The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [430]
A brave man did not have to leave his shrewdness at home, and Kennedy had worked with immense sagacity and high political duplicity. He kept the deal over the Turkish missiles secret, since he knew that the Republicans would bludgeon him with it in the congressional election. He knew too that the Soviets would keep their pledge of silence; as much as the Soviets disliked him, they disliked the Republicans more.
As the president debated the Cuban situation, he did not stand in an arena with two doors before him marked “Courage” and “Cowardice.” He stood before a multitude of doors, some of them barred, others half open, all marked in an obscure language. When he finally walked through one, some of those watching were convinced that it had been clearly labeled with the word “Courage.” Others swore that it was marked “Cowardice,” either for what they considered his gutless refusal to stand up to the Soviet tiger or conversely for recklessly provoking a needless crisis.
Whatever they thought, though, most of the audience left the arena believing that the drama had ended. But history is rarely resolved in epic confrontations, and much of the drama of the missile crisis began when almost everyone thought it was over. It is a drama that in many respects still haunts America today.
The Soviets moved quickly to remove their missiles, allowing American ships to come close enough to their freighters to photograph the massive closed crates on deck. They were less willing to take home their IL-28 planes since they were not explicitly part of the earlier negotiations and were considered defensive weapons. These planes became a major sticking point in ending the blockade. In the next weeks the Kennedy administration debated how to resolve this matter, not only the IL-28s but the overall relationship between the United States and Cuba.
“Once we’ve got these missiles out … don’t we want to look at everything else against the background of our long-range objectives of eliminating communism in Cuba?” said Dillon at the NSC meeting on November 7. “Don’t we want to press along to get sort of a halfway workable inspection system? … Or you might prefer to get a less good inspection system and strengthen your ability to get rid of them.”
In the White House important new proposals were often not forcefully made but gingerly introduced in the guise of mere alternatives. The clear import of Dillon’s suggestion was that the administration should consider backing away from promising not to invade Cuba and instead contemplate finishing off what it had begun at the Bay of Pigs.
Bundy quickly followed the secretary of the Treasury’s lead, asking whether they were “trying in effect to get a bargain in which we have undertaken or to avoid any bargain.”
Kennedy heard every nuance of his colleagues’ statements, but he made his position emphatically clear. “With this election now over, it seems to me that we ought to just play it straight, say what is pleasing and what is not,” Kennedy said in words forcefully spoken. “We wouldn’t invade unless there was a major upheaval on the island or a reintroduction [of offensive weapons]. Otherwise, our commitment ought to stand. We don’t plan to invade Cuba. But we are ready to give that in a more formal way when they meet their commitments.”
There was yet another voice in this meeting that resonated with neither the narrow interests of one inner governmental constituency nor an ideological mindset. When the president asked Llewellyn Thompson to comment, Kennedy was listening to a mind versed in the nuances of history and the Soviet Union, in a man who pandered to no one. The former ambassador to Moscow knew Khrushchev and the evils of communism firsthand, and far better than anyone in Washington, but he also knew the realities of power in the nuclear age.
“There’s another angle in this that we ought to keep in mind,” Thompson said in his modest, studied manner. “We still have a European aspect