Theodore Sorensen was special counsel to President Kennedy and a member of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council, or ExComm, that met during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He was interviewed for COLD WAR in March 1997.

On the Bay of Pigs:

1961 was in many ways the height of the Cold War. Shortly before President Kennedy took office, Khrushchev made statements about "We will bury you," statements about wars of liberation all over the world. The Soviet Union, in contrast with what we see in Moscow today, was a powerful country: militarily powerful, technologically, scientifically, even economically powerful, with steel and other major industries that were surpassing the United States and pointing to the Third World as a way for all the rest of the world to go, not the way of democracy. So President Kennedy had reason to be concerned about a Soviet outpost in Cuba, 90 miles from our shore. In addition to that, Cuba was a gnawing, nagging political problem, almost an emotional problem. Castro seemed like this taunting figure that got into the skin of Americans.

Kennedy had been briefed on the Bay of Pigs invasion plan by President Eisenhower and his outgoing team, and felt that a plan that he had inherited, in which a band of Cuban exiles were to liberate their own country, was one he could hardly turn his back on. It was a decision that he came to regret, but at the time it seemed [that] if this is what they wanted to do, surely the United States should help get rid of a communist dictatorship in our hemisphere. The fact is that the CIA, the Central Intelligence Agency, which had devised the plan, sold it to the president on the basis of a number of premises which turned out not to be correct. ...

Jack Kennedy was devastated by the fiasco at the Bay of Pigs, and he said it was a fiasco. He was not accustomed to failure in politics or in life. He felt personally responsible for the brave Cuban exiles who had been placed on that island by United States ships and under United States sponsorship. And he was also angry -- angry at himself for having paid attention to the experts without checking out their premises more carefully; angry at the Central Intelligence Agency for having sold him a bill of goods about a plan that supposedly would not have any discernible American connection and that had all these safety fallbacks, a plan that they told him would lead to an uprising of the Cuban people, all of which turned out to be nonsense; and disappointed in his own military leaders and others, that they had not asked tougher questions and checked out the plan more carefully.

It altered his whole approach toward government. He realized that intelligence officers and military officers were human beings, capable of imperfection, as he was. He realized that he needed people who thought the way he thought, and looked at the world the way he looked at it, to join him in these sessions; and [he] asked Robert Kennedy, his brother, the attorney general, and me, to sit in on National Security Council meetings from then on. He decided to make some changes in personnel in all of the agencies that were involved; he decided to make some changes in policy as to how we would isolate Cuba, some changes in procedure -- all of which stood him in very good stead when we had another crisis in Cuba a year and a half later. ...

The day that the invasion [ended] ... we were in his office, and he went outside to walk in the sunshine in the April day; we walked around the garden in the back, and he was more distraught than I'd ever seen him. "How could I have been so stupid?" he said. "How could I have let the experts so mislead me? I never rely on experts alone." That's how he'd gotten where he was in politics, that's how he had achieved what he had achieved in life, by not relying on experts; and this time he had relied on them and they had let him down.

On the Cuban Missile Crisis:

On Tuesday morning, October 16th, the President called me into his office and said that we had sent a U-2 surveillance flight over Cuba. The photointelligence had been interpreted and the conclusion was that the Soviets were building offensive missile bases in Cuba. It was clearly a threat; it was clearly an action that required a response. And he was calling together the key people in his administration, the small group that would later be known as the Executive Committee of the Security Council, or ExComm. He wanted me to attend those meetings, and he wanted me to bring to the first meeting copies of whatever statements he had made about the U.S. reaction to offensive weapons in Cuba.

The first meeting was very somber. Seated around the table were about a dozen of the president's closest and most trusted advisers, assembled not necessarily on the basis of position or even rank -- because the secretary of Treasury was there, for example; I had no military responsibilities; the attorney general had no official national security responsibilities -- but they were the people whose judgment he wanted on this matter.

And we didn't spend a great deal of time wondering why the Soviets were doing this, because why they had done it, for whatever reason they had done it, they had done it in a surreptitious way, lying to the United States through a variety of messages and messengers, that they were only putting defensive weapons into Cuba, and those [offensive] weapons constituted a clear and present danger to our security. Those missiles were capable of reaching almost every part of the United States and almost every part of Latin America.

