An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 by Robert Dallek
The only new idea put forth at the evening meeting came from McNamara. He suggested a middle ground between the military and political courses they had been discussing. He proposed a “declaration of open surveillance: a statement that we would immediately impose a blockade against offensive weapons entering Cuba in the future, and an indication that, with our open surveillance reconnaissance, which we would plan to maintain indefinitely for the future, we would be prepared to immediately attack the Soviet Union in the event that Cuba made any offensive move against this country.”
After a long day of discussions, Kennedy was no closer to a firm decision on how to proceed. On Wednesday, the seventeenth, while he continued to hide the crisis from public view by meeting with West Germany’s foreign minister, eating lunch with Libya’s crown prince, and flying to Connecticut to campaign for Democratic candidates, his advisers held nonstop meetings. But first he saw McCone, who had returned to Washington, at 9:30 in the morning. The CIA director gained the impression that Kennedy was “inclined to act promptly if at all, without warning, targeting on MRBMs and possible airfields.” McCone may have been hearing what he wanted to hear, or, more likely, Kennedy created this impression by inviting McCone to make the case for prompt air strikes.
As part of his balancing act, Kennedy invited Adlai Stevenson into the discussion. After learning about the crisis from the president, who showed him the missile photos on the afternoon of the sixteenth, Stevenson predictably urged Kennedy not to rush into military action. When Kennedy said, “I suppose the alternatives are to go in by air and wipe them out, or to take other steps to render the weapons inoperable,” Stevenson replied, “Let’s not go into an air strike until we have explored the possibilities of a peaceful solution.”
The next day, before he returned to the U.N. in New York, Stevenson wrote a letter urging the president to send personal emissaries to see Castro and Khrushchev. He predicted that an attack would bring Soviet reprisals in Turkey or Berlin and would “risk starting a nuclear war [which] is bound to be divisive at best and the judgments of history seldom coincide with the tempers of the moment.” Stevenson’s appeal to take the long view was not lost on Kennedy, who understood that his actions could permanently alter the course of human affairs. To underscore his point, Stevenson added: “I know your dilemma is to strike before the sites are operational or to risk waiting until a proper groundwork of justification can be prepared. The national security must come first. But the means adopted have such incalculable consequences that I feel you should have made it clear that the existence of nuclear missile bases anywhere is negotiable before we start anything.” This was not a counsel of defeat, Stevenson concluded. The Soviets needed to be told “that it is they who have upset the precarious balance in the world in arrogant disregard of your warnings—by threats against Berlin and now from Cuba—and that we have no choice except to restore the balance, i.e., blackmail and intimidation never, negotiation and sanity always.”
The differences between McCone and Stevenson were repeated in various forms during discussions among Kennedy’s advisers on the seventeenth. At midnight, after three long meetings, Bobby summarized five options that advisers were putting before the president: (1) on October 24, after a week’s military preparation and notification to Western European and some Latin American leaders, bomb the MRBMs and send Khrushchev a message of explanation—Rusk opposed this plan; (2) attack the MRBMs after notifying Khrushchev—defense chiefs opposed this proposal; (3) inform Moscow about our knowledge of the missiles and our determination to block additional ones from entering Cuba, declare war, and prepare an invasion—Rusk and Ball favored this option but wanted it preceded by surveillance without air strikes; (4) engage in “political preliminaries” followed by extensive air attacks with preparations for an invasion; and (5) the “same as 4, but omit the political preliminaries.”
When Ex Comm met again on Thursday morning, October 18, additional reconnaissance photos revealed construction of IRBM launching pads. They had now discovered five different missile sites. McCone reported that the Soviets could have between sixteen and thirty-two missiles ready to fire “within a week or slightly more.” Concerned about convincing the world of the accuracy of their information, Kennedy wanted to know if an untrained observer would see what the experts saw in the photos. Lundahl doubted it. “I think the uninitiated would like to see the missile, in the tube,” he said.
Sensing the president’s hesitancy about quick action without clear evidence to convince the world of its necessity, Rusk asked whether the group thought it “necessary to take action.” He believed it essential. The Soviets were turning Cuba into “a powerful military problem” for the United States, he said, and a failure to respond would “undermine our alliances all over the world.” Inaction would also encourage Moscow to feel free to intervene wherever they liked and would create an unmanageable problem in sustaining domestic support for the country’s foreign policy commitments. Rusk then read a letter from Bohlen urging diplomatic action as a prelude to military steps. An attack on Cuba without a prior effort at diplomatic pressure to remove the missiles, Bohlen said, would alienate all America’s allies, give Moscow credibility for a response against Berlin, and “greatly increase the probability of general war.”
Bohlen’s argument echoed Kennedy’s thinking. People saw the United States as “slightly demented” about Cuba, the president said. “No matter how good our films are . . . a lot of people would regard this [military action] as a mad act by the United States.” They would see it as “a loss of nerve because they will argue that taken at its worst, the presence of those missiles really doesn’t change the [military] balance.”
