CHAPTER 16

“He’s the One Playing God”

Around the Cabinet table, Tuesday, October l6, at noon, with the reels of the President’s secret tape recorder turning and microphones hidden in the curtains, Kennedy and his advisers stared at the two-day-old aerial pictures of MRBM sites in Cuba.

The enlargements were propped up on an easel in front of the fireplace, above which loomed a Stuart portrait of George Washington. The President summoned his photographer, Captain Cecil Stoughton, to capture the meeting for history. Roswell Gilpatric noted that Kennedy was “very clipped, very tense. I don’t recall a time when I saw him more preoccupied and less given to any light touch at all.”

Just before this meeting, Kennedy had called Bohlen to his office and told him the secret that Bundy had confided to him in his bedroom after breakfast. Bohlen thought it “almost purely a Khrushchev venture.” He found the President “absolutely determined” that the missiles would leave Cuba.

Dean Rusk had learned of the missiles on Monday night. Now he told the men in the Cabinet Room, “We, all of us, had not really believed the Soviets could carry this far.… Now I do think we have to set in motion a chain of events that will eliminate this base. I don’t think we can sit still. The questioning becomes whether we do it by sudden, unannounced strike of some sort—or we build up the crisis to the point where the other side has to consider very seriously about giving in, or even the Cubans themselves take some … action on this.”*

Throughout the secret meetings on Mongoose, Rusk had asked for covert action to promote a split between the Russians and Cubans. Now he suggested using some channel to tell Castro privately “that Cuba is being victimized here, and that the Soviets are preparing Cuba for destruction or betrayal.”

The Secretary noted that on Monday the New York Times had reported that the Russians might wish to trade Cuba for Berlin: “This ought to be brought to Castro’s attention. It ought to be said to Castro that … the time has now come when he must take the interests of the Cuban people—must now break clearly with the Soviet Union, prevent this missile base from becoming operational.”†

Rusk said he was “very conscious” that “there is no such thing … as unilateral action by the United States. It’s so heavily involved with forty-two allies and confrontation in many places that any action that we take will greatly increase the risks of direct action involving our other alliances and our other forces in other parts of the world.”

Aside from notifying Castro, they had two broad alternatives: “One, the quick strike. The other, to alert our allies and Mr. Khrushchev that there is an utterly serious crisis in the making here.… Mr. Khrushchev may not himself really understand that or believe that at this point.” The situation “could well lead to general war.” They must “do what has to be done” in light of the President’s September warning against offensive weapons in Cuba. But they must try to settle the problem “before it gets too hard.”

McNamara said that any air strike against the missiles had to be scheduled before they became operational. If the missiles were launched, “there is almost certain to be chaos in part of the East Coast or the area in a radius of six hundred to a thousand miles from Cuba.”

Such an air strike would have to include not only the missile sites but airfields, hidden aircraft, and possible nuclear storage sites. They must assume that the planes had nuclear warheads or at least “high explosive potential.” This kind of broad air strike would mean perhaps two or three thousand Cuban casualties.

McNamara reported that the Joint Chiefs would prefer to have several days to prepare such an assault. But if “absolutely essential, it could be done almost literally within a matter of hours.… The air strike could continue for a matter of days following the initial day, if necessary. Presumably there would be some political discussions taking place either just before the air strike or both before and during. In any event, we would be prepared, following the air strike, for an … invasion both by air and by sea.”

The air strike option must involve mobilization of American forces “either concurrently with or somewhat following, say, possibly five days afterwards, depending upon the possible invasion requirements.” The first phase could be carried out under the congressional resolution on Cuba signed by the President just a week ago. The second would require declaration of a national emergency, as Kennedy had considered doing in 1961 over Berlin.

Newly sworn as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Maxwell Taylor said, “Once we have destroyed as many of these offensive weapons as possible, we should … prevent any more coming in, which means a naval blockade.… At the same time, reinforce Guantanamo and evacuate the dependents.” Then, “continuous reconnaissance.” The results of the air strike would help them decide “whether we invade or not. I think that’s the hardest question militarily in the whole business—one which we should look at very closely before we get our feet in that deep mud in Cuba.”

Rusk: “I don’t believe myself that the critical question is whether you get a particular missile before it goes off because if they shoot those missiles, we are in general nuclear war.” If Khrushchev wanted nuclear war, he did not need to launch MRBMs from Cuba.

With his abiding worry about nuclear war by accident, McNamara noted that someone might somehow get his thumb on the nuclear trigger against the wish of the Kremlin: “We don’t know what kinds of communications the Soviets have with those sites. We don’t know what kinds of control they have over the warheads.”

The President broke his silence: “What is the advant—must be some major reason for the Russians to set this up as a—must be that they’re not satisfied with their ICBMs. What’d be the reason that they would—”

Taylor argued that missiles in Cuba would supplement the Soviet Union’s “rather defective ICBM system.”

Kennedy: “Of course, I don’t see how we could prevent further ones from coming in by submarine. I mean, if we let ’em blockade the thing, they come in by submarine.”

McNamara: “I think the only way to prevent them coming in, quite frankly, is to say you’ll take them out the moment they come in. You’ll take them out and you’ll carry on open surveillance and you’ll have a policy to take them out if they come in.”

Rusk: “About why the Soviets are doing this. Mr. McCone* suggested some weeks ago that one thing Mr. Khrushchev may have in mind is that he knows that we have a substantial nuclear superiority, but he also knows that we don’t really live under fear of his nuclear weapons to the extent that he has to live under fear of ours. Also, we have nuclear weapons nearby—in Turkey and places like that.”†

The President asked how many missiles the United States had in Turkey. The reply: about fifteen Jupiter IRBMs.

Rusk said McCone believed “that Khrushchev may feel that it’s important for us to learn about living under medium-range missiles, and he’s doing that to sort of balance that … political, psychological fact. I think also that Berlin is very much involved in this. For the first time, I’m beginning really to wonder whether maybe Mr. Khrushchev is entirely rational about Berlin.”

Perhaps the Russians thought they could “bargain Berlin and Cuba against each other or … provoke us into a kind of action in Cuba which would give an umbrella for them to take action with respect to Berlin”—just as Khrushchev had exploited Suez in 1956 to deflect world attention and scorn from his invasion of Hungary. “But I must say I don’t really see the rationality of the Soviets pushing it this far unless they grossly misunderstand the importance of Cuba to this country.”

With the benefit of his eight years, of diplomacy under Eisenhower, Douglas Dillon warned that “OAS action and telling people in NATO” in advance of an air strike on Cuba had the danger of forcing the Russians “to take a position that if anything was done, they would have to retaliate. Whereas a quick action, with a statement at the same time saying this is all there is to it, might give them a chance to back off and not do anything.”

Bundy worried about the “noise we would get from our allies saying that they can live with Soviet MRBMs, why can’t we?” and the “certainty that the Germans would feel that we were jeopardizing Berlin because of our concern over Cuba.”

Rusk: “And if we go with the quick strike, then … you’ve exposed all of your allies … to all these great dangers … without the slightest consultation or warning or preparation.”

Kennedy: “But, of course, warning them, it seems to me, is warning everybody. And I, I—obviously you can’t sort of announce that in four days from now you’re going to take them out. They may announce within three days they’re going to have warheads on ’em: if we come and attack, they’re going to fire them. Then what’ll—what’ll we do? Then we don’t take ’em out. Of course, we then announce, well, if they do that, then we’re going to attack with nuclear weapons.”

Adamant about telling only “the minimum number of people that we really have to tell,” the President asked how long they could expect to keep the secret before it became known beyond the highest levels of the government.

McNamara said, “I think, to be realistic, we should assume that this will become fairly widely known, if not in the newspapers, at least by political representatives of both parties within … I’d say a week.… I doubt very much that we can keep this out of the hands of members of Congress, for example, for more than a week.” Rusk said, “Not later than Thursday or Friday of this week.”

Kennedy warned the group that whatever course of action they ultimately chose must be the “tightest” secret of all: “Because otherwise we bitch it up.”

Listening to the discussion of an air strike, Robert Kennedy had passed a note to Sorensen: “I now know how Tojo felt when he was planning Pearl Harbor.” This comment was an abuse of history: there was only the most surperficial comparison between Japan’s unprovoked surprise attack and a surprise assault against an offensive base in Cuba against whose construction the United States had warned the Soviet Union, however belatedly.

The Attorney General warned the group that with a full-fledged air strike, “you’re going to kill an awful lot of people and we’re going to take an awful lot of heat on it.… You’re going to announce the reason that you’re doing it is because they’re sending in this kind of missiles. Well, I would think it’s almost incumbent upon the Russians then to say, ‘Well, we’re going to send them in again, and if you do it again … we’re going to do the same thing to Turkey, or … Iran.’”

The President asked how the Cuban people would react to an air strike. Taylor said, “Great confusion and panic.” McNamara said, “There’s a real possibility you’d have to invade. If you carried out an air strike, this might lead to an uprising such that in order to prevent the slaughter of—of—of the free Cubans, we would have to invade to—to reintroduce order into the country.… It’s not probable, but it’s conceivable that the air strike would trigger a nationwide uprising.”

Bundy argued that there should be an “enormous premium” on making the air strike as “small and clear-cut” as possible.

Kennedy said, “The advantage of taking out these airplanes would be to protect us against a reprisal by them. I would think you’d have to … assume they’d be using iron bombs and not nuclear weapons, because obviously why would the Soviets permit nuclear war to begin under that sort of half-assed way?”

He returned to the heart of the matter: “I don’t think we’ve got much time on these missiles.… It may be that we just have to—we can’t wait two weeks while we’re getting ready to—to roll. Maybe just have to take them out, and continue our other preparations if we decide to do that. That may be where we end up.… Because that’s what we’re going to do anyway.

“We’re certainly going to do Number One—we’re going to take out these missiles. The questions will be … what I describe as Number Two, which would be a general air strike.… The third is the—is the general invasion. At least we’re going to do Number One, so it seems to me that we don’t have to wait very long. We—we ought to be making those preparations.”

Bundy worried that the President had seemed to leap so hastily to a decision in favor of an air strike. Gently he said, “You want to be clear, Mr. President, whether we have definitely decided against a political track.”

Why had the revelation of the missiles caught Kennedy by such surprise? Khrushchev had publicly warned in the summer of 1960 and during the Bay of Pigs that missiles might be used to defend Cuba. In early 1961, Dean Rusk and Allen Dulles had privately raised the matter with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In August 1962, Walt Rostow had issued an alarm with his “Khrushchev at Bay” memo. John McCone repeatedly raised the possibility in August and September, saying that if he were Khrushchev he would send offensive missiles to Cuba.

Nevertheless until mid-October 1962, Kennedy accepted—oddly, with almost none of his usual skepticism—the consensus view of his Soviet experts that the Chairman would not violate his self-imposed ban against stationing nuclear missiles outside Soviet territory.* As Bundy recalled, the President and his circle assumed that Khrushchev “was much too sensible to challenge us in the way that nuclear weapons in Cuba so obviously would.”

Kennedy’s partisans later lauded his detached ability to see things from his opponents’ point of view and his care not to push them to the wall. This quality was not in consistent evidence in his relations with Khrushchev through 1961 and early 1962. The President had almost no understanding of the extent to which his allusions to American nuclear superiority and a possible first strike had made Khrushchev feel trapped and deeply insecure.

Bundy recalled how in 1962 Kennedy and his aides “believed that in the overall contest with the Soviet Union we were still on the defensive. It was not we who threatened destabilizing changes in Berlin or in Southeast Asia.… We did not suppose that nuclear superiority conferred on us the opportunity for political coercion that Khrushchev took for granted.”

By the summer of 1962, the President had been persuaded by McNamara’s insistence that nuclear superiority mattered little as long as a nation had sufficient warheads and delivery systems to inflict unacceptable damage on another. So captured was Kennedy by this reasoning that he did not pause to think that Khrushchev might not share it. He gave short shrift to McCone’s arguments that Khrushchev had both the motive and the ability to quickly repair his missile gap by sending MRBMs and IRBMs to Cuba.

