Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) (30 page)

Someone brought Robert Kennedy a souvenir from the battle of Ole Miss—a white federal marshal’s helmet that had been dented by a flying missile. Kennedy kept the battered helmet on display in his office for the rest of his tenure as attorney general, as a graphic reminder of what the administration was confronting.

When it came time for President Kennedy to honor the heroism that was displayed in Oxford during that long night, he did not hand out citations to anyone from the U.S. Army or the FBI. He summoned five ragged warriors from the ranks of the federal marshals. During a White House ceremony, Kennedy told the men that if they had not stood their ground and James Meredith had been lynched, “it would have been a blow from which the United States and Mississippi would not have recovered for many years.”

Ole Miss drove home two unavoidable conclusions for the Kennedy administration: the U.S. Army could not be trusted to settle a domestic crisis, and the South was hostile territory. The crisis stirred new doubts within JFK’s inner circle about how firmly the president was in control of his own military. And the battle of Oxford—with its jolting images of U.S. troops in action, not against Castro’s Cuba, but against the American South—incited more dark muttering among Kennedy’s opponents about the president’s leadership.

James Meredith had forced a U.S. president to send troops into the South for the first time since the Civil War to protect the human rights of black Americans. “I wasn’t there as a student—I was there as a soldier,” the courageous and messianic Meredith later declared. “I was a general. I was in command of everything.”

There were many defenders of the old order, not just in the South but in the military and the Washington establishment, who regarded this as a grossly improper use of the armed forces. Barry Goldwater denounced the display of military power as an unconstitutional federal attempt to seize the schools. Republican candidates in the forthcoming midterm elections made a point of standing on stage with Confederate flags fluttering behind them, a vivid symbol of the emerging GOP majority in the South. The Republican Senate contender in South Carolina compared Kennedy to Hitler, charging that his Ole Miss actions had “the earmarks of a cold-blooded, premeditated effort to crush the sovereign state of Mississippi into submission.” When a high school band struck up
Dixie,
the Senate campaigner whooped, “I just hope that song could be heard all the way from Oxford, Mississippi, to Washington, D.C.!”

The explosion of violence in Mississippi would have reverberated even louder in Washington and across the country if another concussion of a still greater magnitude had not quickly blown it off the front pages. This crisis emanated, once again, from Cuba.

IT WAS 9:45 ON
the morning of Friday, October 19, 1962, four days after a U-2 spy plane had spotted several medium-range ballistic missile sites under construction in a remote area in the west of Cuba. The United States and Soviet Union were locked in the first week of the Cuban Missile Crisis, a thirteen-day dance of death that Arthur Schlesinger Jr. would later declare “the most dangerous moment in human history.” President Kennedy was straining to pick just the right steps in this tremulous choreography, so the world did not go stumbling over the nuclear edge. He and the two men who had emerged as his wisest advisors, his brother Bobby and Robert McNamara, were trying to steer the decision-making process toward the idea of a naval blockade of Cuba, to stop the flow of nuclear shipments to the island and to pressure the Soviets into a peaceful resolution of the crisis. But virtually his entire national security apparatus was pushing the president to take military action against Cuba. Leading the charge for an aggressive response were the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who were urging the president to launch surprise air strikes on the island and then invade. On the morning of October 19, the nation’s top military commanders filed into the Cabinet Room to convince Kennedy to adopt their position. No meeting between a leader and his national security advisors has ever been so laden with consequence. And no meeting during the Kennedy presidency so dramatically illustrates the divisions between the head of state and his military chiefs.

