by Oliver Stone
Kennedy’s most emphatic response to Khrushchev’s peace overtures came in his June 1963 American University address. He and his closest advisors had drafted the speech without input from the Joint Chiefs, the CIA, or the State Department. It may be the most enlightened speech made by any president in the twentieth century.
I have . . . chosen this time and this place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth is too rarely perceived—yet it is the most important topic on earth: world peace. What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. . . . I am talking about genuine peace—the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living—the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children—not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women—not merely peace in our time but peace for all time. I speak of peace because of the new face of war. Total war makes no sense in an age when great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces. It makes no sense in an age when a single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all of the allied air forces in the Second World War. It makes no sense in an age when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by the wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations unborn. . . . Second: Let us re-examine our attitude toward the Soviet Union . . . it is sad to . . . realize the extent of the gulf between us. But it is also . . . a warning to the American people not to . . . see only a distorted and desperate view of the other side, not to see conflict as inevitable, accommodations as impossible and communication as nothing more than an exchange of threats. . . . Today, should total war ever break out again. . . . All we have built, all we have worked for, would be destroyed in the first 24 hours. . . . In short, both the United States and its allies, and the Soviet Union and its allies, have a mutually deep interest in a just and genuine peace and in halting the arms race. . . . And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal. Third: Let us re-examine our attitude toward the Cold War . . . we shall also do our part to build a world of peace where the weak are safe and the strong are just. We are not helpless before that task or hopeless of its success. Confident and unafraid, we labor on—not toward a strategy of annihilation but toward a strategy of peace.160
Kennedy’s most emphatic response to Khrushchev’s overtures for peace during the previous year came in his extraordinary 1963 commencement address at American University. He and his closest advisors had drafted the speech without input from the Joint Chiefs, the CIA, or the State Department.
McNamara was convinced that Kennedy was about to change the course of history. The secretary of defense told an interviewer, “The American University speech laid out exactly what Kennedy’s intentions were. If he had lived, the world would have been different. I feel quite confident of that.”161
Nowhere was Kennedy’s speech more appreciated or more widely circulated than in the Soviet Union. Khrushchev considered it the best speech by a U.S. president since Roosevelt. Encouraged by what he heard, he publicly supported an atmospheric test ban treaty for the first time.162 On July 25, U.S., Soviet, and British representatives initialed the historic treaty. It was the first nuclear arms control agreement in history.
Passage by the U.S. Senate, however, was far from certain. The Joint Chiefs argued in April 1963 that “only through an energetic test program in all environments can the United States achieve or maintain superiority in all areas of nuclear weapons technology.”163 The public seemed to concur. Congressional mail was running fifteen to one against the treaty.
Kennedy feared a future in which nuclear weapons might proliferate widely. He foresaw “the possibility in the 1970’s . . . of the United States having to face a world in which 15 or 20 or 25 nations may have these weapons. I regard that,” he told reporters at a March press conference, “as the greatest possible danger and hazard.”164 In order to avert that, he fought doggedly for passage, assuring aides that he would “gladly” forfeit reelection if that were the cost of passing the treaty.165
His efforts were rewarded. The Senate passed the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty on September 24 by a vote of 80–19. Ted Sorensen believed that “no other accomplishment in the White House ever gave Kennedy greater satisfaction.”166 The treaty was ratified on October 7, 1963—Henry Wallace’s seventy-fifth birthday. In recognition of this monumental achievement, the editors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock back to twelve minutes before midnight.
Kennedy wanted to eradicate all the long-standing sources of tension between the two nations. Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko visited New York for the General Assembly meetings in September 1963, and Dean Rusk went to see him. As Gromyko recalled:
He said, “The President wants to find ways of improving relations with the Soviet Union and reducing tension.” He went on: “Could we go for a ride out of town and carry on our conversation.”
I realised something serious was afoot, and of course accepted.
We drove beyond the city limits, where Rusk reported the President’s message: “Kennedy is thinking of reducing the number of US forces in Europe.”
We discussed this walking along the side of the road.
It seemed to me that common sense about this issue had at last gained the upper hand in Washington. The question had been present, visibly or invisibly, at almost every Soviet-US meeting since the war, whenever NATO policy and the remilitarisation of West Germany were discussed. The Soviet view was that US forces and bases in western Europe represented an obstacle to peace. Kennedy’s idea therefore seized our attention.
I reported what Rusk had told me to Khrushchev, and said: “If the President has the political strength to carry out his idea, he’ll be doing a great thing for Europe, for the world and for the USA. Well, we’ll just have to wait and see.”
Sadly, however, the President’s days were numbered.167
Believing that he and Khrushchev could actually end the Cold War, he confided in two friends that he planned to conclude another arms control agreement and then become the first sitting U.S. president to visit the Soviet Union. The Soviet people, he was sure, would give him a hero’s welcome.
