By Sheldon M. Stern
In the nearly three decades since the declassification of the secret recordings of the Cuban missile crisis ExComm meetings, I have often been asked if the recordings add anything vital to our grasp of that singular event. The answer is irrefutable: yes!
That question also led me to wonder whether any of the key ExComm participants ultimately learned anything from the recordings. The tapes were not declassified until 1996 and by then most ExComm survivors were quite elderly. However, years earlier, McGeorge Bundy, President Kennedy’s special assistant for national security, received clearance from the National Archives to listen to still-classified tapes from the first day (Tuesday, 16 October 1962) and also from the pivotal last day (Saturday, 27 October 1962).
One afternoon in the 1980s I was surprised to see Bundy, then in his sixties, preparing to eat a meal in the Kennedy Library staff lunchroom. I introduced myself as the JFK Library historian, and explained that I had previously listened to the missile crisis tapes all the way through to the November lifting of the naval quarantine. Bundy looked incredulous at first, but after I alluded briefly to my background (Harvard PhD) he seemed more interested and at ease. Eventually, he acknowledged that he having difficulty identifying some speakers and I offered to help. Bundy had, of course, worked with these ExComm members and it almost seemed presumptuous for me to tell him who was talking. I explained, however, that when a speaker did not have a distinctive or familiar voice, I had compared it to other tape recordings on which the speakers were clearly identified, enabling me to recognize the voices of Paul Nitze, Roswell Gilpatric, John J. McCloy, U. Alexis Johnson, and several others. If the Boston twang of the Kennedy brothers occasionally made them difficult to distinguish, I was usually able to examine the context of the discussion to determine whether the president or attorney general was speaking.
Bundy and I spent six absorbing hours in the classified national security vault listening to the October 27th tapes. He had been, the recordings proved, a consistently tough and outspoken critic of the president’s views—which was, of course, his job as White House national security adviser. He knew that JFK did not wish to be surrounded by sycophants. Bundy was also the only participant who openly questioned the president’s judgment and decisions by frequently using the personal pronoun “I” to explain what “I myself would do” in this situation—leading the president to respond impatiently, “I want everybody to understand it, Mac, if you don’t mind.”[1]
“There may be an advantage,” Bundy suggested in his memoir, “in combining in one account what I know as a participant and what I have since learned from the work of others and from my own study.” These formerly top-secret recordings thoroughly document Bundy’s distinctive role during the ominous October 27th meetings—revised and corrected by the startling new evidence on these scratchy, low fidelity, but irreplaceable and indispensable recordings.[2]
The most widely-read book about the crisis has been Robert F. Kennedy’s Thirteen Days. It has never been out of print; created the interpretive paradigm for the crisis; and inspired several documentaries and two Hollywood films. Yet many of its key conclusions have been exposed as flatly untrue by the tapes. RFK appears to have chosen to settle personal scores with argumentative participants like Bundy—accusing him “of strange flip-flops . . . . First, he was for a [missile] strike, then a blockade and then for doing nothing . . . because it would upset the situation in Berlin, and then, finally, he led the group which was in favor of an air strike . . . without prior notification, along the lines of Pearl Harbor.” He also claimed that Bundy “had been irresolute or weak-willed.”[3]
The decisive moment of the crisis arrived on Friday evening, October 26, when Khrushchev sent a lengthy, emotional message to Washington. He insisted that the missiles in Cuba were defensive and proposed removing them in exchange for a US pledge not to invade the island. The next morning the ExComm was stunned to learn about an entirely new offer, made publicly on Moscow Radio, to remove the Cuban missiles if the US removed its Jupiter missiles from Turkey. The president immediately asked what negotiations had taken place with the Turks, noting that he had been considering such a move since the first day of the crisis. Bundy urged JFK not to soften his resolve and asserted that “I would stick to the terms in the Friday letter.” The president insisted that world opinion would back the trade—because “it will look like a very fair trade . . . . you’re going to find a lot of people thinking this is a rather reasonable position.” “That’s true,” Bundy conceded, but “privately we say to Khrushchev: ‘Look, your statement is very dangerous . . . You’d better get straightened out . . . . The current threat to peace is not in Turkey—it is in Cuba.’ JFK countered, “They’ve got a God[damn] . . . they’ve got a very good proposal, which is the reason they’ve made it public.”
Bundy soon reported that he had contacted the US ambassadors to France and NATO “who confirmed that the “knockdown of the Cuba-Turkey link” had been well-received by the allies. No such inquiry had been explicitly authorized by the president at the ExComm meetings, yet JFK did not comment on or make an issue of Bundy’s potential brush with insubordination.
“It’s one thing to stand them down,” Bundy repeated, “to reduce the likelihood of a Soviet attack on Turkey . . . . It’s quite another thing to trade them out.” But Kennedy countered again that “most people will regard this as not an unreasonable proposal, I’ll . . . tell you that!” Bundy remained unconvinced: “But what ‘most people’ Mr. President?” JFK shot back, “I think you’re gonna have it very difficult to explain [Kennedy often fractured grammar in tense moments] why we are going to take hostile military action in Cuba . . . when he’s saying, ‘If you get yours out of Turkey, I’ll get ours out of Cuba.’ I think you’ve got a very tough one here. Let’s not kid ourselves”—a remark he repeated three times. “I don’t see why we pick that track,” Bundy persisted, “when he’s offered us the other track in the last twenty-four hours.” JFK cut him off, “Well, he’s offered us a new one! . . . in fact, all these matters can be discussed if he’ll cease work [in Cuba].” Then the president paused dramatically for about six seconds before concluding bleakly, “And then where are we? . . . if that’s part of the record, then you don’t have a very good war.” “NATO may be firm now,” he warned, in language evocative of his letters home during World War II, but “we all know how quickly everybody’s courage goes when the blood starts to flow.”
“I myself,” Bundy pronounced again, would send back word that they have to do better than this public statement . . . and get [Khrushchev] back to where he was last night. JFK recommended requesting an emergency Sunday meeting of the NATO council. “No,” Bundy countered, “I would not do it tomorrow, Mr. President, myself!” JFK ignored him, reiterating that “time is running out . . . . It’s got to be finessed. We have to finesse [Khrushchev].” The national security chief remained convinced that NATO would conclude that “we were trying to sell out our allies for our interests. It’s irrational, and it’s crazy, but it’s a terribly powerful fact.”
The tapes confirm that Kennedy was convinced that the Soviet premier would not, and could not, return to his Friday proposal after moving on to a tougher public position on Saturday. RFK and special assistant Ted Sorensen urged the president to send a letter to persuade Khrushchev to return to the Friday proposal. Kennedy agreed to send it, but his indifferent tone suggests no confidence in that idea; he referred to the letter as “this thing.” JFK was certain that political pressure around the world would make it impossible for Khrushchev to swallow an offer he had abandoned.
Some readers may be wondering about the so-called “Trollope Ploy”—a scheme designed to assist the administration in concealing the truth about the secret deal that ended the crisis. Thirteen Days credits RFK with the idea. JFK, however, phoned former presidents Eisenhower, Truman, and Hoover on Sunday and lied about the deal, insisting that he had pressured Khrushchev back to the Friday proposal. Ike was impressed: “this is a very conciliatory move he’s made”—the “Trollope Ploy” before it had a name.[4]
Bundy’s memoir largely ignored his abrasive and officious exchanges with the president. That regrettable decision deprived historians and the public, before the tapes were available, of unique evidence and insight into the personal, emotional, and human realities of these discussions. (The possibility that Bundy acted as ExComm “devil’s advocate” is effectively belied by these taut, quarrelsome recorded clashes.)
Bundy stood by the 1962 US line that “the crisis was brought on” by Khrushchev. “We have a list of sabotage options, Mr. President,” which included removing Castro. “I think it would need your approval . . . . Post-Castro Cuba, is the most complex landscape.” JFK concurred that Khrushchev had “initiated the danger . . . he’s the one playing God, not us.” These covert US schemes, kept secret from the American people, were no secret to the USSR and Cuba, and help explain Khrushchev’s gamble to protect Cuba with Soviet missiles.
The international political appeal of Khrushchev’s Saturday message, Bundy reluctantly agreed, had negated the first proposal “Yet, in the end,” he concluded, “President Kennedy not only chose that [public] course but recognized the importance of giving it clear [public] priority over any effort to persuade the Turks” to accept a missile trade. In fact, this was a shrewd and devious half-truth. JFK never expected the ploy to succeed—a fact Bundy well understood. Yet the president used the Friday letter gambit (as he had done in the call to the former presidents) as a public cover story to conceal the behind-the-scenes Turkey-Cuba trade.
Bundy was impressed by the contributions of Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who resisted the missile trade during the meetings, but also shared the president’s aversion to allowing “an intransigent position on these unwanted weapons stand between his country and the safe removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba . . . [which] was worth many times any possible cost.”
Bundy’s own judgment, a quarter century later, echoed both JFK and Rusk:
Kennedy’s understanding of the political power of Khrushchev’s second letter made him pessimistic about the prospect of success in returning to the first . . . . Twenty-five years have passed, and I find myself less impressed by my own insistence on the reality of NATO sentiment than I am by the president’s unwavering recognition that the basic interest of all concerned was to find a peaceful end to the crisis and that the Turkish missiles, whatever the opinions of allies, did not justify bloodshed in Cuba.[5]
Sheldon M. Stern was John F. Kennedy Library Historian from 1977-2000. He had the unique opportunity to hear and evaluate all the Cuban missile crisis recordings two decades before they were declassified. He is the author of Averting the Final Failure: JFK and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings (2003); The Week the World Stood Still: Inside the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis (2005); and The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory: Myths vs. Reality (2012).
[1] Sheldon M. Stern, “The Selective Memory of McGeorge Bundy,” in The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory, Myths vs. Reality (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 119-128.
[2] McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival: Choices about the Bomb in the First Fifty Years (New York: Random House, 1988) 391.
[3] Sheldon M. Stern, “Beyond the Smoke and Mirrors: The Real JFK White House Cuban Missile Crisis,” in Len Scott and R. Gerald Hughes, eds., The Cuban Missile Crisis: A Critical Reappraisal (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2015) 204-224.
[4] Stern, “The Trollope Ploy Myth,” Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory, 134-147.
[5] Bundy, Danger and Survival, 430, 436.
©2024 by Sheldon M. Stern
