One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War

someone with no military background, and no understanding of the paraphernalia that accompanied the rockets themselves, could have reached such a conclusion.'

The most Soviet commanders on Cuba could do was order a crash program to bring all the missiles to combat readiness as quickly as possible. Soviet soldiers were accustomed to Stakhanovite labor campaigns, organized bursts of mass enthusiasm designed to 'fulfill and overfulfill the plan.' Fortunately, the R-12 regiments were almost at full strength. By October 23, 42,822 Soviet soldiers had arrived in Cuba ? out of a planned deployment of around 45,000.

Overnight, the missile sites swarmed with laborers. It took one regiment three and a half hours to erect the first semicircular beam for a nuclear warhead shelter. The pace picked up, and the entire shelter ? forty beams in all ? was completed in thirty-two hours. The shelters were designed to withstand a blast of 140 pounds per square inch.

The Cuban topsoil was so rocky that much of the digging had to be done by hand. Touring the missile sites, General Gribkov was shocked to see soldiers using pickaxes and shovels to clear land that resisted the efforts of bulldozers and tractors. He noted bitterly that the Soviet Union had shipped 'some of the most sophisticated military technology of the age' to Cuba, but remained 'shackled' to the Russian soldier's proverb: 'One sapper, one axe, one day, one stump.'

In the afternoon, the weather changed abruptly, and a cold north wind began to blow. The wind sent waves crashing across the Malecon in Havana, drenching marching militiamen with plumes of powdery spray. Soldiers were already erecting antiaircraft guns outside the venerable Hotel Nacional, where Lucky Luciano had once held summit meetings with other mafia bosses and luminaries from Winston Churchill to Errol Flynn had sipped daiquiris.

All day, little groups of people gathered on the stone walls of Havana's seafront boulevard, gazing expectantly northward as they scanned the horizon for the silhouettes of American warships. Curtains of wind and the rain crashed down along the coast, emphasizing the island's isolation. Following Kennedy's quarantine speech and Castro's mobilization order, the island was effectively sealed shut. Only official vehicles were permitted on the main roads. Civilian air traffic had been suspended indefinitely, including the daily Pan American flight between Havana and Miami.

For months, the Cuban middle classes had been lining up at Havana Airport to board the Pan Am plane, and make a new life for themselves in America. Dubbed 'the ninety milers,' the refugees were willing to abandon everything ? homes, cars, jobs, even their families ? to escape the revolution. Now even this lifeline had been severed, leaving opponents of the regime with a stifling sense of claustrophobia.

'Other people are deciding my life, and there's nothing I can do,' the Cuban intellectual Edmundo Desnoes would later write in Memories of Underdevelopment, a novel set against the background of the Cuban missile crisis. 'This island is a trap.'

But most Cubans seemed unperturbed by the country's isolation. Overnight, tens of thousands of posters had appeared on the streets of Havana and other Cuban cities, showing a hand clutching a machine gun. A LAS ARMAS, the slogan read, in large white letters ? TO ARMS.

'The poster ? one color, three words, one gesture ? summed up the instantaneous reaction of the Cuban people,' wrote a sympathetic Argentinean eyewitness, Adolfo Gilly. 'Cuba was one man and his rifle.'

FIDEL HABLARA HOY AL PUEBLO, blared the headline in Revolucion that morning. FIDEL WILL SPEAK TO THE PEOPLE TODAY.

7:06 P.M. TUESDAY, OCTOBER 23

The flashbulbs popped in the Oval Office as Kennedy signed the two-page proclamation authorizing the U.S. Navy to intercept, and if necessary 'take into custody,' Soviet ships bound for Cuba with 'offensive weapons.' He wrote his full name ? John Fitzgerald Kennedy ? with a smooth flourish. The quarantine would come into force at 10:00 a.m. Washington time the following day. To project a sense of international legality, Kennedy had delayed issuing the edict until his diplomats secured a 19 to 0 vote of approval from the Organization of American States (OAS).

