Killing Kennedy

7

OCTOBER 16, 1962

THE WHITE HOUSE

8:45 A.M.

The president of the United States is rolling around on the bedroom floor with his children. Jack LaLanne is on the television telling JFK, Caroline, and John to touch their toes. Kennedy wears just a T-shirt and underpants. The carpeting and a nearby easy chair are cream-colored, providing perfect accents to the blue-patterned covers on the president’s four-poster canopy bed.

The TV volume is “absolutely full blast” in Jackie’s words, as JFK and his son and daughter tumble around—loud enough that Jackie comes in from her bedroom to see what’s going on. She loves her husband’s lack of self-consciousness and how at ease he is in all situations. But as she can plainly see, morning with the kids is when John Kennedy is at his most relaxed. He dotes on his children, letting Jackie be the disciplinarian, and takes unbridled pleasure in being close to them. She worries about their rambunctious behavior. The president thinks it a blessing. His one great lament is that his bad back prevents him from tossing young John into the air and catching him, a game the president’s son loves. Instead, JFK depends upon members of his staff and even visiting dignitaries to do the throwing for him.

As president, JFK no longer needs to campaign or spend hours in his Senate office. He works at home. What was once a solitary morning ritual has become a family affair. He has drawn closer to his children than ever before and relishes each and every moment they spend together. They start each morning in his bedroom, even as he bathes, shaves, stretches, and eats.

The president has just finished his bath and will soon get dressed. The kids will stick around and watch cartoons. Jackie might return to her bedroom, or she might come sit with him as he wraps his back brace into place before slipping on the tailored shirt that longtime valet George Thomas has laid out for him. Then will come the president’s shoes, the left one with a quarter-inch medical lift. Then, a quick glance into the bedroom mirror above the dresser to double-check his appearance. The mirror’s frame is a clutter of postcards, family photographs, and other minutiae, such as the Sunday Mass schedules for St. Stephen’s and St. Matthew’s cathedrals. He attends Mass and takes the sacrament regularly, although Kennedy bridles when photographers shoot pictures of him leaving confession. A time of atonement should also be a time of humiliation and privacy.

Sometimes during the day, John and Caroline walk into the Oval Office and play on the floor or even beneath the presidential desk. Jackie fiercely protects the children from the public eye. But the president takes a larger view, realizing that America is enthralled by such a young First Family and clamors for every morsel of news about their daily life. Caroline and John have become celebrities in their own right, although they don’t know it. Photographers, writers, news magazines, and daily newspapers chronicling their young lives are just a fact of daily life.

John, almost two years old, likes to stop at Evelyn Lincoln’s typewriter on his way in to the Oval Office and pretend to type a letter. Caroline, who is nearly six years old, likes to bring one or all of the family’s three dogs when she pays a visit to her father. In fact, the Kennedy children have turned the White House into a veritable menagerie, with dogs, hamsters, a cat, parakeets, and even a pony named Macaroni. JFK is allergic to dog hair, but he never lets on.

Sometimes the president returns the favor by paying a surprise visit to Caroline and her classmates at their small private school on the third floor of the White House. The school is unique, set up by Jackie Kennedy to protect her children and those of her sister-in-law Ethel Kennedy. The First Lady has brought in two teachers to give the children the best possible education.

At nights the president is a great storyteller, making up tales about the fictitious giant in “Bobo the Lobo” and the sock-eating creatures of the deep in “The White Shark and the Black Shark.”

The drop-in visits, forays to the schoolroom, and bedtime stories are unscheduled, but rolling around on the floor is a cherished morning routine. Kennedy, like every president since John Adams became the White House’s first resident in 1800, has learned that life inside the White House is complicated. Mornings are the only time the president can be carefree, unrehearsed, and, best of all, unwatched by a curious public.

But on this Tuesday morning in October, a knock on the president’s bedroom door intrudes on his private time with the children. That knock will change everything.

* * *

National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy steps through the door. The razor-sharp creases of his suit pants and his polished shoes give the slim, bespectacled scholar an outward look of complete organization, which conflicts with his internal feelings of utter disarray.

Bundy is about to deliver very bad news. He learned of it last night but has intentionally waited until now to tell the president. John Kennedy was in New York to deliver a speech and didn’t return to the White House until very late. The national security adviser wanted to make sure Kennedy received a full night of sleep before Bundy stepped into the presidential bedroom and broke the news. Bundy knows that from now until the moment this problem is solved, the president will be lucky to get any rest. For what McGeorge Bundy is about to tell JFK could change the course of history.

“Mr. President,” the forty-three-year-old Bundy calmly informs Kennedy, “there is now hard photographic evidence, which you will see later, that the Russians have offensive missiles in Cuba.”

U-2 spy planes flying over Cuba have confirmed that six Soviet medium-range ballistic missile sites and twenty-one IL-28 medium-range bombers are now just ninety miles from the United States. Each of the airplanes is capable of launching nuclear weapons from thousands of feet up in the air. Each of the medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBMs) can fly as far as Montana.

The detonated nuclear warheads could kill eighty million Americans within a matter of minutes. Millions more would die later from the radioactive fallout.

The president has dealt with crisis after crisis since taking office twenty-one months ago. But nothing—not the Bay of Pigs, not civil rights, not the Berlin Wall—can even remotely compare to this.

