On Wednesday morning, October 24, Attorney General Robert Kennedy read to the ExComm the chilling letter from Khrushchev that Ambassador Dobrynin had handed him last night at the embassy. The blockade, said Khrushchev, constituted “outright banditry or, if you like, the folly of degenerate imperialism.”
Kennedy smiled. “Well, he’s not the first man to call me a degenerate.”
Nobody laughed. Bobby read on: “The Soviet Government considers that the violation of the freedom to use international waters and international air space is an act of aggression which pushes mankind toward the abyss of a world nuclear-missile war. Therefore, the Soviet Government cannot instruct the captains of Soviet vessels bound for Cuba to observe the orders of American naval forces blockading that island.”
“I see,” said the President, his humor fading.
“Mr. President, he concludes by insisting that the Soviet ship captains will protect their rights. He says they have—quoting again now—‘everything necessary to do so.’ ”
“It’s practically a declaration of war,” said McNamara.
Now other voices competed. Everyone had a suggestion. But Kennedy asked for quiet.
“Okay. That’s the face Khrushchev has decided to put on. Is he just posturing, to keep his own fanatics in line? Or is this a real threat?”
He was looking at McCone, the director of central intelligence, who cleared his throat and shuffled his papers. “Sir, as far as we can tell, work on the launchers isn’t slowing down. It’s speeding up.”
The President turned to Maxwell Taylor, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. “General?”
“Mr. President, our naval forces on station inform us that the trawlers headed for Cuba are now being escorted by submarines.”
Kennedy turned back to McCone. “Are their missiles ready for launch?”
“No, sir. Our best estimate is at least three more days.”
Somebody from the State Department asked how good the intelligence was. McCone said it was excellently sourced and deemed highly reliable, but Bundy wondered. The arrest of Penkovsky left in limbo all their Soviet sources.
“So, in three days, they’ll be able to hit our cities with nukes?” asked someone else.
“They can hit our cities already,” growled General LeMay.
“Well, in three days they’ll be able to hit us from a lot closer,” a worried voice put in.
“Exactly,” said LeMay.
As Bundy watched, the mood in the room began subtly to shift. Before, only the Joint Chiefs had seemed to favor invasion. Now the entire table was moving in that direction.
The President evidently sensed the change as well. He waved the others silent. “I don’t want to put Khrushchev in a corner from which he can’t escape.”
But Bundy wondered. On Monday, the President had briefed congressional leaders, who, almost to a man, wanted swift military action. Kennedy had been stunned by their belligerence, but Bundy hadn’t. He worried that the President he served, in his determination to listen to every argument and consider every option, was missing the response of the man in the street. Millions were leaving the cities, afraid of war; but many of those same millions considered war inevitable, even desirable. If their President decided to take military action against the missiles in Cuba, the great majority of the American people were angrily ready to support him.
The President asked what would happen if a submarine were to fire on an American vessel.
“What do you think?” one of the military men near Bundy muttered, but too softly for the commander in chief to hear.
Bundy made a note of his name.
There were small depth charges, McNamara answered, that could be dropped and even hit a submarine without doing damage. The captain would interpret this as an order to surface or be destroyed.
“How can we know for a fact that we won’t damage the submarine?” asked Bobby. “It’s not like we’ve tested these things on Soviet hulls.”
“We know,” said McNamara, jaw thrust forward belligerently.
The President, still driven by a concern about retaliation, answered that he would rather attack a merchant vessel than a submarine. McNamara corrected him gently. Maritime warfare could never be entirely accurate. He was skeptical that the Navy could put enough separation between the cargo ship and its submarine escort to take on one without fighting the other.
“Okay,” Kennedy said, but he didn’t sound persuaded.
The conversation turned to various ways to stop the Soviet ships if they refused to turn at the quarantine line—warning shots? taking out their rudders?—and it was left to Robert Kennedy to ask whether anybody had bothered to make sure that each American ship had a Russian speaker on board.
Silence.
Just before the meeting broke up, an aide handed McCone a note. “Mr. President, the Soviet ships are slowing. They are not challenging the blockade line.”
There was a moment of disbelief; then, if not a cheer, at least a relaxation of tension. A smiling Dean Rusk went so far as to say that the other side had blinked.
Bundy was reluctant to join the celebration. Khrushchev had slowed the ships to gain time to consider his options. The ExComm seemed to have forgotten McCone’s earlier report that work on preparing the missiles had actually accelerated. The Soviets were not backing down. Sooner or later, they would send at least one ship toward the line. They had to. Until that happened, neither side knew how far the other was prepared to go.
They needed GREENHILL and the back channel more than ever.
Margo Jensen had not so much settled into a routine as come to experience her life as a single unbroken nightmare. Some of the girls were going out after work and invited the newcomer along. Her polite refusal only added to their suspicion that she was in town for the pleasure of someone powerful, especially after her furtive telephone conversation earlier in the day. A man had called the office looking for her—that’s what they said when they came down to her cubby to get her, “a man”—and as Margo made her way along the hallway to the reception desk, she sensed the curious and disapproving scrutiny of everyone she passed. The receptionist was a thickset, unpleasant woman named Sylvie who wet her lips constantly with her tongue. She held out the phone and told Margo that she had almost hung up, so please don’t take so long next time. Margo asked politely whether it would be possible to transfer the call to an empty office.
“No,” said Sylvie with cruel satisfaction.
Defeated, Margo took the handset. An unfamiliar male voice began talking some nonsense about how a book she had requested from the Library of Congress had gone missing, and it would likely be weeks or more before they could find another copy.
“It wasn’t that important,” she said, because the code word was library, and meant an unscheduled meeting tonight. “I can wait.”
Sylvie took the phone back. She licked her lips. “Everything all right, sweetie?”
“Fine, thanks.”
“He can’t make it?”
“There isn’t any he.”
“We’re both women here.” A horrendous wink. “Don’t you worry. That’s how men are. It doesn’t mean he’s tired of you. He’s probably just busy.”
Walking back to her cubicle, Margo kept her head high. She was now more puzzled than embarrassed. This was Wednesday. She had been in the city only since Saturday night. She had made no friends, confided in nobody, least of all her roommates or fellow interns. Despite that, everybody seemed to think she was in Washington at the command of a powerful man.
The rumor had spread awfully fast.