Jacqueline Kennedy - Caroline Kennedy [148]
54. This has echoes of the British royal family's determination in 1940 to remain in London through the dangers of the German Blitz.
55. Unbenownst to Mrs. Kennedy, even had the U-2 photographed Cuba a few days earlier, it would probably have given the Americans little advantage in trying to have the missiles withdrawn.
56. On the final weekend of the crisis came two messages from Khrushchev—the first conciliatory, the second fire and brimstone. In what scholars later called the "Trollope ploy" (in Anthony Trollope's fiction, a woman hastens to interpret a friendly gesture as a marriage proposal) the Kennedy brothers opted to treat the first one as the definitive Soviet message, which helped save the situation.
57. ROGER HILSMAN (1919– ) was the State Department's intelligence chief. At the height of the crisis, an American U-2 accidentally flew into Soviet airspace—legally an act of war that might have inspired retaliation that could have spiraled into nuclear conflict. A furious Kennedy said, "There's always some son-of-a-bitch who doesn't get the word!"
58. When Kennedy made his initial public response to the missiles in Cuba (he used the more peacelike euphemism "quarantine"), some of the Joint Chiefs, such as the navy's George Anderson (1906–1992) and the air force's Curtis LeMay, thought the President was being too weak—even on Sunday, October 28, when Radio Moscow announced that the missiles were coming out to "prevent a fatal turn of events and protect world peace."
59. By coincidence, the U.S. destroyer Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. was one of the ships blockading Cuba.
60. TAZEWELL SHEPARD, JR. (1921– ) was the President's naval aide.
61. JFK presented a gift of remembrance to Jacqueline and those around him who had been most involved in deliberations on the Cuban Missile Crisis. Each was a little silver Tiffany calendar for October 1962, with the fateful thirteen days highlighted in bold, and engraved with "J.F.K." and the recipient's initials.
62. CHESTER BOWLES (1901–1986) was an advertising executive, governor of Connecticut, and Dean Rusk's number two before succeeding Galbraith as ambassador to India.
63. After the Bay of Pigs, when Bowles let it be known around Washington that he had opposed the venture, an indignant RFK poked his finger at Bowles's chest and told him that his position had henceforth better be that he was for the invasion.
64. JFK's friend Charlie Bartlett collaborated with the columnist Stewart Alsop (1914–1974) on a Saturday Evening Post article claiming that during the crisis deliberations, Adlai Stevenson had "wanted a Munich." Because Bartlett was known to be close to the President, members of the Washington cognoscenti mistakenly took the piece as a signal that Kennedy wanted his UN envoy out. Stevenson himself was especially agitated.
65. CLAYTON FRITCHEY (1904–2001) was an ex-journalist and Stevenson aide who was a social friend of the Kennedys.
66. During the missile crisis, the vice president attended only one meeting of "Ex Comm," the ad hoc presidential panel quickly formed by JFK to fashion a solution to the problem by meeting around the clock. Other members were Rusk, McNamara, Dillon, RFK, Bundy, McCone, and Taylor. The reference to Laos is the covert efforts by both North Vietnam and America to undermine the 1962 agreement at Geneva to preserve the country's neutrality and independence.
67. Powers and O'Donnell had agreed to stay on with Johnson for a transitional period.
68. In mentioning her husband's warning, Mrs. Kennedy was eerily prescient about the problem that would doom America's involvement in Vietnam.
69. In other words, even if the President orders the invasion halted, proceed anyway.
70. JOSEPH KRAFT (1924-1986) was a Washington columnist and denizen of Georgetown.
71. HAROLD E. STASSEN (1907–2001), the onetime Republican "boy governor" of Minnesota, had once been a serious