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

by M. Dobbs

  Drawing on a cable from the U.S. ambassador to Turkey, Rusk had thought of a way to reconcile the differences in the ExComm. He suggested that Bobby simply inform Dobrynin that the Jupiters would be withdrawn soon anyway. That way, the obsolete American missiles would not be an obstacle to an agreement. But they would also not become a pretext for further haggling. To avoid giving the impression of a Soviet-American bargain at the expense of the Turks, it was important that the unilateral assurance on the Jupiters remain confidential. The secretary of state's ingenious attempt to square the circle quickly won unanimous support.

  Knowledge of the arrangement would be tightly held, everybody agreed. In Bundy's words, "No one not in the room was to be informed of this additional message." Furthermore, the Soviets would have to observe the same secrecy, or the commitment would become "null and void."

  8:05 P.M. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27

  Anatoly Dobrynin had mixed feelings about Bobby Kennedy. For the genial Russian diplomat, RFK was a "complex and difficult person who often lost his temper." He "behaved rudely," working himself into a state about Soviet misdeeds, real and imagined. Their conversations tended to be "uneven and broken." Bobby seemed to regard himself as an expert on foreign policy, but he knew little about the rest of the world. During his one visit to the Soviet Union, in 1955, he had gone out of his way to offend his hosts, inquiring about Soviet techniques for "tapping telephone conversations" and criticizing the lack of freedom. Nevertheless, he was the president's brother, and the best channel for direct, informal communications between the Kremlin and the White House.

  They had seen a lot of each other in the seven months since Dobrynin arrived in Washington. To break the ice, Bobby had invited the new ambassador out to his home in McLean, introducing him to his "rather tumultuous family." On the subject of Cuba, Dobrynin thought that Bobby was "impulsive and excitable." He viewed RFK as one of the hawks on the ExComm, pushing his brother to take "a firm approach," up to and including an invasion of the island. At their previous meetings, Bobby had angrily denounced Soviet trickery and "deception." Summoned to the Justice Department on Saturday evening, Dobrynin braced for yet another explosion.

  Instead, he encountered a subdued, almost distraught individual in a vast, dimly lit office decorated with children's paintings. In a cable to the Foreign Ministry written immediately after the meeting, Dobrynin described the attorney general as "very upset," with little of his normal combativeness. He had never seen him like this before. "He didn't even try to get into fights on various subjects, as he usually does. He persistently returned to one theme: time is of the essence and we shouldn't miss the chance."

  Instead of the standard diplomatic demarche, Bobby addressed the Soviet ambassador as a fellow human being trying to save the world from nuclear destruction. He began by describing the shootdown of the U-2 and the firing on low-level U.S. Navy jets as "an extremely serious turn in events." He was not delivering an ultimatum; he was simply laying out the facts.

  "We're going to have to make certain decisions within the next twelve, or possibly twenty-four, hours. There's very little time left. If the Cubans shoot at our planes, then we are going to shoot back."

  Dobrynin objected that American planes had no right to fly over Cuba at all. Rather than argue the point, Bobby wanted the ambassador to understand American political realities. The military was demanding that the president "respond to fire with fire." Khrushchev should know that there were many hotheads among the generals ― "and not only among the generals" ― who were "itching for a fight."

  "We can't stop these overflights," RFK explained. "It's the only way we have to quickly get information about the state of construction of your missile bases on Cuba, which pose a very serious threat to our national security. But if we open fire in response, a chain reaction will start that will be very difficult to stop."

  A similar logic applied to the Soviet missile bases, said Bobby. The United States was determined to "get rid" of the bases, if necessary by bombing them. If this happened, Soviet citizens would almost certainly be killed, causing Moscow to take action against the United States somewhere in Europe. "A real war will begin, in which millions of Americans and Russians will die. We want to avoid that any way we can."

  Bobby described the contents of Kennedy's latest letter to Khrushchev. The president was ready to end the quarantine and issue guarantees against an invasion of Cuba if the Soviet government dismantled the missile bases.