But the evidence of additional missile sites had convinced the Joint Chiefs to urge a full-scale invasion of Cuba. Kennedy stubbornly resisted. “Nobody knows what kind of success we’re going to have with this invasion,” he said. “Invasions are tough, hazardous. We’ve got a lot of equipment, a lot of—thousands of—Americans get killed in Cuba, and I think you’re in much more of a mess than you are if you take out these . . . bases.” And if Bobby’s opinion remained a reflection of his brother’s thinking, Kennedy also opposed unannounced air strikes. Ball made what Bobby called “a hell of a good point.” “If we act without warning,” Ball said, “without giving Khrushchev some way out . . . that’s like Pearl Harbor. It’s the kind of conduct that one might expect of the Soviet Union. It is not conduct that one expects of the United States.” The way we act, Bobby asserted, speaks to “the whole question of . . . what kind of a country we are.” Ball saw surprise air strikes as comparable to “carrying the mark of Cain on your brow for the rest of your life.” Bobby echoed the point: “We’ve fought for 15 years with Russia to prevent a first strike against us. Now . . . we do that to a small country. I think it is a hell of a burden to carry.”
KENNEDY HAD NOT RULED OUT military action, but his remarks at the meetings on October 18 revealed a preference for a blockade and negotiations. He wanted to know what would be the best way to open talks with Khrushchev—through a cable, a personal envoy? He also asked, if we established a blockade of Cuba, what would we do about the missiles already there, and would we need to declare war on Havana? Llewellyn Thompson, who had joined the Thursday morning discussion, addressed Kennedy’s first concern by suggesting Kennedy press Khrushchev to dismantle the existing missile sites and warn him that if they were armed, our constant surveillance would alert us, and we would eliminate them. As for a declaration of war, Kennedy thought it would be unwise: “It seems to me that with a declaration of war our objective would be an invasion.”
To keep up the facade of normality, Kennedy followed his regular schedule for the rest of the day, including a two-hour meeting with Soviet foreign minister Andrey Gromyko. Nothing was said about the offensive missiles by Gromyko or Kennedy. But they gave each other indirect messages. Gromyko ploddingly read a prepared statement. He emphasized that they were giving Cuba “armaments which were
Whatever hints Kennedy offered, Gromyko missed them. He noticed that Rusk was red “like a crab” and unusually emotional, and Kennedy was more deliberate than usual. Eager to believe that they were outwitting Kennedy, Gromyko advised Khrushchev that “the situation is in general wholly satisfactory.”
Lovett’s advice to Kennedy was similar to McNamara’s: Establish a blockade around Cuba. If it failed, air strikes and an invasion could follow, but a blockade might persuade the Russians to withdraw the missiles and avoid bloodshed. It would also insulate the United States from charges of being “trigger-happy.” When Bobby entered the room, the president asked Lovett to repeat what he was saying. When he did, Bobby agreed with the wisdom of “taking a less violent step at the outset, because, as he said, we could always blow the place up if necessary, but that might be unnecessary, and then we would be in the position of having used too much force.”
Kennedy reconvened his advisers at a secret late-night meeting on the second floor of the executive mansion. He wanted to hear the results of the day’s deliberations. Bundy now argued the case for doing nothing. He believed that any kind of action would bring a reprisal against Berlin, which would divide the NATO alliance. But Kennedy thought it was impossible to sit still. As he had said earlier in the day, “Somehow we’ve got to take some action. . . . Now, the question really is . . . what action we take which lessens the chances of a nuclear exchange, which obviously is the final failure.” They agreed that a blockade against Soviet shipments of additional offensive weapons would be the best starting point. Instead of air strikes or an invasion, which was tantamount to a state of war, they would try to resolve the crisis with “a limited blockade for a limited purpose.”
On Friday, October 19, Kennedy kept his campaign schedule, which took him to Cleveland and Springfield, Illinois, and Chicago. He considered canceling the trip, but when he asked Kenny O’Donnell, who knew about the crisis, if he had called it off, O’Donnell replied, “I didn’t call off anything. I don’t want to be the one who has to tell Dick Daley that you’re not going out there.”
In the morning, however, he held a secret forty-five-minute meeting with the Joint Chiefs. The discussion was as much an exercise in political hand-holding as in advancing a solution to the crisis. Kennedy knew that the Chiefs favored a massive air strike and were divided on whether to follow it with an invasion. He saw their counsel as predictable and not especially helpful. His memories of the navy brass in World War II, the apparent readiness of the Chiefs to risk nuclear war in Europe and their unhelpful advice before the Bay of Pigs, and the army’s stumbling performance just a few weeks before in Mississippi deepened his distrust of their promised results.
Nevertheless, Kennedy candidly discussed his concerns with the Chiefs. An attack on Cuba would provoke the Soviets into blockading or taking Berlin, he said. And our allies would complain that “we let Berlin go because we didn’t have the guts to endure a situation in Cuba.” Moreover, we might eliminate the danger in Cuba, but the Berlin crisis would likely touch off a nuclear war.
Taylor respectfully acknowledged the president’s dilemma but asserted the need for military action. Without it, we would lose our credibility, he said, and “our strength anyplace in the world is the credibility of our response. . . . And if we don’t respond here in Cuba, we think the credibility is sacrificed.”
Curtis LeMay was even more emphatic. He did not share the president’s view “that if we knock off Cuba, they’re going to knock off Berlin.” Kennedy asked, “What do you think their reply would be?” LeMay did not think there would be one. He saw military intervention as the only solution. “This blockade and political action,” he predicted, “I see leading into war. I don’t see any other solution. It will lead right into war. This is almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich.” LeMay indirectly threatened Kennedy with making his dissent public. “I think that a blockade, and political talk, would be considered by a lot of our friends and neutrals as being a pretty weak response to this. And I’m sure a lot of our own citizens would feel that way, too. In other words, you’re in a pretty bad fix at the present time.”
LeMay’s response irritated Kennedy, who asked, “What did you say?” LeMay repeated himself: “You’re in a pretty bad fix.” Kennedy responded with a hollow laugh, “You’re in there with me.” After the meeting, referring to LeMay’s assertion about a Soviet nonresponse, Kennedy asked O’Donnell, “Can you imagine LeMay saying a thing like that? These brass hats have one great advantage in their favor. If we listen to them, and do what they want us to do, none of us will be alive later to tell them that they were wrong.”
The Chiefs were angry, too. After Kennedy left the room, marine commandant David Shoup said to LeMay, “You, you pulled the rug right out from under him.” LeMay replied, “Jesus Christ. What the hell do you mean?” Shoup replied that he agreed with LeMay “a hundred percent” and added, “If somebody could keep them from doing the goddamn thing piecemeal. That’s our problem. You go in there and friggin’ around with the missiles. You’re screwed. . . . You can’t fiddle around with hitting the missile sites and then hitting the SAM sites. You got to go in and take out the goddamn thing that’s going to stop you from doing your job.” Earle Wheeler, the army’s representative on the Joint Chiefs, thought that Kennedy was set against military moves: “It was very apparent to me, though, from his [Kennedy’s] earlier remarks, that the political action of a blockade is really what he’s [after].”
As he left Washington, Kennedy told Bundy to keep the possibility of air strikes alive until he returned. His request may have partly resulted from Bundy’s advice that a blockade alone would not get the missiles out. Having changed his mind, Bundy now urged an air strike as a “quick . . . and a clean surgical operation.” At the same time, Kennedy, who impressed Sorensen as “impatient and discouraged” by his meeting with the Chiefs, told Bobby and Sorensen “to pull the group together quickly—otherwise more delays and dissension would plague whatever decision he took.”
At a late-morning gathering of the Ex Comm, Acheson, Bundy, Dillon, and McCone lined up with the Chiefs in favor of an air strike. McNamara, undoubtedly alerted to the president’s preference, favored a blockade over air action. Bobby, grinning, said that he had spoken with the president that morning and thought “it would be very, very difficult indeed for the President if the decision were to be for an air strike, with all the memory of Pearl Harbor. . . . A sneak attack was not in our traditions. Thousands of Cubans would be killed without warning, and a lot of Russians too.” The president supported a blockade, which would “allow the Soviets some room for maneuver to pull back from their over-extended position in Cuba.”
Following an afternoon break, during which advocates of an air strike and a blockade formed themselves into committees to develop their respective arguments, the whole group reconvened for further discussion. After two and a half hours, they seemed to agree that a blockade should be a first step with air strikes to follow if the Soviets did not remove the missiles. But worried that support for a blockade remained shaky, Bobby urged the president to pretend he was ill with a cold and return to Washington to forge a clearer consensus.
For two hours and forty minutes, beginning at 2:30 P.M., on Saturday, October 20, Kennedy and the National Security Council reviewed their options. None impressed him as just right, but under the president’s prodding the group agreed to a blockade or, rather, a “quarantine,” whic
Managing domestic opinion was another Kennedy concern. He planned to reveal the crisis to the public and announce the quarantine in a televised speech on Monday evening, October 22, in which he intended to state clearly “that we would accept nothing less than the ending of the missile capability now in Cuba.” To mute the crisis until then, he asked the New York Times and Washington Post, which had learned of the crisis from Pentagon leaks, to hold off publishing emerging details of the danger.
Kennedy spent Monday working to create a national and international consensus for the blockade. Remembering LeMay’s implicit threat to reveal Kennedy’s reluctance to use air power as the Chiefs wanted, he told Taylor, “I know you and your colleagues are unhappy with this decision, but I trust that you will support me.” Kennedy telephoned former presidents Hoover, Truman, and Eisenhower and consulted advisers about messages to foreign heads of state and his planned evening address. At an afternoon National Security Council meeting he “outlined the manner in which he expected Council Members to deal with the domestic aspects of the current situation. He said everyone should sing one song in order to make clear that there were now no differences among his advisers as to the proper course to follow.” Kennedy feared that domestic dissent might encourage Moscow to defy the blockade or strike at Berlin in the belief that the president would lack national support for a military response. He also believed that domestic divisions could weaken the Democrats in the November elections.