Stillness Is the Key

Stillness Is the Key

The room was called the Cabinet Room, but for thirteen days in October 1962, it became something closer to a pressure cooker. John F. Kennedy sat at the head of the table surrounded by the men who ran the most powerful nation on earth -- the Joint Chiefs, the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Advisor, the Attorney General. Photographs taken by U-2 spy planes had confirmed what intelligence analysts had feared: Soviet nuclear missiles were being installed ninety miles off the coast of Florida. They could reach Washington, D.C. in thirteen minutes.

The Joint Chiefs were nearly unanimous. Strike the sites. Invade Cuba. End the threat before the missiles became operational. General Curtis LeMay, who had firebombed Tokyo in World War II and never found a military problem he did not want to solve from the air, told Kennedy that doing nothing would be worse than Munich. The pressure was immense. The logic of force was clean and simple. Every hour of delay was another hour for the Soviets to finish the installations. The generals had plans, personnel, hardware. They were ready.

Kennedy did not give the order.

Instead, he slowed down. He removed himself from the daily ExComm meetings -- the secret Executive Committee convened to manage the crisis -- so the generals and advisors could speak freely without his presence distorting the conversation. He read cables. He walked the White House grounds at night. He wrote private notes to himself. He called former presidents. He went to mass. He thought. While the machinery of war idled, waiting for his command, he kept asking the question that nobody else in that room was asking: what happens after we strike? What does Khrushchev do next? What does the world look like on day fourteen?