Kennedy

by Ted Sorensen

  De Gaulle’s inconsistencies of policy and position were regarded by Kennedy with some irony. The General favored neutralism in Southeast Asia (where he was powerless) but not in Africa (where he wasn’ t). He believed in stout Allied resistance to the Communists, but constantly provoked divisions that could only weaken that resistance. He felt free to divide the Alliance politically because it protected him militarily. He wanted to be a leader in NATO, but withdrew his forces from it. He assumed to speak for the Common Market, but constantly hampered it. “Unlike us,” said Kennedy privately, more in wonder than in irritation, “he recognizes the Soviet position on the Oder-Neisse, trades extensively with the East Germans and accepts the division of Germany—and yet he has persuaded the West German Government that he is more pro-German and anti-Communist than we.” De Gaulle refused to sign the Test Ban Treaty, to pay his back UN assessments or to take part in disarmament talks. Indeed, he seemed to prefer, observed Kennedy, tension instead of intimacy in his relations with the United States as a matter of pride and independence.

  Despite these differences, the two men retained a consistent admiration for each other. De Gaulle in 1961 toasted Kennedy’s “intelligence and courage” with unaccustomed warmth. He was smitten with Jacqueline, warned her to beware of Mrs. Khrushchev at Vienna, and was touched by the Kennedys’ hand-picked gift of an original letter from the Washington-Lafayette correspondence. He was reported to be deeply impressed by “the real stuff” in an American President calmly prepared to exercise his nuclear responsibilities. “I have more confidence in your country now,” said De Gaulle when Kennedy departed Paris. (According to one veteran diplomat with us who had observed the General’s attitude toward Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower, that was no exaggeration but very faint praise.)

  JFK in turn could not help but admire De Gaulle’s single-minded determination and progress in restoring the glory and grandeur of a country geographically smaller than Texas, his ability to convert French weaknesses into strengths, and his majestic command of language, presence and character. Publicly he maintained that

  if trouble comes, General De Gaulle, as he has in the past, will definitely meet his responsibility…. We do not look for those who agree with us but for those…who are committed to the defense of the West. I believe General De Gaulle is. So we will get along.

  The truth is that Kennedy himself did not look upon either the Alliance or Atlantic harmony as an end in itself. He cared about the concrete problems which the Alliance faced, such as Berlin, trade negotiations and the American balance of payments. But he felt that State Department tradition had led us to think of every problem of foreign policy in terms of the Western Alliance when it was no longer as central to all our problems as it once had been, and when Europe’s own strength had caused it to assert its views more independently. He tended to look upon the rest of the Alliance in somewhat the same light as he looked upon the Congress—as a necessary but not always welcome partner, whose cooperation he could not always obtain, whose opinions he could not always accept and with whom an uneasy relationship seemed inevitable. As the Cuban missile crisis illustrated, he was at his best when his responsibilities did not have to be shared.

  He quoted Napoleon as having said that he won all his successes because he fought allies—and Churchill as having said that the history of any alliance is the history of mutual recrimination—and obviously he agreed with both of them. The prolonged, fruitless consultations on Berlin in 1961, and the constant criticisms emanating from unnamed sources in Allied capitals, often annoyed him. He noted sarcastically that NATO members who complained about U.S. “interference” in European security still expected the U.S. to bear the brunt of NATO military outlays while they failed to meet their quotas. (“A coherent policy,” he said, “cannot call for both our military presence and our diplomatic absence.”) He could not please both Macmillan and De Gaulle on the pace of Berlin negotiations and recognized that displeasing them both was better than trying to please either.