Kennedy’s inclusion of ground-to-ground missiles in his September public warning reflected not that he had realized his mistake but instead that he still had no notion Khrushchev might need or want to send such weapons to Cuba. He issued the warning on the basis of Robert Kennedy’s reminder that offensive missiles would “create a major political problem here.” Its main purpose was to provide a showy demonstration to Republican critics that the President was capable of drawing the line on Cuba. He did not know that he was closing the barn door after the cows were out.

Kennedy gave only secondary thought to how the warning might influence the course of world history. He did not canvass a full range of advisers before making it. Despite the warnings of Allen Dulles, Rusk, McCone, and the Chairman himself, the President was still so certain Khrushchev would not dream of sending offensive missiles to Cuba that he assumed he was issuing a challenge he would never have to back up with force.

Had the President issued his warning in March 1962, it is not so likely that Khrushchev would have defied it, especially in his then-current gloom about American first-strike capability. By September, the Chairman could not have reversed course without becoming a laughingstock in the Kremlin and throughout the Communist bloc, when his ignominy became known. Castro might have cried out to the world about how the Soviets had failed to fulfill their treaty commitment to send him missiles.

Had Kennedy taken the time to convene a cross-section of his advisers and examine the dangers of issuing such a warning, they might have impressed on him that mid-range missiles might go to Cuba and counseled him to word the statement more ambiguously.

It can be argued that in the fall of 1962 and the hot political climate over Cuba, Americans would never have tolerated nuclear missiles in Cuba and that anyone who was President would have felt compelled to demand their removal. The problem with Kennedy’s warning was that it locked him into a specific course of action. In his haste to remedy his domestic political worries and his excessive certainty about his judgment of Khrushchev and Soviet motives, Kennedy had issued a blanket warning that had the effect of foreclosing any presidential action if missiles were found in Cuba short of risking nuclear war.

On Tuesday afternoon in the Oval Office, Kennedy pored over Kohler’s cables on his three-hour morning meeting with Khrushchev. The Chairman had assured him, “I am most anxious not to do anything that will embarrass the President during the campaign.”

Khrushchev had told Kohler he would do nothing new about Germany and Berlin until after the American elections in November. But then a German solution must finally be found. He was still considering a visit to the UN and to President Kennedy in November.

Khrushchev’s complaint about the Jupiter missiles in Turkey and Italy took Kohler by surprise. The State Department had not briefed him on how to respond to such a complaint because it considered the matter so extraneous. Not so Khrushchev. He almost certainly knew that in six days the Jupiters were scheduled to be turned over to Turkish command.

To help relieve post-Sputnik fears about a missile gap, NATO had decided in late 1957 to install IRBMs on European soil. Sixty Thors were earmarked for Britain, thirty Jupiter launchers for Italy, fifteen for Turkey.

In June 1959, after Khrushchev complained to Washington about the IRBMs, Eisenhower privately told his Defense Secretary, Neil McElroy, that he could see good reason for them to go into West Germany, France, and Britain, but that provoking the Russians by going so close to their border as Greece seemed “very questionable.”

McElroy reminded the President that Khrushchev had threatened “to obliterate Western Europe” and the allies were “showing signs of being shaken by the threat.” One day the IRBMs could be used as bargaining chips. Eisenhower rejoined that the missiles would hardly “reduce tensions between ourselves and the Soviets.” He worried that the Soviets might equate the deployment of missiles on NATO’s southern flank with the installation of Soviet missiles in “Cuba or Mexico.”

The Jupiters went into Turkey at about the time of Khrushchev’s first visit to the United States in 1959. Eisenhower’s aide Karl Harr reminded the President that “in terms of public relations” the installation must be handled carefully in light of Khrushchev’s “particular political sensitivity” about IRBMs along his border.

American ICBMs and missiles launchable from Polaris submarines soon made the Jupiters obsolete. Dean Rusk was told that Turkish motorists could strike the above-ground missiles with a BB-gun and that the Jupiters were so out of date that, if launched, the United States could not be certain which way they would fly.

Like the Russians, the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy worried that American control over the missiles in Turkey might be too lax. Kennedy had asked for a review of the matter in March 1961 but was advised in June that in light of Khrushchev’s “hard posture” at Vienna, withdrawing the Jupiters “might seem a sign of weakness.” General Norstad warned him that the Turks would feel insulted. The President gibed, “What the Turks want and need is the American payrolls these represent.”

The British announced in August 1962 that the Thors were being phased out. (The job was completed by December.) Kennedy again pondered pulling out the Jupiters but knew this would require negotiation within NATO. As Rostow recalled, “Neither the Pentagon nor the State Department had gotten on with the diplomacy of getting them out of Turkey and Italy.”

Were the President aware that the missiles in Turkey were being turned over on October 22 with ceremony to the command of Turkish armed forces, he would have seen the gesture as a sop to good alliance relations. He would have presumed that the question of ownership meant little as long as the United States controlled their nuclear warheads.

Khrushchev may not have known that their nuclear warheads were to remain under strict American control. He was always worried that some local commander in West Germany or elsewhere might be able to put his finger on the nuclear trigger. Misapprehension that the Turks might be about to gain the ability to launch nuclear warheads against the Soviet Union would have caused him to place high value on getting the Jupiters out of Turkey.

At six-thirty, Kennedy and his men returned to the Cabinet Room. McCone’s deputy, General Carter, reported that the latest reconnaissance of Cuba showed “a capability of from sixteen or possibly twenty-four missiles.” There was “no evidence whatsoever” of nuclear warheads, although this did not prove the absence of such weapons. The Soviet launchers in Cuba “could be operational within two weeks” or, in the case of one, “much sooner.” Once operational, “they could fire on very little notice.”

Rusk pursued his idea of persuading Castro to evict the Soviet missiles from Cuba. He thought that Castro might “break with Moscow if he knew that he were in deadly jeopardy. Now this is one chance in a hundred, possibly. But in any event, we’re very much interested in the possibility of a direct message to Castro as well as Khrushchev.”

If the United States took the air-strike route, “we would expect, I think, maximum Communist reaction in Latin America.” About six Latin American governments “could easily be overthrown.”* After an air strike, “the Soviets would almost certainly take some kind of action somewhere.” Could Washington take such an action “without letting our closer allies know of a matter which could subject them to very great danger?” The United States could find itself “isolated and the alliance crumbling.”

McNamara opposed any discussion with Castro, Khrushchev, or NATO leaders before an air strike occurred: “It almost stops subsequent military action.” He raised a new, middle option: “a blockade against offensive weapons entering Cuba in the future” and constant reconnaissance of the island.

He warned that any form of direct military action “will lead to a Soviet military response of some type someplace in the world.” American military action could generate an anti-Castro uprising in Cuba: the United States might be forced to accept an “unsatisfactory uprising,” like the Bay of Pigs, or else have to invade.

Now the President spoke: “I completely agree that there isn’t any doubt that if we announced that there were MRBM sites going up … we would secure a good deal of political support after my statement. And the fact that we indicated our desire to restrain, this really would put the burden on the Soviet.”

He agreed that if the United States revealed the missiles to the world before it used force against Cuba, “we lose all the advantages of our strike. Because if we announce that it’s there, then it’s quite obvious to them [the Soviet Union] that we’re gonna probably do something about it—I would assume.” He doubted that a message to Castro about the missiles would turn the dictator against Moscow: “I don’t think he plays it that way.”

Nor did he think a message to Khrushchev would work. He noted that the Chairman had obviously ignored his September warnings against missiles in Cuba: “It seems to me my press statement was so clear about how we wouldn’t do anything under these conditions,* and under the conditions that we would. He must know that we’re going to find out [about the missiles], so it seems to me he just—”

Bundy: “That’s, of course, why he’s been very, very explicit with us in communications to us about how dangerous this is, and the [September 11] TASS statement and his other messages.”

Kennedy: “That’s right. But he’s—he’s initiated the danger really, hasn’t he?”

As the President’s tape machine churned on, he made a muffled comment on Khrushchev that could be interpreted as “He’s the one playing his card”—“cahd” in the Boston accent—“not us.” He may also have said, “He’s the one playing God, not us.”

Rusk: “And his statement to Kohler on the subject of his visit and so forth. Completely hypocritical.”

McNamara warned again that the Soviet missiles on Cuba could be placed “in operational condition quickly.” Whether six hours or two weeks, “we don’t know how much time has started.”

Rusk: “We could be just utterly wrong, but we’ve never really believed that Khrushchev would take on a general nuclear war over Cuba.”

Kennedy: “We certainly have been wrong about what he’s trying to do in Cuba. There isn’t any doubt about that.… [Not] many of us thought that he was going to put MRBMs on Cuba.”

Bundy: “Yeah. Except John McCone.”

Carter: “Mr. McCone.”

Kennedy: “Yeah.”

Now, for the first time in the Cabinet Room all day, Bundy finally raised the most fundamental issue: “Quite aside from what we’ve said—and we’re very hard-locked onto it, I know—what is the strategic impact on the position of the United States of MRBMs in Cuba? How gravely does this change the strategic balance?”

McNamara: “Mac, I asked the Chiefs that this afternoon, in effect. And they said, ‘Substantially.’ My own personal view is, not at all.”

Defending the Joint Chiefs, Taylor said, “They can become a very”—he corrected himself—“a rather important adjunct and reinforcement to the strike capability of the Soviet Union. We have no idea how far they will go. But more than that … to our nation, it means, it means a good deal more—you all are aware of that—in Cuba and not over in the Soviet Union.” By this he meant that Americans would feel more insecure when they learned that Soviet missiles had been placed in the Western Hemisphere, only ninety miles away.

Dillon did not speak, but he and Paul Nitze considered the missiles in Cuba “a major step toward nuclear parity” by the Soviet Union, as Nitze said years later: “Not in numbers but in military effectiveness, because their capability in an initial strike from those sites would be tremendous.… Between the MRBMs and the IRBMs there was hardly any part of the United States that wasn’t vulnerable to these missiles.”

Kennedy returned to the possibility that the missiles were already operational: “Then you don’t want to knock ’em out.… There’s too much of a gamble. Then they just begin to build up those air bases there and then put more and more.… Then they start getting ready to squeeze us in Berlin.” He embraced McNamara’s view that the Soviet nuclear danger was not now necessarily greater than it had been before the missiles were sent to Cuba: “You may say it doesn’t make any difference if you get blown up by an ICBM flying from the Soviet Union or one that was ninety miles away. Geography doesn’t mean that much.”

Taylor: “We’d have to target them with our missiles and have the same kind of—of pistol-pointed-at-the-head situation as we have in the Soviet Union at the present time.”

Kennedy noted that if he had pressed the April 1961 invasion of Cuba to the point of success, he would not be facing this monumental crisis: “That’s why it shows that the Bay of Pigs was really right.”

Robert Kennedy said, “The other problem is in South America a year from now. And the fact that you got these things in the hands of Cubans here and then you—say, your—some problem arises in Venezuela. You’ve got Castro saying, ‘You move troops down into that part of Venezuela, we’re going to fire these missiles.’”

Edwin Martin, Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America: “It’s a psychological factor. It won’t reach as far as Venezuela is concerned.”

McNamara: “It’ll reach the U.S. though. This is the point.”

Martin: “Well, it’s a psychological factor that we have sat back and let ’em do it to us. That is more important than the direct threat.”

The President agreed: “Last month I said we weren’t going to.” By this he meant allowing offensive weapons in Cuba. He laughed caustically: “Last month I should have said we’re—that we don’t care. But when we said we’re not going to and then they go ahead and do it, and we do nothing, then our risks increase.… I think it’s just a question of, after all, this is a political struggle as much as military.”

