The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [419]
In the councils of power, moral arguments are usually unfurled primarily on ceremonial occasions and then put back into the closet. In this instance Bobby held aloft a flag of high principle, but he embedded it in a foundation of steel. If the blockade failed, he would hit Cuba with all the mighty arsenal of America.
Those favoring a blockade went off to write their position paper, while those proposing an air strike prepared a paper justifying their plan.
28
“The Knot of War”
Bobby called his brother in Chicago early Saturday morning, October 20, and asked him to come back early from his trip. When the president arrived in Washington later that morning, he faced one of the most difficult decisions of his presidency. His military chiefs were calling for massive air strikes consisting of eight hundred sorties that would hit all the suspected missile sites, the Russian bombers, and supposed nuclear storage facilities, a great storm of death and destruction descending on the island. Anything less and the surviving missiles might be launched against American cities. It would be done without any warning, or the Russians would hide the missiles, making it impossible to strike them.
Before the Ex Comm meeting, the president went to the White House pool. Swimming was one of the few things that helped his back, and he rarely missed his sessions in the water. This afternoon, though, while Kennedy swam back and forth, Bobby sat next to the pool talking to his brother. To the two Kennedys, Ex Comm was as much “them” as “us,” a varied group that they sought to forge into a coalition of common purpose and strategy. There was no tape recorder by the pool that day, no stenographer, and the brothers planned their strategy with no one listening to their words. At 2:30 P.M.., the brothers walked in together to the meeting in the Oval Room.
This was the decisive moment, and the generals wanted nothing left unused in their great arsenals, possibly including nuclear weapons. Taylor, usually the most prudent of military men, said that he did not fear that “if we used nuclear weapons in Cuba, nuclear weapons would be used against us.” These military leaders had strong, forceful arguments to make, and they made them most articulately in the stern, patriarchal voice of General Taylor, a voice that to Bobby always resonated with courage and usually with wisdom.
By all bureaucratic imperatives, McNamara should have pulled his chair up next to General Taylor and loudly seconded his call for air strikes. But the secretary of Defense knew that massive air strikes were likely to lead to a smoldering, enraged Cuba, with dead Russians strewn across the island, the probability of invasion, and a bloody response from Khrushchev. Bobby and most of the civilians in the room held their ground, arguing that the president should first call for a naval blockade while trying to talk the Soviets into removing their nuclear missiles.
After listening to this intense debate, Kennedy called for a blockade of military goods being shipped to Cuba. This would be no Munich-like acquiescence but what was generally considered to be an act of war. The president struggled to understand all the possible consequences of the various actions. His mind reached further and deeper than the mind of anyone else in the room. He kept coming back to the idea of offering to remove missiles from Turkey and Italy, yet he bristled when Stevenson suggested a straight quid pro quo: the withdrawal of missiles from Turkey and the evacuation of Guantánamo. He scribbled a little note to himself when Dillon starting talking about the Jupiter missiles either being “flops” or in such oversupply that the United States had simply unloaded them on the gullible Turks and Italians.
Now that he had decided on a blockade, Kennedy did not want the world to know that his administration had contemplated the deadly action of unannounced air strikes. “We don’t want