The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [425]
The next afternoon, Thursday, October 25, Kennedy walked in on a scene of Jackie photographing Caroline while Robin Douglas-Home carved an enormous Halloween pumpkin. His wife had just finished being filmed for an NBC special on Washington’s new National Cultural Center. Although the Kennedys were often called American royalty, a coinage so antithetical to American traditions, there was one way in which they exemplified the finest aspects of noble blood. That was the way they let nothing, no personal unhappiness, no private pain, and no public problem, affect their performance of public rituals. By now Jackie knew why her husband had asked her and the children to return from their weekend home. He wanted her with him through this crisis, and he wanted the world to think that life was going on normally at the White House. She had not canceled the television interview today, despite the political drama and the fact that John Jr. was in bed with a 104-degree fever.
Douglas-Home stayed for dinner that evening. This was not a mannered social function but a casual meal. “For God’s sake, don’t mention Cuba to him,” Jackie admonished her guest. Kennedy was involved in the greatest crisis of his presidency, and yet even now at this moment he was fascinated by gossip and trivia, all the flotsam of popular culture and modern society. He sat puffing on a cigar, the evening interrupted by any number of serious phone calls about Cuba. Listening to him through most of this evening, though, was like paging through a wondrously eclectic magazine. Here was an adroit essay on how Lord Beaverbrook ran his newspaper empire. And an ironic, insightful article on Frank Sinatra’s way with women. Then an aside on the infamous photo of a model sucking her thumb while lying on a bearskin rug that ran in Queen, the British magazine. Nothing seemed too trivial or too bizarre for Kennedy this evening as he segued from subject to subject that had nothing in common except his curiosity about them.
Even at the worst of the crisis, Lansdale continued to push the covert role of Operation Mongoose. “Lansdale feels badly cut out of the picture and appears to be seeking to reconstitute the Mongoose Special Group operations during this period of impending crisis,” the CIA’s deputy director wrote his superior, McCone, on October 25. The next day at a Mongoose meeting, at which Bobby was present, McCone “stated that he understood the Mongoose goal was to encourage the Cuban people to take Cuba away from Castro” and that the CIA “would continue to support Lansdale.”
The president seemed almost equally unwilling to face up to the melancholy reality that he might have to promise to live with Castro’s Cuba. When Kennedy talked to Prime Minister Harold Macmillan about the possibility of guaranteeing the territorial integrity of Cuba in exchange for the removal of the missiles, the president told the British leader “that would leave Castro in power,” as if the United States could demand his removal. The only way out of this was to negotiate, yet the experts on the NSC staff were advising “the primary Soviet tactic will be to draw the U.S. into negotiations, meanwhile getting a standstill.”
Khrushchev had indeed been willing to dawdle until the missiles were in place and only then negotiate, but he was realizing that he might be faced with the imminent invasion of Cuba. He wrote a letter to Kennedy that arrived late Friday evening, October 26. If the letter rambled, it was no more than human emotions often ramble. It was a display that some in Washington feared meant that the Soviet leader had become unstable, overly emotional, and dangerously incoherent. Bobby understood, as some of his more phlegmatic colleagues could not, that “it was not incoherent, and the emotion was directed at the death, destruction, and anarchy that nuclear war would bring to his people and all mankind.”
Khrushchev’s letter pleaded with Kennedy to back off his blockade of Soviet ships. In exchange, Khrushchev