THE QUARANTINE WENT into effect at 10 a.m. Washington time—1400 hours Greenwich Mean Time—on Wednesday, October 24. It would initially comprise twelve destroyers from the Second Fleet’s Task Force 136, the attack carriers Enterprise and Independence, the anti–submarine carrier USS Essex, aerial anti–submarine warfare squadrons based in Puerto Rico and Bermuda, nine escorting destroyers, and six utility ships. The armada would have air support from as many as 448 fighter planes and 67 reconnaissance aircraft. The ships spread out in an arc five hundred miles from Cape Maisí, Cuba. Among the ships called for this historic duty was the Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr.
President John F. Kennedy met with members of ExComm at 10 a.m. As the quarantine became effective, the Strategic Air Command (SAC) upped the general defense condition to DEFCON 2, the level just below full-scale war. If US troops invaded Cuba, the Pentagon estimated that 18,500 American soldiers would perish in the first ten days. The nation’s 1,400 nuclear bombers were put on twenty-four-hour alert. Bomber pilots took to the skies immediately with preassigned targets in the Soviet Union and remained in the air, refueled every nine hours by aerial tankers. Military bases across America prepared intercontinental ballistic missiles for launch. Navy submarines, loaded with ballistic missiles, sat submerged off the Atlantic coast. More than two hundred high-priority targets in the Soviet Union were selected for immediate destruction, including the Kremlin. The United States was preparing for thermonuclear war.
Meetings about the strategy for Cuba dominated the president’s schedule that day. He signed the official proclamation for quarantine on Soviet ships entering Cuba at just after 7 p.m. in the Oval Office. The night before, Kennedy had signed the formal instrument of quarantine and had to ask the date. The ordeal was weighing heavily on him. Members of the media noticed that the normally impeccably dressed JFK’s collar stuck out over his lapel, and his handkerchief was not folded to keep his initials from showing. Also on Tuesday night, the Soviet vessel Poltava, carrying twenty nuclear warheads, had retreated before reaching the quarantine line. This was good news. But two other Russian ships, the Kimovsk and Yuri Gagarin, showed no sign that they would respect the quarantine as each continued to sail for Cuba.
On Wednesday morning, October 24, the ships were edging close to the five-hundred-mile quarantine line. The moment of reckoning would soon arrive for the world’s two superpowers. “This is the moment we had prepared for, which we hoped would never come,” Bobby Kennedy later wrote. “The danger and concern that we all felt hung like a cloud over us all and particularly over the President.”1
As the ExComm meeting commenced, CIA director John McCone updated JFK on Soviet action on the ground in Cuba. Surveillance indicated rapid progress in completion of the intercontinental-and medium-range ballistic missile sites. “No new sites have been discovered.”
McCone told Kennedy that the previous day’s U-2 flights had photographed buildings being assembled for nuclear storage and that Cuban naval vessels had formed blocking positions in the bays of Banes and Santiago. Rudy Anderson, Steve Heyser, and other U-2 pilots had gathered massive photographic evidence. The film alone was twenty-five miles long.2
“The launching pads, the missiles, the concrete boxes, the nuclear storage bunkers, all the components were there, by now clearly defined and obvious,” Bobby Kennedy wrote in his crisis memoir Thirteen Days. The consensus around the room was that several of the launching pads would be ready for war in just a matter of days.
Defense Secretary Robert McNamara then explained that the Yuri Gagarin and Kimovsk were expected to reach the quarantine line by noontime. The Kimovsk was about fifty miles ahead of the Gagarin, and a Soviet submarine escorted each ship.
“It’s a very dangerous situation,” McNamara told the president.3
When Kennedy asked what type of warship the Americans would use to intercept the Soviet vessels, McNamara said the plan was to use a destroyer accompanied by the aircraft carrier Essex, which was equipped with antisubmarine helicopters.
“It’s believed that it would be less dangerous to our forces to use a destroyer,” McNamara added.
McCone was then handed a note saying that all ships currently identified near the quarantine line had either stopped or reversed course. It was not clear at that moment whether they had been outbound to the Soviet Union or headed from Russia to Cuba.
“Makes some difference,” Dean Rusk said dryly.
While McCone left the meeting to seek clarification, the group learned that a Soviet submarine had taken position between the oncoming Russian ships and the Essex. The president’s secret tape recorder captured the conversation.
