The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [413]
As most of his top aides pushed for immediate action, Kennedy continued to explore the political dimensions. The president mused aloud: “If we said to Khrushchev that ‘We would have to take action against you. But if you begin to pull them out, we’ll take ours out of Turkey.’ “A few minutes later he came back to the same point. “The only offer we would make, it seems to me, that would make any sense, the point being to give him some out, would be giving him some of our Turkey missiles,” Kennedy said. In the Ex Comm meetings these were the first mentions of this possible solution.
As these men discussed the situation, they followed the steps that led from an air attack on Cuba to a Soviet reaction in Berlin, and from there to nuclear war. These were not hypothetical war games any longer. If that point needed to be emphasized even more strongly, the top White House officials all had prearranged places in Washington where they were to go with their families to be helicoptered to an immense, nuclear-proof cave burrowed into the mountains of West Virginia. Some of the mordantly imaginative of them pictured the scene as a helicopter set down on streets full of bumper-to-bumper traffic to lift them to safety while panicking Washingtonians tried to climb aboard and flee certain death in the capital.
“We figured we would have fifteen minutes’ warning of an approaching nuclear weapon to get out of Washington,” recalled Feldman. “We didn’t think we’d be able to carry out our evacuation plans. Thus, we had plans if all the government heads were killed. Each department had to have a list of who followed second, third, and fourth. That was something we developed during the crisis.”
In the midst of this deadly discussion, Bobby expressed himself in a way he had rarely spoken before. “I think it’s the whole question of, you know, assuming that you do survive all this …,” Bobby said, “what kind of country we are.”
For his part, the secretary of State had up until now been silent when such moral questions came floating up in this extended discourse. “This business of carrying the mark of Cain on your brow for the rest of your life is something …” Rusk began in his ponderous fashion.
“We did this against Cuba,” Bobby interrupted. “We’ve fought for fifteen years with Russia to prevent a first strike against us. Now, in the interest of time, we do that to a small country. I think it’s a hell of a burden to carry.”
At 5:00 P.M.. that same day, Thursday, October 18, Kennedy kept a long-established appointment with Andrei Gromyko. The Soviet foreign minister was a worldly, subtle man with whom Kennedy felt he could negotiate, as he could not with the calculatedly brutish Khrushchev. Now, as he listened to Gromyko reading from a prepared script his mirthless Marxist scenario, Kennedy was tempted to open his drawer and pull out a sheaf of U-2 photos and expose the man for the intolerable liar that he appeared to be.
Gromyko was saying in his diplomatic way what leftist protesters were shouting in the streets of America: “Hands off Cuba.” The Soviet foreign minister pointed out that “Cuba belonged to Cubans and not to the United States,” and he asked, “Why then are statements being made in the United States advocating invasion of Cuba?”
Inevitably, Gromyko brought up the Bay of Pigs. That was a subject that invariably irked the president. Kennedy interrupted the foreign minister’s monologue by pointing out that he had gone through all this with Khrushchev in Vienna and had said that it