Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House (45 page)

Khrushchev’s response: not so fast. Where he was willing to consider between two and four on-site inspections, Kennedy insisted that it had to be between eight and ten, a substantial decrease from earlier demands for between twelve and twenty. Nor could they agree on where detection stations should be located. The acrimony over these differences and other issues between them became so sharp that Bobby Kennedy refused to carry a message from Khrushchev to the president that Ambassador Dobrynin handed to him on April 3, 1963. But he couldn’t resist giving Kennedy the gist of Khrushchev’s twenty-five-page letter: Khrushchev described himself as tired of hearing about Kennedy’s problems with the Senate. “The United States is run by capitalists who are interested only in war profits. They were the ones that were dictating policy. If President Kennedy was not as concerned about the Rockefellers and these capitalists then he would take this step for world peace. Further, who did we think we were in the United States trying to dictate to the Soviet Union?”

Although Khrushchev clearly was not yet ready to compromise, Kennedy, bolstered by the conclusion of his science advisers that little would be gained by additional atmospheric tests, was more determined than ever to find a way to overcome the barriers to a ban. With advisers predicting that continual testing would make it cheaper to build nuclear weapons, increase the likelihood of proliferation, and heighten prospects of a nuclear war, Kennedy saw the need for an agreement as irresistible. At news conferences in February and March 1963, Kennedy voiced fears that the absence of a ban would allow irresponsible governments to acquire nuclear weapons and increase chances of a general nuclear conflagration. He told reporters that he was “haunted by the feeling that by 1970, unless we are successful [in banning tests] there may be 10 nuclear powers instead of 4, and by 1975, 15 or 20 . . . I regard that as the greatest possible danger and hazard.”

Prime Minister Macmillan, who was determined to achieve a test ban, urged Kennedy to work with him toward some formula that could break the stalemate with Russia. He thought “a personal message to Khrushchev . . . or perhaps some emissary such as Averell or your brother Bobby” might make a difference. Writing from Moscow, Llewellyn Thompson advised that Khrushchev’s principal interest in a ban rested on inhibiting Chinese and West German acquisition of nuclear weapons. On April 15, seizing on Thompson’s insight, Kennedy and Macmillan sent Khrushchev a joint letter asserting that agreement on nuclear testing might allow them to move rapidly to prevent proliferation of nuclear power.

But Khrushchev was still unprepared to compromise, and the Joint Chiefs also resisted the JFK-Macmillan initiative. Before Kennedy heard back from Khrushchev, Taylor, speaking for the Chiefs, expressed renewed doubts about the likelihood of effective verification arrangements. Ignoring the view of Kennedy’s science advisers, he warned that the United States could maintain its nuclear weapons superiority only through continued testing in the atmosphere and underground. A report from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow was equally discouraging: Khrushchev’s reaction to the Kennedy-Macmillan letter was “entirely negative.” Thompson explained that Khrushchev was committed to additional tests and currently saw discussions as interfering with these plans. In addition, intensifying tensions with China’s communists deterred Khrushchev from talks that could become a propaganda barrage against him. In a lengthy letter to Kennedy in May, Khrushchev repeated and underscored familiar arguments against inspections and for more comprehensive arms control arrangements. Khrushchev, however, left the door open to further test discussions, saying he would be happy to receive high-level representatives of the United States and Great Britain in Moscow for talks.

On May 30, Kennedy responded that he was eager to send a notable representative to Moscow during the summer to bridge the gap in their views. But he felt that something more dramatic needed to precede the arrival of any envoy if the stalemate were to be broken. His impetus partly came from a conversation with Norman Cousins, the editor of the
Saturday Review of Literature
and an outspoken peace activist, who had met with Khrushchev in Russia in April and then with the president to report on their conversation. Cousins described Khrushchev as eager for peace but under pressure from militants in the Kremlin. Kennedy sympathized with Khrushchev’s predicament. He said that he had “similar problems . . . the hard-liners in the Soviet Union and the United States feed on one another, each using the actions of the other to justify his own position.” Cousins urged Kennedy to handle the problem by offering a “breathtaking new approach toward the Russian people, calling for an end to the cold war and a fresh start in Soviet-American relations.”

