1
General LeMay's Threat
WASHINGTON
FOR PRESIDENT KENNEDY, JANUARY 1963 was not too early to prepare for his 1964 reelection campaign. Ever since his stunning upset of Republican Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. in the 1952 Senate race in Massachusetts, Kennedy always got an early start.
"My chief opponents followed the old practice of not starting until about two months ahead of the elections. By then, I was ahead of them. In 1952, I worked a year and a half ahead of the November election before Senator Lodge did," Kennedy said. "I am following the same practice now."
Kennedy's head start philosophy ignored the latest polls. They showed you where you were today but were no predictor of future standing. More important was a checklist of advantages and disadvantages, strengths and weaknesses, positives and negatives. Even so, the poll released January 20 showed Kennedy with a scintillating approval rating by 76 percent of voters interviewed by George Gallup's American Institute of Public Opinion. Much of it stemmed from his triumphal resolution of the Cuban missile crisis four months earlier. But in 1963, Kennedy's biggest advantage had the potential of turning into a devastating weakness. That chilling prospect hit home during a meeting with Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara. After disposing of some issues related to Pentagon hardware, McNamara shifted to the 1964 reelection campaign.
"LeMay and Power could cause real trouble during the campaign next year," McNamara told Kennedy. He was speaking of General Curtis LeMay, the Air Force chief of staff, and General Thomas Power, commander of the Strategic Air Command. Both generals knew the truth about the 1962 Cuban missile crisis that Kennedy had hidden under layers of deception, manipulation, and mendacity. Kennedy had secretly agreed to Khrushchev's demand of a missile swap-U.S. Jupiter rockets in Turkey for Soviet missiles in Cuba. Since Kennedy had deployed the Jupiters in 1961, the Russian leader had raged at the U.S. warheads only a quick flight from Moscow. The cunning Russian's gambit in Cuba was designed to remove the American threat in Turkey.
To the world, Kennedy presented a very different story. He made it seem that Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev had overplayed his hand by secretly deploying Russian nuclear-tipped missiles in Cuba that could strike targets in the southern United States. The showboating communist leader, famous for pounding his shoe on the podium at the United Nations, blundered and then stepped back from nuclear warfare in the face of a steely determination demonstrated by the young American president. "We're eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked," said Secretary of State Dean Rusk. That quote, underlining a Kennedy victory and Khrushchev's retreat, first appeared in an inside account of White House deliberations published in the Saturday Evening Post two months after the 1962 crisis. It portrayed a president ready to launch devastating air strikes and send 140,000 troops into Cuba if Khrushchev did not remove the offending missiles. The article set the factual standard for historians, librarians, moviemakers, and teachers, and the global perception of crisis outcome.
In those days before television news became predominant, the Post and Life magazines were in millions of American homes, barbershops, hair salons, and doctor's offices. They were national publications with an impact equal to today's penetrating 60 Minutes reports based on exclusive facts from the lips of the insiders, including the president. The publications were crucial to voter perceptions. The magazine article, entitled "In Time of Crisis," was just one more example of Kennedy's burying the reality of what was the pinnacle of the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union. Kennedy and his staff had duped one of the authors of the article, Charles Bartlett, into writing a total fabrication of White House decisions. Bartlett, Kennedy's chum since their prep school days and a reporter for the Chattanooga Times, would not learn the truth himself until decades later. The cover-up was so complete and lasting because Kennedy demanded-and got-Khrushchev's silence as a condition of the missile swap. What really happened would not emerge on the public record for more than thirty-five years with the declassification of White House tape recordings and Soviet documents. Both show Kennedy quickly conceding to Khrushchev's offer of a nuclear weapons exchange-Russian missiles in Cuba for American missiles in Turkey that the Soviet leader so bitterly resented.
Kennedy not only embraced Khrushchev's missile swap the day it was offered, he ordered the Air Force to defuse the fifteen Jupiter rockets in Turkey that had so angered the Soviet leader. American Air Force troops stationed near Izmir where the missiles were deployed were ordered to remove all of the W49 warheads, each with an estimated blast of l.44 megatons. "We could not take them out unilaterally, "Rusk said twenty-three years later, explaining how the Jupiters were technically under the control of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. "So Kennedy had them remove the warheads from the missiles in Turkey during the Cuban missile crisis." The crisis ended on Sunday, October 28, the day after Kennedy's secret agreement with Khrushchev. Kennedy, Rusk, McNamara, and McGeorge Bundy, in top secret discussions on October 27, seem to think the order to remove the warheads was done that day. It was a different story at Cigil Air Force Base in Turkey, where Airman Fred Travis, then twenty-one, had a more accurate version. "The order came down October 27, but you couldn't remove fifteen warheads in one day," Travis said. "We could lock them down, make them safe. But it took days to remove the warheads. This was a sixty-five-foot rocket that you had to lay down on its side on a special truck. Then another crew removed the nose cone that contained the warhead." Work was under way well after Khrushchev announced removal of Russian rockets from Cuba.
Those Jupiters were never the focus of the showdown between Kennedy and Khrushchev, according to the White House rewrite of history for the Saturday Evening Post. Kennedy would lead Bartlett to believe that it was Adlai Stevenson, his ambassador to the United Nations, who pushed for the missile swap while the president was standing firm against it. "Adlai wanted a Munich," said an unidentified source quoted by Bartlett, referring to Britain's craven diplomatic surrender to Adolf Hitler in 1938. In fact Stevenson first raised the idea of the missile exchange that Kennedy swiftly accepted from Khrushchev. And it was Kennedy himself who manipulated Bartlett into smearing Stevenson, according to McGeorge Bundy, the president's national security affairs adviser.
