The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [428]
“We should retaliate against the SAM [surface-to-air missile] site and announce that if any other planes are fired on, we will come back and take it,” General Taylor asserted.
“We can’t very well send a U-2 over there, can we now, and have a guy killed again tomorrow?” Kennedy mused aloud.
“I think you’re going to have great pressure internally within the United States too, to act quickly, with our planes always being shot down while we sit around here,” Dillon said minutes later, a tacit criticism of Kennedy’s apparent passivity.
In this decision-filled day, even the taciturn, restrained Dillon sounded strained. Of all people, the usually undiplomatic Bobby advanced a possible solution.
Stevenson was worried that the proposal to stop the blockade in exchange for Soviet removal of the missiles sounded too harsh. “I think it’s just an acceptance of what he [Khrushchev] says [in his first letter],” Bobby said. “Don’t you think?”
“Actually, I think Bobby’s formula is a good one,” Sorensen said soon afterward. “Does it sound like an ultimatum if we say: ‘And we are accepting your offer in your letter last night. And therefore there’s no need to talk about these other things’?” In doing so, they would not mention Khrushchev’s second letter with its talk of Turkish missiles.
These Ex Comm meetings were the stage on which the president spoke his public lines, doubly recorded by the ever-whirling tape and the careful memos and recollections of the men around the large table. In this public forum Kennedy did not criticize the mindless bellicosity of LeMay or berate Stevenson for what he considered his endless timidity. Nor did Kennedy voice his uncertainties here or contemplate policies in words that could be used against him by men whose memories might last longer than their loyalty.
After this day of endless discussions, Kennedy met in the Oval Office with a select group of about eight that included Bundy, McNamara, Sorensen, Rusk, and Bobby. These men would keep Kennedy’s secrets. They decided that Bobby should meet with Dobrynin. Kennedy trusted Bobby, not simply because the attorney general was his closest blood kin. He trusted him because Bobby was closest to him in his view of the crisis and his determination to seek a solution. Bobby was to tell the Soviet ambassador that in exchange for removing the Cuban missiles the United States would end the blockade and promise not to invade Cuba. Beyond that, he was to tell the diplomat that as soon as matters calmed down, the Turkish missiles would be quietly removed.
Dobrynin met Bobby in his Justice Department office on the evening of Saturday, October 27. The ambassador noticed a dramatic change in the president’s emissary since he had met with him four days before. He appeared exhausted, as though he were living sleeplessly on adrenaline. Kennedy told the diplomat in the boldest terms that unless the Soviets took their nuclear missiles home, the United States would remove them with the full force of arms. Bobby’s voice was tense with emotion when he told the ambassador that the American generals and others were “spoiling for a fight.” Bobby was under tremendous strain. He knew that if this proposal failed, the hawks would rise in such magnitude that they would darken the skies.
In this meeting all that mattered were the final exchanges, not the unpleasantries and recriminations. “What about the missile bases in Turkey?” Dobrynin asked finally, after Bobby had spent his anger.
Early in the crisis, the prescient Kennedy asked himself that very question. From the American perspective, the immediate negotiations ended when Bobby laid out the deal to the Soviet ambassador and told him that the details had to remain secret. This was a final offer; if it was turned down, the generals would have their war.
The Robert F. Kennedy who sat there talking intensely to the Soviet ambassador was not the same Robert F. Kennedy of two weeks before. No one else in those endless Ex Comm meetings had so dramatically shifted his perspective. General LeMay did