The Kennedy Half-Century (19 page)

De Gaulle and the people of France were smitten with the beautiful First Lady. Mrs. Kennedy’s command of their language, Gallic pedigree, and fashion sense (including frequent choice of Oleg Cassini outfits) made her perhaps the most celebrated American to visit Paris since Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson had walked the city’s streets nearly two centuries earlier. Enraptured Parisians lined the Kennedys’ motor route shouting “Vive Jacqui!” Like the quaintly dressed Franklin, Jackie Kennedy knew how to use clothing to her advantage—especially in a time when prominent women were judged as much by their appearance as their abilities.
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She arrived for a dinner at the Elysée Palace wearing a “pink-and-white straw-lace straight-line dress” that turned heads. The president acknowledged his wife’s irresistible appeal during the toasts: “My preparation for the presidency did not include acquiring firsthand knowledge of France through diplomatic experience—I acquired it through marriage instead.” At a subsequent press luncheon, JFK delivered an even more memorable line regarding Jackie’s je ne sais quoi: “I do not think it altogether inappropriate to introduce myself to this audience. I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris, and I have enjoyed it.” That night at Versailles, Jackie flattered her hosts by wearing another French couture creation, an evening gown and coat designed by Hubert de Givenchy.
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The president had his own small triumphs as well, especially when he employed his wit. During a ceremony at the Hôtel de Ville (Paris’s city hall), he relayed an amusing story about Pierre L’Enfant. The French architect had presented a bill for $90,000 to Congress for designing the city of Washington, but he received only $3,000. Quipped the president, no doubt referring to his wife’s sizable clothing expenditures: “Some have been unkind enough to suggest that the dress designers of Paris have been collecting his bill ever since.” Parisians swooned over Kennedy’s charm and good looks, describing him as “formidable,” an adjective they “usually reserved for their own leader.” The host of the event told an American reporter, “Your president, he is very good. He marches very quickly, that young man.”
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Kennedy enjoyed the adulation, but knew that he would soon be dealing with a much tougher audience in Vienna. Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev had agreed to meet Kennedy for the first time on June 3, 1961. The Bay of Pigs fiasco had made JFK look weak and Khrushchev would try to test him, especially on Berlin. Was the Soviet leader willing to risk a war over the city? De Gaulle didn’t think so. Khrushchev was bluffing, he said, and the president should stick to his guns.
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Kennedy wasn’t so sure. After all, Berlin was the Cold War’s preeminent hot spot and a major embarrassment for the Soviets. At the end of World War
II, the Allies had divided the city (as well as the whole of Germany) into four occupation zones controlled by American, French, British, and Russian forces. Unfortunately for NATO, Berlin lay 110 miles inside Communist East Germany, making it difficult to defend. In 1948, the Soviets had closed off the highways, railroads, and waterways leading into the city with the hope of seizing control. Harry Truman responded by airlifting two million tons of supplies to West Berlin and putting troops and bombers on standby. This show of force convinced the Soviets to back down, but they had never abandoned the dream of seeing the city united under a Communist dictatorship. The East German people grew to loathe the Soviet system; by 1961, thousands of them were pouring across the border each month in search of jobs and freedom. Khrushchev was under pressure to stop the exodus before Walter Ulbricht’s Communist government collapsed. He thought that the best way might be to sign a peace treaty with East Germany, which in turn—as a supposedly independent state—could then expel the Western allies from Berlin and absorb the city. Such an agreement would also keep Germany from reuniting, a primary goal for Russia, having lost more than twenty million people to German aggression during the war.
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On June 3, 1961, Kennedy shook hands with Khrushchev on the steps of the American embassy in Vienna. The president certainly felt good since, in preparation for the meeting, he had instructed Jacobson to inject him with painkillers. When the press corps asked for additional pictures, he smiled and said, “Tell the chairman that it’s all right with me if it’s all right with him.” Khrushchev grinned and struck a pose. Behind closed doors, however, things quickly turned ugly. When Kennedy suggested that the two leaders work together to maintain the geopolitical status quo, Khrushchev lectured the young president on the inevitable triumph of Communism. “Ideas have never been destroyed and this is proven in the whole course of human development,” he railed. “The Soviet Union supports its ideas and holds them in high esteem. It cannot guarantee that these ideas will stop at its borders.” When Kennedy warned about the dangers of miscalculation and war, Khrushchev told a story about a man who kept trying to control his son after he’d already grown up. One day the son simply refused to take any more instructions from his aging father. The parallels were obvious. “We have grown up,” said the Soviet chairman. “You’re an old country. We’re a young country.” Khrushchev threw verbal punches the rest of the afternoon. He got JFK to admit that the Cuban operation had been a “mistake” and pointed out the hypocrisy of opposing Castro while supporting right-wing dictators like Francisco Franco in Spain. He also lambasted the United States for supporting the “old colonial powers of Western Europe.” “The United States itself rose against the British,” he lectured, “but now the U.S. has changed its position and it is against other people
following suit.” The sole bright spot in the afternoon came when Khrushchev agreed to support a neutral government in Laos. Kennedy’s military mobilization had convinced Khrushchev that the United States was planning to invade the country, so in the Soviet’s mind, neutrality was a better alternative. This lone concession was not enough to console JFK, who hung his head in dismay at the end of the day. “He treated me like a little boy,” the president complained. “Like a little boy.”
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Jackie did all she could to salvage the situation. At a state dinner that night at Schönbrunn Palace, she wore a shimmering pink-silver gown which accentuated her shapely figure (Oleg Cassini thought that she looked like a “mermaid”). Khrushchev, like de Gaulle, was far more taken with Mrs. Kennedy than with her husband. His own spouse, Nina, was wearing a frumpy business suit without any makeup—a symbolic gesture intended to promote Soviet values and expose the West’s decadence. When asked by one of the reporters if he would like to shake hands with JFK, Khrushchev gestured toward Jackie: “I’d like to shake
her
hand first.” Eddy Gilmore captured the mood of the event in an article penned for the
Washington Post:
?Jackie Kennedy waltzed through Vienna today in an elegant triumph that included even Soviet Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev. Meeting her for the first time, the tough and often belligerent Communist leader looked like a smitten school boy when the ice thaws along the Volga in springtime.” Sensing her advantage, Mrs. Kennedy lavished attention on the Soviet leader at dinner, asking him friendly questions about his homeland. When Khrushchev launched into a tedious monologue on the wonders of the Soviet educational system, Jackie said, “Oh, Mr. Chairman, don’t bore me with statistics.” Khrushchev “suddenly laughed and became for a moment almost cozy.”

In another part of the city, Kennedy’s advisers were reviewing the minutes of the day’s sessions and wringing their hands—the president had been soundly thrashed. George Kennan, the former ambassador to Moscow, thought that Kennedy had come across as a tonguetied rookie. Paul Nitze, assistant secretary of defense, compared Kennedy’s performance to a meaningless dance routine. The Soviets were even more unimpressed. Khrushchev was beginning to think that his inexperienced opponent might be a flaccid American intellectual.
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The sparring match between the leaders of East and West continued the next day. When the discussion turned to a ban on nuclear testing, Khrushchev scoffed at the idea of giving United Nations inspectors free reign on Soviet soil. He viewed the international assembly as a tool of capitalist oppression. One needed to look no further than the Congo for proof, he argued. U.N. troops helped topple Patrice Lumumba, the Republic of Congo’s first prime minister and a Soviet ally, an action that had famously prompted Khrushchev
to pound his shoe on a desk at the U.N. in protest. Better to have a “troika” consisting of one capitalist, one Communist, and one neutral observer manage the inspections. Now it was Kennedy’s turn to scoff. Such an arrangement would give the Soviets an unfair advantage, he complained.