Kennedy and McNamara's concern about these truths leaking into the 1964 presidential campaign was a legitimate fear. General LeMay, a table-pounding critic of Kennedy's handling of the Cuban missile crisis, knew of the secret Jupiter disarmament and the missile swap. Also, LeMay was close to Senator Barry Goldwater, the conservative Arizona Republican. Goldwater, already seen in 1963 as the GOP standard-bearer in 1964, was a leading critic of Kennedy's policy toward Cuban leader Fidel Castro. While diplomatic spin could-and eventually would-mute suspicions of the Jupiter removal from Turkey, a leak about defusing the warheads would underscore a Kennedy concession and a political cover-up.
Before their removal, the thermonuclear Jupiter warheads-a hundred times more powerful than the weapon that incinerated Hiroshima-were less than a fifteen-minute flight from Moscow. The brevity of the flight time posed a first-strike threat to Kremlin military planners-destroying Soviet weapons with a sneak attack before bombers and missiles could be used or dispersed. In those days, according to the CIA, Russia had only ten rockets that could threaten the United States. Kennedy's Jupiter deployment in 1961 was done over the objections of his defense chief, Congress, and other experts. While a dubious addition to the American strategic arsenal, the deployment outraged the Russian leader. Khrushchev ignored thirty Jupiters deployed in Italy during the Eisenhower administration. Nor did he mention sixty American-made Thor missiles based in the United Kingdom. His personal ire was reserved for the fifteen Jupiters in Turkey that he objected to in person when first meeting with Kennedy in Vienna. Surrounding Russia with nuclear weapons was unwise, the Soviet leader told Kennedy at their 1961 summit meeting. "We must be reasonable and keep our forces within our national boundaries," Khrushchev told Kennedy. "This situation may cause miscalculation."
However, Khrushchev's threats to seize Berlin within six months stunned Kennedy at Vienna, who resolved to deploy the Jupiters as a show of strength. The deployment was completed by March of 1962. The Soviet leader saw the Jupiters in Turkey as a personal insult. To illustrate his anger, Khrushchev put on a little show for visitors, including American newspaper columnist Drew Pearson, at his vacation home at Sochi. The site of the 2014 Winter Olympics, the town is a Russian resort on the Black Sea that borders Turkey. Khrushchev would hand binoculars to guests and ask them to look at the sea's horizon. Saying they saw nothing, the guests would return the binoculars. With a flourish, Khrushchev would hold them to his eyes. What did he see? they asked. "U.S. missiles in Turkey aimed at my dacha!" Khrushchev would bellow. The CIA picked up the Russian's outbursts and Kennedy knew of Khrushchev's anger over the Jupiter deployment. When it became apparent that the Soviet missile deployment was under way in Cuba, Kennedy understood it was linked to the U.S. missile deployment in Turkey. When the White House sent out the first alarm to the Pentagon, the CIA, and the State Department about the Cuban deployment, Kennedy asked for advice on how the Jupiters could be removed. "What actions can be taken to get the Jupiter missiles out of Turkey?" demanded McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy's national security affairs adviser, in an all-points memo on August 21, 1963.
"We were not inventing anything new," Khrushchev would say years later about his secret missile deployment in Cuba. "We were just copying methods used against us by our adversaries." The Americans, he said, "would learn just what it feels like to have enemy missiles pointing at you; we'd be doing nothing more than giving them a little of their own medicine." Starting in January of 1962, the Soviet leader personally directed the covert deployment in Cuba of forty-two Sandal missiles that could explode nuclear warheads over dozens of American cities 1,200 miles away in the South and Southwest. The Sandal could reach Washington, Atlanta, Miami, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, and smaller cities in that region. Soon, according to Kennedy, longer-range Russian rockets in Cuba could reach every city in the western hemisphere. But American intelligence never spotted in Cuba the Skean rocket that could fly 2,800 miles to strike New York or other major U.S. cities.
In the end, Khrushchev's stealthy deployment of rockets and ninety nuclear warheads in Cuba was the fulcrum to leverage the threatening missiles out of Turkey and off the Russian doorstep, out "of the left armpits of the Russians," as one American missile expert put it. Kennedy and his advisers discussed the possibilities of such a deal, but it seemed beyond their reach until the Soviet leader laid it on the table Saturday, October 27. In Moscow the day before, Khrushchev told his executive board, the Presidium, for the first time that the Cuban deployment was aimed at elevating the Soviet status in the world and removing the Turkish missiles. "If we could achieve additionally the liquidation of the bases in Turkey, we would win," said the party chairman as he outlined the missile exchange proposal sent to Kennedy. Khrushchev made the stark swap public, placing it before the eyes of global public opinion. Even Kennedy admired the politically shrewd end game by the Russian leader when it unfolded in the Oval Office on Saturday morning, October 27, 1962. "This trade has appeal," Kennedy told his advisers. "He's got us in a pretty good spot here. Because most people will regard this as not an unreasonable proposal. I just tell you that." Disagreeing were Secretary of State Rusk, Defense Secretary McNamara, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, Army General Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy. They and five others in the deliberations made for a lopsided majority against the missile swap. To them, the Kremlin solution was so laden with potentially disastrous political and diplomatic consequences. To American voters, it would seem Kennedy had sacrificed a NATO ally after being outfoxed by the communist leader. Instead of humiliating Khrushchev for taking the world to the edge of a nuclear abyss, Kennedy would be capitulating to the Soviet leader. By pulling the Jupiters out of Turkey, the rest of NATO would forever doubt American solidarity. "Kennedy's concession" was how Bundy would later characterize the agreement. Bundy had demanded that Kennedy reject the Soviet proposal outright the day it arrived. "This should be knocked down publicly," Bundy said.
