Kennedy

by Ted Sorensen

  With deep feelings of relief and exhilaration, we gathered in the Cabinet-Room at eleven, our thirteenth consecutive day of close collaboration. Just as missiles are incomparably faster than all their predecessors, so this world-wide crisis had ended incredibly faster than all its predecessors. The talk preceding the meeting was boisterous. “What is Castro saying now?” chortled someone. Robert McNamara said he had risen early that morning to draw up a list of “steps to take short of invasion.” When he heard the news, said John McCone, “I could hardly believe my ears.” Waiting for the President to come in, we speculated about what would have happened

  • if Kennedy had chosen the air strike over the blockade…

  • if the OAS and other Allies had not supported us…

  • if both our conventional and our nuclear forces had not been strengthened over the past twenty-one months…

  • if it were not for the combined genius and courage that produced U-2 photographs and their interpretations…

  • if a blockade had been instituted before we could prove Soviet duplicity and offensive weapons…

  • if Kennedy and Khrushchev had not been accustomed to communicating directly with each other and had not left that channel open…

  • if the President’s speech of October 22 had not taken Khrushchev by surprise…

  • if John F. Kennedy had not been President of the United States.

  John F. Kennedy entered and we all stood up. He had, as Harold Macmillan would later say, earned his place in history by this one act alone. He had been engaged in a personal as well as national contest for world leadership and he had won. He had reassured those nations fearing we would use too much strength and those fearing we would use none at all. Cuba had been the site of his greatest failure and now of his greatest success. The hard lessons of the first Cuban crisis were applied in his steady handling of the second with a carefully measured combination of defense, diplomacy and dialogue. Yet he walked in and began the meeting without a trace of excitement or even exultation.

  Earlier in his office—told by Bundy and Kaysen that his simultaneous plea to India and Pakistan to resolve their differences over Kashmir in view of the Chinese attack would surely be heeded, now that he looked “ten feet tall”—he had evenly replied: “That will wear off in about a week, and everyone will be back to thinking only of their own interests.”

  Displaying the same caution and precision with which he had determined for thirteen days exactly how much pressure to apply, he quickly and quietly organized the machinery to work for a UN inspection and reconnaissance effort. He called off the Sunday overflights and ordered the Navy to avoid halting any ships on that day. (The one ship previously approaching had stopped.) He asked that precautions be taken to prevent Cuban exile units from upsetting the agreement through one of their publicity-seeking raids. He laid down the line we were all to follow—no boasting, no gloating, not even a claim of victory. We had won by enabling Khrushchev to avoid complete humiliation—we should not humiliate him now. If Khrushchev wanted to boast that he had won a major concession and proved his peaceful manner, that was the loser’s prerogative. Major problems of implementing the agreement still faced us. Other danger spots in the world remained. Soviet treachery was too fresh in our memory to relax our vigil now.

  Rejecting the temptation of a dramatic TV appearance, he issued a brief three-paragraph statement welcoming Khrushchev’s “statesmanlike decision…an important and constructive contribution to peace.” Then the President’s fourth letter of the week—a conciliatory reply to the Chairman’s “firm undertakings”—was drafted, discussed, approved and sent on the basis of the wire service copy of the Chairman’s letter, the official text having not yet arrived through diplomatic channels.

  Weeks later the President would present to each of us a little silver calendar of October, 1962, mounted on walnut, with the thirteen days of October 16 through October 28 as extra deeply engraved as they already were in our memories. But on that Sunday noon, concealing the enormous sense of relief and fatigue which swept over him, he merely thanked us briefly, called another meeting for Monday morning and rejoined his family as he had each night of the crisis.

  I went down the hall to where my secretary, Gloria Sitrin, was at work as she had been day and night for almost two weeks. From her bookcase I picked up a copy of Profiles in Courage and read to her a part of the introductory quotation John Kennedy had selected from Burke’s eulogy of Charles James Fox: “He may live long, he may do much. But here is the summit. He never can exceed what he does this day.”

