By Sheldon M. Stern
In 1981, JFK Library director Dan Fenn informed me that the departments of State and Defense had signed off on declassifying the 43+ hours of White House tape recordings from the Cuban missile crisis. “You’re the historian,” he said, “listen to them.” For the greater part of the next two years, I became the first non-ExComm participant to listen to all the classified missile crisis tapes, as well as many other recorded meetings and private telephone conversations. It was a life-altering experience.[1]
Nonetheless, even after all this time and study, a credible explanation for several of my personal Kennedy Library (JFKL) experiences remained elusive.
In 1979, the JFKL was preparing to move from its temporary location in Waltham, Massachusetts to the permanent site at Columbia Point in Boston. Dave Powers, Jack’s former pal, and later the JFKL’s gatekeeper for the Kennedy family, was relaxing with a bottle of wine at a staff picnic. I casually asked about the controversy over whether JFK wrote the 1957 Pulitzer Prize-winning Profiles in Courage. Powers smiled and replied, “Sheldon, do you really think that because I’ve had a bit to drink, I’m going to answer that?” The Kennedy family’s sensitivity on this question had already become well known.[2]
JFK, a politician to the core, was always suspicious of the judgment and priorities of academic historians. In 1962, he groused to Professor David Herbert Donald about the facile hubris of historians’ surveys that rated presidents “below average” or as “failures.” He resented the whole process,” Donald vividly recalled. Kennedy relied instead on Ted Sorensen, my “intellectual blood bank,” and their relationship became virtually symbiotic. If JFK thought some document or statement should be put aside for the book they would later write about his administration—it was Sorensen he alerted. The president, during the missile crisis, had to admonish several ExComm members who questioned whether ‘speechwriter’ Sorensen should even attend these secret meetings. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Pulitzer Prize historian and White House special assistant, participated in just one meeting. Sorensen, however, was virtually omnipresent; he drafted messages to heads of state (including the letter to Nikita Khrushchev that led to a peaceful outcome), complex policy analyses and anything else required by the president at any time of day or night.
In the mid-1980’s I flew to New York with a colleague for a meeting to reconsider opening some JFKL documents marked “personal.” Attorney Theodore Sorensen attended as well. After the committee’s business was concluded, food and ample drink were served; we called a cab to take us to the airport and offered to drop Sorensen off. Someone mentioned Profiles in Courage. Sorensen, perhaps less inhibited in this convivial atmosphere, suddenly exclaimed, “I wrote Profiles in Courage and much more,” followed by stunned and embarrassed silence. After we dropped him off, I wrote it down.
Fast forward to 2007. Sorensen and I (my 2003 and 2005 books on the missile crisis had been published) were invited to speak at a Princeton University program to mark the 45th anniversary of the event. Sorensen was scheduled to be the first speaker. His assistant called to say they were stuck in traffic and the moderator asked me to speak first. About ten minutes into my remarks, the door to the theater opened and Sorensen came in on the arm of his assistant. (A stroke had damaged his optic nerve and left him blind.) He received a standing ovation from the audience and the panelists. Having arrived late, he had missed the introductions, and did not know exactly who was speaking. When I finished my account, Sorensen took the microphone and declared, “With all due respect, I am the only person in the room who was there in 1962.” He referred briefly to my “inaccurate” presentation and launched into a defense of the traditional Thirteen Days narrative: Bobby Kennedy as the leading opponent of military force, the importance of the celebrated “Trollope Ploy” in reaching a settlement, etc. During the Q&A after the panel, when my full name was mentioned, Sorensen added, “Oh, Sheldon, of course I know him. Wonderful book.” I passed a note to the moderator, “Should I take him on?” He shook his head, “no.”[3]
When the program ended, Sorensen received another standing ovation and dozens of people lined up for questions or an autograph. No one asked about the tapes, and I was dismayed by the public appeal of celebrity over evidence. Is it possible to make sense of Sorensen’s reliance on these myths —a full decade after declassification of the ExComm recordings?
The three episodes discussed above, it finally occurred to me, fit together much more coherently when viewed in the context of an earlier incident, then unknown to the public. In the spring of 1964, Attorney General Robert Kennedy turned up in Kenny O’Donnell’s office in the White House. (LBJ had persuaded key JFK men to stay on though the transition). RFK told O’Donnell that he had been working on a book about the missile crisis. White House staffer Dan Fenn later recalled that there had been many rumors about such a book—apparently intended for use in JFK’s 1964 reelection effort—just as the Kennedy campaigns had utilized John Hersey’s account of PT 109 in 1946 and Profiles in Courage in 1960. O’Donnell agreed to read the manuscript.
When RFK returned, Fenn and O’Donnell’s secretary Pauline Fluet were also present. O’Donnell, known for his brusque, direct style, confronted RFK: “I thought your brother was president during the missile crisis?” “He’s not running, and I am,” [for the U.S. Senate from New York], Bobby replied, as Fenn recalled. Fluet cited a more personal, heartfelt response, “Jack wouldn’t mind.” RFK’s focus had apparently shifted from JFK’s reelection to his own political future. (After learning, decades ago, about the RFK-O’Donnell exchange from these two eyewitnesses, I searched without success in the relevant JFKL collections for any sign of the manuscript that RFK had brought to the White House in 1964).
