An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (70 page)

Kennedy returned to Washington on the morning of June 6. He met with congressional leaders that afternoon and spoke to the American people from the Oval Office at 7:00
P.M.
He gave the sixteen Senate and House leaders a candid assessment of the talks, reading some excerpts from minutes of the meetings rather than simply giving them his gloss on what had occurred. He had no intention, he told the leaders, of saying anything “that would seem to put Khrushchev in a corner where he must fight back.” But he also wanted them to understand that the United States was competing with an adversary intent on world dominance. Kennedy believed the test ban talks were now pointless and hoped to end them while making Soviet responsibility for the failure clear. On Berlin, Kennedy said that the U.S. would not cede its rights of access. “The Soviets feel that our edge is gone on the nuclear side,” he added, meaning not that Moscow had greater nuclear might than the United States but that it doubted U.S. resolve to fight a nuclear war.

Kennedy’s evening TV address struck a balance between signaling emerging dangers and avoiding rhetoric that could provoke a crisis. To mute the difficulties with Russia, he partly spoke about his successful meetings with de Gaulle and Macmillan. But, as with the congressional leaders, he left no doubt that the United States faced a tough challenge from the Soviet Union. “It was a very sober two days” in Vienna, he said. To be sure, although the gap between the two countries had not been materially reduced, “the channels of communication were opened more fully.” Yet no one should ignore the fact “that the Soviets and ourselves give wholly different meanings to the same words—war, peace, democracy, and popular will. We have wholly different views of right and wrong.” Yet both sides realized that they had the capacity to inflict enormous damage on each other and the world. Consequently, they owed “it to all mankind to make every possible effort” to avoid an armed clash.

Kennedy was not optimistic that Moscow would act sensibly. The Soviets had no desire to provoke a direct conflict with the United States and its allies, but it was clear that the contest between East and West would now spread to developing countries where Moscow gained a foothold. America, Kennedy said, needed to resist such communist advances with economic and military assistance programs to emerging nations struggling to remain free. And though he hid his private anxieties about a possible war over Berlin, his closing words left no doubt about the difficulties ahead: “We must be patient. We must be determined. We must be courageous. We must accept both risks and burdens.”

Renewed public and private expressions of doubt about Kennedy’s performance in Vienna made his sensible statesmanship all the more difficult. After the meeting,
Time
reported “a widespread feeling that the Administration has not yet provided ample leadership in guiding the U.S. along the dangerous paths of the cold war.” Privately, Macmillan shared this concern: “I ‘feel in my bones’ that President Kennedy is going to fail to produce any real leadership. The American press and public are beginning to feel the same.” Mac Bundy told Kennedy that he and columnists Joe Alsop and Walter Lippmann believed that “this problem of Berlin is one which you will have to master and manage, under your own personal leadership and authority.” He would need to be “in immediate, personal, and continuous command of this enormous question.” And he would have to do better than he had been doing so far.

Kennedy now worried that a defeat over Berlin or in Vietnam, where the Saigon government remained in jeopardy, could be a decisive blow to his presidency. He told Galbraith, “There are limits to the number of defeats I can defend in one twelve-month period. I’ve had the Bay of Pigs, and pulling out of Laos [or refusing to fight there], and I can’t accept a third.”

Kennedy had enough detachment about himself and the magnitude of the problems he confronted not to let criticism or negative perceptions control his public actions toward the USSR. The personal concerns underlying his father’s unwise isolationism remained an object lesson in how not to make foreign policy. He was determined to shape an image of himself as clear and firm about international affairs, but not at the risk of being reckless or allowing considerations other than avoiding a nuclear war to shape what he said and did. Where Bobby would explode in anger toward someone like Chester Bowles for seeming to criticize his brother, JFK was much more restrained. Being president, of course, was vastly different from being attorney general. The reflective temperament that set Kennedy apart from his father, Bobby, Acheson, and most American military chiefs served him well in a job one shudders to imagine in any of their hands in 1961.

