CHAPTER 8:
CIA CONCOCTS POISON CAPSULES FOR CASTRO
The CIA’s secret plan to assassinate Fidel Castro originated with a December 1959 memorandum by Colonel J. C. King, chief of the Agency’s Western Hemisphere Division (WHD). But one of the first schemes King developed to target Castro involved hallucinogenic drugs. The objective was to undermine Castro’s charismatic leadership by causing him to act bizarrely in public.
In his “Report on Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro,” CIA Inspector General J. S. Earman referred to “a scheme to contaminate the air of the radio station where Castro broadcast his speeches with an aerosol spray of a chemical that produces reactions similar to those of lysergic acid (LSD).”
Earman reported that the Agency considered another operation involving a cigar laced “with some sort of chemical,” which Castro would be induced to smoke before giving a speech, causing him to “make a public spectacle of himself.” King also targeted Castro’s beard: “Without this important symbol, it is believed that his personal position might be significantly weakened. A beardless Castro might be effectively ridiculed and the loss of it might be associated with a decline in his power and that of his revolutionary cohorts.” According to Earman, the CIA experimented with thallium salts, a depilatory, to cause the whiskers in Castro’s beard to fall out.
King advised the Havana station chief that the WHD plans targeting Castro would require the cooperation of the station. Operational intelligence about Castro’s personal life would have to be gathered: What were his food preferences and drinking habits? What restaurants and bars did he frequent? Who bought his food and where? What was his favorite brand of cigar? With whom did he have “amorous liaisons” and what was his “vulnerability to seduction?” Earman reported that King’s covert schemes never got beyond the planning stage.315 In the meantime, the CIA reached out to the Mafia.
In August 1960, CIA Deputy Director for Plans (DDP) Richard Bissell contacted Colonel Sheffield Edwards, director of the CIA’s Office of Security. Bissell told Edwards that the Agency needed an asset to carry out a “gangster-type action” against Fidel Castro. Edwards turned to Jim O’Connell, a senior Office of Security official, to recruit a Mafia assassin.
O’Connell got in touch with his friend Robert Maheu, the Washington representative of the reclusive millionaire Howard Hughes, who had good connections in Las Vegas and had been recruited by the Office of Security as an asset in 1954.316 Hughes Aircraft did secret contract work for the CIA and the Department of Defense. Maheu said Johnny Rosselli might be willing to introduce the CIA to Mafia gamblers with connections in Cuba. Maheu agreed to act as a “cut-out,” or go-between, for the CIA and Rosselli, as he had in numerous other operations.
In September 1960, Maheu arranged a meeting between O’Connell and Rosselli at the Plaza Hotel in New York. Maheu told Rosselli that O’Connell was representing business interests in Cuba, which had suffered because of the revolution. Maheu said O’Connell’s clients believed “the elimination of Castro [w]as the essential first step to the recovery of their investments.” Rosselli figured out that O’Connell worked for the CIA, but agreed to introduce Maheu to Sam Giancana, godfather of the Chicago Outfit, whose Las Vegas gambling interests Rosselli represented.
In Washington, Edwards reported to Bissell that the Mafia gamblers in Cuba were willing to collaborate with the CIA to assassinate Castro. Bissell met with Allen Dulles and Deputy Director of Central Intelligence (DDCI) Charles Cabell. Dulles nodded his approval, and the assassination operation moved to the next phase.317
On September 24, 1960, Jim O’Connell flew to Miami. O’Connell, Maheu, and Rosselli, who used the alias “John Rawlston,” met frequently over the next several weeks in Florida to work out the details of the assassination operation. Rosselli arranged a meeting between Maheu and Sam Giancana at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach, where Giancana had a permanent suite of rooms. Giancana, who used the alias “Sam Gold,” said a man he called “Joe” could make the necessary arrangements in Cuba to kill Castro. Joe was Mafia gambler Santo Trafficante. According to CIA Inspector General Earman, Giancana rejected the CIA’s proposed method of assassination—a “typical gangland-style killing” with a gun.
“Giancana was flatly opposed to the use of firearms,” Earman wrote. “He said that no one could be recruited to do the job, because the chance of survival and escape would be negligible. Giancana stated a preference for a lethal pill that could be put into Castro’s food or drink.” The CIA agreed to concoct poison capsules for Mafia assets in Cuba to slip secretly into Castro’s food or drink.318 While Rosselli searched for an assassin, the CIA experimented with poisons to administer to Castro.
