Friday marked the fourth day since Bundy had shown the president the surveillance pictures. Now the stakes were raised even higher, with new aerial photographs revealing more sites in Cuba, ones serving intermediate-range missiles. Such weapons could travel nearly three thousand miles, all the way to New York. The hawks were now screaming for action. The most ferocious was the air force chief of staff, General Curtis LeMay, the former head of the Strategic Air Command, who, during World War II, had led brutal incendiary attacks over Japan.
Kennedy challenged LeMay’s thinking. Might not an American attack on Cuba quickly start a nuclear chain reaction? We attack their ally, they grab for Berlin. Then, confronted by the overwhelming force of the Red Army, the only resort of the United States would be to use tactical atomic weapons right there in the middle of Europe. The next escalation, involving an exchange of each side’s nuclear arsenals, was not, after that, hard to imagine.
This was all unfamiliar language to the cigar-smoking LeMay, who’d entered the air corps in 1929. His interest was simply spelling out the strategic facts. The United States enjoyed a huge advantage in intercontinental missiles. Why weren’t we playing our strength? A naval blockade of Cuba, the only alternative to an attack on the missile sites, would be a sign of weakness. It would be like “appeasement at Munich,” LeMay said. He’d dared—though he may not have entirely realized what he was doing—to imply that Jack Kennedy was his father’s appeasing son.
Yet, to his credit, Kennedy realized to whom he was talking, understood the mind-set of what he was confronting in this frightening moment. LeMay was telling him that the smart move for the United States was to engage in a nuclear test of strength, as if it were an arm wrestle. We lose tens of millions but we end up winning the test of strength, since the Russians will get the worst of whatever planetary horror is inflicted. “You’re talking about the destruction of a country,” Kennedy said simply. That led to the following exchange:
LeMay:
You’re in a pretty bad fix at the present time.
Kennedy:
What did you say?
LeMay:
You’re in a pretty bad fix.
Kennedy:
Well, you’re in there with me. Personally.
Tapes of the discussions among the Joint Chiefs after their civilian commander left the room show them united against the president. “You pulled the rug right out from under him,” Chief of Staff General David Shoup of the marines applauded LeMay. The military men agreed that anything short of an all-out invasion was “piecemeal.”
Kennedy, fortunately, knew whom he was dealing with. He knew that LeMay and others in the high strategic command leaned toward a “first strike” option, especially in the case of a Soviet move on Berlin. This meant an “obliterating” nuclear attack on all Communist countries, three thousand weapons aimed at a thousand targets. “And we call ourselves human,” Kennedy said after a briefing.
Out campaigning in Chicago, fulfilling his obligation to attend a Democratic fund-raiser for Mayor Richard J. Daley, Jack received a call from Bobby. His brother didn’t mince words. The time had come to make a decision, he said. Flying back to D.C. on Air Force One, Jack warned Pierre Salinger: grab your balls.
A phalanx of powerful men now was allied against him. The Joint Chiefs, McGeorge Bundy, John McCone, Douglas Dillon—all supported an air strike. Here was the Establishment—intelligence, military, and finance—mutually agreeing that the best move was to send in the bombers. And other influential voices were about to join the chorus. On Monday, Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, stood by LeMay, urging an air strike followed by an all-out invasion. The time for the showdown with the Soviets had arrived. Yet, still, Kennedy persisted in disagreeing.
Here was a perfect affirmation of the Founding Fathers’ reasoning, which had led them to place ultimate constitutional authority in the hands of the person elected by the American people. As the French statesman Georges Clemenceau more recently had observed, “War is far too important to be left to the generals.” Thus, even after hearing the expert arguments, Kennedy rejected the air-attack option, ordering instead a blockade on all offensive weapons headed to Cuba, a suggestion earlier made by Dean Rusk. He would announce it three days later in a nationally broadcast address.
“This government, as promised, has maintained the closest surveillance of the Soviet military buildup on the island of Cuba,” he told American listeners, the aerial photographs in hand. “Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island. The purpose of these bases can be none other than to provide a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere.”
The missiles had to go, Kennedy declared, decreeing a naval blockade of all ships carrying offensive weapons or missile-firing equipment to Cuba. Any such vessel would be stopped and turned back. “It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response to the Soviet Union.” He then recited the Cold War canon: “The 1930s taught us a clear lesson: aggressive conduct, if allowed to go unchecked and unchallenged, ultimately leads to war.”
Now began the waiting. During this period he distracted himself, as usual, by having his buddies to dinner at the White House. “I think the pressure of this period made him desire more to have friends around,” recalled Charlie Bartlett. “I think I was over there for dinner three times in the week . . . just small groups, which he would break up about nine thirty and go back to the cables.”
He shared what he could. On one of those nights, Bartlett was climbing into bed around eleven thirty when the phone rang. Kennedy told him, “You’d be interested to know I got a cable from our friend, and he says that those ships are coming through, they’re coming through tomorrow.” To hear such information gave his listener a very clear notion of what kind of pressure Jack was under. Bartlett realized “it was on that kind of a note that he had to go to sleep. But I must say that the president’s coolness and temper were never more evident than they were that week.”
