The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby (34 page)

An hour before going on television on Monday, October 22, the president met with senior congressional leaders. Senators Richard Russell and J. William Fulbright, both Democrats, expressed their opposition to the blockade, advocating the air strike instead. As he had predicted, Kennedy couldn’t hold his own party at this critical juncture. He told Russell and Fulbright that millions of Americans might lose their lives if a shooting war erupted between the superpowers, and therefore he was determined to exhaust all possibilities before taking irrevocable steps
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Moments before the speech, Secretary Rusk delivered the text along with a letter to Khrushchev to a stupefied Dobrynin.

In his statement, Kennedy justified the showdown in terms of his conclusion that “this sudden, clandestine decision to station strategic weapons for the first time outside the Soviet Union represents a deliberately provocative and unjustified change in the status quo.” As Sorensen, who drafted the speech, later commented: “[JFK] was indeed worried that the world would say, ‘What’s the difference between Soviet missiles ninety miles away from Florida and American missiles right next door to the Soviet Union in Turkey?’ It was precisely for that reason that there was so much emphasis on the
sudden and deceptive. . . .
Look at that speech very carefully. We relied heavily on words such as these to make sure that the world didn’t focus on the questions of symmetry. ”
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In the days that followed, the Americans launched an inspired diplomatic offensive, complete with the photo blowups and a chronology of Soviet perfidy. During a session of the Security Council in New York, United Nations ambassador Stevenson cross-examined the Soviet ambassador in riveting style, and in far-off Conakry, Guinea, Ambassador Bill Attwood persuaded Guinean president Ahmed Sekou Touré to deny Ilyushin bombers refueling rights in his country. But the American case was thin. As Georgi Shaknazarov later commented, “You speak of deception. . . . But according to international law, we had
no
reason to inform you beforehand.”
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Khrushchev’s reaction to Kennedy’s speech was immediate and unambiguous: “The United States has openly taken the path of grossly violating the United Nations Charter, the path of violating international norms of freedom of navigation of the high seas, the path of aggressive actions both against Cuba and against the Soviet Union.” America was pushing mankind “to the abyss of a world missile-nuclear war,” he thundered. According to Russian historian Roy Medvedev, Khrushchev then ordered his generals to finish construction of the missile silos and the captains of the Soviet ships to hold course and run the blockade.

The next day, after the Organization of American States approved the American quarantine, Kennedy sent a letter to Khrushchev. He assured Khruschchev that the United States did not want to fire on any ships of the Soviet Union: “I am concerned that we both show prudence and do nothing to allow events to make the situation more difficult than it is.” “The great danger and risk in all of this is a miscalculation — a mistake in judgment,” he told Bobby, Sorensen, and O’Donnell. They discussed Barbara Tuchman’s
The Guns of August
and the “tumble into war” by European nations in 1914 through the toxic combination of overreaction and patriotic vanity. Afterward, Jack asked Bobby to approach Dobrynin.
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Bobby met with Dobrynin at 9:30 P.M. that Tuesday for about forty-five minutes on the third floor of the Russian embassy. Kennedy reiterated that Russian deception was the cause of this dangerous reckoning and explained why, in response to Dobrynin’s question, the president had not confronted Gromyko with the American position. Back in the White House, Jack joined his brother and British ambassador David Ormsby-Gore, who strongly recommended that the U.S. Navy pull its line of interception back from 800 miles off the coast of Cuba to 500 miles, to give Khrushchev more time.
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The president agreed. He called McNamara to relay the order. Did the navy actually obey the president’s order to move the blockade line closer? Subsequent scholarship by Graham Allison, among others, revealed that it did not.
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To maintain control over the generals and admirals, McNamara remained on watch around the clock in his Pentagon office during the crisis. His concern was justified: at a meeting the day before the first Russian ship reached the American blockade, he asked Admiral George Anderson what would happen when a Soviet ship reached the line.

“We’ll hail it,” the admiral replied.

“In what language — English or Russian?” McNamara asked.

“How the hell do I know?” Anderson answered, irritated.

“What will you do if they don’t understand?”

