by Larry Tye
Bobby emphasized to the Soviet ambassador that “the White House was not prepared to formalize the accord, even by means of strictly confidential letters, and that the American side preferred not to engage in any correspondence on so sensitive an issue,” Dobrynin recalled in his memoir. The attorney general also confided to the ambassador in the wake of the crisis another reason why stealth was imperative: “That some day—who knows?—he might run for president, and his prospects could be damaged if this secret deal about the missiles in Turkey were to come out.” Bobby offered a stick along with his carrot: If the Soviets didn’t agree to the arrangement, the United States would likely attack Cuba in short order.
The rest of the world didn’t learn about the deal until twenty-seven years later when, at a conference in Moscow, Dobrynin challenged John Kennedy’s speechwriter and confidant Ted Sorensen to come clean. Sorensen publicly confessed that, after Bobby died but before Thirteen Days was published, he removed from the text Bobby’s “very explicit” admission about the missile swap. “At that time it was still a secret even on the American side, except for the six of us who had been present at that meeting,”*12 he said, “so I took it upon myself to edit that out.” Sorensen maintained the cover-up not just to protect himself and his co-conspirators, but to safeguard the hard-line reputation of the president he cherished, whose role in the missile crisis needed no burnishing.
Thirteen Days indulged in another self-interested untruth. As the book describes it, the Soviet placement of missiles in Cuba took America by total surprise. “No official within the government,” Bobby wrote, “had ever suggested to President Kennedy that the Russian buildup in Cuba would include missiles.” Saying otherwise would have made the president look derelict for ignoring what were, in fact, repeated warnings. Some came from CIA director John McCone, who, in September 1962, took time from his honeymoon on the French Riviera to pass on his growing suspicions that the Soviets were installing offensive weapons in Cuba. (Bobby would later say that if McCone had been serious, “he should have come home and worked on it, not be sending a letter from Cannes, France.”) Other alerts came from Republican senator Kenneth Keating of New York, who claimed to have “fully confirmed” evidence of missile sites under construction in Cuba nearly a week before pictures taken by a U-2 spy plane documented their existence. Bobby’s reaction to the U-2 photographs was typically blunt: “Oh shit!, Shit!, Shit! Those sons a bitches Russians.” He was infuriated not just by the weapons installations, but because the Soviets had promised not to take any precipitous actions before the upcoming congressional elections. He also had seen this confrontation coming and perhaps blamed himself for not doing enough to head it off. For it was Bobby himself who had sounded the earliest and strongest warnings eighteen months before, when he ended a memo to the president by saying, “If we don’t want Russia to set up missile bases in Cuba, we had better decide now what we are willing to do to stop it.”
As was his wont, Bobby used his book to reward his friends and to undermine his enemies. Robert McNamara, a “goodie” in Bobby’s and Ethel’s vernacular, became the blockade’s “strongest advocate” and someone JFK considered “the most valuable public servant in his Administration.” He was both, by the end, but there is no mention of his earlier insistence on “nothing short of a full invasion.” Baddies were cut no such slack. Bobby had never had any use for Dean Rusk, his idea of the quintessential deskbound, overstarched bureaucrat. The secretary of state, he said, should have chaired meetings during those thirteen days but often arrived late, left early, or didn’t show up. He later added that Rusk “was impossible….He would always adjust. No matter what the subject was. Never argue. Never take a position that was different….He collapsed physically and mentally during that period of time—just because of the strain.”*13 The tapes, however, prove that Rusk attended nineteen of the twenty critical meetings during the crisis, and McGeorge Bundy, JFK’s national security advisor, put Rusk’s role in the critical missile swap on par with Bobby’s.*14 The attorney general also thrashed the vice president, telling a Kennedy Library interviewer that Johnson “was against our policy on Cuba in October of ’62…although I never knew quite what he was for.” As for Adlai Stevenson, the Kennedys’ ambassador to the United Nations but not their friend, Bobby called him “courageous” but wrong in proposing the blockade-and-negotiate strategy that became the consensus choice. “We have to get someone better at the UN or put some starch in the son of a bitch’s back,” Bobby told Jack loudly enough for others to overhear.
