Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [158]
Though running the Justice Department, Bobby had decided to moonlight in the area of intelligence. He’d done so because of the numerous dissatisfactions with the ill-conceived Bay of Pigs scenario. He was now running the administration’s secret anti-Castro operation himself. Code-named “Operation Mongoose,” this enterprise involved an array of secret plots to topple the Cuban dictator, all doomed to be pathetically unsuccessful.
In the Senate, Kennedy was already under attack from two Republicans—New York’s Kenneth Keating and Indiana’s Homer Capehart—with both insisting on the fierce reality of those now verified Soviet missile installations. “Ken Keating will probably be the next president!” Jack commented as he looked at the three large photographs Bundy had carried to him. The Republicans who had been mounting the attacks may have lacked hard evidence, but at the moment it didn’t matter. They were right.
Squeezed between his soon-to-be-gloating critics on the right and the Soviets, whom he now realized had deceived him, Kennedy was suddenly in an extremely tight spot with little breathing room. The wily Khrushchev had made use of the delay he initiated for the American election to arm his Cuban allies with nuclear weapons—SS-24 Scalpels, medium-range ballistic missiles with a range of a thousand miles—able to reach well into the United States.
The only question on which the CIA had no intelligence at that moment was how rapidly the weapons on that site could be equipped with nuclear warheads. Summoned to the White House, the top cabinet officials and military advisors began to weigh in, making their case for immediate action to destroy the missiles. Such a response, Kennedy was told, would entail either an air strike on the missile sites alone or else a full-scale invasion.
The latter option, General Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told him, would mean an involvement of up to 150,000 troops—a hundredfold increase on the ragtag Bay of Pigs invaders. Attacking Cuba was serious military business, and for the Joint Chiefs, what they’d been lobbying for all along. As he listened to his people, one thing was clear: the overall consensus in the room held that the least delay would allow the Soviets the time needed to ready the missiles for use.
Kennedy now assembled an expert panel to decide on what steps to take. The purpose of this group, called ExComm—for Executive Committee—was to keep all intelligence regarding the Soviet missiles at San Cristobal limited to a smaller group than the National Security Council.
“Virtually everyone’s initial choice, at that first October 16 meeting, was a surgical air strike against the nuclear missile sites before they could become operational,” said O’Donnell. “U.S. bombers could swoop in, eliminate the sites, and fly away, leaving the problem swiftly, magically ended. But further questions—JFK always had further questions—proved that solution illusory. First, no cruise missiles or smart bombs existed in those days to assure the precision and success of the strike. The air force acknowledged that it could be certain of eliminating only sixty of the missiles, leaving the others free to fire and destroy us.”
With each question he now asked, Kennedy gained more knowledge. It would be highly risky to send bombers over Cuba unless its surface-to-air missile sites were destroyed, along with its antiaircraft sites, its fighter planes, and its bombers, which might head off to Florida. But an invasion would pit American fighting men against Cubans defending their homeland, a recipe for long casualty lists on both sides, a guarantee of a bitter occupation. It would also mean killing countless numbers of Russians.
Time was of the essence. But so was taking the time—even if it was in short supply—to weigh all the options. Every so often, JFK would leave the room during the deliberations, allowing the others to express themselves