THE BERLIN CRISIS
as it evolved during the summer of 1961 was arguably the most dangerous moment for a nuclear conflict since the onset of the Cold War. It tested Kennedy’s ability to strike an effective balance between intimidating the Soviets and giving them a way out of their dilemma. How could Moscow halt the migration from East to West, which threatened the collapse of East Germany, without altering existing U.S. treaty rights of unfettered access to Berlin and pushing Washington toward war? Khrushchev had some hope that a Soviet-East German peace treaty might not cause the United States to fight. The Western press, which repeatedly described him as not believing that JFK would pull the nuclear trigger, encouraged the chairman to accept these reports as evidence that Kennedy would not act. But he could not be sure.

On June 10, six days after he left Vienna, Khrushchev publicly released the aide-mémoire he had given Kennedy insisting on a German peace treaty that he hoped could be used to alter Western rights of unfettered access to Berlin through East Germany. Two days later, the Soviet delegate at the Geneva test ban talks “dropped all pretense of serious interest in concluding an agreement.” Khrushchev had “no further interest in keeping the test talks alive as a means of promoting an accommodation with Washington,” the CIA concluded. On June 15, Khrushchev spoke to his people on television about the urgency of concluding a peace treaty and changing the status of Berlin. East Germany’s head of government, Walter Ulbricht, added to the sense of crisis by threatening to shut off Western access to Berlin, including the city’s Tempelhof Airport.

Kennedy’s initial public response was muted. In the three weeks after Moscow released the aide-mémoire, he said nothing directly about Berlin. Instead of making him look responsible, Kennedy’s silence made him seem like an indecisive leader or perhaps a politician seeking a middle ground. International relations expert Hans J. Morgenthau complained that Kennedy’s response to Khrushchev’s threat to Berlin was reminiscent of the failed “half-measures” he had used during the Cuban invasion.

But behind the scenes, Berlin was Kennedy’s greatest daily concern. “He’s imprisoned by Berlin, that’s all he thinks about,” cabinet members complained. It was the highest priority for almost everybody around the president. National security advisers, academic experts, journalists close to the administration, and even Acheson were asked for their input on how to discourage Soviet implementation of the aide-mémoire and what to do if Khrushchev went ahead.

Much of the argument now revolved around “the need for re-establishing the credibility of the nuclear deterrent.” Acheson pressed for acceptance of a formal proposition that the U.S. might have to resort to nuclear war. A failure to defend Western rights in Berlin, he argued, would destroy international confidence in the United States. “The whole position of the United States is in the balance,” Acheson said. The Soviets might make nuclear war unavoidable, but in the meantime Kennedy needed “to increase the nuclear deterrent to the greatest extent we can devise. This . . . offers the best hope of avoiding war short of submitting to Moscow’s demands.”

By the end of June, Kennedy was under irresistible pressure to speak publicly again on Berlin. Stories in
Time
and
Newsweek
that made him seem well behind the public and the Pentagon in determination to face down the Soviets in Germany incensed him. “Look at this shit. This shit has got to stop,” he told Salinger. A Nixon dig that “never in American history has a man talked so big and acted so little” was an additional incentive to speak out.

When Kennedy finally did say something at a press conference on June 28, his remarks were measured, calculated to restrain Moscow without deepening the crisis. The Soviet insistence on signing a peace treaty was “to make permanent the partition of Germany” and close off allied access to West Berlin. “No one can fail to appreciate the gravity of this threat,” Kennedy said. “It involves the peace and security of the Western world.” Kennedy also complained of Moscow’s refusal to negotiate a test ban and warned that the United States would respond to renewed Soviet nuclear testing with tests of its own. He then turned Khrushchev’s claim that the USSR would outproduce the United States by 1970 into a call for peaceful competition. He predicted that the Soviet Union, whose GNP was 39 percent of America’s, would not outproduce the United States in the twentieth century. But he encouraged Moscow to try; it “could only result in a better living standard for both of our people.”

