The Kennedy Imprisonment

by Garry Wills

  If the Russians had made even a limited attack in Europe or elsewhere, the Kennedy buildup of crisis rhetoric would have made it hard to refrain from nuclear response. After all, he felt unable to refrain from exaggerated response to the nonthreat in Cuba. He would have been less free to defy American “panic” if Khrushchev had imitated his bellicosity.

  So the reaction to missiles in Cuba was not a model of restraint, of rational decision-making, of power used in peaceful ways. That it turned out “well” for us is a tribute to Khrushchev’s restraint, not ours. And was the glorious victory so total after all? We have seen that it helped push de Gaulle farther down his independent path. Khrushchev’s loss contributed, or appeared to contribute, to his own later downfall—depriving us of a leader who was easier to deal with than his successors. Besides, what was the lesson of the missile crisis for the Russians? That one should not back off in further confrontations over that island? When Jimmy Carter declared, in 1979, that the presence of Russian combat troops in Cuba was “intolerable,” there was no sign of accommodation from Russian leaders. They have only two or three enthusiastic allies outside their own satellite system and Cuba is the most important one—one they cannot afford to fail again; one no Russian leader, with the example of Khrushchev before him, will abandon. We purchased submission at the price of later intransigence, which is often the case after gratuitous humiliation.

  Praise of Kennedy for his conduct in the missile crisis often reaches the conclusion that he learned pacific ways in this “restrained” success. On the contrary, he must have learned that his own and his party’s popularity soars when he can make an opponent visibly “eat crow,” even if the only way to serve up that menu is to risk the national safety. But the argument for Kennedy can be put in a more persuasive way if we say that the totality of his victory gave him room to be more magnanimous in other areas, to make pacific overtures without looking dangerously weak or “dovish.” The Kennedy literature makes his American University speech, in favor of negotiation and arms limitation, the fruit of the missile decision’s outcome.

  But if that is so, what lesson is taught? That one must never negotiate but in the wake of humiliating an enemy? Surely that is the lesson applied year after year in Vietnam. We must never negotiate from weakness, went the slogan; so, after sedating the war during elections, there was a heavy bombing schedule every November and December of the even-numbered years, culminating in the “Christmas bombing” of 1972. Negotiation, which should mean the achievement of mutual benefit by diplomatic means, has become for Americans the negotiation of the other side’s surrender after a defeat. We could never go to the negotiating table as equals—that would look like trading missile for missile as equals in 1962.

  Some critics, notably Ronald Steel, have accused Kennedy of pushing for a knockout blow late in October of 1962 in order to affect the congressional elections. Put so crudely, the charge is unfair. Rather, an eye on domestic response locked Kennedy into the cycle which makes it impossible for American leaders to make peaceful moves except in the aftermath of bellicose ones successfully carried out. Steel notes that even Sorensen quoted a Republican ExCom member (probably Douglas Dillon) during the crisis:

  Ted, have you considered the very real possibility that if we allow Cuba to complete installation and operational readiness of missile bases, the next House of Representatives is likely to have a Republican majority? This would completely paralyze our ability to react sensibly and coherently to further Soviet advances.

  Roger Hilsman, too, admits that domestic pressures affected Kennedy’s judgment during the crisis. To some extent, he was still the prisoner of his rhetoric, making an apparently “soft” attitude toward Cuba impossible:

  The fact of the matter was that President Kennedy and his administration were peculiarly vulnerable on Cuba. He had used it in his own campaign against Nixon to great effect, asking over and over why a Communist regime had been permitted to come to power just ninety miles off our coast.

  Furthermore, in order to restrain the calls for interdiction of SAMs to Cuba, Kennedy had exaggerated the danger of ground-to-ground missiles (thinking they would not be installed):

  Thus in trying to meet the opposition’s charges and to reassure the public without actually saying why it was so confident, the administration fell into the semantic trap of trying to distinguish between “offensive” and “defensive” weapons.

