John F. Kennedy’s greatest triumph as president came in the missile crisis of October 1962, when, as the world watched in fear, the United States and the Soviet Union moved to the edge of nuclear war. Nikita Khrushchev had been caught in the act of arming Fidel Castro with Soviet nuclear missiles and, confronted by the steely young American president, backed down and agreed to take them out. “We’re eyeball to eyeball,” Secretary of State Dean Rusk said at a meeting to deal with the crisis, “and I think the other fellow just blinked.” The quotation, cited all over the world, seemed to summarize the American victory. Jack Kennedy, in discussing Khrushchev with his friends, had his own summary: “I cut his balls off.”
At the height of the crisis, Kennedy mobilized a vast army of men and matériel that stood poised to attack Cuba and perhaps trigger a nuclear holocaust. The invasion plan called for the largest drop of paratroopers since the battle for Normandy in 1944; the Pentagon estimated that 18,500 Americans would be killed or wounded in the first ten days of battle. The Strategic Air Command’s fleet of 1,436 B-52 and B-47 bombers and 172 intercontinental ballistic missiles was moved to DEFCON 2, the highest military alert short of all-out war. One-eighth of the bombers were in the air at all times during the next thirty days, prepared to drop devastating nuclear weapons on targets in Cuba and the Soviet Union. The 579 fighters of the air force’s Tactical Air Command were programmed to fly 1,190 combat sorties in the invasion’s first twenty-four hours; aviation fuel and other essential supplies were positioned throughout southern Florida and on a British base in the Bahamas. More than 100,000 combat-ready army infantrymen had deployed to ports along the East Coast, a few hours from Cuba. A huge navy fleet, backed up by 40,000 marines, was steaming, moments away from battle stations, through international waters in the Caribbean and the South Atlantic. The American war machine was at its “highest state of readiness,” according to military documents made public years later, and awaited only a go signal from the White House. The president’s determination, and his show of force, seemingly won the day.
Kennedy earned plaudits and admiration not only for his clear triumph but for his cool style and confident demeanor between the discovery of medium-range missiles on Cuba on October 15 and Khrushchev’s public capitulation on October 28. “It was this combination of toughness and restraint,” Arthur Schlesinger wrote in A Thousand Days, “of will, nerve and wisdom, so brilliantly controlled, so matchlessly calibrated, that dazzled the world.… The thirteen days gave the world—even the Soviet Union—a sense of American determination and responsibility in the use of power which, if sustained, might indeed become a turning point in the history of the relations between east and west.”
Over the next thirty-five years a vast assortment of evidence—including published memoirs, interviews, and documents released from Soviet archives—has revealed that much of what the Kennedy administration said about the crisis at the time, publicly and privately, was not true. The overriding deceit—one that still distorts the history of those thirteen days—was the absolute determination of Jack and Bobby Kennedy to conceal their campaign to assassinate Fidel Castro and destroy his regime. The American public was not told what the KGB and Nikita Khrushchev knew. Even more disturbing, many of the American government officials on the ad hoc crisis committee, known as Ex Comm, who served the president as councillors of war, had no knowledge—no “need to know”—of Edward Lansdale’s Operation Mongoose and Bill Harvey’s Task Force W. Kennedy did not dare tell the full story of the Soviet missiles in Cuba, because it was his policies that brought the weapons there.
Historians and journalists have debated for years whether Khrushchev, in sneaking his missiles into Cuba, was primarily concerned with protecting Cuba, as he claimed, or simply attempting to alter the strategic balance of power, as Kennedy claimed. But Khrushchev’s ultimate motive aside, the Kennedy brothers surely understood that the administration’s policy of relentless pressure against Castro had given the Soviet premier the opening and the political rationale for his gamble in Cuba. With his missile deployment, Khrushchev was asserting his country’s status as a superpower. The Soviet Union had submarines that were capable of launching nuclear missiles on New York, Washington, and other major American cities; it was the threat from a missile that was of interest to American policymakers, not whether it was fired at sea or from an island ninety miles offshore. Few in Washington seriously believed that a few dozen ballistic missiles in Cuba could change the essential fact of the strategic balance of power: the Soviet Union was hopelessly outgunned. By the fall of 1962, America’s arsenal contained 3,000 nuclear warheads and nearly 300 missile launchers—far more than the Soviet Union’s 250 warheads (including those in Cuba) and estimated 24 to 44 missile launchers.
The attention given the administration’s highly publicized state of readiness masked another important fact: the Soviet Union made no military moves at all on its home territory during the crisis. Its fleet of liquid-fueled ICBM launchers, which required hours to be ready for a launch, was not put on alert. Soviet reserve forces were not called up. There were no threats against Berlin.
Yet there was a crisis, and it was provoked by Khrushchev, at least publicly. In putting missiles into Cuba, the Soviet premier was even more daring than the record showed. He used Georgi Bolshakov and other back-channel messengers in the summer and fall of 1962 to repeatedly assure Kennedy, who was continually receiving intelligence reports of a Soviet buildup on Cuban soil, that missiles were not being shipped to Cuba.
Jack Kennedy, confronted with political and personal difficulties that fall, chose to believe Khrushchev’s assurances over his own intelligence services. His administration had accomplished little in Congress in its first two years, and he wanted to get more Democrats elected in the midterm congressional elections, scheduled for November 6. More Democrats would mean a better legislative record for the all-important presidential reelection campaign in 1964. Another crisis in Cuba would evoke the Bay of Pigs and give the Republicans a vibrant foreign policy issue.
The Republicans already had civil rights. In late September the reluctant president, urged on by his brother, fought his way through yet another bloody black-white confrontation in the South, and put the full weight of the federal government behind the ultimately successful attempt of one black, James Meredith, to register at the University of Mississippi. Most Americans, sickened by the violence of southern sheriffs, seemed to be supporting their president, Kennedy was privately told by his pollsters. But no one could predict whether that support would translate into votes for Democrats.
The president also continued to maneuver through a succession of potentially career-ending personal crises, all revolving around women. Marilyn Monroe’s suicide in early August triggered a wave of conspiracy theories, but no journalist had—yet—publicly reported what many in Hollywood knew: that she and the president had been lovers. His liaison with Judith Campbell Exner was still a secret from the public, although J. Edgar Hoover and dozens of FBI agents now knew of Kennedy’s involvement with her and that she met regularly with Sam Giancana and Johnny Rosselli. Hoover also knew that a senior employee of General Dynamics, one of two bidders for the $6.5 billion TFX aircraft contract, had been part of a team that in August broke into Exner’s apartment in Los Angeles. Rumors about his first marriage to Durie Malcolm were still afloat, despite Ben Bradlee’s seemingly definitive story.
On the morning of October 16, when the president learned that Khrushchev had been systematically lying to him about the missiles in Cuba, his ambitious hopes for the 1962 and 1964 elections were directly put at risk. Once again, Kennedy was facing the prospect of being undone by Cuba, and humiliated, as he had been in the Vienna summit, by Nikita Khrushchev. One possible solution was diplomatic: the president could privately confront the Soviet premier with evidence of his treachery, and negotiate the quiet withdrawal of the missiles.
But Kennedy remained obsessed with Cuba, and so it became Khrushchev’s turn to be humiliated. Over the next thirteen days, the president eschewed diplomacy and played a terrifying game of nuclear chicken, without knowing all of the facts. For the first time in his presidency, Kennedy publicly brought his personal recklessness, and his belief that the normal rules of conduct did not apply to him, to his foreign policy. On October 27, at the height of the crisis, when the downing of an American spy plane threatened to move events beyond his control, Kennedy was forced to seek a compromise and to rely on Khrushchev’s common sense and dread of nuclear war to keep the superpowers apart. Once again, at a moment of high risk the president turned to Bobby Kennedy, his protector, to bail him out.
