JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (12 page)

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian Foreign Ministry declassified Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin’s October 27, 1962, cable describing his critical one-on-one meeting with Robert Kennedy. Dobrynin’s report offers a less dramatic version than Khrushchev’s memoirs of Robert Kennedy’s words concerning the military pressures on President Kennedy: “taking time to find a way out [of the situation] is very risky. (Here R. Kennedy mentioned as if in passing that there are many unreasonable heads among the generals, and not only among the generals, who ‘are itching for a fight.’) The situation might get out of control, with irreversible consequences.”
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In Robert Kennedy’s own account of the meeting in
Thirteen Days
, he does not mention telling Dobrynin of the military pressures on the president. However, his friend and biographer Arthur Schlesinger says, whatever the Attorney General said to Dobrynin, RFK was himself of the opinion there were many generals eager for a fight. Robert thought the situation could get totally out of control.
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In any case, Khrushchev felt the urgency of the pressures on the president. He responded by withdrawing his missiles.

Is there any evidence U.S. military leaders took advantage of the missile crisis, not to overthrow President Kennedy but to bypass him? Were they trying to trigger a war they felt they could win?

According to political scientist Scott Sagan in his book
The Limits of Safety
, the U.S. Air Force launched an intercontinental ballistic missile from Vandenberg Air Force Base on October 26, 1962, the day before the U-2 was shot down. The ICBM was unarmed, a test missile destined for Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands. The Soviet Union could easily have thought otherwise. Three days before, a test missile at Vandenberg had received a nuclear warhead, changing it to full alert status for the crisis. By October 30, nine Vandenberg “test” missiles were armed for use against the Soviets.
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At the height of the missile crisis, the Air Force’s October 26th launch of its missile could have been seen by the Soviets as the beginning of an attack. It was a dangerous provocation. Had the Soviets been suckered into giving any sign of a launch of their own, the entire array of U.S. missiles and bombers were poised to preempt them. They were already at the top rung of their nuclear war status, DefCon (Defense Condition)-2, totally prepared for a massive strike.

Also at the height of the crisis, as writer Richard Rhodes learned from a retired Air Force commander, “SAC [Strategic Air Command] airborne-alert bombers deliberately flew past their customary turnaround points toward the Soviet Union—an unambiguous threat that Soviet radar operators would certainly have recognized and reported.”
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With their far superior number of missiles and bombers, U.S. forces were prepared for a preemptive attack at the slightest sign of a Soviet response to their provocation. Fortunately the Soviets didn’t bite.

President Kennedy had reason to feel he was being circumvented by the military so they could win a nuclear showdown. Kennedy may also have recalled that Khrushchev, in his second secret letter to the president, on November 9, 1961, regarding Berlin, had hinted that belligerent pressures in Moscow made compromise difficult from his own side. “You have to understand,” he implored Kennedy, “I have no ground to retreat further, there is a precipice behind.”
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Kennedy had not pushed him. Now there was a precipice behind Kennedy, and Khrushchev understood.

Khrushchev recalled the conclusion of Dobrynin’s report as Robert Kennedy’s words, “I don’t know how much longer we can hold out against our generals.”
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Since Khrushchev had also just received an urgent message from Castro that a U.S. attack on Cuba was “almost imminent,”
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he hastened to respond: “We could see that we had to reorient our position swiftly . . . We sent the Americans a note saying that we agreed to remove our missiles and bombers on the condition that the President give us his assurance that there would be no invasion of Cuba by the forces of the United States or anybody else.”
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Kennedy agreed, and Khrushchev began removing the Soviet missiles. The crisis was over.
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Neither side revealed that, as part of the agreement, on the analogous issue of U.S. missiles in Turkey Robert Kennedy had in fact promised Anatoly Dobrynin that they, too, would be withdrawn but not immediately.
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It could not be done unilaterally at a moment’s notice. The promise was fulfilled. Six months later the United States took its missiles out of Turkey.

Twenty-five years after the missile crisis, Secretary of State Dean Rusk would reveal that President Kennedy was prepared to make a further concession to Khrushchev in order to avoid war. Rusk said that on October 27, after Robert Kennedy left to meet Dobrynin, the president “instructed me to telephone the late Andrew Cordier, then [president] at Columbia University, and dictate to him a statement which would be made by U Thant, the Secretary General of the United Nations [and a friend of Cordier], proposing the removal of the Jupiters [in Turkey] and the missiles in Cuba. Mr. Cordier was to put that statement in the hands of U Thant only after further signal from us.”
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Rusk phoned the statement to Cordier. However, when Khrushchev accepted Robert Kennedy’s promise to Dobrynin that the Jupiter missiles would be removed, Kennedy’s further readiness for a public trade mediated by U Thant became unnecessary. The president’s willingness to go that extra mile with Khrushchev, at a heavy political cost to himself, shocked the former ExComm members to whom Rusk revealed it for the first time at the Hawk’s Cay (Florida) Conference on March 7, 1987.

The extent to which Kennedy’s willingness to trade away missiles with Khrushchev was beyond political orthodoxy at the time can be illustrated by my own experience. In May 1963 I wrote an article on Pope John XXIII’s encyclical
Pacem in Terris
. It was published by Dorothy Day in her radically pacifist
Catholic Worker
newspaper. The article said that, in harmony with Pope John’s theme of increasing mutual trust as the basis for peace, the United States should have resolved the Cuban Missile Crisis by negotiating a mutual withdrawal of missile bases with the Soviet Union. Unknown to Dorothy Day and myself, our politically unacceptable view was what President Kennedy had committed himself to doing in the midst of that crisis, at whatever political cost, and had in fact carried through secretly with Nikita Khrushchev.
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How close did the United States and the Soviet Union come to a nuclear holocaust?

