The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [407]
Every day Kennedy received an endless stream of information. He read crucial secret reports known only to half a dozen people in the world. He perused reams of pedestrian facts churned out by the bureaucratic machine. Mixed into this meld was brilliantly orchestrated misinformation conceived by America’s enemies and sometimes by her friends, or even by those within the administration. As Kennedy pored through the endless pieces of paper, he remained deeply suspicious of the CIA and Joint Chiefs’ memos. As difficult as it was to mistrust what he read in their memos, Kennedy had learned the valuable lesson that even on these sheets of paper lay the world in all its duplicity, misunderstanding, and uncertainty.
Since the day Kennedy entered office, conservatives had been condemning him for what they considered his cowardly acquiescence to Communist Cuba. On August 31, Senator Kenneth Keating of New York, a moderate Republican, got up in the Senate and savaged the administration for its willful laxness on the Cuban issue. Keating’s speech was doubly troublesome, since he was not one of the wild men of the right, and he had what he called “ominous reports” that “missile bases” were under construction in Cuba.
Kennedy did not know where the Republican senator had gotten his information. He realized, though, that the opposition might try to use this issue to barter its way into majority control of Congress in an election only two months away. Before the Bay of Pigs, the president harbored the delusion that he could control the information that came out of the White House, and he had tried to hide an entire operation under a tarpaulin of deception. Now he was so worried about information leaking that he was unwilling to trust some of the people he had to trust if he was going to make rational decisions.
The afternoon of Keating’s speech, Kennedy called Marshall Carter, the CIA’s deputy director. The president was worried about the dissemination of photos showing the construction of what appeared to be surface-to-air missile sites across Cuba. The photos should have set off an alert throughout the government’s various intelligence operations, but the president wanted them hidden away. “Put it back in the box and nail it tight,” Kennedy told Carter.
Khrushchev needed to lull the Americans for a few weeks and Kennedy was helping him do so. Georgi Bolshakov, the Russian agent used as a conduit in Washington, told his American contacts that relationships between the two great powers might well improve if the Americans would end their “piratical” flights monitoring Soviet ships sailing to Cuba. Kennedy invited the Russian to the White House on September 4 and told him, “Tell him [Khrushchev] that I’ve ordered those flights stopped today.” Afterward Bobby stood with Bolshakov outside the White House beseeching him to inform Khrushchev that whatever he did, he must not try any needless provocations before the midterm congressional elections. “Goddamn it!” Bobby exclaimed. “Georgi, doesn’t Premier Khrushchev realize the president’s position?”
In the charming, gregarious figure of Bolshakov, Bobby saw the possibility of dialogue across the Iron Curtain. The Russian had been useful to the Kennedys before, though he had been more useful to his Soviet masters. Bobby did not quite grasp that if his own opinion of the Soviet system was correct, Bolshakov was as imprisoned by his handlers as if Bobby were talking to him in a cell.
On September 7, the president learned the deeply disturbing news that in analyzing their most recent U-2 photos of Cuba, the CIA analysts “suspect[ed] the presence of another kind of missile site—possible surface-to-surface.” This was precisely the kind of information that the president’s opponents might use to stir up political hysteria across America. Kennedy could no longer “put it in the box and nail it tight.” But even as he told the analysts to continue their work, he froze the information’s dissemination