When Kissinger wrote an eleven-page letter railing against his exclusion from policymaking, describing himself as “a kibitzer shouting random comments from the sidelines,” Schlesinger took the letter to Kennedy and urged him to intervene. There followed an awkward meeting between Kissinger and Bundy. “MB made a great attempt to grovel,” Kissinger wrote afterwards, “and since he covered almost every point in the letter to AS, it seems obvious that he was schooled to make these points.” It was all to no avail. Kissinger’s role in the Kennedy administration, such as it had been, was essentially over. As he exited in November, he expressed his disdain to Schlesinger about “the lack of an overall strategy which makes us prisoners of events.”
Forwarding the resignation letter, Schlesinger told the president that Kissinger remained “devoted to you and to the Administration and would like to help wherever he can.” Moreover, Kissinger would not be consulting for Republicans, because “he feels that foreign policy will be in much safer hands under a Democrat than a Republican Administration.” That turned out to be wishful thinking on Schlesinger’s part. As Kissinger later told Arthur’s son, Stephen, it was the unwillingness of the Kennedy administration to give him a proper job that “put me on the path to a post with Nixon.”37
Yet Schlesinger in the summer of 1961 had been key to the Berlin decision-making process. His memos to the president on July 7 had promoted JFK’s demand to hear more voices and explore a wider range of alternatives. That approach, successfully applied during the Berlin crisis, would become the hallmark of the administration’s decision-making process, especially during the missile crisis the following year. Running concurrently with Berlin that summer was another Cold War crisis about nuclear testing that again saw Schlesinger centrally involved, although this time he found himself on the wrong side of the debate.
During the 1950s, as both superpowers had built up frightening destructive capabilities through their thermonuclear weapons programs, each had come to recognize that mutual self-interest demanded some kind of self-restraint. On the American side, President Eisenhower, increasingly anxious about the buildup of nuclear weapons, committed himself to working out an agreement to ban nuclear testing as the capstone on his presidency. In April 1958, Hans Bethe, who had been head of the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos, told the president that technology now existed to detect even the smallest atmospheric and underground nuclear tests. In other words, verification of any agreement was now possible. Eisenhower wrote to Khrushchev calling for “technical talks” and offering to observe an informal moratorium on testing in the meantime. Khrushchev readily agreed. By 1960, however, with agreement on a treaty at hand, the U-2 incident crashed those hopes.38
The collapse of the test ban talks was a bitter moment for Eisenhower, who failed to strike (as Ronald Reagan would in 1987–89) a defining peacemaker’s note on which to leave office. But his disappointment was about more than vanity and an appeal to legacy. “What worried Eisenhower most wasn’t what happened on his watch,” White House Staff Secretary and future NATO Supreme Allied Commander Andrew Goodpaster recalled. “He knew he could handle the military people. It was what would happen to another president—one who hadn’t had his preparation or experience.”39
A few weeks into office, Kennedy got to see some of those problems for himself. During a White House luncheon with his top foreign policy, defense, and arms control officials, an intense row broke out. Were continuing test ban talks simply a tactic by the Soviets that would allow them to further increase their nuclear capability? Kennedy defused tension in the room through humor, wrapping up the meeting, Glenn Seaborg of the Atomic Energy Commission recalled, “with a smile in his voice,” thanking everyone for speaking openly, and saying, to great laughter, that he was “glad to see that there was agreement on the U.S. side.” Then he added that it only remained “to get the Russians to agree also.”40
But for all the humor, Kennedy understood that nuclear matters were the most onerous and deadly aspect of his job. That same spring, in a meeting with General Curtis LeMay, chief of the air force, and Harold Brown, director of defense research, he was informed that 60 million Americans would die if the Soviet Union launched a first-strike nuclear attack, with the number being “probably 20–30 million” Americans if the United States struck first. “I don’t see there is very much difference,” Kennedy said, shaken. “The answer is the same: there must never be a nuclear war.”
