Kennedy: The Classic Biography (131 page)

The most attention was given to Khrushchev’s letter of the previous night. Under the President’s direction, our group worked all day on draft replies. Fatigue and disagreement over the right course caused more wrangling and irritability than usual. Finally the President asked the Attorney General and me to serve as a drafting committee of two to pull together a final version. He also asked me to clear the text with Stevenson, who had skillfully advanced parallel talks at the UN. The final draft of his reply—which confined itself to the proposals made in Khrushchev’s Friday letter, ignoring the Fomin and Zorin talks and any specific reference to Turkish bases—read into the Chairman’s letter everything we wanted. Stevenson feared it might be too stiff. But with two minor amendments acceptable to the President, I obtained Stevenson’s clearance; and the President, in the interests of both speed and psychology, released the letter publicly as it was being transmitted to Moscow shortly after 8
P.M
.

The first thing that needs to be done…is for work to cease on offensive missile bases in Cuba and for all weapons systems in Cuba capable of offensive use to be rendered inoperable, under effective United Nations arrangements. [Note that, instead of arguing with Mr. K. over whether his missiles and planes were intended to be offensive, he insisted on action against those “capable of offensive use.”]

As I read your letter, the key elements of your proposals—which seem generally acceptable as I understand them—are as follows:

1. You would agree to remove these weapons systems from Cuba under appropriate United Nations observation and supervision; and undertake, with suitable safeguards, to halt the further introduction of such weapons systems into Cuba.

2. We, on our part, would agree—upon the establishment of adequate arrangements through the United Nations to ensure the carrying out and continuation of these commitments—(a) to remove promptly the quarantine measures now in effect and (b) to give assurances against an invasion of Cuba. [Note that, unlike the action to be undertaken by Khrushchev, ours was conditional upon UN arrangements.]

…the first ingredient, let me emphasize…is the cessation of work on missile sites in Cuba and measures to render such weapons inoperable, under effective international guarantees. The continuation of this threat, or a prolonging of this discussion concerning Cuba by linking these problems to the broader questions of European and world security, would surely lead to an intensification of the Cuban crisis and a grave risk to the peace of the world.

At the private request of the President, a copy of the letter was delivered to the Soviet Ambassador by Robert Kennedy with a strong verbal message: The point of escalation was at hand; the United States could proceed toward peace and disarmament, or, as the Attorney General later described it, we could take “strong and overwhelming retaliatory action…unless [the President] received immediate notice that the missiles would be withdrawn.” That message was conveyed to Moscow.

Meanwhile the Executive Committee was somewhat heatedly discussing plans for the next step. Twenty-four Air Force Reserve troop carrier squadrons were called up. Special messages to NATO, De Gaulle and Adenauer outlined the critical stage we had reached. The POL blockade, air-strike and invasion advocates differed over what to do when. An invasion, it was observed, might turn out differently than planned if the overground rockets (FROGs) spotted by our planes in the Soviet armored division now in Cuba were already equipped with nuclear warheads. In front of the White House, more than a thousand pickets mustered, some pleading for peace, some for war, one simply calling JFK a traitor.

The President would not, in my judgment, have moved immediately to either an air strike or an invasion; but the pressures for such a move on the following Tuesday were rapidly and irresistibly growing, strongly supported by a minority in our group and increasingly necessitated by a deterioration in the situation. The downing of our plane could not be ignored. Neither could the approaching ship, or the continuing work on the missile sites, or the Soviet SAMs. We stayed in session all day Saturday, and finally, shortly after 8.
P.M
., noting rising tempers and irritability, the President recessed the meeting for a one-hour dinner break. Pressure and fatigue, he later noted privately, might have broken the group’s steady demeanor in another twenty-four or forty-eight hours. At dinner in the White House staff “mess,” the Vice President, Treasury Secretary Dillon and I talked of entirely different subjects. The meeting at 9
P.M
. was shorter, cooler and quieter; and with the knowledge that our meeting the next morning at 10
A.M
. could be decisive—one way or the other—we adjourned for the night.

SUCCESS

Upon awakening Sunday morning, October 28, I turned on the news on my bedside radio, as I had each morning during the week. In the course of the 9
A.M
. newscast a special bulletin came in from Moscow. It was a new letter from Khrushchev, his fifth since Tuesday, sent publicly in the interest of speed. Kennedy’s terms were being accepted. The missiles were being withdrawn. Inspection would be permitted. The confrontation was over.

Hardly able to believe it, I reached Bundy at the White House. It was true. He had just called the President, who took the news with “tremendous satisfaction” and asked to see the message on his way to Mass. Our meeting was postponed from 10 to 11
A.M
. It was a beautiful Sunday morning in Washington in every way.

With deep feelings of relief and exhilaration, we gathered in the Cabinet-Room at eleven, our thirteenth consecutive day of close collaboration. Just as missiles are incomparably faster than all their predecessors, so this world-wide crisis had ended incredibly faster than all its predecessors. The talk preceding the meeting was boisterous. “What is Castro saying now?” chortled someone. Robert McNamara said he had risen early that morning to draw up a list of “steps to take short of invasion.” When he heard the news, said John McCone, “I could hardly believe my ears.” Waiting for the President to come in, we speculated about what would have happened

• if Kennedy had chosen the air strike over the blockade…

• if the OAS and other Allies had not supported us…

• if both our conventional and our nuclear forces had not been strengthened over the past twenty-one months…

• if it were not for the combined genius and courage that produced U-2 photographs and their interpretations…

• if a blockade had been instituted before we could prove Soviet duplicity and offensive weapons…

• if Kennedy and Khrushchev had not been accustomed to communicating directly with each other and had not left that channel open…

• if the President’s speech of October 22 had not taken Khrushchev by surprise…

• if John F. Kennedy had not been President of the United States.

