The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  “Why does he put these [missiles] in there, though?” Kennedy asked, wondering why the Soviets had made such a dramatic move.

  “Soviet-controlled nuclear warheads,” Bundy replied, ever the professor. “That’s right,” Kennedy said, though that was not quite what he had asked. “But what is the advantage of that? It’s just as if we suddenly began to put a major number of MRBMS in Turkey. Now that’d be goddamn dangerous, I would think.”

  “Well, we did, Mr. President,” Bundy replied. That exchange, if Khrushchev could have heard it, would have richly vindicated his decision. The proximity of nuclear weapons aimed at them was precisely what he wanted Americans not simply to know but to feel.

  From this day forward Bobby participated in all the important discussions. Bobby was all for contemplating action, even staging an incident as a pretext for invasion. “Let me say, of course, one other thing is whether we should also think of whether there is some other way we can get involved in this,” he said, “through Guantánamo Bay or something. Or whether there’s some ship that … you know, sink the Maine or something.”

  “I think any military action does change the world,” Bundy said later in the meeting. “And I think not taking action changes the world. And I think these are the two worlds that we need to look at.”

  By doing nothing, the whole nature of the geopolitical world would change almost as much as if they destroyed the Cuban missile bases and invaded the island.

  The following evening, the president and first lady drove in the presidential limousine to a dinner party at Joseph Alsop’s home in Georgetown. Kennedy had told his wife nothing about the missile crisis, and he was in an apparently carefree mood this lovely fall evening. The acerbic conservative columnist gave the best parties in Washington, other than those at the White House. This evening he had a sterling sixteen-member guest list that included the attorney general; French Ambassador Hervé Alphand; Phil and Katherine Graham of the Washington Post; the new American ambassador to France, Charles “Chip” Bohlen, and his wife Avis; and Bundy.

  As the distinguished group stood chatting on Alsop’s terrace, Kennedy and Bohlen sauntered nonchalantly off by themselves into the garden, walking back and forth beneath the spreading magnolias in animated conversation. Bohlen had been the State Department’s leading Sovietologist, and it was exquisitely bad timing that he was about to fly off to a new ambassadorial post in Paris.

  It was not only in the Kremlin that the tiniest of events were analyzed for hidden meaning. As the guests pretended to socialize aimlessly, many eyes were on the pair of guests pacing back and forth in the farthest reaches of the garden. The French ambassador became increasingly intrigued, his curiosity turning to nervousness as the discussion went on and on until finally the pair returned. Over dinner Kennedy was a charming raconteur, laughing and smiling, seemingly oblivious to anything but the pleasures of a social evening.

  By the time the Ex Comm met the next morning, Thursday, October 18, at 11:00 A.M. in the Cabinet Room, CIA analysts had discovered IRBM (intermediate-range ballistic missile) sites for missiles that they believed were twice the size and twice the power of the MRBMs, capable of hitting most of the United States. By then opinion had hardened among the president’s advisers. McNamara asked for swift action, and General Taylor, the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called for a full-scale invasion of Cuba. These were not mindlessly bellicose reactions, but reasonable military solutions, given how many more Americans would die if the military attacked after the Soviets had their missiles in place ready to launch.

  As Kennedy saw the hard physical evidence of the photos and heard the calls for action, he thought of the political dimensions of this problem. “If we wanted to ever release these pictures to demonstrate that there were missiles there,” he asked, “it might be possible to demonstrate this to the satisfaction of an untrained observer?”

  “I think it would be difficult, sir,” replied Lundahl. To the untrained eye, the missiles were no more than smudges. Here was Kennedy’s immediate dilemma. He would have to justify any military action to the American people and the world, and it would not be easy. When a nations lies, it is no different from when a person lies: the loss of credibility is the same. Adlai Stevenson had unknowingly lied in the United Nations about America’s role in the Bay of Pigs. There would be scores of diplomats, and not only those unfriendly to the United States, who would doubt America’s word if they did not have indisputable proof of Soviet perfidy.

