The Dark Side of Camelot

by Seymour Hersh

  Kennedy also did not tell Dwight Eisenhower, his new telephone confidant, the real story, although Eisenhower shrewdly asked the right questions. A transcript of the call, from the Evelyn Lincoln Dictabelts, shows that the president claimed victory over the Soviets and told Eisenhower that he had rejected Khrushchev's public demand that the Jupiters be withdrawn. "We couldn't get into that deal," Kennedy said, disingenuously.

  Eisenhower: "Of course, but Mr. President, does [Khrushchev] put any conditions on?"

  Kennedy: "No, except that we're not going to invade Cuba.... That's the only one we've got now. But we don't plan to invade Cuba under these conditions anyway, so if we can get them out, we're better off by now."

  Eisenhower: "I quite agree. I just wondered whether he would try to engage us in any kind of statement or commitments that would finally one day be very embarrassing."

  Kennedy: "I don't think the Cuban story can be over yet ... If they engage in subversion, if they attempt to do any aggressive acts and so on, then all bets are off. In addition, my guess is that by the end of next month we're going to be toe-to-toe in Berlin anyway, so I think this is important for the time being because it requires quite a step-down for Khrushchev."*

  Not everyone cheered Kennedy's agreement, as it was publicly stated---trading the Soviet missiles in Cuba for an explicit American commitment never to invade. "We now have a U.S.-protected Soviet base in the Western Hemisphere," Sam Halpern recalled telling one of his colleagues on Task Force W at the time. As Halpern anticipated, the president's attitude toward Castro did not change after the missile crisis; the CIA would still be asked to get rid of him.

  The Kennedy brothers brought the world to the edge of war in their attempts to turn the dispute into a political asset. They survived by making private entreaties to a Soviet premier they had sought only days earlier to humiliate before the world. Jack Kennedy was willing to trust the Soviet leadership with information that, if made public, would destroy his presidency. Robert Kennedy was also willing to hold his future presidency hostage to the vagaries of a foreign government that could choose, at any time, to make public the terms of the missile trade.

  Robert Kennedy could not bring himself to tell the truth, either in his memoir or in his oral interviews with his brother's library. Jack Kennedy accepted the nation's adulation as a peacekeeper, while remaining eager to tell his friends that he'd "cut off Khrushchev's balls." Members of the Ex Comm were also hailed by the public and the media for their role in repeatedly encouraging the president to be tough. The president's public approval ratings shot up to 77 percent---almost as high as in the weeks following the Bay of Pigs. Kennedy arranged for Tiffany's, the posh New York jeweler, to design a silver calendar, mounted in walnut, that depicted the month of October 1962, with the thirteen days of crisis etched more deeply. He presented the desktop mementos to each member of the Ex Comm and other aides who participated in the crisis.

  The public was touched by his display of affection for the men who had helped him make the tough decisions. Kennedy kept up the pretense of toughness after the crisis by helping to smear the dovish Adlai Stevenson, his ambassador to the United Nations, who had been the only member of the Ex Comm to have the courage to suggest trading the missiles in Cuba for the Jupiters in Turkey---the precise agreement that was secretly worked out. Stevenson's suggestion was criticized by his peers at the time; six weeks later the ambassador was anonymously accused of having "wanted a Munich" in an article coauthored by Charles Bartlett and Stewart Alsop. Jack Kennedy denied any role in the mud-slinging, but Stevenson later learned, according to his public papers, that Bartlett and Alsop presented a draft of the article to the president in advance. "It is true," Alsop later acknowledged, "that Kennedy read the piece for accuracy, and proposed a couple of minor changes."*

  The few men who knew part or all of the story said nothing, and the missile crisis continued to be the most misunderstood and poorly reported event of the Cold War. McNamara has never talked about what he knew. And Dean Rusk waited until 1987 before he finally acknowledged that the president, after dispatching his brother to see Dobrynin on the night of October 27, desperately sought a further compromise, although not the one that was actually negotiated. Kennedy authorized Rusk to draft a statement calling on U Thant, the United Nations secretary-general, to propose a public trade of Soviet missiles for American Jupiters. The president would then publicly accept the offer.*

  Anything was better, in Jack Kennedy's world, than being compelled to admit to his admirers in the government---and to the hard-nosed generals and admirals who ran the armed forces---that their heroic young president had compromised to avoid war.