Even a return to testing he found dangerous. “We test and then they test and we have to test,” he complained, “and you build up until somebody uses them.” But as he also explained in a press conference in June, following difficult discussions with Khrushchev at Vienna weeks earlier and with the Soviet leader now dropping heavy hints that the USSR would soon return to testing, it was “a serious question about how long we can safely continue on a voluntary basis a refusal to undertake tests in this country without any assurance that the Russians are not testing.”41
In this context Kennedy asked Schlesinger to prepare a white paper on nuclear testing that would look at the political context of any decision to resume. Working with Edward R. Murrow, the legendary reporter who now headed the United States Information Agency, he also drew up a paper setting out a strategy for how the United States might present a decision to resume testing. “Unless we persuade our allies and the uncommitted nations of the rightness of our course on the nuclear test ban issue,” it read, “we stand in grave danger of losing their support on other issues, notably general disarmament and Berlin.” Therefore it was essential to begin a “political warfare effort” immediately to convince world opinion that the United States had done “everything in its power” to get agreement, and that the Soviet Union had “not negotiated in good faith.”42
Meeting with Kennedy a few days later, Schlesinger was struck by “his lack of enthusiasm over the resumption of tests” despite the “rising pressure at home for immediate resumption.” As Schlesinger and Murrow had written in their note on political strategy, much of this pressure came from the Atomic Energy Commission. “Those fellows,” Kennedy complained in agreement, “think that they invented the bomb themselves and look on everyone else as Johnny-come-latelies and amateurs.” Matters weren’t helped, Schlesinger slyly pointed out, because the long-awaited State Department brief was still outstanding.43
Meeting to renew discussions at the beginning of August, the president “expressed general approval” for the papers Schlesinger had written. “The President’s immense reluctance to resume testing became increasingly apparent in the course of the talk,” Schlesinger wrote, “He also said . . . that the risk of being caught was so great that . . . even the Soviet Union would be extremely stupid to try and get away with anything.” A technical report by the president’s Science Advisory Committee reinforced that judgment. The panel concluded that there was no evidence to suggest the Soviet Union had begun testing again and that, as a consequence, the United States could compensate for a lack of testing opportunities through other means. If, however, the Soviets did renew testing, then the United States could not maintain the test ban without harming its military position.
The joint chiefs of staff filed an opposition paper—“semi-literate and generally unimpressive,” Schlesinger judged—that sought to undermine the premise and findings of the Advisory Panel report. But after a tense conference in the middle of August, over which Kennedy presided, Schlesinger remained convinced that “JFK has no wild passion to resume testing” and that “pressure for resumption seems to have subsided.” In the meantime, talks between the powers continued in Geneva, where a joint US-UK proposal for a test ban treaty was under review.44
Before long the issue reignited. Khrushchev’s modus operandi throughout much of Kennedy’s brief tenure was to place the president under maximum stress in multiple arenas. Many, including Dean Acheson, believed that the Soviet leader’s actions in Berlin had been more about pretext than context; that Berlin was just a convenient issue over wh
ich to bully Kennedy on the world stage. Schlesinger profoundly disagreed, but events that took place at the end of August gave it greater force, when the Soviet leader initiated another provocative move in the confrontation between East and West.
On August 30 at a routine press conference, Kennedy expressed cautious optimism about the Geneva test ban talks. No sooner was the conference over than Ted Sorensen told him that the Soviets had announced a planned resumption of nuclear tests. “Fucked again,” Kennedy roared, losing his customary cool. “The bastards. That fucking liar.” Bundy would later claim that “of all the Soviet provocations of these two years, it was the resumption of testing that disappointed Kennedy most.” At a top-level meeting the next day, Dean Rusk presented a draft statement saying that the United States would soon begin testing.
