I have a particular memory of a Tuesday afternoon in October 1962: the carpet in the West Wing corridor, which was a kind of institutional beige, and the sound of voices from the Cabinet Room, and the specific quality of silence in the outer offices — the silence of people who know something that they cannot say to anyone outside the building.
I was twenty-seven years old and had been working for the National Security Council staff for eighteen months. My job was documents: classifying them, organizing them, moving them from one part of the building to another according to protocols designed for exactly this kind of situation, a situation in which what was on the documents could not be mentioned in a telephone call or a cable or a conversation in a room with windows.
On the morning of October 16th, I moved a folder from the Situation Room to the third floor and back again. The folder contained the U-2 photographs. I did not look at them closely — that was not my role — but I saw them, and what I saw was the beginning of the thirteen worst days of my life.
The First Days
The crisis was managed in secrecy for the first six days. ExComm — the group of about fifteen senior officials advising the President — met twice daily in the Cabinet Room. The President attended when he could; often he did not, because the normal schedule of a President had to continue, or the Soviets would know that something had changed.
I observed parts of several ExComm meetings in those first days, not as a participant but as the person who brought in documents and took others away. What I observed was not reassuring.
The arguments in those rooms were real arguments, not the managed consensus of committees designed to produce predetermined outcomes. The Joint Chiefs wanted air strikes — immediate, comprehensive air strikes on all the missile sites, followed by an invasion. Secretary McNamara wanted a blockade. Robert Kennedy thought the air strikes were a Pearl Harbor in reverse, an unprovoked attack on another country, and said so at volume. General LeMay said that not attacking was the equivalent of appeasement. Former Secretary of State Acheson and Ambassador Thompson took different positions and did not agree with each other. The President sat at the end of the table and listened and said, at one point: "If we're lucky, one in three of these options doesn't start a nuclear war."
He was trying to be funny. He was not entirely joking.
October 22nd
The President addressed the nation on the evening of October 22nd. I watched the broadcast on a small television in a West Wing office with four other staff members. Watching a President address the country about a secret you have been keeping is a strange experience. The secret becomes public in real time. The country learns, as you watch it learn, what you have known for six days.
The phones began immediately. The switchboard handled calls from governors, senators, foreign heads of state, military commanders. I helped route documents about Soviet ship movements — the Soviet freighters carrying military cargo toward Cuba had not yet reached the quarantine line, and every hour's analysis of their movements was treated as potentially the most important document in the building.
Soviet ships were approaching the quarantine line. The first confrontation at sea would come within forty-eight hours.
The Wednesday the Ships Turned
On Wednesday morning, October 24th, Soviet ships approaching the quarantine line stopped. Then they turned.
I was in the Situation Room when this was confirmed. The word moved through the building in a particular way — not celebration, because nothing was resolved, the missiles were still in Cuba and the crisis had not ended — but something like a collective exhale, the sound of a decision that had been made to hold the line being vindicated for at least this morning.
Secretary Rusk is reported to have said: "We're eyeball to eyeball and I think the other fellow just blinked." I cannot confirm whether he said this in my presence. I believe it is the kind of thing that sounds better in retrospect than it felt in the moment. In the moment, what we knew was that twenty-six Soviet ships had turned around, and that the missiles in Cuba were still there, and that the next confrontation had simply been deferred.
October 27th
Saturday, October 27th, is the day that appears in the histories as the crisis's most dangerous moment. A U-2 was shot down over Cuba by a Soviet surface-to-air missile. An American U-2 also accidentally flew into Soviet airspace over Alaska — a potentially catastrophic navigational error that the Soviets, for reasons never fully explained, chose not to exploit. And a Soviet submarine, B-59, was depth-charged by the destroyer USS Beale as it tried to surface — the submarine had been out of contact with Moscow for days and had no way of knowing whether war had begun.
I did not know about the submarine until much later. What I knew on October 27th was this: the U-2 had been shot down. Under the standing orders Kennedy had signed, an attack on an American plane was an action that was supposed to trigger an automatic military response. Kennedy did not order the response. He absorbed the incident. He waited.
The people in that building who understood what he was absorbing, who understood what it costs a man to do nothing in the face of what looks like an attack — I was one of those people, in a small way. I knew what it took to sit at that table on October 27th and not give the order that the orders said to give.
The Morning After
Khrushchev's withdrawal offer came on Sunday morning, October 28th. It offered to remove the Soviet missiles from Cuba in exchange for an American pledge not to invade Cuba. There was a separate, secret agreement involving American missiles in Turkey. The crisis ended.
I went home on Sunday afternoon for the first time in six days. I sat in my kitchen and drank tea and looked out the window at the ordinary Sunday afternoon of a city that had come within hours, possibly, of ceasing to exist in its current form. The children on the street below were playing. The leaves were turning. A neighbor was washing his car.
None of them knew about B-59. None of them knew about Vasili Arkhipov — the Soviet officer whose objection had prevented the submarine's captain from launching a nuclear torpedo. None of them knew about the navigational error over Alaska. They knew that there had been a crisis and that it had ended, and they went back to their Sundays.
I went back to mine. But I have never, since that October, been able to look at an ordinary Sunday afternoon in quite the same way as I looked at them before.
Narrator's note: Margaret Collis is fictional. The ExComm discussions, Kennedy's statements, Rusk's "eyeball to eyeball" remark, and the B-59 submarine incident (including Arkhipov's role) are documented in Ernest May and Philip Zelikow's The Kennedy Tapes (1997) and Sheldon Stern's The Week the World Stood Still (2005).