A Thousand Days

by Arthur M. Schlesinger

  Yet in our gloom we underestimate the extent to which things were already stirring underneath the surface. For imperceptibly the Charter of Punta del Este was transforming the politics of Latin America, imprinting the issues of modernization on the consciousness of the political and intellectual community and channeling the energies of both public and private agencies as never before. All the time, things were happening: development plans submitted, reform laws passed, teachers trained, schoolbooks circulated, roads and houses built, water supplies purified, land redistributed, savings and loan associations organized, economic integration among blocs of countries advanced, embers of hope kindled—never enough but a beginning. The shadows of communism, military adventurism and ancient privilege still obscured a gathering consensus which might in time bring the goals of the Alliance into reach.

  Moreover, the President himself was winning in Latin America a faith and affection enjoyed by no other North American leader except Franklin Roosevelt in the long history of the Americas. His policies at home were validating his efforts in the hemisphere. Professor Albert O. Hirschman of Harvard, the expert on Latin American economic development, reported, for example, that his clash with United States Steel made a strong impression south of the border; “if Kennedy took on a real fight with a major segment of the U.S. business community, perhaps he meant what he said when he proposed social reforms for Latin America?” Moreover, the President, with his understanding of the crucial role of the Latin American intellectuals, seized opportunities to meet with academic and artistic groups at the White House—Chilean rectors and deans, Brazilian students, the writers, painters and architects assembled at the annual meetings of Robert Wool’s Inter-American Committee for the arts.

  In 1900 the Uruguayan writer José Enrique Rodô in his essay Ariel had articulated a favorite South American view of the United States: “Titanic in its concentration of will, with unprecedented triumphs in all spheres of material aggrandizement, its civilization yet produces as a whole a singular impression of insufficiency, of emptiness.” Now for a moment the United States appeared no longer in the guise of Caliban but as a culture worthy in its own right of the leadership of the Americas.

  XXX

  Again Cuba

  IN 1962 THE ALLIANCE FOR PROGRESS was still an uncertainty. As for Castro, increasingly isolated within the hemisphere, he was more bent than ever on the course he had pursued since 1959. “I am a Marxist-Leninist,” he said on December 2, 1961, “and I shall be a Marxist-Leninist until the last day of my life”; nor was there any reason to doubt his word. Within Cuba life had settled into drab routine. Economic planners fumbled ineffectually with agricultural and industrial programs. Popular enthusiasm diminished, even if organized opposition did not materially increase. Toward Latin America the regime maintained tenuous relations with half a dozen states and denounced the rest. Toward the United States invective was undefiled, though there were occasional intimations of a desire for something else.

  In an accidental encounter after the first Punta del Este conference, Che Guevara told Richard Goodwin that the revolution was irreversible, that Cubans preferred a single-party state headed by Fidel Castro to any alternative and that Cuba’s ties with the east were firmly imbedded in a common ideology. At the same time, though, Guevara discussed Cuban economic problems with surprising freedom—bungled planning, shortages in spare parts, in consumer goods and in hard currency reserves—and said that, while any real understanding with the United States would be impossible, what about some sort of modus vivendi? He indicated that Cuba might be prepared to pay compensation in trade for expropriated properties and to forswear formal alliance, though not ideological loyalty, to the east. Goodwin saw this—I am sure, quite correctly—as an attempt to persuade Washington to call off the policy of containment before the Latin American governments generalized that policy, as they were soon to do at the second Punta del Este. Castro stated the limits of a modus vivendi more exactly on January 23, 1962: “How can the rope and the hanged man understand each other or the chain and the slave? Imperialism is the chain. Understanding is impossible. . . . We are so different that there are no bonds between us. . . . Some day there will be links—when there is a revolution in the United States.”

  1. THE GAMBLE

  On July 2, 1962, Raúl Castro, the Minister of the Armed Forces, arrived in Moscow. Either before his arrival or very soon thereafter the Soviet and Cuban governments arrived at a startling decision: that Soviet nuclear missiles were to be secretly installed in Cuba in the fall.

  The Soviet Union had never before placed nuclear missiles in any other country—neither in the communist nations of Eastern Europe, nor, even in the season of their friendship, in Red China. Why should it now send nuclear missiles to a country thousands of miles away, lying within the zone of vital interest of their main adversary, a land, moreover, headed by a willful leader of, from the Russian viewpoint, somewhat less than total reliability? Castro, with characteristic loquacity, later produced a confusion of explanations. He told a Cuban audience in January 1963 that sending the missiles was a Soviet idea; he repeated this to Claude Julien of Le Monde in March 1963; in May he described it to Lisa Howard of the American Broadcasting Company as “simultaneous action on the part of both governments”; then in October he told Herbert Matthews of the New York Times that it was a Cuban idea, only to tell Jean Daniel of L’Express in November that it was a Soviet idea; in January 1964, when Matthews called him about the Daniel story, Castro claimed again that it was a Cuban idea; and, when Cyrus Sulzberger of the New York Times asked him in October 1964, Castro, pleading that the question raised security problems, said cagily, “Both Russia and Cuba participated.”

