Thirteen Days

by Robert F. Kennedy

  Fourth, the coalition that had formed behind the President’s initial preference gave him reason to pause. Who supported the air strike—the Chiefs, McCone, and Acheson for instance—counted as much as how they supported it.

  Fifth, a piece of inaccurate information, which no one probed, permitted the blockade advocates to fuel (potential) uncertainties in the President’s mind. When the President returned to Washington Wednesday evening, RFK and Sorensen met him at the airport. Sorensen gave the President a four-page memorandum outlining the areas of agreement and disagreement. The strongest argument was that the air strike simply could not be surgical. After a day of prodding and questioning, the Air Force had asserted that it could not guarantee the success of a surgical air strike limited to the missiles alone.

  Thursday evening, the President convened the Ex Comm at the White House. He declared his tentative choice of the blockade and directed that preparations be made to put it into effect by Monday morning. Though he raised a question about the possibility of a surgical air strike subsequently, he seems to have accepted the experts’ opinion that this was no live option. (Acceptance of this estimate suggests that he may have learned the lesson of the Bay of Pigs—“Never rely on experts”—less well than he supposed.) This information seems to have been incorrect. During the second week of the crisis, civilian analysts examined the surgical air strike option, asserted that with suitable modification of Air Force plans this option could be chosen with high confidence, and thus added it to the list of possible choices for the end of the second week. Why no one probed the initial estimates earlier remains an interesting question.

  The decision to blockade thus emerged as a collage. Its pieces included the initial decision by the President that something forceful had to be done; the resistance of Robert Kennedy, McNamara, and Sorensen to the air strike; the relative distance between the President and the air strike advocates; and a probably inaccurate piece of information.*

  A DILEMMA OF GOVERNANCE

  The process of decision in this case illustrates a set of checks and balances almost unmentioned by our Constitution. A President and his top-level associates are mutually dependent. But their needs of one another can be incompatible. Rarely do they serve each other to their mutual satisfaction. Robert Kennedy’s account suggests that in the Cuban missile crisis satisfaction was indeed obtained by both. A careful reading will suggest, however, the fragility of this result. It is not to be taken for granted.

  What President Kennedy needed from executive officialdom is plain in his brother’s story. He needed information, analysis, and control to match his own unshared and now unshareable responsibility. In retrospect he seems to have received enough of each, but only just, and only by extraordinary effort on his own part and on that of his most intimate associates. The U-2 photographs were taken in the nick of time for him; our aircraft lined up wing-to-wing were not dispersed until he intervened; his agent McNamara never did succeed in wresting from the Navy full control over its ships, and only Soviet caution saved him from the consequences of an Air Force pilot’s fix on the wrong star. What he needed, evidently, was information building up from small details and control reaching down to small decisions in the depths of every relevant department. These were his needs because the country and its future depended so heavily on his judgment.

  What top officials needed from the President is also plain in RFK’s account of the Ex Comm. They needed a forum for discussion, a referee for arguments, assurance of a hearing, and a judgment on disputes. Their jurisdictions were at once divided and entangled. The Secretaries of Defense and State, the military services, the CIA, our missions at the United Nations and at NATO all had roles to play, but these required each to share the stage with all the rest. None could act alone. And their perspectives were parochial (at least in in some degree). The Air Force saw the interest of the nation—and its options—in terms diametrically opposed to those of our Ambassador at the United Nations. The Secretary of Defense weighed up MRBMs in Cuba and derived a different balance than his State Department counterparts: he emphasized deterrence while they emphasized diplomacy. Robert Kennedy and Dean Acheson differed over the lessons of history and the lessons that U.S. action in this case would teach the future.

  In hindsight, the invention of the Ex Comm and its improvised procedures (including sessions separate from the President) gave men like these the very things they needed, under circumstances bound to minimize parochialism, strengthening their sense of common service to the top. But JFK’s contrivance of a special hearing for the Air Force case before he ruled against an air strike at the start suggests that the Ex Comm had its limits as a forum, also as a court-of-last-resort. And in the second week of crisis there were signs aplenty that the third week might have witnessed something close to an explosion by harassed, frustrated, shut-out bureaucrats below the top. If so, their weary seniors, strained by thirteen days, scarcely could have contained them. As a means to meet the needs of second-level men, the Ex Comm was a travesty. Yet by the sixteenth day their needs would have been paramount. They would have had to mount the military operations and the corollary diplomatic actions.

  Thirteen Days does not have much to say about the needs and frustrations of subordinate officials. It is a personal memoir and its author viewed the scene from a position close to the top. But the authors of this Afterword have heard in vivid detail the complaints of those below, also their hopes and plans. As one of us once told a Senate subcommittee:

  One can already see in these two weeks (of missile crisis) frustration rising at official levels. The…needs of officials in their own lives and work would have proven very intense indeed over a month. Two weeks were quite enough to build up great concern about being left out of things. At the same time, action officers were finding no department heads to take their issues to…. Then add to these psychological and operating troubles…that there evidently was beginning to be a proliferation of ad hoc subcommittees under the Ex Comm—and I think I can tell you what would have happened in the course of a month….

