Gangsterismo by Jack Colhoun

Author:Jack Colhoun
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Bisac Code 1: HIS036060 / POL036000
ISBN: eBook ISBN: 9781935928904
Publisher: OR Books
Published: 2013-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

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President Kennedy’s senior advisers remained in the Cabinet Room after a CIA briefing on the Soviet missiles in Cuba on October 16. In this and subsequent meetings of the ad hoc Executive Committee (ExCom) of the National Security Council, Kennedy and his aides struggled to assess the significance of the missiles in Cuba and what to do about them.

Kennedy asked Secretary of State Dean Rusk for his views. Rusk said that the goal of U.S. policy should be to bring about the removal of the Soviet missiles from Cuba. Rusk proposed military action against the missile sites in Cuba: “The question becomes whether we do it by a sudden, unannounced strike of some sort or that we build up the crisis to the point where the other side has to consider very seriously about giving in, or even the Cubans themselves take action on this.”

Rusk said that the time had come to move to the revolt phase of Operation Mongoose. “We then would move more openly and vigorously into the guerrilla field and create maximum confusion on the island,” Rusk counseled. “We won’t be too squeamish at this point about the overt/covert counterpoint of what is being done.”590 Meanwhile, an initial consensus formed in the ExCom in support of air strikes on the missile sites in Cuba. White House aide Theodore Sorensen later wrote, “The idea of American planes suddenly and swiftly eliminating the missile complex with conventional bombs in a matter of minutes—a so-called ‘surgical’ strike—had appeal to almost everyone first considering the matter, including President Kennedy…”

Sorensen added, “But there were grave difficulties to the air-strike alternative, which became clearer each day.” The core members of the ExCom were the members of Kennedy’s foreign-policy inner circle, including Bundy, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Robert Kennedy, Secretary of the Treasury C. Douglas Dillon, McCone, Rusk, Sorensen, and General Maxwell Taylor, Kennedy’s new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.591

McNamara played a forceful role in the ExCom debates. On October 16, he outlined a possible sequence of military action in Cuba, beginning with several days of air attacks on known missile sites. He asserted, “[W]e would be prepared, following the air strike, for an invasion, both by air and by sea.” He added U.S. forces would be ready to invade Cuba seven days after the start of the air strikes. He outlined a five-day air campaign of 700 to 1,000 sorties a day. He estimated an invasion force would require from 90,000 to more than 150,000 U.S. troops. He pointed out that U.S. military intervention “will lead to a Soviet military response of some type, some place in the world.”

At the same time, however, McNamara opposed bombing Soviet missile sites in Cuba if they were operational. Instead, he proposed a naval blockade of Cuba as an alternative to U.S. air strikes or an invasion. “We would plan to maintain [the blockade] indefinitely,” he stated. “[W]e would be prepared to immediately attack the Soviet Union in the event that Cuba made any offensive move against this country.

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