* * *

The Bay of Pigs, in its own mismanaged way, has shaped John Kennedy’s presidency. Now, listening to National Security Adviser Bundy, JFK is not nervous, as he was in April 1961. He is not overwhelmed. Instead, he behaves like the president of the United States, a man who long ago stopped defining himself by party affiliation.

Kennedy knows that he needs to tread carefully. The Bay of Pigs will forever be a fresh wound. A second misstep in Cuba could be devastating—not only to his presidency, but also to his own children. The thought of losing Caroline and John to an atomic bomb terrifies Kennedy, for his children are always on his mind when he deals with the Soviets and the issue of nuclear war. The president is lobbying for an international nuclear test ban and characterizes himself as “President of generations unborn—and not just American generations.”

Once, on a visit to a New Mexico nuclear testing ground, Kennedy was astounded at the enormity of the crater left by a recent underground test explosion. Even more troublesome was the opinion of two physicists, who explained, with broad smiles on their faces, that they were designing a more powerful bomb that would leave a much smaller crater.

“How can they be so damned cheerful about a thing like that?” the president groused to a writer afterward. This was highly uncharacteristic. Kennedy’s typical behavior is outwardly friendly and inwardly guarded. He usually gives away nothing. So this sharing of his feelings is glaring evidence of his anxiety. “They keep telling me that if they could run more tests they could come up with a cleaner bomb. If you’re going to kill a hundred million people, what difference does it make whether it’s clean or dirty?”

* * *

JFK orders McGeorge Bundy to immediately schedule a top secret meeting of the national security staff. He then phones Bobby, telling him that “we have some big trouble. I want you over here.” The president decides not to deviate from his normal schedule, not wanting the news about Cuba to get out quite yet. One reason is that he doesn’t want to panic the American public. He knows very little about the situation and doesn’t have a plan for moving forward. Leaking word prematurely, at a time when he doesn’t have answers to the many questions the press will ask, will make him appear weak and indecisive.

Another reason for keeping this “second Cuba” quiet has to do with JFK’s political best interests. The president long ago assured the American public that he would not allow the Soviets to install offensive weapons in Cuba. Khrushchev is calling Kennedy’s bluff at a time when midterm congressional elections are just a few weeks away. The president has no way of knowing whether the Soviets ever plan to use the missiles, but their mere presence shows that Khrushchev continues his quest to secure the upper hand in the U.S.-Soviet relationship.

This must not happen. As with all midterms, the votes being cast across the nation will be a referendum on Kennedy’s policies and administration. His party holds a majority in the House and Senate, making it easier for JFK to promote his presidential agenda. Losing those majorities will complicate his job—and could perhaps cost him the election in 1964.

President Kennedy, with brothers Robert and Teddy. (Cecil Stoughton, White House Photographs, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)

There is another, even more personal, reason JFK wants his policies viewed in a popular light: his youngest brother, Teddy, is running for the Senate in Massachusetts. Something as catastrophic as a mishandling of this new Cuba situation could destroy any hopes of Teddy winning.

JFK is proud of his thirty-year-old brother’s bid for office but has given it a wide berth during the campaign. The president’s official statement on the matter was a terse “His brother prefers that this matter be decided by the people of Massachusetts and that the president should not become involved.” JFK bristles at the widespread media coverage of Teddy’s run, including a sarcastic New York Times column about the youngest Kennedy brother’s relative inexperience and other newspaper articles warning of a Kennedy dynasty.

None of this really bothers the president, personally. But he knows that if Teddy loses in the Kennedys’ home state, it will be a reflection on JFK’s political strength—or lack thereof.

The final, and by far the most important, reason the president doesn’t want word leaking out about the missiles in Cuba is that he does not want the Russian leadership to know that he is onto their secret. In that way, he believes, he can gain some control over the unsettling turn of events.

Because on the morning of October 16, as Kennedy leaves his bedroom and strolls down to the Oval Office to start his day, one fact is very clear: if the Soviets launch those missiles, the midterm elections, Teddy’s bid for office, and even the opinion of the American people won’t matter anymore. Because there may no longer be a Washington, D.C.—and there may no longer be much left of the United States of America.

Whatever happens next has nothing to do with being a Democrat or a Republican, and everything to do with what’s best for the American people. If anything shows how much JFK has grown since taking the Oath of Office, it is this resolve, at this moment.

* * *

At 10:00 A.M. the president emerges from a brief meeting in the Oval Office with Mercury astronaut Wally Schirra, who spent nine hours in outer space two weeks earlier. JFK walks next door into Kenny O’Donnell’s office. The appointments secretary has previously voiced an opinion that America’s voters don’t care about Cuba anymore. “You still think the fuss about Cuba is unimportant?” Kennedy asks innocently.

“Absolutely. The voters don’t give a damn about Cuba.”

The president calmly shares with O’Donnell the news McGeorge Bundy delivered just an hour ago.

“I don’t believe it.”

“You better believe it,” Kennedy tells him before marching back to the Oval Office.

Two hours later, JFK steps away from his desk yet again. He joins Caroline in the nearby Cabinet Room, then shoos her back to the residence as he convenes the top secret meeting about the Soviet missiles. He takes a seat at the center of the table, not the head. Bobby sits across from him, as does LBJ. Eleven other men are in attendance, all handpicked for their expertise and loyalty to the president.

