Fallout

by Steve Sheinkin

  Kennedy’s injured back was beginning to throb. He and his men were stuck on a tropical island about the size of a football field. There were a few trees but no edible plants. No fresh water. They were surrounded by Japanese bases. The nearest Allied-held island was Rendova—they could see Rendova Peak in the distance to the southeast. It was forty miles away.

  The lives of eleven young Americans, including twenty-six-year-old John Kennedy, could easily have ended right there, on a spit of land in the Solomon Islands in the middle of World War II.

  * * *

  Three days later, two young men were paddling their canoe near tiny Naru Island, about two miles southeast of Kasolo Island, when they spotted something interesting.

  Biuku Gasa and Eroni Kumana were both in their late teens, both fishermen and canoe makers born on nearby islands. Both had volunteered for the perilous job of scouting for the Allies, observing and reporting on the movement of Japanese forces.

  Cautiously, they paddled closer to Naru. Stuck on the reef near shore was the wreckage of a small Japanese boat. Gasa and Kumana decided to take a look at the wreck, see if there was anything worth salvaging. And it was a good find: maps, cooking pots, a sword, a gun. They started gathering the stuff—then froze when they noticed they were being watched.

  Two men stood on the beach of Naru Island, staring at them.

  Gasa and Kumana couldn’t make out details from this distance but figured the men must be Japanese sailors from the wreck. They jumped into their canoe and sped off.

  At the same time, the men on the beach dove under a bush. They, too, thought they’d just been spotted by the enemy.

  They were John Kennedy and fellow sailor Barney Ross.

  Kennedy had spent the last three days trying to keep his crew alive. He’d spent an entire night treading water between islands, fighting currents, terrified of sharks, beyond exhausted, hoping an American ship would pass. No luck. He and his crew had swum another mile to Olasana Island in search of food and water. Nothing. That morning, with his men dying of thirst, Kennedy had swum to Naru with Ross. They saw some sort of wreckage on the reef—but were spotted by men in a canoe and dove for cover.

  Gasa and Kumana raced to what they hoped was a safe distance from Naru. It was thirsty work. Gasa suggested they stop for coconuts at Olasana Island. They were near the shore when a white man in rags staggered out of the bushes, waving his arms and shouting:

  “Navy! Navy! Americans! Americans!”

  Those were two of the few English words the scouts knew. They paddled to the beach. More Americans emerged, some injured, all starving. Gasa and Kumana made a fire and shared the food they had in the canoe. When John Kennedy returned to the island that evening, he tripped up to Gasa and Kumana—and fell into their arms.

  In the morning, the group gazed at Rendova Peak, forty miles in the distance. The Americans could never get there. The scouts could, maybe.

  Gasa husked a coconut and used hand gestures to convey his idea. Kennedy understood. He took out his knife and carved an SOS message in English into the shell of the coconut.

  The scouts set out to deliver the message, paddling fifteen hours through choppy waters patrolled by the Japanese military, knowing they’d be killed if caught helping Americans. They showed the coconut to an amazed American officer. The crew of PT-109 had been given up for dead.

  A PT boat picked the men up just after midnight on August 8, six days after PT-109 was destroyed. Kennedy was guided below deck, where he broke down in tears, his body drained and aching, his six-foot-one frame wasted to a skeletal 110 pounds.

  * * *

  “And so, my fellow Americans…”

  Eighteen years later, still thin but no longer cadaverous, John Kennedy sat in the bathtub in his Washington home, soaking a back that had never fully healed, practicing the inaugural address he’d give in a few hours. He’d worked through many drafts and revisions to get it just right—short and decisive, focused on the dangerous road ahead.

  He recited the lines aloud again over bacon and eggs at the breakfast table.

  “And so, my fellow Americans…”

  Kennedy’s rise had been quick. A year after World War II ended, he ran for Congress. At a campaign event in Boston, a high school student asked the young candidate what he’d done to become a war hero.

  Kennedy smiled and said, “It was easy—they sank my boat.”

  That was Kennedy’s style, to crack a self-deprecating joke. But he needed the PT-109 story, and he knew it. It was his origin story, proof he wasn’t just a pampered kid who’d had everything handed to him by a rich father. He was elected to the House of Representatives in 1946, the Senate in 1952, and the White House just eight years later.

  With his thick dark hair, quick smile, and custom suits, John Kennedy was something new—a stylish young president. A cool president. Voters had no idea that behind the slick image was a man who battled several chronic illnesses, who required a mix of shots and pills, plus three hot baths for his back, just to get through each day.

  * * *

  Inauguration morning was sunny and cold in Washington, about 20 degrees. A fresh layer of snow covered the city. Kennedy stood at the podium outside the Capitol, no hat or coat, puffs of frost coming from his mouth along with his carefully crafted words.

  “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

  The human species had reached a turning point, he argued, a testing point. The Cold War was going to go one way or the other—sooner rather than later. “In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility—I welcome it.”

  With one of the most quoted lines of the century, Kennedy challenged all Americans to face the coming test together. “And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.”