  Kennedy was soon stuck with his own claim that ground-to-ground missiles were offensive: “If the missiles were not important enough strategically to justify a confrontation with the Soviet Union, as McNamara initially thought, yet were ‘offensive,’ then the United States might not be in mortal danger but the administration most certainly was.” When Ronald Steel quoted that sentence to show that Kennedy was affected by electoral pressures, Hilsman replied with the claim that he had larger issues of political support in mind: “I meant that the administration would be faced with a revolt from the military, from the hardliners in the other departments, both State and CIA, from not only Republicans on Capitol Hill but some Democrats too.” Kennedy, who boasted that McNamara had brought the military people under control, had to please them, or they would “revolt.”

  Over and over in our recent history Presidents have claimed they had to act tough in order to disarm those demanding that they act tough. The only way to become a peacemaker is first to disarm the warmakers by making a little successful war. And if the little war becomes a big one, it must be pursued energetically or the “hawks” will capitalize on the failure. War wins, either way. If you are for it, you wage it. And if you are against it, you wage it. So Kennedy is given credit for making overtures to lessen the threat of nuclear weapons only after he risked nuclear war to get the “capacity” to make a mild disarmament proposal. That was the obvious lesson of the missile crisis. Even Sorensen had to admit it was the moral many people derived: “Ever since the successful resolution of that crisis, I have noted among many political and military figures a Cuban-missile-crisis syndrome, which calls for a repetition in some other conflict of ‘Jack Kennedy’s tough stand of October 1962 when he told the Russians with their missiles either to pull out or look out!’ Some observers even attributed Lyndon Johnson’s decision to escalate in Vietnam to a conviction that America’s military superiority could bring him a ‘victory’ comparable to JFK’s.” Sorensen thinks that was not the lesson that should have been learned. But it is the lesson that was learned. Assertions of power rarely teach what the powerful intended.

  23

  Charismatic Nation

  His success was the immediate cause of his destruction.

  —GIBBON, of the Emperor Maximus

  The Kennedys rightly dazzled America. We thought it was our own light being reflected back on us. The charismatic claims looked natural to a charismatic country. America, we like to think, has been specially “graced.” Set apart. The first child of the Enlightenment, it was “declared” to others as the harbinger of a new order. Yet this rationally founded nation was also deeply devotional, a redeemer nation. Reason and religion, which should have contended near our cradle, conspired instead. If we kept ourself isolated from others, it was to avoid contamination. If we engaged others, we did so from above, to bring light into their darkness. To deal with others as equals would betray our mission.

  So, in the missile crisis, some asked why we should resent missiles near our shores more than Russians were allowed to resent missiles on their border. But to most Americans the answer was obvious. We are not like other nations. We can be trusted to use our power virtuously. Our missiles were not offensive because they were ours. As Hanson Baldwin wrote, after the crisis, in the New York Times: “The real measure of the overseas base therefore is its purpose. The United States contention, shared by its allies, has always been that its overseas bases were established solely in answer to Communist aggressive expansionism and at the request of the countries concerned.” The distinction between missiles depended l
ess on their structure and range than on the character of the country producing them. And who could doubt our good character?

  If we refuse to “negotiate from weakness” (i.e., from parity with the negotiating partner), that is because we are not simply one more member of the community of nations scrambling for narrow advantage. It is our task to think for all those involved, to keep scavengers away from the world’s developing nations, to uphold freedom around the globe. Charisma exempts from normal process. The sense of a “graced” country lay behind our dispatching of Peace Corps youths to dazzle the world with our virtue. The implicit message, underneath the laudable desire to serve, was anti-Communist even when crude propagandizing was excluded. The message was: Be like us.

