The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  Khrushchev’s letter pleaded with Kennedy to back off his blockade of Soviet ships. In exchange, Khrushchev would “not transport armaments of any kind to Cuba” during negotiations. For all its high emotional tenor, the letter proposed a subtle, carefully constructed solution. Everything would change, Khrushchev wrote, if Kennedy gave assurances “that the USA itself would not participate in an attack on Cuba and would restrain others from actions of this sort.” Kennedy would have to call off his covert operations against Cuba and rein in the Cuban exiles and their attacks on Castro’s regime. If that was done, as the Soviet leader saw it, “the question of armaments would disappear,” and there would be no reasons for Russian missiles.

  I don’t know whether you can understand me and believe me. But I should like to have you believe in yourself and to agree that one cannot give way to passions…. Mr. President, we and you ought not now to pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied the knot of war, because the more the two of us pull, the tighter that knot will be tied. And a moment may come when that knot will be tied so tight that even he who tied it will not have the strength to untie it, and then it will be necessary to cut that knot. And what that would mean is not for me to explain to you, because you yourself understand perfectly of what terrible forces our countries dispose.

  The next morning Kennedy received a second, more formal letter in which Khrushchev proposed a new element. The United States would not only have to make its all-encompassing noninvasion pledge but also remove its Jupiter missiles from Turkey. This latter idea had been discussed in Ex Comm meetings, broached with Bolshakov, and in other ways thrown on the table as a possibility. The Soviets announced over Radio Moscow their offer of a compromise, letting the world see what Kennedy himself realized would be regarded by most people “as not an unreasonable solution.”

  In this moment the cold war had reached its high point, not only in its imminent dangers but also in all the posturing of power. The military chiefs were the most adamant in their opposition to trading off these missiles for a result some would dare call peace. They stirred restlessly, fancying themselves in a death struggle against an implacable Communist foe. Stripped of their ideological veneer, Generals LeMay and Taylor were like the brightly plumed gentlemen leading the cavalry in the charge of the light brigade during the Crimean War. These military chiefs stood in their stirrups, swords raised, ready to charge through the valley of death in the name of honor.

  “The missiles [in Turkey] were worthless in the Eisenhower administration,” reflected McNamara two decades later. “They sure as hell were worthless and known to be worthless in the Kennedy administration. And yet, because the Soviets … said, in effect … ‘We won’t remove our missiles from Cuba unless you remove yours from Turkey,’ there was almost a requirement that we go to war with the Soviets to preserve missiles in Turkey that were worthless.”

  Kennedy was in a predicament of excruciating difficulty. Khrushchev might coo his sweet song of peace, but as he did so his soldiers hurried to finish their Cuban missile bases. At least five bases already appeared operational. As Kennedy discussed a response with the civilian leaders of Ex Comm, the Joint Chiefs were preparing for Oplan 312, a full-scale air strike on October 29, followed seven days later by Oplan 316, the invasion of Cuba. The military leaders believed that they had to overwhelm the enemy. First, waves of air strikes would pulverize the missile sites, the airports, and the military facilities. Then the most massive American invasion since D-Day would move rapidly through the shell-shocked, demoralized defenders.

  Bombing rarely decimates an enemy. Some of the missile sites may have survived, and surely many of the Cubans and their Soviet allies on the island would have defended it to the death. Moreover, the military chiefs did not know that the Soviet weapons included tactical nuclear-tipped missiles. Most of these Luna missiles would not be taken out in air raids. In an invasion the Soviet commander, General Issa Pliyev, had originally been authorized to use them, but on October 27, Moscow changed that directive, requiring formal authorization from officials in Russia. In the lexicon of the nuclear age, these were not major weapons, but anyone within half a mile of the center of the blast would die, most of them immediately, though a few would survive only to succumb within a few weeks to radiation poisoning. Once the Soviet launched their Lunas against the invading Americans, Kennedy would doubtless respond with nuclear weapons too, and World War III would likely begin.

  The danger was that Kennedy and the others might become so immersed in the minutiae of the moment that they would not be able to stand back and see the full scale of what was at stake. Only Kennedy seemed able to distance himself enough to see this crisis set in the context of history and human conduct.

  “If we appear to be trading the defense of Turkey for a threat to Cuba, we’ll just have to face a radical decline in the effectiveness [of NATO],” Bundy told the president on October 27. Kennedy’s NSC adviser probably did not know that, through Bolshakov, the administration had informally and secretly proposed such a trade.

  “This trade has appeal,” Kennedy replied. “Now, if we reject it out of hand, and then have to take military action against Cuba, then we’ll also face a decline [in NATO].” Kennedy faced square on the natural self-interest of men, even if they wore the badge of allies. He knew that those same Europeans who would condemn him for withdrawing the Jupiter missiles would complain even louder if America went to war over Cuba.

  When Kennedy spoke of these allies, he displayed a passion that he rarely displayed to his nation’s enemies. “We all know how quickly everybody’s courage goes when the blood starts to flow, and that’s what’s going to happen to NATO,” he told his colleagues. “When we start these things and they grab Berlin, everybody’s going to say, ‘Well, that was a pretty good proposition.’ … Today it sounds great to reject it [trading off the Turkish missiles], but it’s not going to after we do something.”