On August 16, Sheffield Edwards sent Dr. Edward Gunn, chief of operations of the CIA’s Medical Services Division, a box of Cuban cigars. Gunn was instructed to turn the cigars, thought to be Castro’s “favorite brand,” into a lethal weapon. Gunn contacted the CIA’s Technical Services Division (TSD).
Earman wrote, “[Redaction] remembers experimenting with some cigars and then treating a full box… with botulinum toxin, a virulent poison that produces a fatal illness some hours after it is ingested.” Bissell said the liquid form of the toxin was chosen because “Castro frequently drank tea, coffee, or bouillon for which a liquid poison would be particularly well-suited.”319
Gunn experimented with guinea pigs and monkeys to make sure the capsule form of the botulinum toxin was lethal.320 Meanwhile, Giancana appeared to be working on a plan of his own to assassinate Castro, according to an October 18, 1960 memorandum from FBI Director Hoover to Dulles. “[D]uring recent conversations with several friends, Giancana stated that Fidel Castro was to be done away with very shortly,” Hoover wrote. Giancana told Phyllis and Christine McGuire of the McGuire Sisters that Castro would be killed in November. He said he had already met with the assassin-to-be three times, most recently “on a boat docked” at the Fontainebleau Hotel. “Everything had been perfected for the killing of Castro.” The assassin had arranged “with a girl,” not further described, to put a “pill” in Castro’s food or drink.321
Giancana could not have been referring to the CIA-Mafia poison capsule plan. The CIA’s poison pills were not delivered to Rosselli until March 1961. Instead, HSCA investigators speculated, Giancana was creating his own assassination plot, possibly involving his associate Richard Scalzitti Cain: “The suspicion is that Cain was being sent by Giancana to supervise the poisoning attempt on Fidel Castro… Cain could be the ‘assassin-to-be’ whom Giancana referred to… in the FBI memo of October 18, 1960 or he could be the contact man for the operation.”
Why then would the Mafia collaborate with the CIA? “The mob was then in a perfect position,” the HSCA memorandum stated. “If their private plot actually worked, and Castro died, then the syndicate had enormous blackmail potential against the CIA which it could exercise at the opportune moment. However, if their intrigue backfired, then their position would be that they were only attempting to execute the wishes of their government.”322
As Giancana plotted with the CIA at the Fontainebleau Hotel, Cain was meeting with the FBI in Miami Beach, providing them with information about armaments in Cuba, which he obtained from Antonio Varona. Cain also made contact with the CIA, telling the Agency that he planned to travel to Cuba on an assignment for Carlos Prío to tap telephones. According to CIA records, Cain was an informant for the CIA from 1960 until 1964 on a variety of matters.323
Cain disclosed that he secretly worked for Giancana when he was employed by the Chicago Police Department from 1956 until 1960. He was currently the head of a private detective agency in Chicago, but Giancana was one of his clients. A CIA biographical sketch of Cain noted his ties to the Agency-sponsored Cuban opposition: “Employment: private detective possibly employed by the Frente Revolucionario Democrático in 1961.”324 As the CIA and Mafia conspired to kill Castro, the Cuban middle class began to turn against the Cuban revolution.
On June 4, 1960, National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) 85-2-60 reported growing disillusionment with the revolution among Cuban professionals and the middle class. The NIE stated, “In recent months there have been increasing signs of opposition in Cuba to the Castro regime mainly in reaction to the expansion of communist influence, the dictatorial nature and methods of the regime, and assorted economic grievances.”325 It pointed out Castro still “enjoyed enormous” popularity in the rural areas, where guajiros had benefitted greatly from the revolution. A May 1960 Foreign Service dispatch reported support for the revolution was strong among “the poorer classes,” noting that “none of the old political leaders had much standing in Cuba.”326
Wayne Smith watched political developments in Cuba in 1960 as a foreign service officer at the U.S. Embassy. “When Castro marched into Havana in January 1959, he had the overwhelming support of the Cuban people,” Smith writes. “As the months had gone by, however, and he reneged on promises to restore the Constitution of 1940, to hold fair and honest elections and guarantee freedom of expression, doubts arose. After Castro played his Soviet card, these doubts hardened into outright opposition.” In 1960, small groups of armed insurgents appeared in Cuba. Smith notes, “Rarely did a night go by in Havana that we did not hear bombs, and occasionally we even heard gunfire.”327 Bissell hoped to take advantage of middle-class unrest to organize an underground network of counterrevolutionary groups on the island. He wrote, “Our immediate goal was to model the guerrilla organization along the lines of the underground organizations of World War II. The first step was to create a command and control net on the island whose mission would be to establish safe houses, provide the capability for receiving supplies, and enable the retrieval of infiltrated agents.”