Jack Kennedy’s deceits about his personal life and the corruption of the 1960 presidential election pale beside the false legacy he and his brother manufactured in the days and weeks after the missile crisis. Kennedy brought the world to the edge of nuclear war to gain a political victory: to humble an adversary who had humbled him before. But the public would be told, and would believe, that the valiant young president had won the missile crisis, by negotiating from strength. The lessons seemingly learned in the missile crisis would haunt American policymakers during the peace negotiations with North Vietnam, and would have made it more difficult for Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon to accept a compromise had they chosen to do so, thus perpetuating a war that claimed the lives of thousands of Americans and millions of Asians.
This, then, is a new history of the missile crisis, centered on the two most powerful men in Washington in the fall of 1962, the two men who knew all the secrets.
In May 1962 Nikita Khrushchev decided to make the boldest gamble of his career: he would station Soviet nuclear weapons in Cuba—the first deployment of such weapons outside of Eurasia—and do it in secret.
One factor, certainly, was strategic. A year earlier, President Kennedy had overridden objections from Khrushchev and some of his own advisers and approved operational status for fifteen medium-range Jupiter nuclear missiles in Turkey, across the Black Sea from Russia. The weapons had been ordered to Turkey in 1959 by President Eisenhower, but were not ready to fire until the Kennedy administration was in office. Khrushchev, who had a seaside summer home in Soviet Georgia, was incensed by the deployment, and often asked guests, especially Americans, to peer with binoculars across the water. When they asked what they were looking at, he said, “U.S. missiles in Turkey, aimed at my dacha.” Soviet missiles in Cuba might not change the balance of power, but they would put dozens of major American cities more directly in harm’s way and remind the young president that the Soviet Union insisted on being treated as a superpower equal. There were many troubling international issues still to be resolved between Washington and Moscow: the American insistence on unfettered access to West Berlin; the deepening American commitment in South Vietnam; and the White House’s decision in March to respond to renewed Soviet nuclear testing by beginning its own atmospheric tests.
A second factor was the U.S. threat to Cuba. Operation Mongoose and the continued secret American attempts to assassinate Castro had driven the Cuban government more firmly into the protective grasp of Moscow, which had provided some $250 million in arms and matériel since mid-1960. The White House responded with public intimidation. In April 1962 the president lent the prestige of his office to the anti-Cuba effort by flying to Norfolk, Virginia, to watch a huge military exercise; some 40,000 men conducted amphibious landings at beaches in North Carolina and off Vieques Island, Puerto Rico, less than fifty miles from Cuba. In their 1997 study of the missile crisis, “One Hell of a Gamble,” Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, who had access to Soviet archives, concluded that Khrushchev “came to believe” in the first few months of 1962—as the president wanted him to believe—that “John F. Kennedy was prepared to invade Cuba.” In his memoirs, published in 1970, Khrushchev wrote, “I’m not saying we had any documentary proof that the Americans were preparing a second invasion [after the Bay of Pigs]. We didn’t need documentary proof. We knew the class affiliation, the class blindness, of the United States, and that was enough to make us expect the worst.”
To ensure the secrecy of the missile deployment, Khrushchev relied on Georgi Bolshakov and the fascination of the Kennedy brothers with back-channel negotiations. Bolshakov and Bobby Kennedy met at least six times in July 1962, according to Fursenko and Naftali, with Bolshakov suggesting at one point that Washington would have better relations with Moscow if it stopped aerial monitoring of Soviet shipping in international waters. Such overflights constituted “harassment,” Bolshakov told the unsuspecting Kennedys, who continued to be worried about a flare-up in Berlin. In late July, Bolshakov was invited to a private meeting in the Oval Office with the Kennedy brothers, and the president seemingly agreed—so the Soviets thought—to limit U.S. surveillance of Soviet shipping if Khrushchev would put the Berlin issue “on ice.” Soviet files show that in early August Bolshakov was authorized to tell John Kennedy that Khrushchev was “satisfied with the president’s order to curtail U.S. planes’ inspections of Soviet ships in open waters.” There is no evidence that surveillance was significantly cut back, however. The American intelligence community was able to report in late August 1962 that fifty-five Soviet ships docked in Cuba that month—four times more than in August 1961.
By late summer the first intelligence reports of Soviet surface-to-air missiles in Cuba began circulating in Washington, and Khrushchev escalated his back-channel manipulations to deceive the Kennedy brothers. On September 6, Anatoly Dobrynin, the new Soviet ambassador to Washington, forwarded Khrushchev’s assurances to the brothers that “nothing will be undertaken before the American Congressional elections that would complicate the international situation or aggravate the tension in the relations between our two countries.” A similar message was passed to Charles Bartlett, Kennedy’s newspaper friend, by Aleksandr Zinchuk, the Soviet minister in Washington. The message presented on behalf of Khrushchev was warm, Bartlett recalled in an interview for this book: “Khrushchev wants the president to know that he understands he is busy with the elections coming up and he will not in any way interfere with the election.” The Soviet reassurances could not have come at a better time. The president was being lambasted in public by Senator Kenneth Keating of New York, a prominent liberal Republican, who claimed that “our do-nothing president” was suppressing intelligence about the extent of a Soviet missile buildup in Cuba. Georgi Bolshakov, on home leave in Moscow, was summoned to see Khrushchev and instructed to tell the president, through Bobby Kennedy, that the Soviet Union was providing Cuba only with weapons that were “defensive in character.”
Khrushchev was unquestionably being deceptive in his use of the back channel throughout the summer and fall, but he was apparently careful to avoid an explicit lie. Throughout the crisis, and for years afterward, he insisted the Soviet missiles in Cuba were defensive—just as American policymakers called the Jupiters in Turkey “deterrent/defensive.”
Cuba was once again front-page news, and the White House was forced to put out a statement declaring that there was no evidence of ballistic missiles in Cuba or “of other significant offensive capability either in Cuban hands or under Soviet direction and guidance.” At a news conference on September 13, the president put his credibility on the line, saying that if the Soviet Union was shown to have provided Cuba with offensive weapons, “this country will do whatever must be done to protect its own security and that of its allies.”
By this point, the president was getting a steady stream of cables and reports from John McCone, the CIA director, warning that Soviet offensive missiles, capable of delivering a nuclear warhead, were coming into Cuba. The direct warnings began on August 22, when McCone told Kennedy what he had been saying for two weeks at Operation Mongoose meetings: the CIA had learned from its sources inside Cuba that Soviet SAMs were being shipped to the island. In his opinion, McCone said, according to a CIA summary declassified in 1996, there was a probability that medium-range ballistic missiles would be the next step in the Soviet buildup. McCone’s memorandum of the meeting, published in 1992 by the CIA, showed that Kennedy specifically raised the question “of what we could do against Soviet missile sites in Cuba.” The linkage between the Jupiter missiles in Turkey and the Soviet missiles was also discussed, according to the memorandum: “McCone questioned value of Jupiter missiles.… McNamara agreed they were useless but difficult politically to remove them.” McCone coupled his aggressive intelligence reporting with aggressive recommendations for an immediate American invasion of Cuba in sufficient force “to occupy the country, destroy the regime, free the people, and establish in Cuba a peaceful country.”
In September, McCone renewed his reporting, sending a series of “eyes only” messages to the president and other senior officials warning that “an offensive Soviet Cuban base will provide Soviets with most important and effective trading position with all other critical areas and hence they might take an unexpected risk to establish such a position.” The CIA director began to insist on a U-2 overflight of mainland Cuba; direct flights over the island had been limited since August for fear of a shootdown.
