by Oliver Stone
In the midst of this harrowing confrontation, the Executive Committee of the National Security Council received word that a U-2 plane had been shot down over Cuba. The Joint Chiefs, believing that the Soviets were trying to blind the United States, demanded that Kennedy authorize an air strike and invasion. With reconnaissance missions also drawing fire, reports came in that Soviet missiles were being placed on launchers. Kennedy acknowledged that “time was running out.”135 The United States completed its preparations. Two hundred fifty thousand troops were mobilized and ready to invade. Plans were in place to install a new Cuban government. Two thousand bombing sorties were readied. The invasion seemed imminent.
Predicting a U.S. strike in twenty-four to seventy-two hours, Castro urged Khrushchev to respond by launching a nuclear attack against the U.S. imperialists before the United States attacked the Soviet Union. Kennedy, meanwhile, received a second letter from Khrushchev that further complicated the situation. Unlike the first, which had been highly personal, this one sounded as though it had been written by a committee. Some suspected that a military coup had taken place and Khrushchev had been ousted. The letter demanded both the pledge not to invade Cuba and the removal of NATO missiles in Turkey. Undersecretary of State George Ball and Adlai Stevenson had already suggested swapping Turkish missiles for Cuban ones, and Kennedy, prior to the current crisis, had himself twice endorsed U.S. removal of the obsolete Jupiters from Turkey. Now, however, Kennedy rejected a missile swap, fearing that yielding to Soviet demands under those circumstances could alienate Turkey and destroy NATO.
Kennedy decided to respond only to the first letter, offering a pledge not to invade Cuba. At the height of the crisis, a U-2 plane “accidentally” strayed over Soviet territory protected by jets armed with nuclear air-to-air missiles, and, unbeknown to the Americans, a Soviet nuclear missile battery was moved to fifteen miles from the U.S. base at Guantánamo, ready to blow it to smithereens. War drew closer by the second. In a last-ditch effort, Robert Kennedy met with Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin on Saturday, October 27, and told him the United States was about to attack unless it received an immediate Soviet commitment to remove its bases from Cuba. He promised to withdraw the Jupiter missiles from Turkey within four to five months but only if Soviet leaders never publicly disclosed this secret agreement. While waiting anxiously for the Soviet response, a distraught President Kennedy admitted revealingly to a young female companion, “I’d rather my children be red than dead.” Fortunately for all, such heresy departed profoundly from the then more conventional views of Eisenhower, who once told the British Ambassador that he “would rather be atomized than communized.” Going to bed, McNamara thought that he might not live to see another Saturday night.136 Fortunately for everyone, Khrushchev, who had been unable to sleep for several days when he was first briefed on nuclear weapons in 1953,137 decided that it was not worth the slaughter of hundreds of millions of people or more to save face. The next morning, the Soviets announced that they would withdraw the missiles. In his 1970 memoirs, Khrushchev claimed that Robert Kennedy’s message was even more desperate. “Even though the President himself is very much against starting a war over Cuba, an irreversible chain of events could occur against his will,” he warned. “. . . 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.”138
Kennedy meets with the Executive Committee (EXCOMM) of the National Security Council during the crisis.
The crisis was over. Or was it? Although people everywhere breathed a huge sigh of relief, the crisis actually continued for three more weeks. Kennedy also demanded that the Soviets remove their Il-28 bombers from Cuba on the grounds that they could potentially carry nuclear weapons and that they cut the number of their military personnel on the island down to 3,000. For Khrushchev, acceding to this demand was complicated by the fact that the planes now belonged to Cuba. On November 11, Khrushchev made an offer similar to the one Robert Kennedy made to Dobrynin: he offered his “gentlemen’s word” that he would remove the Il-28s at some later date.139 Kennedy turned him down flat, demanding that he publicly announce their immediate withdrawal. The United States remained on DEFCON 2 throughout this ordeal, rubbing the Soviet Union’s vulnerability in its face. The crisis finally ended on November 20, when the Soviets complied with U.S. demands.
