Lovett—sat in from time to time; and six days later USIA Deputy Director Donald Wilson, acting for the ailing Edward R. Murrow, was officially added.)
At this meeting I saw for the first time the crucial photographs, as General Carter and his photo analysts pinpointed the evidence. Barely discernible scratches turned out to be motor pools, erector launches and missile transporters, some with missiles on them. They looked, said the President, “like little footballs on a football field,” barely visible. Soviet medium-range ballistic missiles, said Carter, could reach targets eleven hundred nautical miles away. That covered Washington, Dallas, Cape Canaveral, St. Louis and all SAC bases and cities in between; and it was estimated that the whole complex of sixteen to twenty-four missiles could be operational in two weeks. The photographs revealed no signs of nuclear warheads stored in the area, but no one doubted that they were there or soon would be.
The President was somber but crisp. His first directive was for more photography. He expressed the nation’s gratitude to the entire photo collection and analysis team for a remarkable job. It was later concluded that late September photography of the San Crist?bal area might have provided at least some hints of suspicious activity more than three weeks earlier, but certainly nothing sufficiently meaningful to convince the OAS, our allies and the world that actual missiles were being installed. The contrast between the October 14 and August 29 photos indicated that field-type missiles had been very quickly moved in and all but assembled since their arrival in mid-September. American reconnaissance and intelligence had done well to spot them before they were operational. But now more photographs were needed immediately, said the President. We had to be sure—we had to have the most convincing possible evidence—and we had to know what else was taking place throughout the island. Even a gigantic hoax had to be guarded against, someone said. Daily flights were ordered covering all of Cuba.
Kennedy’s second directive was to request that those present set aside all other tasks to make a prompt and intensive survey of the dangers and all possible courses of action—because action was imperative. More meetings were set up, one in the State Department that afternoon and another back in the Cabinet Room with him at 6:30. Even at that initial 11:45 meeting the first rough outlines of alternatives were explored. One official said our task was to get rid of the missile complex before it became operational, either through an air strike’s knocking it out or by pressuring the Soviets into taking it out. He mentioned the possibilities of an OAS inspection team or a direct approach to Castro. Another said an air strike could not be limited to the missile complex alone but would have to include storage sites, air bases and other targets, necessitating thousands of Cuban casualties and possibly an invasion. Still another spoke of adding a naval blockade combined with a warning and increased surveillance. It was agreed that the U.S.-leased Naval base at Cuba’s Guantánamo Bay would have to be reinforced and all dependents evacuated. No conclusions were reached—but all the possible conclusions were grim.
The President’s third directive enjoined us all to strictest secrecy until both the facts and our response could be announced. Any premature disclosure, he stressed, could precipitate a Soviet move or panic the American public before we were ready to act. A full public statement later would be essential, he said, talking in the same vein about briefing former President Eisenhower. There was discussion about declaring a national emergency and calling up Reserves. But for the present secrecy was vital; and for that reason advance consultations with the Allies were impossible. He had already given the surface impression that morning that all was well, keeping his scheduled appointments, taking Astronaut Walter Schirra and his family out in back to see Caroline’s ponies, and meeting with his Panel on Mental Retardation. (Praised by the Panel’s chairman for his interest, the President had responded: “Thanks for the endorsement…. I’m glad to get some good news.”) He had also proclaimed the last week in November to be National Cultural Center Week and declared storm-struck areas of Oregon to be disaster areas.
But even as he went about his other duties, the President meditated not only on what action he would take but why the Soviets had made so drastic and dangerous a departure from their usual practice. Evidently they had hoped, with the help of the SAMs and an American preoccupation with elections, to surprise the United States in November with a completed, operational missile chain. But why—and what next? The answer could not then—or perhaps ever—be known by Americans with any certainty; but in the course of our meetings several theories, some overlapping and some inconsistent, were advanced:
Theory 1. Cold War Politics. Khrushchev believed that the American people were too timid to risk nuclear war and too concerned with legal-isms to justify any distinction between our overseas missile bases and his—that once we were actually confronted with the missiles we would do nothing but protest—that we would thereby appear weak and irresolute to the world, causing our allies to doubt our word and to seek accommodations with the Soviets, and permitting increased Communist sway in Latin America in particular. This was a probe, a test of America’s will to resist. If it succeeded, he could move in a more important place—in West Berlin or with new pressure on our overseas bases—with missiles staring down our throats from Cuba. A Lenin adage, said Bohlen in one of our first meetings, compared national expansion to a bayonet drive: if you strike steel, pull back; if you strike mush, keep going. Khrushchev, having invested considerable money and effort in nuclear hardware he hoped never to use in battle, at least wanted one more try at using it for blackmail purposes.
Theory 2. Diverting Trap. If the United States did respond, presumably by attacking “little” Cuba, the Allies would be divided, the UN horrified, the Latin Americans more anti-American than ever, and our forces and energies diverted while Khrushchev moved swiftly in on Berlin. (Some speculated that Khrushchev also calculated that any strong U.S. reaction would help him prove to the Stalinists and Chinese that the West was no “paper tiger.”)