McCone’s intelligence, and his insistence on pushing his view on the national security leaders of the administration, posed a dilemma for Jack Kennedy and his brother. In early October, with the congressional elections a month away, Bolshakov once again told Bobby Kennedy that the weapons going into Cuba were of “a defensive character.” The president chose to believe Georgi Bolshakov over his CIA director, and did not authorize a direct U-2 flight over Cuba until October 9. It was the president’s mistake, but McCone ultimately paid for it.
In Thirteen Days, his posthumous 1969 memoir of the missile crisis, Bobby Kennedy dealt with McCone’s intelligence by pretending that it did not exist. When the book was published, none of McCone’s reporting on the missiles had been made public. “We had been deceived by Khrushchev, but we had also fooled ourselves,” Kennedy wrote. Ignoring Senator Keating’s public assertions, Kennedy added that “no official within the government had ever suggested to President Kennedy that the Russian buildup in Cuba would include missiles.” In his oral history for the Kennedy Library, which was not made public in full until 1988, Kennedy again insisted that McCone had not warned his brother about the Soviet missiles, and accused the CIA director of the most grievous offense in the White House—disloyalty. “He has not the loyalty that, for instance, Bob McNamara has,” Kennedy said. “He is very careful of his own position. That’s how he’s been able to survive so many years in Washington.… I think he liked the president very much. But he liked one person more—and that was John McCone.… We all knew that John McCone was moving among senators and congressmen peddling this idea [that he had warned the president about the missiles] because it got him off the hook. Who was primarily responsible for not knowing there were missiles in Cuba earlier? The CIA. He wasn’t going to have that on his back.”
The first U-2 flight was a success and, on the evening of October 15, the intelligence community notified McGeorge Bundy that it now had photographic evidence of a Soviet ballistic missile site in Cuba. The president was briefed the next morning, and immediately spread the bad news.* Bobby Kennedy had an appointment with Richard Helms of the CIA a few moments later. “Dick, is it true? Dick, is it true?” he asked. Helms, describing the scene years later to the journalist Richard Reeves, said yes. “Shit!” said the attorney general.
He and his brother were convinced they had been duped in the back channel by Khrushchev. There are no notes or available records in the Kennedy Library to provide any insight into the president’s thinking, but his actions over the next few days seem to have been brilliantly conceived. There would be an angry series of I-told-you-so’s from John McCone and the military men in the Pentagon, who would—predictably—call for immediate air strikes or a ground invasion to destroy the missile sites. Being tough and advocating military action had never damaged the career, or the reputation, of anyone in the Kennedy White House. The president would have to act quickly to keep control of his staff and head off any Republican calls for a congressional investigation into the Cuban intelligence failure. Jack Kennedy did not want the Republicans to begin asking about what the president knew and when he knew it.
Kennedy’s first move was to organize the Ex Comm (for Executive Committee of the National Security Council), staff it with insiders and outsiders, and insist that its deliberations remain totally secret. He gave the Ex Comm members one goal: the Soviet missiles in Cuba had to go, either by a blockade of Soviet shipping or something more drastic. In one move, Kennedy isolated those men who could lead a public charge against his stewardship of state and left them to debate in private, while he and his brother struggled to reap political gain from a mess that had been triggered by their obsession with Cuba. The Ex Comm members, who included cabinet secretaries and establishment figures such as Dean Acheson, the hard-line former secretary of state, and Robert A. Lovett, the New York lawyer and financier, were kept busy plotting air strikes and planning invasions.* But the real decision-making was done elsewhere.† The American public would not be informed of the missile crisis until the president decided to inform them, six days hence; until then, barring a leak, the Soviet Union would also not know that its missiles had been discovered. Jack Kennedy had time to consider, in secret conversations with his brother, the next step.
There was one quick casualty of Khrushchev’s daring in Cuba—Ed Lansdale’s White House career as a covert operative. On the afternoon of October 16, Bobby Kennedy managed to find the time to go through with a previously arranged meeting in his office with Lansdale and the Special Group (Augmented). It was a cathartic session, as summarized in a memorandum that day by Richard Helms, with the attorney general venting anger and frustration over Mongoose’s inability “to influence significantly the course of events in Cuba.” Kennedy said, according to Helms, that “the operation has been under way for a year” with no significant acts of successful sabotage. Helms’s memorandum, written with ominous understatement, noted that the attorney general, after expressing the “general dissatisfaction” of the president, “traced the history of General Lansdale’s personal appointment by the president a year ago.” Mongoose was shut down after the missile crisis, and the disgraced Lansdale was shuffled over to a job in the Pentagon.
President Kennedy, skeptical about the ability of Lansdale and Harvey, had begun worrying months earlier about what to do if, as the intelligence community was predicting, Soviet missiles did arrive in Havana. Documents released in the early 1990s under the Freedom of Information Act show that on August 23 Kennedy had asked the Pentagon for a list of possible responses in case of a Cuban capacity to launch a nuclear strike against the United States. On October 3, Admiral Robert Dennison, commander in chief of the Atlantic Fleet, was ordered to plan for a blockade of Cuba; those plans were ready, according to a later Pentagon history, before the first public announcement of the missile crisis.
The missiles were politically toxic. Later in the crisis, after the blockade was under way, Bobby Kennedy reassured his brother by telling him, he wrote in Thirteen Days, “I just don’t think there was any choice, and not only that, if you hadn’t acted, you would have been impeached.” The president thought for a moment, and said, “That’s what I think—I would have been impeached.”
On October 18, as the Ex Comm debated whether to bomb Cuba, invade Cuba, or blockade Soviet shipping, the president went ahead with a previously scheduled meeting with Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet foreign minister, who had come to the United States for the opening of the fall session of the UN General Assembly. In Thirteen Days, Robert Kennedy quoted the dutiful Soviet official as repeating the party line: “All Cuba wanted was peaceful coexistence; … she was not interested in exporting her system to other Latin American countries.” Gromyko said nothing about the ballistic missiles his country was installing in Cuba, and insisted that the USSR had simply sent some specialists “to train Cubans to handle certain kinds of armament, which were only defensive.” Kennedy quoted Gromyko as saying that his country’s sole objective was to “give bread to Cuba in order to prevent hunger in that country.” His brother, Bobby Kennedy wryly concluded, “was displeased with the spokesman of the Soviet Union.”
“It was incredible,” Jack Kennedy later told Kenny O’Donnell, “to sit there and watch the lies coming out of his mouth.” The foreign minister’s lies became a major component in the newspaper and magazine telling and retelling of the missile crisis, with a State Department official permitting a New York Times reporter to take verbatim notes of the transcript to demonstrate the Russian’s “perfidy.”
It was a setup, and Gromyko fell right into the trap. The president had anticipated, an approving Ted Sorensen reported in Kennedy, that Gromyko would say nothing about the missiles in Cuba. “Kennedy had hoped for this,” wrote Sorensen, “believing it would strengthen our case with world opinion.”
But Jack Kennedy participated in the lie, too. Why didn’t he come clean with Gromyko and share the U-2 evidence of the Soviet missiles in Cuba, and thus give Khrushchev a chance to privately withdraw them? Bobby Kennedy explained in Thirteen Days that his brother, after some debate, decided against any revelations, since “he had not yet determined a final course of action and the disclosure of our knowledge might give the Russians the initiative.”
