Exceptional (9 page)

ONCE THE WALL WENT up, the world wondered what the Soviets would do next. Would Khrushchev back down or would he provoke a larger crisis between the two nuclear-armed nations by carrying out his pledge to prevent Western access to the entire city?

Kennedy decided to call Khrushchev's bluff. Since taking office, Kennedy had learned that the missile gap on which he had campaigned did not exist. In fact, U.S. satellite images had confirmed the Soviets' arsenal was smaller than America's. Kennedy decided to send a clear message to Khrushchev about America's strategic superiority, as a warning against escalation of the Berlin crisis.

He authorized his deputy secretary of defense, Roswell Gilpatric, to give a speech detailing America's military advantage. After listing the immediate steps America had taken in response to Soviet actions in Berlin, Gilpatric continued, “But our real strength in Berlin—and at any other point in the perimeter of the free world's defenses that might tempt Communist probes—is much more broadly based.” America was confident in its ability to deter communist action because
of “a sober appreciation of the relative military power of the two sides.” Despite the Soviet bluster about their superiority, Gilpatric said he suspected they actually knew the truth. He wanted to be sure they knew that we knew it, too:

While the Soviets use rigid security as a military weapon, their Iron Curtain is not so impenetrable as to force us to accept at face value the Kremlin's boasts. The fact is that this nation has a nuclear retaliatory force of such lethal power that an enemy move which brought it into play would be an act of
self-destruction on his part.

Describing the land-, air-, and sea-based platforms that constituted America's nuclear triad, Gilpatric explained, “The total number of our nuclear delivery vehicles, tactical as well as strategic, is in the tens of thousands; and, of course, we have more than one warhead for each vehicle.” Summing up, Gilpatric said, “In short, we have a second strike capability which is at least as extensive as what the Soviets can deliver by striking first. Therefore, we are confident that the Soviets will not provoke a major nuclear conflict.” In closing, Gilpatric issued one more clear warning to Khrushchev:

Those who would impose a totalitarian world order and deny men and nations the right to pursue their own destinies should understand one point very clearly. The United States does not seek to resolve disputes by violence. But if forceful interference with our rights and obligations should lead to violent conflict—as it well might—the United States does not
intend to be defeated.

Khrushchev decided not to escalate the crisis in Berlin. He would, however, test American resolve a year later when he installed SS-4 and
SS-5 ballistic missiles on the island of Cuba. Missile sites in Cuba gave him the ability to directly threaten the United States. He was also interested in expanding the Soviet sphere of influence and supporting Castro's Marxist-Leninist regime. As Khrushchev claimed later, “The fate of Cuba and the maintenance of Soviet prestige in that part of the world pre-occupied me. We had to think of some way of confronting America with more than words. . . . The logical
answer was missiles.”

Khrushchev likely assumed he could take advantage of a president he had judged to be weak, but he was wrong. Speaking to the nation on October 22, 1962, Kennedy reminded his audience, “The 1930s taught us a clear lesson: aggressive conduct, if allowed to go unchecked and unchallenged, ultimately
leads to war.” Therefore, America had to secure “the withdrawal or elimination” of the Soviet missiles. He announced he would impose a quarantine on shipments of all offensive military equipment to Cuba. He ordered the armed forces to “prepare for any eventualities,” and he made clear he would hold the Soviets responsible: “It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response
upon the Soviet Union.”

Kennedy addressed Premier Khrushchev and said he now had an opportunity to “move the world back from the abyss of destruction” by removing the missiles. Over the next few days, the crisis built. On October 24, twenty Russian ships looked set to challenge the quarantine. Instead,
they turned around.

On October 26, Khrushchev transmitted a long letter to Kennedy. If Kennedy promised not to invade Cuba, Khrushchev would remove the missiles. While the Americans were preparing a response, a second letter arrived. This one added a new condition. Kennedy must also agree to remove NATO missiles from Turkey. The Americans decided to publicly ignore the second letter and respond to the
first. At the same time, Attorney General Robert Kennedy met secretly with the Soviet ambassador and agreed to withdraw the missiles from Turkey
within six months. The next day, Radio Moscow announced that the order had been given to dismantle and
remove the missiles from Cuba. Because the Turkish agreement was secret, Khrushchev appeared to have been the one who blinked.

The Cuban Missile Crisis reminded officials and citizens alike of the reality of the nuclear threat. In its aftermath the United States and the Soviet Union signed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, prohibiting atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons. A new doctrine was developed that would govern America's nuclear policy for the next twenty years, mutual assured destruction, or MAD, which meant that our own nuclear arsenal had to be of sufficient size and quality that the Soviets would know, were they ever to strike first, that we would survive the attack and strike back with devastating force. In their first strike on us, they would be sowing the seeds of their own annihilation.

IN BERLIN IN 1953, Hungary in 1956, and Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Soviets used military force to crush opposition movements within the Soviet Bloc. They were simultaneously providing military and economic support for insurgents and guerrilla movements in noncommunist countries around the globe, including for the Viet Cong guerrillas, who were attempting a communist takeover of South Vietnam. In response, in 1961, President Kennedy sent 500 U.S. military advisors to train the South Vietnamese. By the end of 1963, there were more than 16,000 American military
advisors in Vietnam. At the height of the war, in 1968, President Lyndon Johnson had deployed 563,000 American troops to Vietnam.

The objective of preventing a communist takeover of South Vietnam was a worthy one. There were many errors in the way America
pursued this objective, about which much has been written elsewhere. Perhaps the most significant obstacle to our success was that our policy was never aimed at defeating the enemy. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara captured the essence of U.S. policy in Vietnam when he famously asked General William Westmoreland in 1965, “How many additional American and Allied troops would be required to convince the enemy he would be
unable to win?” The American strategy wasn't to win. It was to convince the enemy he couldn't.

Former secretary of state and national security advisor Henry Kissinger explained it another way:

The strategic goal was not to lose in order to give South Vietnam time to create democratic institutions and social programs that would win the war for the hearts and minds of the population. . . . What is certain is that the process required a time span of stalemated war beyond the psychological endurance
of the American public.

President Nixon, elected in 1968, began to bring America's troops home from Vietnam and formally ended the war in January 1973 with the Treaty of Paris. America's combat troops came home, and the United States promised to provide economic assistance and renewed military support to the South if the North Vietnamese violated the treaty. Despite these promises, when the North reinvaded the south in early 1975, the U.S. Congress refused to provide funding for the assistance we had promised. Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese in April 1975.

The way the war ended was tragic. We had abandoned millions of South Vietnamese, leaving them to the mercy of the communists. Kissinger explained:

The United States devoted two decades of blood and treasure to help a group of newly independent fledgling societies avoid conquest by their merciless and militarily more powerful communist neighbor in North Vietnam. Yet, when the precarious peace wrought by the Paris Agreement was challenged, the United States, in the throes of physical and psychological abdication, cut off military and economic assistance to people whom we had given every encouragement to count on our protection. This consigned those we had made our wards to an implacable—and, in Cambodia, genocidal—
communist conqueror.

On April 23, 1975, President Gerald Ford spoke at Tulane University and declared the war “
finished as far as America is concerned.” Even those who had supported the war felt a sense of relief at its end.

Long after the conclusion of the war, there was a view among many of our nation's top military leaders that the political leadership had failed our men and women in uniform. And in many ways this is true. President George H. W. Bush and his team were very aware of this when the United States deployed forces to liberate Kuwait in 1990. President Bush was committed to deploying a force large enough to win and providing them with all the resources they needed to do the job the country had asked them to do.

