JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President (15 page)

Kennedy concluded his 1962 conversation with Fay about a
Seven Days in May
–style coup by saying flatly, “Then,
if there were a third Bay of Pigs
, it [a coup] could happen.” He paused to emphasize the significance of his comment before concluding with an old Navy phrase, “But it won’t happen on my watch.”

By August 1963, some opponents of the test ban treaty were calling it a betrayal of America’s strategic interests. An ad hoc organization calling itself the Committee Against the Treaty of Moscow
ran a full-page advertisement
in U.S. newspapers that quoted General LeMay as saying that he would have opposed the treaty had it not been signed in Moscow before he learned about it. The advertisement also repeated Edwin Teller’s warning to senators that by ratifying the treaty, “You will have given away the future safety of our country.” Referring to the forthcoming ratification vote, it declared, “In September 1963, we shall be asked to repeat the reckless venture in appeasement that culminated in the ‘Peace in Our Time’ agreement signed in Munich on September 30, 1938.”

A
New Republic
article in September titled “
Rebellion in the Air Force
?” began, “The Air Force’s ruling hierarchy is in open defiance of its Constitutional Commander-in-Chief, and in some ways the situation bears a growing resemblance to the fictional story line of last year’s best-seller
Seven Days in May,
the account of a nearly successful military coup by an Air Force general in protest against a nuclear arms treaty just concluded with the Russians.” The article’s author, Raymond Senter, reported that during its recent convention, the Air Force Association (AFA), an organization of retired and active-duty Air Force personnel, aerospace contractors, and lobbyists, had issued a blistering statement opposing the test ban treaty. Active-duty AFA members were prohibited from participating in drafting AFA statements, but Senter argued that the prohibition was meaningless since they seldom deviated from official Air Force views. Secretary of the Air Force Eugene Zuckert, usually a strong AFA supporter, condemned the AFA statement as “immoderate” and “alarmist,” and canceled his appearance at its convention.

The test ban treaty may have pushed the most extreme elements in the military-industrial complex to the brink of mutiny, but it was not—at least not yet—the “third Bay of Pigs” that Kennedy had mentioned to Fay. But there were two others on the horizon: Vietnam and Ellen Rometsch. Kennedy had told O’Donnell that he expected to be “
damned everywhere as a Communist appeaser
” when he removed U.S. advisers from South Vietnam, and the revelation that he had bedded a former member of the East German Communist Party months before negotiating the test ban treaty might have tempted his opponents in the military to circumvent a drawn-out impeachment process with an Operation Northwoods–style action.

Khrushchev had also run afoul of his military establishment in the months preceding the treaty. He had told a February 1963 meeting of the Soviet Defense Council, “
The time has come when he who is successful
in preventing war wins, not he who counts on military victory.” According to his son Sergei, his father followed this with “
some absolutely unusual things
—things that seemed to me not only seditious, but improbable as well.” These included a plan to stop increasing the Soviet nuclear arsenal because, as Khrushchev told Marshal Zakharov, who headed his general staff, “
You plan hundreds of targets
, but even a dozen missiles with thermonuclear warheads are enough to make the very thought of war senseless.” (At his August 20 news conference Kennedy had said, “How many weapons do you need and how many megatons do you need to destroy?”)
Khrushchev also recommended scaling back the conventional army
on the theory that if nuclear missiles had made war between the great powers senseless, it was equally senseless to spend money to maintain a large conventional army.

Khrushchev believed that more agreements like the test ban treaty might reduce cold war tensions to the point that a large standing army and growing nuclear arsenal might become unnecessary. This was the reasoning behind the letter that Dobrynin handed Kennedy at their August 26 meeting. As Dobrynin watched, Kennedy opened it and read, “
Availing myself of the return
of our Ambassador A. Dobrynin to Washington I would like to express some of my thoughts in connection with the state of things shaping up now after the Treaty on banning nuclear weapons has been signed in Moscow.” These “thoughts” were so similar to the points Kennedy had made in his nationally televised July 26 speech that Khrushchev could have been plagiarizing them.

On July 26, Kennedy had praised the treaty as “a shaft of light cut into the darkness” and the first agreement to seek control over “the forces of nuclear destruction,” and had said that although it did not “mean an end to the threat of nuclear war” it would “radically reduce the nuclear testing” that might otherwise occur. “This treaty is not the millennium,” he continued. “It will not resolve all conflicts . . . or eliminate the dangers of war. . . . But it is an important first step—a step towards peace—a step towards reason—a step away from war.” He stressed that although “no one can predict with certainty, therefore, what further agreements, if any, can be built on the foundations of this one. . . . The important point is that efforts to seek new agreements will go forward.” He warned against assuming that the new atmosphere between the United States and the Soviet Union would last forever, saying, “We have learned in times past that the spirit of one moment or place can be gone in the next.” After declaring, “for the first time in many years, the path of peace may be open,” he evoked the Chinese proverb “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step” and concluded, “My fellow Americans, let us take that first step. Let us . . . step back from the shadows of war and seek out the way of peace. And if that journey is a thousand miles, or even more, let history record that we, in this land, at this time, took that first step.”

Khrushchev reiterated these points in his letter, writing that it was important to follow the treaty quickly with more agreements that would demonstrate to critics that its economic and political benefits outweighed any security risks. He called the treaty a “good beginning” and said it “strengthens the hopes of the peoples [of the world] for a further relaxation of tension, [and] gives a prospect of solution of other unsettled questions.” He agreed that “it is important now not to stop at what has been achieved but to make further steps from the good start taken by us” and urged that “there should be no slowing down the pace,” and that the problems separating them “should rather be solved now when a more calm and consequently more favorable atmosphere has been created.”

Dobrynin was a glib and charming man who had served in Washington and at the United Nations during the fifties. He spoke excellent English, so he and Kennedy conversed without interpreters. Ambassador-at-Large Llewellyn Thompson, the only other person in the room, took notes, and Kennedy secretly recorded the meeting.
Thompson’s official memorandum
is lengthy and detailed. It corresponds closely to the tape but
omits some of Kennedy’s playful banter
with Dobrynin, and several of the president’s statements that would have been deeply embarrassing had they become public. For example, speaking of the fierce attacks on the treaty during the Senate hearings, Kennedy had asked rhetorically, “What can I do with people like Teller or Senator Goldwater?” Like General de Gaulle, they were, he said, “impervious to reason and raised absurd arguments.”

He told Dobrynin that he hoped the treaty would lead to further agreements, and said that once the Senate ratified it he was prepared to discuss ways to prevent surprise attacks, a declaration prohibiting the introduction of weapons into outer space, and a civil aviation agreement, and would raise all this with Foreign Minister Gromyko when he visited the United States the next month. Kennedy assured Dobrynin that America would not allow West Germany to “carry us into an adventure which we would have to finish,” and, speaking of a possible escalation of tensions in Southeast Asia, said, “I wish one of us never got into Laos.” After Dobrynin confirmed that Khrushchev would soon be visiting Cuba, he said that when the chairman spoke there, he hoped he would remember how sensitive Cuba was in the United States, particularly for a president facing reelection.

Dobrynin pressed him to promise that there would be more agreements and “no slowing down the pace.” He countered that they would have to find “the right time” to sign a civil aviation agreement. Dobrynin pushed back, suggesting they sign it immediately and have it take effect later.

After bemoaning the cost of the space program, Kennedy suggested that the United States and Soviet Union consider coordinating their activities in outer space. Since neither was exploring space for military purposes, it was largely a matter of “scientific prestige,” he said, and even then, the prestige turned out to be fleeting “three-day wonders.” He proposed that they “come to some understanding as to what our space schedules might be.” That way, they might each save “a good deal of money.” He added, “If we’re both going to the moon, we ought to both go to the moon on some arrangement where we don’t use so many resources for something that is, in the final analysis, not that important.”