  The other part of the deal was the promise not to invade Cuba, which to Bobby was almost as big a problem as Turkey. “Well, the only thing is, we are proposing in here the abandonment …” he began.

  “What?” Kennedy said urgently. “What? What are we proposing?”

  “The abandonment of Cuba,” Bobby repeated.

  “No, we’re just promising not to invade,” said Sorensen, always the wordsmith.

  “Not to invade,” McNamara repeated. “We changed that language.”

  No matter what pledges their government made, men such as Bobby, McCone, and LeMay would not accept a Communist sanctuary in the Caribbean. The diplomats might believe otherwise, but there was a misunderstanding here much like that between Kennedy and Khrushchev at the summit conference. Then Kennedy criticized the Soviet leader for tinkering in the affairs of other nations, but Khrushchev said that a liberation struggle like that against the Portuguese colonies in Africa was “a sacred war” and the Soviet Union would always support such struggles. For Bobby and his allies within government, Cuba was just such a sacred war.

  As Kennedy attempted to find some peaceful resolution that would not be condemned as cowardice, events conspired to push him closer to raising war’s banner. A U-2 plane had wandered off course in the Arctic and been chased out of Soviet air space by a menacing squad of MIGs. The Cubans had started firing at low-level reconnaissance planes, forcing them to turn back. And Kennedy learned that in Cuba a missile had been fired at a U-2 plane flying high above the island, bringing the plane down and killing the pilot, Major Rudolph Anderson.

  Kennedy and the Ex Comm team were strong men at the height of their intellectual powers, but they had been working day and night for eleven days, living with an intolerable level of stress. They were tired, and even as they tried to use good judgment, some of them were ready to strike back at those who taunted them.

  “We should retaliate against the SAM [surface-to-air missile] site and announce that if any other planes are fired on, we will come back and take it,” General Taylor asserted.


  “We can’t very well send a U-2 over there, can we now, and have a guy killed again tomorrow?” Kennedy mused aloud.

  “I think you’re going to have great pressure internally within the United States too, to act quickly, with our planes always being shot down while we sit around here,” Dillon said minutes later, a tacit criticism of Kennedy’s apparent passivity.

  In this decision-filled day, even the taciturn, restrained Dillon sounded strained. Of all people, the usually undiplomatic Bobby advanced a possible solution.

  Stevenson was worried that the proposal to stop the blockade in exchange for Soviet removal of the missiles sounded too harsh. “I think it’s just an acceptance of what he [Khrushchev] says [in his first letter],” Bobby said. “Don’t you think?”

  “Actually, I think Bobby’s formula is a good one,” Sorensen said soon afterward. “Does it sound like an ultimatum if we say: ‘And we are accepting your offer in your letter last night. And therefore there’s no need to talk about these other things’?” In doing so, they would not mention Khrushchev’s second letter with its talk of Turkish missiles.

  These Ex Comm meetings were the stage on which the president spoke his public lines, doubly recorded by the ever-whirling tape and the careful memos and recollections of the men around the large table. In this public forum Kennedy did not criticize the mindless bellicosity of LeMay or berate Stevenson for what he considered his endless timidity. Nor did Kennedy voice his uncertainties here or contemplate policies in words that could be used against him by men whose memories might last longer than their loyalty.

  After this day of endless discussions, Kennedy met in the Oval Office with a select group of about eight that included Bundy, McNamara, Sorensen, Rusk, and Bobby. These men would keep Kennedy’s secrets. They decided that Bobby should meet with Dobrynin. Kennedy trusted Bobby, not simply because the attorney general was his closest blood kin. He trusted him because Bobby was closest to him in his view of the crisis and his determination to seek a solution. Bobby was to tell the Soviet ambassador that in exchange for removing the Cuban missiles the United States would end the blockade and promise not to invade Cuba. Beyond that, he was to tell the diplomat that as soon as matters calmed down, the Turkish missiles would be quietly removed.

  Dobrynin met Bobby in his Justice Department office on the evening of Saturday, October 27. The ambassador noticed a dramatic change in the president’s emissary since he had met with him four days before. He appeared exhausted, as though he were living sleeplessly on adrenaline. Kennedy told the diplomat in the boldest terms that unless the Soviets took their nuclear missiles home, the United States would remove them with the full force of arms. Bobby’s voice was tense with emotion when he told the ambassador that the American generals and others were “spoiling for a fight.” Bobby was under tremendous strain. He knew that if this proposal failed, the hawks would rise in such magnitude that they would darken the skies.

  In this meeting all that mattered were the final exchanges, not the unpleasantries and recriminations. “What about the missile bases in Turkey?” Dobrynin asked finally, after Bobby had spent his anger.

  Early in the crisis, the prescient Kennedy asked himself that very question. From the American perspective, the immediate negotiations ended when Bobby laid out the deal to the Soviet ambassador and told him that the details had to remain secret. This was a final offer; if it was turned down, the generals would have their war.

  The Robert F. Kennedy who sat there talking intensely to the Soviet ambassador was not the same Robert F. Kennedy of two weeks before. No one else in those endless Ex Comm meetings had so dramatically shifted his perspective. General LeMay did not lie down with the lambs, nor did Ambassador Stevenson saddle up as a rough rider leading the charge toward Cuba. Only Bobby spoke lines he had never spoken before. He was caught between emotions that took him from unrelieved fury at the Soviets for betraying his brother and his nation to an equally profound sense of the immense dangers the world faced, and then back again. In the end he understood the enormous stakes that were at play and how close they were to stepping off the precipice.

  When Bobby talked to Dobrynin that final evening, the ambassador recalled that Bobby was almost crying. These were not calculated tears, but honest ones for his brother, his family, his nation, and the world. Bobby had not forsaken his personal agenda. Dobrynin recalled that at a follow-up meeting the attorney general said “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.”

  Khrushchev lived among hawks and doves too. Castro himself had admonished the Soviet leader to consider responding to an American invasion of Cuba with a nuclear first strike against the United States. Marxists see history as the story of immense social, economic, and political forces working their way across time. To Castro, the slaughter of millions was a noble sacrifice if the Marxist system survived and out of its ashes rose a Communist paradise. To those who view history that way, writing about an individual life is like chronicling the life of a toe, a hand, or some other appendage that means nothing without the body to which it is attached.

  If ever history has been the chronicle of individual human character moving through time, though, it is in these thirteen days, and that is as true for the Marxist Khrushchev as for the Kennedys. The Soviet leader decided that he had to take his missiles home, and he saw the removal of the Turkish missiles as no better than a paltry consolation prize. “In order to save the world, we must retreat,” Khrushchev told the Soviet Presidium. These were not words that a leader could speak often or loudly. Khrushchev had blinked, but it was probably not Kennedy’s tough stance that had set his eyes aflutter as much as Russia’s military weakness and the prospect of the world’s being engulfed in a war of horrors beyond human imagination.

  On Sunday morning, October 28, Radio Moscow broadcast Khrushchev’s message around the world: the Soviet Union “has given a new order to dismantle the arms which you [Kennedy] described as offensive, and to crate and return them to the Soviet Union.”

  During the two-week crisis the great themes of the president’s life came into focus. In 1947, as a freshman congressman, Kennedy had prophesied a time when the Soviets would have massive atomic armaments and there would be “the greatest danger of … a conflict [that] would truly mean the end of the world.” During his years in Congress, he had seen the Soviet Union as the most serious threat to his nation, and as president he feared that he would face this ultimate confrontation. He had been in part responsible for this greatest of cold war crises, since without the relentless covert attacks on Cuba, the missiles of October never would have arrived in Cuba.

  The other great theme of his life was courage, to him a man’s highest virtue. He had written about it, and both in the war and in his long struggle with ill health, he had walked with a hero’s bold stride. Political courage is struck of even sterner stuff, and many questioned Kennedy’s mettle when it came to the hard questions of his age.

  Kennedy had stood apart from his advisers in his intellectual detachment. He did not get lost in the emotional minutiae of the moment. His eyes searched ceaselessly for a safe harbor in turbulent seas.

  Kennedy had been the first to mention the missiles in Turkey as a possible bargaining chip. That decision required intellectual courage to seek a solution so far away from the narrow straits of diplomatic combat. He had at the same time finessed Generals LeMay and Taylor and the other military chiefs, subtly procrastinating until peace could work its way slowly to the fore.

  A brave man did not have to leave his shrewdness at home, and Kennedy had worked with immense sagacity and high political duplicity. He kept the deal over the Turkish missiles secret, since he knew that the Republicans would bludgeon him with it in the congressional election. He knew too that the Soviets would keep their pledge of silence; as much as the Soviets disliked him, they disliked the Republicans more.

  As the p
resident debated the Cuban situation, he did not stand in an arena with two doors before him marked “Courage” and “Cowardice.” He stood before a multitude of doors, some of them barred, others half open, all marked in an obscure language. When he finally walked through one, some of those watching were convinced that it had been clearly labeled with the word “Courage.” Others swore that it was marked “Cowardice,” either for what they considered his gutless refusal to stand up to the Soviet tiger or conversely for recklessly provoking a needless crisis.

  Whatever they thought, though, most of the audience left the arena believing that the drama had ended. But history is rarely resolved in epic confrontations, and much of the drama of the missile crisis began when almost everyone thought it was over. It is a drama that in many respects still haunts America today.

  The Soviets moved quickly to remove their missiles, allowing American ships to come close enough to their freighters to photograph the massive closed crates on deck. They were less willing to take home their IL-28 planes since they were not explicitly part of the earlier negotiations and were considered defensive weapons. These planes became a major sticking point in ending the blockade. In the next weeks the Kennedy administration debated how to resolve this matter, not only the IL-28s but the overall relationship between the United States and Cuba.

  “Once we’ve got these missiles out … don’t we want to look at everything else against the background of our long-range objectives of eliminating communism in Cuba?” said Dillon at the NSC meeting on November 7. “Don’t we want to press along to get sort of a halfway workable inspection system? … Or you might prefer to get a less good inspection system and strengthen your ability to get rid of them.”