Admiral George W. Anderson, Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, shared his reflections on the events of October 1962 with Lieutenant Commander Michael N. Pocalyko. Admiral Anderson was the principal operational architect of the naval quarantine of Cuba during the Missile Crisis. At the point when President John F. Kennedy made his decision to go ahead with the quarantine, he turned to Anderson with a few brief and characteristic words: “This is up to the Navy.” Anderson’s reply: “Mr. President, the Navy won’t let you down.”
Admiral Anderson was party to a famous encounter with Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara on Wednesday, 24 October 1962. Both Anderson and McNamara were the personal choices of President Kennedy for their jobs. These two advisers also clashed over McNamara’s TFX fighter aircraft and a military pay bill. In June 1963, Admiral Anderson was not reappointed for a second two years as Chief of Naval Operations. Instead, President Kennedy named him his Ambassador to Portugal. Admiral Anderson, now retired, lives in Washington, D. C.
I first saw the photographic intelligence showing that the missiles were in Cuba on about 1 October. It was not particularly a surprise to me. We reacted normally in terms of our naval response—we sort of expected it— and had a relatively normal deployment. I guess it didn’t get the President’s attention or the media’s attention until two weeks later. Media coverage is what actually brought the crisis to the government. Senator Kenneth Keating [R-NY] was talking loudly about offensive weapons in Cuba.
The crisis came largely as a political circumstance. The President’s bringing together the Ex-Comm [Executive Committee] was a different sort of response, a political approach to the problem. I think it would have been better if he had just adhered to the regular SecDef [Secretary of Defense] and JCS [Joint Chiefs of Staff] process.
I was in telephone communication with CinCLantFlt [Commander in Chief, Atlantic Fleet] most of the time, starting prior to the political process. From a military, strategic standpoint, the placement of the missiles was something for us to worry about. The response was entirely up to the President.
The President had gone through the previous experience of the Bay of Pigs and as a result distrusted the military. He wanted to run this show himself. He had as his close advisors McNamara and McNamara’s deputy, Roswell Gilpatrick, who were inexperienced. The situation was totally absurd. All they wanted to do was say “yes” to what they thought the President wanted to hear. Secretary of the Navy Fred Korth was not impressive. Paul “Red” Fay was Undersecretary of the Navy. I think that they were sort of captives of the political process of the day. They were looking not to repeat the mistakes of the Bay of Pigs.
This sets the stage for the so-called difficulties between McNamara and me. McNamara and Gilpatrick arrived at the Navy Command Center late in the afternoon or in the early evening of Wednesday, 24 October. The center is manned by all sorts of people, most of whom are cleared for highly classified information, but some are not. McNamara wanted answers to a lot of highly classified questions, and there were many people present who were not cleared to hear the answers. So I intervened. I took him to the inside “sanctum,” you might say. There he had the whole story explained to him. As we were leaving, McNamara said something like, “It’s all right.” I said, “Mr. Secretary, you go back to your office, and I’ll go to mine and we’ll take care of things.” Apparently that got him very provoked. I didn’t realize it at the time.
In personality terms, earlier in the crisis, McNamara was Alice in Wonderland—and arrogant. He once told me he was a person of integrity. I said, “Not the type of integrity that we’re used to.” He didn’t take that very well. I got along with Gilpatrick, pretty well. Of course there were ups and downs, but there were no major problems.
I got along very well with the President right from the start. He was pleasant and straightforward.
How we handle a Cuban Missile Crisis or anything else depends entirely on the personalities involved. I had great satisfaction with the people who were in command during the crisis. Vice Admiral Wallace Beakley, the Deputy CinCLantFlt was an old friend of mine—a hell of a guy. Admiral Robert Dennison was CinCLantFlt, Admiral Harry Felt was CinCPac [Commander in Chief Pacific], and Admiral John Sides at CinCPacFlt [Commander in Chief Pacific Fleet] was a man I had known very well and had worked for. Before the start of the crisis, I had appointed Vice Admiral Alfred Ward as Commander Second Fleet. I was pretty happy with the people I had.
I didn’t come away with any particular lesson from the Cuban Missile Crisis. Give good people the jobs and let them do the jobs in accordance with the national objectives. You can’t get away from the fact that the president is responsible, politically and militarily, for everything that he does. The service secretaries have basically little to contribute, but they perhaps tend to get involved too much. I don’t know about today.
McNamara wanted options for the President. The hell with the options—the President needs good advice administratively, economically, politically, as well as militarily. I think when you have dominant people like McNamara playing, they throw the whole thing off balance.
For example, I sent out a directive to make sure that there were qualified Russian-language officers on each ship involved in the quarantine—in case there had to be interrogations. As CNO, I didn’t go around and personally try to check every ship to find out if a Russian-language officer was on board. After all, I had a four-star, experienced CinC in Admiral Dennison, I had a good organization, and I had no thought of saying, “Well, did you carry out my order? Did each one arrive on each ship?” Dennison said he’d get them on there, and that was enough for me. But McNamara wanted me to get into every detail, he wanted me to interrogate each ship as to whether language officers were actually on board. This was an overpreoccupation with detail that I don’t think the civilian authorities should get involved with in a case of this sort.
It did not particularly create any problems for the Navy operationally that McNamara wanted to send political signals with antisubmarine warfare operations, carefully measured, with limitations on action and diplomatic intentions. But McNamara was not the type of person to be in that sort of position of responsibility. I see the problems more in terms of personalities than the mechanics of the management.
The main thing to do is to have good people in the jobs, particularly military, give them what it takes to do the jobs, and then keep your hands off.