A TALE OF THREE CITIES: NEW YORK, L.A. AND SAN FRANCISCO IN OCTOBER OF ‘62 (63 page)

"'In this regard,' R. Kennedy said, ' the
president considers that a suitable basis for regulating the entire
Cuban conflict might be the letter N.S. Khrushchev sent on
October.26 and the letter in response from the President which was
sent off today to N.S. Khrushchev through the US Embassy in Moscow.
The most important thing for us,' R. Kennedy stressed, 'is to get
as soon as possible the agreement of the Soviet government to halt
further work on the construction of the missile bases in Cuba and
take measures under international control that would make it
impossible to use these weapons. In exchange the government of the
USA is ready, in addition to repealing all measures on the
"quarantine," to give the assurances that there will not be any
invasion of Cuba and that other countries of the Western Hemisphere
are ready to give the same assurances - the US government is
certain of this.'

"'And what about Turkey?' I asked R.
Kennedy.

"'If that is the only obstacle to achieving
the regulation I mentioned earlier, then the president doesn't see
any unsurmountable difficulties in resolving this issue,' replied
R. Kennedy. 'The greatest difficulty for the president is the
public discussion of the issue of Turkey. Formally the deployment
of missile bases in Turkey was done by a special decision of the
NATO Council. To announce now a unilateral decision by the
president of the USA to withdraw missile bases from Turkey - this
would damage the entire structure of NATO and the US position as
the leader of NATO, where, as the Soviet government knows very
well, there are many arguments. In short. if such a decision were
announced now it would seriously tear apart NATO.

"'However, President Kennedy is ready to
come to agree on that question with N.S. Khrushchev, too. I think
that in order to withdraw these bases from Turkey,' R. Kennedy
said, 'we need 4-5 months. This is the minimal amount of time
necessary for the US government to do this, taking into account the
procedures that exist within the NATO framework. On the whole
Turkey issue,' R. Kennedy added, if Premier N.S. Khrushchev agrees
with what I've said, we can continue to exchange opinions between
him and the president, using him, R. Kennedy and the Soviet
ambassador. ''However, the president can't say anything public in
this regard about Turkey,' R. Kennedy said again. R. Kennedy then
warned that his comments about Turkey are extremely confidential;
besides him and his brother, only 2-3 people know about it in
Washington.

"'That's all that he asked me to pass on to
N.S. Khrushchev,' R. Kennedy said in conclusion. 'The president
also asked N.S. Khrushchev to give him an answer (through the
Soviet ambassador and R. Kennedy) if possible within the next day
(Sunday) on these thoughts in order to have a business-like, clear
answer in principle. [He asked him] not to get into a wordy
discussion, which might drag things out. The current serious
situation, unfortunately, is such that there is very little time to
resolve this whole issue.

"'Unfortunately, events are developing too
quickly. The request for a reply tomorrow,' stressed R. Kennedy,
'is just that - a request, and not an ultimatum. The president
hopes that the head of the Soviet government will understand him
correctly.'

I noted that it went without saying that the
Soviet government would not accept any ultimatums and it was good
that the American government realized that. I also reminded him of
N.S. Khrushchev's appeal in his last letter to the president to
demonstrate state wisdom in resolving this question. Then I told R.
Kennedy that the president's thoughts would be brought to the
attention of the head of the Soviet government. I also said that I
would contact him as soon as there was a reply. In this regard, R.
Kennedy gave me a number of a direct telephone line to the White
House.

"In the course of the conversation, R.
Kennedy noted that he knew about the conversation that television
commentator Scali had yesterday with an Embassy adviser on possible
ways to regulate the Cuban conflict [one-and-a-half lines whited
out]

I should say that during our meeting R.
Kennedy was very upset; in any case, I've never seen him like this
before. True, about twice he tried to return to the topic of
'deception,' (that he talked about so persistently during our
previous meeting), but he did so in passing and without any edge to
it. 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.

"After meeting with me he immediately went
to see the president, with whom, as R. Kennedy said, he spends
almost all his time now."

