The Abyss, page 29
Max Taylor returned to the charge, expressing the chiefs’ vehement opposition to limiting a strike programme. In their view, he said, either the US launched a full air campaign, to destroy the entire Soviet offensive capability on the island, or better not start. The chiefs were also keen to ensure that, if their forces were to attack, they should enjoy the advantage of complete surprise. JFK responded: ‘Don’t let the Chiefs knock us out on this one, General, because I think that what we’ve got to be thinking about is: If you go into Cuba in the way we’re talking about . . . then you really haven’t got much of an argument against invading it.’ Taylor reasserted that he opposed invasion, but supported a major air campaign.
Robert Kennedy raised a new issue: how to stop the Russians sending in more missiles, even if the USAF destroyed those now in place? McNamara said that a blockade would be essential. RFK: ‘Then we’re going to have to sink Russian ships. Then we’re going to have to sink Russian submarines.’ Taylor: ‘Right. Right.’ The attorney-general suggested the possibility ‘if we’re going to get into it at all, whether we should just get into it, and get it over with, and take our losses. And if he [Khrushchev] wants to get into a war over this . . . Hell, if it’s war that’s gonna come on this thing, he sticks those kinds of missiles in after the warning [given by the president in September], then he’s gonna get into a war over six months from now, or a year from now on something.’ RFK’s first ideas about many things were often terrible: Adlai Stevenson, for instance, thus dismissed him as ‘a bull in a china shop’. This seems unjust. Robert Kennedy vacillated no more and no less than did most others at Excom, and his ultimate endorsement of caution was wiser than the contrary counsel of some older men.
George Ball had an inspired moment. The under-secretary, a fifty-two-year-old Iowan, was a protégé of Stevenson who had worked on the wartime Strategic Bombing Survey in London for two years; later played a leading role in guiding Europe’s end of the Marshall Plan. A smart man who nonetheless often lost arguments inside the administration, Ball now raised the possibility that Khrushchev believed the missiles would not be discovered; that he had planned to appear the next month at the United Nations, to spring a devastating surprise on the United States and the world. Nobody picked up on this, but of course his hunch represented the reality of Khrushchev’s thinking.
Mac Bundy said he drew modest comfort from his own conviction that the Soviets would not allow Castro discretionary control of nuclear warheads. Ball agreed: ‘I think Khrushchev himself would never, would never risk a major war on a fellow as obviously as erratic and foolish as Castro.’ He then raised the prospect that the missiles in Cuba were intended as a trading ploy – maybe for concessions in Berlin.
There followed one of the most famous, or notorious, exchanges of the Crisis. Kennedy mused aloud: ‘It’s just as if we suddenly began to put a major number of MRBMs in Turkey. Now that’d be goddam dangerous, I would think.’
BUNDY: ‘Well, we did, Mr. President.’
U. ALEXIS JOHNSON: ‘We did it. We [also] did it in England.’
KENNEDY: ‘Yeah, but that was five years ago.’
JOHNSON: ‘That’s when we were short. We put them in England too when we were short of [long-range] ICBMs.’
KENNEDY: ‘But that was during a different period then.’
JOHNSON: ‘But doesn’t he realise he has a deficiency of ICBMs vis-à-vis our capacity, perhaps? In view of that he’s got a lot of MRBMs and this is a way to balance it out a bit.’
Here, of course, the White House group stumbled upon a key factor in Khrushchev’s thinking, and also the major weakness in America’s moral and political position. Kennedy’s remarks emphasized the unwillingness of the Excom folk to consider for more than a few moments the mismatch between what had been deemed appropriate strategic conduct by the US and its allies – the British and Turkish deployment – and their outraged rejection of similar action, now undertaken by the USSR and its Caribbean client. Bundy wrote later: ‘In ways which Americans did not bother to explain to themselves, the prospect of Soviet thermonuclear warheads on a next-door island was simply insupportable.’ The Americans also believed, with better reason, that there was an important distinction between their own missiles, openly sited under the terms of declared treaties with host allies, and the Soviet weapons, installed in deepest secrecy and amid a barrage of Kremlin falsehoods.
