Having made his case, Kennedy stood at the door of the embassy, Dobrynin reported, and asked, "as if by-the-way ... what sort of orders the captains of the Soviet ships bound for Cuba have, in light of President Kennedy's speech yesterday." Dobrynin told the attorney general what he knew: that the Soviet captains had been instructed not "to stop or be searched on the open sea." At that point, Bobby Kennedy, "having waved his hand, said, 'I don't know how all this will end, but we intend to stop your ships.'"
In his 1995 memoir, In Confidence, Dobrynin, who as a forty-two-year-old was the youngest man ever to serve as Soviet ambassador to the United States, acknowledged that at the time of Kennedy's visit he had been told nothing about the Soviet missiles in Cuba. Years later, in Moscow, Dobrynin added, a high Soviet official explained that the lack of instructions and explicit information at the height of the crisis reflected "the sense of total bewilderment that enveloped Khrushchev and his colleagues after their plot [to install the missiles in Cuba] had taken such an unexpected turn."
Dobrynin was ordered to keep on talking in private with the attorney general; it turned out to be one of the most important decisions of the crisis. The Tuesday-night conversation with Kennedy led to a subsequent series of confidential meetings, usually after midnight, throughout the crisis. "We met either at my embassy or in his office at the Department of Justice," Dobrynin wrote.
When he visited me, I used to meet him at the entrance, and we ascended to the third floor to my sitting room where we proceeded to talk in the perfect silence of the night. Never was anyone else present at those meetings.... All this made the ambiance somewhat mysterious and at the same time reflected the tense atmosphere of Washington in those days. This tension was accentuated by the fact that Robert Kennedy was far from being a sociable person and lacked a proper sense of humor.... He was impulsive and excitable.
On Wednesday the nation was riveted to television sets as the first of twenty Soviet merchant ships approached the navy blockade. Jack Kennedy was unflappable, as usual. As the tension grew, Charles Bartlett and his wife were dining in the White House with the president and his wife. "That's when I admired him the most," Bartlett told me in a 1997 interview, "the night that the Russian ships were approaching the blockade. He was very cool and yet very sensitive to the implications of what was going on. It was scary. He literally did not know what the Russian reaction was going to be when they reached that blockade. We went home early and he hadn't heard. And he called me about ten-thirty and said, 'Well, we've got the word they turned around.' He'd been perfectly normal all night."
Nikita Khrushchev backed off. The Soviet ships either stopped dead in the water or turned back toward the Soviet Union. Jack Kennedy kept up the pressure. He had Ex Comm under firm control, with its members lined up in unanimous support of the blockade. He had the nation's armed forces on alert and ready to pounce. America's newspapers and television networks were called in for a briefing by Dean Rusk and warned that tensions had not eased, despite the Soviet capitulation on the high seas. Overflights of Cuba showed that construction at the missile sites was proceeding at breakneck pace. Newspapermen depicted Bobby Kennedy, McGeorge Bundy, and Robert McNamara as among those advocating an invasion of Cuba, if necessary, to get the missiles out. Local newspapers published articles on the status of food reserves, civil defense systems, and bomb shelters, as much of America---and the world---continued to be terrified. The Soviet Embassy in Washington warned Moscow, Dobrynin wrote in his memoirs, that Jack Kennedy, "like a gambler, actually was staking his reputation as a statesman, and his chances for reelection in 1964, on the outcome of this crisis. That was why," Dobrynin added, "we could not rule out---especially given the more aggressive members of his entourage---the possibility of a reckless reaction."
A crucial piece of information in Washington was withheld from the public: the American intelligence community found no evidence of an increase in military readiness or alerts in the Soviet Union. Samuel Halpern and his colleagues in Task Force W were closely monitoring the crisis and finding no sign of a Soviet mobilization, although the Soviet troops in Cuba continued to work round-the-clock assembling medium-range ballistic missile sites. "By the twenty-sixth [of October]," Halpern told me, "we're saying, 'What's going on?' There's no Soviet reaction. Nobody is getting ready to shoot at us. We're asking, 'Have we won already?'" The Strategic Air Command had gone to DEFCON 2, the stage just short of war, while the Soviets, Halpern said, "did not do a damn thing, even though they had nukes [in Cuba] that we didn't know they had." Most significant, the Soviets did nothing to upgrade the readiness of their nuclear missile fleet.
