By the time Arbenz fell, the social democratic, nationalist tide in Latin America was already waning, with a new wave of dictatorships coming to power. The Eisenhower administration had not meant to simply back U.S. corporations or local oligarchs. After the overthrow of Arbenz, it brought an antitrust suit against United Fruit and tried to cultivate anticommunist Latin American reformers who would bring greater stability and an improved standard of living through controlled change. But in practice the United States ended up bolstering antidemocratic forces and military leaders who increasingly saw themselves as autonomous agents, entitled to power and wealth in their own right rather than as servants of the old ruling classes. Meanwhile, much of the rapidly growing Latin American population remained impoverished.
Washington policymakers were taken aback by the widespread anti-Americanism on display when Nixon toured Latin America in 1958. The victory of the Cuban Revolution the next year presented the United States with the possibility of a left-wing regime just off its shores, in a country where Americans had very significant economic interests. Initial American government ambivalence toward Cuban leader Fidel Castro soon turned into hostility as he verbally attacked the United States, executed opponents, consolidated power, and postponed promised elections, determined, as revolutionary leaders like Ernesto Che Guevara proclaimed, to avoid the fate of Arbenz.
Cuba’s moves toward redistributing wealth, most importantly a sweeping land reform program, and its acceptance of economic assistance from the Soviet Union led the Eisenhower administration to cut off sugar imports from the island and order U.S.-owned refineries in Cuba to refuse to handle Soviet oil. Cuba, in turn, began expropriating American-owned property. In its final months in office, the Eisenhower administration hatched unsuccessful plots to assassinate Castro, broke diplomatic relations with Cuba, banned Americans from visiting the island, and, under the leadership of the same CIA men who had ousted the Guatemalan president, began training a force of exiles to invade it.
Cold War with Vigor
John F. Kennedy shared the basic assumptions about America’s place in the world held by his predecessors, but he brought to the presidency new strategies and a heightened combativeness. Kennedy and many of his advisers believed that the Soviet space achievements, the widespread attraction to socialism among leaders of the emerging nations of Africa, the growing strength of communist movements in Southeast Asia, and the drift of the Cuban Revolution toward socialism all indicated that the United States might be losing the Cold War. Kennedy did not share Eisenhower’s fear of a society dominated by an ever-expanding militarized state or his longing for a world of individual achievement and decentralized private initiative. Kennedy and the liberals who somewhat belatedly embraced him relished the idea of a potent, centralized state with significant control over the economy. Support for a powerful presidency became a cult belief among intellectuals. The most influential study of the office, Richard Neustadt’s 1960 Presidential Power, became required reading for generations of college students and politicians, including John Kennedy, who periodically turned to Neustadt for advice.
Kennedy’s desire to lead a bolder, more vigorous Cold War effort stemmed not only from his assessment that the freedom faced “its hour of maximum danger” but also from his extraordinary competitiveness and obsession with manhood and virility, which spilled across his private and public life. The son of a wealthy businessman and chronic womanizer who had served as ambassador to Great Britain under FDR, Kennedy grew up admiring the licentious British aristocracy. Serious, lifelong chronic diseases (largely hidden from the public) seemed to spur on his obsessive need to affirm his vitality and enjoy his prerogatives through sexual conquests, which he relentlessly pursued before and during his marriage and presidency. Especially in conducting foreign policy, Kennedy felt a need to demonstrate his toughness, seeing this as a cardinal virtue for political leaders and manly men.
Kennedy embodied a notion of manhood shared by many middle- and upper-class men of his generation, who feared the stifling embrace of corporate bureaucracy and family togetherness. The astonishing success of Playboy magazine, which rejected the pieties of fulfillment through family commitment for the freedom of sexual and material consumerism, reflected the unease many men had with their lives and their longing for something different, even if most never acted on it. As president, Kennedy, a charming, quick-witted man with a beautiful young wife, projected an air of cultural sophistication that won him much admiration among liberal intellectuals, but in private he liked reading James Bond novels, with their middlebrow male fantasies (which, unlike most men, he could act out).
Before becoming president, Kennedy had traveled extensively in the developing world. Sympathetic to the desire of third world nationalists for freedom and the alleviation of poverty, he had repeatedly called for the United States to break with European imperialism and ally itself with emerging nations. But Kennedy did not hesitate to suggest what directions those nations should take. During the 1960 campaign, after criticizing American economic exploitation of Cuba, he declared that “Castro and his gang have betrayed the ideals of the Cuban revolution.” A Khrushchev speech promising support for anticolonial “wars of liberation,” though standard Kremlin rhetoric, heightened Kennedy’s determination to exert U.S. power in the developing world, if need be through military force.
Upon taking office, Kennedy signed on to a CIA plan to overthrow Castro using measures from the Guatemala playbook: training an exile military force and landing it, with U.S. air support, in Cuba, where it would begin a guerrilla war that would spark a popular uprising. The April 1961 invasion at Playa Girón (the Bay of Pigs), an isolated spot on the island’s southern coast, proved a complete fiasco. The fourteen hundred invaders failed to get off their beachhead, ultimately surrendering to the larger and better-equipped Cuban force that surrounded them. Meanwhile, the claim by Ambassador Adlai Stevenson at the United Nations that the planes that had bombed Cuban airfields were flown by Cuban defectors was quickly exposed as a lie, as the facts came out about the American government role in organizing the operation and providing airpower.
