The text of the second letter, sent on the following day, was broadcast on Moscow radio at the same time it was delivered to the U.S. embassy.
Kennedy resolved to answer Khrushchev’s first letter, agreeing not to invade Cuba. He then instructed Bobby to tell the Soviet ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin, in confidence that the Jupiter missiles in Turkey would be withdrawn later. Bobby gave Dobrynin a timetable of one day to accept.
Arriving at the Justice Department, Dobrynin was taken aback by Bobby’s conduct. In the past he’d come to expect the same rough treatment the president’s brother had meted out to Mike DiSalle and other resistant Democrats two years earlier. He had prepared himself to be castigated for the Soviets’ deception. Instead, he came face-to-face with an upset young father trying desperately to prevent a nuclear war. “He didn’t even try to get into fights,” the envoy cabled his superiors in Moscow. The United States would remove the missiles from Turkey, as Khrushchev had requested, within four or five months, Bobby assured him, but couldn’t let it look like a concession. “He persistently returned to one theme: time is of the essence and we shouldn’t miss the chance.”
Still, the entire perilous and exhausting adventure wasn’t going to be over, Bobby told Dobrynin, until the Russian missiles were actually removed from Cuban soil. That was “not an ultimatum, just a statement of fact.” Khrushchev must commit to doing so. It worked. Within the week, Kennedy had won the Soviet leader’s agreement. The crisis had ended. A country that had lived for days with the prospect of nuclear war could now breathe easy.
Though Curtis LeMay would call the decision to not invade Cuba “the greatest defeat in our history,” it was a minority view. “If Kennedy never did another thing,” said the British prime minister, Harold Macmillan, “he assured his place in history by this single act.”
It was later learned that the Soviets had deposited in Cuba a disturbing cache of nuclear weapons in early October, well before the Kennedy administration had the photographic evidence that spurred it into action. There were ninety nuclear warheads in all. Thirty of them possessed sixty-six times the explosive power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. There was an equal number of warheads with the firepower of the Hiroshima atomic bomb, plus an assortment of other, smaller ones.
Would Khrushchev have fired them? Here’s what he said afterward in his memoirs: “My thinking went like this: If we installed the missiles secretly, and then the United States discovered the missiles after they were poised and ready to strike, the Americans would think twice before trying to liquidate our installations by military means. I knew that the United States could knock out some of our installations, but not all of them. If a quarter or even a tenth of our missiles survived—even if only one or two big ones were left—we could still hit New York, and there wouldn’t be much of New York left. I don’t mean to say everyone in New York would be killed—not everyone, of course, but an awful lot of people would be wiped out . . . And it was high time that America learned what it feels like to have her own land and her own people threatened.”
But if America had attacked those missile sites, killing the Soviet soldiers and technicians there to deploy them, Khrushchev had in mind another target: West Berlin. “The Americans knew that if Russian blood were shed in Cuba, American blood would surely be shed in Germany.”
The bitter coldness of that statement would have surprised the American president only in tone. It’s precisely what Kennedy had on his mind when everyone else was thinking Cuba. It’s hard to imagine any other president—let alone the youngest one ever elected—resisting the pressures the way Jack Kennedy had managed to. Despite the many buddies he relied upon, despite his brother’s indispensability, despite the curiosity about the world that drove him, the Bay of Pigs had taught him whom he could best rely upon: himself.
Bobby Kennedy offered the sharpest assessment of what his brother had done. “The final lesson of the Cuban missile crisis is the importance of placing ourselves in the other country’s shoes. During the crisis, President Kennedy spent more time trying to determine the effect of a particular course of action on Khrushchev and the Russians than on any other phase of what he was doing. President Kennedy understood that the Soviet Union did not want war.”
It was his detachment that saved us. Another man would have reacted with force to the Soviet treachery. He would have shared in the righteousness of the cause, been stirred to attack by the saber rattling. Jack resisted. He was not moved by the emotion of others around him. He knew his course and stayed to it. Thank God. The boy who had read alone of history’s heroes was now safely one of them. He had done it not by winning a war, but by averting one far more horrible than any leader in the past could have imagined.
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President Kennedy in West Berlin
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“I have a dream.” Dr. King in Washington, DC,
August 28, 1963
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Caroline and John Jr. in the Oval Office
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
GOALS
Blessed are the peacemakers.
—Matthew 5:9
Politicians are, at different times, driven by grand notions and near necessity. Speak of the next election when they’re dreaming loftily, and you risk being dismissed as a hack. Speak of high purpose when they’re hearing the footsteps of a rival, and you invite instant dismissal.
Jack Kennedy was both an original and a consummate politician. Yet his stewardship of priorities still resembled those of a college student. With a number of classes on his schedule, he gave most of his attention to some, did the best he could with others, and let a few slide. It’s common enough. He was always most committed to what interested him. What made all the difference was the love of history that never failed to engage him.
