Worldmaking (56 page)

Nitze was instead forced to take the position of assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs—the job he had accepted in 1953 before the forces of McCarthyism had intervened. It was not a bad compromise move, as it turned out, because the Office of International Security Affairs (ISA), known as the “little state department,” offered Nitze considerable autonomy and some three hundred staff. The ISA's primary function was to coordinate the disbursement of foreign military aid, but Kennedy wanted the office to do more. On Christmas Day,
The New York Times
endorsed Nitze's appointment, noting that the ISA's scope had been “widened” to allow Nitze to contribute to policy on multiple levels. President-elect Kennedy remarked that “I cannot too strongly stress the importance of the post which Mr. Nitze has accepted … His wealth of experience will be of great assistance to both Defense Secretary McNamara and to me.”
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Kennedy's warm words were likely conditioned by some guilt at the retraction of his initial job offer. In fact, Nitze's influence on the Kennedy administration turned out to be significant. But this owed less to the job he assumed than to the geopolitical principles he bequeathed. John Kennedy was the first president to fully embrace the maximalist crisis logic of NSC-68: “We cannot simply sit by and watch on the sidelines. There are no sidelines.”
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In January 1961, Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy delivered seminal speeches: the first a farewell address, the second an inaugural. They were opposite in purpose. Eisenhower's speech repudiated Nitze's foreign-policy vision; Kennedy's embraced it. Eisenhower was bidding farewell to the nation. Foremost on his mind was the manner in which the military had come to assume an outsized place in national life. He observed that the “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the federal government.” Eisenhower was referring to the quadrupling of America's defense budget ushered in by NSC-68 and the Korean War—and the problems he had faced in trimming a budget once it had been established. “In the councils of government,” Eisenhower warned, “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” This complex did not only threaten “our liberties or democratic processes,” Eisenhower said, but could also sully the nation's reservoir of intellectual capital:

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present—and is gravely to be regarded.
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Eisenhower's presidency had ended in the most remarkable fashion.

Kennedy delivered his inaugural address three days after Eisenhower's elegiac farewell. It was a typically frigid January day in Washington, and Kennedy chose not to wear an overcoat or scarf so as to emphasize his youthful vitality. Flanked on each side by two well-wrapped former and future presidents, Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson, Kennedy spoke with conviction and purpose, his words given exclamation points by visible puffs of exhalation. It took just two and a half minutes for Kennedy to commit U.S. foreign policy to anything and everything: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty. This much we pledge—and more.”
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The speech was one of the most gracefully written inaugurals in history. It contained myriad other themes presented with artistry: a pledge of assistance to “those people in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery”; an entreaty to remember that “civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof. Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate”; a challenge to American citizens to “ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” The speech became the unavoidable point of comparison for all subsequent inaugurals; its primary author, Theodore Sorensen, set the highest literary bar. Yet lurking behind the ornate words was a fierce commitment to Cold War confrontation and activism every bit as pungent as that presented in NSC-68. “In the long history of the world,” Kennedy said near the end of the speech, “only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility—I welcome it.” The inaugural address synthesized Woodrow Wilson's idealism—“defending freedom”—and Paul Nitze's alarm-fueled pugnacity: “its hour of maximum danger.” The United States had arrived at a high point in its confidence in muscular foreign-policy idealism. For Kennedy to remain true to his inaugural word, America's diplomatic commitments would have to expand in precisely the way Nitze had earlier proposed.

