Listening In: The Secret White House Recordings of John F. Kennedy

by Ted Widmer

  Now, there are many things that you could say that would justify our coming to this conclusion. I’m sure you are aware of the fact that more bombings of churches and homes have taken place in Birmingham than any city in the United States, and not a one of these bombings over the last fifteen to twenty years has been solved. In fact, some twenty-eight have taken place in the last eight to ten years and all of these bombings remain unsolved. There is still a great problem of police brutality, and all of this came out in tragic dimensions Sunday when the bombing took place and four young girls were killed instantly, and then later in the day, two more. I think both were boys, the other two who were killed.

  Now, the real problem that we face is this. The Negro community is about to reach a breaking point. There is a great deal of frustration and despair and confusion in the Negro community, and there is a feeling of being alone and not being protected. If you walk the street, you aren’t safe. If you stay at home, you are not safe, there is a danger of a bomb. If you’re in church now, it isn’t safe. So that the Negro feels that everywhere he goes, if he remains stationary, he’s in danger of some physical violence.

  Now, this presents a real problem for those of us who find ourselves in leadership positions, because we are preaching at every moment the philosophy and the method of nonviolence. And I think that I can say without fear of successful contradiction, that we have been consistent in standing up for nonviolence at every point, and even with Sunday’s and Monday’s developments, we continue to be firm on this point. But more and more, we are facing a problem of our people saying, “What’s the use?” and we find it a little more difficult to get over nonviolence [to them].

  And I am convinced that if something is not done to give the Negro a new sense of hope and a sense of protection, there is a danger that we will face, and that will lead to the worst race rioting we’ve ever seen in this country. I think it’s just at that point. I don’t think it will happen if we can do something to save the situation, but I do think—and I voiced the sentiment in the evening as well with those that we met with the other day—that something dramatic must be done at this time to give the Negro in Birmingham and Alabama a new sense of hope and a good sense of protection.

  SURVEILLANCE PHOTOGRAPHS OF SOVIET SHIP POLTAVA EN ROUTE TO CUBA, SEPTEMBER 15, 1962

  The Cuban Missile Crisis was, in the words of British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, a “strange and still scarcely explicable affair.” Macmillan added that it represented the greatest period of strain in his many decades of public service, including World War II. It is generally agreed by historians that the crisis, which extended from October 16 to October 28, 1962, represented the high water mark of a Cold War that lasted nearly half a century between the United States and the Soviet Union. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was more specific and said that these two weeks saw “what many of us felt then, and what since has been generally agreed, was the greatest danger of a catastrophic war since the advent of the nuclear age.” In Robert Kennedy’s opinion, it threatened nothing less than “the end of mankind.” Scientists had previously estimated that an initial exchange of nuclear missiles would rain death upon seventy million people in both the Soviet Union and the United States. Fortunately, that theory remained a hypothesis only.

  It began quietly enough, with overhead surveillance photographs that indicated new construction in Cuba. As the evidence was studied, and gradually ascertained to prove new missile installations built by Soviet technicians, it was clear that all of the underlying assumptions of the Cold War had changed. Robert Kennedy records that his brother called him on the morning of October 16, simply telling him that there was “great trouble.”

  That trouble was political in many ways. President Kennedy had to both conciliate and stand up to the Soviet Union, in the right measure; he had to win over the court of world opinion; and he had to guide forward a measured American response from a government that did not entirely speak with one voice. The Joint Chiefs of Staff demanded immediate retaliation of a kind that almost certainly would have led to a thermonuclear apocalypse. As they encountered resistance from the President, one of their more outspoken leaders, Air Force General Curtis LeMay, accused Kennedy of “appeasement,” a word with a rich legacy, tracing back to Neville Chamberlain’s futile accommodation of Adolf Hitler in 1938. Few historians had studied that episode more closely than Kennedy himself.

