President John F. Kennedy felt outmaneuvered by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis and his generals were pushing for war, according to newly declassified White House tape recordings.
Kennedy worried that Khrushchev's offer to remove Soviet missiles from Cuba if the United States removed its nuclear missiles from Turkey seemed so reasonable that it would turn world public opinion to the Soviet side."If we don't take it we're going to be blamed and if we do take it we're going to be blamed," the president complained in tapes released Thursday by the National Archives.
His military leaders had a different view.
"We don't have any choice but military action," Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Curtis LeMay insisted Oct. 19, three days before the public knew about the crisis.
In the end, Kennedy accepted the deal, though he managed to keep it a secret.
The glimpse of the Oval Office during the 1962 standoff were contained in 15 hours of tapes from the Kennedy White House.
Much of the material has been recounted in the writings of participants, but the tapes illustrate the tension of the times that had many Americans believing nuclear war between the Soviets and the United States was imminent.
"What you're getting is the interaction between the principals," said Stephanie Fawcett, the National Archives' senior foreign policy archivist. "You are literally a fly on the wall" in the White House.
The crisis began Oct. 22 when Kennedy revealed to America that the Soviets had secretly installed offensive nuclear missiles in Cuba. Kennedy had demanded the Soviets remove the missiles or face retaliation.
Six days later Khrushchev agreed to dismantle the missiles, but during those few days a nation waited and worried.
The tapes reveal that some at the White House were pressing for all-out war.
At the height of the crisis, one of Kennedy's top military commanders warned him that failing to invade the island was like backing down to Hitler's territorial demands in Europe.
LeMay, like other military leaders, wanted immediate military intervention to destroy Soviet missiles and unfinished silos that had been detected by aerial reconnaissance in Cuba. He said blockading ships bound for Cuba, as other presidential advisers urged, would lead to war anyway.
"If we don't do anything in Cuba, then they're going to push on Berlin, and push real hard, because they've got us on the run," LeMay told Kennedy.
A year earlier, in 1961, the Berlin Wall was erected to prevent people in Soviet-occupied East Germany from escaping into West Germany. The wall became a symbol of the Cold War between East and West that arose out of the end World War II.
Several of Kennedy's advisors, foremost among them Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, also urged an attack.
The president several times on the tapes broached the issue of potential civilian casualties should it come to nuclear war. His aides informed him that 92 million people lived in range of the Cuban missiles, but there was room in the fallout shelters for only 40 million.
"We can do the airstrike, but we still have got to face the fact that if we invade, by the time we get to these sites, after a very bloody fight, we will have (the missiles) fired at us," Kennedy said.