BEFORE WE HIT THE ACTUAL TWO WEEKS ITSELF, YOU WERE INVOLVED IN 5412, THAT COMMITTEE WHICH OVERSAW A LOT OF THESE...?

Covert actions. Yes.

WHAT WAS YOUR REACTION TO SOME OF THOSE PLANS?

Well the more exposed I became to the covert operations, or the planning for covert operations by the CIA, the more distressed I became over what appeared to be our inherent disability as a country, as a society to carry on successful that kind of an operation. We just didn't seem to be able to be effective. And I still can't, looking back over those years, think of any, in very brilliant concepts that we were confronted with in reviewing the plans that the agency came in with Presidential approval.

WAS THERE A CONCERN ABOUT THE EFFICACY OF THE PLANS? NOT THE IDEA OF DOING THAT...

No, I was in favor of the general objective of destabilizing the Castro regime by anything short of air strikes or major military operations. I felt that if we could cause enough problems for Castro in his own economy, his own infrastructure, power plants, roads, bridges that it would be to our interest to do so. And therefore I, every plan that the agency came up with got sympathetic treatment until we saw that most of them either were destined not to work because of their own internal problems or when they actually were put into effect, they weren't successful.

WAS IT A PROBLEM OF LANSDALE HIMSELF, OR WAS IT A PROBLEM WITH...

No, I think it was, it was, my judgment, in the light of hindsight, is that the United States, whether it's because of the nature of our society or our education, are not very good at dirty tricks. We just can't pull them off. And in the end, the agency had, as you know, resort to bringing in Mafia types and others than just good graduates of Ivy League schools.

YOU NEVER QUESTIONED THE MORALITY OF IT, THOUGH...

Well, you're not talking about, I guess Project Mongoose, which was different from what the 5412 group considered.

MONGOOSE DID NOT COME BEFORE 5412?

It came before was sort of an enlarged version of 5412, because McNamara was part of Mongoose and he was not on the 5412 group. And also, the attorney general was involved. So it was not the same forum that we had for the run of mill covert operations. And as you know from the hearings that were subsequently held before the church committee, there's a lot of difference in recollections between what people thought they were talking about, and I never recall hearing any reference to assassinating Castro. And yet some of the records that have been dug up show that was one way or another referred to in some of these meetings of the Project Mongoose.

BUT IF YOU SAY AMERICANS AREN'T VERY GOOD AT THIS AS A SOCIETY, DO YOU THINK WE SHOULD BE, DO YOU THINK WE SHOULD DO IT AT ALL? IN CUBA AT THAT TIME...

As a matter of principle or a matter of national ethics and morality, I don't have, I'm not troubled by doubts there. I am troubled by the fact we don't seem to do it very well. We I think it's partly a matter of the training that our military have during their days in service academies and...staff schools. They just, they just don't have inoculated in them the kinds of elements of judgment and ingenuity and also lack of principle that you've got to have to conduct that kind of thing. You've got to be pretty free of conscience breaks.

WHAT WAS YOUR VERY FIRST REACTION WHEN YOU SAW THE PHOTOS...?

...the first time I knew of what was actually going on near Cristobal in Cuba was on Sunday night the 13th I think it was of October when General Carroll came to my apartment as I was dressing to go for dinner at General Taylor's. And he had some photographs with him and he, without getting into a very detailed assessment or appreciation of those photographs, it was clear to me that we were up against a very critical set of problems. That the things that Keating had been talking about and that John McCone had been fearing, hypothesizing, having no basis for them, were really, were really in fact confronting us. And that was my initial reactions. That this was an extremely serious matter, even though I don't have the expertise to read those photographs the way the experts...and General Carroll just brought them himself.

WHAT WAS YOUR INITIAL FEELING ABOUT WHAT HAD TO BE DONE?

Well, my first reaction was that we had to step up our U-2 coverage of Cuba. We'd been frustrated by weather problems, by differences between the CIA and the Air Force over who should fly the U-2 flights. And I felt we had to know a lot more and we had to act very quickly because even on the first look at these photographs, these installations were pretty well along. We couldn't see any missiles but we could see that the launches were there, and obviously, the thing had moved very fast compared to the photographs we had in August, only a month and a half before. So, it was the urgency of our reaction that was the first impression that struck me.

YOU MENTIONED IN YOUR NOTES HERE THAT IT WAS RIGHT FROM THE START YOU REALIZED THAT IT WAS A KIND OF LIMITED WINDOW...