  But Kennedy had on his side the fact that the Soviet Union had baldly lied about its intentions. It also became clear, not long into the crisis, that most of the world stood with him. A complex diplomacy ensued, involving official communiqués, back-door messages, speeches to the nation, confrontations in the United Nations, and a crucial decision to accept certain offers and to reject others as if they never existed. As the tapes reveal, the President was also supported by a superb leadership team that functioned effectively as a unit, going with little sleep and working incessantly to improve his options from the unthinkable to the unpalatable, and ultimately to the acceptable. The resulting decision not to go to war was greeted with euphoria around the world and brought many dividends, including a calming of international tensions, and the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963.

  The Cuban Missile Crisis remains noteworthy for another reason—it shows off the taping system to its finest advantage. We will never know all of the reasons that President Kennedy installed his tapes, but if he was worried about the poor advice he was receiving on military matters, the tapes bear that theory out, and bear witness to this day. They, too, performed well—they rolled through the crisis, and the result is a historic record of enormous importance for any student of the presidency and how it functions in a time of near-cataclysm.

  MEETING WITH MILITARY ADVISORS, OCTOBER 16, 1962

  This meeting, the first in response to the crisis, begins with a brief conversation between a four-year-old Caroline Kennedy and her father, as the meeting was getting under way.

  PRESIDENT KENNEDY WITH DAUGHTER CAROLINE IN THE OVAL OFFICE (PHOTOGRAPH BY JACQUELINE KENNEDY)

  CAROLINE: Daddy?

  JFK: Oh, excuse me. I’ll see you later, Caroline. I’ll see you later.

  CAROLINE: Know what? [I won’t let you do much?] [laughter]

  JFK: OK.

  ARTHUR LUNDAHL:1 This is a result of the photography taken Sunday, sir. There’s a medium-range ballistic missile launch site and two new military encampments on the southern edge of Sierra del Rosario, in west-central Cuba.

  JFK: Where would that be?

  LUNDAHL: West-central, sir.

  MARSHALL CARTER:2 That’s south of Havana. I think [unclear] represents your three dots we’re talking about. Have you got the …?

  [UNIDENTIFIED]: Yes, sir.

  LUNDAHL: The President would like to see those. One site, on one of the encampments contains a total of at least fourteen canvas-covered missile trailers measuring sixty-seven feet in length, nine feet in width. The overall length of the trailers plus the tow bars is approximately eighty feet. The other encampment contains vehicles and tents, but with no missile trailers.

  CARTER: These are the launchers here. These are missile bases up the [unclear]. In this instance the missile trailer is backing up to the launch point. The launch point of this particular vehicle is here. The missile [unclear] feet long.

  LUNDAHL: The site that you have there contains at least eight canvas-covered missile trailers. Four deployed probably missile erector-launchers. These are unvetted. The probable launch positions as indicated are approximately 850 feet, 700 feet, 450 feet, for a total distance of about 2000 feet. In area two, there are at least six canvas-covered missile trailers, about seventy-five vehicles, about 18 tents. And in area number three we have thirty-five vehicles, fifteen large tents, eight small tents, seven buildings, and one building under construction. The critical one—do you see what I mean?—is this one.

  CARTER: There is, right there, see? The missile trailer is backing up to it at the moment. It’s got to be. And the
missile trailer is here. Seven more have been enlarged here. Those canvas-covered objects on the trailers were sixty-seven feet long, and there’s a small billet between the two of them. The gate on that side of the particular trailer [unclear]. That looks like the most advanced one. Then the other area is about five miles away. There are no launcher-erectors over there, just missiles.

  JFK: How far advanced is this?

  LUNDAHL: Sir, we’ve never seen this kind of an installation before.

  JFK: Not even in the Soviet Union?

  LUNDHAHL: No, sir. … But from May of ’60 we have never had any U-2 coverage of the Soviet Union. So we do not know what kind of a practice they would use in connection with …

  JFK: How do you know this is a medium-range ballistic missile?

