“The Moment We Hoped Would Never Come”
On Monday, October 22, Hale Boggs, the House Democratic Whip, was fishing in the Gulf of Mexico when a bottle was dropped by air into the water: “Call Operator 18, Washington. Urgent message from the President.” The Air Force flew House Republican leader Charles Halleck from Indiana to Washington at almost the speed of sound. Other congressional leaders left the campaign trail boasting that the President needed their advice.
Dean Acheson flew to a SAC base north of London to brief David Bruce, who produced a bottle of Scotch from which they both drank. He left behind a CIA man to help Bruce show the U-2 pictures to Harold Macmillan. After peering at them, the Prime Minister said, “Now the Americans will realize what we here in England have lived through for this past many years.” He could not know that was almost exactly what Khrushchev had said before sending his missiles to Cuba.
Flying on to Paris, Acheson slipped into the Élysée to brief Charles de Gaulle, who asked whether he had come to inform or consult. Acheson said, “We must be very clear about this. I have come to inform you of a decision which he has taken.” The French President said he did not need to see the U-2 pictures: a “great nation” did not act if there were “any doubt about the evidence.”
At Gettysburg, Eisenhower received a call from Kennedy, who told him of the speech planned for that evening. The General replied that without “all the background on file and communications and international conversation,” he could not offer advice, but that whatever the government decided to do would have his support.
The President told him he hoped prominent Republicans would not make the crisis “a partisan thing.” Eisenhower was “sure they wouldn’t.”
In Moscow, Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, who for eighteen months had been feeding thousands of pages of top-secret Soviet documents to British and American intelligence, was arrested. Richard Helms later said, “I remember very well that a meeting was scheduled with Penkovsky. We got no word and no word and no word. This really began to worry the hell out of me, and I went to McCone.… I burst through the door and said, ‘It looks to me as though we’ve lost Penkovsky.’”
That the Russians should arrest the Western agent now, after months of surveillance, was no surprise. During the missile confrontation, the Kremlin could not afford to leave a traitor in a position from which he could do more damage to the Soviet cause. McCone considered the arrest strictly an operational intelligence matter and did not mention it to his colleagues on Ex Comm.
Had Penkovsky been arrested a year earlier, the United States might not have been able to establish so quickly that the U-2 pictures showed MRBMs and IRBMs. As Helms recalled, were it not for the information smuggled by Penkovsky to the West, “the President would have been up against a very tough decision because he didn’t know if he could wait several days. Maybe they were in a firing position. How the hell is he going to know? Intelligence bought him the time he needed.”*
On Monday afternoon, tossing his coat over his shoulder, Robert Kennedy walked from Justice to the White House for a three o’clock NSC meeting. The previous week, he had been so preoccupied that when an aide brought in documents for signing, he had to remind the Attorney General that there was “a human being in the room.” The aide said, “Something looks different here.” Kennedy replied, “I’m older.”
The President entered the Cabinet Room after a brief swim and luncheon with Jacqueline. He told his men that quarantine was going to be “a very tricky course, and we will never know whether this is the best course.… An air strike is tempting and I didn’t give up on it until yesterday morning.” As long as they could not be sure of annihilating all the missiles, a quarantine was “far less likely to provoke a nuclear response.”
Placing missiles outside the Soviet Union was a “drastic change” in Soviet policy. If he did not act against them, the Russians might think he would not act elsewhere, especially in Berlin. “It would create grave problems in Latin America, where there would be a feeling that the balance of power in this hemisphere was shifting away from us, that the Russians could throw their weight around right on our own doorstep.”
There was “a big difference” between the missiles in Cuba and those in Turkey and Italy: “Ours are an attempt to redress the balance of power in Europe.… But what is happening in Cuba is far different—a provocative change in the delicate status quo in this hemisphere.… The very secrecy of this operation, and attempts to guard that secrecy even by Khrushchev himself, poses an obvious danger to us that we can’t ignore.… The next move is up to the Russians.”
As Fidel Castro recalled, he was alarmed by the “movements in Washington, the convocation, the special meetings.… We understood by instinct, by smell, that something would happen.”
That afternoon, preparing for the North American invasion that he believed to be imminent, he evidently mobilized 270,000 Cubans. His Army Chief of Staff, Sergio del Valle, estimated that they would suffer more than a hundred thousand casualties. But he insisted that the Cuban people were “ready to die defending the revolution.” They were “utterly determined to fight to the last man.”
At five-thirty, Kennedy opened his meeting with seventeen leaders of Congress, telling Everett Dirksen of Illinois, the chief Senate Republican, “Tonight you’re going to get reelected.” Dirksen knew that the President had been speaking for his opponent when called back to Washington: “That was a nice speech you gave for Sid Yates in Chicago. Too bad you caught that cold making it.”
The merry atmosphere abruptly halted when Kennedy revealed the presence of missiles in Cuba. “Why, that’s right next to my home state,” cried George Smathers. “We never knew anything about it!”
Unlike his colleagues, Senator Richard Russell already knew about the missiles. Before going to Georgia, he had asked the White House for a briefing on Cuba. Bundy had warned the President that it would be “very bad for him to go home with an incomplete picture after he has asked for a briefing.” The President had Lyndon Johnson confide the secret to his old friend during an automobile ride along the Potomac.
Now, as Kennedy described his quarantine plan, Russell scrawled, “Khrushchev believes what he says—we are afraid.” When the President fell silent, Russell said he could not live with himself unless he spoke his mind. A quarantine was a “halfway measure.… If we let the Communists get away with it here, we’d be plagued by them for the rest of our lives.” Why not “invade Cuba and remove the missiles physically, and at the same time remove Mr. Castro physically and set up a new and different government?”
Johnson evidently agreed but dared not speak out himself. Robert Kennedy noticed that as his brother defended the quarantine, the Vice President “was shaking his head, mad.”
The President was astounded when Fulbright declared that a quarantine was the wrong decision, and that an invasion would be “less provocative and less inclined to precipitate a war with Russia.”
Struggling to contain his anger, Kennedy looked at his abdomen and drummed the arm of his chair. He told Fulbright, “You’re for an invasion of Cuba, Bill? You and Senator Russell? … Last Tuesday, I was for an air strike or an invasion myself, but after four more days of deliberations, we decided that was not the wisest first move. And you would too, if you had more time to think about it.”
With the two Senate Democrats in open opposition, others complained that the quarantine was too slow and irrelevant to the scale of the danger. Some said they would back the President in public only because the hour was so dangerous. For several moments, everyone talked at once. Dirksen and Halleck told the President they would support him but, like de Gaulle, insisted that the record show they had been informed, not consulted.
Kennedy walked back to the family quarters with O’Donnell to dress for his speech. Mocking the leaders, he chirped, “Oh, sure, we support you, Mr. President. But … if it goes wrong, we’ll knock your block off.” Later he said, “The trouble is that when you get a group of Senators together, they are always dominated by the man who takes the boldest and strongest line.… After Russell spoke, no one wanted to take issue with him.”
Dean Rusk lamented his failure to consult at least a few leaders earlier: “When you get the congressional leaders in there two or three hours before a major speech … which would precipitate a major crisis, about the only question for these Congressmen is ‘Are you ready to support your country in a moment of crisis?’”
Most of the leaders did not fault Kennedy for his worry about leaks, but the bitter memory of being ignored during the first week of the Missile Crisis may have been one influence leading to the War Powers Act, enacted by Congress in 1973 in order to gain more authority over decision-making at times of foreign crisis.*
As the President donned a blue shirt for television, Sorensen noticed that he seemed more weary from his wrangling with the leaders than during the week of agonizing about Cuba. Kennedy said, “If they want this job, fuck ’em. They can have it. It’s no great joy to me.”
A message arrived from Harold Macmillan warning the President to prepare for Soviet retaliation against Berlin and the “weaker parts of the Free World defense system.”
Rusk called Dobrynin to the State Department and gave him a copy of the President’s speech. Uninformed by his own government about the missiles, the Ambassador said, “It is going to be terrible.”† Rusk noticed that “Dobrynin seemed to age ten years while we were talking. It had a real physical impact on him, because he realized that this would be a major crisis. I didn’t keep him too long, because I wanted him to get it on the wire back to Moscow.”
