by Kai Bird
16. Evening transcript, NSC Excomm meeting, 10/16/62, p. 48, JFK.
17. Ibid., p. 26.
18. Garthoff, Reflections, p. 43. Previous accounts of the Oct. crisis have downplayed the role of the Turkish missiles; in fact, they are a central explanation of the entire crisis and its ultimate resolution. The Turkish parallel certainly was not lost on the president’s advisers, who on that very first day of the crisis speculated that Khrushchev was merely trying to rectify somewhat his own missile gap. As Bundy told his colleagues, “I’m sure his generals have been telling him for a year and a half that he had, was missing a golden opportunity to add to his strategic capability.” (Evening transcript, NSC Excomm meeting, 10/16/62, p. 26, JFK.)
19. Bernstein, “We Almost Went to War,” p. 13. Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs, “We hadn’t given the Cubans anything more than the Americans were giving to their allies.” (Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers [Boston: Little, Brown, 1970], p. 496.)
20. Evening transcript, NSC Excomm meeting, 10/16/62, p. 47, JFK.
21. Abel, The Missile Crisis, pp. 72–73.
22. Theodore C. Sorensen, Kennedy, p. 695; Abel, The Missile Crisis, p. 95. In a memo to the president on Oct. 22, 1962, Averell Harriman also suggested a trade of the Jupiter missiles in Turkey for the Cuban missiles. (Barton J. Bernstein, “The Cuban Missile Crisis: Trading the Jupiters in Turkey?,” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 95, no. 1 (Spring 1980), p. 106.
23. David Detzer, The Brink: Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962 (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1979), p. 159; Abel, The Missile Crisis, p. 96.
24. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Robert Kennedy and His Times, p. 556.
25. Kennedy, Thirteen Days, pp. 35–36.
26. Abel, The Missile Crisis, pp. 113–14. McCloy was scheduled to see Hermann Abs that day in Frankfurt. (“Memo to Mr. McCloy—European trip,” box Oil 1, folder 10, JJM.)
27. Isaacson and Thomas, Wise Men, p. 627; “Memo to Mr. McCloy—European trip,” box Oil 1, folder 10, JJM.
28. Walter Johnson, ed., The Papers of Adlai E. Stevenson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), vol. 8., p. 307.
29. Mahmoud Riad interview, Nov. 22, 1983.
30. Michael V. Forrestal secret memo to Bundy, 10/23/62, AH.
31. Johnson, ed., Papers of Adlai E. Stevenson, vol. 8, p. 325.
32. Michael V. Forrestal confidential memo to Bundy, 10/25/62, AH.
33. Judge Charles E. Wyzanski, Jr., letter to the authors, Nov. 23, 1982.
34. Dean Rusk appointment book, 10/25/62, box 1, Rusk Papers, LBJ. McCloy joined a meeting in Rusk’s office at 7:20 P.M. with Rusk, Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson, Edwin M. Martin, Harland Cleveland, George Ball, and U. Alexis Johnson.
35. Abel, The Missile Crisis, p. 151.
36. Summary record of NSC Excomm meeting no. 6, Oct. 26, 1962, 10:00 A.M., JFK.
37. Ibid., p. 6.
38. Notes of Excomm meeting taken by Colonel Burris for Lyndon Johnson, 10:00 A.M., 10/26/62, LBJ.
39. Garthoff, Reflections, p. 51.
40. Abel, The Missile Crisis, p. 174.
41. Detzer, The Brink, p. 234.
42. McNamara, Blundering into Disaster; p. 10.
43. Kennedy, Thirteen Days, pp. 65–67.
44. WP, Oct. 22, 1987.
45. Summary record of NSC Excomm meeting no. 7, Oct. 27, 1962, 10:00 A.M., JFK.
46. Summary record of NSC Excomm meeting no. 8, Oct. 27, 1962, 4:00 P.M., JFK.
47. WP, Oct. 22, 1987. According to Seymour Hersh, the National Security Agency cracked a Soviet military code several years later and learned that the SAM site in question was in the hands of Cuban, not Soviet troops. (Seymour Hersh, “Was Castro Out of Control in 1962?,” WP, Oct. 11, 1982.) Castro, fed up with the Soviet response to the blockade, had reportedly ordered the firing of the SAM to take down the U-2 over Cuban skies. If Kennedy had followed McCone’s advice, he would have been retaliating against the Soviets for an act performed by a recalcitrant Soviet ally. (Garthoff, Reflections, p. 53.) Soviet sources deny that any of the SAM sites were ever in the hands of the Cubans. (Richard Bernstein, “Meeting Sheds New Light on Cuban Missile Crisis,” NYT, Oct. 14, 1987.)
48. WP, Oct. 22, 1987.
49. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, p. 564.
