Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series)

by Talbot, David

  By the last week of July, Kennedy found himself caught up in a growing storm, buffeted by the winds of war both at home—within his military—and overseas in Berlin. “Nuclear conflict was very much in the air that week,” wrote University of Texas political historian James K. Galbraith, the son of John Kenneth Galbraith, in a revealing article about the first-strike pressures on Kennedy. Khrushchev was escalating tensions over Berlin, the divided city that had long been a Cold War flashpoint, by threatening to let his East German clients close off access to West Berlin. Kennedy’s generals and hard-line advisors like Acheson, who were convinced that the president’s failure of will at the Bay of Pigs had led directly to his humiliation at the hands of a bullying Khrushchev at the Vienna summit in June, thought he was in danger of being pushed around yet again in Berlin. They urged him to take a firm stand, and Kennedy asked his advisors for a Berlin scenario that envisioned a limited nuclear war.

  But in the end, JFK threaded the needle on Berlin, as he would do repeatedly during his administration, avoiding either an explosive confrontation or embarrassing capitulation through an artful dance combining tough speech, symbolic military measures, and back-channel diplomacy. “The Berlin Wall was allowed to remain intact when constructed in August of 1961, a symbolic column of [American] soldiers was sent through to West Berlin, and a fallout shelter program was undertaken in the United States,” noted Galbraith. “But [Kennedy] did not engage the Soviets.” LeMay’s nuclear Armageddon would be averted—at least until the next showdown.

  As usual, the military found Kennedy’s moderation unsatisfying. General Lucius Clay, the hero of the 1948–49 Berlin Blockade whom Kennedy had installed as his top military envoy in the divided city during the latest crisis, seemed anxious to find ways to challenge the tense but peaceful truce that prevailed in Berlin during the fall. In October, Clay precipitated a nerve-wracking confrontation with the Russians at the Berlin Wall, the first time in history that American and Soviet tanks had ever faced each other. Valentin Falin, Soviet ambassador to West Germany, said Moscow later learned that Clay had ordered his tank commanders to knock down the Berlin Wall—as he had instructed them to practice doing in a nearby forest without informing the White House. If that had happened, Falin said, the Soviet tanks would have returned fire and we would have slid “closer to the third world war than ever”—just the kind of accidental inferno sparked by trigger-happy generals that Kennedy deeply feared.

  In the midst of this unnerving showdown, Kennedy felt compelled to soothe not only Soviet pride but that of his military commander. “I know you people over there haven’t lost your nerve,” he told Clay over the phone. The confrontational general was not mollified by this presidential pat on the back, however. “Mr. President,” he shot back, “we’re not worried about our nerves. We’re worrying about those of you people in Washington.”

  In the end, Kennedy succeeded in outmaneuvering his general, secretly instructing Bobby, the “little brother” whom Clay said he could “not abide,” to communicate with his back-channel Soviet friend Georgi Bolshakov and work out a mutual withdrawal of the opposing tanks “without damage to each other’s prestige.”

  IT WAS THE CRUSTY World War II–vintage commanders like Burke and LeMay with whom Kennedy clashed most fiercely during his first year in the White House. But his supporters in Washington worried that JFK’s problems with the military ran deeper than that. Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright, one of Kennedy’s closest allies on the Hill, was among those who viewed with alarm the rise of what he saw as a politicized military culture, one that was extremely right-wing and blatantly insubordinate.

  The far-right indoctrination of the military had its roots in the Eisenhower era, McNamara aide Joseph Califano later noted, when a 1958 National Security Council directive encouraged the military to educate its troops and the public about the dangers of communism—“tasks many officers pursued with gusto.” Ironically, Califano observed, Bobby Kennedy had played a role in kicking off this propaganda offensive when he was counsel for the McClellan Committee, which reacted to the widely publicized brainwashing of U.S. POWs in North Korea by calling for more effective anticommunist indoctrination in the ranks. By the time Kennedy entered the White House, there was widespread right-wing agitation within the military, with anticommunist seminars and conferences sponsored by the military proliferating on bases at home and overseas and far-right films and tracts by groups like the John Birch Society flooding the barracks.

  The controversy over the politicization of the military exploded into public view in the spring when the Overseas Weekly, an independent newspaper popular with GIs stationed abroad for its racy tabloid fare, broke a story about the flamboyant indoctrination efforts of Major General Edwin A. Walker, commander of the 24th Infantry, a crack, front-line division in West Germany. Walker, a hero in World War II and Korea, had always been something of an eccentric. He volunteered to lead a paratroopers unit against the Nazis without ever having jumped from a plane—“How do you put this thing on?” a puzzled Walker asked a subordinate as his plane lifted off the ground for his first jump. But the war in Korea set him on his collision course with civilian authority, after he became convinced that America’s elected officials wanted no better than a “stalemate” with international communism. A diehard segregationist, he was further disillusioned when he was ordered by President Eisenhower to lead the Army unit that enforced the integration of Little Rock schools in 1957.

  The following year Walker joined the loony-right John Birch Society—whose candy-maker founder had famously denounced Eisenhower as “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy”—and began lavishing Bircher propaganda on the men under his command. The general, a lifelong bachelor who grew up on a Texas ranch, found it hard to distinguish American liberalism from godless Communism. Among the targets of his wrath were Eleanor Roosevelt, Adlai Stevenson, Mad magazine, and Harvard University. “General Walker,” reported an aide, “thought Harvard was the bad place, the factory where they made Communists. He was sure death on Harvard.” This was undoubtedly one more source of his estrangement from the Kennedy White House, which was practically a hiring hall for the elite university. Walker believed the administration was stocked with “no-win” Ivy Leaguers and “confirmed Communists” like Edward R. Murrow, whose appointment as Kennedy’s USIA director caused the general to “practically have a tantrum,” according to Newsweek.

  In April, the Overseas Weekly reported that Walker not only communicated his low opinion of leading American liberals and Kennedy officials in speeches to his troops, but instructed them how to vote, using a political index prepared by a group so far to the right that it did not even give Barry Goldwater a perfect score. In doing so, Walker broke various Army regulations and federal laws, including the Hatch Act, which prohibits political activity by government employees. In June, Walker was relieved of his command and transferred to the Army’s European headquarters in Heidelberg—a relatively mild reprimand considering his violations. But Walker’s punishment immediately made him a martyr in far-right circles, both in and out of the military.

  The ensuing political melee quickly demonstrated that Walker’s extremist agitation had an alarmingly wide base of support in the officer corps, where Hanson Baldwin reported that he was regarded as a “soldier’s soldier.” An aggrieved Army captain told the New York Times, “I feel the general is being crucified. And I think the men feel the same way.” It was revealed that Walker’s indoctrination program had been endorsed by none other than General Lemnitzer, the country’s top military leader, who wrote in a letter to the far-right officer that he found his efforts “most interesting and useful.”

  As the military establishment flexed its political muscle, two young legislative aides to Senator Fulbright looked on with growing apprehension. They saw the political effects of this right-wing agitation back in the senator’s home state of Arkansas, where military officers were joining with Christian fundamentalists in an a
nticommunist crusade that targeted liberal politicians and legislation as subversive. They looked overseas at the restive right-wing generals in France who, angry at President De Gaulle’s attempts to reach a peaceful settlement of the Algerian war, were threatening to overthrow him. (In September, De Gaulle would be the target of an unsuccessful assassination attempt by right-wing extremists.) And they wondered if there was the growing possibility of such a coup in Washington.

  The two aides took their fears to Senator Fulbright, who cornered McNamara at a party and urged him to take action. Soon after receiving a memo on the dangers of rising militarism that was prepared by Fulbright’s aides, the defense secretary issued a directive that limited military officers’ ability to promote right-wing causes at public events. McNamara and Fulbright were immediately denounced by South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, a major general in the Army Reserve, and other congressional mouthpieces for the military-industrial complex. Thurmond charged that McNamara’s directive was a “dastardly attempt to intimidate the commanders of the U.S. Armed Forces” and “constitutes a serious blow to the security of the United States.”

  Fulbright decided to stand up on the Senate floor to answer Thurmond and take his message about the menace of militarism before the American people. The man who had grown up on an Arkansas hog farm to become a Rhodes scholar, university president, and chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee had been considered a potential secretary of state by Kennedy. Indeed, the brilliant, independent-minded statesman—one of the few who warned the new president against the Bay of Pigs invasion—could have been featured in a sequel to Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage if it had not been for the residue of segregationism he carried with him from his home state and which cost him the top post in the State Department. Fulbright was the only member of the Senate to vote against funds for Joe McCarthy’s witch-hunt expedition during the fevered height of his inquisition.

  On August 2, the tall, lanky Fulbright rose to his feet and in his soft Ozarks drawl offered the nation a civics lesson in the vital importance of keeping the military out of political affairs in a democracy. Fulbright’s speech echoed the passage in Eisenhower’s farewell address that warned against “the acquisition of unwarranted influence…by the military-industrial complex.” If the country allowed such “a disastrous rise of misplaced power,” Ike had counseled, it would “endanger our liberties or democratic processes.” But Eisenhower himself had helped create the Frankenstein of a politicized military with his 1958 directive on the indoctrination of troops. Now Fulbright was telling his fellow citizens it was time for the military to return to its barracks and leave the political arena to elected officials.

  Fulbright declared that military officers at the highest levels, including the National War College, were being steeped in propaganda produced by far-right groups, with the approval of the Joint Chiefs. They were being indoctrinated with the message that “sellouts” in Washington were undercutting the military’s effort to defeat communism. They were being taught that President Kennedy’s domestic legislative program—“including continuation of the graduated income tax, expansion of Social Security (particularly medical care under Social Security) and federal aid to education”—was another front in the communist assault on America.

  “If the military is infected with the virus of right-wing radicalism, the danger is worthy of attention,” Fulbright told his Senate colleagues and the public. “If, by the process of the military educating the public, the fevers of both groups are raised, the danger is great indeed.”

