One minute to midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the brink of nuclear war Read Online Free PDF Page B

function of the "laws of political gravitation."
    Just ninety miles from Key West, Cuba exercised a powerful pull over the American imagination, long after the withdrawal of the Marines. In the thirties, forties, and fifties, the island became a playground for rich Americans who flew in to lie in the sun, gamble, and visit whorehouses. American money poured into casinos and hotels in Havana, sugar plantations in Oriente, and copper mines in Pinar del Rio. By the 1950s, much of the Cuban economy, including 90 percent of the mining industry and 80 percent of utilities, was under the control of American corporations.
    The attraction was not just geographic and economic; it was very personal. By the eve of the revolution, Ernest Hemingway, America's most celebrated writer, had taken up residence at the Finca Vigia, on a hilltop overlooking Havana. The Mafia boss, Meyer Lansky, had built a twenty-one-story hotel called the Riviera on the Malecon and was advising Batista on gambling reform. Nat King Cole was singing at the Tropicana nightclub. And a young American senator named John F. Kennedy was making frequent visits to Havana as the guest of the pro-Batista U.S. ambassador.
    THURSDAY, OCTOBER 18, 9:30 A.M.
    Bobby Kennedy was already having trouble keeping his promise--made Tuesday afternoon--to hold daily Mongoose briefings in his office. He had been unable to attend the scheduled Wednesday session because of an urgent White House meeting. But on Thursday he managed to squeeze in half an hour with Mongoose operatives, including Lansdale and Bill Harvey, the head of the CIA's anti-Castro task force.
    Gruff and uncouth, Harvey had the job of making sense of the blizzard of paperwork generated by Ed Lansdale. The two men were like fire and water. The visionary Lansdale would come up with dozens of new ideas for hitting Castro, only to have them squelched by the methodical Harvey. In Harvey's view, such operations required months of meticulous planning before they could be launched.
    By the third day of the crisis, Bobby was rethinking his views on how to respond to Khrushchev. His initial fury at Soviet duplicity had given way to more sober analysis. One of his biographers would later detect a pattern: "an initial burst of belligerence and intransigence, followed by a willingness to listen and change." He now opposed a surprise air attack on the missile sites as incompatible with American traditions, a kind of Pearl Harbor in reverse. "My brother is not going to be the Tojo of the 1960s," he had told a White House meeting on Wednesday. Bobby was beginning to favor a naval blockade of Cuba combined with some kind of ultimatum to Moscow, an idea first proposed by McNamara.
    Bobby's sudden streak of moralism did not, however, extend to calling a halt to Operation Mongoose. According to Harvey's record of the Thursday, October 18, meeting, the attorney general continued to place "great stress on sabotage operations and asked to be furnished with a list of the sabotage operations CIA planned to conduct."
    The most feasible target, in Harvey's view, was a copper mine in Pinar del Rio Province in western Cuba. The CIA had been trying for months to halt production at the Matahambre mine and had made careful studies of the terrain, but had been hampered by a string of bad luck. The first operation, back in August, failed after the would-be saboteurs got lost in a mangrove swamp. The second attempt was aborted when the radio operator fell and broke his ribs. The third time around, the sabotage team had got within a thousand yards of the target when it was challenged by a militia patrol and forced to withdraw after a firefight. Despite these setbacks, Matahambre was still at the top of Harvey's "to do" list.
    He informed RFK and Lansdale that he would "re-run" the operation as soon as circumstances allowed.
    FRIDAY, OCTOBER 19, 9:45 A.M.
    The president was leafing through the latest batch of intelligence reports as the generals filed into the