The United States had come within a hairsbreadth of invading Cuba. U.S. officials, it turned out, had little idea of what they were about to encounter had they done so. Reconnaissance flights had succeeded in photographing only thirty-three of the forty-two SS-4 medium-range ballistic missiles and never found the nuclear warheads that were also present. SS-5 intermediate-range ballistic missiles, which could travel 2,200 miles and hit most of the continental United States, had also been shipped. The United States remained completely ignorant of the fact that the Soviets had also placed approximately a hundred battlefield nuclear weapons in Cuba to repel a U.S. invading force.140 They included eighty FKR cruise missiles armed with 12-kiloton warheads, twelve Luna ground-to-ground rockets with 2-kiloton warheads, and six 12-kiloton bombs for Il-28 bombers with a range of 750 miles. Anticipating that U.S. forces would confront 10,000 Soviet military personnel and 100,000 armed Cubans, the United States expected to suffer 18,000 total casualties and 4,500 dead in an invasion. When McNamara later learned that there were actually 43,000 Soviet military personnel and 270,000 armed Cubans, he raised the estimate of U.S. deaths to 25,000. Thirty years after the crisis, in 1992, McNamara discovered that the battlefield nuclear weapons were in place and would likely have been used against U.S. invaders. He blanched and responded that in that case, 100,000 Americans would have died and the United States would have responded by wiping out Cuba with a “high risk” of nuclear war between the United States and Soviet Union. Hundreds of millions of people might have perished—possibly all mankind. It has also recently been discovered that on the island of Okinawa, a large force of Mace missiles with 1.1 megaton nuclear warheads and F-100 fighter bombers armed with hydrogen bombs was preparing for action. Their likely target was not the Soviet Union but China.141
As Daniel Ellsberg has astutely pointed out, Khrushchev made a blunder of epic proportions by not divulging the fact that the warheads had arrived before the blockade went into effect and then, even more bafflingly, not announcing that he had delivered tactical cruise and ballistic missiles along with their nuclear warheads. By keeping these facts secret, he had undercut the missiles’ deterrent effect. Had U.S. policymakers known for sure of the warheads’ arrival for the MRBMs, they would have hesitated to strike and risk a retaliatory launching. Similarly, had they known that tactical missiles with nuclear warheads might be fired at U.S. troops, they would likely have forsworn an invasion. In fact, the Kremlin had initially given local Soviet commanders authority to launch the tactical missiles at their own discretion if the U.S. invaded. Such authorization was later withdrawn, but that did not preclude the possibility of an unauthorized launching. Although the details were different, this frightening scenario of deterrence gone awry with cataclysmic consequences was hauntingly similar to the one that Stanley Kubrick presented little more than a year later in his satirical masterpiece Dr. Strangelove.
U.S. military leaders were furious when the crisis ended without an attack on Cuba. On several occasions, they had as much as accused Kennedy of cowardice for resisting their recommendations. McNamara recalled their bitterness at a meeting with Kennedy the day after the Soviets agreed to remove their missiles: “The President invited the chiefs in to thank them for their support during the crisis, and there was one hell of a scene. Curtis LeMay came out saying, ‘We lost. We ought to just go in there today and knock ’em off!’ ”142 Kennedy viewed the outcome differently. He privately boasted that he had “cut [Khrushchev’s] balls off.”143 Khrushchev was vilified for his restraint. The Chinese charged him with cowardice for caving in to U.S. demands. Some Soviet officials a
greed and spread the word that Khrushchev had “shitted his pants.”144 Many U.S. officials, believing that the United States’ willingness to go to war had forced the Soviets to back down, decided that superior force would also work elsewhere, including in Vietnam. The Soviets drew the opposite lesson: determined to never again be so humiliated and forced to capitulate from weakness, they began a massive buildup of nuclear weapons to achieve parity with the United States. Weakened by the crisis, Khrushchev would be forced out of power the following year.