There is a better answer. Even before his meeting with Gromyko, Jack Kennedy had decided there would be no diplomacy but instead a blockade and an ultimatum about what would happen if the Soviets defied it. He would seem to be willing to force Khrushchev to his knees—at any cost. The possibility exists, too, that Kennedy decided early on in the crisis that if his threats failed, and Khrushchev remained steadfast, he would compromise in secret, as he had done in Berlin a year earlier.
Only one Washington journalist seemed to understand the danger of Kennedy’s policy as it was publicly stated, and was not afraid to write about it. “By confronting Mr. Gromyko privately,” the columnist Walter Lippmann, who had visited Khrushchev in 1961 at his Black Sea dacha, wrote in the New York Herald Tribune, “the President would have given Mr. Khrushchev what all wise statesmen give their adversaries—the chance to save face.” Kennedy’s subsequent speech on the missiles would then have been more effective, Lippmann added, “for it would not have been subject to the criticism that a great power had issued an ultimatum to another great power without first attempting to save face.”* There is no evidence that those in the government who knew about it took issue with Kennedy’s decision to entrap Gromyko amidst a nuclear crisis.
The Soviet version of the Kennedy-Gromyko meeting, published in the winter 1996–97 Cold War International History Project Bulletin, added an essential detail: Kennedy went out of his way to offer an explicit agreement, as the foreign minister reported to Moscow, not to attack Cuba in return for a reduction in Soviet arms shipments. “If Mr. Khrushchev addressed me on this issue,” Kennedy said, “we could give him corresponding assurances” not to invade Cuba. Gromyko quoted Kennedy as stating at another point that he had already told Khrushchev that the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion “was a mistake.” The president then repeated his offer to give the Soviet premier “assurances that an invasion would not be repeated neither on the part of Cuban refugees, nor on the part of the USA armed forces.”
If Kennedy’s soft words were designed to lull Gromyko and his Politburo colleagues to complacency, they were a success; Gromyko reported to Moscow, according to the Bulletin’s newly released Soviet documents, that all was well. “Everything which we know about the position of the USA government on the Cuban question,” Gromyko smugly told Khrushchev, “allows us to conclude that the overall situation is completely satisfactory.… There is reason to believe that the USA is not preparing an intervention in Cuba and has put its money on obstructing Cuba’s economic relations with the USSR and other countries.… In these conditions a USA military adventure against Cuba is almost impossible to imagine.”
What Gromyko and Khrushchev knew—and the Kennedy brothers did not—was that, according to declassified intelligence files in Moscow, the Soviets had secretly shipped at least 134 nuclear warheads, and perhaps more, into Cuba. Within hours, in case of invasion or all-out air attack, the 42,000 Soviet troops in Cuba—twice as many as American intelligence reported—would be able to mount the warheads on Soviet missiles and aircraft.* The Soviet commander in Cuba, General Issa Pliyev, was a battle-hardened veteran who had fought at Stalingrad and had commanded a division that beat back the Germans in defense of Moscow. Pliyev had direct operational control of twelve short-range tactical nuclear missiles, known as Lunas, with two-kiloton warheads. There is every reason to believe that Pliyev would have used every weapon in his arsenal if American marines and army paratroopers began an invasion. The possibility that a Soviet commander in Cuba could respond to American invasion by launching nuclear weapons was never considered in the missile crisis deliberations by the president, his brother, or any member of the Ex Comm. “We never had any positive evidence” that Soviet nuclear warheads were in Cuba, Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric told the Kennedy Library in a 1970 interview. “If you ask my own belief, I don’t think that there were,” he added. “I think there were plans for flying them in, but I don’t think they were actually matched up.… with the launchers.” Even eight years after the event, Gilpatric was wrong.
Gromyko’s assurances to Moscow came as America’s military machine, unchecked by the increasingly confident president, was flexing its might, moving aircraft, ships, men, and matériel to jumping-off positions for what many generals and admirals were urging: a full-fledged invasion of Cuba. On Monday, October 22, six days after learning of the Soviet missiles in Cuba, Kennedy finally shared what he knew with the American people—and with Nikita Khrushchev. It was an aggressive and chilling crisis address, in which the president compared Castro’s revolution to the Third Reich and depicted the Soviet missiles in Cuba as posing the gravest of national security threats to the United States. “The 1930s taught us a clear lesson,” Kennedy said. “Aggressive conduct, if allowed to grow unchecked and unchallenged, ultimately leads to war.” He announced a blockade on all Soviet military equipment being shipped to Cuba and described that action as “the one most consistent with our character and courage as a nation.… The cost of freedom is always high—but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender or submission.”
“It shall be the policy of this nation,” Kennedy declared, “to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.” The president had staked out his position: the fate of the world now rested with Khrushchev.
Kennedy’s audience, of course, was not only Moscow but his political critics in the Republican Party. “Who lost Cuba?” would not be a theme of the 1962 congressional elections.
Earlier in the day, Kennedy had telephoned Dwight Eisenhower at his retirement farm in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to give him advance word of the blockade. The call was recorded by Evelyn Lincoln, at Kennedy’s direction, on the White House’s standard Dictaphone system. (Lincoln removed fourteen Dictabelts containing the president’s telephone conversations from the National Archives after Kennedy’s assassination; the Dictabelts, never before made public, were transcribed for this book.)
Kennedy was resolute and fatalistic in his talk with Eisenhower. He assured his predecessor that “we will continue” the U-2 surveillance of Cuba, although, Kennedy said, “I would anticipate.… Khrushchev will make a statement that any attack upon Cuba will be regarded as an attack upon the Soviet Union. We have to assume,” Kennedy added, “that as this surveillance continues with the U-2S, these SAM sites may shoot one down.” He and his advisers were considering what steps to take if that did happen, Kennedy added. “I don’t know, we may get into the invasion business before many days are out, but we just have to.”
Eisenhower was approving of the tough talk, and the two men then casually discussed the possibility of all-out nuclear war.
Eisenhower: “Of course, from a military standpoint, [invading Cuba is] a clean-cut thing to do now.”
Kennedy: “That’s right.”
Eisenhower: “Because you’ve made up your mind you’ve got to get rid of this thing. The only real way to get rid of it, of course, is the other thing. But having to be concerned with world opinion.…”
Kennedy: “And Berlin.… I suppose that may be what they’re going to try to trade off.”
Eisenhower: “My idea is this: the damn Soviets will do whatever they want, what they figure is good for them.… I could be all wrong, but my own conviction is that you will not find a great deal of relationship between these things [Cuba and Berlin].…”
Kennedy: “General, what if Khrushchev announced tomorrow, which I think he will, that if we attack Cuba, it’s going to be nuclear war? What’s your judgment as to the chances they’ll fire these things off if we invade Cuba?”
Eisenhower: “Oh, I don’t believe they will.”
Kennedy: “In other words, you would take that risk if the situation seems desirable?”
Eisenhower: “What can you do? If this thing is such a serious thing here on our flank.… you’ve got to use something. Something may make these people [the Soviets] shoot them off. I just don’t believe this will.… I’ll say this: I’d want to keep my own people very alert.”
Eisenhower and Kennedy shared a laugh at that point.
Kennedy: “Well, hang on tight.”