In September 1960, the Special Group approved a CIA proposal for “supply drops” to counterrevolutionary forces in the Escambray mountains. But Department of State memorandums described the problems that plagued the U.S. supply operation in Cuba. “An air drop to rebel forces seems to have gotten pretty SNAFU’ed,” an October 11 Department of State memorandum reported. “Sinesio Walsh and 100 of his men are reported captured.”328 Another Foggy Bottom memorandum noted, “[A]irdrops have been arranged but the planes encounter so much difficulty that this means of delivery is very uncertain and unpredictable.”329 The Cuban army had effectively countered the CIA air supply operation.
In late 1960, the Cuban army and 50,000 militia troops launched an offensive against the insurgents in the Escambray. Peasants were evacuated temporarily to deprive the insurgents of food and intelligence from the local population. When the operation ended in March 1961, thirty-nine guerrillas had been killed and another 381 taken prisoner.330
William Morgan, a North American soldier of fortune linked to the Mafia, was among the insurgents taken prisoner. A secret asset of U.S. Army intelligence, Morgan was charged with smuggling arms to Cuban counterrevolutionaries in October 1960. Morgan procured arms for Manuel Ray, leader of the Movimiento Revolucionario del Pueblo (MRP) (Revolutionary Movement of the People). A CIA report stated, “Ray said that Major William Morgan, now under arrest, had done a great deal of work for the MRP and had been responsible for obtaining most of the weapons the MRP now has.”331 He was executed in March 1961.
By late 1960, the United States had concluded that Manuel Ray and his MRP represented a significant new political development in Cuba: an evolving alliance of business leaders with Cuban nationalist passions and a Cuban professional class strongly opposed to a return of the corrupt and repressive politics of Cuba’s past.
A CIA memorandum asserted, “While the present MRP program is considered dangerously radical by more conservative [anti-Castro] groups, it will probably draw strong support from a large segment of the Cuban population, especially the large new generation of middle-class Cubans who are determined to prevent the return to the old authoritarian political systems of the past.”
The MRP’s core membership was drawn from the Havana-based Movimiento Resistencia Cívico (MRC) (Civic Resistance Movement) and dissident elements of the July 26th Movement. The MRP’s leadership included Ortodoxo leader Raúl Chibás, brother of the late anti-corruption leader Eddy Chibás; Felipe Pazos, former president of the Cuban National Bank; José Pepin Bosch, head of Bacardi Rum; and Colonel Ramón Barquín, a former anti-Batista leader in the Cuban army.
In meetings with the CIA, Ray committed himself to forming “a government free of communism and free of hostility to the U.S.” But Ray told the CIA some of the MRP’s “solutions” for the post-Castro period would likely cause “misgivings” in Washington. “He was quite firm… on the need of the nationalization of [U.S.-owned] public utilities [in Cuba].”
The CIA was uneasy about Ray’s politics. But the MRP represented a political trend in Cuba too important to be ignored. A November 1960 CIA cable concluded, “Question remains degree of support we give MRP in view of its political stance which needs further analysis.”332
In the meantime, Bissell and U.S. intelligence analysts concluded there was little likelihood the CIA could organize an effective insurgency inside Cuba. Special National Intelligence Estimate (SNIE) 85-3-60 reported, “Internal resistance to the Castro regime has risen in the last six months but it is still generally ineffective.”333 Other intelligence assessments indicated that the Cuban army and police had been brought under the “unified control” of the revolution. They had been “purged” of Batistianos and “outspoken anti-Communist elements.” The newly organized militia could be used to counter sabotage operations or quell “major disorders.”334
The Cuban revolution’s consolidation of power would cause the Eisenhower Administration to reevaluate the strategic conception of the CIA’s covert action plan.
