The Abyss, page 51
The critical passage of Khrushchev’s missive to Kennedy, now read to the world, stated: ‘I have received your message of October 27, 1962. I express my satisfaction and gratitude for the sense of proportion and understanding of the responsibility borne by you at present for the preservation of peace throughout the world which you have shown. I very well understand your anxiety and the anxiety of the United States’ people in connection with the fact that the weapons which you describe as “offensive” are, in fact, grim weapons . . . In order to complete with greater speed the liquidation of the conflict dangerous to the cause of peace, to give confidence to all people longing for peace, and to calm the American people, who, I am certain, want peace as much as do the people of the Soviet Union, the Soviet government, in addition to previously-issued instructions on the cessation of further work at building sites for the weapons, has issued a new order on the dismantling of the weapons which you describe as “offensive” and their crating and return to the Soviet Union.’
Two signals to Pliev in Cuba were dispatched that Sunday by Malinovsky, undoubtedly prompted by Khrushchev and perhaps dictated by him: ‘We believe that you were too hasty in shooting down the US U-2 reconnaissance plane, at the time an agreement was emerging to avert, by peaceful means, an attack on Cuba . . . We have made the decision to dismantle the R-12s and remove them. Begin to implement the measure. Confirm receipt . . . In addition to the order not to use [SAM] S-75s, to avoid clashes with US reconnaissance planes you are ordered not to “scramble” fighters.’ Moreover, the general was instructed that when U Thant and his UN delegation arrived in Cuba on their imminently scheduled peace mission, they were to be permitted to visit the Soviet missile sites, to confirm the dismantling.
It is not difficult to comprehend the anger and resentment of the senior Soviet officers in Cuba who read these signals. None had sought to be posted to the Caribbean, the sick Pliev least of all. They had striven in an extraordinarily hostile environment, amid fractious and excited local people, to execute orders which required them, essentially, to prepare to confront the Americans in arms. Now they were told that all their labour and hardships had been wasted. They were to retire with no glory and little honour. Thoughtful men among them may have appreciated the value of Kennedy’s new guarantee of Cuban inviolability. Mac Bundy wrote in 1988 that Khrushchev ‘had saved much from the shipwreck of his bold venture’. Some Russians may also have felt gratitude for their own deliverance from the looming threat of incineration. There were few such on the island, however, in those last days of October.
Yet another signal was dispatched by Soviet naval authorities to vessels at sea, which caused US warships in the western Atlantic to report before dawn on the status of the tanker Grozny, inbound towards the blockade line with its cargo of ammonia: ‘Contact dead in the water since 0430’. Soon after 9 a.m. in Washington, afternoon in Europe, the contents of the broadcast from Radio Moscow began clattering off the world’s news agency wire machines. The president read the words that promised to avert war as he prepared to leave the White House Mansion to attend mass. ‘I feel like a new man now,’ he told Dave Powers. Bundy said: ‘It was a very beautiful morning and it had suddenly become many times more beautiful.’
At the Pentagon, the US chiefs of staff refused to believe a word of it. They messaged the president: ‘The JCS interpret the Khrushchev statement, in conjunction with the [Soviet] buildup, to be efforts to delay direct action by the United States while preparing the ground for diplomatic blackmail.’ The chiefs asked Kennedy to order a full air strike against Cuba for next day, to be followed by invasion. Maxwell Taylor duly forwarded this recommendation, while telling McNamara that he himself dissented. Curtis LeMay did not trouble to hide his rage that the USAF’s beautiful programme of air strikes, designed to devastate Cuba, at a stroke appeared redundant. While McNamara, who had slept at the Pentagon since the Crisis began, strove to calm the service brass, all save Taylor persisted with their insistence that the Kremlin message was a ruse, designed to buy time to hide the missiles. Robert Kennedy observed with some disdain: ‘Admiral Anderson’s reaction to the news was “we have been had”. This caused the President to say wearily “The military are mad. It’s lucky for us that we have McNamara over there.”’