America was bristling and ready for war. At seven o’clock that evening, as the president began his speech, the Pentagon placed the American military establishment on increased alert, to DEFCON 3, beginning the greatest mobilization since World War II. The Strategic Air Command (SAC), which would unilaterally move to DEFCON2 two days later, began deploying its bomber fleet to more than thirty predesignated civilian airfields across the United States. Nuclear weapons were loaded aboard bombers on SAC bases in Spain, Morocco, and England. Fighter-bombers at American bases throughout Europe and Asia also went on alert and many were armed with tactical nuclear weapons and assigned targets in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Several Polaris missile submarines, the heart of the American underwater attack force, left their bases in Scotland and began patrols in the North Atlantic. The submarines had enough nuclear ordnance to destroy every major city in Russia.*
There was a final, contemptuous contact with Bolshakov, whose loyalty to his government had, not surprisingly, been greater than his loyalty to the Kennedys. After the president’s Monday-night speech, Charles Bartlett was instructed by Bobby Kennedy to telephone Bolshakov and let him know that he and the president were enraged at his manipulations. The attorney general, Bartlett said in an interview for this book, “wanted me to tell [Bolshakov] how mad he was.” It was, Kennedy told Bartlett, “a slimy thing [for Bolshakov] to do.” (Moments after making the call to Bolshakov, Bartlett was telephoned by the attorney general, who chided him for not being very subtle. It was clear, Bartlett told me, that Kennedy had wiretapped either his or Bolshakov’s telephone.) There was more payback: Bolshakov’s role as a purveyor of misleading information soon surfaced in the Washington press, ending his usefulness. He was recalled to Moscow.
With Bolshakov no longer in the picture, Robert Kennedy turned to Dobrynin, the new ambassador. Soviet documents show that the two men met at the Soviet Embassy late on Tuesday, October 23. Kennedy’s message seemed to be that his big brother wasn’t kidding. Dobrynin’s account, summarized in a cable sent that night to Moscow, described an “obviously excited” Kennedy explaining that the president understood “the seriousness of the situation” and “what sort of dangerous consequences” could arise if the Soviet ships did not respond to the American blockade—“quarantine” was the word now being used—in the Caribbean. Nonetheless, Kennedy said, his brother “cannot act in any other way.” The president, Kennedy added, had been deliberately misled by Khrushchev in the back channel. “The personal relations between the president and the Soviet premier have suffered heavy damage,” Kennedy told the ambassador. “The president believed everything which was said from the Soviet side, and in essence staked on that card his own political fate, having publicly announced to the USA that the arms deliveries to Cuba carry a purely defensive character, although a number of Republicans have asserted to the contrary.… President Kennedy felt himself deceived, and deceived intentionally” by Khrushchev, who “the president has always trusted on a personal level … despite the big disagreements and frequent aggravations in relations.”
Having made his case, Kennedy stood at the door of the embassy, Dobrynin reported, and asked, “as if by-the-way … what sort of orders the captains of the Soviet ships bound for Cuba have, in light of President Kennedy’s speech yesterday.” Dobrynin told the attorney general what he knew: that the Soviet captains had been instructed not “to stop or be searched on the open sea.” At that point, Bobby Kennedy, “having waved his hand, said, ‘I don’t know how all this will end, but we intend to stop your ships.’”
In his 1995 memoir, In Confidence, Dobrynin, who as a forty-two-year-old was the youngest man ever to serve as Soviet ambassador to the United States, acknowledged that at the time of Kennedy’s visit he had been told nothing about the Soviet missiles in Cuba. Years later, in Moscow, Dobrynin added, a high Soviet official explained that the lack of instructions and explicit information at the height of the crisis reflected “the sense of total bewilderment that enveloped Khrushchev and his colleagues after their plot [to install the missiles in Cuba] had taken such an unexpected turn.”
Dobrynin was ordered to keep on talking in private with the attorney general; it turned out to be one of the most important decisions of the crisis. The Tuesday-night conversation with Kennedy led to a subsequent series of confidential meetings, usually after midnight, throughout the crisis. “We met either at my embassy or in his office at the Department of Justice,” Dobrynin wrote.
When he visited me, I used to meet him at the entrance, and we ascended to the third floor to my sitting room where we proceeded to talk in the perfect silence of the night. Never was anyone else present at those meetings.… All this made the ambiance somewhat mysterious and at the same time reflected the tense atmosphere of Washington in those days. This tension was accentuated by the fact that Robert Kennedy was far from being a sociable person and lacked a proper sense of humor.… He was impulsive and excitable.
On Wednesday the nation was riveted to television sets as the first of twenty Soviet merchant ships approached the navy blockade. Jack Kennedy was unflappable, as usual. As the tension grew, Charles Bartlett and his wife were dining in the White House with the president and his wife. “That’s when I admired him the most,” Bartlett told me in a 1997 interview, “the night that the Russian ships were approaching the blockade. He was very cool and yet very sensitive to the implications of what was going on. It was scary. He literally did not know what the Russian reaction was going to be when they reached that blockade. We went home early and he hadn’t heard. And he called me about ten-thirty and said, ‘Well, we’ve got the word they turned around.’ He’d been perfectly normal all night.”
Nikita Khrushchev backed off. The Soviet ships either stopped dead in the water or turned back toward the Soviet Union. Jack Kennedy kept up the pressure. He had Ex Comm under firm control, with its members lined up in unanimous support of the blockade. He had the nation’s armed forces on alert and ready to pounce. America’s newspapers and television networks were called in for a briefing by Dean Rusk and warned that tensions had not eased, despite the Soviet capitulation on the high seas. Overflights of Cuba showed that construction at the missile sites was proceeding at breakneck pace. Newspapermen depicted Bobby Kennedy, McGeorge Bundy, and Robert McNamara as among those advocating an invasion of Cuba, if necessary, to get the missiles out. Local newspapers published articles on the status of food reserves, civil defense systems, and bomb shelters, as much of America—and the world—continued to be terrified. The Soviet Embassy in Washington warned Moscow, Dobrynin wrote in his memoirs, that Jack Kennedy, “like a gambler, actually was staking his reputation as a statesman, and his chances for reelection in 1964, on the outcome of this crisis. That was why,” Dobrynin added, “we could not rule out—especially given the more aggressive members of his entourage—the possibility of a reckless reaction.”
A crucial piece of information in Washington was withheld from the public: the American intelligence community found no evidence of an increase in military readiness or alerts in the Soviet Union. Samuel Halpern and his colleagues in Task Force W were closely monitoring the crisis and finding no sign of a Soviet mobilization, although the Soviet troops in Cuba continued to work round-the-clock assembling medium-range ballistic missile sites. “By the twenty-sixth [of October],” Halpern told me, “we’re saying, ‘What’s going on?’ There’s no Soviet reaction. Nobody is getting ready to shoot at us. We’re asking, ‘Have we won already?’” The Strategic Air Command had gone to DEFCON 2, the stage just short of war, while the Soviets, Halpern said, “did not do a damn thing, even though they had nukes [in Cuba] that we didn’t know they had.” Most significant, the Soviets did nothing to upgrade the readiness of their nuclear missile fleet.
There was another crucial player in the crisis: Fidel Castro, whose importance was, astonishingly, discounted by the White House. Castro was convinced that the Americans were coming—he knew the Kennedys wanted him dead—and was increasingly agitated by the refusal of General Pliyev to fire at American intelligence planes. By Friday, October 26, American reconnaissance aircraft were crisscrossing the island at treetop level with impunity, and presumed to be gathering the intelligence needed for a ground invasion. Castro began urging Pliyev to get authority to begin knocking the Americans out of the sky with surface-to-air missiles. Pliyev agreed and, according to the Soviet documents obtained by Fursenko and Naftali, permission was received a day later.
Castro panicked early on the morning of October 27, according to “One Hell of a Gamble,” and began telling his Soviet counterparts that “under certain circumstances”—the possible loss of Cuba—a nuclear first strike against an American target was justified. If the Americans “actually carry out the brutal act of invading Cuba,” Castro wrote in a letter to Khrushchev, “that would be the moment to eliminate such danger forever through an act of legitimate defense, however harsh and terrible the solution would be.” “We must not wait to experience the perfidy of the imperialists,” Castro told a Soviet diplomat in Havana, “letting them initiate the first strike and deciding that Cuba should be wiped off the face of the earth.”
