Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (123 page)

There was never any possibility of concealing this activity, and its true nature, from US air observation. The sites were photographed by a U-2 aircraft on 15 October. It was clear that by December at least fifty strategic missiles would be deployed, armed with nuclear weapons and strongly protected, only a few miles from American territory. From 16 October the Administration debated what to do. It divided into ‘Hawks’ and ‘Doves’, as they were now termed. The Hawks, led by Dean Acheson, who was brought into the secret debate, advocated, as he put it, ‘cleaning the missile bases out decisively with an air attack’, without further warning. The Doves, led by Robert Kennedy and Robert McNamara, deplored the idea of a ‘Pearl Harbor in reverse’, which would be sure to kill ‘several thousand’ Russians as well as Cuban civilians – the Chiefs of Staff calculated that 800 sorties would be – required. Moscow, argued McNamara, would feel obliged to make ‘a very major response. In such an event the United States would lose control of the situation which could escalate to general war.’ Instead they urged a blockade or (to use the more cunning term Roosevelt had applied to Japan) a ‘quarantine’, which would give Russia a chance to retreat from the brink without too much loss of face.
⁴⁷

President Kennedy wavered from one side to the other. He ordered preparations for an air-strike to continue but finally opted for quarantine and announced it publicly on 22 October, with a deadline two days later. The deadline was put in because by 23 October four out of six medium-range missile sites were operational and it was essential to prevent the Russians from working on the sites under cover of diplomatic delays. On 24 October, Soviet missile-carrying cargo ships approached the quarantine line and stopped. But it remained to get the existing missiles out. So the following day President Kennedy cabled Khrushchev asking for ‘a restoration of the earlier situation’ (i.e., removal of the missiles). Khrushchev sent two replies. The first, on 26 October, indicated compliance in return for an American pledge not to invade Cuba. The second, the next day, demanded a further US concession: removal of its own medium-range Jupiter missiles from Turkey. Kennedy ignored the second letter and accepted the non-invasion deal proposed in the first. It was on this basis that Khrushchev agreed to remove the missiles on 28 October.
⁴⁸

President Kennedy’s handling of the missile crisis was much praised at the time and for some years thereafter. Khrushchev was blamed by his own colleagues. When the Soviet Presidium dismissed him in October 1964, it referred to his ‘hairbrained scheming, hasty conclusions, rash decisions and actions based on wishful thinking’.
⁴⁹
‘ There was no doubt the world came close to large-scale nuclear war.
On 22 October all American missile crews were placed on ‘maximum alert’. Some 800
B
47
S
, 550
B
52
S
, and seventy
B
58
S
were prepared with bomb-bays closed for immediate take-off from their dispersal positions. Over the Atlantic were ninety
B
52
S
carrying multi-megaton bombs. Nuclear war-heads were activated on 100 Atlas, fifty Titans and twelve Minuteman missiles, and on American carriers, submarines and overseas bases. All commands were in a state of Defcon-2, the highest state of readiness next to war itself.
⁵⁰
Robert Kennedy spoke of ‘60 million Americans killed and as many Russians or more’. Khrushchev himself claimed that in arguing with his own military he warned of ‘the death of 500 million human beings’.
⁵¹
He took a gigantic risk, but pulled back from the brink when his bluff was called. Castro, who was not consulted about the climb-down, was furious when he got the news. According to Che Guevara, who was present, he swore, kicked the wall and smashed a looking-glass.
⁵²
More than a decade later, however, he told George McGovern: ‘I would have taken a harder line than Khrushchev. I was furious when he compromised. But Khrushchev was older and wiser. I realize in retrospect that he reached the proper settlement with Kennedy. If my position had prevailed there might have been a terrible war.’
⁵³

