[MUSIC FADES IN]
[CLIP FROM A 1986 INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT MCNAMARA]
ROBERT MCNAMARA: I remember leaving the White House at the end of that Saturday. It was a beautiful fall day. And thinking that might well be the last sunset I saw.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: October 27, 1962 was a Saturday, and the 12th day of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The night before, President Kennedy and advisors in ExComm had received what seemed to be a promising message from Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. But their plans to respond would be stopped before they could begin.
MAX HASTINGS: But then he suddenly issued a new letter on the Saturday which utterly confused the White House saying, oh, by the way, the American missiles in Turkey are going to have to go, too.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: The White House couldn’t understand what had happened for Khrushchev to send this new message.
SERHII PLOKHY: Maybe a sort of a coup took place in Kremlin. Maybe there is somebody else who is in charge now, or maybe there is enormous pressure coming on Khrushchev from so-called hardliners in the Presidium.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: And while Kennedy and his advisors would debate what to do, they would also learn that the crisis had taken a deadly turn.
MAX HASTINGS: And of course at that moment, somebody at the White House table says, well, they fired the first shot. And everybody at that moment around that table believed that meant there were going to be more shots.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Both Kennedy and Khrushchev would be urged to use deadly force to resolve the crisis.
[CLIP OF TED SORENSEN SPEAKING AT A JFK LIBRARY FORUM IN OCTOBER 2002]
TED SORENSEN: But it was very clear that the hawks were rising. That they were gaining. They were finding their voices again: “We told you the quarantine wouldn’t work. We told you you'd have to bomb and invade.”
NINA KHRUSHCHEVA: And Castro was pushing Khrushchev to, basically, “Let's nuke the hell out of America.”
JAMIE RICHARDSON: This is Atomic Gambit - The Cuban Missile Crisis 60 Years Later. Episode 4: “Black Saturday.”
[MUSIC FADES OUT]
JAMIE RICHARDSON: At 10:00 am on Saturday October 27, 1962, President Kennedy and his advisors met to review the latest intelligence in Cuba.
They were also going to discuss Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s long message from last night, his “knot of war” letter where he indicated that the crisis could be resolved if the US guaranteed to not invade Cuba and lift the quarantine blocking Soviet ships.
But before they could start that conversation, JFK was handed a new message from advisor and speechwriter Ted Sorensen.
It was a news report that had just come in, saying that Khrushchev would remove missiles from Cuba if the United States withdrew its missiles from Turkey.
He read the message to the group.
[CLIP FROM EXCOMM MEETING ON 10/27/1962 AT 10:05 A.M.]
JOHN F. KENNEDY: [reading from news ticker copy handed him by Ted Sorensen] “Premier Khrushchev told President Kennedy yesterday he would withdraw offensive weapons from Cuba if the United States withdrew its rockets from Turkey.”
MCGEORGE BUNDY: Hmm. He didn’t.
TED SORENSEN: That’s how it is read by both of the associations that have put it out so far. Reuters has the same thing.
MCGEORGE BUNDY: He didn’t . . .
TED SORENSEN: He didn’t really say that, did he?
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Members of ExComm were confused - that was different from the letter they received last night. This new message added a condition that wasn’t in Khruschev’s letter from the day before. Sir Max Hastings, author of the 2022 book The Abyss: The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962 explains how Khrushchev’s latest message puzzled ExComm.
MAX HASTINGS: But then he suddenly issued a new letter on the Saturday which utterly confused the White House saying, “Oh, by the way, the American missiles in Turkey are going to have to go, too.” And the Americans couldn't understand this.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: When Khrushchev wrote to Kennedy the night before, he was expecting Kennedy to launch an invasion of Cuba very soon and had hoped to stop that from happening.
Serhii Plokhy, author of Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis, says when Khrushchev woke up on Saturday and the US had not fired the first shot, he decided to push Kennedy a little further.
SERHII PLOKHY: Then he wakes up the next morning in Moscow to the news that the invasion didn't take place. He thinks, “OK, the Americans blinked, so maybe there is a chance for me to get something more and raise the price for my withdrawal from Cuba.”
