As he had done before the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy phoned New York Times publisher Orvil Dryfoos, who killed the article being written by James Reston. The President was less successful at the Washington Post. When Kennedy called Phil Graham, the publisher “would probably have taken out the story completely, but the paper wouldn’t let him,” said Katharine Graham. A modified version ran on Sunday under the headline “MARINE MOVES IN SOUTH LINKED TO CUBAN CRISIS.” Both publishers agreed to hold off further stories until after Kennedy’s speech.
In meetings with his advisers and a briefing for congressional leaders on Monday, October 22, Kennedy lucidly described the rationale for action and outlined the next steps. He warned Ex Comm members not to let on that they had ever contemplated a surprise attack. “I can’t say that strongly enough,” he said. The senators and congressmen drilled Kennedy with queries and objections. He told them that a military strike could invite a nuclear retaliation, and “doing nothing . . . would imperil” both Berlin and Latin America. Only the blockade offered “flexibility.” “There’s no use in waiting, Mr. President,” concluded Georgia Democrat Richard Russell, the most powerful force in the Senate. “The nettle is going to sting anyway.” That session, Bobby said later, was his brother’s “most difficult meeting,” creating “tremendous strain.”
Kennedy’s seventeen-minute speech to the nation included an implicit repudiation of his father’s pro-appeasement stance when he was ambassador to Britain. “The 1930s taught us a clear lesson,” JFK said. “Aggressive conduct, if allowed to grow unchecked and unchallenged, ultimately leads to war.” Shortly afterwards, he had the first in a series of evening conversations with Macmillan—mostly monologues with occasional words of encouragement from the prime minister, who “often sounded rather vapid.” Given his age and experience, Macmillan soothed Kennedy simply by listening. He had earlier urged the President to negotiate, but now he leaned toward taking action. Khrushchev’s duplicity rankled Kennedy more than anything. He “played a double game,” said JFK, “to face us with a bad situation in November . . . to squeeze us on Berlin.”
To divert her husband, Jackie hastily organized a dinner party with Benno and Nicole Graziani, Oleg Cassini, and Lee, who had flown to Washington that weekend and moved into the Queen’s Bedroom. The White House also belatedly phoned Bill Walton. His designated date was Mary Meyer, but he decided instead to bring Helen Chavchavadze. Helen watched the speech with Bill at his Georgetown home, and they raced to the White House, arriving on the second floor just before the President.
As Kennedy was telling Walton that he was “just listening and praying,” an aide informed Chavchavadze that if a Soviet attack was imminent, she would have to go with the group to the presidential shelter at Camp David. She began to sob, begging to be sent home to be with her two daughters. Only after the aide reassured her that an evacuation was highly unlikely did Chavchavadze calm down.
“Jackie tried to be cheerful and upbeat,” Cassini recalled. “But it was a tense evening.” Bundy interrupted several times, and when Kennedy left to take a phone call, Cassini walked out with him. Kennedy “refused to seem depressed or overwhelmed by the immensity of the moment,” recalled Cassini. Puffing on his cigar, Kennedy ruminated on the possibility of “being obliterated.” It was an example, Cassini said, of Kennedy’s “elegant fatalism.”
In a series of meetings on Tuesday the twenty-third, the Ex Comm discussed how to impose the quarantine and analyzed Khrushchev’s initial bellicose reply. At the United Nations, Adlai Stevenson made a dramatic presentation using several of the spy satellite photos as evidence. JFK gave a background briefing to Harry Luce and Time’s managing editor, Otto Fuerbringer, promising them full access to the surveillance photographs for the following week’s issue of the magazine. As they talked in the Oval Office, Kennedy tapped the coffee table in front of him with two fingers. “Our troops are ready in Florida,” he said. “If there is any reason to go in, they are going to go in. Khrushchev is not going to get away with this.” Luce later observed that Kennedy was “emotional . . . deeper than any ordinary emotion, because the President evidently felt that the situation was very serious and that the worst could happen.”
