JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President

by Thurston Clarke

  The crisis afforded Khrushchev a similar understanding of the pressures on Kennedy. He wrote in his 1970 memoirs that during a secret meeting between Robert Kennedy and Ambassador Dobrynin, Robert Kennedy had said, “The President is in a grave situation, and he does not know how to get out of it. We are under very severe stress. In fact we are under pressure from our military to use force against Cuba.” Considering this, he said, the president “implores Chairman Khrushchev to accept his offer.” He also warned that although the president was “very much against starting a war over Cuba, an irreversible chain of events could occur against his will. If the situation continues much longer, the President is not sure that the military will not overthrow him and seize power. The American army could get out of control.”

  The American editor of Khrushchev’s memoirs wrote in a footnote, “Obviously, this is Khrushchev’s own version of what was reported to him. There is no evidence that the President was acting out of fear of a military take-over.” Dobrynin gave an account of his conversation with Robert Kennedy in his memoirs that was based on a report he had written in 1962 that supported Khrushchev’s version. He wrote that during his pivotal late-night meeting with Robert Kennedy on Saturday, October 27, the president’s brother “remarked almost in passing that a lot of unreasonable people among American generals—and not only generals—were ‘spoiling for a fight.’”

  It is possible that Bobby told Dobrynin that his brother feared a military coup, hoping to frighten the Soviets into removing their missiles from Cuba. But what is certain is that by the fall of 1962 the president not only believed a coup was possible, but had repeatedly discussed its likelihood. That fall, Harper and Row published Seven Days in May, a thriller by Fletcher Knebel and Charles V. Bailey II about a coup against a U.S. president instigated by his decision to sign a controversial nuclear arms pact with the Soviet Union. Knebel got the idea from an interview with Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay shortly after the Bay of Pigs. LeMay was still furious with Kennedy for refusing to provide air support for the Cuban rebels, and after going off the record he accused him of cowardice. Knebel also found inspiration in a 1962 conversation with Secretary of the Navy John Connally. With LeMay’s remarks fresh in his mind, Knebel had turned the conversation to the military’s unhappiness with the president. Connally acknowledged that some of his admirals disliked taking orders from the New Frontiersman, and felt they could not express themselves politically. Later in the conversation, Connally mused that the atomic bomb had created conditions in which “the U.S. might unwittingly be laying the groundwork for a military dictatorship.”

  On March 13, 1962, six months before the publication of Knebel’s book, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had sent Secretary of Defense McNamara a top-secret memorandum proposing Operation Northwoods, a program of clandestine actions designed to provide what the chiefs called “adequate justification” for the United States to invade Cuba. It resembled the incursions by German troops dressed in Polish uniforms that Hitler used as a pretext for invading Poland. The chiefs recommended a “logical build-up of incidents” that would “camouflage the ultimate objective and create the necessary impression of Cuban rashness and irresponsibility of a large scale,” and “place the United States in the apparent position of suffering defensible grievances from a rash and irresponsible government of Cuba.” To accomplish this, they suggested “well-coordinated incidents” at the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, in the airspace over Cuba, and on the U.S. mainland. At Guantánamo, anti-Castro Cubans dressed in Cuban Army uniforms would be “captured” by U.S. forces after pretending to attack the base. “Blow up ammunition inside the base,” the Northwoods memorandum recommended. “Burn aircraft on air base (sabotage). . . . Lob mortar shells from outside of base into base. . . . Sink ship near harbor entrance. Conduct funerals for mock victims.” The chiefs also proposed what they called a “Remember the Maine” incident that involved blowing up a U.S. ship in Guantánamo Bay or destroying an unmanned drone vessel in waters off Havana, and blaming Castro. “The U.S. could follow up with an air/sea rescue operation . . . to ‘evacuate’ remaining members of the non-existent crew,” they suggested. “Casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation.” The memorandum’s most disturbing paragraph began, “We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington,” which might entail “exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots.” It continued, “The terror campaign could be pointed at Cuban refugees seeking haven in the United States. We could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated). We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized.”

