by Ted Sorensen
The national security must come first…we can’t negotiate with a gun at our head…if they won’t remove the missiles and restore the status quo ante, we will have to do it ourselves—and then we will be ready to discuss bases in the context of a disarmament treaty or anything else….
But on the other hand:
To risk starting a nuclear war is bound to be divisive at best and the judgments of history seldom coincide with the tempers of the moment…. I feel you should have made [sic] it clear that the existence of nuclear missile bases anywhere is negotiable before we start anything…. I confess I have many misgivings about the proposed course of action….
That note, which also proposed the high-level courier-to-Khrushchev approach, had been written in the context of the air-strike solution. On Saturday and earlier, the author of the note fully endorsed the blockade route, although casting doubt on any unilateral action we took without OAS approval. He wanted this military action accompanied, however, by suggested diplomatic actions which the President found wholly unacceptable. He wanted the President to propose the demilitarization, neutralization and guaranteed territorial integrity of Cuba, thus giving up Guantánamo, which he said was of little use to us, in exchange for the removal of all Soviet missiles on Cuba. Alternatively or subsequently, he said, we could offer to withdraw our Turkish and Italian Jupiter missile bases if the Russians would withdraw their Cuban missile bases, and send UN inspection teams to all the foreign bases maintained by both sides to prevent their use in a surprise attack. He also talked of a UN-supervised standstill of military activity on both sides—thus leaving the missiles in with no blockade—and of a summit meeting, and of UN inspection teams investigating not only Cuba but possible U.S. bases for attacking Cuba. The offer of such a political program, he would later write in a follow-up memo, would avoid comparisons with the Suez invasion. The offer would not sound “soft” if properly worded, he declared. It would sound “wise,” particularly when combined with U.S. military action.
There was not a hint of “appeasing the aggressor” in these plans, as some would charge, only an effort to propose a negotiating position preferable to war and acceptable to the world. Even the synopsis prepared by the air-strike “hard-liners” earlier in the week had included not only a call for a summit but a pledge that the United States was prepared to promptly withdraw all nuclear forces based in Turkey, including aircraft as well as missiles. The Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy had also recommended the Jupiters’ withdrawal the previous year.3
Now an adviser who had served in the preceding administration agreed, to the President’s great interest, that the Jupiter missiles in Turkey and Italy were obsolescent and of little military value, practically forced on those countries by the previous administration.
Nevertheless several of those present joined in a sharp attack on these diplomatic proposals. The President admired the courage of their proponent in adhering to his position under fire. He agreed we should beef up the political side of the speech, and said he had long ago asked McNamara to review the overseas Jupiter missiles. But now, he felt, was no time for concessions that could break up the Alliance by confirming European suspicions that we would sacrifice their security to protect our interests in an area of no concern to them. Instead of being on the diplomatic defensive, we should be indicting the Soviet Union for its duplicity and its threat to world peace.
The remainder of the meeting was occupied with a brief discussion of the speech draft and its timing. The President wanted to speak the next evening, Sunday. Secrecy was crumbling. Premature disclosure could alter all our plans. But the State Department stressed that our ambassadors had to brief Allied and Latin-American leaders and noted the impossibility of reaching them all on a Sunday. The President agreed to Monday, but stated he would still speak Sunday if the story appeared certain to break. He was, moreover, going ahead regardless of Allied reaction, though he wanted them to be informed. The speech was set for 7 P.M. Monday, October 22 (known in the scenario as P hour); and another meeting was set for Sunday.
We then returned to our offices and the multiple tasks at hand. The speech was circulated and redrafted. The quarantine proclamation was prepared. An approach to the OAS, letters to heads of state, a letter to West Berlin’s Mayor and a simple message of information to Khrushchev were all drafted. Eisenhower was brought by helicopter from Gettysburg for his second briefing of the week by John McCone. The Vice President was brought back from his campaign tour in Hawaii—he had caught the President’s cold. The U.S. Information Agency prepared a special hookup with private medium-wave radio stations to carry twenty-four hours of broadcasts, including the President’s speech in Spanish, to Cuba and to all Latin America. The State Department prepared a thorough, highly efficient scenario outlining the timing of each step by each agency. The Joint Chiefs advised all service commanders to be prepared for possible military action. They ordered Guantánamo reinforced and its dependents evacuated on Monday. Acheson, who had earlier in the week wisely suggested a special high-level emissary to brief De Gaulle and NATO, was given that assignment. Military preparations continued for all levels of action against Cuba.
On Sunday morning I incorporated all suggested changes and corrections for the speech into a fourth draft. Simultaneously, the President met with Tactical Air Command Chief Walter Sweeney, Jr. and a few others (the Attorney General driving in directly from Virginia still in his riding togs). Told there was no way of making certain all the missiles would be removed by an air attack, Kennedy confirmed that the air strike was out and the blockade was on. He met with the British Ambassador, his close friend as well as ally. O’Brien and Salinger were informed. O’Brien was to round up the bipartisan Congressional leaders all over the country with White House military aides arranging transportation. Salinger was to coordinate our information policy with his State, USIA and Pentagon counterparts.
