Roswell Gilpatric’s very name is a delicious utterance that would bode well as a character’s name in a work of fiction, although if Roswell Gilpatric were a character in a Howard Hunt spy novel his name would be spelled Roswell Gilpatrick, as the lowercase k gives his name masculine closure. Roswell Gilpatric (no k) is and will continue to be a major character in the history of the 1960s, yet for unaddressed reasons his presence will be slowly erased by historians year after year after year. The man was born in Brooklyn in 1906 as Roswell Leavitt Gilpatric. In less than three weeks he will be fifty-six years old. Five years from now, Roswell Leavitt Gilpatric will fornicate with Jacqueline Kennedy in, among other places, tourist accommodations near the great palaces of Angkor Wat in Cambodia. That future fornication, however, has nothing to do with the so-called Cuban Missile Crisis.
Roswell Gilpatric will live to be eighty-nine years old. He will always remember his part in what the Russians named the October Crisis.
You know 2001 is the true first year of the twenty-first century? Yes. There was no Year Zero between Christ’s conception and Christ’s birth. The first year of the nineteenth century started in 1801 and the first year of the twentieth century began in 1901. And so it goes. I am honored to have made it as far into the future as I have. What do I remember clearest about 1962? My answer will surprise you. Foremost, is a particular Pepsi commercial on television. Yes! The slogan on this Pepsi commercial summed up what it was like working in the Kennedy White House. My wife and I had one of the first color sets in Georgetown, but this commercial was intentionally filmed in B&W… What’s that? Yes, intentionally filmed in B&W like The Misfits.
The commercial starts with a neon sign blinking on and off announcing FOUNTAIN. A male voice says, ‘Have you noticed something new at the soda fountains today? People who think young say, Pepsi, please.’ As he speaks, B&W images appear of handsome men and women in their early twenties sipping Pepsi.
These images continue as a young woman starts singing a bouncy tune, ‘The lively crowd today agrees those who think young say, Pepsi, please.’
‘They choose the right one, the modern light one.’1
‘Now it’s Pepsi, Pepsi, for those who think young.’
When Bob’s guests—Mr. McNamara’s guests—finally left his house, they didn’t look particularly young as they did look hoity-toity, stepping off the front porch in Brooks Brothers and mink. I had never read the Bhagavad Gita then—and still haven’t—but the Bhagavad Gita appeared to put Bob in the perfect apocalyptic frame of mind to look through the photographs I brought with me of U-2 surveillance images of Russian offensive nuclear missiles being assembled in Cuba. ‘Holy cow,’ McNamara said. ‘Holy cow. Holy cow. Oh no—shit shit shit shit. Excuse me, Ros.’ I told him that no excuses were necessary—‘Shit shit shit is an appropriate response.’ Kennedy had not seen the photos yet. We decided we would both show them to him in the morning.
I remember that the goddamn rain started in the middle of the night, the rain that would postpone Game 5 of the World Series. It was six a.m. when Bob and I showed President Kennedy the surveillance photographs. The president was sitting on a stool wearing just his blue pajama bottoms while Dr. Janet was placing leeches on his back to bleed the man to cure his adrenal insufficiency. ‘You’ll have to turn away, Dr. Janet, these pictures are classified,’ Kennedy told her. She rolled her eyes. Her actual name was Dr. Janet Travell. She was sixty years old. The president gave her the dignity of flirtation, but she was the only woman who could touch his naked body so often in so many ways that had nothing to do with the hand gestures of Eros.
Bob established that these were pictures of MRBMs and likely IRBMs—medium range and intermediate range ballistic missiles. This meant the Russians could destroy New York City and Buenos Aires from the vantage point of Cuba. The thing I remember is Dr. Janet leaving the room with a container full of fat leeches and Kennedy screaming in rage that we were going to wipe out Cuba with our own MRBMs and IRBMs. Bob calmed him down. Thereafter, for the rest of the day—for an entire week to be exact—about twenty civilians in the know and God knows how many generals shouted and whispered to each other day after day about the pros and cons of destroying the world with H-bombs and A-bombs and missiles. Fallout. Black Snow. Black Death.