CIA historian Jack Pfeiffer wrote, “[A]s the summer of 1960 drew to a close, it became apparent that Castro’s military strength and training programs were sharply improving and that the initial plan to infiltrate small teams to organize the dissidents no longer was feasible.”
National Security Advisor Gordon Gray reflected the Eisenhower Administration’s growing frustration at a meeting of the Special Group on November 3, 1960. Gray suggested that it might be necessary to stage an incident in Cuba as a pretext for U.S. military intervention in Cuba in order to overthrow the revolution.
“We will never be able to ‘clean up’ the situation without the use of overt U.S. military force,” Gray said, proposing the use of “CIA-backed exiles to mount a simulated attack on [the U.S. Navy base at] Guantánamo.” Gray’s proposal sparked “an involved discussion,” but it was ultimately rejected.
Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Livingston Merchant asked “whether any real planning had been done in taking direct positive action against Fidel, Raul, and Che Guevara,” according to minutes of the meeting. “He said without these three the Cuban Government would be leaderless and probably brainless.” Deputy Director of Central Intelligence (DDCI) Charles Cabell short-circuited the discussion.335
On November 29, Allen Dulles briefed Eisenhower and his deputies on a revised CIA plan for Cuba. The plan had been transformed from an infiltration of small teams of guerrillas into an amphibious landing of a small army. The objective was to establish a beachhead in Cuba and trigger an uprising against the revolution. Pfeiffer noted that CIA planners thought as many as 3,000 Cubans would be needed for the amphibious landing force. At a meeting of the Special Group on December 8, the covert operation was described as “an amphibious landing on the Cuban coast of 600–700 men equipped with weapons of extraordinarily heavy firepower.” The plan also called for the infiltration of sixty to eighty guerrillas prior to the amphibious landing.
The Special Group discussed contingency planning for U.S. military intervention in Cuba on January 12, 1961. “Mr. Whiting Willauer outlined a proposal to establish a task force consisting of representatives of State, CIA, Defense, and the Joint Staff to draw up contingency plans covering the possible use of overt U.S. forces.” The minutes added, “All members agreed that such planning is an essential step.”336
Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs C. Douglas Dillon pointed out that the CIA plan was no longer secret. He said the covert operation was “known all over Latin America and has been discussed in UN circles.”337
Bissell later said no paper was drafted for the revised Cuba covert action plan. Eisenhower indicated that he wanted the CIA plan to go forward. But a memorandum on the meeting reported, “The President wondered whether the situation did not have the appearance of beginning to get out of hand.” As the CIA covert action plan for Cuba was being transformed, U.S. policy in Cuba became a hot-button issue in the 1960 presidential campaign.
At the start of his presidential campaign, Senator John Kennedy offered a liberal alternative to the Republican policy in Cuba. In his campaign book The Strategy of Peace, Kennedy faulted Eisenhower for not pursuing a more enlightened policy in Cuba. He compared the situation in Cuba to the rise of radical Latin American nationalism elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere. “[W]e should now reread the life of Simón Bolívar, the great ‘Liberator’ and sometime ‘Dictator’ of South America, in order to comprehend the new contagion for liberty and reform now spreading south of our borders,” Kennedy wrote. “Fidel Castro is part of the legacy of Simón Bolívar… Castro is also part of the frustration of that earlier revolution which won its war against Spain but left largely untouched the indigenous feudal order.”
Kennedy said the Eisenhower Administration’s support of Batista, whom he called one of Latin America’s “most bloody and repressive tyrants,” contributed to the radical nature of the Cuban revolution. He noted Vice President Nixon praised Batista in a toast for restoring “stability” to Cuba.
He wrote, “Whether Castro would have taken a more rational course after his victory had the United States not backed the dictator Batista so long and uncritically, and had it given the fiery young rebel a warmer welcome in his hour of triumph, especially on his trip to this country, we cannot be sure.” But as summer gave way to fall and the election drew closer, Kennedy became increasingly hawkish on Cuba. He said, “Castro became less of an enigma when he ruthlessly executed many of his enemies, publicly asserted that Cuba would not align itself with the West in the Cold War, and placed Communists in some key posts of government.”338
In the last two months of the campaign, Kennedy framed Cuba as a Cold War issue. “In 1952, the Republicans ran on a platform of rolling back the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe,” he declared in Paterson, New Jersey, on September 15, 1960. “Today the Iron Curtain is ninety miles off the coast of the United States.”339
In a speech in Cincinnati, Ohio, on October 6, Kennedy charged that Castro had turned Cuba into a “communist menace.” “He has transformed the island into a supply depot for Communist arms and operation throughout all of South America, recruiting small bands of Communist-directed revolutionaries to serve as the nucleus of future Latin revolutions.” The following week, in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Kennedy questioned Nixon’s Cold War credentials: “If you don’t stand up to Castro, how can you be expected to stand up to Khrushchev?”340
On October 18, Nixon denounced the Cuban revolution as an “intolerable cancer” in a speech to the American Legion in Miami Beach. The next day, the Department of State announced a U.S. economic embargo of trade with Cuba, with the exception of food and medicine. Kennedy dismissed the embargo plans, calling it “too little, too late, a dramatic but almost empty gesture.”341
Kennedy upped the ante on Cuba on October 21. In a statement provided to the New York Times, he proposed that the United States provide aid to Cuban “fighters for freedom.” He declared, “We must attempt to strengthen the non-Batista democratic anti-Castro forces in exile, and in Cuba itself, who offer eventual hope of overthrowing Castro… Thus far these fighters for freedom have had virtually no support from our government.”342
Nixon was outraged. “I thought that Kennedy, with full knowledge of the facts, was jeopardizing the security of a United States foreign policy operation. And my rage was greater because I could do nothing about it,” Nixon later wrote. “I knew that Kennedy had received a CIA briefing on the administration’s Cuba policy and assumed that he knew, as I did, that a plan to aid the Cuban exiles was already underway on a top-secret basis.”
Nixon continued, “There was only one thing I could do. The covert operation had to be protected at all costs,” he wrote. “I must not even suggest by implication that the United States was rendering aid to rebel forces in and out of Cuba. In fact, I must go to the other extreme: I must attack the Kennedy proposal as wrong and irresponsible because it would violate our treaty commitments.”343 In a speech in Allentown, Pennsylvania on October 22, Nixon called Kennedy’s plan “shockingly reckless,” demonstrating “an immaturity, a rashness, a lack of understanding and an irresponsibility which raised a serious question as to whether he has the balanced judgment to be President in this critical period of the Sixties,” and offering “a direct invitation to the Soviet Union to intervene on the side of Castro…”344
Meanwhile, Kennedy’s call for U.S. aid to Cuban “fighters for freedom” had sparked controversy among Democrats. Kennedy telephoned former Secretary of State Dean Acheson to elicit his opinion on the matter. Acheson biographer James Chace wrote, “Acheson replied that he should stop talking about Cuba immediately, so that he would not get himself ‘hooked into positions, which would be difficult afterwards.’”345
Kennedy’s proposal was not received well either in liberal and intellectual circles. New York Times columnist James Reston wrote, “Senator Kennedy made what is probably his worst blunder of the campaign… His statement this week on Cuba, publicly calling for Government aid to overthrow Castro, is a clear violation of the Interamerican treaty prohibition against intervention in the internal affairs of the hemisphere republics.”
Kennedy backpedaled a little on Cuba, according to historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., who would later join the Kennedy Administration. “On October 22… Kennedy phoned… to suggest that I call Reston and [Walter] Lippmann and explain that, by ‘support from our Government,’ he meant only moral and psychological, not military support, and that he was committed to working within the framework of the Organization of American States,” Schlesinger later wrote. “Lippmann… thought the Kennedy people were trying to play the issue both ways and deserved to be called on it. In any case, Kennedy thereafter dropped Cuba and concentrated for the rest of the campaign on his central themes.”346 In the final days of the campaign, Nixon brooded over his suspicion that Kennedy had been briefed on the CIA’s covert action plan for Cuba.
According to CIA historian John Helgerson, DCI Allen Dulles briefed Senator Kennedy on U.S. intelligence issues, including Cuba, on July 23, 1960. Helgerson writes, “[T]he message on Cuba Dulles conveyed… was at least a bit ‘operational,’ even if not detailed.”
In a memorandum for the record, Dulles stated that he gave Kennedy and his running mate Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson of Texas “a very general briefing and covered the waterfront,” including developments in Sino-Soviet policy, an analysis of Soviet strategic attack capabilities, and recent flare-ups in Asia and the Middle East. “Both candidates were particularly interested in developments that might arise during the campaign, particularly with regard to Berlin, Cuba, and the Congo.”
