American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  The diplomats facing Kennedy in the East Room represented a region with some of the most entrenched poverty on the globe. The Latin American per capita income was not only low—$325 a year—but seemed static. Over two-thirds of the Latins lived in dire want. This figure both reflected and concealed the enormous disparity of income: 2 percent of the people owned three-quarters of all arable land and about one-half of all personal wealth. Twenty-four million Mexicans, out of a population of 35 million, lived in homes without electric lights; 30 million urban Latins lacked city-controlled drinking water; the average Peruvian subsisted on 1,900 calories a day, enough for bare survival.

  But even these figures hardly told the story. While the Latins had scored some notable economic achievements, their poor lived in a Gordian knot of poverty, the thongs of which pulled ever tighter in its crushing embrace. Against limited resources the population was expanding faster than any other in the world. Only half of children under eighteen—only a quarter in rural areas—attended school. Half of the whole Latin population was illiterate. Life expectancy ranged from 33 years in Haiti to 39 in Brazil to 57 in Argentina—as against 67 years in the United States. Investigating the human condition behind such figures, an anthropologist found a “culture of poverty” in the very heart of great cities like San Juan and Mexico City—a poverty of “segregation and discrimination, fear, suspicion or apathy” thwarting involvement of the poor in the wider society; a poverty that drained hope, expectation, motivation, morale, opportunity; a “family” poverty comprised of the “absence of childhood” as a long, protected stage in the life cycle, “early initiation into sex, free unions of consensual marriage,” frequent abandonment of wives and children, “a trend toward female- or mother-centered families,” individual feelings of helplessness, dependence, and inferiority. These were the truly mute, invisible Latins; these were the unfree.

  The bewildering diversity of Latin American peoples, nationalisms, cultures, and subcultures had produced a variety of American diplomatic and military responses over the decades. After the earlier times of hostility and intervention Washington’s relations with Mexico had come to a happy plateau. Two fine ambassadors, Coolidge’s and Hoover’s Dwight Morrow and FDR’s Josephus Daniels, helped to defuse and finally settle through skillful diplomacy and political compromise the long-simmering issue of Mexican expropriation of the oil properties of United States companies. Mexico, under its own able leadership, appeared to help teach Americans how to live with avowed revolutionaries next door.

  The rest of Latin America made up a patchwork of old-style caudillo regimes, such as Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo’s in the Dominican Republic, François Duvalier’s in Haiti, and Somoza’s in Nicaragua; of conservative, more or less democratic regimes, as in Ecuador, Chile, Panama, and Peru; of newly established liberal regimes, as in Brazil, Colombia, and Venezuela; and of revolutionary regimes in Bolivia and most notably Cuba. The “postrevolutionary” regimes of Mexico and Uruguay had demonstrated that Latin American nations could pass through upheavals and achieve “politically durable and relatively prosperous regimes” without undue guidance from the “motherland” of American nations born in revolution—the United States of America. Latin Americans had long been familiar with Washington orators who declaimed about glorious revolutions in history and in theory—United States style, of course—and attacked contemporary revolutions in process.

  If the United States had given birth to the very model of the successful “democratic” revolution, Cuba was the father of revolutionary failure. The slave revolts that began in the sixteenth century and rose to horrifying proportions in the nineteenth, the revolt of vegueros—planters—against the tobacco monopolists early in the eighteenth century, and the ten-year war against Spanish rule ending in 1878, were put down with slaughter and torture. The rebellion against Spain, during which the Spanish commander ordered that any doctor, schoolteacher, or lawyer captured with the rebels should be instantly shot, took 200,000 lives and left a land seared with hatred. Cubans finally won their independence at the end of the century only to fall under the writ of the North Americans who had helped them gain it.

  From the days of Theodore Roosevelt, who wanted to teach the “cheating, mañana lot” to behave properly, Cuba stood as a classic example of United States intervention in Latin America. Washington tolerated and supported corrupt and brutal dictators in Havana as long as American economic and security interests—especially its huge base at Guantánamo—were protected. By the 1950s “American companies controlled 40 percent of the island’s sugar lands, 80 percent of its public utilities, 90 percent of the mines and cattle ranches, and, in combination with Shell, substantially all the oil business.” Although part of the rationale for heavy Yankee investment—equal to one-third of Cuba’s gross national product— was that it would raise the people’s living standards, hundreds of thousands of cane-cutters, tobacco-field laborers, and other peasants lived in the usual poverty. The Cuban labor forces also included 100,000 or more sugar-mill workers, who formed the core of the island nation’s labor movements, as well as several hundred thousand jobless people, some of whom found seasonal work in the fields for a few meager months.

  For a time after Fidel Castro and a small army of guerrillas, following initial blundering attacks, through sheer tenacity and fanatical determination drove the malodorous Batista regime out of power, Washington and Havana maintained a semblance of harmony; Castro even visited the United States and conducted virtually a sidewalk campaign tour. Relations hardened when Castro seized American-owned oil refineries and other properties and Congress cut the quota on Cuban sugar. By the time he left office a hesitant Eisenhower, prodded by Vice President Nixon, was organizing a CIA-backed invasion of Cuba by exiles. This stratagem had worked in Guatemala six years before—why not in Cuba?

  John Kennedy had once called Fidel Castro “part of the legacy of Bolívar,” part of that “earlier revolution which won its war against Spain but left largely untouched the indigenous feudal order.” By the fall of 1960, however, Castro had turned to the Kremlin for support and Kennedy was locked in a bitter campaign struggle with Nixon, who had proposed to the annual American Legion convention that the “cancer” of Castroism be eliminated through a “quarantine.” The Democratic nominee was not to be outdone. Nixon, who for security reasons could not reveal the “Cuba project,” was enraged when he read a New York Times headline: “Kennedy Asks Aid for Cuban Rebels to Defeat Castro, Urges Support of Exiles and ‘Fighters for Freedom.’ ” The Vice President used his fourth television debate with Kennedy to call his foe’s proposals “the most dangerously irresponsible recommendations,” all the while knowing that it was more than a White House recommendation—it was White House policy.

  It was against this background of escalating, vote-huckstering anti-Castroism that the new President inaugurated his bold Alliance for Progress. He was now imprisoned by his own campaign rhetoric and promises, by the invasion plans already underway, by CIA support for those plans. Faced with a situation calling either for direct military action, as against Mexico in olden times, or for self-restraint and diplomacy, the new President was politically and intellectually able to do neither. Rather he clung to the “middle way” of an invasion by refugees shielded by a deployment of United States air and sea power that must—on this Kennedy insisted— remain invisible. The success of the venture depended finally on the hope, founded on the Guatemalan experience, that once the rebels had landed, support for Castro among the Cuban military and population would collapse. Kennedy’s staff shared a tendency toward group-think that discouraged dissent from this notion.

  The invasion that got underway in mid-April 1961 became a world-class example of military misadventure. Almost everything that could go wrong did go wrong: bad communications, faulty intelligence, unexpected reefs, poor coordination of arms, inadequate numbers and equipment. The real failure, however, was not operational but psychological and political. Even if the invaders had landed
in force and moved inland, they would have failed. For the effect of the invasion on the Cuban people was just the opposite of Washington’s hopes. Mobilized not merely by the fast-moving, well-prepared Castro but by fierce nationalistic instincts, the “invisible” Cubans emerged to support the dictator’s smashing counterattacks.

  Humiliated by failure, heartsore over the hundreds of rebels killed or taken prisoner, Kennedy rose to one of his finest hours in taking personal responsibility for the fiasco. “There’s an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan,” he told the press. “I am the responsible officer of the government.” Privately, he was furious at the CIA, the military, and above all himself. “All my life I’ve known better than to depend on the experts,” he said to Sorensen. “How could I have been so stupid, to let them go ahead?”

  Vienna, June 1961. After dazzling Charles de Gaulle and the crowds in Paris with the young President’s vitality and humor and the First Lady’s dark beauty and Oleg Cassini gowns, the presidential couple flew on to Vienna for a much-heralded summit conference. Greeting them warmly, Khrushchev insisted that he wanted to “shake her hand first.” But once the talks began, the mood turned cold and heavy and not even a glittering dinner in the Schönbrunn Palace could dispel it.…

  Kennedy’s thrust against Castroism had plunged Latin Americans more deeply into the global cold war. Once upon a time Washington had been able to isolate Latin politics from European rivalries, coldly informing London and Paris and Berlin that the North Americans would deal with their neighbors to the south under the Monroe Doctrine, which was conveniently adapted to Washington’s needs of all seasons. But during the cold war Latin America became part of the great trembling mobile of global politics, and the Bay of Pigs fiasco sent a tremor through the quivering balances.

  The Bay of Pigs intersected with another Kremlin sortie over Berlin. Kennedy had hoped that Berlin could be left in its impasse while he dealt with Castro but Khrushchev was not so obliging. In Vienna he presented Kennedy with a demand that if the two Germanys could not agree on a means of reunification in six months, then each should sign a separate peace treaty with the World War II victors. At this point, as a new European crisis loomed, both Moscow and Washington were caught in the spiral of fear. While boasting about his big missile force Khrushchev knew that he was far behind the Americans. Despite his campaign charges of a huge “missile gap,” Kennedy now knew that the United States was far ahead on missiles but he feared that the Soviets were rapidly filling the gap.

  The summer tension of 1961 rose to a fever pitch as the Kremlin stuck to its “deadline diplomacy” and Americans glimpsed the possibility of nuclear war. Kennedy and his Defense Secretary, Robert McNamara, somberly discussed the nation’s capacity to absorb a Soviet nuclear attack and then launch a devastating strike against the Russians. At the height of the war fever the President gave the most frightening speech Americans had heard from the White House since Pearl Harbor. Seated at a desk surrounded by the panoply of his office, speaking with a cold militancy, he called for a big expansion in armed manpower, a boost in nonnuclear arms, and an emergency civil defense program. A kind of midsummer madness swept the nation as Americans rushed to build bomb shelters and to debate whether it was morally justified to slam the shelter door shut against desperate intruders—or even shoot them down.

  “I don’t know when I’ve been happier,” Harry Truman wrote the President, “than when I listened to your great speech.” But Eleanor Roosevelt worried in a newspaper column that civilian defense measures would induce a war psychosis, and later she urged on him a demilitarized Central Europe and a tenacious give-and-take for arms reduction regardless of whatever charges of “appeasement” it might bring. Khrushchev suddenly transformed the whole Berlin issue by allowing the East Germans to stem the flow of desperate refugees to the West. Soon Berlin was split by the Wall.

  The spiral of fear mounted in late 1961 and early 1962 as Moscow and Washington spurred the arms race. Then the Kremlin came to a decision that would startle the world, for it amounted to nuclear adventurism. This was to emplace missiles in friendly Cuba. At first it was hard for the Administration to believe that Moscow was deploying missiles capable of bearing nuclear warheads on a vulnerable island some 6,000 miles from Russia. But Khrushchev had his reasons. In the wake of the Bay of Pigs, Cuba offered him a delicious opportunity to protect a friend—and a position of strength in the Caribbean—against further “imperialist” onslaughts. The Chairman, moreover, had to negotiate with his own hardliners, especially in the military. But the Kremlin acted also out of fear bordering on paranoia. If Russia was far behind on intercontinental missiles and could not catch up for years, what better way to close this real missile gap than by deploying Soviet medium-range or intermediate-range ballistic missiles only a few hundred miles from cities and military installations in the southern United States?