Many of the young president's appointments were precisely the type of policy-oriented academics that Eisenhower identified with alarm. McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy's national security adviser, was old-money Boston and a star in the academic firmament. Harvard had elected Bundy to its prestigious Society of Fellows in 1941, when he was just twenty-two, and made him dean of the college in 1953, when he was thirty-four—the youngest man so honored in Harvard's history. Walt Rostow, Bundy's deputy assistant for national security affairs, was a Yale Ph.D. and a Rhodes scholar at Oxford. He joined the administration from MIT's CIA-funded Center for International Studies, where he had participated in numerous government-sanctioned research programs. In 1960, Rostow “answered Karl Marx” with his seminal book
The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto
. Rostow claimed that the United States was destined to best the Soviet Union in “modernizing” the Third World, thus sealing the West's victory over Marxism-Leninism—which Rostow dismissed as a mere “disease of the transition” to modernity.
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Rostow borrowed from NSC-68—and expanded upon it—in rationalizing a vast increase in America's Cold War commitments. Finally, Robert S. McNamara moved from the presidency of Ford to assume control of the Pentagon—an even larger organizational behemoth. Nonetheless, his academic credentials, from the University of California, Berkeley, and Harvard Business School, were highly impressive. Indeed, McNamara made his cerebral proclivities clear when he chose to live in the college town of Ann Arbor rather than buy a mansion in Grosse Point, the more conventional housing choice of Ford executives. He was a voracious reader, possessed of preternatural self-assurance, and devoted to RAND's pioneering work in quantitative analysis. McNamara was set on rationalizing his department, on making it bow to his will.

Kennedy himself was a gifted student at Harvard and the London School of Economics, although he followed Nitze in succumbing to extracurricular temptations that brought down his grades. His gilded childhood and early adulthood involved a significant amount of European travel, which included a trip to Prague in 1938, where he had roused the ire of George Kennan, then serving as the U.S. ambassador. Kennedy summarized the method behind his hiring policy when he remarked, “There's nothing like brains, you can't beat brains.”
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Rostow, in turn, was impressed by Kennedy's intellect, observing, “Ideas were tools. He picked them up easily like statistics or the names of local politicians. He wanted to know how ideas could be put to work.”
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Having been rejected for his preferred position as secretary of state—this vital position went to another Rhodes scholar, Dean Rusk—Adlai Stevenson accepted as a consolation prize the ambassadorship to the United Nations. Casting a jaundiced eye over the bright young things hired ahead of him, Stevenson observed: “They've got the damndest bunch of boy commandos running around … you ever saw.”
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Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn relayed his own concerns in memorable terms to his friend and protégé, Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson: “Well, Lyndon, you may be right and they may be every bit as intelligent as you say, but I'd feel a whole lot better about them if just one of them had run for sheriff once.”
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Rayburn's meaning was clear: running for elected office imparts a cautionary sense of what will fly that might elude the most brilliant thinkers, unused to real-world constraints on their process of thinking and strategizing. Rayburn suspected that the Kennedy administration was committed to too many bold, transformational ideas—rendered vital by the backdrop portrayal of acute crisis presented by Nitze and others—and seemed to have only trace understanding of what was meant by the art of the possible. The Kennedy era truly witnessed the social sciences entering the “crucible of circumstance,” as Charles Beard had prophesied in 1917.