  As for the Russians, Khrushchev told the Supreme Soviet in December 1962, “We carried weapons there at the request of the Cuban government . . . including the stationing of a couple of score of Soviet IRBMs [intermediate-range ballistic missiles] in Cuba. These weapons were to be in the hands of Soviet military men. . . . Our aim was only to defend Cuba.” The presence of the missiles, Khruschev continued, was designed to make the imperialists understand that, if they tried to invade Cuba, “the war which they threatened to start stood at their own borders, so that they would realize more realistically the dangers of thermonuclear war.” This was all very noble, and the defense of Cuba was certainly a side effect of the Soviet action. But the defense of Cuba did not really require the introduction of long-range nuclear missiles. One may be sure that Khrushchev, like any other national leader, took that decision not for Cuban reasons but for Soviet reasons. Pending Khrushchev’s reminiscences, one can only speculate as to what these Soviet reasons were.

  In a general sense, the decision obviously represented the supreme Soviet probe of American intentions. No doubt a ‘total victory’ faction in Moscow had long been denouncing the government’s ‘nowin’ policy and arguing that the Soviet Union could safely use the utmost nuclear pressure against the United States because the Americans were too rich or soft or liberal to fight. Now Khrushchev was prepared to give this argument its crucial test. A successful nuclearization of Cuba would make about sixty-four medium-range (around 1000 miles) and intermediate-range (1500–2000 miles) nuclear missiles effective against the United States and thereby come near to doubling Soviet striking capacity against American targets.* Since this would still leave the United States with at least a 2 to 1 superiority in nuclear power targeted against the Soviet Union, the shift in the military balance of power would be less crucial than that in the political balance. Every country in the world, watching so audacious an action ninety miles from the United States, would wonder whether it could ever thereafter trust Washington’s resolution and protection. More particularly, the change in the nuclear equilibrium would permit Khrushchev, who had been dragging out the Berlin negotiation all year, to reopen that question—perhaps in a personal appearance before the United Nations General Assembly in November—with half the United States lying within range of nucl
ear missiles poised for delivery across the small stretch of water from Florida. It was a staggering project—staggering in its recklessness, staggering in its misconception of the American response, staggering in its rejection of the ground rules for coexistence among the superpowers which Kennedy had offered in Vienna.

  The decision having been made, the next problem was the development of a plan. Moscow evidently saw the operation in two stages—first, the augmentation of Cuban defensive capabilities by bringing in surface-to-air anti-aircraft (SAM) missiles and MIG-21 fighters; then, as soon as the SAMs were in place to protect the bases and deter photographic reconnaissance (a SAM had brought down the U-2 over Russia in 1960), sending in offensive weapons, both ballistic missiles and Ilyushin-28 jet aircraft able to deliver nuclear bombs. The first stage, involving only defensive weapons, required no special concealment. The second stage called for the most careful and complex program of deception. One can only imagine the provisions made in Moscow and Havana through the summer to ship the weapons, to receive them, unload them, assemble them, erect bases for them, install them on launching pads—all with a stealth and speed designed to confront the United States one day in November or December with a fully operational Soviet nuclear arsenal across the water in Cuba.

  2. THE SURVEILLANCE

  By late July the Soviet shipments began to arrive. Three weeks later CIA sent an urgent report to the President that “something new and different” was taking place in Soviet aid operations to Cuba. There were perhaps 5000 Soviet ‘specialists’ now in Cuba; military construction of some sort was going on; more ships were on their way with more specialists and more electronic and construction equipment. The data suggested that the Soviet Union was refurbishing the Cuban air defense system, presumably by putting up a network of SAM sites.

  The intelligence community concluded that Moscow, having resolved after a time of indecision that it had a large stake in Castro’s survival, had decided to insure the regime against external attack. It could thereby hope to secure the Soviet bridgehead in the western hemisphere, strengthen Castro’s prestige in Latin America and show the world Washington’s inability to prevent such things.at its very doorstep. This all seemed logical enough. Obviously Moscow had calculated that the United States, with the Bay of Pigs still in the world’s recollection, could not convincingly object to Castro’s taking defensive precautions against another invasion. No one in the intelligence community (with one exception; for the thought flickered through the mind of John McCone) supposed that the Soviet Union would conceivably go beyond defensive weapons. The introduction of nuclear missiles, for example, would obviously legitimatize an American response, even possibly an invasion of Cuba. Our best Soviet experts in State and CIA considered Khrushchev too wary and Soviet foreign policy too rational to court a risk of this magnitude.

  Nonetheless, when a U-2 flight on August 29 showed clear evidence of SAM sites under construction, the President decided to put Moscow on notice. On September 4, the Secretary of State brought over a draft of the warning. The President showed it to the Attorney General, who recommended stiffening it with an explicit statement that we would not tolerate the import of offensive weapons. The draft as revised read that, while we had no evidence of “significant offensive capability either in Cuban hands or under Soviet direction,” should it be otherwise, “the gravest issues would arise.”

