The JCS didn’t agree; they were itching to attack Cuba. But McNamara’s point, and mine, was that the missiles in Cuba didn’t affect us much more (despite the short warning time, which the JCS made much of) than did forty more ICBMs in the Soviet Union, which we were expecting in the next few months anyway. A year earlier, CINCSAC had been claiming that the Soviets already had a thousand ICBMs aimed at us. Forty, fifty, a hundred were not in that class of threat.
Walt Rostow at the State Department asked me to join a working group looking at “long-range plans”: two weeks from now and more. (That designation “long range” for a two-week time span sounds like a joke, but that perspective is what defined this as a “crisis.”) Harry also included me in his short-term invasion planning group. As far as I know, I was the only person to be in two of these groups (and the only outside consultant in any of them). Harry’s boss, Paul Nitze, was in charge of another group planning our response if the Soviets blockaded Berlin if and when we attacked Cuba.
I was staying at the Dupont Plaza Hotel, where RAND people always stayed in those days. But we were working almost around the clock. Wednesday and Thursday nights I caught some sleep on a leather sofa in Nitze’s office.
In Rostow’s working group on Thursday morning, more than a dozen people were sitting around a long table at the State Department, reading the daily reports from the CIA on progress of the construction of the missiles and air defenses in Cuba; reports from the Pentagon on events on the blockade line; requests for information from the ExComm; and cables from embassies around the world on reactions to the crisis.
I found myself reading two cables that were almost identical, word for word, to the two simulated cables in the Berlin game I had participated in a year earlier. As in that game, students were now protesting our actions at the Free University in Berlin, and in the second report, large crowds were rioting around the American embassy in Delhi. As Walt Rostow was passing behind my chair, I turned to him and handed him the cables. He read them quickly. I said, “This shows how realistic the Berlin game was.” He handed them back and said, “Or how unrealistic this is.” One of his better lines.
We rarely saw, in the working groups, any cabinet-level members of the ExComm, who were meeting almost continuously at the White House or State Department. Once, on Saturday morning, Secretary of the Treasury C. Douglas Dillon dropped into the Rostow group during a break in the ExComm meetings. He didn’t know me, but at one point, looking in my direction, he asked, “What is it we’re offering? We’ve got to have something to offer him to get out.”
I burst out, “We’re offering not to hit his goddamn missiles!” He looked at me incredulously, snorted, and turned away.
It was wildly impudent of me—though no rank was being observed in the working groups, or, as it turned out, in the ExComm—and provocative, not really my style. I’m not proud of that memory. What’s worse, I have to say that it did really reflect my expectations about how the crisis would come out, or ought to.
I was thinking all week—from Wednesday on, when the Soviets didn’t choose to challenge the blockade—that Khrushchev had to back down without any real concession on our part. He was looking down the barrel of U.S. invasion forces that were fully primed to go on the following Monday or Tuesday, if not earlier. We had him outgunned at every level in the Caribbean: in the air, at sea, on the ground, in conventional weapons. And none of us, that I knew of, imagined that to redress that conventional imbalance, Khrushchev would allow any combat use of the nuclear missiles he was deploying.
That conventional superiority was reversed in Europe, in Berlin or Turkey, or in NATO as a whole. But our strategic nuclear superiority was so enormous that I couldn’t believe he would really challenge it there either. I suspected that Dillon hadn’t really absorbed, if he knew it at all, how much of a mirage the notion of Soviet superiority that we had all feared in the fifties had turned out to be.
It was precisely to repair that extreme strategic nuclear imbalance, I presumed, that Khrushchev had undertaken what seemed to be this desperate measure. But he had overreached. It might indeed have been a preparation to bargain over Berlin on more equal terms, or even to make new threats, and that was worth batting back, though I wouldn’t have thought it was essential to do so. Even if we had accepted it, it wouldn’t have changed significantly the risks for him of confronting us over Berlin.
That was pretty much what Nitze thought, and Harry; and so did the JCS. The difference was that the JCS wanted to attack Cuba, and I didn’t, nor did I think that was needed to get the missiles out. I didn’t even think it was essential to remove them, but I could understand the president’s determination to get them out of there, even at some risk, which I (foolishly) thought was quite small.
