To Move the World Page 5

  * Key members of the ExComm included Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Secretary of the Treasury Douglas Dillon, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, CIA director John McCone (who was one of the earliest officials to accurately warn of the threat of Soviet missiles in Cuba, but whose assessment was undercut by his subsequent departure for his honeymoon), Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman General Maxwell Taylor, Undersecretary of State George Ball, ambassador to the Soviet Union Llewellyn Thompson, Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric, former secretary of state Dean Acheson, special assistants to the president Kenneth O’Donnell, David Powers, and Theodore Sorensen, and adviser Paul Nitze.

  † Psychologist Daniel Kahneman has described the distinctive mental pathways of “slow” rational thought in the prefrontal cortex and “fast” emotional thought involving other parts of the brain. Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011).

  ‡ Once this deal was made public, adviser McGeorge Bundy, one of the few who knew about it, noted, “There was no leak. As far as I know, none of the nine of us told anyone else what had happened. We denied in every forum that there was any deal.” McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years (New York: Random House, 1988).

  Chapter 3.

  PRELUDE TO PEACE

  KENNEDY HAD COME to office inexperienced. He had a lot to learn about presidential leadership, and he needed time and experience to assess the quality of the advice he was receiving. He also needed time to build up his own credibility. He would have to face down a lot of domestic opposition to succeed in negotiations with the Soviet Union, given the previous fifteen years of confrontation, arms race, and anti-Soviet rhetoric. From the start, Kennedy composed his foreign policy team of establishment heavyweights—McGeorge Bundy, Robert McNamara, Douglas Dillon, Dean Rusk, Averell Harriman, Paul Nitze, and others—yet it took time to make them a team, and indeed his team.* He also suffered the powerful holdovers from the political right, even the far right, including CIA director Allen Dulles, CIA deputy director Richard Bissell (both of whom Kennedy forced to resign after the Bay of Pigs debacle), and J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI. And Kennedy himself lacked experience in executive organization, foreign policy leadership, and dealing with both the Soviet Union and his own noisy and opportunistic allies across Europe and Asia.

  Kennedy meets with State Department officials. Far side of table: U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union Llewellyn Thompson; Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson; ambassador at large Averell Harriman; special assistant to the secretary of state Charles Bohlen. With backs to camera, left to right: ambassador-designate to Yugoslavia George Kennan; President Kennedy; Secretary of State Dean Rusk (February 11, 1961).

  His first two years in office were marked by an unending series of crises: the Bay of Pigs, the Vienna Summit, the Berlin Wall, skirmishes in Laos and Vietnam, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Kennedy learned quickly and grew markedly from these experiences. The Cuban Missile Crisis was the catharsis and turning point. From then to the end of his life a year later, Kennedy led. He became a master of events, not their pawn. He envisioned a pathway to peace, and achieved it. He was a changed man, and he changed the world.

  Kennedy’s Evolving Strategy of Peacemaking

  In his final and commanding year, Kennedy implemented a strategy of peacemaking, one deeply grounded in both concept and experience. He was both idealist and realist, visionary and arm-twisting politician. The two approaches, one soaring and one with feet firmly on the ground, were necessary for success. He had mastered the double-barreled strategy he much admired in Churchill.

  Kennedy had come to office with four basic precepts, to which he added a fifth and sixth. First, he had long recognized that the arms race under way in the 1950s and early 1960s was a prisoner’s dilemma. Both sides had amassed nuclear weapons to the point of massive overkill, and the arms spiral was largely self-fulfilling. As Kennedy declared in the inaugural address:

  [N]either can two great and powerful groups of nations take comfort from our present course—both sides overburdened by the cost of modern weapons, both rightly alarmed by the steady spread of the deadly atom, yet both racing to alter that uncertain balance of terror that stays the hand of mankind’s final war.

  The implication of the prisoner’s dilemma is that there are large mutual gains from cooperation. Peace is worth pursuing for both sides. The Cold War was not a struggle in which the gains of one side equaled the losses of the other. The belief in mutual gains from peace is fundamentally different from the conception of the Cold War as a zero-sum struggle, a titanic fight to the death between competing ideologies, of God-fearing freedom versus atheistic tyranny (in the view of U.S. hardliners), or of rapacious global capitalism versus historically ascendant communism (as it was seen by the Soviet hardliners).

  The mutual gains, Kennedy felt, could be immense. Again, from the inaugural address:

  Let both sides seek to invoke the wonders of science instead of its terrors. Together let us explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease, tap the ocean depths, and encourage the arts and commerce.

  And if a beachhead of cooperation may push back the jungle of suspicion, let both sides join in creating a new endeavor, not a new balance of power, but a new world of law, where the strong are just and the weak secure and the peace preserved.

  Kennedy’s second precept was that the arms race was not only costly, but also inherently unstable. The idea propounded by many nuclear strategists of a “stable balance of terror” was naïve. The rapid buildup of arms gives rise to a rapid buildup of risks as well, of accidents and unintended consequences, as the mishaps from the Bay of Pigs to the Cuban Missile Crisis amply demonstrated. When he became president, Kennedy frequently recalled the calamity of World War I, a war that resulted from a series of interlocking misjudgments and false perceptions among military and political leaders. By the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis he was horrified that he had nearly committed the same missteps.

