The new defense secretary, Robert McNamara, the former head of Ford Motor Company, was an ambitious architect of change from the start, seeking to standardize warplane types and advocating a new notion of allowing the USSR to achieve nuclear parity with the United States, creating a defense formula of “Mutual Assured Destruction.” The rationale for this was that it would make nuclear war practically impossible, as neither side could be under the slightest illusion that the result of conflict would not be the destruction of everyone. Critics of this view would claim that it would only incite the Soviets to an accelerated buildup to try to gain absolute nuclear superiority. And critics of McNamara’s quest for a standardized warplane claimed, with some justice as it turned out, that aircraft flown from aircraft carriers have to be lighter and that those flown from the land should have larger bomb or missile-launch capacities. These problems emerged gradually and in very awkward circumstances.
The conventional national security team was fairly orthodox, and welcome after the sclerosis of Herter and Allen Dulles (who unfortunately was kept on at the CIA). Dean Rusk as secretary of state was not a radical departure from the past and was an articulate, expressionless spokesman for whatever was afoot. Adlai Stevenson, who would have been secretary of state had he not responded to the incitements of Eleanor Roosevelt and sought the nomination himself for the third time, was a very pacifistic and urbane figure at the United Nations, where he replaced Henry Cabot Lodge, the late vice presidential candidate, who would soon become the envoy to the coming, and altogether predictable, hot spot of South Vietnam. The national security advisor was Colonel Henry L. Stimson’s old aide, McGeorge Bundy, a Harvard eminence, and his deputy was Walt Whitman Rostow, a tough anti-communist of a largely economic background. Kennedy transformed the White House decision-making apparatus from a layered command structure that Eisenhower had had, to one where almost all initiatives came back to the president from their originators, even if they were well down in the organization. Many relatively untried and rather academic people were directing a new government in a novel way. When Vice President Lyndon Johnson told Speaker Sam Rayburn (who had served in Congress since Wilson’s time) how impressed he was with many of these bright young people, Rayburn responded: “I’d feel a whole lot better about them if just one of them had run for sheriff once.”
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In emphasizing a less confrontational and more upbeat approach to the exigencies of the Cold War, Kennedy early in his administration set up the Peace Corps, which was intended to be an adjunct to foreign aid, to be helpful to those in need of it, and to stress the desire of the United States to live peacefully with all countries. He installed his brother-in-law, R. Sargent Shriver (husband of his sister Eunice), as the head of the Peace Corps, in which eventually 200,000 Americans served in 139 countries. It is not easily quantifiable, but it assumedly had a positive effect on America’s relations with the world. It amplified the upbeat nature of the Kennedys, though to cynics it also appeared to be the substitution of the politics of the Eagle Scout for the generally harsh and unsentimental realities that control international relations.
Trying to retrieve Roosevelt’s cordial atmosphere of the Good Neighbor in Latin America, he also set up the Alliance for Progress in Latin America, and put Puerto Rico’s capable governor Luis Muñoz Marin at the head of it. It was a public relations success, and received over $20 billion from the U.S. through the decade of the sixties. Its goals were to foster economic growth and investment, literacy, better health care, and democratic government in Latin America, and it set the goal of 2.5 percent annual GDP growth rates. That objective was achieved, and there were large advances in literacy, but the Alliance was not a political success under future U.S. presidents. The funds commitment was not adequate to be vital to a whole hemisphere, and critics remarked that American business extracted far more in dividends from Latin America than the U.S. government was reinvesting in it.
On May 25, 1961, a month after the Soviet Union put aloft successfully the first man in space, President Kennedy enunciated the goal of putting a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth before the end of the decade. As he put it a few months later: “We choose to go to the moon.” It did fairly quickly eliminate concerns about who was leading the space race, put a stop to the drivel about the missile gap, and certainly uplifted the imaginations of a great many people. And it would prove a very thoroughly developed and administered program that continued under three presidents and achieved all its objectives.
