An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (89 page)

AS KENNEDY BEGAN
to pay more attention to Vietnam, he could not neglect larger threats. After announcing plans to resume atmospheric tests at the end of April, he made last-ditch efforts to halt the slide into an escalating arms race. On March 5, he thanked Khrushchev for agreeing to have their foreign ministers open a new round of disarmament talks in Geneva on March 14. He also urged against additional “sterile exchanges of propaganda.” He proposed, “Let us, instead, join in giving our close personal support and direction to the work of our representatives, and let us join in working for their success.”

But Kennedy could not persuade the Soviets that international verification was essential to a comprehensive test ban treaty. The sticking point in Soviet-American discussions was on-site investigation of seismic shocks. The Americans insisted that only direct observation could establish the difference between an earthquake and a nuclear explosion, “a natural and an artificial seismic event.” The Soviets rejected the distinction as an American espionage ploy. Gromyko privately told Rusk that “even one foreigner loose in the Soviet Union could find things out that could be most damaging to the USSR.” Although it was possible to ascribe Soviet suspicion to paranoid fears of foreigners, Macmillan saw more rational calculation at work. Convinced that on-site investigations would reveal nuclear inferiority to the West and eager to use American tests as an excuse for additional tests of their own, the Soviets were resigned to pushing the United States into atmospheric explosions. (Much later, Khrushchev admitted as much.)

The administration suffered a public relations setback after the Defense Department released preliminary results of a seismic research study concluding that international detection stations in the Soviet Union might not be essential to monitor underground nuclear explosions. When Arthur Dean, U.S. ambassador to the disarmament talks, publicly acknowledged this as a possibility, it gave the Soviets a propaganda bonanza. In fact, although the seismic study weakened the case for on-site inspection stations, the Pentagon maintained that they were still essential to prevent Soviet cheating. But that now seemed like a secondary detail, and because Moscow continued to reject inspections, prospects for a comprehensive test ban largely disappeared. At a July 27 White House meeting on arms control, Kennedy vented his irritation at the premature release of the report. “We had messed up the handling of the new data,” he said. “Information about it was all over town before we had decided what effect it would have on our policy.”

Kennedy’s frustration with professional diplomats and military officers who, in addition to Dean, had undermined America’s position in the test ban talks was part of a larger concern. On July 30, three days after complaining about the Pentagon’s misstep, he expressed his low opinion of America’s professional diplomats and military chiefs. In a taped conversation with Rusk, Bundy, and Ball, Kennedy described U.S. career envoys as weak or spineless: “I just see an awful lot of fellows who . . . don’t seem to have
cojones
.” By contrast, “the Defense Department looks as if that’s all they’ve got. They haven’t any brains. . . . You get all this sort of virility . . . at the Pentagon and you get a lot of Arleigh Burkes: admirable nice figure without any brains.”

In fact, the Pentagon’s premature release of a report undermining a White House policy was partly the consequence of bureaucratic chaos. The
New York Times,
in particular, had frequently complained about the hit-or-miss procedures of a government poorly coordinated by the White House. Kennedy was not unsympathetic to the
Times’
argument. He had already expended more energy than he cared to on trying to bring greater order to his foreign policy agencies—defense, state, and the CIA. Predictably, domestic red tape bothered him less than poorly functioning foreign policy machinery; he was fond of saying, “Domestic policy can only defeat us; foreign policy can kill us.” But there seemed only so much that could be done. Certainly, Kennedy was temperamentally uncomfortable with managing everything from the White House. Why had he surrounded himself with so many talented people if he were going to oversee every agency? And perhaps some disorder was even a good thing. “Creative governments will always be ‘out of channels,’” Schlesinger told
Times
publisher Orvil Dryfoos. “[They] will always present aspects of ‘confusion’ and ‘meddling’; [they] will always discomfit officials whose routine is being disturbed or whose security is being threatened. But all this is inseparable from the process by which new ideas and new institutions enable government to meet new challenges. Orderly governments are very rarely creative; and creative governments are almost never orderly.” The balance between constructive chaos and bureaucratic mess seemed hard to maintain, however.

In September, the Soviets rejected U.S. proposals for both comprehensive and limited test bans, proposing instead a nonbinding ban on atmospheric explosions and a moratorium on underground detonations, both to begin on January 1, 1963. Kennedy accepted the cutoff date, but insisted at an August 29 press conference that it should rest on “workable international agreements; gentlemen’s agreements and moratoria do not provide the types of guarantees that are necessary. . . . This is the lesson of the Soviet government’s tragic decision to renew testing just a year ago.” On September 7, when the Geneva talks recessed to make way for the U.N. General Assembly session in New York, a reliable test ban agreement of any kind remained an uncertain hope.

INTO 1962 KENNEDY STRUGGLED
to find some formula for accommodation with Moscow over Germany and Berlin. In November 1961, the president suggested the creation of an International Access Authority made up of NATO, Warsaw Pact, and neutral representatives to eliminate the possibility of confrontations over Allied movements in and out of Berlin. Although the East Germans promptly rejected this plan as colonialist, Kennedy expanded the idea to include flights, over which East Germany had no control. Seeing the suggestion as a way to block productive talks, the Soviets began harassing civil aircraft flying in the Berlin air corridors.

Despite mutual recognition of the importance of Berlin to improved Soviet-American relations, both sides doggedly stuck to their positions: The United States would not give up access to Berlin or concede to a permanent division of Germany, both changes Moscow believed essential to its future national security. Although Kennedy persuaded Khrushchev to end the buzzing of air traffic, they could not break the impasse. By June, Kennedy saw no point in continuing the exchange of private messages on Germany. “Matters relating to Berlin are currently being discussed in careful detail by Secretary Rusk and Ambassador Dobrynin,” he wrote Khrushchev, “and I think it may be best to leave the discussion in their capable hands at this time.” In July, when Khrushchev answered with a stale proposal for the replacement of western occupation forces with U.N. troops, Kennedy dismissed the suggestion as an extension of Moscow’s “consistent failure . . . to take any real account of what we have made clear are the vital interests of the United States and its Allies.”

An incident at the Berlin Wall, in which East German security guards killed a defector, together with Khrushchev’s fears of a U.S. first strike against the Soviet Union, heightened tensions between Moscow and Washington in the summer. In March, Adenauer had told Bobby that Khrushchev told him that he genuinely believed that “the United States wants to destroy the Soviet Union.” In an interview with journalist Stewart Alsop, Kennedy said that, “in some circumstances we must be prepared to use the nuclear weapon at the start, come what may—a clear attack on Western Europe, for example.” Khrushchev told Salinger that this “new doctrine” was “a very bad mistake for which [the President] will have to pay!” Although Kennedy’s full statement left little doubt that his concern was with avoiding nuclear war, Khrushchev ordered a special military alert in response to the article.

In June, Bolshakov reported a conversation with Bobby Kennedy that renewed Khrushchev’s worries about a U.S. nuclear attack. Do war hawks enjoy special influence in the United States? Bolshakov had asked Bobby. “In the government, no,” he had replied, “[b]ut among the generals in the Pentagon . . . there are such people. Recently,” Bobby had added, “the [Joint] Chiefs [of Staff] offered the President a report in which they confirmed that the United States is currently ahead of the Soviet Union in military power and that
in extremis
it would be possible to probe the forces of the Soviet Union.”

Although Bobby Kennedy assured Bolshakov that the president “had decisively rejected any attempt by zealous advocates of a clash between the United States and the Soviet Union . . . to [get him to] accept their point of view,” the conversation upset Khrushchev. If Bobby’s “candor” was aimed at encouraging Khrushchev to reach agreements on Berlin and test bans, it backfired. Khrushchev sent back a message through Bolshakov restating his determination to sign a peace treaty with East Germany that would liquidate “war remnants . . . and on this basis the situation in West Berlin—a free demilitarized city—would be normalized.” To underscore Soviet determination not to be intimidated by U.S. military might, Khrushchev told Interior Secretary Stewart Udall during a September visit to Russia that if “any lunatics in your country want war, Western Europe will hold them back. War in this day and age means no Paris and no France, all in the space of an hour. It’s been a long time since you could spank us like a little boy—now we can swat your ass.”