Dominating the discussions was the president's brother, known to most as Bobby. He worried about the image of the United States attacking the tiny nation of Cuba because of Soviet actions. "You're going to kill an awful lot of people and we're going to take an awful lot of heat on it," Bobby told his brother. Even then, Khrushchev could send replacements for missiles damaged by air attacks. Bobby argued only an invasion of Cuba would end the Soviet threat. To whip up American support for such an invasion, Bobby recalled the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana harbor under mysterious circumstances in 1898. "Remember the Maine" became the battle cry that led the United States into war with Spain. At one point on October 16, Bobby suggested staging an American attack on U.S. warships that could then be blamed on Cubans-an American-generated provocation at the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo, Cuba. Bobby said he wondered "Whether there's some ship, you know, that ... sink theMaine again or something." Bobby led the hawk contingent against the missile exchange.
The exceptions-siding with Kennedy in the crucial hours-were Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, Undersecretary of State George Ball, and Director John McCone of the CIA. All three had taken hawkish positions when the crisis started. But they were transformed to doves after the shocking word that an American U-2 spy plane had been shot down over Cuba and the surge among other advisers for quick retaliation. Their attitudes changed after a convoluted scenario by McNamara that included an attack on Cuban sites followed by the public announcement that the Jupiters had been disabled. The defense chiefs hoped the defusing of the Jupiters would keep the Soviet Union from attacking the Turkish rockets in retaliation for U.S. air strikes in Cuba, a tortured idea designed to prevent a tit-for-tat escalation that could lead to nuclear warfare.
The vice president quickly offered the logic that if the Jupiters were to be disabled anyway, why not forgo the air strikes and just swap the missiles in Turkey for those in Cuba. "Why not trade?" interjected Johnson upon hearing McNamara's scenario. Ball applauded the vice president's common sense. "And save a few hundred thousand lives," Ball added. "Make the trade," Ball shouted at another point. "Make the trade then!" McCone also supported the vice president's logic. "I don't see why you don't make the trade then," McCone said. Later he added: "And, I'd trade these Turkish things out right now. I wouldn't even talk to anybody about it." A few hours later, Kennedy would do exactly as McCone recommended.
Johnson, Ball, and McCone wanted to avoid the launch within hours of five days of massive air attacks on Cuba. Five hundred warplane sorties a day would be followed by a landing of 140,000 troops to destroy the Soviet threat, oust Fidel Castro, and establish an anticommunist government. Most of the others in the pressure-packed Cabinet Room were supporting the military strike. Brother Bobby dismissed the president's blockade of Russian ships from entry into Cuban ports. "Slow death" was Bobby's view of the naval tactic, which delayed a conflict but did not remove the missiles from Cuba. The attorney general, Rusk, and Bundy kept clinging to a secret Khrushchev offer Friday that suggested a simple U.S. pledge to never invade Cuba would result in the removal of the Russian weapons. The president, his voice impatient, reminded them that Khrushchev's emotional Friday-night solution was no longer on the table. "Now he's got something completely new," Kennedy said of the Soviet leader's public announcement. "I think you're going to have it very difficult to explain why we are going to take hostile military action in Cuba against all these sites ... when he's saying, 'If you get yours out of Turkey, we'll get ours out of Cuba.'
"I think we've got a very tough one here," Kennedy said.
The president was in and out of the Cabinet Room when Johnson, Ball, and McCone became the three advisers to openly favor the missile swap. The other twelve advisers favored the attack on Cuba even though Kennedy was pushing acceptance of Khrushchev's final offer. "Save all the invasion ... lives ... everything else," Johnson said after again urging the missile swap. He also argued that Turkish leaders would go along after they realized that removal of the Jupiters would take them off the Soviet target list. And Turkey would get the protection of the U.S. nuclear umbrella with the Polaris submarine fleet-without needing a base in Turkey. "We're going to give you more protection than ever with Polaris with less advertising," Johnson said. "And it's going to make it less likely you'll get hit. Why wouldn't [the Turkish prime minister] buy that?" Ball again pushed for the swap. "I'd say, 'Sure, we will accept your offer,'" Ball said. "We can work it out."
Johnson's support of the president's preference to accept the missile trade has been largely ignored by historians. Most accounts are influenced by Bobby Kennedy's claim that Johnson contributed nothing to the crisis except hawkish statements. And even after instigating Ball and McCone's support for the missile swap, Johnson continued to warn Kennedy of the potential drawbacks. It could lead to demands for total withdrawal-U.S. planes and troops as well as missiles-from Turkey. In effect, Moscow would be dictating limits to American support for a NATO ally. "Why then, your whole foreign policy is gone," Johnson said sharply to Kennedy. "You take everything out of Turkey-20,000 men, all your technicians and all your planes and all your missiles ... and crumble." "How else are we going to get those missiles out of there, then?" Kennedy replied calmly. "That's the problem." Despite his ambivalence, Johnson agreed to lobby the military in behalf of Kennedy's acceptance of Khrushchev's missile swap. At the Pentagon, the Joint Chiefs were pushing for an attack on Cuba, as were the majority of Kennedy's civilian advisers. Shortly after the Russian leader's missile exchange proposal arrived at the White House Saturday morning, October 27, Johnson urged a four-star general who influenced the top military commanders to endorse the missile swap.
