WASHINGTON, D.C.
INAUGURATION DAY, FRIDAY, JANUARY 20, 1961
The snow began to fall at noon, shortly after Kennedy left his meeting with Eisenhower. Washington dealt badly with inclement weather, even when it was on a preinaugural footing. Traffic snarled. Two-thirds of the sold-out crowd didn’t show for the inaugural concert that evening at Constitution Hall. The National Symphony started its performance a half hour late because so many of its musicians were caught in traffic or blocked by drifts. Frank Sinatra’s star-studded gala began only after a two-hour delay.
Yet by the clear, cold, sunny morning of January 20, a battalion of soldiers and plows had cleared the eight inches of snow. The skies opened and provided perfect lighting for the most intricately planned and most widely televised inaugural show in history. Some 140,000 feet of cable ran to fifty-four television circuits, covering the inaugural from thirty-two locations, from the oath to the last parade float. Some six hundred extra telephones had been scattered around strategic locations for reporters. However else the Kennedy administration would differ from its predecessors, it would present the most televised commander in chief in history, all in living color.
When Kennedy traveled with his wife, Jackie, in their limousine the day before the inauguration, when he sat in the bathtub that evening, and again over breakfast the next morning after four hours of sleep, the president-elect reviewed time and again the latest version of his inaugural address. Whenever he could find a moment, he familiarized himself more deeply with each of its tightly crafted 1,355 words, honed through more drafts and rewrites than any speech he had ever delivered.
Back in November, he had told his chief wordsmith, Ted Sorensen, to keep the speech short, nonpartisan, optimistic, uncritical of his predecessor, and focused on foreign policy. However, when they worked through the final draft—a process which got under way only a week before the speech would be delivered—he still found it too long and domestic for his liking. He told Sorensen, “Let’s drop the domestic stuff altogether. It’s too long anyway.” His view: “Who gives a shit about the minimum wage anyway?”
The more difficult decision was, what message to send Khrushchev? Though nuclear war with the Soviets was unthinkable, negotiating a just peace seemed unfathomable. Kennedy had campaigned from the hawkish side of a Democratic party that still hadn’t resolved its internal dispute about whether engagement or confrontation was the best way to deal with the Soviets.
Dean Acheson, who had been President Truman’s secretary of state, represented the Democratic party’s hard-liners, who were convinced Khrushchev was still pursuing Stalin’s goal of world domination. Other Democrats—Adlai Stevenson, Averell Harriman, Chester Bowles—saw Khrushchev as a genuine reformer whose primary aim was to reduce his military budget and improve Soviet living standards.
Kennedy’s inaugural speech would place him squarely in the indecisive middle of the debate, reflecting his uncertainty about whether he would be more likely to make history by confronting the Soviets or by making peace with them. It was that same ambiguity that had fed Kennedy’s reluctance since his election to respond to Khrushchev’s many efforts through multiple channels to establish a private conduit and schedule an early summit meeting.
On December 1, 1960, Kennedy had sent an early but indirect plea for patience to the Soviet leader through his brother Robert, who had met with a KGB officer posing as a correspondent for the newspaper Izvestia in a presidential transition office in New York. At age thirty-five, Bobby had been his brother’s campaign manager and was soon to become his attorney general, so the KGB officer had no reason to doubt it when Bobby said he was speaking for his brother.
The Soviet reporter never filed a story to his newspaper but he did send an account to his KGB superiors, which likely also reached Khrushchev, as an indication of the Kennedy administration’s foreign policy direction. It contained several messages. Bobby said the president-elect would pay great attention to the relationship, and he thought a test ban treaty agreement could be concluded in 1961. He said that Kennedy shared Khrushchev’s desire for a face-to-face meeting, and that he wanted to repair the harm done to the relationship under Eisenhower.
