“What do you think their reply would be?” Kennedy asked.
“I don’t think they’re gonna make any reply,” LeMay said. “This blockade and political action, I see leading into war…. This is almost as bad as appeasement at Munich.”
By mentioning Munich, LeMay had come close to insulting the president. “Munich” was not a word one mentioned casually around Kennedy. To LeMay, “Munich” was only a slogan. To Kennedy, it stood at the bedrock of his intellectual life. Kennedy had an awareness of Munich unlike that of any other politician of his generation. He had done his first serious intellectual work on the issue of appeasement, and he knew that the crowds that had welcomed Chamberlain with flowers and cheers as the bearer of peace in our time had soon come to see him as a carrier of an infection of moral cowardice and compromise. The word “appeasement” had been hung around the president’s father’s neck too, an albatross that doomed his career in public life. Kennedy knew that if he failed at this moment and the missiles stood, he would be labeled America’s Chamberlain, bearer of the new Munich.
“I think that a blockade, and political talk, would be considered by a lot of our friends and neutrals as being a pretty weak response to this,” LeMay said a few minutes later. “And I’m sure a lot of our own citizens would feel that way too.” One of the fundamental tenets of American democracy is that the military stays out of politics, but LeMay was lecturing the president about the supposed feelings of the American people.
“In other words, you’re in a pretty bad fix at the present time,” LeMay concluded.
“What did you say?” Kennedy asked, perhaps not quite believing what he was hearing.
“You’re in a pretty bad fix.”
“You’re in with me,” the president said, his words punctuated by an ironic laughter. There was no one in the room who understood as deeply as Kennedy did that he was indeed in a “pretty bad fix,” part of which was military leaders like LeMay with their restless fingers on the nuclear button. When the meeting ended, several of the Joint Chiefs stayed behind to talk among themselves.
“You pulled the rug right out from under him,” said General David Shoup, the Marine Corps commandant. “Goddamn.”
“Jesus Christ!” LeMay laughed. “What the hell do you mean?”
“I agree with that answer, agree a hundred percent, a hundred percent,” Shoup exclaimed. There was anger in his voice that suggested the wrathful vitriol that might greet the president if he did not proceed militarily. “Somebody’s got to keep them from doing the goddamn thing piecemeal!”
“That’s right,” LeMay exclaimed. As he and his colleagues saw it, their planes, missiles, and ships were being held back, hostage to what they considered the compromising palaver of a mere politician.
“You’re screwed, screwed, screwed,” Shoup said. “Some goddamn thing, some way, that they either do the son of a bitch and do it right and quit frig-gin’ around…. You got to go in and take out the goddamn thing that’s going to stop you from doing your job.”
Kennedy shared something with the simplest of men and the most complex: a belief that words mattered, that they were the primary conduits of truth. He despised the morally slovenly way men like LeMay talked about a nuclear war they had not seen and could not feel and did not understand. “I don’t think I have ever seen him more irritated than when he was describing how people talked rather glibly about the escalation that might take place—with apparently no deep understanding of just what it would entail,” recalled Kennedy’s old friend David Ormsby-Gore, who as British ambassador saw Kennedy several times that week.
While Kennedy flew off on Air Force One to speaking engagements in the Midwest scheduled months before, Bobby and the other Ex Comm members spent an intense day exploring alternatives before the president returned. Most of the civilian leaders believed in a blockade, while the generals universally called for preemptive air strikes.
The president had not gone off without leaving directives. “This thing is falling apart,” he said to his brother and to Sorensen. “You have to pull it together.” That was all he had to say. There was a private language that Kennedy spoke among his intimates, a lingo in which Bobby and Sorensen were the most fluent, the president’s nod a command, the pursing of his lips a directive. Sorensen, who was the president’s intellectual alter ego, sensed that Kennedy had decided that he must begin actions against the Cuban missiles with a blockade. “That’s not what he said to us,” Sorensen recalled. “But he didn’t have to. He knew what Bobby and I thought.”
Bundy was as close to a pure intellectual as anyone in Ex Comm. His mind turned back and forth between the alternatives, finding him at one moment for air strikes, the next for a blockade, and then perhaps for no action at all. Bobby had no regard for such Hamlet-like musings, and he did not appreciate the NSC adviser’s “strange flip-flops.” Bundy, for his part, was no more admiring of what he considered Bobby’s quick, easy certitudes, which Bundy believed would have had a deeper flavor if they had been aged at least a day or two.
Bundy tossed and turned all night long, musing about all the imponderables. In the morning he went in and saw the president before he left to tell him that he was not quite comfortable with the blockade option. “Well, I’m having some of those same worries,” Kennedy said, as Bundy recalled a few months later in a private memo, “and you know my first reaction was the air strike. Have another look at that and keep it alive.” Kennedy was thinking of a limited air strike, not setting the island aflame the way the generals were proposing.
