Kennedy did not know where the Republican senator had gotten his information. He realized, though, that the opposition might try to use this issue to barter its way into majority control of Congress in an election only two months away. Before the Bay of Pigs, the president harbored the delusion that he could control the information that came out of the White House, and he had tried to hide an entire operation under a tarpaulin of deception. Now he was so worried about information leaking that he was unwilling to trust some of the people he had to trust if he was going to make rational decisions.
The afternoon of Keating’s speech, Kennedy called Marshall Carter, the CIA’s deputy director. The president was worried about the dissemination of photos showing the construction of what appeared to be surface-to-air missile sites across Cuba. The photos should have set off an alert throughout the government’s various intelligence operations, but the president wanted them hidden away. “Put it back in the box and nail it tight,” Kennedy told Carter.
Khrushchev needed to lull the Americans for a few weeks and Kennedy was helping him do so. Georgi Bolshakov, the Russian agent used as a conduit in Washington, told his American contacts that relationships between the two great powers might well improve if the Americans would end their “piratical” flights monitoring Soviet ships sailing to Cuba. Kennedy invited the Russian to the White House on September 4 and told him, “Tell him [Khrushchev] that I’ve ordered those flights stopped today.” Afterward Bobby stood with Bolshakov outside the White House beseeching him to inform Khrushchev that whatever he did, he must not try any needless provocations before the midterm congressional elections. “Goddamn it!” Bobby exclaimed. “Georgi, doesn’t Premier Khrushchev realize the president’s position?”
In the charming, gregarious figure of Bolshakov, Bobby saw the possibility of dialogue across the Iron Curtain. The Russian had been useful to the Kennedys before, though he had been more useful to his Soviet masters. Bobby did not quite grasp that if his own opinion of the Soviet system was correct, Bolshakov was as imprisoned by his handlers as if Bobby were talking to him in a cell.
On September 7, the president learned the deeply disturbing news that in analyzing their most recent U-2 photos of Cuba, the CIA analysts “suspect[ed] the presence of another kind of missile site—possible surface-to-surface.” This was precisely the kind of information that the president’s opponents might use to stir up political hysteria across America. Kennedy could no longer “put it in the box and nail it tight.” But even as he told the analysts to continue their work, he froze the information’s dissemination within a small circle of advisers.
While Kennedy was examining the U-2 photos and trying to put a damper on the whole uncertain business, Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall was meeting with Khrushchev at his summer home on the Black Sea in Soviet Georgia. Khrushchev had decided that he needed a conduit to Kennedy, and Udall was the nearest available vehicle. The Soviet leader, a student of American politics, was perfectly aware of Kennedy’s obsession with the forthcoming election. He promised Udall that he would not create a crisis over Berlin before the American election. “Out of respect for your president we won’t do anything until November,” he said.
If shrewdness were the ultimate attribute, then no one would ever have bested Khrushchev. His salty aphorisms sounded like homespun peasant wisdom, but they were superb vehicles with which to promote his Marxist ideology, the metaphors carrying meanings within meanings. As the Soviet leader saw it, everything was all so simple and logical. The United States had put nuclear weapons in Japan, but all the Soviet Union was doing was giving Castro defensive weapons. “You have surrounded us with military bases,” Khrushchev said. “If you attack Cuba, then we will attack one of the countries next to us where you have placed your bases.”
As Udall listened, he was in essence merely holding a microphone so that Khrushchev could reach Kennedy’s ear. Udall pointed out that only a few members of Congress were spouting such craziness as to call for an invasion of Cuba. “These congressmen do not see with their eyes, but with their asses,” Khrushchev replied. “All they can see is what’s behind them. Yesterday’s events are not today’s realities. I remember Gorky recounting in his memoirs how he had a conversation with Tolstoy. Tolstoy asked him how he got along with women, and then ventured his own opinion. ‘Men are poorly designed. When they’re young, they can satisfy their sexual desires. But as they grow old, the ability to reap this satisfaction disappears. The desires, however, do not.’ So it is with your congressmen. They do not have power, but they still have the same old desires.”
