Read Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House Online
Authors: Robert Dallek
Kennedy’s first challenge was to bring his military under control. On June 28, at a meeting with the Joint Chiefs, who predictably were urging robust demonstrations of American preparedness in case of a communist interdiction of West Berlin, Kennedy said he valued their counsel but saw 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.” He was making clear that a military solution to the Berlin challenge was not his preference. He was also trying to discourage the Chiefs from stimulating public support for a confrontation with the Soviets or sending messages that might provoke Moscow into more aggressive action. As matters stood, U.S. opinion was already inclined to face down the Soviets: Surveys between June 23 and June 28 showed 82 percent in favor of a continued U.S. military presence in Berlin, despite the view of 59 percent that a nuclear conflict might be in the offing.
Time
and
Newsweek
published stories suggesting that Kennedy was reluctant to be as militant as the Pentagon. The leaks to the magazines angered him: “Look at this shit,” he told Pierre Salinger. “This shit has got to stop.” The same day as his meeting with the Chiefs, Kennedy used a press conference to take the lead on the developing crisis. He refused to take the bait when a reporter asked him what he thought of Vice President Nixon’s “dim view of your administration. . . . Never in American history has a man talked so big and acted so little,” Nixon said. Instead, Kennedy offered measured comments that could remind Khrushchev of his determination not to abandon Berlin to communist control and “make permanent the partition of Germany. . . . No one can fail to appreciate the gravity of this [Soviet] threat,” he added. “There is peace in Germany and in Berlin. If it is disturbed, it will be a direct Soviet responsibility.”
On the twenty-eighth, Kennedy also received a report he had asked Dean Acheson to write on Berlin. Because he saw Acheson as “one of the most intelligent and experienced men around,” Kennedy believed it useful to have his judgment on how to meet Khrushchev’s challenge over Berlin. By no means, however, was he prepared to take Acheson’s advice as gospel. After all, judging from earlier policy statements, Acheson was of two minds about Berlin: In 1959 he had said, “To respond to a blockade of Berlin with a nuclear strategic attack would be fatally unwise. To threaten this attack would be even more unwise.” But by 1961 he had shifted ground: He not only favored a buildup of U.S. ground forces in the city to confront any possible Soviet attack; he also believed it essential to convince the Soviets that we were ready to use nuclear weapons if they started a war. The issue, Acheson said, was how to restore the credibility of the deterrent. “Nothing could be more dangerous,” he wrote, “than to embark upon a course of action of the sort described in this paper in the absence of a decision to accept nuclear war rather than accede to the demands which Khrushchev is now making.”
At the same time, however, Acheson was not prepared to go as far as some in the military, who advocated “limited use of nuclear means—that is to drop one bomb somewhere. . . . This I thought was most unwise,” Acheson said later. He saw it leading to a larger nuclear exchange. He rejected the suggestion that you could simply stop after a single bomb had demonstrated your willingness to employ these ultimate weapons. “This seems to me irresponsible and not a wise strategy adapted to the problem of Berlin.”
In a discussion of Acheson’s report at the National Security Council on the day after he gave Kennedy his report and at a later White House meeting that included only Kennedy and Bundy, Kennedy asked Acheson to clarify just when he thought nuclear weapons might have to be used. Bundy recalled that “Acheson’s answer was more measured and quiet than usual. He said that he believed the president should himself give that question the most careful and private consideration, well before the time when the choice might present itself, that he should reach his own clear conclusion in advance as to what he would do, and that he should tell no one at all what that conclusion was. The president thanked him for his advice, and the exchange ended.”
Acheson’s discretion masked his low regard for Kennedy’s leadership. He considered Kennedy and his national security team as too young and inexperienced for the challenges they were facing. He wrote a friend, “It seems to me interesting that a group of young men who regard themselves as intellectuals are capable of less coherent thought than we have had since Coolidge. They are pretty good at improvising. . . . But God help us if they are given time to think!” He said later that Kennedy was “out of his depth” and given to “high-school thinking.”
Despite outward expressions of deference, Kennedy resisted Acheson’s militant advice. Asked later what the president thought of Acheson, Bobby Kennedy replied, “He liked him. No, he didn’t like him—that’s not correct. He respected him and found him helpful, found him irritating; and he thought his advice was worth listening to, although not accepted. On many occasions, his advice was worthless.” Jackie Kennedy thought that Acheson resented Kennedy becoming president at so young an age. It was, what she called, “a jealousy of generations. He couldn’t bear to see someone younger . . . come on.” The tensions with Acheson ran deeper than his current advice on Berlin or any age gap. Acheson was closely identified with Harry Truman; they shared an antagonism to Joe Kennedy, the “appeaser,” and had been unenthusiastic about the son’s presidential aspirations. Their hostility to his father and Jack’s political ambitions partly colored Bobby Kennedy’s assessment of his brother’s view of Acheson.
Like so many of his predecessors in the White House, by the summer of 1961 Kennedy had second thoughts about serving as president. No one seemed to have answers to any of the major problems that had descended on him so quickly. The only response to the mounting difficulties he could identify was to appear confident and hope for the best. He saw no miracles on the horizon that would oust Castro or stabilize Vietnam or end segregation or deter Khrushchev from trying to take full control of Berlin. But he continued to believe that rational understanding would deter the Soviets from a mutually destructive war, and that on the domestic front, a majority of southerners, eager to prevent turmoil in their region, would reach some kind of accommodation with the undeniably justified demands for equal treatment of blacks. However much it might be a triumph of faith over fact, Kennedy trusted that he could find ways to ease, if not resolve, each of these dilemmas.
D
espite all the difficulties of his first six months in office, Kennedy had not lost his sense of humor. He remembered his advice to Bobby when he complained that Jack shouldn’t have told the press that he had made him attorney general in order to give him some legal experience: Bobby, you have to understand that to survive in politics you sometimes need to poke fun at yourself and others. So, when the reporter asked him about Nixon’s harsh assessment of his foreign policy, Kennedy joked, I sympathize with his problems, adding that he looked forward to 1964, which amused reporters, who thought Kennedy was saying that it was too soon for Nixon to begin his next campaign.
On a lighter note, July began with an eleventh anniversary party at Bobby and Ethel Kennedy’s Virginia estate, where wild dancing and singing preceded thirty-year-old younger brother Teddy’s leap into the swimming pool fully clothed. “It was all great fun,” Schlesinger recorded, “a perfect expression of the rowdier aspects of the New Frontier.”
Kennedy’s initial problems as president were a prelude to even more troubles in the second half of the year. The testing of nuclear weapons rivaled Cuba as a major concern. Kennedy had come to office against a backdrop of anxiety about nuclear tests and the consequences of a total war. John Hersey’s 1946 book,
Hiroshima
, made clear the horrors of a nuclear attack, and explosions in the atmosphere by the United States and Soviet Union had spawned fears of radioactive fallout. The series of U.S. nuclear tests in 1954 over remote islands in the Pacific, which poisoned and eventually killed a Japanese fisherman; the samples of radioactive rain over Chicago in 1955; and evidence four years later of lethal strontium-90 in milk moved the
Saturday Evening Post
to publish a lead article: “Fallout: The Silent Killer.” Various cancers and permanent genetic damage were seen as consequences of the Soviet-American race to outdo each other in building nuclear arms.
During his presidency, Eisenhower had grown increasingly worried about the excessive stockpiling of nuclear missiles. He lamented the fact that the military had begun to “talk about megaton explosions as though they are almost nothing.” At the end of his term, Ike complained that the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) “are trying to get themselves into an incredible position—of having enough to destroy every conceivable target all over the world, plus a three-fold reserve. The patterns of target destruction are fantastic.” He worried that “there just might be nothing left of the Northern Hemisphere” after a nuclear war. And this was at a time when Eisenhower’s fear was of “radioactive fallout, not of sky-blackening, earth-freezing soot and smoke” scientists later described as a nuclear winter. As a growing group of concerned scientists observed, the only function the excess of nuclear weapons could serve would be to make the rubble bounce.
In 1957–58, the Soviet Union and the United States agreed to a moratorium on atmospheric tests. The first underground nuclear test by U.S. scientists persuaded the Eisenhower White House that it could develop more sophisticated nuclear bombs without aboveground explosions. Then, in March 1958, when the Soviets unilaterally extended their suspension on atmospheric tests, world opinion pressured Washington into a similar decision. A conference of experts in Geneva, Switzerland, during the summer of 1958 concluded that it would be possible permanently to end atmospheric testing by creating detection sites around the world to guard against cheating by any of the nuclear powers. On October 31, a conference convened in Geneva to create an inspection system that would allow the United States, Soviet Union, and Britain to negotiate a test ban treaty. An impasse quickly developed, however, over the conditions governing a control system. The U-2 episode in 1960, followed by the collapse of a U.S.-Soviet summit scheduled for May, left test ban differences unresolved when Kennedy became president.