  Yet he recognized that the preservation of Allied unity, like the passage of his legislative program, was indispensable to the achievement of his aims. Consequently, he labored tirelessly to win support in the Alliance as he did in the Congress. While he had devoted more time as Senator to Latin America, Africa and Asia (and continued as President to give those areas unprecedented attention), he recognized—as he showed in the Berlin crisis—that Western Europe was this nation’s foremost area of “vital interest.” While some charged him with downgrading NATO, his emphasis on conventional force to meet Communist “nibbling”—as a substitute for total reliance on the American nuclear umbrella—actually gave the full NATO membership a more important role than it would otherwise have played. His opposition to individual nuclear deterrents, while unpopular among some allies, helped in part to hold the Alliance together. He recognized—in his 1961 Paris address, among others—that Western Europe was no longer an uncertain dependent but an Increasingly productive, united and influential equal. On July 4, 1962, in a “Declaration of Interdependence” address from Independence Hall in Philadelphia, he looked forward to a “concrete Atlantic Partnership, a mutually beneficial partnership between the new union now emerging in Europe and the old American union founded here 175 years ago.”

  In both 1961 and 1962 he expressed the hope that Western Europe would “play [its] role in this great world struggle, as we have done it…not look inward and just become a rich, carefully secluded group.” He encouraged—even though it created problems for American business—Europe’s economic and political integration, including the adherence of Great Britain to the Common Market.

  His chief concern was the necessity of maintaining Western unity in the face of specific Communist threats. “If there is one path above all others to war,” he said in his 1961 address on Berlin, “it is the path of weakness and disunity.” He did not expect the Alliance to hold tight on Vietnam, the Congo, Cyprus or similar side issues. But he was determined to hold it together on any major confrontation with the Soviet Union.

  TROUBLE IN THE ALLIANCE, 1963

  The Alliance held when war threatened at Berlin and again in the Cuban missile crisis. But Kennedy’s success at Cuba caused Khrushchev to revise his plans for Berlin. The balance of power became more stable; the superiority of our deterrent was hailed; and the Western Europeans, unduly confident that their danger was over, promptly indulged in what the President called “the luxury of dissension” and displayed a not unnatural resentment of their powerful American guarantor.

  The initial, and possibly avoidable, trouble came in a chain of events sparked by the Kennedy-McNamara decision to cancel all further work on the Skybolt air-to-ground missile. The high cost of this highly complex weapon, compared to Polaris and Minuteman missiles, could not be justified once more reliable means had been developed to do the same job. But this decision stunned not only the Air Force and its manned bomber partisans in the Congress but Great Britain as well. For that country had planned with our assent to purchase Skybolt missiles as the best available means of remaining a nuclear power. A 1960 Macmillan-Eisenhower agreement that the U.S. would make Skybolt available if produced was interpreted by the British as a promise to produce. Now Kennedy had decided that it was not worth producing.

  Unfortunately preoccupation with the Cuban and India-Chinese crises postponed all White House decisions on the defense budget until late in 1962, too late for an orderly consideration of the problems created by Skybolt’s demise. The President—who saw no point to a small independent British deterrent anyway—mistakenly assumed that it was largely a technical and not a political problem. He paid comparatively little attention after McNamara promised to see British Defense Minister Thorneycroft and “work it out.” After Cuba, it seemed a small problem. All problems did. Later Kennedy would wonder aloud why his Ambassador to London, David Bruce, or Macmillan’s Ambassador to Washington, David Ormsby-Gore, or Macmillan himself, or Rusk, or someone, had not warned both sides in
advance of the storm. But no doubt Macmillan wondered why Kennedy had not called him; and Rusk, after warning Kennedy in November of the possible British reaction, deferred to McNamara.

  The storm, when it broke, threatened a rift in Anglo-American relations. It posed a major political crisis for Macmillan’s already shaky government. McNamara had alerted Bruce, Thorneycroft and Ormsby-Gore in November but postponed until mid-December his trip to London to break the news definitely. Then he frankly stated at the London airport that Skybolt was on its way out, and refused to present an alternative that would keep alive a separate British deterrent. This led to an angry outburst from Thorneycroft, which promptly appeared in the British press. McNamara was surprised—not only by the outburst but by the British Government’s failure to face up to the problem during the preceding month, and even during the previous fourteen months which had witnessed recurring doubts about Skybolt. He had expected them to propose an alternative, probably Polaris, which we could then negotiate. But the British, under pressure from their own air force and defense contractors, preferred to take their stand on Skybolt, hoping that delay would pressure Kennedy into keeping it.

