Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series)

by Talbot, David

  Castro was intrigued by Kennedy’s Latin America offensive, years later admitting to Szulc that JFK’s Alliance for Progress was an “intelligent strategy” that sought the same goals as the early phase of the Cuban revolution, including agrarian reform, social justice, and a better distribution of wealth. But, like Guevara, he believed it was doomed to fail because the region’s ruling cliques would not allow real reform. Castro’s prediction seemed borne out during the Kennedy years, when reactionary forces responded to the winds of change that the Alliance for Progress had helped set loose in the continent by overthrowing democracies in Brazil, Argentina, and Peru. The Kennedy administration made known its displeasure at these antidemocratic coups, withholding recognition of the puppet government that replaced President Arturo Frondizi in Buenos Aires for nearly three weeks—longer than it took the Soviet Union—and slapping economic, diplomatic, and military sanctions on the military junta that took over following the July 1962 putsch in Peru. The New York Times proclaimed Kennedy’s response to the Peruvian coup “the most significant turn in U.S. hemispheric foreign policy since the inception of the Alliance for Progress 16 months ago.”

  Kennedy’s action put the administration on the side of democratic reform in a region where the U.S. historically supported repression. Eduardo Frei, one of Chile’s last democratic presidents before his country’s 1973 fall into military tyranny, expressed his amazement over Kennedy’s progressive policies in a letter to Dick Goodwin, which the aide framed and hung in his White House office: “Latins were astonished that this young Yankee was trying to force them to agree on radical social change. It was as if the positions of decades had been reversed.”

  President Kennedy was serious about reforming U.S. policy in Latin America, according to Goodwin. Soon after moving into the White House, Kennedy summoned Goodwin to the Oval Office, where the aide found him poring over congratulatory telegrams from Latin leaders. “There’s even one from that bastard Somoza,” said Kennedy, referring to Nicaragua’s gangster-like dictator, “saying that my election has given him new hope for Nicaragua’s democracy. Draft an answer saying that’s my hope too—democracy for Nicaragua. That ought to scare him.”

  Later in their conversation, Kennedy ripped into the United States’ Latin policy, in impassioned language that could have come from Castro or Guevara: “We can’t embrace every tinhorn dictator who tells us he’s anticommunist while he’s sitting on the necks of his own people. And the United States government is not the representative of private business. Do you know in Chile the American copper companies control about 80 percent of all the foreign exchange? We wouldn’t stand for that here. And there’s no reason they should stand for it. All those people want is a chance for a decent life, and we’ve let them think that we’re on the side of those who are holding them down. There’s a revolution going on down there, and I want to be on the right side of it. Hell, we are on the right side. But we have to let them know it, that things have changed.”

  But, as Goodwin discovered, Kennedy’s foreign policy bureaucracy was not ready for the sweeping changes in Latin policy that he had in mind.

  The former Kennedy advisor is now standing in the study of his Concord home, as an evening snow falls gently outside. His mane has grown long now, his eyebrows are more impressively lawless than ever. The room is crowded with Kennedy memorabilia. He picks up an object, a box with a polished sheen. It’s empty of Che’s cigars now, but he’s kept it all these years as a reminder of a different time, when anything seemed possible.

  Looking back, Goodwin now sees a link between Kennedy and Guevara as “children of the ’60s”: Despite their obvious political differences, they both believed that the world could be changed through heroic exertions. “That is why, as the times changed,” he would write in Remembering America, his memoir of the decade, leaders like this “would have no successors. There would be no place for romantics in the triumphant ascendance of bureaucracy.”

  Goodwin said that as a young, progressive White House aide, he never felt any personal antagonism from hard-line opponents in the government “except when I dealt with Latin America—then I got it from these old-line CIA guys down there who would be pulling off various capers. They were totally Cold Warriors. Kennedy took a longer view of our future and the hemisphere, of how to build a solid bulwark of democracy there. But they were fighting the Cold War…they were just concerned with individuals and regimes, whether we liked them or didn’t like them. And anybody who seemed the least like a socialist was a threat, whereas that was not Kennedy. He wanted to ally himself with the democratic left in Latin America, so he had a whole different outlook and approach.”