  In the vision of war by mishap, Kennedy had been deeply influenced, as we have seen, by Churchill’s description of World War I in The World Crisis, a book that he had read as a fifteen-year-old and that weighed on his mind ever after. More recently, Kennedy had been moved by historian Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August, a neo-Churchillian account that described the false premises, errors, miscalculations, and flawed military doctrines that led to the war.1 Kennedy was so much influenced by it that he gave a copy to the secretary of the army, Elvis Stahr Jr., telling him, “I want you to read this. And I want every officer in the Army to read it.” Stahr had the book placed in every officers’ day room around the world, with a note saying that it came from the president.2

  Kennedy had also been affected by the wisdom of British war theorist B. H. Liddell Hart, whose book Deterrent or Defense Kennedy had reviewed favorably for the Saturday Review during the 1960 campaign. Liddell Hart wrote:

  The study of war has taught me that almost every war was avoidable, and that the outbreak was most often produced by peace-desiring statesmen losing their heads, or their patience, and putting their opponent in a position where he could not draw back without serious loss of “face” …

  The best safeguard of all is for all of us to keep cool … War is not a way out from danger and strain. It’s a way down into a pit—of unknown depth.

  On the other hand, tension so intense as it has been during the last decade [the 1950s] is almost bound to relax eventually if war is postponed long enough. This has happened often before in history, for situations change. They never remain static. But it is always dangerous to be too dynamic, and impatient, in trying to force the pace. A war-charged situation can only change in two ways. It is bound to become better, eventually, if war is avoided without surrender. Such logic has been confirmed by experience.3

  Kennedy had adopted Liddell Hart�
�s precept of patience as the guiding principle for managing the Cuban Missile Crisis. Find time. Delay. Allow the other side to do the same, and find a way for the aggressor to retreat with some dignity. Don’t shoot first, to “get it over with.” The Liddell Hart approach had worked. Kennedy was determined to keep this lesson in mind as he pursued a longer-lasting peace.

  Kennedy was also becoming increasingly aware of technological breakdowns that could trigger a nuclear war that nobody wanted. The command-and-control systems governing complex military systems were highly vulnerable to breakdown. At the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis his orders to suspend U-2 flights inadvertently went unheeded by at least one pilot. He learned in horror how that pilot had then accidentally gone off course into Russian airspace. In addition, numerous phenomena caused false alerts of Soviet nuclear attacks, which might have triggered a disastrous response. These included the aurora borealis (the northern lights), space debris, a full moon, computer errors, and a Norwegian weather research rocket.4

  Kennedy’s third precept was that peace is a process, a series of step-by-step confidence-building measures. He recognized that moves by one side lead to moves by the other. A situation of high distrust necessitated a series of confidence-building steps. He and Khrushchev had seen the hard way that distrust on each side could quickly spiral out of control—even out of the leaders’ control. Kennedy would repeatedly emphasize that success would occur one step at a time, and it was the responsibility of leaders, here and now, to take that first step.

  Here is how he put this issue in April 1963 in his letter to Khrushchev, co-signed with British prime minister Harold Macmillan, proposing three-party talks on a test ban treaty:

  We know that it is argued [by Khrushchev himself] that a nuclear tests agreement, although valuable and welcome especially in respect of atmospheric tests, will not by itself make a decisive contribution to the peace and security of the world. There are, of course, other questions between us which are also of great importance; but the question of nuclear tests does seem to be one on which agreement might now be reached. The mere fact of an agreement on one question will inevitably help to create confidence and so facilitate other settlements.5

  Kennedy’s fourth precept was that peace must be pursued in a manner that defends the fundamental interests of each side. In the U.S. case, this meant resisting any rollback of democracy or, say, the loss of West Berlin. Peace would be achieved through cooperation, not through appeasement. The West would hold its ground against communism. Negotiation through strength, à la Churchill, and security through containment, as famously outlined by diplomat George Kennan in 1947, remained Kennedy’s cornerstones. Arms control and the reduction of tensions would be pursued while defending the core interests of the United States.

  But how to cooperate, not appease? Striking this balance was the critical step of Kennedy’s maturation. At the start of his presidency, Kennedy had been too ready to accede to the generals, too fearful of rebuke from the right, to accommodate legitimate Soviet concerns and interests. Yet he learned to listen more clearly to Khrushchev, and to see both sides of the security issues. He found a point of equilibrium. Later he would describe this point as a spot to place a lever that could move the world toward peace.

  One of Kennedy’s great strengths in finding this balance was his recognition that the enmities of nations should not be viewed as permanent. Cooperation toward shared strategic interests could overcome deep historical and ideological differences even in the most unlikely cases. The United States and the Soviet Union could find points of agreement to unwind the Cold War. Kennedy would repeat this theme many times in 1963, when he urged Americans to imagine a world beyond the Cold War.

