The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  Kennedy sat down at his desk shortly before 7:00 P.M.. to give as dramatic a speech as any American president had ever given. Always before when a president made an important address to the American people, they had had some hint of what was to be said, be it the sight of the unemployed wandering the streets or news reports of ships sunk and planes smoldering at Pearl Harbor. But across the nation, people had little idea why the president had usurped airtime on this Monday evening.

  Kennedy did not seek to soothe the nation but spoke with words that would create apprehension in even the stoutest of hearts. Kennedy laid out the threat: the Soviet ballistic missiles sailing toward Cuba were capable of “striking most of the major cities in the Western Hemisphere, ranging as far north as Hudson Bay, Canada, and as far south as Lima, Peru.”

  As Kennedy addressed the American people, it was the image of Munich that stood starkly before him, in an era before nuclear weapons. “The 1930s taught us a clear lesson,” Kennedy said. “Aggressive conduct, if allowed to grow unchecked and unchallenged, ultimately leads to war.”

  In Sorensen’s words lay some of the tensions and arguments of the Ex Comm deliberations condensed into a few passages. “Many months of sacrifice and self-discipline lie ahead—months in which both our patience and our will will be tested, months in which many threats and denunciations will keep us aware of our dangers. But the greatest danger of all would be to do nothing.” In his inaugural address Kennedy had not promised ease and blissful peace but challenge, and he delivered on that pledge a hundredfold this evening. “The path we have chosen for the present is full of hazards, as all paths are; but it is the one most consistent with our character and courage as a nation and our commitments around the world.”

  When Kennedy finished, many of the residents of the great cities of America feared that death stalked them, and they looked up at the silent skies with foreboding.

  Kennedy’s restless, searching mind reached out, seeking contradictions, new imponderables, trying to will himself into Khrushchev’s mind. He had set up a naval blockade around Cuba and vowed to stop further shipment of military goods to the island. But the Soviets already had a vast nuclear arsenal in Cuba, and if he were Khrushchev, he would have ships carrying more weapons turn around. It could be ships carrying baby food and humanitarian supplies that the Americans would attempt to stop on the high seas.

  Kennedy described with painful vividness what could happen if the U.S. Navy stopped a ship, even one, full of nothing but baby food. “They’re gonna keep going,” he said. “And we’re gonna try to shoot the rudder off or the boiler. And then we’re going to try to board it. And they’re going to fire guns, machine guns. And we’re going to have one hell of a time trying to get aboard that thing and getting control of it, because they’re pretty tough, and I suppose they may have soldiers or marines aboard their ships…. We may have to sink it rather than just take it.”

  When Kennedy was not worried about confrontation on the high seas, he contemplated death on a magnitude beyond anything America had ever known. He did not visualize the ultimate nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States, but a more modest scenario in which five, ten, or fifteen nuclear-tipped missiles hit American cities in the midst of an invasion of Cuba. For the citizens to flee almost certain death, they would need ample notice. The problem, as McCone had noted, was that “whatever was done would involve a great deal of publicity and public alarm,” signaling to Cuba and the Soviets that the invasion was imminent. There, then, was a moral conundrum that the president might soon face.

  “It looks really mean, doesn’t it?” the president said to his brother as they sat together in the Cabinet Room with only a few other advisers. “But on the other hand, there wasn’t any other choice. If he’s going to get this mean on this one, in our part of the world … no choice. I don’t think there was a choice.”

  “Well, there wasn’t any choice,” Bobby said, reassuring the president. “I mean, you would have been … you would have been impeached.”

  “Well, I think I would have been impeached….”

  During the summer Kennedy had read Barbara W. Tuchman’s Guns of August, an epic account of how interlocking treaties and misunderstandings had inexorably led in 1914 to a great and tragic world war. History was the president’s favorite lesson book, and Tuchman’s lessons resounded profoundly within his psyche. Kennedy, like Khrushchev, understood that the world was only a miscalculation or two away from oblivion. While the Soviet leader slept in his clothes in his office seeking a solution that would neither dishonor his political faith nor betray his Latin comrades, in Washington Kennedy sought his own way out of the impasse.

  As a score or more of Soviet ships approached Cuba, Kennedy pondered endlessly what else he could do. The president did not trust the established channels of government as the only conduits between his administration and the Soviets. As the Kennedys had done before, they reached out to the Russian agent Bolshakov as a conduit to the Kremlin.

  Frank Holeman, a former New York Daily News journalist now working for Bobby in the Justice Department, called his Soviet source and asked for a meeting. In such an infinitely delicate situation, Holeman doubtlessly would not have made the contact except under the attorney general’s explicit instructions. This judgment is reinforced by the fact that Holeman told Bolshakov things that only a person conversant with the president’s inner thinking would have known. “Robert Kennedy and his circle consider it possible to discuss the following trade: The U.S. would liquidate its military bases in Turkey and Italy, and the USSR would do the same in Cuba,” Bolshakov wrote in his notes of the meeting. That alone represented the most sophisticated diplomatic suggestion that had surfaced in the Ex Comm meetings. Holeman went beyond that, adding a crucial caveat that at this time had probably been thought of only by the president and Bobby. “The conditions of such a trade can be discussed only in a time of quiet and not when there is the threat of war.”

  When Bolshakov did not reply within a few hours, Bobby asked his friend Charley Bartlett to call the Russian and berate him. “I called Bolshakov, and I said this is outrageous what the Russians are doing,” recalled Bartlett, who may also have broached the possibility of a missile trade. “I said Bobby feels a betrayal.” A few minutes later Bartlett received a call from the attorney general, who, after apparently listening to a wiretap of the conversation, felt that Bartlett had gone too far in his rage.

  This was not a dispute that could be solved by calculated bursts of outrage. Bobby did not seem to grasp that there was a dangerous aspect to this ad hoc covert diplomacy. The attorney general did not have a diplomat’s subtle skills. As much as he cared for his brother and loved his country, he risked stirring up the waters to such an extent that more dispassionate negotiators would not be able to see through to a clear solution. The secretary of State and the Joint Chiefs of Staff apparently knew nothing of these initiatives. It was bad business trading off part of their military or diplomatic assets without their knowledge.

  Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador, recalls that during the crisis he and Bobby “had almost daily conversations,” a relationship that Bobby later downplayed to several dramatic face-to-face meetings. That evening, Tuesday, October 23, both men agree that the attorney general went to see the ambassador in his office on the third floor of the Russian embassy. The attorney general was the least diplomatic of men sent on the most diplomatic of missions. Bobby might disdain the State Department as a haven for pinstriped prissy men measuring out their lives in teatime social niceties. The reality was that a diplomat’s task was to put forth a precise rendering of his nation’s positions while maintaining some semblance of civility, keeping a dialogue going even in the worst of crises. Bobby, however, was at his best when his emotions were wedded to facts and he could speak as a fiery truth-sayer.

  Bobby, as Dobrynin recalled, was “in a state of agitation” that accentuated the inevitable tension of this moment: he “was far from being a so
ciable person and lacked a proper sense of humor…. He was impulsive and excitable.” In his memo of the meeting, Bobby remembered telling the Soviet ambassador that his brother felt that “he had a very helpful personal relationship with Mr. Khrushchev … a mutual trust and confidence between them on which he could rely.” When politicians praise each other, their feelings are often the precise opposite of what they say, and Bobby’s words were as platitudinous as they were untrue. Bobby then laid out what he considered the whole litany of betrayal in the most vivid detail, accusing the Soviet leaders of being “hypocritical, misleading and false.” The Russian could give only a diplomat’s most pathetic response—that he knew nothing of what his nation purportedly had done. Bobby was full of righteous anger, which an envoy from the State Department would never have expressed so dramatically to the Russian ambassador. The Soviets believed that they had legitimate policy goals in Cuba that they were pursuing by legitimate means. But they had to understand that they had triggered an honest rage and sense of betrayal in a powerful enemy. The Soviet ambassador sent a message to Moscow that gave “an idea of the genuine state of agitation in the president’s inner circle.”

  Despite the merciless tension, Kennedy had a preternatural coolness about him. That same evening, October 23, the president and first lady attended a dinner party at the White House for fourteen guests, including the maharaja of Jaipur and his wife, journalist Benno Graziani and his wife, Nicole, and two old friends, British ambassador Ormsby-Gore and Charley Bartlett. Every person in the room was aware of the immense drama that was taking place, and yet the tone of the evening was one of convivial sociality, without a mention of missiles or Cuba.

  At around 11:00 P.M.., Bobby arrived at the White House. He told the president and Ormsby-Gore of his difficult meeting with Dobrynin. The moment of climax was arriving quickly, too quickly, out on the open seas. To gain more time Ormsby-Gore suggested that Kennedy move the quarantine line from eight hundred to five hundred miles, a proposal that Kennedy accepted. At around midnight, when Nicole Graziani was scrambling eggs in the private quarters for a midnight repast before the group departed, Kennedy turned to the young woman. “He [Kennedy] took her hand,” remembered her husband, Benno, “and he said, ‘You know, maybe tomorrow we will be at war.’…”

  On Wednesday morning, October 24, the United States ratcheted up its military readiness to DEFCON 2, only one step below war. The air force’s massive B-52 bombers loaded with nuclear weapons flew twenty-four hours a day, refueled by in-flight KC-135 tankers, ready to enact their savage revenge even if Soviet missiles destroyed most of America’s military capabilities. In the South Atlantic, two Russian ships, the Gagarin and the Kimovsk, drew near to the imaginary line Kennedy had drawn five hundred miles from Cuba. If the vessels did not turn back soon, the navy would try to stop them, and war would be a giant step closer to beginning.

  Bobby took a seat across from the president at the Ex Comm meeting and looked into his brother’s drawn face, with “his eyes pained, almost gray.” The burden of this moment was like a physical pressure bearing down on him, “the danger and concern … like a cloud over us all and particularly over the president.”

  There was no button Kennedy could press, no gauge he could read to tell whether the situation was about to explode, and every moment there seemed new uncertainties, new elements. Now there were Russian submarines running deep near the Russian freighters closing toward the line of blockade.

  “Here is the exact situation,” McNamara said. “We have depth charges that have such a small charge that they can be dropped and they can actually hit the submarine, without damaging the submarine. Practice depth charges. We propose to use those as warning depth charges.”

  Kennedy was a navy man and knew that the admirals’ most exquisitely conceived plans often became nothing more than inane doodles once combat began. The president had, if anything, too accurate an imagination about all the possibilities of this moment. And as he sat there, Bobby saw him put his hand up to his face, cover his mouth, and close his fist. That was not his brother as he had ever seen him, and for a moment he worried not about war but about Jack.

  This room was full of powerful, intense men speaking ponderous words, but for a moment the brothers stared at each other and Bobby had the sense that “for a few fleeting seconds, it was almost as though no one else was there and he was no longer the president.” As Bobby looked at his brother he recalled later that his mind flashed back to so much that had gone on in the family. Their father had taught his sons to see a pinprick of blue in the blackest sky, but he thought now only of the darkest of times. He thought of how Jack had been ill. He thought of the day at Hyannis Port when they learned of Joe Jr.’s death. He thought of the day Jackie lost a child, when he had been there and his brother had not. He thought “of personal times of strain and hurt,” the memories flashing by with such intensity that he heard not a word of the discussion going on around him.

  Out of this miasma of memories, Bobby heard his brother’s voice. “If he doesn’t surface or if he takes some action—takes some action to assist the merchant ship, are we just going to attack him anyway?” the president asked about a Russian submarine shadowing the Soviet freighters. “At what point are we going to attack him?”

  Kennedy did not even wait for his military leaders to give their strong response. “I think we ought to wait on that today. We don’t want to have the first thing we attack [be] a Soviet submarine. I’d much rather have a merchant ship.”

  John McCone came into the room a few minutes later after gathering the latest intelligence on the Russian ships approaching the imaginary barricade that the Americans had drawn in the Atlantic Ocean. “Well, what do they say they’re doing with those, John?” Kennedy asked.

  “Well, they either stopped them or reversed direction,” McCone responded.

  In that room there were no audible sighs, no backslapping, and no self-congratulations. “The meeting droned on,” Bobby recalled. “But everyone looked like a different person. For a moment the world had stood still, and now it was going around again.”

  The threat of an immediate confrontation on the high seas was over, but the missiles of October remained in place. For Kennedy, the weight of his burden did not lessen, for U-2 photos clearly showed how quickly the missile sites were being built and the IL-28 bombers uncrated and prepared for flight. The longer the president negotiated, the greater the possibility that the missiles would be combat-ready and Khrushchev would walk with a bold new strut.

  The next afternoon, Thursday, October 25, Kennedy walked in on a scene of Jackie photographing Caroline while Robin Douglas-Home carved an enormous Halloween pumpkin. His wife had just finished being filmed for an NBC special on Washington’s new National Cultural Center. Although the Kennedys were often called American royalty, a coinage so antithetical to American traditions, there was one way in which they exemplified the finest aspects of noble blood. That was the way they let nothing, no personal unhappiness, no private pain, and no public problem, affect their performance of public rituals. By now Jackie knew why her husband had asked her and the children to return from their weekend home. He wanted her with him through this crisis, and he wanted the world to think that life was going on normally at the White House. She had not canceled the television interview today, despite the political drama and the fact that John Jr. was in bed with a 104-degree fever.

  Douglas-Home stayed for dinner that evening. This was not a mannered social function but a casual meal. “For God’s sake, don’t mention Cuba to him,” Jackie admonished her guest. Kennedy was involved in the greatest crisis of his presidency, and yet even now at this moment he was fascinated by gossip and trivia, all the flotsam of popular culture and modern society. He sat puffing on a cigar, the evening interrupted by any number of serious phone calls about Cuba. Listening to him through most of this evening, though, was like paging through a wondrously eclectic magazine. Here was an adroit essay on how Lord Beaverbrook ran his
newspaper empire. And an ironic, insightful article on Frank Sinatra’s way with women. Then an aside on the infamous photo of a model sucking her thumb while lying on a bearskin rug that ran in Queen, the British magazine. Nothing seemed too trivial or too bizarre for Kennedy this evening as he segued from subject to subject that had nothing in common except his curiosity about them.

  Even at the worst of the crisis, Lansdale continued to push the covert role of Operation Mongoose. “Lansdale feels badly cut out of the picture and appears to be seeking to reconstitute the Mongoose Special Group operations during this period of impending crisis,” the CIA’s deputy director wrote his superior, McCone, on October 25. The next day at a Mongoose meeting, at which Bobby was present, McCone “stated that he understood the Mongoose goal was to encourage the Cuban people to take Cuba away from Castro” and that the CIA “would continue to support Lansdale.”

  The president seemed almost equally unwilling to face up to the melancholy reality that he might have to promise to live with Castro’s Cuba. When Kennedy talked to Prime Minister Harold Macmillan about the possibility of guaranteeing the territorial integrity of Cuba in exchange for the removal of the missiles, the president told the British leader “that would leave Castro in power,” as if the United States could demand his removal. The only way out of this was to negotiate, yet the experts on the NSC staff were advising “the primary Soviet tactic will be to draw the U.S. into negotiations, meanwhile getting a standstill.”

  Khrushchev had indeed been willing to dawdle until the missiles were in place and only then negotiate, but he was realizing that he might be faced with the imminent invasion of Cuba. He wrote a letter to Kennedy that arrived late Friday evening, October 26. If the letter rambled, it was no more than human emotions often ramble. It was a display that some in Washington feared meant that the Soviet leader had become unstable, overly emotional, and dangerously incoherent. Bobby understood, as some of his more phlegmatic colleagues could not, that “it was not incoherent, and the emotion was directed at the death, destruction, and anarchy that nuclear war would bring to his people and all mankind.”