  1 Missions were flown on September 5, 11, 26 and 29, and October 5 and 7- Bad weather held up flights between September 5 and 26 and made the September 11 photography unusable. Two U-2 incidents elsewhere in the world also led to a high-level re-examination of that airplane’s use and some delay in flights.

  2 “Any historian,” the President later commented, “who walks through this mine field of charges and countercharges should proceed with some care”; and I have thus relied only on my own notes and files in recounting the passages that follow. The same is in fact true for the most part of this entire chapter.

  3 The vulnerable, provocative and marginal nature of these missiles in Turkey and Italy, so strikingly revealed in this week, led to their quiet withdrawal the following year in favor of Mediterranean Polaris submarines, a far superior and less vulnerable deterrent.

  4 One of the boarding ships, the President learned afterward, was the U.S. destroyer Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. About the same time, a replica of the PT-109—then in Florida for a film story—was commandeered in a side incident involving Cuban exiles, and the President felt these coincidences would never be believed.

  5 While the answer to this and all other questions about internal Soviet thinking and actions will probably never be known with any certainty, the far greater length of time required to send a private, coded message made this possibility highly doubtful.

  CHAPTER XXV

  THE STRATEGY OF PEACE

  THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS, Harold Macmillan told the House of Commons shortly after it ended, represented “one of the great turning points in history.” The autumn of 1962, said President Kennedy, if not a turning point, was at least “a climactic period…even though its effects can’t be fully perceived now…. Future historians looking back at 1962 may well mark this year as the time when the tide…began [to turn].”

  Time will tell whether subsequent events—in Peking, Moscow, Dallas and elsewhere—have altered or will yet alter the accuracy of those prophecies. But in 1962-1963 little time elapsed before the impact of that crisis was affecting Soviet-American relations, Soviet-Chinese relations, the Western Alliance, domestic American politics and Castro’s Cuba itself.

  POSTCRISIS CUBA

  The first task was to make certain all Soviet offensive weapons left Cuba. One high official warned the day after Khrushchev’s letter of retreat that it might have been a fake while work continued on the missiles. Somewhat more attention was paid by the President to a letter he received from Dean Acheson which praised in superlative terms Kennedy’s handling of the crisis but warned, out of his experience with Korea, that national exultation could turn to national frustration as Communist negotiators wrangled on and on. Kennedy continued our aerial reconnaissance in the absence of the UN’s ability to mount a substitute, and provided formal notice to the Soviets of his action. He continued the daily, sometimes twice daily, meetings of the Executive Committee—continued the high state of readiness of American military forces in the Caribbean and elsewhere—and continued to supervise personally all releases to the press and all details of the prolonged discussions carried on at the UN by his team of negotiators. (Their views did not always reflect his caution after the earlier Soviet duplicity or his concern for Congressional relations; and he remarked to them only half in jest after one of many long sessions that “we seem to be spending as much time negotiating with you as you are negotiating with the So
viets.”)

  The Soviet negotiators, fearful that taunts from Red China would impair their standing in the eyes of other non-European Communists, were concerned with their relations with Cuba. Fidel Castro—who had earlier snarled that “whoever tries to inspect Cuba must come in battle array”—was stunned by Khrushchev’s reversal, to which he obviously had not consented. He adamantly insisted on five new conditions of his own, and harangued and harassed the UN’s U Thant when the Secretary General arrived to work out details. The baffled U Thant returned to New York, and the Soviet Union’s Mikoyan flew down for similar treatment. Castro complained to him that Cuba had been betrayed, tried to give the impression that the Chinese were moving in, argued fruitlessly with him for a week, totally ignored him for ten days, and finally resumed discussions only when Mikoyan prepared to fly back to Moscow. Castro, the Armenian was reported to have said, is like a mule—hard to convince and hard to deal with.

