Kennedy

by Ted Sorensen

  Some argued that the treaty accomplished very little. Kennedy agreed. He repeated the words “limited” and “first step” until he was weary of saying them. He emphasized what it would not do as well as what it would. But he also warned of the perils of a continuing arms race, continuing atmospheric pollution and continuing nuclear proliferation.

  Other opponents argued that the Soviets might engage in secret violations or in secret preparations for a sudden termination of the treaty. Kennedy agreed. He intended for that reason to keep our development steady, our ability to resume ready and our vigilance high—by maintaining underground testing, nuclear laboratories and a satellite detection system. Any test so small and so far away in space that it could not be detected, he pointed out, could be more easily and cheaply conducted underground without risking the consequences of violation. There are, he said, “risks inherent in any treaty, [but] the far greater risks to our security are the risks of unrestricted testing.”

  Still others argued that we needed atmospheric tests to develop new nuclear weapons. But we have no need for a hundred-megaton bomb, said the President; neither side needed nuclear tests to achieve an antimissile missile; and no amount of Soviet underground or undetected testing could overtake us.

  He assured the Senators that there were no secret conditions or side agreements, that the treaty could not be amended without the Senate’s consent and that it would not affect our freedom to choose any weapons in any future war.3 He took pains also to coordinate the testimony of administration witnesses on Capitol Hill. McNamara, as always, was the most impressive, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as always, were the most difficult. General Taylor understood the net advantages to our security in a test ban, and the President had been careful to obtain in advance the agreement in principle of Taylor’s colleagues. But their agreement had assumed that a test ban, like all other disarmament proposals, was only a diplomatic pose unlikely to achieve reality. Confronted with an actual treaty limiting the development of weapons, the Chiefs began to hedge.

  Repeatedly, and ultimately successfully, Kennedy and McNamara reassured them that underground testing would continue our nuclear progress, and that all the safeguards they desired would be provided. The President blocked a maneuver by the less friendly Senate Armed Services Subcommittee to cross-examine the Chiefs before Taylor could present their views to the Foreign Relations Committee. Taylor testified under cross-examination that “arm twisting by superiors” was not responsible for the Chiefs’ position. Air Force Chief LeMay acknowledged that he would have opposed the treaty had it not already been initialed; and his Strategic Air Command General Thomas Power flatly denounced it. But the support of the other Chiefs was helpful, and the President held similar sessions with the nuclear laboratory directors to ensure their backing.

  The treaty nevertheless encountered heavy attack—from nuclear scientist Edward Teller, former Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Lewis Strauss and former Chiefs of Staff Arleigh Burke, Arthur Radford and Nathan Twining. The Air Force Association, composed of military, former military and defense contractors, came out against it (and the Association’s dinner was consequently shunned by the administration). Influential Senators Stennis and Goldwater as well as Russell announced their opposition. Other Senators said their mail was evenly divided; and the Senate Armed Services Preparedness Subcommittee filed a special report on the treaty’s “serious military disadvantages” to the United States. The President did not want “only grudging support,” he told his news conference, but “the widest possible margin in the Senate” as a demonstration of the fact “that we are as determined to achieve…a just peace as we are to defend freedom.”

  To help secure that margin, to reduce the large number of uncommitted Senators, he worked through unofficial as well as official channels. A series of telephone calls and off-the-record meetings encouraged the creation of a private “Citizens Committee for a Nuclear Test Ban,” a bipartisan group of prominent leaders organized to mobilize support. The President, beginning with an off-the-record meeting in the Cabinet Room, advised them which Senators should hear from their constituents, approved their newspaper and TV advertisements, counseled them on their approach to the unconvinced, and suggested particular business and other leaders for them to contact.

  In a remarkable shift of public sentiment between July and September, sentiment for the treaty became overwhelming. Dirksen’s speech in support was a highlight of the debate. Goldwater’s attempt to condition U.S. acceptance upon a Soviet withdrawal from Cuba found few backers.4 When the roll was called, only 11 Democrats (all Southerners except for Lausche) and 8 Republicans (all West of the Missouri except for Mrs. Smith) were opposed, with 55 Democrats and 25 Republicans voting yea. The vote, said the President happily, was “a welcome culmination.” No other single accomplishment in the White House ever gave him greater satisfaction. He decided to sign the official instrument of ratification in the historic and newly restored Treaty Room in the Mansion, partly because it enabled him to have the pleasure of signing it on a desk belonging to him personally.5

  THE EMERGING DETENTE

  Kennedy regarded the Test Ban Treaty itself, however, as more of a beginning than a culmination. It was an important beginning. After 336 nuclear explosions in the atmosphere by the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union, after thirteen years of almost steady accumulation of radioactive poisons in the air, those three powers had formally committed themselves to no more atmospheric tests. Over a hundred other nations signed the same pledge. While testing by France and Red China or the development of other weapons might someday outmode this gain, the genie was at least temporarily back in the bottle.

  The political change in the atmosphere was even more important than the physical, in John Kennedy’s view. The treaty was a symbolic “first step,” a forerunner of further agreements. It facilitated a pause in the cold war in which other, more difficult problem areas could be stabilized.

  On the very day the Senate approved the Test Ban Treaty, work on a new area of accommodation was under way in the White House. On the preceding day Agriculture Secretary Freeman told a Cabinet meeting that a Minnesota grain trader had just reported a possible Soviet interest in purchasing American wheat. In the only occasion I can recall when a subject spontaneously raised at a Cabinet meeting produced a valuable discussion, the President heard the views of his Secretaries of State, Defense, Commerce, Labor and Treasury, all of whom had an official interest. Other members volunteered comments. One official, for example, warned on the basis of his experience of political opposition from Polish-Americans. The President then held a much smaller session in his office to consider the problem further.

  The following day, as soon as the Test Ban Treaty was approved, he departed on an extended conservation tour of the West. At his request, I gathered with Bundy’s help all the pertinent information, legislation, pro-and-con arguments and intelligence estimates. The picture which emerged was encouraging. In their rush to develop heavy industry, space and armaments, the Soviets had short-changed investment in agriculture. The collective farms were riddled with inefficiency—“for a closed society is not open to ideas of progress,” as the President had said, “and a police state finds it cannot command the grain to grow.” The original soil moisture and productivity in the “New Lands” opened by Khrushchev in Siberia and Kazakhstan had been used up, and a severe drought had held per capita food production to its lowest point in history. Large imports of grain from the West were required; and sizable purchases had already been concluded with Canada and Australia. Soviet exports were insufficient to pay for these imports along with necessary industrial supplies; and the Soviet gold reserve was being drawn down faster than their mines could replace it.

  While the sale of 65 million bushels of surplus wheat would hardly make a dent in our several hundred million bushels in storage, it would bring added income and employment to American agriculture and business, benefit our balance of payments and reduce F
ederal storage costs. Other Western nations had sold wheat and flour to the Communist bloc for many years. France and West Germany, two of the leading “anti-Communist” nations, had in fact bought our wheat and then sold wheat flour to Red China.

  The President, reviewing these findings, preferred to base his approval publicly on economic grounds. He did not share the view that “a fat Communist was a good Communist,” or that the Soviets were so desperate that they would grant political concessions in return. Nor did he believe that increased economic contacts would in time make capitalists of them all. But he welcomed the opportunity to demonstrate to the Soviet leaders that the improved climate of agreement could serve the interests of both nations.

  Once again, however, he did not wish to go out on a controversial limb if no agreement were possible. Llewellyn Thompson was instructed to sound out the Soviet Ambassador, and on October 5 a reply was received. The Soviets were interested—under normal commercial terms and at the world market price. They were also agreeable to the use of American ships. This comment amazed us all, inasmuch as American shipping rates were among the most expensive in the world and no such condition had been attached to our offer. But the President gladly accepted the additional stipulation; and when the Soviets later balked at our shipping rates, and a fifty-fifty compromise was effected, we speculated that Russian bureaucracy could be as confused as our own. Some political commissar, we joked, had decreed American ships to avoid problems with our longshoremen and port security restrictions, and a belatedly informed commercial commissar had then told him about high-cost American shipping.

  The next problem was the Congress. The granting of export licenses to sell wheat to the Russians was not prohibited under any of the statutes limiting commercial transactions with the Communists. But Congress had added to the Agricultural Act of 1961 an amendment opposing the sale of subsidized agricultural commodities to unfriendly nations. Republican legislators were already invoking this provision as an obstacle to any sale. Kennedy decided to ignore it, and offered ample reason. It was only a nonbinding declaration of interest. It had been adopted at the height of the Berlin crisis in a wholly different climate. It had been assumed by at least some members of Congress to apply to a different kind of sale. And it made no sense when we had been selling the Russians nonsurplus agricultural commodities and dozens of other items for many years. The subsidy went not to the foreign buyer but to the American wheat farmer, regardless of where and whether the wheat was sold.

  As the Republicans would later charge, the President did not “consult” the Congressional leaders, he merely informed them. Certain that the information would leak promptly once it left the Executive Branch, he scheduled his meeting with the legislators for 4 P.M., October 9, two hours before the press conference at which his decision would be announced. With Dirksen and Hickenlooper absent, only the House Republicans were negative;6 and Kennedy’s announcement that evening, long and factual, was unchanged by their opposition. Asked immediately whether he feared “political repercussions,” he replied matter-of-factly, “I suppose there will be some who will disagree with this decision. That is true about most decisions. But I have considered it very carefully and I think it is very much in the interest of the United States….”

