Curtis LeMay hadn’t been at the Joint Chiefs’ first briefing, on October 16, 1962, when the Defense Intelligence Agency laid out the details of the Soviet buildup. The Russians had put three nuclear missile sites in the Cuban countryside, the agency’s experts told the Joint Chiefs, and equipped them with missiles that had a range of 700 to 1,100 miles—far enough to reach central Virginia. Each of them was potentially operational within twenty-four hours. But by the time he joined the Joint Chiefs’ discussion, on October 18, LeMay knew what had to be done. The air strike should come first, a surprise attack not only on the sites but on Cuba’s entire military capability, followed by an invasion that would topple the Castro regime and put in its place an American occupation. Clearly there’d be casualties, possibly on a colossal scale. But wars weren’t won with halfway measures. They were won with unrelenting violence.
It was the principle that had guided LeMay in 1942 and 1943, when he led a series of high-risk bombing runs over occupied Europe that traded cataclysmic losses among his own crews for the ability to batter Germany’s industrial capacity. He’d pushed it even harder in 1945, when he ordered the firebombing of Japan. Night after night B-29s hit selected cities with incendiaries and napalm; 100,000 civilians were killed in the Tokyo raid alone, possibly half a million in the five months that the campaign ran. “I suppose if I had lost the war I would have been tried as a war criminal,” LeMay said later. “But . . . if you let that bother you you’re not a good soldier.”1
The onset of the nuclear age didn’t change the calculation. It had been his men who’d carried out the president’s order to obliterate Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. The following year he was put in charge of the Strategic Air Command, whose bombers would deliver the next nuclear strike should that moment ever come. The Cold War defined his target. From the late 1940s onward LeMay argued that the United States ought to meet any indication of an impending Soviet attack with the full force of its nuclear arsenal. Assume he’d received the order this morning, he told the National War College in 1956. “Between sunset tonight and sunrise tomorrow the Soviet Union would cease to be a major military power or even a major nation. . . . Dawn would break over a nation infinitely poorer than China—less populated than the United States and condemned to an agrarian existence perhaps for generations to come.”2
But the politicians didn’t have the stomach for it. In 1954 his fellow general Dwight Eisenhower signed a directive declaring that the United States would not launch a preemptive war, a message meant to reassure the Soviets that they’d never have to mobilize toward a first strike of their own. LeMay tried to push back, mostly through apocalyptic speeches to military groups, a couple of times in dangerously provocative ways. No matter what he said or did, though, Washington wouldn’t budge. When he was promoted to the Joint Chiefs in 1961, the directive was still in place. Worse, its implementation had passed from Ike to Jack Kennedy. Not quite two years later there were Soviet missiles ninety miles from Miami.
On LeMay’s first day in the thick of the crisis, it seemed that the White House might give him what he wanted: definitely air strikes, the Joint Chiefs’ chairman Maxwell Taylor said, and probably the invasion too. That evening, though, Kennedy’s thinking started to shift from an assault toward a more cautious approach, centered on a naval blockade and a set of political maneuvers. General Taylor delivered the news at the next morning’s briefing, forty-five minutes before the Joint Chiefs were to meet with the president himself. Taylor’s colleagues spent the time planning their response. But LeMay wasn’t interested in an exchange of views. At 9:45 he trooped into the Cabinet Room looking for a fight.
Kennedy opened the session with a careful, balanced review of the dangers the Cuban missiles created not only in the Western hemisphere but in Europe as well. Taylor, a confidant of the president’s, said a few politic things about having to defend American credibility. “That’s right, that’s right,” Kennedy said. “So that’s why we’ve got to respond. Now the question is: what is our response?”
“I’d emphasize . . . that we don’t have any choice but direct military action,” LeMay replied. And he was off, racing through the practical reasons a blockade wouldn’t work, sweeping past the international complications Kennedy had raised, heading straight for the confrontation he wanted. “So I see no other solution,” he concluded. “This blockade and this political action I see leading into war. I don’t see any other solution.”
Then he delivered the crippling blow, as sharp and quick as he could make it. “This is almost as bad,” he said of Kennedy’s caution, “as the appeasement at Munich.”3
The Cold War
IT WAS STRIKING how quickly Munich’s meaning had changed. “Good man,” Franklin Roosevelt had wired the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, on the day he agreed to meet with Adolf Hitler in late September 1938.4 Within a year Europe was at war. Within two years the Germans had taken most of Western Europe and had set stretches of London to burning. Within three the Wehrmacht was 150 miles from Moscow, imperial Japan was barely two months from its attack on Pearl Harbor, and no one in Roosevelt’s circle was praising Chamberlain’s Munich meeting anymore.
In 1942 and 1943 it took on added significance, as Washington’s most powerful policy makers scoured through the 1930s for the lessons they needed to remake a shattered world. They were sure that the descent into war had begun with the economic devastation of the Great Depression, which destabilized every major industrial nation. Some, like the United States, had righted themselves through reform. But in their desperation Germany and Japan had fallen prey to extremists who promised regeneration through hyper-nationalism, militarism, imperialism, and racism so ferocious it pointed toward the genocidal. From that combination came acts of unconscionable aggression, much of it aimed at land the regimes thought ought to be theirs. Japan’s belligerence stretched across the 1930s, while Germany’s grew more intense from the mid-1930s on.
The other major powers had compounded the crisis, Washington’s policy makers concluded, by trying to buy off the aggressors with concessions—to appease them, in the language of the time—never more callously than in the autumn of 1938. Through the summer Hitler had been threatening to seize the portion of Czechoslovakia that bordered Germany, by agreement if possible and by force if necessary. For weeks the other powers tried to negotiate, but Hitler kept hardening the terms as they closed in on the October 1 deadline he’d set. On September 29, Chamberlain and the French premier, Edouard Daladier, rushed to Munich for a last-minute summit. The talks started that afternoon. When they finished early the next morning Chamberlain and Daladier had given Hitler everything he demanded, in blatant violation of Czechoslovakian sovereignty and international law. Still Hitler wasn’t appeased. For another year his aggression mounted, until the British and French finally decided in September 1939 that they had to meet force with force because, as the Munich meeting had made painfully clear, peace couldn’t be won with weakness.
Out of those lessons the Roosevelt administration shaped its approach to the postwar world. In a series of complicated negotiations that stretched across the war years, it pieced together a new economic order meant to avoid another Great Depression by linking nations together in a globe-spanning system of free and open trade. The United States was to stand at its center, as the only major industrial power not devastated by the war. To make the system work, though, the other industrialized countries would have to be rebuilt, an extraordinarily expensive undertaking Washington committed itself to pursuing through a new international organization called the World Bank, with an initial capitalization of $714 million, 80 percent of it from the United States.
To anchor the global system of free trade, the United States pledged to set the dollar’s value permanently at one thirty-fifth of an ounce of gold, the standard secured by Washington’s guarantee that anyone holding a dollar could exchange it for its gold equivalent. In 1944 forty-three other nations agreed to set their currencies in relation to the dollar, in the process creating a network of firm exchange rates from Australia to Canada, South Africa to the Soviet Union. From that network—and the deals to follow—would eventually emerge a vibrant global economy, stabilized by its participants’ interlocking interests. Or so Roosevelt’s advisers decided in the course of the war.
Economic integration wasn’t enough, though. The most powerful nations also had to sweep aside the timidity that had led them to Munich. But it wasn’t clear precisely what ought to take its place. Publicly Roosevelt seemed to favor a system of global diplomatic cooperation much like the economic system his experts were building, to be implemented through another new international organization, the United Nations, which the United States helped to found in 1945. In private FDR took a tougher approach. Germany’s aggression had pushed the United States into alliance with Great Britain and the Soviet Union. It wasn’t an obvious combination, fusing as it did the world’s foremost capitalist states and its only Communist one. Two of the powers operated by democratic principles, however imperfectly; the other was fiercely totalitarian, with a propensity for mass murder. But the alliance worked. In 1943 and 1944 the Soviets’ enormous Red Army pressed in on Germany from the east, the Americans and the British from the south and the west. In the power of their combined forces Roosevelt seemed to see the future he wanted. When the war was won the United States and its allies could transform themselves into the world’s policemen, standing up to aggressor states whenever they threatened the international order, the ghost of Munich laid to rest in the rubble of Hitler’s criminal regime.
Then, in the war’s last months, everything threatened to come undone. The trouble started in 1944, as the Red Army swept across Eastern Europe—through Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Romania, and Bulgaria—in pursuit of the retreating Wehrmacht. Instead of liberating those countries as they raced toward Berlin, the Soviets made it clear that they intended to occupy them, as if they had no right to rule themselves.
In Washington the Soviets’ actions set off a furious debate. Were the Russians simply trying to shut down the corridors the Germans had used to invade in the summer of 1941, at the cost of 26 million Soviet lives? Or were they doing exactly what the Nazis and Japan’s imperialists had done in the 1930s and early 1940s, extending their reach as far as force would carry them, their aggression driven by the Soviets’ own toxic mix of militarism and Communism? If the latter were true, as some of the best minds in Washington thought it was, didn’t the war’s lessons require that the United States stand against them? Roosevelt’s final round of wartime diplomacy, at the Russian resort of Yalta in the winter of 1945, seemed to suggest that he was leaning toward the softer reading of the Soviets’ aims. Two months later FDR was dead. And the weight of the debate fell to his successor, Harry Truman.
Truman had no intention of overturning Roosevelt’s approach to the postwar world. But he also had no experience in foreign affairs, no briefings from the president—in his three months as vice president he’d met with Roosevelt twice—and not a hint of the secrets FDR had kept. So he had to inch his way along, trying to balance the commitments Roosevelt had made with his own deepening sense that the Soviets couldn’t be trusted, the course made all the more complex as the Allies rushed to the end of the war. Germany fell on May 8, 1945, two weeks after the Red Army breached the defenses the Reich had assembled around Berlin. Japan held out another three months, until the August destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: the last of Curtis LeMay’s bombing runs, driven partly by military calculation and partly by Truman’s determination to impress the Russians with the awesome power he now had at his disposal.
But the Soviets weren’t impressed enough to pull back from Eastern Europe. And Truman wasn’t willing to use his new weapon to force them out, though a few of the military’s more aggressive officers thought that he should, LeMay among them. Through 1946 the two powers circled around each other, the Soviets probing for openings, the Americans trying to shut them down, Truman struggling to shape a coherent policy from the rush of events. Not until the winter of 1947 did he manage to pull it together.
The fundamental principle came from one of the State Department’s most experienced Soviet watchers, forty-four-year-old George Kennan. The Soviets were indeed aggressors, he argued in a long analysis that raced through official Washington in late 1946. But they couldn’t afford to confront the United States directly, not when their industrial base was a fraction of America’s, their military much less powerful, and their people exhausted by four years of horrific warfare. Given those conditions, Kennan argued, the Soviets’ only option was to use the Communist parties they controlled around the world to take advantage of the West’s economic and political weaknesses and the anticolonial movements sweeping through Asia and Africa: to spread their power not by invasion but by subversion. There wasn’t any point in meeting that subversion with threats or military posturing, Kennan said. Rather, Washington ought to match every Russian move with a calm, cool countermove designed to close off whatever opening the Soviets hoped to exploit, and by so doing to seal them—to contain them, as Kennan put it—within the limited sphere they’d already established.
It was one thing to read a policy paper, though, another to push its principles through the political process. In March 1947 Truman went to Congress to ask for financial aid for Greece and Turkey, so as to block any Soviet expansion into the eastern Mediterranean. But he put his pitch in dramatically broader terms. The world was being divided into two “ways of life,” he declared. One was “based upon the will of the majority and . . . distinguished by free institutions,” the other “on the will of a minority forcibly imposed on the majority” through “terror and oppression . . . and the suppression of personal freedoms.” A world so sharply split forced the United States to make the starkest choice. It could come to the defense of freedom wherever it was threatened, Truman said. Or it could shirk its responsibilities, as it had in the 1930s, and “endanger the peace of the world and . . . the welfare of our own nation,” which was to say that it had no choice at all.5
It would be another month before someone thought of saying that the Truman Doctrine had taken the United States into a global cold war with the Soviets, a couple of months more until the term “cold war” entered common usage. But by universalizing the Soviet threat, that’s what Truman had done. At first it seemed to go well enough. The Greeks and Turks got their aid. From that victory the administration pushed for a wave of economic programs meant to contain the Russians precisely as Kennan had suggested, most of them built on the structures Roosevelt’s men had put in place. The most sweeping came from the former general and current secretary of state George Marshall, who in June 1947 called for a dramatic increase in reconstruction funds for almost all of Western Europe, a total of about $12 billion to build the roads and bridges, rail lines and factories that would keep the Soviets at bay. Reconstruction fed integration, nowhere more forcefully than in the western half of occupied Germany, where in 1948 the Americans used currency reform to create an entirely new non-Communist state that pressed up against the Soviet sphere: as sophisticated a countermove as Kennan could have hoped to see.
But wars—even cold ones—aren’t easy to control. Kennan’s emphasis on economic containment fit perfectly with Truman’s commitment to shrinking the enormous armed forces the world war had created. By framing the Soviet threat so broadly, though, Truman gave his generals an opening to argue that economics alone wouldn’t do; to face an enemy of such sweeping intent, they insisted, the United States had to maintain a devastating military capacity too. And by stressing Soviet subversion he gave the Republican Right another opportunity to turn on him. They’d embraced anti-Communism in 1946 to batter the Democrats’ domestic agenda. As US-Soviet tensions mounted they gave the attack a conspiratorial twist. There were Communists and fellow travelers scattered throughout the New Deal’s leading institutions, they suggested, and Truman and his liberal friends were too soft on radicalism to root them out.
Truman tried to ease the pressure with a series of concessions. To undercut the Right, he created an internal security system empowered to fire from government service anyone its investigators found to be subversive. And in 1948 he gave the generals back the military draft he’d taken from them two years before. But those moves weren’t strong enough to withstand the twin shocks of 1949. On August 31 the Soviets tested their first atomic bomb, wiping out the security of the American nuclear monopoly in a single seismic blast. Four weeks later the Chinese revolutionary Mao Zedong announced from Beijing that after four brutal years of civil war the forces under his command had toppled the old regime and put in its place the People’s Republic of China, the servant state of the liberated masses. Suddenly the American military was talking about the desperate need for a rapid buildup, while the Republican Right was demanding to know how the president had allowed the Soviets to steal America’s atomic secrets and the Communists to seize control of the world’s most populous nation.
As the furor grew, one of the Right’s most obscure politicians saw his opening. Joe McCarthy had been elected to the U.S. Senate from Wisconsin in 1946. Five years into his first term he had yet to distinguish himself in any way, which is undoubtedly why the party asked him to headline a February 1950 fundraising dinner in Wheeling, West Virginia, about as far as a man could go from the Republicans’ center of power and still be within the country’s continental limits. But a stage was a stage, and McCarthy used his to charge that the secretary of state was allowing 205 Communists to work inside the State Department, despite—or perhaps because of—the threat they posed to the nation. He knew this to be true, McCarthy said, because he had a list of their names in his hand.