As Khrushchev muttered his soothing shibboleths, he was orchestrating a deployment of Soviet military power in Cuba beyond anything even the most vociferous critic had imagined. Soviet plans were to install in Cuba twenty-four R-12 nuclear ballistic missiles with a one-thousand-and-fifty-mile range, sixteen R-14 missiles with twice that range, and eighty nuclear cruise missiles with a short range of about one hundred miles. From Cuba, the largest of these missiles could target American cities almost as far west as Seattle. A single missile could destroy one of the nation’s major cities with a force over seventy times that of the bomb that devastated Hiroshima.
The Soviet leader also planned to send eleven submarines sailing out of a new Cuban submarine base, each probably carrying one nuclear torpedo and twenty-one conventional torpedos. Seven of these would carry nuclear missiles. There were also plans to send a squadron of IL-28 light bombers carrying nuclear bombs and a large number of tactical nuclear weapons called Lunas by the Russians and Frogs by NATO. These weapons had a thirty-one-mile range that could be used against anyone rash enough to attempt an invasion of fortress Cuba. Traveling to Cuba with these missiles would be 50,874 Soviet troops, a force that even without the nuclear weapons would change the nature of power in Cuba and the price to be paid in any invasion.
With one bold action, the Soviets would more than double the number of Soviet missiles targeted at American cities. Communist Cuba, so threatened by an American invasion, would suddenly become impregnable to all but an American leader willing to set off nuclear war. The Americans would see and feel what the Soviet people felt: enemy nuclear weapons near enough to cast dark shadows across their border. Khrushchev’s nation was still no match for America in military might and nuclear weaponry, but this daring move would reap untold psychological and political benefits for Communist nations around the world.
During the first days of October, Kennedy did not know the extent of the awesome nuclear weaponry sailing toward Cuba, but he knew that Khrushchev had moved his queen forward on the chessboard of the cold war. Kennedy was fond of quoting Hemingway’s definition of courage as “grace under pressure.” For Kennedy, a true man acted not only courageously but with unflinching coolness. That was precisely how Kennedy himself had acted when PT-109 was cut in two, and it was how he acted now as he received reports on the situation in Cuba. He asked that the U.S. armed forces begin to prepare themselves for military action in Cuba—not immediately, but in the coming three months. He wanted American pilots to be fully prepared to take out the Soviet SA-2 surface-to-air missile sites that he knew were already in existence, and the air force developed mock-ups for their training.
If the president had not been Bobby’s brother, the attorney general would most likely have accused him of a prissy reluctance to confront Castro. On October 4, Bobby chaired a meeting of the top officials overseeing Operation Mongoose in which he vented his rage, exhibiting a full measure of gracelessness under pressure. These were not midlevel officials he yelled at, but among them Lansdale himself, a man not used to being on the receiving end of such wrath. The general was no longer in the outsider’s enviable position, able to condemn and ridicule what others had done before him. Now he was in the bureaucrat’s uncomfortable chair, having to defend what had not been accomplished while giving what McCone took as the “general impression that things were all right.”
No longer was the man Bobby had
thought of as the personification of “the Ugly American” safe from the rebuke that he spilled so indiscriminately on those working on Operation Mongoose at the CIA. The attorney general fumed that “nothing was moving forward.” Bobby wanted gung-ho action, militancy, and bold acts of sabotage, including possibly what would have been an act of war: secret mining of the harbors where the Soviet ships were arriving.
These few men in the room represented most of the spectrum of thought on Cuba in the administration. They knew that they would be judged not by how forcefully they spoke today but by how true their assessments proved. Bobby and McCone stood at one end as the most militant advocates of determined military action against Cuba. They shared the same Catholic faith, the same militant anticommunism, the same brutal assessment of Cuban and Soviet motives.