  After receiving a summary of the memorandum, Kennedy told Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Lyman Lemnitzer that he could not imagine a set of events “that would justify and make desirable the use of American Forces for overt military action” against Castro’s Cuba. Three months later, he transferred him to Europe to serve as supreme allied commander of NATO, replacing him with Maxwell Taylor. Kennedy was too smart, and too suspicious of the brass, not to recall Operation Northwoods when he read Seven Days in May in galleys a few months later, and not to reason that if the chiefs were prepared to recommend deceptive, violent, and illegal actions on the U.S. mainland that risked harming civilians, it was not preposterous to imagine them cooking up a similar scheme to justify overthrowing a president whose policies they viewed as threatening national security. After finishing the book, he told Laura Bergquist that he had been pondering the possibility of a military coup, and then named some generals at the Pentagon whom he thought “might hanker to duplicate fiction.”

  During a discussion of Seven Days in May, Fay asked Kennedy if he really believed a coup was possible. He said it was, and believed it would require three confrontations between a president and the military similar to the one between himself and the Joint Chiefs during the Bay of Pigs. “The conditions would have to be just right,” he said. “If the country had a young President, and he had a Bay of Pigs, there would be certain uneasiness, and maybe the military would criticize him behind his back [as LeMay had done during the Knebel interview] but this would be written off as the usual military dissatisfaction with civilian control. Then if there was another Bay of Pigs, the reaction of the country would be, ‘Is he too young and inexperienced.’ The military would almost feel that it was their patriotic obligation to stand ready to preserve the integrity of the nation, and only God knows just what segment of democracy they would be defending if they overthrew the elected establishment.”

  This second Bay of Pigs scenario bore a resemblance to how some of the chiefs would react several months after his conversation with Fay, when he rejected their recommendation to bomb Soviet missile sites in Cuba and instead imposed a naval blockade. At a meeting in the Cabinet Room during the crisis, LeMay told him, “I just don’t see any other solution except military intervention right now,” and condemned a blockade as “almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich.” A few minutes later, LeMay said bluntly, “I think that a blockade and political talk would be considered by a lot of our friends and neutrals as being a pretty weak response to this. And I’m sure a lot of our own citizens would feel that way, too. In other words, you’re in a pretty bad fix at the present time.”

  “What did you say?” Kennedy asked, forcing LeMay to repeat himself.

  “You’re in a pretty bad fix.”

  “You’re in there with me.” After a pause, he added, “Personally.”

  “Can you imagine LeMay saying a thing like that?” he asked O’Donnell afterward. “These brass hats have one great advantage in their favor. If we listen to them, and do what they want us to do, none of us will be alive later to tell them that they were wrong.”

  LeMay’s comment bordered on insubordination and may have contributed to Bobby’s remark to
Dobrynin that “the President is not sure that the military will not overthrow him and seize power.” LeMay would call the peaceful outcome of the Cuban missile crisis “the greatest defeat in our history.” If he really believed that, why not consider extralegal means to remove the man responsible?

  After the crisis ended, Kennedy told Schlesinger, “The military are mad. They wanted to do this [invade Cuba]. It’s lucky for us that we have Mac [Robert McNamara] over there.” He told Bradlee, “The first advice I’m going to give my successor is to watch the generals and to avoid feeling that just because they were military men their opinions on military matters were worth a damn.” A year later McNamara informed Kennedy that according to Admiral Hyman Rickover, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral George Anderson had been “absolutely insubordinate” during the missile crisis and had “consciously acted contrary to the President’s instructions.” Kennedy asked what Rickover had meant by this. McNamara answered, “Rickover said enough to let me know that Anderson was objecting to the instructions that you and I were giving relating to the quarantine and the limiting of action in relation to stopping the Russian ships.” Kennedy asked if this meant Anderson wanted to sink a ship. “That’s right,” McNamara said.