  * * *

  * Bundy, in his repeated telling of the missile crisis over the next few months, explained that he did not immediately give the intelligence to Kennedy because the president had spent the day before campaigning and seemed worn out. "I decided that a quiet evening and a night of sleep were the best preparation you could have," he later told Kennedy in writing, "in light of what you would face in the days ahead." Bundy made the explanation to the president after a magazine raised questions in early 1963 about the legality of his unilateral decision not to immediately inform the president of so significant a matter. Bundy was obviously going through the motions in his written explanation. As we have seen in this book, there were many times in the Kennedy White House, according to the Secret Service, when the president could not be disturbed, even for the most urgent of matters.

  * Lovett, a wealthy New York lawyer whose father was president of the Union Pacific Railroad, had served as defense secretary in the Truman administration. He also served in the mid-1950s with Joseph Kennedy on the Eisenhower administration's intelligence advisory board; Jack Kennedy was eager to bring him into the inner circle during the missile crisis. Lovett arrived for a meeting in the Oval Office while the president was getting yet another briefing on the Soviet missiles. The CIA's Dino A. Brugioni, one of the briefers, described what happened next in a later memoir, Eyeball to Eyeball, published in 1991: "The president ... asked Bobby to do the honors [escort Lovett to the Oval Office]. Bobby stuck his head out of the office door and called out to the waiting guest, 'Hey, you!' Lovett, calm, dignified, and reserved, did not respond. 'Hey, you,' Bobby called out a second time, and Lovett quizzically pointed to himself. 'Yes, you!' Bobby said with some irritation. 'Come here!' The president slammed his pen to the desk, ran his hand across his brow and, thoroughly disgusted, screamed out, 'Goddamn, Bobby!' To us," Brugioni noted, "it wasn't evidence of a brotherly feud or family infighting. It was simply the president dressing down a younger sibling who just happened to be the attorney general of the United States. We hastily packed our briefing materials and left."

  † Some of the Ex Comm meetings were tape-recorded by Kennedy, who---under the recording system set up a few months earlier by the Secret Service---had to manually push a button to do so. The president and his brother were the only persons involved in the deliberations who knew that there could be a record for posterity. By the late 1980s, the Kennedy Library began making public many of the transcribed proceedings of the Ex Comm; their historical value can only be diminished by the fact that the two key players of the crisis knew they were being recorded.

  * Kennedy was confounded by Lippmann, who seemed unmoved by his charms. "You have lunch with Lippmann or Reston and they go back and knock the shit out of you to prove their integrity," Kennedy told Charles Bartlett. "The hell with them." Bartlett told the anecdote to Richard Reeves.

  * One of the ironies of the missile crisis, Sam Halpern told me, was that the huge CIA station in Miami, relying on defector reports and other data, estimated the Soviet troop level in Cuba at slightly more than 42,000 by the fall of 1962. But that estimate was rejected as far too high by the intelligence community in Washington. "The president didn't know the numbers that our people in Florida were using," Halpern said.

  * In April 1962 Kennedy had visited the navy's Atlantic
Fleet headquarters, and was given a briefing by Admiral Robert Dennison on the command-and-control procedures for firing a Polaris nuclear missile. "I gave President Kennedy my chair at my desk, where he could see everything," Dennison recounted in his oral history for the U.S. Naval Institute. "I told [him] what was going to happen, because things happen so fast ... just a lot of bang, bang, bang, and it's all over. I gave the command to start the exercise. Of course, all hell broke loose. Bells and buzzers and everything else started going,... getting the necessary instructions ... and giving the order to shoot." After the exercise, Dennison said, he asked Kennedy if he had any questions. "He didn't say anything, and there was quite an appreciable pause, which seemed like a long time but was probably maybe six or seven or eight seconds. Finally, he said, 'Can these missiles be stopped?' I said, 'No, sir.'...I've wondered often what he was thinking about; what could happen in a matter of a few seconds---not half an hour or fifteen minutes---for him to think about countermanding an order to shoot." Kennedy's question---asking, in effect, whether he could reverse his decision once a nuclear weapon was launched---is indicative of his constant concern with maintaining personal control over events.

