If the Cuban Missile Crisis was the most dangerous passage of 
the Cold War, the most dangerous moment of the Cuban Missile 
Crisis was the evening of Saturday, 27 October 1962, when the 
resolution of the crisis—war or peace—appeared to hang in the 
balance.  While Soviet ships had not attempted to break the U.S. 
naval blockade of Cuba, Soviet nuclear missile bases remained on 
the island and were rapidly becoming operational, and pressure on 
President Kennedy to order an air strike or invasion was mounting, 
especially after an American U-2 reconnaissance plane was shot 
down over Cuba that Saturday afternoon and its pilot killed.  Hopes 
that a satisfactory resolution to the crisis could be reached between 
Washington and Moscow had dimmed, moreover, when a letter 
from Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev arrived Saturday morning 
demanding that the United States agree to remove its Jupiter 
missiles from Turkey in exchange for a Soviet removal of missiles 
from Cuba.  The letter struck U.S. officials as an ominous hardening 
of the Soviet position from the previous day’s letter from 
Khrushchev, which had omitted any mention of American missiles 
in Turkey but had instead implied that Washington’s pledge not to 
invade Cuba would be sufficient to obviate the need for Soviet 
nuclear protection of Castro’s revolution.
	On Saturday evening, after a day of tense discussions within the 
“ExComm” or Executive Committee of senior advisers, President 
Kennedy decided on a dual strategy—a formal letter to Khrushchev 
accepting the implicit terms of his October 26 letter (a U.S. non-
invasion pledge in exchange for the verifiable departure of Soviet 
nuclear missiles), coupled with private assurances to Khrushchev 
that the United States would speedily take out its missiles from 
Turkey, but only on the basis of a secret understanding, not as an 
open agreement that would appear to the public, and to NATO 
allies, as a concession to blackmail.  The U.S. president elected to 
transmit this sensitive message through his brother, Attorney 
General Robert F. Kennedy, who met in his office at the Justice 
Department with Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin.
	That meeting has long been recognized as a turning point in the 
crisis, but several aspects of it have been shrouded in mystery and 
confusion.  One concerned the issue of the Jupiter missiles in 
Turkey: U.S. officials maintained that neither John nor Robert 
Kennedy promised to withdraw the Jupiters as a quid pro quo, or 
concession, in exchange for the removal of the Soviet missiles from 
Cuba, or as part of an explicit agreement, deal, or pledge, but had 
merely informed Dobrynin that Kennedy had planned to take out the 
American missiles in any event.  This was the version of events 
depicted in the first published account of the RFK-Dobrynin 
meeting by one of the participants, in Robert F. Kennedy’s Thirteen 
Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis, posthumously 
published in 1969, a year after he was assassinated while seeking 
the Democratic nomination for president.  While Thirteen Days 
depicted RFK as rejecting any firm agreement to withdraw the 
Jupiters, this was also the first public indication that the issue had 
even been privately discussed.
	With Dobrynin obviously unable to publish his own version—he 
remained Moscow’s ambassador in Washington until 1986, and 
Soviet diplomats were not in the habit of publishing tell-all exposés 
prior to glasnost—the first important Soviet account of the event to 
emerge was contained in the tape-recorded memoirs of deposed 
Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, which were smuggled to the West 
and published in 1970 (after Khrushchev’s death, additional 
installments saw print in the West in 1974 and 1990).  The account 
of the RFK-Dobrynin meeting in Khrushchev Remembers, in the 
form of a paraphrase from memory of Dobrynin’s report, did not 
directly touch upon the secret discussions concerning the Jupiters, 
but did raise eyebrows with its claim that Robert F. Kennedy had 
fretted to Dobrynin that if his brother did not approve an attack on 
Cuba soon, the American military might “overthrow him and seize 
power.”  The second volume of Khrushchev’s memoirs 
(Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament), published 
posthumously in 1974, touched only briefly on the Robert Kennedy-
Dobrynin meeting, but included the flat statement (on p. 512) that 
“President Kennedy said that in exchange for the withdrawl of our 
missiles, he would remove American missiles from Turkey and 
Italy,” although he described this “pledge” as “symbolic” since the 
rockets “were already obsolete.”
	Over the years, many scholars of the Cuban Missile Crisis came 
strongly to suspect that Robert Kennedy had, in fact, relayed a 
pledge from his brother to take out the Jupiters from Turkey in 
exchange for the Soviet removal of nuclear missiles from Cuba, so 
long as Moscow kept the swap secret; yet senior former Kennedy 
Administration officials, such as then-National Security Advisor 
McGeorge Bundy and then-Secretary of State Dean Rusk, continued 
to insist that RFK had passed on no more than an informal 
assurance rather than an explicit promise or agreement.
	The first authoritative admission on the U.S. side that the 
Jupiters had actually been part of a “deal” came at a conference in 
Moscow in January 1989, after glasnost had led Soviet (and then 
Cuban) former officials to participate in international scholarly 
efforts to reconstruct and assess the history of the crisis.  At that 
meeting, former Kennedy speechwriter Theodore Sorensen (and the 
uncredited editor of Thirteen Days) admitted, after prodding from 
Dobrynin, that he had taken it upon himself to edit out a “very 
explicit” reference to the inclusion of the Jupiters in the final deal to 
settle the crisis.
	Now Dobrynin’s original, contemporaneous, and dramatic cable 
of the meeting, alluded to in some accounts by Soviets (such as 
Anatoly Gromyko, son of the late foreign minister) with special 
access, has been declassified and is available at the archives of the 
Russian Foreign Ministry.  It is reprinted in translation below, along 
with relevant excerpts from the other publications mentioned above.  
The Dobrynin cable’s first publication in English, a copy obtained 
by the Japanese television network NHK, came last year in an 
appendix to We All Lost the Cold War, a study by Richard Ned 
Lebow and Janice Stein, whose commentary is also excerpted.