Photos taken by U-2 spy planes show that the Soviet missiles are still being prepared for launch, but for the time being, they probably lack the nuclear warheads that would make them lethal. The talk shifts to military options. After listening to the various opinions, the president provides his own list. The first is a limited air strike. The second is a broader air strike, on a broader number of targets. The third is a naval blockade of Cuban waters, preventing the Soviet ships carrying nuclear warheads from reaching the missiles.

Bobby, who has listened quietly throughout the seventy-minute meeting, finally speaks up, suggesting that a full-scale invasion of Cuba might be necessary. It is the only way to prevent Russian missiles from ever being placed on Cuban soil.

Even as military force seems like the only solution, JFK is still troubled by the question of motive. Why is Nikita Khrushchev trying to provoke the Americans into war?

The president doesn’t know the answer. But two things are apparent: those missiles must be removed and, far more important, those nuclear warheads cannot be allowed to reach Cuba.

Ever.

* * *

It is Saturday afternoon, October 20. John Fitzgerald Kennedy is spending the weekend in downtown Chicago, rallying the Democratic Party faithful at a fund-raiser.

Two days ago he met privately with Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko. It was Gromyko who requested the meeting, not knowing that the Americans had discovered that the Soviets had placed offensive missiles in Cuba. The topics of discussion were the goings-on in Berlin and Soviet leader Khrushchev’s pending visit to America. Kennedy skillfully guided the subject toward the topic of nuclear weapons. Gromyko then lied to the president’s face, stating most adamantly that “the Soviet Union would never become involved in the furnishing of offensive weapons to Cuba.”

For this reason, Kennedy now refers to Gromyko as “that lying bastard.”

The mood in Chicago is a radical departure from the tension in Washington. When Air Force One lands at O’Hare Airport, the president is greeted by an army of bagpipers and local politicians, and an estimated half million people line the Northwest Expressway to witness the president’s motorcade. After JFK’s speech at a $100-a-plate fund-raising dinner on Friday night, a fireworks show lights up the sky over Lake Michigan. As if by magic, the display features the president’s face in profile.

But the public adulation is a stark contrast to the private inner hell John Kennedy is living right now. He hasn’t even told his wife what is going on in Cuba. What will become known as the Cuban missile crisis is now four days old, and his ExComm team—short for Executive Committee of the National Security Council—is close to formulating an aggressive strategy to avert a nuclear attack. One hundred and eighty naval ships are being sent to the Caribbean. The army’s First Armored Division is being relocated from Texas to Georgia. The air force’s Tactical Air Command has transferred more than five hundred fighter jets and tankers to Florida and is hustling to find enough munitions to supply them.

The legendary Strategic Air Command has squadrons of B-47 and B-52 bombers ready to launch, the pilots sequestered in secure “Alert” facilities. Most of these long-range bomber bases are in the northern portion of the United States—Maine, New Hampshire, and northern Michigan. The primary reason for this is simple: it’s the shortest route to the Soviet Union, which has long been thought to be the primary target once war comes. The pilots and navigators are familiar with those coordinates and have practiced them for years. The straight shot down to Havana is brand-new territory.

The president calls the First Lady from his Chicago suite. Jackie and the children are at the Glen Ora estate in Virginia.

“I’m coming back to Washington this afternoon. Why don’t you come back there?” he asks her. Jackie senses “something funny” in JFK’s voice.

“Why don’t you come down here?” she answers playfully. Jackie and the children have just arrived. The autumn weather is warm enough that Jackie is lying in the sun when she takes her husband’s call.

But something about that tone in JFK’s voice alerts Jackie. He knows how important those weekends in Virginia are to her and how much she treasures unwinding from the pressures of the White House. He’s never before asked her to cut a weekend short.

“Why?” the First Lady asks again. She will later remember the alarm she felt, realizing that “whenever you’re married to someone and they ask something—yeah, that’s the whole point of being married—you must sense some trouble in their voice and mustn’t ask why.”

But she asks anyway.

“Well, never mind,” JFK answers, not telling her his reasons. “Why don’t you just come back to Washington?”

Then, suddenly, the president changes his mind. At a time like this, he wants nothing more than to relieve his burden and be with his family. So the president finally tells Jackie about the possibility of a nuclear war.

“Please don’t send me away to Camp David. Please don’t send me anywhere,” Jackie answers. She now pleads with her husband, disregarding her safety. Jackie knows that in event of an attack, the family will be evacuated to the Maryland presidential retreat, which will take her and the children away from JFK—perhaps forever. “Even if there’s no room in the bomb shelter in the White House. Please, then I just want to be on the lawn when it happens. I just want to be with you, and I want to die with you, and the children do too.”

The president assures his wife he will not send her away. Then, instructing Pierre Salinger to explain to the press that he has a cold, JFK flies back to Washington, D.C. The New York Times will report that a “slight upper respiratory infection” is the reason the president is cutting short the three-day trip; the paper is unaware that the president is flying back to Washington in an effort to prevent global thermonuclear war.

Jackie and the children are waiting when he arrives.

* * *

There is no day and there is no night in the Kennedy White House as the Cuban confrontation escalates. The president is in such pain from his back that he gets around on crutches, further adding to the tension. He sleeps just one or two hours at a time, then rises and talks on the phone for hours in the Oval Office, before returning to bed for another short nap. Jackie sleeps with him now, whether night or day. Sometimes they sleep in his small bed; at others, in her bedroom, in the two double beds, which have been pushed together to form one large king. They often talk late at night about the crisis. Once, Jackie wakes up to see Mac Bundy standing at the foot of their bed to wake her husband, whereupon JFK rises instantly and disappears for several more hours of top secret phone calls.

