One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War

by M. Dobbs

  It looked as if Kennedy was already forgetting a promise he had made to his predecessor after the disaster of the Bay of Pigs. "There is only one thing to do when you get into this kind of thing," Eisenhower had lectured him, back in April 1961. "It must be a success." To which Kennedy had replied, "Well, I assure you that, hereafter, if we get into anything like this, it is going to be a success."

  At the end of its first year, Operation Mongoose was shaping up as an almost perfect failure.

  TUESDAY, OCTOBER 16, 4:35 P.M.

  Jack Kennedy had been bracing for a showdown with the Soviet Union ever since he took his oath of office and publicly pledged that "a new generation of Americans" would "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty." He liked to carry around a slip of paper with a quote from Abraham Lincoln:

  I know there is a God ― and I see a storm coming;If he has a place for me, I believe I am ready.

  The storm clouds had long seemed most ominous in the divided city of Berlin, deep inside Communist East Germany. The previous year, the Soviets had erected a wall to stem the flow of refugees to the West, and American and Russian tanks had confronted each other directly across the narrow divide of "Checkpoint Charlie." The Soviets enjoyed almost complete military superiority in Berlin, and there was little the United States could do to prevent the takeover of the city, other than threaten to use nuclear weapons. Instead, the storm had broken in Cuba.

  Never had Kennedy felt quite so alone as he did now. Even before the missile crisis, he would obsessively calculate the chances of nuclear destruction, like a bookie calling a horse race. At a dinner party that evening, he would startle other guests by announcing that the "odds are even on an H-bomb war within ten years." Only a handful of his closest aides knew how much closer the nightmare had come in the last twenty-four hours. He had earlier thought there was a "one-in-five chance" of a nuclear exchange.

  He had one public appearance that afternoon, a foreign policy conference for newspaper and TV editors at the State Department. The tone of his speech was unusually bleak. The major challenge facing his presidency, he told reporters, was how to ensure "the survival of our country…without the beginning of the third and perhaps the last war." He then pulled a slip of paper out of his pocket and recited a verse that reflected his determined, solitary mood:

  Bullfight critics row on row

  Crowd the enormous plaza full,

  But only one is there who knows

  And he is the one who fights the bull.

  TUESDAY, OCTOBER 16, 6:30 P.M.

  Back in the White House for an evening meeting with his advisers, the president activated his secret recording system from his place at the center of the Cabinet Room table. Microphones hidden in the wall behind his chair relayed the voices of everyone in the room to reel-to-reel tape machines installed in the basement. Apart from Kennedy, Bobby, and the Secret Servicemen who operated the sophisticated equipment, nobody knew about the devices.

  Khrushchev's motives in provoking a superpower confrontation were "a goddamn mystery" to Kennedy. "Why does he put these in there?" he asked his aides. "What is the advantage of that? It's just as if we began to put a major number of MRBMs in Turkey. Now that'd be goddamn dangerous, I would think."

  "Well, we did it, Mr. President," Bundy pointed out.

  Kennedy brushed Bundy's observation aside. In his mind, there were clear differences between Cuba and Turkey. The United States had agreed to provide Turkey with medium-range ballistic missiles similar to the Soviet R-12s now being deployed in Cuba back in 1957. They had become fully operational earlier in 1962. The lengthy public debate among NATO countries over the dispatch of missiles to Turkey contrasted with the secrecy surrounding the Soviet missiles in Cuba. Even so, the Turkey analogy was an uncomfortable one for Kennedy and his aides. It was possible that Khrushchev was acting out of deep-seated psychological pique. He wanted to give Americans a taste of their own medicine.

  It was an open question whether Soviet missiles in Cuba substantially changed the balance of power. The Joint Chiefs had emphasized the heightened risk to the United States of a sneak attack. But the president was inclined to agree with McNamara, who insisted that Khrushchev was still a very long way from achieving first-strike capability.