“I suppose we’ll use flags.”

“Well, what if they don’t stop?”

“We’ll send a shot across the bow.”

“What if that doesn’t work?”

“Then we’ll fire into the rudder.” The admiral was now angry.

McNamara brought him up short: “You’re not going to fire a single shot without my express permission, is that clear?”

Anderson shot back that the navy had been running blockades since the days of John Paul Jones, and that if the secretary would leave them alone they would run this one successfully as well.

McNamara got to his feet and started walking out of the room, then he turned and told Anderson that this was not a blockade but a “means of communication between President Kennedy and Khrushchev.”

No force would be applied without the president’s permission, McNamara told the admiral. Was that understood? he demanded to know.

The unhappy answer was, “Yes.”
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By this time south Florida had fully mobilized for the expected invasion. JM/WAVE was distributing road maps of Cuba to Special Forces units. The anti-Castro fighters believed that their hour of deliverance had come at last. If the nation and the world shuddered at the imminence of warfare between the superpowers over Cuba, for the exiles it was nothing less than Gideon’s trumpet. According to Cuban Revolutionary Council leader Miro Cardona, Pentagon officials were calling for the “massive enlistment of all Cubans of military age.”

The next day, Wednesday, October 24, American warships at the quarantine line sighted two Russian ships. Sonar then revealed a disturbing development: a Russian submarine had moved into position between them. The carrier
Essex,
under the president’s orders, scrambled a squadron of helicopters armed with small-explosive depth charges over the submarine while the carrier signaled it to surface. In the Cabinet Room, the members of Ex Comm waited in silence. The president brought his hand up to his face and covered his mouth. He opened and closed his fist. He stared at his brother across the table.

Bobby later wrote about Jack: “Inexplicably, I thought of when he was ill and almost died; when he lost his child; when we learned that our oldest brother had been killed; of personal times of strain and hurt.” The voices droned on until finally Bobby heard his brother say, “Isn’t there some way we can avoid having our first exchange with a Russian submarine — almost anything but that?” McNamara replied that for the safety of the American ship there was no alternative course of action. At 10:25 A.M., a messenger brought in a note for the CIA director: The Russian ships had stopped dead in the water. Seven minutes later, another report came in. Some of the ships had reversed course. Bobby remembered that instant: “For a moment the world had stood still, and now it was going around again. ”
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The next problem was getting the Russians to remove the missiles already inside Cuba. Reconnaissance flights revealed that the launching sites were being constructed at breakneck pace and nearing completion. Ex Comm could only guess whether any Russian warheads were on the island. On Friday morning the president told Ex Comm, “We are going to have to face the fact that, if we do invade, by the time we get to these sites, after a very bloody fight, they will be pointed at us. And we must further accept the possibility that when military hostilities first begin, those missiles will be fired.”

Suddenly — again — there was a break. At 6 P.M. Khrushchev, in a rambling letter of what looked to be his own composition, stated: “If assurances were given that the president of the United States would not participate in an attack on Cuba and the blockade lifted, then the question of the removal or the destruction of the missile sites in Cuba would then be an entirely different one.” His appeal to Kennedy was personal:

If you have not lost your self-control and sensibly conceive what this might lead to, then, Mr. President, we and you ought not to pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied the knot of war, because the more the two of us pull, the tighter the knot will be tied. And a moment may come when that knot will be tied so tight that even he who tied it will not have the strength to untie it, and then it will be necessary to cut that knot, and that would doom the world to the catastrophe of thermonuclear war.
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The next day, Saturday, October 27, Khrushchev sent Kennedy yet another letter. This time the tone was formal. Khrushchev added a new condition — the withdrawal of American Jupiter missiles from Turkey. There was the darkest irony in the entirely reasonable request: Kennedy had been demanding the removal of these obsolete missiles from Turkey for the better part of a year, but the State Department had reported that it was unable to get the Turks to agree. The Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, General Taylor, warned the president that to acquiesce to such blackmail would undermine NATO. The Joint Chiefs recommended an air strike take place that Monday, followed by an invasion, particularly since it was probable that the Soviet missiles in Cuba were not yet loaded with warheads. The president was furious: “I’m not going to war over any damned useless missiles in Turkey,” he told Bundy. But that afternoon Ex Comm was informed that an American U-2 spy plane, piloted by Major Rudolf Anderson Jr., had been shot down over Cuba. George Ball recalled his sensation of the beckoning abyss ofwar. And Bobby wrote later, “The noose was tightening on all of us . . . and the bridges to escape were crumbling.”
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“My impression was that military operations looked like they were becoming increasingly necessary,” Secretary Dillon remembered. “We were drifting without wanting to into becoming victims of a fait accompli. . . . By Saturday the 27th, there was a clear majority in the Ex Comm in favor of taking military action.”
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McNamara, in his recollection of the same day, was to note simply, “There was tremendous pressure . . . for military action.” The military recommended that the SAM sites be taken out immediately, but the president pulled everyone back. “It isn’t the first step that concerns me,” he said, “but both sides escalating to the fourth and fifth step — and we don’t go to the sixth because there is no one around to do so.” There would be no attack tomorrow, the president said. In Cuba, Castro suggested to the Soviets that in order to “prevent our own missiles from being destroyed, we should launch a preemptive attack against the United States.” Although Castro later denied that he had ever proposed this, both he and Che Guevara seemed fatalistically prepared for a catastrophic deluge.
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At the Ex Comm meeting that afternoon, Bobby proposed that Jack ignore Khrushchev’s second letter and agree to his initial offer to withdraw the missiles in exchange for a no-invasion-of Cuba pledge. The tactical simplicity of the idea was ingenious; so was the fact that it bought some time.
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Jack went along with his brother’s proposal, and Sorensen and Bobby immediately set to work on a draft. Before Ex Comm reconvened at 9 P.M. that Saturday night, the president undertook another secret maneuver to avoid war: he asked Secretary Rusk to open a channel through the UN secretary general to arrange, if necessary, a public trade of the American Jupiters in Turkey for the Russian missiles in Cuba. That night Jack told his brother that he was going to do everything possible to avert catastrophe. “The thought that disturbed him most, and that made the prospect of war more fearful than it would have otherwise been, was the specter of death of the children of this country and all the world — the young people who had no role, who had no say, who knew nothing even of the confrontation, but whose lives would be snuffed out like everyone else’s.”
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Jack asked Bobby to approach Ambassador Dobrynin again — an idea that had been briefly discussed at the previous Ex Comm meeting. Bobby and Dobrynin met at the attorney general’s at 7:45 that evening. According to both his account and Dobrynin’s, Bobby said the situation was getting out of control — the accelerated construction of the missile sites, the downing of the U-2, and the fact that United States military “hotheads” were spoiling for a fight. Dobrynin asked about the missiles in Turkey. Bobby replied that the United States intended to remove them “within a short time” but would agree to no quid pro quo made under a Soviet threat.

Bobby then delivered what the Soviets regarded as an ultimatum: if the Soviet Union didn’t pull out the missiles, “we would remove them.” The president wanted an immediate answer from the Soviet Union.
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After the meeting, Bobby went back to the White House and relayed the details of the exchange to his brother. They were not hopeful. The president ordered twenty-four troop-carrier squadrons of the Air Force Reserve to active duty in anticipation of an invasion.

Early the next morning, Bobby took his daughters to a horse-jumping competition at the Washington Armory. In Moscow, “near-panic” had seized Khrushchev and his small group of advisors huddled at the premier’s home. “Everyone agreed,” Khrushchev aide Oleg Troyanovsky later remembered, “that Kennedy intended to declare war, to launch an attack.” They feverishly composed a brief reply in the light of Kennedy’s “deadline,” rushed the copy to Radio Moscow, and took a specially secure elevator to the sixth floor of the building to make sure it was immediately broadcast word for word. At around 10 A.M., Bobby received a call at the horse show from Rusk. The Russians had publicly agreed to remove their missiles from Cuba. The crisis was over. Castro, who had not been informed of the Russian decision to stand down prior to the broadcast, exploded with anger when he heard the news.