by Oliver Stone
Having justified this precarious—one might say insane—nuclear buildup as the price of keeping defense spending down, Eisenhower’s FY 1960 federal budget had increased by only 20 percent over his first budget despite a nearly 25 percent rise in GNP over that time period.
The Eisenhower years were relatively peaceful and prosperous, but many Americans feared that the country was stagnating and hungered for a new dynamism. Democrats turned to the youthful Bostonian John F. Kennedy. Kennedy hailed from a prominent and politically ambitious family. His father, the controversial Joseph Kennedy, was a successful Wall Street speculator and major financial backer of Franklin Roosevelt. His stint as ambassador to Great Britain was cut short because of his appeasement policy toward Hitler and his open pessimism about Great Britain’s prospects in the war.
Elected to the Senate in 1952, John Kennedy’s congressional career offered little indication of the heights to which he would later rise. A Cold War liberal, he supported Richard Nixon’s Red-baiting congressional campaign against the progressive Democrat Helen Gahagan Douglas. Illness enabled him to miss the December 1954 Senate vote of censure against Joseph McCarthy, an old family friend, whom he had avoided criticizing. Alluding to the title of Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book, Profiles in Courage, Eleanor Roosevelt said she wished that Kennedy “had a little less profile and a little more courage.”56 His brother Robert had even served on McCarthy’s staff. Kennedy tried to win the support of the Eleanor Roosevelt–Adlai Stevenson liberal wing of the party but never gained its trust. His opportunistic, though politically astute, choice of Lyndon Johnson as running mate confirmed the liberals’ mistrust of him.
Kennedy defeated Nixon by the narrowest of margins in 1960. Nixon had touted his vice presidential experience and strong contribution to the Eisenhower administration. But when a reporter asked Eisenhower to name an important decision Nixon had participated in, Eisenhower said that if you gave him a week he might think of one.57
Kennedy positioned himself as the candidate of change. But not all the changes he promised were positive ones. Running as a hawk, he criticized the Eisenhower-Nixon administration for tolerating Castro’s takeover in Cuba and for allowing a dangerous missile gap to develop.
On some level, Eisenhower understood the potentially cataclysmic situation he had created and regretted the virtual doomsday machine he had bequeathed to his successor. He was deeply disappointed that pressure from hawkish scientists and military advisors had thwarted his efforts to conclude a test ban treaty before leaving office. With that in mind, he delivered an extraordinary farewell address whose warning about the rise of an increasingly powerful and threatening “military-industrial complex” not only flew in the face of his actual track record as president but described a phenomenon whose growth Eisenhower had personally masterminded.
This speech, the best remembered of Eisenhower’s presidency, originated in conversations between the president’s chief speechwriter, Malcolm Moos, a Johns Hopkins political scientist, and Ralph Williams, a retired navy captain who was also on the speechwriting staff. Moos and Williams met on October 31, 1960, to discuss ideas for the farewell address and agreed that it was necessary to expose the “problem of militarism.” Williams’s memo spelled out their concern very clearly:
. . . for the first time in its history, the United States has a permanent war-based industry. . . . Not only that, but flag and general officers retiring at an early age take positions in /a/ war based industrial complex shaping its decisions and guiding the direction of its tremendous thrust. This creates a danger that what the Communists have always said about us may become true. We must be careful to ensure that the “merchants of death do not come to dictate national policy.”58
The specific phrase “military-industrial complex,” which the speech immortalized, was apparently suggested by physicist Herbert York, the former director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. In 1971, while working for the summer at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), York told a younger American colleague that he had been the one to suggest the precise wording to President Eisenhower for insertion into the speech.59 Eisenhower agreed and sounded the tocsin:
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal Government. . . . we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. . . . We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. . . . Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.60
For most Americans, the significance would not be understood for a long time. But there were some notable exceptions. Walter Lippmann astutely compared Eisenhower’s farewell address to George Washington’s. As Washington had warned about the foreign “menace to civilian power,” Eisenhower warned about the domestic military menace.61 Eisenhower considered Washington his “hero.” In At Ease, Eisenhower shared the fact that Washington’s “farewell address . . . exemplified the human qualities I frankly idolized.”62
The New York Times’ Jack Raymond provided a full-page analysis of the military-industrial complex, replete with graphs detailing the exorbitance of U.S. defense spending, which accounted for 59 percent of the nearly $81 billion national budget. In addition to spending half the federal budget, he noted, the Pentagon also controlled $32 billion worth of real estate, including air bases and weapons arsenals. Raymond explained how the military and industry worked hand in glove to achieve this. The United States’ excessive militarism, he added, was hurting the nation’s image abroad: “in carrying a big stick, the United States appears to have forgotten the other part of Theodore Roosevelt’s dictum to ‘speak softly.’ ”63