Attending the meeting with the president were Joint Chiefs Chairman Maxwell Taylor, Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay, Chief of Naval Operations George Anderson, Army Chief of Staff Earle Wheeler, and Marine Corps Commandant David Shoup, as well as McNamara. Taylor was ostensibly a Kennedy man, inserted into his position by the president to inject some intellectual sophistication into the Pentagon. Shoup lacked Taylor’s intellectual gifts but also tried to position himself as a New Frontiersman, spreading the word that he had supported JFK’s election and clashing with Senator Strom Thurmond over the far right’s attempts to indoctrinate the Marine Corps. (“I didn’t feel that we needed to have Strom Thurmond and his henchmen determine for me what I taught the Marines about communism,” Shoup later remarked. “I thought it was rather ridiculous.”) But Kennedy expected trouble from crusty, cigar-chomping Curtis LeMay—who had been advocating a preemptive nuclear strike on Russia since the early 1950s, after taking over the Strategic Air Command. LeMay dismissed Cuba as a “sideshow,” and bluntly recommended that the United States “fry it.” The president also knew he could not count on support from George Anderson, the tall, handsome, straight-arrow naval chief known for lecturing his sailors to follow a morally clean path. Anderson, whose good looks earned him the nickname “Gorgeous George,” had proven to be as abrasive as his predecessor, Arleigh Burke, openly challenging the Kennedy-McNamara attempts to take control of defense spending and the weapons procurement process. And Wheeler, a by-the-numbers general, was still stinging from JFK’s furious scolding following the Army’s sluggish performance at Ole Miss.

LeMay was in the habit of taking bullying command of Joint Chiefs meetings. With his sagging jowls and chronic scowl, he came across as a bulldog marking his territory. He blew cigar smoke in the faces of anyone who disagreed with him and communicated his boredom and contempt by leaving ajar the door to the bathroom that was located off the Joint Chiefs conference room while he relieved himself with raucous abandon. The Air Force chief reverted to the same confrontational style with Kennedy in the Cabinet Room that morning. The loathing between the two men was mutual and complete. They had already clashed over the developing crisis, at a White House meeting held the day before. Kennedy had asked LeMay to predict how the Russians would respond if the United States bombed Cuba. “They’ll do nothing,” LeMay blandly replied. “Are you trying to tell me that they’ll let us bomb their missiles, and kill a lot of Russians and then do nothing?” an incredulous Kennedy shot back. “If they don’t do anything in Cuba, then they’ll certainly do something in Berlin.” JFK was always sensitive to how a move on one square of the Cold War chessboard might trigger a countermove somewhere else.

After the meeting, the president was still shaking his head over the general’s blithe prediction. “Can you imagine LeMay saying a thing like that?” Kennedy wondered aloud to O’Donnell when he got back to his office. “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.”

At the Friday meeting, LeMay bluntly declared that “we don’t have any choice except direct military action.” And he obstinately repeated his prediction from the day before, insisting that there would be no Soviet response to an air strike on Cuba. “I don’t think [the Russians] are going to make any reprisal if we tell them that the Berlin situation is just like it’s always been. If they make a move, we’re going to fight.” LeMay made no effort to hide his disgust with Kennedy’s blockade strategy. It reeked of cowardly Neville Chamberlain, he growled. The general was certainly crafty enough to know what he was doing when he raised the specter of Munich. He must have known how it would put Kennedy on the defensive, with its reminder of his father’s shameful performance as ambassador to London. Kennedy’s blockade scheme was “almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich,” he needled the president.

Emboldened by LeMay, the other chiefs jumped into the fray, repeating the Air Force general’s call for immediate military action. “I do not see that, as long as the Soviet Union is supporting Cuba, that there is any solution to the Cuban problem except a military solution,” Admiral Anderson lectured Kennedy. Even Taylor and Shoup endorsed LeMay’s bellicose position. But Kennedy evaded the chiefs’ attempts to back him into a corner. When a rambling, inarticulate Shoup offered the passing observation that the Soviet Union already had the ability to strike the United States without the Cuba missiles, Kennedy seized on this side comment. Maybe the installation of the new missiles was not such a destabilizing development, the president suggested—perhaps it was not worth risking nuclear war over. “No matter what they put in there, we could live today under [this threat],” Kennedy mused aloud.

This conciliatory sentiment provoked another outburst from LeMay. “If we leave them there,” the general fumed, the Communist bloc would wield a “blackmail threat against not only us but the other South American countries.” Then the Air Force chief did something remarkable. He decided to violate traditional military-civilian boundaries and issue a barely veiled political threat. If the president responded weakly to the Soviet challenge in Cuba, he warned him, there would be political repercussions overseas, where Kennedy’s government would be perceived as spineless. “And I’m sure a lot of our own citizens would feel that way too,” LeMay added. With his close ties to militaristic congressional leaders and the far right, LeMay left no doubt about the political damage he could cause the administration. “In other words, you’re in a pretty bad fix at the present time,” LeMay told Kennedy.

