Kennedy

by Ted Sorensen

  There were, of course, the usual formal letters and diplomatic notes as well. The State Department experts expressed their traditional doubts about any avoidance of their normal channels. Eisenhower had also corresponded with Zhukov, Bulganin and Khrushchev; but those letters were recognized as a formal, governmental correspondence and were usually public. Kennedy rejected all advice that he terminate the correspondence; and the familiarity of this private channel facilitated, in my opinion, the exchange of letters that ended the Cuban missile crisis.

  The letters also enabled both men to judge the other more accurately. Khrushchev told Salinger and others that he had acquired a healthy respect as well as a personal liking for Kennedy, despite their differences. He told Castro, according to one source, that “Kennedy is a man you can talk with.” He appreciated Kennedy’s undemagogic approach and—certainly after October, 1962—believed in his determination.

  Kennedy in turn wholly rejected the popular images of Khrushchev as a coarse buffoon or lovable figure. The Chairman, in his view, was a clever, tough, shrewd adversary. “A national inferiority complex,” said JFK, “makes him act extra tough at times.” But Khrushchev was aware, Kennedy believed—certainly after October, 1962—of the caution with which they must both move in an age of mutual nuclear capability. He found the Chairman admirably uninterested in arguing over matters too small to concern him or too large to be changed. Khrushchev, he noted, shared some of his own complaints of internal pressures from the military, from other politicians and from associated countries. He was interested in Harriman’s report, after a visit to Moscow in 1963, that the Soviet Chairman—unlike Stalin, whom Harriman had also known—was willing to walk openly among the people, appeared to share a mutual affection with them, and maintained a stern dictatorial discipline without the Stalinist atmosphere of terror. Asked his evaluation of Khrushchev’s political status, the President replied simply: “I don’t think we know precisely, but I would suppose he has his good months and bad months—like we all do.”

  The President’s contacts with the Soviet Union were not confined to Khrushchev. He talked regularly with Soviet Ambassador (as of early 1962) Dobrynin, who combined a more genial attitude than his predecessor with a more sophisticated understanding of Western ways and a closer rapport with the Chairman. Dobrynin also saw Thompson and Rusk regularly, and talked with the Attorney General and White House aides. A variety of special trips to Moscow—by Rusk, Harriman, Salinger, McCloy, Udall and others—added to the increased exchange of views.

  The President met on several occasions with Khrushchev’s son-in-law, Aleksei Adzhubei, editor of Izvestia and a member of the Central Committee. (“He combines,” said the President, “the two hazardous professions of politics and journalism.”) Welcoming Adzhubei and his wife to his January 31, 1962, news conference in his first opening statement, he then devoted the second, as previously planned, to praising the Punta del Este OAS session for denouncing Marxism-Leninism in this hemisphere. Answering a query about a Republican Congressman’s attack on Salinger’s trip to Moscow, he commented: “I’m sure that some people in the Soviet Union are concerned about Mr. Adzhubei’s visits abroad” (undoubtedly an accurate surmise).

  Adzhubei was a useful if sometimes arrogant channel to the Chairman, and the possessor of an excellent sense of humor.3 His most valuable role, however, was as a channel to the Russian people. Under an agreement inspired by Salinger, Adzhubei was granted late in 1961 an exclusive two-hour interview with the President and published it in full, subject to check by our Russian-language experts, on the front page of Izvestia. It was the first time in history that the Russian people had been directly and fully exposed to an American President’s views on Soviet policy—and Kennedy mixed incisive reason with quiet reproof.

  Adzhubei, representing both of his hazardous professions, made a speech out of most of his previously prepared questions and another speech in response to most answers. “He is afraid,” said the President afterward, “that his colleagues on the Central Committee won’t think so much of his scoop when they see what he has to print on the front page.”