The attorney-general had started that morning by fulfilling a longstanding promise to take his daughters to a horse show at the Washington Armory. It was there that he received a call from Dean Rusk, reporting the news. The attorney-general drove immediately through the deserted Sunday morning streets of the capital to the White House, where he received a request to meet Anatoly Dobrynin, and thus left again for his own office. There, the Soviet ambassador told him that he had been requested by Khrushchev to convey best wishes to both Kennedy brothers.
RFK returned to the White House, to share with the president an overwhelming surge of relief. As he then left the Oval Office, JFK offered another characteristic witticism, almost unbearably painful to posterity in the light of what came thirteen months later. Recalling Lincoln, he said: ‘This is the night I should go to the theater.’ His brother said: ‘If you go, I want to go with you.’ Then the president sat down to write to Jane Anderson, widow of the downed U-2 pilot.
At 11.10 a.m. the Excom group reassembled in a mood of euphoria. Dean Rusk said that eight days earlier the president had remarked ironically that whatever course they adopted, those who advocated it would wind up being sorry. Now, however, ‘I think there is some gratification for everyone’s line of action, except [for those who wanted] to do nothing.’ Bundy said that, after days when some had been hawks and others doves, this was a day of the doves. The president urged his advisers to display caution in their public statements. The Cuban quarantine would remain in place until all other arrangements were made: ‘No interview should be given, no statement made, which would claim any kind of victory . . . [I]f it was a triumph, it was a triumph for the next generation and not for any particular government or people.’
When the meeting broke up soon after noon, following a session lasting less than an hour, Kennedy telephoned in succession America’s three living ex-presidents to pass on the news, with RFK listening in. Eisenhower asked warily: ‘Did [Khrushchev] put any conditions in whatsoever, in there?’ Kennedy said, far from truthfully: ‘No, except that we’re not going to invade Cuba . . . [Although] my guess is that, by the end of next month, we’re going to be toe to toe on Berlin.’ Harry Truman said generously: ‘I’m just pleased to death the way these things came out.’ Herbert Hoover said: ‘It seems to me these recent events are rather incredible . . . That represents a good triumph for you.’ Then Kennedy left Washington to join his wife and children at Glen Ora, their rented weekend house at Middleburg, Virginia.
At Novo-Ogaryovo, once the letter had been dispatched to Radio Moscow, Khrushchev’s hitherto grim demeanour brightened. He threw open the meeting-room doors to call on the flunkeys outside to produce lunch. The senior guard excused the staff for some delay, saying that they had been unable to lay the table. The Presidium members left their chairs and began chatting inconsequentially while the meal was set out. Sergei Khrushchev wrote: ‘The entire atmosphere changed, as if the sun had come out after a thunderstorm.’ The family had been awaiting Nikita Sergeyevich at their dacha, ten minutes’ drive away from the guesthouse where the Presidium was meeting. They ate lunch without him; first heard the news of what he had been doing on the 5 p.m. bulletin.
Once the Presidium members had listened to Radio Moscow’s broadcast, Khrushchev said abruptly, in an uncanny echo of Kennedy’s words to his brother: ‘Why don’t we go to the theatre? We’ll show the whole world there’s nothing to fear.’ As always, no one dissented. What was playing downtown? They were told there was a final performance that night by a visiting Bulgarian ensemble. ‘That’s good,’ said the first secretary. ‘Let’s go and see the Bulgarians.’ It was almost six o’clock, and he merely paused briefly at his own dacha to change a shirt before the show.
Harold Macmillan, writing his diary on Sunday night, the 28th, was a man bewildered as well as exhausted: ‘Impossible to describe what has been happening in this hour-by-hour battle . . . The Turkey offer to Khrushchev was very dangerous . . . The press today . . . were awful. It was like Munich [1938] . . . All through Saturday night, the strain continued . . . As we were finishing luncheon together, the news came (by radio) that the Russians had given in! First they admit to the ballistic missiles (hitherto denied by Communists and doubted by all good fellow-travellers in every country).’ Here, Macmillan referred to the throngs of demonstrators who not merely blamed the US for its response to the Crisis, but had also swallowed Moscow’s denials of the reality of the threat. The prime minister initially found it hard to credit the outcome: ‘A complete climb-down (if they keep their word).’ His scepticism was at least partially merited. President Kennedy did not inform the British – nor, indeed, any other ally – of his private pledge on removal of the Turkish missiles.