27/X-62 A. DOBRYNIN

(Source: Russian Foreign
Ministry archives, translation from copy provided by NHK, in
Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein,
We All Lost the Cold War
, Princeton,
New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994, appendix, pages
523-526, with minor revisions.)

Lebow and Stein comment

We All Lost the Cold
War
(excerpt):

"The cable testifies to the concern of John
and Robert Kennedy that military action would trigger runaway
escalation. Robert Kennedy told Dobrynin of his government's
determination to ensure the removal of the Soviet missiles in Cuba,
and his belief that the Soviet Union 'will undoubtedly respond with
the same against us, somewhere in Europe.' Such an admission seems
illogical if the administration was using the threat of force to
compel the Soviet Union to withdraw its missiles from Cuba. It
significantly raised the expected cost to the United States of an
attack against the missiles, thereby weakening the credibility of
the American threat. To maintain or enhance that credibility,
Kennedy would have had to discount the probability of Soviet
retaliation to Dobrynin. That nobody in the government was certain
of Khrushchev's response makes Kennedy's statement all the more
remarkable.

"It is possible that Dobrynin misquoted
Robert Kennedy. However, the Soviet Ambassador was a careful and
responsible diplomat. At the very least, Kennedy suggested that he
thought that Soviet retaliation was likely. Such an admission was
still damaging to compellence. It seems likely that Kennedy was
trying to establish the basis for a more cooperative approach to
crisis resolution. His brother, he made clear, was under enormous
pressure from a coterie of generals and civilian officials who were
'itching for a fight.' This also was a remarkable admission for the
Attorney General to make. The pressure on the President to attack
Cuba, as Kennedy explained at the beginning of the meeting, had
been greatly intensified by the destruction of an unarmed American
reconnaissance plane. The President did not want to use force, in
part because he recognized the terrible consequences of escalation,
and was therefore requesting Soviet assistance to make it
unnecessary.

"This interpretation is supported by the
President's willingness to remove the Jupiter missiles as a quid
pro quo for the withdrawal of missiles in Cuba, and his brother's
frank confession that the only obstacle to dismantling the Jupiters
were political. 'Public discussion' of a missile exchange would
damage the United States' position in NATO. For this reason,
Kennedy revealed, 'besides himself and his brother, only two-three
people know about it in Washington.' Khrushchev would have to
cooperate with the administration to keep the American concession a
secret.

"Most extraordinary of all is the apparent
agreement between Dobrynin and Kennedy to treat Kennedy's de facto
ultimatum as 'a request, and not an ultimatum.' This was a
deliberate attempt to defuse as much as possible the hostility that
Kennedy's request for an answer by the next day was likely to
provoke in Moscow. So too was Dobrynin's next sentence: 'I noted
that it went without saying that the Soviet government would not
accept any ultimatum and it was good that the American government
realized that.'

"Prior meetings between Dobrynin and Kennedy
had sometimes degenerated into shouting matches. On this occasion,
Dobrynin indicates, the Attorney General kept his emotions in check
and took the Ambassador into his confidence in an attempt to
cooperate on the resolution of the crisis. This two-pronged
strategy succeeded where compellence alone might have failed. It
gave Khrushchev positive incentives to remove the Soviet missiles
and reduced the emotional cost to him of the withdrawal. He
responded as Kennedy and Dobrynin had hoped."

****

The Kennedy image was burnished in the 1980s
by Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy, who felt President Ronald
Reagan was embracing brinkmanship. They joined other former Kennedy
aides warning that the Cuban Missile Crisis had not been resolved
by America's nuclear superiority, but conventional superiority in
the Caribbean, enabling restraint and quarantine to replace nuclear
war.

Declassified U.S. government documents in
the mid-1980s included notes and transcripts of Kennedy's top
advisers, portraying a President devoted to peace in direct
contradiction to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Led by Air Force
General "bombs away with" Curt LeMay (who prosecuted the Dresden
firebombings), the military was supposed to be itching to go to
war. The chiefs could not guarantee the destruction through air
strikes of all the Soviet missiles in Cuba. If JFK thought he could
achieve through the crisis what he had failed to do at the Bay of
Pigs, perhaps he would have endorsed a strike. But he faced,
instead, the prospect of killing a lot of Russians and Cubans,
creating a huge international imbroglio, and in the end not only
failing to destroy the nukes but giving the Communists the excuse
they wanted to keep them there.