  What Izvestia had to print was Kennedy’s statement that the great threat to peace “is the effort by the Soviet Union to communize…the entire world…[and] to impose Communism by force”; that the Soviet Union had resumed nuclear tests even while its representatives were at the bargaining table; that if it would look “only to its national interest and to providing a better life for its people,” all would be well. Emphasizing the threats posed by Soviet moves in Berlin and elsewhere, he stressed constantly his desire for peace, his sympathy with Russian losses in World War II and his desire to work out a solution in Central Europe which would end all fears for both sides. “Our two peoples have the most to gain from peace,” he said, speaking to the larger Russian audience without forgetting his American and Allied readers also.

  He reassured the Russians that West Germany would not be armed with nuclear weapons, expressed hope for more Soviet-American trade in calmer times and exposed the fallacies in the Soviet position on disarmament. He was at his best when asked to imagine how he would look at West Germany if he were a veteran of the Soviet Navy instead of the American:

  If I were a Soviet veteran, I would see that West Germany has only…a fraction of the Soviet forces…[all] under the international control of NATO…and [poses] no…military threat now to the Soviet Union…. Then I would look at the power of the United States…and I would say that the important thing is for the Soviet Union and the United States not to get into a war, which would destroy both of our systems. So as a Soviet veteran, I would want the Soviet Union to reach an agreement with the United States which recognizes the interests and the commitments of the United States as well as our own, and not attempt to enforce singlehandedly a new situation…which would be against previous commitments we had made…. I would feel that the security of the Soviet Union was well protected, and that the important thing now is to reach an accord with the United States, our ally during that second war.

  The interview, faithfully reprinted, was reported by our embassy to have caused quite a stir in Moscow. Those unable to buy newspapers clustered around the outdoor bulletin boards where the front page was tacked up. Among those who purchased the paper, reported my brother Tom, a Deputy Director of USIA, after his visit to Moscow with Salinger several months later, many still carried well-worn copies in their pockets for cautious reference. Kennedy had come through loud and clear.

  Kennedy and Salinger then moved to carry communication with the Russian people still further. Agreement was reached early in 1962 on a TV exchange between Kennedy and Khrushchev. Each was to tape a film in his own office, without limitation as to subject matter and supplying his own translator’s “voice-over.” Films would then be exchanged one week ahead of their joint showing in both countries without either having an opportunity to answer or edit the other’s remarks. The order of appearance was up to the home country’s government. Kennedy was pleased. The American people, he noted, had far more TV sets than the Russians, but they also had far more exposure to the opposing point of view.

  The show was scheduled for March 25, 1962, to be announced March 15, to be filmed March 8. I began working on the President’s script on March 7. No cold war polemics were to be included, but America’s position on disarmament, wars of liberation and similar issues was to be set forth frankly. The chief emphasis was on our desire for peace, our friendship for the people of the Soviet Union and our common interests. The President hoped to use a few Russian words, to invoke the magic name of FDR and to ask the Soviets to reverse the course that Stalin had started.

  That very evening one of Khrushchev’s private messages arrived. He was deeply offended, he said, by the President’s address a few days earlier announcing that the United States was resuming full-scale nuclear tests. The TV exchange was off. Bolshakov told me a few days later that his government had been obligated to say a few harsh words. But these were c
omparatively low-key, he said. The Chairman still liked the President and the TV exchange would be held later. It never was.

  THE WESTERN ALLIANCE

  Kennedy had set out early in 1961 to establish personal contacts not only with his chief adversary but with his chief partners in the Atlantic Alliance. The Western leader whom he saw first, liked best and saw most often—four times in 1961 alone, seven times altogether—was British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. They did not always see eye to eye. Macmillan was more eager for summits with Khrushchev and less eager to prepare for war at West Berlin. He was not sure whether his government could go along with American plans for NATO conventional forces; and Kennedy knew his government couldn’t go along with Great Britain’s recognition of Red China. From time to time, the President had to discourage the Prime Minister’s temptation to play the role of peacemaker between East and West. And at least once Macmillan was briefly but violently angry—when he thought Kennedy’s offer of American Hawk missiles to Israel had displaced a British sale.