  "Geography doesn't make much difference," Kennedy mused. What did it matter if you got blown up by a missile based on Cuba or an ICBM flying from the Soviet Union?

  The real problem, he thought, was "psychological" and "political" rather than "military." To do nothing would be to surrender to blackmail. In the Cold War game of nuclear brinkmanship, perception shaped reality. If Khrushchev got away with his gamble over Cuba, he would be encouraged to use similar tactics in Berlin, Southeast Asia, or any other Cold War trouble spot. Under attack by the Republicans for his passivity over Cuba, the president had issued a public statement on September 4 warning the Soviets that "the gravest issues would arise" if they developed a "significant offensive capability" in Cuba. He had planted a marker in the sand, and was now committed to defending it.

  "Last month, I should have said we don't care," Kennedy said wistfully, as if to himself. "But when we said we're not going to, and then they go ahead and do it, and then we do nothing…" His voice trailed off. Doing nothing was no longer an option.

  From across the table, Bobby argued the case for an aggressive response to Moscow. The attorney general was more belligerent than he was articulate. If Khrushchev wanted war, it might be better to "get it over with…take our losses." It would not be too difficult to find an excuse for invading Cuba. Bobby thought back to the Spanish-American War of 1898. The pretext for that war had been the destruction of an American battleship, the USS Maine, in Havana Harbor by a mysterious explosion. The United States had blamed the disaster on Spain as the colonial power, but true responsibility was never established.

  Perhaps "there is some other way we can get involved in this," Bobby ruminated. "You know, sink the Maine again or something…."

  The discussion turned to the sabotage proposals against Cuba that had been considered by the Special Group earlier in the day. "I take it you are in favor of sabotage," Bundy told the president briskly as he handed him the list.

  The only item that raised a problem for Kennedy was the mining of Cuban harbors, an indiscriminate act of war that could result in the destruction of foreign flagships, in addition to Cuban and Soviet vessels. The following day, the White House sent a memo to the Mongoose team, formally recording the approval by "higher authority" ― code word for the president ― of the eight other sabotage targets, including the grenade attack on the Chinese Embassy.

  WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 17, AROUND NOON

  Hurricane season was under way in the Caribbean. More than forty U.S. warships were headed toward the Puerto Rican island of Vieques for a practice invasion of Cuba. As the winds from Hurricane Ella topped 80 knots an hour, the approaching naval task force switched course to avoid the worst of the storm. Plans for an amphibious landing by four thousand Marines were put on hold.

  Pentagon planners had dubbed the maneuvers "Operation ORTSAC," Castro spelled backward. Once the task force got to Vieques, the Marines would storm ashore, depose an imaginary dictator, and secure the island for democracy. If all went well, the entire operation would last no more than two weeks.

  The five Joint Chiefs had been pushing for an invasion of Cuba for many months. They were very skeptical of Operation Mongoose and saw "no prospect of early success" in fomenting an anti-Castro uprising inside Cuba. Back in April, they had warned the president that the "United States cannot tolerate permanent existence of a communist government in the Western Hemisphere." If Castro was permitted to remain in power, other countries in Latin America might soon fall under Communist domination. Moscow might be tempted to "establish military bases in Cuba similar to U.S. installations" around the Soviet Union. The only sure method of overthrowing Castro was thr
ough direct "military intervention by the United States."

  Prior to the discovery of Soviet missiles on Cuba, the main problem confronting the Joint Chiefs was how to justify an attack against a much weaker nation. A memorandum dated August 8 outlined various ideas for a staged provocation that could be blamed on Castro, along the lines of the "Remember the Maine!" scenario that intrigued Bobby Kennedy:

  • We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba;

  • We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities, and even in Washington;

  • A "Cuban-based, Castro-supported" filibuster could be simulated against a neighboring Caribbean nation.

  • It is possible to arrange an incident that will demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civilian airliner.

  The Joint Chiefs were confident that they could organize an invasion of Cuba without running the risk of a "general war" with the Soviet Union. U.S. forces were strong enough to secure "rapid control" over the island, although "continued police action would be required." A single infantry division, around fifteen thousand men, would be sufficient to occupy the island following the initial invasion.