Nevertheless, because Khrushchev was eager to help the president in the congressional elections, he sent a message asking if Kennedy preferred that he wait on a Berlin treaty until after November 6. After Sorensen told Dobrynin that the president “could not possibly lay himself open to Republican charges of appeasement in his response to any buildup in Berlin pressures between now and November 6,” Khrushchev promised not to “hurt [his] chances in the November elections.” Khrushchev said that he intended to give Kennedy a choice after the elections: “go to war, or sign a peace treaty. We will not allow your troops to be in Berlin. We will permit access to West Berlin for economic or commercial purposes, but not for military purposes. Everybody is saying nowadays that there will be a war. I don’t agree. Sensible people won’t start a war. What is Berlin to the United States? . . . Do you need Berlin? Like hell you need it. Nor do we need it.”

It was not clear to Kennedy why Khrushchev had reverted to such belligerence. He concluded that Khrushchev was an unstable personality, an irresponsible character carried away by delusions. He was wildly erratic and unpredictable, friendly one day and unfriendly the next. He was “like the gangsters both of us had dealt with,” Bobby said. “Khrushchev’s kind of action—what he did and how he acted—was how an immoral gangster would act and not . . . a statesman, not as a person with a sense of responsibility.” Khrushchev, Kennedy told Cyrus Sulzberger of the
New York Times,
reminded him of Joe McCarthy and Jimmy Hoffa—rough, tough characters who could disarm people with their politeness. Llewellyn Thompson shared Kennedy’s view. There was “a kind of hypocrisy” to the man, Thompson told Kennedy during a conversation about Khrushchev in August. “It’s like dealing with a bunch of bootleggers or gangsters.” Yet Kennedy also knew that Khrushchev was a shrewd, calculating politician who never acted without some self-serving purpose. Events in October 1962 would reveal what Khrushchev was trying to achieve.

CHAPTER 16

To the Brink—And Back

When at some future date the high court of history sits in judgment on each of us, it will ask: “Were we truly men of courage—with the courage to stand up to one’s enemies—and the courage to stand up, when necessary, to one’s associates?”

— John F. Kennedy, address to the Massachusetts Legislature, January 9, 1961

IN THE SPRING AND SUMMER OF
1962, Khrushchev’s renewed threats against Germany and Berlin were tied to his belief that Washington was planning an invasion to topple Castro. He was wrong. In March, when Cuban exile leader José Miró Cardona asked Bundy for help with an invasion, he refused. “Decisive action [cannot] be accomplished without the open involvement of U.S. armed forces,” Bundy said. “This would mean open war against Cuba which in the U.S. judgment [is] not advisable in the present international situation.” The following month Kennedy told Cardona the same thing. But even if the United States had no immediate invasion plan, Khrushchev felt that Castro’s support of subversion would eventually persuade Kennedy to act against him. In addition, concern that Castro was moving closer to communist China gave Khrushchev another reason to strengthen Soviet-Cuban relations.

To do this, he decided to turn Cuba into a missile base from which he could more directly threaten the United States. In May and June, Khrushchev and Soviet military and political chiefs agreed to deploy on the island twenty-four medium-range R-12 missiles, which could travel 1,050 miles, and sixteen intermediate R-14 missiles, with a range of 2,100 miles. The forty missiles would double the number in the Soviet arsenal that could reach the continental United States. The plan also called for approximately forty-four thousand support troops and thirteen hundred civilian construction workers, as well as a Soviet naval base housing surface ships and “nuclear-missile equipped submarines.”

Khrushchev saw multiple benefits from the deployment of Soviet missiles abroad. It would deter a U.S. attack on Cuba, keep the island in Moscow’s orbit, and give him greater leverage in bargaining with Washington over Berlin. Yet such a substantial change in the balance of power seemed likely to provoke a crisis and possibly a war with the United States. Khrushchev convinced himself, however, that the “intelligent” Kennedy “would not set off a thermonuclear war if there were our warheads there, just as they put their warheads on missiles in Turkey.” These seventeen intermediate-range Jupiter missiles under U.S. command, which became operational in 1962, had indeed frightened Moscow, but Khrushchev did not anticipate using his missiles. “Every idiot can start a war,” Khrushchev told Kremlin associates, “but it is impossible to win this war. . . . Therefore the missiles have one purpose—to scare them, to restrain them . . . to give them back some of their own medicine.” The deployment would equalize “what the West likes to call ‘the balance of power.’ The Americans had surrounded our country with military bases and threatened us with nuclear weapons, and now they would learn just what it feels like to have enemy missiles pointing at[them].”