Kennedy even announced that he was ready to call off the space race with the Soviet Union and replace competition with cooperation. That was another stunning reversal. During the 1960 campaign, he had emphasized how badly Soviet space triumphs had diminished the United States’ stature abroad:
The people of the world respect achievement. For most of the 20th century they admired American science and American education, which was second to none. But they are not at all certain about which way the future lies. The first vehicle in outer space was called Sputnik, not Vanguard. The first country to place its national emblem on the moon was the Soviet Union, not the United States. The first canine passengers in space who safely returned were named Strelka and Belka, not Rover or Fido, or even Checkers.168
The Soviets had reaped a political windfall from those triumphs. On April 12, 1961, five days before the Bay of Pigs invasion, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit the earth. Flying over Africa, he sent greetings to Africans below who were struggling against colonialism. Alan Shepard’s suborbital flight three weeks later paled by comparison. After that flight, 40 percent of Western Europeans believed that the Soviets were ahead in total military strength and overall scientific achievement. Worried that U.S. prestige was at stake, Kennedy called a rare joint session of Congress and announced that “if we are to win the battle . . . between freedom and tyranny, . . . this nation should commit itself to achieving the
goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth.”169 Almost a year later, in February 1962, John Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth. Though his three-orbit flight almost ended in disaster, it boosted Americans’ spirits. But in August, the Soviets launched Vostok III, which circled the earth seventeen times and was joined the next day by Vostok IV. The following June, they captured the world’s attention with a weeklong mission that included Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space.
Kennedy had gambled so much of his own and the country’s prestige on winning the race to the moon that his sudden about-face in September 1963 came as a complete surprise. He stated:
Finally, in a field where the United States and the Soviet Union have a special capacity—in the field of space—there is room for new cooperation, for further joint efforts in the regulation and exploration of space. I include among these possibilities a joint expedition to the moon. Space offers no problems of sovereignty; by resolution of this Assembly, the members of the United Nations have foresworn any claim to territorial rights in outer space or on celestial bodies, and declared that international law and the United Nations Charter will apply. Why, therefore, should man’s first flight to the moon be a matter of national competition? Why should the United States and the Soviet Union, in preparing for such expeditions, become involved in immense duplications of research, construction, and expenditure? Surely we should explore whether the scientists and astronauts of our two countries—indeed of all the world—cannot work together in the conquest of space, sending someday in this decade to the moon not the representatives of a single nation, but the representatives of all of our countries.170
During the remarkable last few months of his life, Kennedy even contemplated a course reversal when it came to relations with Castro’s Cuba—a relationship in which he was personally deeply invested and in which his policies were consistently wrongheaded. But just as he clung to the hope of victory in Vietnam while taking steps toward withdrawal, he endorsed a new round of CIA sabotage in Cuba while holding out hope for friendship and reconciliation with Fidel Castro. His ambivalence toward Castro represented, in microcosm, his lingering ambivalence in dealing with all of Latin America, where he spoke of democracy and reform yet continued aiding repressive dictators and supported a military coup in Guatemala as late as March 1963.
But even in Latin America, he began showing signs of rethinking U.S. policy. ABC News correspondent Lisa Howard interviewed Castro in April 1963 and reported that he had expressed his willingness to normalize relations if the United States was interested in doing so. U.S. intelligence officials were fully aware that Castro had become disillusioned with the Soviet Union after its capitulation during the missile crisis and was seeking to reduce dependence on his erstwhile ally. In September 1963, Kennedy asked journalist and diplomat William Attwood to explore with Cuban leaders the possibility of a rapprochement. Although UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson authorized Attwood “to make discreet contact” with Cuba’s UN ambassador, Carlos Lechuga, to determine whether dialogue with Castro was possible, Stevenson added regretfully that “the CIA is still in charge of Cuba” so not much was expected of this overture.171
Attwood and Lechuga had several productive discussions, but Attwood’s request for a meeting with Castro was rejected on the grounds that such talks would not be “useful at this time.” Kennedy decided to try another avenue of approach. French journalist Jean Daniel, an old friend of Attwood’s, was about to go to Cuba to interview Castro. Attwood arranged for him to interview Kennedy before meeting with Castro. In that interview, Kennedy offered an extraordinarily sympathetic portrait of the Cuban Revolution:
I believe that there is no country in the world, including all the African regions, including any and all the countries under colonial domination, where economic colonization, humiliation and exploitation were worse than in Cuba, in part owing to my country’s policies during the Batista regime. . . . I approved the proclamation which Fidel Castro made in the Sierra Maestra, when he justifiably called for justice and especially yearned to rid Cuba of corruption. I will go even further: to some extent it is as though Batista was the incarnation of a number of sins on the part of the United States. Now we shall have to pay for those sins. In the matter of the Batista regime, I am in agreement with the first Cuban revolutionaries. That is perfectly clear.172