Army General Lyman Lemnitzer, who had just stepped down as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs on October 1, said the vice-president called him to the White House. Even though he was no longer chairman, Lemnitzer huddled with the Joint Chiefs throughout the crisis. He had been succeeded by Taylor, a Kennedy favorite, three weeks earlier. "Johnson stated that he thought the Khrushchev proposal was a reasonable one and should be accepted," Lemnitzer said. Lemnitzer recalled the White House meeting with the vice-president in a letter and conversations with Dino A. Brugioni, a CIA official who prepared briefings for the chiefs that accompanied photographic intelligence of Soviet missile bases in Cuba. "I had great difficulty in convincing Vice President Johnson that our Jupiter missiles were an important part of NATO's deterrent posture," Lemnitzer said in a letter to Brugioni. Johnson became belligerent, saying, "since we damn well gave them to the Turks, we can damn well take them back," Lemnitzer continued. "Then Johnson, in his inimitable manner, said: 'We can make it up to the Turks.'" The substitute for the Turks would be Mediterranean patrols by new American submarines with nuclear-tipped Polaris missiles. After being softened up by Johnson, Lemnitzer met with Kennedy about five P.M. After that meeting, Lemnitzer shared the White House position with the other service chiefs at the Pentagon. With nuclear war still possible, the chiefs viewed eliminating any U.S. warheads as a mistake. "Lemnitzer would say it was a most stupid move," Brugioni said.
There is no White House record that Kennedy and Johnson planned an approach to the Joint Chiefs. But Johnson stressed that he reserved his best advice for private meetings with Kennedy. Both Johnson and Rusk favored the one-on-one channel, which often eluded the White House tape recording system and attacks by other advisers in bigger group settings. Johnson's forceful lobbying of the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs was likely not done on his own. The vice president was probably acceding to Kennedy's request. Lemnitzer's letter and the White House tape recordings challenge Bobby's contention that Johnson played no role in ending the crisis.
Defusing the warheads made moot another part of the secret proposal to Khrushchev-pledging to remove the Jupiters within five months. Bobby delivered the deal to Khrushchev via the Soviet ambassador in Washington along with a demand for total secrecy: If Russians made public the missile swap agreement, the whole deal was off. But Bobby made no mention of the Jupiter warhead removal, according to American and Soviet documents. Perhaps that would have been a form of instant gratification for Khrushchev that Kennedy was not ready to grant. Rusk's disclosure of Kennedy's order on October 27 to disable the Jupiters was made during interviews in 1984. But the president's order also may have been based on fear of an accidental launch during the crisis. Control of the Jupiters depended on commercial telephone from Paris, a long-distance network of landlines that was easily compromised and notorious for disruptions and poor sound quality.
The missile swap pact was kept secret until 1971, shortly before Khrushchev's death. The Soviet government said secrecy was the key aspect of the Kennedy agreement for a missile swap negotiated by Kennedy's brother Robert and the Russian ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Dobrynin. But there was no proof to back up the Soviet claim. One reason was the refusal by the Americans to sign any documents outlining the missile swap. Khrushchev asked for a written agreement to replace what had been only an oral pledge to remove the missiles from Turkey. According to Dobrynin, two days after the secret agreement, Khrushchev wanted the deal spelled out in a formal document. The Soviet leader's appeal was directed in a letter to Bobby Kennedy. After consulting with his brother, Bobby returned the letter. According to Dobrynin, Kennedy said he could not sign a document that might become public at some future date. "The appearance of such a document could cause irreparable harm to my political career in the future," Robert Kennedy said, according to Dobrynin. Or to the 1964 reelection campaign of his brother, John-a campaign Bobby planned to manage. The matter was dropped, Rusk confirmed later. Bobby Kennedy was later elected as U.S. senator in New York and was killed in 1968 while campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination.
The American version of events did not start to emerge until the release of White House tape recordings in 1997. Rusk's revelation about removing the Jupiter warheads was made in a 1984 interview with his son, Richard, who was preparing to write a book. Richard did not reveal the removal of the warheads in Rusk's recollection of the missile crisis. In hiding these concessions to the Soviet leader, Kennedy also covered up his finest moment as president. He led the minority in favor of concessions to protect the world from Armageddon. At times he seemed almost alone in the clear-eyed perception that events were eroding his best efforts to avoid a nuclear conflict with a death toll in the millions and staggering destruction to both nations. Kennedy was immersed in a chess match of escalation:
What would be the Soviet reply to an attack on their missiles in Cuba? A Soviet strike on the American missiles in Turkey?
What would be the American reply? A U.S. attack on Russian forces that attacked Turkey?
Or would Khrushchev grab the western sectors of Berlin as he had vowed to do a year earlier? The German capital had been divided among allies at the end of World War II. What then?
One miscalculation could quickly evolve into a holocaust. Most of the men in the Cabinet Room offered muddled advice that always came back to a military attack and the first step toward Armageddon. Kennedy, however, rejected every suggestion that risked escalation. Kennedy let everyone in on the stakes involved in a televised speech-the first nationwide broadcast of a crisis-with words that sent chills up the spine of all. After hearing from the military and briefing congressional leaders, Kennedy faced the cameras on October 22, his baritone unwavering, his eyes unflinching. Most who heard it would never forget that there really was a chance for a sudden, fiery death.
"It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the western hemisphere as an attack on the United States, requiring the full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union," Kennedy said. "The 1930s taught us a clear lesson: aggressive conduct, if allowed to go unchecked, ultimately leads to war. I call upon Chairman Khrushchev to halt and eliminate this clandestine, reckless and provocative threat to world peace. We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth-but neither will we shrink from that risk at any time it must be faced." He portrayed Khrushchev as a cowardly sneak who brought the world to the edge of a nuclear abyss with a deployment of nuclear weapons hidden behind a string of clumsy lies. When Kennedy finished, it was easy to pick out the world's savior from the archvillain-the kind Ian Fleming produced in his James Bond novels that Kennedy so admired.