The deployment obviously did confront Kennedy103 with a domestic political problem, after he had publicly rejected Republican claims that missiles would be coming and then that they actually arrived, following which he had given explicit notice to the Soviets that “gravest issues” would arise if they contradicted their assurances to him.† If he failed to act on his warning, the Republicans would charge, with good reason, that he had been both foolish and weak.
At that time, I hadn’t yet come to recognize just how decisive domestic politics were in the calculations of presidents as they addressed foreign policy. But the external politics of this situation seemed enough to explain what Kennedy was doing so far in this crisis.
If he had backed down from his own warnings in the face of this provocative (though legal) Soviet move, I shared the view that our allies in Europe would have been impressed by both Khrushchev’s boldness and Kennedy’s timidity. They would fear that Khrushchev was not likely in the future to believe Kennedy’s warnings or threats and that he was not wrong about this. Our allies would be less willing to commit themselves to threats—with respect to Berlin—that Kennedy was likely to back down from and that Khrushchev was not.
So though the blockade was an act of war, illegal in peacetime (Kennedy had chosen the word “quarantine” precisely not to admit an analogy to the Soviets’ blockade of Berlin in 1948, which we had always described as illegal), I could agree that it was important for Kennedy to show boldness not only for domestic reasons but for real alliance considerations as well. I took the defense of Berlin seriously. I wasn’t in favor of invading Cuba or attacking the missiles, nor did I think it would come to that. But even if we did either, I didn’t believe that Khrushchev could afford to expand the conflict.
That Thursday afternoon, Rostow took me with him from the State Department back to the Pentagon, where he was to meet with a CIA specialist on Cuba. He was interested in expanding the blockade to cover oil and other petroleum products. How long would Cuban supplies of oil last, he wanted to know, before their economy ground to a halt? Six weeks, he was told.
He was excited by that: more, it seemed to me, than was justified. He said it would mean a “ticking clock” for Cuba. Back at Rostow’s long-range (two weeks) working group, I wrote a critical memo to him. An alarm, I said, that rang after six weeks didn’t seem to be related to the timescale we were facing. All the missiles were expected to be operational within days, and the other working group I was on, Rowen’s in ISA, contemplated an invasion by the following Tuesday.a
Moreover, I said in the memo to Rostow, what we had heard of the ExComm meetings that morning, which had led to a message to Khrushchev from JFK, indicated that while we were demanding that work on the missiles be stopped and the missiles subsequently removed, no deadline was being set. We needed, I argued, to put a time limit on the process explicitly if we wanted the Soviets to move out: something a lot shorter than six weeks, more like days.
The transcripts later showed that John McCone, the director of the CIA and a Republican hawk on the ExComm, was making the same recommendation the next morning, and Bobby Kennedy actually delivered a forty-eight-hour ultimatum to the Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin the following night. I myself (unli
ke McCone) didn’t want an ultimatum to be carried out, and I didn’t expect it to be challenged.
But I have to admit that I don’t recall spending any time thinking about what to do if it were challenged. At thirty-one, I was overconfident that a leader who was outgunned would back down under threat. And that seemed to be confirmed by Khrushchev, three days on. I wasn’t the only one who drew wrong conclusions, as we’ll see, about his reasons for doing that. (A number of my elders, Rostow and several on the ExComm—McNamara, Bundy, Johnson, and Taylor, among others—applied that mistaken lesson three years later to Ho Chi Minh.)
Friday evening I read a long six-part telegram from Khrushchev that showed a sober appreciation of the unacceptability of nuclear war between our two countries and that seemed to offer that he would remove the missiles from Cuba on the basis of nothing more than a no-invasion pledge by Kennedy. That was more or less what I had expected. That night I went back to the hotel to sleep for the first time in three days. Like most others, I thought the crisis was about to end. I saw no problem for Kennedy to accept this proposal.