News leaks and inquiries for the first time were a growing problem, as crisis was in the air. The movement of troops, planes and ships to Florida and the Caribbean, the unavailability of high officials, the summoning of Congressional leaders, the Saturday night and Sunday activity, the cancellation of the Presidential and Vice Presidential campaign trips and the necessity of informing a much larger circle of officials meant that our cherished hours of secrecy were numbered. Washington and New York newspapers were already speculating. Publishers were asked not to disclose anything without checking. One newspaper obtained the story Sunday evening and patriotically agreed at the personal request of the President not to print it. The direct questions of other reporters were avoided, evaded or answered incorrectly by officials who did not know the correct answers; and a few outright falsehoods were told to keep our knowledge from the Communists.
It was “the best kept secret in government history,” said the President, amazed as well as pleased. For most of the week, very few people outside the fifteen regulars, most of their wives and some of their secretaries knew the facts. (Of the three girls in my office, I worked two in alternate night shifts, believing it in the interest of the third that she be kept in the dark, inasmuch as her roommate worked for Senator Keating.) Some officials typed out their own papers or wrote them out in longhand. We stopped signing the entry book at the State Department door, used various entrances to that department and the White House and kept routine appointments where possible.
At 2:30 that Sunday afternoon, October 21, the President met with the NSC once again. He reviewed the State Department’s drafts of instructions to embassies and Presidential letters to allies, all to be sent out in code that night and held for delivery. He reviewed the approaches to the OAS and UN, and agreed that UN supervision and inspection of the missiles’ removal would be requested. He asked Navy Chief of Staff Anderson, Jr. to describe plans and procedures for the blockade. First, said the Admiral, each approaching ship would be signaled to stop for boarding and inspection. Then, if no satisfactory response was forthcoming, a shot would be
fired across her bow. Finally, if there was still no satisfactory response, a shot would be fired into her rudder to cripple but not to sink. “You’re certain that can be done?” asked the President with a wry smile. “Yes, sir!” responded the Admiral. Nitze reported on Berlin planning. More aerial surveillance of Cuba was ordered.
Most of that meeting was spent in a page-by-page review of the latest speech draft. Among the issues raised at that meeting, and in my earlier and later meetings with the President, were the following:
1. Should the latest enlarged photographs be shown by the President on TV? No, he decided—both because the average viewer could discern too little for it to be intelligible and because the mere presence of pictures might contribute to panic. The desire to avoid panic also caused the President to delete all references to the missiles’ megatonnage as compared with Hiroshima, and to speak of their capability of “striking,” instead of “wiping out,” certain cities. But to increase hemispheric unity, he did include a reference to the Canadian and Latin-American areas within their target range.
2. Should the speech admit our secret surveillance by U-2 planes, internationally sensitive since 1960 and an illegal violation of Cuban air space? Yes—deciding to make a virtue out of necessity, the President listed increased surveillance as an announced part of his response, justifying it on the basis of an earlier OAS communiqué against secret military preparations in the hemisphere, adding that “further action will be justified” if the missiles remain, and hinting at the nature of that action by urging a consideration of the hazards “in the interest of both the Cuban people and the Soviet technicians at the sites.”
3. Would he institute the blockade without OAS approval? Yes, if we could not get it, because our national security was directly involved. But hoping to obtain OAS endorsement, he deliberately obscured this question in the speech by a call for unspecified OAS action and an announcement of the blockade and other steps “in the defense of our own security and of the entire Western Hemisphere.”
4. Should his speech anticipate, and try to forestall, a retaliatory blockade around Berlin? Yes—both by emphasizing that we were not “denying the necessities of life as the Soviets attempted to do in their Berlin blockade of 1948” and by warning that we would resist “any hostile move anywhere in the world against the safety and freedom of peoples to whom we are committed—including in particular the brave people of West Berlin.”
5. What should he say about diplomatic action? Nothing that would tie our hands, anything that would strengthen our stand. Saturday’s discussion, which obtained some additional State Department support and refinement over the weekend, was of major help here. The President deleted from my original draft a call for a summit meeting, preferring to state simply that we were prepared to present our case
and our own proposals for a peaceful world at any time…in the United Nations or in any other meeting that could be useful, without limiting our freedom of action…. I call upon Chairman Khrushchev…to join in an historic effort to end the perilous arms race and to transform the history of man…. We have in the past…proposed the elimination of all arms and military bases…. We are prepared to discuss…the possibilities of a genuinely independent Cuba.
These remarks were a far cry from the Saturday afternoon proposals, but they were more than we had for the first draft.
6. How would we explain our action to other nations long living in the shadow of missiles? The President deleted a specific reference to self-defense against armed attack under Article 51 of the UN Charter, but carefully chose his words for anyone citing that article:
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. Nuclear weapons are so destructive, and ballistic missiles are so swift, that any substantially increased possibility of their use or any sudden change in their deployment may well be regarded as a definite threat to peace.