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Plokhy also explains how Khrushchev took ExComm by surprise by releasing this new message just hours after JFK and his advisors had received his Friday message.
SERHII PLOKHY: It took really up to 24 hours for a diplomatic letter to be translated then put into the code and then deciphered and delivered to the White House…His second letter he sends as one that was read in Russian on Radio Moscow, International Service radio in Moscow, so to speed up the process of delivering that message to Washington, to the White House, where he starts talking about the additional condition for his withdrawal of his missiles.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Now ExComm had two letters to think about: one that had been transmitted privately to President Kennedy a little over 12 hours before, and this new message broadcast publicly on Saturday morning, Eastern time.
They wondered which letter they should respond to - and why Khrushchev sent them two different messages in such a short time period.
SERHII PLOKHY: Also, in the White House, they don't know which of these letters they should respond to, deal with, whether both of those letters come from Khrushchev, [or] maybe a sort of a coup took place in Kremlin. Maybe there is somebody else who is in charge now, or maybe there is enormous pressure coming on Khrushchev from so-called hardliners in the Presidium.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: For the White House, trying to figure out what Khrushchev was doing or even how decisions were made in the Kremlin was difficult because of the nature of the Soviet system.
Tom Nichols, professor at the Naval War College and columnist, describes how hard it was at the height of the Cold War to understand the internal workings of the Soviet Union.
TOM NICHOLS: We didn't know anything about the Soviet Union. I think for younger people, it's-- I always try to get them to understand that before satellites and before cable and before smartphones, we knew more about the dark side of the Moon than we did about certain parts of the Soviet Union because they were just impenetrable to us…The Kremlin was-- political scientists like to talk about the black box of policymaking. The Kremlin was a locked black box lined with lead and buried in snow.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: JFK and ExComm could only speculate on what prompted the second letter with its stronger terms. McGeorge Bundy, National Security Advisor, explained what he and other advisors thought that motivation was.
[CLIP FROM EXCOMM MEETING ON 10/27/1962 AT 10:05 A.M.]
MCGEORGE BUNDY: We reached an informal consensus that—I don’t know whether Tommy agrees—that this, last night’s message, was Khrushchev. And this one is his own hard-nosed people overruling him, this public one. That they didn’t like what he said to you last night.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: They thought it was the so-called “hard-nosed” people who had taken control, but scholars have since learned that that was not the case, according to Max Hastings.
MAX HASTINGS: There was absolute chaos in the Kremlin and that all that these different letters and these different messages reflected was the fact that Khrushchev kept rewriting his own script. And the United States, the US government, could not get its mind around the level of chaos that was then prevailing in the Kremlin.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: This lack of understanding, as well as Khrushchev’s own bombastic personality, led ExComm to believe that Khrushchev could bring the world to the brink of nuclear war.
MAX HASTINGS: And it's hard to overstate the extraordinary lack of understanding on both sides, that on that Saturday, Khrushchev had four or five days earlier admitted to his colleagues, the Presidium, around the table in the Kremlin, that almost certainly the missiles were going to have to be removed from Cuba and that there was going to have to be a retreat…. But because he refused to say so and had gone on bluffing and blustering, that nobody in the White House understood this or knew this and nobody in the world understood it.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: And as Nina Khrushcheva, granddaughter of Nikita Khrushchev and professor of International Affairs at the New School, says, starting a war was on the mind of the Americans, not the Soviets.
NINA KHRUSCHEVA: But once again, going to war is your rhetoric. It's not the Russian rhetoric. Nobody was going to war, including-- by the way, Khrushchev was very clear: “We are not going to war.”
JAMIE RICHARDSON: But in the White House, no one trusted that Khrushchev didn’t want to go to war, or that even he was prepared to work with Kennedy.
