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

by Ted Widmer

  PRIME MINISTER HAROLD MACMILLAN OF GREAT BRITAIN AND PRESIDENT KENNEDY, APRIL 5, 1961

  MACMILLAN: There’s one idea that you’ve just mentioned is that Cuba might be made like Belgium was—an international guarantee—an inviolable country which now all of us would guarantee its neutrality and inviolability. Is that a possibility?

  JFK: Well, that is a matter which seems to me we ought to be thinking about and we will be talking about that in the next twenty-four hours as to whether there is any room for a settlement on that basis. That would leave Castro in power, it would leave the Russians perhaps free to ship in a good deal more of defensive equipment and they have shipped in a good deal. We now find a good many self-propelled armored vehicles with very sophisticated conventional equipment and so on, but it may be a possibility, but I could probably give you more information about that by tomorrow night, but at least there have been a couple of hints but not enough to go on yet.

  MACMILLAN: Yes, now I thought another possibility was that U Thant might himself propose to the United Nations, which I believe they would accept, that he should go with a team and ensure that these missiles were made inoperable during the period of any conference or discussions.

  JFK: Yes, that is correct. There would have to be some technical way of determining that these weapons were being made inoperable and that work on the sites was ceasing during these conversations. That is correct.

  MACMILLAN: Yes, but do you think that U Thant mightn’t … I am quite sure that Hammarskjöld22 would have done such a thing. Mightn’t he suggest to the United Nations that he would do this? He would go and do it with a team and see that they were not operable during the period of the talks.

  JFK: Yes, there is some suggestion of that. Also they want to inspect some of the refugee camps in Florida and Nicaragua, Guatemala and Swan Island. That came up in the conversation with the governor and I am looking into it. I don’t think we have got anything going there that would be difficult to inspect but this is all part of the political proposals which are now being looked at in view of the governor’s conversation. So I would sum it up, Prime Minister, by saying that by tomorrow morning or noon we should be in a position of knowing whether there is some political proposal that we could agree to which—and whether the Russians are interested in it or not. We will know a little more I think by tomorrow afternoon. In the meanwhile the quarantine stays, he doesn’t send ships in, we let a ship pass this afternoon, but there’s no other ships within forty-eight hours or so, so we don’t expect any problems on the sea. The problem that concerns us is the continued buildup and I issued a statement on that today. I think I can probably get you a little more precise information on the various political proposals and U Thant’s conversation with Stevenson. I’ll send you a report on that tonight and then you will have it in the morning.

  MACMILLAN: There is just a third point that occurred to us. If we want to help the Russians to save face, would it be worthwhile our undertaking to immobilize our Thor missiles which are here in England during the same period—during the conference.

  JFK: Well, let me put that into the machinery and then I’ll be in touch with you on that.

  MACMILLAN: I think it is just an idea that it might help the Russians to accept.

  JFK: Good, Prime Minister, let me send that over to the Department. I think we don’t want to have too many dismantlings, but it is possible that that proposal might help; they might also insist on Greece—on Turkey and Italy—but I will keep in mind your suggestion here so that if it gets into that, that may be advantageous.

  MACMILLAN: Yes, I don’t see why they should ask, because we have got sixty, so that missile for missile you see there wouldn’t be as many as that in Cuba.

  JFK: Yes that is correct. Let me—I’ll let Stevenson know that and he will have that in mind in the conversation.

  MACMILLAN: Well now, if there are any other suggestions that we can make, you will probably send me a message tonight and we can get in touch with you tomorrow.

  JFK: That is correct, Prime Minister. I think we just have to wait until we’ve analyzed this conversation. I haven’t seen the entire conversation, but I think that there may—and the prospect of a trade of these missiles for some guarantees of Cuba is still so vague that I am not really in a position to say that there is any possibility of it as yet. Maybe by tomorrow evening at this time we’ll know better.