In the wake of the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy fired the head of the CIA, Allen Dulles (John Foster Dulles’s brother), and his deputy, holdovers from the Eisenhower administration. But the Cuban fiasco, rather than deterring Kennedy from covert action, spurred him to develop greater capacity to carry out nontraditional military operations, while convincing him never again to trust formal government channels when dealing with critical national security issues. Kennedy wanted the ability to counter communist moves with something other than threats of nuclear war, a “flexible response” that could be calibrated to particular situations. For the developing world, this meant the creation of counterinsurgency forces beyond what the CIA offered.
Kennedy recognized that anticolonial and anticapitalist movements grew out of discontent with poverty, maldistribution of wealth, lack of democratic freedoms, and foreign economic and political control. Kennedy adviser Walt W. Rostow, an economic historian, argued that the very process of modernization created disaffection in the period when traditional social arrangements were torn asunder and the rewards of capitalist development had not yet reached the masses. Communist insurgents were “scavengers of the modernization process.” To stop them, Kennedy sought to speed modernization through economic aid while using diplomatic and military force to check anticapitalist forces until economic growth and political development eliminated the social basis for their popular support. Kennedy set up special forces units within the Army to train and work with third world militaries in fighting guerrilla movements, personally picking the green beret as their emblem. To deal with Cuba, he established “Operation Mongoose” under the supervision of his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, which undertook various covert efforts to get rid of Castro. After John Kennedy’s death, his vice president, Lyndon Johnson, characterized his administration as having b
een “operating a damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean.”
Counterinsurgency formed only part of a military buildup Kennedy embarked on. He also began a large-scale bolstering of nuclear forces, seeking superiority to the Soviets, rather than the sufficiency that Eisenhower accepted. To provide a possible response to a Soviet attack in Europe besides nuclear retaliation, he pressed to increase U.S. and NATO conventional forces.
Kennedy’s pursuit of the Cold War also involved nonmilitary measures. He established the Peace Corps as a way to compete with the Soviets for goodwill in the developing world, a program that proved enormously popular at home. For Latin America, he launched what he called the Alliance for Progress, an aid program meant to encourage the governments that the United States supported (often authoritarian regimes) to undertake reforms aimed at promoting economic growth and increasing living standards and opportunities for the poor. (In practice it never had much impact.) The Apollo program, to send a manned craft to the moon, provided another nonmilitary way to compete with the Soviets for prestige.
Even as he built up the military, Kennedy showed caution about using it, especially in direct confrontations with the Soviets. Early in his term, he decided not to increase the American military presence in Laos, where communist forces were making progress in an on-again, off-again civil war. Instead, at a summit conference with Khrushchev in June 1961, he agreed to a cease-fire and negotiations that led to a coalition government. Khrushchev’s revival at the same summit of his threat to hand over control of Berlin to East Germany, backed, if need be, by Soviet force, led Kennedy to announce in a nationally televised speech a major military mobilization, including an increase in the draft, the call-up of reserves, the sending of additional troops to Europe, and a request to Congress for increased defense spending and money for the construction of fallout shelters for defense against nuclear war. But when several weeks later Khrushchev unilaterally acted to stanch the flow of East Germans to the West by having a wall constructed severing connections between the two halves of Berlin, Kennedy acquiesced.
The Berlin crisis was a scary moment for all involved, but the true “hour of maximum danger” came the following year, when the Soviet Union took a huge strategic gamble by sending nuclear-armed missiles to Cuba. Khrushchev came up with the plan in response to a number of concerns. In spite of Kennedy’s claims during the 1960 campaign that there was a “missile gap” that had the Soviets ahead of the Americans, the reality was just the opposite. With only a few Soviet missiles capable of reaching the United States, the imbalance in nuclear capacity nagged at Khrushchev, who believed that the Kennedy administration, in failing to negotiate a resolution to the Berlin crisis and building up its military presence in South Vietnam, displayed a growing arrogance toward the Soviet Union. At least as important, the Soviets, like the Cubans, feared that the United States might soon launch a new military attack on Cuba, this time using its own troops. In a bold effort to achieve nuclear parity with the United States, force it into negotiations over a range of issues, protect Cuba, and cement the Soviet relationship with Castro, Khrushchev won approval from Soviet leaders for a massive, secret deployment of Soviet arms to Cuba, including bombers, missiles, atomic warheads, and over forty thousand military personnel.
Khrushchev hoped to keep the Cuban operation secret until Soviet missiles had been deployed, but the very size of the operation made its discovery almost inevitable. In October 1962, a U-2 flight over Cuba confirmed that, contrary to explicit assurances from Khrushchev, the Soviets were setting up nuclear missiles capable of reaching the United States. Kennedy immediately decided that the missiles would have to be removed. In secret deliberations, administration officials debated a range of military options, from a full-scale invasion of Cuba to bombing the missile sites to a blockade of the island. Kennedy chose the most moderate course. In a televised address on October 22, he announced a naval “quarantine” of shipments of offensive weapons to the island—U.S. officials thought “quarantine” sounded less warlike than “blockade”—that would be kept in place until the missiles already on the island were removed. With U.S. military preparedness brought up to one level below general war, Soviet ships carrying military equipment to Cuba stopped or turned back just before the quarantine went into effect.