Kennedy’s close advisor and biographer Theodore Sorensen later mused, “I think that the principal reason Kennedy ran for the presidency was he thought the Eisenhower-Dulles policy of massive retaliation and all of that was heading the country toward nuclear war. He felt the policy of massive retaliation—in which we supposedly kept the peace by saying if you step one foot over the line in West Berlin or somewhere else, we will respond by annihilating you with nuclear weapons—he felt that was mad.”64 But little in the 1960 presidential campaign would have led observers to believe that Kennedy was going to reduce the risk of nuclear war or that the new administration would do anything other than fuel U.S. militarism. Kennedy attacked Eisenhower’s “willingness to place fiscal security ahead of national security,” especially at a time when the Soviets would soon be able to outproduce the United States “two to three to one” in missiles.65 During the campaign, Kennedy acknowledged that he didn’t expect the Soviets to “use that lead to threaten or launch an attack upon the United States,” but he wouldn’t take any chances. Calling for increased defense spending, he declared that “those who oppose these expenditures are taking a chance on our very survival as a nation.”66
Kennedy’s inauguration was resplendent with symbolism. Eighty-six-year-old Robert Frost became the first poet ever to participate in a presidential inauguration. Marian Anderson, the talented singer whom the Daughters of the American Revolution had once barred from Constitution Hall because of her race, sang the National Anthem. And Kennedy delivered a ringing inaugural address that both reached out to the Soviet Union in hopes of building friendship “before the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science engulf all humanity” and welcomed the fact that his generation had been granted the opportunity “to defend freedom in its hour of maximum danger” and would “pay any p
rice, bear any burden, meet any hardship” in order to do so.67
The new administration recruited establishment insiders from the leading foundations, corporations, and Wall Street firms and leavened them with a sprinkling of progressives in secondary positions. David Halberstam labeled them “the best and the brightest,” chronicling how their intelligence, achievements, and can-do spirit combined with hubris and profound moral blindness to land the United States in Vietnam. They were typified by National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, the dean of the faculty of arts and sciences at Harvard, who had been the first applicant to get perfect scores on all three Yale entrance exams, and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who was renowned for his computerlike mind and managerial brilliance. During a CINCPAC meeting on materials in the pipeline to Vietnam, McNamara stopped the projector and accurately complained that the data in slide 869 contradicted what had been presented seven hours earlier in slide 11. The intelligence of Kennedy’s advisors was never in question. Their judgment, however, was. John Kenneth Galbraith, who served as Kennedy’s ambassador to India, regretted that “foreign policy was still with the Council on Foreign Relations people. We knew their expertise was nothing. . . . All they knew was the difference between a Communist and an anti-Communist . . . they had this mystique and it still worked and those of us who doubted it . . . were like Indians firing occasional arrows into the campsite from the outside.”68 As a result of this odd mix of arrogance and ignorance, the new administration blundered badly in foreign policy right from the start.
John F. Kennedy delivered a ringing inaugural address that both reached out to the Soviet Union in hopes of building friendship and reaffirmed his generation’s willingness “to defend freedom in its hour of maximum danger” and “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship” in order to do so.
Kennedy proceeded with Eisenhower’s plan to have the CIA secretly train an invading force of 1,500 Cuban exiles in Guatemala. When he initially expressed doubts about the wisdom of such a scheme, Allen Dulles assured him that an invasion would inspire anti-Castro Cubans to rise up and overthrow the government. Administration officials Chester Bowles, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Richard Goodwin took sharp issue with the plan, and Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair J. William Fulbright urged Kennedy to abandon it entirely. But the new and inexperienced president feared blocking an operation backed by Eisenhower and the Joint Chiefs. Three days before the operation was set to begin, eight U.S. B-26 bombers destroyed or incapacitated half of Castro’s air force. The invading force arrived at the Bay of Pigs in seven ships, two of which belonged to the United Fruit Company. The Cuban army easily subdued the invaders, who begged for direct U.S. military assistance.
The promised popular uprising never materialized. Bundy, Rusk, and Kennedy himself had repeatedly made it clear to CIA officials that no air support would be forthcoming. They knew that such action would damage the United States’ image abroad and invite a Soviet move against West Berlin. Shortly before midnight on April 18, Kennedy, Johnson, McNamara, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk met in the White House with General Lyman Lemnitzer, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Navy Chief Admiral Arleigh Burke, and the CIA’s chief of clandestine services, Richard Bissell. Burke and Bissell spent three hours trying to persuade Kennedy to send ground and air support. They had known all along that that was their only hope of success and fully expected that Kennedy would cave in to their pressure. Kennedy said, “They were sure I’d give in to them and send the go-ahead order.”69 “It was inconceivable to them,” Kennedy’s advisor Walt Rostow later wrote, “that the president would let it openly fail when he had all this American power.”70 Lemnitzer charged that “pulling out the rug” was “unbelievable . . . absolutely reprehensible, almost criminal.” But Kennedy stood strong. As he explained to an old friend, “We’re not going to plunge into an irresponsible action just because a fanatical fringe in this country puts so-called national pride above national reason.”71 One hundred fourteen men were killed, 1,189 captured. Among the casualties were four U.S. pilots under contract to the CIA from the Alabama National Guard.