Khrushchev was losing control.
Confronted with fanaticism from both Fidel Castro and John Kennedy, Khrushchev brought the superpower game of chicken to an end. He sent Kennedy a long, rambling letter that offered a way out. “It is … no secret to anyone that the threat of armed attack, aggression, has constantly hung and continues to hang over Cuba,” Khrushchev wrote. “It was only this that impelled us to respond to the Cuban government’s request to give it aid to strengthen its defensive capacity. If the President and the government of the United States were to give assurance that the USA itself would not participate in an attack on Cuba and would restrain others from this kind of action, if you would recall your fleet, this would immediately change everything.” The Soviet premier was accepting the offer that the president had made to Andrei Gromyko a week earlier, before there was any public mention of the missiles in Cuba.
In “One Hell of a Gamble,” Fursenko and Naftali reported that by this time, according to Soviet documentation, twenty-four medium-range ballistic missiles were operational and could be loaded with nuclear warheads within hours. Why didn’t Khrushchev, who had overridden the opposition of many in the Politburo to put the missiles in Cuba, now announce their readiness and challenge Kennedy to war? “In the heat of the crisis,” the authors wrote, “Khrushchev backed away.… Time and again between 1956 and 1961, he had threatened nuclear retaliation as a bargaining chip to further his political objectives. But Khrushchev did not have the desire to threaten nuclear war when [the threat] might actually lead to one.”
On the next morning, however, Khrushchev, under pressure from the Politburo, made a last-minute attempt to strengthen his position—and save his political standing in Moscow. The White House received a second proposal from him, advocating a public trade of the missiles in Turkey for the missiles in Cuba. The American Jupiters in Turkey were known to be strategically insignificant and vulnerable to Soviet attack, and Khrushchev’s offer put the president in a dilemma. “He obviously did not wish to order the withdrawal of the missiles from Turkey under threat from the Soviet Union,” Bobby Kennedy explained in Thirteen Days. “On the other hand, he did not want to involve the U.S. and mankind in a catastrophic war over missile sites in Turkey that were antiquated and useless.” McGeorge Bundy and Ted Sorensen, always tough in front of their boss, argued against the trade, telling Kennedy that American credibility in NATO as a nuclear defender of Europe would be undermined by withdrawal of the Jupiters. The president was on the verge of a knockout punch of Khrushchev, they said, and his political standing among the Republicans would be jeopardized if he resolved the crisis by trading off America’s nuclear arsenal, strategically relevant or not.
But there was more bad news from Cuba that morning. The CIA’s photo interpreters, whose analyses turned out to be correct, concluded that construction work at all twenty-four medium-range missile sites was now complete. The missiles, with a range of 1,020 nautical miles—enough to strike Washington—could be fueled, armed, targeted, and ready to launch in six to eight hours. The FBI reported that Soviet diplomats were behaving as if war was imminent: they had begun burning files and archives at their embassy in Washington and at their UN enclave on Long Island.
The crisis worsened later that afternoon, when it was learned that a Soviet surface-to-air missile had shot down an American U-2 spy plane during an intelligence-gathering overflight of the island. The Joint Chiefs had agitated since the crisis began for a massive air strike unless the Soviets began to dismantle their missiles. It had been agreed in Ex Comm, without serious debate or known dissension, that if a reconnaissance plane was shot down, the air force could retaliate by destroying a Soviet surface-to-air site. Maxwell Taylor, the Kennedy’s favorite general, who had recently been named chairman of the Joint Chiefs, recommended with the support of his four-star colleagues that the air strike be followed by an all-out invasion. “There was the knowledge that we had to take military action to protect our pilots,” Bobby Kennedy wrote. “There was the realization that the Soviet Union and Cuba apparently were preparing to do battle. And there was the feeling that the noose was tightening on all of us, on Americans, on mankind, and that the bridges to escape were crumbling.”
Kennedy was losing control.
At the suggestion of Bundy, the president agreed that he would respond to Khrushchev’s first letter and ignore the second, which insisted on a missile trade. In Kennedy, his 1965 insider’s memoir, Ted Sorensen described what happened next. “At the private request of the President, a copy of [a] letter was delivered to the Soviet Ambassador by Robert Kennedy with a strong verbal message: The point of escalation was at hand; the United States could proceed toward peace and disarmament, or, as the Attorney General later described it, we could take ‘strong and overwhelming retaliatory action … unless [the President] received immediate notice that the missiles would be withdrawn.”’ On the next morning, Sorensen wrote, the Kremlin announced that “Kennedy’s terms were being accepted.… I [was] hardly able to believe it.” Later, at a cabinet meeting, Sorensen wrote, “John F. Kennedy entered and we all stood up.” The president, he added, had “earned his place in history by this one act alone.… Cuba had been the site of his greatest failure and now of his greatest success.”
Sorensen’s published account was a half-truth. As he knew, and would not reveal for twenty-seven years, the crisis was resolved when Bobby Kennedy, on behalf of his brother, held a last-minute meeting with Dobrynin and made a secret arrangement to give Nikita Khrushchev the trade he wanted—Jupiter missiles removed from Turkey in exchange for withdrawal of Soviet missiles from Cuba.
Dobrynin’s secret cable to Moscow about the meeting, published with little fanfare in 1995 by the Cold War International History Project Bulletin, reported that Kennedy arrived with a compromise offer as well as a warning: time was of the essence, because, Kennedy said, “there are many unreasonable heads among the [American] generals, and not only among the generals, who are ‘itching’ for a fight. The situation might get out of control, with irreversible consequences.” His brother, Robert Kennedy told the Soviet ambassador, was under “strong pressure” to permit the air force to retaliate against Cuban targets if American reconnaissance planes were fired upon. “The USA can’t stop these flights,” Kennedy said, “because this is the only way we can quickly get information about the state of construction of the missile bases in Cuba.” If the American bombing took place, the president’s brother said, the result could be nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. “In response to the bombing of these bases,” Dobrynin quoted the distraught Kennedy as saying, “the Soviet government will undoubtedly respond with the same against us, somewhere in Europe. A real war will begin, in which millions of Americans and Russians will die. We want to avoid that any way we can.”*
“During our meeting,” Dobrynin wrote in his cable home, “R. Kennedy was very upset; in any case, I’ve never seen him like this before.… He didn’t even try to get into fights on various subjects, as he usually does, and only persistently returned to one topic: time is of the essence and we shouldn’t miss the chance.”
The brothers had lost control because of the downing of one American spy plane. What began as payback for the Bay of Pigs was beginning to evolve into a world war. The Kennedys, fanatical about being tough and resolute in front of their peers, could not turn to the government they controlled to extricate themselves from disaster. They turned for help, instead, to Nikita Khrushchev.
With a missile trade on the table, Bobby Kennedy asked Dobrynin and Khrushchev for secrecy, explaining that only two or three people in Washington were aware of the behind-the-scenes bargaining. “The president can’t say anything public in this regard,” Kennedy added. The missiles in Turkey were nominally under NATO command, and to order their removal unilaterally “would seriously tear apart NATO. However,” Dobrynin’s cable quoted Kennedy as saying, “President Kennedy is ready to come to agreement on that question with N.S. Khrushchev, too. I think that in order to withdraw these bases from Turkey, we need four-five months.” If Khrushchev agreed, Kennedy added, he and the president could continue to work together, with Dobrynin serving as the middleman in a new back channel.