From the Joint Chiefs’ standpoint, not close enough. The only real danger, they thought, came from the President’s lack of will in not attacking the Russians in Cuba.

At the October 19 meeting between the president and the Chiefs, when General LeMay argued for a surprise attack on the Russian missiles as soon as possible, President Kennedy had asked him skeptically, “What do you think their reprisal would be?”

LeMay said there would be no reprisal so long as Kennedy warned Khrushchev that he was ready to fight also in Berlin.

After Admiral George Anderson made the same point, Kennedy said sharply, “They can’t let us just take out, after all their statements, take out their missiles, kill a lot of Russians, and not do . . . not do anything.”
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After the meeting, the President recounted the conversation to his aide Dave Powers and said, “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.”
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In a conversation that fall with his friend John Kenneth Galbraith, Kennedy again spoke angrily of the reckless pressures his advisers, both military and civilian, had put on him to bomb the Cuban missile sites. “I never had the slightest intention of doing so,” said the president.
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Thirty years after the crisis, Kennedy’s Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was surprised to learn the contents of a November 1992 article in the Russian press. The article revealed that at the height of the crisis Soviet forces in Cuba had possessed a total of 162 nuclear warheads. The more critical strategic fact, unknown to the United States at the time, was that these weapons were ready to be fired. On October 26, 1962, the day before the U-2 was shot down, the nuclear warheads in Cuba had been prepared for launching. Enlightened by this knowledge, McNamara wrote in his memoirs:

“Clearly, there was a high risk that, in the face of a U.S. attack—which, as I have said, many in the U.S. government, military and civilian alike, were prepared to recommend to President Kennedy—the Soviet forces in Cuba would have decided to use their nuclear weapons rather than lose them.

“We need not speculate about what would have happened in that event. We can predict the results with certainty . . . And where would it have ended? In utter disaster.”
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In the climactic moments of the Cold War, John Kennedy’s resistance to pressures for a first strike, combined with Nikita Khrushchev’s quick understanding and retreat, saved the lives of millions of people, perhaps the life of the planet.

In those days, however, when compromise was regarded as treason, U.S. military leaders were not pleased by the Kennedy-Khrushchev resolution of the crisis. The Joint Chiefs of Staff were outraged at Kennedy’s refusal to attack Cuba and even his known concessions to Khrushchev. McNamara recalled how strongly the Chiefs expressed their feelings to the president. “After Khrushchev had agreed to remove the missiles, President Kennedy invited the Chiefs to the White House so that he could thank them for their support during the crisis, and there was one hell of a scene. LeMay came out saying, ‘We lost! We ought to just go in there today and knock ‘em off!’”
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Robert Kennedy was also struck by the Chiefs’ anger at the president. “Admiral [George] Anderson’s reaction to the news,” he said, “was ‘We have been had.’”
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“The military are mad,” President Kennedy told Arthur Schlesinger, “They wanted to do this.”
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Yet as angry as the Chiefs were at Kennedy’s handling of the missile crisis, their anger would deepen in the following year. They would witness a Cold War president not only refusing their first-strike mandate but also turning decisively toward peace with the enemy.

On Sunday morning, October 28, after Kennedy and Khrushchev had agreed mutually to withdraw their most threatening missiles, JFK went to Mass in Washington to pray in thanksgiving. As he and Dave Powers were about to get into the White House car, Kennedy looked at Powers and said, “Dave, this morning we have an extra reason to pray.”
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At the Abbey of Gethsemani, Thomas Merton’s response to the Cuban Missile Crisis was also a prayer of thanksgiving. He wrote Daniel Berrigan: “As for Cuba, well thank God we escaped the results of our own folly this time. We excel in getting ourselves into positions where we ‘have to’ press the button, or the next thing to it. I realize more and more that this whole war question is nine-tenths our own fabricated illusion . . . I think Kennedy has enough sense to avoid the worst injustices, he acts as if he knew the score. But few others seem to.”
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Regarding the president’s handling of the crisis, Merton wrote Etta Gullick in England: “Of course things being what they were, Kennedy hardly had any alternative. My objection is to things being as they are, through the stupidity and shortsightedness of politicians who have no politics.”
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To Ethel Kennedy he said further: “The Cuba business was a close call, but in the circumstances I think JFK handled it very well. I say in the circumstances, because only a short-term look at it makes one very happy. It was a crisis and something had to be done and there was only a choice of various evils. He chose the best evil, and it worked. The whole thing continues to be nasty.”
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On Sunday afternoon, October 28, with the crisis over, Robert Kennedy returned to the White House and talked with the president for a long time. When Robert got ready to leave, John said, in reference to the death of Abraham Lincoln, “This is the night I should go to the theater.” His brother replied, “If you go, I want to go with you.”
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They would both go soon.

John Kennedy’s third Bay of Pigs was his Commencement Address at American University in Washington.
Saturday Review
editor Norman Cousins summed up the significance of this remarkable speech: “At American University on June 10, 1963, President Kennedy proposed an end to the Cold War.”
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The Cold Warrior John F. Kennedy was turning, in the root biblical sense of the word “turning”—
teshuvah
in the Hebrew Scriptures,
metanoia
in the Greek, “repentance” in English. In the Cuban Missile Crisis John Kennedy as president of the United States had begun to turn away from, to repent from, his own complicity with the worst of U.S. imperialism—its willingness to destroy the world in order to “save it” from Communism. Nevertheless, in the process of turning from the brink, Kennedy seemed unable to begin walking in a new direction.