CHUCK MAULTSBY SAT at the tiny radar station in Alaska totally exhausted from his ten-hour-and-twenty-five-minute odyssey over the Arctic and part of the Soviet Union. He was glad to board a C-47 for the flight back to Eielson Air Force Base, where he looked forward to some much-needed rest. Instead, when he finally arrived at Eielson, he got two pieces of bad news. The first was that he had thirty minutes to pack all his gear, because another plane was waiting to fly him out of Alaska and all the way to Omaha, Nebraska. He was being summoned to Strategic Air Command headquarters by SAC commander General Thomas Power. The next surprise was even worse. He learned that his friend and neighbor back at Laughlin Air Force Base, Rudy Anderson, had been shot down over Cuba and was most likely dead. “That bad news,” wrote Maultsby, “really knocked the wind out of my sails.”
Chuck had been through a terrifying ordeal, but he had survived. He would be going home to Jeanne and his boys. He could not imagine the pain that Rudy’s family would endure.
Maultsby, now depressed, was the only passenger on the massive jet-powered KC-135 aerial refueling aircraft that launched for the long flight back to the lower forty-eight. This only added to his dread at meeting with General Power.
When the jet finally touched down at Offutt, Chuck was driven straight to the underground SAC command post and escorted into a meeting room. An easel holding an aeronautical chart of his flight stood at the front of the room. Within minutes General Power arrived, followed by several other high-ranking SAC officers, all of whom looked “like they had slept in their uniforms for days.… [T]heir eyes were bloodshot and they hadn’t seen a razor for at least 24 hours.”1
“Captain Maultsby,” said Power, “how about briefing us on your flight?”
Chuck walked up to the easel and began retracing his trip. When he reached the point where his U-2 was at the North Pole, Power said, “Captain Maultsby, do you know where you went after leaving the Pole?”
At that moment, according to Chuck, the other men in the room squirmed in their seats “as if they were sitting on tacks.” The pilot then explained that he knew he had mistakenly flown into Russian airspace. He soon found out that he had been over the Soviet Union for more than three hundred miles.
Power then said, “Too bad you weren’t configured with a system to gather electromagnetic radiation. The Russians probably had every radar and ICBM [intercontinental ballistic missile] site on maximum alert.”
Power ordered Maultsby to not tell a soul about his flight, then left the room, followed by the others. A brigadier general, the last to leave, turned to Chuck and said, “You are a lucky sonofabitch. I’ve seen General Power chew up and spit out people for doing a hellova lot less.”
Incredibly, Maultsby’s marathon day of close calls wasn’t over. He boarded a U-3A for a flight to Laughlin Air Force Base, where he could finally get some rest and see his wife. The U-3A, a twin-engine Cessna, six-seat utility aircraft, is quite reliable but on this night ran into icy conditions. Chuck listened to the pilot request an unscheduled landing at an airport near Enid, Oklahoma. Then conditions caused one of the engines to lose partial power, and the pilot, Captain Ed Perdue, declared an emergency. As they approached the airport, ground control screamed at them to level off. Chuck could only think, What a way to go after all that’s happened. “I could see the ground now,” he recalled, “and was certain we wouldn’t make it to the runway that was barely visible through light fog. I swear Ed was trying to hold the airplane up by pulling on the yoke.”
Once again, Maultsby somehow landed safely. When he finally made it to Laughlin, he staggered into his home, where his wife, Jeanne, was shocked to see him. After a big hug and kiss, she asked what had happened, and Chuck said he needed a shower and then would tell her. Later she asked, “Does all this have anything to do with Rudolf Anderson being shot down?”
He said that it did not and recounted what happened. Then, finally, Chuck could lie down and get some sleep.2
When later told by his colonel that President John F. Kennedy had called him a “son of a bitch” on learning about Chuck’s ordeal, Maultsby bit his tongue. He wanted to say, “I wish that sonofabitch [Kennedy] had been sitting on my lap! If I’d gotten the word, like simply a steer [direction], I wouldn’t be sitting here. Just one steer would have prevented all this commotion.”