Jackie will later remember these days and nights as the time she felt closest to her husband. She walks by the president’s office all the time, cheering him up by bringing the children for surprise visits. She arranges for dinner from a favorite Miami seafood restaurant to be flown to Washington. The president and First Lady often slip into the Rose Garden for a quiet walk, where he confides in her about the escalating tension.

When the president returns to his work, he is not alone—nor is Jackie. While Bobby Kennedy works closely with his brother, his wife, Ethel, and their three children are frequently at the White House. It is Ethel who gives White House nanny Maud Shaw a pamphlet on how to prepare children for nuclear war—a pamphlet that Jackie snatches away moments later. “Don’t you know that panic is catching? And that children are susceptible?” the First Lady scolds Shaw.

This is not the demure Jackie the public sees, but a fiercely protective mother and wife taking charge of her household.

For two days, the president and his small White House entourage debate the top secret threat to the United States. Photos taken by U-2 spy planes show that the Soviets are working around the clock to complete the missile sites, meaning that warheads could be launched toward the United States within a matter of days. No one “bitches it up,” in JFK’s words, by leaking this information to the press, even though it’s clear that some journalists already know. Not even the Congress is told.

On the night of Monday, October 22, the scene changes. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy appears on national television to inform America about the potentially lethal missiles in Cuba—and what he plans to do about them. The end of the world is no time to keep the American people uninformed.

* * *

“Good evening, my fellow citizens,” John Fitzgerald Kennedy greets the nation from his study at the White House. There are deep grooves under his greenish-gray eyes, giving him a haggard look instead of the vibrant, youthful countenance the nation is used to seeing.

JFK’s face is puffy from his chronic hypothyroidism. He wears a crisp blue suit, blue tie, and starched white shirt, though the television audience can see him only in black and white. It is 7:00 P.M. in Washington, D.C.

This broadcast from the White House is quite the opposite of Jackie’s lighthearted tour of just ten months earlier. John Fitzgerald Kennedy must make the most powerful speech of his life. He does not smile. His face is stern. There is menace in his eyes. He is not optimistic, nor even hopeful. His words come out angrily, with a vehemence that shocks some viewers. Kennedy speaks the words of a man who has been bent until he will bend no more. And now he’s fighting back.

“Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island. The purpose of these bases can be none other than to provide a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere.”

Here the president pauses, letting the words sink in. He then recounts Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko’s visit to his office the previous Thursday, quotes Gromyko on the subject of missiles in Cuba—and then calls Gromyko a liar, for all the world to hear.

“The 1930s taught us a clear lesson: Aggressive conduct, if allowed to grow unchecked and unchallenged, ultimately leads to war. This nation is opposed to war. We are also true to our word. Our unswerving objective, therefore, must be to prevent the use of these missiles against this or any other country and to secure their withdrawal or elimination from the Western Hemisphere.”

The president’s cadence is quicker now, as he grows angrier and angrier. The word Cuba comes out as Cuber.

After his speech is done, the president will enjoy a quiet dinner upstairs with Jackie, Ethel, Bobby, and a handful of invited guests. Watching the speech, the president’s dinner guests—among them designer Oleg Cassini and Jackie’s sister, Lee Radziwill—are stunned to learn that their dinner will not be the typical easygoing White House gathering. Even though they will sip French wine in the newly redecorated Oval Room, on the second floor, and JFK, with his usual understated style, will play the part of the congenial host, the tension at the dinner table will be something they will remember for the rest of their lives.

* * *

Thirteen hundred miles away, in Dallas, Texas, Lee Harvey Oswald is listening to Kennedy’s speech. Unlike the majority of his peers, Oswald believes that the Soviets have every right to be in Cuba. From his perspective, the Russians must protect Castro’s people against terrorist behavior by the United States. Oswald is firmly convinced that President Kennedy is putting the world on the brink of nuclear war by taking such an aggressive stance against the Soviets. To him, JFK is the villain.

Oswald finalized his move from Forth Worth to Dallas earlier in the month and rented a P.O. box, number 2915, at the post office on the corner of Bryan and North Ervay Street. A few weeks before that, Oswald found a job at the firm of Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall, as a photographic trainee. Amazingly, the firm has a contract with the U.S. Army Map Service that involves highly classified photographs taken by the U-2 spy planes flying over Cuba. It is Marina Oswald’s Russian friend George de Mohrenschildt who arranged for Oswald to be hired there. If the FBI, in all its zeal to stop the spread of communism, is concerned that a former Soviet defector has access to such top secret U-2 data at the peak of cold war tension, it’s not proving it by paying attention to his case.

* * *

On television, the president is about to throw down the gauntlet. “Acting, therefore, in the defense of our own security and of the entire Western Hemisphere, and under the authority entrusted me by the Constitution as endorsed by the resolution of Congress, I have directed that the following initial steps be taken immediately.”

