Before the Storm (28 page)

It wasn't just international strategy; it was domestic politics. The growing popularity of Goldwaterite conservatism and popular resentment over the failure at the Bay of Pigs were very much in the President's thoughts. “They'd kick me in the nuts,” Kennedy told an adviser who warned against a game of tit-for-tat on nuclear testing. “I couldn't get away with it.” On September 5 he announced that the United States, too, would resume tests.

The Cold War social contract was stretched near the breaking point. Life manfully tried to make it all sound like an episode out of the era of Teddy Roosevelt: “the American people are willing to face nuclear war for Berlin,” an editorial boasted, citing “our spontaneous boom in shelter building as proof.” The issue that followed, introduced by a letter from President Kennedy, demonstrated how, “prepared, you and your family could have 97 chances out of 100 to survive.” (Time Inc. even helped the Administration draft a civil defense pamphlet to send to every family in the country, part of which would explain that community fallout shelters could double as “after school hang-outs” where “gregarious teenagers” could “relax with sodas and play the jukebox.”) General Eisenhower was so disgusted by the charade that he came out
and said that America could “survive” a nuclear attack only as a garrison state. “I would not want to face that kind of world,” he proclaimed.

But in fact the crisis was over. Kennedy's July 25 speech had telegraphed a sort of coded message to the Soviets proposing a middle course between surrender and war: that America would not fight over what Khrushchev did on his side of Berlin. While Kennedy publicly professed outrage at the concrete monstrosity dividing Berlin, privately, he was relieved: “A wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”

The near miss was a hinge in the history of the Cold War. “Now we have a problem in making our power credible,” Kennedy told James “Scotty” Reston of the
New York Times,
“and Vietnam is the place.” Kennedy meant that it was the safest place: one could signal resolve to draw the line against Communist aggression in a land so godforsaken that neither the Soviets nor China would ever risk escalation over it—escalation that could only lead, inexorably, to nuclear war. It was one of those secrets that only the President and a few of his closest advisers were allowed to know: amidst all the bluster, the only Cold War option conscience truly allowed was local, limited war. The ultramilitant publisher of the
Dallas Morning News,
E. M. Dealey, as guest at the White House, once insulted President Kennedy to his face: “We need a man on horseback to lead this nation, and many people in Texas and the Southwest think that you are riding Caroline's bicycle.” The President replied sternly: “I have the responsibility for the lives of 180 million Americans, which you have not.” Only those who didn't have all the facts could counsel unchecked belligerence.

On October 26, Kennedy sent President Ngo Dinh Diem, whose brutal South Vietnamese government existed at the sufferance of the U.S., a note promising continued American assistance. In November, Walt Rostow and General Maxwell Taylor recommended adding 8,000 “advisers” to the 800 already stationed in Vietnam. Secretary of State Dean Rusk agreed, with one eye on the Goldwater boom: losing Vietnam “would stimulate bitter domestic controversies in the United States and would be seized upon by extreme elements to divide the country and harass the administration.” At mid-month Kennedy sat down with his Joint Chiefs of Staff to discuss the idea. They thought it splendid. Kennedy was ambivalent, worried about justifying sending thousands of troops to Southeast Asia given that he had sent none to Cuba, 90 miles from our shores. The abrasive chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Lyman Lemnitzer, spat out that the Chiefs thought the United States should pour troops into Cuba, too.

This intemperate, nearly insubordinate, right-wing drift of certain top military brass and an accompanying militant cast infecting much of the body
politic were worries very much on Kennedy's mind then. He was giving a speech on the subject in Seattle in two days, in fact.

 

It was as if the fear he was addressing had flowed uninterrupted from Berlin.

In California, Democratic governor Pat Brown had ordered his attorney general, Stanley Mosk, to submit a report on the John Birch Society. It came out in July and was excerpted in the
New York Times Magazine
in August. Mosk reported that Birchers defined Communism as “any idea differing from their own,” that to fight it they were “willing to give up a large measure of the freedoms guaranteed them by the United States Constitution in favor of accepting the dictates of their founder,” and that they sought “by fair means or foul, to force the rest of us to follow their example.” Birchers “do the work of the Communists,” Mosk concluded, by undermining the integrity of the United States.

It had been only three weeks since a shocking memo from Democratic senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, addressed to Kennedy's defense secretary, Robert McNamara, had been made public. In 1956 Army psychiatrist William E. Mayer released a report, which became a media sensation, that Korean War POWs had been brainwashed with alarming ease because they had been sent out into the field with a profound lack of understanding of the meaning of America. It led in 1958 to a National Security Council directive that military authorities begin educating the troops in their charge, and the public in their community, in basic facts about the Cold War. Commanding officers were supplied literature and suggestions but were allowed wide latitude in carrying out the directive. And in some cases that latitude, Fulbright reported, had created a monster. A private outfit, the Foreign Policy Research Institute, bankrolled by the conservative Richardson Foundation, was being retained by military bases nationwide—and by the Army War College, under the auspices of no less than the Joint Chiefs of Staff—to convene “strategy seminars” to carry out the NSC Cold War directive. Among their teachings was that Defense Secretary McNamara's project to replace bombers with missiles as the centerpiece of American nuclear strategy was in fact a deliberate, covert plan for unilateral disarmament. The civilian arm of the Foreign Policy Research Institute instructed civic leaders on how entire American states might be turned into “civilian war colleges” to train the populace in “Catonic” strategy—the right-wing doctrine, named for the Roman general who ended his every Senate speech with the declaration “Carthage must be destroyed,” that preparations for protracted total war to annihilate the Soviet Union should begin immediately.

In Pensacola (a town so dominated by the right that a local theater company presenting Arthur Miller's
The Crucible
interpreted the play as a critique
of the persecution of anticommunists), the chief of naval air training set up a series of mandatory, weeklong seminars for officers that taught that the progressive income tax, the Federal Reserve, and increased business regulations were, just as Robert Welch believed, part of the Soviet takeover of the United States. Then the show was taken on the road in mass rallies for civilians. At one of them, in Los Angeles, Loyd Wright educated the audience on the imperative of “preventive war”—a doctrine proposed in 1953 by Air Force general Jimmy Doolittle, rejected with horror by President Eisenhower, to issue an ultimatum that the Soviet Union leave Eastern Europe by a certain date on pain of nuclear retaliation. “If we have to blow up Moscow,” said Wright, “that's too bad.”

Fulbright's startling revelation that military personnel were being indoctrinated with the idea that the policies of the Commander in Chief were treasonous dovetailed with the return to the news of the strange case of General Edwin Walker. Walker had always been an odd one; he volunteered to lead a paratroopers unit in World War II without ever having jumped out of a plane (“How do you put this thing on?” he reportedly asked a subordinate as the plane took off for his first jump). His long, spectacular disillusionment with his civilian masters began in the Korean War. “I saw stalemate become the substitute for victory,” he later recalled. The disillusionment continued when he served as a military adviser for Chiang Kai-shek: Why wasn't America preparing Taiwan for the final assault on the mainland? (The Cold War was a war, and Walker, like all West Point graduates, had been taught that in a war, “the only real victory was total victory, the complete annihilation of the enemy and its power to wage war.”) Fulbright gained public prominence in 1957 by commanding the regiment guarding Little Rock's Central High. And this bastardization of the military was the last straw. “In my opinion the 5th column conspiracy and influence in the United States minimize or nullify the effectiveness of my ideals and principles,” he soon wrote in a letter resigning from the Army. His resignation was refused. If every old salt who felt the same way were to leave, it would decimate the officer corps. Instead Walker was promoted, sent to command the Twenty-fourth Infantry Division in Augsberg, Germany. And immediately upon arrival, he set to work implementing the National Security Council Cold War directive.

In June 1961, the Army released a report as thick as a telephone directory documenting how Walker had been lecturing his troops about the suspicious loyalties of Harry Truman, Eleanor Roosevelt, Dean Acheson, Walter Lippmann, and Edward R. Murrow. Before the 1960 elections Walker had distributed the Americans for Constitutional Action voting index. ACA had been founded by former admiral Ben Morreel in 1958 upon his retirement as chairman of the board of Jones & Laughlin, a steel manufacturer so brutish that its
workers once dubbed its works “Little Siberia.” ACA's goal of “repeal of the socialistic laws now on our books” was abetted by its famous index, which rated congressmen from I to 100 in categories such as “FOR Sound Money and AGAINST Inflation” and “FOR Individual Liberty and AGAINST Coercion.” Senator Kennedy scored zero on “FOR Private Ownership and AGAINST Government Ownership and Control of the Means of Production”; even Barry Goldwater was two points short of a perfect score. Walker also prescribed what he called a “Pro-Blue” reading program—consisting largely of the publications of the John Birch Society and like groups.

The Army feared if it punished Walker he would become a right-wing martyr. So he was given the lightest sanction possible. It didn't work. Instead Strom Thurmond held hearings on this “dastardly attempt to intimidate the commanders of the U.S. Armed Forces.” Robert McNamara was jeered from the gallery when he testified. From California, eleven-year-old James Quinlan wrote the President: “I heard that you pulled out a general for teaching Americanism. Would you rather for him to teach communism to all those men?” Editorialized the
New York Mirror,
“No matter how it is sliced, General Walker seems to have committed the crime of being excessively patriotic, of preferring his own country to Soviet Russia.” The Texas state senate pledged its “unqualified support”; the newspaper columnist Paul Harvey lamented, “Today, the loyal American is being defamed, demoted, discharged, destroyed if he militantly defends the American ‘ism' against all its enemies, foreign and domestic.” Barry Goldwater declared: “When we reach the point where we have a bunch of namby-pambies as our generals, men who cannot use a little strong language once in a while, particularly as it concerns enemies who say, ‘We will bury you' and ‘Your children will live under socialism' ... I think we are farther down the road than we realize.”

The centrist press panicked too; it tended to imply that the nation was on the verge of having a military putsch.
Look
magazine reporter Fletcher Knebel began drafting a novel called
Seven Days in May
in which military leaders plot to overthrow a President after he signs a nuclear disarmament treaty—of the sort Kennedy had dreamed of, eloquently, in a September 25 speech at the United Nations before signing a bill establishing the United States Arms Control Agency.

On October 16 the spectacle in Washington was joined by Dr. Fred Schwarz's Christian Anti-Communism Crusade at the Hollywood Bowl, which was broadcast across the state—then, a few weeks later, shown again in New York City. This required monumental sums of money. It came from two of southern California's most prominent businesses: Richfield Oil, whose filling stations dotted the West Coast; and Coast Federal Savings & Loan, the third
largest S&L in the country. Coast dedicated 4 percent of its net revenue to far-right propaganda, distributing two million pieces of literature in 1961 alone. In a typical blitz, account holders received a red postcard bearing a spurious quote from Khrushchev: “We cannot expect the Americans to jump from capitalism to communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving Americans small doses of socialism, until they suddenly awake to find they have communism.”

The Schwarz crusade made President Kennedy jump out of his skin. The podium at the Hollywood Bowl was graced with stars like John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, and Roy Rogers. But the most remarkable presence was that of C. D. Jackson, the publisher of Life. He was there to proffer a groveling apology for running an article critical of Dr. Schwarz. “It is a great privilege to be with you tonight,” he said, “because it affords me an opportunity to align Life in a very personal way with a number of stalwart fighters.” Then it was back to the program, Walter Judd proclaiming that Khrushchev possessed a “well-disciplined” apparatus to “start a riot or a strike in any major city any time he wants to.” The extremist fringe had humbled the mighty Luce empire. Kennedy had a legislative agenda to pass, a foreign policy to manage—tasks complicated when the most powerful media institution in the country was joining forces with those who would declare both treasonous. The day after the news, Bobby Kennedy breakfasted with Walter Reuther and his brother Victor, and lawyer Joseph Rauh, to begin plotting a counterstrategy.