THE AMERICAN PUBLIC’S response to John F. Kennedy’s speech varied widely from person to person and even from city to city. There was pervasive tension but no widespread panic (although there were pockets). Most people woke up on Tuesday morning, October 23, and went about their business. But a cloud of fear forced them to keep an ear tuned to the radio or an eye on the TV to find out as much as they could and, more importantly, to glean news of what the Russians were doing. After all, Kennedy had squarely put the ball in the Soviet court, and Tuesday seemed to pass in slow motion as people anxiously waited for a Russian response.
Many people purchased extra water, food, gasoline, and flashlights—the same items one might stockpile in response to an oncoming hurricane. The US civil defense was woefully inadequate, and fallout shelters would hold only a fraction of the population. Fear made some people physically ill, knowing that of all the crises in the past, this one could really mean the end. Richard Neustadt had served as an advisor to President Kennedy at the beginning of his term and was now teaching at Columbia University in New York. After Kennedy’s speech, Neustadt wrote to Ted Sorensen, “The reaction among students here was qualitatively quite different from anything I’ve ever witnessed.… These kids were literally scared for their lives.”1
A grim-faced CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite summed up the stakes in a special report on October 24: “There is concern there might be shooting by ships at sea and the possibility that an invasion [of Cuba] might have to be undertaken to ensure that those bases are eliminated. And if an invasion is undertaken the Russians have said they would retaliate with rocket fire. We have said if there’s a rocket fired from Cuba we would retaliate, and there goes the whole ballgame.”2 It’s no wonder some people felt terror like never before.
At Laughlin Air Force Base, wives of the U-2 pilots recognized that their husbands’ situation, at least for the time being, was even more perilous than that of ordinary Americans. Their men were on the front lines of the conflict, flying unarmed and unprotected. Jane Anderson and the other wives knew their husbands were involved in aerial reconnaissance of Cuba and that at some point tempers could flare and surface-to-air missiles be fired. Jane had been keeping a secret to share with her husband upon his return. She was pregnant with their third child and wanted to share the joyous news with him in person. She hoped this baby would be a girl, the little redhead they had always dreamed about.3
Jeanne Maultsby privately hoped her spouse, Chuck, would not be pulled from his current duty in Alaska for the far more dangerous mission in Cuba. The couple had recently welcomed a third child, another boy, they had named Kevin. Jeanne could not imagine the thought of raising her sons on her own. She wrote to her husband in Alaska regularly, and while the distance between them was difficult, the alternative would be excruciating. Her husband might be champing at the bit to join Rudy Anderson in the skies over Cuba, but Jeanne did not envy Rudy’s distraught wife or the rest of the families caught between peace and nuclear war.4
A missile fired from Cuba could reach Washington, DC, in an estimated twelve minutes. Should there be enough time, the president and his family would be whisked into a bunker beneath the White House. The plan—in theory—called for a special group of rescuers from Olmstead Air Force Base in Pennsylvania to helicopter to the White House and dig the president out of the rubble. In truth, a nuclear bomb would probably kill him.
Another scenario, which called for more time, had a higher chance of success. If the military perceived a high likelihood of a nuclear attack on Washington, a helicopter would take the president and other key governmental officials to a bunker hidden in the mountains of Virginia. Of course, if word got out that the president was evacuating, the very thing the government was trying to prevent—wholesale panic—would ensue.
Early in the crisis, President Kennedy had discussed the situation with his wife, Jackie, during a stroll in the Rose Garden and given her the option to go to Virginia. The Army Corps of Engineers had built a massive secret underground shelter at Mount Weather, near Bluemont, Virginia, about fifty miles west of Washington, DC, in 1949 after the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb. Mrs. Kennedy resisted the idea. And what if there was no warning—no time to flee? The First Lady’s secret service agent, Clint Hill, then briefed her on her options should missiles fall on Washington.
“You know about the bomb shelter here, under the White House,” Hill told Jackie with his hand gently touching her elbow. “In the event a situation develops, where we don’t have time to leave the area, we would take you and the children into the shelter for your protection.”5
Jackie Kennedy stared back at Hill and spoke to him defiantly. “Mr. Hill, if the situation develops, I will take Caroline and John, and we will walk hand-in-hand out onto the south grounds [of the White House]. We will stand there like brave soldiers and face the fate of every other American.”
“Well, Mrs. Kennedy, let’s pray to God that we will never be in that situation,” Agent Hill replied.
The horrors of nuclear war were almost too much for people to contemplate, and Kennedy himself said it best in his TV speech: “even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was nine years old in October 1962. He did not see his father much during those tension-filled days, but US marshals stationed at their home kept close watch on the family. Shipments of canned food and fruit cocktail were brought in and stored in the basement. Kennedy Jr. and his older brother Joe spoke to their father by phone. Both wanted to go to the bunker at Mount Weather, not because they were necessarily afraid but because they were boys and wanted to see something cool.
“Can we go to Mount Weather?” they asked.
“No,” the attorney general replied firmly. “You need to go to school because if you don’t go to school, then everybody’s going to panic and you need to be good soldiers.”
Bobby Kennedy’s voice began to crack. “Sons, I want you to know that if there is nuclear war, none of us will want to survive.”