PRESIDENT KENNEDY—If this submarine should sink our destroyer, then what is our proposed reply?
General Maxwell Taylor answered that American anti–submarine warfare patrols would cover the Red Navy sub, and a signaling arrangement, delivered to the Soviet Foreign Office the night before, had been put into place to order the vessel to surface.
MCNAMARA—Here is the exact situation. We have [practice] depth charges that have such a small charge that they can be dropped and they can actually hit the submarine, without damaging the submarine.… We propose using those as warning depth charges.
The defense secretary went on to explain that when US forces came upon the submarine, they would ask the captain to surface using sonar signals and then depth charges. No one in the room believed the Soviets would respond to the sonar signals, so the depth charges would be necessary.
PRESIDENT KENNEDY—If he doesn’t surface or if he takes some action… to assist the merchant ship, are we just going to attack him anyway? At what point are we going to attack him?
MCNAMARA—I think it would be extremely dangerous, Mr. President, to try to defer attack on the submarine in the situation we’re in. We could easily lose any American ship by that means.
The president put his hand to his face and covered his mouth. He opened and closed his fist as he looked to his brother Bobby.
“His face seemed drawn, his eyes pained, almost gray,” Bobby observed. “We stared at each other across the table. For a few fleeting seconds, it was almost as if no one else was there and he was no longer the President.”4
Bobby had seen that look in his brother’s eyes before. He’d seen it when Jack was ill and almost died after back surgery, and he’d seen it when both learned that their older brother, Joe, had been killed in World War II. He had seen it at times of great stress, none greater than this very moment, when the fate of the world was at stake.
One mistake or misinterpretation on either side could lead to nuclear war. As a navy veteran himself, JFK knew that every man, despite his training, was capable of miscalculation, of simple human error that could have catastrophic consequences. If the Soviets mistook the depth charges for an attack, there would be blood in the water, with the possible firing of missiles to follow.
To avert potential disaster at the critical point of interception, Secretary McNamara said they would send in helicopters to harass the submarine in hopes of moving it out of the area. “This is only a plan,” he cautioned. “There are many, many uncertainties.”
President Kennedy turned his focus to Berlin. For every action in the waters off Cuba, there would be a reaction in Western Europe and elsewhere around the globe. He expected Nikita Khrushchev to “close down” Berlin, allowing no movement in or out of the divided city. The only option then would be to take to the air. JFK was told that American airmen were flying fighter planes at that very moment in the corridor between West Germany and Berlin, ready to shoot down Soviet MiGs if necessary. Should that happen, World War III would be imminent.
“I felt we were on the edge of a precipice with no way off,” Bobby Kennedy later wrote. The theoretical discussions were over. Each decision made in the room could spell the difference between life and death for millions. “The moment was now—not next week—not tomorrow [no time for another meeting or another message to Khrushchev], none of that was possible.”5
John McCone reentered the Cabinet Room with welcome news: the Soviet ships that had stopped and reversed course had all been inbound for Cuba. There was a collective sigh of relief.
“We’re eyeball to eyeball,” Dean Rusk told Mac Bundy. “And I think the other fellow just blinked.”6
But the president knew that neither side was out of troubled waters just yet.
PRESIDENT KENNEDY—Now is this all the Russian ships, or would this just be selected ones?
MCCONE—This is apparently a selected bunch, because there’s 24 of them.
General Taylor then confirmed that three ships were turning back from the quarantine line, including the Poltava. Taylor said that Admiral George Anderson, chief of naval operations, was scrambling planes to the area. The concern now was that the US Navy would fire upon a Soviet ship as it was turning back to Moscow.
The Americans had been planning to intercept the Kimovsk, a wide freighter with seven-foot hatches and loaded with R-14 missiles, before 11 a.m.
PRESIDENT KENNEDY—I would think that we ought to be in touch with the Essex, and just tell them to wait an hour and see whether that ship continues on its course.
The president gave the order that no Russian ships were to be stopped or intercepted. US planes were also authorized to photograph and trail Russian ships as they turned around.
