The real weapons of mass destruction (Part 2 of 2)

Richard Holbrooke ,  New York   |  Fri, 06/27/2008 10:06 AM  |  Opinion

More than 40 years later, there is no longer any dispute about the most critical meeting of the crisis. It started at 8:05 p.m. on Black Saturday, when, at Kennedy's instruction, his brother Bobby summoned the Soviet ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin, to his cavernous office in the Justice Department, and told him that the crisis had reached its moment of truth. "We're going to have to make certain decisions within the next 12, or possibly 24 hours," he declared.

With the downing of the American U-2 that day, Bobby Kennedy said the American military, and not only the generals, were demanding that the president "respond to fire with fire." This meeting, coupled with a letter to Khrushchev skillfully drafted by Bobby Kennedy, Ted Sorensen and others, led to the Soviet announcement the next day that the missiles would be removed from Cuba.

The Soviets had suggested they would remove their missiles from Cuba if the United States withdrew its 15 medium-range Jupiter missiles from Turkey. By the time these missiles had been deployed in early 1962, they were already obsolete; Kennedy had asked that they be removed before the missile crisis, but no action had been taken.

Kennedy was more than willing to dismantle them, but he was determined not to leave a public impression that he had made any sort of deal or "trade" with Moscow. Asked by Dobrynin about the Jupiters, Bobby Kennedy said they were not an "insurmountable obstacle" but that they could not be linked -- ever -- to the withdrawal of the Soviet missiles. Bobby Kennedy also said that there would have to be a time lag of several months before their removal. It was this "non-deal deal" that opened the door for a resolution.

In Thirteen Days, his posthumously published chronicle of the crisis, Bobby Kennedy carefully edited his account of the Dobrynin meeting to remove any hint of a deal on Turkey. But almost from the beginning, many people suspected the truth, and looking back on it today, it may seem surprising to see how hard the Kennedys sought to conceal it. But in 1962, with the midterm elections days away, Kennedy did not want to appear weak.

Dobbs's research uncovers some juicy nuggets for history buffs. My favorite is the debunking of the once-famous "back-channel" between the ABC reporter John Scali and Aleksandr Feklisov, a K.G.B. station chief. The Kennedy administration attached great importance to this connection, and spent much time drafting a message for Scali to give to Feklisov.

But on the basis of extensive analysis and interviews, Dobbs believes that the so-called back channel was a self-generated effort by an ambitious spy to send some information to his bosses in Moscow, as well as self-promotion by an ambitious journalist, who parlayed his meetings with the K.G.B. agent into a public legend that eventually led to his becoming the American ambassador to the United Nations.

Dobbs, one of the most thorough journalists in Washington, concludes that "there is no evidence" the K.G.B. cable containing Scali's message "played any role in Kremlin decision-making on the crisis, or was even read by Khrushchev." He calls it "a classic example of miscommunication." Nonetheless, Dobbs adds wryly, "the Scali-Feklisov meeting would become part of the mythology of the Cuban missile crisis."

One Minute to Midnight is filled with similar insights that will change the views of experts and help inform a new generation of readers. For those not versed in the full story, I would recommend reading this book in conjunction with Frankel's short and elegant overview. For those already familiar with the crisis, Dobbs's account more than stands on its own.

It is hard to read this book without thinking about what would have happened if the current administration had faced such a situation -- real weapons of mass destruction only 90 miles from Florida; the Pentagon urging "surgical" air attacks followed by an invasion; threatening letters from the leader of a real superpower and senators calling the president "weak" just weeks before a midterm Congressional election.

Life does not offer us a chance to play out alternative history, but it is not unreasonable to assume that the team that invaded Iraq would have attacked Cuba. And if Dobbs is right, Cuba and the Soviet Union would have fought back, perhaps launching some of the missiles already in place. One can only conclude that our nation was extremely fortunate to have had John F. Kennedy as president in October 1962.

Like all presidents, he made his share of mistakes, but when the stakes were the highest imaginable, he rose to the occasion like no other president in the last 60 years -- defining his goal clearly and then, against the demands of hawks within his administration, searching skillfully for a peaceful way to achieve it.

The writer, a former American ambassador to the United Nations, is the author of To End a War. This article was first published in The New York Times.

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