Kennedy

by Ted Sorensen

  CONVENTIONAL AND UNCONVENTIONAL FORCES

  No degree of nuclear superiority and no amount of civil defense shelters would have increased John Kennedy’s appetite for nuclear war or his willingness to use nuclear weapons. It was a responsibility he was coolly prepared to meet, if meet it he must. But he deeply believed, as he once privately remarked, that any actual resort to nuclear missiles would represent not the ultimate weapon but “the ultimate failure”—a failure of deterrent, a failure of diplomacy, a failure of reason.

  A superior nuclear deterrent, moreover, had a limited military value in the 1960’s. It could deter a nuclear attack. It could probably deter a massive conventional attack on a strategic area such as Europe. But it was not clear that it could deter anything else. And for at least a decade the most active and constant Communist threat to free world security was not a nuclear attack at the center but a nonnuclear nibble on the periphery—intimidation against West Berlin, a conventional attack in the Straits of Formosa, an invasion in South Korea, an insurrection in Laos, rebellion in the Congo, infiltration in Latin America and guerrillas in Vietnam.

  Khrushchev’s speech on January 6, 1961, threatened not to destroy or invade new areas and populations but to impose his system upon them through continued “salami” tactics—through piecemeal expansion of the Communist domain one slice at a time—through limited warfare, subversion or political aggression in areas where our nuclear deterrent was not usable both because our security was not directly in danger and because massive weapons were inappropriate. If we lacked the conventional capacity to withstand these tactics effectively, we could be faced with a choice of launching a virtually suicidal nuclear war or retreating.

  Unfortunately, in the 1950’s, as the Communists increasingly achieved a military posture that made the threat of massive retaliation less and less credible, the United States had moved increasingly to a strategy based on that threat. Kennedy inherited in 1961 a 1956 National Security Council directive relying chiefly on nuclear retaliation to any Communist action larger than a brush fire in general and to any serious Soviet military action whatsoever in Western Europe. “If you could win a big one,” Eisenhower had said, “you would certainly win a little one.” Because NATO strategy had a similar basis, no serious effort had been made to bring its force levels up to full strength, and our own Army had been sharply reduced in size.

  This doctrine bore little relation to the realities. Frequently, when conferring about some limited struggle, the President would ask, “What are my big bombs going to do to solve that problem?” There was no acceptable answer. Even the tactical nuclear weapons supposedly designed for “limited” wars were not an answer. The Kennedy administration increased the development and deployment of those weapons worldwide, and by 60 percent in Western Europe alone. The President understandably preferred that we hold the edge in such weapons rather than the Soviets. But he was skeptical about the possibility of ever confining any nuclear exchange to the tactical level, and he was concerned about the thousands of such weapons theoretically under his control that were in the hands of lower-level commanders. For some of these “small” weapons carried a punch five times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Those ready for use in Europe alone had a combined explosive strength more than ten thousand times as great as those used to end the Second World War. If that was tactical, what was strategic—and what would be the effect of their use in heavily populated Europe on the people we were supposedly saving? Once an exchange of these weapons started, the President was convinced, there was no well-defined dividing line that would keep the big bombs out.

  This analysis of our predicament produced the new Kennedy-McNamara doctrine on conventional forces—a more radical change in strategy even than the augmenting and defining of the nuclear deterrent. The essence of this doctrine was choice: If the President was to have a balanced range of forces from which to select the most appropriate response for each situation—if this country was to be able to confine a limited challenge to the local and nonnuclear level, without permitting a Communist victory—then it was necessary to build our own nonnuclear forces to the point where any aggressor would be confronted with the same poor choice Kennedy wanted to avoid: humiliation or escalation. A limited Communist conventional action, in short, could best be deterred by a capacity to respond effectively in kind.

  Obviously this doctrine did not downgrade nuclear power. But Kennedy’s experiences in Berlin in 1961 and Cuba in 1962 demonstrated to his satisfaction that the best deterrent was a combination of both conventional and nuclear forces. At times, he commented, “A line of destroyers in a quarantine or a division of well-equipped men on a border may be more useful to our real security than the multiplication of awesome weapons beyond all rational need.”

  The new approach began immediately upon the administration’s taking office. It was consistent with the President’s Senatorial and campaign speeches on a “military policy to make all forms of Communist aggression irrational and unattractive.” It was articulated in books he admired by Maxwell Taylor, James Gavin and the British analyst B. H. Liddell Hart. It was urged by Secretary Rusk as essential to our diplomacy. It was recommended by Secretary McNamara as a part of his build-up of options. It was represented in Kennedy’s first State of the Union Message authorizing a rapid increase in airlift. It was emphasized by the ammunition, personnel and other increases in his March, 1961, Defense Message. It was expanded considerably in his May, 1961, special State of the Union Message, in which all his defense recommendations were in the nonnuclear field. It was stressed in his efforts to strengthen local forces through the military assistance program. And it was, finally, the heart and hard core of his military response to the 1961 Berlin crisis.

  That crisis, as described in the previous chapter, illustrated as nothing before how useless and dangerous the old “New Look” policy could be. It also caused Kennedy and McNamara to re-examine the traditional American doctrine that the West could not fight a ground war in Europe. Eisenhower had said so publicly. But Kennedy refused to concede that the Warsaw Pact nations in the Soviet Alliance were automatically more powerful in conventional strength than the members of NATO, who had a hundred million more people, twice as large an economy, one-half million more men in uniform, and the capability of placing in time more combat forces on the ground in Central Europe and more tactical bombers in the air. (“We do not believe,” said McNamara, “that if the formula E = Mc2 had not been discovered, we should all be Communist slaves.”) The President did not hope to defeat an all-out Communist attack on Western Europe by conventional forces alone, but he doubted that the Communists would try an all-out attack since it would guarantee a nuclear response.3

  To provide the manpower needed for the Berlin crisis, draft calls were doubled and tripled, enlistments were extended and the Congress promptly and unanimously authorized the mobilization of up to 250,000 men in the ready Reserves and National Guard, including the activation of two full divisions and fifty-four Air Force and Naval air squadrons. Some 158,000 men, Reservists and Guardsmen, mostly for the Army, were actually called up; and altogether the strength of our armed forces was increased by 300,000 men before winter. Some 40,000 were sent to Europe, and others were prepared for swift deployment. Six “priority divisions” in the Reserves were made ready for quick mobilization, and three Regular Army divisions engaged in training were converted to full combat readiness.

  Along with the manpower, the Berlin build-up provided enough equipment and ammunition to supply the new troops, enough sealift and airlift to transport them and enough airpower to cover ground combat. Some three hundred tactical fighter aircraft, more than 100,000 tons of equipment and several thousand tanks, jeeps, armored personnel carriers and other vehicles were placed in position on the European continent, and still more on “floating depot” ships.

  A degree of inefficiency and grumbling not surprisingly accompanied this rapid expansion of conventional forces in late 1961.
The mobilization of Reservists in peacetime had traditionally been considered politically suicidal. Newsreels containing Kennedy’s picture were booed in theaters on newly opened Army bases. Some men called to beef up below-strength units at first lacked uniforms and bedding as well as weapons and equipment. Reservists who had assumed that their contract to serve would never be taken up complained to reporters and Congressmen that the interruption of their lives was unnecessary inasmuch as no fighting had broken out at Berlin. Early in 1962 two privates first class—one who organized protest meetings and disparaged his commanding officer’s ban, and another who wrote his Senator, on behalf of seventy-four buddies, attacking Kennedy’s “political maneuvers” in giving their jobs to the unemployed—faced court-martial charges. But “in the spirit of Easter Week” the President directed their release.

  “I would hope that any serviceman who is sitting in a camp,” he had said earlier, recalling his own service,

  however unsatisfactory it may be—and I know how unsatisfactory it is—will recognize that he is…rendering the same kind of service to our country as an airplane standing on a fifteen-minute alert at a SAC base…. We call them in order to prevent a war, not to fight a war…to indicate that the United States means to meet its commitments.

  His objectives were achieved. The Berlin crisis eased. He could not claim that he had increased NATO ground forces to a level where Soviet forces could be long contained without resort to nuclear weapons. For our NATO Allies, accustomed to relying wholly on the nuclear bombs they hoped we would never use, responded only partially to his request for more troops. But Berlin remained free. And elsewhere in the world—in Greece, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Thailand and other nations around the Communist perimeter or in danger of Communist penetration—the emphasis on conventional preparations continued through the training and equipping of local armies with American military assistance as a substitute for American forces.4

  Throughout his term in office Kennedy’s emphasis on conventional forces continued. Some Senators as well as allies alleged that all this attention to nonnuclear responses signaled a dangerous timidity about reaching for the nuclear button.5 And in 1963 Kennedy himself wondered aloud in more than one meeting whether, were it not for Berlin, any large-scale armies would ever be needed in Europe. But he believed that his conventional force build-up had helped prevent a confrontation over Berlin that might otherwise have reached the nuclear level. He believed that his increased nonnuclear forces had required Khrushchev to choose at the time of the Cuban crisis between nuclear war and the withdrawal of his missiles. And he believed that the Communists would continue their world-wide pattern of crawling under our nuclear defenses in limited forms of penetration and pressure. To demonstrate his appreciation of the role played by our troops, he made a special effort to visit their operations at home and overseas. He did not share, he said, the sentiment supposedly scrawled on an old sentry box in Gibraltar:

  God and the soldier all men adore,

  In time of danger and no more,

  For when the danger is past and all things righted,

  God is forgotten and the old soldier slighted.

  UNCONVENTIONAL WARFARE

  The scrawl was no doubt illegible because the President varied the verse slightly each time he quoted it. But he neither slighted our old soldiers nor lost sight of the need for a wholly new kind of soldier. For even increased conventional power could not root out the assassins, guerrillas, insurgents, saboteurs and terrorists who fought the Communist “wars of liberation.” These wars, as the following chapter illustrates, were designed not to liberate but to undermine the newly independent nations through erosion and exhaustion in the twilight zone between political subversion and limited military action. A small band of guerrillas, for example, might tie down ten to fifteen times as many conventional forces. “We possess weapons of tremendous power,” said the President in 1961, “but they are least effective in combating the weapons most often used by freedom’s foes: subversion, infiltration, guerrilla warfare, civil disorder.” A new kind of effort was required, “a wholly new kind of strategy,” he told a West Point commencement the following year.