  MACMILLAN: Yes, because of course at this stage any movement by yours, by you, may produce a result in Berlin which would be very bad for us all. That’s the danger now.

  JFK: Well, we’re not going to have any problem at sea because he is keeping his ships out of there, and as I say we let one ship pass today for the very reason that you’ve named. On the other hand, if in the end of forty-eight hours we are getting noplace and the missile sites continue to be constructed, then we are going to be faced with some hard decisions.

  MACMILLAN: And of course in making those decisions, one has to realize that they will have their effect on Berlin as well as on Cuba.

  JFK: That’s correct, and that is really why we have not done more than we have done up till now. But of course on the other hand if the missile sites continue and get constructed and we don’t do anything about it, then I would suppose that it would have quite an effect on Berlin anyway.

  MACMILLAN: Yes, I think that is the difficulty, but anyway there are these political plans which we have now got going, and if I may, I’ll send you a message concerning them and you will send me the result of U Thant’s conversation.

  JFK: Yes, I’ll send you a memorandum based on the copy of the conversation that Stevenson had with U Thant. I will also keep in touch with you tomorrow at this time if you’re—or otherwise I’ll send you a message tomorrow. Maybe I’ll send you a message unless we have got something immediate. And number three, we will not take any further action until I have talked to you in any case. I won’t bother to call you tomorrow, because I may be down—I may be away from here tomorrow evening and I assume you may be, too. But I will send you a message if there is anything new, and in any case I will talk to you on the phone before we do anything of a drastic nature.

  MACMILLAN: Well, thank you. I will be here all day so you can get me any time today, tomorrow, or Sunday.

  JFK: Prime Minister, I’m going to send you a note tonight or tomorrow morning about asking if it’s agreeable with you if General Norstad stay on until January 1, that there be an overlap with Lemnitzer’s23 tour of duty; that Lemnitzer go over there and take over the American forces and be there and have that sixty-day period to be sort of adjusted to his new responsibilities. You’ll be getting a formal letter, and I didn’t want to say anything about it because we haven’t been in touch with General de Gaulle as yet, who is very sensitive in these NATO matters. But I will be in touch with you and I would assume probably that the suggestion would be agreeable to you?

  MACMILLAN: It is indeed very sensible.

  JFK: Good. Well I’ll be in touch in a formal way with you tomorrow on that matter and I’ll send you tonight the memorandum on the U Thant conversation—over and I hope all goes well.

  MACMILLAN: Well thank you very much and of course Bundy can always ring up de Zulueta24 here. They can speak to each other so it is quite easy to have a talk.

  JFK: Good, fine, Prime Minister, and I’ll be in touch with you very shortly. Thank you and good night.

  MACMILLAN: Good night.

  MEETING IN CABINET ROOM, OCTOBER 27, 1962

  On October 27, President Kennedy and his team were weighing different offers from Khrushchev, and the complicated separate issue of dismantling aging Jupiter missiles in Turkey.

  RFK: You made an offer, up there now, and you also ask U Thant to find an answer to this. Now if U Thant should come back and say, number one, that they are going to continue the work on the bases, in which case, I suppose we have to move in some way. Or they are going to say that they are going to discontinue the work on the bases. If they
say they are going to discontinue the work on the bases, they can either accept our proposal, or they can reject the proposal and say we still want Turkey for Cuba.

  If they reject the proposal and say they want Turkey for Cuba, but they are going to discontinue the work on the bases, I would think, would be the time to bring NATO in and say, “This is the proposal, do you want to consider it?” We haven’t lost anything, and they have discontinued the work on the bases. If they say they are going to continue the work on the bases, I think then we’ve got to decide whether, if they have said by tomorrow morning that they are going to continue the work on the bases whether we are going to have a military strike.

