An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (103 page)

Despite these expressions of goodwill, differences between the two sides on banning nuclear tests seemed too great to bridge. Khrushchev complained that while Kennedy might see the Polaris arrangement with Britain as a bar to greater proliferation, he could only view it as an expansion of nuclear armaments that would intensify rather than diminish the arms race. At the same time, they could not agree on the number and location of on-site inspections, which Washington still insisted be part of any test ban treaty. Khrushchev was under the impression that Kennedy would settle for three or four inspections a year as opposed to the twelve to twenty he had been asking for. In fact, Kennedy explained, he was ready to accept between eight and ten inspections, but three were too few.

Although Khrushchev agreed to talks in New York between Soviet and U.S. representatives to take place in the first four months of 1963, the discussions produced little progress. In late March, when a reporter asked Kennedy if he still had any hope of achieving a test ban agreement, he answered, “Well, my hopes are somewhat dimmed, but nevertheless, I still hope. . . . Now, the reason why we keep moving and working on this question . . . is because personally I am haunted by the feeling that by 1970, unless we are successful, there may be 10 nuclear powers instead of 4, and by 1975, 15 or 20. . . . I regard that as the greatest possible danger and hazard.”

Khrushchev shared Kennedy’s concern, but his own political pressures kept him from reaching any agreement. During a meeting in Moscow with
Saturday Review
editor Norman Cousins in April, he claimed that false American promises to reduce the number of on-site inspections had embarrassed him and stalled the talks. He said that he had convinced his council of ministers to accept three on-site inspections as the price of a treaty and that Kennedy had then upped the ante to eight. “And so once again I was made to look foolish,” Khrushchev said. “But I can tell you this: it won’t happen again.”

In addition to this “misunderstanding” over on-site inspections, two other differences undermined the talks. Kennedy believed that a principal value of a test ban treaty could be its inhibition of Chinese nuclear development. “Any negotiations that can hold back the Chinese Communists are most important,” he said [at an NSC meeting in January], “because they loom as our major antagonists of the late 60’s and beyond.” But because the Chinese understood that a treaty would be directed partly against them, they pressured Moscow to resist Washington’s overtures. Though Khrushchev shared American hopes of inhibiting Peking’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, he was also reluctant to open himself to Chinese attacks for signing a treaty that “betrayed” a communist comrade. On the American side, Senate opposition, fueled by warnings from the hawkish U.S. Joint Chiefs, to anything but an airtight agreement with Moscow on verification made it impossible for Kennedy to accept Soviet proposals that could be seen as giving them even the smallest leeway to cheat.

On April 1, Dobrynin handed Bobby a twenty-five-page message from his government that seemed to signal a collapse of hopes for a test ban agreement or accommodation on anything else. Bobby looked it over and returned it without passing it on to Kennedy. As he summed it up for his brother, the U.S. insistence on more than two or three inspections showed U.S. contempt for Moscow: “Who did we think we were in the United States trying to dictate to the Soviet Union?” the message said. “The United States had better learn that the Soviet Union was as strong as the United States and did not enjoy being treated as a second-class power.” As he returned the document to Dobrynin, Bobby told him that Dobrynin “had never talked like this before.” He considered the paper “so insulting and rude to the President of the United States that I would never accept it nor transmit its message.”

Yet Kennedy, who was determined to do all he could to salvage the test ban talks, saw some indications of Soviet receptivity to additional negotiations. At the end of 1962, the American physicist Leo Szilard received encouragement from Khrushchev to hold “an unofficial Soviet-American meeting at a non-governmental level to exchange views and examine the possibility of coming to an agreement on disarmament.” In addition, Macmillan urged Kennedy not to give up on test ban talks, describing himself in a long letter to the president in March as having a “very deep personal obligation” to ban nuclear explosions “before it is too late.” Kennedy also took hope from Khrushchev’s statement through Dobrynin that past confidential exchanges with the president “had been helpful,” and he would be glad to reopen “this area of contact.” He also obliquely suggested that another summit meeting “might be helpful.” In addition, Kennedy saw something positive in Soviet acceptance on April 5 of discussions to create a Teletype “hot line” between Moscow and Washington for use during a crisis.