50. Herbert S. Dinerstein, The Making of a Missile Crisis: October 1962 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 228, 236.
51. On the evening of Oct. 27, President Kennedy instructed Dean Rusk to phone a Columbia University professor, Andrew Cordier, who had discreet but ready access to U Thant. Rusk dictated a statement to Cordier proposing the removal of the missiles in both Turkey and Cuba. Cordier was to have U Thant propose the swap only after a signal from Washington. Thus, if Khrushchev had not capitulated the next morning, Kennedy had prepared for himself a face-saving method of accepting a public swap of the missiles through U.N. auspices. (James Blight, Joseph Nye, Jr., and David A. Welch, “The Cuban Missile Crisis Revisited,” Foreign Affairs, Fall 1987, p. 179; Thomas J. Schoenbaum, Waging Peace and War: Dean Rusk in the Truman, Kennedy and Johnson Years [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988], p. 324.)
52. Detzer, The Brink, p. 260.
53. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, p. 550.
54. Raymond L. Garthoff, “The Cuban ‘Contras’ Caper,” WP, Oct. 25, 1987.
55. State Department memo to USUN, “Subject: New York Negotiations,” 10/31/62, LBJ. Ralph Bunche, the undersecretary general of the U.N., frankly told McCloy and Stevenson that “what is being asked of Cuba on verification has never been granted by any sovereign country and he doubted Castro would accept.” (Stevenson cable to secretary of state, 11/5/62, LBJ.)
56. U.S. intelligence later learned that Cuban troops had actually encircled the four Soviet missile bases on Oct. 28, the day after Khrushchev’s capitulation, and continued to threaten Soviet control over the sites for as long as three more days. (Garthoff, Reflections, p. 63.)
57. State Department cable nos. 1584 (11/1/62); 1588(11/1/62); 1579(10/31/62); 1585 (11/1/62; and Rusk, eyes only, for George Ball, 11/1/62, LBJ.
58. NYT, Nov. 4, 1962.
59. On Oct. 28, Kennedy “agreed that we should read offensive weapons to include bombers, but should not get hung up on this issue.” [NSC Excomm record of action, 10/28/62, LBJ.)
60. Betty Goetz Lall interview, Feb. 23, 1985. The IL-28S had been decommissioned out of the Soviet Air Force in 1960, and the United States had not protested when some of these planes were given to Egypt and Indonesia. (Garthoff, Reflections, p. 65.)
61. Johnson, ed., Papers of Adlai E. Stevenson, vol. 8, p. 337.
62. Ronald R. Pope, ed., Soviet Views on the Cuban Missile Crisis (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1982), contains a translation of Anatolii A. Gromyko’s article “The Caribbean Crisis” on p. 221.
63. John Bartlow Martin, Adlai Stevenson and the World: The Life of Adlai Stevenson, p. 739.
64. Eyes only for Stevenson and McCloy from the president, 11/3/62, LBJ.
65. Garthoff, Reflections, p. 76.
66. Ibid., pp. 76–77. Early in 1963, the CIA estimated that seventeen thousand Soviet troops remained in Cuba after the departure of five to six thousand troops closely associated with operating and defending the missile and bomber systems. (Colonel Burris to vice-president, 2/5/63, LBJ.)
67. Stevenson to secretary of state, 11/5/62, LBJ.
68. Stevenson to secretary of state, 11/14/62, cable no. 1781, LBJ. In fact, President Kennedy had been told that such refugee reports could not be substantiated and instructed White House officials to brief various reporters on the unreliability of such rumors.
69. Edwin M. Martin, unpublished manuscript, pp. 102–3. McCloy believed the U-2 overflights of Cuba had “probably saved us from war and they might do so again.” (McCloy-Kuznetsov meeting, 11/18/62, box CMC 1, folder 7, JJM.)
70. Defense Department officials were quite unhappy with the procedures McCloy worked out, believing they left th
e Soviets plenty of opportunity to cheat. (Colonel Burris to LBJ, 11/2/62, LBJ.)
71. McCloy interview, March 19, 1986.
72. State Department cable no. 1710, 11/9/62, LBJ.
73. NSC Excomm record of action, 11/12/62, LBJ.
74. NYT, Nov. 19, 1962; eyes only for the secretary, meeting between McCloy and Kuznetsov, 11/18/62, box CMC 1, folder 7, JJM.
75. Garthoff, Reflections, p. 72.
76. These Soviet-Cuban conditions had been initialed by Mikoyan in Havana just a few days before, and Rusk told McCloy they were “obviously unacceptable.” He even suggested McCloy might want to tell Kuznetsov that Washington understood that it may have been necessary for the Soviets to sign this protocol with the Cubans “in order to get Mikoyan out with a whole skin, [but] they can hardly expect us to take it seriously.” (Rusk to McCloy, 11/17/62, box CMC 1, folder 6, JJM.)
