An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (58 page)

However strong his determination to avoid a nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union, Kennedy could not rule out the possibility. The Soviet acquisition of a nuclear arsenal had provoked American military planners into advocacy of a massive first-strike stockpile, or what they called “a war-fighting capability over a finite deterrent [or] (retaliatory) posture.” They believed that the more pronounced the United States’ nuclear advantage over Moscow was, the more likely it would be “to stem Soviet cold war advances.” But such a strategy would also mean an arms race, which seemed likely to heighten the danger of a war. It was a miserable contradiction from which Kennedy was never able entirely to escape.

The possibility, under “command control” rules he had inherited from Eisenhower, that “a subordinate commander faced with a substantial Russian military action could start the thermonuclear holocaust on his own initiative” added to JFK’s worries about the inadvertent outbreak of a nuclear conflict. When Henry Brandon asked Strategic Air commander General Thomas Powers “whether he was not worried by the fearful power he had at his fingertips, he said he was more worried by the civilian control over him and equally frightened by both.” Gilpatric said later, “We became increasingly horrified over how little positive control the President really had over the use of this great arsenal of [thousands of] nuclear weapons.” A February 15 report from a subcommittee of the Atomic Energy Commission reviewing NATO procedures deepened Kennedy’s concern that accidental use of a nuclear weapon “might trigger a world war.” In response, Kennedy tried to guard against a mishap and to assure himself of exclusive control over the nuclear option. But even with this greater authority, the conviction of the military chiefs that in any Soviet-American war we would have to resort to nuclear force made Kennedy feel that he might be pressured into using these weapons against his better judgment.

Perhaps not surprisingly, from the start of his term, Kennedy felt little rapport with the military chiefs. His World War II memories of uninspiring commanders with poor judgment, military miscalculations in the Korean fighting, and the Eisenhower policy of massive retaliation made him distrustful of the U.S. defense establishment. Specifically, neither Kennedy nor McNamara saw Lyman Lemnitzer, the army chief of staff and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, taking “the lead in bringing the military along to a new doctrine such as flexible response,” the freedom to choose from a wider array of military responses in a conflict with the Soviet Union. And of course Burke had already fallen out of favor.

Kennedy’s greatest tensions, however, were with NATO commander General Lauris Norstad and air force chief of staff General Curtis LeMay. Harvard’s dean of faculty McGeorge Bundy, whom Kennedy had brought to Washington as national security adviser, told the president that Norstad “is a nuclear war man,” meaning that he believed any war with the Soviet Union would quickly escalate into a nuclear exchange if the United States were to have any hope of emerging victorious. Bundy urged Kennedy to make clear to Norstad that “
you
are in charge and that your views will govern. . . . If Norstad sets a very different weight on the uses of nuclear war from your own, you need to know it and you need to make him know who is boss.”

LeMay was even more of a problem. In charge of firebombings on Japan during World War II and the Berlin airlift in 1948-49, he enjoyed widespread public support. A gruff, cigar-chewing, outspoken advocate of air power who wanted to bomb enemies back to the Stone Age and complained of America’s phobia about nuclear weapons, he became the model for the air force general Jack D. Ripper in the 1963 movie
Dr. Strangelove
. After McNamara opposed some of his demands for additional air forces, LeMay privately complained, “Would things be much worse if Khrushchev were Secretary of Defense?” Gilpatric described LeMay as “unreconstructable.” Every time the president “had to see LeMay,” Gilpatric said, “he ended up in a fit. I mean he just would be frantic at the end of a session with LeMay because, you know, LeMay couldn’t listen or wouldn’t take in, and he would make what Kennedy considered . . . outrageous proposals that bore no relation to the state of affairs in the 1960s. And the president never saw him unless at some ceremonial affair, or where he felt he had to make a record of having listened to LeMay. . . . And he had to sit there. I saw the president right afterwards. He was just choleric. He was just beside himself, as close as he ever got . . . ” Gilpatric said without concluding the sentence.

