by Oliver Stone
Kennedy put his brother Robert in charge of a significant portion of covert operations. The new responsibility kept the youthful attorney general very busy. Under his watch, the CIA launched 163 major covert operations in three years, only seven fewer than had been conducted under Eisenhower in eight years.83
Before assuming his new position, General Taylor conducted an inquiry into what went wrong in the Cuban operation. General Walter Bedell Smith testified, “A democracy cannot wage war. When you go to war, you pass a law giving extraordinary powers to the President. The people of the country assume when the emergency is over, the rights and powers that were temporarily delegated to the Chief Executive will be returned to the states, counties and to the people.” Smith thought that the CIA’s usefulness might have come to an end and a new covert agency was needed. He remarked, “It’s time we take the bucket of slop and put another cover over it.”84
Kennedy’s growing mistrust of his military and intelligence advisors made it easier to rebuff their pressure to send troops to Laos, something that Eisenhower had warned him might be necessary to defeat the Communist Pathet Lao. If not for the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy told Ted Sorensen and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., it would probably have happened. The Joint Chiefs insisted that Kennedy give prior commitment to a large-scale invading force and approval for taking the war to China if necessary, even if it meant using nuclear weapons. Kennedy resisted such demands and angered the generals by opting for a neutralist solution. “After the Bay of Pigs,” Schlesinger told David Talbot, “Kennedy had contempt for the Joint Chiefs. . . . He dismissed them as a bunch of old men. He thought Lemnitzer was a dope.”85
Still reeling from the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy prepared meticulously for his June meeting with Khrushchev in Vienna. Khrushchev had earlier reached out to the new president, hoping to ease tensions and reach an accord on nuclear testing, Laos, and Berlin. But now the mood had darkened. During the summit, the Soviet premier bristled with accusations. Khrushchev berated the young president for the United States’ global imperialism. He declared that U.S.-Soviet relations hinged on resolution of the German question and deplored Germany’s remilitarization and prominence in NATO. He demanded a treaty recognizing two separate Germanys by the end of the year. Berlin would function as a “free demilitarized city” under East Germany’s jurisdiction, with guaranteed access from the west. Kennedy’s parting comment to Khrushchev was “I see it’s going to be a very cold winter.”86 He told one reporter, “If Khrushchev wants to rub my nose in the dirt, it’s all over.”87 George Kennan thought that Kennedy was “strangely tongue-tied” during the summit.88 The browbeaten president sat down afterward with James Reston, who asked, “Pretty rough?” Kennedy responded, “Roughest thing in my life.” He explained:
I’ve got two problems. First, to figure out why he did it, and in such a hostile way. And second, to figure out what we can do about it. I think . . . he did it because of the Bay of Pigs . . . he thought that anyone who was so young and inexperienced as to get into that mess could be taken, and anyone who got into it, and didn’t see it through, had no guts. So he just beat hell out of me. So I’ve got a terrible problem . . . in trying to make our power credible, and Vietnam looks like the place.89
It would have been easier for Kennedy to comprehend Khrushchev’s belligerence if he had understood the depth of Soviet concerns about Germany. These went well beyond the placement of U.S.-controlled intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) on German soil and beyond the flood of East Germans escaping through West Berlin. What really terrified Khrushchev was the prospect of Germany getting control over its own nuclear weapons. He threatened to sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany and cut off British, French, and U.S. access to West Berlin.
