The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [417]
“I think that a blockade, and political talk, would be considered by a lot of our friends and neutrals as being a pretty weak response to this,” LeMay said a few minutes later. “And I’m sure a lot of our own citizens would feel that way too.” One of the fundamental tenets of American democracy is that the military stays out of politics, but LeMay was lecturing the president about the supposed feelings of the American people.
“In other words, you’re in a pretty bad fix at the present time,” LeMay concluded.
“What did you say?” Kennedy asked, perhaps not quite believing what he was hearing.
“You’re in a pretty bad fix.”
“You’re in with me,” the president said, his words punctuated by an ironic laughter. There was no one in the room who understood as deeply as Kennedy did that he was indeed in a “pretty bad fix,” part of which was military leaders like LeMay with their restless fingers on the nuclear button. When the meeting ended, several of the Joint Chiefs stayed behind to talk among themselves.
“You pulled the rug right out from under him,” said General David Shoup, the Marine Corps commandant. “Goddamn.”
“Jesus Christ!” LeMay laughed. “What the hell do you mean?”
“I agree with that answer, agree a hundred percent, a hundred percent,” Shoup exclaimed. There was anger in his voice that suggested the wrathful vitriol that might greet the president if he did not proceed militarily. “Somebody’s got to keep them from doing the goddamn thing piecemeal!”
“That’s right,” LeMay exclaimed. As he and his colleagues saw it, their planes, missiles, and ships were being held back, hostage to what they considered the compromising palaver of a mere politician.
“You’re screwed, screwed, screwed,” Shoup said. “Some goddamn thing, some way, that they either do the son of a bitch and do it right and quit frig-gin’ around…. You got to go in and take out the goddamn thing that’s going to stop you from doing your job.”
Kennedy shared something with the simplest of men and the most complex: a belief that words mattered, that they were the primary conduits of truth. He despised the morally slovenly way men like LeMay talked about a nuclear war they had not seen and could not feel and did not understand. “I don’t think I have ever seen him more irritated than when he was describing how people talked rather glibly about the escalation that might take place—with apparently no deep understanding of just what it would entail,” recalled Kennedy’s old friend David Ormsby-Gore, who as British ambassador saw Kennedy several times that week.
While Kennedy flew off on Air Force One to speaking engagements in the Midwest scheduled months before, Bobby and the other Ex Comm members spent an intense day exploring alternatives before the president returned. Most of the civilian leaders believed in a blockade, while the generals universally called for preemptive air strikes.
The president had not gone off without leaving directives. “This thing is falling apart,” he said to his brother and to Sorensen. “You have to pull it together.” That was all he had to say. There was a private language that Kennedy spoke among his intimates, a lingo in which Bobby and Sorensen were the most fluent, the president’s nod a command, the pursing of his lips a directive. Sorensen, who was the president’s intellectual alter ego, sensed that Kennedy had decided that he must begin actions against the Cuban missiles with a blockade. “That’s not what he said to us,” Sorensen recalled. “But he didn’t have to. He knew what Bobby and I thought.”
Bundy was as close to a pure intellectual as anyone in Ex Comm. His mind turned back and forth between the alternatives, finding him at one moment for air strikes, the next for a blockade, and then perhaps for no action at all. Bobby had no regard for such Hamlet-like musings, and he did not appreciate