In 1987 Dean Rusk revealed
the proposal of a public Turkey-Cuba trade through the United
Nations. Theodore Sorenson admitted that while editing
Thirteen Days
he cut
references in RFK's diary to the Turkey-Cuba deal. JFK had
dismissed such proposal as appeasement, attributing it to U.S.
Ambassador to the U.N. Adlai Stevenson (who JFK disliked and called
a "swisher" because he felt he lacked manly sexuality). A
declassified cable from Dobrynin (published in the Cold War
International History Project Bulletin) showed that RFK made the
deal explicit, commenting to Dobrynin that such a document "could
cause irreparable harm to my political career in the
future."

Held between 1987 and 1992, a series of
conferences were organized by James Blight and Janet Lang of the
Thomas J. Watson Jr., Institute for International Studies at Brown
University. Many introduced revelations of "critical oral history,"
and included Kennedy aides, Soviet participants, and Cuban veterans
(among them Fidel Castro). Along with intermediate-range missiles,
the Soviet arsenal in Cuba included tactical nuclear warheads that
might have been used if the United States had invaded. Cuba was
apparently more in control of their destiny than originally
painted, although Castro's survival and the downfall of the Soviet
Union and their leadership allows him to create this picture more
easily. He is supposed to have said to Kruschev "use 'em or lose
'em."

Most Soviet recollection
was uncorroborated, diluted by age, or came from children, like
Khrushchev's son.
One Hell of a
Gamble
by Russian scholar Alexandr A.
Fursenko and Yale University historian Timothy Naftali, cited
quotations from still-secret Moscow archives, and were compared
with new U.S. documentation.

The crisis was the
beginning of the end of Kruschev, who was ousted by hard-liners in
an October, 1964 coup
.
A military intelligence officer named Georgi Bolshakov
reportedly met with Bobby Kennedy on a backchannel basis 51 times
in 1961 and '62. KGB intelligence failed the Politburo. KGB station
chief Alexandr Feklisov reported in March, 1962 that he had at
least three well-placed sources whose names "the Russian government
continues to protect." Wanna bet their Democrats? Despite this, the
KGB ended up relying on inaccurate invasion tips from a bartender
at the National Press Club!

Khrushchev ended up believing nobody. He
dealt with a non-KGB inner circle and did not delegate authority or
consult with his intelligence agencies, probably out of fear from
his own experiences moving up the Stalinist ladder during the Beria
era. The Politburo was infuriated at his habit of inviting
prominent American businessmen visiting Moscow to the Kremlin, as
if the head of Westinghouse could enlighten him as to U.S. military
intentions. While trying to decide whether to place tactical
nuclear weapons in Cuba, Khrushchev was visited at his dacha by the
poet Robert Frost!

The Kennedy version of the crisis is
designed to make them appear particularly heroic, saving the world
from Armageddon. The odds of nuclear war have been said to be one
in three. McGeorge Bundy said one in 100. That is quite a
differential.

"In this apocalyptic matter the risk can be
very small indeed and still much too large for comfort," Bundy
added.

Much of the history related to the crisis
centers on the aftermath of it, not the causes. Cuban leaders were
expecting another invasion, and there is little doubt that they
were going to get something - an invasion, an attempted
assassination, a CIA-organized coup, or a combination of the above.
Notably, former Secretary of Defense McNamara acknowledged in 1989,
meeting with former Soviet and Cuban officials, that "if I had been
a Cuban leader, I think I might have expected a U.S. invasion. Why?
Because the U.S. had carried out what I have referred to publicly
as a debacle - the Bay of Pigs invasion...Secondly, there were
covert operations. The Cubans knew that. There were covert
operations extending over a long period of time."