Theory 3. Cuban Defense. A Soviet satellite in the Western Hemisphere was so valuable to Khrushchev—in both his drive for expansion and his contest with Red China—that he could not allow it to fall; and thus, in his view, an invasion from the United States or hostile Latin-American states, which seemed inevitable if Cuba collapsed internally, had to be prevented at all costs. The Castro brothers, requesting military aid, could cite the Bay of Pigs and the constant invasion talk in Congress and the Cuban refugee community. Although they reportedly had expected no more than a firm Soviet pledge, the presence of Soviet missiles looked to them like an even tighter guarantee of their security. (It should be noted that the Soviet Union stuck throughout to this position. Mikoyan claimed in a conversation with the President weeks after it was all over that the weapons were purely defensive, that they had been justified by threats of invasion voiced by Richard Nixon and Pentagon generals, and that the Soviets intended to inform the United States of these weapons immediately after the elections to prevent the matter from affecting the American political campaign.)
Theory 4. Bargaining Barter. Well aware of Cuba’s sensitive role in domestic American politics, Khrushchev intended to use these bases in a summit or UN confrontation with Kennedy as effective bargaining power—to trade them off for his kind of Berlin settlement, or for a withdrawal of American overseas bases.
Theory 5. Missile Power. The Soviets could no longer benefit from the fiction that the missile gap was in their favor. To close it with ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles) and submarine-based missiles was too expensive. Providing Cuban bases for their existing MRBMs and IRBMs (medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles) gave them a swift and comparatively inexpensive means of adding sharply to the tot
al number of missiles targeted on the United States, positioned to by-pass most of our missile warning system and permitting virtually no tactical warning time between their launch and their arrival on target. The fifteen-minute ground alert on which our nuclear bombers stood by on runways would no longer be sufficient. To be sure, these Cuban missiles alone, in view of all the other megatonnage the Soviets were capable of unleashing upon us, did not substantially alter the strategic balance in fact—unless these first installations were followed by so many more that Soviet military planners would have an increased temptation to launch a pre-emptive first strike. But that balance would have been substantially altered in appearance; and in matters of national will and world leadership, as the President said later, such appearances contribute to reality.
His own analysis regarded the third and fifth theories as offering likely but insufficient motives and he leaned most strongly to the first. But whichever theory was correct, it was clear that the Soviet move, if successful, would “materially…and politically change the balance of power” in the entire cold war, as he would later comment. Undertaken in secrecy, accompanied by duplicity, the whole effort was based on confronting Kennedy and the world in November with a threatening fait accompli, designed perhaps to be revealed by Khrushchev personally, we speculated, in a bristling UN speech, to be followed by a cocky demand for a summit on Berlin and other matters. With these somber thoughts in mind, our Tuesday morning meeting ended; and I went down the hall to my office with a sense of deep foreboding and heavy responsibility.
PLANNING A RESPONSE
My recollection of the ninety-six hours that followed is a blur of meetings and discussions, mornings, afternoons, evenings. The proposals varied, their proponents varied, our progress varied. In order to clear my desk, particularly of the President’s campaign speeches for that week, I did not attend any of the preliminary meetings held that afternoon. One was in the Pentagon, where McNamara and the Joint Chiefs executed the President’s instructions to alert our forces for any contingency and to be ready in a week for any military action against Cuba. The other principal meeting that afternoon was in the State Department, where Soviet motives and possible actions were discussed. Both meetings imposed extra-tight security. Also meeting that afternoon and every morning thereafter was the United States Intelligence Board, on which the State and military intelligence officers were represented with the CIA.
At 6:30 P.M. we met again with the President in the Cabinet Room, as we would regularly for the next several weeks. That Tuesday was the first of thirteen days of decision unlike any other in the Kennedy years—or, indeed, inasmuch as this was the first direct nuclear confrontation, unlike any in the history of our planet.
Much misinformation has been written about this series of meetings, about who said what, and about such terms as “hawks and doves,” “think tank,” “Ex Comm” and “Trollope ploy” which I never heard used at the time. With all due respect to those Cabinet and other officers sometimes credited in these accounts with shaping our deliberations when the President was absent, the best performer in this respect was the Attorney General—not because of any particular idea he advanced, not because he presided (no one did), but because of his constant prodding, questioning, eliciting arguments and alternatives and keeping the discussions concrete and moving ahead, a difficult task as different participants came in and out. Bundy and I sought to assist in this role. Indeed, one of the remarkable aspects of those meetings was a sense of complete equality. Protocol mattered little when the nation’s life was at stake. Experience mattered little in a crisis which had no precedent. Even rank mattered little when secrecy prevented staff support. We were fifteen individuals on our own, representing the President and not different departments. Assistant Secretaries differed vigorously with their Secretaries; I participated much more freely than I ever had in an NSC meeting; and the absence of the President encouraged everyone to speak his mind.
