The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (117 page)

The president was constantly being called to the telephone. When he returned, it was not to muse morbidly about Cuba and nuclear war but to exchange some witty repartee. Kennedy peppered the others with questions about the lives of those he found interesting, seemingly unconcerned about anything but his charming dinner guests.

N
ow that the president had decided on a firm policy, he had to tell the American people on television of the magnitude of the crisis that faced them. As he left the Oval Office on Monday afternoon, October 22, where he had gone over Sorensen’s words, Kennedy overheard his secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, talking on the phone to Ed Berube, who was asking for some autographed pictures. Berube had a feisty authenticity about him that had amused Kennedy when the bus driver worked for the young congressman in his first senatorial race in 1952. The president had invited Berube to his wedding and as president named him postmaster in his hometown of Fall River, Massachusetts.

“Who’s that? Eddie?” Kennedy asked his secretary, as if this were the most normal of presidential days. “Let me talk to him…. How’re you, pal? How are you, Mr. Postmaster?”

“Oh … uh … uh … Mr. Senator … Mr. Congr—… Mr. President.”

“How’s your office? Anything I can do for you?”

“No, you’ve done enough for me now, Mr. President. We’re all so proud of you. You’re doing a wonderful job.”

“Well, you keep up the good work. I hear some good reports about you.”

T
he president needed the support of Congress, and when he briefed eight senators and seven senior congressmen at 5:00
P.M.
., just before his television
speech, there was in some of their shrill voices a harbinger of the jeers and shouts that would greet him if his policies failed. This afternoon the most esteemed and knowledgeable experts on foreign policy in Congress, Senators Richard Russell and J. William Fulbright, did little but argue feverishly for war.

“It’s a very difficult choice that we’re faced with together,” Kennedy told Russell, “Now, the …”

“Oh, my God, I know that !” Russell interjected. “A war, our destiny, will hinge on it. But it’s coming someday, Mr. President. Will it ever be under more auspicious circumstances?”

The Georgia senator was a thoughtful man, but today he sought only to push his nation off to war. Kennedy instructed his former colleagues on the vicissitudes of leadership. “The people who are the best off are the people whose advice is not taken because whatever we do is filled with hazards,” Kennedy said, speaking an epigram of power. “Now, the reason we’ve embarked on the course we have … is because we don’t know where we’re going to end up on this matter…. So we start here, we don’t know where he’s going to take us or where we’re going to take ourselves…. If we stop one Russian ship, it means war. If we invade Cuba, it means war. There’s no telling—I know all the threats are going to be made.”

“Wait, Mr. President,” Russell said. “The nettle is going to sting anyway.”

“That’s correct. I just think at least we start here, then we go where we go. And I’ll tell you that every opportunity is full.”

Kennedy stopped. The time for his nationally televised address was near. “I better go and make this speech,” he said.

K
ennedy sat down at his desk shortly before 7:00
P.M.
. to give as dramatic a speech as any American president had ever given. Always before when a president made an important address to the American people, they had had some hint of what was to be said, be it the sight of the unemployed wandering the streets or news reports of ships sunk and planes smoldering at Pearl Harbor. But across the nation, people had little idea why the president had usurped airtime on this Monday evening.

Kennedy did not seek to soothe the nation but spoke with words that would create apprehension in even the stoutest of hearts. Kennedy laid out the threat: the Soviet ballistic missiles sailing toward Cuba were capable of “striking most of the major cities in the Western Hemisphere, ranging as far north as Hudson Bay, Canada, and as far south as Lima, Peru.”

As Kennedy addressed the American people, it was the image of Munich that stood starkly before him, in an era before nuclear weapons. “The 1930s
taught us a clear lesson,” Kennedy said. “Aggressive conduct, if allowed to grow unchecked and unchallenged, ultimately leads to war.”

In Sorensen’s words lay some of the tensions and arguments of the Ex Comm deliberations condensed into a few passages. “Many months of sacrifice and self-discipline lie ahead—months in which both our patience and our will will be tested, months in which many threats and denunciations will keep us aware of our dangers. But the greatest danger of all would be to do nothing.” In his inaugural address Kennedy had not promised ease and blissful peace but challenge, and he delivered on that pledge a hundredfold this evening. “The path we have chosen for the present is full of hazards, as all paths are; but it is the one most consistent with our character and courage as a nation and our commitments around the world.”

When Kennedy finished, many of the residents of the great cities of America feared that death stalked them, and they looked up at the silent skies with foreboding.

K
ennedy’s restless, searching mind reached out, seeking contradictions, new imponderables, trying to will himself into Khrushchev’s mind. He had set up a naval blockade around Cuba and vowed to stop further shipment of military goods to the island. But the Soviets already had a vast nuclear arsenal in Cuba, and if he were Khrushchev, he would have ships carrying more weapons turn around. It could be ships carrying baby food and humanitarian supplies that the Americans would attempt to stop on the high seas.

Kennedy described with painful vividness what could happen if the U.S. Navy stopped a ship, even one, full of nothing but baby food. “They’re gonna keep going,” he said. “And we’re gonna try to shoot the rudder off or the boiler. And then we’re going to try to board it. And they’re going to fire guns, machine guns. And we’re going to have one hell of a time trying to get aboard that thing and getting control of it, because they’re pretty tough, and I suppose they may have soldiers or marines aboard their ships…. We may have to sink it rather than just take it.”

When Kennedy was not worried about confrontation on the high seas, he contemplated death on a magnitude beyond anything America had ever known. He did not visualize the ultimate nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States, but a more modest scenario in which five, ten, or fifteen nuclear-tipped missiles hit American cities in the midst of an invasion of Cuba. For the citizens to flee almost certain death, they would need ample notice. The problem, as McCone had noted, was that “whatever was done would involve a great deal of publicity and public alarm,” signaling to
Cuba and the Soviets that the invasion was imminent. There, then, was a moral conundrum that the president might soon face.

“It looks really mean, doesn’t it?” the president said to his brother as they sat together in the Cabinet Room with only a few other advisers. “But on the other hand, there wasn’t any other choice. If he’s going to get this mean on this one, in our part of the world … no choice. I don’t think there was a choice.”

“Well, there wasn’t any choice,” Bobby said, reassuring the president. “I mean, you would have been … you would have been impeached.”

“Well, I think I would have been impeached….”

D
uring the summer Kennedy had read Barbara W. Tuchman’s
Guns of August,
an epic account of how interlocking treaties and misunderstandings had inexorably led in 1914 to a great and tragic world war. History was the president’s favorite lesson book, and Tuchman’s lessons resounded profoundly within his psyche. Kennedy, like Khrushchev, understood that the world was only a miscalculation or two away from oblivion. While the Soviet leader slept in his clothes in his office seeking a solution that would neither dishonor his political faith nor betray his Latin comrades, in Washington Kennedy sought his own way out of the impasse.

As a score or more of Soviet ships approached Cuba, Kennedy pondered endlessly what else he could do. The president did not trust the established channels of government as the only conduits between his administration and the Soviets. As the Kennedys had done before, they reached out to the Russian agent Bolshakov as a conduit to the Kremlin.

Frank Holeman, a former New York
Daily News
journalist now working for Bobby in the Justice Department, called his Soviet source and asked for a meeting. In such an infinitely delicate situation, Holeman doubtlessly would not have made the contact except under the attorney general’s explicit instructions. This judgment is reinforced by the fact that Holeman told Bolshakov things that only a person conversant with the president’s inner thinking would have known. “Robert Kennedy and his circle consider it possible to discuss the following trade: The U.S. would liquidate its military bases in Turkey and Italy, and the USSR would do the same in Cuba,” Bolshakov wrote in his notes of the meeting. That alone represented the most sophisticated diplomatic suggestion that had surfaced in the Ex Comm meetings. Holeman went beyond that, adding a crucial caveat that at this time had probably been thought of only by the president and Bobby. “The conditions of such a trade can be discussed only in a time of quiet and not when there is the threat of war.”

When Bolshakov did not reply within a few hours, Bobby asked his friend Charley Bartlett to call the Russian and berate him. “I called Bolshakov, and I said this is outrageous what the Russians are doing,” recalled Bartlett, who may also have broached the possibility of a missile trade. “I said Bobby feels a betrayal.” A few minutes later Bartlett received a call from the attorney general, who, after apparently listening to a wiretap of the conversation, felt that Bartlett had gone too far in his rage.

