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By Root 1492 0

confrontation on the high seas, he contemplated death on a magnitude beyond anything America had ever known. He did not visualize the ultimate nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States, but a more modest scenario in which five, ten, or fifteen nuclear-tipped missiles hit American cities in the midst of an invasion of Cuba. For the citizens to flee almost certain death, they would need ample notice. The problem, as McCone had noted, was that “whatever was done would involve a great deal of publicity and public alarm,” signaling to Cuba and the Soviets that the invasion was imminent. There, then, was a moral conundrum that the president might soon face.

“It looks really mean, doesn’t it?” the president said to his brother as they sat together in the Cabinet Room with only a few other advisers. “But on the other hand, there wasn’t any other choice. If he’s going to get this mean on this one, in our part of the world … no choice. I don’t think there was a choice.”

“Well, there wasn’t any choice,” Bobby said, reassuring the president. “I mean, you would have been … you would have been impeached.”

“Well, I think I would have been impeached….”

During the summer Kennedy had read Barbara W. Tuchman’s Guns of August, an epic account of how interlocking treaties and misunderstandings had inexorably led in 1914 to a great and tragic world war. History was the president’s favorite lesson book, and Tuchman’s lessons resounded profoundly within his psyche. Kennedy, like Khrushchev, understood that the world was only a miscalculation or two away from oblivion. While the Soviet leader slept in his clothes in his office seeking a solution that would neither dishonor his political faith nor betray his Latin comrades, in Washington Kennedy sought his own way out of the impasse.

As a score or more of Soviet ships approached Cuba, Kennedy pondered endlessly what else he could do. The president did not trust the established channels of government as the only conduits between his administration and the Soviets. As the Kennedys had done before, they reached out to the Russian agent Bolshakov as a conduit to the Kremlin.

Frank Holeman, a former New York Daily News journalist now working for Bobby in the Justice Department, called his Soviet source and asked for a meeting. In such an infinitely delicate situation, Holeman doubtlessly would not have made the contact except under the attorney general’s explicit instructions. This judgment is reinforced by the fact that Holeman told Bolshakov things that only a person conversant with the president’s inner thinking would have known. “Robert Kennedy and his circle consider it possible to discuss the following trade: The U.S. would liquidate its military bases in Turkey and Italy, and the USSR would do the same in Cuba,” Bolshakov wrote in his notes of the meeting. That alone represented the most sophisticated diplomatic suggestion that had surfaced in the Ex Comm meetings. Holeman went beyond that, adding a crucial caveat that at this time had probably been thought of only by the president and Bobby. “The conditions of such a trade can be discussed only in a time of quiet and not when there is the threat of war.”

When Bolshakov did not reply within a few hours, Bobby asked his friend Charley Bartlett to call the Russian and berate him. “I called Bolshakov, and I said this is outrageous what the Russians are doing,” recalled Bartlett, who may also have broached the possibility of a missile trade. “I said Bobby feels a betrayal.” A few minutes later Bartlett received a call from the attorney general, who, after apparently listening to a wiretap of the conversation, felt that Bartlett had gone too far in his rage.

This was not a dispute that could be solved by calculated bursts of outrage. Bobby did not seem to grasp that there was a dangerous aspect to this ad hoc covert diplomacy. The attorney general did not have a diplomat’s subtle skills. As much as he cared for his brother and loved his country, he risked stirring up the waters to such an extent that more dispassionate negotiators