MAX HASTINGS: And so for another five days, six days after Kennedy's broadcast, not only the world, but also the White House was still in this state of acute tension. They did not know that Khrushchev expected to have to back off. They did not know that Khrushchev privately recognized that he lost his gamble. And Khrushchev went on publicly blustering, and he played his hand worse after Kennedy's broadcast than he did before.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara expressed his frustration at Khrushchev’s second letter and the demand for the US to remove its Jupiter missiles from Turkey:
[CLIP FROM EXCOMM MEETING ON 10/27/1962 AT 10:05 A.M.]
ROBERT MCNAMARA: How can we negotiate with somebody who changes his deal before we even get a chance to reply, and announces publicly the deal before we receive it?...Our point, Bobby, is he’s changed the deal. Well, almost before we even got the first letter translated, he added a completely new deal and he released it publicly.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Khrushchev had sent two letters in as many days, opening negotiations to end the crisis, but each letter had different terms.
In his first private message, he implied construction would stop in Cuba if the US pledged not to invade the island and if they lifted the quarantine.
But in this new, public message, he agreed to remove “the arms which you described as offensive" if the US pledged not to invade the island and if the US removed its missiles on the Soviet border in Turkey.
All of JFK’s advisors in ExComm wanted to ignore this latest message and only focus on Friday’s letter. Noting that this new message was sent publicly, the president disagreed and said this was Khrushchev's current offer.
[CLIP FROM EXCOMM MEETING ON 10/27/1962 AT 10:05 A.M.]
MCGEORGE BUNDY: I don’t see why we pick that track when he’s offered us the other track within the last 24 hours.
JOHN F. KENNEDY: But that offer is a new one.
LLEWELLYN THOMPSON: I hear you. And you think the public one is serious, when we have the private one...
JOHN F. KENNEDY: Yes! I think we have to assume that this is their new and latest position, and it’s a public one.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: The demand to remove the missiles in Turkey came as a surprise, but this was not the first time those missiles had been a topic of conversation amongst JFK and his advisors during the crisis.
On the 22nd, President Kennedy had asked his advisors to look into the possibility of removing the missiles. Even before the crisis had begun, the missiles in Turkey on the Soviet border were out of date and vulnerable to an attack from the Soviet Union.
National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy argued that agreeing to Khrushchev’s proposal would be damaging to the partnership the US had with Turkey and other NATO countries.
[CLIP FROM EXCOMM MEETING ON 10/22/1962 AT 4 P.M.]
MCGEORGE BUNDY: And I think that if we sound as if we wanted to make this trade, to our NATO people and to all the people who are tied to us by alliance, we are in real trouble.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: ExComm had heard from the US ambassador in Turkey, who gave his observations that the Turkish government would be opposed to removing the missiles.
Forty years after the crisis, Secretary McNamara reflected.
[CLIP OF ROBERT MCNAMARA SPEAKING AT A JFK LIBRARY FORUM IN OCTOBER 2002]
ROBERT MCNAMARA: We considered Khrushchev’s offer, as Ted said, to take the missiles out of Cuba if we’d remove the U.S. Jupiters from Turkey. Both Turkey and NATO were strongly opposed to that action.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: ExComm was also opposed to removing the missiles in Turkey.
In meetings, advisors had suggested framing the missiles in Cuba and the missiles in Turkey as two very different situations. The missiles in each country served different purposes. They argued that the US had installed the Jupiter missiles in Turkey openly, in contrast to the secrecy that surrounded the Soviet’s installations in Cuba.
The United States would not bring the Jupiters into the discussion about Cuba.
McGeorge Bundy pointed out that it was important to stress that the danger was with the Cuban missiles only.
[CLIP FROM EXCOMM MEETING ON 10/27/1962 AT 10:05 A.M.]
MCGEORGE BUNDY: I think it will be very important to say at least that the current threat to peace is not in Turkey; it is in Cuba.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Despite that argument, JFK didn’t want to ignore the missiles in Turkey. Max Hastings says that unlike the rest of his advisors, Kennedy saw that he could work with what Khrushchev wanted the Americans to do.
