on through one of his closest contacts and the humiliation that Castro had once again made the United States look like a bunch of fools. He struggled in the early part of these Ex Comm meetings with that humiliation on his shoulders.Robert Kennedy believed that the missiles in Cuba represented an extremely valuable bargaining chip for both the Soviets and the Cubans. His opinion was also shared by his brother the president of the United States. Kennedy wondered whether Castro might not make new threats against Cuba’s neighbors, saying, “You move troops down into that part of Venezuela, we’re going to fire these missiles.”(Fursenko & Naftali p.235) The attorney general in the first meeting of Ex Comm was by far the strongest advocate for invasion. He understood his brother’s sensitivity toward the political impact of a U.S. reaction that was not considered commensurate to the crime. But Robert Kennedy also expected Khrushchev simply to reload his missiles if he lost his first group of missiles to an American air strike. The odds of destroying every missile cleanly and efficiently with just one simple air strike were next to impossible.(Fursenko & Naftali p.247)Perhaps as a way of showing how an invasion could be made internationally acceptable, Robert Kennedy brought up the quick fix that he had been advocating off and on since the Bay of Pigs disaster. “We should also think of . . . whether there is some other way we can get involved in this through . . . Guantanamo Bay, or something, . . . or whether there’s some ship that, you know, sink the Maine again or something.”(Hinckle & William p. 278) Kennedy was indeed grasping for straws suggesting such farfetched and outlandish excuses for invading Cuba, under pretexts of questionable morality. However Kennedy was confused and extremely frustrated by the current situation. Much of what Kennedy suggests early on in the Ex Comm meeti...