Kennedy’s new administration recruited ambitious, highly intelligent establishment insiders, whom David Halberstam would later label, somewhat ironically, “the best and the brightest.” They were typified by National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy (with Kennedy, left), the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara (right), renowned for his computerlike mind and managerial brilliance.
Cuban counterrevolutionaries after their capture in the Bay of Pigs. Encouraged to believe that an invasion would inspire anti-Castro Cubans to rise up and overthrow the government, Kennedy proceeded with Eisenhower’s plan to have the CIA secretly train an invading force of 1,500 Cuban exiles in Guatemala. The Cuban army easily subdued the invaders, who begged for direct U.S. military assistance. Kennedy refused, and the promised popular uprising never materialized. One hundred fourteen men were killed and 1,189 captured.
The postmortems started quickly. The Chicago Tribune put it succinctly: “The main results of the supposed Cuban ‘invasion’ are that the Castro dictatorship is more firmly installed than ever, the communists have made hay all over the world, and the United States has taken a dreadful kick in the teeth.”72 The Wall Street Journal declared that “the U.S. finds itself in a sorry mess. . . . This country is reviled around the world. . . . But we suspect that the deeper feeling, especially in the capitals of international Communism, is one of astonishment at U.S. weakness.”73 The New York Times fretted that U.S. “hegemony . . . in the Western Hemisphere is threatened for the first time in a century” as the Cuban Revolution offered a “model” for the rest of Latin America.74
The world was indeed shocked by the United States’ ineptitude and misjudgment. Dean Acheson reported from Europe that the fiasco “shattered the Europeans,” who saw it as “a completely unthought out, irresponsible thing to do. They had tremendously high expectations of the new administration, and . . . they just fell miles down with a crash.”75 Bowles wrote in his diary, “The Cuban fiasco demonstrates how far astray a man as brilliant and well intentioned as Kennedy can go who lacks a basic moral reference point.”76 Bowles would soon be unceremoniously ushered out of the State Department. Kennedy took responsibility for the botched invasion but vowed to redouble his efforts to combat Communism:
We dare not fail to see the insidious nature of this new and deeper struggle. We dare not fail to grasp the new concepts, the new tools, the new sense of urgency we will need to combat it, whether in Cuba or South Vietnam. . . . The message of Cuba, of Laos, of the rising din of Communist voices in Asia and Latin America—these messages are all the same. The complacent, the self-indulgent, the soft societies are to be swept away with the debris of history. . . . Let me then make clear as President of the United States that I am determined upon our system’s survival and success regardless of the cost and regardless of the peril.77
Democratic Senator Al Gore, Sr., who was a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called for “a shake-up of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. All the members should be replaced by new, wiser and abler men.” The New York Times placed the lion’s share of blame on the CIA and called for the agency’s “thorough reorganization.”78
Cuban exiles blamed the mission’s failure on Kennedy’s refusal to provide air support. Most of them would never forgive him. But despite the broad-based criticism of his handling of this affair, Kennedy’s overall approval ratings jumped to the highest level of his presidency, leading him to comment, “It’s just like Eisenhower. The worse I do the more popular I get.”79
The entire sordid affair had a profound effect on the inexperienced president. Kennedy developed a healthy skepticism toward military advisors and intelligence officials. He explained to Schlesinger, “If someone comes to tell me this or that about the minimum wage bill, I have no hesitation in overruling them. But you always assume that the military and the intel
ligence people have some secret skill not available to ordinary mortals.”80 Kennedy told journalist Ben Bradlee, “The first advice I’m going to give my successor is to watch the generals and to avoid feeling that just because they were military men their opinions on military matters were worth a damn.”81 Kennedy’s post-invasion remarks seemed to reveal the first flickering of understanding of Eisenhower’s poignant warning. But his learning curve would need to be a steep one for him to escape the steel trap of Cold War thinking.
Following the botched invasion, Kennedy decided to shake up the Joint Chiefs “sons of bitches” and “those CIA bastards.” He threatened to “shatter the CIA into a thousand pieces, and scatter it to the winds.”82 He named General Maxwell Taylor to replace Lemnitzer as chairman of the Joint Chiefs but, hoping to placate hawkish critics, chose Curtis LeMay as air force chief of staff—a decision he would come to regret. At the CIA, he replaced Dulles with conservative Republican businessman John McCone. He also forced the resignation of Deputy Director Richard Bissell, and Deputy Director General Charles Cabell. He placed all CIA agents and other overseas U.S. personnel under the local ambassador and took steps to cut the CIA budget, shooting for a 20 percent reduction by 1966.