In the first two years of his presidency, he had been making history. His accomplishments were linked in a singular way to what he most highly valued: his commitment to the Peace Corps, to peaceful competition in science and space travel, to containment of nuclear arms, to civil rights. But he also needed to be reelected. He began his third year in office pushing for a tax cut. It was an attempt to court a constituency that was resisting him: a previous year’s poll had shown that 88 percent of businessmen viewed him as hostile to their interests. However, many of them didn’t even go for his idea of a tax cut. The view then from Wall Street and Main Street both was that balanced budgets were the best thing for business.
Kennedy had campaigned on just such a principle, only to grow concerned over time that the economy simply wasn’t growing as it should. His chief economic advisor, Walter Heller, believed tax cuts would stimulate spending and investment, thereby increasing employment. Eisenhower’s commitment to fiscal conservatism had spiked the jobless rate in the fall of 1960, hamstringing Nixon’s quest to succeed him. Looking ahead to November 1964, Kennedy wanted that rate heading downward—and believed a slash in taxes would do the trick.
He also sought to correct the unfairness he saw in the tax code. Why, for example, had H. L. Hunt, the oil baron, paid just $22,000 in taxes the previous year? Why had J. Paul Getty, another ridiculously wealthy oilman, forked over only $500? When Ben Bradlee told him he paid the same amount, Kennedy said it made his point. “The tax laws really screw people in your bracket.” Hearing this, Bradlee suggested it would surely help the cause of reform if he’d release the figures on those oilmen’s tax levels. Kennedy paused before replying. “Maybe after 1964.” All he wanted at the moment was a tax cut that would juice the economy enough to get it moving before voters had their next chance to weigh in at the polls.
President Kennedy delivered three epochal addresses in June of 1963. The first was the commencement address at American University. It became known as his “Peace” speech. In it he spoke of his desire for a limited nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviet Union. The Cuban Missile Crisis, he knew, had been a terrifyingly close call.
“What kind of peace do I mean? Not the peace of the grave or t
he security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables man 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.”
He was calling on the Soviet Union to join with the United States to prove that peace was possible, conflict not inevitable. “The problems of man are man-made; they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable—and we believe they can do it again.” With these words, he revealed that his highest commitment was not to arms control alone but to human hope.
Kennedy then expressed thoughts new to an American president, ideas especially startling coming from a man who’d once been a committed Cold Warrior. What he pointed out was the obvious but unspoken fact that the peoples inhabiting the two countries, the USA and the USSR, are not that different in their needs and dreams. “For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet; and we are all mortal.” He went on to offer a gesture of respect that was even more unexpected. “As Americans, we find Communism profoundly repugnant as a negation of personal freedom and dignity. But we can still hail the Russian people for their many achievements—in science and space, in economic and industrial growth, in culture and in acts of courage.”
He continued, powerfully, to make his case. “Among the many traits the peoples of our two countries have in common, none is stronger than our mutual abhorrence of war. Almost unique among the major world powers, we have never been at war with each other. And no nation in the history of battle ever suffered more than the Soviet Union suffered in the course of the Second World War. At least twenty million lost their lives. Countless millions of homes and farms were burned or sacked. A third of the nation’s territory, including nearly two thirds of its industrial base, was turned into a wasteland—a loss equivalent to the devastation of this country east of Chicago.
“The one major area of these negotiations where the end is in sight, yet where a fresh start is badly needed, is in a treaty to outlaw nuclear tests. The conclusion of such a treaty, so near and yet so far, would check the spiraling arms race in one of its most dangerous areas. It would place the nuclear powers in a position to deal more effectively with one of the greatest hazards which man faces in 1963, the further spread of nuclear arms. It would increase our security—it would decrease the prospects of war. Surely this goal is sufficiently important to require our steady pursuit, yielding neither to the temptation to give up the whole effort nor the temptation to give up our insistence on vital and responsible safeguards.
“To make clear our good faith and solemn convictions on the matter, I now declare that the United States does not propose to conduct nuclear tests in the atmosphere so long as other states do not do so. We will not be the first to resume. Such a declaration is no substitute for a formal binding treaty, but I hope it will help us achieve one. Nor would such a treaty be a substitute for disarmament, but I hope it will help us achieve it.”
Finally came the radical commitment: “Our primary long-range interest in Geneva, however, is general and complete disarmament—designed to take place by stages, permitting parallel political developments to build the new institutions of peace which would take the place of arms.”
What Kennedy had said would quickly become known to the men and women of the Soviet Union—but only because Nikita Khrushchev had dictated that it be so. According to a New York Times piece three days later, headlined “Russians Stirred by Kennedy Talk About Cold War,” the Communist daily Izvestia had published the speech in full. Reported the Times, “The decision to make the speech available to the Soviet people through the government newspaper was interpreted here as an indication that the speech had made a favorable impression in the Kremlin.”