JFK concluded: ‘Well, it’s a goddam mystery to me. I don’t know enough about the Soviet Union, but if anybody can tell me any other time since the Berlin blockade where the Russians have given us so clear a provocation, I don’t know when it’s been.’ Kennedy soon afterwards left the Cabinet Room, while the others talked on. McNamara returned to his earlier remark, that went to the heart of the matter. He refused to regard this as a military issue, he said, because he did not see that the presence of the missiles in Cuba changed the nuclear balance, which was still drastically in America’s favour. It was, instead, ‘a domestic political problem’.
The defense secretary meant, of course, that the challenge for the president was how to manage the inevitable fierce reaction of the American people, when they were presented with news of missiles installed on the nation’s porch. Kennedy had explicitly stated that if such weapons were deployed in Cuba, he would act. And so he now must. McNamara nonetheless favoured a blockade, accompanied by overt around-the-clock surveillance of Cuba, so that the Kremlin would quickly realize that the White House knew what the Soviet Union had done. The president should issue a statement before the world that if the Russians showed any sign of using the missiles placed in Cuba, the US would respond with a full nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. The defense secretary added a gallows humour line, such as would be heard more than once during the fearsome days ahead: ‘Now, this alternative doesn’t seem to be a very acceptable one. But wait until you work on the others.’ He got his laugh.
When the session broke up, although there were more evening meetings at the State Department and the Pentagon – where McNamara slept that night – it was deemed essential for the key players to resume agreed schedules, to avoid alerting watchful journalists. At a final farewell dinner for Charles Bohlen at Joe Alsop’s house, which the president attended, JFK pulled the guest of honour out onto the porch to discuss the Crisis, and also to vent his impatience with the perceived shortcomings of the State Department: ‘Chip, what’s wrong with that goddamned Department of yours? I can never get a quick answer.’ Bohlen responded that foreign policy did not lend itself to fast fixes. The president whispered to the ambassador’s wife Avis: ‘I wouldn’t be too sure you are leaving. I think I may ask you to stay.’
Bohlen urged upon Dean Rusk that such a change of plan would rouse suspicion; give the Soviets a clue to American knowledge. Rusk agreed. When Kenny O’Donnell rang Bohlen at the airport next morning to say that he was urgently needed at the White House, the envoy said that he was due to make a speech in New York, for which his plane was leaving in fifteen minutes: he must go. JFK, himself called to the phone, reluctantly assented: ‘Go on. I guess we’ll have to do without you.’ Bohlen left behind a handwritten memo, urging the dispatch of a private letter to the Kremlin, to allow Khrushchev space to back off. An air strike, said the veteran, ‘will inevitably lead to war’.
Several of the White House inner circle later rejected Bohlen’s explanation for his decision to proceed with his scheduled sea voyage to France, among them Robert Kennedy: ‘“Chip” ran out on us, which always shocked me. That wasn’t necessary. He could always have postponed it. But he decided to leave the country in a crisis.’ Bohlen, nursing his haunting secret knowledge, did not enjoy the subsequent five days at sea – indeed, he was visibly in a high state of nerves. He always afterwards asserted that he had felt able to sail because he trusted ‘Tommy’ Thompson, his successor at the Moscow embassy, to give the president the same counsel of caution that he himself would have offered. In truth, Bobby Kennedy could have been right, that Bohlen departed because he felt that he had participated in enough world dramas; was content now to take up residence in Paris for a dignified, glamorous, yet relatively undemanding posting in which he remained for the ensuing six years.
On Wednesday morning, 17 October, at the State Department there was another meeting of some of the principals. George Ball reasserted his opposition to military action. He was convinced that Khrushchev simply did not understand the enormity of what he had done. Llewellyn Thompson, however, disagreed: he believed the Soviet leader was working up to a showdown on Berlin. Maxwell Taylor and the CIA’s McCone, now back in Washington, supported Thompson. McCone then drove north to Gettysburg, to brief ex-President Eisenhower. The old general described the situation as ‘intolerable’, and promised his support for US military action.