It was after noting these tendencies in a Wednesday afternoon meeting, held while the President fulfilled a campaign commitment in Connecticut, that I recommended he authorize more such preparatory meetings without his presence. He agreed, and these meetings continued in George Ball’s conference room on the State Department’s seventh floor. But inasmuch as some or all of us met daily with the President, those meetings over which he did not preside—held chiefly while he maintained his normal schedule for the sake of appearances and to carry out other duties—were not formulating policy or even alternatives without his knowledge. And when he did preside, recognizing that lower-ranking advisers such as Thompson would not voluntarily contradict their superiors in front of the President, and that persuasive advisers such as McNamara unintentionally silenced less articulate men, he took pains to seek everyone’s individual views. In sharp contrast with his first Cuban crisis, when he had conferred with a somewhat different group, he knew his men, we knew each other, and all weighed the consequences of failure.
As the week wore on, the tireless work of the aerial photographers and photo interpreters gave an even greater sense of urgency to our deliberations. More MRBM sites were discovered, for a total of six. They were no longer recognizable only, in the President’s words, “to the most sophisticated expert.” Their construction had proceeded at such a pace in those few days that there could be no mistaking the Soviet intention to have them operational much earlier than we had anticipated on Tuesday. The literally miles of film taken of the island—which was blanketed daily with six or seven flights—now revealed excavations for three IRBM sites as well. The 2,200-mile IRBMs, when readied in December, would be capable of reaching virtually any part of the continental United States. At these locations, too, the fields and wooded areas photographed in earlier coverage had suddenly been transformed into networks of roads, tents, equipment and construction, all completely manned and closely guarded by Soviet personnel only.
The knowledge that time was running out dominated our discussions and kept us meeting late into the night. The stepped-up U-2 flights had apparently not alerted the Soviets to our discovery. But we had to formulate and declare our position, said the President, before they knew we knew, before the matter leaked out to the public and before the missiles became operational.
Despite the fatiguing hours and initially sharp divisions, our meetings avoided any loss of temper and frequently were lightened by a grim humor. Each of us changed his mind more than once that week on the best course of action to take—not only because new facts and arguments were adduced but because, in the President’s words, “whatever action we took had so many disadvantages to it and each…raised the prospect that it might escalate the Soviet Union into a nuclear war.”
It was an agonizing prospect. In no other period during my service in the White House did I wake up in the middle of the night, reviewing the deliberations of that evening and trying to puzzle out a course of action. Not one of us at any time believed that any of the choices before us could bring anything but either prolonged danger or fighting, very possibly leading to the kind of deepening commitment of prestige and power from which neither side could withdraw without resort to nuclear weapons.
The Soviet statement of September 11 had warned that any U.S. military action against Cuba would unleash nuclear war. What would Khrushchev actually do if we bombed the missile sites—or blockaded the island—or invaded? What would we do in return, and what would his reaction be then? These were the questions we asked that week. Among the locations listed as possible targets for Soviet retaliation were West Berlin (first on everyone’s list, and therefore the subject of a special subcommittee of our group established by the President); Turkey (because our exposed Jupiter missiles there were most likely to be equated with the Soviet missiles in Cuba); Iran (where the Soviets had a tactical advantage comparable to ours in the Caribbean and a long-standing desire for control); Pakistan, Scandinavia and Italy. Nor could we worry only about Soviet retaliation. Castro, not known for his steady reactions, might o
rder an attack on Guantánamo, on Florida or on whatever planes or ships we employed. He might also order the execution of the Bay of Pigs prisoners. The news that week that Red China had attacked India made us wonder whether this was a coincidence or whether a whole round of conflagrations would include Formosa, Korea and the Indochinese peninsula. The most dire possibility of all was that the Soviets might conclude—from a similar analysis of measures and countermeasures, as seen from their point of view—that all-out war was inevitable and thereupon launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike on the United States to make certain they hit us first.
The fact that Khrushchev had already made one major miscalculation—in thinking he could get away with missiles in Cuba—increased the danger that he would make more. Our predictions of the outcome were further clouded by the Soviet Chairman’s known penchant for surprise, by the difficulty of halting an escalation once started, and by the possibility that he was deliberately trying to provoke us into an attack on Cuba to facilitate his moving on Berlin (just as the Suez invasion of 1956 had confused the opposition to his suppression of Hungary). We prepared all the arguments distinguishing Cuba from West Berlin—e.g., the latter was not a site for strategic weapons, and the U.S. had suggested an internationally supervised plebiscite to determine the wishes of its citizens—but we doubted that such distinctions would impress the Soviets.
We could not even be certain they would impress our allies. Most Western Europeans cared nothing about Cuba and thought we were overanxious about it. They had long accustomed themselves to living next door to Soviet missiles. Would they support our risking a world war, or an attack on NATO member Turkey, or a move on West Berlin, because we now had a few dozen hostile missiles nearby? And would not any disarray in the Alliance weaken both our Cuba posture and our Berlin defense? On the other hand, if we failed to respond, would that not confirm the fears of De Gaulle and others that the U.S. could not be depended upon to meet threats even farther from our shores? Failure to consult could also weaken their support; yet consultation, with the inevitable leaks, disagreements and delays, could weaken our action. The situation appeared even worse in Latin America, where nonintervention by the U.S. was a religion but a failure to intervene would bring a Castro-Communist trend.