by Ted Sorensen
THE BREAKTHROUGH TO AGREEMENT
The fate of Cuba, however, was the least of the consequences of the Cuban missile crisis. That confrontation has aptly been called “the Gettysburg of the Cold War.” For the first time in history, two major nuclear powers faced each other in a direct military challenge in which the prospects of a nuclear exchange were realistically assessed. Berlin, had its access been cut off, and even Laos, had there been no cease-fire, made a total of three potentially “major clashes with the Communists…in twenty-four months which could have escalated,” said the President, adding “That is rather unhealthy in a nuclear age.”
Khrushchev, it appeared, had reached the same conclusion. He had looked down the gun barrel of nuclear war and decided that that course was suicidal.
He had tried the ultimate in nuclear blackmail—dispatching not the usual missile threats, which had been issued over a hundred times since Sputnik, but the missiles themselves. That move having failed, nuclear blackmail was no longer an effective weapon in Berlin or anywhere else.
He had tested his premise that the United States lacked the will to risk all-out war in defense of its vital interests. That premise having proved wrong, he was less likely to underestimate our will again.
He had attempted a quick, easy step to catch up on the Americans in deliverable nuclear power. That step having been forced back, he implicitly accepted the superiority of our strategic forces as a fact with which he must and could live.
He had accepted—although only in Cuba, not in the Soviet Union—both a measure of inspection and an acknowledgment that the aerial camera was rapidly ending total secrecy. And he had learned, finally, that the American President was willing to exercise his strength with restraint, to seek communication and to reach accommodations that did not force upon his adversary total humiliation.
The result of all these lessons was apparently an agonizing reappraisal of policy within the Communist camp. The Soviet-Chinese split had been further widened when the Chinese—who had simultaneously and successfully attacked Russia’s friend India—openly assailed Khrushchev for his weakness in Cuba. Throughout the winter of 1962-1963 the Kremlin appeared to flounder. Reports of a new power struggle were widespread. But the change which finally emerged was one not of personnel but of policy—a change not of basic purposes but of methods and manner. The taunts and threats to his leadership from the Red Chinese caused Khrushchev to reshuffle his priorities, removing conflict with the West from the top of his agenda. They also required him to prove concretely the value of coexistence and to isolate the more reckless Chinese position.
The arms race, moreover, looked very different to the Soviet Chairman than it had a few years earlier. The Kennedy acceleration of 1961 had given the United States, even earlier than planned, several times as many operational ICBMs as the Russians could deploy and every prospect of retaining that advantage for years to come. Khrushchev’s submarine-based missiles were fewer in number and inferior in capability to the Polaris system. The total number of strategic aircraft available to him for a strike in the Western Hemisphere was less than half the number of missile-equipped, long-range bombers placed by Kennedy on constant ground and air alert alone. In addition to obtaining tens of thousands of nuclear warheads for tactical and strategic use, the United States had discouraged any move on Berlin by sharply increasing its number of combat-ready divisions and tactical air support wings. For Khrushchev to match all these increases in not only personnel but equipment and air transport would be enormously expensive. The slowdown in Russia’s industrial, investment and agricultural growth, particularly in comparison with the new burst of growth in the United States, along with the simultaneous rise in Russian consumer demands, pressured him to forgo trying to win the arms race, to allocate more resources to his civilian economy and to avoid another crisis that would threaten its very existence.
“Mr. Khrushchev and I are in the same boat in the sense of both having this nuclear capacity and both wanting to protect our societies,” said Kennedy.
He realizes how dangerous a world we live in. If Mr. Khrushchev would concern himself with the real interests of the people of the Soviet Union…[their] standard of living [and]…security, there is no real reason why…[we] should not be able to live in peace.
The Soviet Chairman, in talks with Harold Wilson and Paul Spaak, and in his letters to Kennedy, seemed to be looking for a chance to live in peace, for a meaningful breakthrough in nuclear arms control that would prevent any breakthrough on nuclear arms, for a breathing spell to focus on goulash and housing and ballet instead of weapons. He removed the pressure from Berlin, saying only that he would welcome new suggestions from the West.
The Chairman, reported Mikoyan to Kennedy in late November at the White House, liked the spirit of the President’s statements and felt that the United States and the Soviet Union should proceed to a point-by-point negotiation of all outstanding questions. It would be helpful, the President replied, for the Soviets to start by devoting their efforts to the pursuit of Russian interests only instead of kindling fires all over the world. He did not forget—and did not fail to remind Khrushchev by letter and Mikoyan in person—that the missile crisis had originated in a high-level, calculated attempt by the Soviets to deceive him. The possibility of improving Soviet-American relations, he warned Mikoyan, had suffered a severe blow because of this deception. Recognizing also that their failure in Cuba might force the more militant voices in the Kremlin to try again closer to home—as in Berlin—he had no intention of relaxing his vigil. Nevertheless he recognized that the Soviet Union was probably more ready for serious negotiations with the United States in early 1963 than at any time since the close of the Second World War.
He derived little comfort from the Soviet-Chinese dispute, and thought, on the contrary, that it might increase the dangers of desperation in Moscow or irresponsibility in Peking. Their disagreement, he told the Congress, “is over means, not ends. A dispute over how to bury the West is no grounds for Western rejoicing.” But the new fluidity in the post-Cuban Communist camp, he recognized, presented opportunities which seventeen years of cold war rigidities had never made possible before.
Kennedy, too, was ready to negotiate—to apply, as Dean Rusk put it, the lessons of World War III before it could occur because it will be too late to apply them afterward. Success in Cuba had not endowed him with any smug belief that the results were due to military superiority alone, or that superiority meant omnipotence, or that the pattern in Cuba could be often repeated. Cuba, he said, was located in an area where our conventional superiority posed problems for the Communists. Secret intelligence had enabled careful planning and timing which took the initiative away from the Soviets. Our side of the dispute had been convincing, even without advance consultation, to both allies and neutrals. A crisis in Berlin or Southeast Asia would have none of those features. “You can’t have too many of those,” he said of the Cuban showdown in his 1962 year-end interview. “One major mistake either by Mr. Khrushchev or by us…can make this whole thing blow up.”
Nevertheless the President recognized that the impact of Cuba was broader than its precedent. It had helped clear the air in this country about the fatal futility of total nuclear “victory” and the creative possibilities of agreement. It had sharpened his own interest in peaceful solutions. Disarmament looked more like a necessity and less like a dream. He began to look at the new arms requests for his budget in terms of their effect on ultimate arms control. His perspective, too, had changed after looking down the nuclear gun barrel. After the first Cuban crisis he had stressed to the nation’s editors that “our restraint is not inexhaustible.” After the second Cuban crisis, questioned by the same audience about that statement, he replied: “I hope our restraint—or sense of responsibility—will not ever come to an end.”
He had often argued that fruitful disarmament negotiations could never take place at the point of a Communist gun—or as long as the Communists thought the
y could overtake us in the arms race or effectively break up the Alliance—or until they were convinced by a test of will that we would not yield our vital interests, whatever the risk or threat—or until the United States had some serious, specific arms control proposals with which it could take the diplomatic offensive. In 1963 those conditions finally prevailed.
But the usual suspicions, misunderstandings and bureaucratic delays seemed destined at first to frustrate his hopes of converting the new atmosphere into any solid agreements. Only two minor accords were reached—the exchange of weather and other information from space satellites, previously mentioned, and the “hot line” teletype link between Moscow and Washington to make possible quick, private communications in times of emergency.
The “hot line”—passing through Helsinki, Stockholm and London, but with no kibitzers—was not insignificant. Such a communications link (originally labeled the “purple telephone”) had been under discussion since Kennedy’s first months in office; and its importance had been dramatized during the Cuban missile crisis when it had taken some four hours for the transmission of each Kennedy-Khrushchev message, including time for translation, coding, decoding and normal diplomatic presentation. As indicated in the missile chapter, Khrushchev had made his final message of withdrawal public long before it had arrived in Washington as the only means of assuring its immediate delivery. A future crisis—which could be caused not only by some actual conflict but possibly by an accidental missile firing or some misleading indication of attack—might not permit either four hours or a public broadcast. Nevertheless an agreement on communication was not as important as the matters to be communicated. “If he fires his missiles at me,” observed the President, “it is not going to do any good for me to have a telephone at the Kremlin…and ask him whether it is really true.”
His chief hope for a more substantive agreement—a treaty ending nuclear tests—had foundered once again, with each side blaming the other. In response to Khrushchev’s talk of new accords after the Cuban crisis, Kennedy had put the test-ban treaty first. Indeed, since the day of his inauguration, a test ban had been his principal hope for a first step toward disarmament and other pacts. He had termed the collapse of the Geneva talks in 1961 “the most disappointing event” of his first year. He had hopes that a new treaty would be the most rewarding event of his third. The time was right. Both sides had tested extensively. Neither had scored a decisive breakthrough. The American tests had not been as important as the scientists and military had predicted. And the U.S.-U.K. draft treaty to ban all testing had impressed the neutral world as a fair and effective proposal. Kennedy after Cuba thus pressed again for a treaty—and, to his surprise, Khrushchev agreed to the principle of on-site inspections apparently without reference to a Troika.
Following Khrushchev’s December, 1962, letter to this effect, unofficial, off-the-record talks between spokesmen for both sides were held in this country. The Russians made what they regarded as a major concession, “two or three” on-site inspections a year of suspicious seismic disturbances inside any one nation. Kennedy had reduced our insistence on twelve to twenty such inspections to a scale of eight to ten and then seven after his scientists learned that the Soviet figure on unidentifiable underground shocks was more precise than our own. But two or three, in the light of the still incomplete science of distinguishing earthquakes (of which there were many in the U.S.S.R.) from clandestine nuclear tests, was still unacceptably low. The Soviets said heatedly that they had been led to believe that their figure would be acceptable, and that Congressional protests—stirred by press rumors that the United States was changing its position—had caused the American President to renege. They went home in January complaining bitterly that Khrushchev had risked his political prestige within the Kremlin to get their mission approved, and that he had been embarrassed in front of his critics by its failure.
The President wrote Khrushchev that he was certain that American negotiators Dean and Wiesner had never, as the Soviet Chairman charged, indicated a readiness to agree on three inspections. An honest misunderstanding, he wrote, had somehow occurred. He sent Averell Harriman to Moscow to review the full range of problems dividing the two nations. He took advantage of a visit by U.S. magazine editor Norman Cousins to Khrushchev to send word once again that he really did want a treaty. With Macmillan he made new proposals for a test ban in letters delivered by their ambassadors, although he rejected Macmillan’s suggestion of a summit in the absence of any assurance of agreement.1 He again urged the Soviets to relate the number of inspections to the number of unidentifiable seismic disturbances and to raise their figure of three in exchange for an American reduction below seven. He suggested that the reopened talks at Geneva seek agreement on all other issues regarding inspection—so that numbers would mean something—and then reconsider the issue of numbers.
But the Soviets refused to consider any issues until he accepted their position on three tests. They seemed at times to back away even from three. Khrushchev was hurt and suspicious. He was no more willing to ask his Council of Ministers for a new number still unacceptable to Kennedy than the President was willing to wear down the opposition of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy to a new number still unacceptable to Khrushchev. Deadlock prevailed once again. The three-power Geneva conferees, now a mere subcommittee of the eighteen-nation disarmament conference, were no nearer agreement than they had been throughout five fruitless years of talk. “I am not hopeful,” the President said in May, 1963.
If we don’t get an agreement this year…I would think…the genie is out of the bottle and we will not ever get him back in again…. Personally I am haunted by the feeling that by 1970, unless we are successful, there may be ten nuclear powers instead of four….I regard that as the greatest possible danger and hazard….I think that we ought to stay at it.
He stayed at it. While not hopeful, he had not abandoned hope. An exploratory message from a Soviet scientist attending a private conference in London, a Khrushchev hint to Cousins and others that he hoped for a fresh signal from the United States, and a new resolution in the Senate for an atmospheric test ban—cosponsored by thirty-four Senators, ranging from Humphrey of Minnesota to Dodd of Connecticut, a former test-ban opponent—all helped keep his hopes alive. The tax cut and other legislative measures were competing for his attention, and the civil rights struggle was rising to a crescendo. But Kennedy took time in the late spring of 1963 to take three important steps in search of an agreement with the Soviets:
1. He joined with Macmillan in proposing new talks on a test-ban treaty, to be held in Khrushchev’s capital and by new high-level emissaries as a sign of our earnest intention to forget past misunderstandings and reach agreement. The President had no clear evidence that agreement was possible, but he felt obligated to make this last great effort, which had been suggested by Macmillan in May. The announcement of this proposal was set for Kennedy’s Commencement Address at American University on June 10. As the speech underwent its final revisions in Honolulu on June 8-9, Khrushchev sent word of his acceptance. The announcement—simultaneously made in Moscow and London—was thus one of action rather than suggestion. It was accompanied in the President’s speech with hopes for the mission’s success, “hopes which must be tempered with the caution of history—but with our hopes go the hopes of all mankind.”
2. To improve the atmosphere for agreement, he decided—without any recommendation from the departments or consultation with the Congress—that this nation, once its present series of tests had ended, would not be the first to resume nuclear tests in the atmosphere. That decision also was announced at American University. He rejected suggestions that he also suspend testing underground for a limited period, for he felt that, in the absence of any inspection, our atomic laboratories had to be working to avoid the dangers of secret Soviet testing underground or secret preparation to test aboveground. (Only underground tests required inspection to prevent cheating, inasmuch as our own monitoring s
ystems could detect all others.) He was convinced that we were still ahead in nuclear development and could stay ahead without testing in the atmosphere. Nevertheless it was a bold step to take unilaterally, and he took it, he said, “to make clear our good faith and solemn convictions” on the test-ban issue, adding, however, that it was “no substitute for a formal binding treaty.”
3. The final step was the American University speech itself, the first Presidential speech in eighteen years to succeed in reaching beyond the cold war. The address had originated in a Presidential decision earlier in the spring to make a speech about “peace.” His motives were many. It was, first of all, an expression of his deep personal concern. He had not elaborated his views on this topic since his 1961 address to the UN. He thought it desirable to make clear his hopes for East-West agreement as a backdrop to his European trip in June. He valued in particular an April 30 letter from Norman Cousins. Cousins suggested that the exposition of a peaceful posture prior to the May meeting of the Soviet Communist Party Central Committee, even if it could not deter an expected new rash of attacks on U.S. policy, might at least make those attacks sound hollow and hypocritical outside the Communist world. That meeting had been postponed until June, and the June 10 commencement at American University appeared to be the first appropriate forum on the President’s schedule.
I obtained material from Cousins, Bundy, Kaysen, my brother Tom and others, and gathered appropriate passages that had been cut from the Inaugural Address in 1961, or discarded when the Kennedy-Khrushchev TV exchange fell through in 1962, or used in previous Kennedy speeches and worthy of repetition. Unlike most foreign policy speeches—none of which was as sweeping in concept and impact as this turned out to be—official departmental positions and suggestions were not solicited. The President was determined to put forward a fundamentally new emphasis on the peaceful and the positive in our relations with the Soviets. He did not want that new policy diluted by the usual threats of destruction, boasts of nuclear stockpiles and lectures on Soviet treachery.