CHAPTER 14

“Your President Has Made a Very Bad Mistake”

At the Kremlin New Year’s celebration, chimes sounded as Khrushchev stood and raised his glass at midnight: “The main achievement of the past year was that on most of the planet there was no war.… We shall do everything to prevent a new war in 1962.”

Western diplomats felt that the Chairman looked “far from well” and that his entourage seemed “preoccupied, under serious tension.” His text was uncommonly trite and devoid of his usual improvisations and jokes. He left at the earliest opportunity without speaking to a single foreigner.

The Kremlin announced that he was suffering from influenza, but rumors swept Moscow that Khrushchev was gravely ill or about to resign. These were not dispelled by his first major speech of the year at Minsk on Friday, January 12: “I am at the retirement age, and it is highly disagreeable when one finds oneself without an occupation.… This is the state of mind that is most painful to a man.”

While the Chairman was in Minsk for a hunting trip, he was said to have been punched in the jaw at a party or stabbed in the shoulder by his chauffeur. The Italian Communist newspaper L’Unità reported a rumor that one of Khrushchev’s bodyguards, while raising rifles in a triumphal arch, had lowered his gun and taken a shot as he walked through.* Another story had it that his hunting lodge had been set aflame. The Soviet Foreign Ministry took the rare step of denouncing the “lying rumors and nonsense.”

At the White House, Chip Bohlen advised Kennedy that Khrushchev was not in serious trouble; otherwise he would never have taken the risk of leaving Moscow. The new CIA Director, John McCone, counseled the President that Khrushchev did not need to “fear for his position. But he does have to maneuver among colleagues who are less than equal to him but more than the terrorized lackeys who surrounded Stalin.”

McCone and his analysts felt that odds were now “about even” that China and the Soviet Union would file for a complete and public divorce. Llewellyn Thompson warned from Moscow that “any indication that we were moving to exploit the quarrel” might force Khrushchev to heal it: “The less we discuss the situation in official statements, the better.”

Georgi Bolshakov conceded to Ben Bradlee that the Soviet Union was having “serious difficulties” with China, Albania, and other radical Communist states. The problem for the West was simple: “You know you can live with Khrushchev, and you will never have it so good with Albanians.” The way to help Khrushchev was to solve the problem in Berlin: “Give us the tools to strengthen our hand against the firebrands who charge our coexistence policy is a dismal failure, and we can live in peace forever.”

Khrushchev had hoped that the October Party Congress would help to foil his enemies and enshrine his plans to shift resources to agriculture and consumer goods, achieving the blissful state of full communism by 1980. Instead Frol Kozlov, the Deputy Prime Minister whom he had once called his successor but who now attacked him from the Right, was given the number-two post in the Secretariat.

Despite his assaults on Stalin’s personality cult, Khrushchev more than ever encouraged his own as a source of influence. A documentary called Our Nikita Sergeyevich was playing in Soviet movie houses. A highly fictionalized book was published on the Chairman’s early years called The Tale of an Honorary Miner. The New York Times lampooned a new Soviet novel on Siberian farm problems whose protagonist was Khrushchev: “Sure Success for Novel—Khrushchev Is the Hero.”

By January 1962, the harvest in Khrushchev’s cherished Virgin Lands was confirmed to be the leanest in five years. Soviet citizens were demanding food, cars, and apartments, not fifty-megaton bombs. Critics cited the contrast between Khrushchev’s rodomontade and reality. His three years of Berlin threats had not been followed by action.

Now that he was prosecuting his quarrel with China, the Soviet Union could no longer challenge the West with the combined force of more than a billion Communists. Tiny Albania had defied him. For all his rhetoric about expanding world communism, the only country to enter the Communist camp since Khrushchev took supreme power was Cuba—and not by Soviet premeditation.

During a brief Washington visit, Thompson privately told Senators that U.S. policy must not be “geared to whether Khrushchev is good or not good for us.” Even if they wished to strengthen the Chairman against his rivals, “we don’t know what action we could take.… Certainly as far as internal affairs go, Khrushchev is the best in sight because he is doing more to make the country more normal.… If we ever are going to work out a way of living with them, they have to become more normal than they were.”

Thompson conceded that, in foreign affairs, Khrushchev had championed “some pretty dangerous policies, particularly over Berlin.” But anyone who deposed him would take years to gather the authority to reach agreements with the United States. That leader “wouldn’t be able to do the things which he could do and get away with.”

Early in 1962, while researching a profile of Dean Rusk for Life, Theodore White interviewed the President and his staff. Kennedy warned his aides that White had better not hear “a discouraging word” about the Secretary.

Nevertheless, when he spoke to White off the record, he could not keep himself from complaining about Rusk: “He never gives me anything to chew on, never puts it on the line. You never know what he is thinking.… Take Acheson—a brilliant advocate, sarcastic but too bitter. I couldn’t have worked with so bitter a man.” Rusk was “calm, wise, thoughtful,” an “excellent Secretary if you’re not interested in foreign affairs—but I am.” The problem with State was execution: “That’s why Dick Goodwin is over there. They hate him, but he’s needling them every minute.”*

Worried that he had been too critical, he called White back for another conversation but still could not summon much praise: Rusk “knows more than anyone else in the White House or State about all these problems—the alliance of free peoples. But he’s too busy to run the Department. It is understandable. McNamara can do things—moves divisions around the map—and Rusk can’t do things on his job. His job is harder.”

As early as the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy had privately complained, “How do you fire a Secretary of State who does nothing—good or bad?” He told Oleg Cassini a few months later that while Rusk was brilliant, “he always gives me twenty options and argues convincingly for and against each of them.” In January 1962, while trying to dissuade Roger Hilsman from leaving State, he told Hilsman that Rusk was “certainly no Dean Acheson” and that he was “unhappy” with Rusk, but there wasn’t much he could do about it except to keep on acting as his own Secretary of State.

Such presidential criticism got back to Rusk. This proud and sensitive man could not have helped but feel wounded that his ostentatious loyalty to the President was not reciprocated. Stoical as always, he said nary a word of complaint to anyone, but it surely must have crossed his mind that neither Truman nor Eisenhower would ever have dreamed of complaining about his Secretary of State to a reporter or, worse yet, one of the Secretary’s own subordinates.

Kennedy benefited from Rusk’s discretion and self-effacement, his excellent relations with Congress, and his willingness to announce bad news from Foggy Bottom.† But Rusk lacked the eagerness to use the telephone, the verbal shorthand, the informality, originality, impatience, flexibility, aggressiveness, acerbic humor, social ease, physical grace, and near-absolute loyalty that attracted the President to other key figures he had scarcely known, such as Bundy and McNamara.*

Robert Kennedy complained in a 1965 oral history interview that Rusk “would never follow anything up. He’d never initiate ideas.… I would think sixty percent of new concepts or plans about matters came from the President—maybe eighty percent came from the President and the White House, of which probably sixty of the eighty percent came from the President himself.… When we had letters from Khrushchev, he would either have to rewrite them himself or have someone in the White House rewrite them.”

Unlike the Attorney General and McNamara, who brought in battalions of New Frontiersmen to bend their departments to the President’s purposes, Rusk took seriously his role not only as Kennedy’s action officer at State but as champion of the permanent State Department, especially the Foreign Service, assuring that its needs won a fair hearing at the White House.

During the early Eisenhower years, Rusk saw what could happen when a Secretary refused to defend the Foreign Service from political tampering: Foster Dulles had thrown one diplomat after another to the wolves rather than stand up to Joseph McCarthy. As Secretary, Rusk tried to rehabilitate one such victim, the China hand John Paton Davies, but Robert Kennedy refused to intervene in the case. He was evidently worried about political embarrassment to the President.

Such behavior opened Rusk to charges of disloyalty and obstructionism, especially from the Attorney General. Years later he recalled, “Robert Kennedy wanted people in the government who were Kennedy men.… In some cases I had a little tussle with Bobby Kennedy about getting some names approved.… Sometimes he would go for blood.… McNamara and Bobby got to be good personal friends, but that never developed between Bobby and me.”

Rusk once complained to the President about the Attorney General’s demand to have the State Department ask American corporations abroad to stage demonstrations in support of American foreign policy. Kennedy told him, “Let Bobby have his say in some of these matters because he is very interested in them. But if he ever gets in your way, I want you to speak to me about it.”

For Robert Kennedy and, much more tacitly, his brother, Rusk became a conspicuous symbol of State Department resistance to presidential aims. Notes taken by Arthur Schlesinger for his memoir A Thousand Days provide the essential view of Rusk taken by the Attorney General and his allies:

He lived under a constant fear of inadequacy and threat of humiliation.… His colorlessness of mind seemed almost convulsive, the evenness of tone and temper purchased at inner cost.… One wondered whether the reality of the world, harsh revolutionary aspirations, underdeveloped countries, could ever penetrate the screen of clichés through which foreign affairs found their form for him.

As he talked on in his even Georgia/Rockefeller Foundation voice, the world seemed to lose reality, everything became some bureaucratic fantasy, a film of the thirties seen on the Late Show.… Public stance stopping just short of self-righteousness; he knew that he spoke for the Establishment but, unlike John Foster Dulles, was not sure that he spoke for God too. He had a Foundation mind—his eyes sparkled when he thought of hospitals and universities and laboratories spreading benignly around the world.

On Soviet Union had a matter-of-fact rigidity of a professional sort rather than missionary conviction of evil, PATIENT—endured with fortitude White House relationship—knew he did not fit into swift, irreverent, gay mood, considered it all frivolous and flippant. Yet State did not own foreign policy.*

The President covertly egged on Rusk’s critics but stopped short of firing him. When he asked O’Donnell if they shouldn’t find someone “with a little more pep,” the aide replied, “Do you want somebody like Dean Acheson over there? Somebody who would be fighting everything you want to do and antagonizing the Congressmen … and talking to the newspapers?” Kennedy said, “Thanks for reminding me.”

Kennedy told a friend that Rusk was “a tremendous operations man. He fits in exactly where I want him.” To Justice Douglas he described him more bluntly as “a good errand boy.” He kept the pressure on State by sending over operatives like Goodwin, encouraging Kennedy men to make alliances with like-minded diplomats throughout the Department, and turning more and more to his brother, McNamara, special task forces, Bundy, and his staff for advice on major foreign issues.

