by Kai Bird
But when their conversation turned to substantive topics, Khrushchev again took a hard line. Regarding the stalled test-ban treaty talks, he confided that he was subject to strong pressure from his own military establishment to resume nuclear testing.64 The crisis over Berlin was only making it more difficult to fend off this pressure. McCloy tried to assure Khrushchev that the United States was not secretly preparing another series of atomic tests in the Nevada desert. (In fact, the tunnels for such a series of underground tests were being dug that very month.) If Moscow would reciprocate, he said, Washington would invite Soviet scientists to inspect the Nevada test sites. Khrushchev harshly responded, “I will never agree to inspection. You would only come over and spy on what we were doing.”65 In the absence of a major arms-control agreement, both sides were obviously edging toward a resumption of nuclear testing.
At one point, Khrushchev tried to give McCloy a lesson on how the Soviets view Europe. “We are Europeans,” he asserted. “We are here to stay.. . . Napoleon, then Hitler came and gave us problems. And now the Americans.” McCloy protested that the United States would never attack Russia. But when Khrushchev reminded him that Woodrow Wilson had sent American troops after the October Revolution, McCloy had to concede that he had forgotten about this intervention.66
Turning to Berlin, Khrushchev frightened McCloy. “You know and I know that when war starts there [in Germany] with conventional weapons, if you are losing, you will use atomic weapons. If we are losing, we will use atomic weapons.”67 Though this might be the hard truth, McCloy thought it ominous that Khrushchev should be saying such things to him in the midst of the Berlin crisis. It also greatly disturbed him, as he later told Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, that he “had never talked with any national leader who talked so much about his weapons as did Mr. Khrushchev. He seemed enamored of them; it was like a farmer with a new set of tractors. . . .”68 Once, in the presence of McCloy’s daughter, Khrushchev began boasting that his scientists were ready to test a hundred-megaton bomb. Ellen was so distraught about Khrushchev’s description of the weapon that, to the surprise of both men, she suddenly burst into tears.69 McCloy was also shocked by the premier’s behavior. Khrushchev was an enigma to him. To some extent, the Soviet leader’s earthy language and candor were reassuring, and certainly a refreshing change from the impenetrable hardness of Stalin. But even if there was nothing really new in what Khrushchev was saying, the emotion with which he said it was somehow alarming.
The next day, McCloy returned to Moscow for one more two-hour meeting with Zorin. The Soviet negotiator finally consented that, back in New York in September, they could try to reach agreement on a joint statement on disarmament principles. But in every other respect, the talks had reached an impasse. Before leaving Moscow, McCloy sent a long cable back to Washington summarizing his talks with Khrushchev. Emphasizing as it did Khrushchev’s more extremist statements, the cable created quite a stir in Washington. Dean Acheson disapproved, telling Justice Frankfurter, “McCloy has caused quite a flurry [sic]. He repaired to the Black Sea . . . and had a weekend of talks in which Khrushchev said nothing whatever that he has not said at least a dozen times. . . . I should have thought the way to treat this quite unpleasant discussion was with ‘intelligent neglect.’ . . . Instead of this, he appears as a sort of modern Paul Revere, flapping his way through the sky to warn us that the Russians are coming, and giving everyone the idea that we are in quite a dither about something, though God knows what.”70
