Thirteen Days by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-11-24T05:00:00+00:00

As Nitze maintained, when starting down a path that might lead to nuclear war, any man with a responsible regard for the lives of American citizens had to distinguish sharply between the consequences of war before and after those missiles became operational.

Thus the Soviet missiles in Cuba posed no single issue. The men who gathered at the pinnacle of the U.S. government perceived many facets of quite different issues. And in spite of efforts to classify these men simply as “hawks” and “doves”—metaphors coined during this crisis—their initial reactions were much more diverse than the metaphors suggest. The process by which the blockade emerged from these initial reactions and preferences is a story of the most subtle and intricate probing, pulling and hauling, leading, guiding and spurring. Even with the aid of Robert Kennedy’s account, reconstruction of this process can only be tentative.

Initially the President and most of his advisers wanted a clean, surgical air strike. On the first day of the crisis, when informing Adlai Stevenson of the missiles, the President mentioned only two alternatives: “I suppose the alternatives are to go in by air and wipe them out, or to take other steps to render them inoperable.” At the end of the week a sizeable minority still favored an air strike. As Robert Kennedy once told an interviewer: “The fourteen people involved were very significant…. If six of them had been President of the U.S., I think that the world might have been blown up.” What prevented the air strike was a fortuitous coincidence of a number of factors, the absence of any one of which might have permitted that option to prevail.

First, McNamara’s vision of holocaust set him firmly against the air strike. His initial attempt to frame the issue in strategic terms struck Kennedy as particularly inappropriate. Once McNamara realized that a strong response was required, however, he and his deputy Gilpatric chose the blockade as a fallback. When the Secretary of Defense—whose department had the action, whose reputation in the Cabinet was unequaled, in whom the President demonstrated full confidence—marshalled the arguments for the blockade and refused to be moved, the blockade became a formidable alternative.

Second, Robert Kennedy pressed the “Tojo” analogy. His arguments against the air strike on moral grounds struck a chord in the President. Moreover, once those arguments had been stated so forcefully, the President scarcely could have followed his initial preference without seeming to become what RFK had condemned.

The President learned of the missiles on Tuesday morning. On Wednesday morning, in order to mask the discovery from the Russians, he flew to Connecticut to keep a campaign commitment, leaving his brother as the unofficial chairman of the group. By the time the President returned on Wednesday evening, a critical third piece had been added to the picture. McNamara had presented his argument for the blockade. Robert Kennedy and Sorensen had joined him. A powerful coalition of the advisers in whom the President had the greatest confidence, and with whom he was personally most compatible, had emerged.

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