Cousins’s urgings meshed with Kennedy’s own determination to move beyond stale Cold War tensions, which kept the world on edge and threatened to trigger another crisis, like the one over Cuba, that could end in a world cataclysm. Slated to speak at the American University commencement on June 10, Kennedy decided to deliver a “peace speech” that would announce a unilateral suspension of atmospheric testing, a new push for a test ban, and, more broadly, a plea for “a genuine, lasting peace: . . . Not merely peace for Americans, but peace for all men; not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.” It was not to be the sort of elusive Wilsonian dream of “a sudden revolution in human nature,” but a peace resting on “a gradual evolution in human institutions.” Because “our problems are man made,” Kennedy said, “therefore they can be solved by man.” But this would mean a dramatic shift in outlook: “enmities between nations . . . do not last forever.” The aim must be not so much to eliminate differences but to “make the world safe for diversity.” As fellow inhabitants of the same planet, the United States and Russia needed to guard the world against war for the sake of all “our children’s future. . . . We are not helpless before that task” of world peace, he declared. “Confident and unafraid, we labor on—not toward a strategy of annihilation but toward a strategy of peace.” The speech was one of the great state papers of American history.

In preparing the address, Kennedy had limited the discussion to a handful of White House advisers, including Sorensen, who did the principal drafting, as well as Bundy, Schlesinger, and Tom Sorensen, Ted’s brother, an official at the United States Information Agency. McNamara, Rusk, and Taylor were only told about the speech two days before Kennedy delivered it. He did not want predictable quibbling from the principal national security officials, who would surely object to so unconventional and idealized a call for changes in the country’s perspective on foreign affairs. His caution was borne out by instant objections from Taylor that the Joint Chiefs could not endorse a unilateral suspension of atmospheric tests. Congressional Republicans, the mainstay of conventional thinking, dismissed the speech as “a soft line that can accomplish nothing . . . and a dreadful mistake.” In England, however, it was hailed as an extraordinary landmark pronouncement, and Khrushchev called it “the best speech by any President since Roosevelt.”

The missile crisis had rekindled Kennedy’s interest not only in avoiding an arms race and a nuclear war but also in muting difficulties over Cuba. The end of the crisis made clear to Kennedy and some of his advisers that Cuba had become a major impediment to more productive foreign policy initiatives.

But Castro, some of Kennedy’s most militant counselors, and U.S. domestic politics made Cuban relations a source of continuing contention. Castro was furious at Khrushchev for giving in to Kennedy and promising to remove the missiles in exchange for a verbal non-invasion pledge. As a consequence, he refused to allow U.N. inspectors to enter the island. Castro’s obstructionism made Kennedy’s advisers distrustful of Khrushchev’s commitments. After all, he had lied about having offensive weapons on the island, so why shouldn’t they suspect that he was using Castro as a stalking horse for keeping the missiles in Cuba? Rusk, McNamara, Taylor, McCone, and Dillon pressed Kennedy to resume reconnaissance flights. They also pressured him into insisting that Soviet IL-28 bombers, which could carry nuclear bombs, be added to the list of offensive weapons removed from the island.

Kennedy had originally opposed listing the aircraft as among the offensive weapons the Soviets were to eliminate. Compared to the missiles, they seemed like an inconsequential threat. Kennedy’s advisers, however, insisted that they now be included—not only because they could carry nuclear bombs from Cuba to targets in the United States, but also because political opponents could use them to attack the administration for being careless about national security. But adding the IL-28s to the missiles threatened to unhinge the settlement with Khrushchev and rekindle the crisis. Kennedy continued to see the bombers as an insignificant danger, but once he appreciated how they could be converted into a political liability, he insisted on their removal. It took numerous exchanges between Moscow and Washington, including several interventions by Bobby Kennedy with Dobrynin at the Soviet Embassy, before a final agreement was reached on November 20: Kennedy would announce an end to the quarantine, and the Soviets would remove the bombers along with the missiles. Kennedy also agreed not to press for on-site inspections, convinced that U.S. surveillance of Soviet ships carrying the missiles and planes from Cuba would suffice to demonstrate whether Khrushchev was keeping his word. His objective, he told Khrushchev on November 21, was to push Cuba to the side, so that they might move on to other issues.