  "What about Turkey?" the ambassador wanted to know.

  This was the trickiest, most sensitive issue, the one that had preoccupied the president and the ExComm for much of the day. Once again, Bobby took the Russian into his confidence and explained the dilemma facing his brother. The president was willing to withdraw the Jupiters "within four to five months." But he could not make any kind of public commitment. The decision to deploy the Jupiters had been taken collectively by NATO. If it appeared that the United States was dismantling the missile bases unilaterally, under pressure from the Soviet Union, the alliance might crack apart.

  Bobby asked for a quick answer from Khrushchev, by Sunday if possible. "There's very little time left," he warned. "Events are moving too quickly."

  8:25 P.M. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27

  RFK checked back into the White House at 8:25 p.m. His meeting with Dobrynin had lasted no longer than fifteen minutes. He immediately went up to the executive mansion, where he found the president chatting with his four-year-old daughter on the phone. Over the past few days, Kennedy had been more than usually attentive to Caroline and John Junior, taking the time to put them to bed and read them goodnight stories. He told Dave Powers that he worried not just about his own children but "the children everywhere in the world" whose "lives would be wiped out" in the event of nuclear war.

  Skipping his regular evening swim because of the pressure of meetings, the president invited Powers for an informal supper in the upstairs living room. The kitchen staff had left some broiled chicken on a hot-plate. Jack opened a bottle of white wine. A hungry Bobby asked if they could spare "an extra chicken leg" as he reported on his meeting with the Soviet ambassador. All three men were busy eating and drinking when Kennedy looked at Powers with mock disapproval.

  "God, Dave. The way you're eating up all that chicken and drinking up all my wine, anybody would think it was your last meal."

  "The way Bobby's been talking, I thought it was my last meal," Powers replied.

  The lighthearted joking disguised increasing concern. The White House was the prime target for a Soviet missile attack. Over the last few days, the staff had been receiving packages of instructions telling them what to do and where to go in an emergency. Top aides like Powers, Sorensen, and Kenny O'Donnell received pink identification cards, which meant they would accompany the president to an underground bunker in the Blue Ridge Mountains of West Virginia. An elite helicopter unit, the 2857th Test Squadron, had the sole mission of landing on the White House lawn if a nuclear strike seemed imminent, and whisking the president and his closest aides to safety. The helicopter crews were even ready to make a poststrike rescue attempt. Dressed from head to toe in protective clothing, they would smash their way into the White House bomb shelter with crowbars and acetylene torches, bundle the president into a radiation suit, and fly him out of the rubble.

  The evacuation instructions were part of a secret doomsday plan to ensure the survival of the U.S. government in the event of nuclear war. The president would be evacuated to Mount Weather, fifty miles from Washington, along with cabinet secretaries, Supreme Court justices, and several thousand senior federal officials. Facilities at Mount Weather included an emergency broadcasting network, decontamination chambers, hospital, emergency power plant, crematorium, and presidential suite complete with a special therapeutic mattress for JFK's bad back. Congress had just completed construction of its own "secure, undisclosed location" beneath the luxury Greenbrier Hotel, in the Allegheny Mountains. Contingency plans called for the re
scue of Federal Reserve assets and cultural treasures such as the Declaration of Independence and masterpieces from the National Gallery of Art.

  "What happens to our wives and kids?" asked Powers, after receiving his pink card.

  The families had somehow fallen through the cracks in the doomsday planning. The president's naval aide, Captain Tazewell Shepard, was ordered to make the necessary arrangements. He told dependents to assemble inside a fenced-off reservoir in northwest Washington without bringing any personal belongings. "Minimal supplies of food and water" would be provided for a journey by motorcade to "a relocation site outside of the Washington area." Kenny O'Donnell felt that the chances of survival for his wife and five children were "slim" at best.

