Two weeks after Clare returned from Majorca in early September, Tish Baldrige called from Washington and said, “The President wants you to come down here.”
“What about?”
“I think he’s unhappy about some of the things Time has been publishing.”
Clare said she had no influence at her husband’s magazines, but obeyed the summons.53
At 1:00 P.M. on Wednesday, the twenty-sixth, she was ushered into JFK’s small dining room on the second floor of the White House. She found him still “slim, handsome, courteous, [his] graciousness concealing a great inner reserve.”54
His first remark took her aback.
“Gather you have something on your mind.”
Clare had expected him to tell her what was on his. But since he’d asked, she said, “Yes, I have.”
There was a long pause, so she continued. “I woke this morning with a thought.… The greater a man is the easier it is to describe his greatness in a single sentence.”
Kennedy seemed puzzled, and she gave him some examples.
“Does anyone need to tell you the name of these men: He died to save us.… He discovered America.… He preserved the Union and freed the slaves. He lifted us out of a Depression and won a great World War..… What is on my mind, Mr. President, is what sentence will describe you, when you leave here.”
“I am not interested in my place in history,” Kennedy said. He changed the subject to Cuba.
Less than a month before, U.S. aerial surveillance had confirmed the existence of eight Soviet missile sites on Fidel Castro’s Communist island. Since then there had been mounting evidence of Soviet military shipments arriving there, most alarmingly combat troops, and several cargoes of medium-range nuclear missiles. Up to now, Kennedy had seen no need for military intervention. But he had announced on September 13 that the United States would consider it provocation if offensive weapons were installed in Cuba. The Senate had voted 86–1 to authorize the use of force if he deemed it necessary, in the face of a warning by the Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko that any U.S. attack on Cuba or Cuba-bound shipping would mean war.
In view of these escalations, Clare was surprised to hear Kennedy say he did not think Cuba was “at present” dangerous compared with other flashpoints in the world.
“I cannot quite understand, Mr. President, why the presence of Communist power in Vietnam is a threat to our security nine thousand miles away, and the presence of it in Cuba is not.”
“Would you have us give up our commitment in Vietnam? As I remember it, Time magazine urged us to take action there. Cuba was around at that time.”
“I don’t speak for or edit Time,” she said.
“You surely have some influence.”
“Such as I have—very little—I am urging them to keep their eye on Cuba now.”
Kennedy asked, “Assuming Cuba is a threat, what is your policy?”
Clare said only that she feared the island would become a base for Communism to spread into Latin America.
“If we take action in Cuba,” the President said, “it may be used as a pretext for the Russians to take Berlin.”
He was clearly still nervous about the previous year’s near nuclear confrontation between the Allies and the Soviets over the multinational occupation of Berlin. Just a month ago, an East German youth had been gunned down trying to escape over the wall that now divided the city.
Clare said that his argument meant that Cuba had placed the United States in a “global double bind,” and asked which danger spot he thought was easier to break out of—Cuba or Berlin.
Kennedy’s response was dismissive. “We can get ready in three weeks for the invasion of Cuba. We could win there, obviously.”
Waiting even that long, she warned, would “be more costly in American lives.”
“There are some situations you have to live with,” he said.
Clare again asked if Americans should tolerate the presence of Russian military power ninety miles from Florida. “Why is the extrusion of Communism in Vietnam and the Near East more important to us than in our own sea off our own shores?”
“Your policy, then, is war with Cuba and the risk of nuclear war with the USSR?”
The Soviets had not risked it over Vietnam or Korea, Clare reminded him. She felt the United States should “call their bluff” in its own hemisphere.
Kennedy was dubious. “ ‘Calling their bluff,’ as you put it, could lead to nuclear war.”
“Nuclear war will settle nothing for anybody. But if Khrushchev really believes it will, now is the time to find it out.”
“You would rather take Cuba than hold Vietnam or Berlin.”
“We are holding Vietnam alone,” she said. “Berlin is a multilateral commitment. If our Allies want to hold it at the risk of nuclear war, we will be in better shape to honor that commitment without Russia at our back door.”
Kennedy rejected her brinkmanship. “I do not wish, or intend to be, the President who goes down in history as having unleashed nuclear war.”
“Nobody—not you or Khrushchev—will go down in history in the event of nuclear war. A veil will be drawn over the history of the West. No one can benefit but China. Khrushchev knows that too.”
“You have not yet said what your Cuban policy is—except that regardless of what our Allies think, we should invade.”
It was up to him, Clare conceded, whether to invade or impose a naval blockade. “Militarily Cuba is more important to us than the city of Berlin.… Maybe the sentence by which you will go down in history will be: He kept this hemisphere free and did not yield in Berlin.”
“It looks easier when you are on the outside,” the President said.