Meanwhile, Bobby dispatched two trusted emissaries to meet separately with his KGB contact, Georgi Bolshakov: Charley Bartlett and Frank Holeman, a New York Daily News reporter who had introduced the Russian to the attorney general and had helped set up their secret meetings. Each newsman carried the same sub rosa message: a willingness to trade the removal of missiles from Turkey and Italy for the weapons in Cuba. Bolshakov dutifully relayed these proposals in a cable to Moscow that included an important caveat from Holeman: “The conditions of such a trade can be discussed only in a time of quiet and not when there is the threat of war.”
At 7:10 that evening, following a meeting in the Cabinet Room, Bobby reported to his brother that Bartlett and Holeman had seen Bolshakov. But in the brothers’ telepathic conversational style, the attorney general offered no details, making unclear the President’s involvement in the overture. With the tape recorder running, the Kennedy brothers carefully avoided saying anything beyond simple confirmation of the contacts with the Soviet agent. Perhaps more noteworthy was Kennedy’s call to Charley Bartlett at 7:50 p.m.—his last conversation before leaving the Oval Office at 8:06.
The Kennedys were dining again with friends, but the President was in no mood for socializing. His talk with Bobby had come moments after ringing off with Jackie. “Oh Christ, about the dinner tonight,” Kennedy said with annoyance. “She’s invited somebody and I invited somebody.” In a gesture of reciprocal hospitality, Jackie had asked the Maharajah and Maharani of Jaipur to stay for two days at Blair House, the official presidential guest house across Pennsylvania Avenue. They were invited to dinner along with Lee, Oleg Cassini, and the Grazianis—the remnants of a dinner dance originally planned in honor of the distinguished Indians. Jack, in turn, had invited the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, newly arrived in town for the opening of an exhibit at the National Gallery of old master drawings from their Chatsworth estate, David and Sissie Gore, and several other British friends in town for the exhibition.
The dinner was held on the state floor, in the smaller of the two official dining rooms. With “unfailing good humor,” Kennedy “kept everybody else calm and in a good mood,” recalled David Gore. As the evening wound down, Kennedy and Gore disappeared to talk privately. Jackie wandered upstairs to see what had become of the two men, and found them both “squatting on the floor, looking at the missile pictures. . . . I had to rush backwards and forwards, to keep the party going.”
Kennedy was disappointed in the lukewarm European reaction to his speech. To help build the American case, Gore suggested that instead of selectively showing the surveillance photographs to the press, Kennedy should release a batch of pictures immediately. Together, the two men chose the images that illustrated the situation most clearly. (Time was still able to run its “big spread” of dramatic exclusive photos.) Gore also recommended that Kennedy reduce the quarantine perimeter from eight hundred to five hundred miles outside the Cuban coastline. “The Soviet Union had some very difficult decisions to take,” Gore recalled. “They had to climb down as gracefully as they could. . . . Every additional hour that could be given them might save us from a dangerous episode.” The President immediately phoned McNamara with the new instructions.
Kennedy had earlier dispatched Bobby to meet with Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. Shortly after 10 p.m., Bobby joined JFK and Gore upstairs. Bobby’s mood was glum. He had greeted Dobrynin “in a state of agitation,” bursting with angry accusations over Soviet betrayal, and warnings that the United States was serious about stopping the ships. Unlike his emissaries, Bobby had said nothing about Turkish missiles.
Meeting with the Ex Comm on Wednesday morning the twenty-fourth, Kennedy received word that a Soviet submarine had approached a U.S. aircraft carrier on the cordon. McNamara described the option
s for an American response as JFK endured what Bobby later called “the time of greatest worry. . . . His hand went up to his face & covered his mouth and he closed his fist. His eyes were tense, almost gray, and we just stared at each other across the table.” Moments later, the group heard that Soviet ships were turning around, prompting Dean Rusk to whisper to Bundy, “We are eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked.” Still, when Kennedy called London, he asked Macmillan “straight out, the 64 thousand dollar question. ‘Should he take out Cuba?’”
