ngs were the venting of great frustration over the crisis. None the less his brother, the president of the United States took Bobby Kennedy’s lamentations very seriously. Bobby was still his closest advisor and John F. Kennedy felt the same frustration and confusion that his brother felt.Initially most of the other members of Ex Comm barring the members of the actually military who were present, supported a much more peaceful way of dealing with the situation. Diplomacy was seen as an alternative means of dealing with such an explosive situation. Llewellyn Thompson advocated a naval blockade of Cuba.(Dolan & Scariano p.105) Believing it “very highly doubtful the Russians would resist a blockade against military weapons . . .”(Dolan & Scariano p.105) Thompson argued that the best way to avoid peace or at least legitimatize an invasion of Cuba was a combined stern coercion of blockade with a public demand that Moscow dismantle its missile sites in Cuba. Thompson realized that odds were this would not be enough to remove the missiles already existing in Cuba and would not prevent them from becoming operational in the near future. He suggested threatening to use force if Khrushchev ignored the U.S. demand. “I think we should be under no illusions that this would probably in the end lead to the same thing,” he said with some resignation. “But we would do it under an entirely different posture and background, and much less danger of getting into the big war.”(Fursenko & Naftali p.253)In the beginning Robert Kennedy, still very much a hawk disagreed in entirely with Thompson. He saw the blockade as a “very slow death.”(Thompson p.123) Robert Kennedy envisioned that a blockade would last for months. He saw a great deal of conflict involved in a naval blockade anyway. The stopping of Russian ships by the American navy would cause chaos and possibly even retaliation by Russian sh...
