The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [429]
When Bobby talked to Dobrynin that final evening, the ambassador recalled that Bobby was almost crying. These were not calculated tears, but honest ones for his brother, his family, his nation, and the world. Bobby had not forsaken his personal agenda. Dobrynin recalled that at a follow-up meeting the attorney general said “that some day—who knows?—he might run for president, and his prospects could be damaged if this secret deal about the missiles in Turkey were to come out.”
Khrushchev lived among hawks and doves too. Castro himself had admonished the Soviet leader to consider responding to an American invasion of Cuba with a nuclear first strike against the United States. Marxists see history as the story of immense social, economic, and political forces working their way across time. To Castro, the slaughter of millions was a noble sacrifice if the Marxist system survived and out of its ashes rose a Communist paradise. To those who view history that way, writing about an individual life is like chronicling the life of a toe, a hand, or some other appendage that means nothing without the body to which it is attached.
If ever history has been the chronicle of individual human character moving through time, though, it is in these thirteen days, and that is as true for the Marxist Khrushchev as for the Kennedys. The Soviet leader decided that he had to take his missiles home, and he saw the removal of the Turkish missiles as no better than a paltry consolation prize. “In order to save the world, we must retreat,” Khrushchev told the Soviet Presidium. These were not words that a leader could speak often or loudly. Khrushchev had blinked, but it was probably not Kennedy’s tough stance that had set his eyes aflutter as much as Russia’s military weakness and the prospect of the world’s being engulfed in a war of horrors beyond human imagination.
On Sunday morning, October 28, Radio Moscow broadcast Khrushchev’s message around the world: the Soviet Union “has given a new order to dismantle the arms which you [Kennedy] described as offensive, and to crate and return them to the Soviet Union.”
During the two-week crisis the great themes of the president’s life came into focus. In 1947, as a freshman congressman, Kennedy had prophesied a time when the Soviets would have massive atomic armaments and there would be “the greatest danger of … a conflict [that] would truly mean the end of the world.” During his years in Congress, he had seen the Soviet Union as the most serious threat to his nation, and as president he feared that he would face this ultimate confrontation. He had been in part responsible for this greatest of cold war crises, since without the relentless covert attacks on Cuba, the missiles of October never would have arrived in Cuba.
The other great theme of his life was courage, to him a man’s highest virtue. He had written about it, and both in the war and in his long struggle with ill health, he had walked with a hero’s bold stride. Political courage is struck of even sterner stuff, and many questioned Kennedy’s mettle when it came to the hard questions of his age.
Kennedy had stood apart from his advisers in his intellectual detachment. He did not get lost in the emotional minutiae of the moment. His eyes searched ceaselessly for a safe harbor in turbulent seas.
Kennedy had been the first to mention the missiles in Turkey as a possible bargaining chip. That decision required intellectual courage to seek a solution so far away from the narrow straits of diplomatic combat. He had at the same time finessed Generals LeMay