  These four precepts were already reflected in Kennedy’s inaugural address. They were deepened by experience and remained at the core of Kennedy’s approach to peacemaking. But Kennedy added two crucial new precepts as the result of his first two years as president.

  Kennedy’s fifth precept was that it is crucially important to listen carefully to the other side, given the inherent difficulties of accurate communication. His long correspondence with Khrushchev was critical in solving the Cuban Missile Crisis. It helped each side discern what was really important in their mutual dealings. Noise, propaganda, and public confusion were inevitably part of U.S.-Soviet relations. Kennedy and Khrushchev both recognized the value of their private communications, outside the glare and distortions of the media.

  Kennedy deepened his communication with Khrushchev by using an informal go-between, Saturday Review editor and peace activist Norman Cousins. Cousins visited Khrushchev twice, in December 1962 and April 1963, carrying messages between Kennedy and Khrushchev, as well as serving as an informal emissary of Pope John XXIII to both leaders. Meeting Cousins in the White House in spring 1963, Kennedy described the great practical difficulties of clear communication, referencing the growing rift with intransigent ally France:

  You know, the more I learn about this business, the more I learn how difficult it is to communicate on the really important matters. Look at General de Gaulle. He’s one of our allies. If we can’t communicate with him and get him to understand things, we shouldn’t be surprised at our difficulty with Khrushchev.6

  What had Kennedy learned from his long communication with Khrushchev? He had learned, first, that Khrushchev and he faced the same problem in pursuing peace: the hardliners on their own teams. As he said to Cousins:

  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. Meanwhile, the lack of progress in reaching agreements between our two countries gives strength to the hard-line boys in both, with the result that the hard-liners in the Soviet Union and the United States feed on one another, each using the actions of the other to justify its own position.7

  Second, he had come to understand and to appreciate the nature of Soviet concerns. Khrushchev’s actions and threats on Berlin were a symptom of a deeper anxiety: the resurgence of German power after the devastating experiences of German aggression in the world wars. They were not a mere bluff, and still less a crude Soviet attempt at global conquest. They were, in a sense, cries of fear. This was not easy to recognize, since fear was manifested as threat and bluster.

  Khrushchev raised the issue in his meetings with Cousins. Yes, Khrushchev acknowledged, the Soviet Union “could crush Germany in a few minutes. But what we fear is the ability of an armed Germany to commit the United States by its own actions. We fear the ability of Germany to start a world atomic war.”8

  Kennedy not only came to understand more clearly the nature of Soviet concerns, he acted upon them. He, too, was wary of German fingers on the nuclear trigger. Since Adenauer was pressing hard for this, Kennedy would have to confront the West German chancellor, his own ally, on this point. He did more than that. By making clear his displeasure with Adenauer’s aggressive push for nuclear weapons, he helped other leading German politicians to ease the eighty-seven-year-old Adenauer out of power in October 1963, to be replaced by a far less truculent successor, Ludwig Erhard.

  Kennedy’s sixth precept followed from all that he had learned in navigating the many crises of his first two years, and this became the keystone to all the rest. Only strong and vigorous presidential leadership could deliver peace. That leadership was required not only in dealing with the Soviet Union, but also and perhaps especially in terms of the U.S. public, military and political elites, and European allies. Kennedy was not negotiating only with Khrushchev. He was constantly negotiating, maneuvering, and forging alliances at home and in Europe as well. Only active presidential leadership would overcome the doubts, fears, and provocations of the military, the hardliners, and the public. The Soviet leader faced the same constraints, perhaps even tough
er ones. Both Kennedy and Khrushchev gave ground to each other to enable his counterpart to face down his own domestic skeptics and critics.

  Through hard experience, Kennedy came to appreciate that only the president could set a vision of peace, and that only the president could overcome the deeply entrenched false assumptions held by the military, the foreign policy establishment, and the public, after years of anti-Soviet rhetoric and strategy. As the scholar James Richter noted, “Domestic politics of the great powers will also act as a brake on change … once established, [legitimating] myths become embedded in countries’ domestic politics and are difficult to dislodge.”9 A consensus to cooperate with the Soviet Union would never coalesce on its own in the early 1960s. It would need to be forged by Kennedy himself.

  Kennedy entered 1963 determined to lead the way to peace despite all the skepticism and barriers. He was determined to use the significant political capital that he had garnered in the Cuban Missile Crisis to that end. He had come to believe that his relationship with Khrushchev would help make an agreement possible. He also knew something crucial that the public did not. The Cuban Missile Crisis had been solved by negotiation, not by hardline bluster or militarism. It had involved an informal handshake and trust at the top between two adversaries.

  The Push for Peace

  Both Kennedy and Khrushchev personally seized the opportunity opened by the crisis. In late 1962, they began an intensive exchange of letters on reviving the on-again, off-again negotiations on a nuclear test ban, an agreement made all the more urgent given the evident progress of China in acquiring nuclear weapons. On December 19, Khrushchev wrote Kennedy that the time had arrived to “put an end once and for all” to nuclear weapons testing.10