Less encouraging to Khrushchev was Kennedy’s intention to handle Berlin far more slowly than the Soviet leader wanted. The new president would need two to three months before he could engage in a summit, Bobby said. “Kennedy is seriously concerned about the situation in Berlin and will strive to find the means to reach a settlement of the Berlin problem,” said the KGB report on the meeting. “However, if in the next few months the Soviet Union applies pressure on this question, then Kennedy will certainly defend the position of the West.”
Still, that did not dissuade Khrushchev from continuing to press for an early meeting. A few days later, on December 12, Soviet Ambassador Mikhail Menshikov invited Bobby for lunch at Moscow’s Washington embassy. The ambassador, whom U.S. officials derisively called “Smiling Mike,” cut a comic figure with his modest intelligence and supreme confidence. His fractured English once produced a much-maligned toast to the women attending a Georgetown cocktail party: “Up your bottoms!” However, the direct messages he carried from Khrushchev made even his detractors take his invitations seriously.
Menshikov argued to Bobby that U.S.–Soviet misunderstandings were often a result of the two countries’ leaders leaving crucial matters to mid-level officials. He said Kennedy and Khrushchev were unique individuals who together could find a way around their bureaucracies to achieve historic outcomes. He thus urged Bobby to get his brother to embrace the idea of an early meeting between the two nations’ leaders, to achieve a “clear and friendly understanding.”
Two days after meeting with the president’s brother, Menshikov reached out with much the same message to Khrushchev’s favorite American, Averell Harriman, the U.S. ambassador to Moscow under President Franklin Roosevelt. A day later, Menshikov again pressed his campaign for an early Khrushchev–Kennedy meeting through the well-connected New York Times correspondent Harrison Salisbury. “There is more to be gained by one solid day spent in private and informal talks between Khrushchev and Kennedy,” he told the reporter, “than all the meetings of underlings taken together.”
Kennedy was the target of some similar lobbying from two-time presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, an erstwhile rival, who was trying to position himself for a major administration job. Stevenson phoned Kennedy at his father’s house in Palm Beach to volunteer himself as a middleman who could fly to Moscow immediately after the inauguration and put matters on track with Khrushchev. “I think it’s important to find out whether he wants to expand the Cold War,” Stevenson told Kennedy.
Kennedy did not take the bait. Stevenson had failed to endorse Kennedy’s nomination before the time of the Democratic convention, and that had likely cost him the post of secretary of state that Kennedy had dangled as incentive. If that weren’t enough, anticommunists on Capitol Hill considered the former Illinois governor an appeaser. And Kennedy was unwilling to run his foreign policy in anyone’s shadow. Beyond that, West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer had made clear through press leaks that what worried him most about the Kennedy administration was the prospect they would bring in someone as soft on Moscow as Stevenson to lead his foreign policy. So Kennedy made Stevenson ambassador to the United Nations instead, and he would not take up his offer of mediation with Khrushchev.
Weary of Khrushchev’s lobbying barrage, Kennedy asked his friend David Bruce, whom he had tapped as ambassador to London, to help him frame a response to Khrushchev’s extended hand. Bruce was a veteran diplomat who had run America’s spy service in London during the war, and he had been Harry Truman’s ambassador to Paris.
After much eating and drinking at Menshikov’s residence on January 5, the Soviet ambassador gave Bruce a letter without letterhead or signature, which Menshikov said held his personal thoughts. Its unmistakable message: Khrushchev urgently wanted a summit and would go to great
lengths to arrange it.
Menshikov told Bruce that Khrushchev believed under the Kennedy administration, the two countries could “resolve existing and dangerous differences.” However, the Soviet leader believed they could only relax tensions once the two great powers at the top levels had agreed on a program for peaceful coexistence. He said this would revolve around “two outstanding problems”—achieving disarmament and solving “the German question, including West Berlin.” Khrushchev wanted to meet Kennedy before the incoming president sat down with West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, meetings Menshikov said he had heard were scheduled for February and March.
