How do you bury responsibility for a decision inspired by a pilfered idea? Blame someone
else, especially if that person came up with the idea to begin with. This tried method of
distraction was used with invidious gusto by US President John F. Kennedy, who recast his
role in reaching an agreement with the Soviet Union during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.
The stationing of Soviet nuclear-capable missiles in Cuba, and the response of the Kennedy
administration, took the world to the precipice of nuclear conflict. Its avoidance, as things
transpired, involved dissimulation, deception and good, old-fashioned defamation.
In a crucial meeting on October 27 between Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and Soviet
Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, the first intimations were made that a quid pro quo
arrangement could be reached. If the Soviets were to pull out their missiles in Cuba, the US
would return the favour regarding their missiles in Turkey. That part of the agreement
would, however, remain secret. RFK, as the administration’s emissary, informed Dobrynin
that his brother “is ready to come to agree on that question with N.S. Khrushchev.” For the
withdrawal to take place, however, some four to five months had to elapse. “However, the
president can’t say anything public in this regard about Turkey.”
Time was pressing. A U-2 spy plane had been shot down over Cuba that day; the hawks in
the administration were baying for blood, demanding US military retaliation. “A real war
will begin,” warned RFK, “in which millions of Americans and Russians will die. We want
to avoid that any way we can, I’m sure that the government of the USSR has the same wish.”
In his subsequent account of the meeting with the Soviet ambassador, documented in a report
to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, RFK ducks and weaves. Recalling the urgency with which
he impressed upon Dobrynin on removing the Soviet missiles, he also offered a slanted
reading. When the ambassador had asked about the US missiles in Turkey, “I replied there
could be no quid pro quo – no deal of this kind could be made.” Mention is made to the
elapse of four to five months, by which time “these matters could be resolved satisfactorily.”
(In the draft version, that reference is scrawled out by RFK.)
Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s response on October 28 to President Kennedy did
acknowledge, in an uncharacteristically subtle way, “the delicacy involved for you in an open
consideration of the issue of eliminating the US missile bases in Turkey.” He appreciated the
“complexity” involved and thought it right that it should not be discussed publicly. Any
mention of the quid pro quo agreement would be kept secret, to be only communicated via
RFK. The Soviet Premier then made intimations about “advancing the cause of relaxation of
international tensions and the tensions between our two powers”.
Within hours of Khrushchev’s announcement that he would be ordering the dismantling and
withdrawal of the missiles in Cuba, Kennedy made a call to former president Herbert Hoover.
The message is distinctly, to use that immortal phrase from the charmingly slippery Alan
Clark, economical with the actualité. Moscow had supposedly gone back “to their more
reasonable position” in accepting a pledge that Cuba would not be invaded in return for the
withdrawal of the missiles.
The train of fibbing continued chugging in another call made that same day to former
president Harry Truman. To Truman, Kennedy suggests, falsely, that his administration had “rejected” trading the Jupiter missiles in Turkey for the Soviet withdrawal of their missiles in
Cuba.
On October 30th, Robert Kennedy returned the quid pro quo letter to Ambassador Dobrynin
instead of conveying it to his brother. Brother Jack had not been “prepared to formulate such
an understanding [regarding the missiles in Turkey] in the form of letters, even the most
confidential letters, between the President and the head of the Soviet government, when it
concerns such a highly delicate issue.”
Such an attitude could hardly be explained as noble or even reasoned; the Kennedys were
concerned that any moves seen as conciliatory towards Moscow could ruin their electoral
fortunes and those of the Democratic Party.
Dobrynin’s own summary reveals a political animal contemplating his future prospects. RFK
was against transmitting “this sort of letter, since who knows where and when such letters can
surface or be somehow published”. The reasons had little to do with averting nuclear
catastrophe or preserving the human species. Such a document, were it to appear, “could
cause irreparable harm to my political career in the future. This is why we request that you
take this letter back.”
With such maneuverings achieved, the Kennedys went to work on covering their tracks and
scrubbing the fingerprints. On December 6, 1962, Stevenson received a letter from JFK about
a story soon to be published by the Saturday Evening Post titled “In Time of Crisis”. The
article, authored by Stewart Alsop and Charles Bartlett, promised an insider’s overview of
how Kennedy and his circle resolved the Cuban missile crisis. In the true tradition of
insiders, the overview was utterly compromised.
The decorative account came with the baubles and splendour of Camelot, depicting the
president as calm and collected in the face of crisis. He only ever “lost his temper on minor
matters” but never his nerve. “This,” the authors remark, “must be counted a huge intangible
plus.”
The very tangible plus, for the Kennedys, came in the form of former Democratic presidential
candidate and US ambassador to the UN, Adlai Stevenson. Stevenson had, according to a
“non admiring official” – later identified as National Security Council staffer Michael
Forrestal – “wanted a Munich.” His heretical proposal entailed trading Turkish, Italian and
British missile bases for Soviet missiles in Cuba. Forrestal had himself been urged by the
Kennedys to feed that version to Bartlett and Alsop, despite their embrace of the idea.
Alsop’s brother, Joseph, went so far as to argue in a column that this revealed a president
keen on finding some basis to fire Stevenson. Special aide McGeorge Bundy, on being made
aware of the article in advance, had talked him out of doing so.
As things transpired, the origins of the “Munich” slur against Stevenson came from the
president himself. As historian Gregg Herken noted in his book, The Georgetown Set:
Friends and Rivals in Cold War Washington, “The president had pencilled in the ‘Munich’
line when he annotated the typescript of the draft article”. Alsop’s son, Joseph Wright Alsop
VI, also claimed that his father had told him “that it had actually been JFK who added the
phrase ‘Adlai wanted a Munich’ in his own handwriting.”
In Alsop’s correspondence with his editor at the Saturday Evening Post, Clay Blair Jr., there
is a pungent warning: the president’s role was to remain concealed and had to “remain Top
Secret, Eyes Only, Burn After Reading, and so on.” If Alsop “so much as hinted that JFK
was in any way involved, I’d be run out of town.”
In his delightful, if severe dissertation on presidential mendacity, Eric Alterman makes the
admirably radical suggestion that the US commander in chief should not lie. Doing so
triggers “a series of reactions in the political system that builds on itself and can easily spiral
out of the control.” One lie becomes many; the drop becomes an ocean. And Kennedy
showed, not only a willingness to be mendacious, but a certain aptitude for it.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He
currently lectures at RMIT University. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com
