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

by Talbot, David

  But Kennedy’s greatest moment as the voice of his nation came two weeks before his tumultuous Berlin appearance, on the morning of June 10, when he delivered the commencement address at American University in Washington. The president’s Peace Speech, as it became known, caused little stir at the time. But it carried one of the most radical messages ever delivered by an American president: it is possible to live peacefully in the world with even the most formidable enemies. This was a concept with profound implications during the deep freeze of the Cold War.

  President Kennedy delivered his visionary remarks from a stage wrapped in red, white, and blue bunting that had been erected on the university’s Reeves Athletic Field. Looking out at the crowd assembled under a bright, cloudless sky, Kennedy made history by proposing an end to the Cold War. It was time for Americans and Russians alike to break free of militarism’s cold grip, he said. The public had been indoctrinated to believe that peace was impossible, he told the audience, but that was not true. “Our problems are man-made—therefore, they can be solved by man.” Political speeches during the Cold War era typically vilified the Communist enemy and glorified the American way of life. But, remarkably, the American University speech challenged Americans, as well as Russians, to rethink their attitudes toward peace and each other. “Every graduate of this school, every thoughtful citizen who despairs of war and wishes to bring peace, should begin by looking inward—by examining his own attitude toward the possibilities of peace, toward the Soviet Union, toward the course of the Cold War and toward freedom and peace here at home,” declared Kennedy. His call for national introspection about the defining conflict of the day marked a sharp break from the period’s triumphalist rhetoric.

  Kennedy then did something equally startling—he sought to humanize the Russians, our Cold War bogeyman. Americans might “find communism profoundly repugnant…but no government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue.” With this ice-breaking statement, Kennedy launched into a passage of such sweeping eloquence and empathy for the Russian people—the enemy that a generation of Americans had been taught to fear and hate—that it still has the power to inspire. This passage ended with poetic cadence: “We all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”

  The president concluded his speech by vowing that America would “never start a war. We do not want a war…. This generation of Americans has already had enough—more than enough—of war and hate and oppression.” It was a stark rejoinder to the hard-liners in his administration who were pushing for a preemptive military solution to the Cold War.

  The Peace Speech received a muted reaction. After one week, it elicited only 896 letters from the public. (A bill on the cost of freight brought over 28,000 into the White House during the same week.) Goldwater and other Capitol Hill Republicans paid scant attention, succinctly—and predictably—brushing aside the speech’s “soft stand.” Moscow signaled its pleasure with the speech by allowing the Voice of America to broadcast it into Russia and by reprinting the full text in Izvestia. But eleven days after the speech, Khrushchev used it to win points with his Central Committee, strangely mirroring Kennedy’s domestic enemies by belittling the president’s call for peace as an expression of weakness. (Privately, however, the Soviet leader called it “the best speech by any president since Roosevelt.”)

  The Peace Speech has grown more lustrous with time, with historian Michael Beschloss anointing “the lyrical address” as “easily the best speech of Kennedy’s life.” This estimation is shared by surviving dignitaries of the administration. At a “Recollecting JFK” forum at the Kennedy Library in October 2003, Robert McNamara grew euphoric when the speech was evoked. “Let me comment on this speech,” he told the audience. “Most of you, probably all of you, have never read it, never heard it. Please read it. It’s one of the great documents of the twentieth century.”

  In a recent interview, the former defense secretary elaborated on the speech’s historic significance. “The American University speech laid out exactly what Kennedy’s intentions were,” McNamara told me in a voice gravelly with age. “If he had lived, the world would have been different, I feel quite confident of that. Whether we would have had détente sooner, I’m not sure. But it would have been a less dangerous world, I’m certain of that.”

