by Ted Sorensen
2. The United Nations
These remarks were contained in John Kennedy’s address to the United Nations General Assembly in September, 1961. It was a critical moment in the life of that body, the most critical in its sixteen-year history. The Soviet Union, angered in particular by the UN peace-keeping operation in the Congo, was slowly strangling the organization financially, disrupting its progress and insisting upon three Secretary Generals instead of one, each representing a different bloc (East, West and neutral), and each empowered to block the others.
The application of this principle, known as the Troika (a Russian wagon drawn by three horses abreast), would have permanently crippled the United Nations. It stemmed from Khrushchev’s anger at Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld, “who poses as a neutral person….” There are neutral nations but no neutral men, he told the President at Vienna, and the events in the Congo taught the Soviet Union a lesson—that the UN could act against the interests of individual states. The Soviet Union did not seek control over the organization, he said, but it did not wish the United States to have such control either. The United States had a majority in the UN, but times may change, he went on. The UN is not a parliament and the rule of majority has no place there. With a three-man Secretariat no one would be able to pursue a policy prejudicial to any other side.
At the time there seemed little reason to believe that the Chairman could succeed in displacing Hammarskjöld and amending the UN Charter. On the contrary, Hammarskjöld daily was making the UN a more meaningful, powerful instrument. But on the morning of Monday, September 18, 1961, as Kennedy boarded “Air Force One” at Cape Cod to return to Washington, he was handed a grim message. Dag Hammarskjöld had been killed in a plane crash in the Congo. The President had not known the Secretary General well, but he admired his courage and skill. “I hope that all of us recognize,” he said, “the heavy burdens that his passing places upon us.”
Only three days earlier he had tentatively decided to address the opening of the General Assembly on September 25. Now it was suggested in some quarters that he wait until the dust settled. The atmosphere at the UN was dispirited and disorganized. The Soviets were insisting that they would veto even an Acting Secretary General until a Troika was installed. The Congo operation was at a standstill. The last session had been at times turned into a circus by the antics of Khrushchev and Castro. And now rising tensions in much of the world—over Berlin, nuclear testing, Southeast Asia, Bizerte and elsewhere—cast doubt upon the UN’s future.
But the President believed the UN had to have a future. He hoped he could help to rekindle its hope. Brushing aside suggested gimmicks for the contents of his speech—e.g., “The Agenda of Man” or “A World Bill of Rights”—he decided to speak forcefully (although not for an hour, which he was told was customary) on the real issues confronting the Assembly and the world: a stronger UN with no Troika—disarmament and a nuclear test ban—cooperation on outer space and economic development—an end to colonialism in the Communist empire as well as in the West—and a recognition of the Communist threats to peace over Berlin and Southeast Asia. He wanted the United States to initiate concrete proposals for UN efforts and to include them in his remarks.
Several days later, the speech was written and rewritten over an intensive weekend at Hyannis Port. I worked with the President at his cottage, on the phone and, finally, on his plane as it flew in heavy fog from Cape Cod to New York. Because both the Presidential and passenger cabins were crowded and noisy, we squatted on-the floor in the bare passageway between the two, comparing and sorting pages. He suggested that we each write a peroration and then take the best of both. In New York he read the latest draft aloud to Rusk and his UN team—an unusual practice for him—and then made his final revisions that night.
The next morning, as he strode to the rostrum in that great hall, the Secretary General’s chair was empty and the air seemed heavy with gloom. The President began softly:
We meet in an hour of grief and challenge. Dag Hammarskjöld is dead. But the United Nations lives on. His tragedy is deep in our hearts, but the task for which he died is at the top of our agenda….
The problem is not the death of one man; the problem is the life of this organization…. For in [its] development…rests the only true alternative to war, and war appeals no longer as a rational alternative….
So let us here resolve that Dag Hammarskjöld did not live, or die, in vain. Let us call a truce to terror….
The UN, said the President, was “both the measure and the vehicle of man’s most generous impulses.” It needed to be strengthened, not defied.
However difficult it may be to fill Mr. Hammarskjöld’s place, it can better be filled by one man rather than by three. Even the three horses of the troika did not have three drivers, all going in different directions….
To permit each great power to decide…its own case would entrench the Cold War in the headquarters of peace…. As one of the great powers, we reject it. For we far prefer world law, in the age of self-determination, to world war, in the age of mass extermination.
He reviewed the pending issues and proposals, and then closed with unusual feeling in his voice:
However close we sometimes seem to that dark and final abyss, let no man of peace and freedom despair. For he does not stand alone….
Together we shall save our planet or together we shall perish in its flames. Save it we can, and save it we must, and then shall we earn the eternal thanks of mankind and, as peacemakers, the eternal blessing of God.
