Kennedy (108 page)

During 1961-1962 the President interested himself in a variety of negotiating proposals: an updated version of the 1959 “Western Peace Plan,” adjudication by the World Court, an all-Berlin free city, parallel Western and Communist peace conferences, a five-to-ten-year
modus vivendi
, the use of Berlin as a UN headquarters, a Central European security plan, an International Access Authority, a ten-point mutual declaration and others. Most failed to survive copious Allied study and deliberate French and German leaks. The result, as Prime Minister Macmillan commented to him, was that he had little that was specific to offer the Russians, “hardly the soup course and none of the fish.” The Germans, prodded by De Gaulle, became angry all over again in the spring of 1962,
wrongfully charging that the Americans were not reporting all their proposals and complaining about those that were reported. Our error, JFK later acknowledged, was in trying to push the Germans to accept ideas in which he could not interest Khrushchev anyway.

Nevertheless the contacts and exchanges continued. Kennedy often likened the problem to that of Austria, where several years of fruitless bargaining had suddenly produced a Soviet-Western agreement after Khrushchev took over. But even in 1963, after the Cuban missile crisis and the nuclear Test Ban Treaty had helped change the bargaining atmosphere, no agreement was reached or in sight. Khrushchev did, however, remove his pressure and halt his threats; and the President believed that our demonstrated willingness to talk—by holding out the possibility of a reasonable settlement, by treating the Soviet Union as a great power and by making clear to the world that the intransigence was not on our side—had contributed in its own way to the peaceful defense of West Berlin. “Jaw, jaw” for its own sake had been helpful and effective, and Kennedy was not pushing for any new solutions now that the pressure was off.

In 1963 the Wall was still there, but the East Germans had initiated proposals for openings in exchange for trade. West Berlin was still a city in danger, an island of freedom and prosperity deep within imprisoned East Germany. And incidents still occurred—including an unseemly squabble in the fall of 1963 over whether Western troops at the
Autobahn
checkpoints needed to dismount or lower their truck tailgates to be counted. But access to West Berlin remained free—West Berlin remained free—and neither a devastating nuclear war, nor a collapse of the Western Alliance, nor a one-sided treaty of peace had taken place as once feared. “I think [the Communists] realize,” said President Kennedy, “that West Berlin is a vital interest to us…and that we are going to stay there.”

The West Berliners also realized it. They gave John Kennedy the most overwhelming reception of his career on the twenty-sixth of June, 1963. The size of the crowd, their shouts and the look of hope and gratitude in their eyes moved some in our party to tears—even before we surveyed the Wall. The President—who would later remark that his trip had given him a far deeper understanding of the necessity of ultimate reunification—was moved to extemporaneous eloquence. “When I leave tonight,” he told a trade union conference, “the United States stays.” “You are now their hostages,” he said to the American troops stationed in the city, “you are…the arrowhead.” And at a luncheon given by Mayor Brandt at Berlin City Hall, he offered a toast “to the German people on both sides of the Wall [and] to the cause of freedom on both sides of the Wall.”

It was on the platform outside that City Hall—from where I could
see only a sea of human faces chanting “Kenne-dy,” “Kenne-dy” as far as my vision could reach—that he delivered one of his most inspired and inspiring talks:

As we departed that evening to fly over East Germany to Ireland, the President was glowing from his reception. It would make all Americans recognize that their efforts and risks had been appreciated, he said. He would leave a note to his successor, “to be opened at a time of some discouragement,” and in it he would write three words: “Go to Germany.”

He came into the cabin of “Air Force One” with a look of pride and pleasure that reflected more, I believe, than that day’s tributes. It reflected satisfaction that he had done what had to be done, despite dangers and detractors, to keep that city free. As he sat down across from me, weary but happy, he said, “Well never have another day like this one as long as we live.”

O
F ALL
the Churchill phrases John Kennedy liked to quote, his favorite was: “We arm to parley.” Kennedy believed in arming the United States to provide bargaining power and backing for disarmament talks and diplomacy. He also believed in 1961 that urgent steps were required to make certain that “our arms are sufficient beyond doubt.”

His task was made more difficult by the fact that his predecessor was a justly renowned general who believed that our arms were sufficient beyond doubt. “I’ve spent my life in this,” President Eisenhower had snapped in answer to a 1960 press conference question on defense, “and I know more about it than almost anybody, I think, in the country…. Defense has been handled well and efficiently.” Later, in 1963, complaining of Kennedy’s large military expenditure increases, he would declare that “the defense budget I left behind provided amply for our security.”

But John Kennedy had a different view. As a student author in 1940 he had written: “We must always keep our armaments equal to our commitments.” As a Senator in the 1950’s he had grave doubts that we had done so, and had strongly opposed the “New Look” weakening of Army manpower and the overreliance on “massive retaliation.” As a candidate in 1960 he had repeatedly called for strengthening our nuclear and conventional forces. As President-elect he fired off a list of questions to his new Secretary of Defense following our late December, 1960, budget and program review:

At the same time he gave McNamara his first basic policy change: “Under no circumstances should we allow a predetermined arbitrary financial limit to establish either strategy or force levels.” Our strategy was to be determined by the objectives of our foreign policy. Our force levels were to be determined by the necessities of our safety and commitments. His Budget Director and White House aides were to work with McNamara on providing whatever had to be provided at the lowest possible cost. “Like any other investment,” Kennedy had said of defense spending in 1960, “it will be a gamble with our money. But the alternative is to gamble with our lives.”

