of operations' requesting updated information about their needs for 'secure communications' and 'filing space' in the Pentagon war room 'in the case of a contingency' in Cuba. With military efficiency, Lansdale gave the agencies one week in which to respond. The State Department reply was typical: one classified telephone and one secure filing cabinet 'will meet our requirements.'
Had Operation Mongoose merely been an exercise in self-delusion ? 'a psychological salve for inaction,' as Bundy later described it ? it would have been relatively harmless. In fact, it was the worst possible foreign policy combination: aggressive, noisy, and ineffective. It was clear to anybody who paid attention to leaks in the American press and rumors in the Cuban exile community that the Kennedys were out to get Castro. There was enough substance to Mongoose to alarm Castro and his Soviet patrons into taking countermeasures ? but not enough to threaten his grip on power.
It looked as if Kennedy was already forgetting a promise he had made to his predecessor after the disaster of the Bay of Pigs. 'There is only one thing to do when you get into this kind of thing,' Eisenhower had lectured him, back in April 1961. 'It must be a success.' To which Kennedy had replied, 'Well, I assure you that, hereafter, if we get into anything like this, it is going to be a success.'
At the end of its first year, Operation Mongoose was shaping up as an almost perfect failure.
Jack Kennedy had been bracing for a showdown with the Soviet Union ever since he took his oath of office and publicly pledged that 'a new generation of Americans' would 'pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty.' He liked to carry around a slip of paper with a quote from Abraham Lincoln:
I know there is a God ? and I see a storm coming;If he has a place for me, I believe I am ready.
The storm clouds had long seemed most ominous in the divided city of Berlin, deep inside Communist East Germany. The previous year, the Soviets had erected a wall to stem the flow of refugees to the West, and American and Russian tanks had confronted each other directly across the narrow divide of 'Checkpoint Charlie.' The Soviets enjoyed almost complete military superiority in Berlin, and there was little the United States could do to prevent the takeover of the city, other than threaten to use nuclear weapons. Instead, the storm had broken in Cuba.
Never had Kennedy felt quite so alone as he did now. Even before the missile crisis, he would obsessively calculate the chances of nuclear destruction, like a bookie calling a horse race. At a dinner party that evening, he would startle other guests by announcing that the 'odds are even on an H-bomb war within ten years.' Only a handful of his closest aides knew how much closer the nightmare had come in the last twenty-four hours. He had earlier thought there was a 'one-in-five chance' of a nuclear exchange.
He had one public appearance that afternoon, a foreign policy conference for newspaper and TV editors at the State Department. The tone of his speech was unusually bleak. The major challenge facing his presidency, he told reporters, was how to ensure 'the survival of our country…without the beginning of the third and perhaps the last war.' He then pulled a slip of paper out of his pocket and recited a verse that reflected his determined, solitary mood:
Back in the White House for an evening meeting with his advisers, the president activated his secret recording system from his place at the center of the Cabinet Room table. Microphones hidden in the wall behind his chair relayed the voices of everyone in the room to reel-to-reel tape machines installed in the basement. Apart from Kennedy, Bobby, and the Secret Servicemen who operated the sophisticated equipment, nobody knew about the devices.
Khrushchev's motives in provoking a superpower confrontation were 'a goddamn mystery' to Kennedy. 'Why does he put these in there?' he asked his aides. 'What is the advantage of that? It's just as if we began to put a major number of MRBMs in Turkey. Now that'd be goddamn dangerous, I would think.'
'Well, we did it, Mr. President,' Bundy pointed out.
Kennedy brushed Bundy's observation aside. In his mind, there were clear differences between Cuba and Turkey. The United States had agreed to provide Turkey with medium-range ballistic missiles similar to the Soviet R-12s now being deployed in Cuba back in 1957. They had become fully operational earlier in 1962. The lengthy public debate among NATO countries over the dispatch of missiles to Turkey contrasted with the secrecy surrounding the Soviet missiles in Cuba. Even so, the Turkey analogy was an uncomfortable one for Kennedy and his aides. It was possible that Khrushchev was acting out of deep-seated psychological pique. He wanted to give Americans a taste of their own medicine.
It was an open question whether Soviet missiles in Cuba substantially changed the balance of power. The Joint Chiefs had emphasized the heightened risk to the United States of a sneak attack. But the president was inclined to agree with McNamara, who insisted that Khrushchev was still a very long way from achieving first-strike capability.
'Geography doesn't make much difference,' Kennedy mused. What did it matter if you got blown up by a missile based on Cuba or an ICBM flying from the Soviet Union?
The real problem, he thought, was 'psychological' and 'political' rather than 'military.' To do nothing would be to surrender to blackmail. In the Cold War game of nuclear brinkmanship, perception shaped reality. If Khrushchev got away with his gamble over Cuba, he would be encouraged to use similar tactics in Berlin, Southeast Asia, or any other Cold War trouble spot. Under attack by the Republicans for his passivity over Cuba, the president had issued a public statement on September 4 warning the Soviets that 'the gravest issues would arise' if they developed a 'significant offensive capability' in Cuba. He had planted a marker in the sand, and was now committed to defending it.
'Last month, I should have said we don't care,' Kennedy said wistfully, as if to himself. 'But when we said we're not going to, and then they go ahead and do it, and then we do nothing…' His voice trailed off. Doing nothing was no longer an option.
From across the table, Bobby argued the case for an aggressive response to Moscow. The attorney general was more belligerent than he was articulate. If Khrushchev wanted war, it might be better to 'get it over with…take our losses.' It would not be too difficult to find an excuse for invading Cuba. Bobby thought back to the Spanish- American War of 1898. The pretext for that war had been the destruction of an American battleship, the USS
Perhaps 'there is some other way we can get involved in this,' Bobby ruminated. 'You know, sink the
The discussion turned to the sabotage proposals against Cuba that had been considered by the Special Group earlier in the day. 'I take it you are in favor of sabotage,' Bundy told the president briskly as he handed him the list.
The only item that raised a problem for Kennedy was the mining of Cuban harbors, an indiscriminate act of war that could result in the destruction of foreign flagships, in addition to Cuban and Soviet vessels. The following day, the White House sent a memo to the Mongoose team, formally recording the approval by 'higher authority' ? code word for the president ? of the eight other sabotage targets, including the grenade attack on the Chinese Embassy.
Hurricane season was under way in the Caribbean. More than forty U.S. warships were headed toward the Puerto Rican island of Vieques for a practice invasion of Cuba. As the winds from Hurricane Ella topped 80 knots an hour, the approaching naval task force switched course to avoid the worst of the storm. Plans for an amphibious