Khrushchev explained to an American journalist:
I can understand how Americans look at Germany somewhat differently than the way we do. . . . We have a much longer history with Germany. We have seen how quickly governments in Germany can change and how easy it is for Germany to become an instrument of mass murder. It is hard for us even to count the number of our people who were killed by Germany in the last war. . . . We have a saying here: “Give a German a gun; sooner or later he will point it at Russians.” This is not just my feeling. I don’t think there’s anything the Russian people feel more strongly about than the question of the rearmament of Germany. You like to think in the United States that we have no public opinion. Don’t be too sure about this. On the matter of Germany our people have very strong ideas. I don’t think that any government here could survive if it tried to go against it. I told this to one of your American governors and he said he was surprised that the Soviet Union, with all its atomic bombs and missiles, would fear Germany. I told your governor that he missed the point. Of course we could crush Germany. We could crush Germany in a few minutes. But what we fear is the ability of an armed Germany to commit the United States by its own actions. We fear the ability of Germany to start a world atomic war. What puzzles me more than anything else is that the Americans don’t realize that there’s a large group in Germany that is eager to destroy the Soviet Union. How many times do you have to be burned before you respect fire?90
During their June 1961 summit in Vienna, Khrushchev berated Kennedy about the United States’ global imperialism. He declared that U.S.-Soviet relations hinged on resolution of the German question. Kennedy left frustrated, telling Khrushchev, “I see it’s going to be a very cold winter.”
The failure to bridge differences over key matters in Vienna made for one of the tensest summers in the Cold War. Dean Acheson, who prepared the background papers on Germany for the summit, advised Kennedy to take a strong, uncompromising stand on Berlin and avoid negotiations. He felt that nuclear war was worth risking. In the event of a confrontation, the United States planned to send a few brigades to Berlin. If the Warsaw Pact resisted militarily, the United States was ready to launch an all-out nuclear attack. As Bundy explained to Kennedy, “The current plan calls for shooting off everything we have in one shot, and it is so constructed as to make any more flexible course very difficult.”91
At a special meeting on July 20, Lemnitzer and other military officials briefed Kennedy on plans for and consequences of nuclear war. Lemnitzer reviewed a report detailing a “surprise attack” on the Soviet Union for late 1963. Kennedy asked what would happen if the attack were launched in late 1962. Allen Dulles responded that the United States would not have enough missiles available until December 1963. Kennedy asked how long, if war occurred, would U.S. citizens have to remain in fallout shelters. Two weeks, he was told. He ordered that no one present even disclose the subject of the meeting. Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric reported that Lemnitzer gave the briefing “as though it were for a kindergarten class. . . . Finally Kennedy got up and walked right out in the middle of it, and that was the end of it.”92
In his 1990 memoirs, Dean Rusk described Kennedy’s reaction: “President Kennedy clearly understood what nuclear war meant and was appalled by it. In our many talks together, he never worried about the threat of assassination, but he occasionally brooded over whether it would be his fate to push the nuclear button.”93 In September, Lemnitzer briefed Kennedy, McNamara, and Rusk on SIOP-62, including the option for a full-scale preemptive attack against the Soviet Union. Afterward, Kennedy disgustedly said to Rusk, “And we call ourselves the human race.”94
Despite his reservations, Kennedy intensified the crisis. On July 25, he addressed the nation:
The immediate threat to free men is in West Berlin. But that isolated outpost is not an isolated problem. The threat is world-wide. . . . We do not want to fight—but we have fought before. And others in earlier times have made the same dangerous mistake of assuming that the West was too selfish and too soft and too divided. . . . The source of world trouble and tension is Moscow, not Berlin. And if war begins, it will have begun in Moscow and not Berlin.
Kennedy announced an additional $3.45 billion for
defense, an increase in draft calls to make possible a 25 percent expansion in the size of the army, activation of select reserve and National Guard units, and a national program to construct fallout shelters, both public and private. He emphasized the need to be prepared for nuclear war and reminded citizens, “Now in the thermonuclear age any misjudgments on either side about the intentions of the other could rain more devastation in several hours than has been wrought in all the wars of human history.”95
The Warsaw Pact nations responded in dramatic fashion, implementing changes that had been under discussion for months. On August 13, East German troops began erecting barbed-wire barricades and roadblocks to shut off the stream of escaping East German citizens. Construction workers soon replaced the barbed wire with concrete. Kennedy sent 1,500 U.S. troops by road from West Germany to West Berlin, where they were met by Vice President Johnson. The world teetered nervously on the brink of war. Eighteen-year-old James Carroll waited at the Pentagon to pick up his father, Joseph Carroll, who had just been appointed the director of the newly created Defense Intelligence Agency. Carroll, who would later win the National Book Award for his powerful memoir An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War That Came Between Us, vividly recalled his father’s unsettling words. “Tonight Dad is in a somber mood,” he wrote.
