Thirteen Days (10 page)

Robert Kennedy saw the political wall against which Khrushchev had backed his brother. But he found himself hemmed in by two additional barriers as well. First, like McNamara, he was haunted by the prospect of nuclear doom. Was Khrushchev going to force the President into an insane act? Second, more than any other member of the group, he saw a vital issue posed by the traditions and moral position of the United States. Was his brother going to blacken the name
of the United States in the pages of history? Recall his scribbled note at the first meeting of the Ex Comm: “I now know how Tojo felt when he was planning Pearl Harbor.” From the outset he probed for an alternative to the air strike.

The initial reaction of Theodore Sorensen fell somewhere between the President and his brother. Like the President, Sorensen felt the sting of betrayal. If the President had been the architect of the policy the missiles punctured, Sorensen was the draftsman. Khrushchev's deceitful move demanded a strong countermove. But like Robert Kennedy, Sorensen feared lest shock and disgrace lead to disaster. Chosen by the President to be his primary reporter on the discussions in the Ex Comm, Sorensen guarded against becoming an advocate. Instead, in the Ex Comm he conceived his role to be one of assisting in “prodding, questioning, eliciting argument and alternatives and keeping discussion concrete and moving ahead.” But because his memos posed for the President the issues, arguments, and questions, his personal reactions mattered.

To the Joint Chiefs of Staff the issue was clear.
Now
was the time to do the job for which they had been preparing contingency plans. The Bay of Pigs was badly done; this round would not be. The missiles provided the
occasion
to deal with the issue for which they were prepared: ridding the Western Hemisphere of Castro's Communism. The security of the United States required a massive air strike, leading to an invasion and the overthrow of Castro. As General Maxwell Taylor, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, recalls: “I was a twofold Hawk from start to finish, first as a spokesman for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, secondly from personal conviction.”
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While Taylor argued his position carefully, two of the Chiefs advocated mil
itary action with an abandon that amazed other members of the Ex Comm. As Robert Kennedy notes, after Air Force Chief of Staff General Curtis LeMay had argued strongly that a military attack was essential, the President asked what the response of the Russians might be. General LeMay replied: “There would be no reaction.” The President was not convinced. As he told White House aide Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. on the day the crisis ended, “An invasion would have been a mistake—a wrong use of our power. But the military are mad. They wanted to do this. It's lucky for us we have McNamara over there.”

There were other, more persuasive advocates of military action. Acheson, Nitze, Dillon, and McCone found themselves of like mind. Dean Rusk, the Secretary of State, seems to have leaned in their direction. To this group the overriding issues were two: the security of the United States together with its position of leadership in the Western Hemisphere and Western Europe. The situation permitted little time for deliberation. The Soviet missiles in Cuba were fast becoming an acute danger and should be removed by military action before they become operational. In Acheson's words:

As Nitze maintained, when starting down a path that might lead to nuclear war, any man with a responsible regard for the lives of American citizens had to distinguish sharply between
the consequences of war before and after those missiles became operational.

Thus the Soviet missiles in Cuba posed no single issue. The men who gathered at the pinnacle of the U.S. government perceived many facets of quite different issues. And in spite of efforts to classify these men simply as “hawks” and “doves”—metaphors coined during this crisis—their initial reactions were much more diverse than the metaphors suggest. The process by which the blockade emerged from these initial reactions and preferences is a story of the most subtle and intricate probing, pulling and hauling, leading, guiding and spurring. Even with the aid of Robert Kennedy's account, reconstruction of this process can only be tentative.

Initially the President and most of his advisers wanted a clean, surgical air strike. On the first day of the crisis, when informing Adlai Stevenson of the missiles, the President mentioned only two alternatives: “I suppose the alternatives are to go in by air and wipe them out, or to take other steps to render them inoperable.” At the end of the week a sizeable minority still favored an air strike. As Robert Kennedy once told an interviewer: “The fourteen people involved were very significant…. If six of them had been President of the U.S., I think that the world might have been blown up.” What prevented the air strike was a fortuitous coincidence of a number of factors, the absence of any one of which might have permitted that option to prevail.

First, McNamara's vision of holocaust set him firmly against the air strike. His initial attempt to frame the issue in strategic terms struck Kennedy as particularly inappropriate. Once McNamara realized that a strong response was required, however, he and his deputy Gilpatric chose the blockade as a fallback. When the Secretary of Defense—
whose department had the action, whose reputation in the Cabinet was unequaled, in whom the President demonstrated full confidence—marshalled the arguments for the blockade and refused to be moved, the blockade became a formidable alternative.

Second, Robert Kennedy pressed the “Tojo” analogy. His arguments against the air strike on moral grounds struck a chord in the President. Moreover, once those arguments had been stated so forcefully, the President scarcely could have followed his initial preference without seeming to become what RFK had condemned.

The President learned of the missiles on Tuesday morning. On Wednesday morning, in order to mask the discovery from the Russians, he flew to Connecticut to keep a campaign commitment, leaving his brother as the unofficial chairman of the group. By the time the President returned on Wednesday evening, a critical third piece had been added to the picture. McNamara had presented his argument for the blockade. Robert Kennedy and Sorensen had joined him. A powerful coalition of the advisers in whom the President had the greatest confidence, and with whom he was personally most compatible, had emerged.