Kennedy went along with the thrust of the message, diluting it slightly to say that he was ordering preparations that would make testing possible. Schlesinger saw even this watered-down version as a disaster. “This lets the Russians off the hook,” he hissed to Ted Sorensen, who nodded agreement. “Tell Murrow,” Sorensen whispered back. Schlesinger edged over to the USIA director, who reassured him that he was about to say something similar. “If we issue that statement,” he said, “we destroy the advantages of the greatest propaganda gift we have had for a long time.” Murrow’s intervention sufficed to stall the announcement. “It is all too typical of Rusk,” Schlesinger spat afterwards, “that, instead of speaking for the interests of U.S. foreign policy, he capitulated and put forward a statement which might have been drafted in the Defense Department or the Joint Committee.”45
Schlesinger was tasked to draft a statement if and when it became clear that a first test had taken place. They didn’t have to wait long. Mid-afternoon on September 1, Schlesinger was working in his office when McGeorge Bundy called to say that there now was evidence that the Soviets had resumed testing. “We are trying to figure out what to say,” he said. “You had better come over.” Schlesinger pressed for the statement he had drafted only that morning. John McCloy, director of the US Disarmament Commission, and Arthur Dean, the lead negotiator at the talks in Geneva, argued for announcing a decision to resume testing immediately. Reaching no conclusion, they decided to take two statements to the president. Standing in his bathrobe, Kennedy listened “a little impatiently” to both sides of the argument, “completed our sentences, slashed each statement to bits . . . and briskly ushered us out.” Although “not inclined” to announce a resumption of tests immediately, the president really “did not know how much longer he could refrain from doing so.” The whole discussion, Schlesinger felt, “was all over a little too quickly.”46
Schlesinger’s instinct that the president had almost made up his mind proved correct. Over the next two days, British prime minister Harold Macmillan called for a summit meeting with Khrushchev and a joint US-UK proposal to ban atmospheric tests (a forerunner of the limited test ban treaty that would be negotiated two years later). That briefly encouraged Schlesinger’s hope that the United States would not resume testing. But when Kennedy called him forward to the state rooms on Air Force One on September 5, and there joshed him good-naturedly about a film review Schlesinger had just written for Show magazine, the special advisor knew the game was up. “One thing we did not discuss was the question of our resuming nuclear tests,” Schlesinger wrote afterwards. At five o’clock that same afternoon, the statement appeared, “without much consultation among his advisers,” that the United States would resume nuclear testing.47
“I assume that he did not raise this question with me,” Schlesinger concluded miserably, “because he had heard my view and was not interested in listening to more liberal guff on this matter.” As in divorce, the president didn’t want expert mediation once he’d decided to bail out.48
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
LOOKING SO ARTHURISH
On the evening of Monday, September 11, 1961, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. set out to walk from his office in the East Wing of the White House to Georgetown. His doctor had constantly urged him to exercise more and lose weight (“You certainly have a problem with your weight, and I hope that you are successful in reducing it somewhat”), so Arthur tried to walk home as often as possible, particularly in the more temperate fall weather. On this occasion he was not heading for the crumbling old Federal Period house that the Schlesingers had rented on O Street (“People came to see us not for our interior decor, I can promise you,” Marian tartly observed). Instead he kept going past O Street to 29th and Q Streets to the home of former New Dealer Chester Bowles, now no. 2 at the State Department. There waiting for him was his old friend and Harvard colleague John Kenneth Galbraith, now US ambassador to India, and Adlai Stevenson, the man both had supported in 1952 and 1956 and current UN ambassador.1
These four downcast liberals, Galbraith recorded afterwards, “all talked mournfully about our foreign policy.” A few days earlier, Stevenson had endured a testy meeting with the president. After hearing Stevenson’s critique of his decision to resume nuclear testing and his argument that it gave away an advantage in the propaganda war, Kennedy dismissed the ambassador out of hand. “What does that mean?” Kennedy had asked about the propaganda war. “Anyway,” he added dismissively, “the decision has been made.” Later that evening Stevenson would be further outraged when Schlesinger began “toying provisionally” with an idea of John McCloy’s. “World opinion?” the president’s principal disarmament advisor had scoffed, “I don’t believe in world opinion. The only thing that matters is power.” For Stevenson, it was a phrase that would stick and to which he would return a year later in the most famous speech of his life. Chester Bowles shared Stevenson’s dismay. The last months, he had written in his diary, demonstrated “how far astray a man as brilliant and well-intentioned as Kennedy can go who lacks a basic moral reference point.” The disillusionment was mutual; Kennedy would sack him two months later in the so-called Thanksgiving Day Massacre.