77. A Nov. 7, 1962, State Department document referred to a U.S. strategy of aiming at the “elimination” of the “Castro regime including its old line communist hardcore.” (W. W. Rostow memo, 11/7/62, LBJ.)
78. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, p. 567.
79. Martin, unpublished manuscript, p. 104.
80. Eyes only for the secretary, meeting between McCloy and Kuznetsov, 11/18/62, box CMC 1, folder 7, JJM.
81. Martin, Adlai Stevenson and the World, p. 739.
82. Stevenson to Rusk, 11/15/62, LBJ.
83. NYT, Nov. 19, 1962.
84. Sorensen, Kennedy, p. 721.
85. Kennedy, Thirteen Days, p. 176.
86. Rusk, eyes only for Stevenson and McCloy, “Next Steps in New York Negotiations,” 11/21/62, LBJ.
87. Draft cable, “Correction to ourtel 1941,” 11/25/62, box CMC 1, folder 16, JJM.
88. State Department eyes-only cable for Stevenson and McCloy, “Next Steps in New York Negotiations,” 11/21/62, LBJ.
89. NYT, Dec. 7, 1962.
90. New York eyes-only cable to secretary of state, no. 2140, 12/5/62, LBJ.
91. New York to secretary of state, cable no. 2183, 12/7/62, LBJ.
92. Memo for Excomm meeting, 11/29/62, “Information and Public Affairs Matters Growing Out of Cuban Situation—Part II: East-West Aspects,” mandatory-review case no. 84–6, doc. no. 18, LBJ.
93. Ranelagh, The Agency, p. 398; Isaacson and Thomas, Wise Men, p. 630.
94. Garthoff, Reflections, p. 122.
95. Raymond L. Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1985), p. 77.
96. Averell Harriman memo of conversation, 12/28/62, AH.
97. McCloy interview, March 19, 1986.
98. Harland Cleveland to the secretary (Rusk), “Conversation with Mr. McCloy on Cuba,” mandatory-review case no. NLJ 84–6, doc. no. 13, LBJ, declassified 5/4/84.
99. Ibid.
100. The vague nature of the “understandings” that ended the crisis led a number of right-wing critics years later to charge that McCloy and the Kennedy administration had failed to define exactly what kind of Soviet military presence would be permitted in Cuba. (See George F. Will, “Romanticizing the Cuban Missile Crisis,” WP, Sept. 3, 1987.) Thus, in the midst of the “Soviet combat-brigade” affair of 1978, McCloy was consulted by the Carter administration and questioned as to what exactly had been negotiated. He reported, of course, that no agreement had been reached barring Soviet troops from the island, only that the Soviets had promised to withdraw those troops associated with the operating of the missiles. Similarly, critics in recent years have mistakenly charged that McCloy gave the Soviets a firm pledge not to invade Cuba. In fact, Henry Kissinger told the Soviets in 1970 that the Nixon administration believed that the understandings of 1962 “were still in force” and that the United States had pledged that it “would not use military force to bring about a change in the governmental structure of Cuba.” If anything, Kissinger’s statement represented an expansion of the McCloy-Kuznetsov understandings. (Martin, unpublished manuscript, p. 133.) Finally, twenty-five years after the crisis, Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta charged that the Soviets had violated the “understandings” by placing a dozen TU-95 Bear bombers and some 40 MiG-23 or MiG-27 fighter-bombers in Cuba. Such planes, they point out, are all capable of carrying nuclear weapons. (Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta, “Cuban Missile Crisis Facts Under Wraps,” WP, Oct. 9,1987.) If such reports are true, they merely underscore the limited nature of the understandings reached by McCloy in 1962 and remind us that what was unacceptable on the domestic political stage in 1962 is today merely a redundant fact of life in the age of nuclear parity.
101. Paul Hoffman, Lions in the Street: The Inside Story of the Great Wall Street Law Firms, p. 41.
102. McCloy to President Kennedy, 2/21/63, JFK.
103. Lew Douglas to Clint Murchison, 4/15/63, LD.
104. McCloy to Lew Douglas, 6/7/63, LD; McCloy to Herbert Hoover, 6/5/63, HH.
105. McCloy to Eisenhower, 6/6/63, DDE.
106. Endicott Peabody memo to the president, “John McCloy on Vietnam and the Presidency,” 11/6/67, NSF, Memos to the President, vol. 53, box 26, LBJ. Robert McNamara claims that before his death Kennedy had already made the decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Vietnam. (Robert S. McNamara interview, March 7, 1990.)