  The sign of grace is luck, and who could be luckier than Americans? Given a vast continent to explore and exploit in comparative isolation from the rest of the world, we entered the game of the great powers only when we were ready to—on our own schedule, for our own purposes. Our first major intervention in this century was for the rescue of democracy; but the old system of power relations thwarted us at Versailles. A whole generation of rising leaders vowed that would not happen next time, and the “lesson of Versailles” made us conduct our very own war to a conclusion that left us masters of the world. In 1945, America—which had entered the war still reeling from the Depression—stood at the pinnacle of power, with resources no other nation ever possessed. Our enemies had been defeated by a policy of total war carried through to unconditional surrender. Our allies had been invaded and weakened. Our military apparatus was the greatest ever assembled; and nuclear weaponry was added to it in the climactic last act of our Pacific campaign.

  Total war was waged to insure the totality of our control afterward. Those defending the unconditional surrender policy, against military and intelligence people who said it would prolong the war, maintained that only this would give America a “clean slate” for building a world order of peace. The fascist philosophy had to be destroyed, erased, removed from the world like a cancer. This was not simply a war for trade rights, or ports, or access to material resources. The American vision had to prevail.

  Our power had created expectations which alone can explain the panic of America in 1947. We were still the economic and military master of the world. No one could threaten our shores. We had a nuclear monopoly. Our prosperity continued. No other country could impose its will on us. Yet in an extraordinary series of moves, President Truman followed Senator Vandenberg’s advice and scared the hell out of the country. Solidifying new prerogatives from this sense of crisis, he instituted the security system, established the CIA (which began building resistance centers for World War III), and opened a campaign to avoid “losing” Turkey and Greece as we were losing China.

  Why this panic in the very heart of power? We were hostages to our own broad claims. By attempting total control, we felt imperiled anywhere when anything went against our will. We were illustrating a truth that Gibbon taught in various ways. The expansion of one’s rim of power diffuses internal resources, stretches the thin periphery ever farther out, so that a small concentration of hostile force can burst the bubble of empire. Since “the increasing circle must be involved in a larger sphere of hostility,” the entirety is risked at each isolable point along the rim.

  The Eisenhower years represented a tacit acceptance of limits, at odds with this aspiration toward universal control. That is what Senator Kennedy complained of when he said the country must get moving again (Walt Rostow’s phrase). A new generation must take up again the torch that had guttered out. Massive retaliation had become an excuse for inaction. Little challenges around our periphery of influence were being neglected, cumulative losses not redressed. Maxwell Taylor complained of the cuts in defense spending. Space did not command any enthusiasm on Eisenhower’s part, even after Russia’s Sputnik “victory.”

  We now know that Eisenhower let Allen Dulles initiate secret coups or coup attempts in Iran and Guatemala, Indonesia and the Congo. But, despicable as these were, they were kept secret precisely because there was no public policy of engagement everywhere, no mystique of countering any guerrillas who might pop up. The Dulles operations were small enough, and tailored to the individual situation, for “success” (as in Iran) to cause no widespread outcry against the United States and failure (as in Indonesia) to let us cut our losses with no great public humiliation. Eisenhower’s attitude toward intervention in a colonial war was made clear when he overruled all the advisers asking him to rescue the French at Dien Bien Phu.

  Eisenhower admitted there is a “tyranny of the weak,” an ability of massed little forces to trouble the thin-drawn periphery of American concerns, for which there is no properly “calibrated” response. The gnats could be smashed, but only in ways that made the giant look worse than its challengers. Short of obliteration, no intimidation was credible for most of these enclaves of defiance. Recruiting their will was either impossible or would be made impossible by military threat. There was nothing to do but ignore what could not be controlled in any useful way. That was the advice of a man who understood power, its meaning and limits.

  But John Kennedy had different teachers on the nature of power. They thought any recognition of limits signaled a failure of nerve. For them the question was not can you do everything, but will you do everything? The American resources were limitless—brains, science, talent, tricks, technology, money, virtuosity. The only thing to decide was whether one had the courage to use all that might—and John Kennedy, in his inaugural address, assured us that he had. In his first major speech on defense, he said: “Any potential aggressor contemplating an attack on any part of the free world with any kind of weapons, conventional or nuclear, must know that our response will be suitable, selective, swift, and effective.” Anywhere along the outmost sweep of our vast reach, we would strike if provoked.

