Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House

by Robert Dallek

  On January 20, Lansdale gave marching orders to members of a Caribbean Survey Group. Invoking Bobby’s directive, he said that “it is untenable to say that the United States is unable to achieve its vital national security and foreign policy goal re Cuba. . . . We have all the men, money, material, and spiritual assets of this most powerful nation on earth.” Every member of the group was instructed to meet and if possible exceed deadlines in reaching the goal of turning Cuba away from communism. In February, Lansdale set a timetable stretching from March to October 1962, when Castro was to be overthrown and a new government put in place. In the meantime, the Joint Chiefs were to make contingency plans for U.S. military intervention in Cuba. In March, however, Kennedy put a damper on plans for direct military action. Still concerned that U.S. military intervention would undermine the Alliance for Progress, Kennedy discouraged all talk of air or ground attacks on the island. At a meeting with Bobby, McGeorge Bundy, McCone, Gilpatric, Taylor, and Lemnitzer, he foresaw no immediate circumstances that would justify military steps.

  Yet the administration’s determination to bring down Castro remained as evident as it had been during the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Khrushchev, who saw Castro’s government in Cuba as a valuable encroachment into America’s sphere of control and a blow to U.S. prestige, believed that renewed Soviet threats to Berlin could keep Kennedy from attacking the island. He had no doubt, however, that the Americans, short of an invasion, would continue to do everything possible to subvert Castro’s regime.

  Khrushchev also worried that the U.S. planned a first nuclear strike against Russia. When Georgi Bolshakov, the ostensible Soviet Embassy press officer in Washington, asked Bobby Kennedy about the influence of war hawks in the government, Bobby explained that there were some in the Pentagon as well as other opinion makers who were eager to attack the Soviet Union. He had in mind E. M. Dealey, the conservative publisher of the Dallas Morning News, who made no secret of his belief that Kennedy headed an administration of “weak sisters.” During a White House luncheon, he told the president that the country needed “a man on horseback. Many people in Texas and the Southwest think that you are riding Caroline’s tricycle.” Kennedy angrily replied that “wars are easier to talk about than they are to fight.”

  Yet he could not discount war talk as long as Khrushchev engaged in provocations that made people in the West think that he was intent on destroying anticommunist opponents. During the first half of 1962, Khrushchev renewed his threats to sign a peace treaty with East Germany, which would once more endanger U.S. access to West Berlin. Kennedy could not understand Khrushchev’s belligerence. He described him as unstable and irresponsible, which were frightening traits in someone who could trigger a nuclear war. But Khrushchev saw his own behavior as calculated pushback. During a visit to Moscow by Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, Khrushchev made clear that he would not be intimidated. If “any lunatics in your country want war,” he said, “Western Europe will hold them back. War in this day and age means no Paris and no France, all in the space of an hour.”

  Khrushchev’s aggressiveness made Kennedy all the more eager to end a U.S.-Soviet deadlock over limits on nuclear testing and an arms control agreement that would reduce the possibility of a nuclear war. As he wrote Prime Minister Macmillan on January 13, 1962, “we must do all we can to turn the nuclear spiral downward, and to save mankind from the increasing threat of events of surpassing horror.”

  But Seaborg saw “the realities of American politics” as more compelling in shaping Kennedy’s actions, particularly the constraints put on him by winning Senate approval of any test ban agreement he might negotiate in the future. And as Rusk, who had been well disposed to a test ban, now advised, the Soviets “did not seem to be suffering greatly from the public indignation which had greeted its tests last fall.” Rusk also thought that it would be a mistake to reach a point where anyone thought that we had fallen behind in the arms race. In April 1962, after the Soviets stubbornly continued their opposition to inspections of any kind in their country, Kennedy concluded that prospects for a test ban treaty were all but gone and that he had no choice but to order atmospheric tests in the Pacific over Britain’s Christmas Island. He remained skeptical about the wisdom of testing and did not want them on U.S. territory, where a mushroom cloud could frighten Americans sensitive to the dangers from nuclear pollution. Nonetheless, the political pressure demanding a response to the Soviet challenge, coupled with advice from responsible scientists warning of national security perils, made a decision to test in the atmosphere irresistible.

  Yet Kennedy was unwilling to let matters rest there. He agreed to continue negotiations in Geneva and urged Khrushchev to join him in reaching for “real progress toward disarmament and not to engage in sterile exchanges of propaganda.” Kennedy also told his advisers that he “wanted the world to know that we were prepared to walk the last mile to obtain” a treaty. At a meeting with Gromyko, Rusk said that he did not see disarmament as a hopeless problem, and recalled French foreign minister Aristide Briand’s precept that “disarmament should be such as would leave no one a dupe or a victim.”

  Kennedy assumed that meaningful negotiations were unlikely until both sides completed their current round of tests toward the end of 1962, and then they could decide whether to make another offer limited to tests in the atmosphere or work for a comprehensive test ban that included underground explosions. A limited ban had the advantage of being something the Soviets could accept without feeling that they had backtracked from earlier positions. Stevenson thought it a fine idea that could prevent “a non-stop series of competitive nuclear tests in the atmosphere.” Pressure from the Joint Chiefs to exclude a comprehensive agreement that could not ensure “full verification” through “unhampered verification” largely persuaded the White House to propose a limited ban.

