Life: An Exploded Diagram (24 page)

O
N WEDNESDAY,
October 24, the Americans made their first low-level reconnaissance flights over Cuba. Six U.S. Navy Crusader jets took off from Key West, Florida, and headed south, flying so low that they wet their bellies with sea spray. Having slipped under Cuban radar defenses, they climbed and started taking photographs. Their pictures would show, in clear detail, the construction in progress of a nuclear warhead storage bunker near San Cristóbal. Close by stood lines of fuel tankers, warhead transporters, and tents for MRBMs.

That morning’s ExComm meeting began, as usual, with a briefing by the CIA director, John McCone. It seemed that there were twenty-two Soviet ships steaming toward Cuba. There’d been a heck of a lot of radio traffic, in code, between them and Moscow during the night. Two of the ships, the
Yuri Gagarin
and the
Kimovsk,
could well be carrying armaments. The
Kimovsk
had a very long hold, designed for carrying timber but also suitable for missiles. Both vessels were close to the quarantine line, and there was a Russian Foxtrot-class submarine keeping an eye on them. It looked like showdown time was close at hand.

Kennedy wanted to know what the U.S. navy intended to do if the ships refused to observe the quarantine.

McNamara told him: a U.S. destroyer would intercept the
Kimovsk
while helicopters from the aircraft carrier USS
Essex
would “attempt to divert the sub, or subs.”

“What does that mean, exactly?”

“Well, Mr. President, the helicopters would drop practice depth charges, nonlethal depth charges, to persuade the sub to surface.”

Kennedy did not look well. He had that puffiness around his eyes that made him look slightly Asian, and his posture suggested that he was in pain.

“Jesus,” he said very quietly.

“Sir?”

“Well, Bob, I guess that Russian sub wouldn’t know that these were
practice
charges. I mean, is there any way . . . ? They’re gonna think they’re under attack, aren’t they? And they might take it into their heads to retaliate. These Foxtrots, they can carry nuclear torpedoes, as I recall. If he doesn’t surface, if he takes some action, some action to assist the merchant ship, are we going to attack him for real? At what point are we gonna attack him? I think we should wait on that. We don’t want the first thing we attack as a Soviet submarine. I’d much rather have a merchant ship.”

McNamara said, “I think it would be extremely dangerous, Mr. President, to defer attack on this sub in the situation we’re in. We could easily lose an American ship by that means. . . .”

The secretary of defense clammed up. A CIA man had entered the Cabinet Room. He spooked his way over to McCone, handed his boss a note, and spooked his way out again. McCone read the note and looked up.

“We’ve just received information that all six Soviet ships currently identified in Cuban waters have either stopped or reversed course.”

For a moment or two it seemed, and sounded, like victory. Backs were slapped, God was thanked. Then Dean Rusk spoiled it.

“Whadya mean, John,
Cuban waters
?”

McCone said, “Uh, Dean, I don’t know exactly what that means at this moment.”

Kennedy said, “So, are these ships that were already inside the quarantine? Were they ships going in, or going out?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Makes a helluva difference,” Rusk said dryly.

Laughter, of a sort.

“I’ll go and investigate,” McCone said.

The commander of
B-130,
the submarine that troubled ExComm, was Captain Nikolai Shumkov, and he was a deeply unhappy man. The voyage from his Arctic base to the Caribbean was far longer than his boat had been designed for. Its batteries were faulty, and Shumkov had had to surface too frequently to recharge them. In the middle of the Atlantic, he’d run into a hurricane, and the sub had tipped and slewed in the water like a drowned rocking horse. Most of his crew had fallen violently seasick, and cleansing a submarine of vomit is not the easiest thing in the world. When they reached tropical waters, the temperature and the humidity inside the sub rose to unbearable levels. They had insufficient fresh water. Shumkov and his men stripped to their underwear. A combination of noxious air, poor diet, and dehydration brought on an outbreak of a suppurating skin rash. The medical officer treated it with an ointment the color of boiled spinach. Clad in sopping singlets and sad underpants, daubed in green, the crew looked like bad actors playing Venusians in a cheap sci-fi movie. By the time
B-130
was a week from Havana, two of its three diesel engines had stopped working and the boat was struggling to keep up with the merchant ships it was meant to be protecting. Shumkov was well aware from signal intercepts that he was being tracked by Yankee antisubmarine units. The Americans were on the water and in the sky above him. But he had in his torpedo tubes a weapon with the power of the Hiroshima bomb. And he was wired enough to use it.

The Strategic Air Command had five levels of war readiness called defense conditions, or DefCons. In peacetime, with no trouble brewing, SAC ticked over at DefCon 5. The numbers dropped as things hotted up. DefCon 1 was imminent nuclear war. At ten o’clock on that Wednesday morning, General Thomas Power ordered his forces to adopt DefCon 2. An hour later, he descended into his underground command bunker near Omaha, Nebraska, and broadcast a message to SAC bases and missile stations around the world. He emphasized “the seriousness of the situation this nation faces” and assured his listeners — unnecessarily, one might think — that “we are in an advanced state of readiness to meet any emergencies.” But Power wasn’t speaking only to his own people. He’d chosen to broadcast on a high-frequency radio network that he knew was monitored by Soviet intelligence. He wanted to make sure that his message was heard in Moscow. He wanted the Reds to know that they were knocking at the doors of burning perdition.

Chairman Khrushchev’s reply to Kennedy came through to the White House late in the evening. It had clearly been written by him personally, because it was an erratic combination of threat and persuasion, bombast and reason, indignation and pleading, all awkwardly wrapped in the language of international diplomacy. Essentially, though, it came down to this:
What you’re doing is illegal; it’s piracy. You don’t own the seas. We and Cuba are sovereign nations, and you have no right to tell us what we can and can’t do. Imagine if we had done this to you. Would you have said okay? No. Our ships will sail where they want to. Do you really want to start a nuclear war over this issue? Oh, by the way, what about those nuclear weapons you’ve got in Turkey?

The American low-level flights over Cuba continued into the next day. A plane piloted by Lieutenant Gerald Coffee took photos of things the Americans hadn’t previously known were there: Russian battlefield weapons, nuclear battlefield weapons known in the Pentagon as FROGs. They were mobile, quick to arm, and had a range of twenty miles. Fired from a Cuban hilltop, they could destroy anything within a thousand yards of their target. Such as a sizable chunk of an American fleet. Or an invading army heading for the beach in fragile boats.

When the glossy American planes streaked overhead, the Cubans and their Russian guests assumed that they were Cuban planes. The white stars on their fuselages were the insignia of both air forces. When it dawned on him that these aircraft were American, Fidel Castro was outraged. He called a meeting with the Russians and his own air defense people.

“There’s no reason of any kind,” he told them, “why we should not shoot down
Yanquis
that fly over us at three hundred feet. When those low-level planes appear, fry them.”

The Russians looked edgy. They took their orders from Moscow. But those orders took a long time to arrive. Much longer than it took an American plane traveling at five hundred miles an hour to fly the length of Cuba.

With his eyes on the telly, George poured HP sauce onto his helping of Ruth’s tragic cottage pie.

The same map of the Caribbean with the circles on it.

“. . . conflicting reports of Soviet shipping movements . . .”

Meaningless footage of surging American warships that might have been filmed anywhere, at any time.

Harold bloody Macmillan in front of 10 Downing Street, shaking hands with somebody.

Noisy protestors in Grosvenor Square with placards.
NO WAR ON CUBA! USA OUT OF CUBA! YANKS GO HOME!

“Much ruddy good that’ll do,” George muttered through a mouthful of gray mince.

Something about an emergency debate at the United Nations in New York. “Meanwhile, in Washington . . .”