  But no differences of opinion or age prevented the two leaders from getting along famously. Each recognized in the other a keen understanding of history and politics—both international and domestic. Kennedy regarded Macmillan as a reliable ally, cooperative on issues that were difficult for him back home—such as the 1962 nuclear test resumptions. He enjoyed the Briton’s amiable conversation and style, his often eloquent letters, their frequent talks by transatlantic phone and his delightful sense of humor. (He enjoyed retelling Macmillan’s version of how Eisenhower “wouldn’t let Nixon on the property.”) A fondness developed between them which went beyond the necessities of alliance. A Washington luncheon in the spring of 1962, for example, was devoted mostly to a relaxed discussion of books and politics. Told after the Nassau agreement described below that he was “soft” on Macmillan, Kennedy replied: “If you were in that kind of trouble, you would want a friend.”

  This relationship was enhanced by the close personal ties and mutual respect linking Kennedy and Macmillan’s Ambassador to the United States, David Ormsby-Gore. The Ambassador knew both the President and the Prime Minister so well that he was ideally equipped to interpret or even predict each one’s reaction to the other’s proposals. Cousin to the late Kathleen Kennedy’s titled husband (who had been killed in the war), he was a long-time friend and contemporary of John Kennedy; and when in mid-1961 he was assigned to Washington, his handwritten note of delight pleased the President enormously. They saw each other frequently, on both a personal and official basis. Indeed, the President often consulted with or confided in the British Ambassador as he would a member of his own staff. “I trust David as I would my own Cabinet,” he said.

  Ormsby-Gore’s advantage was heightened by the President’s lesser confidence in the other two leading ambassadors of the Alliance, Wilhelm Grewe from West Germany and Hervé Alphand from France. Kennedy regarded both as extremely competent diplomats (although he was amused on one occasion when the social-minded Alphand chose Jacqueline as his pipeline for a message); and certainly the frequency of four-power ambassadorial meetings in Washington in 1961, principally on Berlin, was unprecedented. But he found Ormsby-Gore far more likely to know the thinking of his principal and far less likely to spill secrets and complaints to favored newsmen.

  The other leader of a Western power most in contact with Kennedy was West Germany’s Konrad Adenauer, eighty-five. Kennedy altered the Dulles policy of regarding the Chancellor as our principal European adviser and Adenauer knew it. Their differences on whether to negotiate with Khrushchev and how closely to follow De Gaulle were important and unresolved. The age barrier was formidable. “I sense I’m talking not only to a different generation,” the President told me, “but to a different era, a different world.” He found Adenauer hard to please and hard to budge, and his government hard put to keep a secret. The old Chancellor was constantly in need of repetitious reassurances of our love and honor. Yet Kennedy had a genuine liking and a deep respect for Adenauer. He admired what he had accomplished, and enjoyed his wit. Although Adenauer never seemed to feel fully confident of Kennedy, he respected the firm U.S. stand at Berlin in 1961 and at Cuba in 1962.

  Charles de Gaulle and John Kennedy met only during their Paris talks in 1961. Their personal rapport on that occasion surprised them as well as everyone else. The President was fascinated by De Gaulle’s role in previous history and his focus on future history. During a glittering white-tie dinner at Versailles Palace, he quizzed the General on his recollections of such former associates as Churchill and Roosevelt. Churchill, said De Gaulle, concerned himself only with short-range aims. “Like all Englishmen, he was a merchant, and bargained with Russia by giving concessions in the East in return for a free hand elsewhere. A fighter, he could on some days be extremely interesting and on others totally impossible.” Roosevelt was always the charming aristocrat, said the General, an exceptional war leader who did have long-range views but often the wrong ones, as in the case of Russia. Despite “much superficial appearance of mutual affection,” he said, FDR and Churchill basically did not see eye to eye.