“Everyone was on red alert,” Kennedy Jr. told the authors of this book. “We were doing duck and cover drills at our school, Our Lady of Victory in downtown Washington. We were all waiting for the day we would wake up dead.”6
RFK Jr. remembers his Jesuit teachers discussing the religious and moral issues weighing on Americans.
“Who will you allow into your bomb shelters with you?” the priests asked the students. “Is it right to keep someone out of the shelter if it meant that your family would live?”
Young Kennedy and his classmates, children of nine and ten years old, were being asked to make impossible ethical choices. The conversations spilled over onto the playground.
“We decided that we wouldn’t let anyone in if they had sores on them,” he remembers.
Kennedy Jr. also recalls the moral questions running through his uncle’s mind. “The mere thought about what could happen to his own children weighed heavily on President Kennedy,” RFK Jr. said. “Caroline and John were quite young as were we. He spoke to my father about the need to do whatever they could to keep us alive.”
The president was also concerned about the Cuban people.
“He knew that thousands of innocent people would be wiped out if US forces invaded the island of Cuba. In a way, they reminded him of the two islanders that saved his life and the lives of his crew in the South Pacific. They did so in such a humane way for a total stranger, a white man, while putting their own lives at risk. President Kennedy felt a great debt to people of color around the world because of what he had gone through during World War II.”
In Russia the civilian response to the crisis was more muted. Sergei Khrushchev, son of Premier Nikita Khrushchev, told us, “There was no panic in Russia, no end-of-the-world talk. Russians had lived with adversaries close by and with enemy missiles near the border, whereas America was protected from enemies by two oceans. The missiles in Cuba were something entirely new for the American public to process, while nuclear threats or risk was something the Soviets had lived with for years.”7
THE PRESIDENT’S SPEECH might have stripped the element of surprise from any forthcoming air attack, but it also liberated the military to authorize low-level reconnaissance flights, code-named BLUE MOON. Now that the Soviets knew about US knowledge of the missiles, the United States had no intelligence secret to keep under wraps, and low-level flights could provide more detailed pictures than the high-flying U-2s. Better photos would not only give analysts the means to ascertain the status of the missile sites but help the United States gain worldwide support. United Nations members, as well as the media, would soon be clamoring for Kennedy to show proof of the missiles. Laypeople needed to see the higher-quality, better-resolution photos of the missile sites provided by low-level flights.
The best aircraft to do the job was the navy’s RF8 Crusader. This supersonic jet, which could reach speeds in excess of 1,100 mph, was normally equipped with four Sidewinder missiles and four 20mm cannons. But the jet had been converted for reconnaissance by removing the weapons and installing five cameras for high-speed photos. Instead of flying thirteen miles above Earth, as the U-2 did, it came in low over its target—sometimes just above treetop level. The cameras worked best between one hundred and five hundred feet above their target, and the aircraft had the advantage of flying beneath cloud cover.
While the Crusader’s speed was impressive, navigation was basic: pilots followed a flight plan plotted on a map and used landmarks such as roads, rivers, and railroads to guide them to their targets.
Members of the navy’s Light Photographic Squadron 62, known as VFP62, commanded by Captain William Ecker, flew these reconnaissance Crusaders. The commander, a former fighter pilot who had served in the Pacific during World War II, later switched to reconnaissance and said that jet photo reconnaissance was “a constant challenge and a much more rewarding type of job.”8 He reasoned in part that the country didn’t have to be at war for the recon pilot to perform missions.
Ecker and eleven other pilots had been pre-positioned on October 19 at Naval Air Station Boca Chica in Key West, Florida. They had been following developments in the Cuban Missile Crisis and were anxious to do their part. But President Kennedy held them back until the morning after his speech, October 23.
These low-level flights entailed considerable risk, first and foremost because of their provocative nature. The Crusaders would be screaming through Cuban airspace toward a Soviet military installation at 400 mph and close enough to the ground that soldiers could see the pilots. The Soviets and Cubans would have no way of knowing if the planes were delivering bombs or taking photos. Zooming in at such low altitude rendered the Crusaders susceptible not only to antiaircraft fire but even to bullets from machine guns.
The six pilots chosen for the first mission were Commander Ecker, Lieutenant Commander Tad Riley, Lieutenant Commander James Kauflin, Lieutenant Gerald Coffee, Lieutenant Christopher “Bruce” Whilhemy, and Lieutenant John Hewitt. They were told to remove everything from their wallets except their Geneva Convention cards and a small amount of cash. Each pilot had a .38-caliber pistol loaded only with tracer bullets to use as a signal if shot down.
Tad Riley was a career navy man, having earned an ensign’s commission upon his graduation from the University of North Carolina in 1952. He had just returned from a six-month Mediterranean cruise aboard the carrier USS Saratoga when ordered to the Pentagon on October 17 and grilled by four navy captains about his ability to fly over locations marked on a map of Cuba. His answers instilled confidence in the higher-ups, who included General Curtis LeMay. Riley then joined the other pilots in Florida.
They would fly in teams of two. The senior pilot would take the lead, navigate to the target and shoot the photos. The junior pilot would position himself a quarter mile behind the veteran and move from side to side to photograph anything of interest that the lead pilot missed.9