19

THE DISPUTE OVER ENRIQUE FOGATA’S POWERS OF PERCEPTION ENDED WITH a victory for Bill Harvey. On October 14, the walls of the Directorate of Intelligence were breached. Intelligence had to concede to Harvey that the photographs brought back that morning showed excavations for the installation of an intercontinental ballistic site outside a Cuban town named San Cristóbal. Since McCone was taking a belated honeymoon in Italy with his new Catholic wife, and was located in a small Italian village, Harvey had to employ open-speak on the phone; his syntax was reminiscent of how we used to translate Latin at St. Matthew’s. “Sir,” said Harvey, “that which you, and you alone, said would happen, did.” McCone remarked that he was coming home forthwith.

There had, of course, been intimations of such crisis already. On October 10, Senator Keating of New York announced the presence of nuclear missiles in Cuba (which made it evident that we had our own leaks in the basement at Langley), and in the confidence that this information was bona fide, the House Republican Caucus spoke of Cuba as “their biggest Republican asset,” a reference to the congressional elections in November. Clare Boothe Luce wrote an editorial for the October issue of Life equal to a clarion call: “What is now at stake is the question not only of American prestige, but of American survival,” and I thought of that delicately boned blond lady whom I had met one night at the Stable after my return to Washington from the Farm, Mrs. Luce a beauty in the style of my own mother (although somewhat more of a beauty since Mrs. Luce seemed to give off a silvery light), and I pondered the exaltation she must feel at having the means to call the world to war.

After October 14, Washington began to remind me of a ship with an unstanchable leak; one could measure the spread of seepage from first light to evening dark. People congregated on the phone all week. To work in the capital was to become aware all over again that Washington was a hierarchy of secrets and one could find one’s relation to History by the number of confidants who would give you access to their collection. Rumors rolled across the city in the rhythm of a powerful surf. In the White House, in the Executive Office Building, and at State, office lights were burning all night long. People drove by the White House at one in the morning to look at the office lights. Rosen was on the phone with me five times a day to present his latest find; if I did not wish to verify or deny it, nonetheless I had to. I owed Rosen too many markers to be able to refuse him now that he was calling them in. I had time to think that if we were all obliterated in a nuclear holocaust, Rosen would not want to go out into that atomized empyrean holding onto unpaid debts.

When I went on errands to the Pentagon, the high officers I passed in the corridors had the look of wild moose in the Maine woods. That the approach of war brought on tumescence was verified forever for me. I was walking by men who did not know whether they would be heroes in a week; or dead; or, for that matter, promoted; their collective anxiety was on fire. So many of these officers had spent their lives getting ready for a great moment—it was as if one lived as a vestal virgin who would be allowed to copulate just once, but in a high temple: The act had better be transcendent, or one had chosen the wrong life. This epiphanic vision of my military brethren gave me less acute pleasure after I recognized that it applied to me as well; if we went to war with Cuba, I felt obliged to get into combat too. I wanted to be in battle when the bomb fell. If flesh and psyche were obliterated at one stroke of a nuclear moment, perhaps my soul would not be so scattered if the death were honorable. Could anyone claim that was less than faith?

I was back in Florida by the 21st of October, and next evening President Kennedy announced to the nation that offensive missile bases large enough for intercontinental weapons had been installed in Cuba by Soviet technicians. The Soviet Union had lied to the United States, the President said. Therefore, a naval and air quarantine of Cuba would now be imposed to halt all further shipments of Soviet military equipment. If missiles were launched by Cuba, the U.S. was prepared to retaliate against this “clandestine, reckless, and provocative threat to world peace.”

I listened in the company of Dix Butler. The bars were filled in Little Havana and Cuban exiles were dancing in the streets. I was enraged. All of my country might yet be destroyed, everyone I knew maimed or dead, but the exiles were happy because they had a chance to get back to Cuba; I remember thinking that they were an unbelievably selfish and self-centered tribe, still furious at the loss of the wealth they might have been amassing in Cuba, although now they were making money in Miami; middle-class Cubans, I decided, had a prodigiously large sense of the rights due to themselves, and little sense at all of the rights due to others. They would gamble all of my great nation against Fidel Castro’s beard. This set of thoughts blazed their way through me so quickly that they were soon gone and I was dancing in the street with Cuban men and women, drunken Hubbard, who usually didn’t dance and might have lost a girl because of that; now he could move to Cuban rhythms—for an hour, the pelvis of Herrick Hubbard escaped its bonds.

Afterward, Butler and I dived into a bar, had a few drinks, and made a pledge. “I,” he said, “am tired of sending men out. I never know when they won’t come back. Hubbard, in an emergency like this, we can count on Bill Harvey. He’ll let us go out with the boatmen.”