When Dobrynin emerged from the State Department, a reporter noted that he was “ashen-faced and visibly shaken.” Asked if a crisis was about to explode, he replied, “What do you think?” He waved Rusk’s manila envelope and slumped into his limousine.
In Moscow, Kohler received a cable from Rusk: “The following message from the President should be delivered to the Foreign Office for transmission to Khrushchev one hour before the delivery of the President’s speech.”
Drafted largely by Thompson, Kennedy’s message did not open with the usual “Dear Mr. Chairman” but the discourteous “Sir.” He had written that the one thing that had most concerned him was that Khrushchev’s government would not understand American will: “I have not assumed that you or any other sane man would, in this nuclear age, deliberately plunge the world into war, which it is crystal clear no country could win and which could only result in catastrophic consequences to the whole world, including the aggressor.”
Since Vienna, he had warned that the United States “could not tolerate any action on your part which in a major way disturbed the existing overall balance of power in the world.” Now he was “determined” to remove the threat in Cuba: “At the same time, I wish to point out that the action we are taking is the minimum necessary.… I hope that your Government will refrain from any action which would widen or deepen this already grave crisis and that we can agree to resume the path of peaceful negotiation.”
Soviet Foreign Ministry bureaucrats no longer slept through the day and worked through the night, as they once had done to keep in tune with Stalin. Long before dawn on Tuesday, by arrangement, Richard Davies brought the President’s message for Khrushchev to the large double glass doors of the Foreign Ministry. Alarmed, a young Russian officer said, “This must be bad news you have for us.” Davies said, “You’ll have to decide for yourself.”
At 6:55 P.M., Kennedy walked past Salinger and other aides, reporters, lights, cameras, and cables to his naval desk, covered with canvas and masking tape. Laced into his tight corset, he lowered himself mechanically onto two pillows, his back ramrod-straight. His face was thinner than usual, with dark rings about the eyes and deep creases in the forehead.
At seven, Evelyn Lincoln moved toward him with a hairbrush. As the television announcer began to speak, he waved her aside. Staring into the camera lens and then down at his script, the President began reading perhaps the most important address of the Cold War:
“Good evening, my fellow citizens. This Government, as promised, has maintained the closest surveillance of the Soviet military buildup on the island of Cuba. Within the past weeks, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island.” Their purpose: a “nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere.”
The United States had found medium-range missiles “capable of striking Washington, D.C., the Panama Canal, Mexico City, or any other city in the southeastern United States, in Central America, or in the Caribbean area.” Other uncompleted sites appeared to be designed to accommodate intermediate-range missiles capable of striking targets “as far north as Hudson Bay, Canada, and as far south as Lima, Peru.”
This was “an explicit threat to the peace and security of all the Americas,” defying tradition, the Rio Pact of 1947,* the September congressional resolution, the UN Charter, and his own public warnings of September 4 and 13.†
The buildup’s size made it clear “that it has been planned for some months.” Just last month, the Soviet government had said it had “no need” to locate its missiles outside the Soviet Union. “That statement was false.” On Thursday, Gromyko had “told me in my office that he was instructed to make it clear once again that Soviet assistance to Cuba—and I quote—‘pursued solely the purpose of contributing to the defense capabilities of Cuba.’ … That statement also was false.”‡
No nation could tolerate such “deliberate deception and offensive threats.… Nuclear weapons are so destructive and ballistic missiles are so swift that any substantially increased possibility of their use or any sudden change in their deployment may well be regarded as a definite threat to peace.” For years, the United States and the Soviet Union had never upset “the precarious status quo which insured that these weapons would not be used in the absence of some vital challenge.” American missiles had never been sent to another nation “under a cloak of secrecy and deception.”
But this “secret, swift, and extraordinary buildup,” in an area “well known to have a special and historical relationship to the United States,” this “sudden, clandestine decision to station strategic weapons for the first time outside of Soviet soil,” was “a deliberately provocative and unjustified change in the status quo which cannot be accepted by this country, if our courage or our commitments are ever to be trusted again by either friend or foe.” America’s “unswerving objective” must be to prevent the missiles’ use and to secure their elimination from the hemisphere.
Kennedy announced his “initial” course of action. (His official text italicized the word.) “To halt this offensive buildup, a strict quarantine on all offensive military equipment under shipment to Cuba is being initiated. All ships of any kind bound for Cuba from whatever nation or port will, if found to contain cargoes of offensive weapons, be turned back.”*
There would be more “close surveillance” of Cuba. If the buildup continued, “I have directed the Armed Forces to prepare for any eventualities.”† Any missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the hemisphere would bring “a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.” Guantanamo would be reinforced. The United States would ask for immediate meetings of the OAS and the UN.
“I call upon Chairman Khrushchev to halt and eliminate this clandestine, reckless, and provocative threat to world peace and to stable relations between our two nations. I call upon him further to abandon this course of world domination, and to join in an historic effort to end the perilous arms race and transform the history of man.‡
“He has an opportunity now to move the world back from the abyss of destruction, by returning to his government’s own words that it had no need to station missiles outside its own territory, and withdrawing these weapons from Cuba, by refraining from any action which will widen or deepen the present crisis, and then by participating in a search for peaceful and permanent solutions.” The President warned against any “hostile move” where the United States was committed—especially against “the brave people of West Berlin.”
Showing how long he expected the Missile Crisis to last, he warned that “many months of sacrifice and self-discipline lie ahead.… Our goal is not the victory of might, but the vindication of right.… God willing, that goal will be achieved.* Thank you, and good night.”
At 7:17, the lights went dark. Kennedy said, “Well, that’s it, unless the son of a bitch fouls it up.”
Bundy recalled years later, “We sure didn’t feel as good as that speech sounded.” In retrospect, he wondered whether some of the President’s language had not been overblown, pretentious, and excessively nerve-racking.†
The address was probably the most alarming ever delivered by an American President. Although it echoed Franklin Roosevelt’s Pearl Harbor message in language and meter, Roosevelt’s speech had been intended to calm the American people, Kennedy’s to frighten them. Roosevelt’s message was written to reassure Americans that the war would be won. Even without it, Pearl Harbor had already united the country behind the war effort. Kennedy knew that the missiles in Cuba were not open to such unambiguous interpretation as the attack on Hawaii.
Borrowing from the rhetorical tradition of his first State of the Union message, Kennedy’s address was designed to divert attention from his private belief that the missiles did not seriously increase the Soviet military danger and the fact that he had not warned Khrushchev against them until it was too late.* He knew that a less apocalyptic speech would not have been so successful in rallying Americans behind their President and lowering the “domestic political heat” he expected to feel after they learned that Keating had been right about missiles in Cuba after all.
In the “war room” of the Pentagon, eerie colored lights on the vast wall map glowed on, showing that theater commanders around the world were following Kennedy’s order to throw all major U.S. commands on alert for the first time since the Korean War.
An official Cuban spokesman called the quarantine “not only an act of war but a provocation for tragic world events.” Almost every major British newspaper wondered whether the President was overreacting: the British Isles had faced Soviet medium-range missiles for years. The pacifist British philosopher Bertrand Russell wired Kennedy, “Your action desperate … no conceivable justification.” He wired Khrushchev, “Your continued forbearance is our only hope.”†
Most Americans rallied around their President. In the Atlanta Constitution, Eugene Patterson wrote, “Now we are at a showdown that will test the nerve of America.” Time predicted that Kennedy’s “resolve” could prove “one of the decisive moments of the twentieth century.”
Despite his private opposition to the quarantine, Richard Russell wrote a constituent that “all good Americans intend to support our Commander-in-Chief.” The old diplomat Adolf Berle, who had stood with Franklin Roosevelt through the invasion of Poland and Pearl Harbor, wrote in his diary, “God help us all.”
Barry Goldwater called Kennedy’s action “welcome but belated.” Hugh Scott complained that nothing the President had said would “remove five thousand Russians and a half-million tons of military supplies from Cuba.”* The Republican chairman, William Miller, asked Americans to “pray” that Kennedy would not be governed by “the same timidity and indecision which doomed the Bay of Pigs.” The Harvard Crimson, for which Kennedy had once written editorials, complained of his “frenzied rejection” of diplomacy.
