JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (17 page)

President Kennedy’s fourth Bay of Pigs toward the coup d’état he saw as possible was the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty that he and Nikita Khrushchev signed.

In the months before his American University address, Kennedy had become increasingly pessimistic about achieving a test ban. Domestic opposition was rising. Liberal Republican governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York denounced the idea of a test ban. Senate Republican leader Everett Dirksen said of Kennedy’s efforts to gain one, “This has become an exercise not in negotiation but in give-away.” The Joint Chiefs of Staff declared themselves “opposed to a comprehensive ban under almost any terms.”
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In Geneva the U.S.–Soviet negotiations were at a deadlock over the question of on-site inspections. Meanwhile, the Atomic Energy Commission was pushing Kennedy to schedule another series of atmospheric tests. The U.S. Congress had similar views. Kennedy supporter Senator John O. Pastore of Rhode Island, chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, wrote the president that even if the current U.S. test ban proposal were accepted by the Soviets, “on the basis of informal discussions with other Senate leaders I am afraid that ratification of such a treaty could only be obtained with the greatest difficulty.” Moreover, Pastore added, “I personally have reservations as to whether such a treaty would be in the best interests of the United States at this time.”
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At his March 21, 1963, news conference, the president was asked if he still had hopes of arriving at a test-ban agreement. He replied doggedly, “Well, my hopes are dimmed, but nevertheless, I still hope.”
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Only three weeks before the American University address, he answered another test-ban question with even less optimism, “No, I’m not hopeful, I’m not hopeful . . . We have tried to get an agreement [with the Soviets] on all the rest of it and then come to the question of the number of inspections, but we were unable to get that. So I would say I am not hopeful at all.”
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He felt, nevertheless, the time to push for a treaty was right then: “I have said from the beginning that [it] seemed to me that the pace of events was such in the world that unless we could get an agreement now, I would think the chance of getting it would be comparatively slight. We are therefore going to continue to push very hard in May and June in every forum to see if we can get an agreement.”
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So while not hopeful, Kennedy was more determined than ever to turn the corner on a test ban treaty. It was then, on June 10, that he launched the peace initiative of his American University address, which broke through Soviet defenses. In response, Khrushchev made preparations to welcome the U.S. test-ban negotiators to Moscow. Kennedy saw the moment was ripe for at least a partial test ban, bypassing the negotiators’ impasse on inspections. At this point Glenn T. Seaborg, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, noted in his journal that whereas JFK had been dedicated to a test ban since the beginning of his presidency, “Now, he decided to
really go for it
!”
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He did so at a personal cost. As we have seen, the response to the American University address was much warmer on the Soviet side than the American. The Joint Chiefs and CIA were adamantly opposed to Kennedy’s turn toward peace. Cold War influences so dominated the U.S. Congress that the president felt getting Senate ratification of a test ban agreement would be “almost in the nature of a miracle,” as he described the task to advisers.
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That process, miraculous or not, was engineered humanly by a president committed at all costs to seeing it accomplished.

Kennedy named Averell Harriman, former ambassador to the U.S.S.R., his top negotiator in the Moscow talks. Known as a tough bargainer, Harriman was liked and respected by the Russians. They saw his appointment as a sign of the president’s seriousness in wanting a test-ban agreement.

Kennedy personally prepared the negotiators. He emphasized the importance of their mission—perhaps a last chance to stop the spread of testing and radioactive fallout. If they were successful, it would mean a concrete step toward mutual trust with the Russians. In both literal and symbolic senses, they stood to achieve a more peaceful atmosphere in the world.
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Their head negotiator would be, in effect, not Harriman but the president himself. He would stay in regular communication with them from Washington. He underlined confidentiality. No one outside a tight circle of officials personally approved by him was to know any of the details.
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During the negotiations, Kennedy spent hours in the cramped White House Situation Room, editing the U.S. position as if he were at the Moscow table himself. Soviet ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin was astounded at the president’s command of every stage of the process. “Harriman would just get on the phone with Kennedy,” he said, “and things would be decided. It was amazing.”
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On July 25, 1963, when the final text was ready, Harriman phoned Kennedy and read it to him twice. The president said, “Okay, great!” Harriman returned to the conference room and initialed the Limited Test Ban Treaty, outlawing nuclear tests “in the atmosphere, beyond its limits, including outer space, or under water, including territorial waters or high seas.”
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The next night President Kennedy made a television appeal to the nation for support of the test ban treaty. Against the advice of Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Kennedy had decided to take the issue of ratification immediately to the people. He wanted to do everything he could to turn public opinion around as quickly as possible. “We’ve got to hit the country while the country’s hot,” he told Rusk, “That’s the only thing that makes any impression to these god-damned Senators . . . They’ll move as the country moves.”
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In his speech Kennedy said, “This treaty is not the millennium . . . But it is an important first step—a step toward peace—a step toward reason—a step away from war.”
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As in the American University address, he opened up a vision beyond the Cold War, that of an era of mutual peacemaking. “Nuclear test ban negotiations have long been a symbol of East-West disagreement.” Perhaps “this treaty can also be a symbol—if it can symbolize the end of one era and the beginning of another—if both sides can by this treaty gain confidence and experience in peaceful collaboration.”

