To Move the World (2 page)

Let us therefore learn and marvel at how Kennedy helped humanity to take one more step on the path of survival and human achievement.

Chapter 1
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WHEN JOHN F. KENNEDY
came to office in January 1961, the world lived in peril of a nuclear war between the two superpowers. The Cold War confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union would eventually consume trillions of dollars and millions of lives in wars fought around the world. At times, humanity seemed to be “gripped by forces we cannot control,” a pessimistic view that Kennedy noted and strenuously argued against in his Peace Speech. And yet the power of those disruptive forces at times was indeed nearly overwhelming, causing events to spin beyond the control even of presidents, Communist Party chairmen, and the countries they led.

The Cold War was in every sense a stepchild of the two world wars. Those wars created the structures of geopolitics, military might, and, perhaps most important of all, the psychological mindsets that determined the course of the Cold War. John Kennedy’s peace strategy would emerge from his intimate understanding of the dynamics that had driven the two wars. The first
war he knew as a voracious student of history, especially the history as written by Winston Churchill. The second war he knew firsthand. The years between 1938 and 1945 were a deeply formative period of his adult life—as a student in prewar London while his father was U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom; as a young author grappling with the question of why England had failed for so long to confront Hitler; as a patrol boat captain in the Pacific, where his vessel PT-109 was sunk by a Japanese destroyer; and as part of a grieving family when his elder brother was lost in a daring bombing mission over Germany.
¹

The overwhelming question facing the world, and facing Kennedy during his presidency, was how to prevent a third world war. The factors that had caused the two wars—geopolitics, arms races, blunders, bluster, miscalculations, fears, and opportunism—continued to operate and to threaten a new conflagration. Yet the context was also fundamentally new and more threatening. The nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 to conclude World War II had ushered in the nuclear age, and had made the stakes incalculably higher. A thermonuclear bomb could now carry far more explosive force than all of the bombs of the Second World War.

Kennedy’s worldview on these issues was shaped above all by the influence and model of Winston Churchill, England’s great author-politician-warrior-statesman, whose masterly history of the first war,
The World Crisis
, described a tragic era of war through miscalculation;
²
whose warnings about Hitler in the 1930s had gone unheeded until almost too late; whose leadership as prime minister between 1940 and 1945 enabled the United Kingdom to survive and eventually triumph over Hitler; whose warnings in 1946, just after World War II ended, alerted the West to the rising threat of Soviet power; and whose calls during the 1940s and 1950s for a negotiated settlement with the Soviet Union did much to influence Kennedy’s peace strategy as president.
³
Kennedy’s lifelong fascination with, learning from, and urge to emulate Winston Churchill has been recounted by many biographers.

The greatest problem facing Kennedy (and indeed the world) in drawing lessons from the two world wars was that the lessons were highly complex, subtle, and even seemingly contradictory. World War I seemed to be a lesson about self-fulfilling crises, where the fear of war itself led to an arms race, while the arms race in turn led to a world primed for war. These lessons seemed to call for restraint in the arms race and avoidance of a self-fulfilling rush to war, and so even as Hitler rearmed Germany in the 1930s, in contravention of the Treaty of Versailles that had ended World War I, Britain avoided provocations that could spiral out of control. Most famously, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain argued that it would be better to accede to German demands on border adjustments with Czechoslovakia, and so “appeased” Hitler in the name of peace at the Munich conference in 1938, a disastrous mistake that fueled Hitler’s drive to war.
⁴

If World War I seemed to argue against arms races and self-fulfilling prophecies of war, the lead-up to World War II, by contrast, seemed to argue for meeting strength with strength, and avoiding the temptation of “appeasement.” For Kennedy, the debate over appeasement was more than intellectual; it was intensely personal. John Kennedy watched closely as his father, Joe, strongly defended appeasement, indeed declaring that Chamberlain had no choice when he acceded to Hitler’s outrageous demands at the 1938 Munich conference, as Hitler would have defeated the United Kingdom in battle. When war finally broke out, the proponents of appeasement were humiliated and Joe Kennedy’s vast political ambitions were destroyed.
⁵
The younger Kennedy would soon implicitly come down on Churchill’s side, writing in his first book,
Why England Slept
, that Britain had dangerously delayed rearming
under the illusion that appeasing Hitler would keep it safe and out of war.
⁶

As president, Kennedy would battle with these powerful and conflicting dynamics. Should he restrain the arms race in order to avoid a self-feeding race to war with the Soviet Union? Or should he strengthen U.S. arms in order to negotiate from strength? Should he make concessions to the Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev to acknowledge Soviet interests? Or should he hold the line to avoid the appearance and reality of appeasement? Kennedy would remain a student of history, and of Churchill, whom he most admired, trying to apply the complex lessons of the past to the urgent challenges of the present.

The Nuclear Arms Race
 

The problems of distrust between the Soviet Union and the United States were profound, pervasive, and persistent, and that distrust spurred the arms race. The two sides were of course rivals and competitors. And each side lied to the other, repeatedly and persistently. These were not grounds for easy trust. Nor was the historical context. Just a few years earlier, Hitler had cheated relentlessly, thereby winning significant concessions. Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler at Munich hung over the Cold War era: Don’t trust the other side. Better to arm to the teeth.

Even though there were enormous gains to be had by both the United States and the Soviet Union if they could agree on the postwar order in Europe, politicians on both sides found it nearly impossible to take any steps that required trust. If they did, they opened themselves up to extraordinarily harsh attacks by hardliners on their own side who denied that the other side would abide by any agreements. A U.S. politician who urged agreement with the Soviet Union risked immediate subjection to the cries of
“Munich” and “appeasement,” powerful political charges and ones Kennedy was especially eager to avoid.

The two sides were trapped by two closely related problems: the prisoner’s dilemma and the security dilemma. The prisoner’s dilemma holds that in the absence of long-term trust or binding agreements, the logic of inter-state rivalry will push both sides to arm. Should the United States arm or disarm? If the Soviet Union arms, the United States has no choice but to arm as well in order to avoid being the weaker side. If the Soviet Union disarms, then the United States gains military and political advantage by arming while the Soviet Union is weak. Therefore, arming is a “dominant” strategy: the best move no matter what the other side does. Since the logic is the same for the other side, both sides end up continually increasing their arms, even though a binding agreement to disarm would be mutually beneficial.
⁷

The security dilemma, propounded by Robert Jervis, a leading political theorist, is a corollary of the prisoner’s dilemma.
⁸
The security dilemma holds that a
defensive
action by one side will often be viewed by the other side as an offensive action. Thus, if the United States builds its nuclear arsenal to stave off a Soviet conventional land invasion of Europe, the Soviet Union will view the U.S. nuclear buildup as preparation for a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union rather than as a defensive measure. And if the Soviet Union tries to catch up with the U.S. nuclear arsenal, that will be viewed as an offensive action by the United States. U.S. hardliners would argue that the Soviet Union is trying to neutralize the U.S. nuclear deterrent so that the Soviet Union can launch a conventional attack.

As a result of the absence of trust, and the harsh logic of both the prisoner’s dilemma and the security dilemma, both sides continued to amass nuclear weapons to the point of massive overkill. And as the arsenals continued to expand, each side feared that the other was actually building up for a surprise first-strike attack.
The United States indeed contemplated launching a preventive nuclear war, worried that it would be unable to defend itself in the future. Jervis recalled the words of the German statesman Otto von Bismarck, who called a preventive war “committing suicide from fear of death.”
⁹

The nuclear arms race accelerated as the United States and the Soviet Union expanded their arsenals, and as the United Kingdom and France became nuclear powers (in 1952 and 1960, respectively) with their own independent arsenals. By 1960, the United States had nuclear warheads positioned in several countries around the world.
¹⁰
The Soviet Union felt itself very much surrounded indeed, and increasingly unsure of whether these U.S. nuclear weapons were really under U.S. control.

Of course it wasn’t just the international situation that prompted the arms buildup on each side. It was also domestic politics. The military-industrial complex gained power within each government as time went on. In the United States, each branch of the military demanded its own nuclear arsenal, so that competition among the U.S. Army, Air Force, and Navy also drove up military budgets and the numbers of nuclear warheads and delivery systems. The same was true on the Soviet side, where there was far less constraint than in the United States on the political power of the military-industrial complex.

To the Brink
 

When Kennedy assumed office, he took to heart Churchill’s belief that political leaders must work actively to solve vexing international problems. He was intent on pursuing arms control, but was also a staunch Cold Warrior, partly out of conviction and partly out of political expediency, in order to protect himself from powerful hardline anti-communists. Kennedy believed that he could untangle the dangerous conflicts with the Soviet Union. And, as Churchill urged, Kennedy would aim to solve these problems from a position of U.S. military strength and without relinquishing vital Western interests.