Schlesinger found the president’s meeting with the Italian prime minister “less interesting than it sounded,” as he wrote home, “because Fanfani had very little on his mind and is not a deeply interesting man.” Schlesinger and Robert Komer, a national security assistant, however, had sufficiently convinced Kennedy to communicate to Fanfani American encouragement of the “opening to the left.” The key to this maneuver, Schlesinger advised, was to do it quickly. “Obviously the Communists are as well aware as we are that the final defection of the Nenni Socialists would be a terrific blow to their prestige and to their hope of getting anywhere in Italy,” he told Kennedy. “Accordingly they are doing everything they can to stop it; hence time is important.”19
To Schlesinger’s frustration, the State Department took a different view. Writing to Walt Rostow, soon to become director of policy planning at the State Department, Schlesinger complained that the department’s policy on Italy was just “a shopping list of desirable objectives . . . rather than a coherent statement of strategy.” The idea that “it is OK for us to stand by until the situation has evolved” was “too complacent” and “a misreading of the situation.”20
Dean Rusk, secretary of state, had another perspective on that same situation. “There were times when I had trouble with Arthur Schlesinger,” he recalled witheringly. “Not content with life in the East Room with the social secretaries, Schlesinger liked to play a role in policy matters.” Schlesinger’s letter on Cuba had been “strong and sensible.” On other matters, however, “he was less helpful,” including on Italy. “A question arose over whether the Italian government should shift toward the left and build a broader coalition of political parties,” Rusk wrote. “Schlesinger wanted the United States to use some pressure and nudge the Italians in that direction. However, our ambassador in Rome, Frederick Reinhardt, and I felt that this was not our job. I stonewalled Arthur, believing ‘an opening to the left,’ as Schlesinger called it, was a matter for the Italians to decide. They later made their move and indeed shifted to the left, but not because of American pressure.” It was, Rusk spat contemptuously, just one example of how “Schlesinger was a fifth wheel in decision making.”21
That contempt was mutual. When Schlesinger traveled to Bologna in the immediate aftermath of the Bay of Pigs, searching around for someone to blame, his eye had fallen on the inscrutable secretary of state. Certainly the CIA’s and the military’s “calculations were mistaken.” But Rusk more than anyone else had failed to recognize the flaws in the planned operation. “The person who should have raised these points with vigor and who should have told the President to cancel the whole thing was the secretary of state,” Schlesinger fumed. “I would regard his failure as almost the most reprehensible of all.” That calculation would prove consequential for Rusk’s historical reputation: A Thousand Days would portray the secretary of state throughout as a hapless mediocrity, well out of his depth and lacking in courage. The effect would be summed up in a Washington Star cartoon illustrating a Buddha-like figure skewered on a fountain pen under the title, “Secretary of State Dean Rusk stabbed in the back by Arthur Schlesinger.”22
Rusk’s own passivity and caution was, in Schlesinger’s view, only the tip of an institutional iceberg for a department lacking in fearlessness and imagination. Subsequent historians would point to the impact of the McCarthyite attacks of the 1940s and 1950s, when many had been driven from the service and accused of being traitors, to explain the lack of independent voices. Averell Harriman, on being appointed assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern Affairs in December 1961, described the department as “a disaster area filled with human wreckage.”23
“The basic problem springs, I believe, from the nature of the Foreign Service itself,” Schlesinger told Kennedy. While most officials were “well above the average in decency, intelligence and devotion,” they were also “emasculated so far as policy decision is concerned.” The reason for this unsatisfactory situation was that “the whole Foreign Service training has the effect of discouraging the Foreign Service officer from strong views on substantive policy.” The broader culture was one in which “officers are taught that their job is to carry out [policy], however idiotic they may personally consider the policy to be.” Obviously the State Department could not be “a collection of freewheelers pursuing their independent foreign policies.” But the “inherent indifference to substance and tendency toward caution,” Schlesinger advised, “have increased the importance of strong [political] leadership.” David Halberstam would later point out that the fault lay with Kennedy. “Those who had applauded the idea of the weak Secretary of State,” he writes, “had gotten what they wanted and deserved.”24
Schlesinger’s overwhelming sense of déjà vu as the administration lurched from one international crisis to another compounded his sense of urgency. Throughout the summer of 1961, the Soviet Union had been making ominous threats about the status of Berlin, with heavy hints that East Germany might seal the East Berlin border, through which two and a half million East Germans had moved permanently to the West since 1949. In the starkest terms, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev warned Kennedy that if the Americans decided to go to war over the issue, it would be nuclear from the outset.25
As Schlesinger came to be involved in planning for any Soviet incursion in Berlin, he quickly concluded that his fears that Cuba had taught the administration nothing were sadly real. He also recognized that having made the right call about Cuba but not voicing it forcefully enough, he had failed to be proactive. “I do not wish to play the role of Cassandra, and this, strictly speaking, is absolutely none of my business,” he wrote in a memo to Kennedy on July 7, “but I cannot resist the feeling that the present stages of planning for Berlin are ominously reminiscent of comparable stages in the planning for Cuba.” In particular, he was concerned that the basic US plan “comes, as the Cuban plan did, as if with the full endorsement of the various departments involved” and that “there has been no adequate presentation of alternatives.”26
Schlesinger had wanted more independent voices, unafraid to speak the truth to the president, and what he had acquired was Dean Acheson—an example of “be careful what you wish for.” Truman’s secretary of state thought Kennedy—whose father the Waspy diplomat abhorred as an upstart bootlegger and an appeaser—was emotionally and intellectually unimpressive. After the disaster at the Bay of Pigs, Acheson made a speech to an audience of Foreign Service officials in which he described the widely held view that they were “watching a gifted young amateur practice with a boomerang when they saw, to their horror, that he had knocked himself out.” Soon afterward, Acheson smirked that Kennedy had heard about the speech and “didn’t like it at all.” Nevertheless, as Berlin sent temperatures rising, Kennedy asked Acheson what he would do as the crisis unfolded. Acheson was blunt in his advice. The Eisenhower administration had drawn up three red lines on Berlin: access to the city by air and ground; a continued military presence in West Berlin; and the freedom and survival of the western sector. Khrushchev, Acheson advised, must be told that the United States was “irretrievably committed” to these three “essentials” even if that meant nuclear war.27
Schlesinger was horrified. “Are the Acheson premises adequate?” his July 7 memo asked the president. “What other premises ought to be brought into the Berlin discussion?” As always for Schlesinger, the problem was that everyone had rallied too quickly behind a plan. “We would have been better off in the Cuba discussions if someone had been appointed as a devil’s advocate and charged with the exercise of picking holes in the plan,” he suggested. But today, he admitted, “This is harder to do here, when the proponent is someone so brilliant, charming and formidable as Dean Acheson.” He told the president to bring in other big guns to challenge Acheson from among such contemporaries as David Bruce, the ambassador in London, Averell Harriman, or Adlai Stevenson, “before all thinking is frozen in the present mold.”28
Schlesinger’s own analysis was th
at Acheson’s plan ignored political realities. “It appears to contain no long-run political strategy, except the view that, if we can win the ‘clash of political wills,’ then we can impose our own terms (unspecified) on the enemy,” he wrote, adding the warning that “we may well be left exposed and even immobile before Soviet political warfare” unless “a more systematic effort” was made “to prepare for the political as well as the military issues implicit in the Berlin situation.”29
In a note to McGeorge Bundy taking up a view remarkably like the actual strategy followed during the Cuban missile crisis, Schlesinger urged thinking about “providing an escape hatch” for the Soviet leader. “We must not shove him against a closed door,” Schlesinger warned, “we must figure a way by which he can back down from the more extreme implications of his present course without inviting an unacceptably large political humiliation.” Plans needed to include “a sketch as to how we think Khrushchev is going to get out of the hole he has dug for himself.”30
When Schlesinger finally saw the president alone just after lunch on July 7, he expressed these “misgivings about the course of the Berlin planning.” Kennedy read Schlesinger’s memo there and then. The president had always admitted that Schlesinger was right about the Bay of Pigs. Now here he was telling him that the same mistakes were being repeated. After reading the paper, Kennedy conceded that Acheson’s paper was too narrowly focused and that “Berlin planning had to be brought back into balance.” So expand on this memo, Kennedy told Schlesinger, and give me an alternative. And do it by the time I leave for Hyannis Port at 5 p.m.
Schlesinger rushed back to his office and his typewriter. He feared that “the issue is being gradually defined, to put it crudely, as—are you chicken?” This approach was another “Cuban resemblance. . . . People who had doubts about Cuba suppressed those doubts lest they seem ‘soft.’ ” Schlesinger now called in reinforcements to bolster the case: two sympathetic Harvard colleagues working within the administration: the international lawyer Abram Chayes, who was legal advisor to the State Department, and the political scientist and future secretary of state Henry Kissinger, then a consultant at the White House. Over the next few hours, with Schlesinger at the keyboard, the three men hammered out a four-page memo for the president, which Schlesinger ripped from the typewriter a few minutes before five o’clock and just got into Kennedy’s bag before Marine One took off from the White House lawn.31
The memo was divided into two parts. The first attempted to undercut the premise of Acheson’s paper, which it said had characterized Khrushchev as using the Berlin question as a pretext for a test of will with the United States. The United States could win that test only by showing that it was prepared for nuclear war over the issue. Thus, the memo argued, “the test of will becomes an end in itself rather than a means to a political end.” According to Schlesinger, Acheson’s premise avoided a number of major issues. At worst it “casts the U.S. as rigid and unreasonable and puts us on the political defensive.” Moreover, Acheson’s paper “hinges on our willingness to face nuclear war, but this option is undefined.” And Acheson made no effort to address the question of “what happens if our allies decline to go along.”
Part two of the memo offered thoughts about “unexplored alternatives.” These alternatives covered predictions, premises, policies, conceptions, and assumptions, with suggestions about “what procedure can be devised to make sure that alternatives are systematically brought to the surface and canvassed.” Among the most important of these was the alternative premise as to Soviet behavior, notably that “Khrushchev may be seeking to stabilize his own situation and relations in Germany and Eastern Europe.” The paper urged a wider discussion of opinions, with as many different voices brought in as possible, including “non-Achesonians” such as Bruce, Harriman, and Stevenson. Equally important, “The White House staff should be directed to question all existing proposals, especially from the viewpoint of the effect the pressure of events will have on decisions; and it should be directed to take an active role in stimulating exploration of the various alternatives listed above (and others which reflection and analysis will bring to mind).”32
The two July 7 memos were among the most influential that Schlesinger wrote during his time in the White House. His memo before the Bay of Pigs had been essentially right, but it failed to impinge. The lesson he learned from that experience—to be bolder—informed his actions in the summer of 1961. The impact on the president this time was direct and immediate. The next morning in Hyannis Port, Kennedy hauled Dean Rusk and his deputy, Chip Bohlen, over the coals for their department’s pacificity on Berlin. Holding Schlesinger’s second memo, as the secretary of state perched uncomfortably in his dark business suit on the fantail of JFK’s docked speedboat, Kennedy barked, “What’s wrong with the goddamned department of yours? I can never get a quick answer, no matter what the question.” The attack was so ferocious that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and General Maxwell Taylor, who were also on the boat, quietly slipped away to grab hot dogs on shore. Once everyone came together again, Kennedy demanded a plan for dealing with Berlin that did not involve nuclear weapons. He wanted alternatives, Kennedy told them, beyond the current choice between “holocaust or humiliation.” The Schlesinger view had taken hold.33
Buoyed by his success, Schlesinger now overreached. Not content with influencing the internal debate, he tried to apply pressure on the White House from the outside. He briefed Scotty Reston at the New York Times that not enough was being done for political planning on Berlin. Reston’s Times article pointed the finger of blame at Schlesinger’s antagonist in the State Department. When the secretary called Reston to ask about his source and was told the briefing came from the White House, Rusk called Kennedy to complain. Summoning Schlesinger to his stateroom on Air Force One, “JFK looked at me shrewdly and asked whether I had recently talked with Reston.” When Schlesinger confirmed that he had, “JFK said mildly that he wished hereafter I would make my complaints directly to the State Department rather than through the New York Times.” The mildness of tone did not hide the force of the rebuke. “What the hell Scotty was doing telling Rusk that he got the story from the White House I shall never know,” Schlesinger grouched, irritated at being sold down the river by one of his most useful journalistic contacts. It was naïve to have expected otherwise: Reston was unlikely to have sacrificed lines to Rusk to protect those with Schlesinger.34
The embarrassment over Reston was not the only difficulty Schlesinger had in trying to shift policy during the Berlin political discussions. Another had its roots in Harvard Yard, as Professor Schlesinger drew on Professor Kissinger for advice. Despite being a White House consultant on national security problems, Kissinger was well known to be playing on both sides of the political aisle. Here the difficulty was not so much Rusk, but the former dean of arts, now national security advisor, McGeorge Bundy, who (to say the least) disliked Kissinger personally and mistrusted his scheming. “Mac had never once asked his advice on anything,” Schlesinger recorded after a conversation with Kissinger that summer, “and had not even responded in any way to the very intelligent series of memoranda Henry had been writing about Berlin.”35
The second memorandum that Schlesinger had handed the president on July 7 had—not surprisingly, given that Kissinger had coauthored it—advised unambiguously that “Henry Kissinger should be brought into the center of Berlin planning.” Presumably Kissinger had been pleased to include that line, but Schlesinger, who believed it himself, had already included Kissinger’s ideas in his own memoranda to the president, even though they sometimes contradicted Schlesinger’s own more dovish views.
Kissinger was less accommodationist than Schlesinger. “The West,” he wrote that summer, “must stand for the unity of Germany despite the experiences of two world wars” and should continue to argue for issues such as freedom of movement and free elections in East Berlin not because they would be accepted by the Soviets, but precisely because they wou
ld not.” But Schlesinger persisted in inserting Kissinger’s voice, emphasizing forcefulness and intimidation, into the debate because he believed his Harvard friend was one of those disruptive voices essential to strong policymaking, someone who was unafraid to speak out against the conventional wisdom or the bureaucratic “line to take.”
Sustaining that diversity became harder after the Berlin crisis reached its climax. On August 13, East German security forces sealed off the border with West Berlin by erecting barbed wire fences that soon evolved into the Berlin Wall. Kissinger’s view, expressed to General Maxwell Taylor, former army chief of staff, was that “the Soviets have made us look like monkeys, weak monkeys, and we can’t wait to demonstrate our masochism by crawling back and begging them please to negotiate, so that we can give up something else to them.” Instead, Kissinger urged, the United States should “inform them that we will go to war before we forgo our rights in and access to Berlin, calmly carry on with our military buildup, and let them sweat for a change.” This sabre-rattling, which his biographer Niall Ferguson contentiously presents as an example of Kissinger’s “idealism,” stood in contrast to the “realism” adopted by the White House and summed up by the president’s phrase that “a wall is a helluva lot better than a war,” not least a nuclear war.36
Kissinger believed that once the wall went up the president needed to “stand before the ruddy bar of history and choose from among carefully and sharply presented alternatives.” Instead he was being “confronted with faits accomplis by the bureaucracy which he can ratify or modify but which preclude a real consideration of alternatives.” That was precisely the argument Schlesinger had been pushing from within the White House in memo after memo to the president. So even as Kissinger excoriated the administration, Schlesinger continued urging that his voice be included.
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