An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (93 page)

On Friday, October 19, Kennedy kept his campaign schedule, which took him to Cleveland and Springfield, Illinois, and Chicago. He considered canceling the trip, but when he asked Kenny O’Donnell, who knew about the crisis, if he had called it off, O’Donnell replied, “I didn’t call off anything. I don’t want to be the one who has to tell Dick Daley that you’re not going out there.”

In the morning, however, he held a secret forty-five-minute meeting with the Joint Chiefs. The discussion was as much an exercise in political hand-holding as in advancing a solution to the crisis. Kennedy knew that the Chiefs favored a massive air strike and were divided on whether to follow it with an invasion. He saw their counsel as predictable and not especially helpful. His memories of the navy brass in World War II, the apparent readiness of the Chiefs to risk nuclear war in Europe and their unhelpful advice before the Bay of Pigs, and the army’s stumbling performance just a few weeks before in Mississippi deepened his distrust of their promised results.

Nevertheless, Kennedy candidly discussed his concerns with the Chiefs. An attack on Cuba would provoke the Soviets into blockading or taking Berlin, he said. And our allies would complain that “we let Berlin go because we didn’t have the guts to endure a situation in Cuba.” Moreover, we might eliminate the danger in Cuba, but the Berlin crisis would likely touch off a nuclear war.

Taylor respectfully acknowledged the president’s dilemma but asserted the need for military action. Without it, we would lose our credibility, he said, and “our strength anyplace in the world is the credibility of our response. . . . And if we don’t respond here in Cuba, we think the credibility is sacrificed.”

Curtis LeMay was even more emphatic. He did not share the president’s view “that if we knock off Cuba, they’re going to knock off Berlin.” Kennedy asked, “What do you think their reply would be?” LeMay did not think there would be one. He saw military intervention as the only solution. “This blockade and political action,” he predicted, “I see leading into war. I don’t see any other solution. It will lead right into war. This is almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich.” LeMay indirectly threatened Kennedy with making his dissent public. “I think that a blockade, and political talk, would be considered by a lot of our friends and neutrals as being a pretty weak response to this. And I’m sure a lot of our own citizens would feel that way, too. In other words, you’re in a pretty bad fix at the present time.”

LeMay’s response irritated Kennedy, who asked, “What did you say?” LeMay repeated himself: “You’re in a pretty bad fix.” Kennedy responded with a hollow laugh, “You’re in there with me.” After the meeting, referring to LeMay’s assertion about a Soviet nonresponse, Kennedy asked O’Donnell, “Can you imagine LeMay saying a thing like that? These brass hats have one great advantage in their favor. If we listen to them, and do what they want us to do, none of us will be alive later to tell them that they were wrong.”

The Chiefs were angry, too. After Kennedy left the room, marine commandant David Shoup said to LeMay, “You, you pulled the rug right out from under him.” LeMay replied, “Jesus Christ. What the hell do you mean?” Shoup replied that he agreed with LeMay “a hundred percent” and added, “If somebody could keep them from doing the goddamn thing piecemeal. That’s our problem. You go in there and friggin’ around with the missiles. You’re screwed. . . . You can’t fiddle around with hitting the missile sites and then hitting the SAM sites. You got to go in and take out the goddamn thing that’s going to stop you from doing your job.” Earle Wheeler, the army’s representative on the Joint Chiefs, thought that Kennedy was set against military moves: “It was very apparent to me, though, from his [Kennedy’s] earlier remarks, that the political action of a blockade is really what he’s [after].”

As he left Washington, Kennedy told Bundy to keep the possibility of air strikes alive until he returned. His request may have partly resulted from Bundy’s advice that a blockade alone would not get the missiles out. Having changed his mind, Bundy now urged an air strike as a “quick . . . and a clean surgical operation.” At the same time, Kennedy, who impressed Sorensen as “impatient and discouraged” by his meeting with the Chiefs, told Bobby and Sorensen “to pull the group together quickly—otherwise more delays and dissension would plague whatever decision he took.”

