Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [78]
The president had formed an executive committee — ExComm, for short — to deal with the crisis. It consisted of people he liked and trusted, people he didn’t like but trusted, people he didn’t trust but who were good at what they did, and people he neither liked nor trusted but who had to be there. Among that last group were a number of people in military uniform whose usual habitat was the Pentagon.
After a week of fearful debate and fierce wrangling, two rough options emerged. And ExComm had divided, although not cleanly, into two groups that JFK would later refer to as the Hawks and the Doves.
Option One was the Hit the Bastards Right Now option. Bomb the missiles sites, bomb the Cuban air defenses, their military bases, without warning. Then send troops in to whack Castro and take over the damn island, the way we should have done years ago. This was the Hawks’ preference.
The Doves pointed out the obvious problem: we’d kill lots of Russians. Moscow would then have an excuse to nuke Berlin, or Turkey, or Iran, or anywhere else that America had parked missiles. They might even launch a nuclear attack on the U.S. itself. Then we’d do the same to them. So good-bye, world.
Nah, the Hawks said. Khrushchev isn’t gonna do that. He’s not going to bet his whole empire on Cuba. No way. Cuba doesn’t mean that much to him. What he’s doing in Cuba is like an adventure, a game. He’s not going to bet his personal ass, let alone the entire Soviet Union, on it. He’ll bluster and bang his shoe on the desk and rant. But he’s not crazy enough to start World War Three over this thing. Besides, he knows that we’ve got more firepower than they do. So let’s do it.
But Kennedy was not perfectly sure that Khrushchev was an entirely rational being. He was not absolutely certain that the Soviet Union wouldn’t be happy to rule a world that was half toxic ash.
Option Two was a sea blockade of Cuba. Send ships and submarines and planes to stop any ships that might be bringing war materials to Cuba. Draw a circle two hundred miles out from Havana, say. Stop anything we don’t like the look of from going any farther. This was the Doves’ preference. Actually, no, they said, let’s not call it a blockade. That sounds warlike. Let’s call it a quarantine. As if Cuba has got a disease we need to stop from spreading. Then we talk to Khrushchev. Tell him that enough is enough. He has to remove his missiles from Cuba, and we’re not going to let him send any more material in. Especially not nuclear warheads. If we’re right, and those warheads aren’t in Cuba yet, the priority is to stop them from getting there.
(The Doves had a point. They didn’t know it, but while ExComm was arguing back and forth, a Russian freighter called the Aleksandrovsk, stuffed with warheads, was steaming across the Atlantic en route to Havana. Another thing the Americans didn’t know — and it’s just as well they didn’t, really — was that there were already ninety warheads on the Cuban mainland. They’d arrived at the port of Mariel on the fourth of October, in a ship designed to carry frozen fish.)
This talk of quarantine and diplomacy caused the Hawks to huff their feathers and narrow their raptor eyes.
What if, they wanted to know, one of those Commie ships refuses to stop?
Well, the Doves said, guess we’d have to board it. Or disable it. Shoot its rudder off, or something.
Well, that would be an act of war, wouldn’t it? And where do you think that will lead?
Hmmm, the