In the confines of the Cabinet Room, however, Kennedy made clear he would do just about anything to avoid nuclear war-including politically unpalatable concessions and blatant mendacity that could cripple his reelection if the body of lies began to crumble. If ever there was a time when the ends justified the means, it was later that Saturday night in the Oval Office. "Now the question is really what action we take which lessens the chances of nuclear exchange, which obviously is the final failure," Kennedy told the newly created executive committee made up of his senior advisers.
The Saturday (October 27) Khrushchev's solution arrived, Kennedy had American strategic nuclear forces on war footing. DEFCON 2, the Pentagon acronym for defense readiness condition, had been issued for B-52 bomber pilots circling within striking distance of the Soviet Union. The red alert of DEFCON 2 was only one step below the white alert of DEFCON 1-nuclear war is imminent. Most B-52s carried four hydrogen bombs with a destructive force equal to 4 million tons of TNT explosives. At Malmstrom Air Force Base in Great Falls, Montana, the men of the 341st Missile Wing began spinning the gyroscopes that would guide 150 Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles to their Soviet targets. Each missile had a warhead with an explosive yield equivalent to 170,000 tons of TNT. Six Polaris submarines-each with sixteen nuclear-tipped missiles-were moving silently and unseen toward Soviet targets. One warhead from these Ethan Allen class subs was the equivalent of 600,000 tons of TNT. Never again were American strategic forces to be on such a hair-trigger alert.
As part of a series of nuclear tests approved by Kennedy earlier in the year, Air Force B-52s detonated three hydrogen bombs at the Johnston Atoll test site in the South Pacific during the missile crisis. Nearby Soviet "trawlers" relayed details of the tests to Moscow. The third B-52 test, code-named Calamity, was conducted at dawn on Saturday, October 27. The ten-engine jet dropped the same sort of hydrogen bomb carried by SAC bombers flying racetrack formations near the Soviet Union. Calamity produced an orange fireball that eerily reflected on the ocean. It was the scariest form of saber rattling. A mushroom cloud rose 63,000 feet. Kennedy was told of the successful test as he began a Saturday of fateful decisions that risked a real-world calamity. The United States had a lopsided advantage in strategic weapons, and Kennedy was confronted with a recommendation to launch a preemptive first strike-launched without warning-that would destroy most of the Soviet missiles and bombers. This "counterforce" strategy envisions the destruction of most Soviet weapons, minimizing Moscow's ability to retaliate against the United States.
A leading advocate was General LeMay. "If there is to be war, there's no better time than the present," LeMay said at the Pentagon. "We are prepared and the [Russian] 'bear' is not." LeMay was the likely role model for actor George C. Scott, who played the scary Air Force General "Buck" Turgidson in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. It was filmed two years later, and the general favors an all-out surprise strike on the communists to degrade their retaliation. The general tells the president that there would still be a Soviet response on American cities. "Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed," Turgidson says. "But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks." The same cold-blooded proposal came from Senator Richard B. Russell, the Georgia Democrat who was chairman of the Senate armed services committee. Russell said he talked to LeMay and supported the Air Force chief's aggressive solutions to the crisis.
"It's a very difficult choice that we're facing together," Kennedy told Russell and the congressional leadership during an October 22 meeting.
"Oh my God!" Russell said, interrupting the president. "I know that. Our authority and the world's destiny will hinge on this decision. But it's coming someday, Mr. President. Will it ever be under more auspicious circumstances? I don't see how we are going to be better off next year."
By invoking LeMay's name, Russell clearly irked Kennedy. The Air Force chief had undoubtedly influenced the president's advisers, including the defense secretary. During World War II, Captain McNamara did statistical studies showing the effectiveness of LeMay's fire-bombing campaign against Japan. More than 40 percent of sixty-six Japanese cities were destroyed; 500,000 people were killed and 5 million left homeless. It was this warrior's ferocity that LeMay brought into the White House deliberations. At times LeMay bordered on open contempt for the president. He dismissed Kennedy's suggestion for a naval blockade of Cuba.
"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." LeMay then implied Kennedy had blundered into crisis. "In other words, you're in a pretty bad fix at the present time," LeMay said.
"What'd you say," Kennedy asked evenly.
"I say, you're in a pretty bad fix," LeMay said.
"You're in it with me," Kennedy said, adding with a laugh, "personally."
LeMay kept boring in. "I just don't see any other solution except direct military intervention," LeMay said. Instead of a reply such as seizing Berlin, LeMay predicted the Russians would do nothing rather than risk devastation. In fact, avoiding an attack on Cuba would be an invitation for Khrushchev to grab Berlin. Moscow would feel "they've got us on the run," LeMay said. As for the naval blockade, it was another incentive for bolder Soviet action. "It will lead right into war," LeMay said. "This is almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich."
That was a deep dig at Kennedy. His father, Joseph P. Kennedy, as U.S. ambassador to Britain in 1938, had supported Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's effort to satisfy Adolf Hitler's Nazi ambitions by flying to Munich. Chamberlain had agreed to Hitler's occupation of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia in exchange for what turned out to be a worthless peace agreement. Munich was forever seen as worst form of statesmanship. It encouraged Hitler to seize Poland, an invasion that launched World War II. Every man in the room realized LeMay had just implied that the president would rather placate Khrushchev than challenge the Soviet provocation. LeMay was challenging Kennedy's guts. After the October 19 meeting was over, other members of the Joint Chiefs lingered in the Cabinet Room, unaware that their comments were being recorded. "You pulled the rug right out from under him," General David Shoup, the Marine commandant, said to LeMay in a voice filled with congratulation.