Acheson could so casually dismiss Khrushchev’s blustering threats only because his own position on Berlin was extremely hard-line. Believing the Soviets would never go to war over Berlin, he was prepared for the brashest kind of brinkmanship and felt increasingly frustrated that Kennedy had not sent a division of army troops down the Autobahn. But, though rejecting the specifics of Acheson’s advice, the president had been acting throughout the crisis as if he agreed that Berlin was a “simple conflict of wills.” This ignored the substance of the problem: Berlin was an abnormality, but so was the division of Germany. And this artificial division of Germany had to be preserved to maintain the postwar peace. But now West Berlin’s very success as an outpost of freedom and economic opportunity threatened continued Soviet control over East Germany. Thousands of educated workers, technicians, and scientists were leaving East Germany through Berlin. The East German state could not sustain this loss of human resources. The specter arose of a collapse in the East that would lead inexorably to the reunification of Germany under NATO’s banner, something Khrushchev’s constituency in the Kremlin would not tolerate.71
When the situation is viewed from this perspective, it is not hard to understand what happened next. On the evening of Friday, August 12, East German troops moved up to the line dividing the city and began building a wall. The flow of refugees from East to West would now be halted. At the time, the president was sailing up on Cape Cod, and didn’t come back to Washington until after the weekend. Some of his political enemies, such as Eleanor Dulles, sister of the late secretary of state and an Eisenhower-administration expert on German affairs, bitterly criticized Kennedy for not having done something promptly to dramatize Washington’s opposition to the wall.72
Over the years, rumors have persisted that one of the reasons Kennedy did not break off his vacation earlier and rush back to Washington was that he had been informed in advance by McCloy of Khrushchev’s intentions. McCloy repeatedly denied these reports and said he had no foreknowledge of Khrushchev’s plan. There seems little reason to doubt him. The wall, however, was not the complete surprise Western governments made it out to be. “We could see the stream of refugees,” recalled Wilhelm Grewe, a high-ranking aide to Adenauer, “and we knew something would happen.”73 The ugly wall splitting the city soon became a symbol of Soviet repression, but it was remarkable how quickly tensions began to recede in the weeks and months immediately after it was built. Khrushchev had defused the explosive German problem by forcefully demonstrating that the issue of reunification had been settled: there would be two Germanys—at least for this generation of Germans.
For McCloy and his generation, who had twice fought a world war against Germany, this was not the worst outcome. George Kennan and Chip Bohlen certainly felt this way and advised the president not to overreact to the building of the wall.74 As for McCloy, he could not publicly say such things without touching a raw nerve among his West German friends. But that Germany was best left divided, even if half of it had to live under communism, was the unspoken truth. And certainly there was no point in going to war over the wall, which, after all, had become a necessity if Germany was to remain divided. Averell Harriman said it bluntly to Kennedy in a secret letter written to the president a few weeks after the wall went up: “Since Potsdam, I have been satisfied that Germany would be divided for a long time. . . . In addition, I believe Khrushchev is sincerely concerned with the remilitarization of Germany, particularly with the prospect of her eventually getting independent nuclear capability. . . . He feels Adenauer is safe enough, but he said to me, ‘What will happen if Strauss or someone else gets control?’ . . . She [Germany] will have the strongest army in Europe, and who can stop her if some leader determines that she shall produce her own nuclear weapons?” Harriman then urged Kennedy to negotiate a “denuclearized control zone of West Germany and East Germany. . . .”75
McCloy felt the same way about the permanency of the Potsdam divisions, though he disagreed with Harriman’s proposal for a nuclear-free Germany. But the difference of opinion is explained by their respective expertise: Harriman came to this position in trying to convey to the president how much the Soviets still feared the Germans. McCloy could talk about giving the Germans access to nuclear weaponry only because he saw it as a means to retain their loyalty and confidence in NATO. Implicit in both views was the commitment to the postwar structure of peace that required the division of Germany between East and West.
Back in Washington, McCloy had four meet
ings with the president over the course of the next month. He testified on the Hill a number of times about both the disarmament talks and his conversations with Khrushchev on the Berlin issue. He was a guest on “Meet the Press,” where he told a national television audience that the United States was prepared to unveil its own comprehensive disarmament plan in the autumn. In fact, he had not come back from Moscow entirely empty-handed. He and Zorin had talked about the feasibility of setting up a direct and reliable communication link between the Kremlin and the White House. McCloy liked the idea; it seemed a logical and practical thing to have in the age of intercontinental missiles. One day, he astonished his security-conscious staff by announcing that he had discussed the feasibility of a “hot line” at a meeting of the AT&T board on which he sat. Security precautions were unusually tight for McCloy’s small staff, but it was characteristic of the man that he felt free to talk to anyone on any subject. (The “hot line” was eventually installed in the summer of 1963.)76
He also had to spend considerable time on Capitol Hill lobbying for passage of legislation to create an Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. While McCloy had been in Moscow, Senator Hubert Humphrey had told Kennedy that in his opinion the legislation had no chance of passage. Important swing-voting senators such as Fulbright and Willis Robertson were opposed to the bill. Humphrey and Kennedy agreed the new agency might just have to be established by presidential fiat. Upon his return from Moscow, McCloy agreed with his staff, particularly Adrian Fisher and Betty Goetz, that the agency would have no clout without a congressional mandate. So he told the president that this was worth a fight. In testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, he bluntly warned that a nuclear war could only be averted in the long run by disarmament. “Such a disaster,” he said, “could happen. It could happen if the world does not disarm and it could happen if we proceed to disarm unwisely. We may suffer such a disaster despite our best efforts to prevent it.”77 In late August, just prior to the critical vote, Goetz heard a rumor that the relevant Senate committee had just about decided in executive session to turn the bill back to the White House. This would have meant there could have been no legislation at all in that year. Goetz persuaded her old boss, Senator Humphrey, to leak her a copy of the transcript of the executive session; this enabled her to go to McCloy with a list of the problem senators and the right arguments to address their concerns. McCloy then went around to their offices and personally twisted arms. Conservative senators like Virginia’s Willis Robertson, and even liberals like Fulbright, had long-standing personal relationships with McCloy. McCloy had been going to Robertson’s favorite fishing streams with the senator ever since the 1930s. And he had seen Fulbright off and on throughout the 1950s in various sessions on the Hill or at the Council on Foreign Relations. McCloy got both their votes and a number of others at the last minute, despite fierce opposition from a number of other Southern Democrats. He was also responsible for getting Eisenhower’s written endorsement of the bill, which in turn won some critical votes on the Republican side of the aisle. “The legislation just would not have passed without him,” said Goetz of McCloy’s lobbying efforts.78
In the meantime, McCloy was scheduled to begin another series of negotiations with Zorin in New York. Just a few days before their talks resumed, however, the Soviets broke the de facto three-year moratorium on open-air nuclear testing by exploding a large bomb somewhere north of China. That same afternoon, McCloy met with Kennedy and others in the White House to discuss the U.S. response. The president came out of his bedroom wearing a dressing gown and seemed impatient as he listened to his advisers argue. McCloy felt strongly that the administration should immediately announce its intention to resume U.S. testing. Arthur Schlesinger, who attended the meeting, recalls McCloy telling Kennedy that he had to demonstrate “hard and tough leadership—that he could not continue to stand by and let the communists kick us in the teeth.” When someone suggested that resumed U.S. testing would have an ill effect on world opinion, McCloy interrupted sharply to say, “World opinion? I don’t believe in world opinion. The only thing that matters is power. What we have to do now is to show that we are a powerful nation and not spend our time trailing after the phantom of world opinion.”79
Kennedy ultimately accepted this advice, telling Stevenson, who again opposed McCloy’s position, “We couldn’t possibly sit back and do nothing at all.” Breaking the moratorium had become a test of wills, and now Washington had to respond in kind. Neither McCloy nor Kennedy believed there was any military necessity to test. Earlier that summer, after listening to a panel of scientists and military officers debate the issue, McCloy concluded that a decision to resume testing could easily be postponed to the first of the year without risk to the nation’s nuclear-weaponry program.80 For him, the question of whether to test or not was always a matter of negotiating tactics. Instinctively, he felt that a decision to break the moratorium would pressure the Soviets to negotiate in good faith a verifiable test-ban treaty. When the Soviets broke the moratorium on their own initiative instead, he believed the only practical response was to resume U.S. testing. Nor was he particularly surprised by the Soviet decision, since Khrushchev had warned him in July that he was under severe pressure from his own military to resume testing. The Soviet testing did not, in any case, prevent McCloy from proceeding to negotiate an agreement on disarmament principles.
