The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (114 page)

These few men in the room represented most of the spectrum of thought on Cuba in the administration. They knew that they would be judged not by how forcefully they spoke today but by how true their assessments proved. Bobby and McCone stood at one end as the most militant advocates of determined military action against Cuba. They shared the same Catholic faith, the same militant anticommunism, the same brutal assessment of Cuban and Soviet motives.

McCone asserted that the Soviets were probably establishing an offensive military posture in Cuba, including medium-range ballistic missiles. As the president’s top national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy reflected the president’s thinking, but he was far from being merely Kennedy’s intellectual clone. Nonetheless, Bundy seemed, for the most part, to believe what the president believed, and this morning he believed that the CIA director’s black assessment was probably wrong, and that the Soviets would not dare go so far. McCone, a man of genteel manners, admitted that many, even most, of his colleagues in intelligence would have agreed with Bundy, but they could not risk the future of the United States if Bundy was wrong.

The scholarly Bundy had history and reason on his side. Yet on this very day, at the Cuban port of Mariel, the Soviet ship
Indigirka
arrived carrying forty-five warheads to arm the R-12s; twelve warheads to be fitted on the Luna tactical missiles; six nuclear bombs for the IL-28 planes, and thirty-six
warheads ready for the cruise missiles. The total firepower carried on that one Russian freighter, Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali wrote, was “over twenty times the explosive power that was dropped by Allied bombers on Germany in all of the Second World War.”

Bobby was more ideological than his brother, believing, like his Marxist enemies, that life was a battle over ideas. Yet he was not a man of abstraction. He wanted to know life at its most intimate, to touch not only some of the young Cubans sent off on missions to their native land from which they might never return but also his enemies or those who knew his enemies. So on the day after the Operation Mongoose meeting he agreed to meet once again with the Russian agent Bolshakov, whom he had first met before the Vienna summit.

Bolshakov had tantalized Bobby, telling him he had a message from Khrushchev. In the netherworld of intelligence, the Russians and the Americans cut their scripts up into many pages so that most players knew only their own few lines and little of the plot they were advancing. Bolshakov had a familiar message to deliver. He told Bobby, “The weapons that the USSR is sending to Cuba will only be of a defensive character.” Bolshakov was like Adlai Stevenson at the United Nations during the Bay of Pigs, speaking lines he thought to be true to serve a purpose of which he had not been informed. Bolshakov believed that he was serving the high cause of peace, but in fact he was betraying Bobby in the name of his country.

The president needed concrete intelligence on what was going on in Cuba, not conjecture, speculation, ruminations, or gossip. On the morning of October 14, Major Richard Heyser of the U.S. Air Force flew a U-2 mission over western Cuba. He was over the island for only six minutes, but that was enough to take 928 photographs that showed three medium-range missile sites and eight missile transporters. Two subsequent flights the next day brought back photos showing two other sites and crates for the Soviet medium-range bombers.

The following evening, October 15, the CIA’s deputy director for intelligence called Bundy at his home to tell him about the latest photos. The news was so extraordinary that it shifted the protocol of power. In any other important matter Bundy would have called the president immediately or left for the White House. This evening, though, he put the phone down and went back to his dinner party, not wanting his foreign guests to have any signal that something was wrong. Even after his guests left, he did not call the president. He knew that Kennedy was tired after a late-night return from New York the previous evening. Bundy decided, as he wrote Kennedy later, that “a quiet evening and a night of sleep were the best preparation you could have in the light of what would face you in the next days.”

K
ennedy sat propped up in bed reading the morning newspapers, including a front-page story in the
New York Times
with the headline “Eisenhower Calls President Weak on Foreign Policy.” That would have been enough unpleasant news for one morning, but then Bundy entered to tell him the results of the U-2’s photographic sortie over Cuba. The first thing the president did was to call Bobby. “We have some big trouble,” the president said. “I want you over here.”

A few minutes later Bobby rushed into Bundy’s office saying that he wanted to see the photographs. It was typical of Bobby not to trust the CIA technicians who had so painstakingly examined the pictures. Arthur Lundahl, the head of the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center, led the attorney general into the room where the pictures were set up on briefing boards. “Oh shit!” Bobby exclaimed. “Shit! Shit! Those sons-of-bitches Russians.” Much as he had during the Bay of Pigs, Bobby immediately personalized these events, seeing the face of the enemy before his eyes.

If there was ever a day that called for the deepest of perceptions and the wisest of judgments, that day had arrived. That reality was not evident that afternoon, as Bobby met at the Justice Department with Lansdale and those most concerned with Operation Mongoose. The attorney general had been upset at Lansdale’s operation for a while. Today he played his trump card, invoking his brother’s sacred name. He opened the meeting by talking of the “general dissatisfaction of the president” with Operation Mongoose. He bemoaned the fact that there had been no real acts of sabotage.

In the world that faced the president now, acts of sabotage hardly mattered against either a Cuba armed with nuclear weapons or a Cuba decimated by American bombs. Bobby could not yet grasp this essential fact but continued to rail so fiercely against Lansdale’s desultory action that he insisted that from now on he would meet every morning at nine-thirty with the Operation Mongoose chieftain and his top subordinates, monitoring them like naughty schoolboys.

There were two meetings that day, Tuesday October 16, of the newly created executive committee of the National Security Council (Ex Comm), the group that in the days that followed became the crucial policymaking organization. Kennedy had sought to surround himself with fiercely intelligent men who would parse an issue up and down, tearing it apart, before they arrived at a sound conclusion. These men had largely failed to alert him to the dangers that lay at the Bay of Pigs. The scale of what faced them was far higher now than a year and a half ago, and this time there was depth and
fierce articulateness to many of their contributions. It was a mark of the vigor of their minds that all of the great issues of what became known as the Cuban Missile Crisis were discussed on this first day.

Although Kennedy and his men often spoke in a kind of intellectual shorthand, these were not mere tactical meetings but discussions of political, philosophical, and moral complexity. “What is the strategic impact on the position of the United States of MRBMs [medium-range ballistic missiles] in Cuba?” McGeorge Bundy asked at the 6:30
P.M.
. meeting in the Cabinet Room. “How gravely does this change the strategic balance?”

“Mac, I asked the Chiefs that this afternoon, in effect,” McNamara replied. “And they said, ‘Substantially.’ My personal view is, not at all.”

“You may say it doesn’t make any difference if you get blown up by an ICBM [intercontinental ballistic missile] flying from the Soviet Union or one that was ninety miles away,” the president said a few minutes later. “Geography doesn’t mean that much.”

That perception was the darkest irony of the nuclear age. Russia and America were gigantic gladiators. America may have held a sharper sword, but the opponents were so well armed and so vicious that once they began fighting, not only were they both doomed, but in their death throes they would pull down the arena.

“Last month I said we weren’t going to [accept it]” Kennedy stated, referring to Russian missiles in Cuba. “Last month I should have said that we don’t care. But when we said we’re not going to [accept it], and they go ahead and do it, and then we do nothing, then I would think that our risks increase. I agree. What difference does it make? They’ve got enough to blow us up now anyway.”

This was in part a struggle over language. The president had not understood the extent to which his words were actions. Now he believed he could not back away. Beyond that, his language and the language of a thousand other politicians had created a climate in which judiciousness was considered a coward’s calling, and anti-Communist jingoism a patriot’s one true song. He and his administration had helped create this image of a monstrous Cuba that he was now compelled to slay or be considered less than a manly leader. The missiles may not have changed the strategic balance of power, but a failure to deal with them changed everything politically.

Some of these men expressed a moral dimension in their discourse that they had rarely sounded before. Around the table there were those for immediately raising swords, but of all people, it was one of the holders of those swords, the secretary of Defense, who first pondered the moral dimension. “I don’t know now quite what kind of a world we live in after we’ve struck
Cuba, and we’ve started it,” McNamara said. “Now, after we’ve launched fifty to a hundred sorties, what kind of world do we live in?” That was an essential question, and it was not quickly brushed off the table.

