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

McCone. Colleagues had dubbed the ritual 'Saying Grace,' because of the CIA director's staunch Roman Catholic faith and droning papal delivery. According to the latest intelligence information, twenty-two Soviet ships were headed for Cuba, including several suspected of carrying missiles. Many of the ships had been receiving urgent radio messages from Moscow in unbreakable code.

McNamara reported that two of the Soviet ships, the Kimovsk and the Yuri Gagarin, were approaching the quarantine barrier, a five-hundred-mile radius from the eastern tip of Cuba. A Soviet submarine was stationed between the two vessels. The Navy planned to intercept the Kimovsk with a destroyer, while helicopters from an aircraft carrier attempted to divert her submarine escort. The Finnish-built Kimovsk had unusually long ninety-eight- foot cargo hatches, designed for lumber but well suited for missiles. The rules of engagement promulgated by Admiral Anderson authorized the destruction of the Soviet ships if they failed to comply with U.S. Navy instructions.

'Mr. President, I have a note just handed to me,' interrupted McCone. 'We've just received information…that all six Soviet ships currently identified in Cuban waters ? and I don't know what that means ? have either stopped or reversed course.'

There was a hubbub at the table and a gasp of 'Phew!' but Secretary of State Rusk quickly squelched any sense of relief.

'Whadya mean 'Cuban waters'?'

'Dean, I don't know at the moment.'

Kennedy asked if the ships that had turned around were incoming or outgoing. The CIA chief did not have an answer.

'Makes some difference,' mumbled Rusk dryly, as McCone stepped out of the room to investigate. His remark was greeted with nervous laughter.

'Sure does,' said Bundy.

Kennedy was alarmed by the thought that the first confrontation of the crisis might involve a Soviet submarine. He wanted to know how the Navy would respond if a Soviet submarine 'should sink our destroyer.' Without replying directly, McNamara told the president that the Navy planned to use practice depth charges to signal that Soviet submarines should surface. The depth charges would not cause any damage even if they hit the submarines.

From the other side of the Cabinet Room, Bobby saw his brother's hand go up to his face and cover his mouth: 'He opened and closed his fist. His face seemed drawn, his eyes pained, almost gray. We stared at each other across the table. For a few fleeting seconds, it was almost as though no one else was there and he was no longer the President.'

Suddenly, Bobby found himself thinking of the tough times they had had as a family, when Jack was ill with colitis and almost died, when their brother Joe Junior was killed in an airplane accident, when Jack and Jackie lost their first child through a miscarriage. The voices in the Cabinet Room seemed to blur together until Bobby heard Jack ask if it was possible to defer an attack on the submarine. 'We don't wanna have the first thing we attack [be] a Soviet submarine. I'd much rather have a merchant ship.'

McNamara disagreed. Interfering with the on-scene naval commander, he told the president firmly, could result in the loss of an American warship. The plan was to 'put pressure' on the submarine, 'move it out of the area,' and then 'make the intercept.'

'OK,' said Kennedy, doubtfully. 'Let's proceed.'

Half a mile down Sixteenth Street, at the Soviet Embassy, diplomats crowded around radios and television sets. They were as much in the dark about the Kremlin's intentions as everyone else. They watched with mounting tension as the networks reported Soviet vessels approaching an imaginary line in the ocean, counting down the hours and minutes until they came face-to-face with American warships. Dobrynin would later describe October 24 as 'probably the most memorable day in the whole long period of my service as ambassador to the United States.'

On the New York Stock Exchange, trading was hectic, and prices were going up and down like a yo-yo. They had fallen sharply on Tuesday. By Wednesday morning, they were 10 percent down from their summer highs. Gold prices were up. A young economist named Alan Greenspan told The New York Times that 'massive uncertainty' would likely result if the crisis continued for any significant length of time.

Fear of nuclear apocalypse was seeping into American popular culture. In Greenwich Village in Manhattan, a tussle-haired bard named Bob Dylan had sat up one night scribbling the words of 'A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall' on a spiral notepad. He later explained that he wanted to capture 'the feeling of nothingness.' Images of apocalypse came tumbling from his brain. Unsure whether he would live to write another song, he 'wanted to get the most down I possibly could.'

In another unpublished song, Dylan would describe 'the fearful night we thought the world would end' and his fear that World War III could erupt by dawn the next day. He told an interviewer that 'people sat around wondering if it was the end, and so did I.'

'Whadda ya have, John?' JFK asked impatiently, as McCone returned to the Cabinet Room.

'The ships are all westbound, all inbound for Cuba,' the CIA director reported. 'They either stopped them, or reversed direction.'

'Where did you hear this?'

'From ONI.' The Office of Naval Intelligence. 'It's on its way over to you now.'

News that the Soviet ships had turned around or were dead in the water came as an enormous relief to the ExComm. After hours of mounting tension, there was a glimmer of hope. An aircraft carrier group led by the Essex had orders to intercept the Kimovsk and her submarine escort. The intercept was scheduled for between 10:30 and 11:00 a.m. Washington time. Believing he had only minutes to spare, Kennedy canceled the intercept.

Dean Rusk suddenly found himself thinking of a childhood game back in Georgia in which boys would stand two feet apart and stare into each other's eyes. Whoever blinked first lost the game.

'We're eyeball to eyeball, and the other fellow just blinked,' Rusk told his colleagues.

'The meeting droned on,' Bobby Kennedy would recall later. 'But everyone looked like a different person. For a moment the world had stood still, and now it was going around again.'

'SECRET. FROM HIGHEST AUTHORITY,' read the order to the Essex. 'DO NOT STOP AND BOARD. KEEP UNDER SURVEILLANCE.'

In fact, it was impossible to do anything of the sort. The Kimovsk was nearly eight hundred miles away from the Essex at the time this order was issued. The Yuri Gagarin was more than five hundred miles away. The 'high-interest ships' had both turned back the previous day, shortly after receiving an urgent message from Moscow.

The mistaken notion that the Soviet ships turned around at the last moment in a tense battle of wills between Khrushchev and Kennedy has lingered for decades. The 'eyeball to eyeball' imagery served the political interests of the Kennedy brothers, emphasizing their courage and coolness at a decisive moment in history. At first, even the CIA was confused. McCone erroneously believed that the Kimovsk 'turned around when confronted by a Navy vessel' during an 'attempted' intercept at 10:35 a.m. The news media played up the story of a narrowly averted confrontation on the quarantine line with Soviet ships 'dead in the water.' Later on, when intelligence analysts established what really happened, the White House failed to correct the historical record. Bobby Kennedy and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., would describe a standoff on 'the edge of the quarantine line' with Soviet and American ships only 'a few miles' apart. The myth was fed by popular books and movies like Thirteen Days and supposedly authoritative works like Essence of Decision and One Hell of a Gamble.

Plotting the location of Soviet vessels was an inexact science at best, involving a considerable amount of guesswork. Occasionally, they were sighted by American warships or reconnaissance planes. But usually they were located by a World War II technique known as direction finding. When a ship sent a radio message, it was intercepted by U.S. Navy antennas in different parts of the world, from Maine to Florida to Scotland. The data was then transmitted to a control center near Andrews Air Force Base, south of Washington. By plotting the direction fixes on a map, and seeing where the lines intersected, analysts could locate the source of a radio signal with varying degrees of accuracy. Two fixes were acceptable, three or more ideal.