JFK meanwhile carried out a scheduled campaign trip in Connecticut. That day he received a memorandum from Adlai Stevenson, urging the dispatch of emissaries to both Khrushchev and Castro, rather than a resort to armed conflict: ‘To start or risk starting a nuclear war is bound to be divisive at best,’ the UN ambassador wrote, ‘and the judgements of history seldom coincide with the tempers of the moment.’ He understood Kennedy’s difficulty, he said, but then urged, in a heavily underscored passage: ‘the means adopted have such incalculable consequences that I feel you should have made it clear that the existence of nuclear missile bases anywhere is negotiable before we start anything’.
The Kennedy team regarded the Democratic veteran as a weak man; a windbag; a loser, albeit a decent and intelligent one. In the same way the other notable dove, George Ball, often displayed wisdom, and would later do so again, by arguing passionately against escalation in Vietnam. Just as Ball failed to carry his point in 1965, however, he also made little impact on the deliberations of October 1962. Both he and Stevenson appeared to promote policies of words, not deeds, which must be perceived by most of the American people as inaction. Among many uncertainties in those first days of the Crisis, the one sure thing in the minds of John F. Kennedy and his advisers was that they had to be seen to do something. Forget any McNamarish niceties about what the missiles did, or did not do, to the global nuclear balance: the Kennedy presidency faced crippling and lasting damage to its authority, if American voters believed that the incumbent displayed weakness in this supreme test of his fitness to lead them through a showdown with the Soviet Union.
There were two significant outcomes of the meetings and planning sessions held on Wednesday 17 October. First, the joint chiefs produced a menu of five alternative air campaigns, listed by Roman numerals from I to V. Attacks on missile and nuclear storage sites would allegedly require only 52 sorties; the same, with the addition of IL-28 and MiG-21 nuclear-capable aircraft, 104 sorties. If other aircraft, SAM sites, cruise missiles and missile boats were included, 194 sorties; all military targets save tanks would require 474 sorties; and a full programme of military targets as a prelude to invasion, 2,002 sorties. Senior civilians who debated the military options and possible Soviet responses reported overwhelmingly in favour of giving a diplomatic warning before such action was undertaken. McNamara and Taylor, however, feared that any such prior alert would diminish the effectiveness of the air campaign.
Another outsider was that day admitted to the secret of the Crisis, and thus joined the select group of White House confidants – Dean Acheson. A long-time hawk, Acheson was the secretary of state who had persuaded Harry Truman to dispatch a US army to Korea in June 1950, and since urged successive presidents to make a demonstration in force over Berlin. He dismissed John J. McCloy, who favoured engagement with the Russians, as a Paul Revere forever warning of dire consequences – ‘one if by land and two if by sea’. He himself favoured treating Moscow with ‘intelligent neglect’. Now, when shown the missile photos by Rusk, he urged immediate bombing. The weapons, he said, ‘are pointing at our hearts and ready to shoot’. It was folly to allow the Crisis to become protracted – the US must go for a showdown straightaway. It was a reflection of Kennedy’s anxiety to engage the widest possible range of advisers that he consulted Acheson, whom he disliked: ‘[Dean] thinks that nothing has been done right since he left office,’ he once confided to the journalist Teddy White.
After the first sessions, Acheson attended Excom meetings through the ensuing four days. When McNamara argued that the missiles presented no more of a threat than if they were sited in Russia, the veteran statesman snorted in disgust. ‘Nonsense,’ he said. ‘Something should be done quickly.’ Nonetheless, he was no admirer of the chiefs of staff – the Korean experience had soured him on the military: ‘When you get soldiers talking about policy, they want to go further and further in a military way . . . until their proposals are apt to be as dangerous as the original danger.’ Acheson opposed invasion; instead he favoured those misnamed ‘surgical air strikes’.