John F. Kennedy entered and we all stood up. He had, as Harold Macmillan would later say, earned his place in history by this one act alone. He had been engaged in a personal as well as national contest for world leadership and he had won. He had reassured those nations fearing we would use too much strength and those fearing we would use none at all. Cuba had been the site of his greatest failure and now of his greatest success. The hard lessons of the first Cuban crisis were applied in his steady handling of the second with a carefully measured combination of defense, diplomacy and dialogue. Yet he walked in and began the meeting without a trace of excitement or even exultation.

Earlier in his office—told by Bundy and Kaysen that his simultaneous plea to India and Pakistan to resolve their differences over Kashmir in view of the Chinese attack would surely be heeded, now that he looked “ten feet tall”—he had evenly replied: “That will wear off in about a week, and everyone will be back to thinking only of their own interests.”

Displaying the same caution and precision with which he had determined for thirteen days exactly how much pressure to apply, he quickly and quietly organized the machinery to work for a UN inspection and reconnaissance effort. He called off the Sunday overflights and ordered the Navy to avoid halting any ships on that day. (The one ship previously approaching had stopped.) He asked that precautions be taken to prevent Cuban exile units from upsetting the agreement through one of their publicity-seeking raids. He laid down the line we were all to follow—no boasting, no gloating, not even a claim of victory. We had won by enabling Khrushchev to avoid complete humiliation—we should not humiliate him now. If Khrushchev wanted to boast that he had won a major concession and proved his peaceful manner, that was the loser’s prerogative. Major problems of implementing the agreement still faced us. Other danger spots in the world remained. Soviet treachery was too fresh in our memory to relax our vigil now.

Rejecting the temptation of a dramatic TV appearance, he issued a brief three-paragraph statement welcoming Khrushchev’s “statesmanlike decision…an important and constructive contribution to peace.” Then the President’s fourth letter of the week—a conciliatory reply to the Chairman’s “firm undertakings”—was drafted, discussed, approved and sent on the basis of the wire service copy of the Chairman’s letter, the official text having not yet arrived through diplomatic channels.

Weeks later the President would present to each of us a little silver calendar of October, 1962, mounted on walnut, with the thirteen days of October 16 through October 28 as extra deeply engraved as they already were in our memories. But on that Sunday noon, concealing the enormous sense of relief and fatigue which swept over him, he merely thanked us briefly, called another meeting for Monday morning and rejoined his family as he had each night of the crisis.

I went down the hall to where my secretary, Gloria Sitrin, was at work as she had been day and night for almost two weeks. From her bookcase I picked up a copy of
Profiles in Courage
and read to her a part of the introductory quotation John Kennedy had selected from Burke’s eulogy of Charles James Fox: “He may live long, he may do much. But here is the summit. He never can exceed what he does this day.”

1
Missions were flown on September 5, 11, 26 and 29, and October 5 and 7- Bad weather held up flights between September 5 and 26 and made the September 11 photography unusable. Two U-2 incidents elsewhere in the world also led to a high-level re-examination of that airplane’s use and some delay in flights.

2
“Any historian,” the President later commented, “who walks through this mine field of charges and countercharges should proceed with some care”; and I have thus relied only on my own notes and files in recounting the passages that follow. The same is in fact true for the most part of this entire chapter.

3
The vulnerable, provocative and marginal nature of these missiles in Turkey and Italy, so strikingly revealed in this week, led to their quiet withdrawal the following year in favor of Mediterranean Polaris submarines, a far superior and less vulnerable deterrent.

4
One of the boarding ships, the President learned afterward, was the U.S. destroyer
Joseph
P.
Kennedy, Jr.
About the same time, a replica of the PT-109—then in Florida for a film story—was commandeered in a side incident involving Cuban exiles, and the President felt these coincidences would never be believed.

5
While the answer to this and all other questions about internal Soviet thinking and actions will probably never be known with any certainty, the far greater length of time required to send a private, coded message made this possibility highly doubtful.

CHAPTER XXV
THE STRATEGY OF PEACE

T
HE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS
, Harold Macmillan told the House of Commons shortly after it ended, represented “one of the great turning points in history.” The autumn of 1962, said President Kennedy, if not a turning point, was at least “a climactic period…even though its effects can’t be fully perceived now…. Future historians looking back at 1962 may well mark this year as the time when the tide…began [to turn].”

Time will tell whether subsequent events—in Peking, Moscow, Dallas and elsewhere—have altered or will yet alter the accuracy of those prophecies. But in 1962-1963 little time elapsed before the impact of that crisis was affecting Soviet-American relations, Soviet-Chinese relations, the Western Alliance, domestic American politics and Castro’s Cuba itself.

POSTCRISIS CUBA

The first task was to make certain all Soviet offensive weapons left Cuba. One high official warned the day after Khrushchev’s letter of retreat that it might have been a fake while work continued on the missiles. Somewhat more attention was paid by the President to a letter he received from Dean Acheson which praised in superlative terms Kennedy’s handling of the crisis but warned, out of his experience with Korea, that national exultation could turn to national frustration as Communist negotiators wrangled on and on. Kennedy continued our aerial reconnaissance in the absence of the UN’s ability to mount a substitute, and provided formal notice to the Soviets of his action. He continued the daily, sometimes twice daily, meetings of the Executive Committee—continued the high state of readiness of American military forces in the Caribbean and elsewhere—and continued to supervise personally all releases to the press and all details of the prolonged discussions carried on at the UN by his team of negotiators. (Their views did not always reflect his caution after the earlier Soviet duplicity or his concern for Congressional relations; and he remarked to them only half in jest after one of many long sessions that “we seem to be spending as much time negotiating with you as you are negotiating with the Soviets.”)