  In previous years Macmillan—despite cautions from his scientists and in answer to attacks from anti-American and antinuclear members of Parliament from both parties—had extravagantly praised the Skybolt agreement as the key to Britain’s “special relationship” with the U.S. He had canceled Britain’s own missile program entirely. Now British press and politicians complained with some justification that the Americans had been tactless, heavy-handed and abrupt, that the U.S. was revealing either an insensitivity to an ally’s pride and security concerns or a desire to push her out of the nuclear business. Latent resentment of Kennedy’s refusal to consult more on the Cuban missile crisis boiled to the top. Some charged that the Skybolt system was not really a failure, and that the U.S. was threatening cancellation to force Britain to fulfill its troop quota in Western Europe.

  A largely symbolic meeting between Kennedy and Macmillan—their sixth—had already been set for late December in Nassau in the Bahamas (Kennedy having rejected another Bermuda meeting on the grounds that its midwinter climate was too undependable for relaxation). There was little relaxation at Nassau. The two leaders talked briefly and with essential agreement on the next steps for the Congo, India, test-ban negotiations and conventional forces. But the nuclear issue prolonged their sessions. Kennedy adamantly refused to retain the full Skybolt cost in his Budget, ignoring the suggestion that he keep it alive until Britain’s Common Market negotiations were settled. His public commitment to abandon it and his plans for the tax-cut Budget made that impossible. Macmillan was equally adamant and both eloquent and emotional as well. He was like a ship that looks buoyant but is apt to sink, he said. Did Kennedy want to live with the consequences of sinking him? He warned that the collapse of his government on this issue could bring to power a more anti-American, more neutralist group from either party.

  Like his Republican predecessor, Kennedy had a soft spot for Macmillan; and he had already decided that the bipartisan nature of our “special relationship” with the British required him not to send the Prime Minister home without some substitute for the missiles Eisenhower had promised. “Looking at it from their point of view—which they do almost better than anybody,” he remarked to me later, “it might well be concluded that…we had an obligation to provide an alternative.” A political crisis in England could upset plans for its accession to the Common Market or even the agreement—made simultaneously in 1960 with the Skybolt agreement—to provide a Polaris submarine base for the U.S. in Scotland.

  If the British still had faith in Skybolt, said the President, the project could proceed—and they need pick up only half of the development costs.6 No, said Macmillan, he now accepted U.S. evidence on the missile’s performance. Perhaps, said the President, a joint study could be commissioned on how to fill the Skybolt gap. No, said Macmillan, he needed something more definitive; and he cited an angry letter he had received from 137 members of Parliament from his own party. Possibly, said the President, the Royal Air Force could be adapted to use our shorter-range Hound Dog air-to-ground missile. No, said Macmillan, that won’t work.

  Obviously Macmillan would be satisfied only with some arrangement on Polaris missiles, and Kennedy was unwilling to provide them on unconditional bilateral terms. No real thought had been given to a new Polaris arrangement. Under Secretary George Ball, representing the State Department at Nassau, strongly reflected the department’s view that any offer of Polaris outside of a NATO multilateral framework would be regarded as fresh evidence of pro-British discrimination and indifference to nuclear “proliferation.” It would sharply contrast with Kennedy’s decisions earlier in the year not to aid the French nuclear force and not to give land-based medium-range missiles to NATO. The President, moreover, considered nuclear proliferation—the development of nuclear capabilities by more countries, even allies—as a most dangerous development. It would increase instability in the balance of power, divisions within the Alliance, the difficulties of disarmament, the diversion of Alliance funds from ground forces, the dangers of accidental or irrational nuclear war, and a duplication of targeting with inconsistent strategies. It raised the possibility of an ally’s triggering a nuclear exchange in the expectation that our deterrent would necessarily come to their aid. The French were already developing their own nuclear “force de frappe,” too small to deter the Soviets but large enough to provoke an attack. The West Germans, who had formally renounced nuclear arms, were under pressure in some quarters to be equal with the French and British. And a nuclear-rearmed Germany, the President knew, would be regarded as intolerable by the Soviets and all Eastern Europe.

