In Washington, it was the same Thursday afternoon, and the ExComm was on the verge of voting for war. The mood in the Cabinet Room was somber. CIA Director McCone had just reported that a handful of the MRBM sites were probably operational, and the President’s advisers were facing the real possibility of their own extinction, perhaps within days. McCone’s announcement had lent to the proceedings an air of reality that had previously been lacking. Until today, the ExComm might have been an academic seminar.
No longer.
Bundy glanced around the table. McCone had said “probably,” but he could see from their faces that the group had missed the qualifier. It was entirely possible that this very afternoon, without waiting for authorization from Congress, the President would allow a dozen or so worried advisers to persuade him to push the button.
“ ‘Operational’ meaning what?” asked Bobby Kennedy, who saw the same danger.
McCone looked straight at him. “Meaning, from launch order to missile away would be about eight hours.”
“Why so long?” asked Gwynn, from State.
All eyes swung his way. The poor man didn’t seem to understand that his job was to shut up and take notes. Watching him, Bundy wondered whether his own alternative plan had any chance of swaying the President: especially given that he wasn’t quite ready to share it. In a crisis, time was always the enemy.
“Because they use liquid fuel,” said General Curtis LeMay, Air Force chief of staff, whose task it would be to execute the attacks on the missiles if and when they were ordered. He toyed with his slate-gray mustache. He was rarely seen not chomping on his trademark cigar, but had forsaken it for the afternoon. “Ours use solid fuel. That’s another advantage we have over the Reds. We can have a bird in the air on fifteen minutes’ warning. A few years from now”—this almost wistful—“well, that advantage just might have disappeared. It might be a good thing this is happening now instead of later.”
The President frowned. Bundy knew what was going through his mind: McCone said some of the launchers were operative, but the truth was that the Agency didn’t know for sure. In the bureaucratic competition to get information to the table, they were reaching the point where unanalyzed rumor was being passed along as fact.
“Let’s come back to this later,” said Bundy. “I understand the Joint Chiefs have prepared attack plans.”
Taylor and LeMay presented the scenarios together. They would begin with two waves of air attacks, the first aimed at destroying the surface-to-air missiles, the second to take out the MRBM launchers. The ideal follow-up would be a ground assault on the launch positions, just to be sure. The discussion went on for a good forty-five minutes. Most of those at the table seemed inclined toward an attack. Then McNamara threw cold water on the whole thing with a chilly reminder that any attack on the missiles would entail significant Soviet casualties—and, since the attack would have to include napalm to be sure that the launching sites were destroyed, the manner of many of those deaths would be quite horrible.
“So, you still think they’d retaliate,” somebody clarified.
“They’d go nuclear,” said McNamara. “They’d have no choice.”
“We could handle them,” said LeMay. He was one of the most respected commanders in the military, but Kennedy loathed him, and the feeling was mutual. Yet Bundy had to admit that LeMay, for all his bellicosity, had been responsible for building the Strategic Air Command into the serious deterrent force it had become. “Believe me, Mr. President, they don’t want war with us.”
“We don’t want war with them, either,” Ted Sorensen shot back. But it was plain that the ExComm was inclined in LeMay’s direction. The man was an aggressive spellbinder. The Kennedys were about to lose control of the table.
“I had a conversation with President Eisenhower,” McCone offered. “He proposes ignoring the missile sites and attacking the Castro regime instead.”
It took the group a moment to appreciate the distinction, but Bundy immediately saw the appeal. First, an attack on Havana was less likely to entail Soviet casualties. Second, once a new regime was installed, the Cuban government itself could demand the removal of the missiles, and if the Soviets refused, they would then be committing the act of war against Cuba.
Bundy thought the plan had merit, but Kennedy seemed uninterested, maybe because he had now twice burned his fingers trying to unseat the Castro regime, maybe because the suggestion came from his still-popular predecessor.
Or maybe because, for all his Cold Warrior credentials, Kennedy still believed in the power of words. That was the part that worried Bundy most.
Bundy stood. “The President has a meeting,” he said. “Let’s resume in ninety minutes.”
From the Cabinet Room, the President returned to the Oval Office to meet Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet ambassador. Bundy had to be there, but first he stopped Alfred Gwynn in the corridor, drew him away from the others.
“You’ve been pestering your superiors about Dr. Harrington,” he said without preamble. “She’s your problem. How you handle her is entirely up to you.”
Gwynn was cautious. “She has powerful friends.”
“They won’t interfere.”
Bundy turned away, but not before noting with satisfaction the leap of delight in the little man’s eyes. A fundamental principle of Washington life was never to let ambition blind you to manipulation. By that measure, poor Alfred Gwynn was as blind as they come.
The question was whether the same could be said of Doris Harrington.