Ruth concentrated on her food, which seemed strangely tasteless. It had happened a few times recently, this inability to taste or smell things. It was another way that things kept going out of focus somehow. Her attention would go wandering, not onto anything else but into blankness, like sleep. A waking sleep, from which she surfaced with a frightened jolt, as if she’d found herself a single step from the edge of a cliff. They lasted only moments, these driftings, but they scared her. Even worse were the hot surges that ran through her body. At least once or twice a day, these past few weeks. They reddened her face and made her sweat, and they brought a kind of panic with them that was like falling or drowning. It was awful when it happened at work. Just a few days ago, she’d had one of these turns while serving a customer. She’d frozen, staring down into the open till, unable to remember which coins were which.

Eventually, she’d summoned up the courage to visit the doctor. He was a posh chap a good deal younger than herself. He’d told her, briskly, that there was nothing wrong with her, that she was merely going through the Change. He gave her a Ministry of Health leaflet about it. On the cover there was a picture of a hale-looking middle-aged woman walking a large dog. A golden retriever, perhaps.

George would never stand for a dog in the house, Ruth had thought.

She’d lived a life of meager proportions, knew it was so and was content. She’d never been to a foreign country, never been to London, and didn’t want to. The only newspaper she read regularly was the
North Norfolk News.
The wider world was vast and therefore dangerous; Ruth excluded it because it caused her only anxiety. She’d persuaded herself that politics had nothing to do with her. And anyway, when it came to politics, she had enough to cope with at home. Maintaining the Secret Treaty of Sexual Nonproliferation between herself and her husband. The bitterly cold war between George and Win. Clem’s moodiness, his prickly neutrality toward his father. And now it seemed that her own body was rebelling against her.

She studied her husband, sidelong. There was gray in his receding hair and in his mustache (along with a spot of sauce). Outdoor work had weathered his lean face, but he was still, she thought, good-looking. He had not, like her, run to fat. She wondered what other women thought, looking at him. The question made a breach in her defenses. She blinked the wetness from her eyes.

“George?”

He lifted his knife hand to hush her.

“Hang on,” he said.

The reedy voice coming from the television belonged to a foxily handsome old man with a crest of white hair. He was the ninety-year-old peace campaigner and Nobel prize–winning philosopher Bertrand Russell.

“Huh,” George grunted after a minute. “What would he know about anything?”

Ruth said unsteadily, “There ent really gorn to be a war, is there, George? I dunt think I could go through another one, on top of everythun else.”

The news came to an end. George looked at her, frowning.

“On top of what everything else?”

She felt hot. “You know. That just dunt seem fair, after all we’re been through.”

“Fair?” George scoffed at the word. “Since when has
fair
got to do with anything?”

She couldn’t think of any reply.

George, as if only then realizing they were alone, said, “Where’s Clem?”

“He said to keep his warm. He’re gone out.”

“What about your mother?”

“Gone down the Brethren.”

“What, again?”

Ruth managed a laugh of sorts. “Yeah. I reckon they think if they pray hard enough, that Bomb wunt drop. D’yer want any more of that pie?”

George leaned back in his chair and felt in his overall pocket for his cigarettes.

“No, I’m all right, ta. Is there anything for afters?”

B
Y FRIDAY,
October 26, President Kennedy had become very twitchy, and not just because of the badly mixed cocktail of drugs he was having for breakfast. Four days into the sea blockade, and no Cuba-bound Russian ships had been intercepted or turned back. No missiles or warheads had been discovered. The “quarantine” looked like it was becoming a tactical and public-relations disaster.

JFK was used to having good press; he was skilled at media management. But now that word
weak
was showing up in the American newspapers. In Britain and elsewhere in Europe, public opinion was turning against him. The slogan
U.S. out of Cuba,
which he saw on television news broadcasts, irked him enormously. It wasn’t the United States that was in Cuba, for Christ’s sake; it was the goddamn Russians. They’d started it.

But the president of the United States couldn’t just start yelling, “It’s not fair,” like an angry schoolboy.

He was under fierce pressure from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. General Maxwell Taylor had told him, politely but bluntly, that you can’t order the biggest troop mobilization since World War II and then sit on the fence whistling “Dixie.”