  Officials would have fastened on to these new subcommittees as a way of getting all the secondary issues raised up and also as a way of getting into the act of top decisionmaking. [Soon]…there would have been two or three levels of committees. They would have been in existence long enough so that people had vested rights…. You would have had an Operations Coordinating Board structure magnified and growing like Topsy. Then suppose the whole thing had evolved successfully. The President would…be faced with having to destroy the…[structure]…in order to get back some flexibility.*

  As this suggests, the same forces that shape presidential needs also shape the needs of bureaucrats, but in different ways. Well before the Soviets achieved an ICBM capability, the place of change in our own weaponry, combined with our wide-ranging economic and political endeavors overseas, was mixing up the jurisdictions of all agencies with roles to play, or claim, in national security: mingling operations along programmatic lines, cutting across vertical lines of authority, breaching the neat boxes on organizational charts. Defense, State, CIA, AID, Treasury, together with the President’s Executive Office staffs, came to form a single complex—a national security complex, tied together by an intricate network of program and staff interrelationships in Washington and in the field. The Atomic Energy Commission, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and USIA are also in the complex; others lurk nearby, tied in to a degree, as, for example, Commerce.

  As early as the National Security Act of 1947, we formally acknowledged the close ties of foreign, military, economic policy; these ties had been rendered very plain by World War II experience. But in pre-Korean War years when the Marshall Plan was on its own, when CIA was new, when military aid programs were hardly heard of, while atom bombs were ours alone, and military budgets stood at under $15 billion, a Secretary of Defense could forbid contacts between Pentagon and State at any level lower than his own, and, within limits, could enforce his ban. Tha
t happened no longer ago than 1949. In bureaucratic terms it is as remote as the Stone Age.

  While operations now have been entangled inextricably, our formal organizations and their statutory powers and the jurisdictions of Congressional committees remain much as ever: distinct, disparate, dispersed. Our personnel systems are equally dispersed. In the national security complex alone, we have at least seven separate professional career systems—military included—along with the general civil service, which to most intents and purposes is departmentalized.

  These days few staffs in any agency can do their work alone without active support or at least passive acquiescence from staffs outside, in other agencies, often many others. Yet no one agency, no personnel system is the effective boss of any other; no one staff owes effective loyalty to the others. By and large, the stakes which move men’s loyalties—whether purpose, prestige, power, or promotion—run to one’s own program, one’s own career system, along agency lines, not across them.

  These developments place premiums on interstaff negotiations, compromise, agreement in the course of everybody’s action. This invokes the horrors of committee work: the wastes of time, the earstrain—and the eyestrain—the “papering over” of differences, the search for lowest common denominators of agreement. But given the realities of programming and operations, interagency negotiation cannot be avoided. To “kill” committees is at most to drive them underground. Officials have to find at best an informal equivalent. What else are they to do?

  One other thing they can do is push their pet issues up for argument and settlement at higher levels. Once started on this course, there is no very satisfactory place to stop short of the White House. In logic and in law, only the Presidency stands somewhat above all agencies, all personnel systems, all staffs. Here one can hope to gain decisions as definitive as our system permits; Congressional committees may be able to supplant them, special pleaders may be able to reverse them, foot draggers may be able to subvert them—even so, they are the surest thing obtainable.

  Accordingly, officials urged to show initiative, to quit logrolling in committee, to be vigorous in advocacy, firm in execution, turn toward the White House seeking from it regular, reliable, consistent service as a fixed and constant court of arbitration for the national security complex. This means, of course, a court which knows how courts behave and does not enter cases prematurely.

  Their need for such a service is unquestionable and legitimate. To flounder through the mush of “iffy” answers, or evasions; to struggle through the murk of many voices, few directives; to fight without assurance of a referee; to face Capitol Hill without assurance of a buffer; or on the other hand, to clean up after eager amateurs, to repair damage done by ex parte proceedings; to cope with happy thoughts in highest places—these are what officialdom complains of, and with reason. For the work of large-scale enterprises tends to be disrupted by such breaches of “good order” and routine. Not bureaucrats alone but also Presidents have stakes in the effectiveness of the Executive bureaucracy. From any point of view, officials surely are entitled to want White House service in support of their performance.

  But if a President should give this service to their satisfaction, what becomes of him? While he sits as the judge of issues brought by others—keeping order, following procedure, filing decisions, clearing dockets—what happens to his personal initiative, his mastery of detail, his search for information, his reach for control? What happens to his own concerns outside the sphere of national security? In short, where is the flexibility he needs to make himself the master of decisions for which he alone remains politically accountable?