Sorensen said later that the president had been “a bit disgusted” at Bundy’s academic pondering when he should have been leading Ex Comm to a consensus for the blockade. The president had suggested opposite things to the two men. Kennedy was not a man like Franklin Roosevelt who believed that nothing flattered one aide more than hearing the president slander another. But Kennedy used people, his brother as well as his closest aides, to further policies and issues and matters that only he understood.
Ex Comm was the stage on which much of the drama played out, and Kennedy was the unseen writer of many of the lines. The fact that he was secretly recording most of the sessions only made the theatrical nature of the committee’s work more pronounced. He could not afford to have the military and civilian leaders at loggerheads, and much of this endless musing was probably an attempt to gently lead these men toward consensus. The fact that the president was instructing his man Bundy to speak positively about air strikes may have been partially an attempt to signal to the Joint Chiefs that their views had not been summarily discarded.
At the meeting Friday, October 19, after Kennedy had flown off on his midwestern trip, Bundy began by saying he had just “spoken with the president this morning, and he felt there was further work to be done.” These were attention-getting words. He went on to say that a mere “blockade would not remove the missiles. An air strike would be quick and would take out the bases in a clean surgical operation. He favored decisive action with its advantages of surprises and confronting the world with a fait accompli.”
That was an extraordinary statement; it changed the whole tenor of the meeting and allowed others to raise their swords. Acheson weighed in supporting air strikes. So did Secretary of the Treasury Douglas Dillon and McCone. General Taylor reiterated his call for bold, immediate action. Even Undersecretary of State George Ball, who usually wore the feathers of a dove, admitted that he was of two minds, wavering between the two courses.
Bobby said that he had talked to his brother “very recently this morning,” as if to say that he who touched the throne last carried the mantle of power. The attorney general was smiling, but he was doubly emphasizing the authority that he and his words carried. He was the fiercest of cold war warriors, a champion of sabotage against Castro and almost certainly of his assassination. Many of the men in the room had heard his endless tirades against Castro, but they had not heard the Robert Kennedy who spoke that morning. As always, he was for
action, but not a sudden air attack against the missile bases. He talked of 175 years of American history, without the shame of a Pearl Harbor to darken the national honor. He said that a “sneak attack was not in our traditions. Thousands of Cubans would be killed without warning, and a lot of Russians too.” He called for a blockade that would seem nearly inevitably to lead within a few days to full-scale military action. “In looking forward into the future, it would be better for our children and grandchildren if we decided to face the Soviet threat [in the Western Hemisphere], stand up to it, and eliminate it now,” the attorney general told the group. “The circumstances for doing so at some future time [are] bound to be more unfavorable, the risks would be greater, the chances of success less good.”
In the councils of power, moral arguments are usually unfurled primarily on ceremonial occasions and then put back into the closet. In this instance Bobby held aloft a flag of high principle, but he embedded it in a foundation of steel. If the blockade failed, he would hit Cuba with all the mighty arsenal of America.
Those favoring a blockade went off to write their position paper, while those proposing an air strike prepared a paper justifying their plan.
28
“The Knot of War”
Bobby called his brother in Chicago early Saturday morning, October 20, and asked him to come back early from his trip. When the president arrived in Washington later that morning, he faced one of the most difficult decisions of his presidency. His military chiefs were calling for massive air strikes consisting of eight hundred sorties that would hit all the suspected missile sites, the Russian bombers, and supposed nuclear storage facilities, a great storm of death and destruction descending on the island. Anything less and the surviving missiles might be launched against American cities. It would be done without any warning, or the Russians would hide the missiles, making it impossible to strike them.
Before the Ex Comm meeting, the president went to the White House pool. Swimming was one of the few things that helped his back, and he rarely missed his sessions in the water. This afternoon, though, while Kennedy swam back and forth, Bobby sat next to the pool talking to his brother. To the two Kennedys, Ex Comm was as much “them” as “us,” a varied group that they sought to forge into a coalition of common purpose and strategy. There was no tape recorder by the pool that day, no stenographer, and the brothers planned their strategy with no one listening to their words. At 2:30 P.M.., the brothers walked in together to the meeting in the Oval Room.
This was the decisive moment, and the generals wanted nothing left unused in their great arsenals, possibly including nuclear weapons. Taylor, usually the most prudent of military men, said that he did not fear that “if we used nuclear weapons in Cuba, nuclear weapons would be used against us.” These military leaders had strong, forceful arguments to make, and they made them most articulately in the stern, patriarchal voice of General Taylor, a voice that to Bobby always resonated with courage and usually with wisdom.
By all bureaucratic imperatives, McNamara should have pulled his chair up next to General Taylor and loudly seconded his call for air strikes. But the secretary of Defense knew that massive air strikes were likely to lead to a smoldering, enraged Cuba, with dead Russians strewn across the island, the probability of invasion, and a bloody response from Khrushchev. Bobby and most of the civilians in the room held their ground, arguing that the president should first call for a naval blockade while trying to talk the Soviets into removing their nuclear missiles.
