Reappraisals (54 page)

Conversely, had the U.S. not uncovered Khrushchev’s plans to install missiles in Cuba before they were complete, Kennedy would certainly have been faced, in November 1962, with a huge political dilemma: accept the indefinite presence of Soviet ballistic missiles just off the U.S. coast, or else stage a crisis under much less favorable military and diplomatic conditions. This situation might have been made worse by Khrushchev, who, with his missiles securely in situ, could have been tempted to push his advantage well beyond what was prudent; at best he would then have suffered a reversal even more humiliating and public than the one he accepted on October 28.

Given Khrushchev’s decision to place nuclear missiles in Cuba (a decision taken well before Kennedy’s public warnings of September 1962), an international crisis of some kind was thus unavoidable. If it took the unnecessarily terrifying form that it did, this was in large measure because of a simple American misunderstanding that can stand as a metaphor for much of the early cold war. The officials in Washington thought that their Soviet opponents were playing a complicated game of diplomatic chess, with the various pawns on the international board—Czechoslovakia, Korea, Germany, Egypt, Indochina, and now Cuba—being subtly moved around to the calculated advantage of the Moscow principals.

In fact, however, the Soviet leaders—first Stalin, now Khrushchev— were not playing chess. They were playing poker. They had a weak hand and they knew it—long before the West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt made the observation, Khrushchev and many of his senior colleagues understood intuitively that the empire they ruled over was basically “Upper Volta with missiles.” So they bluffed. The outcome of the Cuban crisis would not have been very different if the Americans had realized sooner which game they were in; but the risks encountered along the way would have been much reduced.

Poker and chess have this in common, however—that their outcome depends more on the nerve, character, and intuition of the players than on any formal disposition of resources or rules. And the more we learn of the Cuban missile crisis the more we must come to appreciate the two men who held our fate in their hands in those days. Mr. Khrushchev’s role is easier to grasp. Having made a major miscalculation, he resisted the temptation to raise the stakes. When Kennedy imposed a quarantine and demanded the removal of the missiles from Cuba, the Soviet leader could have responded by threatening nuclear retaliation if Soviet ships were intercepted or Cuban territory attacked. That, after all, was the logic of the missile emplacements in the first place—the threat of a nuclear response to deter the U.S. from aggressive moves in the Caribbean.

But Khrushchev never even considered such a challenge. As he explained on October 30 to a disappointed Castro, who would have preferred an armed (and if necessary nuclear) confrontation with the Americans, “There’s no doubt that the Cuban people would have fought courageously or that they would have died heroically. But we are not struggling against imperialism in order to die. . . .”
³¹
Other Soviet leaders might well have behaved similarly—and Stalin, at least, would never have exposed himself as thoughtlessly as Khrushchev had done. All the same, it was Khrushchev whose decisions defused and resolved the Cuban crisis, and history owes him that much recognition.

JOHN F. KENNEDY’S POSITION is more troubling. His own posturing, no less than that of Khrushchev, got the U.S. into its Cuban imbroglio in the first place, and it was in large measure Kennedy’s need to seem strong, his concern for “credibility,” that fueled the rhetoric swirling around Washington in the autumn of 1962. He was a young president, under great pressure to do the “right” thing, possessing imperfect information about a possible threat to his country’s security, and advised by a mixed group of men (many of them older and more experienced) who had in common only their frequently reiterated awareness that this was a major crisis and that the fate of the world hung upon their decisions.