Jack invited Charley and Martha Bartlett for dinner. “I think the pressure of this period made him desire more to have friends around,” said Bartlett. “Just small groups which he would break up about nine-thirty and go back to the cables.” Bartlett was encouraged that Soviet vessels weren’t testing the blockade. “I should think you’d feel like really celebrating,” Bartlett said. “You don’t want to celebrate in this game this early,” Kennedy replied. “Because anything can happen.” On the way home the Bartletts went to Bill Walton’s for a nightcap. Shortly before midnight, as Charley and Martha were getting into bed, Kennedy called to say, “You’d be interested to know I got a cable from our friend. He says that those ships . . . are coming through tomorrow.” Recalled Bartlett, “On that kind of a note, he had to go to sleep.”
Kennedy responded to Khrushchev’s threatened challenge to the blockade with a brief and blunt reply sent at 2 a.m., reiterating his displeasure over Soviet deception and implying that the United States would take action soon if the missiles were not removed. The Washington Post sent quite a different signal on Thursday morning in a Walter Lippmann column suggesting publicly for the first time that the United States trade its missiles in Turkey for the withdrawal of missiles in Cuba. It was a leak, most likely from George Ball—a trial balloon aimed directly at Moscow.
Throughout that day’s meetings, Kennedy and his men debated blockade enforcement. Turning hawkish, McNamara wanted to strengthen the blockade by stopping ships carrying products besides offensive weapons. Kennedy gently restrained his defense secretary and permitted selective enforcement of the quarantine to avoid confrontation. Late in the day, Adlai Stevenson challenged Valerian Zorin, Soviet ambassador to the United Nations, in a televised Security Council meeting. As Zorin evaded, Stevenson dramatically announced, “Don’t wait for the translation—yes or no? . . . I am prepared to wait for my answer until hell freezes over.” Watching with Kenny O’Donnell, Kennedy said, “I never knew Adlai had it in him.”
Nearly four decades later, in December 2000, the feature film Thirteen Days would place O’Donnell, played by Kevin Costner, at the center of the Cuban Missile Crisis deliberations. The portrayal stretched the truth, leading many irritated participants to dismiss his importance entirely. Ethel Kennedy sent a spoof valentine to her friends saying, “Roses are red, Violets are blue, You’ve got 13 days dear to figure out what Kenny O’Donnell would do.”
But O’Donnell did serve a key function for JFK during those days. While he may not have joined any strategy deliberations of the Ex Comm, JFK asked his longtime aide to sit in on all meetings he attended. The President wanted him “to watch and listen,” O’Donnell wrote, “. . . so that he could talk with me later about what had been said and compare his impressions and conclusions with mine. He wanted an observer in the room who would follow the various arguments more or less objectively, without becoming involved or committed to any point of view.”
On Friday the twenty-sixth, Kennedy shifted his full attention to removing the weapons on the ground in Cuba. Reacting to large crowds of peace demonstrations in Britain, Harold Macmillan was pressing Kennedy to avoid military action, drop the blockade, and negotiate—a position that diminished the prime minister’s usefulness as an adviser. (Hervé Alphand would remark later on Macmillan’s “hesitant and frightened attitude” compared to De Gaulle’s unequivocal support.) Stevenson was urging the same course, with a guarantee of Cuba’s “territorial integrity” as well as a willingness to disarm the missiles in Turkey and Italy if asked. Pounding the table with his fist, McCone exclaimed that the Cuban missiles were “pointed at our hearts. . . . That threat must be removed before we can drop the quarantine.”
Continuing surveillance had revealed accelerated work on the Cuban sites all week; by Friday the medium-range missiles were ready for use. Kennedy also learned in a noon intelligence briefing that the Soviets had deployed tactical nuclear weapons for battlefield use. An invasion, McCone warned, would be a “much more serious undertaking. . . . It’s very evil stuff they’ve got there.”
At the same time, Kennedy received two promising feelers, first from Acting UN Secretary-General U Thant, and later from ABC journalist John Scali, who had been approached by a KGB agent. Both men said that the Soviets would consider dismantling the missile sites in exchange for a pledge from the United States not to invade Cuba. Early that evening, a long, rambling private message from Khrushchev clattered across the Teletype, offering the same terms to resolve the crisis.