The subsequent success of the sixteenth session of the United Nations General Assembly could hardly be attributed to the President’s address. Skillful negotiations, conducted chiefly by Ambassador Stevenson, played a major role. But the President had provided a fresh impetus when it was badly needed. The Troika was rejected, U Thant was installed as Acting Secretary General and the integrity of his office was reinforced. Despite a double standard on India’s seizure of Goa, and the growing dangers of an irresponsible Assembly majority, composed of new members who had not participated in drafting the Charter, the UN remained active, and so did U.S. influence within it. No Soviet initiative succeeded over our opposition, yet the reverse was frequently true. In fact, by obtaining a decision that Red China’s admission came under the “important question” category requiring a two-thirds vote, that admission—in the absence of a change of manner in Peking—was made all the more difficult.
But a new UN crisis loomed almost immediately—a financial crisis. To ease the deficit caused by the Soviets, French and others defaulting on their special assessments for the Congo and other peace-keeping operations, a stopgap emergency bond issue was decided upon. The President pledged that his government would purchase up to $100 million. It was, he recognized, in this country’s interest. The loan would be paid back out of the regular UN membership assessments, to which the Communists were contributing proportionately; and any vacuum caused by the bankruptcy and disintegration of the UN in such areas as the Congo would surely lead in time either to a big-power confrontation or a far more costly U.S. operation.
Nevertheless the Congress was hard to convince. Some members complained about various UN actions. (“No policeman is universally popular,” said the President to the Congress, “particularly when he uses his stick to restore law and order on his beat.”) Others complained about the “one country-one vote” principle diminishing our influence. (“Have they ever stopped to consider,” mused the President, calling me from his plane about an anti-UN speech by Senator Jackson that he wanted me to check before he returned from a trip, “what our influence would be compared with India, China and Russia if votes were weighted according to population?”) Some complained about the cost. (This bill represents, said the President, an investment of one-tenth of one percent of our budget, compared to the 50 percent going for defense.) Others complained about even belonging to so weak and dissonant an organization. (They “would abandon this imperfect world instru
ment,” said the President, “because they dislike our imperfect world.”) With considerable White House help the bill passed; and though its financial crisis was only postponed, the United Nations survived.
The President did not regard the UN as a substitute for American action on matters where he bore primary responsibility for our security. The small and neutralist nations—always desperate to avoid war and often gullible to oversimplified Soviet propaganda (such as a “free city” in West Berlin without Western protection, or equating the Cuban missile bases with American overseas installations)—could not be relied upon, in his opinion, to settle major disputes, even if the UN had the power to assume jurisdiction. The great powers had to settle their own confrontations. Nor could the UN do much about Communist subversion and infiltration, or impose effective disarmament, or provide its own military deterrent to major aggression.
But it was, said the President, “primarily the protector of the small and the weak, and a safety valve for the strong.” A small nation’s blowing off steam in the General Assembly was obviously preferable to its blowing up cities elsewhere. The executive actions of the UN Secretary General—far more than the noisy clashes in the Assembly—could help settle, confine or cool off brush-fire wars among the smaller nations and prevent them from turning into major conflagrations. No single outside government could intervene in such cases as safely, impartially or effectively. In the UN’s exercise of this capacity—in West New Guinea, in Yemen, in the Congo—Kennedy was willing to give it every support, including military transports. And over the very long run it could be developed, he hoped (without too much expectation), into “a genuine world security system.”
3. The Space Effort
In his 1961 address to the United Nations, the President called for peaceful cooperation in a new domain—outer space. “The cold reaches of the universe,” he said, “must not become the new arena of an even colder war.” In both his Inaugural and first State of the Union addresses that year, he had called for East-West cooperation “to invoke the wonders of science instead of its terrors. Together let us explore the stars.”
But the Soviets had brusquely rejected the suggestion. They had little incentive to cooperate with an American space program which lagged far behind their own—not in the number and variety of scientific studies but in the all-important capacity to lift large payloads into orbit. With their more powerful rocket boosters—developed originally to launch more massive nuclear warheads before they learned the technique of the small hydrogen bomb—the Soviets in 1957 were the first to launch a space satellite, then the first to put living animals into orbit. The Eisenhower administration, despite prodding from Majority Leader Johnson, started its own program slowly and tardily, with much scoffing and skepticism from Republican officials about the meaning of the Russian effort. President Truman had also cut back the infant American space program started after the war with the help of German scientists.
John Kennedy had borne down hard on this space gap in the 1960 campaign. To him it symbolized the nation’s lack of initiative, ingenuity and vitality under Republican rule. He was convinced that Americans did not yet fully grasp the world-wide political and psychological impact of the space race. With East and West competing to convince the new and undecided nations which way to turn, which wave was the future, the dramatic Soviet achievements, he feared, were helping to build a dangerous impression of unchallenged world leadership generally and scientific pre-eminence particularly. American scientists could repeat over and over that the more solid contributions of our own space research were a truer measure of national strength, but neither America nor the world paid much attention.
After the election, a top-notch transition task force under Jerome Wiesner had warned Kennedy that the United States could not win the race to put a man in space. Others expressed concern that a Soviet space monopoly would bring new military dangers and disadvantages to the West. Our own rocket thrust was adequate for all known military purposes, but no one could be certain of its future uses. Other nations, moreover, assumed that a Soviet space lead meant a missile lead as well; and whether this assumption was true or false, it affected their attitudes in the cold war.
Before his first hundred days in the White House were out, Kennedy’s concern was dramatically proven correct. Moscow announced on April 12 that Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had completed an orbital flight around the earth in less than two hours. As the Soviet Union capitalized on its historic feat in all corners of the globe, Kennedy congratulated Khrushchev and Gagarin—and set to work.
He had already sharply increased the budget request for development of the large Saturn rocket booster; and he had already revitalized the National Space Council, with the Vice President as Chairman, to expedite progress with less military-civilian quibbling. But that was not enough. Nor was he reassured on the day after the Gagarin announcement when National Aeronautics and Space Administrator James Webb brought in a desk model of the U.S.-designed capsule soon to carry an American astronaut into space. Eying the Rube Goldberg-like contraption on his desk, Kennedy speculated that Webb might have bought it in a toy store on his way to work that morning.
To gain some immediate answers, he asked me to review with Wiesner that same day—in preparation for an interview he had granted for that evening—the outlook in NASA and the Budget Bureau on next steps in the space race. NASA reported that the dramatic big-booster steps still to come might include, in possible order of development, longer one-man orbits, two men in a spacecraft, an orbiting space laboratory, a fixed space way station, a manned rocket around the moon and back, a manned landing on the moon and return, manned exploration of the planets and a fully controllable plane for space travel. For any of the early items on this list, said the scientists, America’s prospects for surpassing the Soviets were poor because of their initial rocket superiority. Our first best bet to beat them was the landing of a man on the moon.
The President was more convinced than any of his advisers that a second-rate, second-place space effort was inconsistent with this country’s security, with its role as world leader and with the New Frontier spirit of discovery. Consequently he asked the Vice President as Chairman of the Space Council to seek answers to all the fundamental questions concerning the steps we could or must take to achieve pre-eminence in space—in terms of manpower, scientific talent, overtime facilities, alternative fuels, agency cooperation and money. Intensive hearings were held by the Council. The details of a new space budget were hammered out by Webb and McNamara. On the basis of these reports, the President made what he later termed one of the most important decisions he would make as President: “to shift our efforts in space from low to high gear.” In his special second State of the Union Message of May, 1961, he included a determined and dramatic pledge: to land a man on the moon and return him safely to earth “before this decade is out.”
He was unwilling to promise a specific year, and referred to “this decade” as a deadline he could later interpret as either 1969 or 1970. James Webb, in fact, gave him visions of a late 1968 moon trip as a triumphant climax to his second term, (tinder the level of support previously provided, the flight would not have been accomplished before the middle 1970’ s, if at all.) Whatever the date, the purpose of the pledge was to provide a badly needed focus and sense of urgency for the entire space program. The lunar landing was not the sole space effort to be undertaken; but it was clearly one of the great human adventures of modern history.
“No single space project in this period,” the President told the Congress, “will be more impressive to mankind or more important…[or] so difficult or expensive to accomplish.” It would require, he said, the highest kind of national priority, the diversion of scientific manpower and funds from other important activities, a greater degree of dedication and discipline, and an end to all the petty stoppages, rivalries and personnel changes long troubling the space program.
In a very real sense, it will not be one man going to the moon…it
will be an entire nation. For all of us must work to put him there…. This is not merely a race. Space is open to us now; and our eagerness to share its meaning is not governed by the efforts of others. We go into space because whatever mankind must undertake, free men must fully share.
The routine applause with which the Congress greeted this pledge struck him, he told me in the car going back to the White House, as something less than enthusiastic. Twenty billion dollars was a lot of money. The legislators knew a lot of better ways to spend it. Seated to the side of the rostrum, I thought the President looked strained in his effort to win them over. Suddenly he departed extensively from his prepared text—the only time he ever did that in addressing the Congress—to express his awareness of the responsibility they faced in making so expensive and long-range a commitment. “Unless we are prepared to do the work and bear the burdens to make it successful,” he said, there is no sense in going ahead. His voice sounded urgent but a little uncertain.
The Congress by nearly unanimous vote embraced what the President called this “great new American enterprise,” aided by the successful shot of Commander Alan Shepard into space (although not into orbit) a few weeks earlier. The space budget was increased by 50 percent in that year. The following year it exceeded all the pre-1961 space budgets combined. Major new facilities sprang up in Houston, Texas, Cape Canaveral (now Cape Kennedy), Florida and elsewhere. Research produced for or from U.S. space launchings introduced advancements in dozens of other fields, ranging from medicine to metal fabrication. With the orbital flight of Colonel John Glenn in February, 1962, an instrumented flight past Venus later that year, and the use of a Telstar satellite to relay TV programs (including a Presidential news conference), the acceleration and expansion of America’s space program began to gain ground.