And so, after a briefing via the photointelligence people, the primary question was: what are our options? And although the option of doing nothing was always there, and from time to time would be mentioned by a variety of people around that table -- "Get used to it: the Europeans are used to living on the bull's eye of nuclear weapons; maybe the Americans had better get used to it also" -- that was never an acceptable option to the president. We talked instead about the possibility of an air strike, which was at one time or another almost everybody's first choice, upon first thought, to knock out the missiles. We talked about an invasion of Cuba, which was always the preferred choice of the right wing: go in and take Cuba away from Castro and rid the island of communism, while at the same time getting rid of these missiles; a diplomatic approach, either bilaterally or through the United Nations; a blockade, or a quarantine, as it later came to be called. There were a number of permutations and combinations of all of these. No decision was made at that first meeting. But if a vote had been taken there -- and fortunately it was not; it was not President Kennedy's method to take votes -- an air strike was probably number one on everybody's list. ...

Those few days are something of a jumble in my memory, because we met constantly; information, new information, kept flowing in from the surveillance planes ... while we agonized over what is the right approach, what will solve the problem, what is an answer that is consistent with America's democratic values and its peaceful intentions toward the world as a whole. What kind of action can we take that will not precipitate World War III?

The president emphasized that all of us in the room should give top priority to this and try to get other problems postponed that may be on our desks. But at the same time that it was important not to let on to the Soviet Union that we knew what they were up to. That would give us some time to think and to plan and to react; and therefore we should not be breaking a lot of appointments, we should not have a mass of black official limousines parked outside the White House at strange hours of the day and night. And the president decided that he would maintain his own schedule of the appointments that he had with visiting heads of state, for example, and a campaign swing that he had already scheduled for the very next day. When he came back from that campaign swing, I said to him ... that I'd noticed subordinates spoke far more frankly in front of their superiors -- shall we say an undersecretary of state or an assistant secretary of state in the presence of the secretary of state -- if the president was not in the room, and these were the people we needed to hear from, and we needed to hear from them frankly, and there was some value in his absenting himself from time to time. So thereafter he did absent himself from time to time, while always, at the end of the day, getting a report on how was our thinking progressing, what kinds of solutions were we formulating.

On options discussed by the ExComm:

The air strike, as I mentioned, was a solution that people, from the most peace-minded to the most bellicose, thought from time to time might be the answer. An air strike, of necessity, had to be by surprise, it had to be without warning. In this case, it would have been an air strike against a small island which was inhabited by people of a different color, and Robert Kennedy -- rightfully, in my opinion -- drew the analogy that it would be regarded by the world as a bombing of Cuba, of bases in Cuba, comparable to the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese in 1941. And he said, "I don't think I want my brother to become another Tojo." Some people scoffed at the analogy, but ultimately we drew back from the air strike alternative.

There were those on ExComm who wanted us to go immediately to air strike and invasion. The vice president of the United States said in that rancorous meeting of late Saturday night, "When I was a boy in Texas, walking along the road, and a snake raised its head, there was only thing to do, and that was to take a club and cut off its head." But there were others on ExComm who were determined to find other limited means of turning up the pressure without precipitating war -- because we now know that war would have come, that had there been a bombing and an invasion, those missiles might very well have been fired, and at the very least, Soviet troops on the island of Cuba would have fired tactical nuclear weapons which they possessed at the invading American armies, and we would have felt compelled to respond with nuclear weapons ourselves. ...

People changed their minds because there were no good solutions: every solution was full of holes and risks. It was the only time during my three years in the White House that I would wake up in the middle of the night agonizing over what was the right approach, what would work, what would not blow up the world. I remember very clearly when we brought in former Secretary of State Dean Acheson to talk to our group -- [an] expert on the Russians, expert on the Cold War -- and he recommended the air strike. And someone said, "Mr. Secretary, if we bomb these Soviet missiles in Cuba, what will their reaction be?" And he said, "I know the Soviets very well," he said, "they will feel compelled to bomb NATO missile bases in Turkey." And somebody else said, "And then what would we do?" "Oh," he said, "under our NATO covenants, we would [be] obligated to bomb Soviet missile bases inside the Soviet Union." "Oh, and then what will the Soviets do?" "Well," he said, "by that time we hope cooler heads will prevail and people will talk." There was a real chill in that room. ...

