CHAPTER 15

“No One Will Be Able Even to Run”

At the end of May, Khrushchev attended a Benny Goodman concert at the Red Army sports palace. He found jazz “decadent” but, under prodding by Jane Thompson, had agreed to a tour of the Soviet Union by the King of Swing. Sitting in his box with the Thompsons and the Adzhubeis, he said, “I just came to drink beer. I don’t understand this music.” But when Goodman’s beautiful female vocalist, Joya Sherrill, appeared in a low-cut white gown, Khrushchev led the cheering.

He left at intermission, telling Jane Thompson, “It’s a little too much.” She said, “Well, it’s your first time hearing it.” Khrushchev said, “No matter. Let them enjoy it.” Adzhubei later recalled that his father-in-law considered jazz “an invention of uncultured people.… Although he was a Marxist, and although he understood that blacks and whites are equal, he could still say that.”

After the concert, the Thompsons threw a large reception at Spaso House, one of their last before their planned departure in July. “Tommy and I went to bed before it was over,” recalled Jane. “The Adzhubeis were still having a good time when we left. There was improvisation, with the windows wide open. The next two weeks, jazz mushroomed all over the city. It was a wonderful finale to our time in Moscow.”

On Tuesday, June 5, Kennedy wrote Khrushchev, “I noticed with appreciation your friendly gesture in attending the concert offered by Benny Goodman in Moscow last week. I myself look forward to attending a performance of the Bolshoi Ballet when it comes to us in the fall.”

He also thanked the Chairman “for the generous hospitality which you and your associates offered to Pierre Salinger while he was in the Soviet Union. He has given me a full account of his visit, with particular emphasis on your own generosity in giving him so much of your time.” He recognized “that your kindness to him was in part a friendly gesture to me.”

Berlin was being discussed by Rusk and Dobrynin: “I think it may be best to leave the discussion in their capable hands at this time. I am glad to learn again from Mr. Salinger that Ambassador Dobrynin has your confidence in unusual measure. He has already made a place for himself here in Washington as an intelligent and friendly representative of your Government.”

In the spring of 1962, as Kennedy’s and Khrushchev’s men bargained in Geneva over a “neutral and independent” Laos under Prince Souvanna Phouma, the Communist Pathet Lao had resumed their military offensive. “I fear there is little Washington or Moscow can do on this,” Dean Rusk said privately in March. “I have the impression the Russians would like to see a settlement of the situation, but the Chinese are messing things up.”

In January, the President had warned Adzhubei that the United States would move more strongly in Southeast Asia if the Laotian Communists continued to harbor forces attacking South Vietnam. But that same month he told his NSC that after “careful weighing of the risks” and “examination of the supply problem” (there was no seaport), he had “decided to disengage” from Laos. At a February press conference, to keep a strong hand at Geneva, he denied that this was so. Sorensen years later observed that on Laos, Kennedy “combined bluff with real determination … in proportions he made known to no one.”

In March, the President used his Saturday Evening Post interview to issue a new threat to Khrushchev about Laos. With deceptive offhandedness, he said that the Chairman was as aware as he that if the United States was pushed to intervene in Laos, it might lead to use of nuclear weapons.

In early May, with North Vietnamese support, Prince Souphanouvong and the Pathet Lao broke the cease-fire. The Royal Laotian Army fled. The Communists seemed to be driving toward the Thai border. Kennedy considered how to convince the Pathet Lao to renew the cease-fire without encouraging the rightist General Phoumi Nosavan into thinking that he could block a coalition government and sink the Geneva talks.

Working through Thompson in Moscow, Rusk asked Gromyko to “use his influence” on the Pathet Lao. George Ball asked Dobrynin whether the Soviets had scrapped Khrushchev’s Vienna pledge to seek an independent, neutral Laos: “The United States has been putting pressure on Phoumi. It is now to be expected that the Soviet Union will exercise control over the reckless actions of Souphanouvong.” Dobrynin reaffirmed the Chairman’s pledge and demanded that the Americans force the “Boun Oum–Nosavan clique” to stop sabotaging a coalition government.

On Thursday, May 10, the President considered a limited show of force, including the dispatch of portions of the Seventh Fleet to the Gulf of Siam. Verging on insolence, General Bernard Decker, the Army Chief of Staff, said, “Last spring you made some startling noises and then you had to back down, and I’m just afraid, if you are not prepared to follow through on this, we will look silly again.”

That day in Washington, General Eisenhower told reporters that Kennedy’s efforts for a coalition government in Laos were “the way we lost China.” Kennedy asked McCone to “try to get him back onto the track.” When McCone called on his old boss, Eisenhower agreed to support a limited response. He added that unless Phoumi’s forces were disintegrating, it would be a “very splendid move” to reinforce them “so as to hold a firm position abreast of the northern border of South Vietnam—roughly the Seventeenth Parallel.”*

On Saturday, May 12, the Seventh Fleet was sent. Thompson cabled that it was “highly significant” that Khrushchev and Gromyko did not publicly complain: “The Soviets are almost encouraging us to demonstrate that the Pathet Lao are following a dangerous policy.… I find it difficult to believe that in a matter as important as this Khrushchev would have remained silent if the Soviets intended to seriously oppose us in this area.” He suggested “taking the line that the Pathet Lao are out of control or being egged on by the Chinese.” Washington should also tell the Soviets that “we are now really going to put the bite on Phoumi.”

Four days later, after the United States quietly persuaded Bangkok to request aid, two American air squadrons, five thousand American Marines and infantrymen, and contingents from Britain, Australia, and New Zealand moved through Thailand to the Laotian border. Khrushchev complained to a Western diplomat that the President was playing “a reckless game.”

Suggesting that Kennedy write to the Chairman, Rusk sent a draft to the White House.* Instead, Robert Kennedy asked Georgi Bolshakov to tell Khrushchev that the President had relied on Soviet assurances that there would be no more fighting, and that the new Pathet Lao action had made him feel “double-crossed.”

Bolshakov returned several days later with a “personal” message from Khrushchev: there would be no more armed action in Laos. The Soviet Union was “anxious that the whole matter be resolved peacefully.” After consulting his brother, the Attorney General reported that he was “pleased with the message.” The United States would do all it could with Souvanna Phouma, but the Chairman must “also work with his people on the other side.”

The Pathet Lao reentered talks. A coalition government was formed on June 12 with Souvanna as Prime Minister and Phoumi and Prince Souphanouvong as deputies.

Khrushchev cabled Kennedy. “Good news has come from Laos.… There is no doubt that this may be the turning point not only in the life of the Laotian people but in the consolidation of peace in Southeast Asia.… Our mutual understanding at our Vienna meeting in June of last year on support for a neutral and independent Laos has begun to become a reality.” The President replied, “I share your view that the reports from Laos are very encouraging.”

A “Declaration on the Neutrality of Laos” was signed six weeks later in Geneva. Bolshakov reported to Robert Kennedy that Khrushchev was “very pleased with the settlement in Laos” but unhappy about the continuing presence of Western troops in Thailand. The Chairman understood that they had been sent because of a possible outbreak in Laos. He hoped that it was now possible to withdraw them.

Robert checked with his brother and asked Bolshakov to inform Khrushchev that the President would start the pullout within ten days. Khrushchev sent back a message that this meant “a great deal” to him.

The Laotian settlement did not hold. The Pathet Lao withdrew from the new government. The North Vietnamese continued using the Laos corridor to supply Viet Cong rebels in South Vietnam. Kennedy stepped up CIA covert action against the two enemy forces.

In early July, Castro sent his brother, Raul, and his aide, Major Aragones, to Moscow. In secret the Cubans persuaded Khrushchev, Mikoyan, and Malinovsky that the nuclear missiles should be brought to Cuba in the context of a formal Soviet-Cuban military accord.

Raul and Malinovsky drafted a document pledging the Soviet air force to respect Cuban sovereignty and law. The pact was to be in effect for five years, thereafter renewable, but could be terminated with one year’s notice by either party. In that case, Soviet installations on Cuba would become Cuban government property; Soviet troops would have to leave with their equipment and war matériel.

According to Jorge Risquet, later of the Cuban Politburo, the Cubans suggested to Khrushchev that he make a public announcement that the Soviet Union was shipping missiles to Cuba: this was in both countries’ rights. Otherwise, “led into a blind alley,” the United States would “find itself faced with a fait accompli and it would have to react with a certain degree of violence … when faced with something that could be seen as some sort of deception, as something done dishonestly.”

Khrushchev refused. As Aragones recalled, he “wanted to buy time. He said there would be no problems, he believed that was not going to happen, that it would not be discovered.”

The Cubans insisted that if Washington discovered the missiles before they were combat-ready, “we could expect a preemptive attack by the United States with very grave consequences for ourselves and no ability to respond.” Khrushchev replied that, in that case, he would still defend them and would send a letter to Kennedy telling him what he had done.

The Soviets and Cubans agreed that the pact would take effect as soon as it was initialed. Khrushchev and Castro could sign it publicly during a triumphant visit by the Chairman to Cuba in November, after the missiles were installed. When Castro was given the document in late July, he drafted his own preface. This would be published at the grand moment in November when he welcomed Khrushchev to Havana.

On Wednesday, July 4, Khrushchev went to the annual Independence Day lawn party at Spaso House, where he toasted President Kennedy and said, “I want to congratulate the American people. I wish for peace and success.” Benny Goodman greeted him: “Ah, a new jazz fan.” The Chairman replied, “I don’t like Goodman music. I just like good music!”

The next day, he wrote the President to demand a solution to Berlin. Bolshakov had warned Robert Kennedy in June that the unsolved Berlin problem “makes our relations more difficult and … is full of possibilities of dangerous collision between states. The Soviet Union sincerely wants to reach an agreement with the United States which would not hurt vital interests or prestige for both sides.”

Bolshakov told the Attorney General that he had informed Khrushchev of Robert’s insistence that “the President and his government are realists and trying to reach an agreement and would not like to have a military conflict with the U.S.S.R.” But if the West did not act soon, the Berlin Crisis would be reignited.

On Tuesday, July 17, Bundy gave the President “an AP report of a plane-buzzing incident in the Berlin corridor.” At six o’clock in the Oval Office, Kennedy complained to Dobrynin about the harassment.

He rejected Khrushchev’s latest offer of a settlement requiring removal of Allied troops from West Berlin: this “would get us out” of Berlin “without so much as a fig leaf of concealment. This would mean a major retreat. Europe would lose confidence in U.S. leadership. It would be a major victory for the Soviet Union and a major defeat for the West.”

Dobrynin said that the Chairman would be “greatly disappointed.” He rudely asked Kennedy whether his position was “related to German interests or American interests.” The President kept his cool: “There might well be other issues on which we would be willing to press the Germans quite hard, such as, for example, on the structure of an access authority.” But “our presence in Berlin” was “of vital interest to all.” He thought he had made that point clear to Gromyko when they met the previous autumn.

Kennedy reminded the envoy that “Soviet-created tensions in Berlin” had already caused increased Western rearmament: “Any new crisis would have a similar effect.” Noting his disagreements with his allies on the spread of nuclear weapons (read France), he warned that a new Berlin crisis “could only increase the danger of results which the Soviet government would not like.”

Dobrynin insisted it was the Western troops in West Berlin that created these dangers. The President replied that the best way to reduce tension over Berlin would be for the Soviet Union to understand that the troops were a Western vital interest.

In Geneva three days earlier, Arthur Dean had told reporters that improved nuclear detection methods might foreclose the need for inspection stations within the Soviet Union. After angrily reading Dean’s remarks in a newspaper, Rusk had issued a statement saying that there had been no change in the American position. Kennedy was furious that in public the administration seemed to be so confused.

Now Dobrynin asked him what Dean had had in mind. Evading the question, the President simply said that if the Soviets renewed their nuclear tests, “American scientists would urge the need for additional American testing.… It would help if any new series of Soviet tests could be short.” Dobrynin insisted that since the Americans had conducted “many more tests” than his government, the Soviet Union intended to resume nuclear testing.*

During the summer of 1962, the influence of the nation’s Secretary of Defense was nearing its peak. On taking office, Robert Strange McNamara had surrounded himself with young men “who are smarter than I am”: Alain Enthoven, Charles Hitch, Adam Yarmolinsky, and others who had tutored him about the new innovations in defense doctrine that had percolated in universities and think tanks during the late Eisenhower years.

With his white presidential telephone behind him, hunched in shirtsleeves over his nine-foot General Pershing desk, his eyes racing down one document after another, McNamara had swiftly begun to fulfill the assignment implicit and explicit in Kennedy’s 1960 campaign speeches—to build American nuclear forces, expand conventional forces to respond more flexibly to provocations short of war, and reduce costly intraservice rivalries by bringing the military under clear civilian control.

Arguing for his policies, McNamara always spoke in italics. “He really runs rather than walks,” observed the Secretary of Agriculture, Orville Freeman, who noted that McNamara even ran “up and down the escalator steps.” Generals, admirals, and Congressmen complained of his abruptness. McNamara authorized for direct attribution his wife’s comment that “Bob suffers fools badly.”

He was fastidious in his relations with the Secretary of State, avoiding the public impression of encroachment upon Rusk’s terrain (“I have never taken actions bearing upon foreign policy without the complete concurrence of the Department of State”). But it was in his nature to fill a power vacuum. Whether in a debate behind closed doors or in public with his ferociously articulate Pentagon counterpart, Rusk could not compete.

McNamara began the custom of issuing an annual one- or two-hundred-page posture statement defining political purposes, military threats, and how the United States proposed to meet them. Foy Kohler said years later, “I tried to persuade Dean that we ought to issue our own foreign affairs summary every year before McNamara got his out.… I thought he let Bob run over him.… I thought he should have stood up more.”

With his disdain for conventional procedure, the President more and more sought McNamara’s advice on matters beyond defense. He had never met a self-made big businessman so literate and so able to hold his own against academics, Congressmen, and the press. He was dazzled by McNamara’s toughness, quickness, fluency, competence, incorruptibility, freedom from political cant, and force of personality.

Except for Douglas Dillon and Robert Kennedy, McNamara was the only Cabinet member who made his way across the great divide into the President’s social life. Jacqueline said, “Men can’t understand his sex appeal.” He became especially close to the Attorney General, who said, “Why is it they all call him ‘the computer’ and yet he’s the one all my sisters want to sit next to at dinner?”

Naturally McNamara knew that intimacy with the Kennedys would increase his public influence. Still, he was genuinely attracted by the family’s toughness, rationality, intellectual curiosity, and athleticism, their increasingly liberal instincts, and their hard work and play. He was grateful for deliverance from the anti-intellectual, illiberal realm of automobile men and their wives he had endured for fifteen years.

No one took more seriously the “Hickory Hill seminars” organized by Robert Kennedy and Arthur Schlesinger at which the inner circle of the New Frontier government and social worlds was quietly invited to question visiting academics on subjects ranging from presidential greatness to psychoanalysis.* Not impervious to the Kennedy style, McNamara once danced the twist with Jacqueline at a private White House dinner. Asked by a reporter to name those he called when he wished to chew the fat or have a beer, he said, “The Kennedys—I like the Kennedys.”

Frank with himself about his own managerial deficiencies, the President admired the speed with which McNamara rationalized the Pentagon. He appreciated the Secretary’s one-two-three method of doing business: unlike Rusk, he’d “come in with his twenty options and then say, ‘Mr. President, I think we should do this.’ I like that. Makes the job easier.” Kennedy said McNamara was “one of the few guys around this town who, when you ask him if he has anything to say and he hasn’t, says, ‘No.’ That’s rare these days, I’m telling you.”

McNamara was the embodiment of Kennedy’s increasing conviction that the problems of the 1960s were more subject to “administrative” than ideological solutions. As the President put it in a major speech at Yale in June 1962, these were problems “so complicated and so technical that only a handful of people really understand them,” forcing the average man to fall back on “a bunch of outdated if not meaningless slogans.”

As time went on, the President became more aware of McNamara’s shortcomings. O’Donnell, who disliked him, warned Kennedy that McNamara’s political inexperience would one day get the President into bad trouble. When in 1963 the Secretary suggested to Congress that some missiles sold to Canada had been mainly intended to attract a few Soviet missiles away from U.S. territory, Kennedy privately said, “Everyone ought to run for office. That’s all there is to it.”

Although he admired the Secretary of Defense, Joseph Alsop was exasperated when he heard Kennedy saying that “on a mathematical basis, the chances of a nuclear war within ten years were at least even.” As Alsop recalled, “Bob had this complicated business about if China gets the bomb … it goes up to quadruple sizes. A lot of garbage: it doesn’t go up like that at all. But the President had been given this information by McNamara, and hadn’t really thought about it, and was just repeating it.”

The columnist was also concerned about McNamara’s uneven domestic political instincts. He wrote Kennedy, “Bob is your great discovery, but he resembles my old General, [Claire] Chennault,* in the last war, in the sense that his astonishing qualities are potentially counterbalanced by large gaps in his experience.… Give a short lecture to Bob on the need to be open and frank about his problems with the public, and therefore with people in Congress and in my business. He thinks if you do right, support will be automatic. It’s a beautiful belief but alas not justified by the record.

“Tell him every great officer of state needs to command public support and confidence, and the only way to get it is to explain what he is up to.… I only write you all this because I foresee bad trouble for Bob unless preventive action is taken.… The enemies Bob is forced to make will get him yet, unless he is protected in the way I’ve outlined or in some other way.”

Born in 1916, McNamara grew up in what was described as a “somewhat crowded, rigidly lower-middle-class area” in the northern hills of San Francisco. His father was the Boston Irish Catholic son of immigrants from County Cork, his mother a Scottish-English Protestant. Sales manager of a wholesale shoe firm, the father moved the family in 1924 to Oakland, which allowed the son to attend the excellent high school in the wealthy town of Piedmont.

After Berkeley, he attended and taught accounting at the Harvard Business School. During World War II, as an Army Air Corps logistics expert, he used new statistical techniques. At war’s end, he intended to return to Harvard, but when his new wife, Margaret, contracted polio, the medical bills compelled him to make money in business. He joined a management and control team of veterans dubbed the “Whiz Kids,” hired by young Henry Ford II to revise the archaic, chaotic methods of the Ford Motor Company.

McNamara rose at Ford not through the usual combination of corporate politics and love of cars but through sheer managerial ability. He said, “I agree that I don’t have the rapport that some of the backslappers do. I can’t help it.… I just analyze every situation with all the tools at my command.”

McNamara settled his family not in the suburbs but in the university town of Ann Arbor. Nominally a Republican, he joined the Citizens for Michigan committee formed by George Romney of American Motors to advise on public policy. In 1960, he was named president of Ford, the first time the company had been headed by someone outside the family. He let it be known that year that he was voting for Kennedy, but somehow the Kennedy campaign failed to note and exploit the fact.

After the election, Robert Lovett suggested McNamara among three or four others for the Pentagon. As civilian chief of air, Lovett had known his logistics work during the war. Eager to hire palatable Republican businessmen, the President-elect was relieved when Lovett told him that McNamara was not a Catholic. O’Donnell telephoned the United Automobile Workers and was assured that McNamara had a “liberal outlook.”

Sargent Shriver flew to Detroit and suggested Treasury or Defense. McNamara replied that entering the Cabinet would mean a sacrifice of several million dollars, although he conceded that he already had “more money than I’m ever going to need or use,” and that he had been president of Ford for only a month. By the end of their talk, Shriver left enchanted: “How many other automobile executives or cabinet ministers read Teilhard de Chardin?”

Meeting with the President-elect the next day in Georgetown, McNamara said that he was not qualified for Treasury (he was not candid enough to say that the idea bored him) but was fascinated by the challenge of the Pentagon. Perhaps because he knew that assertive leaders are impressed by assertiveness, he asked Kennedy if he had actually written Profiles in Courage. Kennedy replied that he had, although others had “of course” done much of the research. Afterward the President-elect said, “I think he is just the right man.”

When McNamara saw him again, he brought a letter insisting that he be allowed to choose his own people, that he make up his own mind about the controversial findings of a Kennedy task force report on defense, and have direct operational and administrative authority in a chain from the President through the military commands. It concluded by saying that if Kennedy agreed to these understandings, he was prepared to accept the offer.

Other Presidents might have found it impudent for an incoming Cabinet minister to put such demands in writing. But, as was Robert Kennedy, his brother was “impressed with the fact that he was so tough about it.”

The tug-of-war between the parents’ Irish and Scottish ancestries seemed almost to play itself out in the son. McNamara was an emotional, partisan, driven man who worked hard to contain and conceal these instincts behind a facade of rational, self-confident, apolitical Olympian efficiency.

He told one reporter, “You can never substitute emotion for reason. I still would allow a place for intuition in this process, but not emotion.” To another: “I’ve got to think precisely. The cost of being wrong is very high.” The record of McNamara’s utterances while at the Pentagon is suffused with such comments. If Kennedy was a realist brilliantly disguised as a romantic, McNamara was—if not a romantic—a man of intense emotion who aspired to coldly logical realism.* He knew that men of conspicuous self-doubt do not survive as president of Ford or Secretary of Defense.

At the White House, he argued for his policies with such consistent force and absolute certainty that Robert Kennedy, who greatly liked and admired him, made certain that his brother heard opposing arguments for balance. Robert thought McNamara “the most dangerous man in the Cabinet, because he is so persuasive and articulate.” Someone else said that he hoped the Secretary was “never seriously wrong. Just think what happens when Bob comes up against someone else in a gray area of discussion. The other guy hasn’t a chance.”

James Res ton once complained in the New York Times, “The issue about the Secretary of Defense is not over his inefficiency but his decisive efficiency in putting over dubious policies.… He is tidy, he is confident, and he has the sincerity of an Old Testament prophet, but something is missing: some element of personal doubt, some respect for human weakness, some knowledge of history.”

From the Harvard Business School to the Pentagon, McNamara’s passion had always been to impose rational procedures that would reduce the system’s vulnerability to human error, chance, and accident.* The virtue in his approach was the greater exactitude it brought to American defense policy and statecraft. The weakness was that it lacked an equally sophisticated understanding of the emotional and seemingly irrational impulses that governed a people like the Vietnamese† or a leader like Nikita Khrushchev.

That winter, McNamara pondered an important shift in American nuclear strategy: in the event of impending Soviet nuclear attack, the United States would try to assault not Soviet cities but Soviet bomber and missile sites.

He hoped that such a counterforce strategy would reduce de Gaulle’s doubts that the President would sacrifice New York for Paris, and thus his demands for a French nuclear force de frappe. In February, he declared in a Chicago speech, “We may be able to use our retaliatory forces to limit damage done to ourselves and our allies by knocking out the enemy’s bases before he has had time to launch his second salvos.”

One of his aides later said, “He was listening to his Whiz Kids and accepting too much of what they said at face value. In any case, he should have known there could be no such thing as primary retaliation against military targets after an enemy attack. If you’re going to shoot at missiles, you’re talking about first strike.”‡

Combined with Kennedy’s comments about taking “the initiative,” McNamara’s talk about counterforce deepened Khrushchev’s anxieties that the United States was considering a preemptive nuclear attack against the Soviet Union. Like a child outshouting a rival, he was now all the more desperate to refute American claims of superiority.

On Wednesday, July 11, he told a Moscow “peace congress” that Eisenhower and Kennedy had once been “realistic,” declaring that American and Soviet strength were equal: “That position was stated by President Kennedy during our meeting at Vienna. But now U.S. leaders have started trying to implant in the minds of their people and their allies that the balance of forces has shifted in favor of the United States.…

“This dangerous concept is designed to aggravate … the threat of war. But it is quite without foundation.” He said that the Soviet Union was more dominant than ever, not only because of its hundred-megaton bombs but also a new anti-missile missile.* McNamara’s “monstrous proposal” was “permeated with hatred for human beings, for mankind.… Are there no armed forces in and near big cities? Wouldn’t atom bombs exploded according to McNamara’s rules in, say, the suburbs of New York bring fiery death to that great city?”

Alluding to Kennedy, he said, “Some statesmen in positions of responsibility even declare openly their willingness to ‘take the initiative’ in a nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union.… Their reasoning is: hurry up and start the war now, or the situation may change.”

A few days later Khrushchev boasted to visiting American editors that his anti-missile missile was so precise it could “hit a fly in outer space.” The Soviet Union, he blustered, was “not Laos, not Thailand or some other small state.” No doubt animated by visions of missiles in Cuba, he said, “Those who threaten us will get back everything they are planning for us!”

Faced with choosing a successor to Thompson at the Moscow Embassy, the President asked his brother whether he was interested. Robert reminded him that he had “spent ten years learning second-year French.” Kennedy said, “You certainly don’t need Russian in going,” but concluded that his brother was “too greatly needed in Washington.”

Jacqueline suggested John Glenn, whom she thought “the most controlled person on earth”: “Even Jack, who is highly self-controlled and has the ability to relax easily and to sleep when he wishes, to shrug off the problems of the world, seems fidgety and loose compared to Glenn.” The press sent up trial balloons for John Kenneth Galbraith. Then Republicans cried out against sending a “Socialist” to Moscow. Kennedy told Bradlee that it would not be Galbraith: “We’ve got to get a man who speaks Russian. A little give and take is so important.”

The Foreign Service was fighting hard to keep the prize post. Its consensus choice was Foy Kohler. The Attorney General told his brother that Kohler gave him “the creeps.” He wasn’t “the kind of a person who could really get anything done with the Russians.”

Kohler was the kind of stubborn bureaucrat whose influence the brothers had been fighting to reduce. He lacked the social grace that made them feel simpatico with other Soviet specialists such as Harriman, Kennan, Bohlen, and Thompson. Before joining the diplomatic service in 1931, he had been a Toledo bank teller. Kohler privately considered Kennedy a bright but inexperienced creature of public relations and wondered whether the Republicans might use information on the President’s women to defeat him in 1964.

As Charles Bartlett recalled, Kennedy finally concluded that “if you send people outside the Foreign Service to countries where there is serious business, that person is going to be screwed by the Foreign Service.” Kohler won the appointment.

Over lunch that July, Frank Holeman asked Bolshakov what the Russians thought of Kohler’s selection. It had been six months since Bolshakov told the Americans that Khrushchev was anxious to have a “known friend” of the President, not a career ambassador. Now Bolshakov complained that Foy Kohler was “no New Frontiersman.”

He said he was returning home for summer leave at the start of August. Concealing his rivalry with Dobrynin, he added that he had wanted to go home earlier but his “good friend” the Ambassador had asked him to stay. He reported that he and Dobrynin talked often “about many things”: they both agreed “that the President wants an accommodation with the Soviet Union.”

Bolshakov asked whether Kennedy might be persuaded to send a message to a forthcoming disarmament meeting in Moscow. Holeman replied that the conference was “just a Communist operation.” Bolshakov said all he wanted was greetings. He warned that if the President signed a congressional proclamation for Captive Nations Week, it “might affect talks on Berlin.”*

At a Kremlin reception that month, Nina Khrushchev asked Jane Thompson why she and her husband were leaving Moscow. The Ambassador’s wife reminded her that they had been there for five years: “The kids have to get back to American schools. They’ve never lived in their own country.”

Mrs. Khrushchev almost certainly knew of the missiles planned for Cuba. She threw out an ominous hint: “I would say that it is very important that you do not change ambassadors at this time.”

Puzzled, Mrs. Thompson replied, “Maybe my husband can do more things in Washington than he can in Moscow.”

On Wednesday morning, July 25, Khrushchev received Thompson in the Kremlin for a valedictory talk and that evening gave the envoy and his wife an eight-course dinner on the lawn of his dacha.

He insisted that he wanted to get Berlin settled and resume the road to coexistence: the Soviet Union could win a peaceful competition, and he wanted to get on with it. He also wanted good relations because of the Chinese. He had a “genuine fear” that the United States military might one day seize control of the U.S. government and then “really let go” on Berlin. At they parted, he told his American friend, “Go home and tell President Kennedy what I said.”

Poised to replace Bohlen as the Secretary of State’s adviser on Soviet affairs, Thompson reported home that “seldom has there been such a lack of a general pattern in Kremlin politics as there has been in the last six months.” On domestic issues, Khrushchev was in retreat. Spending cuts were announced for housing, education, and culture. Prices of meat and dairy products were raised by almost a third, provoking a riot near Rostov.

Walt Rostow explained the Chairman’s international problems in an August memo called “Khrushchev at Bay.” He noted that Khrushchev was stalled on Berlin and in the Congo. His Southeast Asian prospects had been eroded in Laos and by Kennedy’s commitment to South Vietnam. Cuba had been isolated. The East Germans and Chinese were pressing for action. By shattering the myth of Soviet nuclear superiority, the West had compelled him to increase defense spending, retarding the Soviet economy.

Rostow argued that Khrushchev must be looking for a “quick success” that would enhance his power and prestige in Moscow and in the international Communist movement. It must cheaply redress the military balance of power, give him leverage on Berlin, and allow the diversion of Soviet resources to consumer goods. Rostow said the United States might be about to see “the greatest act of risk-taking since the war.”*

Dean Acheson shared Rostow’s sense of foreboding. He wrote Harry Truman, “I have a curious and apprehensive feeling as I watch JFK that he is a sort of Indian snake charmer. He toots away on his pipe and our problems sway back and forth around him in a trancelike manner, never approaching but never withdrawing; all are in a state of suspended life, including the pipe player, who lives only in his dream. Someday one of these snakes will wake up, and no one will be able even to run.”

Khrushchev spent August sunning himself and swimming with his grandchildren on the Black sea, except for a brief return to Moscow to welcome a pair of cosmonauts back from space.† As he relaxed, the Kremlin announced that he was considering a fall trip to New York to attend the UN General Assembly and see Kennedy. What the Chairman may have had in mind was to announce the missiles in Cuba from the UN rostrum and then, with his hand strengthened, bargain with the President about the most pressing Cold War issues. He may have been planning to fly on to Havana, where he could bless the new missile sites and sign the new military pact with Castro.

Khrushchev’s bargaining with Kennedy might have included some kind of arrangement to ensure that China and West Germany were barred from acquiring nuclear weapons. In late August, Dobrynin told Rusk that the Soviets “might be willing to sit down and work out an arrangement that would try to interfere with the transfer of nuclear weapons to presently non-nuclear powers.”

That same month, according to Chinese documents, the Soviets secretly informed Peking that Rusk had proposed an agreement banning the nuclear powers from transferring weapons and know-how to other nations and that the Soviet Union had agreed. Peking replied by warning Moscow against infringement on Chinese rights.

Operation Mongoose had not flagged. In August, the Special Group pondered what it could do to foment an anti-Castro uprising by October. Robert Kennedy said, “I am in favor of pushing ahead rather than taking any step backward.”

McCone cautioned that they must be prepared to support the forces in Cuba encouraged to rise up against Castro by all necessary measures, including military force. General Taylor agreed. Rusk argued in favor of trying to create friction between Castro and the old-line Cuban Communists. McNamara worried about the damage to the United States in the world if its hand were exposed.

According to Senate testimony in 1975, the group also discussed the “liquidation of Castro.” By Richard Goodwin’s account, McNamara said, “The only way to get rid of Castro is to kill him … and I really mean it.” Goodwin recalled that Robert Kennedy did not object. McNamara testified that he had no recollection of the exchange.

Taylor told the President that month that they should aim at causing the failure of the Castro regime rather than its overthrow. Kennedy approved a top-secret decree on Thursday, August 23, demanding immediate implementation of Mongoose “Phase B”—massive propaganda and other provocations to damage the Cuban economy and create friction between the Soviets and the Cubans. The CIA contaminated Cuban sugar destined for the Soviet Union while a freighter was docked in San Juan. Sabotage teams were sent into Cuba.*

On Thursday, August 30, an American U-2 soared for nine minutes across the southern tip of Soviet-held Sakhalin Island, a key American intelligence target. The Pentagon told Rusk that the plane had blown off course. Remembering the U-2 fiasco in 1960, he and the President decided to “just tell the truth and thereby prevent the Soviets from making a great issue out of it.” They issued a statement.

As his nuclear missiles were moving toward Cuba, Khrushchev was jittery. Moscow issued a protest of the U-2 incursion in language which sounded like his own: “What is this, a rebirth of the former government’s bandit practice, which President Kennedy himself condemned? Or is it the provocational act of the U.S. military circles, who want to create a new international conflict like the 1960 conflict and to heat up the situation once again to the limit?”

Soviet ships were heading toward Cuba bearing thousands of combat troops, along with the concealed first elements of the missile force intended for the island—apparently twenty-four MRBM and sixteen IRBM launchers, each to be equipped with one nuclear warhead and two missiles.*

Most of the troops aboard the vessels had not been told where or why they were going. To preserve the mystery, their high commanders had equipped them with winter clothes and skis. Some were told the truth only when their ships passed the Rock of Gibraltar.

As Alexander Alexeyev recalled, Marshal Biryuzov believed that the missiles could be sent to Cuba without detection, “but unfortunately our military wanted quickly to fulfill the directive. Instead of ten vessels, they sent so many. Of course, any fool could see that something was not right.” Sergo Mikoyan said that the mistake was “absolutely Russian. We had to do it speedily, so too many ships were used and the Americans noticed.”

The CIA’s aerial pictures of the Soviet ships showed that they had unusual crates on deck and oversized hatches. The vessels were riding high on the water, suggesting that their cargo was large and lightweight.

Reports from Cuban agents and refugees flowing into the CIA’s JM/WAVE station suggested that the Soviets were building surface-to-air missile (SAM) sites and radar and communications facilities as part of a major air defense system. The CIA warned the White House that “clearly something new and different is taking place.”

There had never been such an influx of Soviet personnel and equipment into a non-bloc country: “Together with the extraordinary Soviet bloc economic commitments made to Cuba in recent months, these developments amount to the most extensive campaign to bolster a non-bloc country ever undertaken by the U.S.S.R.”

With his background in business, engineering, and defense, John McCone could not believe that the Soviets would build anything so expensive as an air defense system unless they had some excellent reason to stop American spy planes from flying over Cuba. He concluded that Khrushchev might be on the verge of installing nuclear missiles in Cuba.

McCone wrote out his suspicions in a memo to the President. Kennedy viewed McCone’s warning in terms of the CIA Director’s fierce anticommunism. At the White House on Wednesday, August 22, Kennedy, Rusk, and McNamara all doubted that Khrushchev would take such a risk. Seven days later, a U-2 found two SAM sites in Cuba and six other locations where SAMs might be installed, as well as a “substantial” number of Soviet personnel and missile-equipped torpedo boats.

After more such flights, McCone’s deputy, General Marshall Carter, privately told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that there was a Soviet “crash program” to build as many as twenty-four SAM sites on Cuba. Since mid-July, about sixty-five Soviet bloc ships had been discovered sailing to the island: roughly ten were known to have carried military equipment and technicians.

Dean Rusk told the Senators that the Soviet buildup resembled the military aid Moscow gave to other non-Warsaw Pact nations such as Indonesia, Iraq, and Egypt. The situation would change “if the Soviets were to establish their own military base there—submarine base—or if there were to be established in Cuba ground-to-ground missiles that would directly threaten the continental United States or Cuba’s neighbors in the Caribbean.”

Marines in the Caribbean were rehearsing amphibious landings to topple an island dictator code-named Ortsac. To the island dictator in Havana whose name was Ortsac spelled backwards, these maneuvers made him all the more certain that the United States was about to invade.

In September, Senator Kenneth Keating and others charged that Khrushchev was installing MRBMs and IRBMs in Cuba and that the Kennedy administration was covering up secret evidence of the buildup.* The New York Republican gave interviews in the corridor outside his office, saying that he had “good reason to believe” that the Kennedy brothers had bugged his office and telephone system.

Richard Helms suspected that Keating was just spreading rumors: “In those days, leaking by the intelligence community just wasn’t done.… Keating probably just took a flier. If it’s wrong, you just say, ‘I was misinformed. Outrageous!” Asked later by a friend where he thought Keating got his information, the President replied that there were “fifty thousand-odd Cuban refugees in this country, all living for the day when we will go to war with Cuba and all putting out this kind of stuff.”

Other Republicans did not need to believe Keating’s charges to be angry about the Soviet buildup in Cuba. Richard Nixon and Senators Barry Goldwater, Strom Thurmond of North Carolina, John Tower of Texas, and Hugh Scott all demanded that Kennedy order a naval blockade of Cuba to prevent further Soviet military shipments. Nixon warned that the five thousand Soviet troops known to be in Cuba were a “clear and present danger” to the United States.*

The President asked for and won congressional authority to call up 150,000 reservists if necessary to defend American interests in response to the Soviet buildup in Cuba. But when he spoke in September at Rice University in Houston, Cuban refugees displayed signs: “The Cubans remind you Cuba is still alone and we remind you of your promises.” A light plane circled overhead trailing a banner: ENFORCE THE MONROE DOCTRINE.†

Kennedy had deferred action on issues ranging from civil rights and poverty to China and Vietnam, complaining that he had been thwarted by his slim 1960 mandate and the power balance in Congress.‡ Democrats controlled the Senate by 65–35 and the House by 263–174, but he was obstructed in the House by conservative Southern committee chairmen, in the Senate by a coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats. Now he hoped to reverse the usual pattern for off-year elections by which the party in the White House usually lost an average of forty seats in the House and Senate.

Coming at the outset of the 1962 congressional campaign, the outcry over Cuba hit the President where it hurt. The New Republic gibed that the Kennedy administration was taking its cue from the Rodgers and Hammerstein hit The King and I: “I hold my head erect / And whistle a happy tune / So no one will suspect / I’m afraid.”

Robert and Ethel Kennedy had become close to John McCone since his appointment to the CIA in September 1961 and the death of his beloved wife, Rosemary, three months later. As the Attorney General recalled, “He liked Ethel very much because when his wife died, Ethel went over and stayed with him. So he had a good deal of feeling for us.… But he liked one person more, and that was John McCone.”

With his rimless eyeglasses, white hair, roseate complexion, and three-piece suits, McCone looked like the Republican tycoon he was. An aide called him “something of a snob and a puritan,” the kind of man who “demanded the best room in the best hotel.” He was an Irish Catholic who in 1958 had attended Pope Pius XII’s funeral as Eisenhower’s representative, the kind of Catholic of whom Kennedy said that, in the crunch, money counted more than religion.

Born in 1902 to an affluent San Francisco Republican family, McCone had an engineering degree from the University of California. After working as a riveter, surveyor, and construction manager, he became executive vice president of the Consolidated Steel Corporation at age thirty-one. He was a founder of the Bechtel-McCone-Parsons Corporation, which designed and built oil refineries, factories, and power plants in the Americas and the Middle East.

During the war, he helped to form the Seattle-Tacoma Corporation, which built merchant ships for the United States and Britain.* Truman appointed him to a postwar commission on air warfare and as Under Secretary of the Air Force. In 1956, when ten Cal Tech scientists endorsed Adlai Stevenson’s test ban proposal, McCone, a trustee, complained that they had been “taken in” by Soviet propaganda. He denied the allegation that he tried to have the professors fired.

In 1958, Eisenhower appointed McCone chairman of his Atomic Energy Commission, a striking example of his tendency to put men who did not share his ambitions to relax the Cold War into positions from which they could sabotage his purposes. When McCone fought the President’s efforts for a test ban treaty, Eisenhower told Christian Herter to remind him that he was “an operator, not a foreign policy maker.”

Squeamish about firing his own appointees, Eisenhower allowed McCone to lead the opposition to a test ban from within his own administration. He publicly denounced the idea as a “national peril” and threatened to resign if it came to pass. Before the U-2 affair killed Eisenhower’s test ban efforts, his science adviser, George Kistiakowsky, complained in his diary that McCone was “maneuvering public opinion, including the Senate, so that the President will have a very difficult time getting a treaty ratified.”

In November 1960, McCone voted for Nixon, an old California friend, and cabled the loser, “Let’s look forward to 1964.” During the summer of 1961, he lampooned the “Phi Beta Kappas” surrounding Kennedy and wrote Nixon that he was “deeply concerned” that Khrushchev believed the President would not use nuclear weapons to defend Berlin.

McCone was not Kennedy’s first choice to succeed Allen Dulles. He had half seriously pondered sending his brother to Langley but knew it would scarcely be credible to place him in charge of operations of which presidential knowledge was supposed to be plausibly deniable.

The President’s telephone call interrupted McCone as he was playing golf with Nixon in Los Angeles. Eager to acquire conservative Republican cover for controversial policies, Kennedy felt that McCone would deflect opposition to his intention to reduce the CIA’s size and autonomy in the wake of the Cuban failure.*

As a Senator, he had watched McCone operate on the Hill and was impressed by his knowledge of Soviet missile strength. He considered him a quiet, keen, and steady manager who would ensure that covert operations were subordinated to his foreign policy and “preceded by more planning and less advertising than preceded the Bay of Pigs.”

Before announcing McCone’s appointment, Kennedy consulted almost none of his aides out of fear that they would undermine it. O’Donnell was already indignant that prizes like Defense and Treasury and the embassies in London and Paris had gone to people who had nothing to do with the President’s domestic political constituency. A Washington columnist warned Roger Hilsman that “McCone is an alley fighter who will stop at nothing.”

When McCone moved into Dulles’s gleaming new white CIA headquarters at the end of November 1961, he banned the intercom that allowed senior officers to interrupt the Director at his desk and ordered that the doorway to the office of his newly appointed deputy, General Marshall Carter, be sealed overnight. (Carter mounted a replica of a hand on his side of the newly paneled wall as if it had been sliced off by the closure.)

Anyone who expected the new Director to preside over the CIA’s dissolution was soon corrected. McCone swiftly replaced his inherited deputies, as well as most of his division chiefs. He quashed the recommendation of the President’s newly revived board of outside intelligence advisers that his job be absorbed into the White House. He battled McNamara for influence over espionage by planes and satellites, better logistical support, and top-secret Pentagon data on American strategic capabilities and force dispositions.

When the CIA Inspector General, Lyman Kirkpatrick, drafted a highly critical Bay of Pigs postmortem, McCone reputedly destroyed most or all of the copies and kept the original in his own locked files, where it could do no damage. The launching of Operation Mongoose the month of McCone’s arrival was a vote of presidential confidence in the CIA and its new Director.

McCone’s success in winning Kennedy’s confidence had no little to do with the close relationship he quickly formed with the Attorney General. The new Director did not interfere with Robert’s direct communication with CIA officials and covert operators on the second and third echelons of the Agency. Robert may have known better than to inform McCone if he knew of the CIA’s efforts to assassinate Castro. Deputy Director Ray Cline recalled that McCone “at all times expressed total disapproval of consideration of assassination as a CIA covert action, opposing it on both personal moral and political grounds.”*

McCone never developed the faith in Kennedy’s leadership that Douglas Dillon, another Eisenhower Republican, did. His Air Force and AEC background made him skeptical of the President’s commitment to flexible response and a test ban treaty.

Unlike most of those around Kennedy, McCone continued to believe that tiny changes in the nuclear balance with the Russians were crucial: a nation did not simply need a minimum number of warheads and missiles or bombers for deterrence. The more it had, the stronger its military and political position. Convinced that Khrushchev felt the same way, he was more receptive than Kennedy’s other advisers to the possibility that the Chairman might try to correct his deficiency by sending nuclear missiles into Cuba.

In late August 1962, McCone married a Seattle widow, Theiline Pigott, who commanded an even larger shipping fortune than his. Despite his worries about missiles in Cuba, he sailed for a honeymoon in the south of France. Stopping in Paris, he conveyed his suspicions over lunch with the visiting Roswell Gilpatric.

From his honeymoon cottage on Cap Ferrat, McCone every few days cabled Langley, evidently demanding more probing assessment of the possibility that the new SAM buildup on Cuba foretold nuclear missiles from Khrushchev: “Why would they be putting all these SAM sites around the island unless they were putting something in there to worry us?”*

Fearing that McCone might be right, Robert Kennedy conceded that “Cuba obtaining missiles from the Soviet Union would create a major political problem here.” On Tuesday, September 4, at the Justice Department, he told Dobrynin that the President was “deeply concerned” about the amount of military equipment going to Cuba.

The Ambassador told him that Khrushchev had asked him to assure the President that there would be “no ground-to-ground missiles or offensive missiles placed in Cuba.” The Chairman would do “nothing to disrupt the relationship of our two countries during this period prior to the election.” He liked the President and did not want to embarrass him.

Kennedy replied that Khrushchev had “a very strange way of showing his admiration.” Skeptical about Dobrynin’s assurances, he persuaded the President to issue a public warning to the Soviets that if the United States ever found “offensive ground-to-ground missiles” in Cuba, “the gravest issues would arise.”

Bundy explained years later, “We did it because of the requirements of domestic politics, not because we seriously believed that the Soviets would do anything as crazy from our standpoint as placement of Soviet nuclear weapons in Cuba.” Bundy said it had “never occurred to us” to issue such a warning earlier.

Sorensen much later reasoned that by saying he would accept large-scale Soviet military aid to Cuba but not offensive missiles, “the President drew the line precisely where he thought the Soviets were not and would not be.… If we had known that the Soviets were putting forty missiles in Cuba, we might under this hypothesis have drawn the line at one hundred, and said with great fanfare that we would absolutely not tolerate the presence of more than one hundred missiles in Cuba.”

Kennedy therefore issued a warning that was too late to stop Khrushchev’s Cuba operation and so precise that it caused him to forfeit the option of responding to the discovery of missiles in Cuba with anything less than a full-fledged confrontation with the Soviet Union. Had the President issued such a warning five months earlier or not painted himself into a corner now, history might have been different.

Dobrynin asked Sorensen for an urgent meeting. After checking with Kennedy, the aide went to the Soviet Embassy on Thursday, September 6. Lunching with Dobrynin a fortnight earlier, Sorensen had tried to dispel any Soviet assumption that the congressional campaign would inhibit the President from responding to “any new pressures on Berlin.”

The Ambassador now said that his report of their luncheon had brought a personal message from Chairman Khrushchev, which he read aloud: “Nothing will be undertaken before the American congressional elections that could complicate the international situation or aggravate the tension in the relations between our two countries … provided there are no actions taken on the other side which would change the situation.”

If Khrushchev should come to the United States that fall, “this would be possible only in the second half of November. The Chairman does not wish to become involved in your internal political affairs.” Sorensen replied that Khrushchev’s message seemed “both hollow and tardy.” The buildup in Cuba had “already aggravated world tensions and caused turmoil in our internal political affairs.”

After the meeting, Sorensen told Kennedy that Dobrynin had “neither contradicted nor confirmed my reference to large numbers of Soviet military personnel, electronic equipment, and missile preparations. He repeated several times, however, that they had done nothing new or extraordinary in Cuba … and that he stood by his assurances that all the steps were defensive in nature and did not represent any threat to the security of the United States.”*

By signaling the President that the Soviet Union would not do anything to harm him until after his elections, Khrushchev was not only trying to throw Kennedy off guard but he may have been encouraging the President, if the missiles were found before November, to explain them away to his own generals as purely defensive and conceal them from the public until the balloting was done.

In Pitsunda, Khrushchev received Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, who was touring with an American delegation on electric power. Wearing a collarless embroidered white shirt, the Chairman said he hoped to see President Kennedy soon, perhaps in the United States in November.

As usual, he combined geniality with threat: the President must agree to a Berlin settlement and treat the Soviet Union as an equal. Before long he should come to visit and be sure to bring Mrs. Kennedy. The Soviet people would give him a warm welcome. They could go bear-hunting together. He gave Udall a traditional drinking horn and a case of wine for the President.†

The next day, Khrushchev saw Robert Frost, who had been traveling with Udall. At Kennedy’s inauguration, the blinding sunlight had memorably kept the old poet from reading a preface hailing a new “golden age of poetry and power,” but he had managed to recite “The Gift Outright,” amended for the occasion.*

In July 1962, the President had asked Frost to represent the United States in a Soviet cultural exchange. The eighty-eight-year-old poet had replied, “How like you to take the chance of sending anyone like me over there affinitizing with the Russians.… Great times to be alive, aren’t they?”

Frost had felt insulted when he was not asked to accompany Udall to Pitsunda, but when Khrushchev’s invitation came, he felt wobbly and unwell. Flying to Sochi, he was put to bed in a state guesthouse. After sending over his own doctor, Khrushchev arrived and pulled a chair up next to the poet’s bed: he had better follow doctor’s orders if he was going to live to be a hundred!

Frost implored him to avoid petty squabbles in favor of a “noble rivalry” between Russia and the United States. When Frost suggested reuniting Berlin, Khrushchev warned that in less than thirty minutes, Soviet missiles could blast all of Europe to smithereens. The United States should sign a German peace treaty: the President himself had said that he wished to do so but couldn’t “because of conditions at home.”

Khrushchev said that the United States and Western Europe resembled Tolstoy’s adage—too old and infirm to make love but still with the desire. Frost chuckled: this might be true for him and the Chairman, but the United States was too young to worry about that. All Khrushchev had to do was offer a simple solution on Berlin and the United States would accept it. The Chairman said, “You have the soul of a poet.”

At a press conference in Moscow, affected by illness, travel, and his own prejudices, Frost recalled Khrushchev’s comment about the West being too infirm to make love and announced instead that the Chairman had called the Americans “too liberal to fight.” Republicans quickly adopted this crack to embarrass Kennedy, who privately snapped, “You can’t believe what Frost tells you. He is not very reliable as a reporter.”

On Tuesday, September 11, TASS responded to the President’s warning against ground-to-ground missiles in Cuba: Soviet missiles were so powerful that there was “no need” to locate them in any other country. The armaments being sent to Cuba “are designed exclusively for defensive purposes.”

At his Wednesday news conference, Kennedy read out a more specific warning. If the Communist buildup in Cuba interfered with U.S. security, if Cuba tried to export aggression by force or threat of force “against any nation in this hemisphere” or became “an offensive military base of significant capacity” for the Soviet Union, then the United States would do “whatever must be done” to protect its own security and that of its allies.

In Moscow, Khrushchev told an official Austrian visitor that the Soviet Union would fight any U.S. blockade of Cuba. As the Chairman certainly expected, the message was relayed to Washington. Kaysen gave it to the President under the heading, “More rude noises from Khrushchev.” Bundy advised Kennedy that he “may need to put some fairly tough talk back on both the public and private wires.”

The Soviet freighter Omsk reached Cuba on September 8 with its secret shipment of MRBMs. In the dark, under the baleful stare of KGB guards, Soviet drivers hauled the first of the dismantled launchers out of Havana.

A U-2 had soared over Cuba on September 5 but found no new evidence of MRBMs or IRBMs.* For more than two years, the spy planes had raced over Cuba about twice a month. American satellites were of little help because they were not targeted on Cuba. The intelligence community’s Committee on Overhead Reconnaissance (COMOR) now asked for much more frequent spy flights.

On September 9, Mainland Chinese SAMs downed a Nationalist Chinese-owned U-2. With similar SAMs going up on Cuba, this incident suggested that the Americans had better be more cautious about overflights of the island. As with Eisenhower and the U-2 missions over Russia from 1956 to early 1960, each proposed run over Cuba was remanded to Kennedy.

On September 15, the Soviet freighter Poltava evidently brought the second shipment of MRBMs. Construction of launching sites began, but Washington did not find out. During a U-2 flight two days later, already delayed for nine days by bad weather, American cameras were shrouded by cloud cover.

Reports kept pouring into JM/WAVE in Miami. A subagent in Cuba had seen a missile segment dragged past his house corresponding to CIA profiles of Soviet MRBMs, but the report did not reach Washington until late September. Hundreds of other reports were mostly rumors and error.*

On September 19, a special CIA estimate advised the President that Khrushchev might wish to send offensive missiles to Cuba in order to bolster Soviet subversion of Latin America or a new move against Berlin, but the odds were low. The Chairman knew how violently the United States would react to such a discovery. MRBMs and IRBMs had often been reported in Poland, Albania, and other bloc nations: all had been false alarms. Drawing on advice from Bohlen and Thompson, the estimate stated that keeping nuclear weapon systems within Soviet borders was a firm Soviet policy.

McCone had demanded that the estimate be revoked because it did not consider how much Khrushchev’s bargaining power would be increased by strategic missiles in Cuba. He failed. Writing to Nixon, who was running for governor of California, he said, “We are back in Washington after a very pleasant trip to southern France, and Theiline is attempting to accustom herself to living in the capital.… I wish you every success, Dick, and I’m confident of your victory in November.”

On Tuesday, September 25, Castro announced that the Soviets would build a Cuban fishing port at Mariel. Republicans charged that the port could turn out to be a base for Soviet nuclear submarines.

Through these weeks, partly to throw Kennedy off guard, Khrushchev continued their secret correspondence, holding out the possibility of a test ban. Later, after he knew about the missiles in Cuba, the President compared this duplicity to that of Japanese negotiators in Washington in December 1941 as Tokyo prepared to bomb Pearl Harbor.

At Geneva in late August, the United States and Britain had proposed two draft treaties—a comprehensive ban, requiring monitoring stations and on-site inspections on the soil of each signatory, and a partial treaty banning all but underground tests, which would require less intrusive verification.

On Tuesday, September 4, Khrushchev wrote Kennedy that he was willing to accept a limited test ban in the “immediate future,” as long as the agreement included France.

The President replied on September 15 with a private message delivered by the Attorney General: “I think we should make a serious effort to work out such an agreement in time to meet the target date of January 1, 1963.… We can then look at the problem of continued testing underground.… In your message you mention the role that France should play.… For its part, the United States would work in close consultation with France and would hope that France would adhere to the treaty.”

Replying on Friday, September 28, Khrushchev agreed to the New Year’s 1963 target date for reaching a test ban. He may have expected to discuss the matter with Kennedy in the United States in November, after he revealed his successful installation of missiles in Cuba.

In late September, avoiding known SAM sites, U-2s twice flew over eastern Cuba, the Isle of Pines, and a portion of western Cuba. These were supplemented by other missions along the island’s periphery.

Photointerpreters studying the pictures of the SAM installations noticed the same trapezoidal pattern that U-2 cameras had found around missile bases in the Soviet Union. The center of the trapezoid was San Cristóbal in western Cuba. Two U-2 flights over eastern Cuba during the first week of October found no strategic missiles. The President ordered a dangerous run over western Cuba, but for days bad weather kept the spy planes grounded.

Bolshakov was on home leave in the Soviet Union. By his account, Khrushchev and Mikoyan called him in. The Chairman asked him to tell President Kennedy that he was a “man of his word” and that his “word could be relied upon.” He was “not pleased” by the President’s request for congressional authority to call up 150,000 reservists. The Soviet Union was doing only what it was “absolutely obliged” to do in Cuba. Castro was being sent only “defensive weapons.”

Interjecting, Mikoyan told Bolshakov to tell the President that the Soviet Union was sending Castro only “short-range missiles to be used against airplanes.”

Khrushchev went on to say that Kennedy should be told that he was “in a calm and moderate mood.” There was no reason for the United States to be concerned about Cuba. This was “the time to lower the temperature and calm the atmosphere and not to raise tensions.” He and his colleagues did not like the American talk about invading Cuba. Bolshakov should remind the President “that he said at Vienna that we are equal nations. If we are equal, we must respect each other’s rights.”

Bolshakov penciled the message into his small blue notebook and flew back to Washington.*

The Chairman and Mikoyan may have chosen their words carefully to try to stick to the literal truth. By Khrushchev’s lights, only defensive weapons were going to Cuba. When Mikoyan said that Castro was getting only short-range anti-aircraft weapons, he might have argued that he was not lying: the MRBMs and IRBMs were being sent to Cuba, but since they remained in Soviet possession they were not being given to Castro.

Nevertheless Khrushchev certainly knew that he was sending Kennedy a message that the President would in time consider a deliberate lie. He may have convinced himself that the President might tolerate the deception as a tool of diplomacy. Perhaps he comforted himself with the notion that he had gotten away with deceiving Kennedy before, with the assurance that he would be serious about a test ban treaty at Vienna, and by insisting at the summit that the Soviet Union would not be the first to resume testing.

More likely he felt that the risk of a bold-faced lie to the President was worth the chance that it might throw the Americans off the trail of his Cuban venture or encourage Kennedy to defer a missile crisis until after the November elections.

The State Department sent the White House a pedestrian draft of a presidential thank-you note for the wines and drinking horn Khrushchev had sent back with Udall. Bundy called the text “preposterous.” Kennedy decided to send no letter at all.

He continued to pursue Khrushchev’s apparent interest in a limited test ban. On Monday, October 8, he wrote the Chairman, “I am glad that we can continue to use this channel as a means of communicating privately and frankly.” He and Khrushchev were “within striking distance” of a limited ban: “I believe that we should keep at it to see if we cannot promptly reach the understanding which the world wants and needs.”

The New York lawyer James Donovan was on his way to Havana to bargain with Castro for release of the more than a thousand Cuban exile invaders jailed after the Bay of Pigs.

In May 1961, the dictator had offered to exchange the prisoners for an “indemnity” of five hundred D-8 Super Caterpillar bulldozers. Around this time, the President told O’Donnell that he had not slept the night before: “I was thinking about those guys in prison down in Cuba. I’m willing to make any kind of a deal with Castro to get them out of there.” He asked Eleanor Roosevelt, Walter Reuther, Milton Eisenhower, and George Romney to lead a fund-raising committee.

Since the bulldozers specified by Castro seemed more suited for building airfields and missile bases, the panel offered farm tractors instead. The “Tractors for Freedom” Committee was denounced for trading in human lives, surrendering to Communist ransom demands, and violating the Logan Act forbidding private intervention in American diplomacy. The publicist William Safire wrote Nixon, for whom he had drafted campaign speeches, “Millions for defense but not one damn penny for tribute.” The committee disbanded.

When Castro’s demand for $28 million was refused, he held a four-day show trial in March 1962. At Robert Kennedy’s behest, Richard Goodwin persuaded the Brazilian president, João Goulart, to tell Castro that if the prisoners were executed, Americans would force their President to take strong action against Cuba. The Cubans sentenced the exiles to thirty years at hard labor and increased their ransom demand to $62 million.*

The Attorney General wondered how the United States could “send $60 million worth of equipment to Cuba with part of our population and a number of political leaders calling for an invasion of Cuba.” At his suggestion, Donovan was hired to bargain with the Castro regime on behalf of a newly established “Cuban Families Committee,” whose sponsors included Richard Cardinal Cushing, Lucius Clay, Lee Radziwill, and the television host Ed Sullivan. By mid-September, Donovan had persuaded Castro to accept medicine and drugs instead of cash.

In October, nominated as Democratic candidate against Senator Jacob Javits of New York, Donovan arranged to see Castro once again. On Monday evening, the eighth, Bundy asked Richard Helms to send word to Donovan via Robert Kennedy or General Carter that “before Donovan signs on, another hard effort should be made to include the twenty-two Americans in the deal.” This referred to U.S. citizens in Castro’s prisons. Helms replied, “I got the message.”

Dean Rusk advised the President that Khrushchev may have intended his buildup in Cuba as a diversion from a new Soviet move against Berlin. The President sent for the Pentagon’s large package of contingency plans for a new Berlin crisis. As Sorensen recalled, he felt that Berlin had “every chance of becoming very alive.”

On Wednesday, October 10, a reporter asked Rusk why the administration had not discussed the military buildup in Cuba with the Russians. Rusk replied that the Soviets would then raise the issue of American nuclear weapons in Turkey and support for Iran, two countries on their border, just as Cuba was on the periphery of the United States.

Three days later, CIA photointerpreters concluded that ten huge crates photographed on the decks of the Soviet ship Kasimov near Cuba exactly resembled crates containing Il-28 nuclear light bombers that had been spotted in Egypt and Indonesia. The Il-28’s radius was perhaps six hundred miles—too short to strike Atlanta or New Orleans, but enough to reach Tampa and thus considered deployable as an offensive weapon against the United States. McCone tried and failed to reach Robert Kennedy.

Chester Bowles, now an Ambassador-at-Large, was leaving for lunch with Dobrynin when his aide Thomas Hughes told him about the Il-28s: “We just got the most shocking news here that the Russians are really moving stuff into Cuba.” Bowles told Dobrynin, “We have reports that you are introducing offensive weapons into Cuba.” Hadn’t Dobrynin read the President’s September warnings? “Don’t play around. If this is true, and I think it is true, it’s absolute folly.… Our relations will be in grave trouble.”

Looking surprised, Dobrynin insisted that the report was untrue. He was “fully aware” of how risky such a move would be. Bowles replied that if Dobrynin was wrong, he wouldn’t be the first or last ambassador in history to be deceived by his own government.

Dobrynin no doubt sent a report on the conversation to Khrushchev, who by now was back in Moscow. The Chairman probably assumed that what Bowles told Dobrynin had been carefully worked out beforehand with Kennedy.

The President’s September warnings had referred to offensive weapons of “significant capacity.” Since the Il-28s were unlikely to be so considered, Khrushchev may have taken Bowles’s words to mean that the United States had discovered the nuclear missiles moving into Cuba. If so, Khrushchev may have wondered why Kennedy’s initial response to this discovery was merely a mild, private protest by a second-level diplomat known to have lost his confidence.

Whether or not in reaction to Dobrynin’s cable, Khrushchev evidently ordered his forces to speed up their work on the missile sites in Cuba—even before the SAM defenses were completed. At a New York hotel, Gromyko saw the Cuban President, Osvaldo Dorticos, who had flown in for the UN General Assembly. Worried about American eavesdropping devices that might pick up discussion of the missiles in Cuba, they scribbled messages to each other on slips of paper.

On Sunday afternoon, October 14, Bundy was questioned on ABC’s Issues and Answers about the buildup in Cuba. He said there was “no present evidence,” nor was there any likelihood that the Soviets and Cubans would try to install a “major offensive capability.”

He said that whether a gun was offensive or defensive depended “a little bit on which end you are on.” MiG fighters and other planes had a “certain marginal capability for moving against the United States. But I think we have to bear in mind the relative magnitudes here.… So far, everything that has been delivered in Cuba falls within the categories of aid which the Soviet Union has provided, for example, to neutral states like Egypt and Indonesia, and I should not be surprised to see additional military assistance of that sort.”

At the Kremlin that evening, Khrushchev and most of the Presidium held a farewell dinner for the Chinese Ambassador, Liu Hsiao, departing after eight years in Moscow. The envoy had recently confided to Peking that Khrushchev had found an ingenious “new way” to solve the Berlin Crisis. In the blackness outside the windows, the first snow-flakes of the season were falling. The Chairman raised a glass to “unbreakable and eternal Soviet-Chinese friendship.”

That evening in New York, on the thirty-fourth floor of the Carlyle, Kennedy held his hastily called meeting with Adlai Stevenson and his private dinner with his Harvard roommate Congressman Torbert Macdonald before Air Force One soared at midnight to Washington, where the government’s best photointerpreters were spinning through the U-2 film shot that morning over western Cuba.

The next day, the photoanalysts alerted McCone’s executive assistant, Walter Elder, who telephoned his boss: “That which you alone said would happen, did.”

* Honoring McCone’s promise to keep his conversation with Eisenhower secret, Kennedy referred to the General as “X” when he called Roger Hilsman later that evening: “McCone talked to X. He wants to put troops in there.” He acidly noted that “X” had once told him that the Royal Laotian forces were “a bunch of homosexuals,” adding that “politically” help from “X” would make a limited display of force “a little less tricky.”

*It said, “If your policy remains the same as you expressed to me at Vienna, then you will agree with me that immediate reestablishment of an effective cease-fire is the first and essential step. This must be accompanied by satisfactory assurances from the side you support that you will in the future honor this cease-fire and will restore to the Royal Laotian Government the territory that its aggressors of the past week have seized.”

Otherwise the United States would have to act to honor its commitments to the Royal Laotians: “With this in mind I have ordered elements of the Seventh U.S. Fleet to the Gulf of Thailand and I am prepared to take such additional measures as the circumstances may call for. The United States government and the United States people will simply not permit Laos to be overrun by the Souphanouvong forces. This is particularly true since it is well known that the Soviet Union is in a position to restrain these forces and thereby permit a peaceful settlement.”

*TASS publicly announced this decision four days later.

*Schlesinger called himself the Assistant Dean and Robert Kennedy the Dean. In December 1961, for instance, he wrote Jacqueline Kennedy’s social secretary about “the next meeting of the Robert F. Kennedy Academy of Higher Learning” to be held at his Georgetown house: “The speaker will be Professor A. J. Ayer, the Oxford philosopher.… If Mrs. K. would like by any chance to come for dinner, I need hardly say that nothing would delight us more.”

*Simultaneously wartime chief of the U.S. Air Force in China and chief of staff of the Chinese air force, Chennault was a crony of Chiang Kai-shek (“one of the world’s great men”) who had founded the “Flying Tiger” flying force which bagged an impressive number of Japanese aircraft. He resigned in July 1945 after concluding that his command was being encroached upon, blamed his demotion on pressure from Chinese Communists, and became a pillar of the pro-Chiang “China Lobby” in the United States.

*This effort evidently failed by the third year of massive American involvement and casualties in Vietnam, when under great stress he finally resigned from Lyndon Johnson’s Pentagon. Some of his friends told one of his biographers, Henry Trewhitt, off the record, of their worry that McNamara might take his own life. Johnson, by then angry at McNamara’s change of heart on Vietnam, meanly told intimates that he was worried about “another Forrestal” (referring to the first Secretary of Defense, who leaped from a Bethesda Naval Hospital window to his death). Twenty years later, McNamara demanded of interviewers that they refrain from asking him about Vietnam.

*As Secretary of Defense, he was appalled by how little had been done to prevent accidental nuclear war. One of his early acts was to order installation of Permissive-Action Links—PALs—to thwart unauthorized missile firings. (He also ordered that the technology be quietly provided to the Russians.)

†As McNamara later conceded.

‡McNamara said in the 1980s, “I don’t know anybody who thinks that a nuclear war, once started today, can be limited. But that was our hope then.” During the 1980s, Dean Rusk imagined a presidential call to a Soviet leader after a counterforce attack: “We launched our missiles a few minutes ago, but I want to assure you that we are aiming them only at military targets, and so we hope that you will leave our cities alone.… And by the way … we ought to keep this conversation short, because since Moscow is your central command and control center, I want to give you time to get down into your shelter.”

*McNamara’s aides quickly told reporters that they doubted Khrushchev’s assertion, although the Secretary privately said that the Soviets might be able to develop some kind of anti-missile missile by 1965 or 1966. In fact, we now know that Khrushchev’s claim was correct, but that his anti-missile missile was primitive and inaccurate.

*This was not the first time Khrushchev’s objections to the resolution, signed annually by Presidents since 1950, had been made known. In 1959, when Nixon called on Khrushchev in Moscow a week after Eisenhower had signed the document, the Chairman launched a harangue, saying that he could not “understand why your Congress would adopt such a resolution on the eve of such an important state visit.… This resolution stinks. It stinks like fresh horseshit, and nothing smells worse than that.”

*He was correct about almost everything but the site of Khrushchev’s gamble, although Ray Cline of the CIA told him, “Maybe we’re seeing it in Cuba.” After a private talk two months later, C. L. Sulzberger recorded Rostow’s insistence that “we are not concerned about Cuba and that it is not an ultimate danger.” Rostow told Sulzberger that “despite Russia, Castro was being squeezed out and there was no denying that.”

†The timing of the mission, three weeks before the first ships bearing nuclear missiles reached Cuba, suggested that once again Khrushchev had staged a space spectacular to give his country an added boost in prestige on the eve of a pivotal world event. If this was the Chairman’s aim, he succeeded. At Kennedy’s next press conference, the President was forced to concede, “We’re trying to overtake them, and I think by the end of the decade we will, but we’re in for some further periods when we are going to be behind.” In a Houston speech the following month, he tried to put a more positive face on the American position, saying that some forty of forty-five orbital satellites had been made by the United States, “and they were far more sophisticated and supplied far more knowledge to the people of the world than those of the Soviet Union.”

*Arthur Schlesinger wrote the President on September 5 of his concern about “intelligence reports describing plans for an uprising inside Cuba in the next few weeks.… If … we went to its support, we would find ourselves in a difficult war in which, so far as we can presently tell, the majority of Cubans (and very likely the majority of the nations of the world) would be against us.… If we did not go to its support, we would be charged with betraying our friends and letting them be slaughtered by a brutal dictatorship.… Our failure to act in Cuba would be far worse than our failure to act in Hungary in 1956.… It is indispensable to be sure that no one down the line is encouraging the Cubans into rash action.”

Kennedy wrote Schlesinger an icy reply, using language that seemed designed to betray no presidential awareness of Mongoose. It said in total, “I read your memorandum of September 5th on Cuba. I know of no planned ‘uprisings inside Cuba within the next few weeks.’ Would you send me the intelligence reports to which you refer. In any case, I will discuss the matter with the CIA.”

*The range of the MRBMs has been variously estimated at from 200 to 1,200 miles, the IRBMs at 1,300 to 2,200 miles. The above rendering of the size of the force is based on General Dimitri Volkogonov’s reading of Defense Ministry archives. Cuban sources in 1991 claimed that the force was to be upward of a hundred missiles.

*In the latter charge, these critics may have shared Khrushchev’s judgment of the President’s political timidity.

*Nixon’s Cuban-born, Castro-hating friend Bebe Rebozo sent him an article reporting that the President considered the Cuban issue above politics: “I just can’t read the paper more than once a week anymore—this’ll hold me for another week at least.”

†The Houston FBI office heard in advance of the Cuban picketing from a confidential source and cabled J. Edgar Hoover that the demonstrators were said to be “good people but are fanatical against Castro.” Immigration records were searched to ensure that they were no danger to the President. As Kennedy entered the stadium, a seventeen-year-old boy decided to “test” the Secret Service by pulling from his shirt a convincing replica of a .45-caliber Colt automatic pistol. Secret Service agents and Houston police detectives grabbed him. An FBI man recorded, “This boy was questioned for two hours and then sent home after a lengthy lecture.”

‡In 1960, for the first time in the century, the party that regained the White House failed to increase its strength in Congress. Kennedy ran further behind the candidates for Congress on his ticket than any President elected since the start of the two-party system. Many Democrats were certain that they had helped Kennedy more than he helped them. This did not increase his popularity on the Hill.

*In 1946, Ralph Casey of the Congress’s General Accounting Office castigated McCone and his colleagues in public testimony as war profiteers who had made $44 million on an investment of $100,000: “At no time in the history of American business, whether in wartime or peacetime, have so few men made so much money with so little risk—and all at the expense of the taxpayers, not only of his generation but of future generations.” McCone disputed the figure, claiming that the initial investment had been over $7 million and that the government had retrieved 95 percent of the profits in taxes.

*As with Dillon, Eisenhower disliked the idea of his former official being used to provide Republican respectability for Kennedy’s aims. He wrote McCone, “This morning’s news says that you have accepted the post of Director of the CIA. As you know, I was not in favor of it, but certainly I want you to know that I shall be wishing you every possible success in the post.”

*When the possibility of murdering Castro was raised at the Special Group (Augmented) meeting in August 1962, McCone evidently opposed it. He told McNamara later of his worry that he might be excommunicated were it ever known that he had entertained the idea of assassination.

*Stung by the notion that his brother had ignored McCone’s prescient advice on the most pivotal issue of the Kennedy Presidency, Robert Kennedy inaccurately told an oral history interviewer in 1965, “As far as ever putting anything in writing, as far as ever communicating his thought to President Kennedy or to anybody else, he didn’t. And to indicate the fact that he wasn’t really concerned about it himself, he went to Europe for a honeymoon for a month during that period of time. So if he was so concerned and thought that something should be done, number one, he should have written and told the President, number two, he should not have gone off to Europe for a month during that critical period of time.… He should have come home and worked at it, not be sending a letter from Cannes, France [sic].”

In Thirteen Days, written in 1967 for publication in McCall’s the following year and published as a book in 1969 after his death, Robert went so far as to claim that “no official within the government had ever suggested to President Kennedy that the Russian buildup in Cuba would include missiles.”

Later historians who took Thirteen Days as gospel neglected the fact that one reason for its writing was to bolster Robert Kennedy’s credentials as a potential President. In 1968 Kenneth O’Donnell evidently chided Robert for taking credit for himself in the memoir that more properly belonged to the President. Robert replied, “Well, he’s not running for President this year, and I am.”

*Dobrynin said essentially the same thing to Stevenson.

†The Secret Service barred the President from drinking the wine. FBI laboratories tested it for “anti-personnel drugs which cause a personality change” and for “volatile poisons, methyl alcohol, cyanides, acetone and formaldehyde, unusual residues of metals and metalloids, the barbiturates and other acid drugs, basic drugs such as strychnine, the amphetamines, alkaloids of opium, and others.” None were found.

*During the Eisenhower years, when Frost was not invited to dinner at the White House, he said, “Do you know why they don’t invite me? They are too honest. They are too decent honest to pretend they are interested in what I am interested in.”

*It did return with pictures of a MiG-21 supersonic fighter parked in front of four shipping crates apparently containing additional MiGs, as well as more SAMs.

*A CIA postmortem later found that of more than two hundred reports by Cuban agents about Soviet offensive missiles on the island, only six were accurate. Rusk recalled that many were missightings of SAMs: “When you look at a surface-to-air missile as a layman not accustomed to missiles, you think you’re looking at a hell of a missile.”

*Charles Bartlett recalled that during this period he was contacted by Dobrynin’s subordinate Alexander Zinchuk, whom he thought of as “a very close friend.” Over lunch, Zinchuk said he’d just come back from vacation in Moscow. He said that before he left, the Chairman called him in and asked if he could convey a message to President Kennedy: “The message was that he understood the problems of the congressional elections. He understood that the President would be preoccupied … and wanted him to know that he would do nothing during this period that would in any way divert him or create problems for him.” Bartlett gave Khrushchev’s message to the President. Asked years later if he might have been confusing Zinchuk with Bolshakov, he insisted that it was Zinchuk whom he had seen. If Bartlett’s account is correct, Khrushchev was taking extraordinary care to ensure that his message reached Kennedy.

*In April, Castro released sixty of the sick and wounded, announcing that he would collect his payment of $2.9 million for them later.