Worldmaking

by David Milne

  Similarly attuned to the senator’s potential, George Kennan had attempted to win Kennedy’s favor when he wrote him a long letter detailing his own foreign-policy views. Kennan began by emulating Nitze’s Paul Revere approach, observing that “the Russian and Chinese Communists are obviously determined to bring about, before a new administration can take over and get into the swing, an extensive and decisive undermining of our world position, with a view to isolating us politically and militarily and to eliminating us as a major factor of resistance to their ambitions and undertakings.” The purpose and vitality of the prose might have surprised seasoned Kennan watchers. But after this tub-thumping buildup, Kennan reverted to type:

  One of the most dangerous elements in our present world position is that we are greatly over-extended in our commitments, political and military. I have felt this for years; so, I believe, has Lippmann. This provides our adversaries with one opportunity after another for badgering us and thrusting us onto the defensive. To get ourselves back into a sound position, there should be a careful appraisal of our existing commitments and a ruthless elimination of those which are unsound, super-annuated, or beyond our strength to support.97

  At this moment of supposedly “maximum danger,” to borrow Nitze’s phrase from NSC-68, Kennan recommended “ruthlessly” hacking away at America’s overgrown defense commitments. JFK was not won over. Kennan and Nitze did not so much disagree about foreign policy as inhabit different planets.

  After securing the Democratic nomination ahead of Adlai Stevenson, Kennedy was keen to solicit the best—which for him meant the most robust—foreign-policy advice. He did not turn to Kennan, needless to say, and instead sought out the engineer of NSC-68. On August 30, 1960, Nitze and Kennedy held a joint news conference. The Democratic presidential candidate announced that he had appointed Nitze to convene and chair a Committee on National Security Policy. Its purpose was not to furnish Kennedy with partisan debating points but to provide concrete foreign-policy recommendations that would permit the new administration to hit the ground running. Kennedy informed the assembled press that he wanted Nitze to “consult … on national security problems with the ablest and most experienced authorities in the nation, without regard to party.”98 Nitze was given an office in the Russell Senate Office Building, right next to Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington, where he sat down with his team—David K. Bruce, Roswell Gilpatric, and James Perkins—to prepare his report. With his usual diligence, Nitze took soundings from RAND and some of the nation’s elite universities, including the Center for International Studies at MIT, which had developed a distinctive research program emphasizing the centrality of the struggle with communism in the Third World.

  While Nitze worked on his report, Kennedy had an election to win—against Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard Milhous Nixon. One of Kennedy’s most effective campaigning strategies was to portray the Eisenhower-Nixon years as a period in which the big stick of massive retaliation actually encouraged drift and irresolution, which had allowed the Soviet Union to narrow the gap in nuclear capabilities and project power and influence beyond the European theater. Even Cuba, just ninety miles from Florida, had been “lost” to communism in 1959. For hawkish Democrats with painful memories of McCarthyism, attacking Nixon and the GOP for foreign-policy weakness was cathartic. Drawing on Nitze’s and Wohlstetter’s dark Gaither scenarios, Kennedy blasted the Nixon-Eisenhower team for allowing a “missile gap” to develop, which imperiled American security: “Whether the missile gap—that everyone agrees now exists—will become critical in 1961, 1962, or 1963 … the point is that we are facing a gap on which we are gambling with our survival … Unless immediate steps are taken, failure to maintain our relative power of retaliation may in the near future expose the United States to a nuclear missile attack.”99

  This inflammatory allegation was taken right from Nitze’s playbook. Never mind that the missile gap did not actually exist; the mere allegation was damaging enough. And Nixon could not decisively rebut the charge without revealing the full extent of America’s surveillance operation over the Soviet Union. On this and other issues, Kennedy had Nixon on the hook.

  Partly assisted by these foreign-policy advantages—as well as Walter Lippmann’s priceless endorsement—Kennedy defeated Nixon on Election Day by the slimmest of margins. Across the nation he secured just 100,000 more popular votes, which translated as 303 votes to Nixon’s 219 in the electoral college. Nitze submitted his report to President-elect Kennedy on November 9, the day after his victory. It called for an “early decision” on whether the United States should “attempt to achieve a politically meaningful ‘win’ capability in general nuclear war, or settle for the more modest goal of being able to deny the Soviets such a capability through assuring ourselves secure retaliatory capability.” It also focused on the sheer weight of crises that would confront Kennedy upon entering the White House, in “Cuba, the Congo, Laos, and the ‘smoldering guerrilla war in South Vietnam.’” “Because of limitations of time and space,” Nitze recalled, “our report made only brief stabs at sorting out the multitude of problems inherent in these global time bombs.”100 An appreciative Kennedy directed that a copy of the report be sent to all cabinet appointees as the starting point for their subsequent recommendations. The main question that remained was where would Nitze—an architect of Kennedy’s main diplomatic campaigning advantage—land?

  President-elect Kennedy offered Nitze three jobs during the transition, in a brief phone conversation. He informed Nitze that the incoming secretary of state, Dean Rusk—a man Nitze had recommended for the job—wanted him to serve as his undersecretary for economic affairs. “Before you respond to this, however,” said Kennedy, “you should know that I would like you to become either my national security adviser or deputy secretary of defense.” Nitze asked, “How long do I have to make up my mind?” to which Kennedy answered, “Thirty seconds.” His mind set to gallop, Nitze immediately dismissed the job at State because he had already worked in economic affairs during the Truman administration. He liked the proximity to power that the office of national security adviser provided, but worried that he would be continuously “stalemated by a Pentagon unsympathetic to the type of policy I thought was required.” To truly grapple with the issues that mattered most—primarily pertaining to strategic vulnerabilities and the conventional and unconventional means to address them—Nitze believed it was vital to work in the Pentagon. “I choose the post of deputy secretary of defense,” replied Nitze within the thirty seconds. “Fine,” said Kennedy, who hung up without saying goodbye and crossed another job off his long to-do list.

  Nitze made a major error in declining the job of national security adviser. The position had lacked clout during the Eisenhower years, certainly, but the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Carter appointments—McGeorge Bundy, Walt Rostow, Henry Kissinger, and Zbigniew Brzezinski—used the office to construct independent power bases in the White House, exerting an influence on presidential decision making that often exceeded the supposedly more powerful cabinet appointments. Nitze’s mistake was compounded when Kennedy appointed Robert S. McNamara as his secretary of defense and his position immediately became insecure.

  McNamara and Nitze shared many traits. A graduate of Berkeley and the Harvard Business School, McNamara had enjoyed a spectacularly successful business career, rising to the presidency of the Ford Motor Company. He also held a strong belief in deploying quantitative methods to assess a whole range of issues—from automobile production in Detroit to military progress in Indochina. Once described memorably as an “IBM machine with legs,” McNamara was a formidable presence whose crisp analyses, impatience with prolixity, and unforgiving work ethic kept his subordinates in a state of perpetual tension and exhaustion. He accepted Kennedy’s job offer on one condition: that he would have total control over subsequent Pentagon appointments. McNamara decided that he did not want another McNamara (with actual foreign-policy experience) serving as his numbe
r two. He wanted a loyal lieutenant to carry out his orders without demur. This person turned out to be the hardworking and selfless Roswell Gilpatric. “I had never met Bob McNamara,” Nitze later recalled, “but he knew of me and my reputation for hard-nosed determination. He told Mr. Kennedy that he would prefer a deputy who would be his alter ego and carry out his programs without argument or confrontation.”101

  Nitze was instead forced to take the position of assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs—the job he had accepted in 1953 before the forces of McCarthyism had intervened. It was not a bad compromise move, as it turned out, because the Office of International Security Affairs (ISA), known as the “little state department,” offered Nitze considerable autonomy and some three hundred staff. The ISA’s primary function was to coordinate the disbursement of foreign military aid, but Kennedy wanted the office to do more. On Christmas Day, The New York Times endorsed Nitze’s appointment, noting that the ISA’s scope had been “widened” to allow Nitze to contribute to policy on multiple levels. President-elect Kennedy remarked that “I cannot too strongly stress the importance of the post which Mr. Nitze has accepted … His wealth of experience will be of great assistance to both Defense Secretary McNamara and to me.”102 Kennedy’s warm words were likely conditioned by some guilt at the retraction of his initial job offer. In fact, Nitze’s influence on the Kennedy administration turned out to be significant. But this owed less to the job he assumed than to the geopolitical principles he bequeathed. John Kennedy was the first president to fully embrace the maximalist crisis logic of NSC-68: “We cannot simply sit by and watch on the sidelines. There are no sidelines.”103

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  In January 1961, Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy delivered seminal speeches: the first a farewell address, the second an inaugural. They were opposite in purpose. Eisenhower’s speech repudiated Nitze’s foreign-policy vision; Kennedy’s embraced it. Eisenhower was bidding farewell to the nation. Foremost on his mind was the manner in which the military had come to assume an outsized place in national life. He observed that the “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the federal government.” Eisenhower was referring to the quadrupling of America’s defense budget ushered in by NSC-68 and the Korean War—and the problems he had faced in trimming a budget once it had been established. “In the councils of government,” Eisenhower warned, “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” This complex did not only threaten “our liberties or democratic processes,” Eisenhower said, but could also sully the nation’s reservoir of intellectual capital:

  Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present—and is gravely to be regarded.104

  Eisenhower’s presidency had ended in the most remarkable fashion.

  Kennedy delivered his inaugural address three days after Eisenhower’s elegiac farewell. It was a typically frigid January day in Washington, and Kennedy chose not to wear an overcoat or scarf so as to emphasize his youthful vitality. Flanked on each side by two well-wrapped former and future presidents, Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson, Kennedy spoke with conviction and purpose, his words given exclamation points by visible puffs of exhalation. It took just two and a half minutes for Kennedy to commit U.S. foreign policy to anything and everything: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that 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. This much we pledge—and more.”105

  The speech was one of the most gracefully written inaugurals in history. It contained myriad other themes presented with artistry: a pledge of assistance to “those people in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery”; an entreaty to remember that “civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof. Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate”; a challenge to American citizens to “ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” The speech became the unavoidable point of comparison for all subsequent inaugurals; its primary author, Theodore Sorensen, set the highest literary bar. Yet lurking behind the ornate words was a fierce commitment to Cold War confrontation and activism every bit as pungent as that presented in NSC-68. “In the long history of the world,” Kennedy said near the end of the speech, “only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility—I welcome it.” The inaugural address synthesized Woodrow Wilson’s idealism—“defending freedom”—and Paul Nitze’s alarm-fueled pugnacity: “its hour of maximum danger.” The United States had arrived at a high point in its confidence in muscular foreign-policy idealism. For Kennedy to remain true to his inaugural word, America’s diplomatic commitments would have to expand in precisely the way Nitze had earlier proposed.

  Many of the young president’s appointments were precisely the type of policy-oriented academics that Eisenhower identified with alarm. McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy’s national security adviser, was old-money Boston and a star in the academic firmament. Harvard had elected Bundy to its prestigious Society of Fellows in 1941, when he was just twenty-two, and made him dean of the college in 1953, when he was thirty-four—the youngest man so honored in Harvard’s history. Walt Rostow, Bundy’s deputy assistant for national security affairs, was a Yale Ph.D. and a Rhodes scholar at Oxford. He joined the administration from MIT’s CIA-funded Center for International Studies, where he had participated in numerous government-sanctioned research programs. In 1960, Rostow “answered Karl Marx” with his seminal book The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto. Rostow claimed that the United States was destined to best the Soviet Union in “modernizing” the Third World, thus sealing the West’s victory over Marxism-Leninism—which Rostow dismissed as a mere “disease of the transition” to modernity.106 Rostow borrowed from NSC-68—and expanded upon it—in rationalizing a vast increase in America’s Cold War commitments. Finally, Robert S. McNamara moved from the presidency of Ford to assume control of the Pentagon—an even larger organizational behemoth. Nonetheless, his academic credentials, from the University of California, Berkeley, and Harvard Business School, were highly impressive. Indeed, McNamara made his cerebral proclivities clear when he chose to live in the college town of Ann Arbor rather than buy a mansion in Grosse Point, the more conventional housing choice of Ford executives. He was a voracious reader, possessed of preternatural self-assurance, and devoted to RAND’s pioneering work in quantitative analysis. McNamara was set on rationalizing his department, on making it bow to his will.

  Kennedy himself was a gifted student at Harvard and the London School of Economics, although he followed Nitze in succumbing to extracurricular temptations that brought down his grades. His gilded childhood and early adulthood involved a significant amount of European travel, which included a trip to Prague in 1938, where he had roused the ire of George Kennan, then serving as the U.S. ambassador. Kennedy summarized the method behind his hiring policy when he remarked, “There’s nothing like brains, you can’t beat brains.”107 Rostow, in turn, was impressed by Kennedy’s intellect, observing, “Ideas were tools. He picked them up easily li
ke statistics or the names of local politicians. He wanted to know how ideas could be put to work.”108 Having been rejected for his preferred position as secretary of state—this vital position went to another Rhodes scholar, Dean Rusk—Adlai Stevenson accepted as a consolation prize the ambassadorship to the United Nations. Casting a jaundiced eye over the bright young things hired ahead of him, Stevenson observed: “They’ve got the damndest bunch of boy commandos running around … you ever saw.”109 Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn relayed his own concerns in memorable terms to his friend and protégé, Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson: “Well, Lyndon, you may be right and they may be every bit as intelligent as you say, but I’d feel a whole lot better about them if just one of them had run for sheriff once.”110

  Rayburn’s meaning was clear: running for elected office imparts a cautionary sense of what will fly that might elude the most brilliant thinkers, unused to real-world constraints on their process of thinking and strategizing. Rayburn suspected that the Kennedy administration was committed to too many bold, transformational ideas—rendered vital by the backdrop portrayal of acute crisis presented by Nitze and others—and seemed to have only trace understanding of what was meant by the art of the possible. The Kennedy era truly witnessed the social sciences entering the “crucible of circumstance,” as Charles Beard had prophesied in 1917.

  * * *

  During the televised presidential debates with Richard Nixon, Kennedy had criticized the Eisenhower administration for allowing Cuba to turn communist on its watch. It was a damning charge, which consciously echoed Republican attacks on Truman for “losing China” in 1949. What Kennedy did not know was that Eisenhower and Nixon had already laid plans to oust Castro through a CIA-orchestrated counterrevolution—the gambit that had apparently worked so well in Iran and Guatemala. Yet Nixon could not reveal these plans in response to Kennedy’s charge without giving Castro notice of America’s intentions. Holding his tongue must have been agonizing for Nixon in the circumstances. But he had some kind of revenge when it fell to President Kennedy to implement the optimistic plans already laid. Having hammered Eisenhower and Nixon for complacency, Kennedy could hardly refuse to sanction the ouster of Castro. Indeed, many of Kennedy’s “best and the brightest” welcomed the opportunity. A few weeks prior to the invasion, McGeorge Bundy complained, “At this point we are like the Harlem Globetrotters. Passing forward, behind, sideways and underneath. But nobody has made a basket yet.” Here, Bundy reasoned, was a chance to put some points on the board.111