Memoirs: Bobby’s View

October 1962. At the height of the Cuban missile crisis, a session of the executive committee of the National Security Council breaks up at the White House. “After the meeting, the President, Ted Sorensen, Kenny O’Donnell, and I sat in his office and talked. A short time before, the President had read Barbara Tuchman’s book The Guns of August, and he talked about the miscalculations of the Germans, the Russians, the Austrians, the French and the British. They somehow seemed to tumble into war, he said, through stupidity, individual idiosyncrasies, misunderstandings, and personal complexes of inferiority and grandeur. He did not want anyone to be able to write, at a later date, a book comparable to ‘The Missiles of October’ and say that the U.S. had not done all it could to preserve the peace.”

Robert Kennedy’s somber vignette is part of his personal recollections of the missile crisis six years ago. McCall’s, which publishes Bobby’s “Thirteen Days” this week in its November issue, paid $1,000,000 for the 21,000-word manuscript. The private glimpses he gives of President Kennedy’s ordeal are almost worth the money. In straight forward language, and with sharp perception, Bobby recounts the events that brought the U.S. and the Soviet Union to the edge of nuclear war.

As Equals. Robert Kennedy first learned that the Russians had placed offensive missiles and, presumably, atomic weapons on Cuban soil when he was called into his brother’s office early on Tuesday morning, Oct. 16. 1962. Almost immediately, in the intense, often emotional debate, Bobby firmly declared himself opposed to a military strike but in favor of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s arguments for a naval blockade.

“The members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were unanimous in calling for immediate military action,” Bobby writes. “When the President questioned what the response of the Russians might be, General LeMay assured him there would be no reaction.” At a congressional briefing, Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright also preferred direct military action to “the weak step” of a blockade. As one of the principal debaters, U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson went to the other extreme, advocating appeasement of the Russians by abandoning the Guantánamo naval base in Cuba and dismantling missile sites in Turkey and Italy. Without elaboration, Bobby reports that “we all spoke as equals. We did not even have a chairman. Dean Rusk—who, as Secretary of State, might have assumed that position—had other duties during this period of time and frequently could not attend our meetings.”

Listening to former Secretary of State Dean Acheson uphold the Joint Chiefs’ call for an invasion, Bobby reacted in a way that foreshadowed his later dissent on the Viet Nam war. “Whatever military reasons he and others could marshal,” he recalls, “they were nevertheless, in the last analysis, advocating a surprise attack by a very large nation against a very small one. This, I said, could not be undertaken by the U.S. if we were to maintain our moral position at home and around the globe. Our struggle against Communism throughout the world was far more than physical survival—it has as its essence our heritage and our ideals, and these we must not destroy.”

Human Side. Nearly two weeks later, Robert Kennedy again showed shrewd instincts for international power politics. Nikita Khrushchev had written a personal letter offering to withdraw the missiles in return for a U.S. pledge not to invade Cuba. Subsequently, a formal letter arrived from the Soviets, demanding that the U.S. remove its missiles from Turkey as well. Some advisers suggested asking the Russians for a third letter to “clarify” the first two. Instead, Bobby proposed that the U.S. simply accept Khrushchev’s initial terms. The President agreed, and so did the Russians.

Besides the inner view of history happening, there is also an intensely human side to the memoir. As the military men argued for an air strike, Bobby passed a note to the President: “I now know how Tojo felt when he was planning Pearl Harbor.” On another occasion, when a general took the floor to discuss the use of nuclear weapons: “I thought, as I listened, of the many times that I had heard the military take positions which, if wrong, had the advantage that no one would be around at the end to know.” Finally, Bobby’s memoir displays his own deep sense of sadness and premonition of death. On the night Khrushchev capitulated, the two brothers had a long talk. “As I was leaving,” Bobby writes, “he said, making a reference to Abraham Lincoln, This is the night I should go to the theater.’ I said, ‘If you go, I want to go with you.’ “