Jefferson Morley: Did JFK Believe "Better Red than Dead"?

Jefferson Morley is the Washington editor of Salon and author of the forthcoming book, Snow-Storm in August: Washington City, Francis Scott Key, and the Forgotten Race Riot of 1835 (Nan Talese/Doubleday).

...[Mimi] Alford’s story matters because she spent time with JFK on perhaps the single most important day in his presidency. It came in late October 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The U.S. had discovered that the Soviet Union secretly installed nuclear missiles in Cuba to defend the revolutionary government of Fidel Castro. Most of JFK’s national security advisors — and all of the Joint Chiefs of Staff  — recommended JFK order the invasion of the island to destroy the missiles and overthrow the impudent Castro. JFK, a war hero, resisted. He accepted the lesser measure of a Naval blockade of the island while searching for a diplomatic solution.

Alford, back at school in Massachusetts, evokes the dread of those days when the world stood on the brink of nuclear war,  an “atmosphere of deep concern in some quarters and outright hysteria in others. We were warned about a national shortage of bomb shelters. We were besieged with apocalyptic estimates of how many people would die in a nuclear exchange.” No doubt seeking diversion from the burdens of office, JFK invited her to Washington. (He’d sent Jackie Kennedy and his children out of town.)

When Alford arrived at the White House on Oct. 28, 1962, Dave Powers, JFK’s personal aide, told her that the president had just sent a message to Moscow asking, for the last time, that the missiles be removed. Many thought war would start within 48 hours.

“Normally, he would have put his presidential duties behind him, had a drink and done his best to lighten up the room,” Alford recalls. Instead, JFK paced, contemplating whether he would soon have to make a decision to send thousands, if not millions, of people to a violent death.

Then she writes:

At one point, after leaving the room to take another urgent phone call, he came back shaking his head and said to me, “I’d rather my children be red than dead.” It wasn’t a political statement or an attempt at levity. These were the words of a father who adored his children and couldn’t bear them being hurt.

If true, it’s a telling comment. JFK was echoing a popular slogan of the peace movement of the 1960s: “Better red than dead.” The idea was anathema to the American right but common on the left in Europe: It would be better to live under communism than to die in a nuclear war. At the climactic moment of the Cuban missile crisis, Alford says JFK voiced this sentiment....