  Dick Goodwin was a benign influence in White House foreign policy councils. His advice that President Kennedy defuse the Cuba crisis by simply ignoring Castro became the prevailing sentiment in the White House in the months after Punta del Este. In a September 1, 1961, memo, he told the president that “our public posture toward Cuba should be as quiet as possible.” Kennedy agreed. The Castro threat should be handled through a multilateral Latin American strategy involving economic and diplomatic measures, the president told a visiting South American leader, rather than turning it into a high-drama showdown of “Castro versus Kennedy, because a debate of this kind would only enhance Castro’s prestige.”

  As long as the maverick Goodwin was in the West Wing, the president was assured of a partner in his ongoing battles with the hard liners on Latin policy. But, as with Chester Bowles, the young aide increasingly became a target of conservatives and JFK’s own foreign policy bureaucracy, which resented Goodwin’s trespassing on its turf. The Cold War regime that had taken over in Washington after World War II, dominating the presidencies of Democrat Truman as well as Republican Eisenhower, was not prepared to cede power to the new Kennedy government. This was soon made clear to the president’s team by the nation’s top military commanders.

  “CERTAINLY WE DID NOT control the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” said Arthur Schlesinger when asked near the end of his life about the extent to which President Kennedy controlled his own government. The eminent historian, who played the roles of court chronicler and roving liberal conscience in the Kennedy White House, spoke in a voice feeble with age. But his words were nonetheless chilling, considering the high nuclear stakes of the Kennedy years.

  In a 1994 interview with the Boston Globe, Schlesinger elaborated on Kennedy’s fears about the military. “Kennedy’s concern was not that Khrushchev would initiate something, but that something would go wrong in a Dr. Strangelove kind of way,” he said, referring to Stanley Kubrick’s macabre Cold War satire in which a rabidly anticommunist Air Force general loses his marbles and launches World War III. Haunted by fears of an accidental nuclear war, Kennedy strived to keep “tight controls [on the military] right down the line.” But he never fully succeeded.

  President Kennedy’s tensions with the Joint Chiefs during his first year in office were aggravated by the strenuous efforts of his defense secretary, Robert McNamara, to gain control of the “military-industrial complex”—the increasingly powerful “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry” that Eisenhower warned about as he bade farewell to the nation in what would become his most famous speech. The old general could have added bellicose members of Congress to this militaristic nexus—and in fact his original draft called it a “military-industrial-congressional complex”—as well as the octopus of far-right organizations, retired military officers’ associations, and defense industry trade groups that had sprung up during the Cold War to lobby for higher arms spending and belligerent policies. During his eight years in office, Eisenhower battled heroically to restrain the defense budget against relentless pressure from this complex. But he did little to change the Cold War policies that fueled this militaristic fervor. Kennedy, on the other hand, came into office committed to a major defense buildup as well as a deescalation of the Cold War. By pumping more money into the military-indust
rial complex, he made it even more powerful, complicating his efforts to slow the momentum towards war.

  While presiding over a massive arms buildup, Defense Secretary McNamara simultaneously tried to impose rational controls over the spending, bringing a cost-benefit managerial philosophy from his days as a Ford executive that was alien to the Pentagon, where the military services indulged freely in expensive cost overruns and duplicate weapons systems. The military chiefs, backed by their defense industry and congressional allies, strongly resisted as McNamara and his young, horn-rimmed “whiz kids” tried to take control of the defense spending process.

  The warrior culture also raged against the efforts of McNamara—and the young defense intellectuals from the Rand Corporation he brought into the Pentagon—to transform the country’s nuclear strategy. Alarmed by the massive overkill of the Joint Chiefs’ SIOP (Single Integrated Operational Plan), the military blueprint that called for a planet-threatening fusillade of nuclear fire in the event of war, Kennedy and McNamara ordered the exploration of limited nuclear war scenarios and sought to impose tighter civilian controls over the country’s vast nuclear arsenal. War in the nuclear age, Kennedy told advisors, was too important to be left in the hands of generals.