This was not the first time that Kennedy had proposed that the two nations cooperate in space, even to the point of mounting a joint moon expedition. During the campaign, he had told the
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
that “
certain aspects of the exploration of space
might be handled by joint efforts, for the cost of space efforts will mount radically as we move ambitiously outward.” He had proclaimed in his inaugural address, “Let both sides seek to invoke the wonders of science instead of its terrors. Together let us explore the stars,” and had expanded on this in his 1961 State of the Union address, saying that although the United States was ahead in “the science and technology of space,” the Soviet Union led in the capacity to place large vehicles in orbit, and that both should consider “removing these endeavors from the bitter and wasteful competition of the Cold War.”

He had abandoned these noble sentiments after the Soviet Union launched the first human into orbit on April 12, 1961. The flight by Yuri Gagarin was a
Sputnik
-like shock to American self-esteem, and within weeks Secretary of Defense McNamara and NASA’s administrator James Webb had given him a report recommending a program aimed at landing a man on the moon before the Soviet Union. They argued, “
Dramatic achievements in space
 . . . symbolize the technological power and organizing capacity of a nation.” Such achievements might be “economically unjustified,” but America should nevertheless decide to “pursue space projects aimed at enhancing national prestige,” not least because the competition in space was “part of the battle along the fluid front of the Cold War.” Putting a man on the moon first would represent a decisive victory on this battlefront. With the memory of Gagarin’s triumph fresh, they told Kennedy, “The orbiting of machines is not the same as the orbiting or landing of a man. . . . It is a man, not merely machines, that captures the imagination of the world.”

After accepting the nomination
Kennedy had promised Americans a “New Frontier
,” of “unknown opportunities and perils” beyond which lay “the uncharted areas of science and space.” In his nationally televised address to a joint session of Congress on May 25, 1961, he compared the space race to the exploits of explorers like Lewis and Clark, and declared, “
I believe that this nation should commit itself
to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind. . . . None will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.”

For a competitor like Kennedy, a race to the moon was the ultimate competition. For a man who loved the sea, space was “the new ocean,” and in September 1962 he told students at Rice University, “
We set sail on this new sea
because there is knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won and used for the progress for all people.” But he still harbored doubts about the cost and value of a lunar mission. Soon after announcing the program, he suggested a joint expedition to Khrushchev during their summit in Vienna. After initially dismissing the idea, Khrushchev returned to it later, saying, “
All right—why not
?” But when Kennedy raised it again, he insisted it could only follow a general disarmament.

He remained conflicted about a moon landing throughout 1961 and 1962. The romantic and visionary Kennedy liked its daring and challenge; the practical Kennedy fretted about its expense and wondered if it was simply a cold war stunt. At an August 1962 news conference he said that the United States remained behind the Soviet Union in long-range booster rockets but would soon surpass it. Achieving this, however, was requiring expenditure that he called “
a very heavy burden
upon us all.”

During a November 1962
meeting he and Webb argued about the relative importance of winning the race to the moon compared with NASA’s other projects. Webb believed that the lunar program was part of the goal of making America preeminent in space, calling it “one of the top-priority programs.”

“Jim, I think it is
the
top priority,” he said. “I think we ought to have that very clear. Some of these programs can slip six months, or nine months, and nothing strategic is going to happen. . . . But this is important for political reasons, international political reasons. This is, whether we like it or not, in a sense a race. If we get second to the moon, it’s nice, but it’s like being second any time.” When Webb suggested linking the lunar program to a broader one of making the United States preeminent in space, Kennedy became exasperated, and said, “I’m not that interested in space. I think it’s good, I think we ought to know about it, we’re ready to spend reasonable amounts of money. But we’re talking about these fantastic expenditures that wreck our budget and all these other domestic programs, and the only justification for it . . . is because we hope to beat them [the Soviets] and demonstrate that starting behind, as we did by a couple of years, by God, we passed them.”