  As he reached his conclusion, Fulbright dramatically raised the specter of a military coup, invoking “the revolt of the French generals as an example of the ultimate danger.” The Washington echo chamber quickly picked up Fulbright’s dire warning, with columnist Marquis Childs writing that “in one country after another in recent years, the intervention of the military in politics has had disastrous consequences…[Military officers] do not have the right to impose their political opinions on the troops whom they command. Nor is theirs the right to try to share policy by public speeches that directly oppose what the Government is undertaking.” Syndicated columnist Drew Pearson also rang the alarm bell, writing that “certain Pentagon brass hats were lining up with industrial right-wingers to foment a sort of neo-fascism despite the fact they were wearing Uncle Sam’s uniform.”

  In reaction, Strom Thurmond pushed the Senate Armed Services Committee to open hearings on the “muzzling of the military.” In September, McNamara was hauled before the committee, where Thurmond and his colleagues hammered him for six hours one day on his censorship of military officers. “The military establishment is an instrument—not a shaper—of national policy,” the slick-haired, bespectacled defense secretary reminded his Senate interrogators in his supremely rational, Mr. Spock fashion.

  McNamara was testifying in the marble-walled Caucus Room of the Old Senate Office Building—the same hearing room that was the scene of McCarthy’s downfall seven years earlier during the Army-McCarthy hearings. But the extremist fervor that filled the Caucus Room that day made it clear that the spirit of McCarthy was still alive in Washington. Throughout his testimony, McNamara was loudly booed by the 250 spectators in the room while Thurmond was cheered. As a weary McNamara finished his testimony that day, he was swarmed by dozens of suburban housewives wearing “Stop Communism” tags, who had trooped to Capitol Hill to support Thurmond’s crusade. Newsweek later reported that “an attractive mother of four in a blue frock, trapped McNamara as he stuffed his briefcase” and demanded whether he had read General Walker’s Strangelovian “Pro-Blue” propaganda literature. When he politely murmured that he had not, the woman exploded: “You haven’t! Why, it’s the best statement against Communism. I believe our armed forces should get this material.”

  The same month, as the Armed Services Committee forced McNamara to defend his injunction against political activism in the military, the Army brazenly signaled its defiance of the order by staging another anticommunist spectacle. In late September, the Fourth U.S. Army sponsored a two-day propaganda show that drew thousands of people to San Antonio’s municipal auditorium, where reactionary speakers like General A. C. Wedemeyer denounced the Kennedy administration for “appeasing” the Soviet Union and the Episcopal Church for supporting the civil rights activism of the Freedom Riders.

  The following month, in response to the San Antonio rebellion and other anti-Kennedy seminars organized by the military, McNamara felt compelled to issue another ban against political agitation in the ranks. And once again the Armed Services Committee announced it would subject the McNamara crackdown to congressional scrutiny.

  The Cold War lobby was on the offensive, with retired military leaders and other far-right activists loudly calling for the impeachment of the president and other prominent liberals like Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren. One retired Marine colonel went further and called for Warren’s hanging, while a retired Marine general suggested a coup was in order if the “traitors” could not be voted out.

  Kennedy finally grew exasperated. In October, while hosting an off-the-record luncheon with a group of Texas newspaper publishers in the White House, Kennedy was crudely confronted by the reactionary publisher of the Dallas Morning News, E. M. (Ted) Dealey. As the president idly chatted with the newspaper businessmen, the Texan stunned the gathering by haranguing Kennedy directly to his face, reading from a five-hundred-word statement that he suddenly whipped from his pocket in which he berated the commander-in-chief as if he were an errant copy boy. “We can annihilate Russia and should make that clear to the Soviet government,” Dealey lectured Kennedy. But unfortunately, he continued, “The general opinion of the grassroots thinking in this country is that you and your administration are weak sisters. We need a man on horseback to lead this nation, and many people in Texas and the Southwest think that you are riding Caroline’s tricycle.”

  Kennedy flushed visibly and fixed Dealey with a hard look.
“The difference between you and me, Mr. Dealey,” Kennedy shot back, “is that I was elected president of this country and you were not. I have the responsibility for the lives of 180 million Americans, which you have not…. Wars are easier to talk about than they are to fight. I’m just as tough are you are—and I didn’t get elected president by arriving at soft judgments.”

  Kennedy had been slow to react to the threat from the extreme right. That August, when the subject of the John Birch Society had come up in conversation with Gore Vidal over canapés and vin rose at Hyannis Port, JFK seemed to airily dismiss the danger. The president took the “frenzy of the far right a lot less seriously than I,” Vidal observed. But by the fall, Kennedy’s attitude was no longer complacent. He dispatched Bobby to meet with the Reuther brothers—they discussed over breakfast how the liberal leaders of the United Auto Workers union could help mount an effective media campaign to counter the thunder from the right. The president also asked his staff to begin giving him monthly reports on far-right activities and ordered the director of the IRS to investigate organizations receiving tax exemptions.