  General Curtis LeMay—the cigar-chomping, notoriously gung-ho Air Force chief upon whom actor Sterling Hayden would model the demented General Jack D. Ripper in Dr. Strangelove—made no secret of his loathing for the administration. “Everyone that came in with the Kennedy administration…were the most egotistical people that I ever saw in my life,” snarled LeMay. “They had no faith in the military; they had no respect for the military at all. They felt that the Harvard Business School method of solving problems would solve any problem in the world…. As a matter of fact, I had a man tell me, ‘No, General, this is not the kind of weapon system that you want to use, this is what you need.’ This man was in knee pants when I was commanding the division in combat. He had no experience in the use of weapons at all.”

  Years after he left the Air Force, in an oral history for the Lyndon Johnson Library, LeMay was still venting in remarkably savage terms, calling the Kennedy crowd “ruthless,” “vindictive,” morally debased vermin whom LBJ should have “stepped on” when he took over the White House, “like the cockroaches they were.”

  Despite the Kennedy team’s “ruthless” reputation, LeMay showed no reluctance to publicly challenge the administration’s defense policies during its first year in office. The Air Force chief stunned the capital in July when Washington Post columnist Marquis Childs reported that he casually predicted that nuclear war would break out in the final weeks of the year. LeMay made the hair-raising announcement to a senator’s wife at a Georgetown dinner party, telling the shocked woman that war was “inevitable” and that it would likely incinerate such major U.S. cities as Washington, New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Detroit as well as level most Soviet cities. Asked by the senator’s wife if there was anywhere she could flee to safety with her children and grandchildren, LeMay advised her she might try deserted sage brush country in the far West. After the ensuing uproar in Washington, LeMay felt compelled to deny the story. But Kennedy officials knew it reflected the Air Force general’s true beliefs.

  Years later, an elderly McNamara reflected on the man who ran his Air Force. As always, the former defense secretary was coolly rational in his assessment of LeMay. But his description of the man who presided over most of the nation’s nuclear arsenal was no less jolting for its matter-of-fact tone. Here was a top military leader, McNamara acknowledged, who frankly and firmly advocated a preemptive nuclear war to rid the world of the Soviet threat. “LeMay clearly had a different view of the Soviet problem than most of the rest of us did,” McNamara said. “LeMay’s view was very simple. He thought the West, and the U.S. in particular, was going to have to fight a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, and he was absolutely certain of that. Therefore, he believed that we should fight it sooner rather than later, when we had a greater advantage in nuclear power, and it would result in fewer casualties in the United States.”

  McNamara took issue with his Air Force chief, telling him that even though the United States enjoyed a clear nuclear advantage over the Soviet Union, we could not be certain of destroying the enemy’s ability to respond. “I believed then, and I think I was absolutely right, that we did not have a first-strike capability. We couldn’t launch our 5,000 missiles and destroy so many of their 350 missiles that we could be assured that the remainder would not inflict unacceptable damage on us. Therefore LeMay and I were just totally opposed. I told him, ‘Look, you’re probably right that if we had to fight a war with the Soviet Union, we’d have fewer casualties today than if we had to do it later. But it’s not clear that we have to fight them. So for God’s sake, let’s try to avoid it.’”

  Kennedy and McNamara, despite their early explorations into how nuclear war might be “managed,” would finally conclude that there was no such thing as a winnable nuclear war—considering how many people would be vaporized or poisoned in such a holocaust. But LeMay was of a different opinion. “It depends on how you define ‘win,’” said McNamara. “LeMay defined it as ending up with more nuclear warheads than your opponent had. I would define ‘win’ as no more than acceptable casualties.”

  McNamara managed to stay on civil terms with LeMay, whom he had served as an analyst during World War II, when the general was first making his name as a Shiva of war, laying waste to much of Japan with his infamous firebombing campaign. “I thought he was the ablest combat commander of any senior military man I met during my three years of service in World War II,” McNamara said. But other members of Kennedy’s national security team had decidedly hostile encounters with LeMay and his top Air Force commanders.