  LUNDAHL: The length, sir.

  JFK: The what? The length?

  LUNDAHL: The length of it, yes.

  JFK: The length of the missile? Which part? I mean, which …

  LUNDAHL: The missile is …

  JFK: Which one is that?

  LUNDAHL: This will show it, sir.

  JFK: That?

  LUNDAHL: Yes. Mr. Graybeal, our missile man, has some pictures of the equivalent Soviet equipment that has been dragged through the streets of Moscow. That can give you some feel for it, sir.

  SIDNEY GRAYBEAL:3 There are two missiles involved. One of them is our SS-3, which is 630-mile and on up to 700. It’s sixty-eight feet long. These missiles measure out to be sixty-seven feet long. The other missile, the 1100 one, is seventy-three feet long. The question we have in the photography is the nose itself. If the nose cone is not on that missile and it measures sixty-seven feet—the nose cone would be four to five feet longer, sir—and with this extra length we could have a missile that would have a range of 1100 miles, sir. The missile that was drawn through the Moscow parade was, from the pictures, but …

  JFK: Is this ready to be fired?

  GRAYBEAL: No, sir.

  JFK: How long have we got? We can’t tell, can we, how long before it can be fired?

  GRAYBEAL: No, sir. That depends on how ready the GSC4 … how …

  JFK: But what does it have to be fired from?

  AERIAL PHOTOGRAPH OF SOVIET MISSILE INSTALLATIONS IN CUBA, OCTOBER 14, 1962

  GRAYBEAL: It would have to be fired from a stable, hard surface. This could be packed dirt. It could be concrete, or asphalt. The surface has to be hard. Then you put a flame-deflector plate on there to direct the missile.

  ROBERT MCNAMARA: Would you care to comment on the position of nuclear warheads? This is in relation to the question from the President—when can those be fired?

  GRAYBEAL: Sir, we’ve looked very hard. We can find nothing that would spell nuclear warhead in terms of any isolated area of unique security in this particular area. The mating of the nuclear warhead to the missile from some of the other short-range missiles there would take about a couple of hours to do this.

  MCNAMARA: This is not fenced, I believe, at the moment?

  LUNDAHL: Not yet, sir.

  MCNAMARA: This is important, as it relates to whether these, today, are ready to fire, Mr. President. It seems almost impossible to me that they would be ready to fire with nuclear warheads on the site without even a fence around it. It may not take long to place them there, to erect a fence. But at least at the moment there is some reason to believe the warheads aren’t present and hence they are not ready to fire.

  GRAYBEAL: Yes, sir. We do not believe they are ready to fire.

  MAXWELL TAYLOR:5 However, there is no feeling that they can’t fire from this kind of field position very quickly, isn’t that true? It’s not a question of waiting for extensive concrete pads and that sort of thing.

  GRAYBEAL: The unknown factor here, sir, is the degree to which the equipment has been checked out after it’s been shipped from the Soviet Union here. It’s the readiness of the equipment. If the equipment is checked out, the site has to be accurately surveyed, the position has to be known. Once this is known, then you’re talking a matter of hours.

  PRIVATE DICTATION, OCTOBER 18, 1962

  On only a handful of occasions, President Kennedy used his tape-recording equipment as a device to record his own observations, presumably for his future use in writing a memoir. October 18 had obviously been a day of great strain, and as it ended, he recorded his memory of the day, and how members of his staff had lined up on the great questions that were arrayed before them.