“The President snuck up on him one day,” Robert Kennedy recalled, “and got him fired.” In fact the attorney general was no fan of Bowles either, both for his disloyalty in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs and for his opposition to RFK’s plan for intervention in the Dominican Republic after the assassination of President Rafael Trujillo Molina earlier in 1961. The problem, Schlesinger would write later, was that the Kennedys “put a premium on quick, tough, laconic, dedicated people and [were] easily exasperated by more speculative types” like Bowles. It was a judgment Schlesinger feared might apply to the four who gathered around the dinner table that night.2
A month earlier, knowing his relationship to Stevenson was close, Kennedy had charged Schlesinger in advance of the upcoming UN General Assembly with managing the ambassador. Stevenson’s high moral tone increasingly irritated Kennedy. “He didn’t want to be lectured,” Bobby Kennedy judged—so he handed off the problem to another liberal. Schlesinger was stuck with the task for the remainder of his time at the White House. That left his ill-wishers like press secretary Pierre Salinger free to make contemptuous remarks that his only “official role was that of White House liaison with United Nations Ambassador Adlai Stevenson.” Schlesinger himself had immediately recognized the internal political dangers of the assignment. “I imagine that this will put me unhappily in the middle between JFK and AES,” he complained in his diary, “but I have been through this before and I guess I can survive.”
In fact it took just days before the awkwardness arose. When the Soviets announced a resumption of nuclear testing, Stevenson suggested introducing a resolution at a meeting of the UN Security Council calling on the Soviet Union to rescind the decision and on all other powers to refrain from testing. When Schlesinger took the idea to Kennedy, the president “thought aloud for a minute, then sat silent in his chair, obviously going through a process of visible concentration on the problem.” He eventually decided that it would “look hypocritical” to appeal to the UN when he had already decided to resume US
testing. Then with a wave, “he left cheerily for Hyannis Port,” abandoning Schlesinger to the unhappy task of telling the ambassador.3
Throughout that fall, Schlesinger increasingly came to feel that he was an embattled liberal minority in the White House, constantly forced to fight his corner as the administration settled into an essentially conservative character. Later in September, he was appalled to read in the New York Times that the president was considering appointing the chair of the US Atomic Energy Commission, John McCone, as the next head of the CIA. Schlesinger was not galled simply because he had offered to be Kennedy’s point man in recruiting a new director, and had even been spoken of by the president as a potential candidate. What really bothered Schlesinger was that the appointment of the Republican McCone confirmed what he saw as Kennedy’s political caution. Firing off a memo to the president, Schlesinger complained that “Mr. McCone, for all his able administrative qualities, is a man of crude and undiscriminating political views (or, to put it more precisely, political emotions).”
Once again, Schlesinger tried to play his Cuban trump card. “My guess,” Schlesinger judged, “is that if McCone had been head of CIA in March, we would have got, not a discriminating and careful advocacy of the Cuban operation, but an emotional and moralistic presentation.” In fact, Schlesinger concluded witheringly, “I would consider him far less inclined than [outgoing head] Mr. Dulles to weigh the political significance of proposed clandestine operations.” Schlesinger’s intervention made no difference, since McCone was announced that same day. “I am sure JFK knows what he’s doing and possibly my concern here will turn out to be as unwarranted as my concern last December over the appointment of Doug Dillon,” Schlesinger noted uncertainly in his diary, “but I doubt it.”4
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