  Meanwhile, regardless of Castro’s wishes, the missile bases were dismantled by Soviet technicians. The sites were destroyed and plowed over. The missiles and other equipment were crated for return to the Soviet Union. Inasmuch as Castro continued to prohibit any on-site inspection, the crates were counted and inspected by American air and sea forces in the Caribbean, and the Soviet ships transporting them were followed all the way back to their home ports.

  Khrushchev at first balked at also removing the IL-28 bombers. They were too limited in range to pose much of a threat to the United States. Some of Kennedy’s advisers also suggested that he let the matter drop. But Kennedy (though wondering at times whether his stand was necessary) felt he had to insist on his original vow against all offensive weapons systems, rejected a variety of Khrushchev conditions, kept the quarantine ships on station and finally announced that he would hold a news conference on November 20 to discuss future steps. Setting the hour at 6 P.M. helped signal the seriousness of his intended statement. On November 19 he prepared letters to Macmillan, Adenauer and De Gaulle, warning them that the crisis was about to heat up again, and that air strikes and extensions of the blockade were being considered. On November 19 and 20 we worked on an opening statement which would sternly insist that the IL-28’s must go and call a new OAS Organ of Consultation meeting that week. On Wednesday afternoon, November 20, a few hours before the news conference was to begin, a new letter from Khrushchev arrived. The IL-28’s would be withdrawn in thirty days under full inspection, and Soviet combat units (identified a few days earlier) would be withdrawn “in due course.” A few hours later the President announced to the press not the calling of an OAS council but the end of the quarantine. November 22, 1962, became a Thanksgiving, in his words, with “much for which we can be grateful, as we look back to where we stood only four weeks ago.”

  From that date on the problem of a Soviet offensive military base in Cuba gradually and somewhat fitfully subsided. The President, at his news conference, had announced that the permanent withdrawal of all offensive weapons and the absence of any Cuban aggression would mean “peace in the Caribbean.” The Soviets regarded this as an insufficient fulfillment of the no-invasion pledge, particularly when the President accompanied it by a statement that our battle against Cuban subversion and our hopes for Cuban liberation would both continue. Nor did they like his announcement that our aerial surveillance of the island, a humiliating violation of Cuban air space, would continue, with a clear indication that any fulfillment of Castro’s threat to fire on such planes would be returned with whatever force was required. But the President insisted that Castro’s blocking of on-site inspection and controls not only required such flights but represented a Soviet failure to make good their side of the bargain. After exasperating weeks of haggling over how to wrap the crisis up officially in the UN, it silently sank into limbo.

  The problem of Castro, however, remained. However insignificant he may have been compared to nuclear missiles, the American public’s continued irritation with his presence, the Cuban refugees’ desperate efforts to keep the crisis alive and the Republican Party’s not unnatural desire to becloud John Kennedy’s triumph soon drowned the nation’s sense of pride in a sea of rumors and accusations. The national unity produced by military danger could not be maintained for the follow-up negotiations. Many patriots, once they recovered from their fright, went right back to calling for a blockade of Cuba because it was Cuba. Khrushchev, in one of his letters on the IL-28’s, expressed satisfaction with the election defeats of Nixon and others, who had, he said, made the most frenzied, bellicose speeches. But the number of such speeches was hardly diminished.

  More than three hundred competing, bickering Cuban refugee organizations flooded the Congress and the press with wild reports of missiles in caves, of secret submarine bases, of the potential use of MIGs and torpedo boats for offensive purposes and a supposed Kennedy promise for a second invasion. Public antagonisms were further aggravated by the dawdling rate at which the Soviets removed their 23,000 troops (although they had made no precise commitment on timing), by a MIG attack on an unmarked American shrimp boat near the Cuban coast and by the Republican charge that Kennedy’s aim of “peace in the Caribbean” amounted to a guarantee of Castro. A crackdown by Federal authorities on the publicity-seeking Cuban refugee groups who conducted hit-and-run raids on Cuban ports and shipping—damaging little other than our efforts to persuade the Soviets to leave—fed fuel to the fire. Success was also dimmed by a variety of charges regarding the adequacy of U.S. intelligence, the positions taken by particular advisers, the secrecy surrounding the Kennedy-Khrushchev letters and the “management” of news during the crisis.