Yes. The, the sense of urgency that I talk about was inspired by the fact that once those missiles were in place, and operable, we were confronted with a whole different set of facts. Now, we were threatened of course, by Soviet submarine launch missiles. We were threatened from the Soviet mainland by their intercontinental strategic ballistic missiles, but here was something thirty miles off our shore, which while, as I've said, I didn't regard it as a major strategic move, I thought it was a very important tactical step that would greatly complicate what we were trying to do with NATO and in the Berlin Crisis.

YOU TOLD ME ABOUT A LUNCH YOU HAD WITH MCNAMARA THE FIRST OR SECOND DAY OF...?

After one of the sessions of the EXCOMM, McNamara and I came back and usually had lunch together and we did that day. And we decided that we would try to formulate something less than the air strike plan which was the first, the first idea that was discussed at EXCOMM. Air strike backed up by Navy marine landings and other forms of forceful application of military power. So, as I recall it, I was the, I took the part of the Soviet plan, or McNamara took the part of the US plan and we thought of, we just war-gamed each other there in the back of the envelope at our lunch table. And what we essentially came up with was the idea of a naval blockade and downplaying it so we weren't going to, unless we had to, seize or fire at Soviet vessels, but to show in as many ways we could, including mobilizing forces, moving forces around overtly, that we were very serious about this installation of medium range missiles in Cuba. And that was the basis, as it evolved in the subsequent discussion at EXCOMM of McNamara's strong advocacy of the quarantine or the blockade.

WHERE DID THIS IDEA COME TO YOU? WAS IT SOMETHING THAT THERE WAS PRECEDENT FOR, OR WAS IT...?

Well, our basic objective, as I recall it at that point was to find some alternate to the idea of an air strike, going in and taking our missiles, which we knew meant killing Russians. And we also knew that it would scare our allies to death and we weren't sure that we could make a convincing case in the court of world opinion, the UN and elsewhere. So what's short of that kind of a massive application of brute force in the military sense could we do? And at what stage should we try to intercept the missiles. And so it was a question of where we draw the line, what notice we give, what kind of forces we used and what the instructions would be to the naval commanders who would run the operation.

YOU KNEW THE MISSILES WERE ALREADY THERE IN CUBA...

No, we knew the launching devices were there, but I never was convinced that the missiles, if you mean the, short of the warheads, yes, they probably were there. But not the warheads. I had believed then and I believe now that the Soviet Union would only have put the warheads there prior to actual use. They weren't going to put into the hands of the Cubans or in Cuban soil nuclear warheads.

SO THE BLOCKADE PROBABLY STOPPED THE WARHEADS FROM GETTING THOUGH...

That's my belief. I can't prove it. We had no, we had no photographic evidence. We photographed, of course, the missiles going out as they left on Russians ships, and we made the best count we could, but we never had any precise knowledge of what the Soviet Union had in there, how far the missiles were actually operational at the time that Khrushchev caved in.

IF YOU AND MCNAMARA SORT OF DECIDED IT DIDN'T MAKE ANY STRATEGIC DIFFERENCE,...I THINK BACK IN THE FIRST MEETING WHICH WE HAVE TRANSCRIPTS... MCNAMARA INITIALLY IT SEEMS, WAS ARGUING FOR NOT DOING ANYTHING AT ALL...

Well, as I recall McNamara's thinking at that time, he was trying to head off this almost spontaneous conclusion that had been drawn by people like Mac Bundy, Doug Dillon, and some of the other members of the EXCOMM, who wanted to follow the advise of General LeMay and the naval commanders and just move in and destroy the Castro regime. And I don't think McNamara ever voiced any particular predilection for diplomacy alone. He didn't feel that Stevenson did, we could settle the whole thing in a UN debate. But he was, I think preparing a ground and as the days went by, the hours went by, this other concept began to take more form and we sort of warmed up to the theme and spelled it out in a way that ultimately, at least as far as the attorney general was concerned, it carried more weight.

WHAT WAS KENNEDY'S RELATIONSHIP WITH THE JCS?

At this time, Kennedy had been in office close to two years, and he had stopped seeing the chiefs as a group initially at the time of the crisis over Laos in the early part of 1961. He's had all five of the chief's over there, the chairman and the four chiefs of staff. And he'd become very discouraged over getting any help out of that kind of a presentation and so he'd go through the motions, as he ultimately did in the Cuban Missile Crisis of hearing out General Everest, General LeMay, or Admiral Anderson, or whoever. But, he relied primarily for his military expertise advise on General Taylor. Or, as McNamara reported it, based on his own discussions with Taylor. So, that there was never any, there was no military member of the EXCOMM, and I think Kennedy made a conscious decision that he didn't want the chiefs to dominate the planning process in this particular crisis. He'd seen enough of how they dealt with it and he didn't have the confidence in the planning process.