Paul Nitze, who had worked with Acheson at the State Department on defense issues and had become McNamara’s assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, believed that Kennedy “was always troubled with . . . how do you obtain military advice; how do you check into it; how do you have an independent view as to its accuracy and relevance?” Kennedy saw the decision to make the “transition from the use of conventional weapons to nuclear weapons” in a conflict as his responsibility, not that of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “I don’t think he ever really satisfied himself that he had found a way to get the best possible military help on such matters,” Nitze said.

“The plan that he inherited,” Rostow said, “was, ‘Mr. President, you just tell us to go to nuclear war, and we’ll deal with the rest.’ And the plan called for devastating, indiscriminately, China, Russia, Eastern Europe—it was an orgiastic, Wagnerian plan, and he was determined, from that moment, to get the plan changed so he would have total control of it.” It was clear to Kennedy that an all-out nuclear conflict would be “a truly monstrous event in the U.S.—let alone in world history.” Despite the understanding that the United States had a large advantage over the Soviets in nuclear weapons and the capacity to deliver them, it was assumed that a nuclear exchange would bring “virtual incineration” to all of Europe and the United States. Kennedy staff members attending the briefing by the Joint Chiefs remembered how tense the president was listening to Lemnitzer, who used thirty-eight flip charts sitting on easels to describe targets, the deployment of forces, and the number of weapons available to strike the enemy. There could be no half measures once the war plan was set in motion, Lemnitzer explained. Even if the United States faced altered conditions than those anticipated, he warned that any “rapid rework of the plan” would entail “grave risks.” Kennedy sat tapping his front teeth with his thumb and running his hand through his hair, indications to those who knew him well of his irritation with what was being said. Lemnitzer’s performance made him “furious.” As he left the room, he said to Dean Rusk, “And we call ourselves the human race.”

The pressure wasn’t just from the Pentagon; America’s European allies also expected Kennedy to answer a Soviet attack with nuclear weapons. But the president preferred a strategy of “flexible response” to the current plan of “massive retaliation.” He told Adenauer that he was “not so happy . . . with having ballistic missiles driven all over Europe. Too many hazards were involved in this enterprise and this aspect therefore required careful examination.” In order to raise “the threshold for the use of atomic weapons,” Kennedy proposed that the United States and NATO increase their conventional armies to levels that could “stop Soviet forces now stationed in Eastern Germany.” Because the West Germans feared that “these plans might lessen the prospects for the use of atomic weapons in defense of Western Germany,” Kennedy “made it clear” that the United States was as much committed to their use as before. Kennedy would have been happier if he could have disavowed a first-strike strategy, Nitze said, but without a continuing commitment to “first strike,” Washington feared Franco-German abandonment of NATO, a negotiated compromise with the Soviet Union, and the neutralization of Europe, which would “have left the United States alone to face the whole communist problem.” Nevertheless, Kennedy urged McNamara publicly to “‘repeat to the point of boredom’ that we would use nuclear weapons only in response to a major attack against the U.S. or the allies; that we were not contemplating preventive war; and the Europeans should not believe that by firing off their own nuclear weapons they would drag the United States into a war, that we would withdraw our commitment to NATO first.”

For all his anxiety about nuclear war, Kennedy, supported by McNamara, kept LeMay in place. It would be good to have a Curtis LeMay commanding U.S. air forces if the country ever went to war, Kennedy explained. And the reality of Soviet weakness, which became increasingly clear to Kennedy and American military planners in the first months of 1961, did not deter the president and the Pentagon from an expansion of nuclear weapons. Instead, Kennedy feared that Khrushchev still might push the United States into an all-out conflict and he saw no alternative to expanded preparedness. “That son of a bitch Khrushchev,” he told Rostow, “he won’t stop until we actually take a step that might lead to nuclear war. . . . There’s no way you can talk that fella into stopping, until you take some really credible step, which opens up that range of possibilities” for improved relations. A meeting with Khrushchev in June only confirmed JFK’s view that he might have to fight a nuclear war and that the United States had no choice but to continue building its arsenal and even consider a first strike as an option against an aggressive Soviet Union. “I never met a man like this,” Kennedy told Hugh Sidey. “[I] talked about how a nuclear exchange would kill seventy million people in ten minutes and he just looked at me as if to say, ‘So what?’ My impression was that he just didn’t give a damn if it came to that.”