  * Bobby Kennedy seemed unaware that his statement about the danger of escalation in Europe could be construed as undercutting the American bargaining position in the crisis. The American goal was to use the threat of bombing, or worse, to compel the Soviets to withdraw their missiles from Cuba. If Bobby Kennedy and his brother believed that an American bombing would lead to Soviet retaliation in Europe, the cost to America of hitting Cuba would be much higher---weakening the credibility of the American threat of force. In their 1994 study of the missile crisis, We All Lost the Cold War, published by Princeton University Press, Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Stein noted that "to maintain or enhance that credibility, [President] Kennedy would have had to discount the probability of Soviet retaliation to Dobrynin." There is another, more disturbing, analysis. Bobby Kennedy was reminding Khrushchev, through Dobrynin, that events could get out of control unless they made a private deal right away. He was warning that pressure from the Joint Chiefs might force the president to take steps he didn't want---the bombing of Cuba---and reminding Khrushchev that the same thing could happen to him within hours in the Soviet Union.

  * Kennedy also telephoned former president Harry Truman in Independence, Missouri, and once again misrepresented the agreement. A transcript of that call shows the following exchange:

  Truman: "I'm just pleased to death the way these things came out."

  Kennedy: "Well, we'll just stay at it. I just wanted to bring you up to date on it. We got a letter from [Khrushchev] on Friday night which was rather conciliatory on these withdrawals. Then on Saturday morning ... we got this entirely different letter about the missile bases in Turkey."

  Truman: "That's the way they do things."

  Kennedy: "Well, then we rejected that. Then they came back and accepted the earlier proposal so ... we're making some progress about getting these missiles out of there. In addition, Khrushchev's had some difficulties in maintaining his position."

  "Truman: "You're on the right track. You just keep after them. That's the language they understand, just what you gave them."

  * Evelyn Lincoln's Dictabelt tapes show that Kennedy was privately doubtful of Stevenson during the crisis. At one point early in the crisis, he telephoned the conservative John McCloy, a banker who was his special adviser on disarmament, and urged him to cut short a European business trip to fly to Stevenson's side at the United Nations. "I think we need somebody up there to sort of sustain Adlai, and stiffen him, and support him," the president said. McCloy, who was one of the architects of America's postwar reconstruction policies, wasn't eager to return, but did so when Kennedy arranged for a special flight. The president later informed Dwight Eisenhower that he had sent McCloy to the United Nations "to assist Adlai, so that we get somebody who's had some experience."

  * Ted Sorensen waited until 1989, and some public complaints by Dobrynin about the distortion of history, before revealing at an international conference on the missile crisis that he had deleted from Thirteen Days the essential fact that Jack and Robert Kennedy had decided to approach Khrushchev secretly---that is, behind the back of the Ex Comm---and explicitly agreed to withdraw the missiles in Turkey. Sorensen spent much of his professional life as a ghostwriter for Jack Kennedy and did the same for his brother's posthumous book. Thirteen Days was based on Bobby Kennedy's personal diaries, Sorensen said in a note published on the last page of the text, and written by Kennedy, in draft, in the summer and fall of 1967. As the editor of Robert Kennedy's book, Sorensen explained in 1989, he chose to delete the reference to the back-channel bargaining with Khrushchev, through Ambassador Dobrynin, "because at the time it was still a secret even to the American side." Sorensen's revelation left the impression that Bobby Kennedy, had he lived, would have described the secret agreement in his book. There is nothing in the record, or in Kennedy's oral history, that suggests that he would have done so.

  21

  DECEPTIONS

  Jack Kennedy's shining moment in Cuba immediately paid off in the midterm election on November 6, nine days after the missile crisis ended. The Democratic Party gained four seats in the Senate and lost four seats in the House---the best midterm showing by a party in the White House since 1934, in FDR's first term. One of the winners was Teddy Kennedy, who became the junior senator from Massachusetts; one of the losers was Senator Homer Capehart, of Indiana, a Republican who had spent the fall attacking Kennedy for being too soft on Castro.

  On December 17, 1962, the three major television networks simultaneously broadcast an hour-long interview with Kennedy, who handled the starstruck correspondents' questions with ease. Asked how he went about the decision-making in the missile crisis, Kennedy repeated the agreed-upon history by explaining that decisions were "hammered out" by the Ex Comm members over "five or six days.... After all alternatives were examined ... a general consensus developed ... that the course of action that we finally adopted was the right one." The president wanted no one to know that the Ex Comm had been excluded from the final bargaining with Nikita Khrushchev, and from the secret agreement to withdraw American missiles in Turkey in return for the removal of the Soviet missiles in Cuba.

