The Dark Side of Camelot

by Seymour Hersh

  The need for secrecy was great because the risks of the Kennedy-Khrushchev back channel were high. The president was making strategic decisions without the informed advice of the men and women in the State Department, Defense Department, and CIA who had served in the Soviet Union and who knew the language, people, and history. "Jack was his own secretary of state," Bobby Kennedy told the library.

  Jack and Bobby Kennedy defied the experts and nay-sayers in their government---some of the same experts, the president had come to believe, who had assured him that the invasion at the Bay of Pigs would work. With their daring, the Kennedys seized control of America's Cold War policy; it was a heady time for two brothers who were inexperienced in the workings of the foreign policy establishment.

  The back channel, and Bobby Kennedy's ascendancy, had their beginnings in the disastrous spring of 1961. On May 9, according to Soviet files summarized in "One Hell of a Gamble," by the historians Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, Bobby Kennedy and Bolshakov had their first exploratory meeting in Washington: the issue was the pending summit in Vienna, about which Jack Kennedy was justifiably very nervous. Kennedy and Bolshakov met and telephoned each other at least six times before the summit in early June, but failed to resolve any of the outstanding issues. A precedent was set, however, and an important message communicated, according to Fursenko and Naftali: Robert Kennedy told the Soviets that the tough language his brother was using in public did not indicate "any lessening of commitment to a constructive meeting with Khrushchev." The Soviets were being told to watch what Kennedy did and not to listen to what he said.

  The summit was brutal. Khrushchev bullied and threatened the unprepared Kennedy over the question of allowing the Western Allies continued access to West Berlin. After World War II, Germany was divided into zones of occupation, and Berlin, deep inside the Soviet zone, was itself divided. Thousands of East Germans, including many intellectuals and scientists, were fleeing from communism by walking across the checkpoints between East and West Berlin; the brain drain was humiliating to the East German government and deleterious to the state's long-term economic well-being. Khrushchev gave Kennedy an ultimatum: the United States, Britain, and France had six months to negotiate, in consultation with the Soviet Union, a postwar peace treaty that would resolve the status of Germany and confirm East German control over traffic into West Berlin. The United States was reluctant to agree, since that would amount to de facto recognition of the division of the country. If the Allies did not consent, Khrushchev threatened, the Soviets would go it alone and sign a separate treaty with East Germany. Without a settlement, Khrushchev said, there could be nuclear war. Kennedy, badly shaken, told his longtime friend LeMoyne Billings that he had "never come face to face with such evil before." He fumed to his aide Kenny O'Donnell that Khrushchev was a "bastard" and a "son of a bitch."

  Kennedy linked the dispute to the failure in Cuba. "The Russians thought they could kick [the president] around," Robert Kennedy explained in his interviews for the Kennedy Library. "Khrushchev got the idea ... that he was dealing with a rather weak figure because [JFK] didn't do what Khrushchev would have done in Cuba, in not going and taking Cuba ... that he was dealing with a young figure who perhaps had no confidence. It was a shock to [Jack] that somebody would be as harsh and definitive, definite, as this."

  A few favored members of the Washington press corps learned how thoroughly rattled President Kennedy had been by his confrontation with Khrushchev at Vienna, but they did not share that information with their readers---as Kennedy knew they would not. In Deadline, his memoir, James Reston told how he had been smuggled into the American Embassy in Vienna on a Saturday morning for an exclusive interview with Kennedy after one of the summit meetings. The president, wearing a hat pulled over his forehead, arrived

  over an hour late, shaken and angry, ... sat down on a couch beside me, and sighed. I said it must have been a rough session. Much rougher than he had expected, he said. Khrushchev had threatened him over Berlin.... He felt sure Khrushchev thought that anybody who had made such a mess of the Cuban invasion had no judgment, and any president who had made such a blunder but then didn't see it through had no guts.... He had tried to convince Khrushchev of U.S. determination but had failed. It was now essential to demonstrate our firmness, and the place to do it, he remarked to my astonishment, was Vietnam! I don't think I swallowed his hat but I was speechless.... Khrushchev had treated Kennedy with contempt, and ... he felt he had to act.