Embellishments and score settling notwithstanding, Bobby did have a compelling case to make for his own contributions during those history-making thirteen days. He drew on his skills as an interrogator and listener to recognize the best ideas being voiced in the White House Cabinet Room. Acting as de facto chairman of the meetings, he ensured that the president heard the full spectrum of views as the crisis was building, then he mobilized support for JFK’s decisions. Who better to conciliate than someone who had been both hawk and dove, and who among cabinet officers had less to prove to the commander in chief? He also was effective enough as an intermediary with the Soviets that Khrushchev later paid him a compliment: “In our negotiations with the Americans during the crisis, they had, on the whole, been open and candid with us, especially Robert Kennedy.”*15
Nobody worked harder during those two weeks than Bobby. He met with cabinet officials during the day, the Russians at night, and found time in between to check on Jimmy Hoffa and other matters at the Justice Department. “I watched him walk slowly up the stairs, briefcase in hand, his shoulders hunched,” one aide recalled. “When I think of him now, that is the image that comes to my mind again and again: the lean figure standing in the late-afternoon sun near the top of the steps, arm outstretched, waving.” While the tape recordings exposed his self-important habit of thinking out loud, they also let us see the intellect and wit that helped his colleagues clarify their thinking. Bleak as those days were, Bobby still cracked jokes, asking the officials who showed him the U-2 photos, “Will those goddamn things reach Oxford, Mississippi?” Ever conscious of snooping reporters, he got fellow National Security Council members to pile into his limousine on one another’s laps so as not to arouse suspicions by having a lineup of limos pull up to the White House during the earliest days of the crisis, when the public didn’t know what was happening. Told later of the plans to evacuate top officials to a bunker in West Virginia if things got bad, he instructed his aide, “I’m not going. If it comes to that, there’ll be sixty million Americans killed and as many Russians or more. I’ll be at Hickory Hill.” The night of Black Saturday, eating a warmed-over dinner of broiled chicken in the upstairs living room at the White House, JFK recounted to a friend all the ways that RFK had helped during the crisis. Such an open display of affection for his brother was so unusual, Dave Powers added, that years later he remembered precisely the president’s last words on the matter: “Thank God for Bobby.”
Why, given all that he did right, wasn’t Bobby more forthright in his book? It was partly genetics. Joe Kennedy had warned his children, “Don’t put it in writing,” and while many of them published books, none bared their souls or secrets. Politics played an even more critical role, as Bobby had hinted to Ambassador Dobrynin. The goal when he first conceived of Thirteen Days was to polish the president’s image around what both brothers considered the singular accomplishment of his first term as he campaigned for reelection in 1964. The crisis had already demonstrated its political punch when JFK’s approval rating soared to 74 percent in November 1962, and Democrats did better than anyone dreamed in the midterm elections, with a net gain of four Senate seats and a loss of just four in the House. After Jack was killed, however, Bobby set the book aside.
When he finally picked it up again in 1967, Bobby reimagined Thirteen Days as the literary foundation for his own race for the White House. Jack had pointed the way with his 1956 bestseller, Profiles in Courage, which was half h
istory treatise, half a way of introducing the senator to America. Bobby would run in 1968 as an antiwar candidate, and he wanted to underscore his peacemaking credentials and paper over his cold warrior past. He couldn’t tell the true story of his uneven performance in October 1962, not if he had his eyes on the presidency. Robert McNamara, who understood Bobby’s ambitions, helped by writing an introduction to Thirteen Days that extolled the author for “a most extraordinary combination of energy and courage, compassion and wisdom.” When JFK crony Kenny O’Donnell got a look at an early draft, he teased, “Bobby, I thought your brother was president during the missile crisis.” Bobby: “Yeah, but he’s not running and I am.” The CIA reviewed a later draft, after Bobby was dead. “I listed a number of errors or inaccuracies. From what I was to understand, others who read the galley did the same,” said Dino Brugioni, a longtime senior intelligence official. “When these were shown to the publisher, it was decided not to correct the errors but to allow the book to stand as written.”