AFTER WAKING UP in his underground bunker in Havana, Fidel Castro spent the day conferring with Soviet military commanders and meeting with his own troops on alert at strategic positions around the island. Castro was frustrated by Russia’s apparent unwillingness to engage the Crusader pilots that were performing low-level overflights of Cuba. The Crusaders had been buzzing Soviet missile sites at three hundred feet, and Castro felt that his forces had every right to shoot them down, or “fry them.” He inspected a surface-to-air missile (SAM) site overlooking a potential landing beach for US forces in the resort area of Tarara. He was confident that the SAMs could reach the U-2 planes flying over the island, as the Soviets had used the same weapons system to shoot down Francis Gary Powers in 1960. On the beach below, Castro’s forces worked day and night digging trenches in the sand and fortifying concrete bunkers. The scene was reminiscent of German preparations for the Allied landings along the coast of France just before D-day. Later that day, Soviet forces intensified their drills as they practiced procedures for aiming and firing their missiles. It was a dress rehearsal for a nuclear strike, and all knew that the real thing could happen at any moment.
As day became night in Washington, DC, President Kennedy met with congressional leaders to update them on the unfolding situation. Dean Rusk then read aloud a cable that suggested Khrushchev was ready to negotiate. British peace activist and Nobel laureate Lord Bertrand Russell had passed Khrushchev’s statement along to US Intelligence. The Soviet premier was also using back channels to communicate with the American president.
“The Soviet government will not take any decisions which will be reckless,” Khrushchev wrote. “We will do everything in our power to prevent war from breaking out. We would consider a top-level meeting useful.… As long as the rocket nuclear weapons have not been used, there is a possibility of averting war.”7
Since Khrushchev extended no direct invitation to speak, Kennedy found it pointless to respond. The president later had dinner with journalist Charles Bartlett, who had been serving as an intermediary with the Russians. Earlier in the day, Bartlett had lunched with his Soviet contact, Georgi Bolshakov. The Kennedys were angry with Bolshakov because he had kept feeding them lies that the weapons being installed in Cuba were for defensive purposes only. Bobby Kennedy had slipped Bartlett two black-and-white U-2 photos of medium-range ballistic missiles in Cuba to show Bolshakov at lunch. The Russian was shocked. He pulled out his blue notebook and read back his notes from his conversations with Khrushchev, who had stated the weapons were SAMs to defend Cuba from attack. The Soviet told Bartlett that it appeared that he too had been duped. Bartlett reported back to the White House and delivered this news to the president during a small dinner gathering with the First Lady, her sister Lee Radziwill, Bobby and Ethel Kennedy, and fashion designer Oleg Cassini.
JFK respected and trusted Bartlett. They had been friends since 1946, and Bartlett and his wife, Martha, had introduced Kennedy to Jackie at a small dinner party at their Georgetown home in 1951. On the night of Wednesday, October 24, 1962, Bartlett understood better than most what stress Kennedy was under and yet felt comforted by the president’s calm demeanor.
“The President’s coolness and temper were never more evident than they were that week,” Bartlett later recalled. “He kept very balanced.”8
Once JFK had informed Bartlett that several Soviet ships had turned back that morning, the newspaperman was elated.
“Why I should think you’d really feel like celebrating,” Bartlett told the president.
“Well, you don’t want to celebrate in this game too early,” JFK replied. “Because anything can happen.”9
Charles Bartlett and the other guests went home wondering what the next day would bring. Just before 11 p.m., President Kennedy received a new message from Premier Khrushchev, which read in part:
You, Mr. President, are not declaring quarantines, but advancing an ultimatum and threatening that unless we subordinate ourselves to your demands, you will use force.… You are no longer appealing to reason, but wish to intimidate us.… [T]he Soviet Government cannot give instructions to the captains of Soviet vessels bound for Cuba to observe the instructions of the American naval forces blockading the island.… [W]e shall not be simple observers of piratical actions of American ships on the high seas. We will then be forced for our part to take the measures which we deem necessary and adequate to protect our rights. For this we have all that is necessary. Respectfully yours, N. Khrushchev10
President Kennedy studied the letter very closely. His advisors pointed to the last paragraph, which read like a thinly veiled threat. The Soviets planned to challenge the quarantine. JFK took out a small White House notepad and penned his response, which was sent to Moscow at 2 a.m. He informed Khrushchev that he had learned “beyond doubt” that the Soviet military had set out to establish a set of missile bases in Cuba. President Kennedy ended the message by urging his Soviet rival to repair “the deterioration of our relations.”11
The president then picked up the phone and, through a secure line, called his friend Bartlett at home.
“You’d be interested to know I got a cable from our friend,” JFK said. “And he said those ships are coming through, they’re coming through tomorrow.”12