. . . He is smoking, flicking ashes out the window. He has said nothing. Finally crushes the cigarette in the dashboard ashtray and turns to me. “Son, I want to say something to you. I’m only going to say it once, and I don’t want you asking me any questions. Okay? You read the papers. You know what’s going on. Berlin. The bomber they shot down last week. I may not come home one of these nights. I might have to go somewhere else. The whole Air Staff would go. If that happens, I’m going to depend on you to take my place with Mom and the boys.” “What do you mean?” “Mom will know. But you should know too. I’ll want you to get everybody in the car. I’ll want you to drive south. Get on Route One. Head to Richmond. Go past it. Go as far as you can before you stop.” He didn’t say anything else . . . neither did I. We must have driven the rest of the way home in silence. I do remember very distinctly . . . what I felt . . . fear. . . . Despite all the talk of war, I had believed that my father and the others like him—Curtis LeMay, Tommy White, Pearre Cabell, Butch Blanchard, our neighbors on Generals’ Row—would protect us from it. Now I saw that Dad himself no longer thought they could. I felt my father’s fear, which until then I’d thought impossible. I began to be afraid that night and I stayed afraid for many years, first of what our enemy would do, later of what we would do.96
When recounting the story more than four decades later at a conference on the nuclear threat in Washington, D.C., Carroll concluded with the words, “And I have been driving south ever since.”
The Berlin Wall defused the immediate danger, enabling Khrushchev to back off his threat to sign the provocative treaty with East Germany. Kennedy confided to aides, “It’s not a very nice solution, but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”97 Khrushchev understood the West’s vulnerability in Berlin, which he viewed as “the testicles of the West. Every time I want to make the West scream,” he said, “I squeeze on Berlin.”98
Khrushchev found another way to make Kennedy scream in August 1961: he resumed nuclear testing. When Kennedy learned it would soon happen, he erupted, “Fucked again!” His advisors urged him to hold off responding in kind so that they could score a propaganda victory, but Kennedy brushed them off, exclaiming, “What are you? Peaceniks? They just kicked me in the nuts. I’m supposed to say that’s okay?”99
Kennedy’s warnings during the Berlin crisis infused the debate over fallout shelters with a new sense of urgency. Recommendations to build shelters during the 1950s had largely fallen on deaf ears. In March 1960, Representative Chet Holifield, who chaired the Government Operations Subcommittee, declared civil defense to be in “deplorable shape” with only 1,565 home fallout shelters having been built in thirty-five states.100 Few people could afford or were willing to spend the several thousand dollars it cost to have the shelters installed in their homes. Nobel Prize–winning UCLA nuclear expert Willard Libby, a former member of the Atomic Energy Commision, proposed a solution. To much fanfare, he built a shelter at his Bel Air, California, home for $30 and lectured, “If your life is worth $30, then you can afford a fallout shelter such as this.” Libby dug a five-foot-wide, five-foot-deep, seven-foot-long hole into the side of a hill. He lined the sides, top, and entrance with a hundred dirt-filled burlap bags. He made the roof from sixteen eight-foot-long railroad ties. Unfortunately for the Libbys, a fire swept through the Santa Monica mountains in February 1961, destroying their home. Mrs. Libby had time to salvage only two items: her husband’s Nobel Prize and a mink coat. After initial reports that the fallout shelter had survived intact, the Washington Post sadly reported, “Fire Wrecks Libby’s Bel Air Fallout Shelter.”101 The timing was regrettable. Newspapers were currently running Libby’s multipart series titled “You Can Survive Atomic Attack.” Physicist Leo Szilard commented that this “proves not only that there is a God but that he has a sense of humor.”102