Kenneth Keating declared that the President’s speech had “taken Cuba out of politics.” Richard Nixon saw his California campaign going up in smoke: “Now I knew how Stevenson must have felt when Suez and the Hungarian rebellion flared up in the last days before the election in 1956.”
A Massachusetts schoolgirl wrote a friend, “Can you imagine not seeing another Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, birthday, dance, or even Halloween? … We’re just too young to die.”†
A Georgian wrote Kennedy, “Thank God you seem to be moving in the right direction at last.… What mystifies me is your apparent indignation that Khrushchev has lied to you.… Well, nobody else is surprised at him.… It must be a very bitter thought to you now to realize that if you had not sabotaged the Cuban invasion at the Bay of Pigs, this Cuban buildup would not have been possible. Well, maybe you will now learn and listen before it is forever too late.”
In Madison Square Garden, eight thousand members of the Conservative Party booed the President and roared, “Fight! Fight! Fight!”
In Moscow, Khrushchev was surprised and angry. According to Mikoyan’s son Sergo, the Chairman’s first impulse was to order that the quarantine line be stormed and that work on the missile sites be sped up. The Deputy Premier cautioned him against precipitate action.
On Tuesday at 3:10 P.M. Moscow time, Kuznetsov summoned Kohler to the Foreign Ministry and gave him a letter from the Chairman to Kennedy. It lambasted the quarantine as a “serious threat to the peace” and a “gross violation” of the UN Charter, violating “freedom of navigation on the high seas.” The “armaments now on Cuba, regardless of the classification to which they belong, are intended exclusively for defensive purposes, to secure the Cuban Republic against attack by an aggressor.” The President must “renounce” his actions.
Kuznetsov also gave Kohler a copy of an official Soviet statement to be broadcast by Radio Moscow at four. It told the Soviet people that Kennedy was placing Cuba “under naval blockade” and placing American forces in “combat readiness” but did not mention that these actions were in response to the installation of Soviet missiles in Cuba.
Khrushchev may have wished to conceal the fact of the missiles from the Soviet people in order to prevent them from being outraged in case they had to be removed. Silence about the missiles also helped Moscow to portray the President’s actions as pure aggression.
Both Khrushchev’s letter and this statement showed why in public and private he had been so careful to cast the buildup in Cuba as defensive. Contrary to later opinion that he had never prepared for the possibility that the President might discover and announce the missiles before he did, he had probably presumed that he could now argue that America was using brute force to strip “little Cuba” of the same kind of defense that the West had provided Turks and Italians: let the world declare Kennedy the transgressor and force him to abandon the blockade.
At times of Cold War crises like Suez, the U-2, and the Bay of Pigs, Khrushchev had indulged his penchant for fiery rhetoric only when there was little chance that it could inflame the situation to the point of nuclear war. The absence in both Soviet messages of provocative language and personal attacks on Kennedy (although the statement called the President’s threat of retaliation for a nuclear attack “hypocrisy”) showed the Chairman’s effort to keep the atmosphere calm.
Both documents portrayed the President’s actions primarily as a problem between the United States and Cuba. Perhaps the Russians felt that if they had to back down later, it would be far less embarrassing to do so under the fiction of resolving a conflict between the United States and a third country—not even a member of the Warsaw Pact—than to appear to be retreating from a naked confrontation between the superpowers.
The Soviet bloc announced a military alert, but this involved mainly mild and symbolic actions, such as cancellation of discharges and furloughs. Soviet forces were not redeployed or placed in high readiness. The State Department advised the White House that “the Soviet reaction thus far suggests a high degree of circumspection and implies that the Soviet Union may be carefully leaving the back door open for a retreat from the danger of general war over Cuba.”
On Tuesday evening, Khrushchev made his first public appearance since the world had learned of the Missile Crisis. With Mikoyan, Kozlov, Brezhnev, and Romanian guests, he attended an American performance of Boris Godunov, starring Jerome Hines, at the Bolshoi Theater. (One wonders what went through the Chairman’s mind when onstage a nobleman named Khrushchev was seized and beaten by peasants as anarchy spread through Russia.)
Had the Chairman wished to heat up the crisis, he would have boycotted an American performance. Not only did he attend but afterward he went backstage and raised a glass of champagne while Mikoyan toasted culture and American women.
That evening, Radio Moscow said that while the American blockade was “an act of piracy … an unheard-of violation of international law, the Soviet government could assure the United States “that not a single nuclear bomb will hit the United States unless aggression is committed.” But work on the missile sites was still forging ahead. Soviet ships were still steaming toward Cuba.
On Tuesday morning in Washington, Kennedy woke up, relieved that the Soviets had not bombed the Jupiters in Turkey and Italy, sealed off the Dardanelles, or closed the Autobahn.
He had been deeply worried that Khrushchev would “close down Berlin.” Etched in his mind was the knowledge that West Berliners were unlikely to survive a Soviet blockade longer than Cubans could survive the blockade imposed by the United States. Weeks later, Ben Bradlee found him haunted by the question of why Khrushchev did not blockade Berlin, as he had threatened at Vienna: the Chairman had “said it over and over and over again. And why didn’t he do it?”
Bundy later felt that Kennedy and others “who feared reprisal in Berlin were taking too much counsel of our own long anxieties and too little note of demonstrated Soviet patience.” Bundy believed that the Berlin crisis had been a showcase of “Khrushchev’s unwillingness to risk open war.”*
When the President met with Ex Comm, McCone warned that if the Russians threw a similar blockade around West Berlin, the West Berliners were likely to cave in more quickly than the Cubans.* Yet Robert Kennedy noticed “a certain spirit of lightness … not gaiety, certainly, but a feeling of relaxation perhaps. We had taken the first step, it wasn’t so bad, and we were still alive.”
All agreed that if one of the U-2s now repeatedly photographing Cuba were downed, American bombers and fighters should destroy a SAM site, but only after the President’s specific order. Kennedy asked McNamara to prepare for use of force against Cuba, if necessary: “I want to be able to feel that we will not have to waste any days having to get ready.”
The President and Rusk had been worried that the OAS would not endorse the quarantine, which required a two-thirds vote. Without this sanction, the United States would have a harder time defending itself against Soviet charges of piracy. But at 4:45 P.M., all twenty members approved.
Ex Comm met at six o’clock. The President approved a reply to Khrushchev’s letter, drafted by George Ball: “I hope that you will issue immediately the necessary instructions to your ships to observe the terms of the quarantine … which will go into effect at 1400 hours Greenwich time October 24.” Bundy had scrawled in a final sentence—“We have no desire to seize a fire upon your march”—but struck it out.
The quarantine was to be composed of sixteen destroyers, three cruisers, an antisubmarine aircraft carrier, and six utility ships, with almost 150 others in reserve. Since for now petroleum, oil, and lubricants were not to be kept out of Cuba, all Soviet tankers would be let through.
Kennedy said that if a vessel refused to stop at the quarantine line, the Navy should try to avoid sinking the ship and killing Soviet troops: fire at the rudder or propeller. McNamara noted that instead of boarding the hostile vessel, the Navy could tow it to Jacksonville or Charleston.
The President was worried that they would “go through all of this effort and then find out there’s baby food on it.” He ordered the Navy to place highest priority on tracking the Soviet submarines sliding into the Caribbean and on the protection of American aircraft carriers and other vessels.
At 7:06 P.M., he nervously signed the formal instrument of quarantine. As popping flashbulbs cast ghostly shadows on the Oval Office walls, the President thrice had to ask what date it was. Reporters noticed that he was not dressed as fastidiously as usual. One side of his collar jutted over the lapel; the handkerchief in his breast pocket was not folded to keep the initials JFK from showing. Someone thought that for the first time in his life, Kennedy looked older than his age.
Usually the President signed a bill with numerous pens, which he handed out to the sponsors. This time he signed with one. He told his small audience, “We’ll all be a lot wiser tomorrow.”
