GRANOFF: We are privileged to have with us today Theodore C. Sorensen who was one of the key participants in helping to resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

For eleven years, Mr. Sorensen served as a key policy advisor, legal counsel and speechwriter to John F. Kennedy. He was involved in the civil-rights initiatives that came with President Kennedy, the decision to go to the moon, and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Since 1966, he has been a noted attorney. He is senior counsel at the law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkend, Wharton and Garrison, where he specializes in international business transactions. He has traveled to more than 75 countries, has met with more than 50 Heads of State, and has been involved with some of the significant transactions in our process of living in a global village. He is the husband of the Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations, Gillian Sorensen.

Mr. Sorensen, when did you first hear about the missiles in Cuba? Where were you and what were your thoughts at that moment?

THEODORE SORENSEN:

The President called me in and told me that McGeorge Bundy had informed him that morning that the CIA photo intelligencers had read photos from the U2 satellite plane indicating the beginnings of Soviet nuclear missile sites in Cuba. The President said that at 11:00 that morning he would be calling together a meeting of those whose judgement he wished to advise him on how to handle this unprecedented crisis. He asked me to attend the meeting and to prepare by reviewing the statements he had made about this contingency.

GRANOFF: When did the full gravity of the Crisis hit you?

SORENSEN: The full gravity of the Crisis hit me immediately. It was solidly confirmed at the 11:00am meeting, when the intelligence briefers described the nature and range of these missiles, including Intermediate range missiles that could reach every corner of the United States, except the far Northwest, and most of Latin America as well.

GRANOFF: Was there ever a moment when you felt terrified personally?

SORENSEN: I didn't have time to feel terrified. It was thirteen days of work, service, and doing my duty. I recognized that this was an unprecedented nuclear confrontation between superpowers. There was not much time to assess blame or motive. There was no easy solution, no right solution. The Pentagon informed us that each of these missiles carried a so-called nuclear payload that was 40 times, if I recall the figure, the strength of the bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. I knew, of course, the kind of devastation that these bombs had caused.

GRANOFF: I just want to digress for a second to give everyone an idea of what that means.
A twenty megaton bomb, if dropped, would, within 1,000th of a second, create a fireball with a diameter of about two miles wide, and the epicenter would be several times hotter than the heat on the face of the sun. Within that two-mile radius the heat would be twenty million degrees Fahrenheit, vaporizing everything. Four miles out you would have winds around 650 miles per hour with 25 lbs. pressure per square inch. Six miles out metal would melt. And out to 16 miles you have heat at 1400oF and the death rate would be virtually 100%. That is just one 20-megaton device.

It is hard to conceive of this kind of power. It is hard to even conceive of them as weapons.

In terms of the way the Cuban Missile Crisis was handled, is there a moment that you are most proud of?

SORENSEN: I don't know that I am proud of the entire episode. The United States and Soviet Union brought the world to the very edge of nuclear destruction. That is nothing to be proud of.

I was proud of the leadership demonstrated by the President.

I was proud that I played some role in that. I helped to draft the speech that he addressed to the country, and that was used as our presentation to the Soviet Union, to all of our allies, and to the American people.

I had a modest role, as the movie makes clear, in the discussions of the ExCom (the Executive Committee that convened during the Crisis). I think I had something to do with the idea of ignoring the second Khrushchev letter, which was the more difficult letter, and responding instead to the first. With Robert Kennedy looking over my shoulder, I drafted for the President the reply to the Khrushchev letter, which made an agreement possible. At the President's instruction, I called Adlai Stevenson at the United Nations to read it over the telephone to him. Then we presented it to the ExCom. That was the letter that Robert Kennedy then carried with him to see Ambassador Dobrynin.

A slight difference from the film-it was after that letter was agreed upon that the President called a few of us into his office. It was only in that smaller group that the decision was made to unofficially convey to the Soviets, through Dobrynin, that the NATO missiles in Turkey would be removed in good time, but that they could not be removed as part of the deal.
GRANOFF: Is it true that, independently of the Crisis, the President had wanted to have the missiles removed from Turkey?

SORENSEN: Indeed. He had ordered the missiles in Turkey to be removed some months earlier. Sometimes the State Department doesn't move that rapidly.

President Kennedy had asked that those missiles in Turkey be removed. Quite frankly, this was not an arms-control measure. Polaris submarines were being moved into the Mediterranean-a nuclear-powered submarine was actually a more effective weapon, but a much less provocative weapon, than a missile on the Soviet's border.

GRANOFF: I am struck that the President previously had asked that the missiles in Turkey be removed. At the beginning of the Crisis did he know that they had not been removed?

SORENSEN: I'm not so certain that he did. He expressed some dismay when he heard that the missiles were still there, and that Chairman Khrushchev was citing them as tit for tat, so to speak.

GRANOFF: I find this human element of decision-making based on inaccurate information to be a very interesting part of the whole story. The film stresses the point that the Joint Chiefs wanted to prevent the operability of the missiles in Cuba. Is it true that over a hundred missiles were actually operational at that time?

SORENSEN: No, there were never 100 in Cuba. But certainly a substantial percentage of the missiles were operational by that Saturday evening. The rest were to be operational within a matter of days.

We now know, which we did not know for certain then, that the nuclear warheads for those missiles had already been delivered to those sites in Cuba.

GRANOFF: Do you think that, had the President, Joint Chiefs, and ExCom known the full extent of the Cuban missile operation, more precipitous action might have been taken to eliminate them?

SORENSEN: We are very fortunate that, for a variety of reasons, we had roughly six days, of the thirteen days, to consider our action and to prepare a response.

If we had had no time at all-if we had been required to make an immediate response because the Soviets knew that we knew, or because Congress, or the press, or the American public knew that we knew-we wouldn't have had time to deliberate. We wouldn't have had time to shift from the option of destroying the missiles to a more considered, more limited approach that gave Khrushchev time to reconsider.

So we would have bombed those missiles.

We now know that the missiles, to the extent that they were operational at that stage, would have been fired.

We now know that the Soviet forces in Cuba-and there were more than we realized-were equipped with tactical nuclear weapons: free range, over-ground missiles known as "frogs."

We now know that the local Soviet commanders in Cuba had full authority to use those tactical weapons if there was any attack on Cuba by the United States.

We would have responded, almost surely, to a nuclear attack with a nuclear counter attack, and both parties would have been on a very rapid ride up the nuclear escalator. We probably wouldn't be sitting here talking about this movie tonight.

GRANOFF: We came that close?

SORENSEN: We came very close.

GRANOFF: Some people think that if it had not been for the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs, President Kennedy would have been much less willing to question the military command and the intelligence reports. Is that true?

SORENSEN: I think the Bay of Pigs, while it was a fiasco-a failed invasion of Cuba by Cuban exiles, sponsored by the United States-taught President Kennedy many lessons. One of them was that people who have a lot of brass and gray hair and who are in high military and intelligence positions are not always right. Secondly, it taught him that what are essentially political problems cannot be solved primarily by military solutions.

GRANOFF: What kind of pressures did you feel from Congress, from the military, and from the intelligence community? How much pressure did you actually feel, and how was it exerted?

SORENSEN: It is a terrible thing to say but we may have been better off because Congress was out of session during that time. The President called the congressional leaders in at the very last moment, an hour before he was to go on the air. Of course, by then our decision was set. It was just as well. Congressional leaders of both parties and both houses initially responded the same. Everybody's first reaction was: "You've got to take some violent action. You have to hit them. You have to knock those missiles out and get rid of them."

Indeed, one of the most intelligent, responsible leaders of the Congress, Chairman Fulbright of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, thought that our quarantine idea was crazy. He thought that the Soviets would respond much more negatively and fiercely if we ever shot one of their ships than if we invaded Cuba, which he thought the Soviets didn't care that much about.

