Jack Kennedy

by Chris Matthews

  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” Berlin. 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.”

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  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

  ZENITH

  I felt I was walking with destiny and all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.

  —Winston Churchill, May 10, 1940

  Jack Kennedy’s victories had taught him essential lessons. He recognized the edge a candidate receives when he’s made the earliest start and kept at it. He realized the importance of the vital energy gained by building a trusted team. He discovered the power derived when a politician grasps the nature of the times and wields that understanding.

  But failures also offer education. The Bay of Pigs taught him something more critical: When the stakes are the highest and most desperate, there must be both clarity and completion. Know the enemy and your goal, and hold fast to what you’re attempting. Should any oppose your course, fight them with all your resolve.

  Throughout the summer of 1961, Jack Kennedy had managed to sustain his hopes for a ban on nuclear arms testing to which the Soviets would agree. At the very heart of his presidency was his mission to keep his country from nuclear war. It would be, he knew, a battle from which no winners could emerge. In 1946, the young journalist John Hersey had published in the New Yorker his account of the survivors of the attack on Hiroshima; no one who’d read it would ever forget it.

  We’d agreed, as had the Soviets, to halt nuclear testing in 1958. Yet, in July, a Gallup poll had indicated that public support for the resumption of U.S. nuclear testing stood at two to one. The other side, exhibiting its greater aggression, suddenly showed its hand. August brought Moscow’s shocking announcement of its unilateral decision to resume nuclear testing in the atmosphere. Kennedy’s reaction—“fucked again!”—was deep and personal. Even before this horrifying news hit the headlines, Americans had gotten reports that the milk drunk by Russian children across the country contained detectable traces of radioactivity. Had the Russians treacherously been testing underground all along, even if they’d sworn not to? And was this a clue? And, if so, what were we going to do about it?

  Over the next three months the Soviet Union would go on to conduct thirty-one such tests, including the exploding of the largest bomb in history—58 megatons, four thousand times more powerful than the one dropped over Hiroshima in 1945. Despite partisan pressure to respond by resuming U.S. testing, Kennedy resisted. He persisted in believing in the possibility of a comprehensive ban on all forms of nuclear arms testing, atmospheric and underground as well. “Mankind must put an end to war—or war will put an end to mankind.” Yet as the leader of the Free World, he couldn’t allow the Soviets to proceed without a U.S. response. With this in mind, the president instructed Defense Secretary McNamara to begin testing underground.

  The United States had tested its first nuclear weapon at the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico in July 1945, a month before the U.S. fighters flew off to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those attacks, of course, brought about the Japanese surrender and ended World War II. Seven years later, the United States tested the first hydrogen bomb in the isolated Marshall Islands in the western Pacific in early November 1952. It was one of the last acts of the Truman administration before the election on November 4 ushered in the Eisenhower era.

  Truman himself had presided over the dawn of the nuclear era by signing off on the Hiroshima and Nagasaki missions. Other peacetime nuclear explosions—military tests of new, far deadlier weapons—followed on his watch. Then, under President Eisenhower, the number doubled or even tripled. For a dozen years, from 1946 to 1958, the Marshall Islands, a U.S. Trust Territory until 1986, bore the brunt of America’s experimentation. For the Soviets, the testing of their nuclear weapons secretly in their vast territory had begun in 1949. They had selected sites in remote Kazakhstan and later in Novaya Zemlya, a chain of islands in the Arctic Ocean at Russia’s northern edge.

  The history of the Cold War is written in the long lists of these many tests. During this period, our allies France and Great Britain were intent on developing their own nuclear arsenals. But distinctions such as “atomic” and “hydrogen,” “nuclear” and “thermonuclear” mean little to the average citizen. Americans accepted the basic contradiction. The United States could keep the Soviets from aggression in Europe by the threat of nuclear retaliation. At the same time, neither side would dare use nuclear weapons, knowing the other would as well.

  Even after Kennedy issued the directive for underground nuclear tests, he continued to be pressured by his own experts. They wanted more. In November, the National Security Council delivered a blunt assessment: “If we test only underground and the Soviets tested in the atmosphere, they would surely pass us in nuclear technology.” Still, Kennedy persisted in trying to negotiate. Following a further failure to bring the Soviets around to the American position, he let it be known that the United States was now prepared to begin atmospheric testing again. Though he did nothing beyond indicate American willingness to resume, it was a necessary step in getting to the negotiating table. With it came a new pressure: Prime Minister Harold Macmillan of Britain, considered by JFK a personal as well as an official friend, urged the United States to put off any such activity for six more months.

  As 1962 began, Kennedy hadn’t given up on his hope of bringing the Russians around to his idea of a peaceful rivalry, not a nuclear one. What he cared about, above all, was making sure the nuclear genie got put back in the bottle; for him, arriving at a mutual test ban would be the first step. “A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step,” he liked to quote.

  Nothing mattered more to him.

  In February he and Prime Minister Macmillan jointly wrote a letter to Khrushchev, calling for a “supreme effort” to stop the arms race and avert a nuclear apocalypse. Kennedy, in a phone call with Ben Bradlee not long after sending it, shared his frustration with what he called this “hard-boiled” conflict over nuclear weapons testing between the United States and the USSR, but also the “soft-boiled” one with the British.

  Kennedy’s national security team now voted unanimously to resume atmospheric testing. But with the next round of international peace talks scheduled for March in Geneva, he wanted to delay the announcement. It would get in the way, he felt, of offering Khrushchev another
chance.

  It didn’t matter. Once again, his approaches were refused, his aims thwarted—and, as a result, he saw himself gradually pushed toward brinkmanship. At this point, with the Russians intransigent and any attempts at persuasive diplomacy a failure, Jack felt it was time to present his case to the country. On March 2, speaking on television and radio for forty-five minutes, he made the case for deterrence, explaining the strategic necessity.

  He wanted to explain to millions of worried Americans why he’d agreed to resume atmospheric testing. “For all the awesome responsibilities entrusted to this office, none is more somber to contemplate than the special statutory authority to employ nuclear weapons in the defense of our people and freedom.” He needed to test, he said, in order to maintain the country’s deterrent strength. “It is our hope and prayer that these . . . deadly weapons will never be fired.” Red Fay, at the White House for dinner that night, recalled how deeply delivering the speech had affected his friend. “It was about 9:30 when the President finally arrived. Jackie had placed me so that when he came in, I’d be sitting on his left. He was flushed . . . really worn from the whole experience. Everybody sensed that he was very tense. His hands shook. . . . Everybody else, because of his tension, all started to talk among themselves. He directed his conversation to me and said, ‘God, I hope you’ve been enjoying yourself over here, because I’ve been over there in that office, not knowing whether the decision I made . . . ’ “ His voice trailed off, and Fay was left to imagine the agonizing weight of the responsibility that he felt.