In fact both Castro and Russia did very well out of Khrushchev’s brinkmanship. Before Russia started arming Cuba on a big scale in September 1962, Castro was an easy target for American intervention. No American president was under any contractual restraints in handling the danger. Properly considered, Khrushchev’s installation of strategic missiles was tantamount to a major act of aggression. When Kennedy called Khrushchev’s bluff, he had Russia at a disadvantage. As de Gaulle rightly perceived, Russia really had no alternative but to back down completely. Khrushchev admitted this himself: ‘Cuba was 11,000 kilometres from the Soviet Union. Our sea and air communications were so precarious that an attack against the United States was unthinkable.’
⁵⁴
The missile crisis took place at a time when the strategic nuclear equation was still strongly in America’s favour, and in a theatre where America enjoyed overwhelming advantage in conventional power. Kennedy was thus in a position to demand an absolute restoration of the
status quo ante.
He could have gone further: he could have insisted on punishment – on Soviet acceptance of a neutral, disarmed Cuba: the Finnish analogy. As Dean Acheson rightly observed: ‘So long as we had the thumbscrew on Khrushchev, we should have given it another turn every day.’
⁵⁵

Instead, Kennedy, while winning a public relations victory, rewarded the aggressive Soviet act with two substantial concessions.
The minor one was the withdrawal of the Jupiter missiles, supposedly on the grounds of their obsolescence.
⁵⁶
Far more important, however, was Kennedy’s acquiescence in the continuation of a Communist regime in Cuba, in open military alliance with Soviet Russia.
⁵⁷
On the practical issue of Cuba and Caribbean security, Kennedy lost the missile crisis. It was an American defeat: the worst it had so far suffered in the Cold War.

Thus in an area which, by any definition, was vital to America’s interests, Castro survived to become, for a quarter of a century, her most persistent and successful enemy; to export revolution to South America in the 1960s and, far more successfully, to Central America in the late 1970s and early 1980s; to vilify American ‘imperialism’ systematically at Third World gatherings, while posing as a ‘non-aligned’ power; and, in the 1970s, to send no less than three expeditionary forces to Africa as executants of Soviet policy. With remarkable audacity, Castro posed as a defender of the oppressed in the United States itself, and was rewarded by the adulation of a segment of American progressive opinion. To Saul Landau, Castro was ‘steeped in democracy’, to Leo Huberman and Paul Sweezy he was ‘a passionate humanitarian’, and other visitors testified to his ‘encyclopaedic knowledge’. He made them think of ‘the connection between socialism and Christianity’. He was ‘soft-spoken, shy, sensitive’ and, at the same time, vigorous, handsome, informal, undogmatic, open, humane, superbly accessible and warm. Norman Mailer thought him ‘the first and greatest hero to appear in the world since the Second World War’. When Castro stood erect, wrote Abbie Hoffman, ‘he is like a mighty penis coming to life, and when he is tall and straight the crowd immediately is transformed’.
⁵⁸
Many of the Western liberal fantasies once woven around Stalin were transferred to Castro. Mao’s eventual fall from grace left Castro the last charismatic of the totalitarian world.

The ordinary Cubans, by contrast, voted with their feet and their outboard motors: in the 1960s alone over a million fled from Castro. By 1980, in which year alone 150,000 political refugees were added to the total, about a fifth of the population were living in exile, most of them in the USA. In 1981 it was calculated that, since Castro took charge, Cuba had had an annual growth-rate
per capita
of minus 1.2 per cent; that from being one of the richest Latin-American countries it had become one of the poorest, and with a national income of only $810 per head, worse off than neighbouring Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Colombia and Mexico; and, finally, that with armed forces of 200,000 (a quarter abroad on active service), it was the largest military power in Latin America, except for Brazil – indeed,
per capita
, probably had more men under arms than any other
country in the world.
⁵⁹
That was Castro’s work; and Kennedy’s legacy.

President Kennedy’s handling of Cuba suggested an imperfect understanding of America’s vital interests and a failure to distinguish between image and reality. These weaknesses, which were characteristic of Kennedy’s public-relations approach to politics, were exhibited in other fields, notably the space programme and Vietnam. With the assistance of captured German scientists, Soviet Russia had given highest priority (next to the nuclear-weapons programme itself) to heavy, long-range rockets. The rewards began to come in the late 1950s. On 4 October 1957 Americans were stunned when Russia put Sputnik 1, a 184-pound satellite, into orbit. The next month a much larger one weighing 1,120 pounds followed, with a dog Laika inside it. The first American satellite, Explorer 1, did not go into orbit until 31 January 1958, and it weighed only thirty pounds. An American general was quoted as saying, ‘We captured the wrong generals.’ In fact America was building big rockets too, including the army’s enormous Saturn rocket, developed by Werner Von Braun in Huntsville, Alabama. Equally important was American progress in miniaturization, which explains America’s greater willingness to accept low payloads.
⁶⁰
It was all a question of aims, priorities and finance. Eisenhower, rightly obsessed as he was with the strength of the US economy, would not invest heavily in space beyond the pragmatic needs of the defence programme. He was flatly opposed to luxurious space ventures run for the purpose of ‘prestige’, a word he detested. He took no notice of the post-Sputnik panic.

With Kennedy in office the priorities changed totally. His Vice-President, the Texan Lyndon Johnson, who was placed in charge of Space, was a big-spending Texan with many connections in the aerospace business world. He picked James Webb, a publicity-conscious business operator, as director of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. On 12 April 1961, less than three months after Kennedy had taken over, Russia launched the first man, Yuri Gagarin, into orbit, beating the Americans by nearly four weeks. We have a vivid record of a frenzied meeting Kennedy held two days later in the White House, storming:

Is there any place where we can catch them? What can we do? Can we go around the Moon before them? Can we put a man on the Moon before them? … Can we leapfrog? … If somebody can just tell me how to catch up! Let’s find somebody, anybody. I don’t care if it’s the janitor over there, if he knows how.
⁶¹

Three days later came the Bay of Pigs disaster, and on 19 April a grim Kennedy summoned Johnson for a forty-five-minute session, followed
by an excited directive (20 April 1961), ordering him to find out: ‘Do we have a chance of beating the Soviets by putting a laboratory in space, or by a trip round the Moon, or by a rocket to land on the Moon, or by a rocket to go to the Moon and back with a man? Is there any other space programme which promises dramatic results in which we could win?’
⁶²
The wording was characteristic: ‘beating’, ‘dramatic results’, ‘win’.

There was a sense in which Kennedy was a professional sportsman, a propagandist and a political huckster rather than a man of state. In May he publicly committed America to the Apollo programme, with its aim to land a manned spacecraft on the Moon ‘before this decade is out’. It was a project typical of Sixties illusion, with its contempt for finance, its assumption that resources were limitless. The programme got going in 1963, and for the next ten years, America spent up to $5 billion a year on space. Of course the aim was achieved. On 20 July 1969, Apollo 11 landed Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin on the moon. There were four more Moon landings by 1972, when the programme petered out. By then America and Russia had launched over 1,200 satellites and space-probes, at a combined cost of something like $100 billion. In the more austere conditions of the mid-1970s, the space-effort shifted from propaganda to pragmatism, to space laboratories and shuttles. In 1981
NASA
created the first genuine space-ship, the shuttle, while the Russians developed a 300-foot freighter, capable of lifting 220,000 pounds into low earth-orbit. The showbiz era of space-travel was over.

While President Kennedy was launching America on the Moon-race to reassert her prestige and leadership in technology, he was looking for an area in which his foreign policy, too, could produce a resounding success, especially after the Bay of Pigs humiliation. A National Security Council member advised him: it is very important that the government have a major anti-Communist victory to its credit … here [Vietnam] the odds are still in our favour.’ On 1 May 1961, two weeks after the Bay of Pigs, the Defense Department produced a report outlining how Vietnam could be ‘saved’; eleven days later, Kennedy approved the plan in
NSC
Memorandum 52, which authorized various actions to achieve a clearly stated objective, ‘to prevent Communist domination of South Vietnam’. The next month, after the Vienna Summit with Khrushchev, Kennedy told a journalist: ‘Now we have a problem in making our power credible and Vietnam looks like the place.’
⁶³