The Kennedy Imprisonment

by Garry Wills

  I think that if we faced that situation we would have to become a garrison state on a scale we can’t even imagine now, and be concerned about threats from every quarter of the compass—be hemmed in. We couldn’t be the kind of society we want to be.

  The trade that counts for the United States is with Canada, Western Europe and Japan. That’s the bulk of it. And we could survive without most of that trade, I suppose. It isn’t that. It’s the sense of being hemmed in that becomes so dangerous.

  By this reading, President Kennedy had two dangerous situations to deal with simultaneously—the missile emplacements, and American panic over those emplacements. Robert Kennedy implicitly agreed with Rostow when he told the President he had to remove the missiles or be impeached. In other words, the President was a captive of his own people’s panicky emotions. Options were denied him by the American people—he could not even think of leaving the missiles in place. That avenue was sealed from the outset.

  Yet Kennedy had himself stirred up the feelings that limited his freedom. He had called the missiles offensive and exaggerated their range. It is understandable that he would not reveal all the American provocation that explained the presence of the missiles. But why did he have to emphasize the unprovoked character of their placement? He told the nation that the Russians had lied to him in promising not to send offensive weapons to Cuba. He said in his address on the crisis: “The greatest danger of all would be to do nothing.” If he was chained to a necessity for acting, he forged the chains himself.

  In this he was renewing a cycle that has bound all our postwar Presidents. In order to have freedom of maneuver, a sense of crisis is instilled; but once that sense is instilled, it commits the leader to actions he did not have in mind when he excited the fears. The most famous instance of this is Harry Truman’s use of Senator Vandenberg’s advice—if he wanted to rally support for anti-Communist aid to Greece and Turkey, he would have to “scare hell out of the country.” But once Truman had raised the spectre of communism as an immediate threat to America, he had to calm the people by imposing a security program, establishing the Attorney General’s List, setting up the machinery in 1947 that McCarthy would use in the 1950s.

  Henry Kissinger assured his old academic friends, during the Vietnam war, that such a war must be prosecuted to the end, lest a new McCarthyism arise to ask “Who lost Vietnam?” as it had asked “Who lost China?” War became a homeopathic cure for American bellicosity—a little war taps the aggressiveness that, bottled up, might break out in a larger war. By a kind of devilish symmetry, the contemptuous manipulation of public opinion leads to a slavishness toward public opinion. Kennedy thought he could wage a war out of sight of the American people, for the people’s good; but when the Cubans responded in open ways, he could not explain their effrontery, and had to ride the wave of public fear. All the talent and willpower of the best and brightest could not manipulate away the emotions they had aroused.

  Kennedy thought of himself and Castro in charismatic terms—the two leaders using skill and will against each other, fencing over the heads of their respective peoples. But Castro was openly recruiting his people to a revolutionary cause while Kennedy was secretly scheming at assassination. The difference extends to more than tactics. The mere removal of Castro would not have dissipated the revolutionary élan. An “indispensable man” fallacy was at work in Kennedy’s approach to Cuba. Meanwhile, by failing to recruit the will of the American people in an open way, Kennedy was put in the position of lying to his citizens at a time when Castro was telling the truth about American intentions and schemings. Having fooled the people in order to lead them, Kennedy was forced to serve the folly he had induced.

  22

  “Restraint”

  If Khrushchev wants to rub my nose in the dirt, it’s all over.

  —JFK TO JAMES WECHSLER

  That son of a bitch [Khrushchev] won’t pay any attention to words. He has to see you move.

  —JFK TO ARTHUR SCHLESINGER

  In dealing with the Cuban missiles, John Kennedy displayed a restraint that has become legendary. It made Arthur Schlesinger rather weak in the knees:

  It was this combination of toughness and restraint, of will, nerve and wisdom, so brilliantly controlled, so matchlessly calibrated, that dazzled the world. Before the missile crisis people might have feared that we would use our power extravagantly or not use it at all. But the thirteen days gave the world—even the Soviet Union—a sense of American determination and responsibility in the use of power which, if sustained, might indeed become a turning point in the history of the relations between east and west.