At a late-morning gathering of the Ex Comm, Acheson, Bundy, Dillon, and McCone lined up with the Chiefs in favor of an air strike. McNamara, undoubtedly alerted to the president’s preference, favored a blockade over air action. Bobby, grinning, said that he had spoken with the president that morning and thought “it would be very, very difficult indeed for the President if the decision were to be for an air strike, with all the memory of Pearl Harbor. . . . A sneak attack was not in our traditions. Thousands of Cubans would be killed without warning, and a lot of Russians too.” The president supported a blockade, which would “allow the Soviets some room for maneuver to pull back from their over-extended position in Cuba.”

Following an afternoon break, during which advocates of an air strike and a blockade formed themselves into committees to develop their respective arguments, the whole group reconvened for further discussion. After two and a half hours, they seemed to agree that a blockade should be a first step with air strikes to follow if the Soviets did not remove the missiles. But worried that support for a blockade remained shaky, Bobby urged the president to pretend he was ill with a cold and return to Washington to forge a clearer consensus.

For two hours and forty minutes, beginning at 2:30
P.M.
, on Saturday, October 20, Kennedy and the National Security Council reviewed their options. None impressed him as just right, but under the president’s prodding the group agreed to a blockade or, rather, a “quarantine,” which could more readily be described as less than an act of war and seemed less likely to draw comparisons to the Soviets’ 1948 Berlin blockade. The announcement of the quarantine was to coincide with a demand for removal of the offensive missiles from Cuba and preparations for an air strike should Moscow not comply. Kennedy was willing to discuss the removal of U.S. missiles from Turkey or Italy in exchange, but only if the Soviets raised the issue. Should the United States make this concession, he intended to assure the Turks and Italians that Polaris submarines would become their defense shield.

Managing domestic opinion was another Kennedy concern. He planned to reveal the crisis to the public and announce the quarantine in a televised speech on Monday evening, October 22, in which he intended to state clearly “that we would accept nothing less than the ending of the missile capability now in Cuba.” To mute the crisis until then, he asked the
New York Times
and
Washington Post,
which had learned of the crisis from Pentagon leaks, to hold off publishing emerging details of the danger.

Kennedy spent Monday working to create a national and international consensus for the blockade. Remembering LeMay’s implicit threat to reveal Kennedy’s reluctance to use air power as the Chiefs wanted, he told Taylor, “I know you and your colleagues are unhappy with this decision, but I trust that you will support me.” Kennedy telephoned former presidents Hoover, Truman, and Eisenhower and consulted advisers about messages to foreign heads of state and his planned evening address. At an afternoon National Security Council meeting he “outlined the manner in which he expected Council Members to deal with the domestic aspects of the current situation. He said everyone should sing one song in order to make clear that there were now no differences among his advisers as to the proper course to follow.” Kennedy feared that domestic dissent might encourage Moscow to defy the blockade or strike at Berlin in the belief that the president would lack national support for a military response. He also believed that domestic divisions could weaken the Democrats in the November elections.

A meeting with congressional leaders for an hour before he spoke to the nation heightened his doubts about being able to generate the strong support he felt essential in the crisis. Their opposition to a blockade was as intense as that voiced by the Chiefs and seemed more likely to become public; unlike the military, congressional barons were not under presidential command. Senator Richard Russell saw a blockade as a weak response to the Soviet action. “It seems to me that we are at a crossroads,” he said. “We’re either a first-class power or we’re not.” Since Russell believed that a war with Russia was “coming someday,” he thought that the time to fight was now. William Fulbright also favored an invasion. He saw a blockade as the worst possible policy; by contrast, an invasion of Cuba would “not actually [be] an affront to Russia.” Seizing or sinking a Russian ship was an act of war. “It is not an act of war against Russia to attack Cuba,” he said.

As they left the meeting, Kennedy joked with Hubert Humphrey: “If I’d known the job was this tough, I wouldn’t have beaten you in West Virginia.” “I knew, and that’s why I let you beat me,” Humphrey answered. Facing the possibility of an imminent nuclear war, the pressure on Kennedy was unimaginable. It was one reason for his calls to the three ex-presidents. He thought they were the only ones who could imagine his burden. “No one,” Kennedy told historian David Herbert Donald in February 1962, “has a right to grade a President—not even poor James Buchanan—who has not sat in his chair, examined the mail and information that came across his desk, and learned why he made decisions.” Eisenhower was particularly helpful to Kennedy: “No matter what you’re trying to do,” he said, “. . . I’ll be doing my best to support it.”

