CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS DAY EIGHT
THE mood in the White House on the morning of October 23, in the wake of the President’s TV address, was grim.
As Kennedy biographer Robert Dallek would later record, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev had yet to respond to Kennedy’s call for the Soviets to dismantle their offensive weapons on Cuba under U.N. supervision.
“The country and the world feared the worse,” Dallek wrote. In a moment of gallows humour Secretary of State Dean Rusk told colleague George Ball: “We have won a considerable victory. You and I are still alive.”
Khrushchev’s reply, when it eventually arrived, condemned the U.S. quarantine of Cuba as a “gross violation … of international norms” and insisted that the Soviet missiles on Castro’s island were purely defensive. Kennedy’s actions, he warned, “could lead to catastrophic consequences.”
Kennedy’s reply said that the naval blockade would go ahead – it would start the following morning and said that both he and Khrushchev should show prudence and “do nothing to allow events to make the situation more difficult to control than it already is. With this in mind, I hope you will issue instructions to your ships bound for Cuba not to challenge the quarantine.”
Kennedy was greatly worried that war between the U.S. and the Soviets might be ignited if an American Navy patrol vessel would be forced to fire upon a Russian ship if Khrushchev made no instruction to withdraw.
Kennedy told his younger brother Bobby to visit Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador to Washington, but to pretend that he was there without any instructions from the President. Dobrynin said that as far as he was aware there were still no missiles on Cuba and that Gromyko himself did not think there were any missiles on Cuba. The ambassador said he would ask Moscow about the matter. He “seemed extremely concerned,” Bobby Kennedy noted.
As he left the Ambassador he told him: “I don’t know how this is going to end, but we intend to stop your ships.”
The Glasgow Herald summed up the tense events of the day by reporting that the U.S. had asked the U.N. Security Council to act to end “the new phase of Soviet aggression” on Cuba. In London, the Earl of Hume, the Foreign Secretary, said Britain would support the U.S. in the Security Council. “So long as Communist policy is double-faced,” he said, “our response must be double-handed.”
Russia had ordered an alert of all Warsaw Pact forces. In Cuba, the armed forces had been put on a war footing, with tanks and troops guarding key points in Havana.
There were ‘hands off Cuba’ demonstrations outside the U.S. embassy in London and in Glasgow too.
Sources: JFK Presidential Library and Museum; John F Kennedy, by Robert Dallek.
TOMORROW: The mood darkens in the White House
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