  It also had the advantage of simpler, less intrusive verification. Unlike underground tests, which seemed to require monitoring stations on Soviet and U.S. territory, atmospheric tests of any significant size were impossible to hide. In addition, the unintended release of a Defense Department seismic study concluding that detection facilities in the Soviet Union might be unnecessary to track underground explosions undermined Pentagon insistence on such stations as an essential element of a comprehensive treaty. When Arthur Dean, the U.S. representative to the Geneva disarmament talks, acknowledged that the verification stations might be superfluous, it made convincing Moscow of their need impossible.

  The inability of Kennedy’s diplomatic and military advisers to find the means to negotiate a nuclear test ban with the Soviets had frustrated and demoralized him. The blunder in releasing information that heightened the difficulties of finding some common ground between Soviet opposition to monitors and Pentagon insistence on them left Kennedy feeling angry at advisers who were not only falling short in identifying means to overcome differences but also now adding to them. Kennedy complained that “the U.S. had worked itself into a deplorable situation by releasing the . . . data on enhanced detection possibilities.” Bundy told a member of Dean’s delegation that “the president was very upset. He liked to have things done well and the idea that we had made a proposition and now we were saying something else—he had a rather adverse reaction to that, to put it mildly.”

  In a conversation with Rusk and Bundy, Kennedy was scathing: Of the Foreign Service types or professional diplomats like Dean, he said, “I just see an awful lot of fellows . . . who don’t seem to have cojones. . . . The Defense Department looks as if that’s all they got. They haven’t any brains. . . . And I know that you get all this sort of virility over at the Pentagon and you get a lot of Arleigh Burkes: admirable, nice figure, without any brains.”

  The disappointments over Castro’s unshaken control in Cuba and Moscow’s refusal to come to terms on a test ban agreement were compounded by Kennedy’s continuing struggles with health problems and a stroke that left the seventy-three-year-old Joe Kennedy barely able to speak or
walk. Joe’s illness depressed Kennedy. The sight of someone as active and vital as his father being so disabled heightened his sense of vulnerability to his own medical difficulties and his premonition that he would not have a long life.

  The resurfacing of the civil rights struggle added to Kennedy’s worries. In March 1962, civil rights advocates complained that the White House had not laid the proper groundwork for a major rights law. “Negroes are not convinced that the Administration is really on their side, ” Kennedy was told. He hadn’t made clear that this was a “moral issue.” Moreover, unlike Bobby and the president, who felt that pressing Congress to do something about civil rights would jeopardize the rest of their legislative program, rights supporters predicted that if he lost the fight for a civil rights law, “the President’s whole program will go down the drain.” Kennedy was urged to take the issue to the public in a nationally televised Oval Office address.

  The Civil Rights Commission, headed by Father Theodore Hesburgh, weighed in with demands for bolder action. Bobby and Hesburgh clashed over the commission’s decision to hold hearings in Louisiana and Mississippi to underscore abuses of blacks by police and local authorities. Fearful that the commission’s presence in the South would provoke violence, Bobby urged them to spend more time looking into violations of black rights in the North. But seeing the commission as a “burr under the saddle of the administration,” Hesburgh would not give ground. After the hearing, which passed off without riots, the commission’s report described the terror tactics that Mississippi officials used to inhibit black voting. “You’re making my life difficult,” Kennedy told two commissioners. They were not very sympathetic. They thought that Kennedy was too insensitive to the miserable conditions under which so many southern blacks lived.

  Kennedy took comfort in knowing that the public was on his side. A January 1962 Gallup Poll showed a 77 percent approval rating, while 62 percent said they had a highly favorable view of the president. Moreover, the public sided with him on what it saw as the most important problems facing the country: 63 percent said it was war and peace and only 6 percent mentioned racial tensions. 32 percent of Americans thought that Kennedy was pushing racial integration too fast, 35 percent thought his actions were “about right,” and only 11 percent said he was not moving fast enough. His press conferences were a huge hit—91 percent viewed them favorably. When Gallup asked voters in a trial heat who they preferred between Kennedy and Nixon, Kennedy won decisively—65 percent to 35 percent.