On that hopeful note, Jackie and the children drove to Glen Ora the next morning. She had bowed out of two events in Washington that day, the Washington International Horse Show and a dinner and preview of the Devonshires’ exhibit. Of far greater interest to Jackie was riding in the opening meet of the Orange County Hunt on Saturday afternoon. As she was chasing the hounds over the top of Rattlesnake Mountain and through the fields near Wexford, her husband was struggling to avoid full-scale war in the face of disturbing new developments.
Khrushchev had followed his private overture with a public demand for a Cuba-Turkey missile trade, forcing Kennedy and his advisers to scramble for the correct response. Not knowing about the Bartlett and Holeman approaches, the advisers concluded that the Lippmann column had suddenly emboldened Khrushchev. They spent hours trying to address both messages while concentrating on the terms Khrushchev had outlined in the first one. (“It’s too complicated Bobby,” Bundy said after several iterations.) In the middle of the debate, the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire arrived for a half-hour chat with Kennedy in the Oval Office. “A lot of Jack’s close advisers were surprised to see my wife and me,” the duke recalled.
Kennedy was unwilling to risk going to war in Cuba and Berlin over outmoded rockets in Turkey. Yet he recognized that a public quid pro quo would seem like a sellout of Turkey, leading to what Bundy called “a radical decline in the effectiveness” of the NATO alliance. Eventually the group finessed the problem by deciding to answer only the first letter. It was known as “Bobby’s formula,” but Bundy had initiated the idea. Sorensen, Thompson, and McCone had reinforced it, and Bobby refined it. It would soon be known as “the Trollope ploy,” after an incident of similarly selective interpretation in one of Anthony Trollope’s novels.
The whole plan nearly came unstuck when a U-2 plane was shot down on Saturday afternoon by a surface-to-air missile over Cuba, killing the pilot. McNamara pushed to “take out that SAM site,” while McCone insisted on issuing a “violent protest.” Kennedy held them both at bay. O’Donnell was struck by “the uncertainty many of [Kennedy’s advisers] showed under pressure, the inability of some to make a thoughtful judgment and stick to it.”
After nearly eight hours of meetings, the Ex Comm crafted a reply—removal of the Soviet missiles in exchange for an American noninvasion pledge—that Bobby would deliver to Dobrynin at the same time it was publicly released. Kennedy invited Rusk, McNamara, Bobby, Ball, Gilpatric, Thompson, Sorensen, and Bundy to join him in the Oval Office to devise Bobby’s oral explanation to accompany the letter. It was there that Dean Rusk outlined a second deal to be kept confidential: the United States would dismantle the Turkish missiles but only after all offensive weapons had been removed from Cuba and the crisis had passed—the very message Holeman had given to Bolshakov. If either side betrayed the secret, the deal was off.
Ex Comm members excluded from the briefing on the clandestine plan—either by happenstance or reasons that
never have been made clear—were Dillon, Taylor, McCone, and the Vice President, who had been a silent presence during most of the missile crisis deliberations. Only on that Saturday, particularly when Kennedy was out of the room, did LBJ assert himself with heated objections to any Cuba-Turkey trade.
After Bobby returned from the Soviet Embassy, the Ex Comm met at 9 p.m. Saturday night to discuss contingencies for an invasion on Monday or Tuesday, as well as an interim occupation government in Cuba. “I’d like to take Cuba back,” Bobby mused. “That would be nice.” “Suppose we make Bobby mayor of Havana?” cracked another participant. “That’s something you’re going to have to get done tomorrow,” said Dillon.
Many of Kennedy’s advisers anxiously remained in their offices overnight. Dave Powers stayed with the President in the Executive Mansion. “Dave, are you sure your wife doesn’t mind being alone at home at a time like this?” Kennedy asked Powers. “Of course she minds,” Powers replied, “but she’s used to it.” After a late dinner of broiled chicken, JFK and Powers went down to the White House theater to watch one of the President’s favorite movies, Roman Holiday. The romantic comedy features Gregory Peck as a raffish newspaperman and Audrey Hepburn as a willful European princess who kicks over the traces to secretly spend an adventuresome day in Rome with him. From her fondness for quoting Keats to her mischievous humor, Hepburn’s wide-eyed “Princess Ann” bears more than a passing resemblance to Jackie.
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