Daniel spent three weeks touring Cuba but made no headway in his efforts to interview Castro. As Daniel’s departure from Cuba drew near, Castro showed up unexpectedly at Daniel’s hotel. During the six-hour conversation, he wanted to hear every detail of Daniel’s interview with Kennedy. Although Castro expressed as much criticism of Kennedy’s behavior as Kennedy had of his, he, too, held out hope for a new departure, stating, just two days before Kennedy’s assassination:
I cannot help hoping that a leader will come to the fore in North America (why not Kennedy, there are things in his favor!), who will be willing to brace unpopularity, fight the trusts, tell the truth and, most important, let the various nations act as they see fit. Kennedy could still be this man. He still has the possibility of becoming, in the eyes of history, the greatest President of the United States, the leader who may at last understand that there can be coexistence between capitalists and socialists, even in the Americas. He would then be an even greater President than Lincoln.173
In little more than a year since the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Jack Kennedy, the erstwhile Cold Warrior, had undergone a remarkable transformation. He and Nikita Khrushchev had taken steps to ease Cold War tensions that in October 1962 or at any point in the previous sixteen years would have seemed unimaginable. Both had made enemies who were ready to pounce. On November 7, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller launched his bid for the Republican presidential nomination. For the next two weeks, he kept up a steady assault on Kennedy’s policies. Kennedy, he charged, was soft on communism. He naively believed that Soviet leaders were “reasonable, amenable to compromise, and desirous of reaching a fundamental settlement with the west.” As a result, “the foundations of our safety are being sapped.” He hadn’t stopped Communist aggression in Laos. He had failed to provide air support during the Bay of Pigs invasion and stood “idly by while the wall was being built in Berlin.” And the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty had caused “profound shock” among the United States’ European allies.174
But Rockefeller’s wrath was nothing compared to that of the CIA and Joint Chiefs of Staff, which Kennedy had repeatedly provoked since the start of his presidency. In the summer of 1962, Kennedy read an advance copy of the soon-to-be-best-selling novel Seven Days in May by Fletcher Knebel and Charles Bailey, in which a military coup occurs in the United States. Knebel had gotten the idea when interviewing General Curtis LeMay. Kennedy told a friend:
It’s possible. It could happen in this country. . . . If, for example, the country had a young president, and he had a Bay of Pigs, there would be a certain uneasiness. Maybe the military would do a little criticizing behind his back, but this would be written off as the usual military dissatisfaction with civilian control. Then if there were another Bay of Pigs, the reaction of the country would be, “Is he too young and inexperienced?” The military would almost feel that it was their patriotic obligation to stand ready to preserve the integrity of the nation, and only God knows just what segment of democracy they would be defending if they overthrew the elected establishment. Then, if there were a third Bay of Pigs, it could happen.175
In the minds of some leaders in the military and intelligence community, Kennedy was guilty of far more than three betrayals: he was guilty of not following through in the Bay of Pigs, disempowering the CIA and firing its leaders, resisting involvement and opting for a neutralist solution in Laos, concluding the atmospheric test ban treaty, planning to disengage from Vietnam, flirting with ending the Cold War, abandoning the space race, encouraging third-world nationalism, and, perhaps most damningly, accepting a negot
iated settlement in the Cuban Missile Crisis.
On November 22, 1963, before the young president had a chance to realize the dreams he and Khrushchev shared for refashioning the world, bullets from one or more assassins cut Kennedy down on the streets of Dallas. We may never know who was responsible or what the motive was. The Warren Commission concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin. Commission member John McCloy insisted that the report be unanimous even though four of the seven members—Richard Russell, Hale Boggs, John Sherman Cooper, and McCloy himself—harbored serious doubts about the lone-gunman and magic-bullet theories. Lyndon Johnson, Governor John Connally, who had also been wounded, and Robert Kennedy also questioned the findings. The public found the report unconvincing.
We do know that Kennedy had many enemies who deplored progressive change just as fervently as did those who had blocked Henry Wallace in 1944 when he was trying to lead the United States and the world down a similar path of peace and prosperity. Kennedy bravely defied the powerful forces who would have pushed the United States into a war with the Soviet Union. His courage was more than matched by Khrushchev’s. Future generations owe an enormous debt and possibly their very existence to the fact that those two men stared into the abyss and recoiled from what they saw. And they owe a special debt to an obscure Soviet submarine commander who single-handedly blocked the start of nuclear war. In his inaugural address, Kennedy said that the torch had been passed to a new generation. With Kennedy’s death, the torch was passed back to an old generation—the generation of Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Reagan—leaders who, though not much older, would systematically destroy the promise of the Kennedy years as they returned the country to war and repression.