LAST TIME YOU TOLD ME ABOUT A PARTICULAR CONFRONTATION OR A PARTICULAR CONCERN THAT KENNEDY HAD WITH LEMAY.

Well, all of us, and I include myself, having worked with LeMay during the Korean War when he was commander at SAC, McNamara, who had great respect for him as a Air Force commander during World War II, and ultimately the President recognized that LeMay had, if I can put it crudely, a one track mind. He believed the only way you settle things like this was just to bomb them back to the Stone Age. And whether it was Laos, or Vietnam, or missile sites in Cuba that was his prescription. Well, all of us were torn between this disregarding, overriding the advise of the, of the principle exponent of air power in a whole military establishment, and having to have a constant reiteration of the same theme. The result was that when the President had to he would hear LeMay out. When he met with the chiefs over the budget, for example, in Palm Beach during the Christmas holidays, he'd have all the chiefs, including LeMay down, and he knew that he couldn't fire LeMay. There was no, that would have caused a great crease with the Congress, as well with the military. He just had to rely on Taylor and the chiefs as a corporate body to temper the kind of military advise that LeMay is by nature prone to give.

YOU TOLD ME SOME STORY ABOUT HIM AND HIS HEARING AID...

One of LeMay's problems about communication in meetings of the Joint Chiefs is that he wouldn't turn his hearing aid on when I was talking or McNamara was talking. He would just, when his turn came to make his pitch, he would turn on the hearing aid so he could hear any comments at that stage, but otherwise, he was just tuned out of the discussion. So you couldn't conduct a dialog with General LeMay, even if, even assuming he would be hospitable to any ideas you might have. It was just, he just had one position. He knew what it was going to be. He did it very forcefully and effectively and he had a big following in the Congress and elsewhere, beside the Air Force.

GO.

It, it became evident that, to us, as the...Russian ships were approaching the quarantine area, that we were not being informed on a... hour-by-hour, far less minute-by-minute basis, what was happening, that the Navy was going to run this the way they ran most of their operations, and that if we were going to find out what was happening we'd better go over to...Flag Plot in the quarters of the chief of naval operations and see for ourselves. And this was well into the night... it was midnight, before or right after, but McNamara and I went over alone, we had no staff with us, and we went into a room that just bristled with Navy brass. And we asked for a presentation of exactly what was happening in the area of the, of the quarantine, where the ships were, what the instructions were to our officers, and the atmosphere became increasingly...tense; you could just, you could just feel the... resentment in the air because McNamara was...very quick; he asked his questions rapidly, presses them and he doesn't he doesn't take account of the sensibilities of those to whom he's giving the questions, and so the temperature and the tension rose, until as has been said many times, Admiral Anderson simply told us that... the Navy would run this operation, and that the best thing for us would be to return to our quarters. And I didn't know for a second or two what McNamara's reaction was going to be, whether he was going to explode and exercise his authority as the civilian head of the defense establishment or not, and he his, obviously his face, his whole manner was... signified that he was under very strong internal pressure to react, but… he didn't. He got up, and we both left. And half an hour later a bird or beast came over in the form of a rear admiral, from Admiral Anderson and the Navy thought better of leaving the matter on that note; but on the way back from Admiral Anderson's offices to the Secretary of Defense's quarters, McNamara said, "That's... that's the end as far as my, uh" these aren't the exact words he used, "This is the end as far as I can, as I can count on or rely on or use Admiral Anderson as chief of naval operations," which was very distressing to me because I had a very high opinion of Admiral Anderson. Except in that one instance.

IT WASN'T LONG AFTER THE MISSILE CRISIS THAT...

Admiral Anderson's term, the chiefs had two-year terms at that stage and his two-year term, first two-year term as chairman, as chief of naval operations, came to an end the end of 1962, and when McNamara indicated, to me and to the President, that he wasn't going to recommend... the extension, we usually rolled over the chiefs for another two-year term, I suggested to the President that rather than have Anderson in effect be fired, because it'd be perfectly obvious that... he was being made an exception, in the, in the usual practice of rotating chiefs, unless there was a retirement, as took place for General Decker, that Admiral Anderson would be given this... ambassadorship. So I was sent over to... Admiral Anderson's quarters to try this idea out on him, and I had with me Fred Korth, the Secretary of the Navy, and Anderson's first reaction was of anger and indignation, and...fortunately he took it out on Korth, who had nothing to do with the issue, really, rather than on me. But he said that he wouldn't, he wouldn't think of taking such a post. About two days later he called me and asked me if the offer was still open, and I checked with the White House, and the President said of course it was, and Admiral Anderson accepted, learned Portuguese, and was a very capable ambassador in my opinion, and I think everybody else's.