Then, after months of being diplomatic and appearing weak in Soviet eyes, the president shows his true mettle. JFK promises to “quarantine” Cuba, using the might of the U.S. Navy to prevent any Soviet vessel from entering Cuban waters. He declares that he is prepared to use military might in the form of an invasion, if necessary. He states unequivocally that any missile launched by the Cubans or Soviets will be considered an act of war and that the United States will reciprocate with missiles of its own. The president then places the blame squarely on his nemesis. The entire speech has been building to this moment. “And finally, I call upon Chairman Khrushchev to halt and eliminate this clandestine, reckless and provocative threat to world peace and stable relations between our two nations. I call upon him further to abandon this course of world domination and to join in an historic effort to end the perilous arms race and transform the history of man.”

The power of the president’s speech, and the terrible news that he now delivers to the public, will make this moment stand forever in the minds of everyone who is watching. Kennedy once noted that “the only two dates that most people remember where they were was Pearl Harbor and the death of President Roosevelt.”

His Cuban missile crisis speech now joins that list.

For as long as they live, men and women will be able to recount where they were and what they were doing when they got this terrible news. They will describe the people standing nearby and how their reactions compared. They will talk about the headlines the next day and how their world was transformed by the traumatic news. They will suddenly appreciate each sunrise, each sunset, each mirthful peal of a child’s laughter.

Tragically, another event in JFK’s short life will also soon join that list of unforgettable moments. Its shock and horror will eclipse this news of Cuba and missiles and Soviet lies. John Kennedy will never know it happened.

That event is exactly thirteen months from today. But for now, the Cuban missile crisis is drama enough.

John Kennedy, being his charismatic self, is incapable of concluding a speech without a stirring moment to galvanize his listeners. Whether with his Gold Star Mothers speech in a Boston American Legion hall during his first run for Congress, or with his inaugural address in 1961, or now on national television, JFK knows how to grab his listeners by the heart—or by “the nuts,” as he so often likes to say—and rally their emotional support.

“Our goal is not the victory of might, but the vindication of right. Not peace at the expense of freedom, but both peace and freedom—here in this hemisphere and, we hope, around the world. God willing, that goal will be achieved.”

The White House set fades to black.

* * *

American forces around the world immediately prepare for war. All navy and marine personnel are about to have their duty tours extended indefinitely. American warships and submarines are forming a defensive perimeter around Cuba, preparing to stop and search the twenty-five Soviet ships currently sailing toward that defiant island.

At Torrejón Air Base in Spain, the men of the 509th B-47 bomber wing hear the president’s words over loudspeakers in their rooms, part of a global alert going out to all U.S. military. Captain Alan Dugard, a young bomber pilot, is packing for a week’s leave in Germany. When the air force’s defense readiness condition (Defcon) is upgraded to Defcon 2—only Defcon 1, which means that nuclear war is imminent, is higher—Captain Dugard instantly realizes that there will be no vacation.

U.S. Air Force bombers are already in the air around the clock. The crews will circle over European and American skies in a racetrack pattern, awaiting the “go” code to break from their flight plan and strike at the heart of the Soviet Union. Their contrails are a visible reminder of what is at stake.

The nonstop air brigade means just one thing: the United States is ready to retaliate and destroy the USSR.

* * *

Five thousand miles away, in Moscow, a furious Nikita Khrushchev composes his response to JFK’s televised message.

The Soviet leader is the dashing JFK’s polar opposite in appearance and aplomb. He is just five foot three, weighs almost two hundred pounds, and is as bald as a circus clown. Khrushchev has an enormous mole under his right eye, a wide gap between his front teeth, and a very unstatesmanlike habit of mugging for the camera. When he stepped off the plane on his 1959 visit to the United States, a woman in the crowd took one look at him and exclaimed, “What a funny little man.”

But there is nothing funny about Nikita Khrushchev. He believes in diplomacy by “balance of fear.” His decision to place missiles in Cuba is calculated and ruthless. “I came to the conclusion that if we did everything secretly, and the Americans found out about it only after the missiles were in place and ready to be launched, they would have to stop and think before making the risky decision to wipe out our missiles by military force,” Khrushchev will later write.

However, now, as he begins his response to Kennedy’s speech, the Soviet dictator turns crafty and chooses his words carefully. “You, Mr. President, are not declaring a quarantine,” Khrushchev dictates to a secretary, “but rather are setting forth an ultimatum and threatening that if we do not give in to your demands you will use force. Consider what you are saying!

“The Soviet government considers that the violation of the freedom to use international waters and international air space is an act of aggression which pushes mankind toward the abyss of a world nuclear missile war,” Khrushchev lectures JFK. “Naturally, we will not simply be bystanders with regard to piratical acts by American ships on the high seas. We will then be forced on our part to take the measures we consider necessary and adequate in order to protect our rights. We have everything necessary to do so.”

It was Khrushchev alone who devised the plan to place missiles in Cuba. He presented his idea to the Soviet government’s Central Committee, and then to Fidel Castro just three months earlier. He believed the missiles could be hidden from the United States and, even if they were discovered, that Kennedy would refuse to act.

Khrushchev also claims the decision was a goodwill gesture to the Cuban people, in case of another Bay of Pigs–style invasion by the United States. Having participated in World War II, the Soviet leader knows that the logistics of launching a war in another hemisphere are just about impossible. So he wants his arsenal closer to America, and Cuba provides that opportunity. The weapons he has persuaded Castro to take are Soviet-made, manned by Soviet soldiers and technicians, tipped with Soviet nuclear warheads—and brought to Cuba aboard Soviet ships.