Bruce told the Soviet ambassador that the meetings with those key U.S. allies would occur later than that, but this did not alter Khrushchev’s underlying message: He hoped Kennedy would depart from the usual protocol of consulting with allies before meeting with his adversary. Menshikov said that Khrushchev was willing to accelerate preparations for such a meeting through either private or official conduits. As further incentive, Menshikov sent Bruce a hamper full of his country’s best vodka and caviar after the meeting. A few days later, he invited Bruce to lunch again to underscore his message.
Just nine days before his inauguration, Kennedy had sought from George Kennan—whom he would make his ambassador to Yugoslavia—further advice about how to handle this flurry of Soviet communication. Kennedy had been communicating on Soviet matters with Kennan, the legendary former U.S. ambassador to Moscow, since January 1959. In one letter, Kennedy had praised Kennan for standing against the “extreme rigidity” toward Moscow of Dean Acheson, President Truman’s secretary of state.
Kennan had inspired the U.S. foreign policy of Soviet communist “containment” with his long telegram from Moscow as a diplomat, which was followed by his famous and anonymously written Foreign Affairs article in July 1947, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct.” Yet Kennan now opposed the hard-line doctrines toward Moscow that he had done so much to inspire. He thought the U.S. and its allies were now strong enough to enter into talks with Khrushchev, and he complained about U.S. militarists who had misinterpreted his thinking.
During the campaign, Kennan told Kennedy that as president he should “heighten the divisive tendencies within the Soviet bloc by improving relations with Moscow,” not through formal summits and agreements but rather by using private channels of communication with the Soviet government, aimed at reciprocal concessions. “These things are difficult,” Kennan had said, “but they are not, I reiterate, not impossible.” He said such contacts helped end the Berlin blockade in 1948 and the Korean War. He had urged Kennedy in an August 1960 letter that, should he be elected, his administration should “move quickly and boldly in the initial stages of its incumbency, before it becomes enmeshed in the procedural tangles of Washington and before it is itself placed on the defensive by the movement of events.”
Kennedy wrote back that he agreed with most of Kennan’s recommendations. Now that he was about to be president, however, he wanted guidance of a more concrete and immediate nature. While speaking to Kennan on a flight from New York to Washington on his private jet, the Caroline, Kennedy briefed Kennan on the barrage of Soviet messages and then showed him the Menshikov letter.
Kennan frowned as he read. He concluded by the letter’s stiff and tough language that it had been drafted in Khrushchev’s office but cleared by a wider circle that included both those who were for and those who were against closer relations with the U.S. Contrary to his earlier advice that Kennedy move fast to open up a dialogue with Moscow, he now told Kennedy the Soviets had no right to rush him in this manner, and that the president-elect should not respond before taking office. That said, Kennan suggested he should at that time communicate privately with Khrushchev, breaking Eisenhower’s habit of making almost every exchange with Khrushchev public.
Asked by Kennedy why Khrushchev was so eager to meet with him, Kennan said with characteristic insight that the U-2 incident and the growing intensity of the Chinese–Soviet conflict had weakened the Soviet leader, and he needed a breakthrough with the U.S. to reverse that trend. Khrushchev, Kennan explained, “hoped by the insertion of his own personality and the use of his powers of persuasion he could achieve such an agreement with the United States and recoup in this way his failing political fortunes.”
For Kennedy, it was the clearest and most convincing explanation of Khrushchev’s behavior he had heard. It coincided with his own understanding that domestic politics drove foreign policy issues more than most Americans understood—even in the authoritarian Soviet Union. It made sense to Kennedy that Khrushchev was seeking help to improve his imperiled political standing at home, but that was insufficient reason for Kennedy to act before he was ready. The president-elect again determined that Khrushchev could wait—and so could Berlin.
Thus, Kennedy’s inaugural address would be his first communication with the Soviet leader on Berlin, however indirect and shared with tens of millions of others. The most compelling line was also the one most quoted in Berlin newspapers the following day: “We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”
Yet Kennedy’s soaring rhetoric concealed a dearth of policy direction with regard to the Soviets. Kennedy was leaving all options open. Multiple rewrites altered only nuance, putting his indecision in more memorable form and excising language his speechwriter Ted Sorensen had drafted that might appear too soft toward the Soviets.