He didn’t. But his claim was so spectacular that news outlets across the country picked it up. From the press it came rushing back to Washington, where it dominated the spring. The Democrats insisted that he make his list public or admit that it was a fraud. McCarthy fought back with obfuscation, more accusations, and an infusion of class resentment. “It’s not the less fortunate who have been traitors to this nation,” he insisted. “This is glaringly true in the State Department. There the bright young men who are born with silver spoons in their mouth are the ones who have been most traitorous.” Some of his Republican colleagues pulled the charges in a different direction. The problem wasn’t that State was full of rich young men, they said, but that it was full of gay young men, whom the Soviets could blackmail into espionage simply by threatening to expose the sexual orientation they were desperate to hide. “Certainly Harry Truman cannot like either Communists or homosexuals,” one of the Right’s best publicists wrote in April. “Why does he protect them?”6
Truman wasn’t above a bit of counterpunching: Senator McCarthy was nothing more than a tool of those Republicans who wanted to retreat from the international commitments his administration had made, he told White House reporters at the end of March, and therefore was the Soviets’ “greatest asset.” But by then the president’s approval rating had tumbled to 37 percent, 21 points below where it had been when the Soviets had set off their atomic bomb. With numbers so low, he couldn’t take another blow like the ones the Russians, the Chinese, and McCarthy had delivered. So when the North Koreans invaded South Korea on June 25, he took just three days to order the sort of military action that Kennan had insisted the United States didn’t have to pursue, a decision Truman wrapped in the most powerful justification he could imagine. “The free nations have learned the fateful lesson of the 1930s,” he told the nation as the troops went in. “That lesson is that aggression must be met firmly. Appeasement leads only to further aggression and ultimately to war,” as did the ferocious politics Truman had hoped to contain.7
Ike
“POOR [HARRY TRUMAN],” Dwight Eisenhower wrote in his diary in November 1950, a few weeks before the Korean campaign went hopelessly wrong. “A fine man who, in the middle of a stormy lake, knows nothing of swimming. Yet a lot of drowning people are forced to look to him as a lifeguard. If his wisdom could only equal his good intent.”8 Eisenhower wasn’t normally so candid, even with himself. But these weren’t normal times.
He’d decided that the Soviets were a threat to the United States in 1944 or 1945, he said later, though for years afterward he would be blamed for not pushing American troops on to Berlin before the Red Army arrived. By mid-1946 he’d settled on a strategic framework that looked almost exactly like the one Kennan had laid out a few months before. He agreed that the United States had to stop Soviet expansionism or risk repeating the disasters of the 1930s. And he decided, much as Kennan had, that the best way to block the Russians was with a concerted campaign to promote democracy and free enterprise in every country Washington could reach, and to bring those nations it could sway into the free-trade system the Americans had begun to build during the war, so that they’d be linked together in mutual prosperity.
Eisenhower certainly believed that Kennan-style containment had to be backed by military power; otherwise he wouldn’t have accepted NATO’s command when Truman offered it to him in 1950. He also believed that releasing that power was a very dangerous thing to do. “We are traveling a long and rocky road toward a satisfactory world order,” he’d written his father-in-law in August 1946. “No war can be anything else but a grave setback to such progress. The one thing that disturbs me is the readiness of people to discuss war as a means of advancing peace. To me this is a contradiction in terms.”9 Four years later Truman had American troops clawing their way up the Korean peninsula toward the Chinese border. Ike dutifully gave the president his support, but he wasn’t pleased.
When the Chinese army intervened a few weeks later, the situation grew darker still. The military setback was troubling enough. What really bothered Eisenhower was the assault’s effect on America’s already poisonous public life. He hated MacArthur’s tumultuous return from Korea in the spring of 1951, with its overt politicization of the military. And he absolutely despised the Right’s red-baiters, all the more so after McCarthy stood in the well of the Senate in June 1951 and accused Ike’s longtime commanding officer and mentor George Marshall—now Truman’s secretary of defense—of betraying his country on behalf of “the world-wide web of which has been spun from Moscow.” It wasn’t much later that Eisenhower began to seriously consider the presidential run his corporate supporters were pressing on him. He clearly was swayed by their insistence that his election could stop the Democratic drift toward socialism. But he also wanted to break the rising power of those Republicans he’d come to see as “disciples of hate.”10
He had no intention of confronting them directly. In the winter and spring of 1952 he swept past the Republican Right on the strength of his name more than his policy positions. And in his first official act as the Republican nominee, he picked as his running mate one of their most promising young men. Richard Nixon had grown up in small-town Southern California, the son of a grocer and his sainted wife, whom her little boy adored. From that middle ground he took the same distrust of elites that McCarthy had taken from his parents’ struggling Wisconsin farm. But Nixon combined it with a desperate desire to prove himself their equal. He started at little Whittier College down the road from home, moved on to Duke University’s law school, and then, after wartime service in the navy, went into Congress in the Republican Right’s 1946 resurgence, an interesting career choice for a man who everyone agreed wasn’t particularly comfortable with people.
In the subsequent search for highly placed subversives, Nixon had the good luck to find Alger Hiss, whose suitably genteel family and impeccable credentials—Johns Hopkins undergrad, Harvard Law—had carried him into the State Department’s upper ranks and whose hidden commitments had turned him into a Soviet spy. It didn’t hurt that Nixon’s pursuit of Hiss had a few spectacular turns, one of them involving a pumpkin full of microfilmed secrets. He used the enormous publicity the case generated, along with some vicious red-baiting, to get elected to the Senate in 1950 at the age of thirty-seven. Not quite two years later Eisenhower asked him to be the Republican vice-presidential nominee, the political equivalent of the general making sure that his right flank was secure.
The caution seemed to carry over to Eisenhower’s first year in the Oval Office. In April 1953 he embraced the Right’s combination of red-and gay-baiting by replacing Truman’s loyalty program with a policy that gave the federal government the power to purge any employee who engaged in actions that made him or her a security risk. Within a year 2,200 people had been fired, at least a third of them not because they were Communists but because they were gay or lesbian. Eisenhower tried to ignore McCarthy—for a while the president refused to even speak his name—until late 1953, when the senator decided to take on the army, a line he really shouldn’t have crossed. Eisenhower duly ordered his entire administration not to cooperate in any investigation, citing a little-known doctrine he called “executive privilege.” And in the quiet, careful, essentially untraceable way that he preferred, he turned the Right’s sexual politics inside out by leaking to the press a detailed report pointing to the homosexuality of McCarthy’s leading aide, a young lawyer named Roy Cohn. McCarthy tried to push past it with yet more allegations and intimidation, much of it broadcast on what turned out to be a disastrous stretch of must-see TV. In July 1954 the Senate began censure proceedings, an unmistakable indication that McCarthy was through.
But Eisenhower’s most important steps stretched far beyond breaking a single senator. There was never any doubt that he was going to maintain the international commitments the Democrats had made and the military modernization they’d gotten underway. Within that framework, though, he made two crucial changes. To implement his policies he turned to the business class that had elected him. His secretary of state and his CIA director both had been senior partners in one of Wall Street’s most prominent law firms; his secretary of the treasury had headed a major steel company; and his secretary of defense had been the president of General Motors, the nation’s largest defense contractor. And as soon as he took office, Eisenhower started to move the Cold War’s confrontations into the shadows, so that the passions they’d released could finally be dampened down.