After listening to this intense debate, Kennedy called for a blockade of military goods being shipped to Cuba. This would be no Munich-like acquiescence but what was generally considered to be an act of war. The president struggled to understand all the possible consequences of the various actions. His mind reached further and deeper than the mind of anyone else in the room. He kept coming back to the idea of offering to remove missiles from Turkey and Italy, yet he bristled when Stevenson suggested a straight quid pro quo: the withdrawal of missiles from Turkey and the evacuation of Guantánamo. He scribbled a little note to himself when Dillon starting talking about the Jupiter missiles either being “flops” or in such oversupply that the United States had simply unloaded them on the gullible Turks and Italians.
Now that he had decided on a blockade, Kennedy did not want the world to know that his administration had contemplated the deadly action of unannounced air strikes. “We don’t want to look like we were considering it,” he said. “So I think we ought to just scratch that from all our conversations, and not even indicate that was a course of action open to us…. We might have to do it in the future.”
As Kennedy sought to mobilize the nation behind him, the truth was an unruly companion that he did not want tagging along too closely. He asked about the possibility of “putting holds on the press” or at least requesting newspapers to still their reporters’ hunger for stories.
Kennedy lived in a geopolitical world where unwary wolves became sheep, and sheep might metamorphose into wolves. The missiles in Cuba made America vulnerable to enemies and allies alike. Kennedy, like his predecessor, had opposed de Gaulle’s grand scheme of rebuilding France’s faded glory with an arsenal of nuclear weapons; now he pondered “that in the days ahead we might be able to gain the needed support of France if we stopped refusing to help them with nuclear weapons project.”
While these events transpired, Kennedy tried to create an image of normality not only for the world but also for himself. That Sunday the president called the first lady and his two children back from their weekend home in the Virginia hunt country. His wife knew very little of what was going on or why he had asked her to return. Kennedy was not a man given to darkly pondering his alternatives by himself for endless hours. He preferred convivial company, even at a time like this. He loved the company of British aristocrats as much as his wife loved French haute couture, and this evening he invited the Ormsby-Gores, the duchess of Devonshire, who bore the title that his sister Kathleen would have had if her husband had not died, and Robin Douglas-Home, nephew of another old British friend, William Douglas-Home.
The president was constantly being called to the telephone. When he returned, it was not to muse morbidly about Cuba and nuclear war but to exchange some witty repartee. Kennedy peppered the others with questions about the lives of those he found interesting, seemingly unconcerned about anything but his charming dinner guests.
Now that the president had decided on a firm policy, he had to tell the American people on television of the magnitude of the crisis that faced them. As he left the Oval Office on Monday afternoon, October 22, where he had gone over Sorensen’s words, Kennedy overheard his secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, talking on the phone to Ed Berube, who was asking for some autographed pictures. Berube had a feisty authenticity about him that had amused Kennedy when the bus driver worked for the young congressman in his first senatorial race in 1952. The president had invited Berube to his wedding and as president named him postmaster in his hometown of Fall River, Massachusetts.
“Who’s that? Eddie?” Kennedy asked his secretary, as if this were the most normal of presidential days. “Let me talk to him…. How’re you, pal? How are you, Mr. Postmaster?”
“Oh … uh … uh … Mr. Senator … Mr. Congr—… Mr. President.”
“How’s your office? Anything I can do for you?”
“No, you’ve done enough for me now, Mr. President. We’re all so proud of you. You’re doing a wonderful job.”
“Well, you keep up the good work. I hear some good reports about you.”
The president needed the support of Congress, and when he briefed eight senators and seven senior congressmen at 5:00 P.M.., just before his television speech, there was in some of their shrill voices a harbinger of the jeers and shouts that would greet him if his policies failed. This afternoon the most esteemed and knowledgeable experts on foreign policy in Congress, Senators Richard Russell and J. William Fulbright, did little but argue feverishly for war.<
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“It’s a very difficult choice that we’re faced with together,” Kennedy told Russell, “Now, the …”
“Oh, my God, I know that !” Russell interjected. “A war, our destiny, will hinge on it. But it’s coming someday, Mr. President. Will it ever be under more auspicious circumstances?”
The Georgia senator was a thoughtful man, but today he sought only to push his nation off to war. Kennedy instructed his former colleagues on the vicissitudes of leadership. “The people who are the best off are the people whose advice is not taken because whatever we do is filled with hazards,” Kennedy said, speaking an epigram of power. “Now, the reason we’ve embarked on the course we have … is because we don’t know where we’re going to end up on this matter…. So we start here, we don’t know where he’s going to take us or where we’re going to take ourselves…. If we stop one Russian ship, it means war. If we invade Cuba, it means war. There’s no telling—I know all the threats are going to be made.”
“Wait, Mr. President,” Russell said. “The nettle is going to sting anyway.”
“That’s correct. I just think at least we start here, then we go where we go. And I’ll tell you that every opportunity is full.”
Kennedy stopped. The time for his nationally televised address was near. “I better go and make this speech,” he said.
The Kennedy Men Page 90