MAX HASTINGS: And he, from a very early stage, saw not only the possibility of simply giving a promise that the United States would not attack Cuba, but secondly, also removing the Jupiter missiles from Turkey. And he saw that there would have to be a deal if you wanted this peacefully.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Throughout the long and tense meetings on the 27th, JFK emphasized that most people would see the removal of the missiles in Turkey as reasonable. But as Michael Dobbs, author of One Minute To Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of War, explains, this was not an opinion held by anyone else in the room.
MICHAEL DOBBS: And at one point, the president was the minority of one in the ExComm in believing that these missiles that we had in Turkey, land-based missiles targeted on the southern part of the Soviet Union, were pretty useless strategically and we would be losing very little by giving them up possibly from a loss of face…And the president was not prepared to risk a nuclear war over what he considered to be a few obsolete missiles in Turkey that could easily be replaced by missiles deployed on a nuclear submarine, for example, in the Eastern Mediterranean.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: But in all the discussion around the Jupiter missiles and options for military action, there was one thing that was not up for debate.
Kennedy had been receiving daily intelligence updates from the CIA about progress on the missile sites in Cuba. The president had one primary objective before negotiating anything else - stopping missile construction in Cuba.
[CLIP FROM EXCOMM MEETING ON 10/27/1962 AT 4 P.M.]
JOHN F. KENNEDY: I think what we’ve got to do is say that we’ve got to make the key of this letter the cessation of work. That we’re all in agreement on. There’s no question about that.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: As the White House looked to stop that construction, the president and his advisors would face some of the most serious conflicts in the crisis yet.
After a short break, we look at how situations developed beyond the president's control that could have led the US and Soviet Union over the brink and into all-out war.
[SHORT PODCAST BREAK]
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Outside of the White House, the crisis was heating up.
U-2 planes, used for intelligence gathering, had been continually flying over Cuba to keep up-to-date on the progress being made on construction related to the Soviet missiles.
Fidel Castro – angered by the frequent overflights – gave orders to shoot at the spy planes.
MAX HASTINGS: Meanwhile, over Cuba, first of all, the Cubans start shooting wildly at low-level US Navy reconnaissance aircraft over Cuba. This is the first time they've started shooting. And they don't do any harm, but nonetheless, the word comes back to the White House that the Cubans have started shooting.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Suddenly in the afternoon meeting of ExComm on October 27th, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara received word that one of the planes had been shot down.
[CLIP FROM EXCOMM MEETING ON 10/27/1962 AT 4 P.M.]
ROBERT MCNAMARA: The U-2 was shot down. The fire against our low-altitude surveillance.
JOHN F. KENNEDY: A U-2 was shot down?
ROBERT MCNAMARA: [Unclear] [Defense Intelligence Agency official Colonel John] Wright just said it was found shot down.
ROBERT KENNEDY: Was the pilot killed?
JAMIE RICHARDSON: At first, it wasn’t clear if the pilot had survived. Later, reports confirmed that Major Rudolf Anderson had been killed in the crash. But it wasn’t the Cubans who had shot him down.
MAX HASTINGS: And finally, of course, that afternoon, and again, hours after the event, the White House is suddenly told that a Soviet anti-aircraft missile had shot down a U-2 over Cuba, killing the pilot.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: 35-year-old Anderson had flown his first flight over Cuba on October 15, where he discovered some of the missile sites. This mission on the 27th was his sixth over the island.
Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric later recalled the shock of that news.
[CLIP FROM A 1986 INTERVIEW WITH ROSWELL GILPATRIC]
ROSWELL GILPATRIC: In the case of the shooting down of... by the SAM, in Cuba, of Major Anderson, it was... the human element. Here is a man, who... is, this is a first... casualty of this... terms of human lives, of this crisis. And that was an emotional, sentimental thing.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: President Kennedy posthumously awarded Anderson the first Air Force Cross, as well as the Distinguished Service Medal, the Purple Heart, and the Cheney Award. He also wrote to Anderson’s widow, Jane, who was pregnant with their 3rd child. He expressed the importance and urgency of Anderson’s mission, and included a handwritten postscript that read, “Your husband’s mission was of the greatest importance, but I know how deeply you must feel his loss.”
With the first combat casualty, the crisis took on a new, more dangerous dimension.