Many said, "Well, if we could just have a surgical air strike -- the planes swoop in, dock out the missiles and fly off -- and we're right back to the status quo and to where we were last summer." The Air Force, of course, admitted, "There's no such thing as a surgical air strike. To take those missiles safely, you have to take out the surface-to-air missiles, the anti-aircraft missiles, you have to take out any airplanes that are there, including Castro's small air force, as well as any Soviet planes that are there. You bomb the air bases -- soon you're going to be bombing army bases as well, and chaos ensues, and an invasion is almost necessary." ...

And so we began to divide basically into two camps: the air strike camp, or air strike/invasion camp, and the naval quarantine or blockade camp. ... So I was asked to draft both speeches: both the speech for an air strike (because the president would certainly announce it to the world and the nation about the time the planes took off) and the speech for the blockade. And I came back again and said, "Well, now, the blockade speech -- how do we explain this, and what's the blockade got to do with the missiles, and how's the blockade going to help?" And by getting answers to those questions, it not only strengthened my ability to write the speech, it strengthened the blockade camp, because we began to put together a much more coherent and, I might add, strong and logical approach. And it was after that speech had been reviewed that the majority felt that's the way we should go, and we called the president, who was out on a campaign trip, back to hear our recommendation.

On Kennedy's speech announcing the blockade:

Just before he went on the air, he met with the congressional leaders, who had been summoned from all parts of the country because Congress was in recess at the time, and all of them were against the speech, against the blockade approach, all of them wanted an air strike and invasion. And it was not surprising, because they had not gone through the same thought processes that we had gone through and [had] not seen the same evidence that we had seen. Nevertheless, the president was shaken, disturbed, angry that they were giving him such a hard time at this last moment. But he didn't change a word in the speech, and a good many of them called in after the speech and said, "Well, now we understand much better why this is the approach that you're taking." I think we all felt in the White House that it was the best approach, it was the right approach. As the president said when he made the choice between blockade and air strike, "This is the limited option, this is the way to begin, and we always have the option of escalating later on, if we must."

On the resolution of the crisis:

While we were meeting in the Cabinet Room [a note] was handed to the president and he smiled and said, "We've just received word that the Soviet ships ..." -- particularly those ships that were most suspect of carrying either nuclear warheads or other missile equipment -- had stopped dead in the water. We didn't think it was a final victory; we knew they were probably simply awaiting instructions, we knew that some of them had the submarines accompanying them, so that any blockade was a risky choice in its own right. But at least it was a start. It made possible a dialogue, and President Kennedy wanted a dialogue to accompany his use of deterrents. ...

Finally, on Friday night, came this long message, in which Khrushchev ... [presented] the germ of a solution. And putting the best face on it, and reading it the way that we wanted to read it, so to speak, it said in effect: "We will withdraw those missiles from Cuba if you promise not to invade Cuba -- because that's why we put them there -- and if you withdraw your quarantine; and let's both sides draw back from this hair-trigger alert that could simply destroy the works on both sides." And while we were discussing that letter and whether that was a solution that could go forward, we received a second, public message from Khrushchev, which didn't talk about that solution, which had a very harsh tone to it, which said that we would have to give up NATO bases in Turkey if they were to withdraw their missiles from Cuba, and which sounded to us as though it had been approved by his military staff or some larger group, the Presidium or otherwise. And [that] put us in a dilemma, because it was so different in tone from the letter of the previous night.

Well, Kennedy was very disturbed by the second message. First of all, he was disturbed to know that those missiles were still there [in Turkey], since the previous year he had learned that they were anachronistic, unreliable and unnecessary, because Polaris nuclear submarines would be coming into the Mediterranean to replace them. But they were still there. He was disturbed because there was no way we could unilaterally take them out, and there was no time to gather a NATO conference to take them out. He was disturbed because we could not take them out with a gun pointed at our head, or we would be admitting our weakness to the world and to our allies who had a stake in those anti-Soviet missiles as well. But finally, he was disturbed because he said, "If we ignore this and we proceed into a world nuclear war, what is history going to say about what they will interpret as a very reasonable offer that we rejected: they'll withdraw their missiles if we'll withdraw our missiles." We couldn't do it, and yet he thought we were in a terrible box here.

The solution, finally, was to respond to the first letter and largely ignore the second. And the president asked me to go back to my office, asked the attorney general to come with me and to prepare a letter. I'd had the primary responsibility for answering all of these Khrushchev messages during the week for the president's signature. And [I was asked] to prepare a letter which interpreted the previous night's letter as a solution that we could accept, and so worded, and simply say: "Other disarmament measures can then be discussed after this crisis has been resolved." And that was the letter that Robert Kennedy took that evening to the Soviet Embassy. ...

[That] final meeting between Robert Kennedy and [Soviet] Ambassador [Anatoly] Dobrynin was absolutely essential to the peaceful resolution of the crisis. A group within the ExComm sat with the president when Robert Kennedy was instructed to hand-carry to the ambassador our reply to Khrushchev's letter of the previous day, and to tell him two things: one, that time is growing very short, that those who were of a different mind to those who wanted an invasion or an air strike were growing in their ferocity, and if the blockade did not prove to be a winning remedy, the United States would have to take other measures very soon; and second, to tell him that the bases in Turkey, which had been the subject of the second Khrushchev message that had so discouraged us all, were a problem that the United States had always intended to take care of. ... We could not take them out under threat, we could not take them out unilaterally, because they were NATO bases; but he had our assurance that they would be gone provided it was not done on a quid pro quo basis and therefore the Russians could not talk about it. The deal was simply to be [that] they would pull out the missiles, we would pull back the naval quarantine and not invade Cuba, which we had no intention of invading anyway. And it was that extra oral message, along with our letter, that I believe had a great deal to do with Khrushchev's agreeing to those terms.

On his personal feelings at the time:

I think we, for the most part, were all too intent upon finding a solution to give much concern to personal worries. Some members of our group sent their families outside of Washington, which was likely to be a target. I had no family living with me at the time. The president had joked with me the previous Saturday, after the decision had been made, that there wasn't room for all of us in the White House bomb shelter, but I had a place there if it came to that. But my strongest feeling was of admiration for the president of the United States, who kept cool -- the calmest man in the room. And when they said, "Well, we've got to go bomb that Soviet SAM site," he said, "Let's wait, let's wait until we have more information about it, let's wait until we see what the response is to our letter" -- because he knew the United States dropping a bomb on Cuba could start almost anything.

On learning that the crisis was over:

I was accustomed each morning to wake up on the hour and turn on the news to see what was the breaking news, if any, about the crisis. And the first news I heard on Sunday morning, when I woke up after a very rancorous ExComm meeting Saturday night, after the messages had already been sent off to the Soviets, the top of the news was this broadcast from Khrushchev over the open air, that Soviet missiles were to be withdrawn under inspection, and the crisis was over. I could hardly believe my ears. I called the National Security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, at the White House. He said, "Yes, it is true, we have received that message, we have verified it, and the crisis is over. Our group is meeting at 11 o'clock, and meanwhile the president and first lady have gone off to church to thank God." And we gathered for the 11 o'clock meeting: everybody was in smiles. I was standing with the president, talking with him in his office just before we went into the Cabinet Room for the meeting, and one of his other National Security assistants came up to him, who had not been deeply involved in the crisis preparations, and he said, "Now, Mr. President, you can step in and solve the India-China war," because the war between India and China over the border had broken out at the same time. The president said, "I don't think either of them, or anybody else, wants me to solve that crisis." And the aide said, "But Mr. President, today you're 10 feet tall." And JFK said, "That will last about a week."

On the legacy of the Missile Crisis:

People no longer thought that world war between the Soviet Union and the United States was inevitable. They no longer thought that the only solution to the very real conflicts of interest between Washington and Moscow was to look down the nuclear gun barrel at each other. In the following year, we set up the hot line between Moscow and Washington; we agreed to explore outer space together, and to ban mass weapons of destruction from outer space; we agreed to have the first sale of American wheat to the Soviet Union; and most importantly, we took the first step toward arms control in the nuclear age, which was the limited nuclear test ban treaty. At the United Nations, in September of 1963, Kennedy's speech was a speech on peace and all the next steps that we and the Soviet Union could explore together in order to tamper down and ultimately end the Cold War. And then, unfortunately, he was killed.