Khrushchev, worried about the possibility of an imminent nuclear war that the Soviet Union could not win, now sought to defuse the crisis. Privately he wrote to Kennedy offering to remove the missiles in Cuba if the United States pledged not to invade the island. While the two sides jockeyed, war fears remained high, especially after the Soviets shot down a U-2 flying over Cuba, killing its pilot. But within two weeks of the start of the crisis the two powers reached an agreement based on Khrushchev’s proposal, compromising on an additional demand that he later raised that the United States remove its missiles from Turkey, which Kennedy verbally agreed to do without public notice sometime after the Soviet missiles left Cuba.
During the year that followed the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy took some steps to lessen tensions with the Soviet Union. Eager to move forward with a ban on testing nuclear weapons, in a speech at American University in June 1963, aimed at both the American public (which paid little attention) and the Soviet leadership, the president set out a markedly different view of international relations than he had presented in the past. Kennedy declared that he sought world peace but “not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war.” Acknowledging that in a world of nuclear arsenals “total war makes no sense,” he called on Americans to reexamine their own attitudes toward peace, the Soviet Union, and “the course of the cold war.” Adopting a formulation much like Khrushchev’s notion of “peaceful coexistence,” Kennedy said that world peace did not require countries to like one another or always agree with one another but “only that they live together in mutual tolerance.” In a remarkable rhetorical break from the Manichean language in which America had waged the Cold War, Kennedy said, referring to the Soviet Union, that “if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity.” (How deeply Kennedy was committed to fundamental rethinking remained unclear; just two weeks later, standing at the Berlin Wall, he said that “there are some who say . . . we can work with the Communists. Let them come to Berlin.”)
Following Kennedy’s American University speech, the Soviet Union and the United States set up a “hot line” for direct communication between their leaders to prevent misunderstandings in crisis situations and resumed negotiations about banning nuclear testing. They could not overcome their differences about inspections to guarantee a total halt, but they did agree to a ban on atmospheric and underwater tests, which unlike below ground explosions could be detected without on-site visits. The two countries also began preliminary discussions about broader arms control talks.
But if Kennedy seemed to be moving toward a détente of sorts with the Soviet Union, he did not seem to take too seriously his injunction at American University that “if all nations could refrain from interfering in the self- determination of others, the peace would be much more assured.” Through covert and overt action, the United States continued to try to influence the direction of developing countries across the globe. In South Vietnam, Kennedy had increased the number of U.S. military advisers from eight hundred to sixteen thousand in support of the unpopular, autocratic anticommunist regime of Ngo Dinh Diem. Kennedy privately expressed reservations about a prolonged or enlarged American commitment in Vietnam. But when Diem refused to go along with American demands that he reform his government and end his crackdown on Buddhist protestors, American officials, with Kennedy’s approval, encouraged South Vietnamese military leaders to overthrow him. In October 1963 they murdered Diem and his brother. The “hour of maximum danger” (actual, not rhetorical) had led Kennedy to reassess relations with the Soviet Union but not to fundamentally rethink American assumptions about the need to oppose communism everywhere a
nd to achieve political and economic hegemony in the developing world.
The New Frontier at Home
Though he gave much higher priority to foreign affairs than domestic matters, Kennedy did have a domestic legislative agenda as part of what he called the New Frontier. Much of it consisted of ideas that had been floating around the liberal wing of the Democratic Party since the Fair Deal. Kennedy hoped to create new cabinet-level departments to improve transportation, address urban problems, and create affordable housing; establish a medical insurance program for the elderly; provide federal aid to education; and attack poverty. But he got very little domestic legislation passed. His narrow election victory and the continuing dominance of Congress by a Republican–southern Democratic alliance presented formidable problems for the president, who as a congressman and senator had spent little energy mastering legislative craftsmanship and did not want to squander political capital on bills he thought likely to fail. Though most of his major initiatives went nowhere, Kennedy did win a modest expansion of Social Security, a raise in the minimum wage, some new money for housing, and a very modestly funded Area Redevelopment Act, aimed at reducing privation in the Appalachian states.
The one domestic issue Kennedy kept plugging at was economic growth. He shared the consensus outlook of 1950s liberals and centrists that the United States was basically sound, economically and socially. He recognized that there were some groups plagued by poverty, like the elderly and residents of Appalachia, for whom he proposed targeted programs. But he believed that economic growth in itself would go a long way toward solving social ills, without the need for redistributive measures or major structural changes. The demands of the Cold War, he argued, also made economic growth a necessity, claiming, in a bit of 1962 hyperbole, that “the hope of all free nations” rested on congressional passage of an economic stimulus measure, an example of the way national security talk had come to pervade American life.
American Empire Page 25