[CLIP FROM EXCOMM MEETING ON 10/27/1962 AT 4 P.M.]
PAUL NITZE: They’ve fired the first shot.
JOHN MCCONE: If there’s any continuation of this, we’ve got to take those SAM sites out of there.
MAX HASTINGS: And of course at that moment, somebody at the White House table says, well, they fired the first shot. And everybody at that moment around that table believed that meant there were going to be more shots.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: The death of the pilot increased pressure on Kennedy to react with force. Advisors suggested a targeted strike on the specific Surface to Air Missile, or SAM site, that shot Anderson down.
MAX HASTINGS: The pressure, especially after the shooting down of the U-2 and the killing of the pilot the political pressure within the United States for military action was building all the time. And I don't think one could have counted on the president not ordering bombing on the Monday or Tuesday of that following week.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: While JFK's military advisors discussed not if, but when to attack the SAM sites, the president's concern was whether or not to keep putting American pilots at risk by continuing overflights of Cuba.
[CLIP FROM EXCOMM MEETING ON 10/27/1962 AT 4 P.M.]
JOHN F. KENNEDY: We can’t very well send a U-2 over there, can we now, and have a guy killed again tomorrow?
MAXWELL TAYLOR: We certainly shouldn’t do it until we retaliate and say that if they fire again on one of our planes that we will come back with great force.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: On the 40th anniversary of the crisis, advisor Ted Sorensen recalled the caution President Kennedy showed in the face of increased demands of reacting with force.
[CLIP OF TED SORENSEN SPEAKING AT A JFK LIBRARY FORUM IN OCTOBER 2002]
TED SORENSEN: When the U-2 was shot down and the [Joint] Chiefs [of Staff] pressed to retaliate immediately, Kennedy said, "Not so fast. Yes, we agreed that we would take out anyone who shot down our U-2, but not so fast. Let’s wait and make certain who authorized that shot. Let’s see what happens with the correspondence and negotiations that we’re now engaged in with Khrushchev."
JAMIE RICHARDSON: As pressure rose in the White House to retaliate, two more incidents beyond Kennedy’s or Khrushchev’s control pushed the world closer to the brink.
That same day, in Alaska, a U-2 pilot named Charles Maultsby took off on a standard reconnaissance mission that turned dangerous.
MICHAEL DOBBS: It was a perfectly routine intelligence-gathering mission designed to see whether the Soviets were testing nuclear bombs in the atmosphere, and the pilot was meant to fly to the North Pole and come back … There's a navigational error that causes him to blunder over the Soviet Union on the most dangerous day of the Missile Crisis, the most dangerous day of the Cold War. The Russians sent up MiG fighters to try to shoot him down. The Americans responded by sending up planes to-- turned out, planes armed with nuclear missiles to escort him back to Alaska.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: The president learned of the mission only after it happened.
MAX HASTINGS: And when Kennedy heard about this, he was, of course, appalled, because he realized that the Russians could have interpreted this as being a reconnaissance flight ahead of a bomber attack. And of course, when everything, everything is on a hair trigger, to have allowed a U-2 flight to take place out of Alaska, it was absolutely crazy.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Tom Nichols explains how this accidental diversion into enemy airspace might not have been as consequential if it had happened at any other time.
TOM NICHOLS: So a border guard shooting across a border during a crisis-- something that might not have been a big deal in peacetime or might have gotten written off as an accident during a crisis could be interpreted as a signal or as the first shot of an attack. This is one of the reasons that the Kennedy administration was so frustrated with trying to get control about who's flying B52s and U-2s, and where are they going, because every single thing needed to be tightly controlled because you didn't want your opponent to take something as indicative of an act of war.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: And yet a third incident - not known about until 40 years after it happened - threatened to unleash war.
MAX HASTINGS: And at sea, there's some very tense exchanges between US warships and Soviet submarines. There are four Soviet Foxtrot submarines all armed with nuclear torpedoes off in the Eastern Atlantic.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: US Navy ships had found the four Soviet submarines they had been searching for. The ships used practice depth chargers - small explosives as a signal for submarines to rise to the surface. The submarine captains had been informed of this method, but they had a hard time distinguishing real depth charges from practice ones.