  “Of the two whom did you prefer?” asked Kennedy. The General’s answer intrigued him. “I quarreled violently and bitterly with Churchill but always got on with him. I never quarreled with Roosevelt and never got on with him.” When Kennedy remarked that both Churchill and Macmillan must have inherited some of their qualities from their American mothers, De Gaulle replied grandly that “pure English blood does not seem capable of producing a really strong man”; and he cited the cases of Disraeli and Lloyd George as well as Churchill.

  Kennedy had prepared for his meeting with this “great captain of the West,” as he called him—in a successful appeal to De Gaulle’s known vanity—by reading selections from the General’s Memoirs, which he later quoted back to him. There he found the basic convictions which the French President had maintained for nearly twenty years, and with which he would shock a strangely unprepared Western world in 1963: (1) a determination “to assure France primacy in Western Europe” and to block the efforts of the Anglo-Saxons (Britain and the United States) “to relegate us to a secondary place”; and (2) a belief in unifying all of Europe, including a disarmed Germany, and eventually a reconciled Russia, but never, never Great Britain. (Unification, moreover, could proceed only so far inasmuch as the only ultimate reality was the nation-state.) Britain—as proven by Churchill’s rejection of his plea for an accord in 1945—was an island more interested in the open sea than in Europe, he felt, both a cause and an agent of “the United States’s desire for hegemony” in Europe and Europe’s former colonies.

  “I was almost startled,” Ambassador Gavin would remark later, “by the cold hardness of his unqualified statement that the U.S. should stay out of the affairs of Europe…only bringing its weight to bear in case of necessity.” Kennedy was not startled. In 1961 he had read it in De Gaulle’s Memoirs and heard it from De Gaulle’s lips. Yet their talks, he said, “could not have been more cordial and I could not have more confidence in any man. I found General De Gaulle…a wise counselor for the future…far more interested in our frankly stating our position…than in appearing to agree.” He did not share the view that the General was merely a nineteenth-century romantic with nostalgic yearnings for the past. But he did share the view that the French President could be irritating, intransigent, insufferably vain, inconsistent and impossible to please.

  De Gaulle, for example, talked often of the need to reorganize NATO. Kennedy saw merit in this, in view of the vastly changed conditions since the Organization was formed. The French Foreign Office, during my diplomatic scouting trip in advance of the President’s arrival in Paris, repeatedly suggested that, inasmuch as De Gaulle was not the type to make requests, Kennedy should ask him how he wanted to reorganize NATO. (Obviously De Gaulle’s own subordinates did not know.) Kennedy did ask, but he received only vague generalities in reply. The General did tell Kennedy that he believed in uniting
the Allies for swift, effective responses to every Communist move in Berlin. But within two months his nonparticipation and opposition on everything proposed were making such a stance impossible. He also told Kennedy that he had been frustrated by Eisenhower’s habit of agreeing in principle but never following through, and that increased political and military consultations were required. Kennedy was no more willing than Eisenhower to accept De Gaulle’s scheme for a three-man directorate in which France spoke for all nations of continental Western Europe. But he agreed to more meetings between the two of them and to closer consultation at the Foreign Secretary and Chief of Staff level.

  Yet nothing came of this agreement either. De Gaulle’s answers to Kennedy’s letters on nuclear problems and Berlin negotiations were sharp, evasive or both; attempted telephone contact broke down as both men overwhelmed the interpreters; and all invitations to talk again with the General or with his representative were politely put aside. In September, 1962, for example, De Gaulle sent word through Alphand that he liked Kennedy, liked their last meeting and would like to meet him again, but inasmuch as solid agreements on a long list of issues seemed unlikely, the time was not yet right. (The message strongly resembled Kennedy’s own refusals to meet at the summit with Khrushchev.) Late in 1963 the General did tentatively agree to come in March of the following year. Ambassador Alphand suggested Palm Beach. “But I’ ll be damned,” said Kennedy, “if I’ ll show De Gaulle the worst side of American life. Cape Cod is where I’m really from, and it can’t be any more gloomy in March than Colombey-les-deux-Églises” (where De Gaulle stays).