In his memoirs Dobrynin described three further meetings with Bobby Kennedy over the missile issue. On Sunday, October 28, the ambassador was instructed by cable from Moscow to tell the attorney general that Khrushchev accepted the agreement. The relieved Kennedy smiled and said, according to Dobrynin, “At last, I’m going to see the kids. Why, I’ve almost forgotten my way home.” On the next day Khrushchev told Kennedy, through Dobrynin, that he agreed to keep the missile trade secret and to continue the new back-channel discussions. In a cable sent on the thirtieth to Moscow, published in the Cold War International History Project Bulletin, Dobrynin quoted the attorney general as saying that he and the president “are not prepared to formulate such an understanding in the form of letters, even the most confidential letters, between the president and the head of the Soviet government when it concerns such a delicate issue.” Kennedy was referring to a private letter Khrushchev had sent to the president the day before; the Soviet premier had explicitly stated that he accepted Kennedy’s commitment to eliminate the Jupiters at a future date. The letter could not stand, Bobby Kennedy told Dobrynin, because it was a political liability.
“Speaking in all candor,” Kennedy added, according to the Dobrynin cable, “I, myself, for example, do not want to risk getting involved in the transmission of this sort of letter, since who knows where and when such letters can surface or be somehow published—not now, but in the future—and any changes in the course of events are possible. The appearance of such a document could cause irreparable harm to my political career in the future. This is why we request that you take this letter back.”
The top stratum of the Soviet government was getting a lesson in cover-up from the Americans. “As a guarantee,” Dobrynin quoted Kennedy as saying, “I can only give you my word. Moreover I can tell you that two other people besides the president know about the existing understanding”—Dean Rusk and Llewellyn Thompson, the former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union. There was a carrot for the ambitious Dobrynin. Kennedy told the ambassador, Dobrynin cabled, that “on the Turkish [missile] issue and other highly confidential issues he was prepared to maintain a direct contact with me.… I answered,” Dobrynin said, “that I was prepared to maintain contact with him on highly important issues in the future, passing over the heads, as he himself suggested, of all intermediaries.”
The Dobrynin cable did not include Kennedy’s most remarkable statement—saved, no doubt, for his 1995 memoir. “Very privately,” Dobrynin wrote, “Robert Kennedy added that someday—who knows?—he might run for president, and his prospects could be damaged if the secret deal about the missiles in Turkey were to come out.”
Jack Kennedy was planning to stay in office six more years, and to be followed by his brother for two four-year terms. For perhaps the next fourteen years, therefore, the men running the Soviet Union, with or without a formal letter, would have the means to publicly devastate the Kennedys by putting the lie to their inspiring victory in the missile crisis. The president and his brother were true existentialists at that moment, bargaining their way out of an immediate crisis by putting their future credibility in the hands of the Soviet leadership.
The American people, knowing none of this, cheered the victorious end of the crisis and their hero-president, Jack Kennedy. Those few who doubted or criticized his negotiating tactics ate crow, like Nikita Khrushchev, in public. Walter Lippmann, who had complained in writing about Kennedy’s reckless handling of Andrei Gromyko, lauded the president for having shown “not only the courage of a warrior, which is to take the risks that are necessary, but also … the wisdom of the statesman, which is to use power with restraint.” A few days later Lippmann had lunch at the White House with the president and was shown some of the top-secret correspondence between Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev. The correspondence did not deal, of course, with Kennedy’s secret concession on the Jupiter missiles.
Kennedy also did not tell Dwight Eisenhower, his new telephone confidant, the real story, although Eisenhower shrewdly asked the right questions. A transcript of the call, from the Evelyn Lincoln Dictabelts, shows that the president claimed victory over the Soviets and told Eisenhower that he had rejected Khrushchev’s public demand that the Jupiters be withdrawn. “We couldn’t get into that deal,” Kennedy said, disingenuously.
Eisenhower: “Of course, but Mr. President, does [Khrushchev] put any conditions on?”
Kennedy: “No, except that we’re not going to invade Cuba.… That’s the only one we’ve got now. But we don’t plan to invade Cuba under these conditions anyway, so if we can get them out, we’re better off by now.”
Eisenhower: “I quite agree. I just wondered whether he would try to engage us in any kind of statement or commitments that would finally one day be very embarrassing.”
Kennedy: “I don’t think the Cuban story can be over yet … If they engage in subversion, if they attempt to do any aggressive acts and so on, then all bets are off. In addition, my guess is that by the end of next month we’re going to be toe-to-toe in Berlin anyway, so I think this is important for the time being because it requires quite a step-down for Khrushchev.”*
Not everyone cheered Kennedy’s agreement, as it was publicly stated—trading the Soviet missiles in Cuba for an explicit American commitment never to invade. “We now have a U.S.-protected Soviet base in the Western Hemisphere,” Sam Halpern recalled telling one of his colleagues on Task Force W at the time. As Halpern anticipated, the president’s attitude toward Castro did not change after the missile crisis; the CIA would still be asked to get rid of him.
The Kennedy brothers brought the world to the edge of war in their attempts to turn the dispute into a political asset. They survived by making private entreaties to a Soviet premier they had sought only days earlier to humiliate before the world. Jack Kennedy was willing to trust the Soviet leadership with information that, if made public, would destroy his presidency. Robert Kennedy was also willing to hold his future presidency hostage to the vagaries of a foreign government that could choose, at any time, to make public the terms of the missile trade.
Robert Kennedy could not bring himself to tell the truth, either in his memoir or in his oral interviews with his brother’s library. Jack Kennedy accepted the nation’s adulation as a peacekeeper, while remaining eager to tell his friends that he’d “cut off Khrushchev’s balls.” Members of the Ex Comm were also hailed by the public and the media for their role in repeatedly encouraging the president to be tough. The president’s public approval ratings shot up to 77 percent—almost as high as in the weeks following the Bay of Pigs. Kennedy arranged for Tiffany’s, the posh New York jeweler, to design a silver calendar, mounted in walnut, that depicted the month of October 1962, with the thirteen days of crisis etched more deeply. He presented the desktop mementos to each member of the Ex Comm and other aides who participated in the crisis.
The public was touched by his display of affection for the men who had helped him make the tough decisions. Kennedy kept up the pretense of toughness after the crisis by helping to smear the dovish Adlai Stevenson, his ambassador to the United Nations, who had been the only member of the Ex Comm to have the courage to suggest trading the missiles in Cuba for the Jupiters in Turkey—the precise agreement that was secretly worked out. Stevenson’s suggestion was criticized by his peers at the time; six weeks later the ambassador was anonymously accused of having “wanted a Munich” in an article coauthored by Charles Bartlett and Stewart Alsop. Jack Kennedy denied any role in the mud-slinging, but Stevenson later learned, according to his public papers, that Bartlett and Alsop presented a draft of the article to the president in advance. “It is true,” Alsop later acknowledged, “that Kennedy read the piece for accuracy, and proposed a couple of minor changes.”*
The few men who knew part or all of the story said nothing, and the missile crisis continued to be the most misunderstood and poorly reported event of the Cold War. McNamara has never talked about what he knew. And Dean Rusk waited until 1987 before he finally acknowledged that the president, after dispatching his brother to see Dobrynin on the night of October 27, desperately sought a further compromise, although not the one that was actually negotiated. Kennedy authorized Rusk to draft a statement calling on U Thant, the United Nations secretary-general, to propose a public trade of Soviet missiles for American Jupiters. The president would then publicly accept the offer.*
Anything was better, in Jack Kennedy’s world, than being compelled to admit to his admirers in the government—and to the hard-nosed generals and admirals who ran the armed forces—that their heroic young president had compromised to avoid war.
