Kennedy (103 page)

Nevertheless he had been prepared after Nassau to open full discussions with De Gaulle on nuclear matters, to recognize France as a nuclear power and to provide assistance on weapons, and perhaps even on warheads, if the French aligned their force with NATO under something like the Nassau formula. He would similarly be prepared later in 1963—after the atmospheric Test Ban Treaty had been signed—to help France with techniques of underground testing in exchange for her signature on that treaty. But De Gaulle’s negative response on both occasions—no doubt heightened in January by his suspicions of MLF—made serious negotiations impossible.

In short, concluded the President, little could have been done to avert De Gaulle’s actions and little should be done in response. It was an uneasy conclusion, which he privately re-examined often. But as Western Europe and Red China became stronger and less dependent on their respective big-power backers, he decided splits within both the East and West camps had become inevitable; and lower tensions after Cuba had been certain to widen those splits. He had no desire to raise tensions and reunite the Communists to patch over Western splits.

A decision not to change American strategy, however, did not mean total inaction. Kennedy began wooing more Europeans more assiduously, expressing sympathy for their desire for a larger voice in East-West and nuclear affairs, and paying particular attention to the West Germans. Aware that history would look kindly on the reconciliation of France and Germany, he rejected all suggestions that he pressure Adenauer into choosing between the U.S. and France or putting off ratification of the new French-German Treaty of Friendship. But he did encourage moves in Bonn to associate its ratification with a preamble restating, much to De Gaulle’s discomfiture, Germany’s pledge to NATO and Atlantic unity.

He also proceeded with MLF negotiations, leaving the door open to France and to an eventual all-European nuclear force, which would be aided but not restricted by the U.S. and represented on a two-man (U.S. and Europe) Western nuclear directorate. The May, 1963, NATO meetings created an inter-Allied nuclear force (not
an MLF, but British bombers and five American Polaris submarines, retained in their national force structures, under NATO command). Arrangements were made for European military officers to participate more fully and equally in nuclear target planning at SAC headquarters in Omaha. He also sought to strengthen the dollar against further balance of payments weaknesses, and pushed ahead on tariff negotiations under the Trade Expansion Act, on consultations for monetary reform and on other small, steady steps in building Atlantic ties. Progress was slow; but in a long evolutionary process altering the basic structure of the world’s political architecture, the United States could afford to be patient. The long-range movement, he felt, was irreversible.

Kennedy’s most striking and successful answer to De Gaulle—and one he came perilously close to calling off—was his June, 1963, trip to Western Europe and particularly West Germany. Hailed as even De Gaulle had not been hailed on his earlier triumphant tour, the President summed up the purpose of his trip promptly upon his arrival at the Bonn airport:

Two days later, in the historic Paulskirche in Frankfurt where the first German Assembly had been born, he expanded the theme of Atlantic Partnership in one of the most carefully reworked speeches of his Presidency. The Western Allies, he said, faced not only common military problems but similar internal economic problems. They were bound not only by threat of danger but shared values and goals.

Restating these convictions throughout West Germany, Italy and on European television, and in effective private talks with leaders in those countries and with Macmillan in England, he left the continent the following week convinced—on the basis of citizen, leader and press responses—“that our commitment and its durability are understood.”

Back on his own side of the Atlantic, earlier in 1963, another Allied leader had brought Kennedy headaches, Canada’s erratic John Diefenbaker. But the President, while concerned about his relations with Canada, was less concerned about Diefenbaker. Having troubled himself to learn more about Canada than any previous American head of state, wrote one Canadian observer, Kennedy “expected more of us than his predecessors ever had.” With Diefenbaker his expectations had swiftly vanished.

Their difficulties had begun long before 1963. The Canadian Prime Minister, who embraced anti-Americanism both as a personal view and as a political tactic, was annoyed when his rival, Lester Pearson, talked privately with Kennedy at the White House dinner for Nobel Prize winners. A Diefenbaker-Kennedy meeting in May of 1961 had proceeded harmoniously; but Kennedy had inadvertently left behind one of the staff papers he had been using. Diefenbaker not only expropriated the paper but threatened to expose it publicly, claiming that it referred to him as an s.o.b. (Apparently this was a typically illegible reference to the OAS, which the President was urging Canada to join. “I couldn’t have called him an s.o.b.,” commented Kennedy later. “I didn’t know he was one—at that time.”) Kennedy was his sternest when threatened.
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To Diefenbaker’s threat he replied simply: “Just let him try it.”

In 1963 Diefenbaker and his government not only refused to fulfill their commitments on the location of nuclear warheads on Canadian soil but, in a Parliamentary debate, consistently misrepresented both their position and that of the United States. The Cuban missile crisis had re-emphasized to all the vital importance of rapid readiness to North American defenses; and the State Department, obtaining clearance from the
White House but not from the President, issued a press release making clear the inaccuracy of Diefenbaker’s claims about the American request and his response. Kennedy “hit the roof” when he read it in the newspapers—and Diefenbaker hit the ground. His government fell. The President had been anxious to help Harold Macmillan when he had a domestic political crisis that had stemmed partly from U.S. action, but he had no similar sympathy for Diefenbaker. New Canadian elections were held; Pearson was elected; and a nuclear warhead agreement was promptly reached.

