Part 17 (1/2)

If Keating, whom Kennedy referred to as a ”nut,” was posturing for political gain in the rapidly approaching elections, the White House had to have a more effective refutation than Khrushchev's word or the likelihood that Moscow would not be so rash. To blunt Republican accusations of a pa.s.sive White House, the administration leaked details of Operation Mongoose to James Reston, which he used in a column. But on the off chance that missile sites were going up and that Keating was right, the administration needed to face hard choices on how to eliminate them.

To Kennedy's distress, the October 14 U-2 flight over the island, which lasted six minutes and produced 928 photographs, revealed conclusive evidence of offensive weapons: three medium-range ballistic missile sites under construction; one additional MRBM site discovered at San Cristobal; and two IRBM sites at Guanajay. The photos also revealed twenty-one crated IL-28 medium-range bombers capable of delivering nuclear bombs. The CIA's report on the discoveries reached Bundy on the evening of October 15, but he decided to wait until morning to present this ”very big news” to the president, when enlargements of the photographs would be available. Besides, it seemed to him that a late-night meeting, which might attract attention, would be a bad idea. ”It was a h.e.l.l of a secret,” and it needed to remain such until the president could consider how to deal with it. Also, a rested president, who was returning from a strenuous week of campaigning for congressional Democrats, would be better prepared to confront the crisis than an exhausted one. Nevertheless, Bundy shared the news, which CIA chiefs already had, with Rusk and McNamara and a few of their deputies on the evening of the fifteenth.

At 8:45 on the morning of the sixteenth, Bundy brought the bad news to Kennedy in his bedroom. The president ordered Bundy to set up a White House meeting in the Cabinet Room before noon and ticked off the names of the national security officials he wanted there. He then called Bobby, who had been first on his list. ”We have some big trouble. I want you over here,” the president told him. Determined not to create a public crisis and demands for press comments before he had had a chance to consider his options, Kennedy kept his early-morning appointments.

After twenty-one months in the White House, the Kennedys were not strangers to ”big trouble.” The Bay of Pigs, Berlin, Laos, Vietnam, the Congo, the Freedom Riders, the clash with big steel, Soviet nuclear tests, and, most recently, the September crisis in Mississippi had schooled them in the strains of holding power. But this was worse than anything they had seen before. Indeed, no president or administration had confronted so much danger to the national survival since Roosevelt had led the country through the Second World War. True, Truman and Eisenhower had shouldered Cold War burdens in every corner of the globe, and Truman had presided over a frustrating conflict in Korea, which had cost some twenty-five thousand American lives. But Soviet missiles in Cuba were an unprecedented provocation-a challenge to American national security that threatened to bring on a nuclear war. And on a more trivial but still potent note, if Kennedy failed to remove them by negotiation or force, he a.s.sumed that a successor would come to power on the promise that he would.

Although the Kennedys did not have the luxury to reflect on how they had come to this confrontation with Moscow, the question could not have been far from their minds. Obviously Castro deserved some of the blame. His determination to train Latin American radicals committed to subverting as many hemisphere governments as possible provoked the Kennedy White House into counteractions. This ongoing crisis in U.S.-Cuban relations presented Khrushchev with an irresistible opportunity. By putting missiles on the island, he could achieve several objectives: reduce the Soviet missile gap with the United States; possibly compel a German settlement more compatible with Moscow's security needs than just a wall ending the embarra.s.sing flight of refugees from East to West; outs.h.i.+ne China in compet.i.tion for Third World hearts and minds; and boost his standing at home, where his state-managed economy had failed to deliver the goods. Of course, the Kennedys could not dismiss an American share of responsibility for the crisis. The Bay of Pigs fiasco, Operation Mongoose, and exaggerated fears of communist takeovers in Latin America, which, for all the rhetoric of good intentions, made the United States more an advocate of the status quo than a supporter of democratic change, had all contributed to the hemisphere tensions that drove Castro firmly into the Soviet camp.

THE FIRST ORDER OF BUSINESS was not to a.s.sign blame for the Soviet-American confrontation but to find some way to eliminate the missiles and avert a nuclear war. At 11:45 was not to a.s.sign blame for the Soviet-American confrontation but to find some way to eliminate the missiles and avert a nuclear war. At 11:45 A.M. A.M., thirteen men joined the president in the Cabinet Room for an hour-and-ten-minute discussion. The group came to be called Ex Comm, the Executive Committee of the National Security Council. Kennedy sat in the center of an oblong table, with Rusk, Ball, and Deputy Undersecretary of State U. Alexis Johnson to his immediate right and McNamara, Gilpatric, Joint Chiefs chairman Maxwell Taylor, and acting CIA director Marshall Carter (McCone was at a family funeral) to his immediate left. Bundy, Dillon, Bobby, and Johnson sat across from the president. Two experts on aerial photography, Arthur Lundahl and Sidney Graybeal, briefed the group on the U-2 photos, which were propped on easels. Though Ex Comm would create the impression that Kennedy governed by committee, it was in fact the exception. Though he had appointed the most talented people he could find to his cabinet, for example, he had made almost no use of cabinet meetings in deciding major questions. Instead, consultations with a variety of individuals, including cabinet officers, before initiating policy had been his modus operandi. Regular formal cabinet discussions were never a significant part of his decision-making process.