As far as I knew, for us to pledge not to invade Cuba was no concession by the United States at all, since we had, I presumed, no intention of invading Cuba except for the presence of the missiles. It was, I supposed, a meaningless, face-saving “demand” that Khrushchev was including to cover the fact that he was retreating without having won anything at all by his adventure.
But the next morning, what seemed to be a totally contradictory message arrived, in the clear, demanding the withdrawal of our IRBMs (or, officially, NATO’s IRBMs) in Turkey as well as the no-invasion pledge.
Still, I saw this as just a desperate last-minute attempt at haggling by Khrushchev. The very personal message of the day before seemed to me to show Khrushchev’s realistic understanding of the intolerable position he was in. I saw no need to make that alliance-busting trade of missiles. Nor did almost any member of the ExComm. The word filtered down to us—confirmed by the transcripts of the discussion years later—that almost every member had strongly urged the president against it. And no indication came to us at the Pentagon that that proposal was delaying our preparations for a U.S. attack two days away. On the contrary.
From the beginning President Kennedy had felt sure that if he had to attack the missiles in Cuba, the Soviets would almost certainly retaliate by attacking our missiles in Turkey. (General LeMay had disagreed. This was the only occasion I can think of when I agreed with LeMay.) With the target date for an attack approaching on Saturday, October 27, Harry Rowen was asked by Secretary McNamara to lay out for the ExComm alternative options for a U.S. response to a Soviet non-nuclear attack on the U.S. missiles assigned to NATO in Turkey.
Harry called me in to work on this with him, and the two of us sat at opposite sides of his desk, each writing on yellow pads as fast as we could. The first option we presented was “No further U.S. response”—in effect, calling it “even,” missiles destroyed in Turkey for missiles destroyed in Cuba, seeking to end hostilities there. We took some pride, I recall, in beginning with that, since we felt that few advisors in that era would have had the nerve even to include that as a policy option. Dean Acheson, for one, did not.104†
Along with the next one, to hit the single plane or missile site from which the Soviet attack had been launched, we thought these two options (the first being unlikely to be adopted) were actually best, the only two unlikely to spur further escalations. But we weren’t asked for recommendations, only for a range of alternatives.
The rest, all likely to be preferred by the JCS to these, followed fairly obviously. In ascending order: Retaliate against one Soviet IRBM site, or more than one. Or (especially if the Soviets had also attacked some of our bomber bases in Turkey) against several Soviet air bases in the region. If U.S. aircraft were used for any of these, rather than ballistic or cruise missiles, the JCS would demand attacks as well on the surface-to-air missiles and air defenses in the area.
If there was a Soviet response—or, as the JCS undoubtedly would have recommended, even without it—the United States could attack all the bases, missile sites, and defenses in the region. Or even—Generals Power and LeMay could be counted on to recommend this—full-scale attack on the Soviet Union.
That was, after all, what Eisenhower’s plan for general war—SIOP-62, operational until recently—called for in these circumstances: conflict between armed forces of the Soviet Union and the United States. To be sure, the Kennedy guidance (which I’d drafted) changed that. Yet it was pretty much what NATO policy documents had always prescribed: an attack on one, Turkey, was an attack on all, to be responded to as if it were an attack on the United States directly.
And NATO planners and heads of state still rejected any notion of waging a war in Europe that treated the superpower homelands as sanctuaries; they still regarded deterrence as resting on an almost-immediate launching of a full U.S. attack on the Soviet Union in response to any Soviet attack on an ally. (Only days earlier, after all, President Kennedy had promised “full retaliation against the Soviet Union” as the response to a single IRBM fired from Cuba against the United States.)
On the other hand, NATO planning and policy-making had never contemplated circumstances exactly like the premise of our draft options: armed hostilities initiated by the United States against Soviet forces inside the territory of a Soviet ally. Some restraint in responding to a limited Soviet retaliation to that might seem in order. But not to SAC, or the USAF, or the JCS.
LeMay, in fact, would be sure to point out that if there were ever to be an occasion to disarm the Soviet Union—before it finally built up its missile forces to the scale SAC had been predicting for years—the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 was that time, perhaps the last. A Soviet attack on a NATO ally—no matter what the provocation, or the views of our European allies—would be an irresistible occasion for it, in the eyes of SAC and LeMay, and perhaps all the Joint Chiefs.