  FIRST PITCH

  EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, A middle-aged woman named Evelyn Lincoln sat in the passenger seat as her husband, Abe, drove the family car along Washington streets. Abe pulled up to the gate at the White House. The security guard didn’t know Mrs. Lincoln. He took her word that she worked for the new president.

  “I’ll call you later,” Abe said.

  Lincoln carried her briefcase to the West Wing, a separate building begun by Teddy Roosevelt in 1902 when the White House ran out of room for staff. She introduced herself as President Kennedy’s personal secretary. A guard led her down a hallway to a small room.

  “I guess this will be your office,” he said.

  She liked it. A window with a view of the Rose Garden. One door opening to the Cabinet Room, with its long table, bronze bust of Abraham Lincoln, and portrait of George Washington on the wall. A second door opened right into the Oval Office.

  She walked into the president’s office. It really was oval. The walls were bare, freshly painted a drab green she knew her boss would hate. The glass in the windows was two inches thick. Bulletproof. Tiny holes dotted the carpet, making a path from the desk to the doors leading out to the lawn. Golf shoes, she realized. Eisenhower used to put on golf cleats at his desk and walk outside to hit a few balls.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Lincoln, is there any mail?”

  A familiar voice. She’d worked for John Kennedy since he was first elected to the Senate eight years before. The president came in and sat at the desk, getting the feel of the spot at the center of power.

  “This desk is too big,” he said.

  And he wanted his favorite rocking chair, the one that eased his stiff back, brought in and put by the fireplace. Plus they’d need a nicer sofa. Also, something would have to be done about the paint color.

  First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy managed the remodeling, replacing the furniture, repainting the walls a warm off-white
, hanging family photos, and bringing in the kind of stuff her husband liked—naval paintings, ship models, and his favorite artifact, the coconut shell with his SOS message from World War II.

  Everything was ready just in time for a relentless string of disasters.

  * * *

  Four days after John Kennedy took office, the U.S. Air Force dropped two hydrogen bombs on North Carolina.

  Not on purpose.

  Shortly after midnight on January 24, 1961, ten hours into a routine flight along the East Coast of the United States, a B-52 bomber suffered a fuel leak, went into a spin, and broke apart as it fell. Five members of the eight-man crew managed to eject safely and open their parachutes.

  The plane’s two four-megaton bombs also fell free. One slammed into a wetland and buried itself deep in the mud without exploding. The other worked exactly as designed in case of war. As it fell, a series of automatic triggers inside the bomb engaged. Just one single safety switch prevented detonation.

  The bombs each carried two hundred times the power of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Radioactive fallout could have poisoned communities all the way to Washington, D.C., and beyond.

  Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had been in the job three days. A month before, he’d been head of Ford Motor Company. McNamara knew very little about hydrogen bombs. Just enough to be horrified.

  “By the slightest margin of chance,” he’d later admit, “literally the failure of two wires to cross, a nuclear explosion was averted.”

  * * *

  A few weeks later, in Miami, Robert Maheu entered Handsome Johnny Rosselli’s hotel room with a briefcase in his hand. The CIA cut-out sat on the edge of the bed and dumped out a pile of cash.

  About $10,000, Rosselli judged with an expert eye. Just enough.

  He hadn’t changed his mind—he wasn’t asking to be paid for the Castro job. But there were expenses to be covered.

  Rosselli had consulted with a few mobster friends, and they’d decided a guns-blazing gangland-style shooting would be too messy. Who’d be crazy enough to take that job? Instead, Rosselli had asked whether the CIA could maybe get him some kind of poison. Government chemists produced a batch of six pills with what the lab described as “high lethal content.” Botulinum toxin, to be specific. The victim would be sick for several days before dying, making it hard to trace the source of the poison.

  After Rosselli gathered up the money, Maheu handed over the six capsules. They wouldn’t dissolve well in hot drinks or soup, Maheu explained. Cold drinks should be fine.

  The next step was to get the pills to the Cuban capital of Havana, where Rosselli had a contact who knew a waiter at a restaurant where Castro often dined.

  * * *

  How much did John Kennedy know about this assassination plot? That’s still not clear, even now. Most historians think he must have been informed.

  In any case, that was just one of several plans. Under President Eisenhower, the military and CIA had begun planning a far more ambitious operation to get rid of Fidel Castro—a full-blown invasion of Cuba. On March 11, standing before a map of Cuba on a podium in the Cabinet Room, the CIA’s Richard Bissell updated Kennedy on the plan.

  Fourteen hundred anti-Castro Cubans were training at a secret base in the mountains of Guatemala. Morale was high. They were ready to go. But the Soviets were starting to send military supplies to Cuba. Castro was getting stronger. And rumors of the invasion force were starting to spread. Time was running out.

  The plan, explained Bissell, was to land the invasion force near the Cuban city of Trinidad. U.S. Air Force planes would fly overhead during the landing, bombing Castro’s forces, while U.S. ships brought in supplies.

  Kennedy didn’t like it.

  “It sounds like D-Day,” he objected. “You have to reduce the noise level of this thing.”

  Make it look less like an American operation, Kennedy ordered, more like Cubans liberating their own country. He worried that a failed invasion would be a huge humiliation to the United States. And to him, personally. Kennedy wanted the option, if things went wrong, to deny this was an American-led attack.

