The Turning Point In The Cuban Missile Crisis

One of the main difficulties is knowing which source to trust when making an analysis of why Soviet Union had installed missiles in Cuba and why did they agree to take it down if United States agrees to take down missile from Turkey or Soviet Union unwillingly backed down because of its global reasons.
When Soviet Union 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 1-2 reconnaissance plane was shot down over Cuba on Saturday afternoon and its pilot was killed. 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, whereas, the previous letter from Khrushchev did not mention the missiles in Turkey and they were ready to take down
the missiles if United States pledge not to invade Cuba and that would be sufficient to obviate the need for Soviet nuclear protection of Castro’s revolution. On Saturday evening, Kennedy decided on a dual strategy – a formal letter to Khrushchev accepting the implicit terms of his October 26th letter, 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 the NATO allies, as a concession to blackmail. U.S president sent this 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 had been recognized as a turning point in the Cuban missile crisis as there are many aspects which are still a mystery.
One of them is the issue of the Jupiter missiles in Turkey, U.S officials maintained that Kennedy promised to withdraw the Jupiters in exchange of the removal of the Soviet missiles from Cuba, or as a part of explicit agreement 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 at 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.
Throughout the years, numerous researchers 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 return for the Soviet expulsion of nuclear missiles from Cuba, so long as Moscow kept the secret; yet senior former Kennedy Administration officials, such as then-National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy and Secretary of State Dean Rusk, kept on insisting that RFK had passed on no more than an informal assurance rather than an explicit promise or agreement.