The president had held his tongue until he got outside the Cabinet Room. In private, he produced an angry explosion for Deputy Defense Secretary Roswell Gilpatric. "He was just choleric," Gilpatric recalled later. "He was just beside himself." This situation was nothing new between LeMay and Kennedy. Whenever LeMay briefed the president in earlier meetings, it left Kennedy boiling. "He ended up in sort of a fit," Gilpatric said. "I mean, he just would be frantic at the end of a session with LeMay because, you know, LeMay couldn't listen." This was partly because LeMay was becoming increasingly deaf and refused to wear a hearing aid, Gilpatric said. "He would make what Kennedy considered-we all considered-perfectly outrageous proposals that bore no relation to the state of affairs in the 1960s."
Still, LeMay was on the same track as former president Eisenhower. McCone, who personally briefed Eisenhower on the Cuban crisis, reported to Kennedy that the old general saw an offensive Soviet base in Cuba as "intolerable from the standpoint of this country." He favored all-out military action going "right for the jugular first" by destroying Havana and Castro, McCone reported. To Kennedy, Eisenhower's support was crucial in domestic political terms. If the World War II commander supported Kennedy, there was little room for Republicans in Congress to second-guess his handling of the crisis. Kennedy personally telephoned his predecessor during the crisis to seek his advice-and support.
LeMay, Taylor, and McNamara told Kennedy he must give the order Saturday or Sunday if OPLAN 312 were to be launched on Monday or Tuesday-500 warplane sorties against Cuban sites. That level of assault would be maintained for five days. Then OPLAN 316 would begin with an invasion by air and sea of 90,000 Army and Marine troops. Another 50,000 would join the invasion force within two weeks. Kennedy's advisers were all struggling to avoid public actions that would signal uncertainty. "I don't think at this particular point we should show a weakness to Khrushchev," McNamara said. He was urging combat planes to support surveillance flights over Cuba by unarmed U-2 spy planes and other photoreconnaissance aircraft. It was these flights that first spotted the Soviet missile deployment October 16.
About four P.M. Saturday, word arrived that a Soviet surface-to-air missile had shot down an American U-2. "The wreckage is on the ground and the pilot's dead," General Taylor said. "They've fired the first shot," said Paul Nitze, an assistant secretary of defense.
"Well now, this is much of an escalation by them, isn't it," Kennedy said evenly. It was not a question. The news rattled the Cabinet Room. The death of one man-identified later as Air Force Major Rudolf Anderson Jr.-underscored the reality that it was not just diplomacy and strategy being discussed but human life and death. Vice President Johnson, Undersecretary Ball, and McCone of the CIA began openly endorsing Khrushchev's missile exchange. "That's when everybody's color changed a little bit," Johnson observed. Khrushchev, too, he predicted, would understand the gravity that flowed from downing the American spy plane. "It was sure as hell that's going to make the impression on him," Johnson said. "Not all these signals that each one of us write. He's expert at that palaver."
General Taylor reminded Kennedy that he had authorized an automatic Air Force strike on the offending antiaircraft site in Cuba in the event of a U-2's being shot down. Kennedy quickly countered the standing order and said his personal approval would be needed before any Air Force retaliation. When he got Kennedy's new order at the Pentagon, LeMay hung up the phone in disgust. "He's chickened out again," LeMay told an aide.
With deadlines looming, Kennedy took it all in, tapping his prominent front teeth with first his finger, then a pencil. "We are running out of time," Kennedy said twice during the final meetings Saturday night. After hearing everyone out, the president signaled he had made up his mind.
"This is a pretty good play of his," Kennedy said of the Khrushchev proposal. "Most people will think this is a rather even trade, and we ought to take advantage of it. We can't very well invade Cuba with all its toil and blood ... when we could have gotten them out by making a deal on the same missiles on Turkey. If that's part of the record, then you don't have a very good war." Then Kennedy turned the Oval Office into a woodshed. He ended the opposition to the missile swap by his most trusted advisers. Bobby got his marching orders. The attorney general was instructed on what to tell Soviet ambassador Dobrynin to relay to Khrushchev.
In a diary, Bobby would admit the president's offer hinged on removal of the Jupiters in Turkey. The diary was used as the basis for his posthumous book Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Bobby was quite specific about the swap, according to Theodore Sorensen. He was the president's speechwriter, confidant, and a participant in the super-secret Oval Office session when Bobby was told what to tell the Russians. And it was Sorensen who put together Bobby's best-selling book after he was assassinated on the 1968 campaign trail. Sorensen said he penciled out the truth of the deal. "His diary was very explicit that this was part of the deal; but at that time it was still a secret even on the American side, except for the six of us who had been present at that meeting," Sorensen confessed at a 1989 Moscow conference on the crisis. "So I took it upon myself to edit that out of his diaries." Nor did Sorensen disclose the backroom deal in his biography of Kennedy. Sorensen was part of a cottage industry of authors who knew the truth about Kennedy's missile exchange but hid it. Another was Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Kennedy's in-house Pulitzer Prize-winning historian. In his best-selling A Thousand Days, which was published in 1965, he said Kennedy rejected the missile exchange as soon as it was proposed. Khrushchev, Schlesinger said, backed down. "It was clear that he had thrown in his hand," the historian wrote.