Less than a week after the new administration had come into office, McNamara reported to the Cabinet and then in detail to the President what he had found in the Pentagon:

As a result, reported the Secretary, he could not answer all the President’s questions until some basic analyses had been worked out.
He requested detailed answers to ninety-six questions of his own (which rocked the Pentagon and became known as McNamara’s ninety-six trombones). But for the present neither the overformalized NSC apparatus nor the rivalry-ridden, disorganized Pentagon was geared to provide precise answers. He had seen enough, however, to support the President’s announcement in his first State of the Union Message of plans for an increase in airlift capacity and an acceleration of Polaris; and he was agreeable to that message’s direction that the Secretary of State “reappraise our entire defense strategy—our ability to fulfill our commitments—…and the adequacy, modernization and mobility of our present conventional and nuclear forces.”

No incoming President had ever undertaken a more searching re-examination of the defense establishment; and Kennedy wanted it in a month. “We are trying to telescope a lifetime’s work into twenty days,” remarked McNamara. But he compared it with an architect designing a new house without starting all over with the concept of house-building.

Before the month was out, the report was in. In a succession of meetings with his White House (Bundy, Wiesner, Sorensen), Defense (McNamara, Gilpatric and Comptroller Charles Hitch) and Budget Bureau teams, the President hammered out a series of drastic revisions in nearly every part of the defense budget. He added nearly three billion dollars in appropriations, offsetting this in part by the elimination of obsolete or duplicative programs. The Special Presidential Message to the Congress on March 28 containing these revisions was remarkable for two characteristics. One was the first full statement of a coherent national defense doctrine for the age of mutual nuclear capabilities:

1. The primary purpose of our arms is peace, not war…. The basic problems facing the world today are not susceptible to a military solution. Neither our strategy nor our psychology as a nation, and certainly not our economy, must become dependent upon the permanent maintenance of a large military establishment….

2. Our arms will never be used to strike the first blow in any attack. This is not a confession of weakness but a statement of strength…. We must offset whatever advantage this may appear to hand an aggressor by…increasing the capability of…that portion of our forces which would survive the initial attack….

3. Our arms must be adequate…without being bound by arbitrary budget ceilings….

4. Our arms must be subject to ultimate civilian control and command at all times, in war as well as peace…including all
decisions relating to the use of nuclear weapons, or the escalation of a small war into a large one….

5. Our strategic arms and defenses must be adequate to deter any deliberate nuclear attack on the United States or our allies….

6. The strength and deployment of our forces in combination with those of our allies should be sufficiently powerful and mobile to prevent the steady erosion of the free world through limited wars; and it is this role that should constitute the primary mission of our overseas forces….

7. Our defense posture must be both flexible and determined…our response…suitable [and] selective…permitting deliberation and discrimination as to timing, scope and targets….

8. Our defense posture must be designed to reduce the danger of irrational or unpremeditated general war….

The other remarkable feature of this and subsequent statements of military policy was their reflection of civilian control. “The Secretary of Defense and I,” said the President in his message, “have had the earnest counsel of our senior military advisers…. But I have not delegated to anyone else the responsibilities for decision which are imposed upon me by the Constitution.” In the crisis-filled months and years that followed, with the exception already noted at the Bay of Pigs, he exercised his full authority as Commander in Chief.

More than ever before, defense policy was integrated with foreign policy. No problem in the present world-wide struggle, the President told the Air Force Academy, is purely military or political. Nor do we have separate policies on defense, disarmament, diplomacy and foreign aid—“they are all bound up together in one…over-all national security policy.” Settling an old Pentagon debate, he issued an unprecedented directive to the Joint Chiefs asking them to base their advice not on narrow military considerations alone but on broad-gauged political and economic factors as well.

In the determination of military budgets and strategy, Kennedy and McNamara were no longer mere arbiters of rival service requests. They became originators, planners and analysts, setting up task forces, sending out questionnaires, insisting on alternatives, hard facts and precise comparisons. Instead of unifying the services into one body, as long urged but bitterly resisted, they unified their effort. They did this by aligning the budgets, force levels and strategy of the three branches for the first time, cutting across traditional service lines to budget according to function for Strategic Retaliatory Forces, Continental Air
and Missile Defense Forces, General Purpose Forces, Airlift and Sealift Forces and the Reserve and National Guard Forces. A new unified Strike Command, for example, combined combat units of the Strategic Army Reserve, the Tactical Air Command and supporting airlift under an Army general and an Air Force lieutenant general. The size of our Polaris force was no longer settled by the size of the Navy’s shipbuilding budget but by our over-all strategic need and the contributions of other forces. The number of overlapping weapons systems was reduced—by providing, for example, a new TFX aircraft for both Navy and Air Force use. In time other vested interests gave way to modernization, as the strategic emphasis was shifted from bombers to missiles, vulnerable overseas missile bases were replaced with Polaris submarines, and jet airliftable troops deployed in this country were considered part of the forces available to a foreign front.