At the height of the crisis, Kennedy mobilized a vast army of men and matériel that stood poised to attack Cuba and perhaps trigger a nuclear holocaust. The invasion plan called for the largest drop of paratroopers since the battle for Normandy in 1944; the Pentagon estimated that 18,500 Americans would be killed or wounded in the first ten days of battle. The Strategic Air Command's fleet of 1,436 B-52 and B-47 bombers and 172 intercontinental ballistic missiles was moved to DEFCON 2, the highest military alert short of all-out war. One-eighth of the bombers were in the air at all times during the next thirty days, prepared to drop devastating nuclear weapons on targets in Cuba and the Soviet Union. The 579 fighters of the air force's Tactical Air Command were programmed to fly 1,190 combat sorties in the invasion's first twenty-four hours; aviation fuel and other essential supplies were positioned throughout southern Florida and on a British base in the Bahamas. More than 100,000 combat-ready army infantrymen had deployed to ports along the East Coast, a few hours from Cuba. A huge navy fleet, backed up by 40,000 marines, was steaming, moments away from battle stations, through international waters in the Caribbean and the South Atlantic. The American war machine was at its "highest state of readiness," according to military documents made public years later, and awaited only a go signal from the White House. The president's determination, and his show of force, seemingly won the day.
Kennedy earned plaudits and admiration not only for his clear triumph but for his cool style and confident demeanor between the discovery of medium-range missiles on Cuba on October 15 and Khrushchev's public capitulation on October 28. "It was this combination of toughness and restraint," Arthur Schlesinger wrote in A Thousand Days, "of will, nerve and wisdom, so brilliantly controlled, so matchlessly calibrated, that dazzled the world.... The thirteen days gave the world---even the Soviet Union---a sense of American determination and responsibility in the use of power which, if sustained, might indeed become a turning point in the history of the relations between east and west."
Over the next thirty-five years a vast assortment of evidence---including published memoirs, interviews, and documents released from Soviet archives---has revealed that much of what the Kennedy administration said about the crisis at the time, publicly and privately, was not true. The overriding deceit---one that still distorts the history of those thirteen days---was the absolute determination of Jack and Bobby Kennedy to conceal their campaign to assassinate Fidel Castro and destroy his regime. The American public was not told what the KGB and Nikita Khrushchev knew. Even more disturbing, many of the American government officials on the ad hoc crisis committee, known as Ex Comm, who served the president as councillors of war, had no knowledge---no "need to know"---of Edward Lansdale's Operation Mongoose and Bill Harvey's Task Force W. Kennedy did not dare tell the full story of the Soviet missiles in Cuba, because it was his policies that brought the weapons there.
Historians and journalists have debated for years whether Khrushchev, in sneaking his missiles into Cuba, was primarily concerned with protecting Cuba, as he claimed, or simply attempting to alter the strategic balance of power, as Kennedy claimed. But Khrushchev's ultimate motive aside, the Kennedy brothers surely understood that the administration's policy of relentless pressure against Castro had given the Soviet premier the opening and the political rationale for his gamble in Cuba. With his missile deployment, Khrushchev was asserting his country's status as a superpower. The Soviet Union had submarines that were capable of launching nuclear missiles on New York, Washington, and other major American cities; it was the threat from a missile that was of interest to American policymakers, not whether it was fired at sea or from an island ninety miles offshore. Few in Washington seriously believed that a few dozen ballistic missiles in Cuba could change the essential fact of the strategic balance of power: the Soviet Union was hopelessly outgunned. By the fall of 1962, America's arsenal contained 3,000 nuclear warheads and nearly 300 missile launchers---far more than the Soviet Union's 250 warheads (including those in Cuba) and estimated 24 to 44 missile launchers.
The attention given the administration's highly publicized state of readiness masked another important fact: the Soviet Union made no military moves at all on its home territory during the crisis. Its fleet of liquid-fueled ICBM launchers, which required hours to be ready for a launch, was not put on alert. Soviet reserve forces were not called up. There were no threats against Berlin.