  The only dissent came from the Marine Corps, which challenged the assumption that Cuban resistance would be rapidly crushed. "Considering the size (44,206 sq. mi.) and population (6,743,000) of Cuba, its long history of political unrest, and its tradition of sustained and extensive guerrilla and terrorist resistance to constituted authority, the estimate that only a division-size force will be required subsequent to the assault phase appears modest," a Marine Corps memo noted. It predicted that at least three infantry divisions would be required to subdue the island and that it would take "several years" to install a stable successor regime to Fidel Castro.

  The Marine Corps had reason to be wary of Cuban entanglements. History had shown that it was a lot easier to send troops to Cuba than to pull them out. It had taken four years for the Marines to disentangle themselves from Cuba after the Spanish-American War. The Marines were back again four years later, much to the disgust of President Theodore Roosevelt, whose political career had received a huge boost in Cuba, when he led his Rough Riders up San Juan Hill. "I am so angry with that infernal little Cuban republic that I would like to wipe its people off the face of the earth," the hero of 1898 grumbled to a friend. "All that we wanted of them was that they would behave themselves and be prosperous and happy so that we would not have to interfere."

  The Marines had remained in Cuba, off and on, until 1923, just three years before the birth of Fidel Castro. And even after that date, they still kept a foothold on the island, at Guantanamo.

  From the American perspective, Cuba was a natural extension of the United States. The crocodile-shaped island was like a sluice gate bottling up the Gulf of Mexico, controlling the sea routes between the Mississippi River and the Atlantic Ocean. In 1823, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams attributed to Cuba "an importance in the sum of our national interests with which that of no other foreign Territory can be compared." As Adams saw it, the annexation of Cuba by the United States was virtually inevitable, a function of the "laws of political gravitation."

  Just ninety miles from Key West, Cuba exercised a powerful pull over the American imagination, long after the withdrawal of the Marines. In the thirties, forties, and fifties, the island became a playground for rich Americans who flew in to lie in the sun, gamble, and visit whorehouses. American money poured into casinos and hotels in Havana, sugar plantations in Oriente, and copper mines in Pinar del Rio. By the 1950s, much of the Cuban economy, including 90 percent of the mining industry and 80 percent of utilities, was under the control of American corporations.

  The attraction was not just geographic and economic; it was very personal. By the eve of the revolution, Ernest Hemingway, America's most celebrated writer, had taken up residence at the Finca Vigia, on a hilltop overlooking Havana. The Mafia boss, Meyer Lansky, had built a twenty-one-story hotel called the Riviera on the Malecon and was advising Batista on gambling reform. Nat King Cole was singing at the Tropicana nightclub. And a young American senator named John F. Kennedy was making frequent visits to Havana as the guest of the pro-Batista U.S. ambassador.

  THURSDAY, OCTOBER 18, 9:30 A.M.

  Bobby Kennedy was already having trouble keeping his promise ― made Tuesday afternoon ― to hold daily Mongoose briefings in his office. He had been unable to attend the scheduled Wednesday session because of an urgent White House meeting. But on Thursday he managed to squeeze in half an hour with Mongoose operatives, including Lansdale and Bill Harvey, the head of the CIA's anti-Castro task force.

  Gruff and uncouth, Harvey had the job of making sense of the blizzard of paperwork generated by Ed Lansdale. The two men were like fire and water. The visionary Lansdale would come up with dozens of new ideas for hitting Castro, only to have them squelched by the methodical Harvey. In Harvey's view, such operations required months of meticulous planning before they could be launched.