Taking Khrushchev at his word and seizing upon a suggestion from Macmillan that they jointly propose additional negotiations, Kennedy wrote Khrushchev on April 11 apologizing for any misunderstanding on the number of on-site inspections, promising to offer new suggestions on the matter from himself and Macmillan in the near future, and emphasizing how eager he and the prime minister were to head off “the spread of national nuclear forces.” Kennedy also followed a Macmillan suggestion that he ask whether Khrushchev would be interested in “a fully frank, informal exchange of views” with a Kennedy personal representative. Following up on April 15 with another letter, Kennedy and Macmillan suggested that there be private tripartite discussions either at Geneva or between their representatives meeting in Moscow. If these negotiations came close to an agreement, the three of them could meet to conclude a treaty.

Kennedy and Macmillan’s renewed efforts at negotiations—a tedious, stubborn slog of requests and oblique promises—brought only grudging acknowledgment from Khrushchev of the need for further talks. When the new U.S. ambassador, Foy Kohler, and British ambassador Sir Humphrey Trevelyan gave Khrushchev the JFK-Macmillan letter, Khrushchev’s reaction was “almost entirely negative.” His attitude “was almost one of disinterest,” and after reading the letter, he dismissed it as containing “nothing . . . positive or constructive.” He saw “no basis for agreement.” Kohler and Trevelyan could not budge him with oral arguments. Instead, resurrecting differences over Germany, Khrushchev emphasized them as the “key to everything,” and said that the nuclear test ban “really had no importance.” It would be of no benefit to either the U.S. or USSR; nor would it “deter others from testing and developing nuclear capabilities and would not relieve tensions.”

Khrushchev gave formal response to the Kennedy-Macmillan letter in lengthy written replies on April 29 and May 8. With the United States apparently intent on allowing other NATO states to acquire nuclear weapons and still insistent on inspections, which he continued to describe as an espionage cover, Khrushchev saw little reason to hope for a breakthrough in test ban talks. However, he did announce that he was willing nevertheless to receive Kennedy’s personal envoy, who would be given a full and respectful hearing. Kennedy replied that he took little encouragement from Khrushchev’s messages, which continued to demonstrate “the gaps which separate us on these problems.” In another follow-up letter from him and Macmillan, they confirmed their eagerness to send personal envoys for discussions during the summer but emphasized that they disagreed with Khrushchev’s assessment of the need for on-site inspections and their purpose, which they categorically and honestly affirmed had no hidden espionage design.

It is indeed difficult to believe that Khrushchev saw espionage as the prime motive behind the U.S. insistence on inspections. Instead, it was a convenient excuse to hold up any sort of agreement. Llewellyn Thompson saw Khrushchev’s resistance to a test ban treaty as principally motivated by an eagerness to buy time for additional nuclear tests that could make Soviet nuclear forces more competitive with the United States’. Khrushchev’s “quarrel with the ChiComs,” Thompson said, was also apparently “taking precedence at the present time over other issues. . . . It is important to him at this juncture not to do anything which exposes him to further Chinese attack, both for internal reasons and in connection with the struggle for control of other communist parties.” Averell Harriman, who spent three days in Moscow at the end of April, underscored Khrushchev’s difficulties with Peking. “This challenge by the ChiComs of Kremlin leadership of the Communist International is causing the gravest concern.”

KENNEDY SAW LITTLE HOPE
for a breakthrough unless there were some new departure or fresh impetus to get the genie back in the bottle, as he put it at two May press conferences. He still believed that a failure to ban nuclear testing “would be a great disaster for the interests of all concerned,” and promised to push “very hard in May and June and July in every forum to see if we can get an agreement.”

Kennedy now decided to embrace a suggestion Norman Cousins had made to him on April 22 after returning from his meeting with Khrushchev in Moscow. When Cousins told the president that Khrushchev was under pressure from others in his government to take a hard line, Kennedy responded that he and Khrushchev “occupy approximately the same political positions inside our governments. He would like to prevent a nuclear war but is under severe pressure from his hard-line crowd.” Kennedy said he had “similar problems. . . . The hard-liners in the Soviet Union and the United States feed on one another, each using the actions of the other to justify his own position.” Cousins urged the president to overcome both groups of militants by a “breathtaking new approach toward the Russian people, calling for an end to the cold war and a fresh start in American-Russian relations.” In a follow-up letter on April 30, Cousins pressed Kennedy to make “the most important speech of your presidency . . . [including] breathtaking proposals for genuine peace . . . [a] tone of friendliness for the Soviet people and . . . [an] understanding of their ordeal during the last war.”

Kennedy saw risks in publicly urging a transformation in Soviet-American relations and pressing Moscow for a test ban agreement. He would almost certainly confront forceful opposition from his military chiefs and national security advisers, who would see him as letting idealism eclipse sensible realism. There was some logic, at least some political logic, to this. When Cousins told Kennedy that Americans wanted the nuclear powers to stop poisoning the atmosphere with nuclear tests, Kennedy pointed out that in fact the public did not seem to care; recent White House mail had shown more interest in daughter Caroline’s horse than in negotiating a treaty. And those who wrote about nuclear testing were fifteen to one against a ban.

But Kennedy saw more reasons to try a speech than not. Most important, he believed a plea for better Soviet-American relations and a test ban treaty was right. With his credibility as a foreign policy leader at new highs, he believed that a forceful speech could have an impact on American public opinion and might persuade Khrushchev to take negotiations for a ban more seriously. Kennedy also had an encouraging report from Glenn Seaborg, who had spent two weeks at the end of May in Russia leading a delegation of U.S. scientists in discussing peaceful uses of atomic energy with their Soviet counterparts. Seaborg described a meeting with Soviet president Leonid Brezhnev in which Brezhnev had said that Khrushchev was genuinely interested in peaceful coexistence: “‘This is not propaganda,’ Brezhnev had added. ‘It is the sincere desire of our government, of our people, and of our party, which leads the country. I can’t say more than that.’”

In May, Kennedy decided to turn a June 10 commencement address at American University in Washington into a “peace speech” arguing the case to Americans and Soviets for a test ban treaty. The June date reflected a concern that the speech precede a Sino-Soviet meeting in Moscow in July; Kennedy hoped his remarks could be a counterweight to whatever pressure Peking would put on Khrushchev to avoid any agreement with Washington. Because he wanted to avoid counterpressures from Defense and State Department officials and hackneyed “threats of destruction, boasts of nuclear stockpiles and lectures on Soviet treachery,” Kennedy confined his preparation of the speech to an inner circle of White House advisers—Sorensen, Bundy, Schlesinger, Rostow, Bundy’s deputy, Carl Kaysen, and Thomas Sorensen, Ted’s brother, who was a deputy director at the United States Information Agency. McNamara, Rusk, and Taylor were not told of the speech until June 8, after the president had already left on a speaking tour that would last until the morning of the tenth.

The speech was one of the great state papers of any twentieth-century American presidency. Kennedy’s topic was the “most important . . . on earth: world peace. What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a
Pax Americana
enforced on the world by American weapons of war,” he said, with the Soviets and China particularly in mind. “Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave.” In that one brief sentence, he dismissed both the kind of peace that would follow a cataclysmic nuclear war, which “hard-liners” in Moscow, Peking, and Washington seemed ready to fight, and the sort of peace a generation reared on memories of appeasement feared might come out of negotiations limiting American armaments. This was to be “not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women—not merely peace in our time but peace for all time”—the realization of Woodrow Wilson’s ideal, announced in response to the century’s first great war.

To fulfill so bold a vision, it would not be enough for the Soviet Union to adopt a more enlightened attitude. It was also essential that “[we] reexamine our own attitude—as individuals and as a Nation—for our attitude is as essential as theirs.” There was too much defeatism about peace in the United States, too much inclination to see war as inevitable and mankind as doomed. “We need not accept that view,” Kennedy asserted. “Our problems are manmade—therefore, they can be solved by man.” This would not require a change in human nature, only a change in outlook that leads to “a series of concrete actions and effective agreements which are in the interest of all concerned.” The goal was not a world without tensions but a kind of community peace in which “mutual tolerance” eased quarrels and conflicting interests.