  Reston's reports made headline news in the New York Times during the summit, but Reston wrote nothing in his dispatches about the Khrushchev ultimatum or Kennedy's tough talk on Vietnam.* The columnist did share what he learned with at least one colleague. In an interview with a group of academics in 1978, Joseph Alsop described seeing a "very gray" Kennedy at a diplomatic reception in London a day after the summit. "I really didn't know what had happened in Vienna," Alsop recalled. "Scotty Reston did, but naturally it horrified him so that he didn't write about it properly. The president backed me against the wall and said, 'I just want you to know, Joe, I don't care what happens, I won't give way, I won't give up, and I'll do whatever's necessary.' It was a little chilling.... I hadn't the vaguest idea that there was anything to give way or to give up about. I knew there was pressure on Berlin, but I didn't know there had been an ultimatum." Alsop, like Reston, did not write about the encounter.

  In an interview for this book, Hugh Sidey recalled a private chat with Kennedy after his return from Vienna. "I asked him, 'What's Khrushchev like? Tell me.' And he said, 'I never met a man like this. [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.'" Sidey later described the president's distress to Robert Kennedy and asked, "Did you talk to him about that?" Bobby, in his response, seemed eager to convince Sidey that he and the president were one. "Oh yes, we talk all the time, about everything," the attorney general said, adding that he had never known Jack to be "so upset. I've never seen my brother cry before about something like this. I was up in the bedroom with him and he looked at me and said, 'Bobby, if nuclear exchange comes, it doesn't matter about us. We've had a good life, we're adults. We bring these things on ourselves. The thought, though, of women and children perishing in a nuclear exchange. I can't adjust to that.'" Tears ran down the president's cheeks, Bobby Kennedy told Sidey.*

  Just when and how Georgi Bolshakov and Robert Kennedy linked up again after the summit is not known; no Soviet documents dealing with the period have been made public, and Kennedy did not say in his library interviews. The Kennedy brothers allowed other government officials only a glimpse of the give-and-take of the Bolshakov back channel; not surprisingly, the few officials who knew of it thought it was---as one said---a "dangerous game." An obvious pitfall was the huge discrepancy in status between Kennedy and Bolshakov. Robert Kennedy was indispensable to the running of his government; Bolshakov was not. Any disinformation relayed by Kennedy would immediately taint the president; Bolshakov, if caught lying, could be accused of having gotten the story wrong and be recalled to Moscow, if necessary, or reassigned. The most outspoken critic of the Bolshakov channel was Llewellyn E. Thompson, Jr., the ambassador to the Soviet Union, who after his return from Moscow in mid-1962 was named Kennedy's special assistant on Soviet affairs. "This was a great mistake," Thompson, who died in 1972, told the Kennedy Library in an oral history. The Kennedy brothers, he said, "tried to sell the idea, 'Well, the State Department is so biased against us that we can't get anywhere. If we could just get direct contact, why, we could do this.' This way, they hoped to avoid any staff and to avoid having all the facts known." Thompson worried that Jack or Bobby Kennedy would not be precise in conversations with Bolshakov, to be relayed to Khrushchev, and the Soviet "might attach great importance to careless remarks."

  Thompson's interview was done after Jack Kennedy's assassination; it's
not known what, if anything, he said earlier to the president or his brother. But there is little reason to believe that any complaints would have been heeded. Bobby Kennedy made it clear in his Kennedy Library interviews that he cared little for the opinions and expertise of the American ambassador in Moscow. Asked whether the ambassador there made any difference, Kennedy said, "I don't know whether he does. I think that [the Soviets] had some confidence in Thompson. I don't know whether he becomes just a messenger. Perhaps for the first two or three months [the American ambassador] has some effect, when they think he's in touch with the president." Asked specifically whether the ambassador was bypassed by the Bolshakov back channel, Kennedy responded tersely, "I suppose he was."

