Kennedy (130 page)

The problem of Castro, however, remained. However insignificant he may have been compared to nuclear missiles, the American public’s continued irritation with his presence, the Cuban refugees’ desperate efforts to keep the crisis alive and the Republican Party’s not unnatural desire to becloud John Kennedy’s triumph soon drowned the nation’s sense of pride in a sea of rumors and accusations. The national unity produced by military danger could not be maintained for the follow-up negotiations. Many patriots, once they recovered from their fright, went right back to calling for a blockade of Cuba because it was Cuba. Khrushchev, in one of his letters on the IL-28’s, expressed satisfaction with the election defeats of Nixon and others, who had, he said, made the most frenzied, bellicose speeches. But the number of such speeches was hardly diminished.

More than three hundred competing, bickering Cuban refugee organizations flooded the Congress and the press with wild reports of missiles
in caves, of secret submarine bases, of the potential use of MIGs and torpedo boats for offensive purposes and a supposed Kennedy promise for a second invasion. Public antagonisms were further aggravated by the dawdling rate at which the Soviets removed their 23,000 troops (although they had made no precise commitment on timing), by a MIG attack on an unmarked American shrimp boat near the Cuban coast and by the Republican charge that Kennedy’s aim of “peace in the Caribbean” amounted to a guarantee of Castro. A crackdown by Federal authorities on the publicity-seeking Cuban refugee groups who conducted hit-and-run raids on Cuban ports and shipping—damaging little other than our efforts to persuade the Soviets to leave—fed fuel to the fire. Success was also dimmed by a variety of charges regarding the adequacy of U.S. intelligence, the positions taken by particular advisers, the secrecy surrounding the Kennedy-Khrushchev letters and the “management” of news during the crisis.

Time and again Kennedy patiently explained that our full surveillance would continue; that every refugee report was being checked out; that we had not tied our hands against Cuban subversion, sabotage or aggression; and that we had not weakened our efforts to isolate Castro politically and economically and end Communism in this hemisphere by every act short of war. Time and again he emphasized that questions of war and peace, attack and reprisal, should not be left to private organizations of exiles who had no responsibility or prospects of success (and whom he contrasted with those Bay of Pigs veterans who were quietly entering the American armed forces under special arrangement). “We should keep our heads and…know what we have in our hands,” he said, “before we bring the United States…to the brink again.” Finally, he authorized McNamara to present, in an unusual public disclosure of our reconnaissance capabilities, a comprehensive televised briefing which traced with aerial and naval photographs the arrival, installation, dismantling and removal of the Soviet weapons systems.

In time much of the noise about Cuba faded away. But Kennedy never took his eye off Cuba. While he dismissed in his own mind more firmly than before the possibility of bringing Castro down through external military action, the effort to isolate his regime continued with increased success. Castro was hurt, though not mortally, by a lack of trade with the free world, a lack of spare parts and consumer goods, additional breaks in Latin-American diplomatic relations, plummeting popularity throughout the hemisphere and rising discomfort among hungry Cubans. “I don’t accept the view that Mr. Castro is going to be in power in five years,” said the President. “I can’t indicate the roads by which there will be a change, but I have seen enough change…to make me feel that time will see Cuba free again.”

The newly established “Standing Group” of the National Security Council reviewed regularly the potential range of further actions against Castro, including:

1. What military action would be taken in the event of a Hungary-type revolt, a reintroduction of offensive weapons or the downing of a U-2, the latter possibility having been increased by Cuban operation of Soviet SAMs.

2. What steps could be taken to harass, disrupt and weaken Cuba politically and economically.

3. What steps could be taken to get either Castro or the Soviets out of Cuba, or to get either Cuba or Castro away from the Soviets (the possibility of enticing Fidel into becoming a Latin-American Tito with economic aid was regarded as a doubtful alternative because of his unreliability, because Congress would balk at providing the money, and because his success might encourage other Latin Americans to try the same course).

4. What steps could be taken to curb the export of arms, agents and subversion from Cuba, a principal topic at Kennedy’s March conference with Central American leaders at San Jose, Costa Rica.

5. What steps could be taken to make clear our concept of a free post-Castro Cuba. Pushed by Murrow, action on this front was of deep interest to the President. The United States could not—by supporting one of the many rival refugee groups as a government-in-exile or otherwise—dictate the personnel or policies of a future Cuban regime. But it was important, he thought, to make clear that our objection was to subversion, to dictatorship and to a Soviet satellite, not to “the genuine Cuban revolution…against the tyranny and corruption of the past.” He opposed an effort in the Congress to impose as the first condition to our dealing with a new Cuba its compensation of those Americans whose property had been expropriated by Castro. He stressed in a November 18, 1963, address to the Inter-American Press Association in Miami that only Cuba’s role as an agent of foreign imperialism prevented normal relations.

These remarks were little noticed. But Kennedy hoped to expand on this theme in future speeches, to spell out to the Cuban people the freedoms, the hemispheric recognition and the American aid which would be forthcoming once they broke with Moscow. The Miami speech was unfortunately his last opportunity.

The fate of Cuba, however, was the least of the consequences of the Cuban missile crisis. That confrontation has aptly been called “the Gettysburg of the Cold War.” For the first time in history, two major nuclear powers faced each other in a direct military challenge in which the prospects of a nuclear exchange were realistically assessed. Berlin, had its access been cut off, and even Laos, had there been no cease-fire, made a total of three potentially “major clashes with the Communists…in twenty-four months which could have escalated,” said the President, adding “That is rather unhealthy in a nuclear age.”

Khrushchev, it appeared, had reached the same conclusion. He had looked down the gun barrel of nuclear war and decided that that course was suicidal.

He had tried the ultimate in nuclear blackmail—dispatching not the usual missile threats, which had been issued over a hundred times since Sputnik, but the missiles themselves. That move having failed, nuclear blackmail was no longer an effective weapon in Berlin or anywhere else.

He had tested his premise that the United States lacked the will to risk all-out war in defense of its vital interests. That premise having proved wrong, he was less likely to underestimate our will again.

He had attempted a quick, easy step to catch up on the Americans in deliverable nuclear power. That step having been forced back, he implicitly accepted the superiority of our strategic forces as a fact with which he must and could live.

He had accepted—although only in Cuba, not in the Soviet Union—both a measure of inspection and an acknowledgment that the aerial camera was rapidly ending total secrecy. And he had learned, finally, that the American President was willing to exercise his strength with restraint, to seek communication and to reach accommodations that did not force upon his adversary total humiliation.

The result of all these lessons was apparently an agonizing reappraisal of policy within the Communist camp. The Soviet-Chinese split had been further widened when the Chinese—who had simultaneously and successfully attacked Russia’s friend India—openly assailed Khrushchev for his weakness in Cuba. Throughout the winter of 1962-1963 the Kremlin appeared to flounder. Reports of a new power struggle were widespread. But the change which finally emerged was one not of personnel but of policy—a change not of basic purposes but of methods and manner. The taunts and threats to his leadership from the Red Chinese caused Khrushchev to reshuffle his priorities,
removing conflict with the West from the top of his agenda. They also required him to prove concretely the value of coexistence and to isolate the more reckless Chinese position.

The arms race, moreover, looked very different to the Soviet Chairman than it had a few years earlier. The Kennedy acceleration of 1961 had given the United States, even earlier than planned, several times as many operational ICBMs as the Russians could deploy and every prospect of retaining that advantage for years to come. Khrushchev’s submarine-based missiles were fewer in number and inferior in capability to the Polaris system. The total number of strategic aircraft available to him for a strike in the Western Hemisphere was less than half the number of missile-equipped, long-range bombers placed by Kennedy on constant ground and air alert alone. In addition to obtaining tens of thousands of nuclear warheads for tactical and strategic use, the United States had discouraged any move on Berlin by sharply increasing its number of combat-ready divisions and tactical air support wings. For Khrushchev to match all these increases in not only personnel but equipment and air transport would be enormously expensive. The slowdown in Russia’s industrial, investment and agricultural growth, particularly in comparison with the new burst of growth in the United States, along with the simultaneous rise in Russian consumer demands, pressured him to forgo trying to win the arms race, to allocate more resources to his civilian economy and to avoid another crisis that would threaten its very existence.

“Mr. Khrushchev and I are in the same boat in the sense of both having this nuclear capacity and both wanting to protect our societies,” said Kennedy.

The Soviet Chairman, in talks with Harold Wilson and Paul Spaak, and in his letters to Kennedy, seemed to be looking for a chance to live in peace, for a meaningful breakthrough in nuclear arms control that would prevent any breakthrough on nuclear arms, for a breathing spell to focus on goulash and housing and ballet instead of weapons. He removed the pressure from Berlin, saying only that he would welcome new suggestions from the West.

The Chairman, reported Mikoyan to Kennedy in late November at the White House, liked the spirit of the President’s statements and felt that the United States and the Soviet Union should proceed to a
point-by-point negotiation of all outstanding questions. It would be helpful, the President replied, for the Soviets to start by devoting their efforts to the pursuit of Russian interests only instead of kindling fires all over the world. He did not forget—and did not fail to remind Khrushchev by letter and Mikoyan in person—that the missile crisis had originated in a high-level, calculated attempt by the Soviets to deceive him. The possibility of improving Soviet-American relations, he warned Mikoyan, had suffered a severe blow because of this deception. Recognizing also that their failure in Cuba might force the more militant voices in the Kremlin to try again closer to home—as in Berlin—he had no intention of relaxing his vigil. Nevertheless he recognized that the Soviet Union was probably more ready for serious negotiations with the United States in early 1963 than at any time since the close of the Second World War.

He derived little comfort from the Soviet-Chinese dispute, and thought, on the contrary, that it might increase the dangers of desperation in Moscow or irresponsibility in Peking. Their disagreement, he told the Congress, “is over means, not ends. A dispute over how to bury the West is no grounds for Western rejoicing.” But the new fluidity in the post-Cuban Communist camp, he recognized, presented opportunities which seventeen years of cold war rigidities had never made possible before.

Kennedy, too, was ready to negotiate—to apply, as Dean Rusk put it, the lessons of World War III before it could occur because it will be too late to apply them afterward. Success in Cuba had not endowed him with any smug belief that the results were due to military superiority alone, or that superiority meant omnipotence, or that the pattern in Cuba could be often repeated. Cuba, he said, was located in an area where our conventional superiority posed problems for the Communists. Secret intelligence had enabled careful planning and timing which took the initiative away from the Soviets. Our side of the dispute had been convincing, even without advance consultation, to both allies and neutrals. A crisis in Berlin or Southeast Asia would have none of those features. “You can’t have too many of those,” he said of the Cuban showdown in his 1962 year-end interview. “One major mistake either by Mr. Khrushchev or by us…can make this whole thing blow up.”

Nevertheless the President recognized that the impact of Cuba was broader than its precedent. It had helped clear the air in this country about the fatal futility of total nuclear “victory” and the creative possibilities of agreement. It had sharpened his own interest in peaceful solutions. Disarmament looked more like a necessity and less like a dream. He began to look at the new arms requests for his budget in terms of their effect on ultimate arms control. His perspective, too, had changed after looking down the nuclear gun barrel. After the first Cuban crisis
he had stressed to the nation’s editors that “our restraint is not inexhaustible.” After the second Cuban crisis, questioned by the same audience about that statement, he replied: “I hope our restraint—or sense of responsibility—will not ever come to an end.”