Later he returned to his abiding anxiety: “The great danger and risk in all of this is a miscalculation, a mistake in judgment.” He had lately read Barbara Tuchman’s bestseller The Guns of August, about the faulty assumptions that had led to World War I. He was certain that neither the United States nor the Soviet Union wanted a showdown over Cuba but feared that misunderstanding and pride might force the two powers into war.
At a Soviet Embassy reception that evening, a Soviet military attaché loudly declared that Soviet captains heading for Cuba had been told to defy the American blockade: “If it is decreed that those men must die, then they will obey their orders and stay on course, or be sunk.” This was said in the hearing of foreign guests, who could be relied upon to send it on to Western intelligence services.*
At 9:30 P.M., Robert Kennedy went to see Dobrynin in his third-floor apartment at the Soviet Embassy. As Dobrynin recalled, “Kennedy said that he came alone to share some thoughts with me, some concern about our relations in connection with … the Cuban crisis.” The Attorney General mentioned the attaché’s statement. Dobrynin said, “He’s the one who knows what the Navy is going to do, not I.”
Robert reminded the Ambassador that in early September he had assured him that the Russians had no intention of placing offensive missiles in Cuba. Based on this and other similar assurances, the President had taken a “far less belligerent position” than people like Senator Keating and “assured the American people that there was nothing to be concerned about” in Cuba.
The President had thought he had built “a very helpful personal relationship with Mr. Khrushchev” with “mutual trust and confidence between them on which he could rely.” By sneaking nuclear missiles into Cuba, the Soviet leaders had shown themselves to be “hypocritical, misleading, and false.”
Dobrynin responded that Khrushchev had informed him there were no such missiles in Cuba. As far as he knew, there still were none. He asked why the President had not asked Gromyko about the missiles when they met last week: “He would have received a proper answer to the question.” Kennedy replied by asking why Gromyko had not volunteered the information to the President. What orders had Soviet ships been given for the moment they encountered the quarantine line?
Dobrynin reported that Soviet captains “have an order to continue their course to Cuba.” President Kennedy’s action “contradicts international law.” Soviet ships were “in international waters” and had “no reason to subordinate themselves to an arbitrary decision of the President of another country.” Dobrynin felt that his response “made Kennedy a bit nervous.”
The Attorney General said, “Our military vessels have an order of President Kennedy to intercept them.” Dobrynin countered, “Ours have an order to continue on.” Kennedy said, “I do not know how this will end.”
Dobrynin cabled Moscow about the conversation. As he later recalled, “All my telegrams were coded.… From Western Union, a black man rode a bicycle, came to our embassy. We gave him the cables. And he, at such a speed—we tried to urge him on—rode back to Western Union, where the cable was sent to Moscow.… This was a nerve-racking experience. We sat there, wondering if he would be fast enough to deliver the important communication.”
The Maharajah and Maharani of Jaipur, who had lavishly entertained Jacqueline Kennedy in India, had been scheduled to stay at the White House and be feted at a private White House dinner dance on Tuesday night.
The President had no desire to look like Nero fiddling as Rome burned. Instead, the Jaipurs were installed in Blair House. The dance was changed to a small dinner to accommodate those overseas guests told of the cancellation too late to change their plans. The beautiful Maharani had just won a seat in the Indian Parliament on the Swatantra (“Goldwater”) ticket. Kennedy teased her: “I hear you are the Barry Goldwater of India.” He toasted her political debut and failed to persuade his old London friend J. J. “Jakie” Astor to respond.
After the meal, he sat with David Ormsby-Gore in the large center hall of the family quarters. Great-grandson of Lord Salisbury, Ormsby-Gore was a cousin of Kathleen Kennedy’s husband, Lord Hartington. As a progressive Tory Member of Parliament and Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, he had concentrated on nuclear testing and disarmament.
After the 1960 election, the President-elect told him he must come to Washington as Ambassador. Flying from Key West to Washington the following March, he took the matter up with Macmillan. When the appointment was made, Ormsby-Gore wrote Kennedy, “I must let you know how privileged I feel to be accredited to the greatest country on earth at a period when it is under your exciting leadership.” He was “convinced” that they could turn the tide of history “in our favour and that communism can be manoeuvred into a fatal decline.”
Queen Elizabeth II knighted the new envoy before his departure. She wrote the President in the spring of 1962 that Ormsby-Gore was “highly thought of here”: it was “excellent news that he and Cissie are making their mark in Washington.”
The Ormsby-Gores were frequent Kennedy houseguests at Hyannis Port, Glen Ora, Newport; Palm Beach. The President said, “I trust David as I would my own Cabinet.” He was amused when his British friend quoted Salisbury’s observation that conducting foreign policy in a democracy was like playing bridge with “a number of people standing behind your chair advising you out loud which card you should play.”
Sometimes the relationship was almost too close. In May 1962, Ormsby-Gore told the President that Macmillan was taking “an ostrich position” on the Congo and that the British negotiator, Lord Dundee, was “a fool.” After a talk in July 1962, he promised Kennedy to “heed your parting advice about arguing our nuclear matters in terms of our interests, not yours.”
When the Prime Minister indiscreetly sent congratulations to Edward Kennedy after his Senate primary victory in Massachusetts, Ormsby-Gore wrote the President that Macmillan’s “practically incomprehensible message” was “wholly out of order.” There would be “hell to pay if knowledge of its existence leaked out.”
Despite his friendship with Kennedy, the Ambassador had wired Macmillan on Monday night that he could not believe that the missiles “so far landed” in Cuba posed “any significant military threat to the United States.” Now he warned the President that many Englishmen were wondering whether the U-2 evidence that had started this crisis had been faked; couldn’t the pictures be released? The Labour Party leader Hugh Gaitskell had even spoken of the “so-called missiles” in Cuba.
Salinger and David Bruce had made the same argument, but Ormsby-Gore’s plea won the day: Kennedy sent for a file of U-2 pictures. As the other guests were served after-dinner drinks, he and his British friend combed through the prints for those that seemed most dramatic. He ordered their release the next day.
Robert Kennedy arrived, looking bleak and disheveled. He reported on his meeting with Dobrynin. Talking in machine-gun bursts, his eyes screwed tight, the President wondered aloud whether he should propose an immediate summit with Khrushchev. Then he reconsidered: as with Berlin, before any negotiation Khrushchev must be convinced of his determination to get the missiles out of Cuba. Before a summit took place—and it should—he wanted to have more cards to play.
Ormsby-Gore reminded him that the U.S. Navy had fixed the quarantine line at eight hundred miles: a Soviet ship would probably have to be intercepted just a few hours after the blockade began. Khrushchev had hard decisions to make. Every additional hour could make it easier for him to retreat gracefully. Why not draw the quarantine line closer to Cuba and give the Russians a little more time?
Kennedy called McNamara and ordered him, despite emotional Navy protests, to narrow the quarantine zone to a radius of five hundred miles from Cuba.
The President and Ex Comm were operating on the prudent assumption that there were nuclear warheads in Cuba, but American intelligence had found no conclusive evidence that the weapons had actually arrived.*
According to the Soviet general Dimitri Volkogonov, twenty warheads had indeed reached the island in late September or early October. Twenty more were aboard the Poltava, which had come to Cuba in mid-September, returned to Odessa, and was sailing again toward the island.*
Volkogonov recalled that the Soviets kept the twenty warheads “well away” from the MRBMs to reduce the danger that some madman could start a nuclear exchange. Had Khrushchev issued an order to prepare the missiles for war, it would have taken four hours to target them and fifteen minutes more for countdown.†
On Wednesday before dawn, Richard Davies took a list of quarantine rules to the Soviet Foreign Ministry. Stepping off the elevator onto a high floor, he saw a Russian wearing a gas mask rush by. He was certain that the scene had been staged for his benefit.
He told Soviet diplomats that if Americans were allowed to inspect ships in Leningrad, Odessa, or Vladivostok before their hatches were closed and they contained no contraband, they would be certified to pass through the American quarantine line. He later recalled, “This was high impertinence. Of course, they never let us into any of those places.”
Still, the bureaucrats had clearly been ordered to do nothing that might in some small way escalate the crisis. Davies found that “in great contrast to the usual brusque and rude treatment,” they were “gushingly polite,” asking, “How are the children? … Are you happy in our country?”
Foy Kohler decided to keep his get-acquainted appointments with Soviet officials. To his surprise, no one canceled.
Soviet factories and farms held “spontaneous” demonstrations against the United States. In Moscow, a mob used pocket mirrors to divert the rays of the sun and blind workers inside the American Embassy. Shouting “Hands off Cuba!” the Russians threw rocks at the windows and dented Kohler’s Cadillac. For safety, the Ambassador gathered American children at Spaso House.
Khrushchev wanted to send a new message to Kennedy. Had Thompson remained as Ambassador, he probably would have sent for him. Kohler he considered a bureaucrat who had contributed to the President’s truculence over Berlin. Instead the Chairman tried his luck with another channel.
William Knox, president of the Westinghouse Electric International Company, was in Moscow to talk about patents. He had met Khrushchev in New York in 1960. On Wednesday, rising from lunch, he was told that the Chairman wished to see him within the hour. Arriving at the Kremlin, he noticed that Khrushchev was “very tired.”
Khrushchev said that Monday had been a “very black day.” Before the President’s speech, Rusk and Gromyko had “practically agreed” on nuclear testing and Berlin negotiations. Despite his many difficulties with Eisenhower he believed, if the General were still in the White House, the Cuban problem would have been handled in a much more “mature” manner. He would hate to think that President Kennedy’s handling of Cuba was connected with the congressional elections.
Repeating his private lament of 1960, the Chairman said that one reason negotiation with this President was so difficult was his youth: “How can I deal with a man who is younger than my son?” Kennedy had embarked on a “very, very dangerous” policy. He warned that if U.S. Navy ships stopped and searched an unarmed Soviet merchant vessel, Soviet submarines would sink them.
He offered his own definition of offensive and defensive weapons: “If I point a pistol at you like this in order to attack you, the pistol is an offensive weapon. But if I aim to keep you from shooting me, it is defensive, no?” The United States claimed that its Turkish bases were defensive, but what was the range of the missiles there?
For the first time to Western ears Khrushchev conceded that there were ground-to-ground missiles and nuclear warheads on Cuba.* The Cubans, he said, were “very volatile” people. The missiles would never be fired except on his order.
He told one of his favorite stories, about the man who fell on hard times and had to live with a goat. He hated the smell but got used to it. Well, the Russians had been living with goats in Turkey, Greece, Italy, and other NATO countries. The Americans now had their goat in Cuba. “You are not happy about it … but you’ll learn to live with it.” He said he was anxious to see President Kennedy. At a summit, “without a circus atmosphere,” they could resolve some of their problems.*
In a public reply to Bertrand Russell’s telegram that same day, Khrushchev said that a summit might “remove the danger of unleashing a thermonuclear war.… When aggression is unleashed by the Americans, such a meeting will already become impossible and useless.”
The Chairman probably made his summit offer in the hope that if Kennedy responded favorably, he might postpone plans for a quarantine and possible military action. Khrushchev could push the missiles toward readiness, send more warheads to Cuba, and meet the President with his negotiating leverage magnificently enhanced.
During the night, the Poltava, with its secret cache of twenty nuclear warheads, turned back before reaching the quarantine line. So did other Soviet ships whose hatches were wide enough to accommodate large missiles. Khrushchev almost certainly feared that the United States would intercept the vessels and examine and confiscate their precious cargo. But the Yuri Gagarin and the Komiles kept sailing toward Cuba, escorted by submarines.
On Wednesday morning, before the ten o’clock Ex Comm meeting in the Cabinet Room, the President told his brother, “It looks really mean, doesn’t it?” McNamara told the group that the Komiles and the Gagarin were nearing the five-hundred-mile quarantine line. If they did not stop, the United States would have to intercept them or else declare that the quarantine was to be relaxed. Robert Kennedy wrote later, “This was the moment we had prepared for, which we hoped would never come.”
McNamara reported that a Soviet submarine had moved between the two ships. The Essex had been ordered to signal it to surface and identify itself. If it refused, the Essex would force it to the surface with depth charges and small explosives. The Attorney General later wrote, “Was the world on the brink of a holocaust? Was it our error? A mistake? Was there something further that should have been done? Or not done?”
The President covered his mouth with one hand. The other he opened and closed into a fist. He and his brother stared at each other across the Cabinet table. Robert wrote, “It was almost as though no one else was there and he was no longer the President.… I thought of when he was ill and almost died, when he lost his child, when he learned that our oldest brother had been killed, of personal times of strain and hurt.”
The President asked, “Isn’t there some way we can avoid having our first exchange with a Russian submarine? Almost anything but that!”
“No, there’s too much danger to our ships,” McNamara replied. “Our commanders have been instructed to avoid hostilities if at all possible, but this is what we must be prepared for, and this is what we must expect.”
“We must expect that they will close down Berlin,” said Kennedy. “Make the final preparations for that.” The Attorney General felt as if “we were on the edge of a precipice.… This time, the moment was now, not next week … not in eight hours ‘so we can send another message to Khrushchev and perhaps he will finally understand.’ … What could we say now—what could we do?”
At 10:25 A.M., McCone was handed a note. He said, “Mr. President, we have a preliminary report which seems to indicate that some of the Russian ships have stopped dead in the water.” At 10:32, he said, “The report is accurate, Mr. President. Six ships previously on their way to Cuba at the edge of the quarantine have stopped or have turned back toward the Soviet Union.”
Ex Comm learned that the twenty Russian ships nearest the barrier had stopped or turned back. The President ordered that “if the ships have orders to turn around, we want to give them every opportunity to do so. Get in direct touch with the Essex and tell them not to do anything but give the Russian vessels an opportunity to turn back. We must move quickly because the time is expiring.”
Rusk nudged Bundy. With his pungent private rhetoric almost never used in public, he murmured, “We’re eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked.”
This was soon the most famous utterance of the Missile Crisis, but Rusk was wrong. Khrushchev had decided not to test the quarantine with weapons-bearing ships. This assured that sensitive Soviet military technology would be kept out of American hands and gave the President time to consider his proposal for a summit.
Based on information we now have from Soviet sources, it meant that no more than forty-two of the eighty planned missiles and no more than twenty of the planned forty nuclear warheads made it to Cuba. Evidently none of the thirty-two intended IRBMs reached the island.
The Chairman’s decision may have exacted a high domestic cost. The Soviets later found it so embarrassing that for years no Soviet commander conceded that the ships had ever turned around. Even in his memoirs, Khrushchev found the truth so painful to bear that he claimed his vessels had sailed “straight through.”
Without the thirty-nine hours he was given before the quarantine began, Khrushchev might not have reversed himself. This demonstrated the President’s wisdom in starting his response not with an irreversible air strike but with milder pressures that gave Khrushchev time to ponder his move.
At six o’clock that evening, Kennedy walked downstairs to the Situation Room in the West Wing basement. He was scheduled to speak to Harold Macmillan by telephone at seven.
That afternoon, Ormsby-Gore had told Bundy at the White House that “if there is not going to be a war,” the Prime Minister wished to suggest a “Kennedy-Khrushchev summons” to a meeting on disarmament which, not inconveniently, would include Macmillan as a major player.* Before such a meeting, “there might have to be a standstill involving no import of arms and no blockade.”
Having conveyed his leader’s proposal, Ormsby-Gore disposed of it. He told Bundy that it was “not a good idea because the two sides are too far apart and because it leaves no room for the French.” The President “should make it very plain to the PM that this is not an acceptable position and that the U.S. cannot stand down its blockade without progress toward the removal of the missiles.”
During their conversation at seven, Macmillan asked Kennedy whether the turning back of the Soviet ships that morning meant that Khrushchev was now “frightened a bit.”
The President said, “The ones that are turning back are the ones that we felt might have offensive military equipment on them, so they probably didn’t want that equipment to fall into our hands.” Other Soviet ships were now said to be approaching the quarantine line. “We ought to know in the next twelve hours whether they’re going to submit or be searched.”
Georgi Bolshakov had tried to deliver the message from Khrushchev and Mikoyan that the Soviet buildup on Cuba was purely defensive. By Robert Kennedy’s own account, he refused to see him. After the President’s Monday night speech, the Attorney General called Charles Bartlett: “Get ahold of Georgi and tell him how he betrayed us and how we’re very disappointed.”
Bartlett had never liked Bolshakov: “He was a pusillanimous little fellow, a comic, tough little guy, did a hundred and fifty pushups … a primitive.” But on Tuesday afternoon, he telephoned the Russian: “Georgi, the Attorney General is very disappointed in you.” As Bartlett recalled, “Five minutes later, I got a call from Bobby, who’d obviously been tapping the lines and said, ‘That wasn’t very subtly done. I hope you can be a little more subtle.’”
On Wednesday, at Bolshakov’s request, Bartlett lunched with the Russian, whom he found “puzzled and disturbed.” Bolshakov pulled out his blue notebook and read him the notes of his meeting with Khrushchev and Mikoyan. He told Bartlett he “could not believe” that there were ground-to-ground missiles in Cuba. He warned that Soviet ships were “coming through” the blockade.
Coached by the Attorney General, Bartlett showed him two U-2 pictures of the MRBMs in Cuba. When Bolshakov tried to insist that they were merely SAMs, Bartlett asked him to inquire of his military attaché whether Russia had SAMs that were over fifty feet long. He told him that the plans to mount these missiles had to have been started in early summer. Bolshakov conceded that if things were as they appeared, he was in the position of having been deceived by his own government.*
Hours after his encounter with Bolshakov, Bartlett dined at the White House with the President and First Lady and a small group including the Robert Kennedys, the Radziwills, and Oleg Cassini. Bartlett proposed a celebration of the turning of the Russian ships that morning.
The President refused: “You don’t want to celebrate in this game this early.” Popping in and out during dinner, Bundy reported that the Soviet vessels were still staying away from the quarantine line. Kennedy said, “Well, we still have twenty chances out of a hundred to be at war with Russia.”
At 10:50 P.M., after the guests had gone home, the President’s telephone rang. He was read a new letter from Khrushchev:
Imagine, Mr. President, that we had presented you with the conditions of ultimatum that you have presented us by your action. How would you have reacted to this? … Who asked you to do this? … You, Mr. President, are not declaring quarantines but advancing an ultimatum and threatening that unless we subordinate ourselves to your demands, you will use force.
Consider what you are saying! … You are no longer appealing to reason, but wish to intimidate us.… And all this not only out of hatred for the Cuban people and their government, but also because of considerations having to do with the election campaign in the U.S.A.… The actions of the U.S.A. toward Cuba are outright banditry or, if you like, the folly of degenerate imperialism.
Unfortunately such folly can bring grave suffering to peoples of all countries, not least the American people, since with the advent of modern types of armament, the U.S.A. has fully lost its invulnerability.… If someone had tried to dictate these kinds of conditions to you, you would have rejected it. And we also say—no.… We shall not be simply observers of the pirate-like actions of American ships on the high seas. We will be forced to take measures which we deem necessary and adequate to protect our rights.
Khrushchev may have intended this message to scare the President into accepting his demand for a summit; otherwise the Soviet Union would violate the quarantine, and who could know what might happen next?
The letter was the rudest any Soviet leader since Stalin had written to an American President, especially the suggestion that Kennedy had brought the world to the brink of war to improve the Democratic showing in the congressional elections. The challenge “Who asked you to do this?” implied that Kennedy was a timid youth forced to impose the quarantine by Cold Warriors in the State Department, Pentagon, and CIA, the Rockefellers, Morgans, and du Ponts.
The President called Bartlett at home. “You’ll be interested to know I got a cable from our friend, and he said those ships are coming through. They are coming through tomorrow.”
Kennedy wrote down the essentials of a reply to Khrushchev on a small White House pad. These were polished into a formal response with contributions from Sorensen, Bundy, Rusk, Ball, Gilpatric, and Thompson. It was taken to the Soviet Embassy at 1:45 A.M.
The President reminded Khrushchev that after receiving the “most explicit assurances from your government and its representatives, both publicly and privately,” he had “learned beyond doubt what you have not denied—namely, that all these public assurances were false and that your military people had set out recently to establish a set of missile bases in Cuba.” He hoped that the Chairman would repair the “deterioration in our relations.”
On Wednesday afternoon, Stevenson had warned the President by telephone that the UN Secretary-General, U Thant, was going to propose a two-to-three-week suspension of both the quarantine and the arms shipments to Cuba.
Kennedy complained that this would compel the United States to lift the quarantine while the Soviet Union did no more than give its word that no more arms would be shipped to Cuba. Work on missiles already on the island would go on. Couldn’t Thant wait until Thursday? Stevenson said, “He plans to do it tonight, and I believe we should answer it promptly.”
On Wednesday evening, the Secretary-General made his proposal in identical letters to Kennedy and Khrushchev. George Ball asked Stevenson to deliver a letter from the President to Thant rejecting it. Stevenson refused. He argued that Kennedy should at least be willing to discuss it.
Ball told him that he would have to ask the President to overrule him. When he called the White House family quarters at midnight, Kennedy had just received the shrill new message from Khrushchev.
Ball reminded him that within hours American and Russian ships could be firing at one another: perhaps Thant could be persuaded to intervene with the Russians “to hold their ships dead in the water until things could be better sorted out.” This might give Khrushchev “a public excuse for doing what he might wish to do anyway.” The President agreed that there was no harm in trying.
With this mandate, Ball called Stevenson and asked him to suggest the idea to Thant. At first the Governor demurred, unwilling to disturb Thant’s sleep.* Under further pressure from Ball, he promised to try. At 12:20 A.M., he called Ball to say that Thant had agreed to issue such an appeal, but since communications at night were poor he would wait until morning.
Thursday, October 25. At the morning Ex Comm meeting, McCone reported that the previous day, in East Berlin, Gromyko had made the first public statement on Berlin by a high Soviet official since Monday: it “contained no hint of retaliatory measure against the Western position in Berlin.”
The Soviets were still rushing work on the missiles. The CIA now considered two MRBM sites operational; three others would probably become operational today, a sixth by October 28. The agency suspected that three IRBM sites might become operational by December 1, two more by December 15. All twenty-four SAM sites were considered complete.
At 7:15 A.M., the tanker Bucharest had become the first Soviet ship to reach the quarantine line. Although tankers were excluded from the quarantine, some Ex Comm members had insisted that the vessel be stopped and boarded so that Khrushchev would “make no mistake of our will or intent.”
The American destroyer Gearing challenged the tanker by flashing light. It replied, “My name is Bucharest, Soviet ship from the Black Sea, bound for Cuba.” Unwilling to crowd Khrushchev, Kennedy let the Bucharest pass but ordered that it be trailed by American warships for later interception, if necessary.* He felt that eventually he would have to demonstrate American seriousness by stopping a Soviet ship. He ordered preparations to intercept an “appropriate” Soviet bloc vessel on Friday.
Rusk had arranged private briefings on Cuba for Congressmen and Senators around the country. Before the Ex Comm meeting was over, Salinger reported that Republican Congressman James Van Zandt, who was running for the Senate from Pennsylvania, had emerged from a New York briefing and chidingly told reporters that Kennedy had let the Bucharest pass through the quarantine.
The President had wanted to present the episode to the public in the best possible light. He cried, “What the hell is going on up there?” When Roger Hilsman called to explain, as Hilsman recalled, Kennedy gave him a “tongue-lashing that made the wires sizzle, and my morale, when I was finally permitted to hang up, was very low.”
A few minutes later, Bundy called Hilsman. “I was in the room when the President was—er—talking to you, and I just wanted to say that it has happened to all of us.”
At 1:15 P.M., Kennedy completed his negotiations with Stevenson about a reply to U Thant. Before dawn, he had sent Stevenson a copy of Khrushchev’s new, threatening letter, in part to instill some respect in the UN envoy for the pressures under which he was laboring.
The final version of the President’s message to the Secretary-General, issued at 2:19 P.M., said that while the solution to the Missile Crisis lay in removing offensive weapons from Cuba, Stevenson would be ready to discuss “preliminary talks to determine whether satisfactory arrangements can be assured.” As Kennedy had expected, Khrushchev had approved Thant’s Wednesday night proposal unconditionally.
At 2:26 P.M., Thant wrote Khrushchev to ask for Soviet assurances that ships sailing toward Cuba would keep away from the quarantine zone for a limited time in order to see whether discussions on a solution to the crisis could be started. In a message to Kennedy, he asked for a pledge that all American ships in the Caribbean would try to “avoid confrontation with Soviet ships in the next few days.”
Stevenson went to the chamber of the Security Council. He did not know that for months the Soviet Ambassador, Valerian Zorin, had been suffering from mental deterioration. Arkady Shevchenko recalled that during private meetings, Zorin “would go silent and then look up at us in a daze, asking, ‘What year is this?’”
Influenced perhaps by his illness, perhaps by faulty communication with the Foreign Ministry, Zorin had rejected Thant’s standstill proposal at almost the same moment that Khrushchev was accepting it in Moscow. This afternoon, a full day after Khrushchev had told William Knox that there were ground-to-ground missiles and nuclear warheads in Cuba, Zorin continued to claim before the Security Council that there were no such missiles in Cuba and that the American U-2 evidence was “fake.”
That morning the columnist William S. White had demanded Stevenson’s resignation so that Kennedy could free himself from “unofficial experts who grandly ridiculed the fear of communism in Cuba.” The Chicago Tribune, which had attacked Stevenson since his days in Springfield, inveighed against “wobblies” at the UN whose “built-in disposition” was to “have us surrender to the Soviet Union.”
Delighted to show his mettle, especially after his struggles with Ex Comm on Saturday and Kennedy after midnight, Stevenson now seized the opportunity with both hands: “Do you, Ambassador Zorin, deny that the U.S.S.R. has placed and is placing medium- and intermediate-range missiles and sites in Cuba? … Don’t wait for the translation! Yes or no?”
Zorin: “I am not in an American courtroom, sir, and I do not wish to answer a question put to me in the manner in which a prosecutor does—”
Stevenson: “You are in the courtroom of world opinion right now, and you can answer yes or no. You have denied that, they exist, and I want to know whether I have understood you correctly.”
Zorin: “Please continue your statement.… You will receive your answer in due course. Do not worry.”
Stevenson: “I am prepared to wait for my answer until hell freezes over, if that’s your decision. And I am also prepared to present the evidence in this room.”*
The President watched the exchange on television: “I never knew Adlai had it in him. Too bad he didn’t show a little more of this steam in the 1956 campaign.” Illinois Republican friends who had always voted against Stevenson told him, “What a marvelous job you’ve done at the UN.” His friend Jane Dick felt that he “seemed like a person who’d been purged of something. He was sitting on top of the world—to hell with it—he thought he had taken a long shot, and it had worked.”
Before long Stevenson grimly realized that one of the moments for which future generations would remember him was his bellicose confrontation with a Soviet. He would have felt even more ambivalent about the exchange had he known that his victory had been scored against a sick man.
Sorensen said years later that while Kennedy thought Stevenson’s performance “very good indeed,” it made “no sense in logic. The one thing we were not prepared to do was wait till hell froze over. We wanted action from the Soviets fast.”
The President wrote U Thant pledging to avoid a confrontation with Soviet ships during preliminary talks if the Russians should agree to keep away from the quarantine zone: This was “a matter of great urgency.” Work on the missiles was continuing, and “certain Soviet ships are proceeding toward Cuba and the interception area.”
During the three days after his television speech, Kennedy’s crisis management had been almost flawless. To give the Chairman additional time he endured criticism by political opponents and the Joint Chiefs for reducing the quarantine zone. He had made every effort to avoid an inflammatory American-Soviet incident at sea.
Arriving late for a five o’clock Ex Comm meeting, he said that they must avoid a dangerous incident until after they had heard whether Khrushchev had accepted Thant’s proposal to keep Soviet ships away from the quarantine line. Despite military opposition, Kennedy ordered that the Bucharest be allowed to sail on to Cuba: Khrushchev must not be pushed into “precipitous action. Give him time to consider. I don’t want to put him in a corner from which he cannot escape.”
The East German ship Völker Freundschaft [People’s Friendship], with 1,500 passengers aboard, was nearing the quarantine line. Bundy advised the President that since its registry was not Soviet, stopping the vessel would not contradict his letter to Thant. McNamara warned that if they shot at or rammed the ship, injured passengers, and then found no missiles aboard, the world would wonder why “we allow Soviet ships through the quarantine but stop an East German ship.” After an intense debate, Kennedy decided to let the vessel through.
Rusk reported that during the next two or three days, Thant would meet separately with Zorin and Stevenson “to arrive at a solution of the crisis or, if no solution is possible, to provide a basis for later action, having been unable to negotiate a settlement.” These talks “must be limited to a very few days because the IRBM sites in Cuba are becoming operational, and the Il-28 bombers will soon be able to fly.” Soon they must decide whether the Russians were “getting ready to talk” or “getting ready to attack us.”
The President added jet and missile fuel to the contraband list. He approved planning for low-level evening spy flights, with pilots dropping flares on the IRBM sites. McNamara said the night flights would have a “psychological effect” and help to “convince the public that we are increasing the pressure on the Russians.” The President ordered the Navy to follow the six Soviet submarines known to be near Cuba: they should be harassed and forced to surface in the presence of American warships.
Robert Kennedy reminded his colleagues that “fifteen ships have turned back, which is an impressive action taken by the Russians.” The United States must “indicate clearly that we mean business, but we should avoid a direct confrontation now.” Later they might decide “that it is better to avoid confronting the Russians by stopping one of their ships and to react by attacking the missiles already in Cuba.”
The President warned, “We must act soon because work on the missile sites is still going on, and we must back up very soon the firmness we have displayed up to now.… Tomorrow we will know the Soviet response to U Thant’s proposal.” If Khrushchev refused it, the United States would have to ponder its “next major move.” Bundy described what that next move would be: “Expand the blockade or remove the missiles by air attack.”
*Raymond Garthoff, one of the CIA men who analyzed Penkovsky’s take, wrote in 1987 that a CIA clandestine officer who managed the case told him in 1962 that, when Penkovsky was arrested, the agent sent the telephonic signal prearranged with his Western handlers to warn them against imminent Soviet attack: “Fortunately, his Western intelligence handlers, at the operational level, after weighing a dilemma of great responsibility, decided not to credit Penkovsky’s signal and suppressed it. Not even the higher reaches of the CIA were informed of Penkovsky’s provocative farewell.” Garthoff wrote that he had not been able to confirm the report, but believed it to be true. Helms told the author in 1988 that he was more skeptical.
*Gerald Ford, who was among the congressional leaders not consulted during the first week of the Missile Crisis, said in 1990, “Those of us who operated under the old rules think they were better than what we have to face today.” As President, Ford thought the War Powers Act should be rescinded.
†At a January 1989 Moscow conference of American, Soviet, and Cuban officials and scholars on the Missile Crisis, Dobrynin noted that he had not been informed. Gromyko said, “What, Anatoly Fyodorovich, you mean that I did not tell you, the Ambassador, about the missiles in Cuba?”
Dobrynin: “No, you did not tell me.”
Gromyko: “That means it must have been a very big secret!” [Laughter]
*The 1947 Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance joined the United States with Latin American countries in common concern against aggression, including “an aggression which is not an armed attack.”
†Including the references to tradition, the Rio Pact, and the UN Charter helped to divert public attention from the fact that the President had issued his first warning against offensive missiles in Cuba no earlier than September.
‡Sorensen had profited from reading Roosevelt’s message to Congress asking for a war declaration after Pearl Harbor, in which the President said, “The distance of Hawaii from Japan makes it obvious that the attack was deliberately planned many days or even weeks ago. During the intervening time, the Japanese Government has deliberately sought to deceive the United States by false statements and expressions of hope for continued peace.”
*A passage omitted in the final text from Sorensen’s October 20 draft added, “Let me make it clear that this blockade will not only prevent completion of the current offensive buildup on Cuba. It will also require the Soviet Union to choose between fighting the American Navy in American waters, or abandoning its obligations to Mr. Castro.”
†Douglas Dillon had tried and failed to insert a more blatant threat here: “Unless offensive military preparations are abandoned forthwith, military action to eliminate them will be required.”
‡Sorensen’s October 20 draft had Kennedy asking Khrushchev for a summit, ostensibly to discuss the missiles: “I am asking Soviet Chairman Khrushchev, who will shortly be coming to the United Nations meeting in New York, to meet with me at the earliest opportunity with respect to this provocative threat to world peace.… But we will not negotiate with a gun at our heads—a gun that imperils innocent Cubans as well as Americans. Our byword is: ‘Negotiation yes, intimidation no.’”
Dillon had recommended an additional passage suggesting the President’s personal disappointment with Khrushchev, along the lines of Khrushchev’s statements against Eisenhower after the U-2 episode. Dillon advised, “No firm decision should be taken at this time that the President will see K at the UN if he comes. He might well wish to refuse to see him. My original thought for a meeting with K was after we had eliminated bases, which is quite different from talking before such action with missiles pointing down our throats.”
*Sorensen’s October 20 draft had flatly said here, “I tell you, therefore, that these missiles now in Cuba will someday go—and no others will take their place.” The President may have felt it more prudent not to employ such an unambiguous statement that might later be used against him by domestic political opponents.
†Although Bundy also said that he knew of “no public document in the nuclear age that more faithfully reports a major course of action by a President, and the reasons for his choice.”
*In the speech, Kennedy mentioned his September warnings but placed greater emphasis on the violation of hemispheric security, the Rio pact, American traditions, the congressional resolution on Cuba, the UN Charter, and Khrushchev’s and Gromyko’s “deliberate deception” and use of a “cloak of secrecy.” He noted that Americans had “become adjusted” to Soviet ICBMs and sea-launched missiles but that the missiles in Cuba added to the “already clear and present danger.”
†Kennedy replied that Russell’s attention “might well be directed to the burglar, rather than to those who caught the burglar.”
*How might Scott have reacted had he known that over forty thousand Russians were in Cuba?
†Frazier Cheston, president of the National Association for Mental Health, advised American parents not to hide the crisis from their children: “It is possible for the adult to paint a picture of freedom and right versus slavery and wrong, and to point out that no effort is too great to protect the way of freedom.”
*Along with other claims in his memoirs, Khrushchev said, “The Americans knew that if Russian blood were shed in Cuba, American blood would surely be shed in Germany.” We cannot know whether this was armchair braggadocio or not.
*The CIA felt that even if the United States blockaded all shipments to Cuba except food or medicines, it was unlikely to topple Castro for many months: “There would be much confusion and disruption of life but … the regime would be likely to be able to prevent economic chaos and meet the basic needs of the population.” As Castro’s economy ground to a halt, the dictator could probably maintain control by increased resort to his Soviet-trained secret police and incitement of public rage against the North Americans. Anti-Castro revolutionaries inside Cuba were unlikely to move against him unless they saw evidence of an imminent American invasion.
Should Khrushchev blockade West Berlin, the CIA predicted that the sector would have enough food, fuel, medicines, and industrial material to survive and keep people employed for four to six months. The problem was psychological: “A total and uncontested blockade would cause the West Berliners to lose all hope in a matter of weeks.” Even if the United States staged an airlift, as in 1948, “morale would deteriorate rapidly in the absence of a reasonable expectation that the U.S. would break the blockade.”
*The CIA reported the attaché’s comment to the President the next morning. It also noted that the director of TASS, visiting Hiroshima, and a middle-ranking member of the Soviet UN delegation had made similar comments within Western earshot.
* McNamara observed in an October 22 background briefing of the press after Kennedy’s speech, “Nuclear warheads are of such a size that it is extremely unlikely we would ever be able to observe them by the intelligence means open to us. I think it is almost inconceivable, however, that there would be missiles … without accompanying warheads.”
The next day, the CIA told the President, “While we are unable to confirm the presence of nuclear warheads, photo coverage continues to reveal the construction at several sites of buildings which we suspect are for nuclear storage.” October 24: “Nuclear storage sites apparently are being built on the basis of one site per missile regiment.”
*American intelligence evidently had unverifiable information at the time that nuclear warheads had been loaded on the Poltava in Odessa and that, in the Atlantic, it made a rendezvous with three submarines from the Soviet Union’s Northern Fleet.
†The missiles evidently had no permissive-action-link (PAL) device of the kind that the United States was introducing to prevent unauthorized arming of its nuclear warheads by anyone but the President. McNamara later recalled his worry that, during the crisis in Cuba, “some second lieutenant could start a nuclear war.”
*He probably said this to strengthen the Soviet position, not knowing that Kennedy was acting on the assumption that there were not only missiles but warheads.
*Khrushchev’s advisers may have taken notice of Kennedy’s comment at a February 1962 press conference that “if there was a major crisis which threatened to involve us all in a war, there might be a need for a summit.” Khrushchev told Knox he was welcome to say whatever he wanted to the press, but Knox was close-mouthed. When he returned to New York on Thursday, Robert Komer of the NSC staff suggested that “in light [of the] possibility this guy has something, we should give him more attn. than routine CIA [debriefing]. Possible propaganda use.” Knox was interviewed by State and the CIA, which sent the results to the President.
*The Prime Minister may have been influenced by Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell’s demand on Tuesday that Macmillan fly to Washington to discuss the blockade order with Kennedy. The shadow foreign minister, Harold Wilson, told a television audience the same day that the President should have taken the problem to the UN first.
*Documentation of Bolshakov’s exposure to Robert Kennedy in October 1962 is, like that of all their meetings, sketchy. Sorensen’s 1965 memoir Kennedy and Arthur Schlesinger’s 1978 Robert Kennedy and His Times say that Bolshakov returned with a message from Khrushchev but not that he actually succeeded in delivering it to Robert. Other sources improbably claim that Bolshakov gave the message to Kennedy but that it made the Attorney General so angry he refused to forward it to the Oval Office.
In a 1989 article in the Soviet journal Novoye vremye, Bolshakov claimed that he gave the message in person to Robert Kennedy on October 6, 1962: “As distinct from our past meetings, my host wore a dark formal suit, and his unruly shock of hair was neatly combed and parted. His face bore an impassive expression.… Robert was dry and formal. Everything was meant to impart an official character to our meeting.” By Bolshakov’s account, he lunched the next day with Charles Bartlett, who told him the President wanted Khrushchev’s message “in detail in writing.” This memory was certainly inaccurate: Bartlett did not learn of the missiles until October 22, along with the rest of the world.
*This was not the first time that the Kennedys found Stevenson immobilized by his nineteenth-century manners. When Martin Luther King was jailed during the 1960 campaign, Stevenson had infuriated the brothers by refusing their request to call the civil rights leader’s wife to express concern, saying that he and Mrs. King had “never been introduced.”
Ball suggested years later that Stevenson’s general relations with Thant were affected by his racial attitudes: “He thought he was a Burmese and could be as snobbish and race conscious as anybody. I remember that years ago, we’d walk across the [Chicago] Loop together, and some Negroes in an automobile would honk their horn at us, and Stevenson said, ‘I don’t think we ought to let those coons free.’ It was a joke, but there was a lot of snobbism in him.” As the Burmese broadcasting and information secretary, Thant had first met Stevenson in Burma just after the Governor’s 1952 defeat. Thant found him “a very civilized and cultured gentleman with high ideals.”
*McCone later reported that, on hearing the Bucharest had been let through, Cubans had celebrated in Havana.
*Stevenson’s deputy, Francis Plimpton, recalled that after the embarrassment of displaying doctored evidence during the Bay of Pigs (for which Kennedy privately called him “my official liar”), Stevenson was “reluctant” now to show the U-2 photographs of the missiles in Cuba: “It took a lot of persuading to get him to do it. He had to be convinced that it was OK.”