I believed it very unlikely that the Soviets would risk hitting our missiles in Turkey even if we attacked theirs in Cuba. We couldn’t understand why Kennedy thought otherwise. Why did he seem sure that the Soviets would respond to an attack on their missiles in Cuba by armed moves against Turkey or Berlin? We wondered if—after his campaigning in 1960 against a supposed “missile gap”—Kennedy had never really absorbed what the strategic balance actually was, or its implications.
As I saw it, and I presumed he did also, Khrushchev was just as outgunned in strategic nuclear forces as he was, obviously, in conventional terms in the Caribbean. That meant to me that he had to back down. The long private telegram from him to Kennedy that I’d read the night before told me that he understood that. What some others in the ExComm (it came out later) had read as panicky on his part (Dean Acheson described it in print as “almost maudlin”105), I saw as sober and realistic. Khrushchev had his feet on the ground, and he knew when a gamble had failed.
Ever since Wednesday morning, October 24—when, contrary to his threats on Tuesday, Khrushchev chose not to challenge the blockade line—I hadn’t believed it would be necessary to carry out an air strike to get rid of the Soviet missiles in Cuba. Neither did Harry. I still didn’t as we worked together on Saturday to take account of the repercussions of that possibility.
Nor did I believe it was necessary even to consider journalist Walter Lippmann’s suggestion Thursday morning of trading away our missiles in Turkey, an option which I (like the majority of the ExComm, it turned out) strongly opposed for reasons of NATO solidarity.
That remained my view despite the Saturday-morning message from Khrushchev that seemed to take up Lippmann’s proposal. Nitze relayed to us the sense from the ExComm that it represented a last-ditch bargaining move dictated by hard-liners in the Kremlin, presumably in opposition to his own inclination the night before to concede. Khrushchev could probably overrule that, if he remained in control. And Kennedy apparently was banking on that, having decided calmly to ignore that tough dem
and for a trade in favor of accepting the Friday night message, with no mention of our missiles in Turkey, as the ruling proposal.
All this was thrown in question by the gradual confirmation during the afternoon that a SAC U-2 over Cuba, which had been out of communication since the morning, had, in fact, been shot down by a Soviet-manned SAM. And, on the U.S. side, by President Kennedy’s decision not to respond: contrary to his assurances to the JCS that any shoot-down of a reconnaissance plane would lead to immediate U.S. attacks on the attacking air defense sites and possibly more. That presidential reticence—or, as some military we were working with saw it, dismaying weakness—was explained as a desire not to derail Soviet acceptance of his latest proposal (which was sent before the attack on the U-2 had been confirmed).
But while the ExComm awaited a Kremlin response, and working groups kept working on plans for air attacks and an invasion now scheduled for two days away, a more ominous signal came down to the ISA offices. Harry was given a new task, which he passed on to me. This one came straight from McNamara.
I was to draft cables to our ambassador in Turkey, Raymond Hare, and to our ambassador to NATO, Thomas K. Finletter, conveying a presidential decision to remove the U.S. IRBMs from Turkey and “replace” them with Polaris submarines assigned to NATO in the eastern Mediterranean. As I understood the purpose of these drafts, this was to alert the ambassadors to the possibility, or likelihood, that a presidential decision to this effect would presently be forthcoming.
The brief instructions Harry passed on were that the Turks should be told that this would protect them from being targeted by the Soviets, if the crisis escalated, and that the Polaris submarines were a better deterrent to an attack on Turkey or NATO than the IRBMs, which were vulnerable, veritable lightning rods.
I was appalled. I had been given a file of previous cable exchanges with our Turkey and NATO ambassadors, on the subject of a possible missile trade—missiles being removed from both Turkey and Cuba—and I was entirely convinced by the ambassadors’ judgments that this would have a devastating effect on our relations with the Turks and with other NATO governments in general.
The Doomsday Machine Page 24