This was not a dispute that could be solved by calculated bursts of outrage. Bobby did not seem to grasp that there was a dangerous aspect to this ad hoc covert diplomacy. The attorney general did not have a diplomat’s subtle skills. As much as he cared for his brother and loved his country, he risked stirring up the waters to such an extent that more dispassionate negotiators would not be able to see through to a clear solution. The secretary of State and the Joint Chiefs of Staff apparently knew nothing of these initiatives. It was bad business trading off part of their military or diplomatic assets without their knowledge.

Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador, recalls that during the crisis he and Bobby “had almost daily conversations,” a relationship that Bobby later downplayed to several dramatic face-to-face meetings. That evening, Tuesday, October 23, both men agree that the attorney general went to see the ambassador in his office on the third floor of the Russian embassy. The attorney general was the least diplomatic of men sent on the most diplomatic of missions. Bobby might disdain the State Department as a haven for pinstriped prissy men measuring out their lives in teatime social niceties. The reality was that a diplomat’s task was to put forth a precise rendering of his nation’s positions while maintaining some semblance of civility, keeping a dialogue going even in the worst of crises. Bobby, however, was at his best when his emotions were wedded to facts and he could speak as a fiery truth-sayer.

Bobby, as Dobrynin recalled, was “in a state of agitation” that accentuated the inevitable tension of this moment: he “was far from being a sociable person and lacked a proper sense of humor…. He was impulsive and excitable.” In his memo of the meeting, Bobby remembered telling the Soviet ambassador that his brother felt that “he had a very helpful personal relationship with Mr. Khrushchev … a mutual trust and confidence between them on which he could rely.” When politicians praise each other, their feelings are often the precise opposite of what they say, and Bobby’s words were as platitudinous as they were untrue. Bobby then laid out what he considered the whole litany of betrayal in the most vivid detail, accusing the Soviet leaders of being “hypocritical, misleading and false.” The Russian could give only a diplomat’s most pathetic response—that he knew nothing
of what his nation purportedly had done. Bobby was full of righteous anger, which an envoy from the State Department would never have expressed so dramatically to the Russian ambassador. The Soviets believed that they had legitimate policy goals in Cuba that they were pursuing by legitimate means. But they had to understand that they had triggered an honest rage and sense of betrayal in a powerful enemy. The Soviet ambassador sent a message to Moscow that gave “an idea of the genuine state of agitation in the president’s inner circle.”

Despite the merciless tension, Kennedy had a preternatural coolness about him. That same evening, October 23, the president and first lady attended a dinner party at the White House for fourteen guests, including the maharaja of Jaipur and his wife, journalist Benno Graziani and his wife, Nicole, and two old friends, British ambassador Ormsby-Gore and Charley Bartlett. Every person in the room was aware of the immense drama that was taking place, and yet the tone of the evening was one of convivial sociality, without a mention of missiles or Cuba.

At around 11:00
P.M.
., Bobby arrived at the White House. He told the president and Ormsby-Gore of his difficult meeting with Dobrynin. The moment of climax was arriving quickly, too quickly, out on the open seas. To gain more time Ormsby-Gore suggested that Kennedy move the quarantine line from eight hundred to five hundred miles, a proposal that Kennedy accepted. At around midnight, when Nicole Graziani was scrambling eggs in the private quarters for a midnight repast before the group departed, Kennedy turned to the young woman. “He [Kennedy] took her hand,” remembered her husband, Benno, “and he said, ‘You know, maybe tomorrow we will be at war.’…”

O
n Wednesday morning, October 24, the United States ratcheted up its military readiness to DEFCON 2, only one step below war. The air force’s massive B-52 bombers loaded with nuclear weapons flew twenty-four hours a day, refueled by in-flight KC-135 tankers, ready to enact their savage revenge even if Soviet missiles destroyed most of America’s military capabilities. In the South Atlantic, two Russian ships, the
Gagarin
and the
Kimovsk,
drew near to the imaginary line Kennedy had drawn five hundred miles from Cuba. If the vessels did not turn back soon, the navy would try to stop them, and war would be a giant step closer to beginning.