THE STRAIN ON President Kennedy must have been tremendous, particularly during his wait to hear about his brother’s meeting with Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. The message was nothing less than an ultimatum, and should Nikita Khrushchev turn it down, JFK might find himself forced to take action that could escalate into a thermonuclear holocaust. “This is the week I earn my salary,”3 the president quipped to one of his advisors. That was quite the understatement. Considering the pressure he was under and the magnitude of the decisions he had to make, we are all lucky that someone as levelheaded as John Fitzgerald Kennedy occupied the White House on October 27, 1962. A lesser person would surely have cracked under the strain; nuclear war might well have followed. Instead, the president displayed an equanimity and resolve that allowed him to think his way through the crisis. He constantly put himself in his adversary’s shoes and gave Khrushchev time to reflect on where the crisis was heading and to relay messages to the Soviets in Cuba that a resolution was still possible.
It’s chilling to think that just two men, Kennedy and Khrushchev, could decide the fates of so many. And even today, the fact that the nuclear “football”—a set of codes ensuring that the military knows an order to fire a nuclear missile is coming from the president rather than a maverick or an imposter—travels everywhere the president goes serves as a reminder of how much power rests in one person’s hands and how important it is that this individual retain composure no matter what pressure and advice he or she is receiving.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy found safeguards of this kind woefully lacking and insisted on a more foolproof way for the military to know it was dealing with the president. The safeguards he desired are in the mechanics of today’s nuclear football, but the ultimate authority over the decision still rests with one person, the commander in chief.
Both Kennedy and Khrushchev realized the crisis was not a chess match just between themselves. Each leader understood that other people might ignore or misinterpret instructions from the highest officeholder and launch a nuclear weapon themselves—much as when the two Soviet generals decided to fire on “target 33.” And Maultsby’s straying into Soviet airspace could easily have triggered another disaster, particularly when US fighter jets armed only with nuclear-tipped missiles flew out to safeguard the lost pilot. We can’t know what would have happened if they had arrived when the MiGs were still hot on Chuck’s tail.
Kennedy and Khrushchev instinctively knew that the longer the crisis went on, the shorter the odds that someone at a lower level would act without consulting them. Still, neither leader was going to walk away from his duty to safeguard his country and give the other side the upper hand militarily or in terms of world dominance and influence. They had to strike a deal in which both sides seemed to win.
Helping to keep the president on an even keel was Jackie Kennedy. During the crisis she made more frequent visits to the Oval Office, accompanied by children John and Caroline, knowing that the interaction would relieve some of the pressure. In A Thousand Days, special assistant to the president Arthur Schlesinger Jr. touched on both the stressfulness of the crisis and the importance of Kennedy’s children. “He [the president] never had a more sober sense of his responsibility. It was a strange week: the flow of decisions was continuous: there was no day and no night. In the intervals between the meetings he sought out his wife and children as if the imminence of catastrophe had turned his mind more than ever to his family and, through them, to children everywhere in the world.”4
The risk of nuclear war was so high that Edward McDermott, director of the Office of Emergency Planning, met with Chief Justice Earl Warren to discuss evacuating the Supreme Court justices to the bunkers at Mount Weather in Virginia. And some cabinet members had their wives and children leave Washington that weekend. Dean Rusk wryly commented that if the government leaders, including the president and secretary of state, did “board a helicopter and whirl away to some cave” and somehow survived, “the first band of shivering survivors who got a hold of them would likely hang them from the nearest tree.”5 The president, like so many others, opted not to go to Mount Weather and instead told his staff—many of whom had been sleeping at the White House for several days—to go home for the night. Pierre Salinger remembers how when he left the White House, he received a sealed envelope for his wife. He was instructed to tell her that if he and the White House staff “disappeared” the next day, it meant that a military situation required they be taken to a secure place. Salinger explained, “She was to open the envelope which would tell her where to take her children and herself to be safe.”6
The feeling of an approaching apocalypse cast a shadow over most of the government officials who knew the details of the situation. Dino Brugioni, a senior official at the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center, who analyzed reconnaissance pictures from the U-2s and Crusaders, wrote, “Seeing no earthly way out of this conflict except war and complete destruction, I told my wife on a phone call that she should take our two children, get in the car, and head for my parents’ home in Jefferson City, Missouri.”7
Even the Russians at the Soviet embassy felt the wave of war coming fast and started destroying all their sensitive documents. “Black Saturday,” October 27, 1962, was unlike any day in history: millions of people around the globe sensed that with each tick of the clock, the end of the world came closer.