“Yes,” I said, “I want to dig my feet into Cuban soil.” I was very drunk.

“Yes,” he said, “when the war starts, some of us have to be there to meet our troops.”

We clasped hands on the profound value of this.

In the morning I awoke to great fear. I was bound to a compact built on booze. A little later, following the raw instincts of a hangover, I went to my postal box and found a long letter from Kittredge. I read it standing in the post office at Coconut Grove, and it seemed as if she were sending it to me from the other side of the world.

October 22, 1962, 11:00 P.M.

Dearest Harry,

These days, which may be the most momentous we will know, have put a new kind of strain on one’s control. To listen to my friends reacting to news which I, three days closer to the source, know is now obsolete, has given a glimpse of why people go mad and shout to the rooftops.

You see, Hugh and I have been installed in a most peculiar association with the brothers K. I have indicated some of this to you, but as time goes on, the friendship has taken on more importance, and, then, I haven’t told you all.

Jack became fascinated some months ago with a Soviet official, obviously KGB, about whom you wrote to me while you were in Uruguay. It is the same Boris Masarov, and he works out of the Russian Embassy here, although loosely attached. Apparently, Khrushchev is wild about whatever special quality it is that Masarov possesses—perhaps it is the sad, ironic Russian wisdom that Khrushchev apparently lacks. In any event, the Soviet Premier reached down through the ranks to pluck this man up to the very top; Masarov was sent over to America as Khrushchev’s personal liaison to the Kennedy brothers. I have noticed that Jack likes playing a couple of possibilities at once. In relation to the Soviets, this means a representative to embody the hard line, and another for the soft; depending on events, the President can move toward a freeze or a thaw in relations. Khrushchev also plays with two hands, but has added another element, a wild card.

Masarov seems to be in Washington to initiate conversations with Bobby—these, presumably, to be passed on to Jack; the talks, apparently, range far and wide. For instance, I know from Hugh that one of Masarov’s main functions is to leaven relations between Khrushchev and the brothers K. The Premier, apparently, is a man who likes to converse with his hands on people. He may send you to Siberia next week, but in the interim, let’s keep it on a warm and personal level. So, for instance, Bobby and Boris were in close touch during the last Berlin crisis, and it was Masarov who was told by Bobby that the United States would certainly fight if the Soviets didn’t remove their tanks from the Brandenburg Gate. Do you know, Masarov passed it on to Khrushchev and within twenty-four hours the tanks were gone. In turn, Masarov tells Bobby that in Khrushchev’s opinion, America is still run by Rockefellers, J. P. Morgans, and Wall Street, but he is beginning to see that his old ideas about the Kennedys have to be changed.

So much for the love affair. My husband says not to be carried away by it for one moment; Hugh has been familiar with Masarov’s dossier for years and says he is one of the most talented and brilliant KGB men that the Soviets have. That sad and winning charm conceals a faculty considerably more executive.

Perhaps there is a principle agreed upon here by both Khrushchev and the Kennedys: If your brightest people are usually not where they ought to be in the ordered establishment, then pluck them up and use them for special ventures. I think persons so anointed are chosen because they can speak their own mind, or listen incomparably well. I do a little of the first and a great deal of the second.

Concerning my case, Bobby and Jack are not nearly so interested in my powers of counsel, but do like to hear themselves speak candidly (which they cannot do all that often with working subordinates or opponents). I am called on, therefore, to listen. Hugh is called on to speak up. Be assured that we saw a lot of the Kennedys last week.

They were enraged at Khrushchev and they were not feeling too good about Masarov. For months, Boris had been giving Bobby assurances that the Premier would never send nuclear missiles to Cuba. I suppose the operative principle is that you never tell a lie until it will be maximally effective. Of course, Masarov claims that he is as surprised as the Kennedys.

No matter where the lie originates, you can be certain that Jack is, at this moment, as personally ill-disposed toward the Soviets as he has ever been; in such a frame of mind, he is nonetheless obliged to withstand some powerful pressures being applied by the Executive Committee of the National Security Council. (Let me tell you that it is one committee I pay attention to!) Everyone in White House circles is using the words hawk and dove these days, and be assured, some formidable hawks are perched up in Excom. As of October 17, a lot of them were all-out for bombing Cuba immediately. Just obliterate the missile bases! You find among these high-force presences such men as Maxwell Taylor and Dean Acheson, most of the Joint Chiefs, plus McCloy, and Nitze and McCone. Bobby, who has been the leader of the doves, has argued that any surprise bombing would involve killing tens of thousands of civilians. “It’s a moral question,” he said to me in that wonderful, innocent way of his. For a very tough young man, he is always discovering the wheel. But I know the thought of death does bother him very much these days. Neither Jack nor Bobby has ever spoken word one to me about Marilyn Monroe, but I feel that her suicide shook them somewhat. The death of others seems awfully palpable to Bobby these days. And yet there he is presiding over the Executive Committee of the National Security Council while they argue whether to initiate a blockade (McNamara, Gilpatric, Ball, Stevenson, and Sorensen) or, as the hawks keep insisting, loose that air strike without prior notification of war.

“That,” Bobby tells them, “is right along the lines of Pearl Harbor.”

He made the mistake of saying as much to Dean Acheson, who was sufficiently incensed then to take a private lunch with Jack last Thursday, October 18. Dean Acheson is proud of the fact that he detests emotional and intuitive responses. He said, “Mr. President, there is no choice. You have to call an air strike. The more comprehensive, the better.”

Well, Acheson may be old, but he is still as imperious as Cardinal Richelieu. He was not Secretary of State for too little during the early years of the Cold War, and the few liberal tendencies he might have retained were badly chewed up by his defense of Alger Hiss. Acheson, but for that old gray mustache, even looks like a hawk. “One can analyze the problem from this or that approach,” he tells Jack, “but there is only one effective response. Obliteration of missile capability.”

“I am not happy with that,” said Jack Kennedy, “and Bobby keeps coming around to remind me that such an air strike smacks completely of Pearl Harbor.”

“I cannot believe you said that,” Acheson told him. “Bobby’s clichés are silly. Pearl Harbor could not be more thoroughly useless as an analogy. It is only a label to hide behind. The duty of the presidency is to analyze intolerable problems, and come up with appropriately clear answers. Moral anguish is worth less in the sight of heaven than skilled and disciplined analysis. Tears can be the subtlest creation of the muddled and the weak.” Harry, I promise you, Dean Acheson does talk with just this sort of authority. I would hate to be a small bird in his talons.

Later that afternoon, however, a visit-and-search blockade of Soviet ships approaching Cuba was more or less decided upon by the Executive Committee (McNamara now in the lead) and sent up as a proposal to the President. Next day, Acheson appeared again and said the question had to be reopened; dealing with the Russians was a contest of wills. Since a showdown was going to be inevitable, such confrontations lost their force if too long delayed. A blockade was delay. Secretary Dillon agreed. So did McCone. General Taylor told them that an air strike, to be effective, had to come as quickly as possible. To be gotten ready for Sunday morning, they had to decide it right now, here, on Thursday afternoon. If for Monday, then a decision no later than tomorrow.

If I had been in these councils, I cannot say how I would have reacted. I am a dove, I suppose, but I feel unspeakable anger toward the Soviets. Harry, do you know, listening to Bobby, it came upon me that he is wise. I am beginning to realize he has balance. That same afternoon, in the face of Acheson’s scorn, he told Excom that the world would see an air strike as a sneak attack. We had never been that kind of country, he said, not in one hundred and seventy-five years. It was not in our tradition. We certainly needed forceful action to make the Russians realize that we were serious, but we also had to leave them room to maneuver. Assuming they could recognize that they were out of line on Cuba, we ought to allow them a way to pull back. Blockade was the answer.

That speech of Bobby’s to the Executive Committee proved convincing on Thursday. By Saturday, however, the question was wide-open to debate again. McNamara argued that an air strike would kill hundreds if not thousands of Russians stationed on the missile bases, and we could not predict Khrushchev’s reaction to that event. An air strike, therefore, would lose us control of the situation. An escalation might commence. That could lead to an all-out war. Maxwell Taylor disagreed. This was our last chance, he argued, to destroy the missiles. The Russians, once they no longer possessed such capability in Cuba, would not attempt an escalation; our nuclear powers were superior to theirs. McGeorge Bundy and the Chiefs of Staff supported Taylor.

The President did not give his decision until yesterday, Sunday morning. At that point, he chose the blockade, and began writing the speech he delivered to America tonight. I know he was dreading the political repercussions. The Republicans have been screaming for weeks that there are missiles in Cuba, and he is only now admitting it to the public. So, the loss can be large. Politically speaking, it would have been more advantageous to order the air strike. Then the Republicans would have had to unite behind him.

In any event, we must now wait. It is going to take a few days for the Russian ships to reach the blockade. I am feeling so emotional tonight that I picked Christopher up out of his bed and hugged the sleeping angel so hard that he woke and said, “It’s all right, Mommy, everything will be all right.”

I have the strongest sense of dread, and miss you, Harry, you are dear to me. Do not do anything insane with people like Dix Butler.

Love,

Kittredge