  By the third day of the crisis, Bobby was rethinking his views on how to respond to Khrushchev. His initial fury at Soviet duplicity had given way to more sober analysis. One of his biographers would later detect a pattern: "an initial burst of belligerence and intransigence, followed by a willingness to listen and change." He now opposed a surprise air attack on the missile sites as incompatible with American traditions, a kind of Pearl Harbor in reverse. "My brother is not going to be the Tojo of the 1960s," he had told a White House meeting on Wednesday. Bobby was beginning to favor a naval blockade of Cuba combined with some kind of ultimatum to Moscow, an idea first proposed by McNamara.

  Bobby's sudden streak of moralism did not, however, extend to calling a halt to Operation Mongoose. According to Harvey's record of the Thursday, October 18, meeting, the attorney general continued to place "great stress on sabotage operations and asked to be furnished with a list of the sabotage operations CIA planned to conduct."

  The most feasible target, in Harvey's view, was a copper mine in Pinar del Rio Province in western Cuba. The CIA had been trying for months to halt production at the Matahambre mine and had made careful studies of the terrain, but had been hampered by a string of bad luck. The first operation, back in August, failed after the would-be saboteurs got lost in a mangrove swamp. The second attempt was aborted when the radio operator fell and broke his ribs. The third time around, the sabotage team had got within a thousand yards of the target when it was challenged by a militia patrol and forced to withdraw after a firefight. Despite these setbacks, Matahambre was still at the top of Harvey's "to do" list.

  He informed RFK and Lansdale that he would "re-run" the operation as soon as circumstances allowed.

  FRIDAY, OCTOBER 19, 9:45 A.M.

  The president was leafing through the latest batch of intelligence reports as the generals filed into the Cabinet Room. The news from Cuba was becoming more ominous by the day. In addition to the original missile sites in Pinar del Rio, U-2 spy planes had discovered a second cluster of sites in the center of the island. The new sites included facilities for so-called intermediate-range ballistic missiles, or IRBMs, which were capable of hitting targets nearly 2,800 miles away, more than double the distance of the medium-range rockets, or MRBMs, discovered on October 14.

  There was still no evidence that the bigger missiles had arrived in Cuba, so they were a less immediate threat. But work on the original missile sites was proceeding rapidly. The CIA had identified three different medium-range ballistic missile regiments on the island. Each regiment controlled eight missile launchers, making twenty-four in all.

  "Let's see," said Kennedy, reading aloud passages from the intelligence report. "Two of these missiles are operational now…missiles could be launched within eighteen hours after the decision to fire…yields in the low megaton range."

  He had been dreading this meeting, but knew he must at least go through the motions of consulting
with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He felt that the generals had misled him over the Bay of Pigs, pushing him to support an ill-prepared invasion of Cuba by anti-Castro exiles. He was particularly mistrustful of the Air Force chief of staff, General Curtis LeMay, a cigar-chomping World War II hero with three thousand nuclear bombs under his command. "I don't want that man near me again," Kennedy had said, after listening to one of LeMay's blood-curdling briefings about bombing America's enemies back to the "Stone Age." Profane, tough, and brutally efficient, LeMay was the kind of man you wanted by your side when the fighting started, but not the type who should be making decisions about war and peace.

  LeMay could barely contain himself as the president voiced his fears of a nuclear conflagration. Attempting to put himself in Khrushchev's shoes, Kennedy predicted that a U.S. attack on Cuba would inevitably be followed by a Soviet attack on Berlin. "Which leaves me with only one alternative, which is to fire nuclear weapons ― which is a hell of an alternative."

  Nonsense, retorted LeMay, speaking slowly as if addressing a somewhat dim pupil. It was the other way round. Not taking firm action in Cuba would only encourage the Soviets to try their luck in Berlin. A naval blockade of Cuba, as proposed by some of Kennedy's advisers, could send a fatal message of weakness.

  "It will lead right into war. This is almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich."

  There was a shocked silence around the table. LeMay's remark was an audaciously insulting reference to the president's father, Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., who had advocated a policy of negotiating with Hitler while serving as U.S. ambassador to London. LeMay was implying that JFK, who had launched his political career as the author of an anti-appeasement book called While England Slept, was about to follow in his father's footsteps.