A curious sense of let-down, of anti-climax however welcome, overtook Macmillan’s room at Admiralty House. He said to the little cluster of intimates who remained, after his ministers and senior advisers had gone home: ‘It’s like a wedding when there is nothing left to do but drink the champagne and go to sleep.’ In New York veteran CBS News correspondent Charles Collingwood told millions of American viewers: ‘This is the day we have every reason to believe the world came out from under the most terrible threat of nuclear holocaust since World War II.’ Khrushchev’s letter to the US president, he said, represented a ‘humiliating defeat for Soviet policy’.
While both the White House and the Kremlin felt tolerably confident that the Crisis was within sight of ending, the threat of Armageddon lifted, many ordinary people remained fearful. A notably wary leader in the London Times of 29 October acknowledged that the worst might be past, but declined to take the good news for granted. Elsewhere the distinguished columnist Murray Kempton wrote from New York: ‘There were many indications, and still are, that the President is under great pressure to invade Cuba and get it over. Europe must remember that there is no peace party in the United States [resembling the anti-nuclear movements in Europe]. There is seldom a peace party in any nation in a crisis like last week’s.’ Kempton feared that some forces in the US might derive the lesson from the events of October that the only way to treat the Soviets was to adopt a hard line ‘whenever a direct confrontation can be made’.
David Ormsby-Gore wrote in a personal letter to the president: ‘I am lost in admiration for the superb manner in which you have handled the tremendous events of the critical week we have just lived through. Well done.’ Walter Lippmann applauded the way in which Kennedy had ‘so narrowed his objectives to what he had the power to achieve’, then exercised that power to secure them. Iverach McDonald, foreign editor of The Times, together with Lippmann, lunched in London the following week with foreign secretary Lord Home. The British minister, in a spirit echoing that of the US president, warned against any parade of Western triumphalism. Home added: ‘The chief frightening thing about it all is that Khrushchev could have miscalculated so badly. It could mean that he could blunder into war another time.’ The Spectator agreed: ‘One of the most striking lessons of the whole affair has been the view it has given us of the quality of the Soviet leadership.’ The editorial characterized the Kremlin’s conduct as ‘shallow, irresponsible adventurism . . . the peasant Machiavellianism, the cheap conman’s and gambler’s quality of mind, which came as a surprise even to those of us who have not credited the Russians with any great sense in the past.’
France’s Le Monde headed its comment ‘An unexpected turn of events’, then expressed astonishment that only twenty-four hours after Moscow had proposed a swap, ‘Mr. Khrushchev simply bowed to Mr. Kennedy’s terms and conditions . . . One is left with the feeling that he had no choice. However, serious difficulties persist. Mr. Fidel Castro’s tone stood in stark contrast to that of Mr. Khrushchev.’ The Economist’s editorial of 3 November expressed both astonishment at the completeness of the Soviet climbdown and effusive praise for the fashion in which Kennedy had played his hand. Such enthusiasm contrasted with the mistrust of American judgement often voiced in the magazine’s pages. It also offered ‘unstinted credit’ to the president for his promise not to undertake further military action against Cuba. This seemed to most British people to represent wisdom, quite independent of the need to offer the Soviets a deal. They had been appalled by the possibility of a global war over Castro’s island.
Most of Kennedy’s own countrymen, even those unimpressed by other things he had done or not done since January 1961, applauded his handling of the Crisis. His personal approval rating, measured by Gallup, rose to a stellar 74 per cent, up from 63 per cent two months earlier. In the congressional elections held on 6 November, against the historic tide of most mid-term contests the Democrats strengthened their dominance of the Senate, winning an additional four seats, and increased their margin of the popular vote in the House polls, despite losing one seat.
