October 19, 1997
Profile in Caution
John F. Kennedy's finest hours probably occurred during the gravest confrontation of the cold war.
By BARRY GEWEN
More on the Cuban Missile Crisis, from The New York Times Archives
THE KENNEDY TAPES
Inside the White House
During the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Edited by Ernest R. May
and Philip D. Zelikow.
Illustrated. 728 pp. Cambridge, Mass.:
The Belknap Press/
Harvard University Press. $35.
n Tuesday, Oct. 23, 1962, the eighth day of the Cuban missile crisis, John F. Kennedy and his advisers turned their attention to the prospect of a nuclear attack from Cuba if things got out of hand. An expert on civil defense explained to them that 92 million Americans were vulnerable and that protective shelter was available for only 40 million. Kennedy asked about evacuating the cities and was told that there was little or no protection against radioactive fallout in the rural areas, though much would depend on the size of the attack. ''Five or ten or fifteen'' missiles, the President said, and then, agonizing aloud, he wondered: ''What is it that we ought to do for the population in affected areas, in case the bombs go off? Is there something we can do?''
It is not hyperbolic to say, as many have, that the Cuban missile crisis was the single most dangerous episode in the history of mankind. Certainly, after Kennedy's speech of Oct. 22 announcing the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba and the imposition of a naval blockade around the island, most Americans understood that they were facing the gravest confrontation of the cold war. A Gallup poll of Oct. 23 revealed that one out of five believed World War III was about to begin. Had people been aware of the nature of the talks taking place in the White House, the number of those expecting catastrophe would surely have been much higher.
With ''The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis,'' we now have the chance to sit in on those talks. It has long been known that Kennedy secretly recorded his meetings with the special executive committee (Ex Comm) that he assembled to deal with the crisis (his advisers included Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, Robert Kennedy and Adlai Stevenson). But little of the material had been released before late 1996. Around that time, Ernest R. May, the Charles Warren Professor of American History at Harvard, and Philip D. Zelikow, an associate professor of public policy at Harvard, hired a team of court reporters to transcribe the hissing, crackling, utterly low-fi recordings. Next, they compared the transcriptions with the tapes themselves, listening over and over again to try to make sense of the most obscure passages (not always successfully). For those Ex Comm sessions that were not recorded, they have produced connecting text based on other documents -- personal notes, minutes of meetings, memoirs. Finally, they have provided explanatory interpolations, a scene-setting introduction and an instructive conclusion. The effort was herculean (''The laboriousness of this process would be hard to exaggerate,'' they write) but well worth it. For ''The Kennedy Tapes'' is a splendid achievement, as powerful and exciting a book as one is likely to read this year.
How is it possible for a volume that reproduces days of taped discussions to be a page turner? Unstructured reality, after all, has a way of being incoherent, digressive and tedious. Yet that is not the case here -- in large part because all the participants were so focused on the task at hand. The possibility of nuclear holocaust concentrated their minds wonderfully. The exchanges often seem as pure as a Platonic dialogue, as stripped down as a catechism: ''McNamara: 'We blockade offensive weapons.' Bundy: 'How do we do that?' McNamara: 'We search every ship.' '' What is more, the crisis, as it played out, contained its own coherence. It was one of those rare public events -- Watergate was another -- that had a strong narrative line: a beginning, a middle and an end.
THERE is an obvious comparison to be made with the Watergate tapes. Listening in on Richard Nixon and his associates is indeed like sampling messy reality: conversations ramble, people drift off, comments are elliptical. Overhearing these vindictive and resentful conspirators hatching their plots, we tend to feel voyeuristic, even grimy. The missile crisis tapes, by contrast, are elevating. They convey a sense of privilege, a conviction that we are privy to deliberations at the very highest level. This is how we want our leaders to behave.
For all the thousands of pages on the missile crisis, these tapes possess an immediacy, a ''What would you do?'' quality, that no historical account can match. The missiles are first identified from U-2 photographs on Monday, Oct. 15, and a day later the President and his advisers gather to go over their options. At first, the choices all seem military: a rapid air strike to destroy the weapons; a larger attack that would also target aircraft, airfields and storage areas; or a full-scale invasion. Kennedy refuses to rush into a decision, but he does say that first day: ''We're certainly going to do No. 1. We're going to take out these missiles.'' The idea of a blockade to give Nikita Khrushchev breathing space and the chance to back down emerges only gradually, and on Saturday, Oct. 20, two days before the President is to speak to the nation, the Ex Comm is still deeply divided between air strike and blockade.