There was another crucial player in the crisis: Fidel Castro, whose importance was, astonishingly, discounted by the White House. Castro was convinced that the Americans were coming---he knew the Kennedys wanted him dead---and was increasingly agitated by the refusal of General Pliyev to fire at American intelligence planes. By Friday, October 26, American reconnaissance aircraft were crisscrossing the island at treetop level with impunity, and presumed to be gathering the intelligence needed for a ground invasion. Castro began urging Pliyev to get authority to begin knocking the Americans out of the sky with surface-to-air missiles. Pliyev agreed and, according to the Soviet documents obtained by Fursenko and Naftali, permission was received a day later.
Castro panicked early on the morning of October 27, according to "One Hell of a Gamble," and began telling his Soviet counterparts that "under certain circumstances"---the possible loss of Cuba---a nuclear first strike against an American target was justified. If the Americans "actually carry out the brutal act of invading Cuba," Castro wrote in a letter to Khrushchev, "that would be the moment to eliminate such danger forever through an act of legitimate defense, however harsh and terrible the solution would be." "We must not wait to experience the perfidy of the imperialists," Castro told a Soviet diplomat in Havana, "letting them initiate the first strike and deciding that Cuba should be wiped off the face of the earth."
Khrushchev was losing control.
Confronted with fanaticism from both Fidel Castro and John Kennedy, Khrushchev brought the superpower game of chicken to an end. He sent Kennedy a long, rambling letter that offered a way out. "It is ... no secret to anyone that the threat of armed attack, aggression, has constantly hung and continues to hang over Cuba," Khrushchev wrote. "It was only this that impelled us to respond to the Cuban government's request to give it aid to strengthen its defensive capacity. If the President and the government of the United States were to give assurance that the USA itself would not participate in an attack on Cuba and would restrain others from this kind of action, if you would recall your fleet, this would immediately change everything." The Soviet premier was accepting the offer that the president had made to Andrei Gromyko a week earlier, before there was any public mention of the missiles in Cuba.
In "One Hell of a Gamble," Fursenko and Naftali reported that by this time, according to Soviet documentation, twenty-four medium-range ballistic missiles were operational and could be loaded with nuclear warheads within hours. Why didn't Khrushchev, who had overridden the opposition of many in the Politburo to put the missiles in Cuba, now announce their readiness and challenge Kennedy to war? "In the heat of the crisis," the authors wrote, "Khrushchev backed away.... Time and again between 1956 and 1961, he had threatened nuclear retaliation as a bargaining chip to further his political objectives. But Khrushchev did not have the desire to threaten nuclear war when [the threat] might actually lead to one."
On the next morning, however, Khrushchev, under pressure from the Politburo, made a last-minute attempt to strengthen his position---and save his political standing in Moscow. The White House received a second proposal from him, advocating a public trade of the missiles in Turkey for the missiles in Cuba. The American Jupiters in Turkey were known to be strategically insignificant and vulnerable to Soviet attack, and Khrushchev's offer put the president in a dilemma. "He obviously did not wish to order the withdrawal of the missile
s from Turkey under threat from the Soviet Union," Bobby Kennedy explained in Thirteen Days. "On the other hand, he did not want to involve the U.S. and mankind in a catastrophic war over missile sites in Turkey that were antiquated and useless." McGeorge Bundy and Ted Sorensen, always tough in front of their boss, argued against the trade, telling Kennedy that American credibility in NATO as a nuclear defender of Europe would be undermined by withdrawal of the Jupiters. The president was on the verge of a knockout punch of Khrushchev, they said, and his political standing among the Republicans would be jeopardized if he resolved the crisis by trading off America's nuclear arsenal, strategically relevant or not.