  To a degree—a large degree—the needs of any President and those of “his” officialdom are incompatible. Rarely can both be served alike. Usually one suffers as the other benefits. The missile crisis seems a rarity in just this sense. But probably it would not seem so had it lasted for another week.*

  Since World War II our government has often tried to square the circle of this incompatibility by tinkering with structure. Alternately, efforts have been made to tighten up procedures for official consultation and to loosen their constraints upon the White House. Sometimes efforts of both sorts have been made at once, with contradictory consequences. Each Administration has begun by altering the structure it inherited to cure a “weakness” in its predecessor’s practice as observed from the outside or from below. The National Security Council, created by act of Congress in 1947, has been called Secretary of Defense James Forrestal’s revenge on Franklin Roosevelt for the latter’s quite incurable and sometimes costly tendency to keep all threads in his own hands, or anyway in no one else’s. The subordinate committee structure Eisenhower later sponsored—the Planning Board and Operations Coordinating Board—was said to be a cure-all for alleged disorder under Truman. Kennedy’s abrupt dismantling of that structure was regarded as essential to unleash the human energies locked up inside its “paper mill.” Nixon now “restores” a somewhat comparable structure, ending the “excesses” of the Johnson White House, but he ties it to a presidential staff more formidable in numbers and in jurisdiction than his predecessors ever had employed.

  So goes the tinkering with structure. None of it thus far has obviated the uncomfortable fact that Presidents rarely are better served than when officials are frustrated, and vice versa.

  In terms of structure, Kennedy’s most sophisticated contribution was his refusal to continue the Ex Comm once the missile crisis passed its peak. Reportedly he saw it as an indispensable piece of machinery for a crisis-time, indispensable because so flexible and so removed from vested rights or interests. Its use at any other time would vitiate those qualities. Thus he ordered it disbanded, to the dismay of some members, and the very term “Ex Comm” was barred from current use. In this, although not consciously, he followed Truman’s practice at the outbreak of the Korean War.

  Kennedy’s decision to disband the Ex Comm is expressive of the underlying dilemma. There appear to be no ways whereby a President can be assured routinely, at all times and places, of the information and control he needs while simultaneously assuring to officials the hearings, the due process, the appeals, and the forbearance they require of the White House. Even at the farthest remove from routine, the missile crisis above all, these two assurances seem barely, temporarily compatible. Yet risks of rule lie quite as much in bureaucratic momentum as in presidential misjudgment. Frustrated, uncomprehending bureaucrats can be as much a danger to us all, and to a President, as faults in his own knowledge, or his judgment, or his temperament. The check and balance system we encounter in the Missile Age does not appear to check or balance its destructive hazards. Rather, it may readily enlarge them. For this there is no help in sight from any source except the human qualities of prudence, luck, and fortitude displayed in 1962 by fourteen men for thirteen days.

  A CONSTITUTIONAL ISSUE?

  Our Constitution is a product of the eighteenth century. Its authors were men of the Enlightenment and also men of action: political philosophers—mostly at secondhand—with firsthand practical experience. They were intensely conscious of the paradox of rulership as manifested by the course of history up to their time. On the one hand, the common good required that political power be placed in some human hands. Only by yielding considerable discretion to a central public authority could citizens secure the common defense, law, order, or personal liberties. But on the other hand, to establish a powerful public authority was to create enormous risks of the misuse of power. As so often before, the rulers, being human and thus fallible, might choose unwisely, or might implement their choices clumsily, at awful cost. Our Constitution makers aimed at an effective central government, else they would not have come to Philadelphia. But they sought to minimize the risks.

  The product of their work had four distinctive features. One of these was limited authority: the federal Bill of Rights and its state counterparts were meant to wall off civil liberties, including private property, from arb
itrary governmental action. A second feature was shared powers: federal and state governments had overlapping functions, and within the federal structure, so did President, House, Senate, Supreme Court. A third feature was separated institutions: each power-sharing body had a separate base of political accountability, hence constituency, and these were kept distinct from one another. A fourth feature was legitimation by the symbols of popular sovereignty: the people replaced the monarchy, and this was done in such a way as to clothe institutions with their status, while yielding little to direct democracy.

  Throughout, the underlying theme was checks and balances: rights hedging authority, powers checking powers, separate institutions in enforced collaboration, with political accountability divided and legitimacy dispersed. No man was entrusted with unlimited prerogatives; neither was the mob. Instead, a goodly group of men, each with a piece of power, backed by a constituency, would scrutinize each other, balancing each other, as they tried to fit their pieces into governance. Thus human failings might be cancelled out.

  Then as now the ultimate expression of authority was war, and there this general pattern was applied with special care. The model evidently was the English royal prerogative as modified by Parliament’s control over the purse. Our Constitution-makers modified it further. Congress as a substitute for Parliament would also declare war. The Senate as a parliamentary body was to share in making treaties of alliance or of peace. Our President, as substitute for King, had no prerogative to do these things alone. What he retained, alone, was actual command of such armed forces as Congressional enactments gave him leave to raise and keep. It thus was the intention that recourse to war required a collaborative judgment by the whole body of men in national elective office. Presidents could not declare war, congressmen could not deploy the troops. On this as on all lesser issues, these men were to check and balance one another.