The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [409]
During the first days of October, Kennedy did not know the extent of the awesome nuclear weaponry sailing toward Cuba, but he knew that Khrushchev had moved his queen forward on the chessboard of the cold war. Kennedy was fond of quoting Hemingway’s definition of courage as “grace under pressure.” For Kennedy, a true man acted not only courageously but with unflinching coolness. That was precisely how Kennedy himself had acted when PT-109 was cut in two, and it was how he acted now as he received reports on the situation in Cuba. He asked that the U.S. armed forces begin to prepare themselves for military action in Cuba—not immediately, but in the coming three months. He wanted American pilots to be fully prepared to take out the Soviet SA-2 surface-to-air missile sites that he knew were already in existence, and the air force developed mock-ups for their training.
If the president had not been Bobby’s brother, the attorney general would most likely have accused him of a prissy reluctance to confront Castro. On October 4, Bobby chaired a meeting of the top officials overseeing Operation Mongoose in which he vented his rage, exhibiting a full measure of gracelessness under pressure. These were not midlevel officials he yelled at, but among them Lansdale himself, a man not used to being on the receiving end of such wrath. The general was no longer in the outsider’s enviable position, able to condemn and ridicule what others had done before him. Now he was in the bureaucrat’s uncomfortable chair, having to defend what had not been accomplished while giving what McCone took as the “general impression that things were all right.”
No longer was the man Bobby had thought of as the personification of “the Ugly American” safe from the rebuke that he spilled so indiscriminately on those working on Operation Mongoose at the CIA. The attorney general fumed that “nothing was moving forward.” Bobby wanted gung-ho action, militancy, and bold acts of sabotage, including possibly what would have been an act of war: secret mining of the harbors where the Soviet ships were arriving.
These few men in the room represented most of the spectrum of thought on Cuba in the administration. They knew that they would be judged not by how forcefully they spoke today but by how true their assessments proved. Bobby and McCone stood at one end as the most militant advocates of determined military action against Cuba. They shared the same Catholic faith, the same militant anticommunism, the same brutal assessment of Cuban and Soviet motives.
McCone asserted that the Soviets were probably establishing an offensive military posture in Cuba, including medium-range ballistic missiles. As the president’s top national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy reflected the president’s thinking, but he was far from being merely Kennedy’s intellectual clone. Nonetheless, Bundy seemed, for the most part, to believe what the president believed, and this morning he believed that the CIA director’s black assessment was probably wrong, and that the Soviets would not dare go so far. McCone, a man of genteel manners, admitted that many, even most, of his colleagues in intelligence would have agreed with Bundy, but they could not risk the future of the United States if Bundy was wrong.
The scholarly Bundy had history and reason on his side. Yet on this very day, at the Cuban port of Mariel, the Soviet ship Indigirka arrived carrying forty-five warheads to arm the R-12s; twelve warheads to be fitted on the Luna tactical missiles; six nuclear bombs for the IL-28 planes, and thirty-six warheads ready for the cruise missiles. The total firepower carried on that one Russian freighter, Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali wrote, was “over twenty times the explosive power that was dropped by Allied bombers on Germany in all of the Second World War.”
Bobby was more ideological than his brother, believing, like his Marxist enemies, that life was a battle over ideas. Yet he was not a man of abstraction.