JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (20 page)

[
91
]. Wells, “Private Letters,” p. A4.

[
92
].
FRUS 1961-1963
, vol. VI, p. 25.

[
93
]. Ibid., pp. 25-26.

[
94
]. Ibid., p. 26.

[
95
]. Ibid., p. 35.

[
96
]. Ibid., pp. 38-39.

[
97
]. R. Kennedy,
Thirteen Days
, p. 97.

[
98
]. Ibid., p. 98.

[
99
]. Ibid., p. 106.

[
100
].
Khrushchev Remembers
, pp. 497-98.

[
101
]. From Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin’s cable to the Soviet Foreign Ministry, October 27, 1962. Reprinted in translation in Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein,
We All Lost the Cold War
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 523-26. Cited by Jim Hershberg, “Anatomy of a Controversy: Anatoly F. Dobrynin’s Meeting with Robert F. Kennedy, Saturday, 27 October 1962,”
The Cold War
International History Project Bulletin
(Issue 5, Spring 1995), available at http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nsa/ cuba_mis_cri/

[
102
]. Schlesinger,
Robert Kennedy
, pp. 561-62.

[
103
]. Scott D. Sagan,
The Limits of Safety
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 79.

[
104
]. Richard Rhodes, “The General and World War III,”
New Yorker
(June 19, 1995), pp. 58-59.

[
105
].
FRUS 1961-1963,
vol. VI, p. 57.

[
106
].
Khrushchev Remembers
, p. 498.

[
107
]. Letter from Fidel Castro to Nikita Khrushchev, October 26, 1962, cited by Carlos Lechuga,
In the Eye of the Storm
(Melbourne: Ocean Press, 1995), p. 88.

[
108
].
Khrushchev Remembers
, p. 498.

[
109
]. It is true that in a less intense sense the crisis continued until November 20, when President Kennedy announced at a press conference that two outstanding issues had been resolved: In addition to its nuclear missiles, the Soviet Union had agreed to remove from Cuba its IL-28 bombers, which the U.S. regarded as offensive weapons. Although there would be no UN inspections because Premier Fidel Castro would not cooperate in a process verifying the missiles’ and bombers’ removal, the Soviets agreed to leave the weapons on the decks of their departing ships for observation by the United States.
Kennedy Tapes
, pp. 664-65.

[
110
]. Robert Kennedy had in fact been more explicit in his diary about the missile trade-off between the United States and the Soviet Union than the edited text of his posthumous work,
Thirteen Days
, revealed. In a Moscow conference in January 1989, former Kennedy speechwriter Theodore Sorensen stated: “Ambassador Dobrynin felt that Robert Kennedy’s book did not adequately express that the ‘deal’ on the Turkish missiles was part of the resolution of the crisis. And here I have a confession to make to my colleagues on the American side, as well as to others who are present. I was the editor of Robert Kennedy’s book. It was, in fact, a diary of those thirteen days. And his diary was very explicit that this was part of the deal; but at that time it was still a secret even on the American side, except for the six of us who had been present at that [preliminary White House] meeting. So I took it upon myself to edit that out of his diaries, and that is why the Ambassador is somewhat justified in saying that the diaries are not as explicit as his conversation.” Sorensen’s “confession” is cited in Hershberg, “Anatomy of a Controversy.”

[
111
]. Because Rusk was ill and unable to attend the March 1987 Hawk’s Cay (Florida) meeting of former ExComm members, his revelation was made in a letter read to the conference participants by Kennedy’s National Security Adviser, McGeorge Bundy. Cited by James G. Blight and David A. Welch,
On the Brink
(New York: Noonday, 1990), pp. 83-84.

[
112
]. Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker house had been a stopping point two decades earlier on John Kennedy’s journey of conscience. In her book
Loaves and Fishes
, published in 1963 shortly before the president’s assassination, Dorothy Day recalled a night in the forties when “two members of the Kennedy family” visited her at the Catholic Worker house on Mott Street in New York. The Kennedys, Dorothy, and several others went to an all-night restaurant and talked until the small hours. “I remember,” she wrote, “only that we talked of war and peace and of man and the state. I do not remember which of the Kennedy boys were there, but those who do remember tell me it was our President, John Kennedy, and his older brother Joseph, who lost his life in the war.” Dorothy Day,
Loaves and Fishes
(New York: Curtis Books, 1963), p. 159.

Dorothy Day’s longtime co-worker Stanley Vishnewski remembered the Kennedy brothers’ visit more vividly. He said they spent the afternoon with others at the Worker before seeing Dorothy. “And of course, they were just the Kennedys to us, just young people that we thought were coming slumming.” Recalling the young John Kennedy’s reaction to what he was seeing, Vishnewski told Bill Moyers in a 1973 television interview, “I remember distinctly how bewildered he was by the sight of the poverty and the misery of the place. And then Dorothy came in. She talked to him. Then Dorothy says, ‘Come and have supper with us.’ And Kennedy looked at her, a little startled, and says, ‘No, come out and have dinner with us instead.’ So Dorothy, and Joe and John Kennedy . . . We went out to a little restaurant around the corner. We had a wonderful conversation.” (From “Still a Rebel,” a program on Dorothy Day,
Bill Moyers’ Journal
, February 20, 1973, Public Broadcasting Service.)

John Kennedy’s visit to the Mott Street Catholic Worker took place in the summer of 1940. Marquette University’s Catholic Worker archivist Phil Runkel has sent to me copies of several pages from the Mott Street Catholic Worker’s Guest Book for 1940. Included in the signatures between July 29 and August 4, 1940, is a somewhat illegible “John F. Kennedy, Hyannisport—Cape Cod, Ma.”

Author Michael Harrington, who spent two years with the Catholic Worker, wrote a book entitled
The Other America: Poverty in the United States
(New York: Macmillan, 1962), which had a powerful impact on JFK. Arthur Schlesinger wrote that
The Other America
helped crystallize Kennedy’s determination in 1963 to enact a poverty program (
Thousand Days
, p. 1010). Stanley Vishnewski thought the combination of what Kennedy saw that day at the Catholic Worker, heard that night from Dorothy Day, and read years later in
The Other America
“planted the idea of the poverty program” (
Bill Moyers’ Journal,
February 20, 1973). Perhaps the conversation into the early morning hours “of war and peace and of man and the state,” as Day remembered it, also helped plant the idea of peace in the future president.

[
113
]. Stern,
Averting “The Final Failure,”
pp. 123, 125.

[
114
]. O’Donnell and Powers,
“Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye,”
p. 318.

[
115
]. John Kenneth Galbraith,
A Life in Our Times
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), p. 388.

[
116
]. Robert S. McNamara,
In Retrospect
(New York: Random House, 1995), p. 341.

[
117
]. Rhodes, “General and World War III,” p. 58.

[
118
]. Schlesinger,
Robert Kennedy
, p. 565.

[
119
]. Ibid.

[
120
]. Dave Powers, interview by Ted O’Brien, “Dave Powers & JFK,” WGBH-TV (1990).

[
121
]. Thomas Merton, letter to Daniel Berrigan, November 27, 1962; in
The Hidden Ground of Love: The Letters of Thomas Merton on Religious Experience and Social Concerns
, edited by William H. Shannon (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1985), p. 75.

[
122
]. Merton,
Cold War Letters
, p. 190.

[
123
]. Thomas Merton, letter to Ethel Kennedy, May 14, 1963; in
Hidden Ground of Love
, p. 447.

[
124
]. R. Kennedy,
Thirteen Days
, p. 110.

[
125
]. Norman Cousins,
The Improbable Triumvirate
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), p. 9.

[
126
]. Richard Reeves,
President Kennedy: Profile of Power
(New York: Touchstone, 1993), pp. 312, 339, 514.

[
127
]. Cousins,
Improbable Triumvirate,
p. 101.

[
128
]. Gar Alperovitz,
Atomic Diplomacy
(New York: Penguin Books, 1985), p. 8.