GEORGE BUSH IS NO JACK KENNEDY
By Richard Reeves
Columnist
Universal Press Syndicate
October 14, 2002
WASHINGTON -- These were the options presented President John F. Kennedy by his chief notetaker, Theodore Sorensen, after the first secret White House meetings on possible reaction to the discovery that the Soviet Union was in the process of putting missiles into Cuba forty years ago this week:
"Track A -- Political action, pressure and warning, followed by military strike if satisfaction is not received...
"Track B- A military strike without warning, pressure or action....
"Track C -- Political action, pressure and warning, followed by a total naval blockade...
"Track D- Full scale invasion..."
That was on October 16, 1962. The American people and the world knew nothing of the Soviet attempt to put the United States directly under the nuclear gun, as the Soviet Union had been for a decade. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushev was gambling that with one bold and secret stroke he could gain a rough parity of terror with the United States by placing thirty or so medium-range missiles ( 300 to 1,100 miles) within ninety miles of Key West, Florida.
It was a rational plan -- as Kennedy himself later conceded -- for the leader of a country facing more than 5,000 deliverable American nuclear weapons. The Soviet Union had less than 300 then, most of which could only be delivered by bombers, which would have to evade American air defenses arrayed from the North Pole to the Midwest.
"You have surrounded us with military bases," Khrushchev had said to Kennedy’s Secretary of the Interior, Stewart Udall, earlier in 1962. Indeed. During the two weeks of eyeball-to-eyeball crisis, the United States had more than 200 intercontinetal missiles cocked for firing, a dozen Polaris submarines headed toward Soviet waters, each one carrying twelve nuclear missiles, sixty B-52s carrying 196 hydrogen bombs in the air with 628 more, carrying 2,026 bombs,ready to take off in only a few minutes.
Six days after that, with the CIA telling him that the missiles in Cuba would be operational within one to two weeks, Kennedy was ready to go public. The notes of the speech he planned to make on television began: "An airstrike means a U.S.-initiated ‘Pearl Harbor’ on a small nation which history could neither understand nor forget."
Kennedy, we know, chose "Track C", a blockade of Cuba, called "a quarantine" because blockade is legally and act of war. The world bereated shallowly for a week as Kennedy and Khrushchev manuevered in public and private. Throughout those fearsome days, the American president repeated a single line to his men, many of whom favored invasion or all-out bombing of Cuba: "We are very,very close to war and there’s not room in the White House shelter for us all... I don’t want to put Khrushchev in a corner...We don’t want to push him into precipitous action."
The two politicians finally worked it out. The guns were lowered, essentially because neither of them wanted to be remembered forever as the man who pushed the button. In one of the key sentences in the Khrushchev letter to Kennedy that was the beginning of the end of the crisis, the Soviet leader, usually portrayed as a madman in the American press, wrote:
"Do you seriously think that Cuba can attack the United States and that even we together with Cuba can attack you from the territory of Cuba? Can you really think that way...You can regard us with distrust, but, in any case you can be calm in this regard, that we are of sound mind and understand perfectly well that if we attack you, you will respond in the same way...Only lunatics or suicides, who themselves want to perish and to destroy the world before they die, could do this."
Now, forty years later, President George W. Bush has invoked the Cuban Missile Crisis to justify his moves against a country that may have the potential to build primitive nuclear weapons. He should read more history before his chooses a different track than Jack Kennedy did.
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RICHARD REEVES, author of President Nixon: Alone in the White House (October 2001), is a writer and syndicated columnist who has made a number of award-winning documentary films. His ninth book, President Kennedy: Profile of Power — now considered the authoritative work on the 35th president — won several national awards and was named the Best Non-Fiction Book of 1993 by Time. His other best selling books include Convention and American Journey: Travelling with Tocqueville in Search of American Democracy.
Recipient of the 1998 Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, Reeves writes a twice-weekly column that appears in more than 100 newspapers. He is a former chief political correspondent for The New York Times and has written extensively for numerous magazines, including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire and New York.
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