  Another State Department concern, surely, was the fact that the Kennedys simply did not know as much as they thought they did about communism and international affairs. In early 1962 David Herbert Donald, a Harvard historian widely respected for his scholarly research and writings on the Lincoln presidency, was invited to give an informal talk at a meeting in the private quarters of the White House with the president, first lady, and a small group of friends and administration officials. Donald spoke about Reconstruction for forty minutes and then took questions, half of which came from an attentive president. Donald afterward had a private meeting with Kennedy and came away with grave reservations, as he wrote a friend a few weeks later. His letter, made available for this book, was caustic: "I did not think his mastery of American history particularly impressive; not surprisingly, it reflected a sort of general textbook knowledge of about twenty-five years ago and not much familiarity with recent literature or findings. His view of history, it is clear, is very largely in personal terms---great men and their influence. This is a man," Donald wrote, "determined to go down in our history books as a great President, and he wants to know the secret."

  In a 1996 interview for this book, Donald recalled his disquiet after the talk. The president was fascinated with Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, because "he thought to be a great president you had to be a wartime president. That was scary to me," Donald said. "I came away feeling that this is a young man who doesn't understand history."

  But the young president, even in serene settings---as with Professor Donald---was careful to muffle his real strategy. Kennedy understood that Berlin was not the place to make his stand against Khrushchev. The president and his brother evolved a pattern during the crisis there in mid-1961 that would be essential to superpower negotiations over the next eighteen months---talk tough in public and compromise in private to keep from going to war.

  A flaw in Kennedy's approach was that the adoring men who served JFK as national security advisers saw only his toughness and unwillingness to yield. Being as tough in a crisis as the president became a mantra in the administration; senior officials who advocated compromise and conciliation---such as Adlai Stevenson, the ambassador to the UN, and Chester Bowles, the liberal undersecretary of state---soon found themselves isolated, their advice disregarded. In the summer and fall of 1961, the president's advisers gave him a list of options to resolve foreign policy issues in Germany, Cuba, and South Vietnam. The options were all tough.

  The embattled Kennedy seemed to be heroic and unyielding in public in the weeks after the Vienna summit, as he struggled to regain his poise and as his administration wrestled over the appropriate response to what was seen as Khrushchev's challenge to the postwar status of Berlin. Khrushchev renewed his threat to limit the movement of American troops into and out of West Berlin, and the unrelenting president dealt in kind. There was an atmosphere of crisis. On July 25, 1961, Kennedy, in a televised speech to the nation that echoed the themes of his inaugural address, called the nation to arms in defense of West Berlin, which he depicted as "the great testing place of Western courage and will.... We are clear about what must be done---and we intend to do it."

  America, the young president said, must "have a wider choice than humiliation or all-out nuclear action." He announced a dramatic series of military escalations. He tripled draft calls, added more than 200,000 personnel to the army, navy, and air force, and gave the Pentagon new authorization to call up reservists and extend tours of duty. If more military manpower and higher taxes were needed, he said, "I shall not hesitate to ask for them." He also announced a $3.25 billion increase in defense spending and urged Americans to prepare for the worst by constructing nuclear fallout shelters in basements and backyards. More than $200 million was added to the defense budget for civil defense, triggering what would become a bitter national debate over the morality of digging a shelter and then arming family members against those less-prudent neighbors who in moments of nuclear peril found themselves without their own shelters.

  The imminent Soviet threats to freedom and peace were depicted in the president's speech as being not only in Berlin but---echoing the post-Bay of Pigs view of Walt Rostow---in South Vietnam. "There is also a challenge in Southeast Asia," the president said, "where the borders are less guarded, the enemy harder to find, and the dangers of communism less apparent to those who have so little.... 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."

  Other moves, not made public, were designed to signal American seriousness to the Soviet high command. Robert Kennedy, in his interview with the Kennedy Library, revealed that the American submarine fleet had been redeployed in the North Atlantic that August and elements of the Strategic Air Command placed on heightened alert. Military leaves were canceled and shipments to Europe of military hardware and munitions stepped up.

  Kennedy's speech was a spectacular public relations success. A vast majority of Americans rallied around their handsome young president, as they had after the Bay of Pigs. White House mail ran better than 100 to 1 in support of the president's firm stand in the threat of crisis; there also was a quick response from Congress, which overwhelmingly voted to authorize the increased defense spending. A Gallup poll showed that more than 85 percent of those polled expressed a willingness to keep American troops in West Berlin; 67 percent favored sending troops to fight their way into the city if the Soviets dared block access. In an editorial the New York Times described Kennedy as "at once solemn, determined, and conciliatory." The president, it added, "last night reasserted American leadership of the free world.... We are confident that the American people and free men everywhere will support him."

  Khrushchev's solution was to permanently isolate East from West. Early on the morning of August 13, East German state police began laying wire along the twenty-seven-mile border dividing East and West Germany---the first step in erecting what was to become the Berlin Wall. The Kennedy administration did nothing to stop construction of the wall, provoking enormous anxiety---and much anti-American sentiment---among West Berliners. Kennedy reaffirmed the U.S. commitment within days by sending a battle group of fifteen hundred Americans through East German corridors into West Berlin; on August 30 he announced the appointment of General Lucius Clay, the retired army hero of the 1948 Berlin blockade, as his special envoy. Clay was a hard-line anticommunist who was openly skeptical of Kennedy's decision to accept the wall. But the wall remained.

  Historians today have obtained access to documents in Washington and Moscow that demonstrate what was not known for more than two decades: the Kennedy White House had concluded well before August 1961 that the United States could not and would not do anything to prevent the erection of a physical barrier. The president correctly understood, as history has shown, that Nikita Khrushchev and his colleagues needed a peaceful way to prevent the hemorrhaging of East Germany's best and brightest to the West. The wall, odious as it was to many Americans---especially those who responded to the rhetoric of the president---could defuse the Berlin crisis. Some in his administration viewed the wall as a provocation, and the beginning of what could be an all-out Soviet push into West Berlin. But not the president. "Why would Khrushchev put up a wall if he really intended
to seize West Berlin?" Kennedy rhetorically asked Kenny O'Donnell, according to O'Donnell's memoir. "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." There was family agreement on the president's caution. Joseph Kennedy told the writer William Manchester, then doing a book on the Kennedy White House, that trying to hold Berlin would be "a bloody mistake."

  Did John Kennedy use the back channel to let Khrushchev know that the United States would do nothing about the wall? In his Kennedy Library interview Robert Kennedy said only that he had repeatedly warned Bolshakov before the wall was put up that the United States "would go to war on Berlin," and quoted Bolshakov as responding that he was "sending back that message." Kennedy added that he cut off relations with Bolshakov "for a while" after the Soviets built the wall "because I was disgusted with the fact that they had done so." But the breach, if there was one, was brief. The back channel played a key role two months later in resolving a contretemps between Soviet and American tanks at Berlin's Checkpoint Charlie.

  Robert Kennedy's account of his "disgust" over the wall may have been fabricated, or exaggerated, to hide the White House's secret dealings with Khrushchev. It is not known what, if anything, Khrushchev communicated to Kennedy before the wall went up; one Berlin expert, David E. Murphy, who was in charge of the CIA's intelligence operations in Berlin in 1961, believes that there was no need for Kennedy and Khrushchev to discuss the wall specifically in their back-channel exchanges. Kennedy "was sending message after message" in public and private to Khrushchev in the summer of 1961, Murphy said in a 1997 interview for this book. "No one used the term wall. What Kennedy did make clear was that they [the Soviets] had the right to control movement through their sector." Murphy was formally assigned in August 1961 as chief of the Berlin operations base, the focal point for the CIA's intelligence and espionage efforts in East Berlin and East Germany. In his view the Kennedy administration conveyed all it needed to convey on July 30, 1961, when Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, publicly declared in a television interview, "I don't understand why the East Germans don't close their border, because I think they have the right to close it." That statement, Murphy said, could not have been made without advance presidential approval. It was understood inside the CIA station, he added, that Kennedy "never had any intention of challenging the wall. Everybody knew that."