Yet Kennedy could not ignore the possibility, as his military Chiefs were warning, that the Soviets might try again to sneak offensive weapons onto the island. Nor could he overlook newspaper reports that the Soviets might be hiding missiles in caves or that they might try to build a naval base, which could give them, in Kennedy’s words, “a near parity with us if we should once again blockade.” Khrushchev dismissed the stories about hidden missiles in Cuba by saying, “We do not live in the caveman age to attach great significance to the rumors of this sort.” But given how badly Kennedy had been burned by Khrushchev’s earlier deceptions, he felt compelled to see the island as an ongoing threat to U.S. security. Specifically, having ignored warnings from McCone before October that the Soviets were turning Cuba into an offensive base, he decided to take renewed warnings from him more seriously. At the beginning of December, McCone pointed to evidence of increased air defenses, which suggested that the Soviets might be planning to put more missiles in Cuba. McCone also urged attention to comments by Che Guevara, Castro’s spokesman, that Cuba intended to continue communist subversion in Latin America and that the Soviets saw the island as a communist sanctuary in the Western Hemisphere.

For many of Kennedy’s advisers, overturning Castro’s regime remained an appealing prospect. An administration memo of December 3 declared, “Our ultimate objective with respect to Cuba remains the overthrow of the Castro regime and its replacement by one sharing the aims of the Free World. . . . All feasible diplomatic, economic, psychological and other pressures” were to be brought to bear on behalf of this goal. Amazingly, the Joint Chiefs described themselves as ready to use “nuclear weapons for limited war operations in the Cuban area.” They rationalized the reliance on such overkill by directing that “collateral damage to nonmilitary facilities and population casualties will be held to a minimum consistent with military necessity.”

Surely the Joint Chiefs knew that their assumption about limiting damage was nonsense. A 1962 Air Force pamphlet on “The Effects of Nuclear Weapons” tried to whitewash the consequences of using just a one-megaton nuclear bomb, never mind a sixteen-megaton weapon. The pamphlet acknowledged that radiation exposure was likely to cause hemorrhaging that would produce “anemia and death.” The authors also explained that “if death does not take place in the first few days after a large dose of radiation, bacterial invasion of the blood stream usually occurs and the patient dies of infection.”

What the pamphlet neglected to say was that a one-megaton blast would kill—“vaporize”—everyone within a six-square-mile area. “Outside this circle,” a 1999 report explained, “the light from the explosion will blind people ten miles in every direction.” People seeing the explosion fifty miles away “will have a large spot permanently burned into their retinas.” And most people hundreds of miles from the blast will die later, suffering an agonizing death. A one-megaton nuclear explosion would “create a firestorm that can cover 100 square miles. It will melt everything in its radius.” Dropping a one-megaton nuclear bomb on Cuba would have made the island a living hell.

While Kennedy did not veto the Chiefs’ radical plan for a nuclear attack, he had no intention of ever acting on it, especially since he knew that curbing “collateral damage” seemed like a pipe dream—more a way to justify using these ultimate weapons than a realistic assumption. In April 1961, he had already dismissed talk by the Joint Chiefs about using nuclear weapons against communist forces in Southeast Asia as ridiculous. In a meeting with the Joint Chiefs and McNamara on December 5, 1962, Kennedy questioned the value of building so many nuclear bombs: “What good are they?” he asked. “You can’t use them as a first weapon yourself. They are only good for deterring . . . I don’t see quite why we’re building as many as we’re building.”

But if he saw no place for nuclear bombs in Laos or for toppling Castro, he did not rule out an invasion of Cuba or at least planning for one. As he told the National Security Council on December 10, “domestic public opinion, including congressional opinion,” would exert such “great pressure on the Government in the next few months” that we “must not go too far down the line on no-invasion assurances.”

On December 27, in a meeting with the Joint Chiefs at his Florida retreat in Palm Beach, Kennedy told them, “We must assume that someday we may have to go into Cuba, and when it happens, we must be prepared to do it as quickly as possible.” He wanted them to think about plans for an invasion that might come “one, two, three, or four years ahead.” Whatever the reality of his intentions, such a directive would discourage leaks from the Chiefs about his willingness to live with Castro, which could then become a political liability.