President Eisenhower was more hard-nosed, wanting to know why Kennedy had called off the air strikes. When the younger man said it was to conceal the country’s role in the operation, Ike was contemptuous. The very concept was obviously contradictory. Here was the United States offering training, equipment, transportation, and air cover to a military operation in which it intended to deny involvement. “How could you expect the world to believe that we had nothing to do with it?” When Kennedy said he feared how the Russians might retaliate in Berlin, Ike’s response was to tell his successor that the Soviets didn’t react to what we did. Rather, they “follow their own plans.” The general, now a partisan proud of his presidential service, refused to allow that Soviet strength and belligerence had grown toward the end of his watch. The new president had to.
Accustomed to success, Jack took the defeat hard. For the first time, witnesses actually saw him in tears. Yet, recognizing that he’d backed a military effort requiring greater resources than he was ready to commit and greater risks than he, in the end, wanted to take, he accepted the responsibility. “I’m the responsible officer of the government,” JFK assured reporters and the country.
The American people decided they liked the fact that Kennedy, whatever his failings heading into the disastrous mission, had acquitted himself as a true commander in chief at its conclusion. The record shows that he gained his highest job approval rating—scoring 83 percent in a Gallup poll—in the weeks thereafter.
Close friends such as Red Fay could see the toll it had taken. “In the months that followed, no matter how you tried to avoid touching on the subject, by one route or another it seemed to find its way back into the President’s conversation.” Even on vacation in Hyannis Port, it obsessed him, much to the distress of Jackie, who was ready to put the nightmarish scenes on that Cuban beach that haunted her husband behind them.
One of those Cape Cod evenings provided an outpouring Fay never forgot. It was when Jack outlined for him what he believed in: “I will never compromise the principles on which this country is built,” JFK told him, “but 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.” Then he went on, “Do you think I’m going to carry on my conscience the responsibility for the wanton maiming and killing of children like our children we saw here this evening? Do you think I’m going to cause a nuclear exchange—for what? Because I was forced into doing something that I didn’t think was proper and right? Well, if you or anybody else thinks I am, he’s crazy.”
When his host reached for his crutches, Fay understood he was finished with him for the evening. “He started up the stairs, straining with every step. He stopped me in the middle of the stairs and looked down at me, his face still inflamed. ‘By God, there will be no avoiding responsibility—nor will there be any irresponsibility. When the decisive time for action arrives, action will be taken.’ Turning, he lifted himself painfully up the rest of the stairs and to his room.”
Meeting with the leaders of the Cuban Revolutionary Council, the main exile group, Jack spoke of his own wartime losses, even sharing a photograph of his brother Joe. One of the leaders, who’d lost his son in the invasion attempt, said the exiles had been “taken for a ride.” He suggested Kennedy had been taken for one as well.
• • •
With the wounds from the Bay of Pigs still smarting, another Communist threat suddenly loomed on the horizon. It presented the likelihood of a far more dangerous crisis. Premier Nikita Khrushchev, who’d been making dark utterances for several years about changing the balance of power in Berlin—a city that had become such a symbol—demanded a showdown with President Kennedy in Vienna in early June.
Before heading to the summit in Austria, JFK took his first foreign trip, to Ottawa, where he and Jackie were welcomed by Prime Minister John Diefenbaker. Fifty thousand people turned out to watch the Kennedys’ arrival. After addressing jointly both houses of Parliament, Jack took part in a tree-planting ceremony. As he lifted a silver shovel of dirt, he suddenly wrenched his weak back so painfully that he grabbed his forehead in anguish. Upon his return to Washington, he needed his crutches—which he used now only in private, in front of family and friends—to walk from the helicopter landing pad on the South Lawn to the White House.
Jack Kennedy had spent the past decades stoically rising above extreme physical discomfort, and he wasn’t about to change, having now reached the White House. Less than two weeks after their return from Canada, the First Couple flew off to France, where one of the highlights was a luncheon at the Elysée Palace hosted by President Charles de Gaulle. Throughout her stay, beautiful Jackie, with her fluent French and stunning wardrobe, was an unqualified success, both fascinating and delighting the French public. People would remember that her husband joked to the traveling press corps, “I’m the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris, and I have enjoyed it.” But fewer will know that de Gaulle, an entirely formidable figure, had been captivated enough by her on a trip to Washington the previous year to have commented, “If there were anything I could take back to France with me, it would be Mrs. Kennedy.”
The two leaders got along surprisingly well. During the war, de Gaulle had headed the Free French, symbolizing their country’s resistance to the Nazi occupation. With regard to the American’s coming engagement with Khrushchev in Vienna, de Gaulle was both thoughtful and candid. Urging Kennedy to keep his priorities in perspective, the French president expressed doubts about the ultimate sustainability of the Soviet system. He put little faith in their economic model, and so the Russian tide, he predicted, eventually would recede from Europe. Until that happened, the West, he reminded JFK, must stand firm. The greater threat, he predicted, would come decades later from China.