As the Ex Comm discussion began, Kennedy activated the Cabinet Room tape recorder. After the experts presented the evidence of medium-range ballistic missile sites, Kennedy wanted to know if the missiles were ready to be launched. When told no, he asked how long before they could be fired. No one could be sure, but, McNamara said, ”there is some reason to believe that the warheads aren't present and hence they are not ready to fire.” The question of ”readiness to fire” is ”highly critical in forming our plans,” McNamara added. Consequently, Kennedy agreed that additional U-2 flights were essential to discover where nuclear warheads might be stored and when the Soviets might be able to use them.

Kennedy wanted his advisers to explain, if they could, why Khrushchev was doing this. Perhaps it would give him a better idea of how to respond. ”What is the advantage?” Kennedy asked. ”Must be some major reason for the Soviets to set this up.” He answered his own question: ”Must be that they're not satisfied with their ICBMs.” Taylor echoed the president's view: ”What it'd give them is, primarily ... [a] launching base for short-range missiles against the United States to supplement their rather defective ICBM system... . That's one reason.” Citing McCone, Rusk said that Khrushchev might be animated by concerns about our nuclear superiority. Rusk also believed that ”Berlin is very much involved in this.” Khrushchev may be hoping to ”bargain Berlin and Cuba against each other,” he said, or use a U.S. attack on Cuba as an excuse to act against Berlin.

The princ.i.p.al focus of the meeting was on how to eliminate the missiles from Cuba. Rusk thought that they could do it by a ”sudden, unannounced strike of some sort,” or by a political track in which they built up the crisis ”to the point where the other side has to consider very seriously about giving in.” Perhaps they could talk sense to Castro through an intermediary, Rusk suggested. ”It ought to be said to Castro that this kind of a base is intolerable... . The time has now come when he must, in the interests of the Cuban people ... break cleanly with the Soviet Union and prevent this missile base from becoming operational.” The alternative to the quick strike, Rusk said, was ”to alert our allies and Mr. Khrushchev that there is an utterly serious crisis in the making here... . We'll be facing a situation that could well lead to a general war... . We have an obligation to do what has to be done, but to do it in a way that gives everybody a chance to pull away from it before it gets too hard.”

For the moment, Kennedy was not thinking about any political or diplomatic solution; his focus was on military options and how to mute the crisis until they had some clear idea of what to do. He saw four possible military actions: an air strike against the missile installations; a more general air attack against a wide array of targets; a blockade; and an invasion. He wanted preparations for the second, third, and fourth possibilities, decisions on which could come later. But ”we're certainly going to do number one,” he said. ”We're going to take out these missiles.” Just when, he did not say, but he wanted knowledge of the missiles limited to as few officials as possible. He believed that the news would leak anyway in two or three days. But even when it became known, he wanted policy decisions to remain secret. ”Otherwise,” he said, ”we b.i.t.c.h it up.”

He scheduled another Ex Comm meeting for 6:30 that evening. Again to avoid any hint of crisis, he followed his prearranged afternoon schedule. The only public indication of his concern came in ad lib remarks to journalists attending a State Department conference. ”The United States, and the world, is now pa.s.sing through one of its most critical periods,” he said. ”Our major problem over all, is the survival of our country ... without the beginning of the third and perhaps the last war.” He reflected his sense of burden and irritation with people in the press and Congress who were second-guessing him by reciting a verse: ”Bullfight critics row on row/Crowd the enormous plaza full/But only one is there who knows/And he is the one who fights the bull.”

The evening meeting included the morning's partic.i.p.ants as well as Sorensen and Edwin Martin, a State Department expert on Latin America. Kennedy came back to his puzzlement over Khrushchev's actions. Khrushchev had, all things considered, been cautious over Berlin, so how did the Russian experts explain his willingness to risk a war by putting nuclear missiles in Cuba, especially if, as some believed, it did not reduce America's military advantage over the USSR? ”Well, it's a G.o.dd.a.m.n mystery to me,” Kennedy admitted. ”I don't know enough about the Soviet Union, but if anybody can tell me any other time since the Berlin blockade where the Russians have given so clear a provocation, I don't know when it's been, because they've been awfully cautious, really.”

Ball, Bundy, and Alex Johnson saw the Soviets as trying to expand their strategic capabilities. But McNamara was not so sure. The Joint Chiefs thought the Soviet missile deployments ”substantially” changed the strategic balance, but McNamara believed it made no difference. Taylor acknowledged that the missiles in Cuba meant ”just a few more missiles targeted on the United States,” but he considered them ”a very, a rather important, adjunct and reinforcement” to Moscow's ”strike capability.”

Kennedy saw other reasons for eliminating them. If the United States left them in place, it would be an inducement for the Soviets to add ever greater strength to their forces in Cuba. In addition, it would make the Cubans, he added, ”look like they're coequal with us.” Besides, he said, ”We weren't going to [allow it]. Last month I should have said that we don't care. But when we said we're not going to [allow it], and then they go ahead and do it, and then we do nothing, then I would think that our risks increase... . What difference does it make? They've got enough to blow us up now anyway.” But more was at stake here than matters of strategic balance. ”After all, this is a political struggle as much as military,” he said.

THE QUESTION THAT REMAINED, then, was how to remove the missiles without a full-scale war. Despite his earlier certainty, Kennedy had begun to have doubts about a surprise air strike and may already have ruled this out as a sensible option. When he asked at the morning meeting, ”How effective can the take-out be?” Taylor had answered, ”It'll never be 100 percent, Mr. President, we know. We hope to take out the vast majority in the first strike, but this is not just one thing-one strike, one day-but continuous air attack for whenever necessary, whenever we discover a target.” Kennedy picked up on the uncertain results of such an operation: ”Well, let's say we just take out the missile bases,” he said. ”Then they have some more there. Obviously they can get them in by submarine and so on. I don't know whether you just keep high strikes on.” then, was how to remove the missiles without a full-scale war. Despite his earlier certainty, Kennedy had begun to have doubts about a surprise air strike and may already have ruled this out as a sensible option. When he asked at the morning meeting, ”How effective can the take-out be?” Taylor had answered, ”It'll never be 100 percent, Mr. President, we know. We hope to take out the vast majority in the first strike, but this is not just one thing-one strike, one day-but continuous air attack for whenever necessary, whenever we discover a target.” Kennedy picked up on the uncertain results of such an operation: ”Well, let's say we just take out the missile bases,” he said. ”Then they have some more there. Obviously they can get them in by submarine and so on. I don't know whether you just keep high strikes on.”

Bobby, who had been so eager for clandestine action, doubted the wisdom of air attacks, which he had described in the morning discussion as likely ”to kill an awful lot of people.” It was one thing to have professional spies and devoted Cuban opponents risk their lives to topple a communist regime in Cuba. But killing possibly hundreds, maybe thousands, of people, including surely some innocent civilians, chilled him. At the evening meeting, he pa.s.sed a note to Sorensen: ”I now know how Tojo felt when he was planning Pearl Harbor.”

It seems possible, even likely, that Bobby was reflecting his brother's views. Bobby was not given to freelancing; he was his brother's spokesman on most matters. In this early stage of the discussions about what to do, it would have made Kennedy seem weak to shy away openly from air raids for fear they might not work well or would claim some innocent victims. He surely had not ruled out the possibility, and absent another good solution he could imagine using air power to eliminate the missile sites. However, he was reluctant to follow that option. (When Soviet expert Charles Bohlen, who was leaving for Paris to become amba.s.sador, wrote a memo advocating an ultimatum before any air strikes, Kennedy asked him to stay in Was.h.i.+ngton to partic.i.p.ate in the deliberations. But concern that a delayed departure might alert the press to the crisis persuaded JFK to let him go.) Kennedy may also have tipped his bias against a quick air attack by telling Acheson that a U.S. bombing raid would be ”Pearl Harbor in reverse.” (Refusing to compare air raids on the missile sites to an unprovoked sneak attack, Acheson told the president, ”It is unworthy of you to speak that way.”) 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 Was.h.i.+ngton, 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 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 negotiable before we start anything. 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, never, negotiation and sanity negotiation and sanity always 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. ”n.o.body 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 h.e.l.l 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 a.s.serted, 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 h.e.l.l 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.” 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 only defensive-and he wished to stress the word defensive-in character.” After the meeting, Kennedy told Bob Lovett about Gromyko, ”who, in this very room not over ten minutes ago, told more barefaced lies than I have ever heard in so short a time. All during his denial that the Russians had any missiles or weapons, or anything else, in Cuba, I had the ... pictures in the center drawer of my desk, and it was an enormous temptation to show them to him.” Instead, Kennedy told Gromyko that the Soviet arms s.h.i.+pments had created ”the most dangerous situation since the end of the war.”

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 s.h.i.+pments 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 d.i.c.k 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 ma.s.sive 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 bra.s.s 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 a.s.serted 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 appeas.e.m.e.nt 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 a.s.sertion about a Soviet nonresponse, Kennedy asked O'Donnell, ”Can you imagine LeMay saying a thing like that? These bra.s.s 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 h.e.l.l do you mean?” Shoup replied that he agreed with LeMay ”a hundred percent” and added, ”If somebody could keep them from doing the G.o.dd.a.m.n 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 G.o.dd.a.m.n 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].”