Any man who passed the boundary from the twentieth century to the twenty-first became a modern man regardless of how old he was. I am now aware and confess to you moderns that there was not a single black man among those stuffed shirts who argued so passionately about the fate of the world. Not a single Asian. No Cherokees. Of course, there were no women present, save for Dr. Janet. There must have been one or two Jews who argued about the End of the World, although I can’t think of who was who right now.
Right off the bat, Bob pointed out that the addition of twenty to forty missiles in Cuba did not significantly change the U.S.-Soviet Balance of Power. I told the president, ‘There’s no reason to risk nuclear war over missiles that do no long-term harm to American security.’ Then Bob said more to himself than to the president, ‘Nietzsche says you must be proud of your enemy.’ At that Kennedy yelled, ‘I sure as shit am not proud of Khrushchev. Are you, Bob?’ Bob looked all contrite. Then Bob—Jack’s brother Bob—said, ‘My brother’s chances of being reelected for a second term are worse than zilch if he lets the Soviet Union surreptitiously install atomic missiles ninety miles off Florida.’
Then Jack’s brother Bob floated a balloon: ‘Can the CIA fake a Cuban attack on the U.S. base in Guantánamo Bay to justify hauling U.S. troops to Cuba?’ That idea was shot down, thank God. Then the president met with the chiefs of staff. The head chief was General Taylor. He’s long dead now but I think he was sixty-one years old at the time. The two Kennedy brothers loved him. They thought of him as an uncle. Robert Kennedy even named his fourth son after the General, Matthew Maxwell Taylor Kennedy. General Taylor was all for cautious thinking before we bombed the pants off the Cubans. Then Curtis ‘Bombs Away’ LeMay pounded the table with a fist and yelled, ‘We should invade Cuba now! The Russians won’t touch Berlin—they’re too chicken. If they try something, we’ll fling a few Minutemen their way.’ LeMay was just getting started. ‘The so-called peace we’ve had since Eisenhower left office has been a false one and, besides, that great Chinese warlord General Sun Tzu said, You should love peace as a means to new wars—and the short peace more than the long.’ McNamara says as rebuttal, ‘Sun Tzu was never a warlord and Nietzsche said that.’ LeMay insisted that Bob was mistaken. Kennedy dropped his head into his hands and said ‘Nietzsche schmietzsche, I will not authorize a sneak attack on Cuba and be the Tojo of the 1960s.’ LeMay countered back with: ‘You’d prefer being the Chamberlain of the 1960s instead?’ Oh my! That was a double-sworded barb as it not only referred to Chamberlain appeasing Hitler in Munich—but Kennedy’s father, Joe, was the ambassador to England at the time, and supported ‘Peace in Our Time.’ LeMay was implying, ‘Like father, like son.’
I remember that Game 5 of the World Series was finally played. José Pagán from Puerto Rico drove in two runs for San Francisco—a single in the third and a homer in the fifth. The score was tied 2–2 in the eighth. Then Yankee Tom Tresh walloped a three-run homer, and that was all she wrote.
The day after the game, additional U-2 photographs were thoroughly analyzed. The Cuban missiles were more formidable than we first thought. They could hit anywhere in America save San Francisco and the Pacific Northwest, a region where a terrific storm was threatening to rain out Game 6 of the World Series. Kennedy’s death technicians also estimated that if the U.S. attacked Cuba, we would kill one hundred thousand innocent civilians. General Curtis LeMay heard this and phoned Kennedy to shout, ‘There is no such thing as innocent civilians!’
Anyway, the public never knew anything about the missiles until the next Monday. By that point, on my suggestion, McNamara had convinced Kennedy that a blockade of Cuba was the way to go. The day before Kennedy’s Monday speech, I told McNamara to tell the president to say that we were establishing a quarantine on Cuba instead of a blockade. ‘In international language, a blockade is an act of war. A quarantine is not.’
It was my job to know those things. While Bob was commanding the Ford Motor Company, I served as the undersecretary of the Air Force. Kennedy wanted a man experienced in military matters to watch Bob’s back.
I remember Kennedy on national television revealing the missiles in Cuba to the public. He said the Russian missiles were ‘in flagrant and deliberate defiance of the Rico Pact of 1947’ as if the Rico Pact of 1947 would mean something to the average American. Oh, honey! Those lousy commies can’t get away with violating the Rico Pact! Anyway, Rico sounds like it has something to do with gangsters, doesn’t it? Wasn’t Edward G. Robinson named Rico in Little Caesar? ‘Oh mama, is this the end of your Rico?’2 At any rate, Kennedy said that the U.S. was going to quarantine the island.