  The plan had been a year in the making. Now the CIA and military had a few days to rework it. The revised plan called for a quieter landing, at night without air cover, at a rural spot on the southern coast called Bahía de Cochinos. In English, the Bay of Pigs.

  * * *

  Between briefings on Cuba, Kennedy slipped out to the lawn to toss a baseball. Opening day for the Washington Senators was coming up, and it was traditional for the president to throw a ceremonial first pitch. Kennedy agreed to do it, but his bad back made throwing painful. He wanted to get in some practice before the big day.

  * * *

  There was news from Havana that week.

  “Did you see the paper?” a giddy Robert Maheu asked one of his partners. “Castro’s ill. He’s going to be sick two or three days. Wow, we got him.”

  But Castro got better.

  The CIA never did figure out what went wrong. It’s possible the waiter got scared and never used the pills, or maybe he got fired before he had the chance. Or maybe Castro just stopped going to that restaurant.

  Well, there was always the invasion, set to begin in a few weeks. That should finish off Castro once and for all.

  * * *

  On the chilly afternoon of April 10, the stands of Griffith Stadium were packed for the Washington Senators’ opening-day game against the Chicago White Sox.

  In his seat by the first-base dugout, President Kennedy took off his overcoat, stood, and loosened up his arm. Players from both teams moved in close. They knew the drill—important officials tossing out ceremonial pitches could never really throw.

  But everything was a competition to Kennedy. He wound up and whipped the ball over the heads of the nearby players. It bounced off the gloves of two unsuspecting players, finally landing in the bare hand of White Sox outfielder Jim Rivera.

  The crowd roared. Kennedy smiled and waved, and settled in to enjoy the game.

  * * *

  That same day, in the mountains of Guatemala, José Peréz San Román—Pepe to his men—spoke to the fourteen hundred men he was about to lead into battle. Training was over. It was time, he told them, to liberate their homeland.

  Cheering, singing patriotic songs, the men climbed into trucks and rolled down dirt roads out of the mountains to an air base. They got on transport planes for a night flight to Puerto Cabezas, on the eastern coast of Nicaragua, the jumping-off point for the Bay of Pigs invasion.

  THE COUNTDOWN

  EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, AT the Baikonur Cosmodrome in the Soviet Union, Sergei Korolev stood outside a massive hangar as the doors slid open. Korolev, the Soviet Union’s top rocket scientist, watched his creation roll out—a 112-foot-long rocket on its side, strapped to the platform of a flat train car.

  As the Bay of Pigs invasion force gathered on the beach in Nicaragua, the Soviets were set to launch a surprise mission of their own. Two of the biggest events of the entire Cold War were playing out at the exact same time.

  Korolev walked alongside the train tracks as the flatcar moved slowly, gently, from the hangar to the launch pad. This rocket, the R-7, was his masterpiece, a leap forward in rocket design. With this technology, Korolev had put the first satellite, Sputnik, into orbit. He’d sent dogs into space. He’d crashed an unmanned craft into the surface of the moon. And just weeks before, he’d pulled off another big step, blasting a capsule into space with a very special traveler. The flight had gone smoothly. The passenger, in a helmet and bright orange flight suit, had parachuted down near a village in the Ural Mountains. He’d hit the snow and collapsed, arms and legs splayed at odd angles.

  Startled villagers raced to the fallen figure. Was this another Frank Powers? Another American sky pirate? Just in case, one man bent down and punched the stranger in the head.

  Nothing. No reaction.

  Soldiers sped up in cars, jumped out, and shov
ed everyone back from the body. But then the soldiers just stood there, blocking access. They didn’t even bother to see if the guy was still alive.

  He wasn’t. He never had been. The space traveler was Ivan Ivanovich, an amazingly lifelike mannequin built specially for this final dress rehearsal. Scientists had filled his hollow limbs with test subjects, including mice, guinea pigs, and reptiles. The animals all came through the flight in fine shape. This was also a test of the capsule’s communication system. Could a human voice be heard from space? Ivan wasn’t up to the challenge of talking, so the designers had proposed adding a recording of a person singing.

  Soviet security officers objected, knowing Americans would be watching and listening. “The West will think the cosmonaut has lost his mind, and instead of carrying out his mission he’s singing songs!”

  They compromised, using a tape of a choir; no one would think there was a choir up there. They also added a recording of a woman reading a recipe for borscht. All systems worked perfectly.

  Korolev had been following news of the U.S. space program. The Americans were a lot less secretive than the Russians and were clearly close to sending the first human into space—by far the biggest prize yet in the space race. But the Soviets were about to get the first shot. Korolev and his team were now ready to strap a pilot into a tiny capsule atop an R-7 and blast him into space.

  Hopefully. Of the last sixteen R-7 launches, eight succeeded. Eight failed.

  * * *

  That night, in a cottage near the launch pad, a twenty-seven-year-old fighter pilot named Yuri Gagarin lay still in a wooden bunk, pretending to be asleep. Never in his life had Gagarin been more in need of a good night’s sleep. But that wasn’t going to happen. Not tonight.