The story then quoted a Soviet intellectual: “The speech and its publication in Izvestia show that there can be mutual understanding.” While a young woman worker was “overheard to ask a friend: ‘Have you read the Kennedy speech? It is all about peace.’ “
The previous month, however, most Americans had witnessed something they wanted no one in the world to see. It had been in their newspapers and on their television sets. The incident had occurred in Birmingham, Alabama, in early May, when Eugene “Bull” Connor—the unrepentantly racist commissioner of public safety, just elected for his sixth term—had unleashed dogs and ordered fire hoses turned on peaceful African-American civil rights demonstrators.
Now, on June 11, the day after Kennedy’s American University speech, two black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood, had attempted to enroll at the University of Alabama. Their way was blocked by order of Governor George C. Wallace, who’d campaigned on a promise to do just that. Watching the eleven o’clock news two weeks earlier with Jackie and the Bradlees, the president had grown solemn at clips of Wallace promising—in the face of a federal court order—personally to “bar the door” against any attempts at desegregation. “He’s just challenging us to use the marshals . . . that’s going to be something.”
He’d once met Wallace—whose recent campaign slogan had been “Segregation now—Segregation tomorrow—Segregation forever”—and was disgusted by the man. “Make him look ridiculous. That’s what the president wants you to do,” Attorney General Robert Kennedy instructed his deputy, Nicholas Katzenbach.
There in Tuscaloosa, flanked by an enormous contingent of National Guardsmen—his earlier experience at Ole Miss had taught him about strength in numbers—Katzenbach instructed Wallace to allow the two students to be admitted. When the governor remained immovable in the door of Foster Auditorium, the commander of the Alabama Guard, General Henry Graham, told him to “stand aside,” which Wallace then did.
Thanks to a documentary shot at the time by Robert Drew, we can see much of what happened next. Titled Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment, it shows Kennedy standing in the Oval Office and asking his top aides—Ken O’Donnell, Larry O’Brien, Ted Sorensen, Pierre Salinger, and his brother Bobby—to join him around a small coffee table. Kennedy assumed the captain’s seat, in this case a rocking chair. He did so with a subtle, two-thumbs-up gesture as if he were still a young skipper calling his crew to quarters. General Graham’s success, acting on his behalf, obviously had energized Kennedy. At that moment he made the call to deliver a major speech that night, giving Sorensen only three hours to prepare it.
In his State of the Union that January, President Kennedy had affirmed that the “most precious and powerful right in the world, the right to vote . . . not be denied to any citizen on grounds of his race or color. In this centennial year of Emancipation, all those who are willing to vote should always be permitted.” He’d followed it by endorsing a push for voting rights, backing an end to all discrimination in hiring and supporting full access to public accommodations. Now, with his own deepening conviction heightened by the confrontation in Alabama he’d just seen on television, he was ready to further speak his thoughts.
Calling civil rights “a moral issue . . . as old as the Scriptures and . . . as clear as the American Constitution,” he framed it in the context of the Cold War. “Today we are committed to a worldwide struggle to promote and protect the rights of all who wish to be free. And when Americans are sent to Vietnam or West Berlin, we do not ask for whites only. We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it.”
The commonsense truths he spoke that night were framed in the idiom of everyday American conversation.
“It ought to be possible, therefore, for American students of any color to attend any public institution they select without having to be backed up by troops.
“It ought to be possible for American consumers of any color to receive equal service in places of public accommodation, such as hotels and restaurants and theaters and retail
stores, without being forced to resort to demonstrations in the street, and it ought to be possible for American citizens of any color to register to vote in a free election without interference or fear of reprisal.
“It ought to be possible, in short, for every American to enjoy the privileges of being American without regard to his race or his color. In short, every American ought to have the right to be treated as he would wish to be treated, as one would wish his children to be treated. But this is not the case.
“If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public; if he cannot send his children to the best public school available; if he cannot vote for the public officials who represent him; if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place? Who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay?”
Martin Luther King, Jr., declared that the speech he’d heard represented “the most sweeping and forthright ever presented by an American president.”
But it was one thing to speak eloquently in one’s own language, and another to confront an audience on foreign land. Driving through the streets of West Berlin later that month, on June 26, Ben Bradlee watched Kennedy struggling to rehearse the German sentences he intended to use in a speech. Bradlee knew his friend was no linguist. In fact, Jack was secretly taking French lessons, having resented Bradlee’s own fluency, which he’d gained years before as a press attaché with the American embassy in Paris. “Two thousand years ago the proudest boast was ‘civis Romanus sum.’ Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’ “
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