The next morning, the Washington Post had a headline that said, KENNEDY ORDERS CUBA BLOCKADE AS REDS BUILD A-BASES ON ISLAND. Two other articles called the action a quarantine. By the end of the October Crisis, twenty-seven articles will call it quarantine; twenty-eight articles will call it both quarantine and blockade interchangeably; and ninety-three articles will call the action a blockade.
The rain in San Francisco didn’t stop for what seemed like forty days and forty nights and when the deluge was finally finished, Game 6 of the World Series was played and the home team outpitched the Yankees. The World Series was tied with three wins apiece.
The most dramatic moment of this whole Cuban Missile Crisis came the day after the president’s speech. This is the scene they always film for the movies. Bob and I couldn’t get any straight answers from the Navy on exactly how they are going to implement this quarantine. The president made it clear that no orders would be followed that did not originate with him. There were not going to be any Bay of Sows screw-ups. Together, Bob and I stormed down the halls of the Pentagon and burst into the Navy’s command center, which was called the Flag Plot. It was a massive conference room with a fifteen-foot ceiling and armed Marines standing guard. A plastic nautical map of Cuban waters covered one wall with three-dimensional red markers representing U.S. warships that were moved to different positions by guys with long rakes exactly like the kind stickmen use on craps tables. The man in charge of the Flag Plot was named Anderson. He was a punk actually. The first thing he said was, ‘What do you want?’ as if we had no business being in the Flag Plot.
‘We want to know how you’re enforcing the blockade,’ Bob said.
‘We’re enforcing it.’
‘How? Exactly what are you doing?’
‘Sir, you are not authorized to ask such questions.’
‘I’m the goddamn secretary of defense. You tell me what you are doing.’
Anderson protests. ‘Don’t swear at me.’ Ha! A sailor who’s sensitive to curse words? McNamara stood firm. Anderson got out a red book that contained text swear-to-God written at the time of the War of 1812.
‘We go by the book. First, we require the boat to stop.’
‘How do you do this?’
‘Do what?’
‘Communicate with the ship.’
‘With flags.’
‘What about radio?’
‘We also communicate by radio.’
‘Do you have sailors on standby on each boat who can speak Russian?’ I asked.
Anderson didn’t know. He was turning red.
‘What’s step two?’ Bob asked.
‘If the boat keeps coming we fire once across their bow. Then we fire at their propellers.’
‘Boy,’ Bob said, ‘we are the width of a single matchbook close to a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Your ships will absolutely not be firing at some Russian ship’s propeller.’
Anderson started yelling and yelling. McNamara told me to ‘Straighten him out.’ But I pointed up at the map. There were eight American warships surrounding the waters of Cuba, but another American warship farther away in the Atlantic. ‘What’s that ship doing?’ I asked Anderson. He wouldn’t tell me. Then McNamara goes to a Marine guard and swear-to-God demands his pistol and Bob McNamara gets it and he strides up to Anderson with the pistol and pokes the barrel of the gun to the bridge of Anderson’s nose. ‘I am the secretary of defense. I am authorizing myself to blow your brains out if you don’t tell me what the sons-of-bitches on that boat are doing.’ Anderson actually starts pissing his pants and says, ‘It’s hunting a Russian submarine.’
Well, what it was doing we found out later was dropping depth charges on a Soviet submarine to force it to the surface.