He assessed the options: “Don’t think the message to Castro’s got much in it.” He proposed that “twenty-four hours ahead of our doing something” with military force, the U.S. government should announce the presence of missiles in Cuba: “That would be notification in a sense that, of their existence, and everybody could draw whatever conclusion they wanted to.”

McNamara disagreed: the missiles could be readied “between the time we in effect say we’re going to come in and the time we do come in. This—this is a very, very great danger to this, this coast.… If you are going to strike, you shouldn’t make an announcement.”

Kennedy renewed discussion of how widespread the military attack against Cuba should be: “I don’t think We ought to abandon just knocking out these missile bases.… That’s much more defensible, explicable, politically or satisfactory-in-every-way action than the general strike which takes us—us into the city of Havana.”

Bundy agreed: “It corresponds to the—the punishment fits the crime in political terms.” They would be “doing only what we warned repeatedly and publicly we would have to do.”

Kennedy: “Once you get into beginning to shoot up those airports, then you get in, you get a lot of antiaircraft.… I mean, you’re running a much more major operation. Therefore the dangers of the worldwide effects* are substantial to the United States, are increased. I quite agree that if we’re just thinking about Cuba, the best thing to do is to be bold if you’re thinking about trying to get this thing under some degree of control.”

He asked why the Russians put in the missiles if they “did not increase very much their strategic strength.” Hadn’t Khrushchev been cautious throughout his dealings on Berlin?

George Ball called attention to the Chairman’s trial balloon about a New York visit in November: perhaps he had intended to reveal that “here is Cuba armed against the United States, or possibly use it to try to trade something in Berlin, saying he’ll disarm Cuba if we’ll yield some of our interests in Berlin and some arrangement for it.”

Bundy: “I would think one thing that I would still cling to is that he’s not likely to give Fidel Castro nuclear warheads.”

Kennedy: “That’s right, but what is the advantage of that? It’s just as if we suddenly began to put a major number of MRBMs in Turkey. Now that’d be goddamn dangerous, I would think.”

Someone said, “Well, we did, Mr. President.”

Kennedy: “Yeah, but that was five years ago.… That was during a different period then.” The President betrayed no knowledge that the Jupiters were to be transferred to the Turks next week. No one else raised the subject.

Someone speculated that Khrushchev’s generals “have been telling him for a year and a half that he had—was missing a golden opportunity to add to his strategic capability.”

Robert Kennedy said, “One other thing is whether we should also think of whether there is some other way we can get involved in this through Guantanamo Bay or something, or whether there’s some ship that—you know, sink the Maine again or something.” This was a dangerous suggestion: using a transparent pretext to justify a military action against Cuba for which the United States had substantial reason would have undermined the American case in the court of world opinion.†

The President remembered that he was scheduled to see Gromyko in the Oval Office two days hence. He asked for advice on “whether we ought to say anything to him, whether we ought to indirectly give him sort of a—give him an ultimatum on this matter, or whether we just ought to go ahead without him.” Dobrynin had told the Attorney General and others “that they were not going to put these weapons there. Now either he’s lying or doesn’t know.”

Bundy said he “wouldn’t bet a cookie” that Dobrynin knew.

Kennedy suggested that Robert tell Dobrynin that if offensive missiles were found in Cuba, the United States “would have to take action.” Perhaps this would make the Soviets “reconsider their decision.… I can’t understand their viewpoint, if they’re aware of what we said at the press conferences.… I don’t think there’s any record of the Soviets ever making this direct a challenge ever, really, since the Berlin Blockade.”

Courageously Bundy told his boss what he could not have wanted to hear: “We have to be clear, Mr. President, that they made this decision, in all probability, before you made your statements.”

McNamara: “Uh-huh.”

Bundy read aloud from the September TASS statement that the Soviet Union had such powerful missiles that it had “no need” to place them outside of its own territory.

Kennedy: “Well, what date was that?”

Bundy: “September eleventh.”

The President remained baffled by the Soviet boldness in Cuba: “We never really ever had a case where it’s been quite this—after all, they backed down in—Chinese Communists in ’58.* They didn’t go into Laos, agreed to a cease-fire there.… I don’t know enough about the Soviet Union, but if anybody can tell me any other time since the Berlin Blockade where the Russians have given us so clear provocation, I don’t know when it’s been. Because they’ve been awfully cautious really.… Now maybe our mistake was in not saying sometime before this summer that if they do this, we’re [bound] to act.”

McNamara said, “I’ll be quite frank. I don’t think there is a military problem here.… This is a domestic political problem. The announcement—we didn’t say we’d go in … and kill them. We said we’d act. Well, how will we act? … First place, we carry out open surveillance, so we know what they’re doing.… Twenty-four hours a day from now and forever.… We prevent any further offensive weapons coming in. In other words, we blockade offensive weapons.”

The United States should also make “a statement to the world, particularly to Khrushchev, that … if there is ever any indication that they’re to be launched against this country, we will respond not only against Cuba, but we will respond directly against the Soviet Union with—with a full nuclear strike. Now this alternative doesn’t seem to be a very acceptable one, but wait until you work on the others.… As I suggested, I don’t believe it’s primarily a military problem. It’s primarily a domestic political problem.”

Ball: “Yeah? Well, as far as the American people are concerned, action means military action. Period.”

In his emphatic way, McNamara threw out more questions: “What do we expect Castro will be doing after you attack these missiles? Does he survive as a—as a political leader? Is he overthrown? … How could Khrushchev afford to accept this action without some kind of rebuttal? I don’t think—he can’t accept it without some rebuttal.… Where? How do we react in relation to it? What happens when we do mobilize? How does this affect our allies’ support of us in relation to Berlin?”

Gilpatric suggested that they all study American “points of vulnerability around the world,” especially Berlin, Iran, Turkey, Korea. McNamara warned the group that if Khrushchev struck back at Berlin, “the risk of disaster would go way up.”

The record of Kennedy’s Tuesday Cabinet Room meetings does not quite bear out the later claims made on his behalf that this was a President superbly in command of the crisis from the start.* Even allowing for the fact that he may not have wished to inhibit the conversations by dominating them, he made little effort to provide discipline, other than by injecting questions and comments. Not until halfway through the evening session did the conversation, thanks to Bundy, meander to the central question of whether MRBMs in Cuba actually changed the American-Soviet balance of power.

The Tuesday meetings rested on Kennedy’s immediate assumption that the United States was “certainly going to … take out these missiles”—by diplomacy or force, perhaps at risk of nuclear war. This was despite the fact that at a March 1962 press conference, he had said that there was not “a significant difference” between a nuclear warhead “stationed in this area” and one five thousand miles away.

McNamara was confident that while nuclear missiles in Cuba might increase the speed, power, and accuracy of a Soviet first strike, they could not remotely upset the vast American advantage. As he said years later, if Khrushchev in 1962 “thought he was numerically behind by seventeen to one or thereabouts, do you think an extra forty-two missiles in Cuba, each carrying one warhead, would have led him to think he could use his nuclear weapons? No way!”

The reason the President felt he had to take out the missiles was not because he felt they violated the Monroe Doctrine. He privately thought that the doctrine lacked meaning in international law. But he was unwilling to take the heat of being the first President to say in public that the doctrine had little value.

Asked in August 1962 what the doctrine meant to him, Kennedy replied that it “means what it has meant since President Monroe and John Quincy Adams enunciated it, and that is that we would oppose a foreign power extending its power to the Western Hemisphere. And that’s why we oppose … what’s happening in Cuba today.”* Two weeks later in private, told by a Justice Department official that the doctrine gave the United States special hemispheric rights, Kennedy snapped, “The Monroe Doctrine—what the hell is that?”

He was angry at the secrecy and deception by which Khrushchev had conducted his Cuba operation, in defiance of the assurances the Chairman had given him publicly and privately since early September.† Otherwise it was not easy to argue that the Soviet missiles in Cuba could be any less acceptable to the United States than NATO’s IRBMs along the Soviet border were to the Soviet Union.

Bundy had had to remind the President that he had issued his warning against missiles in Cuba considerably after the moment at which Khrushchev must have decided to send them. Kennedy now knew he had erred badly by brushing aside McCone’s numerous warnings that Khrushchev might be taking such a gamble. Instead, in September he had issued the American people an unambiguous pledge to “do whatever must be done” if Khrushchev moved ground-to-ground missiles into Cuba.

How different these Cabinet Room conversations might have been had Kennedy phrased his September pledge more vaguely or not at all. Instead of discussing how to take the missiles out, he and his advisers would now be able to consider the option of explaining to Americans that they had little to fear from the missiles in Cuba.

As when Eisenhower reassured Americans during the Sputnik and missile gap hysteria, this approach might have forced Kennedy to brave charges that he was too sanguine about the Soviet threat, especially because Kennedy lacked Eisenhower’s military prestige. It might have caused the Democrats to lose the 1962 elections.

Still, this would have been preferable to the Kafkaesque nightmare that now faced the President—risking nuclear war to eliminate missiles that, in his own opinion and that of his Secretary of Defense, did little to harm American security.

The clock could not be turned back now. Kennedy had issued his warning. Like Khrushchev’s decision to install the missiles, he had made exactly the kind of fateful miscalculation he had cautioned the Chairman against at Vienna. He could not discard his September warning now without shattering his political career and the world’s faith in American threats and promises. He later told his brother Robert that if he hadn’t acted against the missiles, “I would have been impeached.”

Wednesday, October 17. After seeing the German Foreign Minister, Gerhard Schröder, the President went swimming and asked Dave Powers to ride with him to St. Matthew’s Cathedral: “Have you forgotten that I proclaimed today as a National Day of Prayer?”

The previous day, after a luncheon for the Libyan Crown Prince, he had taken Adlai Stevenson up to the family quarters and told him of the missile secret. Stevenson’s mind may have drifted back to his first meeting with Khrushchev in 1958, when the Chairman had complained of American missile bases in Turkey and Greece and said, “What would the Americans think if the Russians set up bases in Mexico or some other place? How would you feel?”

Today Stevenson gave Kennedy a handwritten note: “We must be prepared for the widespread reaction that if we have a missile base in Turkey and other places around the Soviet Union surely they have a right to one in Cuba. If we attack Cuba, an ally of the U.S.S.R., isn’t an attack on NATO bases equally justified?” The President must make it “clear that the existence of nuclear missile bases anywhere is negotiable before we start anything.”

Kennedy showed the memo to Sorensen and meanly said, “Tell me which side he is on.”

To balance Stevenson’s advice, he summoned Acheson, McCloy, and Robert Lovett, requesting highest secrecy, to join his crisis council. Acheson’s presence ensured that the hard-line wing of the Democratic Party would be represented and that the President could draw on Acheson’s institutional memory on Berlin.

The President asked Bohlen to cancel his voyage to France, where he was about to start his tour as Ambassador. Bohlen replied that unless he broke “a leg on the station platform,” this would arouse suspicions, not to mention de Gaulle’s sensitivities. Instead he left the President a written suggestion that an air strike “will inevitably lead to war.” A private message to Khrushchev would allow the Chairman to back down gracefully.*

That afternoon Kennedy flew to Connecticut for a four-hour campaign tour with his longtime supporter Abraham Ribicoff, now running for the Senate to succeed the retiring Prescott Bush. The President presumed that when the missiles were revealed, the Republicans would crow that they had been right all along about Cuba. Privately he told aides, “The campaign is over. This blows it—we’ve lost anyway.”

He gave no hint of his pessimism in public. On the village green in Waterbury, Connecticut, where he had ended the last campaign, he said, “Our meeting here two years ago at three o’clock in the morning was the high point of the 1960 campaign, and we will meet at three o’clock in the morning the last week of the 1964 campaign.… I don’t want to see the next two years spent with a Congress in the control of the Republicans … and nothing being done which must be done if this country’s going to move ahead.”

In Washington, to avoid attention, the President’s crisis team met in George Ball’s windowless conference room at the State Department. When told of the missiles on Tuesday, Kennedy had simply rattled off the names that came to mind.

The crisis group was soon styled the Executive Committee of the National Security Council—“Ex Comm.” It included the President, Rusk, Ball, U. Alexis Johnson, Thompson, Edwin Martin, McNamara, Gilpatric, Nitze, Robert Kennedy, General Taylor, Chief of Naval Operations George Anderson, Sorensen, and Bundy. The official members were joined, when duties allowed, by the Vice President, Stevenson, Dillon, and either McCone or General Carter.

As with Berlin, Kennedy proved himself better able to manage the Missile Crisis than to avoid it. And like the group he selected to provide systematic advice during Berlin, Ex Comm showed an impressive diversity of experience and ideology, more varied than a comparable group would have been under Eisenhower. As the students of the Missile Crisis James Blight and David Welch have argued, the council was roughly divided into two schools of thought on Soviet behavior.

Members like Acheson, Nitze, McCone, and Dillon, who had gained power during the age of the American nuclear monopoly, believed that as in the Berlin crises of 1948, 1958, and 1961, America’s nuclear advantage would force Khrushchev to accept the President’s demands. Others, like McNamara, Robert Kennedy, and Sorensen, who had come to power during the years of mutual American-Soviet vulnerability, thought there to be a higher danger that an air strike on the missile sites, killing Russian troops, might risk everything.

Each faction could cite the Berlin Crisis of 1961 as evidence for its point of view. The Achesonians could argue that even in Berlin, where he enjoyed clear conventional superiority, Khrushchev had been compelled to swallow his ultimatum out of fear of the huge American nuclear advantage. The McNamara faction could cite the success of Kennedy’s Berlin policy as evidence of the value of responding to provocation by Khrushchev with a carefully calibrated, gradual application of force.

When Kennedy issued his September warning, he had never confronted the question of whether MRBMs and IRBMs in Cuba would gravely change the nuclear balance of power between the United States and the Soviet Union. Dillon, McCone, Nitze, and the Joint Chiefs felt the missiles had greatly increased the Soviet threat. They noted that the United States had no early warning system on its southern flank and that the new Soviet missiles might increase the temptation for a Soviet first strike. A majority of Ex Comm accepted McNamara’s view that the missiles did “not at all” change the nuclear balance.

On Tuesday, with little soul-searching, Kennedy had agreed with McNamara, saying it made no difference if “you get blown up” by an IRBM or a missile five thousand miles away. Later he reflected that the importance of missiles in Cuba was that they “would have appeared to” change the balance of power, “and appearances contribute to reality.”

In fact, according to Volkogonov, the Soviet Union had deployed only twenty ICBMs in 1962, not the thirty-five or fifty estimated by McNamara that February. Thus the IRBMs and MRBMs earmarked for Cuba could have quadrupled the number of nuclear warheads that Soviet missiles could drop on the United States.

Since the President felt compelled to fulfill his September warning in any case, the matter was academic. But his ready acceptance of the notion that the missiles on Cuba had little military meaning suggested that, even at this late date, he continued to presume that Khrushchev and his generals affected the same indifference to the military significance of nuclear imbalance that he and McNamara did.

Rusk tried to keep his regular public schedule in order to preserve secrecy. When he met with Ex Comm, he saw his function as preventing the group from moving too far or too fast.* Deferring to Rusk’s Constitutional role, McNamara tried with mixed success to rein in his natural take-charge instincts.

In the President’s absence, Robert Kennedy became the group’s de facto leader. His performance did much to suggest that every group considering a paramount matter of state should include at least one participant who need not fear for his job.

With no necessity to convey his ideas in genteel language or respect the political dynamics of the room, he issued a constant, almost prosecutorial challenge to his colleagues’ assumptions. His talent for criticizing propositions from all angles, without the filter of ideology, helped to foreclose the perils of the Bay of Pigs deliberations, in which no one had seemed to have the courage to bell the cat.

At the same time, his presence imposed a certain degree of inhibition. All present knew from experience that anything said in Robert’s hearing might well be reported to the President, and that the rendition was not always flattering. As one Ex Comm member recalled, “We all knew Little Brother was watching and keeping a little list of where everyone stood.”*

Amazingly some Ex Comm members suggested on Wednesday that the problem should be handled “as the 1960 U-2 episode should have been—in effect, to pretend it hadn’t happened.” The United States could pretend that the missiles were “a mistake by the Kremlin in contradiction of Khrushchev’s repeated promises.… Wiping them out with a few non-nuclear bombs would correct the mistake. That would be the end of the affair, on the assumption that the Soviets would not choose to make an issue of being caught red handed in an embarrassing situation.”

The official record says that “most of the group favored this course of action in the first hours of discussion.” This was before it became clear that “an air strike to destroy all the offensive missiles would be a major effort, not an affair of a few bombs and a few minutes.”

Hospitalized the previous month for ulcers, Sorensen recorded the options: “Political action, pressure, and warning, followed by a military strike if satisfaction is not received.… A military strike without prior warning, pressure, or action, accompanied by messages making clear the limited nature of this action.… Political action, pressure, and warning, followed by a total naval blockade.… Full-scale invasion, to ‘take Cuba away from Castro.’”

He listed random points of disagreement: Would Moscow be willing or able to prevent Soviet or Cuban commanders from firing the missiles against the United States? Might the Soviets threaten an “equivalent attack” on U.S. missiles in Turkey or Italy, “or attack Berlin or somewhere else?” How would an air strike affect the fate of the Bay of Pigs prisoners?

That evening, Sorensen and the Attorney General met the President at National Airport. While riding to the White House, Robert convinced his brother to let Ex Comm meet on its own for a while: if the President were present, he might show his own leanings and “cause the others just to fall into line.”

The President was amazed that the missile secret was being kept. Remembering that Kennedy had dined in Georgetown the previous evening, Sorensen joked, “We don’t know of any leak at all other than your conversation with Joe Alsop.” With a flash of anger that betrayed his inner tension, Kennedy said he had never mentioned the missiles to Alsop.

Thursday morning, October 18. At 11:10 A.M., the President called Ex Comm to the Cabinet Room. Sorensen reported that the Secretary of State favored a “surgical” air strike without warning. This was opposed “by the diplomats (Bohlen, Thompson, probably Martin), who insist that prior political action is essential … by the military (McNamara, Taylor, McCone) who insist that the air strike could not be limited … by advocates of the blockade route.”

He reported that Bohlen had left a message favoring “a prompt letter to Khrushchev, deciding after the response whether we use air strike or blockade.” This was supported by all blockade advocates and opposed by General Taylor, “unless the decision had already been made to go the blockade route.”

Thompson warned that if an air strike killed thousands of Russians, Khrushchev might “give an order for a Soviet counteraction” against the Turkish missile sites or Berlin, which could result “eventually if not immediately in nuclear war.” If there must be an air strike, the Chairman must be given “time to reflect on his actions” so that “his advisers would have an opportunity to counsel him.” Knowing how well Thompson knew Khrushchev’s mind, the President was much affected.

Someone asked what the United States should do if Khrushchev struck the missiles in Turkey. Attack the home bases of the attacking Soviet missiles, said someone else. In a later meeting, someone asked, “Where will we be if Khrushchev knocks off Berlin?” Kennedy replied, “In World War Three.”

Sorensen worked on a possible television address to be given by the President after an air strike. His draft began, “This morning, I reluctantly ordered the armed forces to attack and destroy the nuclear buildup in Cuba.” The assault was to show that the United States would “defend liberty with all the means at its disposal. This applies elsewhere in the world as well as in Cuba. I refer particularly to Berlin.” Americans should “remain calm, go about your daily business, secure in the knowledge that our freedom-loving country will not allow its security to be undermined.”

Sorensen was attracted by Bohlen’s suggestion to send a private message to Khrushchev.* He worked on an “airtight letter” that could be carried by a high-level American envoy from Kennedy to Khrushchev.

It began by saying that for the first time since Korea, the United States had been confronted with an event to which it had an “inescapable commitment” to respond with force: “Consequently, the purpose of this note is to inform you that … I have no choice but to initiate appropriate military action against the island of Cuba.”

If Khrushchev could assure the bearer of the letter that he would remove his offensive weapons from Cuba, the President could withhold the use of force. Should the Chairman come to New York, Kennedy would be “glad to meet with you” and “discuss other problems on our agenda, including, if you wish, the NATO bases in Turkey and Italy to which you referred in your conversation with Ambassador Kohler but which are in no way comparable in the eyes of history, international law, or world opinion.”

Sorensen read his draft, dissatisfied. He found that “no matter how many references I put in to a summit, to peaceful intentions, and to previous warnings and pledges,” the letter “still constituted the kind of ultimatum which no great power could accept.” He told Ex Comm that to send Khrushchev a letter saying that “this messenger is going to stay in this room until you give us an answer” was “ridiculous.”

On Thursday afternoon, Thompson said that if there was a blockade, the probability that Soviet ships would turn back or allow inspection was “high but not certain.” The United States might be forced to fire at them first.

Rusk suggested that if the Russians were still working on the missiles by Tuesday, the United States should inform Britain, France, West Germany, Italy, and Turkey that it would use force to remove them. As the Air Force struck Cuba, the Russians would be warned against retaliation: “If we don’t do this, we go down with a whimper. Maybe it’s better to go down with a bang.”

After a swim and two private hours in the family quarters, Kennedy saw Acheson in the Oval Office. The older man was impatient with Ex Comm, which he found “repetitive, leaderless, and a waste of time.” Consensus decision-making was not the way Truman had done things. When the President used the Pearl Harbor analogy to describe the problems of an air strike, Acheson told him that he was repeating his brother’s clichés.

Gromyko was scheduled to come to the Oval Office at five o’clock. Rusk and Thompson advised the President not to show Gromyko the U-2 pictures of the missiles and demand their removal. This would give Khrushchev the initiative. American policy was still undecided. Thompson later said, “It is rather like finding your wife unfaithful. She may know, but when you tell her, things are different. Then you had better be prepared, for things will begin to happen.”

Bundy advised Kennedy that if Gromyko raised the subject of the missiles himself, “you will probably want to hear him before you reply. But you will want to be ready to cut him off if he tries to express any direct threats.”

When Dobrynin and Gromyko and their interpreter, Viktor Sukhodrev, arrived, the President showed them to the cream-colored sofa to the right of his rocker. Rusk and Thompson sat on the sofa across from the Russians. Also present were Vladimir Semyonov, Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister for German affairs, Martin Hillenbrand of the Berlin task force, and Alexander Akalovsky, the interpreter who had accompanied the President to Vienna.

Gromyko recited the Soviet mantra on Berlin: after the November elections, if they could not agree on making Berlin a “free city,” the Soviet Union would be compelled—compelled, he said again—to sign a German peace treaty. Kennedy replied with the American mantra: the United States was always ready to talk about Berlin, but Western troops were vital to the city’s survival and freedom.

Gromyko said that Khrushchev planned to come to the General Assembly in late November, after the elections. He felt that a meeting with the President would be useful. Kennedy said he would be glad to talk with Khrushchev, but not to bargain about Berlin. Other friendly nations had an interest in the city’s future. Such a meeting must have no fixed agenda.

When the Foreign Minister said he wished to raise the subject of Cuba, the Americans wondered whether he was about to reveal the missiles. He did not. Instead he complained of America’s “anti-Cuba campaign.” By sending Cuban exiles to attack the island’s shipping, the United States was committing “piracy on the high seas.” Apparently it intended to blockade all of Cuba.

All of this, he said, could lead only to great misfortunes for mankind. The Soviet Union could not observe the situation idly when aggression was planned and threat of war loomed. Cuba belonged to Cubans, not the United States. It was a “baby facing a giant”—no threat to anyone. Hadn’t Castro repeatedly stressed his desire for peace?

Gromyko said he knew the President appreciated frankness. This was not the nineteenth century, “when the world was divided up into colonies and … the victims of aggression could only be heard weeks after any attack.” The congressional resolution enabling the President to call up 150,000 reservists had “no military significance.” Modern weapons had changed all that.

Taking out notes carefully written after consultation with Khrushchev, Gromyko said he had been “instructed to make it clear” that Soviet aid to Cuba was “by no means offensive.” It was solely for “the purpose of contributing to the defense capabilities of Cuba.… If it were otherwise, the Soviet government would never become involved in rendering such assistance.”

Impassive, Kennedy sent for one of his September warnings against offensive weapons in Cuba and read a key passage aloud. Rusk noticed that while Gromyko kept a straight face, Sukhodrev blanched. The President later told O’Donnell, “I was dying to confront him with our evidence. In effect I told him that there had better not be any ballistic missiles in Cuba. And he told me that such a thing had never entered Khrushchev’s mind. It was incredible to sit there and watch the lies coming out of his mouth.”

Gromyko later argued that he had not lied. Two months later, he insisted that the weapons in Cuba were indeed defensive and that he had never said anything to Kennedy about nuclear missiles. In 1989, shortly before his death, he said, “Why didn’t I mention it? Because President Kennedy—I do not know his concrete line of thought on this—did not ask about it. The words ‘nuclear missiles’ did not figure in the conversation. If he had asked me about it, I would have answered.”

Gromyko recalled that in case Kennedy had asked about the missiles, he had been instructed to say that the Soviet Union was deploying a “small quantity of missiles of a defensive nature” in Cuba that would “never threaten anyone.” If the President complained, he was to encourage quiet diplomacy.*

By Gromyko’s much later account, he warned the President that the Soviet Union “will not remain a mere spectator” if a major war arose in connection with Cuba or anywhere else. He recalled that Kennedy replied that he had “no plans to attack Cuba” and said that he was “restraining those circles that support an invasion.… I am trying to prevent any actions that could lead to war.”

Before Gromyko departed, Kennedy reminded him of what he had told Khrushchev in Vienna: the United States was a large country. So was the Soviet Union. History would judge their competition. Meanwhile, neither he nor the Chairman must “take actions leading to a confrontation of our two countries.” Since his inauguration, he had tried to “adjust” American-Soviet relations. Laos had been “a success—so far,” but not Germany or West Berlin. In light of Khrushchev’s understanding of the United States, what had been happening in Cuba since July was “inexplicable.”

Gromyko found the President “nervous, though he tried not to show it.” When they parted at 7:18 P.M., the President said, “I hope you’ll visit us here at the White House on several more occasions.”

As soon as Gromyko left, Kennedy regretted his decision not to mention the missiles in Cuba. He may have been worried that, as after the Vienna summit, political foes might charge he had been too timid to confront his Soviet interlocutor.† Rusk and Thompson assured him that he had done the right thing.

The President also had second thoughts about replying so favorably to the suggestion of a November summit with Khrushchev—especially if the Chairman planned to use it to brandish his missiles in Cuba and threaten the United States. Rusk said years later that the idea of the President and Khrushchev in the same room at the height of the Missile Crisis sent “chills up my spine.” Thompson repaired Kennedy’s mistake by telling Dobrynin that, under current conditions, a summit would not be “appropriate.”

Robert Lovett found the President fuming that Gromyko had told him “more barefaced lies than I have ever heard in so short a time.” Lovett recommended a blockade of Cuba, followed by gradual pressure against the Soviets, if necessary: “We would look ridiculous if we grabbed a sledgehammer to kill a fly.… We can always increase the tempo of combat, but it is very hard to reduce it once the battle is joined.”

Walking in from the Rose Garden, Robert Kennedy asked pointed questions about a blockade, but Lovett felt that both brothers were by now almost agreed on “taking a relatively mild and not very bloodthirsty step first.”

At a black-tie dinner on the seventh floor of the State Department, Gromyko raised a glass of California cabernet and said, “To the President.” Rusk responded by toasting Khrushchev. By Khrushchev’s later account, Gromyko reported to Moscow that the Secretary of State had been drinking heavily: “I never saw him in such a state. He was not himself.”*

Ex Comm was meeting one floor below. A consensus was developing for a naval blockade and graduated response, which the group now referred to by the euphemism “quarantine,” after Franklin Roosevelt’s 1937 “quarantine-the-aggressor” speech. McNamara argued that, unlike an air strike, a quarantine would not foreclose other options. A straw vote found six members for an air strike, eleven for a quarantine.

At ten, the exhausted men left for the White House. Nine of the officials piled into Robert Kennedy’s limousine to avoid attracting attention with a fleet of cars. Sorensen felt as if a month had passed since the missiles were discovered.

In the upstairs Oval Room, under the President’s questioning, the support for a quarantine seemed to unravel. Although he still had not determined his final course of action, Kennedy asked Sorensen for a television speech to be given on Monday night. If the missile secret reached the press, timing of the address could be moved up.

Friday morning, October 19. Before the President’s departure on a campaign trip, Rusk, Bundy, and the Joint Chiefs told him that they now endorsed an air strike. Afterward Kennedy asked the Attorney General and Sorensen to pull Ex Comm together: “If you have any trouble, call me and I’ll call off the trip and come back and talk to them.” Sorensen found him impatient and “a bit disgusted” that people were still changing their minds—especially Bundy, with whom he usually worked so effortlessly.

Little Brother was watching. He later complained that, first Bundy “was for a strike, then a blockade, then for doing nothing because it would upset the situation in Berlin, and then, finally, he led the group which was in favor of a strike—and a strike without prior notification, along the lines of Pearl Harbor.” Sorensen recalled that “it was not one of Bundy’s best weeks” and the President “didn’t like it.”

With his Irish demand for loyalty, Kennedy may have expected Bundy to realize that he was leaning heavily toward quarantine and help him get the Joint Chiefs on board. The President was carefully establishing a record of consultation with the Chiefs to clear himself of any future charges that he had failed to secure adequate military advice. Bundy almost surely felt his relationship with Kennedy was secure enough that at this moment he had not only the luxury but the duty to give him his best judgment.

Bundy reported to Ex Comm that morning that he had seen the President before departure. Speaking for himself, he now favored “decisive action with its advantages of surprise and confronting the world with a fait accompli.” Sorensen said it was not fair to the President to reconsider a matter they had all decided on Thursday night. But Robert Kennedy insisted that the matter was so vital that people should still talk freely.

Repeating almost exactly his advice during the Berlin Crisis, Acheson declared that Khrushchev had presented the United States with a direct test of will: the sooner the showdown, the better. Taylor said it was “now or never for an air strike.” If they were to attack on Sunday morning, the decision must be made at once. McNamara said that while he would order preparations, he did not favor a strike.

With a faint smile, the Attorney General said that he too had seen the President that morning. It would be very difficult for the President to order an air strike. For 175 years, the United States had not been the kind of country to wage sneak attack. Thousands of Cubans and Russians would be killed without warning. Better to act in a way that allowed the Soviets room to pull back from their “overextended position in Cuba.”

Douglas Dillon recalled, “As he spoke, I felt that I was at a real turning point in history.… I knew then that we should not undertake a strike without warning.… With only one or two possible exceptions, all the members of the Ex Comm were convinced by Bob’s argument.” One need not question the Attorney General’s eloquence to conclude that another reason his argument had such power was that few doubted whom he was speaking for.*

That evening, Bundy looked at new aerial pictures of Cuba. He was told that some of the MRBMs were apparently ready to fire. He called O’Donnell, who was staying with the President at the Sheraton-Blackstone in Chicago: the situation was “so hairy I think he’ll want to come home.”

News of trouble in Cuba was spreading. Salinger, who had not been told of the missiles, learned that Carleton Kent of the Chicago Sun-Times and the columnists Robert Allen and Paul Scott were about to report imminent American military action against Cuba. Kennedy asked him to tell Kent, “We are not planning to invade Cuba.” He asked McNamara to talk to Allen and Scott. The Defense Secretary told his spokesman to deny a Miami Herald report of operational ground-to-ground missiles in Cuba.

Fortified by his first hot meal in days, sent over in a covered dish by a Washington hostess, Sorensen stayed up until three on Saturday morning to work on a draft of the President’s television address after studying Woodrow Wilson’s and Franklin Roosevelt’s speeches asking Congress to declare the two World Wars.

Saturday, October 20. In Moscow at the castellated Spiridonovka Palace, the Foreign Minister’s official residence, Foy Kohler lunched with Frol Kozlov. The Ambassador had been told that despite his opposition to portions of Khrushchev’s program at the Twenty-second Party Congress, Kozlov was still Khrushchev’s most likely successor: he should try to get to know him.

Kozlov arrived late and was “very gross,” recalled Kohler’s political counselor, Richard Davies. “He sat with his elbows on the table, ate like a pig, and drank like a fish. He got thoroughly drunk—a nasty drunk.… Kozlov did not put himself out one whit.… Kohler made every effort to engage him in conversation. His replies were curt.”

Kohler and Davies took Kozlov’s boorishness as a deliberate “insult to the United States.” Had they known about the missiles in Cuba, they might have wondered whether Kozlov now considered the Soviet Union to be so strong that he could openly indulge his instinctive hostility toward the Americans.

In Chicago, Salinger announced that the President was suffering from a cold and returning to Washington. At 1:35 P.M., Kennedy landed on the South Grounds by helicopter, staring silently out the window, chin in hand. He walked into the Oval Office, looked at Sorensen’s draft of his television speech,* swam while talking to the Attorney General, and convened an NSC meeting at two-thirty in the upstairs Oval Room.

The CIA considered four MRBM sites to be operational: those missiles on launching pads could probably be fired within eight hours of a Soviet decision to attack. Two IRBM sites had been spotted: one of these might be operational within six weeks, the other in eight to ten. American spy planes had also found twenty-two Il-28 bombers (only one assembled), thirty-nine MiG-21 fighters (thirty-five uncrated), and twenty-four SAM sites.†

Robert Kennedy tried to give his brother the Ex Comm straw votes, but as when he met with the Joint Chiefs, the President had in mind the domestic political recriminations if his crisis management failed: “I don’t want to see them. I may choose the wrong policy, and then the people who are right will have it in writing.”

McCone warned that if the Kremlin learned that the United States had discovered the missiles, the Soviets might assume that America was about to go to war and order an immediate nuclear attack. Rusk, in his usual fashion, summarized the arguments for air strike and quarantine. He gave the President a handwritten endorsement of a quarantine, which Kennedy read and gave back.

McNamara argued that the Soviets would retaliate somewhere—probably in Berlin—whatever the United States did. They could not ignore thousands of Soviet deaths by air strike: “The U.S. could lose control of the situation, which could escalate to general war.” Quarantine was the only military course compatible with America’s leadership of the Free World. They would get the missiles out only if prepared to offer something in return: perhaps “the withdrawal of U.S. strategic missiles from Turkey and Italy, and possibly agreement to limit our use of Guantanamo to a specified, limited time.”

Taylor warned that soon the missiles would be camouflaged and almost impossible to find. Gilpatric said, “Essentially, Mr. President, this is a choice between limited action and unlimited action, and most of us here think it’s better to start with limited action.”

The President said that before making his final decision, he wished to talk with specialists to make sure that a surgical air strike was absolutely impossible. Otherwise they could assume he would choose a quarantine. He predicted that the “domestic political heat” after his television speech would be “terrific.”

He said he expected the Soviets to move on Berlin, but that would probably happen whatever he did. Perhaps this show of American strength would make the Soviet Union think twice before acting against Berlin. He said that “the worst course of all would be to do nothing.” If the missiles were left in Cuba, both Khrushchev and Castro would seem able to do what they pleased in the world. With the Bay of Pigs prisoners still in Cuban jails, Castro could “shoot one hundred Americans a day with impunity.”

Adlai Stevenson had flown down from New York. Last evening he had told a colleague that he would “insist for history we make one last day’s effort to avoid a clash.… I’m fighting for getting ready … then split seconds to the UN and the OAS.”

In 1960, Stevenson had been the most popular Democrat in the country. Now he served in a job he thought beneath him for a President he considered “cold and ruthless.” He wrote one lady friend that he slept “with the help of God and Seconal.” Three times he sent another lady friend a poem with the last line underscored: “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”

Kennedy knew that Stevenson was the only member of his government, with the possible exception of the Vice President, who had a serious independent political base. He knew that the old Illinois Governor, twice the Democratic nominee, was still more popular among many Democrats than he was. As long as Stevenson remained so, he would be able to exert liberal pressure on the President from within the government, especially on foreign policy. If he ever resigned in protest,* he could jeopardize Kennedy’s support by the dominant wing of his own party.

At the same time as the President ostentatiously consulted his UN Ambassador, he worked to undermine him and coopt his national following. He hoped that by 1965, Stevenson’s standing would be so diminished that without serious cost he could move him to the embassy in London, where his influence over a second Kennedy administration would be negligible.

Bundy years later remembered the President’s relations with Stevenson as “a long and troubled story.” The problems between the two men went back at least to Chicago in 1956, when Sorensen told Stevenson’s staff that Kennedy would like to be Vice President. Stevenson said, “I like Jack Kennedy, admire him, but he’s too young, his father, his religion.” The nomination was thrown open. Nineteen fifty-six was the year that Robert Kennedy traveled with the Stevenson campaign and returned to tell his brother that Stevenson was “just not a man of action at all.”

Kennedy’s attitude was forever poisoned by 1960. In May, after winning the Oregon primary, he had arranged to call at the Governor’s farm in Libertyville, Illinois. He had heard that Lyndon Johnson had invited Stevenson to “go out and corral some votes” against Kennedy, saying, “We’ll teach that little prick a thing or two.” Before going to Libertyville, he told his aide Hy Raskin, “I am going to find out if he is playing Johnson’s game in trying to stop me.… If he wants to become Secretary of State, he’d better do something to earn it.”

Kennedy told Stevenson that “Lyndon is a chronic liar.… He has been making all sorts of assurances to me for years and has lived up to none of them.” The only way to treat the Texan was to beat him: “That fucking bastard can only understand power.” Stevenson would not be moved.

Flying away from Chicago, Kennedy told Charles Bartlett, “Well, I learned one thing today and that is that Adlai Stevenson will never be my Secretary of State. I’m used to being turned down. I ask a hundred people a day if they will support me and about eighty-nine of them are still saying they are going to wait and see how this thing develops.” Not Stevenson. “He said, ‘Jack, I’ve decided I’m not coming out for you now. I’m going to hold back … because I can serve as a bridge between you and Lyndon Johnson.’”

Kennedy laughed bitterly. “I don’t think Adlai realizes that Lyndon Johnson thinks that he’s a fruit.… If he were a great diplomat, he would have come up with a better one than that.”*

After the meeting, Stevenson called George Ball, his old Chicago law partner: “Kennedy behaved just like his old man. He said to me, ‘Look, I have the votes for the nomination, and if you don’t give me your support, I’ll have to shit all over you.’ … I should have told the son of a bitch off but, frankly, I was shocked and confused by that Irish gutter talk. That’s pretty cheap stuff.” Stevenson wrote Schlesinger that Kennedy was “very self-confident and assured and much tougher and bloodier than I remembered him in the past.”

In July, nervous about draft-Stevenson demonstrations planned for the convention floor, Kennedy gave him another chance to join the bandwagon by delivering his nominating speech. Later, recounting Stevenson’s reply that he was a “helpless pawn with all these forces,” Kennedy was profane: “If he doesn’t know how to do this, he’s got no business being here.”

On the weekend before the balloting, Joseph Kennedy clenched his fist and told a Stevenson aide, “Your man must be out of his mind,” adding before he turned away, “You’ve got twenty-four hours.” Robert Kennedy recalled that Stevenson “wasn’t able to decide what he wanted. He wanted the nomination but he wasn’t willing to fight for it. He wanted to keep his options open for Secretary.”

Stevenson never understood how deeply he had alienated the Kennedys. He later said, “It never occurred to me I wouldn’t become Secretary of State.” The President-elect offered Justice, the London Embassy, or the UN, saying that he hoped “very much” that it would be the UN. Shocked, hurt, angry, Stevenson told his law partner Newton Minow, “I’m not going to take it.… I’m going to continue as we are—speeches, articles.” Minow said, “Also you’ll be on page forty-six in the New York Times with three lines of space.”

George Ball recalled, “We sat up until 2 A.M. drinking brandy and talking about it. I told him he was temperamental and incapable of taking himself out of public life.… This was a new administration.… There was no telling what could turn out of it. I told him not to be an Agamemnon.… He always had an enormous capacity for dramatizing himself.… The thing that fascinated me about Adlai was that he accepted so easily the idea that he was a great historical figure moving back and forth on the scene. I think he always had Abraham Lincoln on his mind a good deal.”

Stevenson told the President-elect in Georgetown that he could not accept the UN until he knew who would be Secretary of State. Kennedy said, “I’ll be your boss. You can have a direct line to me.” He took Stevenson out onto his front steps and announced his UN offer. The Governor said he wished to discuss how the job could be strengthened. Reporters asked, “Are we to understand you have not accepted it?” Stevenson said that his answer depended upon a further talk with the President-elect, “which I hope will be very soon.”

“I hope it will be before the middle of next week,” said Kennedy, who went back inside. Robert Kennedy recalled that his brother was “shocked” and “absolutely furious” that Stevenson publicized their bargaining, so furious that he “almost withdrew” the offer.

Unwilling to wind up on page 46 of the Times, the Governor used what few bargaining chips he possessed. Through several days of telephone talks with Kennedy and Rusk, he won the appearance but not the reality of a UN mission in New York that created foreign policy. As George Ball said, “History had passed him by.”

In 1961, Kennedy spent no little amount of time keeping Stevenson happy. Were he not so concerned that the Governor might resign, he might have authorized military actions that might have made the Bay of Pigs less of a travesty.

By his second year in office, pressed by one crisis after another, more firmly established in the White House, Kennedy worried about Stevenson less and less. Although Rusk had backed Stevenson for President in 1960, he now privately said that he would never confide his fallback position to the UN envoy: otherwise “he would reach that point in about the first five minutes of the negotiation.”*

Harlan Cleveland, Assistant Secretary of State for UN affairs, noticed that “Kennedy was pragmatic, Stevenson more interested in long-range and the emotional side. Kennedy was not interested in long-range at all, he was interested in what to do next week.”

Robert Kennedy said, “I don’t like the word tough, but he was so untough. He didn’t face reality in the world, in facing himself even.… Stevenson had a wonderful way of speaking, but he would get to the point and then move off it.… Stevenson would whine all the time.… Jack used to talk about him frequently—what a pain in the ass he was.” The First Lady, who liked Stevenson and attended the theater with him in New York, conceded that “Jack can’t bear being in the same room with him.”

Kennedy encouraged her to pursue her friendship with the Governor. She painted a watercolor for his birthday and wrote him after a visit to the UN that “the whole atmosphere of that place is so charged with undercurrents and tension and excitement.… I was so lucky to have the chance to meet U Thant—and I loved him, but I’m not fickle.” At a White House dinner, she confided in him about her marital relations in a manner that Stevenson found “most indiscreet.”

Kennedy told a friend, “Look, Stevenson has had the two most shattering blows anyone could have had. He was twice defeated for President.” George Ball recalled that once during troubles in the Congo, he called on Kennedy (“he was in the massage room at the White House, naked”), who asked him to call Stevenson in New York while he listened. Afterward he said, “Look, George, he lives in a microcosm that’s totally different from the world of reality we live in here. Don’t be as tough as you are with him.”

At other times the President evinced the hostility of the younger man who knew he would never gain the approval of the older man he had dethroned. His treatment of Stevenson closely resembled the mix of thoughtfulness, wariness, and cruelty with which he treated Lyndon Johnson—and for most of the same reasons.

Kennedy told friends that despite Stevenson’s great reputation as an intellectual, he read more books in a week than Stevenson did in a year. (This was probably true.) George Smathers thought that Stevenson was “just not masculine enough for Jack Kennedy.” The President asked Jacqueline why women liked Adlai so much and wondered aloud whether he was a “switcher”: he had seen him in a Turkish bath in New York and doubted that he would be “much of a rival.” He once told a reporter that he and Bobby had been having some fun “seeing how much old Adlai would stand for.”

Oleg Cassini professed to remember an overcast Newport day when the President asked Stevenson to fly up by helicopter. Told of threatening skies, Kennedy said, by Cassini’s account, “Good, he’ll be airsick.” When Stevenson arrived, “green at the gills,” the President sat him on the deck of his boat in treacherous waters, where the Governor tried “unsuccessfully not to shiver in the wind and rain.”

After Kennedy put him back onto the storm-tossed helicopter, Cassini said, “Mr. President, that is truly cruel and unusual punishment.” By Cassini’s account, Kennedy replied, “He could use it. It’s good for his health.”

From time to time Stevenson tried to increase his leverage in Washington, observing that a “wise politician” should never be far from a microphone. In December 1961, like a maiden prodding a suitor into marriage by waving a rival proposal, he told Kennedy that he was thinking of running for the Senate and wanted “a lot more autonomy and authority than in the past.”

It did not work. “I don’t understand that man and I never have understood him,” the President told Kaysen afterward. “He’s talking about being Senator from Illinois—well, if he wants to do that I wish him well. But I don’t understand why he wants to be one among one hundred.… I know he’s mad because I never offered him Secretary—but why didn’t he ask me for it?” Kennedy refused Stevenson’s request to issue a statement asking him to stay on at the UN.

The Governor never forgot that at the Inauguration he was the only Cabinet member to get no limousine, which he blamed on the “Irish Mafia” on Kennedy’s staff. Of the President he carped, “That young man, he never says please, he never says thank you, he never asks for things, he demands them.” The “avarice” of the Kennedys made him “sick.” He was piqued when Peter Lawford announced that he was paying off Stevenson’s campaign deficits.

For power he substituted the perquisites of power. Ball found him surrounding himself with “these rich females, this odd harem.… They gave him the best food in New York—he went to every first night in the theater.… He knew this was a very phony life, the UN, divorced from the reality of politics, living in the phony adulation of these women all the time.… They took care of him.… He talked about leaving the UN but he had no place to go.”

Robert Kennedy recalled that his brother liked to “shock” Stevenson and “give him something he’d talk to his girls about.” When Stevenson lectured the President at Hyannis Port about disarmament, he was horrified when Kennedy replied that disarmament was just “propaganda.”

During these years Stevenson told one of his lady friends that he had trouble sleeping, “and I have the most terrible dreams when I do get to sleep”—nightmares about the world blowing up, “the death of mankind, the end of life on this planet.”

Now in the Oval Room, Stevenson argued that the President’s television speech on Cuba should include a proposal for negotiations with the Soviet Union: once the missiles were gone, the United States might be willing to discuss the “demilitarization” of Cuba, including both Soviet installations and the American base at Guantanamo. Perhaps they should consider withdrawing the Jupiters from Turkey and Italy.

McNamara had made a similar suggestion, but not as an offer before the escalation began. Sorensen said it was “not us but Russia that should be in the prisoner’s dock.” Dillon and McCone complained that starting with concessions would legitimize Khrushchev’s action and give him an easy victory.

The President said that at this stage they could not consider giving up Guantanamo; that would suggest “that we had been frightened into abandoning our position.” At an appropriate time, the United States would have to acknowledge its willingness to take strategic missiles out of Turkey and Italy, if the Russians raised the issue.

Stevenson did not give up: they should “offer to give up such bases in order to induce the Russians to remove the strategic missiles.” Kennedy insisted that there would be “no bargains over our bases in Turkey and Italy.”

On the Truman Balcony after the meeting, Robert complained to the President that Stevenson was “not strong enough or tough enough to be representing us at the UN at a time like this.” They should “get someone else.” The President replied that maybe Stevenson “went too far when he suggested giving up Guantanamo,” but he had shown “plenty of strength and courage” to “risk being called an appeaser.”

That evening Stevenson told O’Donnell, “I know that most of those fellows will probably consider me a coward for the rest of my life for what I said today, but perhaps we need a coward in the room when we are talking about nuclear war.”

Bundy was informed that the New York Times had assembled a fairly accurate account of the crisis about to burst. Kennedy called James Reston: he was planning a speech on Monday. If the Times published, he “might well be confronted by a Moscow ultimatum” before he had a chance to speak. Reston worked to have the story quashed.

Before leaving Chicago, the President had called Jacqueline at Glen Ora and asked her to return with Caroline and John to the White House so that they could be together in case of sudden emergency. Swimming with Dave Powers on Saturday evening, he used the same words he had spoken while flying to London from the Vienna summit: “If we were only thinking of ourselves, it would be easy, but I keep thinking about the children whose lives would be wiped out.”

Sunday morning, October 21. With the tang of autumn in the air, under a lowered sun, Washington had never looked more handsome. The President gave Ex Comm breakfast in the upstairs Oval Room. As McNamara recalled, Kennedy polled those present and found that the group was now in favor of an air strike, by nine to seven.

After Mass, the President returned to the room to question General Taylor and General Walter Sweeney, the tactical air chief who would command an air strike of Cuba, if ordered. The best they could offer was to destroy 90 percent of the known missiles. Since only about thirty of the forty-eight missiles presumed to be on Cuba had been found, an attack could thus leave as many as twenty-one untouched. McNamara and the two generals said that an initial attack would have to be followed by hundreds of sorties, leading almost inevitably to a full-scale invasion of Cuba.

Robert Kennedy arrived after a horseback ride at Hickory Hill, still wearing his riding clothes. He said they should start with a quarantine and thereafter “play for the breaks.” McCone said that if it did not work, they must move on to air strike and invasion.

The President agreed. Rusk later said, “We did not think that Khrushchev would respond to the quarantine with a nuclear strike, but we couldn’t know it.” Even if he did not, the crisis could last for months. Robert Kennedy expected a “very, very difficult winter.”

From the moment that the President was told of the missiles he had acted to ensure for himself and Ex Comm six days of quiet in which to scrutinize the problem from every angle. This may have been a legacy of what he had learned during the Berlin Crisis. Another President might have moved more hastily. The time that Kennedy bought for himself proved to be fortuitous: had he been compelled to make a decision within hours, he would probably have opted for an air strike.

Here the President also gained from his preference for secrecy and his superb sense of how to package foreign policy decisions for best advantage. From the start he knew that unless the missiles in Cuba and the American response were announced deftly, the world might be disgusted that the United States was risking nuclear war to remove missiles no more menacing than those along the Soviet border. Another President might not have taken such care to make sure that the missiles were not first revealed by the Russians, the New York Times, or CBS in a way that would undermine public support for his course of action.

Kennedy’s six days of quiet deliberation were a gift that no American President in a similar quandary will probably ever enjoy again. Were the Missile Crisis to occur in the political and journalistic culture of three decades later, an American television network with access to a private satellite might well have discovered the missiles and announced them to the world only hours after the President had learned about them.

In the wake of the revelation, Allied leaders might have demanded that nothing be done, noting that the missiles were no greater danger than what Western Europe had endured for years. Republican campaigners would have demanded that the President fulfill his September warning by ordering an air strike and invasion. Others would question whether he had known about the missiles for weeks and been trying to conceal the embarrassing fact until after the November elections.

Amid such a noisy furor, it would have been much more difficult for Kennedy to hold public support for a moderate course of action. In the overheated domestic atmosphere, choosing anything less than air strike and invasion might have caused him to be denounced as an appeaser of Khrushchev.

On Sunday afternoon, the President called his NSC to the Oval Room. Rusk reported that State was drafting letters to forty-three heads of government, UN and OAS resolutions, a quarantine proclamation, and a list of precautions to be taken by American embassies around the world against riots and demonstrations. Admiral Anderson declared, “Mr. President, the Navy will not let you down.”

After the Soviets detonated their first atomic bomb in 1949, American defense planners had begun drawing up plans for evacuation of the President and his highest officials. The Army Corps of Engineers built a huge secret underground shelter out of a mountain in the Virginia countryside called Mount Weather. If a nuclear attack seemed imminent, the President, other top leaders, and their families were supposed to rush there by helicopter.

Dean Rusk thought the plan “psychologically silly”: after a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union, “the first band of shivering survivors that could reach a President or a Secretary of State would hang him under the nearest tree.” Nevertheless Kennedy was reminded to raise the matter with his wife.

Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy’s fastidious eye for art, furniture, and clothes, her indirect public manner, and her refusal to air political opinions all helped to obscure her influence on her husband’s politics and his relations with other politicians. She said, “I think the best thing I could do was to be a distraction. Jack lived and breathed politics all day long. If he came home to more table thumping, how could he ever relax?”

When she asked him about Laos or another crisis dominating the headlines, he often told her, “Oh, gosh, kid, I’ve had that on me all day. Ask Bundy to let you see the cables.” As she later recalled, she would read the cables until the flow of problems “depressed” her. After Kennedy received a notably imperious missive from de Gaulle, Bundy wrote her, “I am mindful of your warning not to fill your mind with official business, but on this one I have the President’s very energetic approval for the notion that you will want to see it.” She thanked him for letting her see his “treasure.”

Arthur Schlesinger sent over a “glowing piece” from a London paper hailing the President as a new Henry V. She wrote back, “The Telegraph article is unbelievable! Couldn’t you translate the Henry V part and send it to de Gaulle?”

Jacqueline’s approach to life was less intellectual or moral than aesthetic. She saw international affairs (although not most of domestic politics) as a drama and her husband, in political terms, as a hero moving through a great historical pageant. She recalled growing up thinking that politics was “corny old men shouting on the Fourth of July” and that history was “something that bitter old men wrote.” Then she had realized that “for Jack, history was full of heroes”—the Knights of the Round Table, Melbourne, the protagonists of Profiles in Courage. In the spring of 1960, she had watched him read Mary Renault’s The King Must Die.

The Telegraph piece was not the first time the parallel between her husband and Henry V had occurred to her. When the Grand Duchess of Luxembourg was scheduled to visit the White House, the First Lady asked Basil Rathbone to read the St. Crispin’s Day speech from Shakespeare’s play. The actor doubted that a speech about murdering kings was appropriate for a duchess.

She wrote Rathbone that Henry V was one of the President’s favorites “for whatever lovely dreams of leading or being led on to victory lurk in his soul” and that the play “reminds me of him—though I don’t think he knows that!” She insisted that “of all the speeches that make you care and want to make the extra effort—sacrifice, fight, or die—this is the one. The only person I would not wish you to say it in front of was Khrushchev, as we are not united in purpose*—but tiny Luxembourg.… We are all striving for the same brave things today.”

On Friday evening, November 22, 1963, she asked the Attorney General, “What’s the line between history and drama?”

The drama and high style later remembered of the Kennedy White House were Jacqueline’s contribution. Before their marriage in 1953, when Kennedy gave a dinner party, a houseman would make do with a hot plate. For a period, the only liquor in his Georgetown house was Scotch, sent by Joseph Kennedy. A colleague recalled a Kennedy meal at which “we had chicken and we drank Scotch before, during, and after the dinner.” One of the Congressman’s aides noticed that he wore only four winter suits.

After Kennedy’s election to the Senate in 1952, Joseph Kennedy urged his son to find a wife, worried that, like Stevenson, his son might become the victim of a whispering campaign that he was a homosexual. The elder Kennedy told his friend Dorothy Schiff, publisher of the New York Post, “We thought of Grace Kelly, but she was too Hollywood.” He was delighted when his son shifted his courtship of Jacqueline Bouvier into high gear.

Her ability to invest her husband’s career with romance was badly tested during their early marriage by his constant political travels and his uninterrupted pursuit of other women. But it survived. After the Los Angeles convention, she painted a portrait of him returning triumphantly in Napoleonic garb. That November, she marked her ballot only for her husband: “I didn’t want to dilute it by voting for anyone else.”

Entering the White House, she was appalled by the “Statler Hilton” decor of the Eisenhowers and “terrified” by the prospect of “all those eyes just staring,” the aides who “hit the White House with their Dictaphones running.” Ben Bradlee found her “nervous and distraught” when she heard he was keeping a diary. Staff members were told that “Mrs. Kennedy requests that you save all notes and memoranda you receive from her.… She will request these back for her files and her library at the end of the Administration.”*

During the late 1950s, she had feared that she was a political liability to her husband and that everyone thought her a Newport snob who had bouffant hair and French clothes and hated politics: “Oh, Jack, I’m so sorry for you that I’m such a dud.” He told her that he loved her as she was.

In the White House, probably no one was more surprised than he at her omnipresence on the covers of fan magazines, the larger crowds and cries of “Jackie!” when she appeared with him in public. She helped assuage her class-conscious husband’s vague feeling of social and cultural inferiority; in November 1963, he encouraged her to show “those cheap Texas broads” what good taste was.

Noting his tendency to compartmentalize his relationships, Jacqueline later said, “Mine was the happiness compartment.” He learned from her knowledge of drawing and French furniture; when she delved into eighteenth-century French history, he took the book from her and found out about Louis XIV’s mistresses before she could.

The White House brought a regularity to their life together that had been absent during the years Kennedy spent campaigning for President. She arranged small dinners to divert him; sometimes she put on phonograph records such as Jimmy Dean’s rendition of the ballad “PT-109,” which she loved, or Lerner and Loewe’s Camelot, after which there might be a moment of dancing. The President would vanish into his bedroom to work or make telephone calls, reappearing in time to bid their guests good night.

Still the marriage was subject to the tensions generated by a President unwilling to give up other women and a First Lady unwilling to perform domestic political errands. Lem Billings recalled Kennedy’s exasperation about his wife’s spending habits: “He just didn’t like to spend money on little things. He was very much in the habit of spending a hell of a lot of money on his career. That was spent like there was no tomorrow. When he died, he had used up all his cash.”

Mrs. Kennedy often departed alone for Glen Ora, New York, Hyannis Port, and Europe. When her husband persuaded her to make a Texas campaign trip in November 1963, it was to be the first time she had ventured west of Virginia since the Inauguration. During that same period, she had traveled abroad a number of times.*

Galbraith found that Jacqueline “had always a sharper view than her husband of the people around the Presidency, and while Kennedy leaned toward charity, she leaned to truth.” Galbraith thought she “concerned herself excessively with dress and related artifacts of style,” saying of General Lemnitzer, for instance, “We all thought well of him until he made the mistake of coming into the White House one Saturday morning in a sport jacket.”†

In thanks for a volume of poetry, she wrote Roswell Gilpatric that a gift of such rare sensitivity could not have come from someone like “Antonio Celebrezze‡ or Dean Rusk.”

The President’s high opinion of men like Gilpatric, McNamara, Dillon, Bundy, Schlesinger, and Galbraith was bolstered by the fact that they met the First Lady’s aesthetic standards. He was unaffected by her affection for Stevenson or her references to O’Donnell as “the wolfhound.” He cautioned her to avoid saying even to him that she disliked some political figure because it would affect the way she acted toward the person.

Gilpatric recalled that “she was always asking me all kinds of questions about the Pentagon, about the flow of power. She had heard her husband mention all kinds of names of people at the Pentagon and she wanted to know what kind of power they had, whether they were motivated mostly by ambition or by their loyalty to the President. She was deeply concerned with how much they could be trusted.… She was very, very astute.”

Jacqueline’s knowledge of French, Spanish, and Italian, her sense of history and ease with foreign political figures (greater than her ease with their American counterparts), helped smooth the President’s diplomacy. In private she was said to perform uncanny impersonations of dozens of world leaders she had met: Adenauer, the Shah, Queen Frederika of Greece, Sukarno, who during his Washington visit salaciously invited the First Lady to visit Indonesia without her husband.

She told the President that before they left the White House she hoped someone would ask her who was the greatest statesman she had ever met: “And it isn’t going to be de Gaulle or Nehru or Macmillan or anyone. It’s going to be Lleras Camargo of Colombia.” This choice was in character: when the Kennedys went to Colombia in December 1961, President Alberto Lleras Camargo had proudly shown her through his presidential palace, a museum of Colombian history which inspired her in her restoration of the White House.

She enlisted Schlesinger and Goodwin to help save Abu Simbel and other Egyptian monuments threatened by the new Aswan Dam by securing funds from Congress and arranging a Tutankhamen show at the National Gallery. The mildly beneficial effect of the exercise on relations with Gamal Abdel Nasser did not enhance Kennedy’s popularity among Jewish voters. Schlesinger wrote the First Lady that with the financial and technical problems solved, “this leaves the political problems with which the President will have to deal.”

Jacqueline’s political interests extended beyond Bogotá and the Nile. McNamara felt that Kennedy consulted her “on any number of issues—I don’t mean in the sense of long, anguished discussions, but certainly she was informed of what was going on and expressed her views on almost everything.” General Clifton said, “She wouldn’t advise his staff, she would advise him. That’s why nobody knew about it.”

David Ormsby-Gore recalled that Jacqueline sent to the Library of Congress for books and articles on the background of political events, which she gave to the President—“her way of encouraging him to share his thoughts and troubles with her.” Ormsby-Gore said that more than once he heard Jacqueline press the President to normalize relations with the Soviet Union.

While deliberating over the missiles in Cuba, he astonished her by calling her at midday and asking her to join him for a walk in the Rose Garden. “He was sharing with her the possible horror of what might happen,” said Charles Spalding. “If it was earlier in their marriage, I don’t think he would have called her then. But things were beginning to break up in his head.”

Early in her husband’s Presidency, she had arranged to see the White House bomb shelter, built during World War II four levels below the state floor. When the door was opened, a small army of Signal Corps men sprang to their feet. She glanced in and quickly left. “How amazing! I didn’t expect to find so much humanity! I thought it would be a great big room that we could use as an indoor recreation room for the children. I even had plans for a basketball court in there.”

Now the President asked his wife whether she wished to go to the government’s great artificial cavern in the mountains. With her unerring sense of both history and drama, she told him that if nuclear war began she preferred to come over to the Oval Office and share whatever happened to him.

*This quotation and those that follow from the Cabinet Room meetings of this date are taken from transcripts made from the President’s secret tapes and from those audio copies of the actual recordings that are available. In the case of the latter, what appears in the transcript has been very occasionally revised in slight degree to conform more exactly with the audiotapes. Most of the “uhs” and “ums” have been omitted.

†Someone wrote a draft of a twenty-four-hour ultimatum to “Mr. F. C.,” saying that “to serve their interests,” the Soviets had “justified the Western Hemisphere countries in making an attack on Cuba which would lead to the overthrow of your regime.” Unless the United States “can receive assurances from you … by public or private channels that you will not tolerate this misuse of Cuban territory … then we and our friends shall, of course, have to act.”

An accompanying note conceded that Castro was “unlikely on short notice to be able to accustom himself to the idea of help from the U.S. for any internal struggles a favorable response might cause. We must, of course, be prepared for a 4-hour TV appearance, revealing and denouncing our approach. But it seems likely that he is aware that Soviet offers of support have not been made in categorical terms and that his internal position is not one of great strength.… Presumably the old-line Communist elements would plump for a flat rejection of the U.S. approach. This might lead to a major flare-up between the two groups, of considerable potential advantage to us.”

* McCone was arranging the funeral of his stepson in Seattle after the boy’s death in a sports-car accident.

†The Chairman himself could not have said it better.

*One analyst later quipped that it wasn’t the Kremlinologists who had erred, but Khrushchev.

*He did not specify which ones or how.

* Meaning a defensive military buildup in Cuba.

*Almost certainly meaning a Soviet attack on Berlin.

†In retrospect, Robert may have thought so too. He omitted his suggestion about Guantanamo and the Maine from Thirteen Days.

*This referred to the Formosa Straits crisis of 1958, when Mainland China tried using shelling and a naval blockade to reduce Nationalist China’s ability to resupply Quemoy and Matsu. Eisenhower had warned that if Quemoy seemed about to be overwhelmed, he would do whatever was necessary. To the area he ordered what was called the “most powerful air-naval striking force” in American history, which was known to include nuclear weapons. Khrushchev complained to the President by letter about American “threats and atomic blackmail” but withheld Soviet support from the Chinese adventure.

In a September 1959 speech, Kennedy said that one lesson from the Formosa episode was that a minor power like Chiang Kai-shek must not be allowed to make unilateral decisions that “dragged” the world into world war—a lesson he did not forget in both the Berlin and Cuban crises.

The first day of the Missile Crisis was not the first time the parallel between Formosa 1958 and Cuba 1962 had occurred to Kennedy. In September, Republicans had modeled their demands for a congressional resolution about Cuba on a similar document enacted at the time of the Formosa crisis.

*The complete record of these meetings only became known to historians when transcripts and copies of the President’s secret tapes, with excisions for national security reasons, were released by the Kennedy Library in 1983.

*Arthur Krock felt this endorsement of the Monroe Doctrine was insufficient. He accused the President of substituting for it a “Kennedy Doctrine” under which the United States would act only if a foreign power was “endangering our peace and safety.” Krock was correct. It was another instance of the President’s extraordinary good fortune that his critics never succeeded in forcing him to articulate and defend such a “Kennedy Doctrine,” which could have caused him serious domestic political damage.

†Bundy recalled the “intense feeling that we had been deliberately deceived.” Sorensen later felt that had the Soviets announced the missiles in Cuba, as the United States had its missiles in Turkey, Kennedy “would have found it much more difficult to mobilize world opinion on his side.”

* Robert Kennedy, indulging his unfortunate tendency to decide who was a patriot and who was not, later said he was “shocked” that Bohlen “ran out on us” and left “this country in a crisis.” This was especially unfair because, to fulfill his responsibilities, Bohlen knew he was missing the greatest challenge of his career.

*Noting Rusk’s comment that he had been “playing the role of the ‘dumb dodo,’” Robert Kennedy later said, “I thought it was a strange way of putting it.”

*For example, in an oral history interview years later, Robert charged that Rusk, his chief major antagonist in the administration, “had a virtually complete breakdown mentally and physically.” It is virtually impossible to find evidence that this accusation had any basis in fact. Rusk himself later denied it. Historians who rely on Robert Kennedy’s oral histories must remember the degree to which his recollections were distorted by a prism of intense loyalties and antipathies. By 1965, when Kennedy, by then Senator from New York, gave this particular interview, he and Rusk were no longer uneasy colleagues in his brother’s administration but open political enemies.

During retirement, in his quiet way, Rusk was not averse to settling scores. In an interview with this author, he said that Robert “didn’t have all that much influence at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. His role has been somewhat exaggerated.… There was a heavy emotional content through that book Thirteen Days. But that emotion was personal to Bobby Kennedy. This was a first experience for him. But fortunately, President Kennedy and other principal advisers were very calm and cool during this period.”

*Adlai Stevenson felt the same way. In his Wednesday note he had written the President that “talking with K” through an emissary “would afford a chance of uncovering his motives and objectives far better than correspondence through the ‘usual channels.’” He went on to recommend that Kennedy’s first public announcement of missiles in Cuba not mention that an attack was imminent: “Because an attack would very likely result in Soviet reprisals somewhere—Turkey, Berlin, etc.—it is most important that we have as much of the world with us as possible. To start or risk starting a nuclear war is bound to be divisive at best, and the judgments of history seldom coincide with the tempers of the moment.”

*Although Gromyko did not say so, this would have given the Russians more time to rush the missiles to completion.

†Despite Kennedy’s much-expressed indignation about leaks, in late October the President caused portions of his session with Gromyko to be leaked to the press. A State Department official allowed Max Frankel of the New York Times to take verbatim notes from the transcript to show “Gromyko’s perfidy.”

*Khrushchev’s memory is cast into doubt by the fact that in the same passage of his memoirs he also claimed that during this visit Rusk also told Gromyko about the U-2 pictures and said, “We know everything.” It is possible that Gromyko portrayed Rusk as tipsy in order to feed the Chairman’s conceits about the American lack of will. The Secretary of State used alcohol, but there is no evidence that any foreign diplomat ever saw him out of control.

* Dining once with other New Frontiersmen at Hickory Hill, where prayer before meals was obligatory, John Kenneth Galbraith marveled that “so many lifelong heretics should so suddenly become so devout from being in the house of the Attorney General of the United States who was also the brother of the President.”

*Sorensen took notes: “The Soviets will probably be able to point to one or more U.S. statements in the past that our base structure, including missile bases, was clearly defensive in purpose. Don’t see how to deal with this in the statement, but perhaps it could be stated that in the context of the then-publicly-known facts, these statements could not have had an ambiguous interpretation as to offensive-vs.-defensive distinctions.”

†According to General Volkogonov in 1989, the Soviet Defense Ministry had planned a force of forty-two Il-28s, forty-two MiG-21s and twenty-four SAM batteries, as well as twelve missile-carrying PT-boats and cruise missile batteries.

*As he was contemplating doing against President Lyndon Johnson over Vietnam at the time of his death in 1965.

*Kennedy was correct. Johnson would speak of “that fat ass Stevenson” as “the kind of man who squats when he pees,” which suggested to Schlesinger that Johnson thought Stevenson a homosexual.

After the Libertyville meeting, Joseph Kennedy told Raskin, “I warned Jack it would be a waste of time because Stevenson was the kind of guy who normally would have volunteered his support as soon as it become apparent that Jack was the front-runner. Jack insisted on going all the way to Libertyville for nothing. All he got was some doubletalk. Fortunately we will win without him. I wouldn’t trust him as Secretary of State anyway. He has too much trouble making up his mind.”

*During Stevenson’s tenure at the UN, Rusk heeded Stevenson’s sensitivities by avoiding opportunities to speak in the General Assembly, as foreign ministers customarily do; he said that in light of his world stature Stevenson should be given a free hand in New York.

*The First Lady was not immune to the Kennedy-Sorensen school of heroic rhetoric.

*In 1965, when she read a draft of Arthur Schlesinger’s A Thousand Days, she implored him to “take me out” of the book “wherever you can” and eliminate “things I think are too personal. That is the only thing that can remain private for JFK—With everyone writing books—there won’t be one shred of his whole life that the whole world won’t know about. But the world has no right to his private life with me—I shared all those rooms with him—not with the Book of the Month readers + I don’t want them snooping through those rooms now—even the bathtub—with the children—Please take all those parts out.”

When Schlesinger was publicly attacked for personal material that appeared in the book’s prepublication serialization in Life, he replied, “This is exactly the kind of intimate detail which critics and readers would be delighted to read if I—or any other historian—came across it while writing about President Jackson or President Roosevelt.”

*In August 1962, when the Gallup poll asked Americans what they liked most and least about their First Lady, the most frequent comment on the latter list was “travels too much, away from family.”

†One can imagine what she must have privately thought of the aesthetic presence on the New Frontier of Lyndon Johnson, whom Arthur Miller found at a White House dinner for André Malraux in May 1962 “wearing a ruffled blue shirt” and “almost demonstrably disdaining the occasion, standing with one knee raised and a shoe pressed against the immaculate wainscoting, studiously cleaning his fingernails with a file like an idler in front of a country store.”

‡Anthony Celebrezze, former Mayor of Cleveland, succeeded Ribicoff in July 1962 as Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare.