by Ted Sorensen
As a result, reported the Secretary, he could not answer all the President’s questions until some basic analyses had been worked out.He requested detailed answers to ninety-six questions of his own (which rocked the Pentagon and became known as McNamara’s ninety-six trombones). But for the present neither the overformalized NSC apparatus nor the rivalry-ridden, disorganized Pentagon was geared to provide precise answers. He had seen enough, however, to support the President’s announcement in his first State of the Union Message of plans for an increase in airlift capacity and an acceleration of Polaris; and he was agreeable to that message’s direction that the Secretary of State “reappraise our entire defense strategy—our ability to fulfill our commitments—…and the adequacy, modernization and mobility of our present conventional and nuclear forces.”
No incoming President had ever undertaken a more searching re-examination of the defense establishment; and Kennedy wanted it in a month. “We are trying to telescope a lifetime’s work into twenty days,” remarked McNamara. But he compared it with an architect designing a new house without starting all over with the concept of house-building.
Before the month was out, the report was in. In a succession of meetings with his White House (Bundy, Wiesner, Sorensen), Defense (McNamara, Gilpatric and Comptroller Charles Hitch) and Budget Bureau teams, the President hammered out a series of drastic revisions in nearly every part of the defense budget. He added nearly three billion dollars in appropriations, offsetting this in part by the elimination of obsolete or duplicative programs. The Special Presidential Message to the Congress on March 28 containing these revisions was remarkable for two characteristics. One was the first full statement of a coherent national defense doctrine for the age of mutual nuclear capabilities:
1. The primary purpose of our arms is peace, not war…. The basic problems facing the world today are not susceptible to a military solution. Neither our strategy nor our psychology as a nation, and certainly not our economy, must become dependent upon the permanent maintenance of a large military establishment….
2. Our arms will never be used to strike the first blow in any attack. This is not a confession of weakness but a statement of strength…. We must offset whatever advantage this may appear to hand an aggressor by…increasing the capability of…that portion of our forces which would survive the initial attack….
3. Our arms must be adequate…without being bound by arbitrary budget ceilings….
4. Our arms must be subject to ultimate civilian control and command at all times, in war as well as peace…including all decisions relating to the use of nuclear weapons, or the escalation of a small war into a large one….
5. Our strategic arms and defenses must be adequate to deter any deliberate nuclear attack on the United States or our allies….
6. The strength and deployment of our forces in combination with those of our allies should be sufficiently powerful and mobile to prevent the steady erosion of the free world through limited wars; and it is this role that should constitute the primary mission of our overseas forces….
7. Our defense posture must be both flexible and determined…our response…suitable [and] selective…permitting deliberation and discrimination as to timing, scope and targets….
8. Our defense posture must be designed to reduce the danger of irrational or unpremeditated general war….
CIVILIAN CONTROL
The other remarkable feature of this and subsequent statements of military policy was their reflection of civilian control. “The Secretary of Defense and I,” said the President in his message, “have had the earnest counsel of our senior military advisers…. But I have not delegated to anyone else the responsibilities for decision which are imposed upon me by the Constitution.” In the crisis-filled months and years that followed, with the exception already noted at the Bay of Pigs, he exercised his full authority as Commander in Chief.
More than ever before, defense policy was integrated with foreign policy. No problem in the present world-wide struggle, the President told the Air Force Academy, is purely military or political. Nor do we have separate policies on defense, disarmament, diplomacy and foreign aid—“they are all bound up together in one…over-all national security policy.” Settling an old Pentagon debate, he issued an unprecedented directive to the Joint Chiefs asking them to base their advice not on narrow military considerations alone but on broad-gauged political and economic factors as well.
In the determination of military budgets and strategy, Kennedy and McNamara were no longer mere arbiters of rival service requests. They became originators, planners and analysts, setting up task forces, sending out questionnaires, insisting on alternatives, hard facts and precise comparisons. Instead of unifying the services into one body, as long urged but bitterly resisted, they unified their effort. They did this by aligning the budgets, force levels and strategy of the three branches for the first time, cutting across traditional service lines to budget according to function for Strategic Retaliatory Forces, Continental Air and Missile Defense Forces, General Purpose Forces, Airlift and Sealift Forces and the Reserve and National Guard Forces. A new unified Strike Command, for example, combined combat units of the Strategic Army Reserve, the Tactical Air Command and supporting airlift under an Army general and an Air Force lieutenant general. The size of our Polaris force was no longer settled by the size of the Navy’s shipbuilding budget but by our over-all strategic need and the contributions of other forces. The number of overlapping weapons systems was reduced—by providing, for example, a new TFX aircraft for both Navy and Air Force use. In time other vested interests gave way to modernization, as the strategic emphasis was shifted from bombers to missiles, vulnerable overseas missile bases were replaced with Polaris submarines, and jet airliftable troops deployed in this country were considered part of the forces available to a foreign front.
Contrary to complaints that he was by-passing his military advisers in these drastic alterations, Kennedy met regularly if not frequently with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But the President centralized military decision-making in the office of his civilian Secretary. McNamara relied not only on the Joint Chiefs but also—to the despair of the military cliques and their special pleaders in the press and Congress—on a brilliant array of civilian aides, young men free from interservice bias who thought in terms of costs and options and management control. These “Whiz Kids,” as they were nicknamed, supplemented the military experience of the generals and admirals with economic, political and other analyses. “We have gone pretty far afield,” complained one Congressman, “when we absolutely ignore the thinking of men who came up the hard way from second lieutenant on up to wearing a galaxy of stars on their shoulders” in favor of men “who believe we can settle all by a computer or a slide rule.” “We read every day,” said a general sarcastically to a Congressional committee, “about how fortunate we are to have the civilian competency which is being brought into the government; and as a simple military man I accept these profound decisions as being made in great wisdom.”
The President was not unmindful of his relations with the military. He addressed the three major service academies, the Veterans Day services at Arlington Cemetery and the assembled brass at the Pentagon. He toured military installations and watched demonstrations from coast to coast. He protected the military from Congressional badgering, sought to move younger men into command positions and gained the admiration of many officers resentful of his rejection of their projects.
But communications between the Chiefs of Staff and their Commander in Chief remained unsatisfactory for a large portion of his term. Enjoying a popular novel, Seven Days in May, about a fictional attempt by a few military brass to take over the country, the President joked, “I know a couple who might wish they could.” His favorite among those Chiefs whom he inherited was Marine Commandant David Shoup, whose infrequent comments were always crisp, thoughtful and broad-minded. (“I don’t think that you have to hate to be a good fighter,” Sho
up told Senate investigators. “I’ve made more than a hundred speeches and I’ve never mentioned the word Communism.”) But with this exception, the President was convinced after the Bay of Pigs that he needed military advice that neither Bundy’s civilian staff nor the holdover Chiefs of Staff were able to give.
Nor were his three military aides in the White House expected to serve in this capacity. They worked primarily on White House ceremonies and operations, warily watching each other to make certain that no other branch received a preference. Chester Clifton and Tazewell Shepard were particularly competent, useful and loyal aides from the Army and Navy respectively. But parochialism was automatically built into the White House military aide establishment, as demonstrated by Air Force Aide Godfrey McHugh late in 1962. The President was resting in Palm Beach after painfully satisfying the British at Nassau about the termination of the Skybolt missile. An Air Force spokesman in Washington thereupon loudly announced a supposedly successful test of the Sky-bolt, to the embarrassment and anger of both governments. The President was mentally vowing that heads would roll when suddenly General McHugh breathlessly burst in with the Air Force announcement in his hands. “Mr. President! Mr. President!” he shouted (or so the President enjoyed telling it later). “Did you hear the good news about Skybolt?”
To fill an obvious gap, the President in mid-1961 persuaded the ablest soldier-statesman available, General Maxwell Taylor, to join the White House staff as “military and intelligence adviser and representative.” Taylor’s frank and incisive speech, his intellectual depth and his emphasis on a range of military capabilities fit perfectly with the thinking of Kennedy and McNamara. The President had never met Taylor before 1961, but had in fact long considered him for several posts in the administration.
Some members of the military hierarchy—and their friends in the Congress and press—were not pleased at this insertion of a new figure between the Chiefs and the Commander in Chief. But terms terminate, Chiefs change and in time Taylor himself was Chairman of a Joint Chiefs of Staff which included only one of the holdovers Kennedy inherited: David Shoup.
Compatibility with the President’s thinking was as important in the Joint Chiefs, Kennedy believed, as in the head of any civilian department. He strongly opposed a bill which would have lessened a President’s appointive freedom by fixing the tenure of all Chiefs at four years. “Any President,” he said, “should have the right to choose carefully his military advisers.” Privately he told me he would veto the bill if it passed; and, in a demonstration of his conviction and authority, he broke precedent by failing to reappoint Admiral George Anderson to a second term as Chief of Naval Operations and by extending Air Chief LeMay’s term for only one year. Anderson had overstepped the bounds of dissent with Kennedy and McNamara on more than one issue, and the meaning of his departure was not lost on his fellow brass; but his many backers in the Congress were unable to make out a case of martyrdom when Kennedy put his considerable talents to use by naming him Ambassador to Portugal.
Kennedy and McNamara were also determined that civilian control be maintained in the event of emergency. In order to lessen the chances of unauthorized or accidental war—in order to permit the kind of deliberate and selective response which might end or limit even a nuclear war—and in order to preserve a clear authority capable of giving recognized messages to our citizens, servicemen and enemies at a time of pandemonium—they steadily improved the reliability and survivability of the command and control system. They initiated, among other steps, a safer missile design, improved warning systems, clearer centralization of authority in the President, better wartime protection of the President and his potential successors, new airborne and seaborne command posts for the President and others, alternate communication channels, electronic remote-control locks on nuclear weapons, and an improved series of checks on mechanical and human failure from the White House on down to the B-52 pilot.