  On the same day the Soviet Ambassador in Washington gave the Attorney General an unusual personal message from Khrushchev for the President. The Soviet leader pledged in effect that he would stir up no incidents before the congressional elections in November. Then a week later, in the midst of a long and wearying disquisition on world affairs, Moscow said flatly that the “armaments and military equipment sent to Cuba are designed exclusively for defensive purposes.” It added:

  There is no need for the Soviet Union to shift its weapons for the repulsion of aggression, for a retaliatory blow, to any other country, for instance Cuba. Our nuclear weapons are so powerful in their explosive force and the Soviet Union has so powerful rockets to carry these nuclear warheads, that there is no need to search for sites for them beyond the boundaries of the Soviet Union.

  The statement continued truculently by accusing the United States of “preparing for aggression against Cuba and other peace-loving states,” concluding that “if the aggressors unleash war our armed forces must be ready to strike a crushing retaliatory blow at the aggressor.” The President responded calmly two days later at his press conference that the new shipments did not constitute a serious threat but that if at any time Cuba were to “become an offensive military base of significant capacity for the Soviet Union, then this country will do whatever must be done to protect its own security and that of its allies.” In the meantime, he asked Congress for stand-by authority to call up the reserves.

  He had also taken the precaution of doubling the frequency of the U-2 overflights of Cuba. The evidence from flights on September 5, 17, 26 and 29 and October 5 and 7, as well as from other sources, indicated a continuing military build-up large in its proportions but still defensive in its character. The government saw no reason as yet to believe that Khrushchev intended anything beyond this; he had not, so far as we knew, lost his mind. Only John McCone had his personal presentiment that he might be planning the installation of offensive missiles. However, given the prevailing complacency on this point, McCone himself did not take this thought seriously enough to prevent his going off now for a three weeks’ honeymoon in Europe. The White House staff worried about this increasingly visible Soviet presence, but it seemed to me much more a political threat to Latin America than a military threat to the United States. I found myself, as I told the President on September 13, relatively a hard-liner and felt that the State Department should tell the Soviet Ambassador in cold and tough fashion that persistence in the arming of Cuba would cause both an increase in our defense budget and a surge of national indignation which would color every other issue between our two countries. But, when I advanced this view at the Bundy staff meeting, I was confronted with the wholly proper question: “OK, but how far would you carry it if they keep on doing what you object to?”

  And, across the world, ships were sliding out of Black Sea harbors with nuclear technicians in their cabins and nuclear missiles in their hatches. Khrushchev, having done his best to lull Kennedy by public statements and private messages, now in early September put the second stage of his plan into operation. He could hope that the hurricane season might interfere with the U-2 overflights and that the fall political campaign might inhibit the administration from taking drastic action. Moreover, he had an advantage unknown to us: Soviet engineering had enormously reduced the time required for the erection of nuclear missile sites. As Roberta Wohlstetter, the searching analyst of both Pearl Harbor and the Cuba crisis, later wrote, “The rapidity of the Russians’ installation was in effect a logistical surprise comparable to the technological surprise at the time of Pearl Harbor.”

  In the meantime, Washington had been receiving a flow of tales about nuclear installations through refugee channels. Such reports had been routine for eighteen months. No one could be sure whether the sources in Cuba could tell a surface-to-air from a surface-to-surface missile; moreover, this government recalled that it had been misled by Cuban refugees before. Lacking photographic verification, the intelligence community treated the information with reserve. In the meantime, it recommended on October 4 a U-2 flight over western Cuba. The recommendation was approved on October 10, and from the eleventh to the thirteenth the pilot and plane waited for the weather to break. Sunday the fourteenth dawned beautiful and cloudless.

  Senator Kenneth Keating of New York had also been receiving the refugee reports, and he treated them with no reserve at all. At the end of August he began a campaign to force the government into some unspecified form of action. In October he began to talk about offensive missile bases. If he felt the national safety involved, Keating was plainly right
to make his case with all the urgency at his command. Some, however, discerned other motives, especially with the approach of the fall election. As Roger Hilsman, Director of Intelligence and Research at the State Department, later wrote, “The charge that Keating was more interested in personal publicity than in his country’s welfare may be extreme. But until the Senator comes forward with a better explanation than he has so far supplied, one of two possible conclusions is inescapable: Either Senator Keating was peddling someone’s rumors for some purpose of his own, despite the highly dangerous international situation; or, alternatively, he had information the United States Government did not have that could have guided a U-2 to the missile sites before October 14, and at less risk to the pilot.’’

  Now on the fourteenth the U-2 plane returned from its mission. The negatives went swiftly to the processing laboratories, then to the interpretation center, where specialists pored over the blown-up photographs frame by frame. Late Monday afternoon, reading the obscure and intricate markings, they identified a launching pad, a series of buildings for ballistic missiles and even one missile on the ground in San Cristóbal.

  3. THE EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE

  About 8:30 that evening the CIA informed Bundy of the incredible discovery. Bundy reflected on whether to inform the President immediately, but he knew that Kennedy would demand the photographs and supporting interpretation in order to be sure the report was right and knew also it would take all night to prepare the evidence in proper form. Furthermore, an immediate meeting would collect officials from dinner parties all over town, signed Washington that something was up and end any hope of secrecy. It was better, Bundy thought, to let the President have a night’s sleep in preparation for the ordeal ahead.