  Lacking confidence in the government's plan, families of top officials devised their own evacuation plans. Dino Brugioni, a key member of the CIA team monitoring the Soviet missile buildup, "succumbed to the general mood of apocalypse" on Saturday evening. Seeing no way out of the crisis "except war and complete destruction," he told his wife to get ready to drive their two children to his parents' home in Missouri, halfway across the country. The man in charge of the president's daily intelligence bulletin, Dick Lehman, had a similar agreement with his wife.

  Often the higher the official, the gloomier they were about the chances for a peaceful outcome of the crisis. Earlier that evening, Bob McNamara had wandered out onto the veranda outside the Oval Office during a break in the ExComm discussions and watched the sunlight fade away. It was a gorgeous fall evening, but the defense secretary was too preoccupied to enjoy it. He thought to himself that he might "never live to see another Saturday night."

  9:00 P.M. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27 (8:00 P.M. HAVANA)

  The secretary of defense wanted the low-level Navy reconnaissance planes to be accompanied by fighter escorts in their missions over Cuba. "If our planes are fired on tomorrow, we ought to fire back," McNamara insisted, after ExComm members reassembled in the Cabinet Room for a final evening meeting.

  The president did not see the point of taking out individual antiaircraft guns. "We just hazard our planes, and the people on the ground have the advantage." He agreed with the military chiefs. If there were any further attacks on American planes, he would announce that the United States considered the island of Cuba "open territory," and take out all the SAM sites. In the meantime, he would activate twenty-four air reserve squadrons, with roughly three hundred troop carrier transports. Known as "flying boxcars," the C-119 planes would ferry airborne troops and supplies to Cuba in an invasion. Calling up the reservists was a way of signaling American determination.

  Even as he prepared for war, Kennedy was attempting to salvage the peace with a series of fallback positions. In addition to his informal promise to Khrushchev to withdraw American missiles from Turkey, he had privately agreed to a suggestion by Dean Rusk on a discreet approach to the secretary-general of the United Nations. It would be easier for the United States and its allies to accept a dramatic last-minute plea for a Cuba-Turkey trade from U Thant than from Khrushchev. With Kennedy's consent, Rusk telephoned a former UN official named Andrew Cordier, who was known to be close to U Thant. If Khrushchev rejected the secret deal outlined by Bobby to Dobrynin earlier in the evening, Cordier would get the secretary-general to publicly call for the removal of missiles from both Cuba and Turkey.

  But first the allies had to be prepped to accept such a deal. The Turkish government in particular regarded the Jupiters as a symbol of its international manhood and was loath to give them up. Rather than withdraw the missiles unilaterally, Kennedy wanted America's NATO allies to fully understand the probable military consequences of rejecting "a Cuba-Turkey connection." The alternative to a deal was a U.S. attack on Cuba, followed by some kind of Soviet attack on Turkey or on Berlin. If this happened, Kennedy did not want the allies to say, "We followed you, and you bitched it up."

  The timetable for diplomacy was getting very tight. The Pentagon was calling for air attacks on Cuba to begin by Monday, October 29, in the absence of firm evidence that the Soviets were dismantling their missile sites. A meeting of the NATO Council had been called for Sunday morning in Paris. There was practically no time for NATO ambassadors to get instructions from their governments. Kennedy proposed pushing the military schedule back a few hours to give everybody a "last chance" to come up with something. Under the president's revised timetable, the bombing of Cuba would begin on Tuesday, October 30, followed by an invasion seven days later.

  After Kennedy left the Cabinet Room, a few ExComm members lingered behind, exchanging desultory conversation.

  "How are you doing, Bob?" RFK asked McNamara with forced jocularity.

  The defense secretary did not want to admit his exhaustion. "Well," he replied. "How about yourself?"

  "All right."

  "You got any doubts?"

  "No, I think we're doing the only thing we can do."

  McNamara's brain was still clicking away, thinking ahead. "We need to have two things ready," he told the others. "A government for Cuba, because we're gonna need one after we go in with five hundred aircraft. And secondly, some plans for how to respond to the Soviet Union in Europe, 'cause sure as hell they're gonna do something there."

  RFK was dreaming of revenge. "I'd like to take Cuba back. That'd be nice."