  In the spring of 1962, part of Kennedy’s upbeat ratings resulted from his effectiveness in winning a battle against corporation executives. On April 10, the nation’s steel companies announced a 3.5 percent price increase, which threatened to trigger greater inflation and an economic downturn. Kennedy was furious at what he described as a “double-cross” by industry chiefs, who had promised to cooperate with labor unions and the White House in holding down prices and avoiding a recession. At a stormy Oval Office meeting, Kennedy told aides that steel executives “fucked me. They fucked us and we’ve got to try to fuck them.” They had “made a fool of him.” He quoted his father as having told him that “businessmen were all pricks. . . . God, I hate the bastards,” he said. “They kicked us right in the balls.” He not only saw the steel chiefs’ action as a personal blow to his political standing and the country’s well-being; he was also irritated at having to shift his focus from more important foreign policy issues to something he considered an unnecessary fight. They had reached a settlement that had served the national interest, and now he had to spend time, energy, and political capital on a needless struggle. The episode also put his impatience with domestic affairs on display. He was hardly indifferent to the country’s economic condition or its fundamental tie to his political standing, but foreign dangers, especially the fear of Soviet or American missteps that might bring them to the brink of war, remained his greatest concern.

  He now took his case to the public, holding a press conference in which he declared the price increase an “irresponsible defiance of the public interest” and a “ruthless disregard of public responsibilities.” Invoking the sacrifices being made by reservists risking their lives in Vietnam, he denounced “a tiny handful of steel executives whose pursuit of private power and profit exceed their sense of public responsibility” and demonstrates “utter contempt for the interests of 185 million Americans.” At the same time, Bobby Kennedy, at the president’s behest, unleashed the FBI to investigate and intimidate the steel executives, while the IRS threatened to audit their tax returns. After the companies relented and announced a rollback in their price increases, Kennedy, with feigned horror, joked at a dinner party that his brother would never have investigated steel executives’ tax returns or tapped their phones, which is exactly what he or, more precisely, his subordinates did. As far as the Kennedys were concerned, they were simply meeting fire with fire.

  The struggle to find answers to the conflict in Vietnam was less satisfying. On January 3, 1962, when Kennedy met with the Joint Chiefs, General Paul Harkins, the U.S. commander in Vietnam, Johnson, and McNamara at his winter retreat in Palm Beach, Florida, he instructed that “no publicity would be given, at least for the time being, to General Harkins’ new mission.” Kennedy made clear that he did not want the United States more greatly involved in Southeast Asia than we already were. He wanted the number of U.S. military personnel in Vietnam to be kept as quiet as possible. Moreover, any discussion of what U.S. troops were doing there “should emphasize their role as advisers and deny that they were in any way engaged in combat.”

  Three days later, when McNamara lifted a Kennedy-imposed embargo on information about the meeting, Lemnitzer informed Admiral Harry Felt and General Lionel McGarr about the change in the command structure in Vietnam and the importance of keeping this secret. He said nothing, however, about Kennedy’s determination to limit and mute the U.S. role in the fighting. He and the other Chiefs were determined to challenge Kennedy’s injunction against the introduction of ground forces. They shared Nolting’s belief, which he articulated before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on January 12, “that the situation in Vietnam was primarily the result of Chinese Communist expansionism” and that the United States could not fail to meet this challenge—even at the risk of deploying combat forces. Nolting’s image of red China winning control across Asia echoed the fears of millions of Americans.

  On January 13, the Chiefs sent McNamara a memo for consideration by the president. They urged Kennedy to reconsider his ban on direct U.S. participation in the fighting, arguing that it was essential to prevent the loss of Vietnam and that American troops were the best and perhaps only way to ensure this. Unwilling to challenge Kennedy’s clear opposition to ground forces, McNamara refused to endorse the Chiefs’ views but waffled on their recommendation by saying that the present U.S. program in Vietnam should be tried first. However, he would not rule out in the future joining in the Chiefs’ call for U.S. fighting men to take on the Viet Cong.

  But Kennedy remained determined to limit U.S. involvement in the conflict. He knew, of course, that attacks by U.S. aircraft and increasing the number of advisers, who would accompany South Vietnamese troops on search-and-destroy missions, would put Americans in harm’s way, with inevitable casualties. But this was to be kept out of the news, with private and public declarations that American advisers were not actively fighting the war. At a press conference on January 15, although one U.S. adviser had already been killed and U.S. aircraft were providing cover for Vietnamese forces, Kennedy emphatically denied that American military personnel were involved in combat.

  As the American role in the fighting grew, Kennedy and his advisers became more aggressive about hiding the truth. To acknowledge that the United States was becoming the principal combatant in the conflict with the Viet Cong would make Diem’s dependence on a Western power transparent and would strengthen the insurgency’s appeal as an anticolonial defender of Vietnamese independence. It woul
d also provoke unwanted pressures in the United States for a victory over the communists that had eluded Kennedy in Cuba, Berlin, and Laos, and the Democrats in Korea. Nolting urged that all press briefings on Vietnam “should give full credit to the GVN [government of Vietnam] and not make it look as though the U.S. were running the war in SVN, making the plans, or pulling all the strings.”

  Hiding America’s role in the conflict was a terrible error. Franklin Roosevelt had understood that the country could not fight World War II without full public backing. The lesson was lost on Harry Truman, whose decision to cross the 38th Parallel and fight a wider war in Korea without building a national consensus for the coming sacrifices had destroyed his political support, with his approval rating falling to 23 percent. An undeclared and secret war in Vietnam risked Kennedy’s credibility and ability to lead the nation.