  It might not have been possible for the Romans to protect an expanding perimeter of power, one thinned by its extension to enclose the known world. But America could protect the whole world, because we had things the Romans lacked—jet planes, helicopters, napalm, defoliants, one-man water-walking rockets, computers, and theoreticians of the strategic hamlet. We could do everything, it was believed, so long as we never did, in any one spot, more than was absolutely necessary. That is where Robert McNamara’s computers came into play—for dispatching the exactly right-sized teams to troubled spots. Admittedly the computers could not measure things like the strength of anticolonial feeling. But that was considered an advantage by Kennedy’s “pragmatic” nonideologists. For them, the hard facts of cash and firepower spoke louder than sentiment. The Americans would come with “clean hands,” as Pyle says in the Greene novel—not apostles of capitalism, like Eisenhower’s big businessmen; not preachers of world ideals, like Wilson. We were just technicians of development in the age of Rostow; producers of what mankind wants, said McNamara of Detroit. This was the policy Arthur Schlesinger had proclaimed, as part of the “end of ideology,” in his book The Vital Center: World War II veterans who had “learned the facts of life through the exercise of power” realized that life “is sometimes more complicated than one would gather from the liberal weeklies.”

  For men holding such views, Vietnam was an ideal place to try out new tools of power—a place to prove that development could be encouraged without colonial exploitation; a place where mobility and concentration of firepower could do more than massive armies and huge weapons; a place where infiltrating North Vietnamese could be interdicted. Jungle and swamp would train our new guerrillas to all kinds of conditions. Despite later talk of a “quagmire” that sucked us in, Americans actually charged into Vietnam—thinking, as we did of Cuba, that a few men brilliantly directed could wrap the whole thing swiftly up. Officers were cycled through to observe the process because the opportunity would not last forever.

  A speech written for Kennedy’s delivery on the day he died boasted that he had “increased our spe
cial counterinsurgency forces which are now engaged in South Vietnam by 600 percent.” The administration was still presenting Vietnam as a symbol of Kennedy’s success in the books written just after his death. Hugh Sidey, for instance, puts this in his list of breakthrough achievements:

  A deep pride in the state of our armed forces really was the biggest factor in the underlying serenity. Our superiority in missiles, our improved conventional fighting capability and the new emphasis on guerrilla warfare, all carefully tailored by Robert McNamara, reestablished confidence in our strength. In Southeast Asia the enemy had been engaged on his own terms, and though there still was no victory in Vietnam or Laos, we were no longer losing.

  William Kaufmann, celebrating the success of The McNamara Strategy, wrote in 1964:

  In fact, the war in South Vietnam, if it has done nothing else, illustrates how the Military Assistance Program and an American military advisory group can produce an indigenous combat force of significant power with a relatively small commitment of American manpower. But the real test of South Vietnam is less of the Military Assistance Program than it is of the ability of the United States to deal effectively with all the related aspects of subversion and guerrilla warfare.

  The unhappy later progress of the Vietnam war made Kennedy’s defenders claim he would have withdrawn from the contest after committing 16,500 troops to it. The only positive evidence that is offered for this view is Kennedy’s assurance to Senator Mansfield that he would have to get out of Vietnam sometime after the 1964 election. But the year intervening between his death and that election would have involved further commitments of the sort that President Johnson (despite his initial distaste for the idea of a larger war) made, on the advice of Kennedy’s most trusted counselors. And Kennedy’s “commitment” would have been even more binding. Not only was he the initiator of the process Lyndon Johnson took over; it was an initiative formulated in the terms of the “flexible response” by which Kennedy hoped to justify his whole military program and foreign policy. Was he going to let Green Berets, too, learn “that Superman is a fairy”? Any withdrawal would have been a confession that his overarching strategy—with Rostow’s rationale, and Taylor’s strategy, and McNamara’s reorganization—was feckless: it could not deal with precisely the kind of problem it was framed for.