  As most of his top aides pushed for immediate action, Kennedy continued to explore the political dimensions. The president mused aloud: “If we said to Khrushchev that ‘We would have to take action against you. But if you begin to pull them out, we’ll take ours out of Turkey.’ “A few minutes later he came back to the same point. “The only offer we would make, it seems to me, that would make any sense, the point being to give him some out, would be giving him some of our Turkey missiles,” Kennedy said. In the Ex Comm meetings these were the first mentions of this possible solution.

  As these men discussed the situation, they followed the steps that led from an air attack on Cuba to a Soviet reaction in Berlin, and from there to nuclear war. These were not hypothetical war games any longer. If that point needed to be emphasized even more strongly, the top White House officials all had prearranged places in Washington where they were to go with their families to be helicoptered to an immense, nuclear-proof cave burrowed into the mountains of West Virginia. Some of the mordantly imaginative of them pictured the scene as a helicopter set down on streets full of bumper-to-bumper traffic to lift them to safety while panicking Washingtonians tried to climb aboard and flee certain death in the capital.

  “We figured we would have fifteen minutes’ warning of an approaching nuclear weapon to get out of Washington,” recalled Feldman. “We didn’t think we’d be able to carry out our evacuation plans. Thus, we had plans if all the government heads were killed. Each department had to have a list of who followed second, third, and fourth. That was something we developed during the crisis.”

  In the midst of this deadly discussion, Bobby expressed himself in a way he had rarely spoken before. “I think it’s the whole question of, you know, assuming that you do survive all this …,” Bobby said, “what kind of country we are.”

  For his part, the secretary of State had up until now been silent when such moral questions came floating up in this extended discourse. “This business of carrying the mark of Cain on your brow for the rest of your life is something …” Rusk began in his ponderous fashion.

  “We did this against Cuba,” Bobby interrupted. “We’ve fought for fifteen years with Russia to prevent a first strike against us. Now, in the interest of time, we do that to a small country. I think it’s a hell of a burden to carry.”

  At 5:00 P.M.. that same day, Thursday, October 18, Kennedy kept a long-established appointment with Andrei Gromyko. The Soviet foreign minister was a worldly, subtle man with whom Kennedy felt he could negotiate, as he could not with the calculatedly brutish Khrushchev. Now, as he listened to Gromyko reading from a prepared script his mirthless Marxist scenario, Kennedy was tempted to open his drawer and pull out a sheaf of U-2 photos and expose the man for the intolerable liar that he appeared to be.

  Gromyko was saying in his diplomatic way what leftist protesters were shouting in the streets of America: “Hands off Cuba.” The Soviet foreign minister pointed out that “Cuba belonged to Cubans and not to the United States,” and he asked, “Why then are statements being made in the United States advocating invasion of Cuba?”

  Inevitably, Gromyko brought up the Bay of Pigs. That was a subject that invariably irked the president. Kennedy interrupted the foreign minister’s monologue by pointing out that he had gone through all this with Khrushchev in Vienna and had said that it had been a mistake. He had promised he would not invade Cuba, and though the Soviet Union had taken certain actions, he still maintained that pledge. But Soviet armaments entering
Cuba had created a new and serious situation, and American policy rested on the assumption that these were only defensive weapons.

  Bobby arrived soon after the Soviet diplomat left. “The president of the United States, it can be said, was displeased with the spokesman of the Soviet Union,” Bobby wrote later in words of masterful understatement.

  That evening at close to midnight, Kennedy went to the Oval Office. The meeting he had just attended with his top advisers normally would have been held in the Cabinet Room, but such an unusual event in the West Wing would have aroused reporters’ suspicions. Not only had he held the meeting in the Oval Room, but to further hide matters Bobby and eight of the other participants had arrived at the White House crowded into one limousine.

