Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [91]
But the president of the United States couldn’t just start yelling, “It’s not fair,” like an angry schoolboy.
He was under fierce pressure from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. General Maxwell Taylor had told him, politely but bluntly, that you can’t order the biggest troop mobilization since World War II and then sit on the fence whistling “Dixie.”
You can’t keep men tensed at High Alert for more than a few days. Something will blow.
And then, of course, there was the major question of what was going on in Cuba itself. The quarantine was doing nothing about that. Did the Russians, by now, have IRBMs ready to fire, ready to rain hottest hell down on San Francisco and Pittsburgh?
The Friday morning meeting of ExComm was a mixture of fear and farce. By then Lundahl of the CIA had taken a good look at Lieutenant Coffee’s photographs.
When his boss, John McCone, told ExComm that the Cubans had battlefield nuclear weapons, it changed the complexion of things.
“These weapons are relatively small and mobile,” McCone told them. “They are most likely no longer in the same positions in which we photographed them. Even if we bombed Cuba for a week before sending troops in, we could not guarantee their destruction.”
There was a big blink. FROGs were the Devil’s own artillery. If the Reds or Castro were crazy enough to use them, there would be thousands of marines dead on the Cuban beaches. An aircraft carrier and a destroyer or two joining the Maine on the seabed. Nuclear radiation spread over half the Caribbean. Not good. Not good at all.
Adlai Stevenson, America’s ambassador to the United Nations, was a cultured, sensitive man. As a diplomat, he deplored confrontation and took no pleasure in humiliating an opponent. He was, in Kennedy’s terminology, a Dove. His insistence that the problem be peaceably resolved by the U.N. was contemptuously dismissed by the Hawks as fatally weak. So when he returned to Washington from New York with the U.N.’s proposal for a standstill, he fully expected to get blitzed. And he did.
He spelled out the U.N.’s proposition to ExComm.
1. No ships would go to Cuba carrying arms of any sort.
2. There would be no further work on the Soviet missile bases.
Okay so far. Then.
3. The quarantine would be suspended.
The Hawks screamed down on Stevenson.
“So we do nothing?”
“We lift the quarantine, and the Russians do whatever the hell they like?”
“Adlai, are you crazy? This is like letting the Soviets win!”
“No, listen —”
“Mr. Ambassador, we are already at DefCon 2. Do you know what that means?”
Kennedy calmed things down. He asked Stevenson to explain how this “standstill” might work.
I can’t resist including the following mad dialogue from the secret tapes. It could be part of a script for a TV comedy. The End of the World Show, or something like that.
Dean Rusk : The work on the Russian bases must include the inoperability of the missiles.
Stevenson : I think it would be quite proper to attempt to do that, but we would have to say “keep them inoperable.” It would be a different thing to say that they should be rendered inoperable, because that requires —
Rusk : Okay, “keep them inoperable.”
McNamara : Well, when did they become inoperable?
McGeorge Bundy : So, uh, “make sure that they are inoperable.”
Stevenson : Well, that . . . You see, I’m trying to make clear to you that this is a standstill. No more construction, no more quarantine, no more arms shipments. Now, when you say “make them inoperable,” that’s not a standstill.
Unidentified speaker : You can ensure that they’re inoperable. Then that leaves open the question whether it’s a standstill.
Rusk: If they turn out to be operable,