CIA records indicate that Dulles briefed Kennedy again on intelligence matters on September 19. Deputy Director of Central Intelligence (DDCI) Charles Cabell briefed Kennedy again on November 2.347
Robert Kennedy later acknowledged that his brother learned during the campaign there was a covert Cuba operation in the planning stage with “men being trained” in Central America. Kennedy campaign aide Richard Goodwin, who drafted Kennedy’s call for U.S. aid for the Cuban “fighters for freedom,” later wrote, “As a presidential candidate, he had received secret briefings by the CIA, some of which revealed that we were training a force of Cuban exiles for a possible invasion of the Cuban mainland.”348
Dulles was not, however, the Kennedy campaign’s only source of intelligence on the Cuban exile force training for an invasion of Cuba. Alabama Governor John Patterson, a Democrat, contacted the Kennedy campaign in October 1960. Patterson had been informed by a CIA official and Major General Reid Doster of the Alabama Air National Guard that members of the air guard were being recruited to work with a Cuban exile invasion force.
Patterson recalled Doster’s words: “Any morning now, you are going to pick up the newspaper and read about a Cuban invasion. It’s going to be a tremendous success.” Patterson traveled to New York where he met privately with Kennedy and told him what he had learned about the Cuba operation.349 Photojournalist Andrew St. George was another Kennedy source. In October 1960, St. George was on assignment for Life magazine in Florida to photograph Frente Revolucionario Democrático activities and Cuban exiles training to invade Cuba. Kennedy campaign official William Attwood contacted St. George.
Journalists David Wise and Robert Ross write, “Attwood was calling St. George for information on the state of training of the Cuban exiles. According to St. George, Attwood expressed concern that the Republicans would try to launch an invasion of Cuba before election day.” Wise and Ross added, “St. George told Attwood that there seemed little possibility of an immediate invasion, judging by the state of readiness of the exiles. This word was passed on to Robert Kennedy, who was managing his brother’s campaign.”350 Kennedy also campaigned like a hawk on “the missile gap.”
Senator John Kennedy’s dire predictions of a missile gap with the Soviet Union were a signature issue of his presidential campaign. The missile gap controversy began with the launch of Sputnik, the world’s first earth satellite, into space on top of a Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) prototype on October 4, 1957. Radio stations in the United States broadcast the eerie “beep, beep, beep” emitted by Sputnik as it orbited the earth, leaving anxiety in its wake. The United States had not yet even tested an ICBM.
Nikita Khrushchev promptly exploited the propaganda value of Sputnik. He boasted that the Soviet Union was producing missiles like “sausages” in a sausage factory. He said that the Soviet Union had pulled ahead of the United States in missile technology, implying the global strategic balance of power had shifted in favor of the USSR.351
On Capitol Hill, the Senate Defense Preparedness Subcommittee held hearings on Sputnik. Democrats asked if a Soviet ICBM could launch a satellite into outer space, why couldn’t Soviet ICBMs also deliver nuclear warheads on targets in the United States?352
Eisenhower tried to reassure an anxious U.S. public. But he rejected the emergency ICBM build up proposed by the Democrats. He denied that the United States had fallen behind the USSR in missile technology. He had what historian Robert A. Divine calls “a clear picture of the pace and nature of the Russian ICBM program.” High-altitude U-2 spy planes had been flying photographic surveillance missions over the USSR since 1956. Divine writes, “The data gathered by the U-2 flights made it clear that the Soviets were still in the early stage of testing their ICBM and had not yet made any preparations for their deployment.” But Eisenhower refused to make public U.S. intelligence on the Soviet ICBM program. He did not want to disclose the existence of the U-2 surveillance flights.353
Meanwhile, Kennedy spoke ominously about the so-called missile gap. He declared, “We are facing a gap on which we are gambling with our survival.” He predicted 1961, 1962, and 1963 would be the years of the greatest danger, as the Soviet Union surpassed the United States in ICBM capacity. And he pledged to restore U.S. nuclear superiority by replacing Eisenhower’s ICBM program with his own more ambitious missile plan. He also called for an across-the-board build up of U.S. conventional military forces.354
Kennedy used his hardline positions on Cuba and the missile gap to establish his Cold War credentials. When the 1960 presidential campaign was over, Kennedy was the winner by the slimmest of margins, 49.72 percent of the total votes cast.355