The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [424]
Bobby took a seat across from the president at the Ex Comm meeting and looked into his brother’s drawn face, with “his eyes pained, almost gray.” The burden of this moment was like a physical pressure bearing down on him, “the danger and concern … like a cloud over us all and particularly over the president.”
There was no button Kennedy could press, no gauge he could read to tell whether the situation was about to explode, and every moment there seemed new uncertainties, new elements. Now there were Russian submarines running deep near the Russian freighters closing toward the line of blockade.
“Here is the exact situation,” McNamara said. “We have depth charges that have such a small charge that they can be dropped and they can actually hit the submarine, without damaging the submarine. Practice depth charges. We propose to use those as warning depth charges.”
Kennedy was a navy man and knew that the admirals’ most exquisitely conceived plans often became nothing more than inane doodles once combat began. The president had, if anything, too accurate an imagination about all the possibilities of this moment. And as he sat there, Bobby saw him put his hand up to his face, cover his mouth, and close his fist. That was not his brother as he had ever seen him, and for a moment he worried not about war but about Jack.
This room was full of powerful, intense men speaking ponderous words, but for a moment the brothers stared at each other and Bobby had the sense that “for a few fleeting seconds, it was almost as though no one else was there and he was no longer the president.” As Bobby looked at his brother he recalled later that his mind flashed back to so much that had gone on in the family. Their father had taught his sons to see a pinprick of blue in the blackest sky, but he thought now only of the darkest of times. He thought of how Jack had been ill. He thought of the day at Hyannis Port when they learned of Joe Jr.’s death. He thought of the day Jackie lost a child, when he had been there and his brother had not. He thought “of personal times of strain and hurt,” the memories flashing by with such intensity that he heard not a word of the discussion going on around him.
Out of this miasma of memories, Bobby heard his brother’s voice. “If he doesn’t surface or if he takes some action—takes some action to assist the merchant ship, are we just going to attack him anyway?” the president asked about a Russian submarine shadowing the Soviet freighters. “At what point are we going to attack him?”
Kennedy did not even wait for his military leaders to give their strong response. “I think we ought to wait on that today. We don’t want to have the first thing we attack [be] a Soviet submarine. I’d much rather have a merchant ship.”
John McCone came into the room a few minutes later after gathering the latest intelligence on the Russian ships approaching the imaginary barricade that the Americans had drawn in the Atlantic Ocean. “Well, what do they say they’re doing with those, John?” Kennedy asked.
“Well, they either stopped them or reversed direction,” McCone responded.
In that room there were no audible sighs, no backslapping, and no self-congratulations. “The meeting droned on,” Bobby recalled. “But everyone looked like a different person. For a moment the world had stood still, and now it was going around again.”
The threat of an immediate confrontation on the high seas was over, but the missiles of October remained in place. For Kennedy, the weight of his burden did not lessen, for U-2 photos clearly showed how quickly the missile sites were being built and the IL-28 bombers uncrated and prepared for flight. The longer the president negotiated, the greater the possibility that the