To Move the World (5 page)

History has judged that Kennedy “lost” the Vienna Summit because he was browbeaten by Khrushchev, particularly when the two quarreled over ideology. Indeed, Kennedy himself described the Vienna experience as brutal, telling a
New York Times
reporter that it was the “worst thing in my life. He savaged me.”
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Yet Kennedy in fact had held firm and clear: the West would not buckle under threats on West Berlin. More important, and despite all appearances, Kennedy and Khrushchev were now on a path to resolve the larger German issues, a path they would pursue successfully in 1963.

But the next act on Berlin would be a public relations disaster for the Soviet Union. As tensions over Berlin mounted, more and
more East Berliners voted with their feet by crossing the line to West Berlin and from there to the West generally. During the first six months of 1961, over 100,000 people left East Germany, with 50,000 fleeing in June and July alone.
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The ongoing exodus of East Berliners was a huge economic loss to a floundering economy, but an even starker daily embarrassment in the frontline competition between socialism and capitalism. It was one of the main reasons why Khrushchev sought a long-term solution to Berlin.

As the flow of East Berliners accelerated, so did the geopolitical pressures. Finally, the East German government, with the support of its Soviet backers, moved to stanch the human flood. Berlin woke up on the morning of August 13 to a barbed wire divide, soon to be a concrete and heavily armed wall patrolled by around 7,000 soldiers and stretching 96 miles in Berlin and along the border between East and West Germany.
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Kennedy wisely did not challenge the Berlin Wall, except in a perfunctory manner, recognizing that any challenge or protest would prove empty. The West would certainly not go to war over Soviet actions on the
Soviet
side of the wall. Indeed, Kennedy immediately and correctly surmised that the wall might actually prove to be stabilizing in its perverse way, by removing the embarrassing and costly provocation of mass outmigration from East Berlin. As he suspected, the end of the flow of migrants from East Berlin rather quickly eased the Berlin crisis.

In fact, the overall Berlin situation seemed to Kennedy to be a dangerous snare that was certainly not worth the risks of global war. After the Vienna Summit, Kennedy had commented to his close aide Kenneth O’Donnell:

Kennedy would continue, successfully, to defend West Berlin, but he would also recognize the need to move to a sounder, long-term position with the Soviet Union vis-à-vis Germany. That insight was crucial to Kennedy’s eventual success in 1963, and to the calming of the East-West confrontation thereafter. It was a basic strategic insight that Eisenhower never recognized or acted upon.

Chapter 2
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The Cuban Missile Crisis
 

In the tense aftermath of the Vienna Summit, military budgets soared on both sides. A voluntary suspension of atmospheric nuclear testing that had lasted since 1958 fell apart in August 1961 when Khrushchev announced the Soviet Union would resume tests, breaking an explicit promise not to unilaterally resume tests that he had made to Kennedy two months earlier in Vienna. When Kennedy was told the news upon arising from a nap, his first reaction was “fucked again.”
¹
His closest advisers, McGeorge Bundy and Ted Sorensen, later said Kennedy felt more betrayed by the resumption of Soviet nuclear testing than by any other Soviet action during his presidency.
²
On October 30, the Soviet Union detonated a fifty-seven-megaton hydrogen bomb nicknamed the Tsar Bomba, which remains the most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated.
³
After agonizing over the political ramifications, Kennedy reluctantly gave the order for the United States to resume testing as well. When Adlai Stevenson, former Democratic presidential
nominee and Kennedy’s ambassador to the United Nations, complained about the resumption of U.S. testing, Kennedy told him:

The two superpowers had entered an icy and dangerous phase of the Cold War, exactly the opposite of what both Kennedy and Khrushchev had hoped for at the start of 1961. In January 1962, when asked about the greatest disappointment of his first year in office, Kennedy answered: “Our failure to get an agreement on the cessation of nuclear testing, because … that might have been a very important step in easing the tension and preventing a proliferation of [nuclear] weapons.”
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The arms race, the Bay of Pigs, the confrontation in Vienna, and other events had eclipsed the early hopes.

Both countries pursued an aggressive agenda. Military budgets grew. Nuclear testing resumed. The Soviet ultimatum on Berlin was repeated, and the U.S. rejection of it held firm as well. In October 1961, Kennedy had his deputy secretary of defense, Roswell Gilpatric, give a blunt speech outlining America’s nuclear superiority, significantly upping the ante. For the first time, the U.S. government publicly spelled out the vast nuclear advantage of the United States over the Soviet Union.
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This was enormously revealing to the public, especially given Kennedy campaign rhetoric about the “missile gap.”

Khrushchev was deeply undercut politically by the speech, as his domestic foes and competitors clearly recognized. Gilpatric’s revelations called into question the Soviet capacity to make good on its threats. More fundamentally, the revelation of the U.S. nuclear advantage undermined Khrushchev’s basic strategy of peaceful coexistence, by giving ammunition to Soviet hardliners who claimed that the Western alliance was out for a first nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. Khrushchev found himself increasingly cornered at home, in part through wounds self-inflicted by boasting and brashness, and in part through the arms race itself. He had overplayed his response to Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs blunder, and found Kennedy to be a tougher foe than he had expected.

A furious Khrushchev decided on an even bolder stroke, a further escalatory move that in his estimation would address the nuclear imbalance, defend Soviet global interests, and present a stunning fait accompli to his U.S. counterpart. He would secretly place intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Cuba, and then reveal them to the world after the November 1962 U.S. congressional elections. He saw several advantages to this remarkable scheme. First, with missiles only ninety miles from the coast of Florida, the United States would feel the same pressure that the Soviet Union felt with U.S. nuclear missiles stationed nearby in Turkey and Italy. Second, the Soviet action would not require massive budgetary outlays, and therefore could be accomplished without a reversal of Khrushchev’s desired strategy of diverting military spending to raising living standards domestically. Third, the Soviet Union would be capitalizing on the Bay of Pigs blunder by presenting the move as a defense of a fraternal socialist ally, in the context of a brazen failed invasion by the imperialist United States that suggested a high likelihood of future U.S. strikes against Cuba. Fourth, the Soviet Union would have a strong bargaining chip in any future negotiations over Berlin or other contested issues.
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The one thing that Khrushchev clearly did not want from this move was war. In explaining his proposal to his skeptical foreign
minister, Andrei Gromyko, he emphasized that “[w]e don’t need a nuclear war and we have no intention of fighting.”
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In winning the support of the Politburo for the move, Khrushchev repeatedly emphasized that “the Soviet Union should not and would not go so far as to risk a nuclear conflict.”
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The proposal was all about perceptions and threats, not about any desire to fight an actual nuclear war. But the reality was that a battle of perceptions could easily and accidentally slide into a shooting war, and a shooting war could become Armageddon.

Starting in August and escalating in October 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis quickly unfolded.
¹⁰
Khrushchev’s plan was to install the missiles by stealth and then unveil the new situation on a visit to the UN in November. In the meantime, Khrushchev would falsely maintain that any military support to Cuba would be conventional and defensive in nature. He naïvely believed that the nuclear missiles would be in place before the United States noticed, despite ongoing U.S. surveillance. At that point the fait accompli would be irreversible. If the United States could have nuclear missiles pointed at the Soviet Union from nearby bases in Turkey and southern Europe, the United States would be forced by world opinion, Khrushchev believed, to accept the Soviet missiles in Cuba.

A massive flotilla of Soviet ships carrying the missiles, other military equipment, and Soviet army units set sail for Cuba. The United States quickly noticed the increase of sea shipments, and Kennedy ordered the CIA to step up U-2 aerial surveillance and other intelligence gathering (including using Cuban informants). Several Republican senators, led by Kenneth Keating, berated the administration for allowing a Soviet weapons buildup in Cuba, and asserted that the Soviet Union planned to introduce nuclear missiles into the new military installations. Kennedy and most of his advisers rejected this claim as political theater, refusing to believe that Khrushchev would ever implement such a dangerous and destabilizing move. Kennedy publicly declared in September
that the United States would never tolerate offensive Soviet weapons in Cuba, promising that “if Cuba should possess a capacity to carry out offensive actions against the United States … the United States would act.”
¹¹
He also denied that such a buildup was taking place, relying on repeated Soviet assurances that all weapons being introduced into Cuba were purely defensive in nature.

On October 15, further U-2 surveillance revealed the shocking truth: offensive weapons, both missiles and fighter planes, were in Cuba, with more on their way, in direct contradiction to repeated Soviet promises. Moreover, the installations were far along, though the surveillance could not say with assurance exactly how far. Perhaps some of the missiles were already installed. Others might be ready to launch in hours or days.

The next thirteen days were the most perilous in the planet’s history. The drama was largely captured on White House tape recordings and is now, of course, the subject of a vast and detailed recounting. Kennedy put the odds of a nuclear war at “somewhere between one out of three and even.”
¹²
He immediately created an Executive Committee (ExComm) of the National Security Council, where the president; his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy; and around a dozen senior officials huddled for agonizingly tense days, trying to plot a way out of the crisis.
^*
At the very start of the ExComm process, Kennedy made the basic decision—one that was never second-guessed within the group—that the Soviet weapons must go. Either the weapons would be removed peacefully by the Soviets themselves, or they would become the cause of war.