  Meanwhile, a few administration officials and members of Congress were asking the president more pointed questions than the reporters: Why had the American government given orders for the withdrawal of all fifteen Jupiter missiles from Turkey? In early 1963 Alexander M. Haig, Jr., an army lieutenant colonel assigned to the Pentagon, was ordered by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to write an analytical study of the missile crisis from a military point of view. Haig, who in ten years would be President Richard Nixon's chief of staff, wrote in his 1992 memoir, Inner Circles, that he and his colleagues were troubled both by the order to pull the Jupiters out and by its timing: the withdrawal order was issued by Secretary of Defense McNamara the day after Khrushchev's public capitulation. "It certainly looked as though there had been a secret deal," Haig wrote in his memoir. "Soviet missiles out of Cuba in return for the removal of American missiles from Turkey." The final report to the Joint Chiefs, he wrote, "mentioned the possibility that what was being described as a coincidence could easily be interpreted as a secret arrangement." JCS chairman Maxwell Taylor "flushed angrily" when he read the paper, Haig recounted, "slammed it down on the table and said that he would never approve it for transmittal to the President. Our paper disappeared."

  The president's men handled questions from Congress by lying. In January 1963 Secretary of State Rusk was asked by Senator Bourke B. Hickenlooper of Iowa, the second-ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to confirm that the removal of the Jupiters "was in no way, shape or form, directly or indirectly connected" with the missile crisis settlement. "That is correct, sir," Rusk responded. One month later, Senator John C. Stennis of Mississippi, chairman of a Senate defense appropriat
ions committee, asked Robert McNamara whether the two were related. "Absolutely not," the defense secretary responded. McNamara apparently could not resist a bit of embellishment: "The Soviet government did raise the issue, [but the] President absolutely refused even to discuss it. He wouldn't even reply other than that he would not discuss the issue at all." At another hearing in February, McNamara, who, like Dean Rusk, knew all about the secret trade with Khrushchev, provided more false history. Khrushchev backed down, he said, because Ex Comm "faced ... the possibility of launching nuclear weapons and Khrushchev knew it, and that [was] the reason, and the only reason, why he withdrew [his] weapons."*

  In the spring, McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy's national security adviser, responded to rumors from Europe of a Jupiter deal by writing Raymond Aron, the French political scientist, in a letter that those "who would spread rumors" about the Jupiter trade, "of course, must be pretty far gone in their mistrust of the United States to start with." The Pentagon's annual report for 1963 described Turkey as being among a group of nations that had "announced their decision to phase out" their intermediate-range missiles.

  Kennedy's high public standing gave him renewed freedom to go after Fidel Castro in secret. "We started up all over again after the missile crisis, to try to unseat the Castro government," the CIA's Samuel Halpern told me in an interview. The Kennedy brothers pressed the CIA for more sabotage operations inside Cuba---one list had nine targets, including the Texaco oil refineries in Havana and Santiago.

  Bill Harvey, the career operative who ran Task Force W, the agency's anti-Castro operation, remained a skeptic who was unafraid to speak his mind; by the end of 1962, he and Bobby Kennedy had been in undeclared war for months. In Harvey's view, Kennedy was an amateur who had no understanding of covert intelligence. And the attorney general was not shy about expressing his unhappiness at the failure of Harvey's task force. A few weeks before the missile crisis, Kennedy had stunned a White House meeting by ripping into Harvey after he began dozing, as he usually did, after lunch. It was the "damnedest tirade," General Charles E. Johnson III, the army representative to Special Group (Augmented), told investigators for the Church Committee in 1975. Kennedy's personal attack went on for "quite a while, eight to ten minutes," Johnson related, with John McCone, the CIA director, saying nothing in defense of his man. "It couldn't have been a tirade for just a failure to make Mongoose succeed, I don't think," the general said. "It seemed to be something beyond that---a failure beyond that." What Johnson probably did not know when he was interviewed was that Harvey and his Mafia collaborators had been unable to pull the trigger on Castro.