De Gaulle, like Kennedy, was able to put himself in the other man’s shoes. Yet even as he could see beyond the immediate conflict to three decades down the road, de Gaulle recognized that such foresight little helped the predicament now. His practical advice, when it came to dealing with Khrushchev over the fate of Berlin, was to avoid even the appearance of negotiating. To do so would mean playing the Soviets’ game.
Yet, as Eisenhower had been, de Gaulle was somewhat out of step with the times when it came to assessing the Russian mood. It had been one matter to not take the Soviets seriously when Russia, despite its immense size, seemed to lag behind the West. Now, just sixteen years after the war had ended, leaving devastation and demoralization in its wake, the Soviets were gunning their engines, trying to race ahead of the European powers and the United States. Their numerous gains—from their first-in-space status to their successful backing of “wars of liberation” in Africa, Asia, and Latin America—had left them confident, ready to flaunt their new standing vis-à-vis the West.
Moreover, if the size and power of the Soviet military forces weren’t sufficiently frightening, the fact that the Soviet defense system had come to include a sizable nuclear arsenal surely was. What was bringing President John Kennedy to Vienna with such uncertainty—and foreboding—was Khrushchev’s announced intention to sign a separate treaty between the Soviet Union and East Germany that would have the effect of stranding the city of Berlin 110 miles within the Russian-allied German Democratic Republic. Berlin, split by the Allies into sectors at the end of the war, had become the main escape route for millions fleeing west to escape Communist dictatorship. Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson told the president that the Soviet leader was so personally committed to a solution to the Berlin problem that the chances for either war or an “ignominious” retreat by the West were “close to fifty-fifty.”
Kennedy’s arrival in Vienna resembled a campaign stop of the year before. As they had in Paris, adoring crowds greeted the American First Couple at the airport. Khrushchev—who’d become first secretary of the Russian Communist Party in 1953 after the death of Josef Stalin and consolidated his power, ascending to premier five years later�
�had taken the train west from Moscow. He arrived to no fanfare. The glamour of Jack and Jackie Kennedy, and their excited reception, undoubtedly stirred resentment.
The meetings were scheduled for alternating sessions in the Soviet and American embassies. On the first day Khrushchev took the role of teacher, lecturing Kennedy on the case for socialist inevitability. Kennedy was no match for his ideological fervor. Both Ken O’Donnell and Dave Powers would write in their joint memoir how the bull-necked Soviet leader paced circles around his slender, youthful listener, “snapping at him like a terrier and shaking his finger.”
That vivid description also paints a picture of Jack Kennedy having to endure the far outer limits of his comfort zone. When Evelyn Lincoln asked the president how the meeting had gone, “Not too well” was his reply.
Khrushchev’s performance was a far cry from an American politician’s usual encounters—except, perhaps, his use of the filibuster. But it seemed to have the effect the Soviet premier desired. Kennedy believed he meant business. Nixon and all the others back home could sound off about the need to call the Soviets’ bluff. Nikita Khrushchev looked and sounded nothing like a bluffer.
The second day turned out to be worse. Khrushchev, having had his ideological warm-up, was now ready for the main event. JFK had come to Vienna hoping to build on what he saw as a recent major diplomatic breakthrough. In April, the United States and the USSR had reached an agreement that each would stop supplying military aid to Laos, a little landlocked kingdom north of Thailand and Cambodia and west of Vietnam. Its significance lay entirely with its central Indochinese location. Kennedy hoped that he and Khrushchev could jointly see the Laos cease-fire as a starting point for broader negotiations.
Unfortunately, Khrushchev himself was there to talk about Berlin, and only Berlin. The Soviet Union, he reiterated, was planning to sign a treaty with East Germany that gave it total authority to control access to West Berlin. What this meant—and Khrushchev made it sharply specific—was that the Americans, the British, and the French would have to end their historic shared occupation of the divided city. The Russians had been edging up to this land grab, then backing away, for several years. This time, however, they seemed ready to proceed.
“The USSR will sign a peace treaty, and the sovereignty of the GDR will be observed,” Khrushchev said in a formal pronouncement. “Any violation of that sovereignty will be regarded by the USSR as an act of open aggression. If the U.S. wants to start a war over Germany, let it do so.”
Kennedy argued, to no avail, for the opposite approach. Instead of heightening Cold War tensions, why not try to lessen them? If Berlin was going to change, why not see it as a model for the future and not as a relic of the past? He tried to interest the Russian in a topic that meant more to him than just about anything else: a treaty over nuclear testing. He tried everything he could think of that might touch the man who was his opponent. He even invoked their shared losses in World War II. For, in the same way Jack mourned his brother Joe, so Khrushchev grieved, still, for his downed fighter-pilot son. But all the efforts the American made to light some spark of commonality between them produced no results.
Desperate, Kennedy requested a third meeting. In the last encounter with Khrushchev, he tried separating the two issues, suggesting that the Soviets might sign a treaty with East Germany while still allowing open access to West Berlin. That way, peace, at least, could be maintained. But the whole idea of the USSR-GDR agreement was to shut down the steady drain of East German workers through the city. Again, Khrushchev dug in his heels.