A first version read, for example: “…nor can two great and powerful nations forever continue on this reckless course, both overburdened by the staggering cost of modern weapons.”
Kennedy, however, did not want to call the U.S. course either “reckless” or unsustainable. So the final text took those two ideas out and instead read: “…neither can two great and powerful groups of nations take comfort from our present course—both sides overburdened by the cost of modern weapons.”
An initial draft read: “And if the fruits of cooperation prove sweeter than the drugs of suspicion, let both sides join ultimately in creating a true world order—neither a Pax Americana, nor a Pax Russiana, nor even a balance of power—but a community of power.”
A final text nixed the notion of a “community of power” with the communists, which congressional hawks would have called naive. The final version read: “And if a beachhead of cooperation can push back the jungle of suspicion, let both sides join in creating a new endeavor, not a new balance of power, but a new world of law….”
He mentioned no countries or places by name—neither the Soviet Union, nor Berlin, nor any other. The German newspaper Die Welt praised the “new wind” from America, which was “hard but refreshing. What we Germans notice, though: No word on Berlin!”
Instead of mentioning Khrushchev by name, Kennedy spoke only of those “who would make themselves our adversary,” having changed the word “enemy” to “adversary” at the suggestion of columnist friend Walter Lippmann. Kennedy prescribed projects of potential cooperation: exploration of the heavens and oceans, negotiation of arms control and inspection regimes, and cooperation in science to cure disease.
There was enough in the speech to please America’s hard-liners. Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona applauded enthusiastically after the line about paying any price for liberty. Having achieved no progress in getting his boss an early meeting with Kennedy, Soviet Ambassador Menshikov sat impassively throughout with a gray hat pulled down over his eyes, a white scarf pulled up over his neck, and his frame wrapped in a large, gray overcoat.
Just as important as his words that day was Kennedy’s appearance, which in the competition for global favor was more than a superficial factor. The world was inspired by the charismatic smile that lit up a face bronzed during his preinaugural vacation in Florida. What no one sensed was Kennedy’s underlying ill health: he had swallowed a cocktail of pills that d
ay for his bad stomach and his aching back, and he had taken an extra dose of cortisone to control the telltale swelling that came with his treatments for Addison’s disease. As he had looked in the mirror just four days before his swearing-in, Kennedy had spoken with shock to his secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, about the impact of his treatments. “My God, look at that fat face,” he said. “If I don’t lose five pounds this week, we might have to call off the Inauguration.”
Evelyn Lincoln would help monitor the multiple medications for a young president who in many respects was far less healthy than Khrushchev, twenty-three years his senior. Kennedy could only hope that the KGB operatives digging up whatever they could find on the true state of his health did not discover the truth. To knock down rumors about his illnesses, the Kennedy team had put two doctors before the press. And just two days before the inauguration, the magazine Today’s Health, working from a report issued by the Kennedy team, had covered the president-elect’s medical history more extensively than it had any other previous president’s. It quoted his physicians on his “superb physical condition” that made him “quite capable of shouldering the burdens of the Presidency.” The article said that the fact he had overcome his many ailments demonstrated “his barb wire toughness.” It said he drank and smoked little, that he enjoyed an occasional cold beer at dinner, and that his only cocktail was a daiquiri. He didn’t smoke cigarettes—only a cigar now and again. It reported authoritatively that he kept his weight at 165 pounds and that he had no special diet, which concealed the fact that he preferred bland foods because of a bad stomach.
A closer read left plenty of reason for concern. The article listed adult health issues that included “attacks of jaundice, malaria, sciatica, and two back injuries.” All it said about his Addison’s disease, without mentioning it by name, was that Kennedy takes “medication by mouth for the aftermath of adrenal insufficiency and has an endocrinologic examination twice a year.” It noted he wore a quarter-inch lift in his shoes “and even beach sandals” to ease back pain caused by a slightly shorter left leg.
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