  Only now when the others had left did Kennedy return to his presidential office by himself. As Kennedy sat there, he turned on a hidden switch and began dictating into a secret tape recorder. During the summer, he had begun recording White House meetings and phone conversations, unbeknownst to everyone but the technicians who monitored the machines, several secretaries, and almost certainly Bobby. The president was probably doing this largely to verify events in his own mind and to provide accurate recollections for the book he would inevitably write of his years in the White House. Kennedy switched the mechanisms in the Oval Office and the Cabinet Room on and off at his own personal volition. Even in the worst of moments, he had the presence of mind to turn the switch on before the Ex Comm meetings, creating an unprecedented secret documentation.

  The president had no recording device in the room where the meeting had taken place this evening. So he went back to his office after a long day to record his own audio memorandum of the meeting. All his life Kennedy had kept a psychological distance from the world around him. He boxed his friends into a corner of his life and brought them out when he sought what each could give. Even Bobby saw only a part of his brother’s inner life. Kennedy brought his wife into his presence for family events and to add grace to public moments. Other women were a casual diversion, largely interchangeable. He shuttled other politicians in and out of his presence, rarely letting them know how much he disdained many of them. He savored his aides’ virtues and measured their weaknesses, but them too he always kept at a distance.

  Now at the most important moment of his presidency and his public life, Kennedy was an observer of himself. The stakes were as high as they had ever been for an American president. His failure could lead to nuclear annihilation or, if he flinched from the Soviet challenge, to disgrace. Yet even now, after this tense, interminable day, he recorded the details of the meeting as if he were a reporter taking down events that involved someone else, and other lives.

  “Secretary McNamara, Deputy Secretary Gilpatric, General Taylor, Attorney General, George Ball, Alexis Johnson,” he began, running down the names of the participants. Kennedy had a superb memory, one of the essential attributes of most successful politicians. His memory served him not merely in remembering thousands of constituents’ names, though he could do that, but in mastering details of legislation and policy and remembering promises made or half made. That evening he recorded the events of the meeting as if he had been there as the official secretary taking copious notes, not as the crucial figure in the room.

  “Ed Martin, McGeorge Bundy, Ted Sorensen,” the president continued. Kennedy had an even greater memory for human character, which is essentially a recording of a person’s actions over time. He knew each one of these men as well as many others whom he was listening to outside this circle. He knew their institutional prejudices and their political passions or the lack of them. In these meetings and conversations he sometimes listened far more than he spoke. He sought and shaped consensus among his subordinates, not as a pathetic need to have his actions justified, but to summon the full moral force of these men and those who stood behind them, not the endless recriminations that had come with the Bay of Pigs. As he always did, he weighed character as much as he did words, and he pondered what would be his decision alone.

  The president was speaking a midnight soliloquy into an unseen microphone, his words echoing through the room. He was not muttering about the burdens of power or the loneliness of leadership, but every sentence spoke to that point. “Dean Acheson, with whom I talked this afternoon, stated that while he was uncertain about any of the courses, he favored the first strike as … being most likely to achieve our results and less likely to cause an extreme Soviet reaction,” Kennedy said. Acheson had been secretary of State under Truman, and he spoke with the authority of a leading architect of cold war policy. The courtly Acheson was a revered figure whose advice Kennedy believed had to be carefully weighed.

  “When I saw Robert Lovett later, after talking to Gromyko, he was not convinced that any action was desirable,” Kennedy then said. Lovett was equally one of Washington’s wise men, an architect of postwar international policy, and his opinion was the opposite of Acheson’s. “Bundy continued to argue against any action on the grounds that there would be inevitably a Soviet reprisal against Berlin,” Kennedy went on. The president had immense confidence in Bundy’s judgment, and his NSC adviser came down largely with Lovett, but they were in a minority. “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,” Kennedy said. “The consensus was that we should go ahead with the blockade beginning on Sunday night.”

  Kennedy reserved most of his boldness for his speeches, and here as usual he sought what he considered solid middle-high ground. He had plumbed the ideas of a score or more of his advisers, and then decided to do what most of them wanted him to do. But as he turned off the tape recorder and left the empty room, whatever decisions he made would not bear the names of some distinguished committee or panel, but his signature alone.