Having been a former political commissar in the Red Army, Khrushchev understands the power of words. He tells the world that the Soviet Union has “a moral and legal justification” for placing missiles in Cuba. Soviet ships have every right to enter Cuban waters and unload any cargo they like and that the American naval quarantine—a fancy way of saying “blockade,” which is an act of war—is reprehensible. Khrushchev feels persecuted by the Americans. He is outraged that the Soviet Union has suffered two world wars on its soil, while the United States has suffered very little homeland devastation. Khrushchev also knows quite well that the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima had an explosive force equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT. That makes the Soviet dictator smile: his nuclear warheads are equivalent to 1 million tons.

Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev collaborated with Cuban prime minister Fidel Castro to challenge President Kennedy in the Western Hemisphere, far from the seat of Soviet power. (Associated Press)

Nikita Khrushchev is no stranger to mass death. He served at the Battle of Stalingrad during World War II, where more than a million men died—including many of the German soldiers Khrushchev personally interrogated. But those killings pale next to the sadistic methods a younger Khrushchev employed to climb the Communist Party ladder in the early 1930s.

When Joseph Stalin, the serial killer who ran the Soviet Union for thirty years, ordered a “Great Purge” of his enemies in 1934, Nikita Khrushchev was an eager participant in this plan. Millions of suspected disloyal Communists were executed or relocated to Siberian prisons. Khrushchev personally ordered thousands of murders and authorized the killing of some of his own friends and colleagues. He gave a speech in 1936 stating that the executions were the only way to rid the Soviet Union of the dissidents striving to undermine its grand success. The following year, Stalin appointed Khrushchev as head of the Communist Party in Ukraine. By the time World War II ended his tenure there in 1939, Khrushchev had overseen the arrest and murder of almost every member of the local party leadership. Hundreds of Ukrainians were murdered. Few politicians survived.

Now Nikita Khrushchev’s relentless quest for power has put the world on the brink of nuclear war.

But there’s a problem: Khrushchev is surprised to learn that his adversary, John Kennedy, is deadly serious about defending his country at all costs. But Khrushchev tells associates he will not back down. He is a firm believer in the old Russian adage, “Once you’re in a fight, don’t spare yourself. Give it everything you’ve got.”

John Kennedy was ignorant of that adage eighteen months ago, during the Bay of Pigs invasion. Now Nikita Khrushchev is gambling that the president of the United States will make the same mistake once again.

On the evening of October 24, Khrushchev orders that his letter be transmitted to Kennedy. In it the Communist leader states calmly and unequivocally that the president’s proposed naval blockade is “a pirate act.” Soviet ships are being instructed to ignore it.

* * *

President Kennedy receives Premier Khrushchev’s letter just before 11:00 P.M. on October 24. He responds less than three hours later, coolly stating that the blockade is necessary and placing all blame for the crisis on Khrushchev and the Soviets.

It’s becoming clear that Kennedy will never back down. The U.S. Navy soon boards a freighter bound for Cuba. Appropriately, the destroyer USS Joseph Kennedy Jr., named for the president’s late brother, is the ship tasked with enforcing the risky quarantine.

“Did you send it?” Jackie asked her husband, referring to the ship, when she learned of this coincidence.

“No,” the president replied. “Isn’t that strange?”

* * *

While the Soviet leadership waits for JFK to crack, he instead goes on the offensive. The president spends Friday, October 26, planning the invasion of Cuba. No detail is too small. He requests a list of all Cuban doctors in Miami, just in case there will be a need to airlift them into Cuba. He orders that a U.S. naval vessel loaded with sensitive radar be moved farther off the coast of the island nation, to make it less vulnerable to attack. Kennedy knows where each invasion ship will assemble, and even scrutinizes the wording of the leaflets that will be dropped to the Cuban people. All the while, the president frets that “when military hostilities first begin, those missiles will be fired at us.”

JFK is privately telling aides that it’s now a showdown between him and Khrushchev, “two men sitting on opposite sides of the world,” deciding “the end of civilization.”

It’s a staring contest. The loser blinks first.

But John Kennedy has seen Nikita Khrushchev blink before. In the early days of Kennedy’s presidency, shortly after the Bay of Pigs incident, the two men held a summit meeting in Vienna. Khrushchev tried to bully his younger adversary on the subject of West Berlin, hoping to take control of the entire city because more and more citizens of Soviet-controlled East Berlin were risking their lives in the name of freedom by escaping into the adjacent territory controlled by the United States and her World War II allies. Kennedy refused to back down, and a chastened Khrushchev began construction of the Berlin Wall to save face.

But time is on Khrushchev’s side on this occasion. Construction of the missile launch facilities in Cuba is nearly complete.

So, while the rest of the world prepares for imminent doom, Nikita Khrushchev spends the early evening of October 26 at the Bolshoi Ballet. “Our people and the foreigners will see this, and it will have a calming effect,” he exhorts his comrades in the Soviet leadership. “If Khrushchev and the other leaders are going to the theatre at a time like this, then it must be possible to sleep peacefully.”

But Nikita Khrushchev is the most anxious man in Moscow, and there’s no way he can rest now. At least a dozen Soviet ships have either been intercepted by U.S. warships or turned back of their own accord. The lightly armed Russian vessels are no match for the American firepower.