DURING THE FRIDAY THAT YOU WERE PUT IN CHARGE OF THIS JUPITER MISSION... COULD YOU TELL ME ABOUT THAT?

Well, as we, as we approached the... what we felt was the zero hour when we were getting these two classes of reactions, two types of reactions out of the Kremlin, there were a series of subcommittees of the EXCOMM that were formed, and I was asked by the President and McNamara to go down with Mac Bundy and Alexis Johnson and work out, in the form of a script or a scenario, the steps we would take, if we had to, in order to terminate the crisis remove the Jupiters publicly, even though, within the Pentagon that step had been decided on some months before. So between some time late in the evening and... early hours of the morning, we actually formulated, put down on a piece of paper and brought back to the cabinet room an outline of that particular course of action. Well, by that time some of the people had left and nothing was done about it; it was just added to the material that we would review, if we had to, the next morning. And that's of course as far as it ever got, because of... the denouement of the crisis.

DO YOU THINK NOW THERE REALLY WERE TWO OPTIONS IF KHRUSHCHEV DID NOT BACK DOWN: TO MAKE THE JUPITER DEAL AN OPEN TRADE, OR GO IN WITH AN AIR STRIKE? WHERE DO YOU THINK THESE OPTIONS WOULD HAVE LED?

On the basis of, you know, 25 years of, 24 years of hindsight, and my recollection of the President's reactions, we went up to the second floor of the White House the day before, when we were on this course of action, I think the President would have would have accepted any alternative other than an air strike. The Attorney General was very explicit about that; he couldn't see us pulling a Pearl Harbor on the Cubans, and I think the President bought his brother's thinking on that, although Kennedy was very careful, President Kennedy was very careful never to, ever to show his hand until he came right down to the... short strokes, to the actual decision point. And...but, in Ted Sorensen's book, he refers to a statement that I made during that meeting with the President where I said that I thought that the technology of the deadliness and the consequences of using nuclear weapons had got to the stage where... they had no purpose other than a deterrent value and that there was a finite limit on when you could use military force to solve the kind of crisis we had there; now, whether that had much effect on the President I don't know, Ted Sorensen thought it did, and it was a subject that McNamara and I believed from the beginning.

WHAT DO YOU THINK IS THE MOST IMPORTANT LESSON TO BE LEARNED FROM THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS FOR TODAY?

I believe the decision-making process was followed, in the case of the Cuban missile crisis is the, best result; I think that, first of all, regardless of title or position, the President ought to assemble people in whose, in whose judgment he has confidence who represent a span, a spectrum of opinion and experience, and then let them just brainstorm the problem, before he gets into it. I think one of the wisest aspects of the whole process was for him to abstain, not being present, because his presence obviously would have an inhibiting factor, or it might, you know it might influence certain people in certain ways, he wouldn't get quite as true an assessment of my opinion if the President was there. On the other hand, I don't know you would supply that element with the President's brother in another situation, that was a unique relationship, and for the, for, we all knew perfectly well that Robert Kennedy was going to go tell his brother whatever his brother wanted to hear, so we're operating on kind of a two-track system, and I don't know how you could, you could necessarily duplicate that, who would play the role in another crisis, of Robert Kennedy? That's the question that's still in my mind…. Otherwise, I think the...I think it's a, it's a much better way of advising the President, and advising administration how to react in a crisis than just, you know, tasking it out to this department, that department, getting papers coming in and then having a national security staff lay out the choices for the President to choose from, between.

HOW CLOSE DO YOU THINK THE WORLD CAME TO NUCLEAR WAR?

All I can say is that the feeling we all had when we went back to our quarters that night, McNamara and I went back to sleep on our cots at the Pentagon, that, you know, we weren't sure what the world was going to be like the next day. It, was a very awesome experience, one that I've never had before or since. We just didn't know what track the Kremlin was on. We had the sense that there was some division there, we got different kinds of signals, but it was a very near thing, I felt at the time.

HOW CONCERNED WERE YOU ABOUT ACCIDENT, ABOUT THINGS GETTING OUT OF CONTROL, RATHER THAN KHRUSHCHEV MAKING A DECISION TO LAUNCH MISSILES?