When Khrushchev pressed for a general disarmament agreement instead of a single test ban treaty, Kennedy realized that the discussions were leading nowhere and changed the subject. Talk turned to Berlin, and the Soviet chairman grew visibly agitated, describing the West’s part of the city as “the bone in the Soviet throat.” Kennedy had none of it, and insisted that the United States would defend West Berlin at all costs. Khrushchev bellowed, “If the U.S. wants to start a war over Germany, let it be so.” The Soviet Union would sign a peace treaty with East Germany by the end of the year, starting the process of West Berlin’s absorption, and it was up to the United States to decide whether that meant war. Kennedy didn’t flinch: “Then, Mr. Chairman, there will be war. It will be a cold winter.” The Berlin crisis had begun.
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It was one of the most dangerous moments of the Cold War. A single misstep on either side could have plunged the earth into nuclear winter, and this thought weighed on Kennedy. According to the journalist James Reston, the president appeared “shaken and angry.” Close aide Kenny O’Donnell could see that JFK was haunted by the prospect of a nuclear exchange.
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“All wars start from stupidity,” JFK said on the flight back to Washington. “God knows I’m not an isolationist, but it seems particularly stupid to risk killing a million Americans over an argument about access rights on an Autobahn in the Soviet zone of Germany, or because the Germans want Germany reunified. If I’m going to threaten Russia with a nuclear war, it will have to be for much bigger and more important reasons than that. Before I back Khrushchev against the wall and put him to a final test, the freedom of Western Europe will have to be at stake.”
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On June 6, 1961, the president appeared on television and briefed the American people on his trip to Vienna. “Mr. Khrushchev and I had a very full and frank exchange of views on the major issues that now divide our two countries. I will tell you now that it was a very sober two days. There was no discourtesy, no loss of temper, no threats or ultimatums by either side.” Kennedy was less than fully truthful, of course. Khrushchev’s announcement that he would sign a treaty with East Germany by December was a crystal-clear ultimatum, but the president did not want to trigger panic. The Vienna talks had been “useful,” he said, and the “somber mood that they conveyed was not cause for elation or relaxation, nor was it cause for undue pessimism or fear.” Instead, they had “simply demonstrated how much work we in the Free World have to do and how long and hard a struggle must be our fate as Americans in this generation as the chief defenders of the cause of liberty.” Behind the
scenes, though, airy discussions about liberty took a back seat to preparations for a Berlin crisis. Bobby Kennedy thought that there was a “one-in-five chance of war” during this period. Dean Acheson, former secretary of state, advised the president to draw a line in the sand for the Russians. “Until this conflict of wills is resolved,” he wrote in a top secret memo, “an attempt to solve the Berlin issue by negotiation is worse than a waste of time and energy. It is dangerous.” Acheson went on to describe Khrushchev as a capricious despot who could not be “persuaded by eloquence or logic, or cajoled by friendliness.” It was time for the American eagle to show its talons, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff agreed. In the parlance of the time, West Berliners were better off dead than red. Besides, most American policymakers reasoned, the Soviets would back down in the face of American military superiority.
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Kennedy still lacked a clear strategic policy on Berlin, and time was running out. He needed to devise a way to unite the American people and send the Soviets a firm message about the West’s determination to defend democratic Germany, but at the same time provide Khrushchev with an escape hatch. Kennedy scheduled a nationally televised address to the nation on July 25, even as his advisers strongly disagreed about the right approach. According to Sorensen, “Few presidents had ever worked harder to get the right words, establish the right mood, and send the right signals. No president had ever believed more was at stake.”
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Some of Kennedy’s men had even worked on a plan to launch a preemptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. In early July, a young Harvard professor and government consultant who would rocket to fame in the Nixon administration, Henry Kissinger, sent JFK’s national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, a memo on the problem of the president’s limited options in Berlin. At the time, U.S. policy called for massive retaliation in the event of an attack, which meant firing every single nuclear weapon at every available target, “no matter how limited the cause of the war might be.” Kissinger thought that it might be possible to wage a limited nuclear war instead. He discussed the idea with Carl Kaysen and Henry Rowen, two fellow intellectuals who were working on defense issues for the administration. Kaysen and Rowen began exploring alternatives to the nuclear doomsday scenario.
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