McCone asserted that the Soviets were probably establishing an offensive military posture in Cuba, including medium-range ballistic missiles. As the president’s top national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy reflected the president’s thinking, but he was far from being merely Kennedy’s intellectual clone. Nonetheless, Bundy seemed, for the most part, to believe what the president believed, and this morning he believed that the CIA director’s black assessment was probably wrong, and that the Soviets would not dare go so far. McCone, a man of genteel manners, admitted that many, even most, of his colleagues in intelligence would have agreed with Bundy, but they could not risk the future of the United States if Bundy was wrong.
The scholarly Bundy had history and reason on his side. Yet on this very day, at the Cuban port of Mariel, the Soviet ship Indigirka arrived carrying forty-five warheads to arm the R-12s; twelve warheads to be fitted on the Luna tactical missiles; six nuclear bombs for the IL-28 planes, and thirty-six warheads ready for the cruise missiles. The total firepower carried on that one Russian freighter, Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali wrote, was “over twenty times the explosive power that was dropped by Allied bombers on Germany in all of the Second World War.”
Bobby was more ideological than his brother, believing, like his Marxist enemies, that life was a battle over ideas. Yet he was not a man of abstraction. He wanted to know life at its most intimate, to touch not only some of the young Cubans sent off on missions to their native land from which they might never return but also his enemies or those who knew his enemies. So on the day after the Operation Mongoose meeting he agreed to meet once again with the Russian agent Bolshakov, whom he had first met before the Vienna summit.
Bolshakov had tantalized Bobby, telling him he had a message from Khrushchev. In the netherworld of intelligence, the Russians and the Americans cut their scripts up into many pages so that most players knew only their own few lines and little of the plot they were advancing. Bolshakov had a familiar message to deliver. He told Bobby, “The weapons that the USSR is sending to Cuba will only be of a defensive character.” Bolshakov was like Adlai Stevenson at the United Nations during the Bay of Pigs, speaking lines he thought to be true to serve a purpose of which he had not been informed. Bolshakov believed that he was serving the high cause of peace, but in fact he was betraying Bobby in the name of his country.
The president needed concrete intelligence on what was going on in Cuba, not conjecture, speculation, ruminations, or gossip. On the morning of October 14, Major Richard Heyser of the U.S. Air Force flew a U-2 mission over western Cuba. He was over the island for only six minutes, but that was enough to take 928 photographs that showed three medium-range missile sites and eight missile transporters. Two subsequent flights the next day brought back photos showing two other sites and crates for the Soviet medium-range bombers.
The following evening, October 15, the CIA’s deputy director for intelligence called Bundy at his home to tell him about the latest photos. The news was so extraordinary that it shifted the protocol of power. In any other important matter Bundy would have called the president immediately or left for the White House. This evening, though, he put the phone down and went back to his dinner party, not wanting his foreign guests to have any signal that something was wrong. Even after his guests left, he did not call the president. He knew that Kennedy was tired after a late-night return from New York the previous evening. Bundy decided, as he wrote Kennedy later, that “a quiet evening and a night of sleep were the best preparation you could have in the light of what would face you in the next days.”
Kennedy sat propped up in bed reading the morning newspapers, including a front-page story in the New York Times with the headline “Eisenhower Calls President Weak on Foreign Policy.” That would have been enough unpleasant news for one morning, but then Bundy entered to tell him the results of the U-2’s photographic sortie over Cuba. The first thing the president did was to call Bobby. “We have some big trouble,” the president said. “I want you over here.”
A few minutes later Bobby rushed into Bundy’s office saying that he wanted to see the photographs. It was typical of Bobby not to trust the CIA technicians who had so painstakingly examined the pictures. Arthur Lundahl, the head of the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center, led the attorney general into the room where the pictures were set up on briefing boards. “Oh shit!” Bobby exclaimed. “Shit! Shit! Those sons-of-bitches Russians.” Much as he had during the Bay of Pigs, Bobby immediately personalized these events, seeing the face of the enemy before his eyes.