  I think if you have a meeting of NATO tomorrow morning, I don’t see that that is going to, I think it’s going to shoot this other possibility which U Thant has suggested, of going forward with this letter, and see if we can trade the non-invasion of Cuba for this, and I think we are keeping the pressure on. We don’t look like we’re weakening on the whole Turkey complex. I mean, I don’t see that you are losing anything by not having the meeting tomorrow morning, except the fact, I admit you are risking something, because some of the allies are going to say that you’re out of your mind.

  MCGEORGE BUNDY: I would prefer to let Finletter25 find out for a day what people think.

  JFK: It’s going to be … you see, they haven’t had the alternatives presented to them. They’ll say, “Well, God, we don’t want to trade them off!” They don’t realize that in two or three days, we may have a military strike which would bring perhaps the seizure of Berlin or a strike on Turkey. And then they’ll say, “My God, we should have taken it!”

  CABINET MEETING, OCTOBER 18, 1962

  * * *

  Cabinet meeting attendees included: Clarence Douglas Dillon; Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy; Administrator for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) James Webb; Administrator for the Housing and Home Finance Association (HHFA) Robert Weaver; Postmaster General James Edward Day; Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara; Secretary of Labor William Willard Wirtz; Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) Anthony Celebrezze; Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) Glenn Seaborg; Special Counsel to the President Theodore C. Sorensen; and Special Assistant to the President Jerome Wiesner.

  CONVERSATION WITH SECRETARY OF DEFENSE ROBERT MCNAMARA, OCTOBER 27, 1962

  Even at this late date in the crisis, as pressure for a peaceful solution was mounting on both leaders, there were moments of grave danger. In this conversation, JFK reiterates his desire to call up reserves.

  JFK: Let me say, I think we ought to wait till tomorrow, to see whether we get any answers if U Thant goes down there. We’re rapidly approaching a real … I don’t think that firing back at a twenty-millimeter [gun] coming off the ground is good. I think we ought to figure that Monday, if tomorrow they fire at us and we don’t have any answers from the Russians. Then Monday, it seems to me, we can, ought to, maybe, consider making a statement tomorrow about the firing and regarding [the fact that] we’ll take action now any place in Cuba, on those three areas we can fire. And then go in and take all of the SAM sites out. I’d rather take … I don’t think that it does any good to take it out, to try to fire at a twenty-millimeter on the ground. You just hazard our planes, and the people on the ground have the advantage.

  On the other hand, I don’t want, I don’t think we do any good to begin to sort of half do it. I think we ought to keep tomorrow clean, do the best we can with the surveillance. If they still fire and haven’t got a satisfactory answer back from the Russians, I think we ought to put a statement out tomorrow that we are fired upon. We are therefore considering the island of Cuba as an open territory, and then take out all these SAM sites.

  Otherwise, what we’re going to do is find this buildup of the protection for the SAM sites low, with guns to fire at low-flying planes, and the SAM sites high, missiles for high-flying aircraft, and we’ll find ourselves without … Our reply will be so limited that we’ll find ourselves with all the disadvantages.

  I think we ought to, tomorrow, let’s get U Thant our messages. If they fire on us, tell them we’ll take them all out. And then if we don’t get some satisfaction from the Russians or U Thant or Cuba tomorrow night, figure that Monday we’re going to do something about the SAM sites. What do you think?

  ROBERT MCNAMARA: I would say only that we ought to keep some type of pressure on tonight and tomorrow night that indicates we’re firm. If we call off these air strikes tonight, I think that settles …

  UNIDENTIFIED: I have a paper here, Mr. President, that we haven’t discussed yet.

  MCNAMARA: Let me say first, I believe we should issue an order tonight calling up the twenty-four air reserve squadrons, roughly three hundred troop-carrier transports, which are required for an invasion. And this would both be a preparatory move, and also a strong indication of what lies ahead.

  JFK: I think we ought to do it.

  AERIAL PHOTOGRAPH OF SOVIET MISSILE LAUNCH SITE, SAN CRISTOBAL, CUBA, OCTOBER 27, 1962

  CALL TO PRESIDENT DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER, OCTOBER 28, 1962

  With the crisis unwinding, President Kennedy placed a round of relieved calls to all three living former presidents: Eisenhower, Truman, and Hoover. The calls with Truman and Hoover are relatively brief, but with Eisenhower (whom Kennedy addressed as both “Mr. President” and “General”), there was more time spent on strategy, including a surprising detour into the “goddamned mountainous country” of Tibet.

  JFK: Hello?

  OPERATOR: Yes, please.

  JFK: Oh, is the general on there?

  OPERATOR: I’ll put him on, yes, sir. Ready.

  JFK: Hello?

  EISENHOWER: General Eisenhower, Mr. President.

  JFK: General, how are you?

  EISENHOWER: Pretty good, thanks.

  JFK: Oh, fine. General, I just wanted to bring you up-to-date on this matter, because I know of your concern about it. We got, Friday night, got a message from Khrushchev, which said that he would withdraw these missiles and technicians and so on, providing we did not plan to invade Cuba. We then got a message, that public one the next morning, in which he said he would do that if we withdrew our missiles from Turkey. We then, as you know, issued a statement that we couldn’t get into that deal. So we then got this message this morning. So we now have to wait to see how it unfolds, and there’s a good deal of complexities to it. If the withdrawal of these missiles, technicians, and the cessation of subversive activity by them …

  LETTER FROM SOVIET PREMIER NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV TO PRESIDENT KENNEDY, OCTOBER 26, 1962

  THE OFFICIAL TRANSLATION OF SOVIET PREMIER KHRUSHCHEV’S LETTER OF OCTOBER 26, 1962

  EISENHOWER: Yeah.

  JFK: Well, we just have to set up satisfactory procedures to determine whether these actions will be carried out. So I would think that, if we can do that, we’ll be, find our interests advanced, even though it may be only one more chapter in a rather long story, as far as Cuba is concerned.

  EISENHOWER: Of course, but Mr. President, did he put any conditions in whatsoever, in there?

  JFK: No, except that we’re not going to invade Cuba.

  EISENHOWER: Yes.

  JFK: That’s the only one we’ve got now. But we don’t plan to invade Cuba under these conditions anyway.

  EISENHOWER: No.

  JFK: So if we can get ’em out, we’re better off by far.

  EISENHOWER: That’s correct. I quite agree. I just wondered whether he was trying to, knowing we would keep our word, whether he would try to engage us in any kind of statement or commitment that would finally, one day, could be very embarrassing. Listen, suppose they got in, suppose they start to bombard Guantánamo?26

  JFK: Right.

  EISENHOWER: That’s what I’m getting at. I quite agree, this is a very, I think, conciliatory move he’s made.

  JFK: Right.

  EISENHOWER: Provided that he doesn’t say that …

/>   JFK: Oh, well, I agree. Oh yes, that’s right. I think what we’ve got to do is keep … That’s why I don’t think the Cuban story can be over yet. I think we will retain sufficient freedom to protect our interests if he …

  EISENHOWER: That’s all I was saying.

  JFK: … if he, if they engage in subversion. If they attempt to do any aggressive acts, and so on, then all bets are off. In addition, my guess is that, by the end of next month, we’re going to be toe-to-toe on Berlin, anyway. So that I think this is important for the time being, because it requires quite a step down, really, for Khrushchev. On the other hand, I think that, as we all know, they just probe, and their word’s unreliable, so we just have to stay busy on it.

  EISENHOWER: As I’ve averred before, Mr. President, there’s one thing about … They, these people, do not equate, and I think it’s been a mistake to equate Berlin with Cuba or anything else.

  JFK: Right.

  EISENHOWER: They take any spot in the world. They don’t care where it is.

  JFK: That’s right.

  EISENHOWER: And it’s just the question is, are you in such a place you either can’t or won’t resist?