Despite opposition from his military chiefs and most Defense Department and AEC officials, Kennedy was keen to sign a treaty that would eliminate the atmospheric pollution from testing, reduce Cold War tensions, inhibit proliferation of nuclear weapons, and give the new administration a landmark achievement. Kennedy’s appointment of Glenn T. Seaborg, chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley and a Nobel laureate in nuclear chemistry, and Jerome Wiesner, a prominent MIT electrical engineer and outspoken proponent of a test ban, as commission members signaled a shift away from the AEC’s insistence on sustained testing. Eisenhower appointees Lewis Strauss and John McCone and commission physicists Ernest Lawrence and Edward Teller warned against undetectable tests that would allow Moscow to eclipse the United States in usable weapons.
In March 1961, Kennedy convened a White House luncheon for the administration’s principal defense and arms control officials as well as five senators and three congressmen to discuss Geneva test ban negotiations. The group divided into those who believed an agreement essential for the future peace and those who warned that the Soviets would use the talks to advance their nuclear capacity. The acrimony between the two sides was intense. Kennedy, “with a smile in his voice,” as Seaborg described it, thanked everyone for their candid views and said, provoking much laughter, he was “glad to see that there was agreement on the U.S. side.” He made clear that he saw much more at stake than just a test ban agreement: unrestrained increase in nuclear weapons and their spread to other countries. If the negotiations were to fail, it was essential that “the watching world would recognize that we had done our best.”
As the talks faltered throughout the spring, Kennedy wrestled with whether to end the moratorium and resume testing. The Joint Chiefs pressed him to ensure the country’s safety by a return to testing and described the advantages to the United States. Despite little evidence to support its assertion, the Defense Department warned that “if we don’t resume the Soviets may pull ahead.” Because the White House feared a hostile world reaction that would undermine U.S. foreign policy objectives, Kennedy decided to hold off on ending the moratorium at least until he discussed a test ban with Khrushchev at the June 1961 Vienna summit.
The exchanges at the conference about nuclear weapons and a test ban could not have been more disappointing. Khrushchev echoed the Soviet position in Geneva, which was dismissive of inspections as a ploy for U.S. espionage. Soviet insistence on barring monitors spoke to the fear of revealing their nuclear inferiority to the United States. Khrushchev insisted that a test ban was of small consequence and that a treaty providing for general and complete disarmament was the best path to improved Soviet-American relations and world peace. As Secretary of State Rusk told his Soviet counterpart, Foreign Minister Andrey Gromyko, and as Kennedy pointed out to Khrushchev, the fact that almost thirty years of disarmament discussions had yielded no results did not discourage Khrushchev from urging additional comprehensive talks. Khrushchev promised that as long as there were discussions, the Soviet Union would not resume testing unless the United States did.
After Vienna, Moscow continued to show little interest in reaching a test ban agreement, but Kennedy refused to lose hope. “It isn’t time yet,” he told Rusk. “It’s too early. They are bent on scaring the world to death before they begin negotiating, and they haven’t quite brought the pot to boil. Not enough people are frightened.” To signal Moscow and other governments the strength of U.S. interest in arms control, Kennedy sent Congress a message proposing the establishment of a new “United States Disarmament Agency for World Peace and Security.” Khrushchev was not impressed. As Kennedy believed, he seemed intent on bringing the world to the brink of catastrophe before he would negotiate an agreement. On August 30, 1961, Moscow resumed testing in the atmosphere, arguing that U.S. failure to accept Soviet disarmament proposals, an unbending attitude on Berlin, and French nuclear tests encouraged by the United States had compelled them to go forward with the development of “super, powerful bombs” and rockets that could carry them to “any point on the globe.” The decision spoke volumes about Moscow’s inferiority to the United States in these ultimate weapons.
Khrushchev’s deception enraged Kennedy. “Fucked again,” he exclaimed when he heard the news. “The bastards. That fucking liar.” But he worried that Khrushchev might have been acting on information that under pressure from the Joint Chiefs, Kennedy had agreed to preparations for renewed testing. He had insisted that they be kept hidden so that Khrushchev would not have a justification for ending the moratorium, but he feared that Moscow might have learned of U.S. preparations through spies or leaks from the Chiefs hoping to intimidate Khrushchev. Once the Soviets had tested a weapon, Kennedy saw no recourse but to implement plans for new U.S. explosions. He wished, however, to have only underground tests and to hold off revealing them in order to mine public indignation toward Moscow for polluting the atmosphere. Administration hawks wanted him to announce a resumption of testing at once as a way to cow Moscow, but Stevenson urged Kennedy not to do it, saying the Soviet action was “not a blow but a bonanza.” Kennedy agreed, saying that he wanted to get the “maximum propaganda” advantage from the Soviet test.
At the same time, Kennedy wished to make clear to the world that the United States was eager for an end to nuclear testing and agreements that could head off what he feared would be the last global war. In September 1961, at the opening annual session of the United Nations, the world body he had described in his inaugural as “our last best hope in an age where the instruments of war have far outpaced the instruments of peace,” he restated his sense of urgency about the dangers from a nuclear conflict, declaring that “mankind must put an end to war—or war will put an end to mankind.” It was more than a felicitous phrase. He had a sense of urgency about convincing Moscow and every nation that the consequences of another global conflict would be humankind’s ultimate defeat.
But the Russians seemed impervious to his appeal or were convinced that the West was so intent on destroying communism that only nuclear parity with the United States would ensure its survival. Kennedy, however, saw Moscow’s behavior as not defensive but offensive—a program aimed at victory in the Cold War. “Of all the Soviet provocations of these two years, it was the resumption of testing that disappointed most,” Bundy wrote later—chiefly because Kennedy now had to commit the United States to underground testing and lay plans for atmospheric tests as well. By November 2, the White House knew of thirty-seven aboveground Soviet explosions, and Seaborg, who had been a consistent voice for a test ban, warned Kennedy at an NSC meeting “that if the US tested only underground while the Soviets tested in the atmosphere, we would be in no position to compete with them.” Another scientist that morning echoed Seaborg’s conclusion: He feared that underground tests were less valuable in developing effective nuclear arsenals. But convinced that the United States was still stronger than the Soviet Union, Kennedy refused to announce that the United States would resume testing. The consequence was what Seaborg described as “a prolonged period of uncertainty regarding preparations for atmospheric testing. A decision would seem to be made one day and withdrawn the next. Kennedy wanted to take a firm stand and be ready; yet he wanted to keep his options open: he was reluctant to take steps that might bar the way to a test ban.”
Kennedy’s ambivalence was on display at a December conference in Bermuda with Macmillan. The president described himself as “a great anti-tester” but felt compelled to make preparations for a test series. In private, Kennedy impressed Seaborg as “considerably more in favor of accepting risks and making compromises in order to achieve a test ban than either he or U.S. negotiators ever allowed themselves to be in public.” Schlesinger and Bundy reinforced his aversion to testing. Schlesinger believed that “the US has an unmatched opportunity to recover the moral and political leadership of the world” by enlisting the support of “world opinion,” which he argued was a match for military power in the contest with the communists. Bundy endorsed Schlesinger’s recommendation as “a better argument against testing now than you have yet heard from advisers nearly all of whom personally favor testing.” But Kennedy could only delay so long on testing without facing an explosion of political criticism that he was letting the Soviets steal a march on the United States in the arms race.
With little success in turning nuclear arms talks or limits on testing in successful directions, Kennedy hoped that he could make some quiet progress on Cuba. He expected General Taylor to be an organizing force in helping to oust Castro. Initially, Kennedy asked Taylor to come back to Washington to serve at the head of a committee, including Bobby, Allen Dulles, and Admiral Arleigh Burke, to study the Cuban failure. By putting Dulles and Burke on the committee, Kennedy was putting the fox in charge of the henhouse. Kennedy was less interested in assessing blame for the Bay of Pigs failure, however—especially against the CIA or military, which would have produced more domestic acrimony—than in putting off any immediate action about Cuba. His objective in the aftermath of the Cuban catastrophe was to convince hard-line anticommunists in the United States that he was working to bring down Castro, while at the same time keeping the lowest possible profile for his administration in its dealings with Havana. The objective remained to rid Cuba of Castro, but without clear evidence that Washington had arranged his demise.
In August, after attending a meeting of the Inter-American Economic and Social Council held in Punta del Este, Uruguay, Dick Goodwin told Kennedy that they should “pay little attention to Cuba. Do not allow them to appear as the victims of U.S. aggression. Do not create the impression we are obsessed with Castro—an impression that only strengthens Castro’s hand in Cuba and encourages anti-American and leftist forces in other countries to rally round the Cuban flag.” Goodwin’s understanding of what was needed rested on a conversation with Che Guevara, the president of the Cuban National Bank and Castro’s close associate, who later became a synonym for leftist Latin American revolutions. Guevara ridiculed the Bay of Pigs failure, saying “he wanted to thank us very much for the invasion—that it had been a great political victory for them—enabled them to consolidate—and transformed them from an aggrieved little country to an equal.”