Shaken by how close the world had come to a nuclear holocaust, Khrushchev wrote Kennedy another long letter on October 30. “Evil has brought some good,” he reflected. “The good is that now people have felt more tangibly the breathing of the burning flames of thermonuclear war and have a more clear realization of the threat looming over them if the arms race is not stopped.” He guessed that Americans “felt as much anxiety as all other peoples expecting that thermonuclear war would break out any moment.” In light of this, he made a series of bold proposals for eliminating “everything in our relations capable of generating a new crisis.” He suggested a nonaggression treaty between NATO and the Warsaw Pact nations. Even better, he said, why not “disband all military blocs?” He wanted to move quickly to finalize a treaty for cessation of all nuclear weapons testing—in the atmosphere, in outer space, under water, and also underground, seeing it as transitional to complete disarmament. He proposed a formula for resolving the ever-dangerous German question: formal acceptance of two Germanys based on the existing borders. He urged the United States to recognize China and let it assume its legitimate place in the United Nations. He encouraged Kennedy to offer his own counterproposals so that together they could move toward peaceful resolution of the problems threatening mankind.145 But Kennedy’s tepid response and insistence on additional on-site inspections before signing a comprehensive test ban treaty frustrated Khrushchev.
Saturday Review editor and antinuclear activist Norman Cousins helped to break the impasse. Khrushchev had invited Cousins, who often attended Soviet-American conferences, to visit him in early December 1962. Prior to leaving, Kennedy asked Cousins to do what he could to convince Khrushchev that Kennedy was sincere about wanting to improve relations and conclude a test ban treaty. In a meeting that lasted more than three hours, Khrushchev told Cousins, “Peace is the most important goal in the world. If we don’t have peace and the nuclear bombs start to fall, what difference will it make whether we are Communists or Catholics or capitalists or Chinese or Russians or Americans? Who could tell us apart? Who will be left to tell us apart?”146
Khrushchev confirmed his eagerness to conclude a test ban treaty quickly and was confident that it was possible “for both our countries to agree on the kind of inspection that will satisfy you that we’re not cheating and that will satisfy us you’re not spying.”147 The prospects for a treaty looked good until negotiations hit a snag when Kennedy, under pressure from U.S. hawks, more than doubled the number of on-site inspections the United States would require. Hoping to salvage an agreement, Cousins returned to the Soviet Union in April 1963 and met with the Soviet premier for six hours. Khrushchev described the pressure he was under from Kremlin hawks. When Cousins briefed Kennedy on Khrushchev’s predicament, the president observed, “One of the ironic things about this entire situation is that Mr. Khrushchev and I occupy approximately the same political positions inside our governments. He would like to prevent a nuclear war but is under severe pressure from his hard-line crowd, which interprets every move in that direction as appeasement. I’ve got similar problems.”148 That April, Undersecretary of State Averell Harriman, the former ambassador, also spoke with Khrushchev and cabled to Kennedy that Khrushchev “meant what he was saying about peaceful coexistence.”149 Harriman and Khrushchev interrupted their meetings to attend a track meet at Lenin Stadium between an Amateur Athletic Union team from the United States and a Soviet team. When the runners from the two nations that had so recently been on the brink of nuclear war marched onto the field arm in arm, the crowd went wild. Harriman and Khrushchev rose to a huge ovation. Harriman said he saw tears in Khrushchev’s eyes.150
After his two visits with Khrushchev, Cousins reported to Kennedy that the Soviet leader sincerely sought a new relationship with the United States but felt bitter at Kennedy’s unresponsiveness. Kennedy asked Cousins what he could do to break the stalemate. Cousins suggested a presidential address offering “a breathtaking new approach toward the Russian people, calling for an end to the cold war and a fresh start in American-Russian relations.” Cousins even submitted a draft of the speech, much of which Ted Sorensen incorporated into the final version of Kennedy’s historic American University commencement address.151 Albeit a little more hesitantly at first than his Soviet counterpart, Kennedy began demonstrating that he too was ready for a fundamental restructuring of relations between the capitalist and Communist worlds.
