Authors: Jeff Greenfield
• • •
On July 15, President Kennedy and his inner circle watched Barry Goldwater win the Republican nomination from the family compound at Hyannis Port.
They’d watched the convention all but boo Nelson Rockefeller off the podium when he argued for a convention plank denouncing extremism. They’d nodded with professional admiration when Goldwater made a politically savvy choice of a running mate.
Michigan’s Gerald Ford—fifty-one years old, Eagle Scout, war veteran, football star, fifteen-year veteran of the House of Representatives—had an engaging smile, and a broad regular-guy/Main Street appeal. (Ford also supplied the comic moment of the convention when he picked up the oversize gavel to proclaim that “when this campaign is over, John Kennedy will never know what had hit him!”—an unfortunate, unintended reference to the events in Dallas—and then lost control of the gavel, which flew out of his hand, over the stage, and wound up opening up a nasty gash on the forehead of former senator William Knowland, chair of the California delegation.)
The next night they heard Goldwater, in his acceptance speech, assail the President’s foreign policy: “He has talked and talked and talked and talked the words of freedom. Now, failures cement the wall of shame in Berlin. Failures blot the sands of shame at the Bay of Pigs. Failures mark the slow death of freedom in Laos. Failures infest the jungles of Vietnam.” They heard him denounce the spiritual and moral climate of the nation.
“Tonight there is violence in our streets, corruption in our highest offices, aimlessness among our youth, anxiety among our elders, and there is a virtual despair among the many who look beyond material success for the inner meaning of their lives.”
(“Exactly!” shouted a young Goldwater supporter, Hillary Rodham, as she watched from her parents’ home in Park Ridge, Illinois. “I’ll remember that line if I ever get to give a speech.”)
And they heard him issue an unprecedented challenge to Kennedy, a challenge stemming from some informal conversations the two men had had.
“Mr. President,” Goldwater said, “you and I have a historic opportunity to turn this political campaign into a civic crusade; to take politics out of the hands of the Madison Avenue hucksters, the cynics who would substitute sixty-second slogans for real debate. I
propose that you and I travel the nation together and engage in a series of debates on the great issues confronting us. I do not fear the outcome of an open clash of ideas. Do you?”
(“We’re going to have to finesse that debate issue,” O’Donnell said.)
And, with unanimous delight, they heard Goldwater answer critics of his allegedly “extremist” view by proclaiming, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice and . . . moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
As Goldwater’s speech ended—with images of liberal Republicans like New York senator Ken Keating leaving the convention floor—the President raised a bottle of beer.
“Gentleman,” he said, “I propose a toast to the Republican National Convention. Tonight, they’ve given us exactly what we’ve asked for.”
In fact, in nominating Goldwater, the Republicans gave John Kennedy something more, something neither he nor any of his aides even imagined. With the Goldwater nomination, the Republicans had unknowingly protected him from the gravest threat to his presidency . . . a threat that was brewing not in the ranks of the opposition, but inside his own house.
• • •
For more than three years the Kennedy administration had been at war with itself, a war whose roots were in the contradictions the new president had brought to the office. He was skeptical of the assumptions that underlay American foreign policy: the monolithic view of communism; the support for every foreign ruler, no matter how brutal, as long as he protected U.S. interests; the dismissal of nationalism as a powerful source of revolt. But he also saw international affairs as a global contest between Moscow and Washington,
looked for new ways to engage the cold war struggle through counterinsurgency, launched a campaign of subversion against Castro’s Cuba, and touted a nonexistent “missile gap” with the Soviets as a motive for inflating the defense budget.
Moreover, many of the highest-ranking members of his administration fully shared the foreign policy orthodoxies of the postwar American establishment. Dean Rusk at State, Mac Bundy at National Security, Walt Rostow, the top men at the CIA, the generals and admirals at the top of the Pentagon firmly believed that only the threat of overwhelming force ever deterred the Communists from their march to world domination; and if threats of force did not work, then force itself was required—up to and including America’s vastly superior nuclear forces.
And by 1964 some of these men—small in number but not in influence—had come to the unsettling realization that President Kennedy did not share these bedrock convictions; worse, that he had embarked on a course that would, in their minds, pose a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States.
Yes, he’d given a steely inaugural address, promising to “pay any price, bear any burden” to protect freedom around the world. Yes, he’d pumped serious money into the Defense Department and enthused over a new breed of counterinsurgency warriors. But at the very start of his presidency, faced with the advice of the military and outgoing president Eisenhower to inject American forces into Laos, Kennedy refused, and shaped a highly shaky “neutralization” plan with Soviet leader Khrushchev. Three months later, when the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba was faltering, he refused to use any American forces to save the plan. It had been a huge black eye for the United States, a huge propaganda victory for Castro. And then the President fired CIA director Allen Dulles, and Richard Bissell, deputy director for plans. These were the men who’d overthrown
U.S. adversaries like Iran’s Mossadegh and Guatemala’s Arbenz. Now this callow, inexperienced president was ending the careers of men of proven judgment and effectiveness. And it got worse: in October 1962, Kennedy and his brother rejected the counsel of the Joint Chiefs, and wise men like Acheson and Nitze, who advised them to take those missiles out. “Moscow will understand it’s our sphere of influence, they’ll do what we did in Budapest in ’56—nothing.” And now a Communist dictator, fomenting subversion throughout Latin America, was shielded by a no-invasion pledge from the American president.
“The greatest defeat in our history,” Air Force chief Curtis LeMay called it, and many of these men agreed. The resolution of the crisis had been, as Dean Acheson had it, a matter of “luck”; in the long run, they were sure, the United States would pay for such feckless leadership—if indeed you could call it “leadership” at all.
Some of these men did not.
“Kennedy is weak, not a leader,” Allen Dulles was saying from his forced retirement.
“We have to face the fact that the United States has no leader,” Acheson told former colleagues at a dinner.
Others were far more acerbic, at least in private. Richard Helms, a career CIA official who took Bissell’s place as deputy director for plans, thought Kennedy weak, cowardly. Air Force chief LeMay despised the Kennedys, calling the President and his brother “vermin, cockroaches.”
These views only hardened after the Cuban missile crisis, when Kennedy seemed embarked on a course of conduct that would effectively call a truce in the cold war. He’d given that speech at American University, asking Americans to “reexamine” their attitudes toward the Communist world, to acknowledge the limits of American power. He’d signed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with Moscow
and, if Dean Rusk was right, he was looking to “normalize” relations with the Communist Chinese in a second term.
By 1964 a few of these men had come to believe that the policies and intentions of John Kennedy posed nothing less than a clear and present danger to the United States. Some of them—we will never really know—may have spent the time on November 22, 1963, between the shooting of the President and word of his survival with this assessment:
A President Lyndon Johnson, far more deferential to the orthodoxies of his time, far less engaged in foreign and military matters, would be far more likely to follow the wisdom that had guided the nation for twenty years or more.
That hadn’t happened. Kennedy had survived; Lyndon Johnson was gone, his spot on the ticket yet to be filled. But in the weeks and months before the Republican convention, they came to an understanding that it might be in their collective power to do politically what that bullet in Dallas had not done. Given the right dissemination of information—or disinformation—to the right people in politics and the press, a portrait could be painted of an administration paralyzed by incompetence. Confidential assessments by military and intelligence operatives—shaped for maximum political effect—could highlight weakness worldwide: an ally in South Vietnam increasingly threatened by collapse; allies in Europe doubting America’s commitment to defend the continent against a Soviet assault; allies in Latin America who feared the United States had given Castro a free hand on the continent. If Kennedy in 1960 could turn polls about U.S. prestige abroad into a campaign weapon, then these assessments of American weakness, coming (under deep cover) from high counsels of power, could prove devastating.
Indeed, they’d had a very recent, unsettling example of just how far President Kennedy had drifted from his 1960 commitment to
“pay any price, bear any burden, support any friend, oppose any foe” to resist the advance of communism. On August 2, the destroyer
Maddox
had engaged three North Vietnamese torpedo boats off the coast of North Vietnam. A brief sea battle erupted; the
Maddox
sustained light damage, the torpedo boats were heavily damaged. Two days later, when reports reached Washington of a second attack on the
Maddox
and the destroyer
Turner Joy
, President Kennedy and his top civilian and military advisors gathered to decide how to respond—most likely with a reprisal attack on North Vietnamese military installations.
And then Kennedy said no. For one thing, he argued, wasn’t there some dispute about whether the
Maddox
was in international or North Vietnamese territorial waters? Hadn’t the South Vietnamese navy been engaged in a series of coastal raids (perhaps, he thought silently, with the whispered okay of American agents)? As for the second “attack,” there was no evidence at all that such an attack had even taken place. It could just as easily have been the faulty conclusion of a nineteen-year-old sonar operator on board the
Turner Joy
.
Remember what had happened during the missile crisis, he asked, when a Soviet sub thought we were dropping depth charges and almost launched a nuclear-tipped torpedo against the
Essex
? Miscalculation, Kennedy said, was the single biggest cause of military blunders—never more so than in a nuclear age.
“Well, Mr. President,” Bundy, the national security advisor, interjected. “If the North Vietnamese
are
engaging us, it wouldn’t be very difficult to get Congress to pass a resolution of support.”
“Support for what?” Kennedy asked.
“Well,” Secretary of State Rusk said, “for pretty much anything you thought necessary to—”
“You mean a blank check,” Kennedy said. “Dean, that’s the
last
thing I want. As soon as they write me a ‘blank check,’ I’m going to start getting flak, not just from Barry, but from our own party—Jackson, Dodd, Smathers—about when I plan to cash it. It’s going to be tough enough to figure out what the hell to do there once this election’s over. We start turning up the heat now, and it’s likely to have a very bad outcome.”
For the most zealous among these men, it was more evidence that, in John Kennedy, the United States had a president who simply did not understand what was necessary to protect the long-term national security of the nation he was leading.
This conviction, in turn, raised the possibility of an even more radical step. Apart from the potential use of military and defense intelligence, there was in the hands of a very few of them intelligence of another sort, intelligence that raised the most unsettling of questions about the President himself—questions of personal behavior and morality—though for most of those desiring the end of the Kennedy presidency that kind of information was something of a “nuclear option,” as likely to injure those handling it as the intended target. Better to concentrate on serious issues of weakened national security and the unraveling of the cold war consensus.
These men might have pursued that path if the Republicans had chosen a different nominee, like George Romney or Bill Scranton or Nelson Rockefeller. The New York governor in particular was an attractive possibility: a strong-on-defense politician with an appetite for big increases in military spending (he’d pressured Nixon into endorsing just such spending as the price of his non-candidacy in 1960) who was comfortable enough with the concept of massive retaliation to propose a massive nationwide fallout-shelter building program. But Goldwater? He was too reckless with his language, like his talk of wanting the ability to “lob one into the men’s room of the Kremlin,” for heaven’s sake; and while Curtis LeMay might
find him a plausible president, the men who’d held the levers at State and Defense and CIA over the years—the “wise men” among current and former diplomats, journalists, House and Senate members, the men who formed an unofficial council of elders—did not. And besides, Goldwater was likely so weak a candidate that their efforts would fail to alter the outcome in November.
So they stayed their hand, and waited. If Kennedy continued on this dangerous path of appeasement, if he moved closer toward a naive accommodation with Moscow, then they could revisit how to render him politically impotent. Indeed, one key test would be coming very soon: whether and how to save an increasingly vulnerable South Vietnam, whose fall, they believed, would jeopardize all of Southeast Asia and whose survival required a large force of American troops, hundreds of thousands of them. If Kennedy faltered in South Vietnam after giving a clear commitment to saving the country, that would be conclusive evidence that Kennedy had to be stopped. And once he’d been reelected and was immune from accountability to the voters, the only effective weapon at their disposal would be that “nuclear” option.