* * * * *

Robert F. Kennedy’s (edited) Description

	I telephoned Ambassador Dobrynin about 7:15 P.M. and asked 
him to come to the Department of Justice.  We met in my office at 
7:45.  I told him first that we knew that work was continuing on the 
missile bases in Cuba and that in the last few days it had been 
expedited.  I said that in the last few hours we had learned that our 
reconnaissance planes flying over Cuba had been fired upon and 
that one of our U-2s had been shot down and the pilot killed.  That 
for us was a most serious turn of events.
	President Kennedy did not want a military conflict.  He had done 
everything possible to avoid a military engagement with Cuba and 
with the Soviet Union, but now they had forced our hand.  Because 
of the deception of the Soviet Union, our photographic 
reconnaissance planes would have to continue to fly over Cuba, and 
if the Cubans or Soviets shot at these planes, then we would have to 
shoot back.  This would inevitably lead to further incidents and to 
escalation of the conflict, the implications of which were very grave 
indeed.
	He said the Cubans resented the fact that we were violating 
Cuban air space.  I replied that if we had not violated Cuban air 
space, we would still be believing what Khrushchev had said—that 
there would be no missiles placed in Cuba.  In any case, I said, this 
matter was far more serious than the air space of Cuba—it involved 
the peoples of both of our countries and, in fact, people all over the 
globe.
	The Soviet Union had secretly established missile bases in Cuba 
while at the same time proclaiming privately and publicly that this 
would never be done.  We had to have a commitment by tomorrow 
that those bases would be removed.  I was not giving them an 
ultimatum but a statement of fact.  He should understand that if they 
did not remove those bases, we would remove them.  President 
Kennedy had great respect for the Ambassador’s country and the 
courage of its people.  Perhaps his country might feel it necessary to 
take retaliatory action; but before that was over, there would be not 
only dead Americans but dead Russians as well.
	He asked me what offer the United States was making, and I told 
him of the letter that President Kennedy had just transmitted to 
Khrushchev.  He raised the question of our removing the missiles 
from Turkey.  I said that there could be no quid pro quo or any 
arrangement made under this kind of threat or pressure, and that in 
the last analysis this was a decision that would have to be made by 
NATO.  However, I said, President Kennedy had been anxious to 
remove those missiles from Italy and Turkey for a long period of 
time.  He had ordered their removal some time ago, and it was our 
judgment that, within a short time after this crisis was over, those 
missiles would be gone.
	I said President Kennedy wished to have peaceful relations 
between our two countries.  He wished to resolve the problems that 
confronted us in Europe and Southeast Asia.  He wished to move 
forward on the control of nuclear weapons.  However, we could 
make progress on these matters only when the crisis was behind us.  
Time was running out.  We had only a few more hours—we needed 
an answer immediately from the Soviet Union.  I said we must have 
it the next day.
	I returned to the White House....

[Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile 
Crisis (New York: New American Library, 1969), 107-109.]

* * * * *

Khrushchev’s Description

	The climax came after five or six days, when our ambassador to 
Washington, Anatoly Dobrynin, reported that the President’s 
brother, Robert Kennedy, had come to see him on an unofficial visit.  
Dobrynin’s report went something like this:
	“Robert Kennedy looked exhausted.  One could see from his eyes 
that he had not slept for days.  He himself said that he had not been 
home for six days and nights.  ‘The President is in a grave 
situation,’ Robert Kennedy said, ‘and does not know how to get out 
of it.  We are under very severe stress.  In fact we are under pressure 
from our military to use force against Cuba.  Probably at this very 
moment the President is sitting down to write a message to 
Chairman Khrushchev.  We want to ask you, Mr. Dobrynin, to pass 
President Kennedy’s message to Chairman Khrushchev through 
unofficial channels.  President Kennedy implores Chairman 
Khrushchev to accept his offer and to take into consideration the 
peculiarities of the American system.  Even though the President 
himself is very much against starting a war over Cuba, an 
irreversible chain of events could occur against his will.  That is 
why the President is appealing directly to Chairman Khrushchev for 
his help in liquidating this conflict.  If the situation continues much 
longer, the President is not sure that the military will not overthrow 
him and seize power.  The American army could get out of 
control.’”

[Khrushchev Remembers, intro., commentary, and notes by Edward 
Crankshaw, trans. and ed. by Strobe Talbott (Boston: Little, Brown, 
1970; citation from paperback edition, New York: Bantam, 1971), 
pp. 551-52]

* * * * *

Sorensen’s “Confession”:

	...the president [Kennedy] recognized that, for Chairman 
Khrushchev to withdraw the missiles from Cuba, it would be 
undoubtedly helpful to him if he could say at the same time to his 
colleagues on the Presidium, “And we have been assured that the 
missiles will be coming out of Turkey.”  And so, after the ExComm 
meeting [on the evening of 27 October 1962], as I’m sure almost all 
of you know, a small group met in President Kennedy’s office, and 
he instructed Robert Kennedy—at the suggestion of Secretary of 
State [Dean] Rusk—to deliver the letter to Ambassador Dobrynin 
for referral to Chairman Khrushchev, but to add orally what was not 
in the letter: that the missiles would come out of Turkey.

	Ambassador Dobrynin felt that Robert Kennedy’s book did not 
adequately express that the “deal” on the Turkish missiles was part 
of the resolution of the crisis.  And here I have a confession to make 
to my colleagues on the American side, as well as to others who are 
present.  I was the editor of Robert Kennedy’s book.  It was, in fact, 
a diary of those thirteen days.  And his diary was very explicit that 
this was part of the deal; but at that time it was still a secret even on 
the American side, except for the six of us who had been present at 
that meeting.  So I took it upon myself to edit that out of his diaries, 
and that is why the Ambassador is somewhat justified in saying that 
the diaries are not as explicit as his conversation.
	
[Sorensen comments, in Bruce J. Allyn, James G. Blight, and David 
A. Welch, eds., Back to the Brink: Proceedings of the Moscow 
Conference on the Cuban Missile Crisis, January 27-28, 1989 
(Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1992), pp. 92-93]

* * * * * 

Accounts of Former U.S. Officials:

McGeorge Bundy:

... Later [on Saturday], accepting a proposal from Dean Rusk, [John 
F.] Kennedy instructed his brother to tell Ambassador Dobrynin that 
while there could be no bargain over the missiles that had been 
supplied to Turkey, the president himself was determined to have 
them removed and would attend to the matter once the present crisis 
was resolved—as long as no one in Moscow called that action part 
of a bargain. [p. 406]