Kennedy saw Vietnam as one place to step back from confrontation, but he knew it would not be easy. Among the earliest administration officials to question U.S. involvement in Vietnam was Ambassador to India John Kenneth Galbraith. After reading Galbraith’s report in early 1962, Kennedy instructed Harriman and NSC staffer Michael Forrestal to “seize upon any favorable moment to reduce our commitment.” The Joint Chiefs emphatically rejected Galbraith’s suggestions. McNamara asked General Paul Harkins for a plan to complete training South Vietnamese troops and withdraw U.S. forces by the end of 1965. It is important to note that in McNamara’s mind, the withdrawal should occur whether victory was attained or not. He stated in his oral history for the Office of the Secretary of Defense, “I believed that to the extent we could train those forces, we should do so, and having done it, we should get out. To the extent those trained forces could not handle the problem—the subversion by North Vietnam—I believed we should not introduce our military forces in support of the South Vietnamese, even if they were going to be ‘defeated.’ ”152
Kennedy started voicing doubts a little bit later. In late 1962, he asked Senator Mike Mansfield to visit Vietnam and evaluate the situation. Mansfield returned with a very pessimistic assessment and recommended that the United States withdraw its forces. O’Donnell described Kennedy’s reaction: “The president was too disturbed by the senator’s unexpected argument to reply to it. He said to me later when we talked about the discussion, ‘I got angry with Mike for disagreeing with our policy so completely, and I got angry with myself because I found myself agreeing with him.’ ”153 In April 1963, Kennedy told journalist Charles Bartlett, “We don’t have a prayer of staying in Vietnam. We don’t have a prayer of prevailing there. Those people hate us. They are going to throw our tails out of there at almost any point. But I can’t give up a piece of territory like that to the Communists and then get the American people to reelect me.”154
McNamara, meanwhile, began pressing the resistant Joint Chiefs for a plan for phased withdrawal. Kennedy approved the plan in May 1963. The first 1,000 men were set to depart at the end of that year. In September, Kennedy sent McNamara and Taylor on a ten-day fact-finding expedition to Vietnam. They gave the president their report on October 2. It called for beginning withdrawal before the end of 1963 and completing it by the end of 1965. Kennedy insisted that the withdrawal dates be included in the statement released to the press. He formalized this commitment in NSAM 263, which he signed on October 11, 1963.155
The debate over Kennedy’s true intentions in Vietnam has at times been quite acrimonious. Kennedy’s own contradictory statements and mixed signals have added to the confusion. Clearly, Kennedy was under enormous pressure to stay the course in Vietnam. The Joint Chiefs issued shrill warnings that the loss of South Vietnam would bring Communist domination of all Southeast Asia and beyond and pushed for the introduction of ground forces. Kennedy went out of his way to convince the American people that he believed it essential for the United States to prevail. In July 1963, he told a news conference that “for us to withdraw
from that effort would mean a collapse not only of South Vietnam but Southeast Asia.”156 The fact that when he did discuss withdrawal, he made it contingent upon being able to depart victoriously, also fed the belief that he had no intention of changing course.
Kennedy’s determination to pull out U.S. forces was made clear in private conversations with several of his closest advisors and confidants. But political considerations drove his decision to postpone action until after the 1964 elections. In several cases, such considerations also convinced his friends to sit on that knowledge long past the time when having divulged it might have helped prevent the nightmare that was to ensue. Kennedy explained the political calculations behind his regrettable delaying tactics to O’Donnell: “If I tried to pull out completely now from Vietnam, we would have another Joe McCarthy scare on our hands, but I can do it after I’m reelected.”157
Among those who later came forward with confirmation of Kennedy’s intention to withdraw were Robert Kennedy, Robert McNamara, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Ted Sorensen, Mike Mansfield, Tip O’Neill, and Assistant Secretary of State Roger Hilsman. When Daniel Ellsberg interviewed Robert Kennedy in 1967, prior to the Tet Offensive and the shift in public opinion on the war, Kennedy explained that his brother had been “absolutely determined not to send ground units.” Ellsberg asked if the president would have been willing, as a result, to accept defeat at the hands of the Communists, and Kennedy replied, “We would have fuzzed it up. We would have gotten a government in that asked us out or that would have negotiated with the other side. We would have handled it like Laos.” In response to Ellsberg’s question as to why the president was so smart when most of his senior advisors were still committed to prevailing, Kennedy responded so sharply that Ellsberg jumped in his chair, “Because we were there! We were there, in 1951. We saw what was happening to the French. We saw it. My brother determined, determined, never to let that happen to us.”158 President Kennedy even told Wayne Morse, the most outspoken war critic in Congress, that Morse was “absolutely right” in his criticism of Kennedy’s Vietnam policy. “I’ve decided to get out. Definitely!” he assured him.159