The new East German government, he said, would have full authority to deny access. Any effort to resist by either America or its allies would be met with the full force of the Red Army, which greatly outnumbered American and allied forces. When Kennedy pushed Khrushchev to acknowledge the right of the United States to continue to have access to West Berlin, Khrushchev held firm. “It is up to the U.S. to decide whether there will be war or peace.”
At this final session Kennedy’s companion made it clear, if it wasn’t already, that his decision was “irrevocable” and “firm.” In the end, all Jack was able to offer in reply to Khrushchev’s threat of war was this grim prediction: “If that’s true, it’s going to be a cold winter.” He left Vienna and returned to Washington, crushed by the experience. The Bay of Pigs had tainted him, he saw, allowing Khrushchev to treat him so contemptuously.
Jack Kennedy now understood he had to find a way to convince Khrushchev he was someone who would fight. But, even before that, he needed to understand exactly why the Soviet leader had talked to him that way, hectoring him. Was Khrushchev, in fact, crazy? He hadn’t thought so, but what else explained why he was talking about war between two countries armed with nuclear weapons? “I never met a man like this,” he told Time’s Hugh Sidey. “I talked about how a nuclear exchange would kill seventy million people in ten minutes, and he just looked at me as if to say, ‘So what?’ My impression was that he just didn’t give a damn if it came to that.”
To Ken O’Donnell he spelled out his own deeper belief, one he’d never share with a reporter, that not even Berlin was worth the possibility now threatened. “It will have to be for much bigger and more important reasons than that. Before I back Khrushchev against the wall and put him to a final test, the freedom of all Western Europe will have to be at stake.” It fell to Lem Billings to record that Jack Kennedy had told him he’d “never come face to face with such evil.”
• • •
Jack knew the order of battle for any conflict over Berlin. The United States had 6,500 troops in the city, for a combined American, British, and French force of 12,000. The Soviets had 350,000. Once the first shot was fired, the choice he’d be facing would be Armageddon or Munich. Long his greatest fear, it was now what he saw before him. Worse still, his adversary refused to acknowledge their mutual humanity.
He heard the voices—the chorus was always there—that exhorted him to “stand tough,” the voices that encouraged him to ignore the signals he was getting from Khrushchev in favor of a different party line. “Our position in Europe is worth a nuclear war, because if you are driven from Berlin, you are driven from Germany. And if you are driven from Europe, you are driven from Asia and Africa, and then our time will come next. You have to indicate your willingness to go to the ultimate weapon.” Hadn’t he said that, himself, to a Milwaukee radio interviewer during the campaign?
So, he knew how to talk like a war hawk. But what did it actually mean—words like that, all the threats and gun-cocking—if you’re the first American president to come into office aware of your enemy’s rival nuclear stockpile? It’s one thing to use words such as appeasement and surrender and vital principle with regard to Berlin when someone else is making the decisions.
It was the old “Munich” argument—the one that had so obsessed him that he’d written a book about it—adapted to the nuclear age. The Berlin conflict would endure through much of the summer. As the months went on, Kennedy seemed sapped of initiative. “He’s imprisoned by Berlin,” members of the cabinet told Sidey. “That’s all he thinks about.” On June 21, he would suffer another flare-up of his Addison’s disease, with his temperature spiking to 105 degrees. For several days he was sick in bed, ministered to by Jackie and Lem.
On July 25, Kennedy gave a pivotal speech on the conflict in Europe. “We cannot and will not permit the Communists to drive us out of Berlin, either gradually or by force. . . . We will at all times be ready to talk, if talk will help. But we must also be ready to resist with force, if force is used upon us.” He spoke of West Berlin as a “showcase of liberty, a symbol, an island of freedom in a Communist sea.” But he also made concessions. Suggesting that it might be possible to remove “irritants” from the conflict, he then made a conciliatory statement about Soviet security concerns regarding Germany, the country that cost it 20 million lives in World War II.
Throughout the speech, he made a point of referring to “West” B
erlin. The message was that his country did not care what the Soviets and East Germans did in the rest of the city. They had a free hand in that regard. Five days later, Senator William Fulbright, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, told a Sunday-morning TV audience that it was in the Russians’ power to shut down the West Berlin escape route if they wished. They could end their problem without war. It was an assessment of American policy, quickly cheered by the East German government, that Kennedy never denied.
On August 3, the Soviets made their long-threatened move on West Berlin. Fortunately for the world, the Soviets and East Germans had found a solution to stop the tide of refugees to the West—a wall. To the man in the White House, it came as a secret relief. “Why would Khrushchev put up a wall if he really intended to seize West Berlin? There wouldn’t be any need of a wall if he planned to occupy the whole city. This is his way out of his predicament. It’s not a very nice solution, but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”
33. President Kennedy with the Joint Chiefs (L to R): Gen. David M. Shoup, Marine Corps; Gen. Thomas P. White, Air Force; Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer, chairman; Kennedy; Adm. Arleigh Burke Navy; Gen. G. H. Decker, Army
34. James Meredith with U.S. Marshals after enrolling in the University of Mississippi, October 1, 1962
35. Sargent Shriver, Peace Corps Director
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Chris Matthews Complete Library E-book Box Set: Tip and the Gipper, Jack Kennedy, Hardball, Kennedy & Nixon, Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, and American Page 72