  The operation must be secret, of course, until the Russians had emplaced enough missiles to scare off or defeat an early United States response. But the sharp photographic eyes of the high-flying U-2S quickly spotted launching sites under construction in Cuba for MRBMs and IRBMs. This time, instead of rushing to action, the President convened a loose assembly of cabinet members, security advisers, and others under the informal leadership of his brother Robert, the Attorney General. Day after day as new intelligence flowed in, members of this “ExCom” analyzed and debated alternative courses of action. While some shifted ground and no firm lines developed, the group split roughly between “hawks” like Dean Acheson and most of the military participants and “doves” such as Stevenson, George Ball, Sorensen, and Robert Kennedy himself. The President occasionally took part, but he listened far more than he talked. More than anyone else, he had to calculate the political element, for Republicans in Congress would leap on another Bay of Pigs, another “surrender.” And the Commander-in-Chief alone would make the final decision. At an off-the-record session with several hundred newspaper editors during the crisis, he quoted the bullfighter’s lament:

  Bullfight critics ranked in rows

  Crowd the enormous Plaza full;

  But only one is there who knows—

  And he’s the man who fights the bull.

  As the ExCom debated, Soviet freighters capable of bearing missiles were headed toward Cuba, nearing the quarantine line Kennedy had drawn around the island. Time was running out. Some in the group wanted an air strike on Cuba, even an invasion, but a very different resolution was taking shape. Messages were running between Moscow and Washington through formal and informal channels, and each side was taking care to leave fallback positions and “escape hatches” open to the other. It became clear that Khrushchev would agree to pull out his missiles if Kennedy made a hard promise not to invade Cuba and a soft—that is, orally communicated—promise later to pull American missiles out of Turkey. To be sure, the Administration had planned to remove those outdated Jupiter missiles anyway, but this mattered not to Khrushchev. He had a deal he could present to his own hard-liners. The freighters slowed, paused, and turned back.

  The nation had waited, poised breathlessly on the brink, while the quiet debate and diplomacy had gone ahead. Now, after days of fear and even terror, people around the globe breathed a huge sigh of relief. The President met a storm of applause that was like balm to the wounds still aching from the Bay of Pigs. It had been a “close-run thing” that depended on an unusual degree of flexibility in both the Kremlin and the White House. Both leaders had had the desire and the authority to face down their hawks. The President learned from the crisis, Robert Kennedy said later, not to “humiliate” Khrushchev “or push him over the brink.” It later became known, indeed, that Kennedy was prepared to offer Moscow an outright exchange of Turkish and Cuban missile withdrawal if Khrushchev had remained adamant.

  In the post-crisis euphoria, however, hard facts were ignored. There had been some intelligence lapses as well as triumphs. Early diplomatic opportunities had n
ot been exploited. At one or two points the war hawks, American and Russian, had almost carried the day. Khrushchev’s standing in the Politburo was undermined by his combination of adventurism and withdrawal. In any event, it was clear that his retreat from Cuba resulted far less from diplomatic statesmanship than from his recognition that the Russians were immensely outgunned in intercontinental nuclear arms. This would not long be the case. For the relentless arms race carried on.

  The Revolutionary Asians

  “To those new states whom we welcome to the ranks of the free,” John Kennedy had proclaimed in his inaugural address, “we pledge our word that one form of colonial control shall not have passed away merely to be replaced by a far more iron tyranny. We shall not always expect to find them supporting our view. But we shall always hope to find them strongly supporting their own freedom—and to remember that, in the past, those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside.” A few words later he called for that “peaceful revolution of hope” which would help “free men and free governments” cast off the chains of poverty.

  Within a few months of inauguration, Kennedy was plunged into both an intellectual and a military struggle over the meaning and application of those evocative terms, Freedom and Revolution. In Moscow, Nikita Khrushchev had no doubts about these ideas and their relationship. If Khrushchev sensed in Vienna that the young President had never seriously read “Lenin or any of the Soviet theoretical writers,” which doubtless was the case, Khrushchev could not have known that Kennedy had read few of the Western theorists either. “Kennedy wanted to maintain the status quo in the world,” the Soviet First Secretary would recall, including the “inviolability of borders plus the enforced preservation of a country’s internal social and political system. ” More than ever Khrushchev saw his own opportunity to appeal to the potentially revolutionary masses of the world.