Pearson was not the only opposition leader with whom the President had friendly contacts. He was particularly fond of Britain’s Hugh Gaitskell and West Germany’s Willy Brandt. With all chief executives and opposition leaders he could talk politics, theirs and his. He privately weighed and analyzed these men as he had his fellow American politicians in the 1960 quest for the nomination, sometimes even comparing a foreign chief to some similar Democratic leader. He understood, as few do, the fact that not only geography but domestic political pressures often accounted for the differences in foreign policy expressed by other nations’ leaders. With few exceptions, foreign politicians soon recognized the impact of his popularity on their own elections. A visit to the White House had long been considered a necessity by the leaders of both parties in many a country. Now the younger politicians in particular imitated Kennedy’s style, analyzed his campaign techniques or permitted their publicists to call them “another Kennedy.”

At an average of more than one a week in his first year in office, and frequently thereafter, Kennedy met personally with his fellow heads of state and chief executives, visiting eleven in their countries and receiving more than fifty presidents, prime ministers and royal leaders in the White House. He prepared for each of those meetings—whether it was the President of France or Togo—with a searching inquiry into all available facts about the other country, its politics, its problems and its personalities. Citing their local statistics from memory, quoting from their writings or their history without notes, he left his hosts and visitors both pleased and impressed. (West Berlin’s Mayor Willy Brandt, for example, could not get over Kennedy’s knowledge of East Berlin’s Mayor: “He asked me whether Ebert’s other son was also a Communist. Ebert’s other son! I didn’t even know he had another son!”)

With his own travels limited, Kennedy maintained a voluminous correspondence with other national chiefs—met separately with an even greater number of foreign secretaries, finance ministers and other officials
—sent his wife, his brother Robert, the Vice President and others on foreign visits—encouraged State Department officials to deal with their counterparts firsthand on special crises instead of through letters and ambassadors—and improved our relations with Japan through annual joint Cabinet sessions. The principal effort in this unprecedented concern for the care and feeding of foreign egos was the White House visit. Each visiting dignitary was brought upstairs to the Kennedys’ private quarters (JFK picking up Caroline from her nap, for example, to show her to King Saud of Saudi Arabia) and shown the Indian paintings and the French furniture in which both Kennedys took pride. Noticing the deplorable condition of the limousine to which he escorted one prime minister, he found it had been rented from a funeral parlor and promptly ordered new arrangements. Impressed by the honor guard lining the avenues in Paris, he installed a similar plan for state dinners at the White House. Convinced that Andrews Air Force Base was a dreary place to begin an official visit, he instituted arrivals by helicopter south of the White House.

The unprecedented flood of high-ranking dignitaries to Washington required less use of the three-day “state visits,” with all the frills and fixings, and more use of one-day “working visits,” with merely a lunch at the White House, as well as more two-day compromises under either label. Nearly always more interested in these talks than in small talk with many Congressmen, he usually kept his foreign visitors overtime, even when other crises pressed. His interest in their problems and politics, his broad knowledge of their needs and views, his wit and charm, and the uniquely hospitable treatment lavished by both Kennedys—glittering White House dinners with menus personally reviewed by the President, dazzling artistic performances and gifts tailored to the recipient’s interests—all helped establish warm ties between Kennedy and his fellow leaders.

This was particularly true and important with the leaders of the new and developing nations, especially in Africa. They liked his efforts on immigration, disarmament, foreign aid, the Congo, Laos and especially civil rights. (Kennedy, in fact, took special pains to send his civil rights address with a personal letter to every African head of government.) They particularly liked his personal grasp of their aspirations and anxieties. Even Ghana’s Nkrumah, who blamed the United States for the assassination of former Congolese Premier Lumumba and the subsequent collapse of Nkrumah’s vision of Pan-African power, was delighted with the American President. To the President of the Sudan Kennedy presented a specially made hunting rifle, and was told with a grateful smile: “In my country there are thirteen million people and a hundred million wild animals.” Accepting Haile Selassie’s plaudits on civil rights,
he steered him to meetings with Roy Wilkins and the Attorney General. Of newly independent Tanganyika’s Julius Nyerere, one of his fellow leaders he most liked, he inquired with a smile, “Tell me, how does it feel to be the first Catholic President of a great country?”

He was particularly interested in those figures already living in the history they helped to write—De Gaulle, Adenauer, Haile Selassie and India’s Jawaharlal Nehru. Kennedy and Nehru, for all their differences in age, culture and policy, shared much in common: an intellectual bent, a wry sense of humor, a preference for clear disagreements instead of diplomatic generalities and an affection for Kennedy’s Ambassador, J. Kenneth Galbraith (“Although,” said the lanky professor to the President, “I don’t see how you trust me to deal with the Prime Minister of India when you wouldn’t consider me competent to handle political problems in Dorchester, Massachusetts”). Greeting Nehru at Newport in the fall of 1961, Kennedy and Galbraith drove him by the enormous homes in that wealthy resort, the President remarking, “I wanted you to see how the average American lives”—to which Nehru, equally dead-pan, replied, “Yes, I’ ve heard of your ‘affluent society’” (the title of a Galbraith book).

Kennedy persuaded Nehru on that occasion to recognize in their communiqué the need for Western access to Berlin. But otherwise that meeting convinced him that Nehru would never be a strong reed on which to rely and that India’s potential role in world affairs had been overestimated by its admirers. The Prime Minister seemed to him overtired, requiring a great effort to interest himself deeply in any problem. Astonished when Nehru later chose to visit Disneyland, he decided that he had accepted too readily the Prime Minister’s request for a “private” visit with no pretentious ceremony or crowds. The intimacy of upstairs in the Mansion (where a furiously smoking fireplace nearly drove them out) had been a little too private for a major world figure.