Yet there was a crisis, and it was provoked by Khrushchev, at least publicly. In putting missiles into Cuba, the Soviet premier was even more daring than the record showed. He used Georgi Bolshakov and other back-channel messengers in the summer and fall of 1962 to repeatedly assure Kennedy, who was continually receiving intelligence reports of a Soviet buildup on Cuban soil, that missiles were not being shipped to Cuba.
Jack Kennedy, confronted with political and personal difficulties that fall, chose to believe Khrushchev's assurances over his own intelligence services. His administration had accomplished little in Congress in its first two years, and he wanted to get more Democrats elected in the midterm congressional elections, scheduled for November 6. More Democrats would mean a better legislative record for the all-important presidential reelection campaign in 1964. Another crisis in Cuba would evoke the Bay of Pigs and give the Republicans a vibrant foreign policy issue.
The Republicans already had civil rights. In late September the reluctant president, urged on by his brother, fought his way through yet another bloody black-white confrontation in the South, and put the full weight of the federal government behind the ultimately successful attempt of one black, James Meredith, to register at the University of Mississippi. Most Americans, sickened by the violence of southern sheriffs, seemed to be supporting their president, Kennedy was privately told by his pollsters. But no one could predict whether that support would translate into votes for Democrats.
The president also continued to maneuver through a succession of potentially career-ending personal crises, all revolving around women. Marilyn Monroe's suicide in early August triggered a wave of conspiracy theories, but no journalist had---yet---publicly reported what many in Hollywood knew: that she and the president had been lovers. His liaison with Judith Campbell Exner was still a secret from the public, although J. Edgar Hoover and dozens of FBI agents now knew of Kennedy's involvement with her and that she met regularly with Sam Giancana and Johnny Rosselli. Hoover also knew that a senior employee of General Dynamics, one of two bidders for the $6.5 billion TFX aircraft contract, had been part of a team that in August broke into Exner's apartment in Los Angeles. Rumors about his first marriage to Durie Malcolm were still afloat, despite Ben Bradlee's seemingly definitive story.
On the morning of October 16, when the president learned that Khrushchev had been systematically lying to him about the missiles in Cuba, his ambitious hopes for the 1962 and 1964 elections were directly put at risk. Once again, Kennedy was facing the prospect of being undone by Cuba, and humiliated, as he had been in the Vienna summit, by Nikita Khrushchev. One possible solution was diplomatic: the president could privately confront the Soviet premier with evidence of his treachery, and negotiate the quiet withdrawal of the missiles.
But Kennedy remained obsessed with Cuba, and so it became Khrushchev's turn to be humiliated. Over the next thirteen days, the president eschewed diplomacy and played a terrifying game of nuclear chicken, without knowing all of the facts. For the first time in his presidency, Kennedy publicly brought his personal recklessness, and his belief that the normal rules of conduct did not apply to him, to his foreign policy. On October 27, at the height of the crisis, when the downing of an American spy plane threatened to move events beyond his control, Kennedy was forced to seek a compromise and to rely on Khrushchev's common sense and dread of nuclear war to keep the superpowers apart. Once again, at a moment of high risk the president turned to Bobby Kennedy, his protector, to bail him out.
Jack Kennedy's deceits about his personal life and the corruption of the 1960 pre
sidential election pale beside the false legacy he and his brother manufactured in the days and weeks after the missile crisis. Kennedy brought the world to the edge of nuclear war to gain a political victory: to humble an adversary who had humbled him before. But the public would be told, and would believe, that the valiant young president had won the missile crisis, by negotiating from strength. The lessons seemingly learned in the missile crisis would haunt American policymakers during the peace negotiations with North Vietnam, and would have made it more difficult for Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon to accept a compromise had they chosen to do so, thus perpetuating a war that claimed the lives of thousands of Americans and millions of Asians.
This, then, is a new history of the missile crisis, centered on the two most powerful men in Washington in the fall of 1962, the two men who knew all the secrets.
In May 1962 Nikita Khrushchev decided to make the boldest gamble of his career: he would station Soviet nuclear weapons in Cuba---the first deployment of such weapons outside of Eurasia---and do it in secret.
One factor, certainly, was strategic. A year earlier, President Kennedy had overridden objections from Khrushchev and some of his own advisers and approved operational status for fifteen medium-range Jupiter nuclear missiles in Turkey, across the Black Sea from Russia. The weapons had been ordered to Turkey in 1959 by President Eisenhower, but were not ready to fire until the Kennedy administration was in office. Khrushchev, who had a seaside summer home in Soviet Georgia, was incensed by the deployment, and often asked guests, especially Americans, to peer with binoculars across the water. When they asked what they were looking at, he said, "U.S. missiles in Turkey, aimed at my dacha." Soviet missiles in Cuba might not change the balance of power, but they would put dozens of major American cities more directly in harm's way and remind the young president that the Soviet Union insisted on being treated as a superpower equal. There were many troubling international issues still to be resolved between Washington and Moscow: the American insistence on unfettered access to West Berlin; the deepening American commitment in South Vietnam; and the White House's decision in March to respond to renewed Soviet nuclear testing by beginning its own atmospheric tests.
A second factor was the U.S. threat to Cuba. Operation Mongoose and the continued secret American attempts to assassinate Castro had driven the Cuban government more firmly into the protective grasp of Moscow, which had provided some $250 million in arms and matériel since mid-1960. The White House responded with public intimidation. In April 1962 the president lent the prestige of his office to the anti-Cuba effort by flying to Norfolk, Virginia, to watch a huge military exercise; some 40,000 men conducted amphibious landings at beaches in North Carolina and off Vieques Island, Puerto Rico, less than fifty miles from Cuba. In their 1997 study of the missile crisis, "One Hell of a Gamble," Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, who had access to Soviet archives, concluded that Khrushchev "came to believe" in the first few months of 1962---as the president wanted him to believe---that "John F. Kennedy was prepared to invade Cuba." In his memoirs, published in 1970, Khrushchev wrote, "I'm not saying we had any documentary proof that the Americans were preparing a second invasion [after the Bay of Pigs]. We didn't need documentary proof. We knew the class affiliation, the class blindness, of the United States, and that was enough to make us expect the worst."
To ensure the secrecy of the missile deployment, Khrushchev relied on Georgi Bolshakov and the fascination of the Kennedy brothers with back-channel negotiations. Bolshakov and Bobby Kennedy met at least six times in July 1962, according to Fursenko and Naftali, with Bolshakov suggesting at one point that Washington would have better relations with Moscow if it stopped aerial monitoring of Soviet shipping in international waters. Such overflights constituted "harassment," Bolshakov told the unsuspecting Kennedys, who continued to be worried about a flare-up in Berlin. In late July, Bolshakov was invited to a private meeting in the Oval Office with the Kennedy brothers, and the president seemingly agreed---so the Soviets thought---to limit U.S. surveillance of Soviet shipping if Khrushchev would put the Berlin issue "on ice." Soviet files show that in early August Bolshakov was authorized to tell John Kennedy that Khrushchev was "satisfied with the president's order to curtail U.S. planes' inspections of Soviet ships in open waters." There is no evidence that surveillance was significantly cut back, however. The American intelligence community was able to report in late August 1962 that fifty-five Soviet ships docked in Cuba that month---four times more than in August 1961.
By late summer the first intelligence reports of Soviet surface-to-air missiles in Cuba began circulating in Washington, and Khrushchev escalated his back-channel manipulations to deceive the Kennedy brothers. On September 6, Anatoly Dobrynin, the new Soviet ambassador to Washington, forwarded Khrushchev's assurances to the brothers that "nothing will be undertaken before the American Congressional elections that would complicate the international situation or aggravate the tension in the relations between our two countries." A similar message was passed to Charles Bartlett, Kennedy's newspaper friend, by Aleksandr Zinchuk, the Soviet minister in Washington. The message presented on behalf of Khrushchev was warm, Bartlett recalled in an interview for this book: "Khrushchev wants the president to know that he understands he is busy with the elections coming up and he will not in any way interfere with the election." The Soviet reassurances could not have come at a better time. The president was being lambasted in public by Senator Kenneth Keating of New York, a prominent liberal Republican, who claimed that "our do-nothing president" was suppressing intelligence about the extent of a Soviet missile buildup in Cuba. Georgi Bolshakov, on home leave in Moscow, was summoned to see Khrushchev and instructed to tell the president, through Bobby Kennedy, that the Soviet Union was providing Cuba only with weapons that were "defensive in character."