  The actor Kirk Douglas was serving himself in a buffet dinner line in the White House in January 1963 when Kennedy came up behind him and asked, “Do you intend to make a movie out of Seven Days in May?” Douglas confirmed that he was producing and starring in a film version of the book being directed by John Frankenheimer. Kennedy said, “Good!” and as their meals cooled spent twenty minutes explaining why Knebel’s book would make a great movie.

  Pierre Salinger told Frankenheimer that the president wanted the film made “as a warning to the Republic.” Schlesinger thought he hoped it would “raise the consciousness about the problems involved if the generals got out of control,” and might also serve “as a warning to the generals.” After the Defense Department denied Frankenheimer permission to film at the Pentagon, Kennedy took a long weekend in Hyannis Port so the director could shoot crowd scenes outside the White House.

  Kennedy concluded his 1962 conversation with Fay about a Seven Days in May–style coup by saying flatly, “Then, if there were a third Bay of Pigs, it [a coup] could happen.” He paused to emphasize the significance of his comment before concluding with an old Navy phrase, “But it won’t happen on my watch.”

  By August 1963, some opponents of the test ban treaty were calling it a betrayal of America’s strategic interests. An ad hoc organization calling itself the Committee Against the Treaty of Moscow ran a full-page advertisement in U.S. newspapers that quoted General LeMay as saying that he would have opposed the treaty had it not been signed in Moscow before he learned about it. The advertisement also repeated Edwin Teller’s warning to senators that by ratifying the treaty, “You will have given away the future safety of our country.” Referring to the forthcoming ratification vote, it declared, “In September 1963, we shall be asked to repeat the reckless venture in appeasement that culminated in the ‘Peace in Our Time’ agreement signed in Munich on September 30, 1938.”

  A New Republic article in September titled “Rebellion in the Air Force?” began, “The Air Force’s ruling hierarchy is in open defiance of its Constitutional Commander-in-Chief, and in some ways the situation bears a growing resemblance to the fictional story line of last year’s best-seller Seven Days in May, the account of a nearly successful military coup by an Air Force general in protest against a nuclear arms treaty just concluded with the Russians.” The article’s author, Raymond Senter, reported that during its recent convention, the Air Force Association (AFA), an organization of retired and active-duty Air Force personnel, aerospace contractors, and lobbyists, had issued a blistering statement opposing the test ban treaty. Active-duty AFA members were prohibited from participating in drafting AFA statements, but Senter argued that the prohibition was meaningless since they seldom deviated from official Air Force views. Secretary of the Air Force Eugene Zuckert, usually a strong AFA supporter, condemned the AFA statement as “immoderate” and “alarmist,” and canceled his appearance at its convention.

  The test ban treaty may have pushed the most extreme elements in the military-industrial complex to the brink of mutiny, but it was not—at least not yet—the “third Bay of Pigs” that Kennedy had mentioned to Fay. But there were two others on the horizon: Vietnam and Ellen Rometsch. Kennedy had told O’Donnell that he expected to be “damned everywhere as a Communist appeaser” when he removed U.S. advisers from South Vietnam, and the revelation that he had bedded a former member of the East German Communist Party months before negotiating the test ban treaty might have tempted his opponents in the military to circumvent a drawn-out impeachment process with an Operation Northwoods–style action.

  Khrushchev had also run afoul of his military establishment in the months preceding the treaty. He had told a February 1963 meeting of the Soviet Defense Council, “The time has come when he who is successful in preventing war wins, not he who counts on military victory.” According to his son Sergei, his father followed this with “some absolutely unusual things—things that seemed to me not only seditious, but improbable as well.” These included a plan to stop increasing the Soviet nuclear arsenal because, as Khrushchev told Marshal Zakharov, who headed his general staff, “You plan hundreds of targets, but even a dozen missiles with thermonuclear warheads are enough to make the very thought of war senseless.” (At his August 20 news conference Kennedy had said, “How many weapons do you need and how many megatons do you need to destroy?”) Khrushchev also recommended scaling back the conventional army on the theory that if nuclear missiles had made war between the great powers senseless, it was equally senseless to spend money to maintain a large conventional army.