  JFK: Secretary McNamara, Assistant Secretary Gilpatric, General Taylor, the attorney general, George Ball, Alexis Johnson, Ed Martin, McGeorge Bundy, Ted Sorensen.6 During the course of the day the opinions had obviously switched from the advantages of a first strike on the missile sites and on Cuban aviation, to a blockade. Dean Acheson,7 with whom I talked this afternoon, stated while he was uncertain about any of the courses, favored the first strike as being less likely to produce, being most likely to achieve our result and less likely to cause an extreme Soviet reaction, that strike to take place just against the missile sites. When I saw Robert Lovett8 later after talking to Gromyko, he was not convinced that any action was desirable. He felt that the missile … the first strike would be very destructive to our alliances. The Soviets would inevitably bring about a reprisal, that we would be blamed for it and that particularly if the reprisal were to seize Berlin, and we would be regarded as having seized, brought about the loss of Berlin with inadequate provocation, they having lived with these intermediate range ballistic missiles for years. Bundy continued to argue against any action on the grounds that there would be inevitably a Soviet reprisal against Berlin and this would divide our alliance and that we would bear that responsibility. He felt it would be better off to merely take note of existence of these missiles and to wait until the crunch comes from Berlin, and not play what he thought might be the Soviet game. Everyone else felt that for us to fail to respond would throw into question our willingness to respond over Berlin, would divide our allies and our country, and we would be faced with a crunch over Berlin in two or three months, and that by that time the Soviets would have a large missile arsenal in the western hemisphere which would weaken our whole position in the hemisphere and cause us, and face us with the same problem we are going to have in Berlin anyway. The consensus was that we should go ahead with the blockade beginning on Sunday night. Originally we should begin by blockading Soviet—against the shipment of additional offensive capacity, that we could tighten the blockade as the situation requires. I was most anxious that we not have to announce the state of war existing, because it would obviously be bad to have the word go out that we were having a war rather than a limited blockade for a limited purpose. It was determined that I should go ahead with my speeches so that we don’t take the cover off this and come back Saturday night.

  MEETING WITH JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF, OCTOBER 19, 1962

  President Kennedy’s options, somewhat limited to begin with, were constrained further by the fact that his military advisors were urging him to invade Cuba, and were openly dismissive of diplomatic channels. Kennedy, in other words, had to negotiate around adversaries at home as well as abroad. The Air Force chief of staff, General Curtis LeMay, attempted to force the President’s hand when he complained that Kennedy’s delay in attack was similar to the appeasement of Hitler at Munich. In fact, since the opening of Russian archives, historians have learned that the Russians had far more missiles and troops in Cuba than were known at the time, and it would have been impossible to knock them all out with an air attack.

  JFK: Let me just say a little, first, about what the problem is, from my point of view. First, I think we ought to think of why the Russians did this. Well, actually, it was a rather dangerous but rather useful play of theirs. We do nothing, they have a missile base there with all the pressure that brings to bear on the United States and damage to our prestige. If we attack Cuban missiles, or Cuba, in any way, it gives them a clear line to take Berlin, as they were able to do in Hungary under the
Anglo war in Egypt. We will have been regarded as—We would be regarded as the trigger-happy Americans who lost Berlin. We would have no support among our allies. We would affect the West Germans’ attitude toward us. And that we let Berlin go because we didn’t have the guts to endure a situation in Cuba. After all, Cuba is five or six thousand miles from them. They don’t give a damn about Cuba. But they do care about Berlin and about their own security. So they would say that we endangered their interests and security. And the implication [would be] that all the rest [happened] because of the end reaction that we took in Cuba. So I think they’ve got … I must say, I think it’s a very satisfactory position from their point of view. If you take the view that what really … And clearly, if we do nothing then they’ll have these missiles and they’ll be able to say anytime we ever try to do anything about Cuba, they’ll fire these missiles. So that I think it’s dangerous, but rather satisfactory, from their point of view.

  If you take the view that what’s basic to them is Berlin and, there isn’t any doubt. In every conversation we’ve had with the Russians, that’s what … Even last night we [Gromyko and I] talked about Cuba for a while, but Berlin, that’s what Khrushchev is committed to personally. So actually, it’s quite a desirable position from their point of view.

  (unclear) McCone visit

  military mission

  over flights