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During the televised presidential debates with Richard Nixon, Kennedy had criticized the Eisenhower administration for allowing Cuba to turn communist on its watch. It was a damning charge, which consciously echoed Republican attacks on Truman for “losing China” in 1949. What Kennedy did not know was that Eisenhower and Nixon had already laid plans to oust Castro through a CIA-orchestrated counterrevolution—the gambit that had apparently worked so well in Iran and Guatemala. Yet Nixon could not reveal these plans in response to Kennedy's charge without giving Castro notice of America's intentions. Holding his tongue must have been agonizing for Nixon in the circumstances. But he had some kind of revenge when it fell to President Kennedy to implement the optimistic plans already laid. Having hammered Eisenhower and Nixon for complacency, Kennedy could hardly refuse to sanction the ouster of Castro. Indeed, many of Kennedy's “best and the brightest” welcomed the opportunity. A few weeks prior to the invasion, McGeorge Bundy complained, “At this point we are like the Harlem Globetrotters. Passing forward, behind, sideways and underneath. But nobody has made a basket yet.” Here, Bundy reasoned, was a chance to put some points on the board.
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Unfortunately, implementing the CIA's plan was akin to attempting a half-court hook shot with a beach ball. In the early morning of April 7, 1961, approximately fifteen hundred CIA-trained Cuban exiles boarded agile landing craft and moved toward Playa Girón—the Bay of Pigs. Their purpose was to establish a beachhead and foment a popular rebellion that would lead in neatly cascading stages to Castro's removal. A tragic series of events ensued. As the boats approached the Bay of Pigs, some of their engines failed, leaving the occupants sitting ducks. Some of the other boats crashed into a coral reef that the CIA advance operation had misidentified as seaweed. Castro's regular army had little trouble subduing this bedraggled insurgent force as it eventually made landfall. Presented with the option of deploying the Air Force to strafe Castro's forces, Kennedy declined, deeming it wiser to cut losses and regroup than to risk a wider conflict. It was an inglorious episode for which the president accepted full responsibility—although it was CIA director Allen Dulles who lost his job. Kennedy was shocked to discover that this misadventure had not dented his high approval ratings, which remained true at 82 percent. He commented wryly, “It's just like Eisenhower. The worse I do, the more popular I get.” It fell to Dean Acheson to capture the flawed logic undergirding the operation, observing that it did not take “Price-Waterhouse to discover that 1,500 Cubans weren't as good as 25,000 Cubans.”
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Nitze was torn about the merits of invading Cuba with CIA-trained exiles. Major General Edward Lansdale, a counterinsurgency adviser based in the Pentagon, had serious doubts about the viability of the operation. He relayed them to Nitze, who also found them sobering. He confessed to his “uneasiness about the operation,” although he ultimately kept those doubts to himself, supporting the action in a meeting called by President Kennedy. “In my mind,” Nitze stated, “our moral right to try to stop the Communist menace from invading our hemisphere was not the issue. The Soviet Union had inserted itself in our backyard by stealth and deception in the form of the Castro regime in Cuba. Like a spreading cancer, it should, if possible, be excised from the Americas.”
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The logic of Kennedy's activism did not faze Nitze—indeed, he had encouraged it. But he would increasingly find himself at odds with the administration on the best means to implement NSC-68's precepts. Nitze liked military assertiveness in principle—his career to date had been devoted to maintaining and extending U.S. strategic dominance over the communist world. While “throw-weights”—the combined weight of each side's ballistic missile payloads—were calculable, however, civil wars in distant theaters were unknowable, impervious to charting, a law unto themselves. And Nitze disliked uncertainty.

In the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs disaster, Walt Rostow suggested that the president focus more intently on combating the fast-growing communist insurgency in South Vietnam—a crisis that had been festering for some time. After the nationalist Viet Minh had defeated France at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the contours of the newly independent nation were thrashed out at the Geneva Conference: Vietnam was divided at the 17th parallel on a temporary basis. The communist Ho Chi Minh led North Vietnam while South Vietnam was governed by the pro-Western combination of President Bao Dai and his prime minister, Ngo Dinh Diem. The treaty stipulated that the division was temporary and that the 17th parallel should not be “interpreted as constituting a political or territorial boundary.”
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Nationwide reunification elections were scheduled to take place in 1956, but realizing that Ho Chi Minh was likely to win a national ballot, South Vietnam, with Washington's full support, refused to participate. From that point a civil war in the weaker South Vietnam became virtually certain. In December 1960, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam, or DRV) approved the establishment of the National Liberation Front (NLF) in South Vietnam. Its avowed aim was “to overthrow the dictatorial … Diem clique, lackey of the U.S. imperialists, to form a … coalition government in South Vietnam, to win national independence and … to achieve national reunification.”
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In little time, the NLF insurgency began to ask hard questions of South Vietnam's continued viability as a state. On April 21, 1961, Rostow advised Kennedy that “Viet Nam is the place where … we must prove we are not a paper tiger.”
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He believed that the conflict in South Vietnam was precisely the type of Third World crisis that the United States had to step in and resolve. Even history needed a nudge sometimes.