Knowing what we know today, we tend to root for the doves. History is on their side. But the truth is that the case for a blockade was not open and shut; the hawks had strong arguments. Any delay or advance notice of military action, they pointed out, would allow the Russians to speed up construction of the missile bases, or move the missiles to more secure positions. Delay would also give Khrushchev the chance to solidify his public commitment to Fidel Castro, making any showdown over Cuba that much more dangerous. Before he decided that an unannounced American attack would bear too close a resemblance to Pearl Harbor, Bobby Kennedy called the blockade option ''a very slow death.'' And Senator J. William Fulbright, that dove of doves a few years later during the Vietnam era, contended that a blockade would set up a direct United States-Soviet Union confrontation, rather than one between the United States and Cuba. It was, he said, ''the worst alternative.'' He favored an ''all-out'' invasion, ''and as quickly as possible.''
The President had sympathy for these arguments, and though he settled on the blockade as the least dangerous path, he was the most skeptical of doves. He was convinced that he was really only buying himself a few days' time before being forced to choose between air strikes and an invasion. ''Whatever we do is filled with hazards,'' he told a delegation of Congressional leaders. ''If we stop one Russian ship, it means war. If we invade Cuba, it means war. There's no telling.'' Having made his decision, Kennedy seemed to approach the future much as the French Army is said to have marched off to Waterloo: without fear and without hope.
The intensity of the tapes abates somewhat at this point. The strategy has been determined, and now it's a matter of implementing it -- getting the message out, maintaining surveillance of Cuba and, above all, waiting to see if any Soviet ships will have to be intercepted. Over the next few days the discussions become faster paced, if less gripping, as the Ex Comm struggles to keep a dozen balls in the air. The Russians, meanwhile, are continuing construction of the bases, as the critics of the blockade insisted they would, and the question at the White House becomes: What do we do next? On the evening of Friday, Oct. 26, Khrushchev seems to provide an answer. He sends a secret cable apparently offering to remove the missiles in return for an American pledge not to invade Cuba. A resolution of the crisis is in sight, and the members of the Ex Comm go to bed that night with, in May and Zelikow's words, a ''sense of cautious optimism.''
BUT they wake on Saturday to the worst day of the crisis, the moment when events genuinely seem to be spinning out of control. Work on the missile bases is still going on. A Russian ship, the Grozny, is fast approaching the blockade line, threatening the face-off that everyone dreads. News arrives that a U-2 is missing over Cuba. (Later reports confirm that it has been shot down and the pilot killed.) Worst of all, Khrushchev appears to have retracted his offer of the night before. Instead, in a public statement that increases the pressure on the White House, he says he will trade Russian missiles in Cuba for American missiles in Turkey.
There is an obvious parity to this new offer -- ''To any man at the United Nations or any other rational man, it will look like a very fair trade,'' Kennedy says -- but it presents the White House with an excruciating problem, raising an issue that has haunted the Ex Comm since the beginning of the crisis. If the proposal is accepted, the Turks in particular and NATO in general will strenuously (and rightly) complain that the United States has sold out its allies for its own national interests; NATO will be weakened, perhaps irrevocably. If, on the other hand, the proposal is rejected, World War III could start over a few missiles that even the Pentagon acknowledges are obsolete. The discussions of a very long day circle round and round this dilemma. Eventually, Kennedy resolves to send Khrushchev a public message calling for the dismantlement of the missiles in exchange for a no-invasion pledge, and a private message indicating that a deal on the Turkish missiles can be hammered out in the future. This plan works. The next day Khrushchev announces that the missiles will be removed from Cuba. Although much negotiating remains to be done, the missile crisis has ended. The tapes conclude with Kennedy ordering a silver commemorative for all the members of the Ex Comm.
As with any good book about a great event, this one has a little of everything -- suspense, humor, pathos, even darkest-before-the-dawn melodrama. But what one is most likely to take away from it is the image of a Lincolnesque Kennedy, lonely, melancholy, grimly persevering. There came a moment on that final, frightening day when a subtle gap had opened up between the President and his advisers. They continued to regard military force as one option among many. But after a week and a half of exchanges in which the full dimension of what was at stake had become brutally clear, the person who had to make the decision that could unleash nuclear war seemed to arrive at the view that violence could be used only as a last resort. May and Zelikow write, ''Saturday, Oct. 27, may well have been the finest hours of John F. Kennedy's public life.'' Of course, if the blockade strategy had failed -- and the role of stupid luck should never be discounted -- critics of the President would be using this volume to show that he was weak when he should have been strong. But given how events did turn out, the aptly titled ''Kennedy Tapes'' stands as a lasting testament to one man's judgment and character.
Barry Gewen is an editor at The New York Times Book Review.
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