Under the careful supervision of Robert McNamara, the navy enforced the blockade without attacking the Soviet ships, which retreated from the Cuban sea channels. Within the Department of the Navy, however, it was an unpopular decision. That’s because, as Red Fay explained it, his friend was stepping all over what the navy brass saw as the right of a captain to run his own ship. “The President said, ‘Any communication with any skipper of our ship when coming in contact with a Russian ship, I will make the decision as to exactly what he is to say, when he’s to say it, and how he’s to say it.’ ” He was running the operation, but it wasn’t what they wanted to hear.
Nor was the young president’s operation like any they’d known before. He wasn’t fighting a war but acting to prevent one, signaling to the other side the terms on which peace could be maintained.
Two letters arriving from Premier Khrushchev marked the beginning of the conclusion to the crisis. They were sent to the U.S. embassy in Moscow on consecutive days, October 26 and 27. The first letter proposed the removal of missiles and Soviet personnel in exchange for a promise not to invade Cuba. The second asked for the added concession of the removal of Jupiter missiles from Turkey.
The text of the second letter, sent on the following day, was broadcast on Moscow radio at the same time it was delivered to the U.S. embassy.
Kennedy resolved to answer Khrushchev’s first letter, agreeing not to invade Cuba. He then instructed Bobby to tell the Soviet ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin, in confidence that the Jupiter missiles in Turkey would be withdrawn later. Bobby gave Dobrynin a timetable of one day to accept.
Arriving at the Justice Department, Dobrynin was taken aback by Bobby’s conduct. In the past he’d come to expect the same rough treatment the president’s b
rother had meted out to Mike DiSalle and other resistant Democrats two years earlier. He had prepared himself to be castigated for the Soviets’ deception. Instead, he came face-to-face with an upset young father trying desperately to prevent a nuclear war. “He didn’t even try to get into fights,” the envoy cabled his superiors in Moscow. The United States would remove the missiles from Turkey, as Khrushchev had requested, within four or five months, Bobby assured him, but couldn’t let it look like a concession. “He persistently returned to one theme: time is of the essence and we shouldn’t miss the chance.”
Still, the entire perilous and exhausting adventure wasn’t going to be over, Bobby told Dobrynin, until the Russian missiles were actually removed from Cuban soil. That was “not an ultimatum, just a statement of fact.” Khrushchev must commit to doing so. It worked. Within the week, Kennedy had won the Soviet leader’s agreement. The crisis had ended. A country that had lived for days with the prospect of nuclear war could now breathe easy.
Though Curtis LeMay would call the decision to not invade Cuba “the greatest defeat in our history,” it was a minority view. “If Kennedy never did another thing,” said the British prime minister, Harold Macmillan, “he assured his place in history by this single act.”
• • •
It was later learned that the Soviets had deposited in Cuba a disturbing cache of nuclear weapons in early October, well before the Kennedy administration had the photographic evidence that spurred it into action. There were ninety nuclear warheads in all. Thirty of them possessed sixty-six times the explosive power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. There was an equal number of warheads with the firepower of the Hiroshima atomic bomb, plus an assortment of other, smaller ones.
Would Khrushchev have fired them? Here’s what he said afterward in his memoirs: “My thinking went like this: If we installed the missiles secretly, and then the United States discovered the missiles after they were poised and ready to strike, the Americans would think twice before trying to liquidate our installations by military means. I knew that the United States could knock out some of our installations, but not all of them. If a quarter or even a tenth of our missiles survived—even if only one or two big ones were left—we could still hit New York, and there wouldn’t be much of New York left. I don’t mean to say everyone in New York would be killed—not everyone, of course, but an awful lot of people would be wiped out . . . And it was high time that America learned what it feels like to have her own land and her own people threatened.”
But if America had attacked those missile sites, killing the Soviet soldiers and technicians there to deploy them, Khrushchev had in mind another target: West Berlin. “The Americans knew that if Russian blood were shed in Cuba, American blood would surely be shed in Germany.”
The bitter coldness of that statement would have surprised the American president only in tone. It’s precisely what Kennedy had on his mind when everyone else was thinking Cuba. It’s hard to imagine any other president—let alone the youngest one ever elected—resisting the pressures the way Jack Kennedy had managed to. Despite the many buddies he relied upon, despite his brother’s indispensability, despite the curiosity about the world that drove him, the Bay of Pigs had taught him whom he could best rely upon: himself.
Bobby Kennedy offered the sharpest assessment of what his brother had done. “The final lesson of the Cuban missile crisis is the importance of placing ourselves in the other country’s shoes. During the crisis, President Kennedy spent more time trying to determine the effect of a particular course of action on Khrushchev and the Russians than on any other phase of what he was doing. President Kennedy understood that the Soviet Union did not want war.”
It was his detachment that saved us. Another man would have reacted with force to the Soviet treachery. He would have shared in the righteousness of the cause, been stirred to attack by the saber rattling. Jack resisted. He was not moved by the emotion of others around him. He knew his course and stayed to it. Thank God. The boy who had read alone of history’s heroes was now safely one of them. He had done it not by winning a war, but by averting one far more horrible than any leader in the past could have imagined.