He reiterated the consequences of a nuclear war: “A full-scale nuclear exchange, lasting less than 60 minutes, with the weapons now in existence, could wipe out more than 300 million Americans, Europeans, and Russians, as well as untold numbers elsewhere.” He quoted Chairman Khrushchev: “The survivors would envy the dead.”

Besides helping to prevent war, he said, the test ban treaty “can be a step towards freeing the world from the fears and dangers of radioactive fallout.” He called to mind “the number of children and grandchildren with cancer in their bones, with leukemia in their blood, or with poison in their lungs . . . this is not a natural health hazard—and it is not a statistical issue. The loss of even one human life, or the malformation of even one baby—who may be born long after we are gone—should be of concern to us all. Our children and grandchildren are not merely statistics toward which we can be indifferent.”

Kennedy’s sense of the vulnerability of children was again the force behind some of his most deeply felt words: “[This treaty] is particularly for our children and our grandchildren, and they have no lobby here in Washington.”

After reminding his listeners of “the familiar places of danger and conflict”—Cuba, Southeast Asia, Berlin, and all around the globe—he concluded with the expression of a deep hope, less than four months before his assassination:

“But now, for the first time in many years, the path of peace may be open. No one can be certain what the future will bring. No one can say whether the time has come for an easing of the struggle. But history and our own conscience will judge us harsher if we do not now make every effort to test our hopes by action, and this is the place to begin. According to the ancient Chinese proverb, ‘A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.’

“My fellow Americans, let us take that first step. Let us, if we can, 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 the first step.”

Kennedy was fiercely determined but not optimistic that the test ban treaty would be ratified by the defense-conscious Senate. It was on August 7, 1963, that he made his comment to advisers that a near-miracle was needed. He said that if a Senate vote were held right then it would fall far short of the necessary two-thirds.
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Larry O’Brien, his liaison aide with the Congress, confirmed the accuracy of the president’s estimate. Congressional mail was running about fifteen to one against a test ban.
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Kennedy initiated a whirlwind public education campaign on the treaty, coordinated by Norman Cousins. The president told an August 7 meeting of key organizers that they were taking on a very tough job and had his total support. Led by Cousins and calling themselves the Citizens Committee, the group mounted a national campaign for Senate ratification. The National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, which had been formed in 1958 to dramatize the dangers of nuclear testing, played a key role in the campaign. Kennedy and Cousins also successfully sought help from the National Council of Churches, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, Catholic Bishop John Wright of Pittsburgh and Cardinal Richard Cushing of Boston, union leaders, sympathetic business executives, leading scientists and academics, Nobel Laureates, and, at a special meeting with the president, the editors of the nation’s leading women’s magazines, who gave their enthusiastic support. As the campaign grew, public opinion began to shift. By the end of August, the tide of congressional mail had gone from fifteen to one against a test ban to three to two against. The president and his committee of activists hoped that in a month public opinion would be on their side.

In the meantime, they were bucking the military-industrial complex, which had become alarmed at the president’s sudden turn toward peace and his alliance with peace activists in support of the test ban. The August 5, 1963,
U.S. News and World Report
carried a major article headlined, “Is U.S. Giving up in the Arms Race?” The article cited “many authorities in the military establishment, who now are silenced,” as thinking that the Kennedy administration’s “new strategy adds up to a type of intentional and one-sided disarmament.”
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The alarm was sounded even more loudly in the August 12
U.S. News
with an article headlined, “If Peace Does Come—What Happens to Business?” The article began:

“This question once again is being raised: If peace does come, what happens to business? Will the bottom drop out if defense spending is cut?

“There is a lull in the cold war. Before the U.S. Senate is a treaty calling for an end to testing of nuclear weapons in the air or under water. A nonaggression agreement is being proposed by Russia’s Khrushchev.

“Talk of peace is catching on. Before shouting, however, it is important to bear some other things in mind.”

U.S. News
went on to reassure its readers that defense spending would be sustained by such Cold War factors as Cuba remaining “a Russian base, occupied by Russian troops” and “the guerrilla war in South Vietnam” where “the Red Chinese, in an ugly mood, are capable of starting a big war in Asia at any time.”
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However, an insider could have asked, what would it mean to defense contractors if Kennedy extended his peacemaking to Cuba and Vietnam?

The president’s peacemaking had moved beyond any effective military control or even monitoring. In the test-ban talks, the military weren’t in the loop. Kennedy had made a quick end run around them to negotiate the treaty. As JFK biographer Richard Reeves observed, “By moving so swiftly on the Moscow negotiations, Kennedy politically outflanked his own military on the most important military question of the time.”
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Kennedy pointed out to Cousins that he and Khrushchev had come to have more in common with each other than either had with his own military establishment: “One of the ironic things about this entire situation is that Mr. Khrushchev and I occupy approximately the same political positions inside our governments. He would like to prevent a nuclear war but is under severe pressure from his hard-line crowd, which interprets every move in that direction as appeasement. I’ve got similar problems.”
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Almost four decades later, Nikita Khrushchev’s son Sergei would provide a wistful footnote to John Kennedy’s political empathy with his father. On February 4, 2001, Sergei Khrushchev, by then a senior fellow in international studies at Brown University, in the course of commenting on the film
Thirteen Days
(a dramatization of the Cuban Missile Crisis), wrote in
The New York Times
: