Kennedy (131 page)

He had often argued that fruitful disarmament negotiations could never take place at the point of a Communist gun—or as long as the Communists thought they could overtake us in the arms race or effectively break up the Alliance—or until they were convinced by a test of will that we would not yield our vital interests, whatever the risk or threat—or until the United States had some serious, specific arms control proposals with which it could take the diplomatic offensive. In 1963 those conditions finally prevailed.

But the usual suspicions, misunderstandings and bureaucratic delays seemed destined at first to frustrate his hopes of converting the new atmosphere into any solid agreements. Only two minor accords were reached—the exchange of weather and other information from space satellites, previously mentioned, and the “hot line” teletype link between Moscow and Washington to make possible quick, private communications in times of emergency.

The “hot line”—passing through Helsinki, Stockholm and London, but with no kibitzers—was not insignificant. Such a communications link (originally labeled the “purple telephone”) had been under discussion since Kennedy’s first months in office; and its importance had been dramatized during the Cuban missile crisis when it had taken some four hours for the transmission of each Kennedy-Khrushchev message, including time for translation, coding, decoding and normal diplomatic presentation. As indicated in the missile chapter, Khrushchev had made his final message of withdrawal public long before it had arrived in Washington as the only means of assuring its immediate delivery. A future crisis—which could be caused not only by some actual conflict but possibly by an accidental missile firing or some misleading indication of attack—might not permit either four hours or a public broadcast. Nevertheless an agreement on communication was not as important as the matters to be communicated. “If he fires his missiles at me,” observed the President, “it is not going to do any good for me to have a telephone at the Kremlin…and ask him whether it is really true.”

His chief hope for a more substantive agreement—a treaty ending nuclear tests—had foundered once again, with each side blaming the other. In response to Khrushchev’s talk of new accords after the Cuban crisis, Kennedy had put the test-ban treaty first. Indeed, since the day of his inauguration, a test ban had been his principal hope for a first step toward disarmament and other pacts. He had termed the collapse of the Geneva talks in 1961 “the most disappointing event” of his first
year. He had hopes that a new treaty would be the most rewarding event of his third. The time was right. Both sides had tested extensively. Neither had scored a decisive breakthrough. The American tests had not been as important as the scientists and military had predicted. And the U.S.-U.K. draft treaty to ban all testing had impressed the neutral world as a fair and effective proposal. Kennedy after Cuba thus pressed again for a treaty—and, to his surprise, Khrushchev agreed to the principle of on-site inspections apparently without reference to a Troika.

Following Khrushchev’s December, 1962, letter to this effect, unofficial, off-the-record talks between spokesmen for both sides were held in this country. The Russians made what they regarded as a major concession, “two or three” on-site inspections a year of suspicious seismic disturbances inside any one nation. Kennedy had reduced our insistence on twelve to twenty such inspections to a scale of eight to ten and then seven after his scientists learned that the Soviet figure on unidentifiable underground shocks was more precise than our own. But two or three, in the light of the still incomplete science of distinguishing earthquakes (of which there were many in the U.S.S.R.) from clandestine nuclear tests, was still unacceptably low. The Soviets said heatedly that they had been led to believe that their figure would be acceptable, and that Congressional protests—stirred by press rumors that the United States was changing its position—had caused the American President to renege. They went home in January complaining bitterly that Khrushchev had risked his political prestige within the Kremlin to get their mission approved, and that he had been embarrassed in front of his critics by its failure.

The President wrote Khrushchev that he was certain that American negotiators Dean and Wiesner had never, as the Soviet Chairman charged, indicated a readiness to agree on three inspections. An honest misunderstanding, he wrote, had somehow occurred. He sent Averell Harriman to Moscow to review the full range of problems dividing the two nations. He took advantage of a visit by U.S. magazine editor Norman Cousins to Khrushchev to send word once again that he really did want a treaty. With Macmillan he made new proposals for a test ban in letters delivered by their ambassadors, although he rejected Macmillan’s suggestion of a summit in the absence of any assurance of agreement.
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He again urged the Soviets to relate the number of inspections to the number of unidentifiable seismic disturbances and to raise their figure of three in exchange for an American reduction below seven. He suggested that the reopened talks at Geneva seek agreement
on all other issues regarding inspection—so that numbers would mean something—and then reconsider the issue of numbers.

But the Soviets refused to consider any issues until he accepted their position on three tests. They seemed at times to back away even from three. Khrushchev was hurt and suspicious. He was no more willing to ask his Council of Ministers for a new number still unacceptable to Kennedy than the President was willing to wear down the opposition of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy to a new number still unacceptable to Khrushchev. Deadlock prevailed once again. The three-power Geneva conferees, now a mere subcommittee of the eighteen-nation disarmament conference, were no nearer agreement than they had been throughout five fruitless years of talk. “I am not hopeful,” the President said in May, 1963.