Fourth, the coalition that had formed behind the President's initial preference gave him reason to pause. Who supported the air strike—the Chiefs, McCone, and Acheson for instance—counted as much as
how
they supported it.

Fifth, a piece of inaccurate information, which no one probed, permitted the blockade advocates to fuel (potential) uncertainties in the President's mind. When the President returned to Washington Wednesday evening, RFK and Sorensen met him at the airport. Sorensen gave the President a four-page memorandum outlining the areas of agreement
and disagreement. The strongest argument was that the air strike simply could not be surgical. After a day of prodding and questioning, the Air Force had asserted that it could not guarantee the success of a surgical air strike limited to the missiles alone.

Thursday evening, the President convened the Ex Comm at the White House. He declared his tentative choice of the blockade and directed that preparations be made to put it into effect by Monday morning. Though he raised a question about the possibility of a surgical air strike subsequently, he seems to have accepted the experts' opinion that this was no live option. (Acceptance of this estimate suggests that he may have learned the lesson of the Bay of Pigs—“Never rely on experts”—less well than he supposed.) This information seems to have been incorrect. During the second week of the crisis, civilian analysts examined the surgical air strike option, asserted that with suitable modification of Air Force plans this option could be chosen with high confidence, and thus added it to the list of possible choices for the end of the second week. Why no one probed the initial estimates earlier remains an interesting question.

The decision to blockade thus emerged as a collage. Its pieces included the initial decision by the President that something forceful had to be done; the resistance of Robert Kennedy, McNamara, and Sorensen to the air strike; the relative distance between the President and the air strike advocates; and a probably inaccurate piece of information.
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A D
ILEMMA OF
G
OVERNANCE

The process of decision in this case illustrates a set of checks and balances almost unmentioned by our Constitution. A President and his top-level associates are mutually dependent. But their needs of one another can be incompatible. Rarely do they serve each other to their mutual satisfaction. Robert Kennedy's account suggests that in the Cuban missile crisis satisfaction was indeed obtained by both. A careful reading will suggest, however, the fragility of this result. It is not to be taken for granted.

What President Kennedy needed from executive officialdom is plain in his brother's story. He needed information, analysis, and control to match his own unshared and now unshareable responsibility. In retrospect he seems to have received enough of each, but only just, and only by extraordinary effort on his own part and on that of his most intimate associates. The U-2 photographs were taken in the nick of time for him; our aircraft lined up wing-to-wing were not dispersed until he intervened; his agent McNamara never did succeed in wresting from the Navy full control over its ships, and only Soviet caution saved him from the consequences of an Air Force pilot's fix on the wrong star. What he needed, evidently, was information building up from small details and control reaching down to small decisions in the depths of every relevant department. These were his needs because the country and its future depended so heavily on his judgment.

What top officials needed from the President is also plain in RFK's account of the Ex Comm. They needed a forum for discussion, a referee for arguments, assurance of a hearing, and a judgment on disputes. Their jurisdictions were at once divided and entangled. The Secretaries of Defense and State,
the military services, the CIA, our missions at the United Nations and at NATO all had roles to play, but these required each to share the stage with all the rest. None could act alone. And their perspectives were parochial (at least in in some degree). The Air Force saw the interest of the nation—and its options—in terms diametrically opposed to those of our Ambassador at the United Nations. The Secretary of Defense weighed up MRBMs in Cuba and derived a different balance than his State Department counterparts: he emphasized deterrence while they emphasized diplomacy. Robert Kennedy and Dean Acheson differed over the lessons of history and the lessons that U.S. action in this case would teach the future.

In hindsight, the invention of the Ex Comm and its improvised procedures (including sessions separate from the President) gave men like these the very things they needed, under circumstances bound to minimize parochialism, strengthening their sense of common service to the top. But JFK's contrivance of a special hearing for the Air Force case before he ruled against an air strike at the start suggests that the Ex Comm had its limits as a forum, also as a court-of-last-resort. And in the second week of crisis there were signs aplenty that the third week might have witnessed something close to an explosion by harassed, frustrated, shut-out bureaucrats below the top. If so, their weary seniors, strained by thirteen days, scarcely could have contained them. As a means to meet the needs of second-level men, the Ex Comm was a travesty. Yet by the sixteenth day their needs would have been paramount. They would have had to mount the military operations and the corollary diplomatic actions.

Thirteen Days
does not have much to say about the needs and frustrations of subordinate officials. It is a personal mem
oir and its author viewed the scene from a position close to the top. But the authors of this Afterword have heard in vivid detail the complaints of those below, also their hopes and plans. As one of us once told a Senate subcommittee:

As this suggests, the same forces that shape presidential needs also shape the needs of bureaucrats, but in different ways. Well before the Soviets achieved an ICBM capability, the place of change in our own weaponry, combined with our wide-ranging economic and political endeavors overseas, was
mixing up the jurisdictions of all agencies with roles to play, or claim, in national security: mingling operations along programmatic lines, cutting across vertical lines of authority, breaching the neat boxes on organizational charts. Defense, State, CIA, AID, Treasury, together with the President's Executive Office staffs, came to form a single complex—a national security complex, tied together by an intricate network of program and staff interrelationships in Washington and in the field. The Atomic Energy Commission, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and USIA are also in the complex; others lurk nearby, tied in to a degree, as, for example, Commerce.