That next morning, the Soviet news agency TASS released a telegram from Khrushchev to President Kennedy that said, ‘You are acting like a pirate. Your demands are arbitrary. This blockade is an act of aggression. Our ships have been instructed to ignore it. Nyet nyet nyet blah blah blah.’ Khrushchev said that and yet twenty Russian ships had turned around in the middle of the Atlantic and headed back to port. Then they turned around and began heading for Cuba again. The next day or maybe the day after that, Khrushchev sent a second message saying if the United States will say that we’ll never invade Cuba or support any other forces that might try, ‘then the necessity of the presence of our military specialists in Cuba will disappear.’ Kennedy agreed in a flash. You know how the President of the United States of America sent Khrushchev this response? The Hot Line hadn’t been thought of yet. To send a message to Moscow, first a bicycle messenger pedaled to the White House and picked up the top-secret presidential response and then rode it to the nearest Western Union telegraph station. And vice versa for Soviet telegrams that weren’t first read aloud on Radio Moscow. Anyway, the next day a different message comes from Khrushchev on Radio Moscow saying that America must withdraw our Jupiter missiles from Turkey before the Soviets will leave Cuba. Kennedy sends brother Bob to a secret meeting with the Russian ambassador in a goddamn Chinese restaurant in Cleveland Park to assure Boris that we will remove the Jupiter missiles if it is not made public. Right after that, a U-2 was shot down over Cuba, the pilot killed. Bob—my Bob—started a screaming fit. ‘This is war! This is war!’ Kennedy, bless his mittens, cooled Bob down. Meanwhile, that Navy ship was still dropping depth charges above that Soviet submarine where the Russian crew had gone crazy with the noise of the explosions and was threatening mutiny unless the commander fired the ship’s single nuclear torpedo up into the belly of the U.S. warship dropping the depth charges. The Russian sub had no way to communicate with Moscow to ask permission to do this. Different stories say the captain of the submarine—I don’t remember all of his name except his first name was Valentine—faced down his crew with a pistol or else Valentine was about to fire the torpedo and a sailor named Arkhipov pulled a gun and faced down Valentine. Anyway, the torpedo was not fired. The world stayed safe.
* * *
During the so-called Cuban Missile Crisis, Richard Nixon was running for governor of California and was campaigning in Los Angeles’s Chinatown, the neighborhood below Dodger Stadium. Nixon was forty-nine. Fellow Californian Jack Nicholson was twenty-five years old. Faye Dunaway was twenty-one. Roman Polanski was twenty-nine years old and still lived in Poland. Nicholson and Dunaway and Polanski will one day make a classic retro-noir titled after this very neighborhood, Chinatown. Another actor in the movie will be director John Huston, who at the moment of Nixon’s speech in 1962 was in Ireland waiting for his movie about Sigmund Freud’s discovery of the Oedipus complex to open.
At Nixon’s Chinatown campaign stop, a group of Chinese youngsters held up signs proclaiming ‘welcome’ in both English and Chinese. Nixon stepped up to a podium and noticed that the Chinese adults in the crowd were talking to each other and pointing above Nixon’s head. The candidate looked up. There was a banner in Chinese strung maybe fifteen feet off the ground between two light poles. ‘What’s that say?’ Nixon asked the Chinese politician who was going to introduce him. The Chinese man told him.
Roman Polanski’s Chinatown ends in this very square. Private eye J. J. Gittes (Jack Nicholson), a once idealistic cop who turned existential and quit the force after failing to save an Asian girl from the Chinatown Tongs, has returned to Chinatown ten years later to rescue a white woman, Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) and her daughter/sister from their father, the incestuous rapist Noah Cross (played by John Huston). In the resulting turmoil, J. J. Gittes sees Evelyn Mulwray shot through her eye by a trigger-happy cop. Once again, Gittes has failed to protect a woman in Chinatown.
In Richard Nixon’s Chinatown 1962, he was told the banner said, ‘What about the Hughes loan?,’ a reference to Howard Hughes’s unsecured $205,000 ‘hamburger’ loan to Nixon’s brother, Donald, in 1956.
The work of Nixon’s nemesis, Dick Tuck!
Nixon climbed a ladder and tore the banner down.
In Chinatown, after Evelyn Mulwray is shot and Noah Cross takes his ‘granddaughter,’ who is actually his daughter, into his arms, one of J. J. Gittes’s compatriots says, ‘Forget it, Jake. This is Chinatown.’
‘Forget it, Dick. This is Chinatown.’
* * *
Roswell Gilpatric remembers:
After Khrushchev ordered the missiles to be dismantled in Cuba, I was at the White House and saw Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay with tears in his eyes telling Kennedy ‘The United States has failed.’ Kennedy was surprised by this S.O.B.’s words as Kennedy assumed that he was the big hero of the hour for simultaneously saving the dignity of the United States and preventing World War III. ‘Why do you say that?’ Kennedy asked. Curtis ‘Bombs Away’ LeMay answered his commander in chief with: ‘We should have gotten rid of Castro and we failed to do so.’
Out of all the men I have outlived, I’m happiest I outlived that repugnant half-wit.