  Kennedy’s landmark speech was nothing less than an attempt to end the nuclear stare-down between the two superpowers that had held the world in its thrall for over a decade, ever since the Soviets had begun their own atom bomb testing in 1949. In recent years, it has become fashionable for conservatives and hawkish liberals to claim Kennedy as one of their own. But Kennedy’s impassioned American University address clearly demonstrated he was no longer a Cold War liberal. “No, Kennedy was not a hawkish Cold Warrior,” Ted Sorensen remarked years later. He was a pragmatist, said Sorensen, who was deeply aware of how human folly led to tragedy. And he was determined to demilitarize relations between the nuclear powers before catastrophe could strike.

  Kennedy, a realist, understood that the journey to end the Cold War would stretch “a thousand miles,” but he was determined to take the first step. Though he was under no illusions about the Soviet system and its ambitions, he yearned to break free from the fevered spell of anticommunist demonology. Ever since World War II, America had been dominated by “a permanent war establishment,” in the words of maverick sociologist C. Wright Mills. This war establishment—which included the country’s militarized executive branch and corporate sector as well as the defense colossus headquartered in the Pentagon—justified its existence by creating a constant, free-floating state of anxiety and animosity. “For the first time in American history, men in authority are talking about an ‘emergency’ without a foreseeable end,” Mills wrote in his durable 1956 work, The Power Elite. “Such men as these are crackpot realists: in the name of realism they have constructed a paranoid reality all their own.” But the Kennedy presidency tried to secede from this reign of fear. The boldness of this attempt has not been fully appreciated by historians.

  The Peace Speech was the masterpiece of the Kennedy-Sorensen creative partnership. Here was the heart of the administration laid bare. The speech was born of JFK’s deepest aspirations as a world leader—and his sharp sense of political timing. But the soaring, utopian language was Sorensen. Presidential historian James MacGregor Burns has suggested that leaders rarely achieve greatness without taking their nations to war. But what the American University address eloquently argued was that great leadership in the nuclear age came from avoiding war—a spasmodic exchange of fire and poison that would mean “all we have built, all we have worked for, would be destroyed in the first twenty-four hours,” as Kennedy told the audience that morning.

  By the spring of 1963, JFK realized that the window for peaceful progress that had opened after the Cuban Missile Crisis was quickly closing, as hard-liners in Washington and Moscow reasserted their control. When Pope John XXIII, who had been deeply alarmed by how close humanity had come to extinction, enlisted Norman Cousins—editor of the liberal magazine Saturday Review and a longtime peace activist—to serve as an informal emissary between the Vatican, Washington, and Moscow, Kennedy readily agreed to discuss strategy with the amateur diplomat. When Cousins returned from a trip to Russia—where Khrushchev had entertained the emissary at his Black Sea retreat, plying him with rounds of vodka and playing badminton with Cousins’s two teenage daughters—JFK eagerly debriefed him.

  The president greeted Cousins in the Oval Office, where the citizen-diplomat sat on a large sofa as Kennedy grilled him. Outside, on the White House lawn, busloads of high school musicians began noisily warming up for a musicale that had been organized by the first lady. “This is Jackie’s department, but Jackie is away,” the president apologetically told his visitor. True to Kennedy fashion, he first wanted to know all the personal details about Cousins’s meeting with Khrus
hchev. How plush was his country estate? How energetically could the portly Soviet leader wield his racket during badminton? The magazine editor assured Kennedy that his Russian counterpart—despite his age, physique, and considerable intake of vodka at lunch—had acquitted himself rather well in the game, which left him “neither winded nor flushed.”

  Then the discussion moved on to more serious matters. Cousins told JFK that Khrushchev was eager for a new chapter in U.S.-Soviet relations. He agreed with Kennedy that the two nations could begin by signing a ban on the nuclear arms testing that was dusting the earth with radioactive poison. “You want me to accept President Kennedy’s good faith?” Khrushchev exclaimed at one point, sitting in a chair facing Cousins in his dacha’s glass-enclosed terrace. “All right, I accept President Kennedy’s good faith…. You want me to set all misunderstandings aside and make a fresh start? All right, I agree to make a fresh start.”

  As Cousins reported on his conversation with the Soviet leader, Kennedy sat quietly in his rocking chair with his eyes fixed intently on the peace courier. While Khrushchev clearly desired diplomatic progress, Cousins continued, the Russian leader also stressed that he was under intense political pressure to maintain a militant Cold War stance. This prompted a revealing reply from Kennedy.

  “One of the ironic things about this entire situation is that Mr. Khrushchev and I occupy approximately the same political positions inside our governments,” the president observed. “He would like to prevent a nuclear war but is under severe pressure from his hard-line crowd, which interprets every move in that direction as appeasement. I’ve got similar problems. Meanwhile, the lack of progress in reaching agreements between our two countries gives strength to the hard-line boys in both, with the result that the hard-liners in the Soviet Union and the United States feed on one another, each using the actions of the other to justify its own position.”

  When Cousins suggested that Kennedy blast through the impasse with “a breathtaking new approach, calling for an end to the Cold War and a fresh start in American-Russian relationships,” Kennedy was intrigued. He asked Cousins to confer on the speech with Ted Sorensen, a fellow Unitarian with whom he was friendly.

  The idea of two anti-war Unitarians working on a presidential speech to redefine U.S.-Soviet relations would surely have been deeply disturbing to national security apparatchiks, as Kennedy knew. The president instructed Sorensen to keep his working draft under tight wraps and not circulate it as usual to the Pentagon, CIA, and State Department for comments. Like Sorensen, Cousins’s pacifist inclinations were well-known. He was a co-founder of the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) and had widely publicized the horrors of nuclear war by bringing twenty-four young Japanese women who had survived the bombing of Hiroshima to the U.S. for medical treatment. The final draft of the American University speech reflected both men’s Unitarian philosophy.

  “The language in the speech is Unitarian language—lines like man’s problems are made by men and can be solved by men,” said Sorensen, sitting in his New York law office. Sorensen has made a longtime practice of not claiming authorship of Kennedy’s speeches, but his creative pride in the American University address is obvious. “I don’t want to take anything away from JFK, but that speech represents my personal philosophy more than anything else out there in the world today. It’s the one I’m proudest of.”

  There was a dramatic international backdrop to Kennedy’s speech that morning. On that same day, a Chinese delegation was arriving in Moscow to deliver a harsh demand to the Kremlin: the wobbly Khrushchev must stop begging for peace with the untrustworthy Americans and adopt a tougher line. Faced with an increasingly bitter Sino-Soviet split, and struggling to maintain its leadership of world communism, would Moscow seek a pact with China or the United States?

  When Kennedy, towards the end of his speech, announced that high-level talks would soon begin in Moscow to reach a comprehensive nuclear test-ban treaty and vowed that in the meantime the United States would not conduct nuclear tests in the atmosphere as long as other nations did not, it was “the breathtaking” bid to blow through the diplomatic bottleneck that Cousins had urged the president to make. It worked. Less than a month later, Kennedy and Khrushchev signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty, which as Sorensen proudly observed, was the first major arms control agreement “in that terrible era known as the nuclear age”—and the first significant diplomatic thaw in the Cold War. It was the American University speech that released these doves into the air. But it took all of Kennedy’s political determination and wiles to capitalize on the speech’s momentum and secure the treaty.

  As Kennedy emissary Averill Harriman was negotiating the treaty in Moscow that July, it became clear that the original goal of banning underground tests as well as atmospheric tests would be impossible. Administration officials knew that they could not succeed in pushing a comprehensive test ban through the Senate unless the Soviets agreed to demonstrate they were not cheating on the hard-to-detect underground tests by allowing numerous on-site inspections. But the Soviets insisted that inspections of their weapons facilities be strictly limited, out of fear that NATO spies would exploit them for their own purposes. The compromise was a Limited Test Ban Treaty that focused solely on atmospheric tests, which were much easier to monitor. Though the treaty was not as far-reaching as originally hoped, it was still a momentous occasion when it was initialed by the negotiators on the evening of July 25. The night before, Khrushchev had invited Harriman to share his box at the closing ceremony of a U.S.-U.S.S.R. track and field meet. As the crowd cheered the two men, the wealthy, immaculately groomed Harriman looked over at his squat, bald host—a man with the rustic manners and raw emotions of his peasant roots. He saw that Khrushchev’s eyes were filled with tears.