36. President Kennedy in West Berlin
37. “I have a dream.” Dr. King in Washington, DC, August 28, 1963
38. Caroline and John Jr. in the Oval Office
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
GOALS
Blessed are the peacemakers.
—Matthew 5:9
Politicians are, at different times, driven by grand notions and near necessity. Speak of the next election when they’re dreaming loftily, and you risk being dismissed as a hack. Speak of high purpose when they’re hearing the footsteps of a rival, and you invite instant dismissal.
Jack Kennedy was both an original and a consummate politician. Yet his stewardship of priorities still resembled those of a college student. With a number of classes on his schedule, he gave most of his attention to some, did the best he could with others, and let a few slide. It’s common enough. He was always most committed to what interested him. What made all the difference was the love of history that never failed to engage him.
In the first two years of his presidency, he had been making history. His accomplishments were linked in a singular way to what he most highly valued: his commitment to the Peace Corps, to peaceful competition in science and space travel, to containment of nuclear arms, to civil rights. But he also needed to be reelected. He began his third year in office pushing for a tax cut. It was an attempt to court a constituency that was resisting him: a previous year’s poll had shown that 88 percent of businessmen viewed him as hostile to their interests. However, many of them didn’t even go for his idea of a tax cut. The view then from Wall Street and Main Street both was that balanced budgets were the best thing for business.
Kennedy had campaigned on just such a principle, only to grow concerned over time that the economy simply wasn’t growing as it should. His chief economic advisor, Walter Heller, believed tax cuts would stimulate spending and investment, thereby increasing employment. Eisenhower’s commitment to fiscal conservatism had spiked the jobless rate in the fall of 1960, hamstringing Nixon’s quest to succeed him. Looking ahead to November 1964, Kennedy wanted that rate heading downward—and believed a slash in taxes would do the trick.
He also sought to correct the unfairness he saw in the tax code. Why, for example, had H. L. Hunt, the oil baron, paid just $22,000 in taxes the previous year? Why had J. Paul Getty, another ridiculously wealthy oilman, forked over only $500? When Ben Bradlee told him he paid the same amount, Kennedy said it made his point. “The tax laws really screw people in your bracket.” Hearing this, Bradlee suggested it would surely help the cause of reform if he’d release the figures on those oilmen’s tax levels. Kennedy paused before replying. “Maybe after 1964.” All he wanted at the moment was a tax cut that would juice the economy enough to get it moving before voters had their next chance to weigh in at the polls.
President Kennedy delivered three epochal addresses in June of 1963. The first was the commencement address at American University. It became known as his “Peace” speech. In it he spoke of his desire for a limited nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviet Union. The Cuban Missile Crisis, he knew, had been a terrifyingly close call.
“What kind of peace do I mean? Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables man and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children—not merely peace for Americans, but peace for all men and women—not merely peace in our time, but peace for all time.”
He was calling on the Soviet Union to join with the United States to prove that peace was possible, conflict not inevitable. “The problems of man are man-made; they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seem
ingly unsolvable—and we believe they can do it again.” With these words, he revealed that his highest commitment was not to arms control alone but to human hope.
Kennedy then expressed thoughts new to an American president, ideas especially startling coming from a man who’d once been a committed Cold Warrior. What he pointed out was the obvious but unspoken fact that the peoples inhabiting the two countries, the USA and the USSR, are not that different in their needs and dreams. “For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet; and we are all mortal.” He went on to offer a gesture of respect that was even more unexpected. “As Americans, we find Communism profoundly repugnant as a negation of personal freedom and dignity. But we can still hail the Russian people for their many achievements—in science and space, in economic and industrial growth, in culture and in acts of courage.”
He continued, powerfully, to make his case. “Among the many traits the peoples of our two countries have in common, none is stronger than our mutual abhorrence of war. Almost unique among the major world powers, we have never been at war with each other. And no nation in the history of battle ever suffered more than the Soviet Union suffered in the course of the Second World War. At least twenty million lost their lives. Countless millions of homes and farms were burned or sacked. A third of the nation’s territory, including nearly two thirds of its industrial base, was turned into a wasteland—a loss equivalent to the devastation of this country east of Chicago.
“The one major area of these negotiations where the end is in sight, yet where a fresh start is badly needed, is in a treaty to outlaw nuclear tests. The conclusion of such a treaty, so near and yet so far, would check the spiraling arms race in one of its most dangerous areas. It would place the nuclear powers in a position to deal more effectively with one of the greatest hazards which man faces in 1963, the further spread of nuclear arms. It would increase our security—it would decrease the prospects of war. Surely this goal is sufficiently important to require our steady pursuit, yielding neither to the temptation to give up the whole effort nor the temptation to give up our insistence on vital and responsible safeguards.
Chris Matthews Complete Library E-book Box Set: Tip and the Gipper, Jack Kennedy, Hardball, Kennedy & Nixon, Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, and American Page 75