Korea came first. His guiding principle was straightforward. “People grow weary of war,” Ike wrote in a private letter early in his term, “particularly when they see no decisive and victorious end to it.” So he was going to stop it as quickly as he could. It took six months of negotiations intensified by another brutal American air assault—this one designed to push North Korea toward starvation—to finalize a settlement that put the two Koreas back to where they’d been before the fighting began, staring at each other across a border they’d killed 2.5 million people to move. On the night the armistice was signed, July 26, 1953, he issued a short statement his speechwriter wanted to close by quoting Abraham Lincoln’s promise in the last days of the Civil War to pursue “a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” On the bottom of the draft Ike scrawled another line. “This is our resolve and our dedication,” it read.11
A month later he ordered the CIA to overthrow the Iranian government. It was a classic application of containment, driven by the administration’s fear that one of the world’s most oil-rich nations was slipping into the Soviet sphere. But the operation was handled with such secrecy that no one in the United States knew that Americans had been involved. In 1954 the CIA staged its second coup, this time in Guatemala, whose democratically elected president had alarmed the White House by nationalizing swaths of land owned by the Boston-based United Fruit Company. Again no one back home cared to see the administration’s hand, not even the august New York Times, which dutifully ignored its own columnist’s hints of the agency’s involvement.
The same year Eisenhower also committed the United States to building a brand-new nation in the southern half of Vietnam. The French had claimed Indochina as a colonial possession in the late nineteenth century. In the decades that followed, a wide variety of nationalist movements had challenged their rule. The most powerful came from the Viet Minh, a coalition of revolutionary groups formed in 1941 under the direction of the Communist Ho Chi Minh. In the twisted course of World War II, as Indochina’s imperial power shifted from the French to the Japanese, Ho built the Viet Minh a base in the countryside north of Hanoi, close to the Chinese border. When Japan collapsed in 1945 and French forces returned to reclaim their possession, the Viet Minh used their base to launch a war of independence.
For the next five years they fought on their own. That Ho had Soviet connections was indisputable; he’d spent much of the 1920s and 1930s as an agent of its international revolutionary apparatus. And in 1946 and 1947 he and his fellow Communists gradually, often brutally, purged their non-Communist comrades from the Viet Minh’s once-expansive alliance. Still Ho couldn’t convince the Soviet leadership to support him, in large part because they feared that he wanted an independent Vietnam rather than a subservient one. So his Viet Minh had to go it alone.
Ho handled the political side of the struggle. Its military strategy he turned over to his hardened young general Vo Nguyen Giap, who built the Viet Minh’s war on a Maoist model of revolutionary struggle. Instead of facing France’s modern military head-on, a fight he was sure to lose, Giap pulled his force back into its rural base. When the French came in pursuit, the Viet Minh would hit them with bursts of guerrilla warfare that a highly mechanized military had no effective way to counter. Giap then fed those small victories into a relentless propaganda campaign in the villages beyond his base, to expand the support he had to have for the war he wanted to fight. The model worked as Giap hoped it would. By the end of 1948 the Viet Minh controlled much of the countryside in northern and central Vietnam and had established pockets of power in the south, while the 100,000 soldiers France had dispatched were piling up casualties in an increasingly futile effort to root them out.
It remained a colonial war on the far edge of world affairs until the Communists’ victory in China changed the major powers’ calculations. In January 1950 the Soviets and the Chinese agreed to back the Viet Minh, the former with moral support, the latter with extensive military aid. Three months later—a month before his Korean intervention—Truman committed $23 million in American aid to the French, not because he wanted them to keep their colony but because he couldn’t afford to have another Asian state fall to the Communists while he was being lacerated by the Right for letting China slip away. With that first installment he turned Vietnam into a proving ground for America’s Cold War resolve.
There was a lot more to come. Through the last two years of the Truman administration the United States equipped the French with mounds of military equipment: more and more the French moved their troops on American trucks, struck Viet Minh strongholds with American bombers, waged firefights with American small arms, and burned stretches of the countryside with the incendiary jelly Americans called napalm. The Viet Minh struck back with the piles of materiel the Chinese provided, some 450 tons of it a month by the end of 1952. With the increase in supplies the bloodshed intensified, both forces—each grown to a quarter million men—inflicting enormous damage on the other, each side struggling to maintain morale as the body counts mounted.
There the war stood when Eisenhower took office in January 1953. “I’m convinced that no military victory is possible in that kind of theater,” he’d written on the day in 1951 that the commanding officer of the French forces had come to call.12 Yet he was also sure that the Communists had to be stopped, because once they’d seized power in Vietnam they’d move on to the rest of Southeast Asia and probably India too. So he spent his first year keeping the French aid flowing, since there wasn’t anything else he could do. But in September 1953 the Soviets unexpectedly proposed that the world’s major powers negotiate a peace deal. The Chinese, anxious to reduce the costs they were carrying, quickly agreed. Once his primary backer was committed, Ho had no choice but to join in. The British signed on. In February 1954 the French did too, though they were then in the midst of a major military maneuver that they hoped would devastate the Viet Minh by luring them into an assault on their northern stronghold at Dien Bien Phu. And suddenly Eisenhower had an opening he didn’t want—to solve a problem that had no solution.
The peace talks opened in Geneva in April 1954. They lasted through the French maneuver’s catastrophic defeat, which convinced Paris that it was time to cut its losses; a few tense weeks in Washington as Eisenhower considered sending US forces into the fighting; and the summer’s push to an agreement everyone was willing to sign, except for the Americans. The settlement split the western portion of French Indochina into two nations, Laos and Cambodia, both of which would be required to remain neutral in the Cold War’s international alignments. As for Vietnam, it would be temporarily split in two. The Viet Minh would be given control of the northern half, the non-Communist independence groups the southern. There they could transform themselves into political parties, in preparation for the July 1956 elections that would decide which of them would govern a united Vietnam.
That sounded reasonable enough. But when the Vietnamese went to the polls, Ike estimated, 80 percent of them would vote for the Viet Minh, and another Asian nation would tumble into the Communist camp. So he decided that there wouldn’t be any elections. Ho would simply hold the northern portion the agreement gave him, while the United States would use its unparalleled power to transform the southern portion into a nation of its own. North and South Vietnam would then become another North and South Korea, with the Communists contained in half the space they otherwise would have controlled—as much a victory as the Americans could manage under the circumstances.
But the maneuver would work only if the United States could make South Vietnam a viable country. The first step was to find it a head of state. Among the multiple factions that made up the non-Communist side of the anticolonial struggle, the administration settled on the longtime Catholic nationalist Ngo Dinh Diem. Those Americans who came into closest contact with him wondered whether he was up to the job. One of the diplomats who staffed the US embassy described him as “a curious blend of heroism blended with a narrowness of view and egotism which will make him a difficult man to deal with.”13 But Diem was a virulent anti-Communist with strong connections to a number of influential Americans. And in Washington that’s what mattered most.
Once they had a premier in place, Ike’s men provided him with a torrent of support. The Joint Chiefs set up a program to create the army he’d need, which the Pentagon then flooded with the latest military equipment; within a couple of years he had 150,000 soldiers at his command. The State Department stabilized his economy with expansive financial aid and a special trade deal that filled Saigon, his new nation’s capital city, with piles of American goods. And inside Diem’s presidential palace the CIA counseled him on how to beat back whatever threats might arise. “Nation-building,” administration insiders called their work, a process that most Americans had no idea was underway, which was exactly how Eisenhower wanted it to be.
Cracks
THE CRACKS STARTED to show as Ike reached the final stretch of his second term. In the years since Truman had turned the Cold War into a global struggle the costs had escalated dramatically. Though he liked to talk about keeping the federal budget under control, Eisenhower had never reined in defense spending: in 1958 the military’s budget was $38 billion, $2 billion above the previous year’s. Much of that money coursed through the American economy. But a solid share went abroad, to pay for the approximately 650,000 soldiers the United States had stationed in other countries and the military aid it provided to a growing number of allies such as Iran and South Vietnam. In the Cold War’s early days the United States could bring back much of that money by selling the Europeans and the Japanese the steel and shoes and automobiles their shattered factories couldn’t produce. By the late 1950s those economies had been largely restored, and the money wasn’t flowing back anymore. The more imbalanced the accounts became, the more investors feared that the situation wasn’t sustainable. So they did what the international financial system allowed them to do. They started to trade their dollars for gold.
At the same time the administration was hearing of serious troubles in the South Vietnamese countryside. No one in Eisenhower’s inner circle had expected Diem to make South Vietnam a genuinely democratic nation. But even some of the most informed observers were surprised by how ruthlessly he suppressed dissent. His primary targets were the Viet Minh loyalists who remained in the South after the Geneva agreement was finalized; his government executed hundreds of suspected Communists in 1956 alone. He also turned against a number of the non-Communist groups who’d made up the South’s fractious politics as he concentrated power in the small Catholic clique he’d assembled to help him rule. “South Vietnam today is a quasi-police state,” said the prestigious journal Foreign Affairs in January 1957, “characterized by arbitrary arrests and imprisonment, strict censorship of the press, and the absence of an effective opposition.”14
Late that year the CIA reported a rising number of guerrilla actions in the rural areas south of Saigon, where the Mekong River widened into its delta. They were coming from the tattered remains of the Viet Minh cadres that had once had a hold there, in alliance with some of the other groups Diem’s repression had alienated. And they were aimed at government officials out in the field. The reports filtered up to North Vietnam as well. At first Ho was inclined to keep his distance. But others inside his government pushed him to see in the attacks an obligation and an opportunity. It took him more than a year to come around, but in January 1959 the North Vietnamese agreed to assist the southern struggle. Within a few months they started to ship arms and men secretly along the Laotian border into South Vietnam’s militant villages, in support of what they took to calling the National Liberation Front (NLF). Diem preferred a term that implied the insurgents’ traitorous intent. He called them the Viet Cong.
That same winter another insurgency came in from another countryside. Fidel Castro’s revolutionary movement had spent the previous two years in Cuba’s Sierra Maestra Mountains, waging a sporadic guerrilla war against the government of Fulgencio Batista, the island’s military dictator. Batista had undermined his popular support by tying himself to the American mobsters who dominated Havana and the sugar company executives who dominated Cuba’s rural areas. Still, even the rebels were surprised when Batista responded to a couple of admittedly serious military defeats in late 1958 by abruptly fleeing the country. Castro’s men marched into Havana unopposed on January 2, 1959. Castro arrived six days later.
At first no one was sure what to make of him. By most accounts—including the Soviets’—Castro wasn’t a Communist. But two of his closest advisers, his brother Raul and the Argentine Che Guevara, were. During the regime’s first year in power they gradually moved Fidel toward Moscow, through the quiet diplomacy that brought their government mounting Soviet aid and the sweeping land reform Raul’s Communist colleagues put in place to strip the sugar companies of 90 percent of their holdings. But it wasn’t until a high-ranking Russian official made a very public visit to Havana in February 1960 that the White House knew the terrible truth. The Soviets had secured an ally ninety miles off the Florida coast.
Then there was the insurgency sweeping up from Arizona. In the Eisenhower years the Republican Right’s old guard had collapsed. Taft had died of cancer in 1953, McCarthy from his drinking four years later. Even MacArthur was fading away. In their place a new generation had established itself. Most of them came from that segment of the business class where distrust of Eisenhower’s corporate elites ran deep. Around them circled a superb group of publicists dedicated to polishing the Right’s tarnished image, led by young William Buckley, whose National Review magazine had become the center of conservative intellectual life. And behind the scenes stood a handful of operatives who decided in 1959 to reclaim the party Eisenhower had taken from them.
Timing was everything. In 1951 the states had ratified a constitutional amendment limiting the president to two terms, so Ike couldn’t run again in the 1960 election. Nixon was his obvious successor, a possibility that in 1952 would have thrilled the party’s conservative wing. But eight years of loyalty to the president had turned Nixon into a charmless version of an Eisenhower Republican, committed to doggedly continuing what the general had done. And if there was one thing the Right hated more than having another moderate take the nomination in 1960, it was seeing it go to an apostate, particularly when they had a true believer in their sights.
Barry Goldwater was a square-jawed, blunt-talking businessman from Arizona—his family owned Phoenix’s largest department store—who’d won a Senate seat in 1952 as part of Eisenhower’s landslide. In the years since, he’d become the Republicans’ leading advocate of the unfettered free market, the right of states to do as they pleased, and an anti-Communism so fervent he saw containment as dangerously close to capitulation. When the Right’s insurgents took him aside to talk about his leading a right-wing charge at the Republican convention, he started to look an awful lot like a candidate. He let Bill Buckley’s brother-in-law ghostwrite a little book that laid out his political positions, foremost among them the dismantling of the New Deal and the complete reconfiguration of Eisenhower’s foreign policy. “If an enemy power is bent on conquering you he is at war with you,” it read, “and you—unless you are contemplating surrender—are at war with him. Moreover, unless you contemplate treason—your objective, like his, will be victory.” And he spent the first half of 1960 barnstorming the country, drawing adoring crowds wherever he went. So strong was the reaction Goldwater couldn’t help but think that he had a path to the nomination, if not the White House. “I would rather see the Republican Party lose in 1960 fighting on principle,” he wrote his Phoenix friend William Rehnquist shortly before the convention, “than I would care to see us win standing on grounds we know are wrong and on which we will ultimately destroy ourselves.”15
But Eisenhower hadn’t spent his presidency suppressing conflict only to let it flare again in his final days. He staunched the flow of gold with a set of economic maneuvers intended to convince investors that he would protect the dollar’s value, even as those maneuvers pushed the economy into a recession. To counter the NLF he sent Diem yet more aid and told the Joint Chiefs that the several hundred US military advisers they had in that country were free to accompany the South Vietnamese army on their forays into the countryside to search out and destroy the Viet Cong. In March 1960 he approved a CIA plan to overthrow Castro just as they’d toppled the Iranian and Guatemalan governments during his first term. And though he had his doubts about Nixon—he doesn’t have any friends, he told his longtime secretary—Ike quietly helped him to consolidate his control of the convention so completely that the Right had no room to maneuver. Having counted the delegates he wasn’t going to win, Goldwater gave up the fight the night before his party nominated Nixon by acclamation.
By then the Democrats had already settled on their candidate, who had a few cracks of his own to seal. John Kennedy had grown up swathed in wealth and steeped in politics, thanks to his father Joseph P. Kennedy, one of the nation’s richest men. Joe’s grandparents had come to America from famine Ireland around the time Ed Cahill’s great-grandparents had arrived. The families’ trajectories had moved in very different directions. Joe’s father had been a Boston ward boss, powerful enough to get his boy into Harvard—Class of 1912—though not powerful enough to get him accepted by the Brahmins who dominated the Yard. From there Joe raced up the social scale, marrying the daughter of Boston’s former mayor and launching a hard-driving, wildly successful career as a stock market speculator, commodity trader, and Hollywood power broker. He invested a share of his money in Franklin Roosevelt’s first two presidential campaigns, and in return received a series of high-level appointments, which he performed with such skill that there was talk of his running for the presidency himself—until Roosevelt asked him to serve as ambassador to Great Britain.
Joe Kennedy arrived in London in February 1938, eight months before the British prime minister went to meet Hitler in Munich. It was hardly surprising that Kennedy thoroughly approved of the appeasement that took place there; FDR approved of it too. His mistake was to cling to that view after the war began. Through its first catastrophic year he repeatedly urged Roosevelt to reach an accommodation with the Nazis in anticipation of Britain’s impending defeat, even as the president was trying to pull American policy in precisely the opposite direction. His stack of confidential cables having failed to move Washington back to appeasement, Kennedy went public. “Democracy is finished in England,” he told the Boston Globe in November 1940, in the midst of the German blitz. “If we get into war it will be [finished] in this country too.”16 He suffered through three weeks of relentless criticism before offering his resignation, long enough to destroy whatever was left of his political career.
So Kennedy transferred his ambitions to his sons. He began with his eldest, Joe Jr., the family’s golden boy. When Joe was killed in the war his father had been desperate to avoid, Joe Sr. turned to his second son. John—Jack to his family and friends—had all the privileges fabulous wealth could buy: winters at his parents’ Palm Beach mansion, summers at their compound on the Cape, school years at Choate and Harvard, where he turned his casual charm into a social whirl built around his relentless, often exploitative pursuit of women. What his father’s fortune couldn’t buy him was good health. As a teenager he was diagnosed with colitis, a debilitating disease of the digestive tract. His doctors tried to control it with an aggressive use of steroids that devastated his adrenal glands and caused a deterioration of his spinal column so severe there were times when he could barely walk.
His conditions should have kept him out of the war, but he was determined to serve. So in 1942 he used his father’s connections to get a naval commission in a combat zone, as commander of a small patrol boat in the Pacific’s Solomon Islands. He came home not quite two years later a national hero, celebrated in a slew of newspaper and magazine stories for the genuinely courageous actions he took to save most of his crew after a Japanese destroyer had split his boat in two. It was the first installment of a concerted campaign to turn Jack into the vigorous young man he’d never been.
Joe Jr. was killed in August 1944. By that December Joe Sr. was pushing Jack to run for office. “It was like being drafted,” he told a reporter a decade later. “My father wanted his eldest son in politics. ‘Wanted’ isn’t the right word. He demanded it. You know my father.”17 In 1946 his family name, his dad’s money, and a lot of copies of John Hersey’s New Yorker story on his wartime heroism won him Boston’s Eleventh Congressional District, though he hadn’t lived in the city for almost twenty years. The House was just a way station; as soon as he could, in 1952, he ran for a Massachusetts Senate seat. It was a Republican year. But Jack took 51.5 percent of the vote: a testament, the experts said, to the candidate’s magnetism and his father’s checkbook.
Over the next eight years Jack polished his image to a blinding sheen. On domestic policy he was a moderate Democrat, supportive of reform but suitably solicitous of his party’s southern wing. Internationally he accepted containment as the core principle of foreign policy, though the only time that Eisenhower seriously considered military intervention—in Vietnam in 1954—Kennedy opposed it. The reservation seemed to come from a distrust of the military establishment, a view a lot of veterans brought home from the war, but it was hard not to see in it a hint of his father too.
Politics didn’t power his image, though, as much as celebrity did. Life ran a photo spread of his 1953 marriage to Jacqueline Bouvier, an elegant twenty-two-year-old raised in almost as much comfort as he had been. When he wrote a book in 1956—some of it, anyway—it became a bestseller and, with a little prodding from some well-placed supporters, won the Pulitzer Prize. Time put him on its cover twice, the women’s magazines ran so many stories it was impossible to keep track, the television networks loved him, and Harvard professors swooned. “Jack is the greatest attraction in the country today,” Joe said in 1959. “He can draw more people to a fundraising dinner than Cary Grant or Jimmy Stewart. Why is that? He has more universal appeal.”18
Yet there was an audacity in his decision to run for the presidency in 1960. He was only forty-two when the campaign started, four years younger than the youngest man ever elected president. He was a Catholic, which a quarter of Americans thought disqualified him from office, on the assumption that he’d be more loyal to the pope than to his nation. He was still suffering from the agonizing back pain that the steroids had caused, along with the full onset of Addison’s disease. Washington was filled with rumors of the obsessive womanizing his marriage hadn’t stopped. And behind him lurked his father the appeaser.
So Joe slipped as far into the background as he could, while his third son stepped to the front. Twenty-six-year-old Robert Kennedy had been a year out of law school when his father insisted that he manage Jack’s first Senate campaign. The idea appalled him. But Joe wanted to be sure that the family had complete control over Jack’s career. And hard-driving, quick-tempered, fiercely loyal Bobby was the perfect person to make that happen. He ran Jack’s 1958 reelection campaign too, with what turned out to be an impressive organizational ability. And there was never any doubt that he’d manage Jack’s run for the presidency, because if there was one thing Bobby believed in above all else, it was his duty to promote and protect his brother.
Together Jack, Joe, Bobby, and the rest of their inner circle hid Jack’s secrets behind a carefully crafted campaign of counter-imaging. Out went the flood of stories of his contented life with his beautiful wife, who was now expecting their second child. Out went the photos of an obviously healthy JFK—a marketer’s perfectly fashioned echo of FDR—playing touch football on the lawn of his family’s compound and sailing off the Cape. And out went reports that the back pain the photos couldn’t completely hide was the result of the injuries he’d suffered in the Pacific: a war hero’s wounds that he eased simply by sitting in a rocking chair.
The weaknesses they couldn’t mask they turned to his advantage. Kennedy wasn’t too young to be president, the campaign said. He was exactly what the country needed to move past the sclerotic administration Eisenhower was running as he closed in on seventy. His Catholicism wasn’t a problem. It was an opportunity for Americans to prove that they weren’t so bigoted as to vote against a man simply because of his faith. And he certainly wasn’t going to show any weakness in defending the nation against foreign threats. In fact Eisenhower had weakened those defenses, Kennedy said, by not spending enough on the missile systems that the nation had to have to keep pace with the Soviets, a charge so baseless Ike found it absolutely enraging.
Kennedy wasn’t running against an aging Eisenhower, though. He was running against a candidate just four years older than he was, whose eight years of service to a widely popular president had given him a depth of executive experience JFK didn’t have. But Nixon was hobbled by the economic slowdown Ike had accepted to keep the gold supply in place. And experience couldn’t substitute for charm. Nixon plodded through the fall of 1960 with a grim determination and obvious discomfort that seemed almost depressing when it was set alongside Kennedy’s glittering image. In late September they met in the nation’s first televised presidential debate. Kennedy was confident, cool, and marvelously telegenic; Nixon tired, nervous, and caked in makeup. “My God,” said Chicago mayor Dick Daley, who was all-in for JFK, “they’ve embalmed him before he even died.”19
Nixon had one last line of defense in the electoral coalition that Eisenhower had assembled. In the end he held a good portion of it, carrying three of the four southern states Ike had won in 1952 and barely losing the fourth, though Kennedy had made its senator his running mate. He swept the West. And he came close to taking the industrial Midwest as well, had old pols like Daley not stopped him with a Democratic firewall. Nixon carried the white vote, though not as strongly as Eisenhower had, and held on to the Republicans’ share of the Black vote. Then there was the question of religion. Studies showed that JFK lost 6.5 percent of the Protestant vote that a Democrat normally won. But he took 78 percent of Catholic ballots, 37 points above Stevenson’s total in 1956. Some of that surge came in just the right places, like the Cahills’ Chicago ward, where JFK won 10,000 more votes than Stevenson had: nine percent of the nationwide margin of 112,000 votes that gave John Kennedy the presidency.
When Nixon finally conceded defeat on the afternoon after the election, JFK was at the Kennedys’ Cape Cod compound. The entire family gathered in their parents’ living room for a photo shoot, then headed to a row of limousines waiting to take them to the president-elect’s first public appearance. “Everybody but Dad,” Jack’s sister Patricia recalled, “who was on the front porch, back a little in the shadows, looking very happy. . . . He had decided to stay at home out of the range of photographers and reporters. Jack suddenly realized what was happening. He got out of the car, went back up on the porch, and told Dad to come along. . . . Jack insisted on it,” since it wouldn’t have been right to leave behind the man who had made him president.20
To the Brink
EISENHOWER HAD KENNEDY into the White House twice after the election, once in December and again in January 1961. He spent a lot of their first meeting going over the White House’s organizational chart, which Kennedy didn’t find the most scintillating way to spend an afternoon. But Eisenhower also made a special mention of the drain on gold and the steps Washington might have to take to keep it under control. In their second session JFK asked about Vietnam and Laos, which was struggling with a Communist insurgency of its own. And Ike told him about the CIA’s plan to overthrow Castro, though Kennedy already knew the details from the agency briefings he’d received. There were covert operations underway on the island. But the major initiative was in development in Guatemala, where the CIA was training 1,500 anti-Communist Cubans to conduct a spring invasion.
In between their meetings Ike offered Kennedy a public warning, wrapped inside his farewell address. It was a tradition stretching back to George Washington, who’d used his final speech as president to warn against entangling alliances. Eisenhower used his to warn about the rising danger of what he called “the military-industrial complex”: the “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry” whose influence was so vast, he said, it could “endanger our liberties or our democratic processes.”21 No doubt he was thinking about the pressure for yet more spending that JFK had created with his campaign talk of a missile gap and the gold rush that the spending could cause. But he was also telling the new president not to repeat the mistake he’d made by tying the nation’s course to a corporatized warfare state.
Kennedy certainly wasn’t as beholden to the corporate world as Ike had been. He handed the Treasury Department to a Wall Street banker—a Republican no less—and Defense to the president of Ford, the nation’s second-largest automaker and a major defense contractor. But forty-four-year-old Robert McNamara wasn’t a typical car guy. A product of Stanford and the Harvard Business School who’d helped Curtis LeMay optimize his bombing runs during World War II, he was an expert in the science of statistical control: rigorously, relentlessly, some thought excessively analytical; a thinking man’s businessman whom Kennedy hoped could control a military establishment he didn’t quite trust. The same analytical bent defined some of the president’s other key appointments. His secretary of state was a career diplomat, his national security advisor a Harvard dean. And his most important appointment was familial. At his father’s insistence Jack named Bobby attorney general, for all the same reasons Joe had wanted his third son managing Jack’s election.
But changing personnel wasn’t the same as changing policy. Though he couldn’t bring himself to cut the defense budget—he spent $4 billion more in his first year than Ike had in his last—Kennedy made a concerted effort to correct the balance-of-payments deficit that had created the pressure on gold, just as Eisenhower had urged him to do. He followed Ike on Vietnam too. In the course of 1960 the NLF had used relentless attacks on Diem’s local officials to take control of some rural areas south of Saigon and scattered parts of South Vietnam’s narrow center. The losses were so extensive that the entire country was in “critical condition . . . needing emergency treatment,” one of the army’s more knowledgeable observers told JFK in January 1961.22 But Kennedy wasn’t interested in moving beyond the parameters Eisenhower had set. So he promised Diem the aid he needed to increase his military by another 30,000 men and upped the number of American advisers from 700 to 1,200, in hopes that small steps could stave off whatever disaster seemed to be heading his way.
Instead the disaster hit in Cuba. Kennedy began reviewing the CIA’s proposed invasion within a few weeks of his inauguration. The agency planned to put its rebels ashore in a daylight beach landing about two hundred miles from Havana. There was a good chance they’d run into Cuban troops. But that wasn’t necessarily a problem, the CIA said, since the resulting firefight might trigger the general uprising that would bring Castro down. If it didn’t, American air support could give the rebels the cover they needed to escape to the nearby mountains, where they could build the anti-Communist version of Castro’s revolutionary movement.
Kennedy wasn’t convinced. A daytime landing was too risky. And he wanted a covert operation, without any indication of American involvement, not one that could depend on American fighter jets strafing Cuban troops. So the agency’s planners quickly reworked the plan. They’d land the rebels at night on an isolated stretch of beach along the Bahia de Cochinos—the Bay of Pigs—where Cuban soldiers weren’t likely to notice. From there they’d slip into the mountains without the firefight, the jets, or the spark of rebellion. Kennedy gave his approval over Easter weekend, two weeks before the invasion date of April 17.
The CIA started the landing at midnight. But the beaches weren’t as isolated as the agency had thought they were. Within a few hours local militias had notified Havana that an invasion was underway. By dawn Castro’s meager air force had the rebels pinned down, while his ground forces closed in. Agency operatives spent the day tracking the fighting. The next morning they told the White House that the invasion wasn’t going to get beyond the beach unless the president ordered the air assault he’d been determined to avoid. Kennedy had every reason to hesitate. And he did, until early the following morning, April 19, when he ordered a limited attack that stripped away what little was left of his ability to deny that the United States was behind the entire operation. It was also too late: the Cubans crushed the CIA’s collapsing force later that day. A hundred rebels had been killed. Almost all the rest were taken as prisoners of the Americans’ undeclared war.
She’d never seen Jack so upset, Jackie Kennedy told his mother that day. For weeks afterward he was haunted by the men who’d died on the beach; when he brought a few of their families to the White House he made a point of telling them about his brother Joe, so they’d know that he understood the depth of their loss. He worried that both the Soviets and the Republicans would assume from his hesitation that he wasn’t tough enough for the job. He was convinced that the CIA had misled him. And he hated the thought that three months into his presidency he’d let the Cold War’s cruelties come out of the shadows and into view.
He spent the rest of the year trying to put them back again. Kennedy had no intention of letting the Castro government stand. But there’d be no more invasions. Now the entire battle would be fought in secret, in the Eisenhower way. And it wouldn’t be run by the CIA but by the one person he knew he could trust. Bobby took over the fight with the devotion he always brought to Jack’s causes. “My idea is to stir things up on the island with espionage, sabotage, general disorder, run & operated by Cuban themselves,” he wrote in a note to himself that November.23 He also seemed to embrace an ongoing CIA effort to assassinate Castro. The plots twisted and turned in various directions, one of them passing through the American mobsters whose casinos Castro had driven out of Havana. Bobby probably didn’t know that part of the agency’s plans. But he knew enough to accede to the idea of murdering a head of state, as long as it was done without anyone seeing the president’s hand in it.
JFK also tried to keep his Vietnamese commitments as covert as he could. In October 1961 he sent his favorite general, iconoclastic Maxwell Taylor, to Saigon to assess Diem’s standing. He came back with news of the NLF’s expanding support and the South Vietnamese army’s sagging morale. Both of those problems could be solved, Taylor thought, with an infusion of 6,000 to 8,000 American military advisers who could show Diem’s troops how a war ought to be fought. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, which Taylor had yet to join—Kennedy would make him chairman in October 1962—argued that a force that small wouldn’t do: they proposed that the president send 200,000 men to take the fight straight to the Viet Cong, a complete misreading of Kennedy’s intentions. In November he told Diem that he was increasing the number of American advisers in South Vietnam from 1,200 to 3,400, and sending still more military equipment, the slightest ratcheting up of the policies he’d put in place at the beginning of the year.
But the most dangerous dynamic he’d set into motion couldn’t be contained. Castro had come out of his victory at the Bay of Pigs convinced that Kennedy would eventually launch a full-scale invasion. As his intelligence services picked up traces of Bobby’s plotting, his fears intensified. So he asked the Russians for protection. In April 1962 the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, handed him a proposal well beyond anything Castro had expected. The Soviets would be willing, he said, to build and staff nuclear missile bases on the island.