5. THE BAY OF PIGS, THE VIENNA SUMMIT, AND THE BERLIN WALL
The Kennedy foreign policy quickly became embroiled in relations with the Soviet Union, especially in regard to Cuba and Berlin. Cuba had been a lively subject of conversation in the latter days of the Eisenhower administration. As Nixon and Kennedy debated in the two months before the 1960 election, Kennedy accused Eisenhower and Nixon of tolerating a festering communist sore right under America’s nose, “eight minutes by jet” from Florida. Nixon was privately imploring Eisenhower to do something to appear more protective of American interests and get him out from under Kennedy’s charges of a feeble and appeasing policy. Eisenhower replied that some covert activities could be engaged in, but that Castro was not violating the OAS Charter and was popular in Latin America, and that if the United States just moved on him militarily, it would be illegal, would cause tremendous problems in Latin America, and could lead to the assertion of extreme pressures by Khrushchev on the West, especially in Berlin. Nixon, in a policy straitjacket, managed a superb series of replies to Kennedy, accusing the Democratic nominee of being a trigger-happy amateur. Nixon called Castro a “pipsqueak demagogue” but said that a direct military attack was unjustified and would be a disaster. Nixon didn’t believe a word of what he was saying to Kennedy, but delivered it very effectively. Eisenhower had asked for the recruitment of a charismatic leader-in-exile from the émigré community around Miami, but they were mainly aggrieved professionals and well-to-do people who were full of rage but not very representative.
On April 16, 1961, following through on Kennedy’s promises of decisive action against Cuba, Kennedy and Allen Dulles authorized the landing of 1,500 armed and trained Cuban refugees at the Bay of Pigs on the south coast of Cuba. They achieved surprise but lost some of their force on uncharted coral reefs. There was some air support, mainly from B-26s, which were no match for the faster aircraft Castro had. Castro also had an army of 25,000, the core of it his loyalists who had driven Batista out. The Cuban government counter-attacked forcefully on April 17 and a somewhat disorganized retreat began. It was over on April 19; 118 of the 1,500 invaders were dead and about 1,200 captured. The Cubans had suffered several thousand dead, but it was a stinging humiliation for the United States. Kennedy took responsibility publicly, and privately felt he had been completely misled by the CIA with predictions of a popular rising such as one would achieve just putting a match to a tinderbox. Allen Dulles replied that he assumed that the administration would prevent a defeat by the insertion of forces if necessary, as Eisenhower had done with Arbenz in Guatemala. They both were out of their minds to imagine anything could be achieved with such a trivial force.
Sputnik,
the U-2, and the cancellation of the Japan trip had been embarrassments for Eisenhower, but this was an absolute debacle that set Khrushchev crowing from the rooftops of the world, of righteousness, invincibility, and triumphant predestination. Kennedy returned to the drawing board.
He traveled to Paris in May and had a very satisfactory meeting with Charles de Gaulle, who found him open-minded, well-informed, very courteous, and accompanied by an excessively gracious, attractive wife quite proficient in French. Kennedy was on his way to meet with Khrushchev at Vienna, on June 4, and de Gaulle warned him that Khrushchev would be extremely bombastic and abrasive and that he should simply ignore that and be firm. The Vienna meeting was not a success. The stylish American president was slightly nonplussed by the obese, demonstrative, boisterous Russian. Khrushchev was pushing his plan for a separate peace with East Germany and the withdrawal of all the occupying powers from Berlin, and preferably Germany, under conditions of German disarmament. The problem came down to what it had been for over 15 years: the Russians, having made the Nazi-Soviet Pact with Hitler that started the World War II, found the Nazis at their throats less than two years later, had to endure most of the human and physical cost in subduing Hitler, but at the end of it found themselves facing a rearming Germany, fully backed by the British and the Americans, and by a swiftly rising France in the hands of a leader who had completely outmaneuvered the French Communist Party that Stalin had used to immobilize the country for decades, including during the German blitzkrieg of 1940. And about 3.5 million East Germans had reached the West through Berlin, and Khrushchev saw what the Soviets had managed to seize of Germany slipping away. He said: “Berlin is a bone in my throat.”
Kennedy did not agree to anything imprudent at Vienna, and warned Khrushchev that any effort to strangle Berlin would lead to war. He and his entourage did feel that he had not replied at all adequately to Khrushchev’s belligerent provocations, and that Khrushchev would take away from the meeting a sense that Kennedy was weak and inexperienced. This he did, and his threats against West Berlin, where large numbers of people were defecting to the West every week, would now increase. Eisenhower had been the first American statesman to draw a possible connection between Cuba and Berlin, when he warned that Khrushchev might imagine he had the right to deploy missiles to Cuba, as the U.S. had to Greece and Turkey Both areas, Berlin and Cuba, increasingly became strategic sore points through 1961.
Kennedy came back strongly and in a speech in July announced a $3.25 billion increase in the defense budget, including the retention of 200,000 more draftees. He was explicit, as he had been with Khrushchev in Vienna, that an attack on West Berlin would be considered an attack on the United States and would be an act of war. The speech was well-crafted and well-delivered, and all polls showed that it was endorsed by 85 percent of Americans. The following month, the Soviets began cordoning off East Berlin with barbed wire, as people in unprecedented numbers fled westward. To reassure West Berliners of America’s commitment to that city, Kennedy sent Vice President Johnson and others by land through the checkpoints to East Berlin. On August 13, 1961, Khrushchev began the construction of the Berlin Wall, as he stopped the subway traffic between the two halves of the city. There were no legal grounds for tearing the wall down, and while all the Western Allies supported the preservation of West Berlin, they were not prepared to go to what would almost surely be a nuclear war to assure the ability of Germans to move freely between the sections of their country that were demarcated by the victorious Allies at the end of a terrible war unleashed by the Germans. A complete impasse was avoided, as the West did not try to demolish the wall and Khrushchev did not interdict traffic between West Germany and West Berlin.
6. VIETNAM AND THE CUBA–MISSILE CRISIS
In the transitional briefings for the new administration, Eisenhower had warned Kennedy that Indochina was a serious and growing problem, and he described Laos as “the cork in the bottle,”
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by which he meant that the key was to stop the flow of communist forces and supplies down what was already known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail from North Vietnam into Laos and on to South Vietnam. It became a very intricate set of many trails, some of them virtual full-scale highways, that delivered and supported the huge North Vietnamese commitment to the war in the South. Kennedy made a defining decision when in March 1961 he changed the American objective from a “free” to a “neutral” Laos. As the quasileader of the opposition, Richard Nixon, pointed out, this was just “communism on the installment plan.”
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And as the country’s two senior retired generals (Dwight D. Eisenhower and Douglas MacArthur) separately warned, it would be impossible to win in the South if the flow of northern reinforcements and supplies through Laos could not be stopped.
Kennedy did redefine the relationship with South Vietnam from “support” to a “partnership” and sent Vice President Johnson to Saigon in May 1961 to explain the level of American commitment to President Ngo Dinh Diem. There was a good deal of political and social assistance, and through much of 1961 and 1962 a lot of unutterable nonsense about fighting communism by building bridges and schools and clinics. All that mattered was who could occupy the land and control the population. The president steadily increased the number of “advisers,” which included some special forces and a fair amount of military hardware, in a total mission of about 13,000 by late 1963. He authorized increased military assistance by a national-security memorandum of early 1962, and there were a number of initiatives, including defoliation of large areas, to try to make the guerrillas a less elusive target. Vietnam continued to suppurate unsatisfactorily through 1961 and 1962; it would not go away and could not be stabilized by half measures, as Ho Chi Minh felt he had been effectively guaranteed the country at Geneva in 1954, and that the two-year layover was just a face-saver for the French. Though it is difficult to be precise about what Kennedy really thought, or how his views evolved, he appears at the least to have wished to keep Saigon afloat until after the 1964 elections and then make the decision of whether the country was worth an all-out effort, which would require the insertion of sizeable forces, incurring serious casualties.