“Why does he put these [missiles] in there, though?” Kennedy asked, wondering why the Soviets had made such a dramatic move.

“Soviet-controlled nuclear warheads,” Bundy replied, ever the professor. “That’s right,” Kennedy said, though that was not quite what he had asked. “But what is the advantage of that? It’s just as if we suddenly began to put a major number of MRBMS in Turkey. Now that’d be goddamn dangerous, I would think.”

“Well, we did, Mr. President,” Bundy replied. That exchange, if Khrushchev could have heard it, would have richly vindicated his decision. The proximity of nuclear weapons aimed at them was precisely what he wanted Americans not simply to know but to feel.

From this day forward Bobby participated in all the important discussions. Bobby was all for contemplating action, even staging an incident as a pretext for invasion. “Let me say, of course, one other thing is whether we should also think of whether there is some other way we can get involved in this,” he said, “through Guantánamo Bay or something. Or whether there’s some ship that … you know, sink the
Maine
or something.”

“I think any military action
does
change the world,” Bundy said later in the meeting. “And I think not taking action changes the world. And I think these are the two worlds that we need to look at.”

By doing nothing, the whole nature of the geopolitical world would change almost as much as if they destroyed the Cuban missile bases and invaded the island.

T
he following evening, the president and first lady drove in the presidential limousine to a dinner party at Joseph Alsop’s home in Georgetown. Kennedy had told his wife nothing about the missile crisis, and he was in an apparently carefree mood this lovely fall evening. The acerbic conservative columnist gave the best parties in Washington, other than those at the White House. This evening he had a sterling sixteen-member guest list that included the attorney general; French Ambassador Hervé Alphand; Phil and Katherine Graham of the
Washington Post;
the new American ambassador to France, Charles “Chip” Bohlen, and his wife Avis; and Bundy.

As the distinguished group stood chatting on Alsop’s terrace, Kennedy and Bohlen sauntered nonchalantly off by themselves into the garden, walking back and forth beneath the spreading magnolias in animated conversation. Bohlen had been the State Department’s leading Sovietologist, and it
was exquisitely bad timing that he was about to fly off to a new ambassadorial post in Paris.

It was not only in the Kremlin that the tiniest of events were analyzed for hidden meaning. As the guests pretended to socialize aimlessly, many eyes were on the pair of guests pacing back and forth in the farthest reaches of the garden. The French ambassador became increasingly intrigued, his curiosity turning to nervousness as the discussion went on and on until finally the pair returned. Over dinner Kennedy was a charming raconteur, laughing and smiling, seemingly oblivious to anything but the pleasures of a social evening.

B
y the time the Ex Comm met the next morning, Thursday, October 18, at 11:00
A.M.
in the Cabinet Room, CIA analysts had discovered IRBM (intermediate-range ballistic missile) sites for missiles that they believed were twice the size and twice the power of the MRBMs, capable of hitting most of the United States. By then opinion had hardened among the president’s advisers. McNamara asked for swift action, and General Taylor, the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called for a full-scale invasion of Cuba. These were not mindlessly bellicose reactions, but reasonable military solutions, given how many more Americans would die if the military attacked after the Soviets had their missiles in place ready to launch.

As Kennedy saw the hard physical evidence of the photos and heard the calls for action, he thought of the political dimensions of this problem. “If we wanted to ever release these pictures to demonstrate that there were missiles there,” he asked, “it might be possible to demonstrate this to the satisfaction of an untrained observer?”

“I think it would be difficult, sir,” replied Lundahl. To the untrained eye, the missiles were no more than smudges. Here was Kennedy’s immediate dilemma. He would have to justify any military action to the American people and the world, and it would not be easy. When a nations lies, it is no different from when a person lies: the loss of credibility is the same. Adlai Stevenson had unknowingly lied in the United Nations about America’s role in the Bay of Pigs. There would be scores of diplomats, and not only those unfriendly to the United States, who would doubt America’s word if they did not have indisputable proof of Soviet perfidy.