  In this context, proposals for a NATO nuclear force had been under study since first publicly aired by Eisenhower’s Secretary of State Christian Herter in 1960. Kennedy, in a May, 1961, address at Ottawa, had pledged to the NATO command five Polaris submarines, which would remain under U.S. control. At the same time he had talked vaguely of an eventual “NATO seaborne force, which would be truly multilateral in ownership and control, if this should be desired and found feasible by our allies, once NATO’s nonnuclear goals have been achieved.” That deliberately left the initiative with our allies to come forward with a feasible plan and first to fulfill their conventional force quotas. Inasmuch as he doubted that they would do either, Kennedy had at that time paid little further attention to the matter. Certainly it was to have no priority until after further steps toward European unity—especially British membership in the EEC—had been taken.

  But at Nassau the pressure was on Kennedy to come forward with some plan “to meet our obligation to the British,” as he put it. He finally offered Polaris missiles (not submarines or warheads) to Macmillan in the NATO context. The Nassau Pact of December, 1962, declared that the British-built submarines carrying these missiles—except when “supreme national interests are at stake”—would be assigned to the NATO command and, upon its development, to a multilateral NATO nuclear force. NATO, in short, was to have two elements, one nationally directed and manned, the other internationally owned and “mixed-manned” by nationals of member governments. By calling both elements “multilateral,” the Nassau communiqué caused some confusion, and thereafter we reserved the term for the second element, which became known as the MLF. But because both sides were uncertain of just what was meant and wanted, in the absence of both State Department experts and an agreed U.S. position, the communiqué contained other deliberate ambiguities; and it was thereafter read with different interpretations and emphasis by the British, the State Department and the Pentagon.

  The merit of a multilateral force, as distinguished from a series of independent nuclear forces, was obvious. Nevertheless, from that hopeful day in Nassau forward, the concept of MLF was a source of confusion and dissension within the Alliance. The Nassau Pact itself showed signs of hasty improvisation and high-level imprecis
ion, of decisions taken by the President in Nassau before he was ready to take them in” Washington, of excellent motivation and poor preparation. The pact was accompanied by an offer to the French “similar” to Kennedy’s offer to the British, but the French promptly rejected it. The MLF idea envisioned an all-NATO force; but the British began to back away from it, the Greeks and Turks couldn’t afford it, the Italian elections avoided it, only the Germans clearly wanted it, and the prospect of an exclusive German-American force was not appealing, particularly if the Germans’ real desire, as many supposed, was to ease out in time the American veto on the nuclear trigger. In this country, MLF had no warm backers in the Congress and few in the military. It presented major legal and legislative problems on the disclosure of nuclear information, the custody of nuclear warheads and—until a surface fleet was substituted—the use of nuclear-powered submarines.

  The decisions taken at Nassau had been put forward for many reasons:

  1. To prevent an independent West German nuclear force—yet they led to cries on both sides of the Wall that we were needlessly placing Germans too close to our force.

  2. To minimize this country’s preferential treatment of Great Britain—yet they seemed in some quarters only to emphasize it.

  3. To meet charges of an American nuclear monopoly—yet, by retaining an American veto, the MLF concept produced fresh attacks upon that monopoly.

  4. To strengthen Western Strategic defense forces—yet no one denied that the real purpose of MLF was political and that it could increase those forces by no more than 1 or 2 percent.

  Gradually in 1963 the MLF proposal fell from the top of the President’s agenda toward the bottom. He would not remove it altogether from his agenda. He understood the desire of allies who lived in the shadow of Russia’s medium-range missiles to join the prestigious “nuclear club” and to have some voice in decisions affecting their security. He did not make a fetish out of national sovereignty, and was willing to accept more direct European participation in the nuclear deterrent to prevent a proliferation of national nuclear forces. Judging from the reaction in Europe, MLF was apparently not the answer. But “there are shortcomings to every proposal,” he said, “and those who do not like our proposal should suggest one of their own.”