* Bundy, in his repeated telling of the missile crisis over the next few months, explained that he did not immediately give the intelligence to Kennedy because the president had spent the day before campaigning and seemed worn out. “I decided that a quiet evening and a night of sleep were the best preparation you could have,” he later told Kennedy in writing, “in light of what you would face in the days ahead.” Bundy made the explanation to the president after a magazine raised questions in early 1963 about the legality of his unilateral decision not to immediately inform the president of so significant a matter. Bundy was obviously going through the motions in his written explanation. As we have seen in this book, there were many times in the Kennedy White House, according to the Secret Service, when the president could not be disturbed, even for the most urgent of matters.
* Lovett, a wealthy New York lawyer whose father was president of the Union Pacific Railroad, had served as defense secretary in the Truman administration. He also served in the mid-1950s with Joseph Kennedy on the Eisenhower administration’s intelligence advisory board; Jack Kennedy was eager to bring him into the inner circle during the missile crisis. Lovett arrived for a meeting in the Oval Office while the president was getting yet another briefing on the Soviet missiles. The CIA’s Dino A. Brugioni, one of the briefers, described what happened next in a later memoir, Eyeball to Eyeball, published in 1991: “The president … asked Bobby to do the honors [escort Lovett to the Oval Office]. Bobby stuck his head out of the office door and called out to the waiting guest, ‘Hey, you!’ Lovett, calm, dignified, and reserved, did not respond. ‘Hey, you,’ Bobby called out a second time, and Lovett quizzically pointed to himself. ‘Yes, you!’ Bobby said with some irritation. ‘Come here!’ The president slammed his pen to the desk, ran his hand across his brow and, thoroughly disgusted, screamed out, ‘Goddamn, Bobby!’ To us,” Brugioni noted, “it wasn’t evidence of a brotherly feud or family infighting. It was simply the president dressing down a younger sibling who just happened to be the attorney general of the United States. We hastily packed our briefing materials and left.”
† Some of the Ex Comm meetings were tape-recorded by Kennedy, who—under the recording system set up a few months earlier by the Secret Service—had to manually push a button to do so. The president and his brother were the only persons involved in the deliberations who knew that there could be a record for posterity. By the late 1980s, the Kennedy Library began making public many of the transcribed proceedings of the Ex Comm; their historical value can only be diminished by the fact that the two key players of the crisis knew they were being recorded.
* Kennedy was confounded by Lippmann, who seemed unmoved by his charms. “You have lunch with Lippmann or Reston and they go back and knock the shit out of you to prove their integrity,” Kennedy told Charles Bartlett. “The hell with them.” Bartlett told the anecdote to Richard Reeves.
* One of the ironies of the missile crisis, Sam Halpern told me, was that the huge CIA station in Miami, relying on defector reports and other data, estimated the Soviet troop level in Cuba at slightly more than 42,000 by the fall of 1962. But that estimate was rejected as far too high by the intelligence community in Washington. “The president didn’t know the numbers that our people in Florida were using,” Halpern said.
* In April 1962 Kennedy had visited the navy’s Atlantic Fleet headquarters, and was given a briefing by Admiral Robert Dennison on the command-and-control procedures for firing a Polaris nuclear missile. “I gave President Kennedy my chair at my desk, where he could see everything,” Dennison recounted in his oral history for the U.S. Naval Institute. “I told [him] what was going to happen, because things happen so fast … just a lot of bang, bang, bang, and it’s all over. I gave the command to start the exercise. Of course, all hell broke loose. Bells and buzzers and everything else started going,… getting the necessary instructions … and giving the order to shoot.” After the exercise, Dennison said, he asked Kennedy if he had any questions. “He didn’t say anything, and there was quite an appreciable pause, which seemed like a long time but was probably maybe six or seven or eight seconds. Finally, he said, ‘Can these missiles be stopped?’ I said, ‘No, sir.’…I’ve wondered often what he was thinking about; what could happen in a matter of a few seconds—not half an hour or fifteen minutes—for him to think about countermanding an order to shoot.” Kennedy’s question—asking, in effect, whether he could reverse his decision once a nuclear weapon was launched—is indicative of his constant concern with maintaining personal control over events.
* Bobby Kennedy seemed unaware that his statement about the danger of escalation in Europe could be construed as undercutting the American bargaining position in the crisis. The American goal was to use the threat of bombing, or worse, to compel the Soviets to withdraw their missiles from Cuba. If Bobby Kennedy and his brother believed that an American bombing would lead to Soviet retaliation in Europe, the cost to America of hitting Cuba would be much higher—weakening the credibility of the American threat of force. In their 1994 study of the missile crisis, We All Lost the Cold War, published by Princeton University Press, Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Stein noted that “to maintain or enhance that credibility, [President] Kennedy would have had to discount the probability of Soviet retaliation to Dobrynin.” There is another, more disturbing, analysis. Bobby Kennedy was reminding Khrushchev, through Dobrynin, that events could get out of control unless they made a private deal right away. He was warning that pressure from the Joint Chiefs might force the president to take steps he didn’t want—the bombing of Cuba—and reminding Khrushchev that the same thing could happen to him within hours in the Soviet Union.
* Kennedy also telephoned former president Harry Truman in Independence, Missouri, and once again misrepresented the agreement. A transcript of that call shows the following exchange:
Truman: “I’m just pleased to death the way these things came out.”
Kennedy: “Well, we’ll just stay at it. I just wanted to bring you up to date on it. We got a letter from [Khrushchev] on Friday night which was rather conciliatory on these withdrawals. Then on Saturday morning … we got this entirely different letter about the missile bases in Turkey.”
Truman: “That’s the way they do things.”
Kennedy: “Well, then we rejected that. Then they came back and accepted the earlier proposal so … we’re making some progress about getting these missiles out of there. In addition, Khrushchev’s had some difficulties in maintaining his position.”
“Truman: “You’re on the right track. You just keep after them. That’s the language they understand, just what you gave them.”
* Evelyn Lincoln’s Dictabelt tapes show that Kennedy was privately doubtful of Stevenson during the crisis. At one point early in the crisis, he telephoned the conservative John McCloy, a banker who was his special adviser on disarmament, and urged him to cut short a European business trip to fly to Stevenson’s side at the United Nations. “I think we need somebody up there to sort of sustain Adlai, and stiffen him, and support him,” the president said. McCloy, who was one of the architects of America’s postwar reconstruction policies, wasn’t eager to return, but did so when Kennedy arranged for a special flight. The president later informed Dwight Eisenhower that he had sent McCloy to the United Nations “to assist Adlai, so that we get somebody who’s had some experience.”
* Ted Sorensen waited until 1989, and some public complaints by Dobrynin about the distortion of history, before revealing at an international conference on the missile crisis that he had deleted from Thirteen Days the essential fact that Jack and Robert Kennedy had decided to approach Khrushchev secretly—that is, behind the back of the Ex Comm—and explicitly agreed to withdraw the missiles in Turkey. Sorensen spent much of his professional life as a ghostwriter for Jack Kennedy and did the same for his brother’s posthumous book. Thirteen Days was based on Bobby Kennedy’s personal diaries, Sorensen said in a note published on the last page of the text, and written by Kennedy, in draft, in the summer and fall of 1967. As the editor of Robert Kennedy’s book, Sorensen explained in 1989, he chose to delete the reference to the back-channel bargaining with Khrushchev, through Ambassador Dobrynin, “because at the time it was still a secret even to the American side.” Sorensen’s revelation left the impression that Bobby Kennedy, had he lived, would have described the secret agreement in his book. There is nothing in the record, or in Kennedy’s oral history, that suggests that he would have done so.