...The other part of the oral message [to Dobrynin] was proposed by 
Dean Rusk; that we should tell Khrushchev that while there could be 
no deal over the Turkish missiles, the president was determined to 
get them out and would do so once the Cuban crisis was resolved.  
The proposal was quickly supported by the rest of us [in addition to 
Bundy and Rusk, those present included President Kennedy, 
McNamara, RFK, George Ball, Roswell Gilpatrick, Llewellyn 
Thompson, and Theodore Sorensen].  Concerned as we all were by 
the cost of a public bargain struck under pressure at the apparent 
expense of the Turks, and aware as we were from the day’s 
discussion that for some, even in our own closest councils, even this 
unilateral private assurance might appear to betray an ally, we 
agreed without hesitation that no one not in the room was to be 
informed of this additional message.  Robert Kennedy was 
instructed to make it plain to Dobrynin that the same secrecy must 
be observed on the other side, and that any Soviet reference to our 
assurance would simply make it null and void. [pp. 432-44]
	...There was no leak.  As far as as I know, none of the nine of us 
told anyone else what had happened.  We denied in every forum that 
there was any deal, and in the narrowest sense what we said was 
usually true, as far as it went.  When the orders were passed that the 
Jupiters must come out, we gave the plausible and accurate—if 
incomplete—explanation that the missile crisis had convinced the 
president once and for all that he did not want those missiles there.... 
[p. 434]

[from McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival: Choices About the 
Bomb in the First Fifty Years (New York: Random House, 1988]


Dean Rusk:

	Even though Soviet ships had turned around, time was running 
out.  We made this very clear to Khrushchev.  Earlier in the week 
Bobby Kennedy told Ambassador Dobrynin that if the missile were 
not withdrawn immediately, the crisis would move into a different 
and dangerous military phase.  In his book Khrushchev Remembers, 
Khrushchev states that Robert Kennedy told Dobrynin that the 
military might take over.  Khrushchev either genuinely 
misunderstood or deliberately misused Bobby’s statement.  
Obviously there was never any threat of a military takeover in this 
country.  We wondered about Khrushchev’s situation, even whether 
some Soviet general or member of the Politburo would put a pistol 
to Khrushchev’s head and say, “Mr. Chairman, launch those 
missiles or we’ll blow your head off!”
	...In framing a response [to Khrushchev’s second letter of 
Saturday, October 27], the president, Bundy, McNamara, Bobby 
Kennedy, and I met in the Oval Office, where after some discussion 
I suggested that since the Jupiters in Turkey were coming out in any 
event, we should inform the Russians of this so that this irrelevant 
question would not complicate the solution of the missile sites in 
Cuba.  We agreed that Bobby should inform Ambassador Dobrynin 
orally.  Shortly after we returned to our offices, I telephoned Bobby 
to underline that he should pass this along to Dobrynin only as 
information, not a public pledge.  Bobby told me that he was then 
sitting with Dobrynin and had already talked with him.  Bobby later 
told me that Dobrynin called this message “very important 
information.”

[Dean Rusk as told to Richard Rusk, As I Saw It (New York: 
Norton & Co., 1990), pp. 238-240]

* * * * *

Dobrynin’s Cable to the Soviet Foreign Ministry,
27 October 1962:


TOP SECRET
Making Copies Prohibited
Copy No. 1

CIPHERED TELEGRAM


	Late tonight R. Kennedy invited me to come see him. We talked 
alone.
	The Cuban crisis, R. Kennedy began, continues to quickly 
worsen.  We have just received a report that an unarmed American 
plane was shot down while carrying out a reconnaissance flight over 
Cuba.  The military is demanding that the President arm such planes 
and respond to fire with fire.  The USA government will have to do 
this.
	I interrupted R. Kennedy and asked him, what right American 
planes had to fly over Cuba at all, crudely violating its sovereignty 
and accepted international norms?  How would the USA have 
reacted if foreign planes appeared over its territory?
	“We have a resolution of the Organization of American states 
that gives us the right to such overflights,” R. Kennedy quickly 
replied.
	I told him that the Soviet Union, like all peace-loving countries, 
resolutely rejects such a “right” or, to be more exact, this kind of 
true lawlessness, when people who don’t like the social-political 
situation in a country try to impose their will on it—a small state 
where the people themselves established and maintained [their 
system].  “The OAS resolution is a direct violation of the UN 
Charter,” I added, “and you, as the Attorney General of the USA, 
the highest American legal entity, should certainly know that.”
	R. Kennedy said that he realized that we had different 
approaches to these problems and it was not likely that we could 
convince each other.  But now the matter is not in these differences, 
since time is of the essence.  “I want,” R. Kennedy stressed, “to lay 
out the current alarming situation the way the president sees it.  He 
wants N.S. Khrushchev to know this.  This is the thrust of the 
situation now.”
	“Because of the plane that was shot down, there is now strong 
pressure on the president to give an order to respond with fire if 
fired upon when American reconnaissance planes are flying over 
Cuba.  The USA can’t stop these flights, because this is the only 
way we can quickly get information about the state of construction 
of the missile bases in Cuba, which we believe pose a very serious 
threat to our national security.  But if we start to fire in response—a 
chain reaction will quickly start that will be very hard to stop.  The 
same thing in regard to the essence of the issue of the missile bases 
in Cuba.  The USA government is determined to get rid of those 
bases—up to, in the extreme case, of bombing them, since, I repeat, 
they pose a great threat to the security of the USA.  But in response 
to the bombing of these bases, in the course of which Soviet 
specialists might suffer, the Soviet government will undoubtedly 
respond with the same against us, somewhere in Europe.  A real war 
will begin, in which millions of Americans and Russians will die.  
We want to avoid that any way we can, I’m sure that the 
government of the USSR has the same wish.  However, taking time 
to find a way out [of the situation] is very risky (here R. Kennedy 
mentioned as if in passing that there are many unreasonable heads 
among the generals, and not only among the generals, who are 
‘itching for a fight’).  The situation might get out of control, with 
irreversible consequences.”
	“In this regard,” R. Kennedy said, “the president considers that a 
suitable basis for regulating the entire Cuban conflict might be the 
letter N.S. Khrushchev sent on October 26 and the letter in response 
from the President, which was sent off today to N.S. Khrushchev 
through the US Embassy in Moscow.  The most important thing for 
us,” R. Kennedy stressed, “is to get as soon as possible the 
agreement of the Soviet government to halt further work on the 
construction of the missile bases in Cuba and take measures under 
international control that would make it impossible to use these 
weapons.  In exchange the government of the USA is ready, in 
addition to repealing all measures on the “quarantine,” to give the 
assurances that there will not be any invasion of Cuba and that other 
countries of the Western Hemisphere are ready to give the same 
assurances—the US government is certain of this.”
	“And what about Turkey?” I asked R. Kennedy.
	“If that is the only obstacle to achieving the regulation I 
mentioned earlier, then the president doesn’t see any 
unsurmountable difficulties in resolving this issue,” replied R. 
Kennedy.  “The greatest difficulty for the president is the public 
discussion of the issue of Turkey.  Formally the deployment of 
missile bases in Turkey was done by a special decision of the 
NATO Council.  To announce now a unilateral decision by the 
president of the USA to withdraw missile bases from Turkey—this 
would damage the entire structure of NATO and the US position as 
the leader of NATO, where, as the Soviet government knows very 
well, there are many arguments.  In short, if such a decision were 
announced now it would seriously tear apart NATO.”
	“However, President Kennedy is ready to come to agree on that 
question with N.S. Khrushchev, too.  I think that in order to 
withdraw these bases from Turkey,” R. Kennedy said, “we need 4-5 
months.  This is the minimal amount of time necessary for the US 
government to do this, taking into account the procedures that exist 
within the NATO framework.  On the whole Turkey issue,” R. 
Kennedy added, “if Premier N.S. Khrushchev agrees with what I’ve 
said, we can continue to exchange opinions between him and the 
president, using him, R. Kennedy and the Soviet ambassador. 
“However, the president can’t say anything public in this regard 
about Turkey,” R. Kennedy said again.  R. Kennedy then warned 
that his comments about Turkey are extremely confidential; besides 
him and his brother, only 2-3 people know about it in Washington.
	“That’s all that he asked me to pass on to N.S. Khrushchev,” R. 
Kennedy said in conclusion.  “The president also asked N.S. 
Khrushchev to give him an answer (through the Soviet ambassador 
and R. Kennedy) if possible within the next day (Sunday) on these 
thoughts in order to have a business-like, clear answer in principle.  
[He asked him] not to get into a wordy discussion, which might 
drag things out.  The current serious situation, unfortunately, is such 
that there is very little time to resolve this whole issue.  
Unfortunately, events are developing too quickly.  The request for a 
reply tomorrow,” stressed R. Kennedy, “is just that—a request, and 
not an ultimatum.  The president hopes that the head of the Soviet 
government will understand him correctly.”
	I noted that it went without saying that the Soviet government 
would not accept any ultimatums and it was good that the American 
government realized that.  I also reminded him of N.S. 
Khrushchev’s appeal in his last letter to the president to demonstrate 
state wisdom in resolving this question.  Then I told R. Kennedy that 
the president’s thoughts would be brought to the attention of the 
head of the Soviet government.  I also said that I would contact him 
as soon as there was a reply.  In this regard, R. Kennedy gave me a 
number of a direct telephone line to the White House.
	In the course of the conversation, R. Kennedy noted that he knew 
about the conversation that television commentator Scali had 
yesterday with an Embassy adviser on possible ways to regulate the 
Cuban conflict [one-and-a-half lines whited out]
	I should say that during our meeting R. Kennedy was very upset; 
in any case, I’ve never seen him like this before.  True, about twice 
he tried to return to the topic of “deception,” (that he talked about so 
persistently during our previous meeting), but he did so in passing 
and without any edge to it.  He didn’t even try to get into fights on 
various subjects, as he usually does, and only persistently returned to 
one topic: time is of the essence and we shouldn’t miss the chance.
	After meeting with me he immediately went to see the president, 
with whom, as R. Kennedy said, he spends almost all his time now.