In a 1988 book, Bundy rationalized the secrecy but not the truth of the swap. "Concerned as we all were by the cost of a public bargain struck under pressure at the apparent expense of the Turks, and aware as we were from the day's discussion that for some, even in our own closest councils, even this unilateral private assurance might appear to betray an ally, we agreed without hesitation that no one not in the room was to be informed of this additional message," Bundy wrote. "Robert Kennedy was instructed to make it plain to Dobrynin that the same secrecy must be observed on the other side. Any Soviet reference to our assurance would simply make it null and void."
The defusing of the Jupiter warheads, however, was not part of a specific quid pro quo between Kennedy and Khrushchev. While McNamara proposed removing the warheads during the Saturday deliberations, there is no evidence of the action in either American or Soviet documents released decades later. According to the Russian diplomat, Bobby was red-eyed and exhausted when they met at the Justice Department. The president wanted an answer from Khrushchev by Sunday-not an ultimatum but a request. Bobby made no mention of defusing the Jupiters in Turkey but said the president agreed to their removal by April of 1963. "The greatest difficulty for the president is the public discussion of the issue of Turkey," Kennedy said, according to Dobrynin. "However, President Kennedy is ready to come to agree on that question with N. S. Khrushchev. However, the president can't say anything in public," Kennedy reiterated, the Soviet diplomat said.
Kennedy and the world breathed a sigh of relief when Khrushchev, as requested, made a Sunday announcement that Russians missiles were coming out of Cuba after the American president pledged never to invade the communist island. But in a later secret letter to the president, Khrushchev stressed his public assurances on the removal of the Cuban missiles "were given on account of you having agreed to the Turkish issue." Now Kennedy was still concerned about Republicans on his domestic political flank. One of his first calls that Sunday was to Eisenhower. Kennedy stressed his rejection of Khrushchev's public offer to swap missiles. "We then issued a statement that we couldn't get into that deal," Kennedy told Eisenhower. Only an agreement not to invade Cuba, he said.
"Any other conditions?" Eisenhower asked.
"No," Kennedy said, adding later, "This is quite a step down for Khrushchev."
Eisenhower, who had dealt with ruthless Russians in the past, was clearly mystified by the Soviet leader's retreat. "This is a very, I think, conciliatory move he's made," he told Kennedy. Ten days after Kennedy's bald-faced lie to his predecessor, Democrats avoided the traditional off-year losses in the congressional elections. They even gained four seats in the House and wound up with two-thirds of the Senate. Kennedy's aura of victory had extended to the polls.
After dealing with Eisenhower, Kennedy plotted one of the most durable cover-ups in American history. He would manipulate the media's perception of the crisis with one of its own. He invited newsman Charles Bartlett to bask in the glow of victory with a dinner at the White House. Bartlett, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, had a long personal relationship with the president. Bartlett had introduced Kennedy to Jacqueline Bouvier and attended their wedding. Bartlett was also a frequent guest during the Cuban crisis in the White House family quarters for dinner with the president and his wife.
"I think the pressure of this period made him desire more to have friends around," Bartlett recalled later. "I think I was over there for dinner three times in the week, or something like that." Bartlett was also one of five working journalists who agreed to provide Soviet embassy officials with ostensibly inside information during the crisis at the behest of the White House. At one point, Bartlett showed one Russian contact actual U-2 photographs from the White House to show that the Americans had solid evidence of the Soviet missiles in Cuba.
October 29, the day after the crisis ended, Bartlett said he had the idea to write about the crisis after talking with a White House press office aide, Ralph Dungan, who encouraged him. "It would be a good magazine article because the president certainly looks good from everything I know," Bartlett told Dungan. That Monday night he went to dinner with Kennedy at the White House and described his plan to write a magazine article. Kennedy said others were also writing inside accounts. "My role, I've decided, in all these articles will be not to talk to the writers," Kennedy said, according to Bartlett. "There's no point sitting around and patting myself on the back." Instead, Bartlett was turned over to McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy's adviser on national security affairs and other participants in the crisis, including Bobby Kennedy. Along with coauthor Stewart Alsop, the Saturday Evening Post article led off with the historic "eyeball to eyeball" quote.
It was supposed to be something Rusk reportedly whispered to Bundy when they learned Soviet ships had gone dead in the water off Cuba rather than defy Kennedy's blockade. Vice President Johnson-who urged the missile swap-was not even included by Bartlett as one of the "nine men who made the live-or-die decisions when the chips are down." Singled out for searing criticism was Stevenson, the ambassador to the United Nations. He was likened to Chamberlain, the appeaser of Hitler, for favoring a missile swap instead of an all-out military strike on Cuba. On October 17-the day after the missiles were discovered in Cuba-Stevenson sent Kennedy a note saying the world would see the Soviet missiles in Cuba as quid pro quo for U.S. missiles in Turkey. While refusing to talk with a gun at his head, Stevenson said Kennedy should remain open to negotiations on "the existence of nuclear missile bases anywhere."
According to Bartlett, Kennedy was ready to destroy the Russian rockets and invade Cuba if Khrushchev decided to run the naval blockade. There was no hint that Kennedy agreed to Khrushchev's missile swap-just the opposite. "Only Adlai Stevenson dissented from the [White House] consensus," Bartlett reported. He quoted an unidentified official as saying, "Adlai wanted a Munich. He wanted to trade the Turkish, Italian, and British missile bases for the Cuban bases." Two decades later, Bartlett recalled for one author that the attack on Stevenson stemmed from a White House lunch with Bundy and his deputy Michael Forrestal. Every newspaper and broadcast network carried a version of Bartlett's report, forcing Stevenson into a series of embarrassing denials. Two years later, Bundy would blame the president for Bartlett's attack on Stevenson. "I will say for myself that I never saw that damned thing [the Bartlett article] before it appeared, but Jack Kennedy did," Bundy said. "That article wouldn't have happened if the president hadn't at one point, and for a period, been very irritated with Adlai," Bundy said. "But it was a case where he let himself go, or let others go." According to Bundy, it was in the aftermath of the crisis when Stevenson balked at Kennedy's orders on negotiations to remove Soviet bombers from Cuba. That irked the president.
But there were other reasons Kennedy would malign Stevenson. Kennedy resented Stevenson for rejecting him as a running mate in the 1956 presidential race. It was too soon to put a Roman Catholic on the ticket, Stevenson had concluded. And when Kennedy offered him the assignment as UN ambassador, Stevenson did not readily accept but asked for time to think it over. "The president never liked him," Bobby said of Stevenson. "He put up with him." Stevenson, a liberal and articulate former Illinois governor, was the Democratic presidential candidate twice defeated by Eisenhower. Schlesinger, who was close to Stevenson, was directed by Kennedy to deny that the president leaked the details. "Will you tell Adlai that I never talked to Charlie [Bartlett] and that this piece did not represent my views," Kennedy said, according to Schlesinger.
Khrushchev, too, reacted to the Post account. He noted that it was no accidental leak but an aggressive media campaign. "This evidently is done for the purpose of informing the public in a one-sided way," Khrushchev wrote Kennedy. To his senior advisers and the White House staff, Kennedy cautioned against public boasting about Khrushchev's retreat. But in private Kennedy bragged to friends, including newsmen that he left Khrushchev battered. "I cut his balls off," Kennedy said. Kennedy's success in spinning the world's media to his advantage could prove temporary and fragile if the truth leaked. When the Jupiters were finally removed in April 1963, there was plenty of speculation that it was part of a deal to get missiles out of Cuba. "Most Turks believed we had made a secret deal with Russia to scrap offensive weapons," C. L. Sulzberger reported from Ankara in the New York Times. But that was just speculation. Most accepted Kennedy's cover story that the Jupiters had become irrelevant as American Polaris submarines began patrolling the Mediterranean off the Turkish coast. The USS Sam Houston, with its sixteen nuclear-tipped rockets, surfaced at the port of Izmir on April 15, 1963.
For Kennedy, however, the Air Force generals remained a ticking time bomb. No one was more unhappy with Kennedy's secret missile swap with Khrushchev than the Air Force chief of staff. "The greatest defeat in our history," LeMay said, slapping a Pentagon table for emphasis, according to General Taylor. When Kennedy invited the chiefs to the White House to thank them for their support during the crisis, LeMay rudely rejected the president's gratitude. "We lost," LeMay said sharply to Kennedy. "We ought to go in there today and just knock them off." Through General Lemnitzer, LeMay knew of Kennedy's acceptance of the Soviet missile swap. The order to remove the Jupiter warheads also passed through LeMay's chain of command, including the Strategic Air Command, which was headed by General Thomas Power. Both senior officers took secrecy labels seriously and were unlikely to expose Kennedy's backroom deal. They also faced punishment if they violated security regulations.
But LeMay was duty bound to tell Congress as much as possible in closed-door hearings where members were cleared to hear top secret details. In heavily censored testimony made public in February 1963, LeMay cryptically hinted that "other factors" were involved in the Jupiter withdrawal. LeMay suggested Congress ask McNamara about these "other factors." Mr. Conservative, Senator Goldwater, was on the armed services committee. He had first met LeMay during World War II when Goldwater was flying supply planes in Asia. As senator, Goldwater remained in the Air Force reserve, rising to the rank of brigadier general. LeMay made sure Goldwater could take spins in the latest Air Force jets, including the Mach 3 SR-71 Blackbird spy plane. They were personal friends.
After LeMay had testified in secret, Goldwater took to the Senate floor for another speech lambasting Kennedy's Cuban policies. "Mr. President, what goes on?" Goldwater said. Were the Jupiter removals "part of some kind of deal involving Cuba and disarmament plans"? The order to remove the Jupiter warheads on October 27 was the sort of evidence that could reveal Kennedy's cover-up. Reporters with the right tip could hunt down the American airmen who just might tell how they raced to disable the Jupiters in Turkey. Even more unnerving for Kennedy was the fact that LeMay and Power were about to leave the restraints of active duty. They could prove a disaster in the 1964 reelection campaign, McNamara warned Kennedy.
"They will retire July first," McNamara said, explaining why LeMay and Power could cause real trouble in 1964.
"Power fortunately can be held until 30 November without difficulty. So we can keep him, all right. I would like-if you agree..."
Kennedy anticipated his next words.
"Keep LeMay on?" Kennedy said.
"I could think of a job between July first and January," McNamara said. "Something like that." That would be two months after the 1964 presidential election.
"Do it well in advance," Kennedy said. "Will you speak to him some time soon?
"I would rather have them in than out," the president said.
LeMay's service was extended for a year. For the rest of his life, including a stint as a vice-presidential candidate in 1968, the removal of the Jupiter warheads and the missile swap remained top secret. But in a 1968 campaign book, he alluded to a secret deal between Kennedy and Khrushchev.
"If so, we definitely came out on the short end of the bargain in a confrontation which has been hailed as a great diplomatic victory," LeMay wrote. "Only the revelations of history will clear this up."
Copyright © 2015 by Patrick J. Sloyan