  Time and again Kennedy patiently explained that our full surveillance would continue; that every refugee report was being checked out; that we had not tied our hands against Cuban subversion, sabotage or aggression; and that we had not weakened our efforts to isolate Castro politically and economically and end Communism in this hemisphere by every act short of war. Time and again he emphasized that questions of war and peace, attack and reprisal, should not be left to private organizations of exiles who had no responsibility or prospects of success (and whom he contrasted with those Bay of Pigs veterans who were quietly entering the American armed forces under special arrangement). “We should keep our heads and…know what we have in our hands,” he said, “before we bring the United States…to the brink again.” Finally, he authorized McNamara to present, in an unusual public disclosure of our reconnaissance capabilities, a comprehensive televised briefing which traced with aerial and naval photographs the arrival, installation, dismantling and removal of the Soviet weapons systems.

  In time much of the noise about Cuba faded away. But Kennedy never took his eye off Cuba. While he dismissed in his own mind more firmly than before the possibility of bringing Castro down through external military action, the effort to isolate his regime continued with increased success. Castro was hurt, though not mortally, by a lack of trade with the free world, a lack of spare parts and consumer goods, additional breaks in Latin-American diplomatic relations, plummeting popularity throughout the hemisphere and rising discomfort among hungry Cubans. “I don’t accept the view that Mr. Castro is going to be in power in five years,” said the President. “I can’t indicate the roads by which there will be a change, but I have seen enough change…to make me feel that time will see Cuba free again.”

  The newly established “Standing Group” of the National Security Council reviewed regularly the potential range of further actions against Castro, including:

  1. What military action would be taken in the event of a Hungary-type revolt, a reintroduction of offensive weapons or the downing of a U-2, the latter possibility having been increased by Cuban operation of Soviet SAMs.

  2. What steps could be taken to harass, disrupt and weaken Cuba politically and economically.

  3. What steps could be taken to get either Castro or the Soviets out of Cuba, or to get either Cuba or Castro away from the Soviets (the possibility of
enticing Fidel into becoming a Latin-American Tito with economic aid was regarded as a doubtful alternative because of his unreliability, because Congress would balk at providing the money, and because his success might encourage other Latin Americans to try the same course).

  4. What steps could be taken to curb the export of arms, agents and subversion from Cuba, a principal topic at Kennedy’s March conference with Central American leaders at San Jose, Costa Rica.

  5. What steps could be taken to make clear our concept of a free post-Castro Cuba. Pushed by Murrow, action on this front was of deep interest to the President. The United States could not—by supporting one of the many rival refugee groups as a government-in-exile or otherwise—dictate the personnel or policies of a future Cuban regime. But it was important, he thought, to make clear that our objection was to subversion, to dictatorship and to a Soviet satellite, not to “the genuine Cuban revolution…against the tyranny and corruption of the past.” He opposed an effort in the Congress to impose as the first condition to our dealing with a new Cuba its compensation of those Americans whose property had been expropriated by Castro. He stressed in a November 18, 1963, address to the Inter-American Press Association in Miami that only Cuba’s role as an agent of foreign imperialism prevented normal relations.

  Once this barrier is removed, we will be ready and anxious to work with the Cuban people in pursuit of those progressive goals which a few short years ago stirred their hopes…[to] extend the hand of friendship and assistance.

  These remarks were little noticed. But Kennedy hoped to expand on this theme in future speeches, to spell out to the Cuban people the freedoms, the hemispheric recognition and the American aid which would be forthcoming once they broke with Moscow. The Miami speech was unfortunately his last opportunity.