  Kennedy knew that even a limited test ban would face stiff political opposition at home. Treaty opponents were initially caught off guard by the speed at which the administration moved the agreement along. But as soon as it was initialed, they swung into action. The president faced his usual band of antagonists. The principal spokesman for the opposition was Dr. Edward Teller, the Hungarian-born physicist known as “the father of the hydrogen bomb” who, with his clotted Eastern European accent and Groucho Marx eyebrows, had established himself as one of the more flamboyant advocates of American militarism. Teller drew on his expertise to downplay the dangers of atmospheric testing, but as Kennedy knew from his own scientific advisors, radioactive strontium was already being detected in the bones and teeth of American children. Behind Teller was the lobbying might of the military-industrial complex, the well-financed network of weapon-makers trade groups, retired military officers associations, and brigades of flag-waving superpatriots that regularly directed fire at Kennedy policies. But what worried the president most were the secret machinations within his own government.

  Carl Kaysen, a deputy national security advisor for Kennedy, recently recalled one of the Pentagon’s more disturbing maneuvers during the test ban drama. It occurred while the administration was still considering a full ban, including controls on underground testing. “There was a complicated argument within the government over whether you could detect underground tests,” said Kaysen. “I tended to be the Bundy staff member who interacted with the scientific crowd on nuclear matters. At one point, we needed to confer with a man named Carl Romney, who was in charge of the Air Force operation that monitored underground testing. He ran these seismic networks we had in Iran and Pakistan, which tried to tune in on underground Russian explosions. So I tried to get a hold of Romney for the White House. But the Air Force hid him! They literally hid him! This was about as near as you could come to mutiny. After a lot of back and forth, he finally got dug out of whatever hole he was hiding in.”

  Kennedy was further enraged when he learned that the CIA was trying to sabotage the treaty in the Senate, where the agreement faced a tough ratification process. The president discovered that McCone was dispatching nuclear experts from the
agency to persuade senators that Moscow could not be trusted to abide by the treaty. JFK’s relationship with the CIA director had never recovered from the missile crisis, when McCone made a point of spreading the word throughout Washington that he had seen the Russian missiles coming long before Kennedy finally acted. Despite his efforts to cultivate Bobby, McCone was wearing thin on the president’s brother, too. The attorney general worried that with the 1964 election approaching, McCone—a lifelong Republican—might be a disloyal fifth column within the administration.

  Dean Rusk cautioned Kennedy to put off addressing the nation about the treaty until he had consulted with key senators. But Kennedy knew that the best way to sway the Senate was by mobilizing the public. The president went before the TV cameras on the night of July 26, one day after the treaty was initialed. “I speak to you tonight in a spirit of hope,” he told the nationwide audience. The United States and Soviet Union were caught in the coils of an endless and increasingly ominous arms race, said Kennedy. But “yesterday a shaft of light cut into the darkness.” He urged the Senate to ratify the test ban so America could “step back from the shadows of war and seek out the way of peace.”

  Kennedy realized that passage of the treaty was far from certain. He was told that congressional mail against the test ban was running at a lopsided fifteen to one. Years of Cold War indoctrination about the demonic Russians could not be dispelled by one presidential broadcast. But Kennedy was determined to put everything he had into winning the treaty. He shocked White House aides by declaring that he would “gladly” sacrifice his reelection for the sake of the arms agreement. The two-month battle that Kennedy waged on behalf of the treaty is a profile in presidential courage. The hard-fought campaign, which highlighted Kennedy’s skills as a political warrior, demonstrated how much a president can win when he is willing to lose all.