107. McCloy to Lew Douglas, 6/7/63, LD.
108. McCloy interview, March 19, 1986.
109. McCloy to Lew Douglas, 6/7/63, LD.
110. Rusk cable to Cairo, Rome, et al., re: McCloy itinerary, 6/18/63, DOS FOIA.
111. NYT, July 4, 1963.
112. McCloy to Johnson, 11/23/63, LBJ.
BOOK SIX
TWENTY-FIVE: THE WARREN COMMISSION, A BRAZIL COUP, EGYPT AGAIN, AND THE 1964 ELECTION
1. Baltimore Sun, July 21, 1975 (courtesy of Harold Weisberg).
2. Doris Kearns, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), p. 170.
3. Lyndon Baines Johnson, The Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency 19631969 (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1971), p. 26.
4. Johnson, Vantage Point, p. 26; Alfred Steinberg, Sam Johnson’s Boy: A Close-up of the President from Texas (New York: Macmillan, 1968), p. 625. Fortas was the lawyer who ensured Johnson’s election to the Senate in 1948 by an eighty-seven-vote margin. The first phone call Johnson made in Dallas immediately after the assassination was to Fortas. (Jack Harrison Pollack, Earl Warren: The Judge Who Changed America [Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1979], p. 260.)
5. Steinberg, Sam Johnson’s Boy, p. 626.
6. Pollack, Earl Warren, p. 229.
7. Johnson later claimed that Bobby Kennedy specifically asked him to appoint both McCloy and Allen Dulles to the Commission. This seems unlikely, since the attorney general at the time acted as if he was emotionally incapable of involving himself in any investigation of who killed his brother. (Johnson, Vantage Point, p. 27; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Robert Kennedy and His Times, p. 662.
8. Steinberg, Sam Johnson’s Boy, p. 625.
9. The Official Warren Commission Report on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, with special analysis and commentary by Louis Nizer (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1964), p. vi-a.
10. Warren Commission meeting transcript, 12/16/63, p. 52, JFK.
11. Warren Commission meeting transcript 12/5/63, p. 37, JFK. On the other hand, McCloy decided that the power to grant immunity to hostile witnesses was unnecessary to the Commission’s work. This decision has been attacked by critics of the Warren Commission. (Ibid., p. 61.)
12. Warren Commission meeting transcript, 12/5/63, p. 37, JFK.
13. Edward Jay Epstein, Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of the Truth (New York: Bantam, 1966), p. 30.
14. Robert Sam Anson, “They’ve Killed the President”: The Search for the Murderers of John F. Kennedy (New York: Bantam, 1975), p. 39.
15. John A. McCone to Lyndon Johnson, 1/9/64, LBJ.
16. Mark Lane, Rush to J
udgment (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1966), p. 7; Henry Hurt, Reasonable Doubt: An Investigation into the Assassination of John F. Kennedy (New York: Henry Holt, 1985), pp. 28–29.
17. Warren Commission meeting transcript, 12/5/63, p. 58, JFK.
18. Jan Black, “Linkage Groups and Denationalization: Denationalizing Business Elites, United States Penetration of Brazil,” unpublished manuscript, p. 87.
19. Edie Black and Fred Goff, The Hanna Industrial Complex (New York: North American Congress on Latin America, 1969), p. 8.
20. Memo of conversation, 9/20/63, DOS FOIA.
21. Jack W. Buford interviews, Jan. 17, 1985, Feb. 1, 1985.
22. John W. F. Dulles, “Hanna in Brazil,” unpublished manuscript, pt. IX, pp. 337, 340. As recently as Aug. 21, 1963, for instance, Gordon had cabled Washington, “If God really is Brazilian, Goulart’s heart trouble of 1962 will soon become acute. . . . Goulart will almost certainly do his best to institute some form of authoritarian regime.”
23. “Proposed Short Term Policy: Brazil,” State Department secret report, 9/30/63, AH. This document mentions such activities as initiating a “covert program” to “assure U.S. penetration of the non-commissioned officers of all three [Brazilian military] services.” The report also recommends “quick recognition and support to any regime which the Brazilians install to supplant Goulart’s regime. . . .” See also Ruth Leacock, “JFK, Business, and Brazil,” Hispanic American Historical Journal, vol. 59, no. 4 (Nov. 1979), p. 667. Not everyone was as pessimistic as Ambassador Gordon. Tom Hughes, director of the State Department’s Intelligence and Research Bureau, argued with his colleagues that Goulart was simply a “social reformer” and that Gordon’s analysis lacked “validity.” (Thomas L. Hughes secret memo to Mr. Martin, State Department, 8/29/63, AH.)
24. Jack W. Buford interview, Jan. 18, 1985.
25. Vernon Walters, Silent Missions (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978), p. 388.