After the ballet, Khrushchev spends all night in the Kremlin—just in case something violent transpires. The Soviet leader is uncharacteristically pensive. Something is on his mind. Shortly after midnight, he sits down and dictates a new message to President Kennedy.

* * *

It is 6:00 P.M. in Washington and 2:00 A.M. in Moscow when the message is delivered. JFK has spent the day fine-tuning the upcoming invasion of Cuba. He is bone tired, running on a hidden reserve of energy. His aching body is in a state of chaos. The president has long suffered from a condition known as autoimmune polyendocrine syndrome type 2 (APS-2), which has caused not only his hypothyroidism (insufficient thyroid hormone) but also his Addison’s disease, which must be closely monitored at all times. Addison’s causes his body to fail to produce the necessary hormones, such as cortisol, that regulate blood pressure, cardiovascular function, and blood sugar. Left unchecked, Addison’s causes exhaustion, weight loss, weakness, and even death. In 1946, before the disease was diagnosed, Kennedy collapsed at a parade and turned so blue and yellow that he was thought to be suffering from a heart attack.

That must not happen now.

So JFK is receiving injections of hydrocortisone and testosterone to battle his Addison’s. He is taking antispasmodic drugs to ward off his chronic colitis and diarrhea. And the president is suffering from another painful urinary tract infection, which requires antibiotics. All of this is in addition to relentless excruciating back pain. A less driven man would have taken to bed long ago, but John Kennedy refuses to let his constant pain and suffering interfere with his performing his duties.

Jackie has chosen not to worry about Jack’s fatigue, having seen him drive himself hard through many a campaign, attending a fund-raising dinner until late in the night and then waking up before dawn to stand outside some factory or steel mill to shake hands with the workers arriving for their shift. But this is different, and she doesn’t know how much longer he can go on. She sees the awkward way he eases himself into his favorite rocking chair for meetings to lessen the pain in his back.

More ominously, Jackie knows about the time his Addison’s almost killed him, fifteen years earlier. She also remembers that, in 1954, a metal plate was inserted into her husband’s spine (to counter a degenerative condition) and a postoperative infection put him in a coma. Once again, John Kennedy was administered the last rites of the Roman Catholic Church. And once again he battled back.

That makes three times—PT-109, Addison’s, and the back surgery—in which JFK defeated death. Jackie Kennedy knows that her man, the president of the United States, is extremely tough. He will persevere. He always has.

But it’s actually the men of ExComm who have the First Lady concerned. Jackie has pressed her ear to the door and eavesdropped on their meetings. She has heard the strain. She believes these men are working to “the peak of human endurance” to save the world.

McGeorge Bundy, too, is quite sure that the ExComm men are all about to crack. They’ve been awake night and day for almost two weeks. These staid men have become emotional because of their extreme exhaustion and have cultivated opinions and petty jealousies that will define their relationships for years to come. One of the most powerful voices among them is that of air force general Curtis E. LeMay, who sees nothing wrong with blowing Cuba off the map.

* * *

Then Khrushchev’s message arrives. The letter’s wording is personal, an appeal from one leader to another to do the right thing. The Soviet leader insists that he is not trying to incite nuclear war: “Only lunatics or suicides, who themselves want to perish and to destroy the whole world before they die, could do this,” he writes. The Soviet ruler rambles on, questioning Kennedy’s motivations.

Khrushchev concludes his letter by negotiating with Kennedy in a somewhat confusing fashion. The paragraph that draws the most attention states: If you have not lost your self-control, and sensibly conceive what this might lead to, then, Mr. President, we and you ought not to pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied the knot of war, because the more the two of us pull, the tighter the knot will be tied. And a moment may come when that knot will be tied so tight that even he who tied it will not have the strength to untie it, and then it will be necessary to cut that knot.”

The ExComm crew does not believe that Khrushchev’s message is the sign of an outright capitulation. But they all agree it’s a start.

For the first time in more than a week, John F. Kennedy feels hopeful. Yet he does not lift the blockade. There are still nearly a dozen Soviet vessels steering directly toward the quarantine line—and these ships show no signs of turning around.

The tension increases the next afternoon, when word reaches JFK that Cuban surface-to-air missiles have shot down an American U-2 spy plane. The pilot, Major Rudolf Anderson Jr., has been killed.

In retaliation, the Joint Chiefs of Staff demand that the president launch U.S. bombers in a massive air strike on Cuba within forty-eight hours, to be followed by an outright invasion.

Worst of all, spy plane photographs now confirm that some of the Soviet missile installations are complete. There are twenty-four medium-range ballistic missile launchpads, and forty-two MRBMs. Once the warheads are attached, the MRBMs can be launched. Each has a range of 1,020 miles—far enough to reach Washington. Soviet diplomats in their Washington, D.C., embassy are so convinced war is imminent that they have begun burning sensitive documents.

The crisis isn’t over. The prospect of nuclear war has never been greater. The United States is so close to invading Cuba that one bad joke in the nonstop series of ExComm meetings is that Bobby Kennedy will soon be mayor of Havana.

White House appointments secretary Kenny O’Donnell sums up the mood best, describing the ExComm meeting on Saturday evening, October 27, as “the most depressing hour that any of us spent in the White House during the president’s time there.”

