What happened on Black Saturday, October 27, 1962?

Friday’s letter, Saturday’s letter

The day began with a puzzle. On Friday, October 26, a long and almost personal letter from Khrushchev had come in piece by piece. He wrote of “the knot of war” and warned that “the more the two of us pull, the tighter that knot will be tied.” His offer was simple: the missiles would go if the United States promised not to invade Cuba.

At ten on Saturday morning, Washington time, Radio Moscow broadcast a second letter, colder in tone, with a new price: the American Jupiter missiles in Turkey. The ExComm tapes catch the confusion over which letter spoke for Moscow. Kennedy worried that to any rational observer the swap would look like “a very fair trade.”

A pilot killed over Cuba

Late that morning, over eastern Cuba, a Soviet surface-to-air missile battery fired at an American U-2 on a photo mission. The pilot, Major Rudolf Anderson, 35, a husband and the father of two small boys, was killed. Soviet officers on the island gave the order themselves, without asking Moscow. Anderson was the only man killed by enemy fire in the crisis. He was awarded the Air Force Cross after his death, the first ever given, and his body was returned to the United States on November 4. Parts of his plane are on show in Havana.

It was not the day’s only shooting. Cuban guns fired at low-flying American reconnaissance jets. Far to the north, a U-2 on an air-sampling flight from Alaska strayed over the Soviet Arctic, above Chukotka, and Soviet fighters scrambled before it found its way out. In Washington the Joint Chiefs pressed for air strikes by Monday, followed by an invasion.

Havana, and a submarine at sea

In Havana, Fidel Castro believed an American attack was imminent. He wrote to Khrushchev that if the Americans invaded, that would be the moment “to eliminate such danger forever,” words Khrushchev read as a call for a Soviet nuclear strike. Out in the Atlantic, the submarine B-59, cornered by American destroyers and nearly out of air, came close to firing a nuclear torpedo until, in the crew’s accounts, Vasili Arkhipov refused to go along.

7:45 p.m., the Justice Department

That evening the president sent his brother to see the Soviet ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin. Robert Kennedy’s own memorandum of the meeting, written three days later for Secretary of State Dean Rusk, records his warning:

I told him that this was an extremely serious turn in events. We would have to make certain decisions within the next 12 or possibly 24 hours. There was a very little time left.

The missile bases had to go, he said, and he insisted that “this was not an ultimatum” but a statement of fact. The president’s written reply, released that evening, took up the first letter’s offer: the missiles out, an American pledge not to invade. On Turkey there could be no public bargain. But the Jupiters, he told Dobrynin, would be gone in four or five months, provided Moscow kept quiet about it. How the two halves played out is in the deal that ended the crisis.

Leaving the White House late that night, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara thought he “might never live to see another Saturday night.” In Moscow it was already Sunday morning, and Dobrynin’s report was on its way to Khrushchev. Within hours, Radio Moscow would announce that the missiles were coming home.