You can’t keep men tensed at High Alert for more than a few days. Something will blow.

And then, of course, there was the major question of what was going on in Cuba itself. The quarantine was doing nothing about that. Did the Russians, by now, have IRBMs ready to fire, ready to rain hottest hell down on San Francisco and Pittsburgh?

The Friday morning meeting of ExComm was a mixture of fear and farce. By then Lundahl of the CIA had taken a good look at Lieutenant Coffee’s photographs.

When his boss, John McCone, told ExComm that the Cubans had battlefield nuclear weapons, it changed the complexion of things.

“These weapons are relatively small and mobile,” McCone told them. “They are most likely no longer in the same positions in which we photographed them. Even if we bombed Cuba for a week before sending troops in, we could not guarantee their destruction.”

There was a big blink. FROGs were the Devil’s own artillery. If the Reds or Castro were crazy enough to use them, there would be thousands of marines dead on the Cuban beaches. An aircraft carrier and a destroyer or two joining the
Maine
on the seabed. Nuclear radiation spread over half the Caribbean. Not good. Not good at all.

Adlai Stevenson, America’s ambassador to the United Nations, was a cultured, sensitive man. As a diplomat, he deplored confrontation and took no pleasure in humiliating an opponent. He was, in Kennedy’s terminology, a Dove. His insistence that the problem be peaceably resolved by the U.N. was contemptuously dismissed by the Hawks as fatally weak. So when he returned to Washington from New York with the U.N.’s proposal for a standstill, he fully expected to get blitzed. And he did.

He spelled out the U.N.’s proposition to ExComm.

1. No ships would go to Cuba carrying arms of any sort.

2. There would be no further work on the Soviet missile bases.

Okay so far. Then.

3. The quarantine would be suspended.

The Hawks screamed down on Stevenson.

“So we do
nothing
?”

“We lift the quarantine, and the Russians do whatever the hell they like?”

“Adlai, are you crazy? This is like letting the Soviets
win
!”

“No, listen —”

“Mr. Ambassador, we are already at DefCon 2. Do you know what that means?”

Kennedy calmed things down. He asked Stevenson to explain how this “standstill” might work.

I can’t resist including the following mad dialogue from the secret tapes. It could be part of a script for a TV comedy.
The End of the World Show,
or something like that.

Dean Rusk
:
The work on the Russian bases must include the inoperability of the missiles.

Stevenson
:
I think it would be quite proper to attempt to do that, but we would have to say “
keep
them inoperable.” It would be a different thing to say that they should be
rendered
inoperable, because that requires —

Rusk
:
Okay, “
keep
them inoperable.”

McNamara
:
Well, when did they
become
inoperable?

McGeorge Bundy
:
So, uh, “make sure that they are inoperable.”

Stevenson
:
Well, that . . . You see, I’m trying to make clear to you that this is a
standstill.
No more construction, no more quarantine, no more arms shipments. Now, when you say “
make
them inoperable,” that’s not a standstill.

Unidentified speaker
:
You can
ensure
that they’re inoperable. Then that leaves open the question whether it’s a standstill.

Rusk:
If they turn out to be
operable,
then that means something altogether different.

Wonderful, isn’t it? Here are the Brightest and Best, within a gnat’s whisker, as far as they know, of global catastrophe, and they’re arguing about the meaning of the word
standstill.
That old pedant Tash Harmsworth would’ve been delighted, though not so much with the Americans’ grammar.

Of course, the whole discussion was pointless. The Russians had a veto in the U.N. Security Council, and there was no way in the world they were going to vote for a “standstill” and allow U.N. inspectors to snoop around their Cuban missile sites. In the language of the Hawks, Adlai Stevenson and the other Doves were screwed. War was on its way. It was the only game in town. The only question was, who dealt?

Clem had looked up
coy
in the two-volume
Oxford Dictionary
and had been surprised to discover that it was the name for “a lobster trap.” Surely not . . . No, the second definition offered “shyly undemonstrative” or “distant, disdainful.” That would be it. Then he sat in one of the beaten-up leather armchairs in the Nelson Library with a copy of
The Oxford Book of English Verse
and turned its small, wispy pages until he got to
Marvell.