A few of those in the American military loop likewise commended the administration’s handling of the Crisis. USAF intelligence officer Maj. Gen. Robert Breitweiser said: ‘I thought it was brought off rather skillfully. The eyeball-to-eyeball bit in which the Soviet supply vessels turned around at the last minute was a pretty good piece of standing firm without overdoing it.’ This was a minority armed forces view, however. Most of Breitweiser’s comrades deplored the outcome; continued loudly to lament Kennedy’s failure to exploit a perceived opportunity to rub in the dirt the noses of both the Soviets and Cubans. Curtis LeMay said: ‘We would have gotten not only the missiles out of Cuba, we could have gotten the Communists out of Cuba . . . In my mind there wasn’t a chance that we would have gone to war with Russia because we had overwhelming strategic capability, and the Russians knew it.’
Another USAF general, World War II fighter pilot Bruce Holloway, said: ‘I think if we had cleaned out that rats’ nest, it would have cut back a lot of the Communist growth in South America for a long, long time.’ Holloway thought air strikes alone would have done it: ‘I was surprised we didn’t actually go in there. I thought we were going.’ The USAF’s Lt. Gen. David Burchinal, LeMay’s forty-seven-year-old deputy, said: ‘There were two big arguments going on. One was the nuclear confrontation that we had already solved. That we won hands down. The second one was do you invade Cuba or don’t you? And of course the military and the hawks wanted to go in and clean it out – take out Castro, get rid of the problem decisively for all time, and the other side [in the White House] didn’t want to invade, just talk. “We will do a little of this, a little of that.” We just fiddled around . . . We had the capability to do the job but in the final analysis it was the indecision . . . at the top. Nobody would bite the bullet.’
When, a few months later, the order came down to remove the Jupiter missiles from Turkey, USAF deputy chief of staff Major-General Gabriel Disosway, who had negotiated the original deployments, was disgusted: ‘They had the Russians on the run and they figured they had to give them a way out so they negotiated . . . We never got to make any inspection of whether the missiles were gone. They could still be in Cuba as far as we know . . . As we said around the Pentagon, we snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory.’ Such views, from the US Air Force’s most senior officers, emphasize the strength of military passions in those days, to which the secretary of defense was the striking hold-out. The USAF’s deputy director of plans Col. Jerry Page described McNamara as ‘the greatest menace to the safety of the United States that’s ever been in Washington’.
Dean Acheson, unusual among the civilians in that he had been an unwavering hawk, even now privately declined to acknowledge that he might have been wrong. He described White House management as ‘a gamble to the point of recklessness’, its success ‘home to plain dumb luck’. Acheson nonetheless wrote graciously to the president: ‘May I congratulate you on your leadership, firmness and judgement over the past tough week. We have not had these qualities at the helm in this country at all times. It is good to have them again. Only a few people know better than me how hard these decisions are to make, and how broad the gap between the advisers and the decider.’
Dean Rusk said: ‘Those who experienced the Missile Crisis came out of it a little different people from what they were before they went into it.’ He intended to suggest, of course, that they had explored the furthest reaches of global peril, diplomacy and statesmanship. Yet it is hard to accept that, beyond the president himself, those tested in the fire of Excom membership thus achieved a great accession of wisdom, since those same men would march the United States into Vietnam, and keep it there for the best part of a decade.
As for reaction within the Soviet Union, the Economist noted sardonically that the aged and oft-disgraced Marshal Kliment Voroshilov ‘had to be picked from the dustbin of history to proclaim in Pravda mankind’s gratitude to Mr. Khrushchev for his performance’. Nikolai Kozakov wrote on 28 October: ‘Shark [Khrushchev] has sent Kennedy another letter. Of course, it is very long and not free of threats, but what matters is that he has ordered a halt to construction work on the missile sites in Cuba, the return of the weapons to the USSR. In short, he has put his naked arse into the stinging nettles. Kennedy, in turn, has guaranteed that they will not attack Cuba. Of course, a lot of diplomatic manoeuvring will follow, but the crisis has been resolved, in the USA’s favour. I finished my poem [about the Crisis] and read it to my mum. She approved, but she also thinks that it is too late now’ – and so thought Kozakov’s editors.