  Conventional military force alone at the Bay of Pigs, he recognized, had been used to no avail, in the absence of indigenous support. A prime lesson of that disaster, he told the nation’s editors on April 20, 1961, one day after it ended, was that freedom in the 1960’s faced

  a struggle in many ways more difficult than war…[the] struggle…taking place every day, without fanfare, in thousands of villages and markets…and in classrooms all over the globe…. Armies [and] modern armaments…serve primarily as the shield behind which subversion, infiltration and a host of other tactics steadily advance…exploiting…the legitimate discontent of yearning peoples [and] the legitimate trappings of self-determination.

  The lessons of the Bay of Pigs altered Kennedy’s entire approach—to executive management and foreign policy in general and to conflicts in the developing nations in particular. I am not referring to any loss of nerve on his part but to the sweeping changes in procedure, policy and ultimately personnel that followed that April fiasco. At first, in keeping with the “Kennedys never fail” doctrine, he had come closer to being pushed in even deeper, searching for a plan to bring down Castro, emphasizing that “our restraint is not inexhaustible,” appealing to publishers to limit certain stories and sounding a strident note of urgency about improving our paramilitary capacity. But while these public statements were in part deliberately stern to rebuild national unity and morale, Kennedy’s private approach was much more cautious. He placed more emphasis on the positive path of helping Latin Americans build more stable and democratic institutions, a policy aimed at isolating Castro but not removing him. And casting off his own sense of shock and irritability, he focused his attention less on the bearded nuisance ninety miles from our shores and more on our world-wide obligations.

  He was unwilling to abandon a capacity for paramilitary action. But his experience at the Bay of Pigs convinced him that the primary responsibility for this kind of effort should be transferred from the CIA to the Pentagon. The CIA, however, retained operating responsibilities as the “department of dirty tricks”; and to improve his oversight of that agency and its many unbudgeted funds, he reactivated the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board under James Killian, tightened White House review procedures under Bundy and Taylor and, upon the voluntary retirement of Allen Dulles, searched for his own man to install as CIA Director.

  Kennedy was never angry at Dulles, who manfully shouldered his share of responsibility for the Bay of Pigs. Nor did he lose his personal high regard for the Deputy Director most responsible for that operation, Richard Bissell, who quietly resigned. But it was clearly time for a change. Neither Taylor nor the Attorney General wanted the job of CIA Director. New York Attorney Fowler Hamilton came highly recommended and was nearly nominated, but was finally asked to head the foreign aid program instead. (“Just tell him,” I suggested to the President, “that you meant to say ICA, not CIA.”) Other names were reviewed and some were interviewed. “We want someone who won’t be too prominent on the social circuit,” the President told a group of us suggesting names.

  Finally he selected Republican John McCone, Truman’s Under Secretary of Air and Eisenhower’s Atomic Energy Commission Chairman. It was one of the few Kennedy selections which caused prolonged debate within the White House.6 McCone was extravagantly praised as a dynamic administrator who would revamp and revitalize all intelligence gathering, and he was excessively assailed as a highly prejudiced Republican who was opposed to academic freedom and coexistence. Neither extreme proved correct. Kennedy liked McCone’s keen and quiet achievements and the steady manner in which he carried out his duties.

  The President did not doubt either the necessity or the legitimacy of “dirty tricks” when confronted with a covert, conspiratorial adversary in an age of hidden perils. But he believed they should be conducted within
the framework of his foreign policy, consistent with his democratic objectives for the developing countries and preceded by more planning and less advertising than preceded the Bay of Pigs. He also believed that the human and psychological side of planning for the cold war in general and “wars of liberation” in particular required a broader effort than those of either the CIA or the Pentagon.

  “We cannot,” he said, “as a free nation, compete with our adversaries in tactics of terror, assassination, false promises, counterfeit mobs and crises.” But we could compete in the political and economic tactics required to gain the support of the countryside in the contested developing nations, turning against the Communists their own slogans of anti-imperialism and anticolonialism, and winning to the cause of independence in each country the young men who would be running it five or ten or fifteen years hence. Assisted by Taylor, Murrow and the Attorney General, he set up a new cold war strategy committee to develop these tactics. He gave orders to train our counterguerrilla corps in a host of civilian techniques and to send tens of thousands of civilian officials to counterinsurgency courses. A Civic Action program was initiated in Latin America training local armies in bridge-building and village sanitation as well as preventing civic disorders.

  The specific military burden required to combat Communist guerrillas and insurgents, however, rested with the Pentagon—and it truly “rested.” For years this problem had been given a low priority, despite its prevalence since World War II in Greece, Malaysia, Burma, the Philippines, Laos, Vietnam, Cuba and China. It was the weakest point in the Western armor. Only eighteen hundred men comprised the U.S. Army’s Special Forces, and they were preparing for a wholly different kind of action in a general war in Eastern Europe. Their equipment was outmoded and insufficient, unchanged since the Second World War.