WHEN RICHARD NIXON BECAME America's thirty-seventh president in 1969, he inherited an array of international challenges, including America's ongoing war in Vietnam and the nuclear arms race with the Soviets. Henry Kissinger described the priorities of Nixon's first-term foreign policy strategy:

(1) to extricate from Vietnam under honorable conditions; (2) to confine the dissent of the protest movement to Indochina; (3) to
seize the high ground of the peace issue by a strategy that demonstrated to the American public that, even while pursuing the Cold War, we would do our utmost to control its dangers and gradually overcome it; (4) to broaden the diplomatic chessboard by including China in the international system; (5) to strengthen our alliances; (6) and, from that platform, to go on the diplomatic offensive, especially
in the Middle East.

It is a well-informed summing up that contrasts markedly with President Obama's description of his foreign policy strategy: “
Don't do stupid stuff.”

It was clear from Nixon's first days in office that there were tensions between the Soviet Union and China. The president decided to exploit those tensions and drive a wedge between the world's two most powerful communist nations. On Monday, February 21, 1972, as a Chinese military band played “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Nixon became the first American president to visit China while in office. Strategically the trip accomplished what he had hoped by reestablishing relations between the United States and China, inserting an irritant into the conduct of foreign policy for the Soviet Union and demonstrating that America's national security policy was larger than the war in Vietnam. “On the way back from Beijing,” Kissinger said later, “I knew
we'd made history.”

Nixon and Kissinger also made history when they established the controversial policy of détente, which was intended to reduce the tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, and to lessen the crises between the two powers that dominated the first two decades of the Cold War. The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), an agreement to limit the number of ballistic missiles in the arsenal of each superpower, was one of the products of détente.

Critics of the policy point out that it essentially solidified the status
quo and ensured that America would not confront Soviet oppression or question the Soviets' right to exert their rule throughout the Soviet Bloc. Critics of the policy also point out that it was only when Ronald Reagan discarded détente and confronted the Soviets across all fronts that the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union itself ceased to exist.

It is not clear that Reagan's approach would have been as effective in the 1970s as it was in the 1980s. Strategies (or tactical approaches, for that matter) have to be tied to concrete circumstances. The art of statesmanship is understanding the environment correctly and choosing the most effective ways and means to secure national objectives. It is also true that another of the hallmarks of détente, the Helsinki Accords, sowed the seeds of the destruction of the Soviet empire.

IN AUGUST 1974, PRESIDENT Nixon resigned over his role in the Watergate break-in and cover-up. That evening, even before Vice President Gerald Ford took the oath of office to become America's thirty-eighth president, he met the press in front of his home in Alexandria, Virginia. His first order of business was to reassure the world that America's national security and foreign policy was in experienced hands and would remain unchanged. Henry Kissinger would be staying on. “Let me say without any hesitation or reservation,” Ford said, “that the policy that has achieved peace . . . will be continued as far as I'm concerned as President
of the United States.”

One of President Ford's first acts was to pardon Richard Nixon, a decision highly controversial at the time, but widely praised today. Ford rightly judged that in the aftermath of everything the nation had been through, it was time to begin to heal and to move on.

IN JULY 1974, ALEKSANDR Solzhenitsyn, a prominent Soviet dissident who had been imprisoned in Stalin's prison camps, visited
Washington. He had been stripped of his Soviet citizenship after the publication of
The Gulag Archipelago
, his devastating account of life in the camps. There was a debate inside the White House about whether President Ford should meet with Solzhenitsyn. Henry Kissinger and his deputy, Brent Scowcroft, advised against it. Arguing for the meeting was one of the authors of this book, Dick Cheney, who wrote in a memo:

My own strong feeling is that the President should see Solzhenitsyn. . . . I think the decision not to see him is based on a misreading of Détente. Détente means nothing more and nothing less than a lessening of tension. Over the last several years it has been sold as a much broader concept to the American people. At most, détente should consist of agreements wherever possible to reduce the possibility of conflict, but it does not mean that all of a sudden our relationship with the Soviets is all sweetness and light. . . .