He stayed at it. While not hopeful, he had not abandoned hope. An exploratory message from a Soviet scientist attending a private conference in London, a Khrushchev hint to Cousins and others that he hoped for a fresh signal from the United States, and a new resolution in the Senate for an atmospheric test ban—cosponsored by thirty-four Senators, ranging from Humphrey of Minnesota to Dodd of Connecticut, a former test-ban opponent—all helped keep his hopes alive. The tax cut and other legislative measures were competing for his attention, and the civil rights struggle was rising to a crescendo. But Kennedy took time in the late spring of 1963 to take three important steps in search of an agreement with the Soviets:

1. He joined with Macmillan in proposing new talks on a test-ban treaty, to be held in Khrushchev’s capital and by new high-level emissaries as a sign of our earnest intention to forget past misunderstandings and reach agreement. The President had no clear evidence that agreement was possible, but he felt obligated to make this last great effort, which had been suggested by Macmillan in May. The announcement of this proposal was set for Kennedy’s Commencement Address at American University on June 10. As the speech underwent its final revisions in Honolulu on June 8-9, Khrushchev sent word of his acceptance. The announcement—simultaneously made in Moscow and London—was thus one of action rather than suggestion. It was accompanied in the President’s speech with hopes for the mission’s success, “hopes which
must be tempered with the caution of history—but with our hopes go the hopes of all mankind.”

2. To improve the atmosphere for agreement, he decided—without any recommendation from the departments or consultation with the Congress—that this nation, once its present series of tests had ended, would not be the first to resume nuclear tests in the atmosphere. That decision also was announced at American University. He rejected suggestions that he also suspend testing underground for a limited period, for he felt that, in the absence of any inspection, our atomic laboratories had to be working to avoid the dangers of secret Soviet testing underground or secret preparation to test aboveground. (Only underground tests required inspection to prevent cheating, inasmuch as our own monitoring systems could detect all others.) He was convinced that we were still ahead in nuclear development and could stay ahead without testing in the atmosphere. Nevertheless it was a bold step to take unilaterally, and he took it, he said, “to make clear our good faith and solemn convictions” on the test-ban issue, adding, however, that it was “no substitute for a formal binding treaty.”

3. The final step was the American University speech itself, the first Presidential speech in eighteen years to succeed in reaching beyond the cold war. The address had originated in a Presidential decision earlier in the spring to make a speech about “peace.” His motives were many. It was, first of all, an expression of his deep personal concern. He had not elaborated his views on this topic since his 1961 address to the UN. He thought it desirable to make clear his hopes for East-West agreement as a backdrop to his European trip in June. He valued in particular an April 30 letter from Norman Cousins. Cousins suggested that the exposition of a peaceful posture prior to the May meeting of the Soviet Communist Party Central Committee, even if it could not deter an expected new rash of attacks on U.S. policy, might at least make those attacks sound hollow and hypocritical outside the Communist world. That meeting had been postponed until June, and the June 10 commencement at American University appeared to be the first appropriate forum on the President’s schedule.

I obtained material from Cousins, Bundy, Kaysen, my brother Tom and others, and gathered appropriate passages that had been cut from the Inaugural Address in 1961, or discarded when the Kennedy-Khrushchev TV exchange fell through in 1962, or used in previous Kennedy speeches and worthy of repetition. Unlike most foreign policy speeches—none of which was as sweeping in concept and impact as this turned out to be—official departmental positions and suggestions were not solicited. The President was determined to put forward a fundamentally new emphasis on the peaceful and the positive in our relations with
the Soviets. He did not want that new policy diluted by the usual threats of destruction, boasts of nuclear stockpiles and lectures on Soviet treachery.

When he decided that the civil rights crisis necessitated his addressing the U.S. Mayors’ Conference in Honolulu, on Sunday, June 9, at the close of a long Western trip, he instructed me to stay behind to complete the American University draft. He was due to deliver it Monday morning, and I was to fly out with it Saturday. It was not until Sunday evening, returning home on “Air Force One,” that he applied the finishing touches. Bundy Deputy Carl Kaysen had meanwhile obtained a quick minimum clearance from the necessary Cabinet-level officials and telephoned the changes resulting from Khrushchev’s acceptance.

The next morning we arrived in Washington; and the President, after stopping by the Mansion and office, proceeded to the American University campus. Soviet officials in Moscow and Washington, and weary White House correspondents on the plane back, had been briefed in advance that the speech was of major importance. That description was wholly accurate.

President Kennedy began with a commitment to genuine, lasting peace:

The dreamers’ “absolute, infinite concepts of universal peace and goodwill…merely invite discouragement and incredulity,” he said. But a practical peace, “based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions,” was not impossible—and neither was war inevitable.