That Saturday night, I was worried as hell. The Ex-Com, the group of advisers President Kennedy had brought together to deal with the Cuban missile crisis, had been meeting secretly for 12 days, ever since we were first shown the photos of Soviet missiles in Cuba. We had begun a blockade of Cuba, but there didn’t seem to be any peaceful way out of the crisis. We were all tired and worn. That day, a Soviet antiaircraft missile stationed in Cuba had shot down one of our U-2s, one of our spy planes, as it flew over a missile site. A majority of the president’s advisers, I believed, were ready to begin bombing the missile sites and launching an invasion of Cuba if Khrushchev didn’t agree to remove the missiles within the next day or two. President Kennedy was worried, and I was worried, that if we bombed Cuba, the Soviets would react–perhaps by grabbing Berlin. If the Soviets attacked Berlin, it could have meant nuclear war. That evening, after the meeting of the Ex-Com broke up, I left the Oval Office and went into the Rose Garden. It was a beautiful evening, just after sunset. As I walked to my car, I believed I might never see another Saturday night.