Khrushchev was unquestionably being deceptive in his use of the back channel throughout the summer and fall, but he was apparently careful to avoid an explicit lie. Throughout the crisis, and for years afterward, he insisted the Soviet missiles in Cuba were defensive---just as American policymakers called the Jupiters in Turkey "deterrent/defensive."
Cuba was once again front-page news, and the White House was forced to put out a statement declaring that there was no evidence of ballistic missiles in Cuba or "of other significant offensive capability either in Cuban hands or under Soviet direction and guidance." At a news conference on September 13, the president put his credibility on the line, saying that if the Soviet Union was shown to have provided Cuba with offensive weapons, "this country will do whatever must be done to protect its own security and that of its allies."
By this point, the president was getting a steady stream of cables and reports from John McCone, the CIA director, warning that Soviet offensive missiles, capable of delivering a nuclear warhead, were coming into Cuba. The direct warnings began on August 22, when McCone told Kennedy what he had been saying for two weeks at Operation Mongoose meetings: the CIA had learned from its sources inside Cuba that Soviet SAMs were being shipped to the island. In his opinion, McCone said, according to a CIA summary declassified in 1996, there was a probability that medium-range ballistic missiles would be the next step in the Soviet buildup. McCone's memorandum of the meeting, published in 1992 by the CIA, showed that Kennedy specifically raised the question "of what we could do against Soviet missile sites in Cuba." The linkage between the Jupiter missiles in Turkey and the Soviet missiles was also discussed, according to the memorandum: "McCone questioned value of Jupiter missiles.... McNamara agreed they were useless but difficult politically to remove them." McCone coupled his aggressive intelligence reporting with aggressive recommendations for an immediate American invasion of Cuba in sufficient force "to occupy the country, destroy the regime, free the people, and establish in Cuba a peaceful country."
In September, McCone renewed his reporting, sending a series of "eyes only" messages to the president and other senior officials warning that "an
offensive Soviet Cuban base will provide Soviets with most important and effective trading position with all other critical areas and hence they might take an unexpected risk to establish such a position." The CIA director began to insist on a U-2 overflight of mainland Cuba; direct flights over the island had been limited since August for fear of a shootdown.
McCone's intelligence, and his insistence on pushing his view on the national security leaders of the administration, posed a dilemma for Jack Kennedy and his brother. In early October, with the congressional elections a month away, Bolshakov once again told Bobby Kennedy that the weapons going into Cuba were of "a defensive character." The president chose to believe Georgi Bolshakov over his CIA director, and did not authorize a direct U-2 flight over Cuba until October 9. It was the president's mistake, but McCone ultimately paid for it.
In Thirteen Days, his posthumous 1969 memoir of the missile crisis, Bobby Kennedy dealt with McCone's intelligence by pretending that it did not exist. When the book was published, none of McCone's reporting on the missiles had been made public. "We had been deceived by Khrushchev, but we had also fooled ourselves," Kennedy wrote. Ignoring Senator Keating's public assertions, Kennedy added that "no official within the government had ever suggested to President Kennedy that the Russian buildup in Cuba would include missiles." In his oral history for the Kennedy Library, which was not made public in full until 1988, Kennedy again insisted that McCone had not warned his brother about the Soviet missiles, and accused the CIA director of the most grievous offense in the White House---disloyalty. "He has not the loyalty that, for instance, Bob McNamara has," Kennedy said. "He is very careful of his own position. That's how he's been able to survive so many years in Washington.... I think he liked the president very much. But he liked one person more---and that was John McCone.... We all knew that John McCone was moving among senators and congressmen peddling this idea [that he had warned the president about the missiles] because it got him off the hook. Who was primarily responsible for not knowing there were missiles in Cuba earlier? The CIA. He wasn't going to have that on his back."
The Dark Side of Camelot Page 41