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By Root 1387 0

of the whole question of our whole relationship with the Soviet…. Khrushchev … has gotten the missiles out quickly, and I think he had hoped as a result to get the quarantine lifted quickly…. It does look from their side that we have not only tried to widen this to the bombers and lots of other things and have indicated we’re not even going to lift the quarantine and we’re not going to come forward with the statement [promising not to invade]. So he’s in pretty poor position to say what he got out of this thing for his quick action…. As important as the IL-28s are, they are old planes, and they are not as important as not having a showdown over Berlin or a chance of getting somewhere in negotiations…. We want to be very careful right now in the way we play it that [we] not botch ourselves off in order to get at Castro. Or we may lose the chance to see whether or not Khrushchev, now having had this confrontation, is ready to cut his losses. I think basically he does want to get in a position with us where he can put it on the basis of economic competition.”

This was precisely Kennedy’s thinking. If he held firm to that position, a no-invasion pledge to the Soviets had immense political benefits. He would still keep a wary eye on Castro, but he could walk away from this dangerously parochial obsession with Cuba and get on with his work on the broadest, most significant scale.

These NSC meetings were attended by articulate, impassioned men with very different ideas. Bobby spoke in a sweetly tempered tenor voice, but often his words had steel to them. If the Soviets did not remove their planes, he wanted the group to consider alternatives, including “conducting surveillance in such a fashion that they would shoot at us and then we would then have an excuse for going in and dropping bombs on the IL-28s.”

“I think we’ve got a hell of a lot of cards in our hand,” Bobby said a few minutes later. Once the IL-28s were gone, the game was supposedly over. Bobby, though, was holding a new hand that he would not easily put down.

In this new crisis Bobby played a central, complex, and contradictory role. He usually sat with the hawks at the NSC meetings, but to the Russians he often played the dove, a role that his colleagues celebrated as good acting. “Bobby’s notion is that there is only one peace lover in the government entirely surrounded by militarists,” Bundy joked to Kennedy. “Bobby is feeding him [Dobrynin] that stuff, Mr. President.”

On November 9, Bobby invited Bolshakov to his home in Virginia. There the attorney general once again began the private, second-track negotiations that during the past year and a half had been such a mixed blessing. The attorney general disliked all the pomp and posturing of diplomacy. He wanted to cut to the chase, in this case seeking a direct, immediate solution. His colleagues, however, did not always know what he was saying or how much he was giving away of their strategy. In this instance he gave what he called his “personal opinion” that if the Russians would remove the planes “as soon as possible,” the Americans would accept that solution, if “the USSR gave an undertaking that these planes would be piloted only by Soviet aviators” and not by Cubans.

Bolshakov had hardly had time to drive back to Washington when he received a call from Bobby at the White House, telling him that the president would accept only “the rapid removal of the IL-28s from Cuba.” This was the kind of snafu that would have gotten an ambassador sacked, but Bobby continued as an active player in this diplomatic game.

Bobby was his brother’s chosen emissary on the most sensitive missions. Three days later the attorney general took the newest proposal to Dobrynin, promising that if the Russians would agree to remove the planes within a “definite schedule … let’s say, in the course of thirty days,” the Americans would immediately end their shipping quarantine. He said that the president would agree not to invade Cuba, but that would remain a verbal agreement, not part of a signed protocol. In the end Khrushchev accepted