  Undoubtedly there was restraint exercised in the White House, most laudably when a U-2 plane was shot down during the tensest moments of the quarantine, before Russia had agreed to pull back. Although “ExCom,” the ad hoc Executive Committee assembled to cope with the crisis, had earlier agreed to take out one of the surface-to-air (SAM) missile sites if this happened, the President wisely said he would wait for Khrushchev’s response to the principal point of contention.

  There was also restraint, of a sort, in the quick rejection of a plan for outright conquest of the island—though no one was very serious about proposing that. The option that did get serious consideration, and toward which the President at first inclined, was a preemptive air strike to destroy the missile launching pads. If the military had not suggested technical difficulties in this procedure, it would have been given even more serious attention—though Robert Kennedy’s first reaction to the idea was to slip his brother a note saying, “I now know how Tojo felt when he was planning Pearl Harbor.”

  Though the air strike was rejected as a first step, it was prepared as the next step in case the blockade failed. Sorensen puts among the signs of Kennedy’s restraint his use of the politer term quarantine instead of blockade—but this ranks rather with the counsels of prudence than of restraint. A blockade is, in international law, an act of war—the reason the administration had earlier given for not intercepting the shipments of SAMs to Castro. Kennedy was cautious in enforcing the blockade. But, with credit given for that, we have exhausted the evidences of Kennedy restraint. It is on the basis of these acts that he claimed, to his brother: “If anybody is around to write after this, they are going to understand that we made every effort to find peace and every effort to give our adversary room to move. I am not going to push the Russians an inch beyond what is necessary.” That claim is demonstrably untrue, on at least five counts.

  1. Kennedy could have explained to Americans that Castro was the object of secret warfare on the part of the CIA. This was something that would have been hard, and no doubt seemed impossible, to do. But the course was “unthinkable” only because Kennedy’s search for “options” imprisoned him in the lies told to cover those options; and refusal to admit that his own acts caused the missile crisis in the first place makes it impossible to claim that every effort to make peace was explored and every possible chance for maneuver allowed to the other side.

  2. Kennedy ruled out, instantly and without discussion, open diplomacy as a means of settling the crisis. When he learned of the missiles’ presence, he kept the knowledge secret—in the first place, to preserve the option of a sneak attack on the sites, what Robert Kennedy called “a Pearl Harbor.” No attempt was made to negotiate with the Russians until an ultimatum had been secretly devised, then publicly delivered. This not only prevented prior diplomacy with the Russians, and forced them to capitulate; it excluded our allies from prior consultation, along with Congress and the UN. It is known that General de Gaulle’s resentment of this act—the risking of nuclear war without consulting those endangered—confirmed him in the determination to carve out a separate nuclear role for France. Walter Lippmann quickly identified the weakness in Kennedy’s approach. During the quarantine itself, he wrote:

  When the President saw Mr. Gromyko on Thursday [two days before the ultimatum], and had the evidence of the missile build-up in Cuba, h
e refrained from confronting Mr. Gromyko with this evidence. This was to suspend diplomacy. If it had not been suspended, the President would have shown Mr. Gromyko the pictures, and told him privately about the policy which in a few days he intended to announce publicly. This would have made it more likely that Moscow would order the ships not to push on to Cuba. But if such diplomatic action did not change the orders, if Mr. Khrushchev persisted in spite of it, the President’s public speech would have been stronger. For it would not have been subject to the criticism that a great power had issued an ultimatum to another great power without first attempting to negotiate the issue. By confronting Mr. Gromyko privately, the President would have given Mr. Khrushchev what all wise statesmen give their adversaries—the chance to save face.

  Later, of course, Kennedy would claim he did give Khrushchev every chance to save face. Lippmann, even before the crisis was over, proved that was not so. Later examples of preemptive strikes—Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia, Israel’s raids on an Iraqi power plant and Beirut—would invoke Kennedy’s action in the Cuban crisis as a justification for neglecting diplomacy. In this respect, at least, the lesson conveyed by Kennedy’s actions was not one of restraint but of unilateral boldness.

  3. The decision-making body Kennedy set up was one that conduced toward boldness, not caution. When, in the spring of 1963, Theodore Sorensen gave a course of lectures at Columbia University celebrating the missile crisis as a model of decision-making, he praised the President for his lack of “preoccupation with form and structure”—proving he had learned nothing from the Bay of Pigs invasion. The “ExCom” was an informal body in more-or-less permanent session, without any order for screening and discussing advice. Its participants dropped in or out as they maintained prior commitments in order to keep the crisis secret. The President himself went off to Cleveland and Chicago while the ExCom debated life-and-death matters. Orderly inquest was at the mercy of separate schedules and improvised security. Roger Hilsman writes: “Everyone tried to keep up social engagements, although they sorely needed both the time and the rest that social engagements cost them. At one stage, nine members of the ExCom piled into a single limousine, sitting on each others’ laps, to avoid attracting the attention that the whole fleet of long black cars would have done.”

  This hasty coming and going, in the back corridors, of men starved for sleep and rubbing against each other in different combinations, led to a blow-up when Adlai Stevenson joined them and suggested a diplomatic trade—removing the Marines from Guantanamo, or our missiles from Turkey, in exchange for Khrushchev’s taking the missiles out. He was savagely denounced; even the President, according to Hilsman, showed his anger—and punished Stevenson through a friendly journalist, as he had done with Arthur Krock. Charles Bartlett was allowed to quote him as a “high official,” in the Saturday Evening Post, saying, “Adlai wanted a Munich.” The same pressures toward “macho” talk, the same inhibitions on any sign of weakness, were at work as in the Bay of Pigs sessions. Robert McNamara, after expressing his view that “a missile is a missile,” was talked out of the recommendation to do nothing. For two days the President pushed for assurance that an air strike would work, and no one of sufficient weight was opposing him—no one but Robert. Though Sorensen later tried to credit the President’s procedures with the happy outcome of the missile decision, that outcome—to the extent that it was happy—was the single accomplishment of Robert Kennedy.

  What brought about this new restraint in the “bad Bobby” who was, even at the time of these sessions, urging Castro’s overthrow? The explanation is almost surely the very fact that he did know how much the crisis owed to prior provocation on the CIA’s part. The “mean altar boy” always had a lively moral strain in him—not enough to urge the admission (or even the suspension) of assaults on Castro, but enough to make him see that the Russians were not acting out of sheer malevolence, that they had some case, and were probably open to sensible bargaining. Mad as the President had been when Adlai Stevenson brought up the idea of trading Turkish missiles for the Cuban ones, Robert quietly assured Anatoly Dobrynin that America intended to remove the missiles from Turkey. Other ExCom people knew of the efforts being directed at Castro—Taylor and Helms and the President—but they do not seem to have felt this made it inappropriate to treat Russia as the aggressor. Only Robert Kennedy showed a dawning awareness that America might have been somewhat in the wrong. It would be a while before he began to sense the same thing about our course in Vietnam. But the “receiving equipment” for such moral signals was already in place; and that alone—plus Robert’s influence with his brother—saved the ExCom from acting as recklessly as the Bay of Pigs advisers had. The veterans of the later sessions would make exaggerated claims for their own restraint—in part because they could easily have taken less prudent steps, but for one man. Against the background of other courses forcefully urged, the outcome did look so magnanimous as to seem self-denying.