During the next month of frenetic negotiations, he continued to display an odd combination of both toughness and the most utopian form of internationalism. In this he was strongly influenced by another Stimsonian, his old friend Grenville Clark. Now seventy-nine years old, Clark had written a book in 1958, World Peace Through World Law, which had received considerable attention in the media.81 Co-authored by Harvard Law Professor Louis Sohn, Clark’s book was a remarkable blend of idealism and legalistic prescriptions for a global government encompassing a unicameral parliament apportioned by population figures, a world court, and an international police force.82 Now, as McCloy began his wranglings with Zorin over a joint U.S.-Soviet statement of disarmament principles, he borrowed liberally from Clark’s ideas.83
Dispensing with their little games of semantics, McCloy quickly told Zorin that the United States would agree to use the “general-and-complete-disarmament” terminology. In return, Zorin reported that Moscow would acquiesce to McCloy’s insistence that disarmament take place in stages supervised by an international body, and that each stage be accompanied by the development of an international police force. By September 20, the two men had drafted a “Joint Statement of Agreed Principles for Disarmament Negotiations.” The thousand-word document was quickly adopted by the U.N. General Assembly and became known as the McCloy-Zorin Agreed Principles. Its language was both utopian and specific: “The programme for general and complete disarmament shall ensure that States will have at their disposal only those nonnuclear armaments, forces, facilities and establishments as are agreed to be necessary to maintain internal order and protect the personal security of citizens; and that States shall support and provide agreed manpower for a United Nations peace force.” To implement the various stages of disarmament, inspectors from an International Disarmament Organization would “be assured unrestricted access without veto to all places as necessary for the purpose of effective verification.”
In the years since its signing, historians have found it difficult to know what to make of this first Soviet-American accord on disarmament. Some observers have simply ignored it or labeled it a transparent exercise in superpower propaganda. Certainly, it had little effect at the time and contained no concrete timetables for achieving any specific steps toward reversing the arms race. But as a definition of disarmament and the principles whereby it could be achieved, the document has survived irrelevancy. At the time, McCloy believed it was no mean achievement to have persuaded the Soviets to agree to the principle of unrestricted verification by an international disarmament organization. Arthur Schlesinger and others in the Kenned
y administration may have belittled McCloy’s “faith in the rule of law,” but to him this was fundamental to any agreement.84
Actually, the McCloy-Zorin Agreed Principles might have contained concrete arms-control provisions had not an earlier draft been vetoed by the Joint Chiefs and various officials in the White House.85 In preparation for his negotiations with Zorin, McCloy had earlier set up a panel of consultants that included such outside experts as Henry Kissinger, Robert Bowie, and Jerome Wiesner. This panel prepared a plan that focused on the stabilization and then elimination of nuclear-weaponry delivery vehicles. The “Foster Panel,” as it became known, first tried to determine how many delivery vehicles—missiles or bombers—would be necessary to maintain nuclear deterrence. Assuming that deterrence would be maintained if each side could wipe out half of its adversary’s population, they concluded that no more than two to five hundred delivery vehicles were necessary. To provide for a sure margin of safety, they doubled their high figure and therefore proposed that a ceiling of one thousand be placed on the number of delivery vehicles in each country’s arsenal. Had it been accepted, this proposal would have dramatically altered the arms race in the decades ahead. But the president himself thought it went too far and too quickly, and McGeorge Bundy simply labeled it “too radical.”86 Once again, an opportunity to achieve some meaningful constraints over the nuclear-arms race was lost. All that was left was a theoretical scheme for what everyone assumed was far in the future.
Kennedy had hired McCloy nine months previously to accomplish three tasks: the creation of an arms-control agency, the formulation of a disarmament policy, and the negotiation of a test-ban treaty. McCloy now retired, having accomplished only the first two of these tasks. He told the press that his failure to achieve a test-ban agreement was the most “discouraging exercise in disarmament negotiations” since World War II.87 He was disillusioned, even bitter, at what he felt had been a lack of candor on the part of the Soviets. But in the eyes of the Soviets, at least, his negotiations with Khrushchev and Zorin had established him as an important channel of communication. About this time, he struck a friendship with the Kremlin’s new ambassador in Washington, Anatoly Dobrynin. This suave, English-speaking Russian regularly used McCloy as a sounding board, and McCloy was blunt and candid with the Russian. They would talk about everything, from the collapse of the stock market in 1962 to why the United States was supporting the creation of the European Common Market. (Dobrynin thought the Common Market would only hurt U.S. exports, and couldn’t understand why Washington was supporting its creation.) McCloy, in turn, would complain about Khrushchev’s attitude on Berlin. Why not, he asked, leave Berlin’s status unchanged? “It was, of course, annoying to Ulbrecht but who was Ulbrecht to allow him to play with fire?” Dobrynin valued such banter, and their relationship became an important source of information for him on America’s ruling circles.88