At the end of March 1961, Kennedy announced increases in the defense budget that would expand the number of invulnerable Polaris submarines from 6 to 29 and their nuclear-tipped missiles aimed at Soviet targets from 96 to 464. He also ordered a doubling of total Minutemen intercontinental ballistic missiles from 300 to 600 and a 50 percent increase in B-52 strategic bombers on fifteen-minute ground alert.

In Kennedy’s judgment, there was nothing strictly rational about the expansion of forces. Would it deter the Soviet Union from aggression? How much of a buildup was necessary to keep Moscow in check? Could Khrushchev’s aggressive Cold War rhetoric be ignored or discounted? Could the Soviets, despite their inferiority to the United States in missile, bomber, and submarine forces, get some of their nuclear bombs past U.S. defenses? How much of a defense expansion would be enough to satisfy the Congress, the public, and the press that America was safe from a devastating attack? When a reporter at a news conference repeated “charges that we have not adequately maintained the strength or credibility of our nuclear deterrent and that we also have not fully convinced the leaders of the Soviet Union that we are determined to meet force with force,” Kennedy systematically described his administration’s defense increases. Afterward, his frustration with the pressure to meet the Soviet threat with ever stronger words and actions registered on Pierre Salinger. “They don’t get it,” Kennedy said to him about critics of his defense policies. Khrushchev’s bluster combined with U.S. fears left Kennedy unable to stand down from the maddening arms race.

Kennedy biographer Herbert S. Parmet said that JFK “would have been profoundly disturbed to know that so many historians would later stress that his contribution to human existence was the extension of the cold war and the escalation of the arms race.” Such distress would have been understandable. Despite irresistible pressures to add to American military power and overreact to communist “dangers,” Kennedy ensured that a decision for nuclear war would be his alone, which meant that he could avert an unprecedented disaster for all humankind—which he did. His management of one international crisis after another to avert what he described as “the ultimate failure” was the greatest overall achievement of his presidency.

AS A SENATOR
who had seen Africa as a major potential Cold War battleground, Kennedy had come to the White House eager to guard against Soviet advances on the continent. The focus of his concern immediately became the Congo, which, as he pointed out in his January 30 State of the Union Message, was “brutally torn by civil strife, political unrest and public disorder.” Independence from Belgium in 1960 had produced violent divisions, with Katanga, the country’s richest province, declaring its independence from Leopoldville. The assassination of former prime minister Patrice Lumumba in January, in which the Soviets alleged a United Nations peacekeeping force was involved, undermined U.N. influence and moved Moscow to assert its own influence by sending technicians and arms to back Lumumba’s followers. Kennedy had responded to the Soviet threat by stating at a news conference in mid-February, “I find it difficult to believe that any government is really planning to take so dangerous and irresponsible a step.” He felt “it important that there be no misunderstanding of the position of the United States in such an eventuality.” He made clear that he supported the U.N. presence in the Congo and that it was the only alternative to a U.S.-Soviet confrontation there. The U.N., he told reporters, was a bar to “massive unilateral intervention by great powers with all the risks of war that might bring.” As he said repeatedly in private, “The U.N. could not bring the great powers together in the Congo, but at least it could keep them apart.”

At every turn, Kennedy emphasized American backing for the U.N. as the only appropriate agency for ending the civil strife, and he sent messages to Khrushchev urging that the Congo not become an obstacle to improved Soviet-American relations. But a conversation between Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson and Khrushchev in March gave little hope that Moscow would show any give on the Congo. Khrushchev claimed that U.N. secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld had connived to kill Lumumba, and that the U.N. was being “used to oppress peoples and help colonialists retain colonies.” Thompson’s reply that it would be “wise to keep [the] cold war out of Africa” moved Khrushchev to ask “how socialist states could support a policy of assistance to those who betray their own people.” He promised that the Soviet Union “would struggle against this policy with all its means.”