But there was more bad news from Cuba that morning. The CIA's photo interpreters, whose analyses turned out to be correct, concluded that construction work at all twenty-four medium-range missile sites was now complete. The missiles, with a range of 1,020 nautical miles---enough to strike Washington---could be fueled, armed, targeted, and ready to launch in six to eight hours. The FBI reported that Soviet diplomats were behaving as if war was imminent: they had begun burning files and archives at their embassy in Washington and at their UN enclave on Long Island.
The crisis worsened later that afternoon, when it was learned that a Soviet surface-to-air missile had shot down an American U-2 spy plane during an intelligence-gathering overflight of the island. The Joint Chiefs had agitated since the crisis began for a massive air strike unless the Soviets began to dismantle their missiles. It had been agreed in Ex Comm, without serious debate or known dissension, that if a reconnaissance plane was shot down, the air force could retaliate by destroying a Soviet surface-to-air site. Maxwell Taylor, the Kennedy's favorite general, who had recently been named chairman of the Joint Chiefs, recommended with the support of his four-star colleagues that the air strike be followed by an all-out invasion. "There was the knowledge that we had to take military action to protect our pilots," Bobby Kennedy wrote. "There was the realization that the Soviet Union and Cuba apparently were preparing to do battle. And there was the feeling that the noose was tightening on all of us, on Americans, on mankind, and that the bridges to escape were crumbling."
Kennedy was losing control.
At the suggestion of Bundy, the president agreed that he would respond to Khrushchev's first letter and ignore the second, which insisted on a missile trade. In Kennedy, his 1965 insider's memoir, Ted Sorensen described what happened next. "At the private request of the President, a copy of [a] letter was delivered to the Soviet Ambassador by Robert Kennedy with a strong verbal message: The point of escalation was at hand; the United States could proceed toward peace and disarmament, or, as the Attorney General later described it, we could take 'strong and overwhelming retaliatory action ... unless [the President] received immediate notice that the missiles would be withdrawn."' On the next morning, Sorensen wrote, the Kremlin announced that "Kennedy's terms were being accepted.... I [was] hardly able to believe it." Later, at a cabinet meeting, Sorensen wrote, "John F. Kennedy entered and we all stood up." The president, he added, had "earned his place in history by this one act alone.... Cuba had been the site of his greatest failure and now of his greatest success."
Sorensen's published account was a half-truth. As he knew, and would not reveal for twenty-seven years, the crisis was resolved when Bobby Kennedy, on behalf of his brother, held a last-minute meeting with Dobrynin and made a secret arrangement to give Nikita Khrushchev the trade he wanted---Jupiter missiles removed from Turkey in exchange for withdrawal of Soviet missiles from Cuba.
Dobrynin's secret cable to Moscow about the meeting, published with little fanfare in 1995 by the Cold War International History Project Bulletin, reported that Kennedy arrived with a compromise offer as well as a warning: time was of the essence, because, Kennedy said, "there are many unreasonable heads among the [American] generals, and not only among the generals, who are 'itching' for a fight. The situation might get out of control, with irreversible consequences." His brother, Robert Kennedy told the Soviet ambassador, was under "strong pressure" to permit the air force to retaliate against Cuban targets if American reconnaissance planes were fired upon. "The USA can't stop these flights," Kennedy said, "because this is the only way we can quickly get information about the state of construction of the missile bases in Cuba." If the American bombing took place, the president's brother said, the result could be nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. "In response to the bombing of these bases," Dobrynin quoted the distraught Kennedy as saying, "the Soviet government will undoubtedly respond with the same against us, somewhere in Europe. A real war will begin, in which millions of Americans and Russians will die. We want to avoid that any way we can."*
"During our meeting," Dobrynin wrote in his cable home, "R. Kennedy was very upset; in any case, I've never seen him like this before.... He didn't even try to get into fights on various subjects, as he usually does, and only persistently returned to one topic: time is of the essence and we shouldn't miss the chance."
The brothers had lost control because of the downing of one American spy plane. What began as payback for the Bay of Pigs was beginning to evolve into a world war. The Kennedys, fanatical about being tough and resolute in front of their peers, could not turn to the government they controlled to extricate themselves from disaster. They turned for help, instead, to Nikita Khrushchev.