  "Yeah," agreed John McCone. "I'd take Cuba away from Castro."

  Someone else joked about putting the Mongoose crowd in charge.

  "Suppose we make Bobby mayor of Havana," kidded one of the Boston Irishmen.

  The tension dissolved into laughter.

  The question of who should form the next government of Cuba was also on the minds of Cuban experts at the Department of State. Earlier in the day, the coordinator for Cuban affairs had signed off on a three-page memorandum proposing the creation of a "Junta for an Independent and Democratic Cuba." The Junta would serve as an advisory body to a military government during "the combat phase of operations," becoming a "rallying point" for all Cubans opposed to Castro.

  The experts warned against any attempt to return Cuba to the discredited Batista era. Instead, the Junta should stress the idea that Castro had betrayed the revolution and the Cuban people now had "a real chance to carry out the original revolutionary program." The State Department's list of "prominent Cubans" aligned neither with Batista nor with Castro was headed by Jose Miro Cardona.

  With his large spectacles, thinning hair, and trim mustache, Miro looked like the lawyer and university professor he had been before becoming a politician. The former president of the Cuban Bar Association had served as figurehead prime minister of Cuba after the triumph of the revolution in early 1959, lasting for fifty-nine days before being replaced by Castro. "I cannot run my office while another man is trying to run it from behind a microphone," he explained to a friend. With his moderate conservative views and anti-Batista, anti-Castro credentials, he was Washington's perennial choice to head a new Cuban government.

  The role of Cuban leader-in-waiting was frustrating and thankless. Miro had seen his hopes rise and fall many times as his American sponsors bickered, schemed, and prevaricated over how to get rid of Castro. The most bitter disappointment had come in April 1961 when the CIA persuaded Miro and his friends to support the Bay of Pigs invasion. As the guerrillas waded ashore, Miro and other members of the Revolutionary Council were spirited away to a safe house in Miami by their CIA handlers, ready to move to the first available chunk of "free Cuba." The call never came. Instead of returning home as heroes, the exile leaders were kept locked up in the house for three days, unaware of the disaster unfolding on the beaches. When it was all over, many of them broke down and wept. Among the 1,180 men captured by Castro's forces at the Bay of Pigs was Miro's own son.

  The exile leaders were flown to Washington to meet with the president. "I know something of how you feel," Kennedy had told them. "I lost a brother and a brother-in-law in the war." He assured them that his commitment to a free Cuba was "to
tal." There would be other opportunities. Miro met with the president several times over the next year and a half, coming away with a different impression every time he left the Oval Office. The discovery of Soviet missiles on Cuba persuaded him that the day of liberation had finally arrived.

  Miro spent much of Saturday meeting with U.S. government officials in Miami. They told him that Cuban refugees serving in the armed forces were being kept at "maximum readiness," pending orders to land in Cuba. With an invasion apparently only hours away, they discussed "final details concerning the establishment of a Cuban belligerent government on liberated territory." After returning home, the exile leader asked an aide to draft a proclamation celebrating the island's "new dawn of freedom":

  We do not come with impulses of vengeance, but with a spirit of justice. We do not defend the interests of any sector, nor do we intend to impose the will of any ruler. We come to restore the right of the Cuban people to establish their own laws and to elect their own government. We are not invaders. Cubans cannot invade their own land….Cubans! Throw off the hammer and sickle of Communist oppression. Join the new battle for independence. Take up arms to redeem the nation, and march resolutely on to victory. Our sovereign flag proudly waves its splendid colors, and the island rises with the stirring cry of liberty!

  In CIA safe houses around Miami, seventy-five guerrilla fighters were waiting impatiently to hear when they would be leaving for Cuba. They were organized into twenty separate teams, most with two to five members. One group had twenty members. The infiltration operation had been mysteriously put "on hold" on Friday afternoon following Bobby Kennedy's confrontation with Bill Harvey at the Mongoose meeting in the Pentagon. Nobody seemed to know what was happening, but some fighters were beginning to wonder if the Kennedys had lost their nerve again.