When Hugh Sidey, Time’s presidential correspondent, came to pick up Clare after lunch, he found her and JFK standing impatiently on the White House steps. Evidently, the meeting had not gone well. Clare had no word to say about her encounter, but Kennedy let Sidey know that he disliked having Clare Luce tell him “how to run the world.”55
Cuba was not his only major problem that Wednesday. A black man named James Meredith had just tried to enroll as a student in the all-white University of Mississippi, and was being denied admittance by state officials, most prominently Governor Ross Barnett, playing much the same racist role as Governor Faubus had done in Arkansas five years before. Violence began to flare around the Oxford campus on Saturday night, after Kennedy signed an order sending twenty-three thousand federal troops to safeguard Meredith’s registration. But there was a delay in deployment and the rioting turned bloody on Sunday night, just as JFK was prematurely announcing on television that the crisis had been resolved. Order was restored by Monday morning, and Meredith attended his first class under armed protection.
In a letter thanking the President for lunch, Clare reminded him of her “single sentence” theory of historic eminence, and could not resist adding that the recent events in Mississippi had proved it.
He upheld and enforced the law of the land against segregation in Mississippi. A noble sentence! A sentence for all the world to read and applaud. A sentence which describes not only the act but the actor. We know him, not because of what he said but because of what he did.56
On October 15 she was back in Phoenix for the winter, completing a syndicated article entitled “Mr. Kennedy on the Hustings.” Its tone was far from that of her adulatory letter. Referring to the President’s current efforts to win support for Democratic candidates in the congressional midterm elections, she said that his record so far on revitalizing the economy had been unimpressive, and had plunged the country into recession. As for foreign policy, he could hardly point with pride “to his handling of the Bay of Pigs invasion, or to his success in driving Khrushchev out of Cuba.”57
The piece was rejected by the North American Newspaper Alliance as too partisan, but was in any case rendered obsolete by the rapidly unfolding nuclear crisis of the next thirteen days. On October 16, Kennedy was shown photog
raphic evidence of the construction of Soviet MRBM launch sites in Cuba, and told that nuclear missiles could be operational in two weeks. He had to decide between the preference of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for “surgical” air strikes upon the offensive sites, or the less aggressive option, advanced by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, to blockade further military shipments to the island. Khrushchev’s argument, echoed by President Fidel Castro, was that the missiles—soon to be confirmed as numbering forty-two, though only twenty were taken from the ships—were purely “defensive.” Kennedy, in contrast, regarded them as a “clear and present danger,” not only to the United States, but to the whole Western Hemisphere.58
The situation began deteriorating rapidly on Monday, October 22, when Kennedy announced that he was ordering “a strict quarantine on all offensive military equipment” shipped to Cuba. As he spoke, the entire U.S. nuclear bomber force was on rotational high alert, with one-eighth of its fleet constantly airborne. Secretary of State Dean Rusk told a gathering of foreign ambassadors in Washington that the world faced as grave a crisis as it had ever seen.
Khrushchev responded belligerently, ordering an acceleration in shipment of installations and Soviet troops (soon to number forty thousand) until 10:00 A.M. on Wednesday, when the U.S. naval quarantine went into effect. Less than half an hour later, the CIA learned that Soviet ships approaching Cuba had “stopped dead in the water.” After four more days of emergency, Khrushchev declared on October 28 that the Soviet Union would dismantle and remove all delivery systems and missiles from Cuba. In exchange, Kennedy pledged not to invade, and offered, as a secret palliative, to close American Jupiter missile stations (actually already obsolete) facing the Soviet Union in Turkey. War had been averted, but only just.
Castro, furious and increasingly paranoid that the United States planned an invasion to oust him, publicly accused Khrushchev of lacking cojones.59
In the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis, Allen Dulles called Clare and told her that in view of the President’s pledge to desist from Cuba-libre operations, she must end her support of a “Flying Tigers” motorboat.60 Since the Bay of Pigs debacle in 1961, a fleet of these clandestine craft, financed by Americans and operated by anti-Castro patriots, had been commuting between Miami and Cuba, gathering information for the CIA on the island’s arms buildup.61
Clare had been recruited as a donor into this operation by William Pawley, a veteran of the original volunteer “Flying Tigers” squadron that had defended China against Japan before Pearl Harbor. His appeal resonated with her because she could not abide the thought that the ideology she had fought so ardently in Italy was now flourishing less than a hundred miles from the American mainland. Her former obsequiousness to Kennedy aside, she, like other hard-line Republican anti-Communists, felt that the administration had been maladroit, and even weak, in its policy toward the totalitarian regime in Havana.
Prevented now from giving money to any more anti-Castro activities, Clare started writing a number of articles and speeches on Cuba and other Cold War subjects that over the next two years would repoliticize her, and lead to her emergence as an oracle of Republican conservatism.62 This did not keep her from maintaining her personal friendship with Kennedy, whose popularity had been so buttressed by the missile crisis that he seemed assured of reelection. At the same time, she challenged him publicly and privately on issues where they disagreed.
In a January 22, 1963, address to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council entitled “The Seventeen Year Trend to Castro,” Clare said that the United States policy of Communist containment since 1946 had been a failure. As a result, by the time Kennedy had been sworn in, “sixteen nations and a billion people were added to the Communist empire—one third of the world’s population.” This was now supplemented by “Castro’s Cuba—44,000 more square miles and six million more people.”