With a missile trade on the table, Bobby Kennedy asked Dobrynin and Khrushchev for secrecy, explaining that only two or three people in Washington were aware of the behind-the-scenes bargaining. "The president can't say anything public in this regard," Kennedy added. The missiles in Turkey were nominally under NATO command, and to order their removal unilaterally "would seriously tear apart NATO. However," Dobrynin's cable quoted Kennedy as saying, "President Kennedy is ready to come to agreement on that question with N.S. Khrushchev, too. I think that in order to withdraw these bases from Turkey, we need four-five months." If Khrushchev agreed, Kennedy added, he and the president could continue to work together, with Dobrynin serving as the middleman in a new back channel.
In his memoirs Dobrynin described three further meetings with Bobby Kennedy over the missile issue. On Sunday, October 28, the ambassador was instructed by cable from Moscow to tell the attorney general that Khrushchev accepted the agreement. The relieved Kennedy smiled and said, according to Dobrynin, "At last, I'm going to see the kids. Why, I've almost forgotten my way home." On the next day Khrushchev told Kennedy, through Dobrynin, that he agreed to keep the missile trade secret and to continue the new back-channel discussions. In a cable sent on the thirtieth to Moscow, published in the Cold War International History Project Bulletin, Dobrynin quoted the attorney general as saying that he and the president "are not prepared to formulate such an understanding in the form of letters, even the most confidential letters, between the president and the head of the Soviet government when it concerns such a delicate issue." Kennedy was referring to a private letter Khrushchev had sent to the president the day before; the Soviet premier had explicitly stated that he accepted Kennedy's commitment to eliminate the Jupiters at a future date. The letter could not stand, Bobby Kennedy told Dobrynin, because it was a political liability.
"Speaking in all candor," Kennedy added, according to the Dobrynin cable, "I, myself, for example, do not want to risk getting involved in the transmission of this sort of letter, since who knows where and when such letters can surface or be somehow published---not now, but in the future---and any changes in the course of events are possible. The appearance of such a document could cause irreparable harm to my political career in the future. This is why we request that you take this letter back."
The top stratum of the Soviet government was getting a lesson in cover-up from the Americans. "As a guarantee," Dobrynin quoted Kennedy as saying, "I can only give you my word. Moreover I can tell you that two other people besides the president know about the existing understanding"---Dean Rusk and Llewellyn Thompson, the former U.S. ambassador to t
he Soviet Union. There was a carrot for the ambitious Dobrynin. Kennedy told the ambassador, Dobrynin cabled, that "on the Turkish [missile] issue and other highly confidential issues he was prepared to maintain a direct contact with me.... I answered," Dobrynin said, "that I was prepared to maintain contact with him on highly important issues in the future, passing over the heads, as he himself suggested, of all intermediaries."
The Dobrynin cable did not include Kennedy's most remarkable statement---saved, no doubt, for his 1995 memoir. "Very privately," Dobrynin wrote, "Robert Kennedy added that someday---who knows?---he might run for president, and his prospects could be damaged if the secret deal about the missiles in Turkey were to come out."
Jack Kennedy was planning to stay in office six more years, and to be followed by his brother for two four-year terms. For perhaps the next fourteen years, therefore, the men running the Soviet Union, with or without a formal letter, would have the means to publicly devastate the Kennedys by putting the lie to their inspiring victory in the missile crisis. The president and his brother were true existentialists at that moment, bargaining their way out of an immediate crisis by putting their future credibility in the hands of the Soviet leadership.
The American people, knowing none of this, cheered the victorious end of the crisis and their hero-president, Jack Kennedy. Those few who doubted or criticized his negotiating tactics ate crow, like Nikita Khrushchev, in public. Walter Lippmann, who had complained in writing about Kennedy's reckless handling of Andrei Gromyko, lauded the president for having shown "not only the courage of a warrior, which is to take the risks that are necessary, but also ... the wisdom of the statesman, which is to use power with restraint." A few days later Lippmann had lunch at the White House with the president and was shown some of the top-secret correspondence between Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev. The correspondence did not deal, of course, with Kennedy's secret concession on the Jupiter missiles.
The Dark Side of Camelot Page 43
