by Ted Sorensen
The President, seeking bipartisan unity, announced that he, the Vice President and Cabinet had canceled the rest of their campaign trips, whatever happened. An invasion could not begin immediately in any event, he said, and it was better to go slow with Khrushchev. But Russell, one of the authors of the original, more belligerent forms of the Congressional resolution, complained that more than halfway measures were required.
The President, however, was adamant. He was acting by Executive Order, Presidential proclamation and inherent powers, not under any resolution or act of the Congress. He had earlier rejected all suggestions of reconvening Congress or requesting a formal declaration of war, and he had summoned the leaders only when hard evidence and a fixed policy were ready. “My feeling is,” he said later, “that if they had gone through the five-day period we had gone through—in looking at the various alternatives, advantages and disadvantages…—they would have come out the same way that we did.”
The meeting dragged on past 6 P.M. I waited outside the door with his reading copy, angry that they should be harassing him right up to the last minute. Finally he emerged, a bit angry himself, and hustled over to his quarters to change clothes for his 7 P.M. speech. As I walked with him, he told me of the meeting, muttering, “If they want this job, they can have it—it’s no great joy to me.” But in a few minutes he was calm and relaxed once again. Alone back in the Cabinet Room, we reviewed the text once more; and in a few more minutes the most serious speech in his life was on the air:
Good evening, my fellow citizens:
This government, as promised, has maintained the closest surveillance of the Soviet military build-up on the island of Cuba. Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island. The purpose of these bases can be none other than to provide a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere….
This urgent transformation of Cuba into an important strategic base, by the presence of these large, long-range and clearly offensive weapons of sudden mass destruction, constitutes an explicit threat to the peace and security of all the Americas….
For many years, both the Soviet Union and the United States…have deployed strategic nuclear weapons with great care, never upsetting the precarious status quo which insured that these weapons would not be used in the absence of some vital challenge. Our own strategic missiles have never been transferred to the territory of any other nation, under a cloak of secrecy and deception…. American citizens have become adjusted to living daily in the bull’s-eye of Soviet missiles located inside the U.S.S.R. or in submarines….
But this secret, swift and extraordinary build-up of Communist missiles, in an area well known to have a special and historical relationship to the United States and the nations of the Western Hemisphere, in violation of Soviet assurances, and in defiance of American and hemispheric policy—this sudden, clandestine decision to station strategic weapons for the first time outside of Soviet soil, is a deliberately provocative and unjustified change in the status quo which cannot be accepted by this country, if our courage and our commitments are ever to be trusted again by either friend or foe.
The 1930’s taught us a clear lesson: aggressive conduct, if allowed to go unchecked and unchallenged, ultimately leads to war. This nation is opposed to war. We are also true to our word. Our unswerving objective, therefore, must be to prevent the use of these missiles against this or any other country, and to secure their withdrawal or elimination from the Western Hemisphere….
We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of world-wide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth, but neither will we shrink from that risk at any time it must be faced.
He went on to outline—in careful language which would guide us all week—the initial steps to be taken, emphasizing the word “initial”: quarantine, surveillance of the build-up, action if it continued, our response to any use of these missiles, the reinforcement of Guantánamo, OAS and UN action and an appeal to Khrushchev and the Cuban people.
The path we have chosen for the present is full of hazards, as all paths are, but it is the one most consistent with our character and courage as a nation and our commitments around the world. The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender or submission.
Our goal is not the victory of might, but the vindication of right; not peace at the expense of freedom, but both peace and freedom, here in this hemisphere, and, we hope, around the world. God willing, that goal will be achieved.
The crisis had officially begun. Some Americans reacted with panic, most with pride. A Congressional leader telephoned the President that a group of them watching together after leaving his office now understood and supported his policy more fully. A U.S. resolution was presented to that month’s Security Council President, Russia’s Valerian Zorin. Briefings of diplomats and the press continued at the State Department and Pentagon. Strategic Air Command and North American Air Defense units had been put on maximum ground and air alert as the President began speaking. His remarks had been broadcast around the world by the USIA in thirty-eight languages and immediately printed and distributed in many more. The OAS would meet the next day as an “organ of consultation,” and the formal proclamation of the blockade would not occur until then. After a brief chat with the President, I went home to get some sleep.
The President also went to bed early, having had no rest after lunch and only a brief swim before. Many marveled that he swam or slept at all. But throughout both the previous week and the week that followed, he had adhered to as normal a life as possible, working nights with no sense of hours, requesting the postponement of minor matters, never taking his mind off the Cuban missiles, but still eating with his family, meeting with unknowing foreign leaders and staff aides, presenting an aviation trophy, and dining the night after his speech with the Ormsby-Gores and other guests as a substitute for a previously planned gala party. “His calmness…[and] unfailing good humor,” said the British Ambassador, were “extraordinary to behold [and] kept everybody else calm and in a good mood.” The telephone interrupted him constantly during that dinner, but he always returned immediately to the lighter conversations he had begun before the interruption. His wife saw more of him during the crisis than usual, as he sought her company at meals normally devoted to business and on walks around the South Lawn.
Similarly, in our meetings and in his office during those two weeks he was calm and deliberate, his mind clear, his emotions controlled, never brooding, always in command. He retained that composure even when fatigue was overtaking us all. After one meeting during the second week he expressed concern to me that one official had overworked himself to the point of mental and physical exhaustion.
The Presidency was never lonelier than when faced with its first nuclear confrontation. John Kennedy never lost sight of what either war or surrender would do to the whole human race. His UN mission was preparing for a negotiated peace and his Joint Chiefs of Staff were preparing for war, and he intended to keep both on rein. He was determined, despite divided counsel and conflicting pressures, to take all necessary action and no unnecessary action. He could not afford to be hasty or hesitant, reckless or afraid. The odds that the Soviets would go all the way to war, he later said, seemed to him then “somewhere between one out of three and even.” He spoke on the back porch on that Saturday before his speech not of his possible death but of all the innocent children of the world who had never had a chance or a voice. While at times he interjected humor into our discussions, his mood can. best be illustrated by the doodles he scratched on two sheets of his yellow legal pad during one of our meetings shortly after his speech:
serious…serious…16-32 [missiles] within a week…2200 [miles]…Khrushchev…Soviet submarines…submarines…submarines…blockade…Sunday…Guantánamo…16-32…Friday mo
rning…increases risk…need to pursue…McCone…1 million men…holding the alliance.
QUARANTINE
The Alliance held. Macmillan phoned his support, although expressing his interest in a summit talk on disarmament and an interim suspension of activity on both sides. Adenauer, Brandt and the people of West Berlin did not flinch or complain. Despite some wavering by Canada, the NATO Council and De Gaulle pledged their backing after Acheson’s briefings, attaching neither reservations nor complaints on grounds of no advance consultation, and ignoring the pickets and protests flooding London and other capitals. The British press, even more than that of the French and some neutrals, was largely negative. Some questioned whether missiles were really there, and at the suggestion of Ambassador Ormsby-Gore, with whom he reviewed the pictures after Tuesday’s dinner, the President released the best photographs of the evidence. Pacifist complaints, interestingly enough, were all directed at the American quarantine, with no word about the Soviet missile deception. Philosopher Bertrand Russell, for example, wired Kennedy: “Your action desperate…no conceivable justification,” while wiring Khrushchev: “Your continued forbearance is our great hope.”
But of far greater importance to Kennedy than Lord Russell was the action taken by the twenty members of the OAS in immediately and unanimously adopting a broad authorizing resolution. The President, who had been concerned about getting the necessary two-thirds vote to back his quarantine, warmly congratulated Rusk and Martin. Martin, in fact, had been one of his most thoughtful and steady advisers all week. So had Llewellyn Thompson, who along with Martin had emphasized the fundamental importance of obtaining OAS endorsement of the quarantine. Martin’s concern was Latin America’s inevitable resentment of any unilateral U.S. action. Thompson’s interest was the added legal justification such endorsement would give to the quarantine under international and maritime law as well as the UN Charter. That was important, he said, not only to our maritime allies but to legalistic-minded decision-makers in the Kremlin.
In the UN, in Washington and in the foreign embassies, support for the U.S. position was surprisingly strong. This was due in part to the shock of Soviet perfidy, and their futile attempts to deny the photographic evidence of attempted nuclear blackmail. It was due in part to world-wide recognition that this was an East-West nuclear confrontation, not a U.S. quarrel with Cuba. It was due in part to the President’s choice of a low level of force at the outset and to his forceful but restrained approach. It was due, finally, to the excellent presentations made in the UN by Ambassador Stevenson, with Schlesinger as an emergency aide and John McCloy to lend bipartisan stature.
At 4 P.M. Tuesday, October 23, and again on Thursday, October 25, flanked by photo interpreters and intelligence analysts, Stevenson made a forceful presentation to the UN Security Council. Zorin had charged that the CIA had manufactured the evidence. Then let a UN team inspect the sites, said Stevenson.
STEVENSON: All right, sir, let me ask you one simple question: Do you, Ambassador Zorin, deny that the U.S.S.R. has placed and is placing medium—and intermediate—range missiles and sites in Cuba? Yes or no. Don’t wait for the translation. Yes or no.
ZORIN: I am not in an American courtroom, sir…
STEVENSON: You are in the court of world opinion right now!
ZORIN:…and therefore I do not wish to answer a question that is put to me in the fashion that a prosecutor does. In due course, sir, you will have your reply.
STEVENSON: I am prepared to wait for my answer until Hell freezes over, if that’s your decision.
Still another kind of support was essential—and forthcoming. Some Americans sought to flee, to hide or to resupply their fallout shelters. The stock market dropped. But by a ratio of ten to one the telegrams received at the White House expressed confidence and support. Reminded that the public mail response in the 1958 Formosa crisis had been against risking military action, Kennedy offered no comment. But he must have inwardly taken some satisfaction with his labors over the previous two years to prepare the American people to face the facts. He mentioned only two telegrams to me, both sarcastically. One came from a right-wing leader who had long urged a tougher policy toward the insignificant Castro but now quaked at the prospects of our confronting a nuclear power. The other came from Mississippi’s Governor Barnett, who “retracted” an earlier wire complaining about our military might being used in Mississippi instead of the Caribbean.
Later in the week the House Republican Campaign Committee would charge that the whole Kennedy approach appeared “brazenly false” and ineffective. Still later some would maintain that the whole crisis had been politically timed and inspired. But on Tuesday the GOP Congressional leaders, echoed by Senator Keating, called for complete support of the President.
“We cannot tell anyone to keep out of our hemisphere,” young Jack Kennedy had prophetically written twenty-two years earlier in Why England Slept, “unless our armaments and the people behind these armaments are prepared to back up the command, even to the ultimate point of going to war.” On Tuesday, October 23, 1962, the people appeared prepared—and so did the armaments. During his twenty-one months in the White House he had, among other moves, increased the number of combat-ready divisions from eleven to fifteen, increased airlift and tactical air support, accelerated the Polaris schedule to place nine instead of three missile submarines (each with sixteen missiles aboard) on active station, and increased the military personnel, fleet readiness and vessel numbers of the U.S. Navy. All these increases were now poised for action.
His attention was focused on the Navy as never before. The “quarantine” was a new form of reprisal under international law, an act of national and collective self-defense against an act of aggression under the UN and OAS charters and under the Rio Treaty of 1947. Its legality, much strengthened by the OAS endorsement, had been carefully worked out. A “Proclamation of Interdiction of the Delivery of Offensive Weapons to Cuba” was discussed in our two Executive Committee meetings on the first day after the President’s speech—at 10 A.M. and 6 P.M. Tuesday—and it was then immediately issued, effective the next day. The proclamation stressed that
force shall not be used except in case of failure or refusal to comply with directions…after reasonable efforts have been made to communicate them to the vessel or craft, or in case of self-defense. In any case force shall be used only to the extent necessary.
Behind this “disable, don’t sink” order, its graduated timing, its exclusion for the time being of POL (which automatically let all tankers pass) and the President’s personal direction of the quarantine’s operation, was his determination not to let needless incidents or reckless subordinates escalate so dangerous and delicate a crisis beyond control. He had learned at the Bay of Pigs that the momentum of events and enthusiasts could take issues of peace and war out of his own hands. Naval communications permitted this operation, unlike the Bay of Pigs situation, to be run directly out of his office and the Pentagon. During his first week as President, he recalled, exiles had seized a Portuguese passenger ship in the South Atlantic which the U.S. agreed to find. The President, surprised at the time it took the Navy to locate the liner, had accepted the answer offered: “It’s a big ocean.” In October, 1962, it still was—and the quarantine was no automatic solution, even with a line of 16 destroyers, 3 cruisers, an antisubmarine aircraft carrier and 6 utility ships, with nearly 150 others in reserve.
Other issues were discussed in the two Tuesday meetings of the Executive Committee: what to do if a U-2 were shot down, how to keep the press and Congress informed, preparations at Berlin, preparations to invade, cancellation of the President’s fall trip to Brazil and defense of the Southeastern states against a sudden air attack. Civil defense authorities in that region were alerted and planes were dispersed, the President persisting that he had earlier seen them lined up wing to wing, an easy target, on a flight to Palm Beach. (When reassured once again that these fears were unfounded, he ordered aerial photographs taken
without the knowledge of the Florida bases and found, to the discomfort of the military, that our aircraft were still highly concentrated.) Under that fall’s Congressional authorization, military tours of duty were extended. For the first time low-level reconnaissance flights were ordered over Cuba, flying in just over the treetops below the range of the Soviet SAMs. These pictures showed in remarkable detail more Soviet military personnel and weapons than anticipated, all Cubans excluded from missile areas and two deadly MRBMs ready to operate.
The big question was the big ocean. To us, Khrushchev appeared—in a harsh but rambling Soviet Government statement Tuesday morning rejecting the quarantine as “piracy,” in two private letters to Kennedy Tuesday morning and Wednesday evening (both answered within hours after their receipt with firm restatements of our position) and in his answers to appeals from Bertrand Russell and Acting Secretary General U Thant—to have been caught off balance, to be maneuvering, to be seeking a consensus among the top Kremlin rulers, uncertain whether to admit that the missiles were there in view of the widespread denunciations of that action. The Soviets, it seemed, had counted on surprising us, on disunity in the West and on a sufficient fear of war in the United States to prevent any military response. Having proven them wrong on those counts, we wondered whether their inconsistent positions reflected a possible internal struggle. We joked around the Cabinet table about Khrushchev’s apparently yielding to his hard-liners one day and his peace advocates the next, and about the fact that—because of the time differential and slowness of transmission—we worked all day to send messages they would receive upon waking up and they did exactly the same.