My concern didn't have to do with what was going to happen in Cuba; be... because I didn't believe, the warheads where they are, I didn't think the missiles were operational in a tactical sense. But I was concerned about what would happen in Russia: what would they do with, vis-a-vis the, western Europe, or vis-a-vis the United States with what with their strategic weapons. I was not concerned if anything was going to come out, come out of Cuba at that juncture. Their, their planes, the L-28s weren't assembled, the missiles while they were there, they weren't in, certainly in a, in a state of readiness that could have been fired off and hit Georgia the next day; so, it was what the Soviet Union would react in some other, larger dimension that was what concerned me.

HOW CONCERNED WERE YOU ABOUT THE CONTROL OF THE AMERICAN MILITARY FORCES?

Well, I never, I never believed in the "Seven Days in May," thesis. I'd seen enough of the military in World War II and the Korean War and during the two years I'd been in the Pentagon under Kennedy to think that the, that the traditional command and control, from the President on down the civilian side, would be, would be, would be breached. I didn't think even that General LeMay would take, would take it into his hands. You always can have accidents and after all missiles cannot be recalled, you have these, you had these so-called locks, PALs, and you had various devices which were... pretty crude in those days — you could have had an accident if... that could happen... in other than a crisis atmosphere. But I'd never seen any indication that any responsible officers, other than making speeches like General Walker did in Texas about that time, was ever going to defy civilian authority.

YOU TOLD ME THAT LEMAY AND OTHERS WERE VERY UPSET THAT THEY DIDN'T GET THEIR CHANCE. DO YOU RECALL SOME OF THEIR REACTIONS?

No, I just I just recall the general demeanor of my friends in the Air Force, their attitude toward me, and what Gene Dukert, who'd been with me in the Air Force during the Korean War and was then secretary of the Air Force under Kennedy, reported that... the brass in the Air Force, certainly, and I guess in the Navy, felt that "those guys up there in OSD really aren't up to their responsibilities, that... go with their office," I just had that sense if, I ...in that respect, they felt we'd failed them.

YOU DIDN'T GET THE SENSE THAT LEMAY WANTED TO GO IN ANYWAY.

No.

(INTERVIEWER INTERRUPTS)

Well, we always, you know, just the way the Reagan administration feels about Nicaragua, and the Sandinistas we always were...just watering at the mouth at... having some opportunity to "do in Castro," short of assassination, which I don't think most people felt was the solution. And... but this had such larger proportions, the missile crisis, to any of the other attributes and aspects of the Cuban situation, that... I don't think anybody felt anyway that a denouement came fast enough, so that there wasn't a... time for rebellion in the ranks, or for the whole subject to fester... It was over, and I don't recall that any forms, any manifestations of resentment on the part of the military over the way we'd acted, they're pretty well disciplined in that regard, and we also had the admirable leadership of General Taylor, backed by Admir-, by General Shoop, who was in all... military matters of great support to the President and to McNamara.

DO YOU RECALL THAT MOMENT WHEN THE U-2'S STRAYED OVER SOVIET TERRITORY?

Well, coming on top of the shooting down of Major Anderson, it was just one more thing, we felt the Fates were... conspiring against us, and it, we were so edgy anyway, on, we're so much on... nervous edge that we ...it just, it just had a very traumatic effect on people. It was, it was not something that, when we thought it through, we thought it would be a determining element in the unfolding crisis, but it was just one of those bad breaks that shook everybody, and wondering you know, whether... the gods were against us.

DO YOU RECALL HOW YOU REACTED TO THAT, OR HOW MCNAMARA REACTED?

Just... we were just... shaken, and you know, we couldn't assess what the impact would be. The... in the case of the shooting down of... by the SAM, in Cuba, of Major Anderson, it was... the human element. Here is a man, who... is, this is a first... casualty of this... terms of human lives, of this crisis. And that was an emotional, sentimental thing, but, whereas this overflight in the far east was just one of the other x-factors to throw in the equation, we didn't know how it would affect the Kremlin.

WHAT DO YOU THINK THE IMPACT OF THE MISSILE CRISIS HAD ON THE PRESIDENT ON THE ROAD TO ARMS CONTROL?

I think it had a...

(INTERRUPTS)

The, the Looking back on the whole episode... in my judgment, the missile crisis and how it was handled gave the President a sense of confidence that he had, he had lacked since the Bay of Pigs and since the confrontation in Vienna with... Khrushchev in early June; he had much more assurance and he felt... the way, he had reacted the way people around him had reacted, the response from the Soviet Union and the general public reaction around the world... gave him a buoyancy, a sort of a sense of, let's say of confidence that he hadn't had before, and I think it gave him the... encouragement to go ahead with his speech at American University and his speech at Yale, and his general attempt to reach some kind of a, of a... standoff with the Russians, on issues other than just arms race or missile contest.