Both at his desk and on some of his many trips to military installations about the country, the President sometimes tested the speed and reliability of the communications network. Startled officers in the Pentagon War Room or in a remote SAC base would pick up seldom-used phones to hear him say, “This is President Kennedy. I’m just checking communications. How are things going up your way?” He remained slightly suspicious, however, of the value and purpose of all the special telephones. He and I were both startled early in his first year when the ring of a previously unnoticed phone in his bedroom interrupted our conference. The woman on the other end, certain she had called the animal hospital, was not easily persuaded by the voice saying, “No, this is John Kennedy…. No, this really is President Kennedy.”
THE NUCLEAR DETERRENT
In three years Kennedy’s build-up of the most powerful military force in human history—the largest and swiftest build-up in this country’s peace-time history, at a cost of some $17 billion in additional appropriations—provided him, as he put it, with a versatile arsenal “ranging from the most massive deterrents to the most subtle influences.” The most massive deterrent was our strategic nuclear force. Beginning with that first Defense Message of March, 1961, the President sharply increased the production and development of the submarine-launched Polaris and the underground Minuteman missiles. By emphasizing the survivability of these weapons, he emphasized both the futility of any attempt to find and knock them out and their second-strike, nonprovocative, time-granting nature. (They were in sharp contrast, for example, with the vulnerable Jupiter missiles located near the Soviet Union in prior years, easy targets requiring hair-trigger Presidential decisions.) Having warned in the campaign against “tempting” Soviet leaders “with the possibility of catching our aircraft and unprotected missiles on the ground in a gigantic ‘Pearl Harbor,’” he placed more nuclear-armed bombers—our chief deterrent until the long-range missile program was completed—on a stand-by fifteen-minute alert basis.
Even more reassuring than these increases was a clearer definition of exactly what was meant by, and needed for, “deterrence,” namely: a nuclear force sufficiently large and secure (.1), in general, to give any rational decision-maker in the enemy camp the strongest possible incentive not to launch an attack by denying him all prospect of victory or even survival and (2), specifically, under the most pessimistic assumptions, to enable that portion of our force which could survive the most serious possible attack to destroy (a), if necessary, the aggressor’s cities and population and (b) enough of his remaining military strength, while still retaining some reserve of our own, to convince him that he could neither complete our destruction nor win the war.
How was this point of deterrence to be determined in concrete figures? asked the skeptics. All the factors contained variables and uncertainties. But, within a reasonable range, McNamara made the first systematic effort to calculate this level on the basis of our best estimates of the size and nature of Soviet attack forces and the performance capabilities of our own retaliatory forces. The estimates used in these calculations were based on public information, reports from Soviet defectors and modern as well as traditional intelligence methods.
In our budget review sessions, McNamara in effect acknowledged that he was agreeing to a nuclear force above the level of pure deterrence, but that the additions could be justified as forces to limit the Soviet’s ability to do further damage should deterrence fail. He and Kennedy agreed, however, that to go further and seek a “first-strike” capability—designed theoretically to render the enemy incapable of damaging us severely, the kind of capability advocated in some Air Force quarters—was not only unnecessarily expensive and provocative but not really feasible. An enemy could always protect or conceal enough missile power to inflict at least thirty to fifty million fatalities on this country, especially by using more submarine-launched missiles. And he could easily offset our attempts to outbuild him by increasing his own forces as he saw ours grow.
Recognizing the infeasibility of a pre-emptive first-strike or full “coun
terforce” capability, Kennedy and McNamara could see as no one else could the insecurity of an endless, unlimited arms race, and the waste of indiscriminately adding tens of billions of dollars’ worth of nuclear weapons as requested by the individual service Chiefs. “There is a limit to how much we need…to have a successful deterrent,” said the President. “When we start to talk about the megatonnage we could bring into a nuclear war, we are talking about annihilation. How many times do you have to hit a target with nuclear weapons?” He looked forward to a leveling off of defense spending and the allocation of more funds to domestic needs.
But these same calculations of deterrence also enabled Kennedy and McNamara to see clearly the folly of unilateral disarmament, and the irrelevance of complaints that we already had enough to “overkill” every Soviet citizen several times. Because our safety as a second-strike nation required a great enough force to survive a first strike and still retaliate effectively, and because our strategy required enough weapons to destroy all important enemy targets, there was no absolute level of sufficiency. The concept of deterrence, moreover, required not only superior forces but a degree of superiority that would, when made known—and the Kennedy administration took unprecedented steps to make it known—convince all Allies and adversaries of that fact.
THE MISSILE GAP
This same problem of determining how much is enough in comparison with a secret, aggressive society produced the issue known as the “missile gap.” That controversy, which rose rapidly on the political scene following the successful Soviet missile tests in 1957, can now be put into perspective: