Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) (13 page)

Kennedy and McNamara, despite their early explorations into how nuclear war might be “managed,” would finally conclude that there was no such thing as a winnable nuclear war—considering how many people would be vaporized or poisoned in such a holocaust. But LeMay was of a different opinion. “It depends on how you define ‘win,’” said McNamara. “LeMay defined it as ending up with more nuclear warheads than your opponent had. I would define ‘win’ as no more than acceptable casualties.”

McNamara managed to stay on civil terms with LeMay, whom he had served as an analyst during World War II, when the general was first making his name as a Shiva of war, laying waste to much of Japan with his infamous firebombing campaign. “I thought he was the ablest combat commander of any senior military man I met during my three years of service in World War II,” McNamara said. But other members of Kennedy’s national security team had decidedly hostile encounters with LeMay and his top Air Force commanders.

Carl Kaysen, one of the Harvard scholars brought into the White House as an advisor, recalled a particularly toxic meeting with LeMay’s longtime associate, General Thomas Power of the Strategic Air Command—a man even LeMay considered “not stable” and a “sadist.” “I went out to SAC for a meeting with Tom Power, with [McNamara whiz kid] Adam Yarmolinsky,” Kaysen recalled. “He just acted extraordinarily hostile to us. In fact, as we compared notes later, we felt that we might never get out of there. His attitude was, What the hell are you civilians doing here at SAC talking about our nuclear strategy and messing around—it’s none of your goddam business.”

Kennedy personally despised LeMay—“I don’t want that man near me again,” he once spat out, after walking out on one of the general’s briefings. “A prick like LeMay—Kennedy didn’t trust him as far as he could throw a marble pillar,” Charles Daly, one of Kennedy’s White House political aides, says today. But in June 1961, Kennedy felt politically compelled to promote LeMay to the Joint Chiefs as commander of the Air Force. “He wanted to be protected on his right flank,” Kaysen explained. JFK knew that if he pushed LeMay into retirement, he would create an uproar in the Air Force and there would be one more retired general on the political circuit, denouncing his “no-win” policies.

General David Shoup, head of the Marine Corps, was the only member of the Joint Chiefs with whom Kennedy was able to build a decent relationship. A few days after promoting LeMay, Kennedy, deeply estranged from his top military men, would prevail on Maxwell Taylor, the maverick military thinker who had fallen out of step with Eisenhower, to come out of retirement and take a specially created position in the White House as his military advisor. The Joint Chiefs immediately recognized the move for what it was—a “screw you” attempt to keep them out of his hair.

IN SUMMER 1961, KENNEDY
came under increasing pressure from military and intelligence officials to consider launching a preemptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. The president was informed that far from suffering a “missile gap,” the United States actually enjoyed a growing lead in land-based nuclear missiles. According to a National Intelligence Estimate delivered that year, the Soviets had only four intercontinental ballistic missiles in place—all of them on low alert at a test site—while the U.S. had 185 ICBMs and over 3,400 deliverable nuclear bombs at the time. This clear “window” of nuclear superiority would eventually close as Soviet nuclear weapons production began to catch up. While it remained open, Washington was a hothouse of militaristic fever, which accounts for LeMay’s intemperate remarks about an imminent nuclear war at the July dinner party.

On July 20, at a National Security Council meeting, Kennedy was presented an official plan for a surprise nuclear attack by the Joint Chiefs chairman, General Lemnitzer, and Allen Dulles, who would remain at the helm of the CIA until the fall. Lemnitzer, whose intellectual abilities the president found wanting, presented the doomsday plan “as though it were for a kindergarten class,” according to Schlesinger, and a disgusted Kennedy got up in the middle of the meeting and walked out. “And we call ourselves the human race,” he bitterly remarked to Secretary of State Dean Rusk afterwards.