He made dozens of other changes, large and small. After each recitation of the September Soviet Government and October Gromyko assurances, he inserted the sentence: “That statement was false.” References to Latin America and the hemisphere were inserted along with or in place of references to this country alone. And a direct appeal to the Cuban people was expanded considerably by one of Kennedy’s top appointees in State from Puerto Rico, Arturo Morales Carrion, who understood the nuances in Spanish of references to “fatherland,” “nationalist revolution betrayed” and the day when Cubans “will be truly free—free from foreign domination, free to choose their own leaders, free to select their own system, free to own their own land, free to speak and write and worship without fear or degradation.”
But Kennedy struck from the speech any hint that the removal of Castro was his true aim. He did not talk of total victory or unconditional surrender, simply of the precisely defined objective of removing a specific provocation. In the same vein, he deleted references to his notification of the Soviets, to the treatment awaiting any ships attempting to run the blockade and to predictions of the blockade’s effect on Castro, believing that making these matters public was inconsistent with his desire not to force Khrushchev’s hand. Lesser action items proposed by the State Department—specifically, a Caribbean Security Conference and further shipping restrictions—he deleted as too weak-sounding and insignificant for a speech about nuclear war. There was no mistaking that central subject, underlined most specifically in the words: “It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.”
Throughout Sunday evening and most of Monday, minor changes in the text were made, each one being rushed to USIA translators and to the State Department for transmission to our embassies. The whole nation knew on Monday that a crisis was at hand—particularly after Salinger’s announcement at noon that the President had obtained 7 P.M. network time for a speech of the “highest national urgency.” Crowds and pickets gathered outside the White House, reporters inside. I refused all calls from newsmen, answering the telephoned questions of only one powerful Congressman (“Is it serious?” “Yes”) and Ted Kennedy (“Should I give my campaign dinner speech on Cuba?” “No”). I informed Mike Feldman and Lee White in my office by giving them copies of the speech. “It’s a shame,” cracked White with heavy irony, gazing out the window. “They’ve just finished sanding that Executive Office Building.” Upon hearing that Gromyko was to make an announcement on his departure for Moscow, a special monitor was arranged—but his remarks contained only the usual farewell.
For the President that Monday, October 22, was a day of conferences. By telephone he talked to former Presidents Hoover, Truman and Eisenhower. He met with our group in the morning and with the full National Security Council at 3 P.M., all Joint Chiefs of Staff present. These were taut, organizational meetings, nothing more. The group he had originally summoned six days earlier was formally established as the “Executive Committee” of the National Security Council, with a standing order to meet with the President each morning at ten. At 4 P.M. he met with the Cabinet, briefly explained what he was doing and promptly adjourned the meeting. His presentation was tense and unsmiling. There were no questions and no discussion.
Just before the Cabinet meeting he kept a long-scheduled appointment with Prime Minister Milton Obote of Uganda. He had hoped to cut it short; and Secretary Rusk, who sat in on the conference, was visibly distracted. The Prime Minister blithely talked on, debating with the President the wisdom of U.S. aid to Rhodesian schools. The President found himself drawn into the debate, enjoying the change of subject and the clash of intellects. Rusk rustled his papers, the Cabinet paced outside the windows. Finally the meeting ended and the President personally escorted Obote to the door of the White House, looking more relaxed than he had all day. (The following day the Prime Minister, info
rmed by Kennedy’s speech of the grave matter with which he had competed for time, wrote the President that his patient attention at that hour was proof of his genuine regard for the new African nations.)
Elsewhere the State Department scenario was being effectively carried out. The President’s speech, now completed, served as the basic briefing document in all capitals of the world and in a series of ambassadorial meetings in the State Department. Photographs were provided as well. Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin was invited to Rusk’s office at 6 P.M. Ambassador Kohler delivered the same message in Moscow a little later. U.S. custodians of nuclear weapons in Turkey and Italy were instructed to take extraordinary precautions to make certain that such weapons were fired only upon Presidential authorization. Latin-American governments were told of possible disorders and the availability of riot control equipment. Our own missions were instructed to tape their windows. Many State, Defense and White House officers went on a twenty-four-hour watch, with cots in offices and personnel working in shifts.
The only sour note of the day was the President’s meeting with some twenty Congressional leaders at 5 P.M. They had been plucked from campaign tours and vacation spots all over the country, some by jet fighters and trainers. (Hale Boggs, for example, fishing in the Gulf of Mexico, was first buzzed by an Air Force plane dropping a note to him in a plastic bottle, and was finally taken by helicopter to New Orleans, traveling by jet from there to Washington.) Members of both parties campaigning for re-election gladly announced the cancellation of their speeches on the grounds that the President needed their advice.
But in some cases their advice was captious and inconsistent. Reacting to a McNamara-Rusk-McCone picture briefing the same way most of us originally did, many called the blockade irrelevant and indecisively slow, certain to irritate our friends but doing nothing about the missiles. An invasion of the island was urged instead by such powerful and diverse Democratic Senators as Russell and Fulbright (who had strongly opposed the 1961 Cuban invasion). Charles Halleck said he would support the President but wanted the record to show that he had been informed at the last minute, not consulted.