To an outside observer, it might have seemed that Americans had taken leave of their senses in the summer and fall of 1961 as the nation conducted an extended conversation about the ethics of killing friends and neighbors in order to protect the sanctity, security, and limited resources in one’s home fallout shelter. In August, Time magazine published an article titled “Gun Thy Neighbor,” which quoted one Chicago suburbanite as saying, “When I get my shelter finished, I’m going to mount a machine gun at the hatch to keep the neighbors out if the bomb falls. I’m deadly serious about this. If the stupid American public will not do what they have to do to save themselves, I’m not going to run the risk of not being able to use the shelter I’ve taken the trouble to provide to save my own family.”103
At public meetings, neighbors with shelters told next-door neighbors and best friends that they would shoot them if necessary. Clergy weighed in on both sides of the issue. Rev. L. C. McHugh, a former professor of ethics at Georgetown, fueled the controversy when he wrote in the Jesuit magazine America: “Think twice before you rashly give your family shelter space to friends and neighbors or to the passing stranger . . . others try[ing] to break in . . . may be . . . repelled with whatever means will effectively deter their assault. . . . Does prudence also dictate that you have some ‘protective devices’ in your survival kit, e.g. a revolver for breaking up traffic jams at your shelter door? That’s for you to decide, in the light of your personal circumstances.”104
A model home fallout shelter designed by the U.S. Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization. The 1961 Berlin crisis infused the fallout shelter debate with a new sense of urgency.
Right Reverend Angus Dun, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, D.C., denounced the every-family-for-itself approach as “immoral, unjust and contrary to the national interest.” He averred that the kind of person who would be “most desperately needed in a post-attack world is least likely to dig himself a private molehole that has no room for his neighbor.”105
Many people took sad note of the ways that the Cold War and threat of annihilation had warped the American conscience. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists editor Eugene Rabinowitch called home fallout shelters “pathetic” and viewed discussions of killing one’s neighbors as “demonstrations of human depravity.” Historian Gabriel Kolko said that government neutrality on the gun-thy-neighbor debate suggested that it would “not complain when shelterless neighbors remove their armed neighbors’ shelter filters, or slip a plastic bag over the air intake.”106 The New York Times reported on one satirical cabaret skit in which shelter owners were encouraged to shoot their neighbors now rather than wait until they tried to break into their shelters. Bob Dylan recorded a song intended for his The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan album titled “Let Me Die in My Footsteps.” The unreleased song began, “I will not go down under the ground/’Cause somebody tells
me that death’s coming ’round./And I will not carry myself down to die/When I go to my grave my head will be high.” For the chorus, Dylan sang, “Let me die in my footsteps/Before I go down under the ground.” In perhaps the most creative response, one protester showed up at the Jesuit publication’s office with an umbrella labeled “Portable Fallout Shelter.” An arrow pointing to the end opposite the handle read, “For stabbing shelterless neighbors.”107 Despite government pressure, surprisingly few Americans actually built fallout shelters, apparently recognizing that shelters would offer scant protection in the event of nuclear war or that such a war might not be worth surviving.
Still, the chilling specter of nuclear war hung over the first two years of the Kennedy presidency. Having won the election in part by exploiting the fear of a missile gap, once in office Kennedy asked McNamara to quickly ascertain just how big the gap was. It took only three weeks to confirm that a gap did exist, but it was in the United States’ favor.
Kennedy wanted to keep that information from the public. He intended to exploit the apocryphal missile gap to justify a robust increase in defense spending. But on February 6, his politically inexperienced secretary of defense shocked reporters by announcing “There’s no missile gap.” McNamara offered to resign over this faux pas. Kennedy explained that all such judgments were “premature,” and the issue faded quickly.