It is tempting to blame those errors on faulty memory, but Bobby knew about the tape recordings documenting what he and others had said, and he apparently used an early and rough four-hundred-page transcription to refresh his memory. National security might have been an excuse for some of the secrecy surrounding deliberations at the time of the crisis, but it wasn’t five years later. And it is legitimate to blame Sorensen for editing out the truth, but only about the missile swap. What Bobby picked and chose was the version he wanted to tell. He wasn’t worried about being contradicted because he trusted that the tapes had been the president’s private property and would never be made public, or at least not before the 1968 election. It was not unlike the miscalculation Richard Nixon would make four years later, during Watergate.
What Bobby wrote mattered because, grave as he and we thought the crisis was, later revelations by the Soviets and the Cubans made clear that the perils were substantially worse. The Russians had more missiles than America believed, with greater capability to take out short-range targets like the U.S. base in Guantánamo Bay in addition to long-range objectives like Manhattan. There actually were forty-three thousand Soviet soldiers on hand, not the ten thousand we thought. Scarier still was the fact that Castro had encouraged Khrushchev to launch a preemptive nuclear strike against America if America invaded Cuba. Castro and his Russian benefactors also had lightweight rocket launchers in the field to repel any attackers with atomic weapons. The Soviet submarines we were tracking and harassing each carried a nuclear-tipped torpedo, and their commanders had orders to use them to break the blockade if war broke out. All of which made it even more essential that, after the fact, policymakers soberly study what happened over those thirteen days—what went wrong as well as right, what we did and didn’t know.
Instead, based in part on Bobby Kennedy’s watered-down and self-referential rendition of events in his book and elsewhere, we drew the wrong lessons from this first-ever nuclear showdown. Dean Rusk’s “eyeball to eyeball” quotation, reported in a December 1962 Saturday Evening Post article that the Kennedys helped shape, would become the defining image of the crisis—although by the time it was uttered the Russian ship captains had already put seven hundred fifty miles between them and the naval blockade as they headed back toward the Soviet Union. And Bobby’s telling of the wider story would become the accepted one—that we had stared down the enemy—when what really saved the day was that both sides blinked.
Getting that wrong had ramifications. In Vietnam, President Lyndon Johnson was determined to prove that he was every bit as hard-nosed as the Kennedys had been in Cuba. He wasn’t in on the behind-the-scenes bartering, so he didn’t know that it was compromise, not steeliness, that got the United States out of the missile crisis. None of his advisers who did know—not Rusk, nor Bundy, nor McNamara, nor even Bobby—broke his vow of secrecy and shared that information with LBJ as he got increasingly mired in the quagmire of Southeast Asia. “Instead,” as the former Kennedy Library historian Sheldon Stern notes, “Johnson went to his grave in 1973 believing that his predecessor had threatened the use of U.S. military power to successfully force the Soviet Union to back down.”*16 An analogous misreading of history helped topple Khrushchev from power. The syndicated columnist Joseph Alsop wrote that the crisis was resolved in a way that gave America “a remarkable victory,” and most Americans agreed. So did most of the rest of the world. The Soviet Presidium and Bobby both knew better, but his rivals blamed the aging Communist Party leader for making Russia lose face, and Bobby preferred the America-is-remarkable version of the missile crisis story. Two years later Khrushchev was deposed and counted himself lucky to hang on to his pension, his dacha, and his life.
Thirteen Days, which has sold half a million copies and never been out of print since its release in 1969, got one thing right: The Cuban missile crisis was John Kennedy’s shining moment. He had believed his generals and spies about the likely success of the Bay of Pigs invasion, and he refused to be fooled again. He stood tough when he had to and made the necessary concessions even if he didn’t admit them. It helped that he had fought in World War II and seen its casualties, whereas Bobby had spent the war wishing he were old enough to fight and had spent the years since then proving he was as tough as any warrior. It also helped that of all the old hands and bright lights in his cabinet room, the president exhibited more patience and wisdom than anyone else.*17 None of that would have mattered, however, if President Kennedy hadn’t had an equally heroic leader with whom to barter. Nikita Khrushchev nimbly shifted from tough guy to conciliator much as JFK did, but he took the sacrificial step the Kennedys demanded by making his withdrawal of the missiles look like a one-sided deal. It wasn’t just his generals who felt betrayed but also his ally Fidel Castro. Getting us into the crisis was Kennedy and Khrushchev at their worst, but they revealed the best in themselves by getting us out without going over the brink. “The two most powerful nations of the world had been squared off against each other, each with its finger on the button,” Khrushchev said looking back. “You’d have thought that war was inevitable. But both sides showed that if the desire to avoid war is strong enough, even the most pressing dispute can be solved by compromise.”