If there was ever a day that called for the deepest of perceptions and the wisest of judgments, that day had arrived. That reality was not evident that afternoon, as Bobby met at the Justice Department with Lansdale and those most concerned with Operation Mongoose. The attorney general had been upset at Lansdale’s operation for a while. Today he played his trump card, invoking his brother’s sacred name. He opened the meeting by talking of the “general dissatisfaction of the president” with Operation Mongoose. He bemoaned the fact that there had been no real acts of sabotage.
In the world that faced the president now, acts of sabotage hardly mattered against either a Cuba armed with nuclear weapons or a Cuba decimated by American bombs. Bobby could not yet grasp this essential fact but continued to rail so fiercely against Lansdale’s desultory action that he insisted that from now on he would meet every morning at nine-thirty with the Operation Mongoose chieftain and his top subordinates, monitoring them like naughty schoolboys.
There were two meetings that day, Tuesday October 16, of the newly created executive committee of the National Security Council (Ex Comm), the group that in the days that followed became the crucial policymaking organization. Kennedy had sought to surround himself with fiercely intelligent men who would parse an issue up and down, tearing it apart, before they arrived at a sound conclusion. These men had largely failed to alert him to the dangers that lay at the Bay of Pigs. The scale of what faced them was far higher now than a year and a half ago, and this time there was depth and fierce articulateness to many of their contributions. It was a mark of the vigor of their minds that all of the great issues of what became known as the Cuban Missile Crisis were discussed on this first day.
Although Kennedy and his men often spoke in a kind of intellectual shorthand, these were not mere tactical meetings but discussions of political, philosophical, and moral complexity. “What is the strategic impact on the position of the United States of MRBMs [medium-range ballistic missiles] in Cuba?” McGeorge Bundy asked at the 6:30 P.M.. meeting in the Cabinet Room. “How gravely does this change the strategic balance?”
“Mac, I asked the Chiefs that this afternoon, in effect,” McNamara replied. “And they said, ‘Substantially.’ My personal view is, not at all.”
“You may say it doesn’t make any difference if you get blown up by an ICBM [intercontinental ballistic missile] flying from the Soviet Union or one that was ninety miles away,” the president said a few minutes later. “Geography doesn’t mean that much.”
That perception was the darkest irony of the nuclear age. Russia and America were gigantic gladiators. America may have held a
sharper sword, but the opponents were so well armed and so vicious that once they began fighting, not only were they both doomed, but in their death throes they would pull down the arena.
“Last month I said we weren’t going to [accept it]” Kennedy stated, referring to Russian missiles in Cuba. “Last month I should have said that we don’t care. But when we said we’re not going to [accept it], and they go ahead and do it, and then we do nothing, then I would think that our risks increase. I agree. What difference does it make? They’ve got enough to blow us up now anyway.”
This was in part a struggle over language. The president had not understood the extent to which his words were actions. Now he believed he could not back away. Beyond that, his language and the language of a thousand other politicians had created a climate in which judiciousness was considered a coward’s calling, and anti-Communist jingoism a patriot’s one true song. He and his administration had helped create this image of a monstrous Cuba that he was now compelled to slay or be considered less than a manly leader. The missiles may not have changed the strategic balance of power, but a failure to deal with them changed everything politically.
Some of these men expressed a moral dimension in their discourse that they had rarely sounded before. Around the table there were those for immediately raising swords, but of all people, it was one of the holders of those swords, the secretary of Defense, who first pondered the moral dimension. “I don’t know now quite what kind of a world we live in after we’ve struck Cuba, and we’ve started it,” McNamara said. “Now, after we’ve launched fifty to a hundred sorties, what kind of world do we live in?” That was an essential question, and it was not quickly brushed off the table.
The Kennedy Men Page 88