Some members of Excom, including the president and Dean Rusk, came and went during its deliberations, which exasperated the veteran: he thought such behaviour frivolous, during meetings of such gravity. He felt that Bobby Kennedy had started to fill Rusk’s rightful role – when JFK was temporarily absent from meetings, his brother instead assumed control. This presumptuous thirty-six-year-old responded to the sixty-nine-year-old Acheson’s call for surprise air strikes: ‘My brother is not going to be the [Japanese Gen. Hideki] Tojo of the 1960s.’ The old man was exasperated by Kennedy’s brashness, ‘moved by emotional or intuitive responses more than by trained lawyers’ analysis’. Moreover, he was scornful of RFK’s Pearl Harbor analogy, saying that for 139 years the US had been warning other nations to keep their hands off the Western hemisphere. ‘Was it necessary to employ the early nineteenth-century method, of having a man with a red flag walk before a steam engine to warn people and cattle to stay out of the way?’ Bobby later wrote of Acheson: ‘I would never wish to be on the other side of an argument with him.’ Yet there and then, that was almost exactly where the attorney-general was.
The same Wednesday evening RFK and Ted Sorensen drove out to the airport to meet the president, returning from his campaign swing. They reported on the day’s meetings, and gave him a list of some twenty unresolved issues. JFK said that he would not re-enter the discussions until next morning; then he went home, leaving the others to rejoin the sessions in town. Several individuals drafted statements of their personal opinions, including treasury secretary Douglas Dillon, who favoured an immediate, unannounced air strike. He wrote that the Soviet Union had ‘initiated a test of our intentions that can determine the future course of world events for many years to come’.
George Ball contrarily restated his conviction that the missile deployments changed nothing strategically, a view that commanded little support among men as convinced of Cuba’s specialness as were many ordinary Americans. Ball, however, declared a proposition also articulated by Robert Kennedy, that would gain increasing traction during the coming days. He opposed any military action without warning: ‘We tried Japanese as war criminals because of the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor.’ Unannounced bombing, ‘far from establishing our moral strength . . . would, in fact, alienate a great part of the civilized world by behaving in a manner wholly contrary to our traditions, by pursuing a course of action that would cut directly athwart everything we have stood for during our national history, and condemn us as hypocrites in the opinion of the world.’
Yet while Ball was not alone in emphasizing the objections to launching a new ‘Day of Infamy’, he slid out on a limb when he argued that the Cuban missiles changed nothing. Even McNamara had retreated from that proposition. The top tier of the Kennedy administration was united on a central point that would remain constant through the days that followed, with Ball the only dissenter: for domestic political if not strategic reasons, the missiles must leave Cuba. On Thursday morning, 18 October, the consensus among those who reassembled in the Cabinet Room at the White House was that direct military action – bombing, perhaps followed by invasion – would likely prove necessary. McNamara had sown a seed with his proposal for blockade, which would constitute a response without necessarily precipitating a shooting war. At 11.35 a.m. that day, however, when the meeting began, this course appeared the least likely to be adopted, because it was judged the weakest of the options available to the president. Most of the other big players favoured the chiefs’ choice: to launch air attacks against the Soviet nuclear weapon installations on Cuba. To go to war.
7
‘They Think We’re Slightly Demented on This Subject’
1 Behind Closed Doors
This was the phase of the Crisis during which posterity can see that the White House was a command centre seething with activity. It was then invisible, however, to all save a handful of Americans, and to everyone beyond the continental shores. Elsewhere the other players – Russians and Cubans – were passive, prey to gratifying delusions of their own cleverness and subtlety. Khrushchev was briefed daily about the progress of the build-up on Castro’s island. Within the Kremlin’s walls members of the Presidium watched Washington intently, seeking the first hint that its gambit had been unmasked, and detecting none. Those grey-suited men presented to the world their accustomed bland faces. Khrushchev received visitors, attended events, presided at policy discussions, issued threats. The pervasive theme of Soviet conduct was business as usual.
In Cuba likewise, Russian personnel went about their duties as they had done for weeks, labouring on the missile sites in incongruous check shirts and slacks or shorts with occasional breaks for sea swimming and tourism. Local people witnessed all the sweatstained activity, but few grasped its significance. Margarita Ríos Alducín, a nineteen-year-old mother of a small baby who lived with her mother in Havana, gazed in bewilderment at troops and anti-aircraft guns deployed around the city, but ‘I never realized how serious it all was.’