In an interview 24 years after the crisis, Chief of Naval Operations George Anderson was asked how he thought the crews of the Soviet submarines reacted to the US ships hounding them.
[CLIP FROM A 1986 INTERVIEW WITH GEORGE ANDERSON]
GEORGE ANDERSON: I imagine they expected it just as we would expect their reaction. Now if they'd all been nuclear subs, or a large percentage of them had been nuclear subs, it would have been more complicated.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: What Anderson didn’t know, and no American knew until 2002, was that the submarines did have nuclear torpedoes on board.
Inside the submarines, temperatures soared to 130 degrees Fahrenheit, with conditions becoming more and more unbearable for their crews, especially as the depth charges exploded around them. One of the commanders described the atmosphere inside the subs: “It was as if you were sitting in an iron barrel that was being beaten with a sledgehammer.”
Underwater and isolated from the rest of the world, and under increasing stress, one Soviet captain considered fighting back with all he had.
MAX HASTINGS: So you have the episode involving a Soviet submarine with a nuclear torpedo being harassed by US warships and the captain starts thinking that war may have broken out on the surface and he starts thinking about using the nuclear torpedo.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: When the submarine surfaced, American planes dropped flares meant to help with their surveillance photos. The Soviets thought they were being attacked, and went below in order to launch the nuclear torpedo. A crewmember of the American ship apologized for the plane, and a truce was made before any weapons could be fired.
TOM NICHOLS: And there were moments during the quarantine where if we had destroyed a submarine or if one of their submarines had used a nuclear torpedo, as we now know they were considering doing at the time, events would have spiraled out of control of the decision-makers because they're not there on the front line. They're not there in the area of conflict, and they can't control every single thing that every single person is doing. And that's what makes a crisis so unpredictable is these contingent events that can totally derail everything that's happening.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Up next: As tensions increased with both countries narrowly avoiding events that could lead to war, Kennedy faced his own trusted advisors who continued to press for military action.
How would JFK respond?
Find out coming up after the break.
[SHORT PODCAST BREAK]
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Earlier in 1962, a book was published that caught President Kennedy’s eye. The book, The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman, recounted the early stages and strategies of World War I.
JFK gave copies of the books to friends and colleagues - and Robert McNamara remembered that he instructed his advisors in the Cuban crisis to take note of its lessons.
[CLIP FROM A 1986 INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT MCNAMARA]
ROBERT MCNAMARA: He had asked each member of the Security Council to read the first chapter of Barbara Tuchman's book, The Guns of August, which describes the way that powers bungled into the First World War without any intention of starting the First World War. And he, in a sense he said, read that, recognize that it was a tragedy to bungle into the First World War that way. It'll be the end of civilization if we bungle into a nuclear war that way.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Michael Dobbs says that JFK found lessons to be learned from The Guns of August in the nuclear age.
MICHAEL DOBBS: And Kennedy was determined that the same thing would not happen with the- a nuclear war. And I think the lessons of the-- he had studied the origins of the First World War. And when he was there in the ExComm meeting, particularly on Black Saturday, when it seemed that everything was spiraling out of control, he, the president, was determined, you know, to do everything in his power to prevent a nuclear war.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: JFK and his advisors used all the available intelligence at the time in their meetings. But for all the intel provided by the surveillance photos of Cuba, he and his advisors didn’t actually know about all of the weapons that were on the island. Americans wouldn’t know this until 30 years after the crisis was over.
MAX HASTINGS: And one's blood does run cold when you see that the intelligence machine didn't know that those Russians had tactical nuclear weapons as well as strategic nuclear weapons. They didn't know anything like the strength of the Russian forces in Cuba.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: The US knew about the city-destroying strategic weapons that could reach as far as New York City and Los Angeles. But they didn’t know about the tactical weapons, smaller bombs meant for use at closer range, like on a battlefield.
Because they didn't have all the facts on the ground about the military capabilities in Cuba, an aggressive action against the island would have been much deadlier than they thought at the time.
SERHII PLOKHY: The US air surveillance, human intelligence was never, never was able to uncover the presence of the tactical nuclear weapons on the island. It was also a major, major failure of the US intelligence because the estimates on the basis of which the decisions were being made in terms of the “invade Cuba/not invade Cuba.”
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Without all that information, ExComm continued to discuss when and how they could invade Cuba as events outside the White House unfolded.
MAX HASTINGS: But the pressure, especially after the shooting down of the U-2 and the killing of the pilot the political pressure within the United States for military action was building all the time. And I don't think one could have counted on the president not ordering bombing on the Monday or Tuesday of that following week.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Since the president addressed the nation five days earlier, combat troops had been mobilizing to invade or launch an airstrike against Cuba. In ExComm meetings, advisors laid out their options for use of deadly force.
[CLIP FROM EXCOMM MEETING ON 10/27/1962 AT 4 P.M.]
ROBERT MCNAMARA: So the military plan now is basically invasion, because we’ve set a large strike to lead to invasion. We might try a large strike without starting the invasion, or without any plan to get started with the invasion at the time of the strike, because we can’t carry it out anyhow for a period of x days.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: The Joint Chiefs of Staff, in a separate meeting, worked out their own recommended course of action for the president.
But as Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara later described, JFK was unconvinced.
[CLIP OF ROBERT MCNAMARA SPEAKING AT A JFK LIBRARY FORUM IN OCTOBER 2002]
ROBERT MCNAMARA: About four o'clock Saturday afternoon, October 27th, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Taylor, stated to President Kennedy, “The Chiefs unanimously recommended attack within about 30 hours. That is to say, Monday morning.” And the majority of the president’s civilian advisors shared that view. But the president said, in effect, “I’m not going to take this nation to war over a pile of junk.” It was acknowledged by all of us that the Jupiter missiles were obsolete, likely to be ineffective.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: President Kennedy repeatedly emphasized the optics of the US going to war over Cuba when there was an option to de-escalate the crisis in the form of the Jupiter missiles in Turkey.
[CLIP FROM EXCOMM MEETING ON 10/27/1962 AT 4 P.M.]
JOHN F. KENNEDY: We can’t very well invade Cuba, with all this toil and blood it’s going to be, when we could have gotten them [the Soviet missiles] out by making a deal on the same missiles in Turkey. If that’s part of the record, then I don’t see how we’ll have a very good war.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Fredrik Logevall, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and JFK biographer, explains what the president meant when he said “I don’t see how we’ll have a very good war”:
FREDRIK LOGEVALL: What Kennedy is saying is that if the world learns that we could have had a deal, that we chose not to take that deal, and we instead opt for a war, opt for a military option, then it's not going to be a very good war. It's not going to look very good for us, because what we've turned down is a pretty good deal. It's a way to preserve the peace, to keep tens of millions of people of dying, and we somehow chose to reject that option.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Despite the opposition he faced from everyone in ExComm - from his Secretary of Defense to his own brother Attorney General Robert Kennedy - JFK was set on resolving the crisis diplomatically.
FREDRIK LOGEVALL: I think Kennedy is somewhat unique in his insistence here in the face of deep and broad opposition within the ExComm, within his top advisory group, his insistence on finding a negotiated solution to this. It's quite extraordinary given, again, how much I believe they were pushing the other way.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Roughly 10 hours after receiving Khrushchev’s message during the morning meeting, ExComm finished its response in the evening.
It had taken hours of meetings discussing how to respond. Different drafts circulated around the room before a satisfactory response had been written. Ted Sorensen, Special Counsel to the President, recalled the process of finalizing Kennedy’s response.
[CLIP OF TED SORENSEN SPEAKING AT A JFK LIBRARY FORUM IN OCTOBER 2002]
TED SORENSEN: First there was the letter that was sent to Khrushchev, and... after a good deal of wrangling in the ExComm about what should be in that letter, the president asked Robert Kennedy and me to draft it. And that letter took the best elements...out of Khrushchev's letter and transformed it into a satisfactory... compromise.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: The letter stated that work on the missile sites must stop in Cuba and the weapons must be removed in order for the US to remove the quarantine and pledge not to invade Cuba. It did not mention the American missiles in Turkey.
At 8 pm, JFK’s message to Khrushchev was transmitted, and released to the press.
A select group of President Kennedy’s advisors met in the Oval Office. It had been decided that Robert Kennedy would again meet with the Soviet Ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin. The Attorney General would give him JFK’s letter to Khrushchev, along with another private message.
SERHII PLOKHY: And it was through Anatoly Dobrynin that John Kennedy uses Robert Kennedy to send this message to Kremlin saying that while we are prepared to remove the missiles from Turkey, the only condition is that we can't publicly go with that and announce that. It should be a separate arrangement outside of the agreement reached on Cuba, and it has to be secret. If the information leaks, the deal is off.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Tom Nichols explains the usefulness of having this back channel in times of crises and negotiations.
TOM NICHOLS: I think backchannels are among the most important tools in diplomacy. You need to have a place to go where you can talk to your opponents out of the glare of public lights. You need to have a place where you can float ideas, have arguments, put forward proposals that may get shot down without having to do everything in front of the cameras.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: As Robert Kennedy met with Dobrynin, ExComm had one final meeting at the end of the day, Ted Sorensen later described:
[CLIP OF TED SORENSEN SPEAKING AT JFK LIBRARY FORUM IN OCTOBER 2002]
TED SORENSEN: After the final letter was sent off with Robert Kennedy to deliver it to Ambassador Dobrynin, there was a brief reconvening of the ExComm in the Cabinet Room. Bobby was not there because he was still with Dobrynin. The president was not there at the beginning.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Sorensen recounted that even with Kennedy’s message with its agreement on its way to Khrushchev, the matter of using military force had not been put to bed for some.
[CLIP OF TED SORENSEN SPEAKING AT A JFK LIBRARY FORUM IN OCTOBER 2002]
TED SORENSEN: But it was very clear that the hawks were rising. That they were gaining. They were finding their voices again. “We told you the quarantine wouldn’t work. We told you you'd have to bomb and invade.” And there was a debate, and some members are still protesting against that and the consequences.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Saturday, October 27th would come to be called Black Saturday because of the dangerous near misses that happened throughout the day. Max Hastings explains what JFK’s advisors’ outlooks were as they headed into Sunday.
MAX HASTINGS: So it was a terrifying day. And by the time they all went to bed that night, that in the minds of JFK and many of those at the top table, there was a real fear that the country was going to war.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara later remembered the atmosphere that evening.
[CLIP FROM A 1986 INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT MCNAMARA]
ROBERT MCNAMARA: I remember leaving the White House at the end of that Saturday. It was a beautiful fall day. And thinking that might well be the last sunset I saw.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: What the Americans also didn’t know was that in Cuba, Fidel Castro had written to Nikita Khrushchev with an urgent request.
Nina Khruscheva describes the contents of that message.
NINA KHRUSHCHEVA: And Castro was pushing Khrushchev to-- basically, “Let's nuke the hell out of America because, otherwise, they're going to nuke us.” And so Khrushchev knew that all this statements or all this feelings really should not really take the better of anybody. I mean, he himself was impulsive, but he also knew where to stop.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Castro had been expecting a US invasion of Cuba, and according to historian Serhii Plokhy, his plea upset Khrushchev.
SERHII PLOKHY: Castro, who got information and intelligence information that turned out to be false, he expects the attack on Cuba happening within anywhere from 24 to 48 hours. And he puts together a letter that he writes and then edits together with the Soviet ambassador to Havana.… The letter asks Khrushchev to consider a first-strike nuclear strike against the United States of America, which makes Khrushchev furious and makes him even more frightened than he was before.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: The knot of war that Khrushchev had written about just the day before was tightening, and neither he nor Kennedy knew if it would be possible to stop it before it was too late.
Find out more on our next episode of Atomic Gambit.