It was purely a power play, Khrushchev told the leading members of the Soviet Central Committee, meant “to scare [the Americans], to restrain them . . . to give them back some of their own medicine.”24 At first Castro wasn’t sure whether he wanted to let the Soviets use him that way. But his fear of attack was too strong to let the offer go. In August Russian military technicians began building the missile sites in the Cuban countryside. The first of them were to be ready by October, in plenty of time for Khrushchev to reveal them right after the American midterm elections.
The Pentagon’s high-tech spy planes photographed the work almost immediately. But they caught the antiaircraft emplacements the Russians were building around the sites rather than the missiles themselves, a worrying sign to be sure, but not a terrifying one. Not until October 14 did a flight get firm evidence that the Russians had put in place missiles capable of hitting the United States. It took another day to develop and analyze the film. JFK was sitting in bed on the morning of October 16, reading the newspapers, when his national security advisor told him the news. Kennedy asked him to assemble his foreign policy advisers as soon as possible, without letting anyone know its cause. Then he called Bobby.
The Executive Committee of the National Security Council—ExComm for short—began its first meeting in the Cabinet Room at 11:50 a.m. Bobby was there, of course, as were the vice president, the secretaries of state, defense, and the treasury, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and the national security advisor, along with a handful of high-ranking aides. Kennedy had already decided that the group would meet whenever possible over the next few days to settle on a response. Their sessions would be absolutely secret; he wouldn’t even change his official schedule, since doing that would alert the press that something was wrong. Only when they had a policy set would Kennedy tell the public what was happening. With that understanding in place, they started to talk. And the Cold War’s inexorable power closed in.
The first meeting was barely underway when the secretary of state, Dean Rusk, said that in his view Khrushchev was making a political move, not a military one. “He . . . knows that we don’t really live under fear of his nuclear weapons to the extent that he has to live under the fear of ours,” he said. “We have nuclear missiles nearby [the Soviet Union], in Turkey and places like that,” while the Soviets’ other missiles weren’t anywhere near the United States.25 It took Bob McNamara a little longer to point out that Khrushchev’s moving the missiles closer to the United States didn’t tip the balance of power; a nuclear warhead fired out of East Germany was going to be just as devastating as one fired out of Cuba. Yet the ExComm spent the next four days—while JFK made the public appearances that kept him out of the room—discussing how the administration had to eliminate the missiles, because even a symbolic Soviet victory was too much to bear.
The key question then became how the missiles might be purged. On that point the ExComm split in two. One side, led by Rusk and backed by Bobby and the Joint Chiefs, urged the president to launch an overwhelming air strike of 500 to 2,000 sorties against the missile sites and ancillary targets, to be followed within a few days by a full-scale invasion with a force of at least 100,000 men, two-thirds the number the Allies had sent onto Normandy’s beaches on the first day of the European invasion in 1944. The power would be enormous, McNamara argued for the other side, but it would also carry tremendous risk. The air strikes would probably destroy the sites. They’d also kill the Russian soldiers stationed around them, which could force the Soviets to respond with an attack of their own, an escalation that could rapidly turn into a nuclear exchange. And 100,000 American troops wading ashore would undoubtedly make things worse. Better to give Khrushchev the chance to back down before the shooting started. American intelligence had reported that the Soviets were still shipping to Cuba what analysts assumed to be the nuclear warheads. The navy could put a blockade around Cuba to prevent those ships from arriving. If the Soviets tried to run the blockade, the American ships would have to sink them, McNamara conceded, and the United States and the USSR would again be on the path to nuclear annihilation. But if they turned around, the Americans would know that the Russians didn’t really want a confrontation. Maybe then they could move toward some form of negotiation.
Through October 18 the assault side dominated. As the sessions dragged on, though, McNamara slowly brought the most influential person in the room over to his side. Around 8:00 p.m. that evening Bobby stopped by the Oval Office for a private conversation with his brother. The next morning the chairman of the Joint Chiefs told his colleagues of JFK’s new inclination. And Curtis LeMay told the president that anything short of immediate military action was appeasement.
When Kennedy went on national television three days later—Monday night, October 22—to tell the American people about the missile sites, he talked of appeasement too. “The 1930s taught us a clear lesson,” he said. “Aggressive conduct, if allowed to go unchecked, ultimately leads to war. This nation is opposed to war. We are also true to our word. Our unswerving objective, therefore, must be to prevent the use of these missiles against this or any other country, and to secure their withdrawal or elimination. . . .”26 But he’d start with a blockade instead of the devastating assault LeMay wanted to lead.
The news shuddered through the nation. Eighty-four percent of Americans supported the blockade, according to Gallup’s overnight poll. But they feared where it might lead. Seventy-five percent expected some shooting between American and Soviet forces. Twenty percent thought that World War III was about to begin. And 65 percent gave some thought to the possibility of nuclear war. JFK knew the feeling. On October 23 he set the military at its highest level of alert, one step short of nuclear war, in case the Soviets should defy him. That evening he asked Jackie whether she wanted to spend the night with their children in the White House bomb shelter. She said she’d stay with him.
The blockade went into effect at 10:00 the next morning. The Soviet signal arrived forty-five minutes later, when the CIA director informed the ExComm that the Russian ships that had been heading toward Cuba were reversing course. But no one knew what to do next. For three more days the Americans and the Soviets edged around each other, trying to puzzle through what the other intended. The longer the impasse lasted, the more the military pressure mounted. On October 27 the Joint Chiefs prepared a formal recommendation that Kennedy immediately order the air strike the blockade had superseded. That afternoon, just as the ExComm was beginning its second meeting of the day, word arrived that a Cuban antiaircraft battery had shot down one of the Americans’ spy planes, killing the pilot in the process. In the taut conversation that ensued, even McNamara started talking about the need to prepare for the occupation that would follow the American bombing and the increasingly inevitable invasion.
The session ended around 7:45 p.m. As everyone was filing out, JFK asked a handful of them to join him in the Oval Office. They spent about twenty minutes settling on instructions. Once they had their message clear, Bobby went to see the Soviet ambassador.
They met alone in the attorney general’s office down the street from the White House. Bobby started with the death of the American pilot. “I told him that this was an extremely serious turn in events,” he wrote a few days later. “There was very little time left. If the Cubans were shooting down our planes, then we were going to shoot back. This could not help but bring on further incidents and he had better understand the full implications of this matter.”27 From the threat he moved to the offer. If the Soviets were to remove their missiles, the United States would guarantee that there’d be no invasion of Cuba. Then he cycled back to a point the secretary of state had raised on the crisis’s opening day. Should the Cuban missiles be withdrawn, he said, the Soviets could expect that in four or five months the president would remove the Americans’ missiles from Turkey. There’d be no formal deal, just a mutual understanding. And if the Russians ever spoke a word of it, the United States would deny everything. The next morning, October 28, Khrushchev announced that the Cuban missile sites would be dismantled, the missiles crated and returned to the Soviet Union. To the president he sent a highly confidential note accepting Bobby’s terms.
In the secrecy that Kennedy wrapped around the settlement lay the crisis’s final danger. It had been seventeen years since the Red Army rolled into the ruins of Berlin. In that time the world war’s lessons had hardened into principles so absolute many of the nation’s most powerful men had come to see caution as weakness and compromise as akin to surrender. Those principles had created the crisis that Kennedy had then solved by refusing to give in to its adherents’ demand for violence on a staggering scale. Yet in the end he believed that he had to hide his path to peace as thoroughly as Eisenhower had hidden his harshest actions, for fear of being called his father’s son.