27/X-62     A. DOBRYNIN

[Source: Russian Foreign Ministry archives, translation from copy 
provided by NHK, in Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein, 
We All Lost the Cold War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University 
Press, 1994), appendix, pp. 523-526, with minor revisions.]

* * * * *

Lebow and Stein comment,
We All Lost the Cold War (excerpt): 

	The cable testifies to the concern of John and Robert Kennedy 
that military action would trigger runaway escalation.  Robert 
Kennedy told Dobrynin of his government’s determination to ensure 
the removal of the Soviet missiles in Cuba, and his belief that the 
Soviet Union “will undoubtedly respond with the same against us, 
somewhere in Europe.”  Such an admission seems illogical if the 
administration was using the threat of force to compel the Soviet 
Union to withdraw its missiles from Cuba.  It significantly raised 
the expected cost to the United States of an attack against the 
missiles, thereby weakening the credibility of the American threat.  
To maintain or enhance that credibility, Kennedy would have had to 
discount the probability of Soviet retaliation to Dobrynin.  That 
nobody in the government was certain of Khrushchev’s reponse 
makes Kennedy’s statement all the more remarkable.
	It is possible that Dobrynin misquoted Robert Kennedy.  
However, the Soviet ambassador was a careful and responsible 
diplomat.  At the very least, Kennedy suggested that he thought that 
Soviet retaliation was likely.  Such an admission was still damaging 
to compellence.  It seems likely that Kennedy was trying to establish 
the basis for a more cooperative approach to crisis resolution.  His 
brother, he made clear, was under enormous pressure from a coterie 
of generals and civilian officials who were “itching for a fight.”  
This also was a remarkable admission for the attorney general to 
make.  The pressure on the president to attack Cuba, as Kennedy 
explained at the beginning of the meeting, had been greatly 
intensified by the destruction of an unarmed American 
reconnaissance plane.  The president did not want to use force, in 
part because he recognized the terrible consequences of escalation, 
and was therefore requesting Soviet assistance to make it 
unnecessary.
	This interpretation is supported by the president’s willingness to 
remove the Jupiter missiles as a quid pro quo for the withdrawal of 
missiles in Cuba, and his brother’s frank confession that the only 
obstacle to dismantling the Jupiters were political.  “Public 
discussion” of a missile exchange would damage the United States’ 
position in NATO.  For this reason, Kennedy revealed, “besides 
himself and his brother, only 2-3 people know about it in 
Washington.”  Khrushchev would have to cooperate with the 
administration to keep the American concession a secret.
	Most extraordinary of all is the apparent agreement between 
Dobrynin and Kennedy to treat Kennedy’s de facto ultimatum as “a 
request, and not an ultimatum.”  This was a deliberate attempt to 
defuse as much as possible the hostility that Kennedy’s request for 
an answer by the next day was likely to provoke in Moscow.  So too 
was Dobrynin’s next sentence: “I noted that it went without saying 
that the Soviet government would not accept any ultimatum and it 
was good that the American government realized that.”
	Prior meetings between Dobrynin and Kennedy had sometimes 
degenerated into shouting matches.  On this occasion, Dobrynin 
indicates, the attorney general kept his emotions in check and took 
the ambassador into his confidence in an attempt to cooperate on the 
resolution of the crisis.  This two-pronged strategy succeeded where 
compellence alone might have failed.  It gave Khrushchev positive 
incentives to remove the Soviet missiles and reduced the emotional 
cost to him of the withdrawal.  He responded as Kennedy and 
Dobrynin had hoped.