When reporters tried to draw Kennedy into more concrete statements about the gravity of the “crisis” or U.S. intentions, he refused. He denied that any proposal for a partial mobilization to meet the Berlin threat had come before him, “though of course we will be considering a whole variety of measures”; defended the value of the Vienna meeting, which had added to his store of information about the Soviets, though no plans for another meeting were in the works; denied any evidence of renewed Soviet nuclear testing; and declared that decisions on measures to counter the Soviet threat to Berlin were under consideration and that public discussion of a matter of such “extreme seriousness” should wait until the administration’s deliberations were complete. Kennedy’s remarks struck an effective balance between firmness and restraint, and contrasted Soviet belligerence with American interest in peaceful economic competition.

Behind the scenes, however, a vigorous argument had begun to rage over what all agreed was now a full-blown crisis. On one side stood advocates led by Acheson, the Joint Chiefs, Allen Dulles, and some State and Defense Department officials urging an overt military buildup to intimidate Moscow, and on the other, Rusk, Stevenson, Bowles, Harriman, Schlesinger, and Sorensen arguing for a more flexible response that included possible negotiations coupled with military preparations.

Kennedy refused to choose openly between the two alternatives, nor would he move precipitously. Above all, he was determined to control the decision making. On June 28, he told the Joint Chiefs that they were his principal advisers on all military matters, but that he also regarded them as “more than military men and expected their help in fitting military requirements into the over-all context of any situation, recognizing that the most difficult problem in Government is to combine all assets in a unified, effective pattern.” The message was clear enough: The military needed to understand that it was part of a larger process in which the president would set military considerations alongside other factors before deciding what best served the national interest.

In a meeting with Acheson and national security officials the next day, Kennedy, who said little, nevertheless made clear that he would not foreclose additional discussions with Khrushchev about Berlin. Although Acheson believed that “no negotiation can accomplish more than to cover with face-saving devices submission to Soviet demands,” Kennedy asked him what would be “the right answer” if the chairman proposed a summit that summer. Acheson suggested that talks could begin at “a lower level. . . . There were plenty of ‘elderly unemployed’ people like himself who could be sent to interminable meetings” and “could converse indefinitely without negotiating at all.” Kennedy’s preference for talks had registered three days before when he met with three Soviet journalists. Most of the discussion was about Berlin: He explained that the American people would impeach him if he gave up U.S. rights in Berlin, urged against a showdown over the city, and predicted that a Soviet-American war would “leave everything to the rest of the world—including the Chinese,” a prediction Kennedy understood would not be lost on the Russians, who were growing increasingly apprehensive about their competition with Peking.

During the first week of July,
Newsweek
boosted Soviet-American tensions over Berlin by reporting a leak about Pentagon planning that included a declaration of limited national emergency, the removal of U.S. military dependents from West Germany and France, the reinforcement and increase of American divisions in Germany, and “some demonstration of U.S. intent to employ nuclear weapons,” either by a resumption of testing or by moving atomic weapons in the NATO stockpile “to advanced ‘ready’ positions.” Kennedy may have authorized the leak to send Khrushchev an unmistakable message. In response, Khrushchev gave private and public indications that Moscow was both ready for and horrified at the prospect of a nuclear fight. “Why should two hundred million people die for two million Berliners?” he asked the British ambassador. Upping the ante on his side, on July 8, Khrushchev publicly canceled plans to reduce Soviet forces by more than a million men, announcing instead a one-third increase in the defense budget.

Kennedy now pressed advisers for political alternatives to the potential military confrontation. He complained to Schlesinger that Acheson was “far too narrowly” focused on military solutions and asked him to bring Berlin planning “back into balance.” Kennedy, who was leaving that afternoon for a weekend in Hyannis Port, where he was to meet with Rusk, McNamara, and General Maxwell Taylor, instructed Schlesinger to write a paper on the unexplored Berlin political issues. Working furiously for two hours with State Department counselor Abram Chayes and Harvard professor Henry Kissinger, Schlesinger delivered a memo as Kennedy was about to leave in a helicopter from the White House south lawn. The memo concluded that Kennedy should ask Rusk “to explore negotiating alternatives, and ask Acheson to supply the missing political dimension in his argument.”