  The next morning, Friday, October 19, in the Cabinet Room, Kennedy got together with his advisers again. The Joint Chiefs had just come from their own meeting, where they had decided that a blockade was not enough; they now strongly recommended an enormous air strike against Cuba without advance notice. As this meeting started, General Taylor sought to grab the initiative and lay out the military chiefs’ plan. “I think the benefit this morning, Mr. President, would be for you to hear the other Chiefs’ comments,” Taylor said.

  “Let me just say a little, first, about what the problem is, from my point of view,” Kennedy replied, subtly deferring the military’s presentation. In Washington those who set the agenda usually win. Until now the president had not dominated these sessions. His role had been to listen and to weigh. But this meeting had become potentially the crucial decision-making moment, and now the president defined the problem. He had a lawyerly ability to take a myriad of contradictory contributions and prune them away into a succinct, muscular presentation of the harsh choices that lay before them.

  At his best, Kennedy was profoundly realistic and intellectually fearless about facing the foibles, weaknesses, and self-interests of men and nations. “First, I think we ought to think of why the Russians did this,” he said, stepping back to admire the skillful way Khrushchev had attempted to checkmate the Americans. “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 Cuba, missiles or Cuba, in any way, it gives them a clear line to take Berlin.”

  Kennedy gave to Khrushchev his own rational mind, finding in the Soviet actions a brilliantly multilayered strategic logic that may not have been there. The president and his advisers discussed almost everything but the one overwhelming reality of the entire crisis. The United States so threatened Castro that Khrushchev was not lying when he called this murderous arsenal “defensive.” Whatever grand strategic role they played, these weapons were in Cuba militarily to defend the island country against an American invasion. And as everyone in the room knew,
if many of these men had their way, that possibility was not Communist propaganda but a reasonable prospect. The best way to get the missiles out of Cuba would be to convince Khrushchev that the United States would not violate the territorial integrity of Cuba.

  “We would be regarded as the trigger-happy Americans who lost Berlin,” the president went on, spinning his tale far beyond the borders of the Caribbean. “We would have no support among our allies…. They don’t give a damn about Cuba.” There was the president’s dark realism on full display. Nations, like people, watched out for themselves; if you wanted them to help you, you had better be prepared to pay in one currency or another.

  As the president talked, there were no tremors in his voice, no irritability at the endless imponderables, no hint of ill temper. He was in an emotional zone all his own, holding the others in the room steady by the sheer magnitude of his dispassion. The situation was a conundrum, and it was a measure of Kennedy’s leadership that he did not pretend otherwise.

  Kennedy set forth all the impalpable, difficult alternatives. He could go in and take out the missiles, but that would surely set off the Russians somewhere else. “Which leaves me only one alternative, which is to fire nuclear weapons—which is a hell of an alternative—and begin a nuclear exchange, with all this happening.” He could start a blockade, but then the Russians would probably blockade Berlin and the European allies would blame the Americans. “On the other hand, we’ve got to do something,” Kennedy concluded. “We’re going to have this knife stuck right in our guts in about two months [Kennedy probably meant two weeks when the midrange missiles would be operational], so we better do something.”

  “I’d emphasize, a little strongly perhaps, that we don’t have any choice except direct military action,” said General Curtis LeMay, as if only the weak-kneed would refuse to act. The air force chief had proven his courage and resolve repeatedly in World War II. After the war the general had revitalized the Strategic Air Command into a prime weapon against the Soviet Union. LeMay saw betrayal in compromise; he had his pistol cocked and his finger on the trigger, ready for the battle he was sure would come. He was unable or unwilling to grasp the complexities of decision making in the nuclear age. His narrowly focused patriotism bordered on paranoia. He was the cold war’s perfect creation, fed on the rhetoric of anticommunism. LeMay had his own natural constituency out there across America.