The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [524]
630 “Oh shit!”: Brugioni, p. 223.
630 “general dissatisfaction…”: memorandum for the record, CIA, “Mongoose Meeting with the Attorney General,” October 16, 1962, FRUS.
630 There were two meetings: The participants in the Ex Comm varied somewhat from meeting to meeting. They included John and Robert Kennedy, and from the State Department, not only Secretary Rusk but Charles Bohlen, a Russia expert (who in the midst of the crisis left to become ambassador to France), Undersecretary of State George Ball, Deputy Secretary U. Alexis Johnson, Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America Edwin M. Martin, and, newly returned from the Soviet Union, Ambassador at Large Llewellyn Thompson. The Defense Department contingent, headed by Secretary McNamara, included his deputy Roswell Gilpatric, Assistant Secretary Paul Nitze, and General Maxwell Taylor, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. The CIA group, led by McCone, included his deputy Marshall Carter and the head of NPIC, Arthur Lundahl. The other members included Vice President Johnson, UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson, McGeorge Bundy, Ted Sorensen, Secretary of the Treasury C. Douglas Dillon, USIA Deputy Directot Don Wilson, and Kenneth O’Donnell. Others were called in at various times.
631 “What is the strategic …”: Ex Comm meeting, October 16, 1962, tapes 28 and 28A, JFKPL. The Ex Comm meetings were secretly tape-recorded by President Kennedy. They have been transcribed and annotated in May and Zelikow, The Kennedy Tapes. Sheldon M. Stern, the longtime historian at the JFKPL, argued in the Atlantic in May 2000 that there are so many errors in the early editions that “The Kennedy Tapes cannot be relied on as an accurate historical document.” Stern expands his argument in “Source Material: The 1997 Published Transcripts of the JFK Cuban Missile Crisis Tapes: Too Good to Be True?” Presidential Studies Quarterly, September 2000, pp. 586-93. The author has listened to the tapes and, like Stern, found differences at various places from the May and Zelikow transcription. Students of this period are strongly advised to listen to the tapes themselves and to read a new edition of The Kennedy Tapes that promises to deal with the pattern of errors that Stern so assiduously discovered. They are doubly urged to do so since the author has radically truncated the dialogue at the Ex Comm meeting (while attempting to remain true to the spirit of these exchanges) in order to write a narrative that the average reader will find of tolerable length. Individual exchanges are cited from the tapes themselves. Dialogue from meetings that were not taped is cited from other sources.
632 Kennedy and Bohlen sauntered: Merry, p. 386.
633 By the time: May and Zelikow, p. 122.
633 “If we wanted to …”: Ex Comm meeting, October 18, 1962, 11:00 A.M., tapes 30 and 30A, JFKPL.
634 the top White House: LL interviews with Malcolm Kilduff and Myer Feldman.
634 “We figured …”: LL interview with Myer Feldman.
634 “I think it’s the whole …”: The secret tape recordings of this and other Ex Comm meetings for the most part parallel other contemporaneously narrated accounts of the events, but in this instance there are major differences. McCone was a meticulous man, but his account of this meeting does not even mention Robert Kennedy’s passionate doubts as recorded. It may be that McCone considered them unimportant or did not record them because they went against his own considered judgment. Memorandum for the file, Washington, D.C., October 19, 1962, CIA, DCI/ McCone file, Job 80-B01285A, “Meetings with the President (top secret),” drafted by McCone, FRUS.
634—35 “Cuba belonged …”: memorandum of conversation, Washington, D.C., October 18, 1962, 5:00 P.M., NSC files, drafted by Akalovsky on October 21, 1962, approved by the White House on October 23, 1962, FRUS.
635 “The president of the …”: TD, p. 33.
635 Only now: May and Zelikow believe that the president was “possibly accompanied by his brother,” but there