He found the poem hard going, at first. Shakespearean. Until he got to the line that ended with the word
breast.
It definitely meant “tit,” because Marvell was talking about taking two hundred years “to adore each breast.” And “each” means there were two, therefore . . . Then came the lines that Tash had quoted in the bogs.

Clem went back to the beginning of the poem and read more slowly, and it dawned on him: the poem was about seduction; no, the poem
was
a seduction. It was pretty dirty, actually.

Marvell was saying to his tight-kneed girlfriend, “Look, we’re going to die, and it might happen anytime soon. And we’re going to be a long time dead. So let’s have sex, right now, before it’s too late.”

It struck Clem as a fairly convincing argument. And urgently topical, despite having been written three hundred years ago.

He didn’t understand the last two lines:

Thus, though we cannot make our sun

Stand still, yet we will make him run.

But the gist of the poem was clear enough. He went to the signing-out book on the corner table and wrote,
The Ox Book of Eng Verse,
then his name and the date.

A lower-sixther called Sullivan walked into the room and said, “The four-minute warning has just gone off. No, really. Didn’t you hear it? I’m off upstairs to do Stinker’s daughter before I die. Anyone coming with me? The swivel-eyed tart will never know which one of us it was.”

“Go away, Slug,” a prefect named Bradley said from another armchair. “Or would you prefer that in language that you understand?”

The American invasion of Cuba was code-named Operation Scabbards. It would begin with a series of massive air bombardments: three a day until missile sites and other military targets had been wiped out. Then twenty-three thousand airborne troops would seize Havana’s airport — or what was left of it — south of the city. Meanwhile eight divisions, a hundred and twenty thousand men, would land on beaches to the east and west. The Americans would converge on Havana from all three directions, isolating it and cutting it off from its inland missile bases, if any had survived.

All well and good, except that the Americans still didn’t know about the forty thousand Soviet troops waiting to greet them. And until late on Friday, the officers who would be at the sharp end didn’t know that the Russians had nuclear battlefield weapons. When they found out, they started demanding them, too.

Castro and his Russian allies had received a good deal of information — some of it accurate — about the American buildup. Fidel was convinced that the
Yanquis
hadn’t invested so much energy, and so many of their filthy capitalist dollars, in some sort of symbolic gesture. This time they would invade, for sure. He’d been anticipating — eagerly, some thought — another invasion ever since the Bay of Pigs fiasco. He’d never really understood why Kennedy had pulled back that time. Maybe because he was a gutless playboy millionaire. But this time, he’d have to go for it. He was too weak to stand up to his generals, and besides, he was fighting a congressional election. He’d need to pretend to be a man of action, of decision.

Fidel Castro was not someone who spent much time on introspection. Had he been, he might have had to admit to himself that he was a lousy politician. What he was good at, though, very good at, was Heroism. The crisis fueled him. Thrilled him. He’d spent the past week in incessant motion, snatching only short periods of sleep in the back of his car or in his underground command post across the river from the Havana zoo. To his Cuban troops, he had spoken of “patriotism” and “
dignidad
”— dignity. Fidel was very big on
dignity,
which is what you die with. To the Russians, he had spoken of the defense of Communism and the revolution, and urged them to stay off the booze, of which they were very fond.

What was worrying him most, on Friday night, was Cuba’s vulnerability to American air attack. His own antiaircraft defenses were weak. The Russians had SAMs, surface-to-air missiles, but he didn’t have direct control over them. It seemed to him vital that the comrades not sit there twiddling their thumbs while the
Yanqui
bombs fell, waiting for instructions from Moscow. At two o’clock on Saturday morning, he sent a message to Aleksandr Alekseev, the Soviet ambassador to Cuba, telling him to expect a visit. Alekseev was a great admirer of Castro. But I bet he groaned when he was woken up. Castro could talk nonstop for hours. He could talk you to a standstill.