The relationship between Kennedy and his Joint Chiefs “reached a new low,” in the words of
New York Times
military correspondent Hanson Baldwin, that month, when the president ordered FBI agents to “invade” the military commanders’ Pentagon offices to determine the source of a press leak about military contingency plans to deal with the developing Berlin Crisis. Kennedy’s action was “degrading,” the chiefs complained to Baldwin, one of their more sympathetic ears in the press, and they predicted that the leaks would not be pinned on them. Years later, in an oral history for the U.S. Naval Institute, Baldwin would charge that he too had been subjected to an FBI probe during the Kennedy presidency, when Bobby dispatched agents to investigate an article he wrote about Soviet missile defenses. “The Kennedys used intimidation and pressure to force people into line. They used it quite often,” said Baldwin, reflecting a point of view widely held in the military world he covered. “From my observation of many years in Washington dealing with many presidents, back to FDR, the Kennedys were the most retributive and the most ruthless of any of them.”

By the last week of July, Kennedy found himself caught up in a growing storm, buffeted by the winds of war both at home—within his military—and overseas in Berlin. “Nuclear conflict was very much in the air that week,” wrote University of Texas political historian James K. Galbraith, the son of John Kenneth Galbraith, in a revealing article about the first-strike pressures on Kennedy. Khrushchev was escalating tensions over Berlin, the divided city that had long been a Cold War flashpoint, by threatening to let his East German clients close off access to West Berlin. Kennedy’s generals and hard-line advisors like Acheson, who were convinced that the president’s failure of will at the Bay of Pigs had led directly to his humiliation at the hands of a bullying Khrushchev at the Vienna summit in June, thought he was in danger of being pushed around yet again in Berlin. They urged him to take a firm stand, and Kennedy asked his advisors for a Berlin scenario that envisioned a limited nuclear war.

But in the end, JFK threaded the needle on Berlin, as he would do repeatedly during his administration, avoiding either an explosive confrontation or embarrassing capitulation through an artful dance combining tough speech, symbolic military measures, and back-channel diplomacy. “The Berlin Wall was allowed to remain intact when constructed in August of 1961, a symbolic column of [American] soldiers was sent through to West Berlin, and a fallout shelter program was undertaken in the United States,” noted Galbraith. “But [Kennedy] did not engage the Soviets.” LeMay’s nuclear Armageddon would be averted—at least until the next showdown.

As usual, the military found Kennedy’s moderation unsatisfying. General Lucius Clay, the hero of the 1948–49 Berlin Blockade whom Kennedy had installed as his top military envoy in the divided city during the latest crisis, seemed anxious to find ways to challenge the tense but peaceful truce that prevailed in Berlin during the fall. In October, Clay precipitated a nerve-wracking confrontation with the Russians at the Berlin Wall, the first time in history that American and Soviet tanks had ever faced each other. Valentin Falin, Soviet ambassador to West Germany, said Moscow later learned that Clay had ordered his tank commanders to knock down the Berlin Wall—as he had instructed them to practice doing in a nearby forest without informing the White House. If that had happened, Falin said, the Soviet tanks would have returned fire and we would have slid “closer to the third world war than ever”—just the kind of accidental inferno sparked by trigger-happy generals that Kennedy deeply feared.

In the midst of this unnerving showdown, Kennedy felt compelled to soothe not only Soviet pride but that of his military commander. “I know you people over there haven’t lost your nerve,” he told Clay over the phone. The confrontational general was not mollified by this presidential pat on the back, however. “Mr. President,” he shot back, “we’re not worried about our nerves. We’re worrying about those of you people in Washington.”

In the end, Kennedy succeeded in outmaneuvering his general, secretly instructing Bobby, the “little brother” whom Clay said he could “not abide,” to communicate with his back-channel Soviet friend Georgi Bolshakov and work out a mutual withdrawal of the opposing tanks “without damage to each other’s prestige.”

IT WAS THE CRUSTY
World War II–vintage commanders like Burke and LeMay with whom Kennedy clashed most fiercely during his first year in the White House. But his supporters in Washington worried that JFK’s problems with the military ran deeper than that. Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright, one of Kennedy’s closest allies on the Hill, was among those who viewed with alarm the rise of what he saw as a politicized military culture, one that was extremely right-wing and blatantly insubordinate.

The far-right indoctrination of the military had its roots in the Eisenhower era, McNamara aide Joseph Califano later noted, when a 1958 National Security Council directive encouraged the military to educate its troops and the public about the dangers of communism—“tasks many officers pursued with gusto.” Ironically, Califano observed, Bobby Kennedy had played a role in kicking off this propaganda offensive when he was counsel for the McClellan Committee, which reacted to the widely publicized brainwashing of U.S. POWs in North Korea by calling for more effective anticommunist indoctrination in the ranks. By the time Kennedy entered the White House, there was widespread right-wing agitation within the military, with anticommunist seminars and conferences sponsored by the military proliferating on bases at home and overseas and far-right films and tracts by groups like the John Birch Society flooding the barracks.

The controversy over the politicization of the military exploded into public view in the spring when the
Overseas Weekly
, an independent newspaper popular with GIs stationed abroad for its racy tabloid fare, broke a story about the flamboyant indoctrination efforts of Major General Edwin A. Walker, commander of the 24th Infantry, a crack, front-line division in West Germany. Walker, a hero in World War II and Korea, had always been something of an eccentric. He volunteered to lead a paratroopers unit against the Nazis without ever having jumped from a plane—“How do you put this thing on?” a puzzled Walker asked a subordinate as his plane lifted off the ground for his first jump. But the war in Korea set him on his collision course with civilian authority, after he became convinced that America’s elected officials wanted no better than a “stalemate” with international communism. A diehard segregationist, he was further disillusioned when he was ordered by President Eisenhower to lead the Army unit that enforced the integration of Little Rock schools in 1957.

The following year Walker joined the loony-right John Birch Society—whose candy-maker founder had famously denounced Eisenhower as “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy”—and began lavishing Bircher propaganda on the men under his command. The general, a lifelong bachelor who grew up on a Texas ranch, found it hard to distinguish American liberalism from godless Communism. Among the targets of his wrath were Eleanor Roosevelt, Adlai Stevenson,
Mad
magazine, and Harvard University. “General Walker,” reported an aide, “thought Harvard was the bad place, the factory where they made Communists. He was sure death on Harvard.” This was undoubtedly one more source of his estrangement from the Kennedy White House, which was practically a hiring hall for the elite university. Walker believed the administration was stocked with “no-win” Ivy Leaguers and “confirmed Communists” like Edward R. Murrow, whose appointment as Kennedy’s USIA director caused the general to “practically have a tantrum,” according to
Newsweek
.

In April, the
Overseas Weekly
reported that Walker not only communicated his low opinion of leading American liberals and Kennedy officials in speeches to his troops, but instructed them how to vote, using a political index prepared by a group so far to the right that it did not even give Barry Goldwater a perfect score. In doing so, Walker broke various Army regulations and federal laws, including the Hatch Act, which prohibits political activity by government employees. In June, Walker was relieved of his command and transferred to the Army’s European headquarters in Heidelberg—a relatively mild reprimand considering his violations. But Walker’s punishment immediately made him a martyr in far-right circles, both in and out of the military.

The ensuing political melee quickly demonstrated that Walker’s extremist agitation had an alarmingly wide base of support in the officer corps, where Hanson Baldwin reported that he was regarded as a “soldier’s soldier.” An aggrieved Army captain told the
New York Times
, “I feel the general is being crucified. And I think the men feel the same way.” It was revealed that Walker’s indoctrination program had been endorsed by none other than General Lemnitzer, the country’s top military leader, who wrote in a letter to the far-right officer that he found his efforts “most interesting and useful.”

As the military establishment flexed its political muscle, two young legislative aides to Senator Fulbright looked on with growing apprehension. They saw the political effects of this right-wing agitation back in the senator’s home state of Arkansas, where military officers were joining with Christian fundamentalists in an anticommunist crusade that targeted liberal politicians and legislation as subversive. They looked overseas at the restive right-wing generals in France who, angry at President De Gaulle’s attempts to reach a peaceful settlement of the Algerian war, were threatening to overthrow him. (In September, De Gaulle would be the target of an unsuccessful assassination attempt by right-wing extremists.) And they wondered if there was the growing possibility of such a coup in Washington.