She granted that the recent crisis had shown that the United States and the Soviet Union were both wise enough to have averted “a nuclear holocaust.” But JFK had subsequently backed down on his demand for United Nations on-site inspections of the island. In consequence, “We have suffered a defeat in Cuba.” Fidel Castro’s army, the largest and best equipped in the hemisphere, outside that of the United States, was intact. There was no realistic chance now of an American invasion to topple the Kremlin’s bearded puppet. “Mr. Kennedy is a brave man, but he is no hero. And like all politicians he is professionally allergic to martyrdom.”63
Another strategic thinker expressing insecurity about Kennedy’s negotiated settlement in Cuba was President Charles de Gaulle of France. He announced that 1963 would see the emergence of his country as an independent nuclear power, capable of defending itself against Soviet imperialism. This statement caused him to be attacked by American leftist commentators, and Kennedy said at a press conference that it was “peculiar logic” to infer from his accommodation with Khrushchev that America would forsake its Western European allies in the event of any aggression from the East.64
Clare joined the fray on the General’s side. In the Washington Star on February 3, she wrote: “The President’s remarks notwithstanding, there is much recent evidence that Mr. Khrushchev himself is now thoroughly convinced that once the 400,000 American troops in Germany are withdrawn, America’s nuclear commitment will then extend no farther than its own coastline.” She went on to argue that Khrushchev’s brilliant “bluff” in Cuba had recast his image into that of a peaceable statesman, despite the fact that he had subsequently boasted, to thunderous applause in East Germany, that the Soviet Union would “bury” the United States with its 100-megaton bombs in any nuclear confrontation. Pointedly, she noted that de Gaulle had at least heeded Kennedy’s warning, in Why England Slept, that “no nation can afford to wait until it is attacked to prepare its own defenses.”
Senator Barry Goldwater was so impressed by her piece that he entered it into the Congressional Record.65 Two days later, Clare followed up with a five-page private letter to the President, urging him to back de Gaulle’s initiative. If he did not, the General would fall, and France would lose “its morale and sense of nationhood.” The Left might then come into power, destroying French-German unity, and ultimately the democratic solidarity of all Western Europe.
Clare said she doubted the administration’s view that Europe was safe under a nuclear umbrella “whose handle is firmly held by Washington.” Nor did she accept that the United States could forever be relied on to use its atomic weapons in Europe’s defense.
I personally believe … that if a conflict situation arose … in which the Soviets gave us the choice of whether we preferred to be alive and not Red, or to be dead along with everybody in Russia (and Europe), most Americans would opt for the former, even if it meant to abandon all Germany. And, frankly, the outcome of the Cuban crisis shows that your Administration holds the same view.
She told Kennedy that he could regain “the moral leadership of the West” by showing his admiration for nations like France and Britain in their desire not to be mere satellites. “The unity of Europe cannot be constructed by the United States of America. It can only be constructed by Europeans—and it must be based on German-French unity.”66
A somewhat dismissive reply came from the National Security Adviser, McGeorge Bundy, who said few “important” Europeans shared her confidence in de Gaulle. Clare, provoked, fired off a three-column letter to The New York Times repeating her views, and unfavorably comparing the administration’s enthusiasm for a “$40 billion rendezvous with the Man in the Moon” with its reluctance “to meet half-way the Man in Paris.”67
This prompted a detailed response from the President himself. Though he claimed to find her suggestions “thoughtful and thought-provoking,” he disagreed with some of them. He was not confident that “European unity and security would be assured by our enabling France to replace the United States as the nuclear defender of Europe.” Nor did he believe that every sovereign nation should have a nuclear arsenal. �
�It seems to me that the objectives which you and I share, and the very real problems and European fears which you cite, can best be met by a new arrangement which maintains the indivisibility of the nuclear deterrent while giving the Europeans real participation in its maintenance and management.”68
Clearly annoyed by Clare’s gibes at his leadership, Kennedy wrote, “If we are to be caught up in a nuclear war, should we not have a voice in the decision that launches it? Is it not my first responsibility as President of the United States to protect the interests of the United States in these developments?”
He then struck a conciliatory tone.
I do not despair if we agree more on ends than on means. Our views on the latter are not essentially so far apart—and the right course to achieving the victory of freedom must be hammered out, shaped and reshaped, as we go along. I know you will continue to contribute your experienced voice to the process of making more effective the policy of our country in a changing world.69
Kennedy was also upset with Henry Luce that spring. He felt that recent Time articles had been excessively critical of his administration, and complained to Harry directly in an Oval Office interview.
“I gave it to him for forty-five minutes,” he told his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. “He says, ‘Well, I’ve been out in Phoenix and it doesn’t seem that bad to me.’ I said, ‘Well, listen, looks bad to me.’ … He’s really losing his grip. Here he’s in to see me, to ask me to come up to that dinner …”
The President was referring to Time’s upcoming fortieth-anniversary celebration on May 6. It was to be the climax of Luce’s professional life.
“What did you say to him?” Bobby asked.
Kennedy said that he had hedged, but had decided not to go. “They’re just mean as hell up there.”70
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