An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (96 page)

In refusing to declare the crisis at an end, Kennedy wished to avoid an embarrassing possible reversal, which would be a political disaster and an irresistible prod to military action. He planned to officially end the quarantine after the Soviets dismantled the launching sites and shipped the missiles back to Russia. He also wanted the IL-28 bombers removed. Three weeks of negotiation and continued flights over Cuba produced a mutually agreeable formula. At a news conference on November 20, Kennedy announced that Khrushchev would remove all the IL-28 aircraft from Cuba within thirty days and would allow U.S. observation of the procedure. He also reported that “all known offensive missile sites in Cuba have been dismantled,” that the Soviets had loaded the missiles on departing ships, and that inspection at sea had confirmed their departure. A naval quarantine was no longer necessary. He was thankful that the crisis had concluded peacefully and hoped that the outcome “might well open the door to the solution of other outstanding problems.”

Though the missiles were gone, because Castro rejected U.N. inspection of Cuba Kennedy would not abandon schemes to oust him from power. He declared at his news conference that to protect the hemisphere from offensive weapons, the United States would “pursue its own means of checking on military activities in Cuba.” The continuing presence of Soviet ground combat units made ongoing vigilance essential. Moreover, he promised that if Cuba was “not used for the export of aggressive Communist purposes, there will be peace in the Caribbean.” But he described efforts to halt subversion and encourage the establishment of freedom in Cuba as “very different from any intent to launch a military invasion of the island.” As he told McNamara in a memo of November 5, he still believed an invasion of Cuba carried huge military risks: “Considering the size of the problem, the equipment that is involved on the other side, the Nationalists[’] fervor which may be engendered, it seems to me we could end up bogged down. I think we should keep constantly in mind the British in the Boer War, the Russians in the last war with the Finnish and our own experience with the North Koreans.” At the same time, Kennedy told Schlesinger, “An invasion would have been a mistake—a wrong use of our power. But the military are mad. They wanted to do this.” Kennedy had little attraction to a direct American assault on Cuba, especially after McNamara gave him estimated casualties of between forty and fifty thousand. If they were to bring down Castro’s regime, it would have to be by covert subversion, which the administration continued to support in the coming months.

Kennedy received justifiable plaudits for resolving the crisis. Yet he had no illusion that his response was the principal reason for success. Rather, America’s local military superiority, Moscow’s limited national security stake in keeping missiles in Cuba, and the Soviets’ difficulty justifying to world opinion a possible nuclear conflict over Cuba were of greater importance in persuading Khrushchev to back down. Still, Kennedy’s resistance to pressure from military chiefs for air attacks and an invasion, and his understanding that patient diplomacy and measured pressure could persuade the Soviets to remove the missiles were essential contributions to the peaceful outcome of the crisis.

Of course, Kennedy’s problem with Cuba was not strictly of his making, but partly the consequence of an “unimaginative and sterile” policy in 1959-1960. “Probably no United States policy could have prevented Castro’s movement into the Soviet orbit,” Schlesinger wrote Kennedy in November 1962, but “a more imaginative U.S. policy could have made it much harder for Castro to join the Soviet bloc.” Indeed, a greater measure of sympathy for a government striving to right the many wrongs visited on Cuba by a U.S.-backed Batista regime was a regrettable Eisenhower omission. And indeed, some historians believe that Kennedy’s role in provoking the confrontation makes him less than heroic in resolving it. As Barton J. Bernstein has said, “a different president than Kennedy might well have chosen not to launch the Bay of Pigs venture, not to pursue clandestine activities against Cuba and Castro, not to build up the American nuclear arsenal well beyond the size of the Soviets’, and not to place the Jupiters in Turkey.” Bernstein believes that these actions, but especially plotting against Castro and indications of a possible invasion, provoked Khrushchev into his Cuban missile adventure.

Bernstein’s argument has merit. Without Kennedy’s Cuban provocations, Khrushchev would have been hard-pressed to justify placing missiles on the island. The administration’s anti-Castro actions gave Moscow an inviting opportunity to use Cuba to reduce America’s nuclear advantage over the USSR and/or force a favorable resolution of the Berlin problem. Yet, as Ernest May and Philip Zelikow have pointed out, Khrushchev probably acted “more from instinct than from calculation. Whether Berlin or the strategic balance or concern about Cuba was uppermost in his mind at the time he ordered the missiles sent to Cuba, he himself could probably not have said.” Khrushchev, in the view of two close aides, was a “reckless” gambler or “hothead,” who made a big bet in hopes of getting a huge payoff. Having stumbled badly in advancing his country’s economic well-being and believing that Kennedy would wilt in a confrontation rather than go to war, Khrushchev sent the missiles to Cuba hoping to win a big foreign policy victory that could secure his political fortunes. He was wrong, and the consequences of his error were nearly fatal. But his ultimate good sense joined with Kennedy’s wise judgment to avert a disaster that the president believed would have been described as the “final human failure.”

Forty years after the crisis, historians almost uniformly agree that this was the most dangerous moment in the forty-five-year Cold War. Moreover, despite his part in provoking the crisis, they generally have high praise for Kennedy’s performance. His restraint in resisting a military solution that would almost certainly have triggered a nuclear exchange makes him a model of wise statesmanship in a dire situation. One need only compare his performance with that of Europe’s heads of government before World War I—a disaster that cost millions of lives and wasted unprecedented sums of wealth—to understand how important effective leadership can be in times of international strife. October 1962 was not only Kennedy’s finest hour in the White House; it was also an imperishable example of how one man prevented a catastrophe that may yet afflict the world.

CHAPTER 17

New Departures: Domestic Affairs

The winds of change appear to be blowing more strongly than ever, in the world of communism as well as our own. For 175 years we have sailed with those winds at our back. . . . Today we still welcome those winds of change—and we have every reason to believe that our tide is running strong.

— John F. Kennedy, State of the Union Message, January 14, 1963

KENNEDY’S HIGHEST PRIORITIES
during the missile crisis had been to rid Cuba of Soviet missiles without a nuclear war and to ensure against a future confrontation by convincing Khrushchev that there could be no payoff from attempted nuclear blackmail. At the same time, however, he was mindful of the political consequences to his administration. With midterm congressional elections only a week away when Khrushchev pledged to remove the missiles, Kennedy appreciated that a failure to deal effectively with the crisis would have been a terrible blow to the future of his presidency.

Kennedy’s successful diplomacy gave the Democrats an advantage in the November elections that he was happy to exploit. The White House welcomed descriptions by Acheson, Bundy, Harriman, Norman Cousins of
The Saturday Review,
and General Norstad of a president who had been “extraordinarily skillful,” “firm,” ”reasonable,” and “calm.” It also took satisfaction from
Newsweek
’s assertion that Kennedy “had given Americans a sense of deep confidence in their President and the team he had working with him.”

The public had only a limited understanding of how resolute Kennedy had been. Health problems continued to dog him during the crisis. He took his usual doses of antispasmodics to control his colitis; antibiotics for a flareup of his urinary tract problem and a bout of sinusitis; and increased amounts of hydrocortisone and testosterone as well as salt tablets to control his Addison’s disease and increase his energy. Judging from the tape recordings of conversations made during the crisis, the medications were no impediment to long days and lucid thought; to the contrary, Kennedy would have been significantly less effective without them and might not even have been able to function. But the medicines were only one element in helping him focus on the crisis; his strength of will was indispensable. With so much at stake in the Soviet-American confrontation, he was not about to let personal pain or physical problems deter him from the most important business of his presidency. He undoubtedly had his own experience in mind when he wrote in an article on physical fitness for
Look
magazine in 1963, “Whether it is the astronaut exploring the boundaries of space, or the overworked civil servant laboring into the night to keep a Government program going, the effectiveness and creativity of the individual must rest, in large measure, on his physical fitness and vitality.”

This is not to suggest that Kennedy was superhuman or to exaggerate his invulnerability to physical and emotional ills. On November 2, he took 10 additional milligrams of hydrocortisone and 10 grains of salt to boost him before giving a brief report to the American people on the dismantling of the Soviet missile bases in Cuba. In December, Jackie asked the president’s gastroenterologist, Dr. Russell Boles, to eliminate antihistamines for food allergies. She described them as having a “depressing action” on the president and asked Boles to prescribe something that would ensure “mood elevation without irritation to the gastrointestinal tract.” Boles prescribed 1 milligram twice a day of Stelazine, an antipsychotic that was also used as an anti-anxiety medication. When Kennedy showed marked improvement in two days, they removed the Stelazine from his daily medications.

Kennedy burnished his image as the principal architect of Soviet defeat by allowing journalists to draw comparisons with Adlai Stevenson. In December, when Stewart Alsop and Charles Bartlett published a
Saturday Evening Post
article on the crisis, which Kennedy had seen in draft form, they contrasted Kennedy’s firmness with Stevenson’s soft approach; Stevenson wanted “a Munich,” they said. It is true that Stevenson exceeded Kennedy’s readiness to make concessions, including especially a willingness to close the U.S. military base at Guantanamo. But in fact he had been in sync with the president on avoiding an air strike or a premature invasion and was an early supporter of the quarantine idea. When the press interpreted the Alsop-Bartlett article as an indirect request from the president for Stevenson’s resignation, Kennedy emphatically denied it, but he left the charges of softness unanswered by refusing to comment on Ex Comm discussions. To boost Stevenson, who was demoralized by the flap, Kennedy released a letter to him praising his contribution at the U.N. Nevertheless, the public depiction of Stevenson as an appeaser strengthened the view of Kennedy as a tough-minded leader comparable to America’s best past and present defenders of the national interest. It increased his freedom to negotiate an arms control agreement and weakened the capacity of conservative critics to press him into more forceful military action in Vietnam. Petty revenge for old slights cannot be ruled out as another motive.

Kennedy understood that a strong showing in the November elections could make Congress more receptive to his major domestic proposals. Although his administration publicly made much of its legislative record, privately it was unhappy. The president had won between 81 and 85 percent of the roll call votes on domestic proposals in 1961 and 1962. And on roll calls involving foreign policy, he had received 96.5 percent backing. But his overall record was much less noteworthy. Many of the bills Congress passed were relatively minor reforms, like temporarily reducing duty exemptions on Americans returning from abroad, authorizing an additional assistant secretary of labor, extending the Sugar Act of 1948, or reorganizing the Federal Home Loan Bank Board. Most of his legislative requests—56 percent in 1962, to be exact—had never emerged from House and Senate committees, where conservative chairmen bottled them up.

Johnson and Hubert Humphrey were so concerned about Kennedy’s ineffective congressional leadership that in August 1962 they suggested ways to improve it. They wanted him to make his presence and influence more visible on the Hill. “[Both men] were talking quite honestly about the problem of getting effective results,” Bundy told the president. “I did not detect any personal soreness in either of them, and both spoke in the framework of great commitment to your program and to you.” So did Truman, who wrote Kennedy at the same time: “The President is just as great as the Congress—and really greater—when he exercises his Constitutional Prerogatives. You are going through the same situations and troubles that Franklin Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln and I had to meet. Don’t like to put myself in that high class—but I had a hell of a time. You meet ’em, cuss ’em & give ’em hell and you’ll win in 1964.”

Kennedy saw no point in risking prestige or expending political capital by openly campaigning for particular candidates. Instead, he worked behind the scenes to advance the political fortunes of vulnerable Democrats. Moreover, Kennedy took Lou Harris’s advice that his best means of influencing the electorate was to speak “over and over again” about the measures needed to get the country moving forward. Harris was convinced that the people were eager to be led and that once “aroused and mobilized, Congress, business, and all groups will respond as a man to the reverberating chorus.”