And yet
The Kennedy Tapes
reveal a remarkable coolness in John Kennedy, a willingness and a capacity to listen, question, absorb, weigh, and finally adjudicate in extraordinary circumstances. At each turn in the proceedings, Kennedy chose the most moderate available option, sometimes against the specialized advice pressing in upon him. Instead of an invasion he favored an air strike on missile bases; instead of a blanket air strike he favored selective strikes only; he insisted that no strikes, however selective, should happen until warning had been given. He opted for a naval blockade over immediate military action, and a partial naval quarantine over a blanket blockade on all shipping.
³²

It was at Kennedy’s insistence that an innocuous ship of non-Soviet registry was targeted for a symbolic exercise of the quarantine, and he pressed his staff to obtain all possible legal and international support in advance of even that limited action. He ignored suggestions that the U.S. might take advantage of the quarantine to seize Soviet ships carrying missiles in order to learn more about the Soviet weapons program. He rebuffed all pressure to respond aggressively when Captain Rudolf Anderson’s U-2 was shot down over Cuba on October 27, and repeatedly postponed the confidential deadline after which the countdown to U.S. military intervention would begin. He welcomed the opportunity to use the Jupiter missiles in Turkey as a secret bargaining ploy and even authorizedhis secretary of state to have the United Nations urge
him
publicly to accept such a trade if all else failed. And just to be sure that there were no mistakes, on October 27 he instructed that those same Jupiter missiles be defused so that if he had to authorize air strikes on Cuba, and the Soviets responded by an attack on the Turkish missile sites, there would be minimal risk of further escalation.

Each of these decisions was taken in the face of criticism from some quarter among his advisers and generals—according to George Ball the defusing of the Jupiters was ordered “much to the disgust of those eager for dramatic action.”
³³
With hindsight we can see that Kennedy managed to obtain the best possible outcome in the circumstances. He was not just lucky, either,
pace
Acheson—he was consistent. In rejecting the advice he was offered in hundreds of hours of secret meetings, he ran serious risks, too; as he remarked to the assembled senior congressmen on the day of his press conference revealing the crisis, “The people who are the best off are the people whose advice is not taken because whatever we do is filled with hazards.”

Of course Kennedy’s motives were never unmixed, and, like any politician, he sought to turn his management of the affair into a political asset. He presented himself, and his colleagues and admirers presented him, as the man who “faced down” the Soviets, who drew a line in the sand, who won the first phase of the cold war; in Dean Rusk’s words, spoken on Thursday, October 25, when the Soviet ships turned back, “We [were] eyeball to eyeball and the other fellow just blinked.”
³⁴

Just to make sure, Kennedy went to the trouble of slandering his old political opponent Adlai Stevenson, then the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Stevenson, it was hinted, had been “soft” during the crisis, favoring negotiations and a missile “trade,” in contrast to Kennedy’s own firm, virile position. The implication—that Stevenson had been unwilling to “stand up to” the Soviets and that Kennedy had been uncompromising and unyielding—was doubly misleading; but after Charles Bartlett and Joseph Alsop published it in their “inside” account of the crisis in the December 8, 1962, issue of the
Saturday Evening Post
(with John Kennedy’s prior knowledge and approval), the damage was done. The irony is that Kennedy himself was no less a victim of these domestic “dirty tricks” than Stevenson: The qualities that the president did display during the crisis—patience, moderation, a capacity for independent judgment, and a steady preference for negotiation over confrontation— were kept hidden from view.

All modern U.S. presidents are perforce also politicians, prisoners of their past pronouncements, their party, their constituency, and their colleagues. Yet there are advantages to a life spent in democratic politics: What these books show is how vulnerable Khrushchev was for lack of anyone to question his more impetuous moves, and how McGeorge Bundy’s logic, Dean Acheson’s diplomatic experience, and even Robert McNamara’s years at the head of the Ford Motor Company had furnished none of them with that “seat of the pants” instinct that John Kennedy (like Lyndon Johnson) brought to the ExComm discussions. In any case, how many recent U.S. presidents would have fared better than Kennedy, or even half as well? It is a grimly sobering exercise to insert into
The Kennedy Tapes
some of JFK’s recent successors and guess at their likely conduct under such pressure. One of the side benefits of the Cuban crisis is that none of them has ever had to face similarly trying circumstances. Meanwhile, the editors of
The Kennedy Tapes
are, I think, convincing when they write, “It seems fortunate that, given the circumstances that he had helped create, Kennedy was the president charged with managing the crisis.”

NOTES TO CHAPTER XIX