  4. Nonetheless, the course pursued was reckless. President Kennedy did not give the Russians the obvious opportunity to “save face.” In the matter of the Turkish missiles, he humiliated them gratuitously, though the missiles had no military importance for us. Sorensen says the trade-off was one of the first things suggested as the ExCom began its considerations, but that “the President had rejected this course from the outset.” His anger at Stevenson for proposing the trade seems to have come in part from the “nerve” he showed in raising again a possibility the President had ruled out. Some have said the President did not want to insult our allies by withdrawing the missiles without consulting them. But the secret sessions were an odd place for punctilious consultation of allies to become a great concern; and, even if this argument were made sincerely, the hurt feelings of allies were little compared with the danger we put them in by serving an ultimatum rather than offering a deal. Besides, the argument is clearly not sincere. Kennedy had already ordered the Turkish missiles removed, and mere procedural delay had kept them in place to this point. Not only were they of no value; they were a source of possible trouble. Hilsman notes that they were “obsolete, unreliable, inaccurate, and very vulnerable—they could be knocked out by a sniper with a rifle and telescopic sights.”

  Though the Turkish missiles meant nothing to us, they were a symbolic grievance to the Soviet Union—in fact, exactly the kind of affront we were complaining of. We felt “crowded” by missiles ninety miles from our shore. The Russians had to live with the ignominy of hostile missiles right on their border. If Kennedy’s first and only concern was the missiles’ removal from Cuba—as he and his defenders proclaimed—then a trade was the safest, surest way to achieve that goal. But Kennedy clearly had other priorities in mind—he wanted to remove the missiles provided he did not appear forced to bargain with the Soviets to accomplish this. He must deliver the ultimatum, make demands that made Russia act submissively. He would not, as he put it, let Khrushchev rub his nose in the dirt. Which meant that he had to rub Khrushchev’s nose in the dirt; and that Khrushchev had to put up with it. Kennedy would even risk nuclear war rather than admit that a trade of useless missiles near each other’s countries was eminently fair. The restraint, then, was not shown by Kennedy, but by Khrushchev. He was the one who had to back down, admit his maneuver had failed, take the heat from internal critics for his policy.

  It was not known at the time that Robert Kennedy informally told Dobrynin that the Turkish sites would be dismantled. Since that detail was published (after his death) in Kennedy’s own account, it has been taken as a further sign of restraint on America’s part. But the secrecy of the assurance is what mattered—along with its late informal relay to a secondary figure in the chess game. Removing the Turkish missiles had been part of the open trade proposed in the famous “second letter” of Khrushchev—the letter Robert Kennedy said should be ignored. When, one day before the President’s deadline ran out, Robert Kennedy told Dobrynin that he thought the missiles would be removed, he expressly “said that
there could be no quid pro quo or any arrangement made under this kind of threat or pressure.” In short, the missiles would be removed so long as the Russians got no credit for their removal, could make no plausible claim that they were bargaining with an equal, not submitting to an ultimatum. It should be remembered that Robert Kennedy wrote his account of the missile crisis in the summer of 1967, five years after the event and when he was rethinking his own hawkish position on Vietnam. If all he could do to emphasize his own dovish behavior in the missile crisis was suggest this last-minute secret assurance to Dobrynin, there is no reason to think this represented a significant act of restraint on the part of the Kennedy administration itself. Kennedy still insisted on Russia’s public humiliation over a symbol that had no real military importance for us—an insistence that faced us with a real military threat if the Russians did not accede to the harsh demand we made. Macho appearance, not true security, was the motive for Kennedy’s act—surely the most reckless American act since the end of World War II.

  5. To add injury to insult, Kennedy—with his insistence on crisis—sent his brother to Dobrynin to announce a twenty-four-hour deadline for Russia’s response. This further “crowded” the Russians, made panicky response possible. It rubbed their noses a little deeper into the dirt. The justification for this hasty act was the possibility that some missiles might be armed and launchable within forty-eight hours. But what was the probability that Cuba would use a few short-range missiles, in a kamikaze attack, when America was in a state of alert, its SAC bombers in the air, its Polaris missiles prowling the waters around Cuba? It was surely less than the probability that Russia, backed into a corner and given a deadline, might make some hasty decision—perhaps to attack American troops in Germany—that could trigger World War III. Neither course of action made much sense. But the less probable was made the basis of our deadline, which threatened to trigger the more probable of two horrible possibilities. Kennedy, in other words, increased our danger by the deadline, on the chance that this would increase our victory, make it more total.