The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [423]
Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador, recalls that during the crisis he and Bobby “had almost daily conversations,” a relationship that Bobby later downplayed to several dramatic face-to-face meetings. That evening, Tuesday, October 23, both men agree that the attorney general went to see the ambassador in his office on the third floor of the Russian embassy. The attorney general was the least diplomatic of men sent on the most diplomatic of missions. Bobby might disdain the State Department as a haven for pinstriped prissy men measuring out their lives in teatime social niceties. The reality was that a diplomat’s task was to put forth a precise rendering of his nation’s positions while maintaining some semblance of civility, keeping a dialogue going even in the worst of crises. Bobby, however, was at his best when his emotions were wedded to facts and he could speak as a fiery truth-sayer.
Bobby, as Dobrynin recalled, was “in a state of agitation” that accentuated the inevitable tension of this moment: he “was far from being a sociable person and lacked a proper sense of humor…. He was impulsive and excitable.” In his memo of the meeting, Bobby remembered telling the Soviet ambassador that his brother felt that “he had a very helpful personal relationship with Mr. Khrushchev … a mutual trust and confidence between them on which he could rely.” When politicians praise each other, their feelings are often the precise opposite of what they say, and Bobby’s words were as platitudinous as they were untrue. Bobby then laid out what he considered the whole litany of betrayal in the most vivid detail, accusing the Soviet leaders of being “hypocritical, misleading and false.” The Russian could give only a diplomat’s most pathetic response—that he knew nothing of what his nation purportedly had done. Bobby was full of righteous anger, which an envoy from the State Department would never have expressed so dramatically to the Russian ambassador. The Soviets believed that they had legitimate policy goals in Cuba that they were pursuing by legitimate means. But they had to understand that they had triggered an honest rage and sense of betrayal in a powerful enemy. The Soviet ambassador sent a message to Moscow that gave “an idea of the genuine state of agitation in the president’s inner circle.”
Despite the merciless tension, Kennedy had a preternatural coolness about him. That same evening, October 23, the president and first lady attended a dinner party at the White House for fourteen guests, including the maharaja of Jaipur and his wife, journalist Benno Graziani and his wife, Nicole, and two old friends, British ambassador Ormsby-Gore and Charley Bartlett. Every person in the room was aware of the immense drama that was taking place, and yet the tone of the evening was one of convivial sociality, without a mention of missiles or Cuba.
At around 11:00 P.M.., Bobby arrived at the White House. He told the president and Ormsby-Gore of his difficult meeting with Dobrynin. The moment of climax was arriving quickly, too quickly, out on the open seas. To gain more time Ormsby-Gore suggested that Kennedy move the quarantine line from eight hundred to five hundred miles, a proposal that Kennedy accepted. At around midnight, when Nicole Graziani was scrambling eggs in the private quarters for a midnight repast before the group departed, Kennedy turned to the young woman. “He [Kennedy] took her hand,” remembered her husband, Benno, “and he said, ‘You know, maybe tomorrow we will be at war.’…”
On Wednesday morning, October 24, the United States ratcheted up its military readiness to DEFCON 2, only one step below war. The air force’s massive B-52 bombers loaded with nuclear weapons flew twenty-four hours a day, refueled by in-flight KC-135 tankers, ready to enact their savage revenge even