Rusk worried about what he thought of as the casual attitude toward note-taking in the West Wing* and the President’s wont to meet with foreign leaders without the presence of someone from State. He could not bear it when the President called mid-level officials in his department, “scaring the hell out of the desk officer and disrupting my system of organization.”

Over highballs on an airplane, he inveighed against the intolerable “interference” by “people with no responsibility” on the White House staff. His relations with Bundy were civilized and cordial, but not all members of the NSC staff were as oblique and polished as their boss. Rusk once said, “It isn’t worth being Secretary of State if you have a Carl Kaysen at the White House.”† He told an assistant, “For God’s sake, try to get the White House under control. They’re all over this building, at every level.”

Khrushchev knew that Thompson was planning to leave the Moscow Embassy in mid-1962. In January, Bolshakov and Smirnovsky told Ben Bradlee and his Newsweek colleague Edward Weintal over a private dinner at the Soviet Embassy that they were anxious for Thompson to be succeeded by “a prominent political New Frontier type, and a known friend of JFK, rather than a career ambassador.” Leaving no doubt whom he meant, Bolshakov repeatedly expressed his “admiration and respect” for the Attorney General.

Bradlee later told the Attorney General that “bad food and good vodka” had been served “by pretty waitresses against the dreary background of the Ambassador’s private dining room. It was a joshing, kidding affair with both hosts and guests in excellent humor.” There was “an endless number of vodka toasts to mir y druzhba [peace and friendship], the New Frontier, Caroline, etc.”

Bradlee reported that the Russians attached “great importance” to the appointment of Thompson’s successor: “They seem to look to it as evidence of American intentions not so much toward the Soviet Union as toward Chairman Khrushchev personally. It was apparent our hosts thought a prominent U.S. Ambassador would be a boost to Mr. K’s prestige.”

That same month, in the Hay-Adams Hotel bar, Bolshakov told Salinger that the Chairman had agreed to Salinger’s proposal for a series of American-Soviet television exchanges with President Kennedy. The Soviets would be “most receptive” if Robert Kennedy would stop in Moscow as part of the world tour he was about to begin. The Adzhubeis were in Havana and would soon be “passing through Washington.”

Salinger saw the President in the Oval Office at midnight, after a dinner for Igor Stravinsky. Kennedy decided to invite the Adzhubeis for lunch but vetoed a Moscow trip by his brother: “The press would blow it up into something it wasn’t, and it would certainly ruffle a lot of feathers over in State.”

Someone leaked the invitation to the New York Times. Salinger thought that Bolshakov might have done it himself as a means of pressuring Robert into accepting. When he told Bolshakov that the Attorney General’s “tight scheduling” precluded a visit, the Russian told reporters that it was “a direct affront to the Soviet Union.” This extreme language suggested to the Kennedys that Khrushchev had been placing great stock in a visit by the President’s brother. Robert wrote the Chairman a mollifying letter and received a twelve-page reply.

On Tuesday, January 30, Bolshakov arrived at the White House with Adzhubei and his blond wife, Rada, who wore a sable coat. Over luncheon the Izvestia editor discounted the rumors about his father-in-law’s political problems: Khrushchev had told him that if there had been a plebiscite in 1957, the result would have been 95 percent for Molotov and 5 percent for him. Now it would be just the reverse. Jacqueline brought out Pushinka, the dog sent her by Khrushchev, and had coffee served in the cups that Khrushchev had given her in Vienna.

Kennedy took Bolshakov and Adzhubei into the Oval Room and warned them once again about misjudging American resolution over Berlin. During an exchange on Cuba, Adzhubei asked whether the United States would invade, and the President said, “No.” At a press conference, Kennedy introduced Adzhubei to reporters as a man who combined the “two hazardous professions of politics and journalism.”

Adzhubei recalled years later that during his White House visit, “little Caroline ran toward us. She’d woken up … and she was crying. Jacqueline took her in her arms, took her to her bedroom, and put her to bed.” In the child’s room was a Russian doll and a crucifix. By Adzhubei’s account, the President told him, “Your father-in-law said that our children should live under communism. But I prefer to put these two objects in front of her bed for her to choose—a present from Khrushchev and a present from the Pope. Let her decide.”

Fidel Castro later recalled that the Soviets gave him a copy of Adzhubei’s report on his talk with Kennedy. By Castro’s recollection, the President had insisted that increased Soviet influence in Cuba would be “intolerable” and that Adzhubei should remember that when the Russians invaded Hungary, the United States had not intervened.

Castro assumed that Kennedy was asking the Russians not to intervene in the event of a full-scale action against Cuba. By his account, he used Adzhubei’s report to persuade Soviet leaders that, despite Kennedy’s insistence to the contrary, the United States was planning another invasion and that resisting the attack would require some dramatic kind of Soviet support. Many years later, reviewing the origins of the Missile Crisis, Castro said, “It was the copy of the report that started everything.”*

At Bermuda in December, Macmillan had asked Kennedy if they and Khrushchev could not get together and make a “great new effort” to break the cycle of the nuclear arms race. The President replied that Soviet behavior suggested that they did not want a test ban. Hadn’t they been preparing their latest series of tests since February 1961?

He said that the problem was what would happen in 1964 if the Russians kept on testing and the West didn’t. He could not “afford to be taken twice.” He was a “great anti-tester” but felt they should prepare for a test series and carry it out unless there was a serious breakthrough on Berlin or disarmament.

He was also worried about Western intelligence reports that the new Soviet tests had made progress toward an anti-missile missile. Following on earlier experiments in 1958, plans for a new American series included tests to find whether high-altitude nuclear blast, heat, and radioactivity were able to destroy incoming Soviet missiles, neutralize their warheads, or foil their guidance systems.

Kennedy agreed to make one last stab at disarmament. For his part, the Prime Minister agreed that if it failed he would approve Kennedy’s request to carry out atmospheric nuclear tests on Christmas Island, a British possession one thousand miles south of Hawaii.*

In early January, he wrote Kennedy that if the capacity for human destruction ended up in the hands of “dictators, reactionaries, revolutionaries, madmen,” then “certainly, I think by the end of this century, either by error or folly or insanity, the great crime will be committed.… On the whole it is not the things one did in one’s life that one regrets but rather the opportunities missed.”

As Bundy worked on a presidential reply, Foy Kohler asked, “Why are we taking so much trouble over this hysterical document? … We can’t let Macmillan practice this emotional blackmail on us.”

Kennedy and Macmillan jointly wrote Khrushchev: “The three of us must accept a common measure of personal obligation to seek every avenue to restrain and reverse the mounting arms race.” At the eighteen-nation Geneva disarmament talks scheduled to open in March, their foreign ministers should “ascertain the widest measure of disarmament” possible at the “earliest possible time.”

The Chairman replied by asking why they should limit themselves to foreign ministers. Heads of government had the final authority. The leaders of all eighteen countries should go to Geneva: “Perhaps this idea will appear somewhat unusual but, you will agree, it is fully justified by the greatness of the goal.” Kennedy responded that it would be more effective to start with foreign ministers; if and when there was progress, he would be “quite ready” to see the Chairman in Geneva.

In a twenty-page reply, Khrushchev wrote that he was “chagrined” by the President’s attitude: “The guiding precept of my life is to be where the main work is being done.… How long can one continue to engage in eliciting, studying, and clarifying each other’s positions with negotiations, meetings, and contacts at various levels, endless arguments, and disputes?”

He charged that America and Britain were only trying to “sweeten the bitter pill” of resuming nuclear testing by making a “gesture” toward disarmament: “The life of the great American writer Hemingway was ended by an accidental shot while a shotgun was being cleaned.… An accident in handling rocket and nuclear weapons would cause the death of millions upon millions of people. Many more would be condemned to slow death by radioactive contamination.”

Kennedy wrote Khrushchev that Rusk could present his views with complete authority; he hoped that progress at Geneva would lead to a summit before June. He asked the Attorney General to tell Bolshakov that since they were deadlocked on Berlin, he thought it necessary to try to find the area in which the earliest American-Soviet agreement was possible—disarmament and a nuclear test ban.

In a television address on Friday, March 2, the President announced that unless the Soviets agreed to a test ban treaty, the United States would resume nuclear testing in April. He told Bradlee, “There was always a chance that if we could make a deal on Berlin, or if the Soviet tests had been unimpressive, we could have called it off.” Asked whether everyone in the administration was happy with the decision, he said, “I suppose if you grabbed Adlai by the nuts, he might object.”

Three days later, a nervous Bolshakov summoned Salinger to the Hay-Adams bar and told him that Moscow was calling off the Kennedy-Khrushchev television exchange. Salinger was furious. He knew that the President was already hard at work on his first script.* Bolshakov said, “The fault is your own President’s for deciding to resume the nuclear tests. The Soviet people would not understand if their Premier would consent to a joint appearance with him at a time like this.”

Salinger had been planning to visit Adzhubei in Moscow in late spring. Bolshakov told him, “None of this affects your visit to the Soviet Union.” Salinger slammed his fist on the table. “It sure as hell does affect my visit. What’s the use of trying to open up lines of communication if your people are going to behave this stupidly?”

Kennedy first ordered Salinger to call Bolshakov and cancel his trip: “You might add that this is just another example of why it’s so difficult for us to come to any agreement at all with the Russians.” Then Bohlen advised a milder reaction: suggest to Bolshakov that they announce the suspension of the television exchange as a joint decision.

The President consented: “But tell him also that we are greatly displeased. Point out the criticism we’ve had from our own press and the great lengths we went to in good faith to bring this agreement to fruition. And you might stress good faith.”

Kennedy’s announcement that he would resume nuclear testing reached Khrushchev on the eve of an important Central Committee meeting. The Chairman wrote him, “Your military are openly boasting that they can allegedly wipe the Soviet Union and all the countries of the Socialist camp from the face of the earth. On the other hand, you now say that the United States has to conduct nuclear weapon tests for the alleged purpose of not lagging behind the Soviet Union in armaments.”

Several days later Bolshakov told Sorensen that his government had been obliged to say a few harsh words about the American resumption, but that they had been comparatively low-key: Chairman Khrushchev still liked the President. The television exchange would be held later.*

From the Central Committee, Khrushchev now suffered one of his most painful rebuffs since taking power. It barred him from shifting money from defense production to agriculture, forcing him to raise butter and meat prices by 25 and 30 percent. Soviet citizens nostalgically remembered the last years of Stalin, when many retail prices had been annually reduced. Western intelligence heard that, across the Soviet Union, Khrushchev was being reviled in demonstrations and riots.