  Carl Kaysen, one of the Harvard scholars brought into the White House as an advisor, recalled a particularly toxic meeting with LeMay’s longtime associate, General Thomas Power of the Strategic Air Command—a man even LeMay considered “not stable” and a “sadist.” “I went out to SAC for a meeting with Tom Power, with [McNamara whiz kid] Adam Yarmolinsky,” Kaysen recalled. “He just acted extraordinarily hostile to us. In fact, as we compared notes later, we felt that we might never get out of there. His attitude was, What the hell are you civilians doing here at SAC talking about our nuclear strategy and messing around—it’s none of your goddam business.”

  Kennedy personally despised LeMay—“I don’t want that man near me again,” he once spat out, after walking out on one of the general’s briefings. “A prick like LeMay—Kennedy didn’t trust him as far as he could throw a marble pillar,” Charles Daly, one of Kennedy’s White House political aides, says today. But in June 1961, Kennedy felt politically compelled to promote LeMay to the Joint Chiefs as commander of the Air Force. “He wanted to be protected on his right flank,” Kaysen explained. JFK knew that if he pushed LeMay into retirement, he would create an uproar in the Air Force and there would be one more retired general on the political circuit, denouncing his “no-win” policies.

  General David Shoup, head of the Marine Corps, was the only member of the Joint Chiefs with whom Kennedy was able to build a decent relationship. A few days after promoting LeMay, Kennedy, deeply estranged from his top military men, would prevail on Maxwell Taylor, the maverick military thinker who had fallen out of step with Eisenhower, to come out of retirement and take a specially created position in the White House as his military advisor. The Joint Chiefs immediately recognized the move for what it was—a “screw you” attempt to keep them out of his hair.

  IN SUMMER 1961, KENNEDY came under increasing pressure from military and intelligence officials to consider launching a preemptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. The president was informed that far from suffering a “missile gap,” the United States actually enjoyed a growing lead in land-based nuclear missiles. According to a National Intelligence Estimate delivered that year, the Soviets had only four intercontinental ballis
tic missiles in place—all of them on low alert at a test site—while the U.S. had 185 ICBMs and over 3,400 deliverable nuclear bombs at the time. This clear “window” of nuclear superiority would eventually close as Soviet nuclear weapons production began to catch up. While it remained open, Washington was a hothouse of militaristic fever, which accounts for LeMay’s intemperate remarks about an imminent nuclear war at the July dinner party.

  On July 20, at a National Security Council meeting, Kennedy was presented an official plan for a surprise nuclear attack by the Joint Chiefs chairman, General Lemnitzer, and Allen Dulles, who would remain at the helm of the CIA until the fall. Lemnitzer, whose intellectual abilities the president found wanting, presented the doomsday plan “as though it were for a kindergarten class,” according to Schlesinger, and a disgusted Kennedy got up in the middle of the meeting and walked out. “And we call ourselves the human race,” he bitterly remarked to Secretary of State Dean Rusk afterwards.

  The relationship between Kennedy and his Joint Chiefs “reached a new low,” in the words of New York Times military correspondent Hanson Baldwin, that month, when the president ordered FBI agents to “invade” the military commanders’ Pentagon offices to determine the source of a press leak about military contingency plans to deal with the developing Berlin Crisis. Kennedy’s action was “degrading,” the chiefs complained to Baldwin, one of their more sympathetic ears in the press, and they predicted that the leaks would not be pinned on them. Years later, in an oral history for the U.S. Naval Institute, Baldwin would charge that he too had been subjected to an FBI probe during the Kennedy presidency, when Bobby dispatched agents to investigate an article he wrote about Soviet missile defenses. “The Kennedys used intimidation and pressure to force people into line. They used it quite often,” said Baldwin, reflecting a point of view widely held in the military world he covered. “From my observation of many years in Washington dealing with many presidents, back to FDR, the Kennedys were the most retributive and the most ruthless of any of them.”