Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [161]
Nor was the young president’s operation like any they’d known before. He wasn’t fighting a war but acting to prevent one, signaling to the other side the terms on which peace could be maintained.
Two letters arriving from Premier Khrushchev marked the beginning of the conclusion to the crisis. They were sent to the U.S. embassy in Moscow on consecutive days, October 26 and 27. The first letter proposed the removal of missiles and Soviet personnel in exchange for a promise not to invade Cuba. The second asked for the added concession of the removal of Jupiter missiles from Turkey.
The text of the second letter, sent on the following day, was broadcast on Moscow radio at the same time it was delivered to the U.S. embassy.
Kennedy resolved to answer Khrushchev’s first letter, agreeing not to invade Cuba. He then instructed Bobby to tell the Soviet ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin, in confidence that the Jupiter missiles in Turkey would be withdrawn later. Bobby gave Dobrynin a timetable of one day to accept.
Arriving at the Justice Department, Dobrynin was taken aback by Bobby’s conduct. In the past he’d come to expect the same rough treatment the president’s brother had meted out to Mike DiSalle and other resistant Democrats two years earlier. He had prepared himself to be castigated for the Soviets’ deception. Instead, he came face-to-face with an upset young father trying desperately to prevent a nuclear war. “He didn’t even try to get into fights,” the envoy cabled his superiors in Moscow. The United States would remove the missiles from Turkey, as Khrushchev had requested, within four or five months, Bobby assured him, but couldn’t let it look like a concession. “He persistently returned to one theme: time is of the essence and we shouldn’t miss the chance.”
Still, the entire perilous and exhausting adventure wasn’t going to be over, Bobby told Dobrynin, until the Russian missiles were actually removed from Cuban soil. That was “not an ultimatum, just a statement of fact.” Khrushchev must commit to doing so. It worked. Within the week, Kennedy had won the Soviet leader’s agreement. The crisis had ended. A country that had lived for days with the prospect of nuclear war could now breathe easy.
Though Curtis LeMay would call the decision to not invade Cuba “the greatest defeat in our history,” it was a minority view. “If Kennedy never did another thing,” said the British prime minister, Harold Macmillan, “he assured his place in history by this single act.”
It was later learned that the Soviets had deposited in Cuba a disturbing cache of nuclear weapons in early October, well before the Kennedy administration had the photographic evidence that spurred it into action. There were ninety nuclear warheads in all. Thirty of them possessed sixty-six times the explosive power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. There was an equal number of warheads with the firepower of the Hiroshima atomic bomb, plus an assortment of other, smaller ones.
Would Khrushchev have fired them? Here’s what he said afterward in his memoirs: “My thinking went like this: If we installed the missiles secretly, and then the United States discovered the missiles after they were poised and ready to strike, the Americans would think twice before trying to liquidate our installations by military means. I knew that the United States could knock out some of our installations, but not all of them. If a quarter or even a tenth of our missiles survived—even if only one or two big ones were left—we could still hit New York, and there wouldn’t be much of New York left. I don’t mean to say everyone in New York would be killed—not everyone, of course, but an awful lot of people would be wiped out . . . And it was high time that America learned