  Khrushchev believed that more agreements like the test ban treaty might reduce cold war tensions to the point that a large standing army and growing nuclear arsenal might become unnecessary. This was the reasoning behind the letter that Dobrynin handed Kennedy at their August 26 meeting. As Dobrynin watched, Kennedy opened it and read, “Availing myself of the return of our Ambassador A. Dobrynin to Washington I would like to express some of my thoughts in connection with the state of things shaping up now after the Treaty on banning nuclear weapons has been signed in Moscow.” These “thoughts” were so similar to the points Kennedy had made in his nationally televised July 26 speech that Khrushchev could have been plagiarizing them.

  On July 26, Kennedy had praised the treaty as “a shaft of light cut into the darkness” and the first agreement to seek control over “the forces of nuclear destruction,” and had said that although it did not “mean an end to the threat of nuclear war” it would “radically reduce the nuclear testing” that might otherwise occur. “This treaty is not the millennium,” he continued. “It will not resolve all conflicts . . . or eliminate the dangers of war. . . . But it is an important first step—a step towards peace—a step towards reason—a step away from war.” He stressed that although “no one can predict with certainty, therefore, what further agreements, if any, can be built on the foundations of this one. . . . The important point is that efforts to seek new agreements will go forward.” He warned against assuming that the new atmosphere between the United States and the Soviet Union would last forever, saying, “We have learned in times past that the spirit of one moment or place can be gone in the next.” After declaring, “for the first time in many years, the path of peace may be open,” he evoked the Chinese proverb “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step” and concluded, “My fellow Americans, let us take that first step. Let us . . . step back from the shadows of war and seek out the way of peace. And if that journey is a thousand miles, or even more, let history record that we, in this land, at this time, took that first step.”

  Khrushchev reiterated these points in his letter, writing that it was important to follow the treaty quickly with more ag
reements that would demonstrate to critics that its economic and political benefits outweighed any security risks. He called the treaty a “good beginning” and said it “strengthens the hopes of the peoples [of the world] for a further relaxation of tension, [and] gives a prospect of solution of other unsettled questions.” He agreed that “it is important now not to stop at what has been achieved but to make further steps from the good start taken by us” and urged that “there should be no slowing down the pace,” and that the problems separating them “should rather be solved now when a more calm and consequently more favorable atmosphere has been created.”

  Dobrynin was a glib and charming man who had served in Washington and at the United Nations during the fifties. He spoke excellent English, so he and Kennedy conversed without interpreters. Ambassador-at-Large Llewellyn Thompson, the only other person in the room, took notes, and Kennedy secretly recorded the meeting. Thompson’s official memorandum is lengthy and detailed. It corresponds closely to the tape but omits some of Kennedy’s playful banter with Dobrynin, and several of the president’s statements that would have been deeply embarrassing had they become public. For example, speaking of the fierce attacks on the treaty during the Senate hearings, Kennedy had asked rhetorically, “What can I do with people like Teller or Senator Goldwater?” Like General de Gaulle, they were, he said, “impervious to reason and raised absurd arguments.”

  He told Dobrynin that he hoped the treaty would lead to further agreements, and said that once the Senate ratified it he was prepared to discuss ways to prevent surprise attacks, a declaration prohibiting the introduction of weapons into outer space, and a civil aviation agreement, and would raise all this with Foreign Minister Gromyko when he visited the United States the next month. Kennedy assured Dobrynin that America would not allow West Germany to “carry us into an adventure which we would have to finish,” and, speaking of a possible escalation of tensions in Southeast Asia, said, “I wish one of us never got into Laos.” After Dobrynin confirmed that Khrushchev would soon be visiting Cuba, he said that when the chairman spoke there, he hoped he would remember how sensitive Cuba was in the United States, particularly for a president facing reelection.