Dramatic evidence has survived that RFK’s personal political ambition was very much alive during the October 1962 crisis. Bobby told Soviet ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin that the secret US proposal to Moscow to inconspicuously remove the missiles from Turkey within a few months could not be revealed publicly and stressed that he could not “risk getting involved” in a possible leak “since who knows where and when…it can surface or be somehow published—not now, but in the future. The appearance of such a document could cause irreparable harm to my political career in the future.”[4]
Barely a year after RFK’s death, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis appeared, and quickly became the go-to source—the only such account by a “key member” of the ExComm. In 1999, a new edition, with a preface by Professor Schlesinger, claimed that the recent evidence “supplements and reinforces Robert Kennedy’s account in Thirteen Days.” Both editions are all but silent on the role of Ted Sorensen in writing this astonishingly influential book. He is, in fact, all but invisible in Thirteen Days, except for a very brief signed note claiming that RFK “wrote this book in the summer and fall of 1967 . . . but never had an opportunity to rewrite or complete it.” Of course, this claim begs the inevitable question: then who did?[5]
In his final 2008 memoir, Counselor: A Life on the Edge of History, Sorensen continued to cling to the “Trollope Ploy.” When Khrushchev publicly urged a trade of the Cuban missiles for NATO missiles in Turkey, JFK remained unmoved by RFK and Sorensen’s efforts to pressure him back to his earlier offer to remove the missiles in exchange for an American pledge not to invade Cuba. The president reluctantly agreed to try their letter, “this thing,” as he dismissively called it; but his tone was skeptical and impatient [listen to the tapes!] and he continued, with Dean Rusk, to pursue diplomatic options well into the night.
Sorensen’s memoir also repeated the false contention in Thirteen Days that RFK was the leader of the ExComm doves. The recordings prove incontrovertibly that RFK was a persistent hawk. On the first day, October 16, Bobby opposed bombing the Cuban missile sites: “You are going to kill an awful lot of people and take an awful lot of heat on it.” Schlesinger, who discovered this quote when researching his 1978 RFK biography, concluded “It was Robert Kennedy who stopped the air strike madness in its tracks.” RFK actually denounced the bombing as inadequate and instead demanded a full-scale military invasion of Cuba! On the last day, October 27, at the close of the final late evening meeting, McNamara urged massive, immediate, air and ground military intervention: “and then we have to have two things ready, a government for Cuba because we’re gonna need one after we go in with 500 aircraft. And secondly, some plans for how to respond to the Soviet Union in Europe, cause sure as hell they’re gonna do something there.” “I’d like to take Cuba back,” RFK mused, “That would be nice.” Someone teased that Bobby could be made mayor of Havana and the recording ended in a burst of nervous laughter.[6]
RFK and Sorensen’s last-minute plan (the “Trollope Ploy”), affirmed in Thirteen Days and reaffirmed in Counselor some forty years later, allegedly preserved the peace on that climactic thirteenth day. “Our” [italics added] letter “to Khrushchev had worked,” Sorensen persisted. By continuing to defend this “brilliant ploy” after the ExComm recordings were declassified, Sorensen, in failing health, only managed to delay a full public reckoning with the startling new recorded evidence. As a result, Theodore C. Sorensen’s most consequential work remains at the “edge” rather than at “the epicenter” of the historical record—in service to the myths he crafted and defended to the end.
Sheldon M. Stern was John F. Kennedy Library Historian from 1977 to 2000 and is a member of Washington Decoded's editorial board.
[1] For a detailed description of that one-off, “fly on the wall” experience, see Sheldon M. Stern, Averting ‘the Final Failure’: John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), xiii-xxx.
[2] John F. Kennedy, Profiles in Courage (New York: Harper, 1956). David R. Stokes, JFK’s Ghost: Kennedy, Sorensen and the Making of Profiles in Courage (Guildford, CT: Lyons Press, 2021), is a thoroughly researched study concluding that Sorensen wrote the 1957 book. Biographer Herbert S. Parmet reached the same conclusion after reviewing the files in the Sorensen papers for Jack: The Struggles of John F. Kennedy (New York: Dial Press, 1980).
[3] On the evening of October 26, a worried Khrushchev sent a private message to Kennedy proposing to withdraw the missiles from Cuba in exchange for a US pledge not to invade the island. Hours later, Khrushchev stunned the ExComm by publicly offering via Moscow Radio a mutual withdrawal of the Cuban missiles and the NATO missiles in Turkey. The so-called “Trollope Ploy” (named for a literary conceit in which a casual interaction is willfully misconstrued as an offer of marriage) was the supposed plan to publicly accept the first, private offer while ignoring the second public message. JFK agreed to try this scheme, but was certain it would fail. The president and Secretary of State Dean Rusk privately pursued a secret, back-channel deal to remove the Turkish missiles soon after the Cuban missiles were withdrawn. But, the deal remained secret for decades and the “Trollope Ploy” lived on as the public explanation. See “The Trollope Ploy Myth,” in Sheldon M. Stern, The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory: Myths Versus Reality (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012) 134-147.
[4] Stern, Averting the Final Failure, 403.
[5] Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969). Soon after the publication of Thirteen Days, former secretary of state Dean Acheson reacted to the claim that Dean Rusk “had other duties during this period of time and frequently could not attend the meetings.” Acheson sneered, “One wonders what those ‘other duties and responsibilities were,’ to be half so important as those they replaced.” Rusk, in fact, attended nineteen of the twenty meetings between October 16 and 27—missing only one because he was required by protocol to host a dinner for visiting Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko. See, “The Real Robert Kennedy,” in Stern, The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory, 40-53.
[6] Schlesinger was given special access to the still classified RFK papers by the Kennedy family. He could not possibly have known the full content of the RFK quote he had discovered.
©2024 by Sheldon M. Stern