Seated behind the Resolute desk, a white handkerchief jutting out of his breast pocket, with the Stars and Stripes behind him, he was the image of presidential determination. But that was not how he felt. He had been questioning his advisers all day about what would happen when U.S. warships came head-to-head with Soviet vessels, and was disturbed by the thought of everything that could go wrong. If the U.S. Navy tried to board a Soviet ship and the Russians fired back, the result would likely be 'quite a slaughter.'

Dean Rusk had mentioned the 'baby food' scenario a few moments earlier. A Soviet ship comes along and refuses to stop. The Americans use force to board it, but a public relations disaster ensues when all they find is a shipment of baby food.

'We shoot three nurses!' mused McGeorge Bundy.

'They're going to keep going,' the president reasoned. 'And we're going to try to shoot the rudder off, or the boiler. And then we're going to try to board it. And they're going to fire a gun, then machine guns. And we're going to have one hell of a time getting aboard that thing…. You may have to sink it rather than just take it.'

'They might give orders to blow it up or something,' his brother interjected.

'It's this baby food thing that worries me,' fretted Robert McNamara.

An even bigger worry was Soviet submarines, reported to be tracking at least two of the missile-carrying ships. An aircraft carrier, the USS Enterprise, was in the vicinity. Kennedy wondered if that was wise. 'We don't want to lose a carrier right away.'

After signing the proclamation, Jack met with Bobby in the Cabinet Room. With no advisers around, the two brothers were much more open about revealing their true thoughts. The president was irritated with his wife for organizing a formal dinner party that evening with the Maharaja of Jaipur, an unwanted distraction from the coming showdown with Khrushchev. For a brief moment, it seemed as if he might be having second thoughts, but he pushed them aside.

'It looks like it's going to be real mean, doesn't it?' he told his brother. 'But on the other hand, there's really no choice. If they get this mean on this one ? Jesus Christ! What are they going to fuck up next?'

'No, there wasn't any choice,' Bobby agreed. 'I mean you woulda…you woulda been impeached.'

'Well, that's what I think. I woulda been impeached.'

Four blocks away from the White House, Soviet diplomats were hosting a caviar and vodka reception in their embassy, a farewell party for a departing naval attache. Guests crowded around anyone in a military uniform, demanding Moscow's reaction to the blockade. 'I fought in three wars already and I am looking forward to fighting in the next,' blustered the military attache, Lieutenant General Vladimir Dubovik, wiping his perspiring hands with a handkerchief. 'Our ships will sail through.'

'He's a military man; I'm not,' shrugged Ambassador Dobrynin, when asked about Dubovik's comment. 'He is the one who knows what the Navy is going to do.'

Other Soviet officials displayed less bravado. At the mission to the United Nations in New York, diplomats exchanged dark jokes about the epitaph on their tombstones in the event of nuclear war.

'Here lie the Soviet diplomats,' was one suggestion. 'Killed by their own bombs.'

8:15 P.M. TUESDAY, OCTOBER 23

Trailed by military and civilian aides, Robert McNamara walked out of his third-floor suite of offices on the E- Ring, the Pentagon's power corridor, overlooking the Potomac River. He was headed for the nerve center of the quarantine operation, Navy Flag Plot, located in the adjacent wing of the complex, one floor up. The president had instructed him to keep a close watch on the Navy's plans for enforcing the blockade.

At the age of forty-six, McNamara was the epitome of 'the best and the brightest' minds that JFK had promised to bring to Washington after his election victory. With his metal spectacles and closely cropped, slicked- back hair, he looked and sounded like a human version of the computers that were beginning to transform American industry. His brain seemed to worked faster than anyone else's. He had a knack for quickly honing in on a complex problem and reducing it to an elegant mathematical formula. But he also had a more sensitive, soulful side that appealed to women. 'Why is it,' Bobby Kennedy once asked, 'that they call him the 'computer' and yet he's the one all my sisters want to sit next to at dinner?'

While conceding that the secretary was brilliant, the uniformed military also found him arrogant and interfering. Many senior officers disliked him intensely. They were suspicious of his entourage of precocious young