Since January, during repeated meetings on the seventh floor of the Foreign Ministry, Gromyko had told Thompson that the Soviet Union would not yield an inch on Berlin. Once again he vetoed internationalization of the Autobahn and demanded the placement of Soviet troops in the Western sector.

Privately Rusk hoped that both sides would talk on and on, tacitly agreeing to leave the city as it was. Berlin itself had been relatively calm, except for harassments of planes flying to and from the Western sector. The Soviets buzzed Western commercial traffic and dropped large masses of metal foil to defeat Western radar, but after the United States quietly complained, the interference stopped.

Frustrated by the failure of Thompson and Gromyko to make progress on Berlin, the President took up the matter in an early March letter to Khrushchev. He complained of the aerial harassments and reminded the Chairman that their “essential interests” did not collide over Berlin.

The Chairman replied, “Neither you, Mr. President, nor I know for how long the two German states that emerged on the ruins of the Reich will exist, if they ever unite.… Once upon a time, so the story goes, two goats met head to head on a narrow bridge across an abyss. They would not give way to each other and down they fell. They were stupid and stubborn animals.”

He was prepared to discuss Kennedy’s proposal for an international commission on access to West Berlin, but only “under the condition that the troops now stationed there by virtue of occupation are withdrawn from West Berlin.… All of this, of course, is connected with the transformation of West Berlin into a free, demilitarized city, and with the simultaneous achievement of an agreement on a final legalization and consolidation of the existing German borders and also on other questions which are well known to you.”

The President was not willing to surrender the Western position in Berlin and recognize Soviet domination of Eastern Europe in exchange for Khrushchev’s vague promise of an international commission on access to West Berlin. The talkathons in Moscow and Geneva ground on. Thompson privately told Senators that Soviet-American relations were “not so dangerous now as they were a year or two ago” but warned that Khrushchev and the Russians were “given to surprises, and they can make a sudden change at any time.”

Two weeks after the first American orbital space flight by Colonel John Glenn in February, Kennedy wrote to Khrushchev suggesting a program of radio tracking stations on each other’s territory, joint communications, weather and mapping satellites: Americans and Soviets might go on to explore the moon, Mars, and Venus together. The costs and risks were “so grave that we must in all good conscience try every possibility of sharing these tasks and costs and minimizing these risks.”

The Chairman consented to medium-level talks on the subject, but the only result was an exchange of meterological data and a communications test using America’s Echo 2 satellite. Cooperation would be easier, he said, when they agreed on disarmament.

During these weeks, Kennedy compartmentalized his myriad lives as much as ever. While touring Pakistan and India, Jacqueline was worried about the welfare of Sardar, the horse given her by Ayub Khan, President of Pakistan, during his 1961 Washington visit. Her husband cabled, DAVE, KENNY, TED, TAZ, MCHUGH, EVELYN, BOB, DEAN, AND MAC ARE DOING NOTHING BUT TAKING CARE OF SARDAR—DON’T WORRY. ALL LOVE, JACK.*

On Thursday, March 22, over lunch, J. Edgar Hoover told the President that the FBI knew of his relationship with Judith Campbell and hers with Sam Giancana. Within a few months, Hoover found that the relationship had ceased.

The day after his luncheon with Hoover, Kennedy flew to California, where he and McNamara toured the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory for nuclear research at Berkeley before flying to Vandenberg Air Force Base to watch a missile firing. They were greeted by the commander of the Strategic Air Command, General Thomas Power, who climbed into the back seat of the open car between President and Secretary.

Chatting as they drove, Power referred to the buildup of Minuteman ICBMs: “Mr. President, after we get the ten thousand Minutemen—” Kennedy interrupted: “Bob, we’re not getting ten thousand Minutemen, are we?”

At the Lawfords’ beach house in Santa Monica, Kennedy rode a Lawford child’s toy car around the pool despite his sister’s complaint that he would “wreck it”: “Pat, how can you deny your President a little relaxation?” Over the Lawford mantel was a Senate campaign poster for Edward Kennedy, with the President’s old slogan, “He Can Do More for Massachusetts.” Kennedy crossed out the words and jovially scrawled, BULLSHIT. That same weekend the President went to Palm Springs, where he called on Eisenhower and, according to several witnesses, Marilyn Monroe.

Back in Washington, he accepted the credentials of Anatoly Dobrynin, the forty-two-year-old new Soviet Ambassador to the United States. Khrushchev wrote the President, “I recommend him to you, and I am confident that he will represent the Soviet Union in your country well.”

The Chairman had finally recalled Menshikov in January and demoted him to what was then the non-job of Foreign Minister of the Russian Soviet Republic.* Thompson explained that this was a way to “give him some pay without too much to do.” Menshikov spent the rest of his life writing elaborate accounts of how the United States was run by Wall Street conspiracies.

Dobrynin found New Frontier Washington different from the city of his first stint as Embassy Counselor from 1952 to 1955: “Suddenly all the diplomats talk like newspapermen and all the newspapermen talk like diplomats.”

Son of a Moscow architect, he had been trained as a historian. He and his wife, Irina, had both spent World War II as aircraft engineers before he was reluctantly drafted into the Soviet diplomatic service. In the late 1950s, he was a UN Undersecretary-General before returning to the Foreign Ministry as chief of the U.S.A. section, in which post he accompanied Khrushchev to Vienna.

Thompson advised the President that Khrushchev had sent Dobrynin to Washington because he embodied the “new generation” in Russia and could thus relate to Kennedy. He told Senators, “Our relations with him have been about as good as with anybody we have over there.… He has lived here long enough that he does understand how we operate. You can at least get on the same wavelength with him.”

Bolshakov soon raved that Dobrynin was “the best ambassador we ever had. He goes out and listens—not like some of our diplomats who sit behind closed embassy doors and interview each other.” This enthusiasm was not reciprocated. Dobrynin regarded Bolshakov as a symptom of what was wrong with the Menshikov regime and did not wish to be circumvented as his predecessor was. Frank Holeman found that the new Ambassador “hated Bolshakov’s guts.”

Dobrynin told Salinger over lunch that he knew all about Bolshakov’s service as middleman between Kennedy and Khrushchev: “All that will stop now. All further communications from the Chairman to the President will go directly through me.”*

In Washington, Rusk and the new Soviet Ambassador resumed talks on Berlin. The President felt sanguine enough about the problem to allow General Clay to resign from his post and return home.

After discussing a test ban with Gromyko in Geneva, Rusk had reported to Kennedy that the Foreign Minister had left “no room for maneuver … by declaring that there should be zero inspections.” He advised the President to “continue to prepare for a test series to start late in April, barring any diplomatic miracle.”

On the night of Wednesday, April 25, the United States fired off its first atmospheric nuclear blast since 1958 over Christmas Island. Kennedy’s restrictions kept the total yield of the six-month-long series, labeled Operation Dominic—forty tests in all—down to roughly twenty megatons, one tenth the yield of the Soviet detonations.†

Life reported that tourists lined up on Hawaiian beaches to watch: “The blue-black tropical night suddenly turned into a hot lime green. It was brighter than noon. The green changed into a lemon pink … and finally, terribly, blood red. It was as if someone had poured a bucket of blood on the sky.”

Andrei Sakharov found that Soviet intelligence “spared no effort” trying to find out the purposes of the new Western tests: “Once we were shown photographs of some documents.… Mixed in with the photocopies was a single, terribly crumpled original. I innocently asked why, and was told that it had been concealed in panties.”

In February 1962, Robert McNamara had told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in private that American nuclear forces “have a great and growing capacity to survive surprise attack.” Half the 1,550 bombers of the Strategic Air Command were on fifteen-minute ground alert. The United States had already hardened some of its ICBM sites and was hardening many more. Its Polaris submarines required no warning “and can launch their missiles from a submerged position at a range of at least 1,200 miles.”

The United States enjoyed “a clear military superiority for major nuclear conflict … even if the Soviet Union strikes first. Moreover, this superiority is growing and we are determined that it shall be maintained.” After a full nuclear exchange, the nuclear power and social and economic fabric of the Soviet Union would be virtually destroyed. The United States and Western Europe would suffer “very serious damage to their human and material resources,” but they would survive.

With Kennedy’s blessing, McNamara gave this recital of American strategic power not only to impress the allies but also to gain support for the President’s conventional buildup, foreclose charges that he was soft on defense, and show that if Kennedy negotiated with the Russians in 1962 over Berlin, a test ban, or other issues, he would do so from a position of massive nuclear strength. As with the Gilpatric speech in October, another principal audience was Khrushchev and the Russians. McNamara knew that much of what he had said would leak to Soviet intelligence.

By now, Kennedy and McNamara felt Khrushchev had been reasonably convinced that the President was willing to use nuclear weapons to defend West Berlin. Giving the Chairman hard, precise facts about what nuclear war would mean would prevent him from believing his own rhetoric about hundred-megaton bombs and Soviet strength. In this, they were not wrong; almost from the moment of Gilpatric’s speech, Khrushchev had eased serious pressure on Berlin.

To keep from needlessly antagonizing Khrushchev and scaring the world, Kennedy had left most of the job of heralding American superiority to McNamara, Gilpatric, Nitze, and other subordinates. But during an interview one late afternoon in March with his friend Stewart Alsop, he threw aside this caution.

“As late as 1954, the balance in air power, in nuclear weapons, was all on our side. The change began about 1958 or 1959, with the missiles. Now we have got to realize that both sides have these annihilating weapons.… Of course in some circumstances, we must be prepared to use the nuclear weapon at the start, come what may—a clear attack on Western Europe, for example. But what is important is that if you use these weapons, you have to control their use.”

In his Saturday Evening Post article, “Kennedy’s Grand Strategy,” published in late March, Alsop reported that the President had “quietly discarded” the doctrine “that the United States would never strike first with the nuclear weapon.… Khrushchev must not be certain that, where its vital interests are threatened, the United States will never strike first. As Kennedy says, ‘in some circumstances we might have to take the initiative.’”

Chalmers Roberts of the Washington Post asked Bundy if the President had actually uttered the words “might have to take the initiative.” Bundy did not deny it; they had somehow been overlooked when the White House cleared the article before publication.

Kennedy, Bundy, and Salinger had all read the article before its release. None of them expected that the quote might be taken to mean that Kennedy was considering a bolt out of the blue against the Soviet bloc. At an off-the-record session with newsmen at the State Department, the President tried to backpedal by saying, “I was not talking about a preemptive act or aggression by us.” But the damage had been done.

The President’s chief purpose in giving the interview had been to gain support in Western Europe for flexible response. But the leader most affected by Alsop’s article was Khrushchev. He had never heard an American President so baldly raise the specter of a first strike against the Soviet Union.

Immediately after the article’s publication, the Kremlin ordered a special military alert. Pravda declared itself “astonished”: Kennedy’s comment meant that the United States “believes it has the right to be the first to inflict a nuclear blow, to be the instigator of an aggressive war.… It is incomprehensible what upside-down logic prompted him to make this rash and provocative statement about a possible preventive nuclear attack against the Soviet Union.”

Combined with the Gilpatric speech and the other assertions of American superiority, Kennedy’s comment almost certainly made Khrushchev wonder whether the Pentagon and the American Right were pressuring the President for a first-strike attack against the Soviet Union. He knew that the President knew that the United States would probably never enjoy such unchallenged nuclear predominance again: if it was ever to wage a preemptive strike against the Soviet Union, now was the time.

The Chairman almost surely thought that however unpredictable and vulnerable to political pressures Kennedy was, he was not so mad as to attempt a first strike. Nevertheless, by brandishing American strength so provocatively, the President had badly aggravated Khrushchev’s political problems.

The Chairman had tried to offset and conceal Soviet nuclear inferiority through such devices as space spectaculars, scaring the world over Berlin, and testing fifty-megaton bombs.* Now that Kennedy and his men had stripped him of his political cover, whatever their reasons, Khrushchev had been shown once and for all that stopgap measures were not enough.

On Friday, May 11, Salinger arrived in Moscow. At the airport, Thompson told him, “Adzhubei insists on taking you from here to the government dacha outside the city. You will spend most of tomorrow there with Khrushchev.” Unaware until now that he would see the Chairman, he insisted on first cabling the President, who told him to avoid substance and assure Khrushchev that he would transmit his views to Washington.†

The next day, perhaps to avoid the indignity of giving such attention to a lesser official, Khrushchev made it clear that Salinger’s visit was in exchange for Kennedy’s hospitality to the Adzhubeis: “I thank your President for having my daughter to the White House. No other American President has had the courage to do that.” He took the guest for a chilly cruise up the Moscow River, skeet-shooting (“Don’t feel badly—I’ve got generals who can’t hit anything either”), and a five-mile expedition through the woods (“You have to walk for your lunch”).

Pulling his Panama hat down over his cold ears, he named the bushes and trees along the way: “I don’t know why I waste my time explaining all this to you. You don’t know anything about agriculture.… That’s all right. Stalin didn’t either.” When no carp surfaced in his pond, Khrushchev grumbled, “I guess they don’t know the Chairman of the Party is here.” Then a fish appeared. “They got the word.”

Khrushchev himself avoided substance, except for a reference to Adenauer as a “dangerous and senile old man” and to a recent Kennedy comment on the importance of Berlin talks as “very good.” He told Salinger that he was staying at the dacha of “Gospodin Averell Harriman”: “I like that man very much and I tried to hire him. I said that if he would come to the Kremlin and be my adviser, I would give him this dacha, but he refused.”

After dessert, Dr. Jekyll abruptly turned to Mr. Hyde. Khrushchev glared at Salinger: “Your President has made a very bad mistake for which he will have to pay.… He has said that you will be the first to use the Bomb.… This warmonger Alsop—is he now your Secretary of State? Not even Eisenhower or Dulles would have made the statement your President made. He now forces us to reappraise our own position.”

Salinger explained that American policy was to avoid using nuclear weapons first unless the West was the target of mass Communist aggression. Khrushchev said, “I have seen that statement, but I take the President’s words literally in the article. This is clearly a new doctrine.” Shaking his finger, he said that he would apply exactly the same policy to the defense of East Germany after a peace treaty. If Western troops crossed its borders, he would respond with an immediate nuclear attack. “And I am talking facts, my friend, not theory.”

Then Khrushchev clapped his hands and smiled: “I am now going to tell you an official state secret.” During the tank confrontation at the Berlin Wall the previous October, he had consulted Marshal Malinovsky. “West Berlin means nothing to us, so I told Malinovsky to back up our tanks a little bit and hide them behind buildings where the Americans couldn’t see them. If we do this, I said to Malinovsky, the American tanks will also move back.… We pulled back. You pulled back. Now that’s generalship! … I personally ordered the construction of the Wall. A state is a state and must control its own borders.”

The sun was sinking fast. Khrushchev rose: “Come, Gospodin Salinger. It is time that we speak to each other privately.” Sitting in an arbor overlooking the river with only Khrushchev’s interpreter along, he repeated how disturbed he had been about Kennedy’s statements on nuclear policy. Still, “your President has accomplished much and shown himself to be a big statesman.

“Please convey to the President that I want to be his friend.… Of course, Kennedy is no kith or kin of mine. He is a big capitalist and I, as a Communist, have a very definite attitude toward capitalists.… It is unwise to threaten us with war.… Adenauer himself says that not a single fool wants to fight over West Berlin.” The United States needed West Berlin “like a dog needs five legs.”

He did not know how their relations would develop. “The key is in the hands of President Kennedy, because he will have to fire the first shot. You see, it was he who said that a situation could arise in which the U.S.A. would be the first to deliver an atomic strike.… So what? We are ready to meet this strike. But I want to warn you: we will not be slow to deliver a retaliatory strike.”

During his talks with Salinger, Khrushchev said almost nothing about Cuba. During the year since the Bay of Pigs, Castro had strengthened his dominion over the island. In December 1961, he had openly ordained “a Marxist-Leninist program” for Cuba, “adjusted to the precise objective conditions of our country.”*

In April 1962, Bundy gave Kennedy the CIA’s “latest estimate,” which was “not encouraging.” Castro’s lavish use of political murder, his anti-Americanism, and Soviet arms shipments had helped him to win the support or acquiescence of a “substantial portion” of the Cuban people. Cubans who might have fought him from within were said to be “resigned” not only because of the terror but because they saw “no feasible alternative.” Castro was quietly sending weapons and supplies to Communist revolutionary movements elsewhere in Latin America.

That same month, the dictator ordered a three-day first-anniversary celebration of the defeat of the United States at the Bay of Pigs. In Havana, after a performance of Copland’s “A Lincoln Portrait,” Castro warned in a two-and-a-half-hour speech that if any more American “mercenaries” planned to attack Cuba, “let them write their wills first.… The new aggressors will have to fight against a force better organized and trained … and the revolution is more invincible!”

As with Khrushchev, Castro’s boasts were often in proportion to his anxieties. The Cuban farm economy was collapsing. Despite his cleanup operations in 1960 and 1961, roughly three thousand anti-Castro guerrillas had reappeared in the Escambray Mountains—ten times the number of Castro’s men in the Sierra Maestra before the revolution. The new rebels had no unified leadership or communication, but Castro’s brother and Defense Minister, Raul, thought they threatened a “second civil war.”

Castro heard that conspiracies against him were being woven by Cuban Communists with ancient ties to Moscow whom he had kept out of his government and denounced as “an army of domesticated and coached revolutionaries.” Encouraged by the Soviet Ambassador in Havana, Sergei Kudryatsev, reputed to be a Soviet intelligence agent who had once stolen British and American nuclear information, the old-line Communists had managed to oust Castro as chief of the agrarian reform movement and were daring to ridicule him in public.

All these problems were flea bites compared to the danger from North America. By the spring of 1962, Cuban intelligence had concluded that the Kennedy administration would use “all means possible” to remove Castro. Another invasion seemed imminent, this time with the full military force of the United States.

In the late spring of 1961, as the Taylor Board secretly resolved that there could be “no long-term living with Castro as a neighbor,” Allen Dulles had privately told Senators that the “menace” must be removed “as soon as possible, because if it stays there year after year, I have grave questions as to what will happen in the Caribbean and more broadly in Latin America.”

The President required no persuasion. Castro was a symbol of Khrushchev’s claim that communism was on the march, a beachhead for Soviet influence in Latin America, a lingering sign of his own failure at the Bay of Pigs. Dean Rusk was surprised that “this man with ice water in his veins” was so “emotional” about Castro. McNamara recalled that they were all “hysterical.”

Behind closed doors, Robert Kennedy demanded that the “terrors of the earth” be invoked against the Cuban dictator. One method was diplomacy. The United States persuaded other members of the Organization of American States, except Mexico, to expel Cuba, portraying Castro as the enemy of the Western Hemisphere. An economic embargo was imposed against Cuba.

The other method was covert action. At the White House in November 1961, the Attorney General said, “My idea is to stir things up on the island with espionage, sabotage, general disorder, in an operation run essentially by the Cubans themselves.” The President ordered use of “our available assets to overthrow Castro.”

Operation Mongoose was born under the statutory command of General Edward Lansdale, a counterinsurgency specialist with experience in Manila and Saigon, where he had helped Diem to consolidate control. Its overseers included Bundy, Taylor, McCone, Lemnitzer, Gilpatric, and U. Alexis Johnson of the State Department, but their de facto leader and back channel to the Oval Office was Robert Kennedy. The target date for Castro’s overthrow was October 1962.

The contamination of Cuban sugar exports, counterfeiting of Cuban money and ration books, other sabotage, paramilitary raids, propaganda, espionage, and guerrilla warfare enjoyed a budget of fifty to one hundred million dollars and a massive nerve center on the campus of the University of Miami called JM/WAVE, said to be the largest CIA installation in the world outside Langley.

American case officers ran some three thousand Cuban agents out of false business fronts with fleets of airplanes, ships, and speedboats. Former owners of Cuban factories, sugar mills, refineries, and mines gave the CIA blueprints on how to wreck their confiscated installations.*

“Bobby was his brother’s wire-brush man,” recalled Helms. “And he was tough as nails on Cuba.” When agents tried to sabotage the Matahambre copper mines, the Attorney General called junior CIA officers again and again. Had they landed? Had they reached the mines? Were they destroyed?

Helms felt that boom-and-bang and “nutty schemes born of the intensity of the pressure” were unlikely to trigger a Cuban counterrevolution. The CIA credited Castro with having built, after the Bay of Pigs, a farreaching internal police apparatus for surveillance and repression.

A March 1962 intelligence estimate said that “increasing antagonism toward the regime is likely to produce only a manageable increase in isolated acts of sabotage or open defiance on the part of a few desperate men.” About the only good news, from Washington’s point of view, was the decline of the Cuban economy, which might inspire Cubans to rise up against their leader.

This implied skepticism about causing a change of government in Havana by covert action may have spurred the CIA’s continued efforts to murder Castro. In April 1962, the Mongoose chieftain William Harvey handed four poison pills to John Roselli in Miami. During the same month, American soldiers were known in Havana and Moscow to be training in the Caribbean for an island invasion.

Castro saw the OAS expulsion, the economic blockade, Mongoose, and the American military maneuvers not as the substitute for the assault by hundreds of thousands of American troops that Kennedy was unwilling to authorize, but as its prelude: “We informed the Soviet Union that we were concerned about a direct invasion of Cuba by the United States and that we were thinking about how to step up our country’s ability to resist an attack.”

As one of Khrushchev’s diplomats recalled, the Chairman was still a “romantic” about Cuba: “He completely believed … that socialism should triumph in Cuba and the entire world.” In November 1961, Castro’s son Felix, a Cuban Young Pioneer, had visited Moscow. Khrushchev had gaily posed with him for pictures.

By the spring of 1962, Castro was not making himself easy to love. Especially at a time when Khrushchev was hard pressed to finance his own military while improving the lot of the Soviet consumer, his advisers found it difficult to square Castro’s increasing appetite for Soviet military and economic aid with his erratic behavior and rhetoric, his rudeness to Ambassador Kudryatsev, his persecution of the old Cuban Communists, and other demonstrations of independence such as his flirtation with Peking, evidenced by the Chinese-Cuban trade treaty he signed in March.

Wary of making a quixotic commitment to defend Cuba with conventional forces, Khrushchev had rebuffed Castro’s efforts to join the Warsaw Pact and even reduced Soviet military shipments for the first half of 1962.* In spite or because of the Chinese accord, the Chairman approved an April increase from $540 to $750 million in Soviet trade with Cuba, which was the euphemism for economic aid. He acceded to Castro’s demand that he fire Kudryatsev and install a Soviet envoy with whom he could get along.

That spring it was in both Castro’s and Khrushchev’s interest to persuade each other that an American invasion of Cuba was imminent. Castro hoped this would overwhelm any Soviet reservations about helping his regime: how would it look if Khrushchev made no conspicuous effort to hold on to the one country that had peacefully opted for communism, the single Soviet ally in the Americas? The Soviets hoped that alarming Castro about the danger from North America might erode his reservations about Soviet encroachment on Cuban sovereignty and exploitation of the island for Soviet aims.

The distortion of intelligence by both Moscow and Havana for political purposes helped to lead both Khrushchev and Castro to a fatefully incorrect conclusion—that Kennedy was about to authorize a massive invasion of Cuba, possibly costing hundreds of thousands of lives.

In fact, the President had no more inclination than in April 1961 to initiate “another Hungary” that would besmirch the American image around the world, especially in Latin America. He remained worried that Khrushchev would retaliate for a full-scale invasion of Cuba with a similar move on Berlin. McNamara said years later, “I can state unequivocally that we had absolutely no intention of invading Cuba.… Obviously there were contingency plans … for a host of circumstances which the government had no intention then to carry out.”*

There is no evidence that Kennedy or his advisers paid sufficient heed to the danger that Khrushchev and Castro might interpret the American military preparations and diplomatic, economic, and covert actions against Cuba as the forerunner of a full-scale invasion. In retrospect, McNamara conceded, “If I had been a Cuban leader at that time, I might well have concluded that there was a great risk of U.S. invasion.… If I had been a Soviet leader at the time, I might have come to the same conclusion.”

Khrushchev’s and Castro’s hazardous misperception was fortified by what Bundy called the President’s “public balancing act” on Cuba. The Russians and Cubans certainly noted that between the Bay of Pigs and the end of April 1962, Kennedy never uttered another flat public assurance that American armed forces would not intervene in Cuba like the one he had offered the week before the failed invasion.

On the contrary, in his first speech after the Bay of Pigs, the President had warned that if there should be “outside Communist penetration” of the Western Hemisphere, he would meet America’s “primary obligations” to its own security. That same week, James Reston had written in the New York Times after a talk with Kennedy that there was a “limit” to the President’s promise not to use American armed forces against Cuba: “Massive military aid from the Communist world to Cuba in the coming weeks and months will not be tolerated:”

Answering a question in March 1962 about what he might do if Castro threatened Guantanamo, the President said, “We’re always concerned about the defense of American territory wherever it is and would take whatever proper steps were necessary.” To an anxious Cuban or Soviet listener, this might have suggested that the United States might use defense of Guantanamo (which despite Kennedy’s reference was not legally American territory, only leased) as a pretext for invasion.*

The President warned congressional leaders in private, “Let the United States make a move against Castro in Cuba and Khrushchev will heat up the Berlin Crisis, move into Laos, strike at Iran or into the Middle East.” But why did he in public leave open the tantalizing and provocative possibility of a full-scale invasion?

He hoped that fear of such an action would deter Khrushchev and Castro from dangerous behavior toward the United States in the Western Hemisphere. And in the political year of 1962, he was nervous about the Cuban issue, which was growing hotter by the week.

His pollster Louis Harris warned him that “the vast bulk of public opinion favors doing everything possible short of armed intervention.” A San Francisco Chronicle poll sent to Sorensen found that, on Cuba, the Kennedy administration received a 62 percent negative rating. The President did not wish to harm himself and other Democrats by publicly closing the door now on an invasion of Cuba.†

Thus Khrushchev and his colleagues considered it almost certain that the United States would launch a full-fledged invasion of Cuba, probably before the year was out. They presumed that this time Kennedy would brook no defeat—especially with his potential for conventional superiority in the Caribbean enhanced by the 1961 buildup over Berlin.

An American invasion that toppled Castro would be the first time John Foster Dulles’s old pledge to roll back the Communist tide was fulfilled. This could damage the Soviet Union in its relations with Eastern Europe, its struggle with China, and its efforts to attract the uncommitted nations. The “Who Lost Cuba?” faction in Washington would be replaced by one in Moscow. Khrushchev knew that he would be the chief defendant.

With the Gilpatric speech and other American statements, Kennedy had revealed Soviet nuclear inferiority to the world. Khrushchev himself had publicly rejected the notion that a few nuclear weapons were all a nation needed to deter aggression, that no rational leader would risk even a few retaliatory hydrogen blasts on his territory. His own philosophy was that the more nuclear missiles and bombs a nation had, the more military and political power it had.

Therefore by the Chairman’s own standard, the Soviet Union was in great danger, especially in light of the hints that the United States might be planning a first-strike attack. Khrushchev had often said that the uncommitted nations would be attracted to the Soviet camp by Soviet power. But what would the Third World do once it fully discovered Soviet weakness?

Khrushchev’s failure to drive the West from Berlin after four years of ostentatious trying threatened to turn him into a joke among the Soviet leadership and people. Now that Kennedy had demonstrated the power and perhaps the will to destroy the Soviet Union in the event of a Berlin attack, the Chairman foresaw only more frustration and embarrassment.

Khrushchev’s frustrations on Cuba, nuclear strength, and Berlin were exploited and exacerbated by Kremlin rivals, who complained that he was betraying Leninist ideology and shortchanging Soviet defense, and the Chinese and Chinese allies, who charged that he had abandoned the dream of world communism and who were on the verge of developing nuclear weapons themselves.

Throughout his career, Khrushchev had taken calculated gambles against monumental odds. In 1956, he had given the Secret Speech against Stalin although he knew that 95 percent of the Twentieth Party Congress opposed such views, or so his aide Burlatsky said years later. The gamble succeeded: by unleashing the forces of anti-Stalinism and placing himself at their head, he tapped a vast wellspring of political power.

During the Anti-Party Coup, with the highest echelon of the Kremlin demanding his resignation, Khrushchev had forced the Central Committee to deal with the question and flown in enough supporters to prevail. Understanding world reaction to a first success in space far better than Eisenhower, he used Sputnik to create the illusion that the Soviets had the power to dominate the world. In 1958, although he privately knew that his nuclear strength was vastly inferior, he issued his ultimatum on Berlin and succeeded in getting the West to bargain with the Soviet Union on the full range of world issues as an equal.

Each time, he had used his inventive brain to remake the circumstances of a seemingly hopeless situation. Khrushchev had almost unlimited faith in his own superior wiliness and nerve. These qualities had been honed in the mines, during his rise to power, while preserving his sanity and his life under Stalin, and as supreme Soviet leader.

Since 1956, he had kept one step ahead of the sheriff as he defeated bloodthirsty Kremlin rivals, repealed major tenets of Stalinism, held off consumer and military rebellions, devised farming remedies, and stripped Moscow bureaucrats of much of their power. During these years, although a foreign policy novice, he had convinced most of the world of Soviet military superiority without actually having to pay for it, brought the West into serious negotiation, and exploited Soviet space successes and local opportunities like Laos, the Congo, and Cuba to bolster his claims that Soviet power and prestige was eclipsing that of the imperialists and that the Soviet economy would surpass the United States by 1970.

Khrushchev had done all this despite the fact that more “educated” advisers might have warned him that he could not keep power as an anti-Stalinist, or that the West would never bargain seriously with a nation so weak as the Soviet Union. It was hardly irrational that he should have such faith in his power to break his political shackles by devising brilliant schemes.

In April 1962, with new dangers on his horizon, Khrushchev’s natural reflex was to devise an even more brilliant scheme that would protect Castro, cheaply and quickly repair the Soviet missile gap, force serious new Western concessions on Berlin, dazzle the Chinese and domestic opponents, and perhaps reap other rewards, such as forcing the West to give up the military bases along the Soviet border that the Chairman had railed against for years.

That month Khrushchev walked with Malinovsky along the Black Sea. The Defense Minister noted that the Turkish bases on the other side “could in a short time destroy all our southern cities.… Why do the Americans have such a possibility? They have surrounded us with bases on all sides, and we have no possibility and right to do the same!”

Khrushchev had long badgered American visitors about the missile sites along the Soviet periphery. In 1958, he complained to Stevenson, “We see ourselves surrounded by military bases.… How can we take a different attitude toward you if we are encircled by your bases?”

Stevenson had replied that the bases were “defensive—not aggressive.” But Khrushchev had insisted, “The Americans have bases in England, Turkey, Greece, and I don’t know where they don’t have them, and yet you want us to respect you. But how can we applaud this? What would the Americans think if the Russians set up bases in Mexico or some other place? How would you feel?”

When Harriman called at the Kremlin in June 1959, he was struck by Khrushchev’s apparent feeling of “humiliation” by the “nuclear bases close to their borders.” It was in August 1961, when Drew Pearson visited Pitsuada, that the Chairman waved his finger at the bases across the Black Sea and wondered whether they would “blow us up.”

Late in April, Khrushchev and Mikoyan strolled in the garden near their dachas outside Moscow. “They had a curious relationship,” recalled the Deputy Premier’s son Sergo, who served as his confidential aide. “They were friends, but Khrushchev was envious of my father’s background and education. Khrushchev did not think of himself as my father’s superior.”

By Sergo’s account, Khrushchev told Mikoyan that the United States was about to repeat the Bay of Pigs, but that this time Kennedy would not make the same mistakes. Even if Kennedy did not wish to invade Cuba, he was “not in a strong position and would submit to CIA preference.” Khrushchev “thought an invasion was inevitable, that it would be massive, and that it would use all American force.”

Khrushchev’s solution: send nuclear missiles to Cuba! Sergo recalled, “The idea was that their very existence would deter an American invasion. It would not be necessary to launch them.… The intention was to do it very speedily, in September and October, but not to reveal it before the American elections in November.”

After the elections, Khrushchev would notify Kennedy by letter. He expected the President to tolerate the news, just as he himself had had to accept it when the Americans installed missiles in Turkey.

These assumptions revealed the depth of the Chairman’s misunderstanding of Kennedy and the United States. He guessed that such a monumental operation could be concealed from American intelligence for eight weeks. He seriously expected that, if Kennedy discovered the missiles, he might conceal the distressing news from the American people until the November elections, after which he could afford to take a more benign attitude toward them.

These assumptions were not without grounds. The Chairman felt that Kennedy was more affected by domestic politics than Eisenhower. He knew that the President considered the 1962 elections an important chance to improve his position in Congress.

He knew the President was in the habit of concealing information from the public that might be politically embarrassing. Throughout the Bay of Pigs, he had obscured his fear about Soviet retaliation in Berlin. After Vienna, he had tried to conceal Khrushchev’s Berlin ultimatum until the Kremlin would no longer stand for it. After the Berlin Wall, he had done a surprisingly effective job of diverting attention from the fact that the United States had given Khrushchev and Ulbricht something tantamount to a green light.

The Chairman knew that, in the past, Moscow and Washington had tacitly joined to conceal certain secrets for mutual benefit. Until May 1960, they had both obscured the fact that the United States was able to send U-2s over Soviet territory for almost four years. Until 1961, the Americans had not revealed the degree to which his boasts about nuclear strength were false.

Going on past history, Khrushchev might have suspected that if Kennedy discovered the missiles before November and wanted them out, he might use Bolshakov or some other secret channel to ask Moscow for their removal. He almost certainly did not guess that the President would risk nuclear war to get the missiles out of Cuba.*

Perhaps he thought that Kennedy would be paralyzed by the same fear of Soviet retaliation in Berlin that had impelled him to accept humiliation at the Bay of Pigs. If the President had not used his nuclear superiority to dictate terms on Berlin, where the United States had treaty commitments, why should he use it over Cuba? Perhaps he would once again be immobilized by his liberal advisers, as during the Bay of Pigs.

Despite Khrushchev’s hints as early as July 1960 that Soviet nuclear missiles might one day defend Cuba, as of the spring of 1962, Kennedy had yet to issue a single serious warning against them. Khrushchev must have assumed that this omission was not by accident. In contrast, during the Berlin Crisis, Kennedy had carefully defined for the Soviet Union which vital interests the United States would and would not risk war to defend in the German city.

The Chairman might have allowed himself to think that the President might explain the missiles away as defensive, or even that Kennedy might be secretly pleased if Soviet missiles were placed in Cuba: perhaps by failing to warn against such missiles, Kennedy was encouraging him to install them as a way of cooling off the Cuban situation, just as he had signaled that he would not oppose the sealing off of West Berlin as a means of cooling the Berlin Crisis. This is doubtful but, in light of Khrushchev’s ample misinformation about American politics, not impossible.

The Chairman’s expectation that Kennedy would not seriously object to the missiles might have been buttressed by the President’s comment at a news conference in March 1962 that it did not matter whether a missile was fired from close range or from five thousand miles away. In his frame of mind at the time, Khrushchev could have interpreted this to mean that Kennedy would no more complain about Soviet mid-range missiles stationed near the United States than he would about ICBMs stationed in the Soviet Union.

Khrushchev expected that by presenting the missiles in Cuba to the world as a justified effort to defend Cuba from American aggression, comparing them to American missiles in Turkey and Italy which the United States defined as defensive, he could win world approval for his move. He never anticipated how the secrecy and deception he used to install the missiles would affect their reception by world opinion.

From Khrushchev’s point of view, as Burlatsky recalled, secrecy was a fact of life in Soviet politics. The Chairman did not realize how furious Kennedy would be at having been deceived by Soviet assurances against offensive weapons in Cuba.

This was partly the President’s own fault. When Bolshakov’s assurance that Khrushchev would be willing to discuss a test ban treaty at the Vienna summit proved to be false, Kennedy had not called him on it. After Khrushchev’s insistence at Vienna that he would not be the first to resume nuclear testing proved a lie, the President had not complained. The Chairman may have presumed that Kennedy accepted such trickery as a staple of international politics.

Even had Khrushchev known how his secrecy and deception would infuriate Kennedy and undermine his case for the missiles in world opinion, he knew there was probably no other way. Not irrationally, he felt, as with the Berlin Wall, that the President would be politically more able to tolerate a fait accompli than a Soviet announcement that nuclear missiles were going to Cuba.

By Sergo’s account, Mikoyan opposed Khrushchev’s idea. He predicted that the Americans would never accept the missiles. Not only would the United States discover them before Kennedy received the Chairman’s letter, but Castro would also object because he knew that the presence of missiles in Cuba might trigger an immediate American invasion.*

Sergo believed that “Khrushchev did not think through the U.S. reaction. He thought that after they were informed of the missiles, U.S.-Soviet relations would improve.” Presumably this belief was based on the Chairman’s thought that once the United States knew that nuclear missiles were in Cuba, the Americans would cease to act with what he found to be such arrogant superiority.

The Deputy Premier had the impression that in his missile gambit, Khrushchev was interested first in defending Cuba and only secondarily in correcting the balance of power. His son Sergo years later said that the Chairman was “worried about the possibility that somebody in the United States might think that a seventeen-to-one superiority would mean that a first strike was possible.… Our inferior position was impossible for us.”

Sergei Khrushchev recalled that the nuclear imbalance “naturally tormented our leadership a great deal.” His father also “felt the pinch of a great state around which were placed military bases where the aircraft of a possible adversary could reach any vital center of the Soviet Union.”

Sergo Mikoyan believed that Khrushchev had “only two thoughts” in sending the missiles: “Defend Cuba and repair the imbalance. But defending Cuba was the first thought.”

By emphasizing Cuban defense in his talks with the senior Mikoyan, Khrushchev may have been concealing his real thinking. He knew that Mikoyan loved Castro and his revolution and that the best way to win him over to a risky plan was to harp on protecting Cuba.

Khrushchev may have been so sensitive about Soviet nuclear inferiority and his culpability for it that he even avoided mentioning it in private. His hypocrisy and duplicity were not so great that he could easily go from a public speech boasting of Soviet strength (hundred-megaton bombs, rockets being turned out like sausages) into private talks in which he spoke the raw facts of Soviet nuclear weakness.

Soviet inferiority may have been one subject Khrushchev’s men tacitly knew not to mention in his presence. Trained in the conspiratorial school of Stalin, Khrushchev was accustomed to pursuing certain political aims, such as changing the nuclear balance, which he might not have been willing to mention even to close colleagues like Mikoyan.

Khrushchev’s determination to champion his system sometimes led him to use Orwellian reasoning even with intimates. He might have considered admitting Soviet military inferiority in private or public as unpatriotic and defeatist as conceding that his economy might not actually surpass America’s by 1970 or that, in 1980, national defense and other activities might not actually be performed by spontaneous initiative of the masses.

Thus the Chairman probably commended missiles in Cuba to Mikoyan and other colleagues not as an embarrassing ploy to repair a Soviet missile gap, for which he was largely to blame, but mainly as a noble and characteristic act of Soviet generosity to defend little revolutionary Cuba from the CIA and the Pentagon’s aggressive designs and generally to advance the socialist camp. He certainly planned to use this line of argument when the missiles were revealed to the world.

Bolstering such a claim was Khrushchev’s intention to send Cuba a substantial contingent of operational Soviet combat military forces, numbering more than 42,000 men, which would protect the missile sites and serve as a tripwire against an American invasion.

Dictating his memoirs years later, without documents to prompt his memory, Khrushchev said that he conceived of his missiles-in-Cuba plan not in late April but during a trip to Bulgaria from May 14 to 20, just after he received Salinger in Moscow: “All these thoughts kept churning in my head the whole time I was in Bulgaria. I paced back and forth, brooding over what to do. I didn’t tell anyone what I was thinking. I kept my mental agony to myself.”

As the Chairman recalled, “My thinking went like this: if we installed the missiles secretly and then if the United States discovered the missiles were there after they were already poised and ready to strike, the Americans would think twice before trying to liquidate our installations by military means.… If a quarter or even a tenth of our missiles survived—even if only one or two big ones were left—we could still hit New York, and there wouldn’t be much of New York left.… The installation of missiles in Cuba would, I thought, restrain the United States from precipitous military action against Castro’s government.”

Khrushchev conceded that “in addition to protecting Cuba, our missiles would have equalized what the West likes to call ‘the balance of power.’” He claimed that the imbalance had been created because “the Americans had surrounded our country with military bases and threatened us with nuclear weapons.”

His speeches in Bulgaria showed the churning in his head. At Varna, May 16: “Would it not be better if the shores on which are located NATO’s military bases and the launching sites for their armed rockets were converted into areas of peaceful labor and property?” At Sofia, May 19, about Kennedy’s Saturday Evening Post statement about an American first strike: “Anyone who dared unleash a military conflict of that kind would receive a shattering retaliatory blow using all the very latest weapons of war.”

Flying the next day from Sofia to Moscow, by Gromyko’s account, Khrushchev told him, “I would like to speak with you alone about an important matter.” As the Foreign Minister recalled, “No one else was about, so I knew that the conversation would be about something very important. Khrushchev did not like ‘narrow’ conversations on political subjects.… What was he going to speak with me about? I decided that he had developed or was developing some new idea that he needed to share with a person who was involved in foreign affairs professionally.”

The Chairman noted that the situation in Cuba was dangerous: “In order to save it as an independent state, it is essential to deploy a certain number of our nuclear missiles there. This alone can save the country. Last year’s failed assault at the Bay of Pigs isn’t going to stop Washington. What is your view on this?”

Gromyko paused and replied, “I must say frankly that putting our missiles in Cuba would cause a political explosion in the United States. I am absolutely certain of that, and this should be taken into account.” He feared that these words might make Khrushchev “fly into a rage.” The Chairman did not, but Gromyko knew “that he had no intention of changing his position.”

Khrushchev declared, “We don’t need a nuclear war and we have no intention of fighting.” When Gromyko heard this he “felt a sense of relief. Even Khrushchev’s voice … had become a bit milder.” The Chairman resolved to raise the question before the Presidium.

Khrushchev used to joke with his advisers that Presidium members were so inclined to talk about secret meetings that the Voice of America could broadcast their contents within a half hour of adjournment. Thus as Sergo Mikoyan recalled, the Chairman resolved to confide his missile scheme to only five officials: Mikoyan, Kozlov, Malinovsky, Gromyko, and Marshal Sergei Biryuzov, a Deputy Defense Minister and commander of Strategic Rocket Forces. To reduce the danger of revelation, Khrushchev excluded even note-takers.

By his own account, he convened a secret meeting on his return from Bulgaria where he “warned that Fidel would be crushed if another invasion were launched against Cuba and said that we were the only ones who could prevent such a disaster from occurring.”

According to Sergo Mikoyan, Khrushchev asked Malinovsky how long it would have taken the Soviet Union to invade an island ninety miles away and win. The Marshal replied, “Three or four days, a week maybe.” The Chairman reasoned that action against Cuba would take the Americans the same amount of time—not long enough for Moscow to defend the island even by retaliation elsewhere. Thus an invasion must be deterred beforehand by sending missiles to Cuba.

Malinovsky would not have been delighted to have to pay the mind-boggling cost of the operation out of his existing defense budget.* Nor would he have been enchanted by sending the most dangerous and secret Soviet weapons to such a strange, distant, highly exposed place as Cuba, where Americans or Cubans might conceivably capture them. The Soviet Union had never before moved missiles capable of bearing nuclear warheads outside its borders. Still Gromyko felt that Malinovsky’s demeanor suggested “that he supported Khrushchev’s proposal unconditionally.”

The Foreign Minister recalled that Khrushchev “repeatedly elaborated his position on the basic questions. How to preserve Cuba as a sovereign socialist state? … When time was required to think carefully through the questions, they were postponed to the next discussion.”

Sergei Khrushchev recalled that such talks were his father’s “usual way to check himself.” Khrushchev said in his memoirs, “It wasn’t until after two or three lengthy discussions of the matter” that he and his colleagues “decided it was worth the risk.”

Gromyko was relieved by the Chairman’s insistence “that the Soviet Union should not and would not go so far as to risk a nuclear conflict,” stated in private talks with several Presidium members.* As Gromyko recalled, “Of course, none of this eliminated the risk of nuclear war, as we did not know the American side’s precise intentions.”

According to Sergo Mikoyan, his father restated his objections. Khrushchev told the group, “Let’s send Marshal Biryuzov to Cuba to find out the possibility of installing missiles without American discovery and take with him my letter to Fidel, in which I shall ask Fidel’s opinion.”

Alexander Alexeyev was the TASS correspondent and Soviet intelligence agent who called himself the first Soviet citizen in postrevolutionary Cuba and who had served as an informal emissary to Castro. In early May, he was mysteriously summoned from Havana to Moscow. Mikoyan showed him in to Gromyko: “Andrei Andreyevich, this is our new Ambassador to Cuba, Alexeyev.” This was how Alexeyev learned of his appointment, a choice which delighted Castro.

In late May, Alexeyev was called to Khrushchev’s office, along with Gromkyo, Malinovsky, Mikoyan, Biryuzov, and Sharaf Rashidov, an alternate member of the Presidium. As Alexeyev recalled, the Chairman was “very interested in the defense capability of Cuba.” After some talk, he asked, “How would Fidel Castro respond if we placed our missiles in Cuba?”

Alexeyev recalled that Khrushchev’s question “put me in a state of complete shock because I could never suppose that Fidel Castro would agree to such a thing.” He advised the Chairman that Castro “will not accept such a proposal from us because he is building his security on first strengthening their defense capability and public opinion in Latin America and world public opinion.”

Malinovsky disagreed: how could a socialist country refuse Soviet aid when Spain had accepted? Khrushchev told Alexeyev, “You are going to Cuba—Comrade Rashidov, Biryuzov, and you—and explain to Fidel Castro our concerns.” By Sergo Mikoyan’s account, the Chairman asked them to find out whether Castro would be willing to accept the missiles and whether they could be installed and deployed in secret.

As Alexeyev recalled, just before his trio’s departure ten days later, Khrushchev summoned them to his dacha along with Gromyko and the Presidium: “For the salvation of the Cuban revolution, there is no other path than one which could equalize, so to say, the security of Cuba with the security of the United States. And this logically could be done only by our nuclear missiles, our long-range missiles. So try and explain it to Fidel.”

As delegation leader, Rashidov was the highest-ranking Soviet to visit Cuba since Mikoyan in 1960, yet sufficiently junior to keep from arousing American suspicions. Not yet accredited as Ambassador, Alexeyev traveled as an adviser to the Soviet Embassy in Havana.

Arriving in early June “to study irrigation problems,” as it was officially announced, they met privately with Fidel and Raul Castro and explained Khrushchev’s plan for “saving the Cuban revolution.” According to Alexeyev, the Cuban leader fell into thought and then said, “If this will serve the socialist camp, and if it will hinder the actions of American imperialism on the continent, I believe that we will agree. But I will give you an answer only after I consult with my close comrades.”

Castro confided Khrushchev’s request to Che Guevara, President Osvaldo Dorticos, the old Cuban Communist leader Blas Roca, and Castro’s close aide Major Emilio Aragones. They endorsed it unanimously. “But we six and especially Fidel Castro were sure that we were doing this … not so much as to defend Cuba as to change the correlation of forces between capitalism and socialism,” recalled Aragones. “Why? Because we believed that to defend Cuba, other measures could be taken without resorting to installing missiles.”

Castro called the Soviets back, along with Raul, Guevara, Dorticos, and Blas Roca, and told them, “Yes, place missiles in Cuba and they will serve both the salvation of the Cuban revolution and assistance to the socialist camp.”

Alexeyev was surprised by Castro’s assent: “But Fidel knew the circumstances with regard to the Americans better than we did.… He added that as a sign of solidarity, that if it would really help world socialism, actually prevent the American threat not only to Cuba but to other regions, other countries, then he was willing to accept the proposal.” Sergo Mikoyan recalled, “Fidel believed he could take the risk. He was always ready to fight to the last soldier, but he knew if the United States used all of its force, he would fail.”

Back in Moscow, the delegation reported to Khrushchev that Castro would accept the missiles. Biryuzov assured him that they could be deployed in secret: there might even be places in the Cuban mountains where the United States would not even find the missiles. (The senior Mikoyan thought him “a fool.”) Malinovsky said the missiles could be installed quickly; if the operation were properly camouflaged, they would not be found.

As Alexeyev recalled, the Chairman “thought that if we would act very carefully and not send immediately a stream of ships, we would take it to the point that on the sixth of November, we would announce openly our measures.” The sixth of November was the date of the American midterm elections.

Castro later said that Khrushchev’s proposal “surprised us at first and gave us great pause.… We finally went along because, on the one hand, the Russians convinced us that the United States would not let itself be intimidated by conventional weapons and secondarily because it was impossible for us not to share the risks which the Soviet Union was taking to save us.” He felt he “had no right to refuse.” Better to risk “a great crisis” than wait “impotently” for an American invasion.

Castro later complained that Khrushchev had not told him the truth about Soviet nuclear inferiority: “It did not occur to me to ask the Soviets about it. It did not seem to me that I had the right to ask, ‘Listen, how many missiles do you have, how many do the North Americans have, what is the correlation of forces?’ We really trusted that they, for their part, were acting with knowledge of the entire situation.”

After the Russians left Havana, Castro donned his battle fatigues and rifle and departed with great fanfare for a week in the Sierra Maestra, birthplace of his revolution. Emboldened by his secret knowledge of Khrushchev’s plan to thwart the American invasion that he presumed was imminent, El Líder Maximo declared, “Once more, I have raised the banner of rebellion!”

Khrushchev was undisturbed by Mikoyan’s warnings that Kennedy would not tolerate missiles in Cuba. “He did not necessarily think through all possible permutations,” recalled Burlatsky. Like Kennedy when he planned the Bay of Pigs, the secrecy Khrushchev had imposed on the operation prevented him from gaining the broad range of advice that might have shown him that the President might respond strongly.*

Khrushchev may have expected the President to pretend he did not know about the missiles if he discovered them before the congressional elections, just as he may have believed that Kennedy pretended he did not know about planning for the Berlin Wall in order to avoid political embarrassment. Even if the President revealed the missiles to the public, it would probably take him many weeks to orchestrate a NATO response. Khrushchev recalled how it took almost two months during the summer of 1961 for Kennedy to draft an Allied response to his Vienna ultimatum on Berlin.

He may have assumed that the President would be deterred from strong action by fear that the Soviets would retaliate over Berlin. This had been so important during the Bay of Pigs that Kennedy had been willing to suffer an American defeat.

Khrushchev felt that sending missiles to Cuba was within his rights, just as the Americans had installed them in Turkey, Britain, and Italy. The missiles in those three nations were not in hardened sites and thus suited only for a first-strike attack, but the Americans called them “defensive.” The Chairman intended to use the same adjective for the missiles in Cuba.

Gromyko bitterly remembered that when he once complained to Foster Dulles that the United States was secretly setting up missile bases along the Soviet border, Dulles had told him, “Matters involving the establishment of American military bases are decided by the United States, and only the United States, at its own discretion, and by agreement with the country on whose territory these bases are established.” Gromyko recalled that South Korea had been covertly “jammed with nuclear weapons.”

Khrushchev might have expected the President to respond to the sudden and secret installation of missiles in Cuba just as he had responded to the sudden and secret installation of the Berlin Wall: he would claim surprise, send Moscow a formal protest, and then tell the American people that this was not an issue on which the West was prepared to go to war. Gromyko years later said, “If this measure were not carried out in secrecy, it just would not have worked.”

The Chairman recalled how Senator Fulbright had seemed to signal beforehand that the Soviets and East Germans had the right to close the Berlin border. In June 1961, Fulbright had told the Senate, “I suppose we would all be less comfortable if the Soviets did install missile bases in Cuba, but I am not sure that our national existence would be in substantially greater danger than is the case today.” If Khrushchev assumed that Fulbright tacitly spoke for Kennedy on Berlin, he may have also assumed that Fulbright spoke for Kennedy on Cuba.

If the Chairman needed further reassurance that the President would not react strongly against missiles in Cuba, he could note the Kennedy administration’s failure as late as May 1962 to issue a formal warning against Soviet missiles on the island. After the Bay of Pigs, Khrushchev had pointedly written the President that while he did not “intend to establish” a missile base on Cuba, the United States did use other nations’ territories for “preparations … that really do pose a threat to the security of the Soviet Union.”

Even to this blatant hint Kennedy had not responded. In the summer of 1961, the President had carefully defined for Khrushchev those interests surrounding Berlin and Germany that the United States would and would not defined. The Chairman could be excused for presuming that Kennedy’s failure to warn against nuclear missiles in Cuba was not accidental.

Now that Khrushchev felt he had found a way out of his quandary, his sense of frustration lifted. What did not lift was his private bewilderment and anger at the United States and its President.

At this solemn moment of decision, the leader of the Soviet Union was still a “very emotional man,” as Burlatsky recalled. Khrushchev could not understand why Kennedy and his people had chosen to embarrass him by revealing Soviet weakness and seeming to threaten a first-strike attack. Among the deep swirl of Khrushchev’s emotions in the late spring of 1962 was an almost childlike feeling of spite and revenge.

“It was high time America learned what it feels like to have her own land and her own people threatened,” he thundered in his memoirs. “We Russians have suffered three wars over the last half century.… America has never had to fight a war on her own soil, at least not in the past fifty years. She’s sent troops abroad to fight in the two World Wars and made a fortune as a result. America has shed a few drops of her own blood while making billions by bleeding the rest of the world dry.”

Khrushchev savored giving the Americans “a little of their own medicine”: “Now they would learn just what it feels like to have enemy missiles pointing at you.”

*The L’Unità story was thought to be inspired by Palmiro Togliatti, the Italian Communist leader known to be furious at Khrushchev’s newest attacks on his hero Stalin.

*In November 1961; the President had moved Goodwin from the White House to State as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs.

†Although it was later widely believed that Rusk was the only Cabinet member whom Kennedy did not call by his first name, this was true only for the first eight months of the Administration. That the President came to call Rusk “Dean” is confirmed by a transcript of a 1963 telephone conversation between them. Years later, in a letter to Bohlen, Rusk noted that early in the Administration, Mrs. Kennedy had told him over dinner, “You know, it is very significant that you are the only member of the Cabinet whom my husband calls Mr. Secretary.” He wrote that it was “clear from the context that she considered it a compliment.… The last thing in the world I can imagine is that I would have said to him, ‘Jack, why don’t you call me Dean?’”

*When he spoke late in life to historians and journalists about his career, Rusk often used language that varied little from interview to interview. One such refrain: “My relationship with President Kennedy was very close, but … I didn’t play touch football in Hyannis Port. I didn’t go yachting at Palm Beach.”

*Reading his son’s treatment of Rusk in the manuscript, Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., scrawled, “Pretty rough on a nice guy!” The junior Schlesinger’s enmity was fully reciprocated by Rusk, who privately grumbled that Schlesinger was too academic, inexperienced, and “talky,” too eager to deal with the Chinese and Russians, “over in the East Wing with the social secretary.” Rusk unfairly told an aide he had refused to discuss Berlin with the President while Schlesinger was present because “Schlesinger is the biggest gossip in town.”

*This problem was discovered by James Reston, who in 1962 complained in the New York Times that records were being “poorly kept”: “The big decisions of this Administration are often taken in small private meetings, usually without the benefit of any chronological account of what happened.”

†In November 1961, Kaysen had become Bundy’s deputy, succeeding Walt Rostow, who went to State as Director of Policy Planning.

*Perhaps at the time and certainly later, Castro confused the Adzhubei conversation with the Kennedy-Khrushchev exchange on Cuba at the Vienna summit. In the early 1980s, he told the journalist Tad Szulc, who was researching a Castro biography, that “from the terms in which Kennedy expressed himself” in Vienna, “it could be deduced that he considered he had the right to use the armed forces of the United States to destroy the Cuban revolution. He referred to different historical events … on that occasion made a reference to Hungary. Having received information about that conversation, we reached the conclusion, as did the Soviets, that the United States persisted in the idea of an invasion.”

By Bundy’s contemporaneous recollection of the talk with Adzhubei, the President did not say that the Cuban situation was “intolerable,” only that it was most difficult for the United States. Kennedy had gone on to say that if Adzhubei wanted to know how important Cuba was to the United States, he should remember Hungary. Bundy said that this remark was intended only to show how vital the United States considered Cuba to be.

*Kennedy did not wish to use the Nevada test site, adamant that the “political cost of another mushroom cloud visible in the United States” would be too high.

*The President had told Sorensen to use a few Russian words, invoke Franklin Roosevelt’s magic name, and ask the Soviets to reverse the course Stalin had started.

*It never was.

*This referred to Powers, O’Donnell, Sorensen, the President’s naval aide Tazewell Shepard, his air aide Godfrey McHugh, Evelyn Lincoln, McNamara, Rusk, and Bundy. During Mrs. Kennedy’s trip, Nehru made a point of installing the First Lady and her sister in the apartment once inhabited by Lady Mountbatten, wife of the last British viceroy, who had apparently been his mistress.

*Before leaving, Menshikov wrote characteristically leaden farewell letters. To Adlai Stevenson: “I am carrying with me my most genuine feeling of high consideration for your impressive personality and I will remember with pleasure our meetings and conversations, which I always found very interesting.” Perhaps feeling that Khrushchev might have let him remain had he not been so contentious in Washington, when Menshikov departed on the Queen Elizabeth, he said that Kennedy was “a very good President. As far as internal affairs are concerned, it is up to you to judge. He is very thoughtful and trying to do things to preserve peace.”

*Khrushchev had written Kennedy of Dobrynin that “whenever you need to convey something to me in a confidential way, he will be able to transmit this to me personally.”

†British scientists were worried that the antimissile tests especially would harm the Van Allen radiation belt by significantly adding to its electrons. Despite American reassurances, one test in the series proved them correct. Seaborg thought this “should have a sobering effect on any who believe that the earth’s outer environment could emerge from a full nuclear exchange without severe damage.” Rusk’s memory of how the American scientists had erred in 1962 helped to inform his opposition in the 1980s to Ronald Reagan’s efforts for a space-based anti-ICBM system: “Spreading the arms race into outer space is politically inflammatory, militarily futile, economically absurd, and aesthetically repulsive. Otherwise it is a great idea.”

*Georgi Arbatov of the U.S.A.-Canada Institute in Moscow even heard that the Soviet Union had “phony missile launch sites” and inflatable mockups of submarines to deceive American spy planes and satellites.

†Every day of Salinger’s Soviet visit, a cable also had to be sent to Bonn to reassure Adenauer that the President’s press secretary was not secretly negotiating Germany’s future with Khrushchev.

*After this speech, Eisenhower wrote a friend that Castro had given the United States “a definite opportunity to intervene.… That statement of Castro’s definitely linked him with the Kremlin; to my mind it was his acknowledgment that Khrushchev was his overlord.… It seemed to me rather strange that it caused no reaction from us.”

*The pace and number of these operations allowed a writer with close links to the CIA to observe in 1986 that John Kennedy had initiated more covert activities by the Agency than any other President.

*Thompson privately told Senators in April 1962 that the Russians “don’t like the fact that Cuba has declared itself a Marxist country and wants to be considered a member of the club, because this involves them in implied responsibilities which they don’t want to assume. It is too far away, and they know they couldn’t fulfill them.”

*In response to McNamara’s statement, made at an American-Soviet-Cuban conference on the Missile Crisis in January 1989, Gromyko replied, “Mr. McNamara, you state that there was no intention. OK, we accept it as information that there was no intention.” Gromyko made it clear that even after twenty-seven years he did not believe that Kennedy intended no invasion.

*Weighing against this was the President’s private negative response when Adzhubei asked him in January 1962 whether the United States would invade Cuba. Adzhubei and his colleagues put greater stock in what they thought to be Kennedy’s statement that increased Soviet influence in Cuba would be “intolerable” and his admonition that Adzhubei remember Hungary.

†This approach to Cuba as a political issue was similar to what friends claimed to be the President’s attitude toward Vietnam and 1964: defer withdrawal of American forces until after he was safely reelected.

*Khrushchev’s expectation that Kennedy would not go to the brink over missiles in Cuba is suggested by the massive Soviet investment in the missile operation. As the political scientist Richard Ned Lebow has noted, the MRBMs and IRBMs sent to Cuba were costly fixed installations: had Khrushchev had any intention of trading them for Cold War concessions by the United States, he could have probably won the same results with a morè limited MRBM force. Such a force, capable of striking the southeastern United States, would have been less vulnerable and easier to disguise.

*Sergo years later said, “He was mistaken on this, as specialists always are.”

*The CIA later estimated that the cost was one billion dollars.

*According to General Dimitri Volkogonov, deputy chief of the political directorate of the Soviet armed forces in 1989, one of the written orders given to Malinovsky stated, “The rocket forces are to be used only in the case of a U.S. attack, unleashing a war, and under the strict condition of receiving a command from Moscow.”

*After speaking with some of the principals, Georgi Arbatov of the U.S.A.-Canada Institute in Moscow complained that the missile decisions “were taken in a closed coterie. They were not analyzed from all sides. I think that a more or less serious analysis would have prevented such a step.”