As for Bobby, aspects of his behavior during and after the missile crisis are even more puzzling now that we have the pieces he left out of Thirteen Days. The afternoon of October 16, just hours after JFK shared with him the photographic evidence of the Russian missile installations, the attorney general summoned the Operation Mongoose planners to his office. Their work so far was “discouraging,” he chided, because “there had been no acts of sabotage, and…even the one which had been attempted had failed twice.” He didn’t say anything about the missiles, but he did vow to “give Operation MONGOOSE more personal attention” by holding a meeting at 9:30 every morning with key representatives from participating agencies. That pledge was strange in two ways: His missile-crisis-related meetings left him less time than ever, yet he was committing an hour a day to Mongoose, and he apparently failed to see any incongruity in plotting such destabilizing operations in the midst of a nuclear crisis.
Once the crisis had passed, Bobby’s role with Cuba was reduced, but he remained determined to pick a fight with Castro. In April 1963 the attorney general encouraged fellow national security planners to commission three studies. One would review what the United States should do if something dramatic happened such as “the death of Castro or the shooting down of a U-2” spy plane. A second would spell out a program for “overthrowing Castro in eighteen months.” The last would explore ways to “cause as much trouble as we can for Communist Cuba.” All such efforts would violate the spirit and letter of the deal reached with Khrushchev the previous October, but that didn’t bother the Kennedys, nor did it keep them from trumpeting breaches by the Soviets and Cubans. Richard Helms, the CIA’s espionage czar, recalled that “although as part of the negotiation [with Khrushchev] President Kennedy had forsworn attempting any invasi
on of Cuba, he and his brother remained absolutely determined to trounce Castro once and forever….The MONGOOSE operation came slowly back to reality.” Bobby himself recounted that in the summer and fall of 1963, “we were also making more of an effort through espionage and sabotage….It was better organized than it had been before and was having quite an effect. I mean, there were ten or twenty tons of sugar cane that was being burned every week through internal uprisings.”
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THERE WAS NEVER just one side of Bobby, as he showed when he vacillated between hawk and dove during the nail-biting days in October 1962. Likewise, in their aftermath, he worried about the human cost of an earlier covert operation against Cuba even as he plotted new ones. He had never been able to get out of his head the more than one thousand Cuban expatriates captured after the botched raid at the Bay of Pigs, who had been rotting for eighteen months in Castro’s jails despite repeated attempts by the United States to ransom them. Castro at first offered their release in exchange for five hundred bulldozers. A Tractors for Freedom Committee was created, headed by President Eisenhower’s brother Milton and quietly encouraged by JFK. The committee bartered with Castro to provide farm tractors rather than the military-grade excavators he wanted, then to substitute $28 million in cash, which Castro said was the value of the tractors and the least he would consider. But congressional Republicans and much of the public resisted any payout to the Communists, and the deal fell through. Castro got his revenge by staging a show trial early in 1962 that condemned the prisoners to thirty years of hard labor. Having used his stick to maximum effect, the Cuban leader dangled another carrot. He would release his captives, but for twice the original ransom. To show his goodwill, he let go sixty of the sickest prisoners—for a payment of $2.9 million that he said could be made later—and they arrived in Miami a year to the day after they had left Nicaragua bound for the Bay of Pigs. With talks on getting out the rest of the detainees stymied, Castro presented a shopping list as thick as a telephone book, detailing the medicines and food he would accept in lieu of cash. The gambit might have worked but for the timing: The offer arrived two days before the president made public his discovery of Russian missiles in Cuba.