John F. Kennedy by Alan Brinkley

Author:Alan Brinkley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

7

The Evolving Cold War

The Kennedys could not get untangled from Cuba. The Bay of Pigs disaster followed them for years. Covert operators continued to seek ways to overthrow the Castro regime. (Lyndon Johnson later said that the Kennedys “had been operating a god-damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean.”)1 Of more concern to President Kennedy was the growing alliance between the Soviets and the Cubans; the Soviets were now providing Cuba, according to CIA memos, with “large quantities of transportation, electronic and construction equipment … possible limited quantity weapons.”2 The battle of Cuba had never stopped.

Despite the buildup in Cuba, Kennedy’s concerns remained at a relatively low level. “The major danger is the Soviet Union with missiles and warheads, not Cuba,” he said privately.3 The Justice Department warned that a blockade of commerce would be illegal under international law. In a September press conference, Kennedy described Cuba as a country “in trouble … increasingly isolated from this hemisphere. [Castro’s] name no longer inspires the same fear or following in other Latin American countries.”4 And so Kennedy and most of his advisers continued to believe that the Soviet military buildup in Cuba was modest and entirely defensive. (An exception was John McCone, the CIA director, who warned the president that the Soviet shipments could only mean they were planning offensive weapons.)5

Members of Congress were also becoming alarmed by the presence of Soviet weapons in Cuba, and pressure for action was growing from the press and the public. There were rising calls for a blockade of Cuba. Kennedy resisted. “It’s an act of war,” he said, even though he had considered a blockade himself not long before. “There’s no evidence that it would bring Castro down for many, many months. You’d have a food situation in which you’d have people starving.”6 Kennedy’s focus was still primarily on Berlin, but he agreed to call up 150,000 reserve soldiers near the Florida coast in case events in Cuba became more dangerous. But Kennedy still considered the placement of offensive weapons in Cuba to be unlikely, and he left Washington for a long and grueling midterm campaign trip through the Northeast and Middle West for almost two weeks in October.7

In response to the growing anxiety in Congress, the president approved sending U-2 flights over Cuba to photograph the weapons that the Soviets were bringing into the country. Kennedy felt certain that the surveillance would confirm that the buildup in Cuba was entirely defensive. But after the first reconnaissance flight on October 14, and after the photographs were processed the next day, there was clear evidence that the Soviets were indeed placing offensive missiles in Cuba. The missiles had a range capable of reaching much of the United States, and it appeared almost certain that nuclear warheads were either already in Cuba or soon to arrive. Bundy, who worried about Kennedy’s exhaustion from his campaign trip, waited until the following morning, October 16, to give him the news. The president quickly assembled a group of aides and military men to respond to the sudden crisis.

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