President Kennedy secretly sends Bobby to meet with Soviet officials in Washington, promising not to invade Cuba if the missiles are removed, and also to meet a Khrushchev demand that he withdraw U.S. missiles from Turkey that are currently in range of the Soviet Union. The Turks won’t like it, and the missiles are technically under control of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), but the president is willing to make this one concession if it will stave off war.

It is a war that could be just hours away.

* * *

Then Khrushchev blinks.

The Communist leader is so sure that Kennedy is bluffing that he has not mobilized the Soviet army to full alert. Yet Khrushchev’s intelligence reports now show that the United States is very serious about invading Cuba. And if that happens, the Russians will be forced to fire nuclear missiles. Failure to do so would make Khrushchev and the Soviet Union an international laughingstock. Far worse, the world will think that John Kennedy is more powerful than Nikita Khrushchev.

There is no way the Soviet leadership or the Soviet people will stand for that humiliation. Khrushchev will be toppled from power.

Despite this possibility, the Soviet leader becomes less bellicose. The “funny little man” is introspective when it comes to the subject of war. He lost his first wife to typhus during World War I. Khrushchev may be remembering his beloved Yefrosinia when he says of war “it has rolled through cities and villages, everywhere sowing death and destruction.” The Russian dictator sees that the American president is willing to conduct a nuclear war if pushed to the limit. Yes, the United States will be gone forever. But so will the Soviet Union.

On Sunday morning, at 9:00 A.M., Radio Moscow tells the people of the Soviet Union that Chairman Khrushchev has saved the world from annihilation. The words are also aimed directly at JFK when the commentator states that the Soviets choose to “dismantle the arms which you described as offensive, and to crate and return them to Soviet Russia.”

After thirteen long days, the Cuban missile crisis is over.

* * *

In Dallas, Lee Harvey Oswald has been following the action closely. His reaction is to show solidarity with the Russians and Cubans by joining the Socialist Workers Party.

Oswald is alone in the new two-story brick apartment he has rented on Elsbeth Street and is eager for Marina to join him. She and baby June are living with friends in Fort Worth, and he is lonesome for her company despite their violent history. Yet when Marina finally arrives in Dallas, on November 3, their domestic battles resume. She calls their squalid new dwelling a “pigsty.” They scream at each other for two solid days. Oswald swears that he’s going to “beat the hell out of her,” and then goes one step further by threatening to hit her so hard and so long that he’ll kill her.

Marina has had enough. She leaves him again, moving in with some of her Russian friends. So complete is their split that she doesn’t even give Oswald her new address. The members of the Russian community in Dallas, who never liked Oswald, refuse to assist him in his search for his wife.

Outcast, misunderstood, and alone, Lee Harvey Oswald, who considers himself a great man, destined to accomplish great things, festers in a quiet rage.

He has now become desperate.

* * *

On November 6, 1962, Teddy Kennedy is one of the first beneficiaries of the outcome of the defused crisis, sweeping into office as the newly elected U.S. senator from Massachusetts. There will now be three Kennedys in Washington. And while the Cuban missile crisis has seen JFK’s approval rating soar to 79 percent, not everyone is happy about the growing Kennedy influence. The Joint Chiefs of Staff are irate that JFK did not, and now will not, invade Cuba. Fidel Castro feels sold out by the Soviets and is already seeing his influence in Latin America plummet because he has been exposed as a Russian puppet. Seething, he blames Kennedy.

With good reason. The Cuban missile crisis does not mark the end of efforts to get rid of Castro. And while the president has promised Khrushchev that he will not meddle in Cuban affairs, this does not mean that the CIA’s Operation Mongoose has come to an end. The brainchild of JFK, Mongoose involved inserting teams of Cuban exiles into Cuba to foment rebellion against Castro. Initially, the Mafia was also secretly enlisted, with the primary aim of killing Castro. The president never used the word assassinate to describe the operation’s ultimate mission, but the Mafia is not a military organization, and their well-documented involvement took Mongoose beyond a popular overthrow by the exiles and into the realm of carefully plotted political murder.

* * *

The bond between Jack and Bobby Kennedy became tighter than ever during the Cuban missile crisis, even as Lyndon Johnson once again stumbled. The vice president made the crucial mistake of being disloyal to President Kennedy, initially aligning himself with the hawkish generals who advocated a full-blown invasion. Bobby, meanwhile, took the opposite point of view. He thought an attack on Cuba would remind the world of Pearl Harbor—an opinion mirroring that of JFK.

Now, with the crisis successfully defused, John Fitzgerald Kennedy is elated. He sees a comparison between the successful outcome of the Cuban missile crisis and Abraham Lincoln’s stable leadership that brought about the end of the Civil War. “Maybe this is the night I should go to the theater,” JFK jokes to Bobby, remembering that Lincoln attended a play as the war ended—only to be assassinated.

It is a bold joke, a playful poke at a fellow president’s murder, almost tempting fate. And it is out of character for John Kennedy, a man with echoes of Lincoln everywhere in his life: from sleeping in the Lincoln Bedroom on the night of his inauguration, to having a secretary surnamed Lincoln, to being driven in a bubble-top convertible Lincoln Continental limousine. But after the nail-biting tension of the recent crisis, John Kennedy feels he is allowed a touch of black humor. Even such a morbid joke feels lighthearted after the darkness that has enveloped his life these last thirteen days and nights.

The president and the attorney general laugh.

“If you go” to the theater, Bobby answers, “I want to go with you.”

Little do they know how macabre those words actually are.