Kennedy later described his session with the congressional leaders as “the most difficult meeting. . . . It was a tremendous strain,” he told Bobby, who had been absent. Kennedy understood their outrage at Khrushchev’s recklessness; it mirrored his own anger when he first heard about the missiles and Khrushchev’s deception in putting them in Cuba. But unlike the congressmen, he could not allow his anger or any sense of personal slight to cloud his judgment. As for Russell and Fulbright, he banked on their patriotism and party ties to ensure their support. He also expected the public to rally behind him, which would discourage military and political opponents of the blockade from taking issue with his policy.

KENNEDY SAW HIS SPEECH
to the country and the world explaining the crisis and his choice of a blockade as crucial not only in bringing Americans together but also in pressuring Khrushchev to accede to his demands. He also sent Khrushchev a letter, which Dobrynin received at the State Department an hour before Kennedy spoke. He had an ongoing concern, Kennedy wrote, that “your Government would not correctly understand the will and determination of the United States in any given situation.” He feared a Soviet miscalculation, “since I have not assumed that you or any other sane man would, in this nuclear age, plunge the world into war which it is crystal clear no country could win and which could only result in catastrophic consequences to the whole world, including the aggressor.” He reminded Khrushchev that “certain developments” in Cuba would force the United States to “do whatever must be done to protect its own security and that of its allies.” He insisted that Khrushchev remove the missile bases and other offensive weapons in Cuba that were threatening Western Hemisphere nations.

Kennedy’s seventeen-minute speech Monday night reached one hundred million Americans, who had been alerted to the crisis by the media; it was the largest audience ever up to that point for a presidential address. The president’s words matched his grim demeanor. Looking drawn and tired, he spoke more deliberately than usual, making clear the gravity of what the United States and USSR, and, indeed, the whole world faced. Moscow had created a “nuclear strike capability” in Cuba. The missiles could hit Washington, D.C., or any other city in the southeastern United States. IRBMs, when installed, could strike most of the major cities in the Western Hemisphere. Kennedy bluntly condemned the Soviets for lying: The deployment represented a total breach of faith with repeated Soviet promises to supply Cuba with only defensive weapons. The United States, Kennedy announced, could not tolerate this threat to its security and would henceforth quarantine Cuba to block all offensive weapons from reaching the island. A Soviet failure to stop its buildup would justify additional U.S. action. Any use of the missiles already in Cuba would bring retaliatory attacks against the Soviet Union. Kennedy demanded prompt dismantling and withdrawal of all offensive weapons in Cuba under U.N. supervision. He also promised to counter any threat to America’s allies, including “the brave people of West Berlin.”

With no response yet from Khrushchev on Tuesday morning, the country and the world feared the worse. Rusk woke George Ball, who was sleeping on a couch in his State Department office, with some graveyard humor: “We have won a considerable victory,” he said. “You and I are still alive.” The two needed to prepare for a 10:00
A.M.
Ex Comm meeting at the White House. Kennedy had issued a National Security Action Memorandum giving formal status to the group, which was to meet every morning in the Cabinet Room for the duration of the “current crisis.”

Ex Comm’s first priority Tuesday was to ensure domestic support by convincing people in the Congress and the press that the administration had not been dilatory in identifying the offensive threat in Cuba. The president and Bobby agreed that McCone should brief skeptics about the timeliness of their actions. Kennedy also wanted the public to understand that the only way the United States could have stopped the Soviet deployment was through an invasion of Cuba in the previous two years, but, he reminded his advisers, “there wasn’t anybody suggesting an invasion of Cuba at a time when they necessarily could have stopped these things coming onto the island.” The committee endorsed Stevenson’s use at the U.N. of reconnaissance photos to combat Soviet charges that a crisis was being manufactured as a pretext for invading Cuba. The discussion also produced an agreement that if a U-2 reconnaissance plane were lost, the United States would destroy a SAM site.