ROBERT KENNEDY DID meet with Dobrynin and explained the president’s position as urgently as possible.
In previous meetings, the Soviet ambassador had found Bobby to be a complex man with a temper who seemed to enjoy arguing.8 But on this night Dobrynin found him restrained, nonconfrontational, and “very upset.”9
In a written account of the meeting, which Bobby chronicled just a few days afterward, he explained that he first told the ambassador that the president was well aware that work on the missile sites was continuing.10 He then mentioned the deadly incident involving Rudy Anderson. “We had found that our planes flying over Cuba had been fired upon and that one of our U-2s had been shot down and the pilot killed. I said these men were flying unarmed planes. I told him that this was an extremely serious turn of events. We would have to make certain decisions within the next 12 or possibly 24 hours. There was very little time left.” Bobby later stated that he told Dobrynin, “We had to have a commitment by tomorrow that those bases would be removed. This was not an ultimatum but just a statement of fact. He should understand that if they did not remove the bases, we would remove them.”
Bobby also addressed the missiles in Turkey, telling Dobrynin that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization had to decide the issue, but “if some time elapsed I was sure these matters could be resolved satisfactorily.” He closed the meeting by saying they would need agreement from Khrushchev by the next day, or “there would be drastic consequences.”
Bobby left in a solemn mood and went straight back to the White House.
President Kennedy had just finished a swim and was having a light dinner with advisor and close friend Dave Powers when Bobby returned, looking glum. As the attorney general summarized the meeting, the president looked at Powers and said, “God, Dave, the way you’re eating up all that chicken and drinking up all my wine anybody would think it was your last meal.” Powers retorted, “The way Bobby’s talking, I thought it was my last meal.”11
The two brothers then walked to the Cabinet Room for the 9 p.m. ExComm meeting. Only the individuals who were in the Oval Office earlier (reviewing what the attorney general planned to say to Dobrynin) knew of Bobby’s face-to-face conversation with the ambassador. The president decided not to tell the others.
In the early part of the meeting the members discussed the difficulty of low-level reconnaissance flights because of all the ground fire from 20mm flak. Maxwell Taylor explained that armed planes preceding the photographic planes would have slim “hope of cleaning out these little air guns.… But we’re approaching the point, I think, Mr. President, where low-level reconnaissance will be entirely impossible.”
Robert McNamara then inserted his view that Sunday’s U-2 missions be scrubbed and a series of low-level Crusaders go over Cuba one last time. He added, “If our planes are fired on tomorrow, we ought to fire back.”
The president responded, “I think we ought to wait till tomorrow afternoon, to see whether we get any answers if [UN Secretary-General] U Thant goes down there [Havana].”
President Kennedy added that if Crusaders launched on Sunday were fired upon, and Moscow had not responded to the latest US proposal, then on Monday “we go in and take all of the SAM sites out.” President Kennedy, not wanting to just fire at the antiaircraft batteries, elaborated, “I don’t think we do any good to begin sort of a half-do-it.” Instead he wanted to put out a public statement to the effect that if US reconnaissance aircraft took fire on Sunday, the United States would consider “the island of Cuba open territory, and then [would] take out all the SAM sites.”
Kennedy was now clearly ready to take what he considered his next step after the blockade if his diplomatic effort failed. And he was prepared to go all in, particularly when he agreed with McNamara to call up “24 air reserve squadrons [and] roughly 300 troop-carrier transports which are required for an invasion.”
After almost two weeks of deliberation, the president had decided the time for talk had run out. The Russians’ response on Sunday would determine whether war began on Monday.