GRANOFF: In the beginning of the movie, much was made of the Joint Chiefs analyzing that this deployment of missiles in Cuba constituted a change of doctrine. They saw this as indicative that the Soviets were adopting a first-use doctrine. Today, in fact, the United States, NATO and Russia currently have a first-use of nuclear weapons doctrine. Do you want to comment on that?

SORENSEN: I don't pretend to know as much about today's status as I did about the doctrine some years ago, but I would say that there were two salient factors about the Soviet move back in 1962:

1. Never before had the Soviet Union placed nuclear weapons outside their own borders. They guarded their secrecy, they guarded their security, and it was unimaginable, we thought, that the Soviets would place weapons as far away as Cuba where they could not have the same kind of control.

2. A year earlier, Khrushchev and Kennedy had begun a back-channel, secret correspondence. It was quite useful in defusing the crisis in Berlin, but unfortunately it was used by Khrushchev to deceive us, to lie to us, about what he was doing in Cuba with the offensive missiles.

That combination of factors constituted a threat, an aggressive move. I have often wondered: had Castro and Khrushchev met openly in Moscow and signed a mutual military assistance agreement, openly announcing that these weapons were going to be placed in Cuba, could the United States, in view of the NATO weapons in Turkey, have really done much about it? I'm not so sure we could. But the Soviets chose a very different path, which is why we suspected the worst.

GRANOFF: I want to convey another point. Weapons are aimed first at weapons. At present, if there is a perceived missile launch by an adversary, there is about a ten-minute period before it must be confirmed.

The President of the United States then has approximately five minutes to decide what his response will be because it takes another ten minutes to use the weapons before they get hit.

There is basically a five-minute period of time in which the decision would have to be made.

This actually happened recently, in 1995. A weather satellite was launched off the coast of Norway, which Russians picked up as a perceived missile launch. The Scientific American article by Frank Von Hippel and Bruce Blair says that President Yeltsin had eight minutes to respond. Thank God that during that 8 minute period it was determined that the missile launch was not a missile aimed at Moscow, but merely a weather satellite going up to the North Pole.

I would like one or two people to look at your watch and clock off 5 minutes. We saw what could happen in thirteen days. Just imagine that, right now, all of us are living in that kind of time frame.

And I wondered: after having had that thirteen day intensive that so few people on the planet have had, what kind of wisdom could you give to us now? What do you think should be learned from that experience?

SORENSEN: I think there are a great many lessons from those thirteen days that are relevant today:

1. Most important is the quality of leadership in positions of command-in the United States or in any other country-that might precipitate a continent or the world into war.

In this respect I pay tribute to Chairman Khrushchev who might have given the order to launch a "retaliatory" attack when our U2 plane in Asia lost navigation control and accidentally flew off course. Chairman Khrushchev might have launched an attack when he first heard that the United States was putting a naval quarantine in front of his vessels. We later learned that Chairman Khrushchev was actually shocked by the launch of the SAM missile that shot down Major Anderson's U2, as we saw in the movie, because he had not given that order. He realized that events might spin out of his control as well.

2. It is important that adversaries keep a line of communication open, keep the dialogue going, and try to find some way other than armed hostilities to solve critical situations. I think we learned that, in that situation or in similar situations, the United States cannot act alone. We had the support of the Organization of American States to authorize this regional defense action. We had the General Assembly and the Security Council of the United Nations as a forum, as a source of counsel for patience and restraint. We had our Allies in Europe who gave us support. Even neutral nations in Africa, fearful of what was coming in the world, denied landing rights to Soviet airplanes with which the Soviets had planned to convey arms and fuel to the missile sites in Cuba. So Allies and the United Nations still matter a great deal.

GRANOFF: You would not recommend unilateralism by one superpower?

SORENSEN: Never.