It was an ugly, sneering comment—particularly in the grave atmosphere of the moment—and Kennedy did not let it pass. “What did you say?” he quickly responded.

“You’re in a pretty bad fix,” LeMay repeated, holding his ground.

“You’re in there with me,” the president tartly replied. Then Kennedy laughed, a strained and mirthless laugh. “Personally,” he added, drilling home the point for LeMay.

Ted Sorensen later expressed astonishment at LeMay’s provocative behavior in the Cabinet Room that morning. “In that meeting, what LeMay said is almost out of
Seven Days in May
,” exclaimed Sorensen in a recent interview. “Telling Kennedy this is like Munich, this is too soft, and the American people will think so too! That’s what outraged me—a general telling the president of the United States what the people think.”

After an hour, Kennedy left the meeting, followed by McNamara. The confrontation with his top military men had clearly disturbed the commander-in-chief. Later he told an aide that the administration needed to make sure the Joint Chiefs did not start a war without his approval, a chronic fear of JFK’s. “I don’t want these nuclear weapons firing without our knowing it,” he said. “I don’t think we ought to accept the chiefs’ word on that one.”

Kennedy had reason to question the Joint Chiefs’ loyalty. After he and McNamara left the Cabinet Room that morning, the president’s secret taping system continued to record the military chiefs’ conversation, unbeknownst to them. As soon as the president and his defense secretary were gone, the chiefs began profanely condemning Kennedy’s cautious, incremental approach to the crisis. Shoup, the supposed Kennedy loyalist, took the lead in the angry attack, as if to show his fellow generals’ where his allegiance truly resided. JFK always took a gradual approach in “every goddamn” crisis, Shoup vented bitterly to his colleagues. You can’t “go in there and frig around with the missiles,” he cursed, or “you’re screwed.”

“That’s right,” LeMay seconded.

“You’re screwed, screwed, screwed.”

Kennedy was hung up on “the political action of a blockade,” Wheeler chimed in, rather than letting his military men solve the problem.

The military chiefs’ scorn and frustration with the president came pouring out in a torrent of “insubordination,” as Sorensen later described it. “What they said after he left the room about their commander-in-chief was outrageous,” he said.

With each passing day of the missile crisis, Kennedy knew that the pressures on him were growing to resolve it militarily. As he came out of the Cabinet Room that morning, he bumped into Sorensen, whom he had wisely kept out of the meeting to avoid provoking the Pentagon chiefs. “He burst out of the meeting, hot under the collar, and he said, ‘You and Bobby have to get a consensus on this [blockade] thing.’ And he pointed at the meeting and he said, ‘They all want war.’ He just felt that with the kind of pressure rising in that quarter, he knew time was going to run out.”

As the crisis progressed, LeMay’s right-hand man, Tommy Power—whose psychological temperament even LeMay acknowledged was “not stable”—took it upon himself to raise the Strategic Air Command’s alert status to DEFCON-2, one step from nuclear war. General Power clearly thought he knew better than the president of the United States how to handle the Russians. To make sure Moscow got the message, Power deliberately sent the alert in the clear, so the Soviets could immediately read it. Was the White House aware of this Strangelovian move by the head of the country’s nuclear air forces? “No, we were not,” Sorensen flatly says today.

It was not until years later that surviving members of the Kennedy administration learned just how dangerous the military pressure on JFK was. At a conference held in Havana in October 2002 to mark the fortieth anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, former Kennedy officials were stunned to hear from their Russian counterparts how cocked and ready Soviet nuclear forces were during the showdown. “The Joint Chiefs were pushing to take out the missiles with a surprise attack,” recalled Schlesinger, who attended the Havana gathering. “But as we discovered at the conference, the Soviet military had forty thousand troops in Cuba, not the ten or twelve thousand we expected. And the Soviet commanders in Cuba were equipped not only with strategic missiles but with tactical nuclear missiles, and they had the delegated authority to use them to repel an American invasion. I was sitting next to Bob McNamara in Havana when the Russian general who had been head of the Red Army contingent in Cuba in 1962 suddenly revealed this. McNamara nearly fell out of his seat. We never had any expectation of that.”