  The next day, beginning with a comprehensive report to the Congress, he set the wheels in motion for obtaining public support. He sought help from several of the same civic and religious leaders who had helped on the test ban. He armed friendly members of Congress with speeches and statistics. He persuaded Polish-language newspapers in Chicago and elsewhere to endorse his decision. Told at the next pre-press conference breakfast that Nixon had attacked it, he expressed his belief that the American people preferred his view to Nixon’s (adding that they had so demonstrated in 1960—“a somewhat thin answer,” Walter Heller observed afterward).

  In time he overcame attempted Congressional restrictions, attempted longshoreman boycotts, Soviet haggling about freight rates, disagreements between Agriculture and State, disagreements between Labor and Commerce, disputes over financing and a host of other obstacles. The export licenses were granted, the wheat was sold, and the President hoped that more trade in nonstrategic goods would follow.

  Still other agreements were in the air: new interest in serious first-stage disarmament measures, prospects for breaks in the Berlin Wall and near-accord on a new Soviet-American civil air agreement and consular treaty. Even a ban on underground testing, the President believed, would come when science outmoded the argument of three versus seven inspections.

  Added to the list of agreements actually concluded was a ban on nuclear weapons in outer space, a measure with no immediate military consequences for either nation but a sign, nevertheless, of easing tensions. Dubious over its enforceability as well as the desirability of sending it to the Senate, the President agreed instead that both nations simply pledge their support of a UN resolution of October 17 against placing weapons of mass destruction in orbit or on celestial bodies. “There is not an agreement…[and] no way we can verify…Soviet intentions,” he said. “But we are glad to hear the intention.”

  Addressing the United Nations General Assembly on September 20, and commenting on the improved outlook for peace since his address some twenty-four months earlier, he called—again on his own initiative, with only a minimum of checking with his space and foreign policy officers—for increased U.S.-Soviet space cooperation, including specifically a joint expedition to the moon. Both powers having forsworn any territorial rights in outer space, he said, why engage in costly duplication?

  The Soviets were still negative. Perhaps they understood better than those Congressmen attacking the proposal that a cooperative approach would just as effectively bar a Soviet militarization or monopoly of outer space, and a Soviet claim to pre-eminence in science, as an American first-place finish in the space race. Our effort in that race, Kennedy reassured the Congress, “permits us now to offer increased cooperation with no suspicion anywhere that we speak from weakness.”

  His UN speech listed other areas in which he hoped early agreement could be reached:

  …measures which prevent war by accident or miscalculation…safeguards against surprise attack, including observation posts at key points…further measures to curb the nuclear arms race, by controlling the transfer of nuclear weapons, converting fissionable materials to peaceful purposes and banning underground testing, with adequate inspection and enforcement…agreement on a freer flow of information and people from East to West and West to East.

  The speech was built on the foundations laid at American University. It defined the real and major differences between the Soviets and ourselves, differences which “set limits to agreement and…forbid the relaxation of our vigilance.” But it also called for “further agreements…which spring from our mutual interest in avoiding mutual destruction,” for “a new approach to the Cold War” on both sides, and for changes in the UN Charter to enable “the conventions of peace [to]…pull abreast and then ahead of the inventions of war…. But peace,” he said, in a near-paraphrase of Judge Learned Hand’s discourse on liberty,

  does not rest in charters and covenants alone. It lies in the hearts and minds of all people. And if it is cast out there, then no act, no pact, no treaty, no organization can hope to preserve it…. So let us not rest all our hopes on parchment and on paper. Let us strive to build…a desire for peace…in the hearts and minds of all of our people.

  Four days later he set out to help build that desire in the hearts and minds of his own people. As already mentioned, the stated subject of that five-day, eleven-state tour was conservation. Increasingly, however, his extemporaneous interpolations related the strength of our resources to the maintenance of freedom and peace. (The foreign policy topics to which he devoted his major addresses at the close of the tour had already been planned before he left Washington, however, and were not, as some speculated, the results of his findings while en route.) Many of his talks we
re in the heart of right-wing territory. Yet he struck boldly at those who yearned for a return to isolationism or offered oversimplified answers to world problems. The Test Ban Treaty, he found, elicited far greater applause than support of a local dam or mineral.

  Look at the true destructive power of the atom today, and what we and the Soviet Union could do to each other in the world in an hour…. I passed over yesterday the Little Big Horn where General Custer was slain—a massacre which has lived in history—four or five hundred men. We are talking about three hundred million men and women in twenty-four hours…. That is why I support the Test Ban Treaty…because we have a chance to avoid being burned.

  Four weeks later he carried the same message to New England and the University of Maine.

  While maintaining our readiness for war, let us exhaust every avenue for peace…. Let us not waste the present pause by either a needless renewal of tensions or a needless relaxation of vigilance.7

  Two weeks later he told a Democratic rally in Philadelphia that America. was “stronger than ever before, and the possibilities of peace brighter…than ever before.”

  Each time the response was enthusiastic. The President had once remarked that he would gladly forfeit his re-election, if necessary, for the sake of the Test Ban Treaty. But in the autumn of 1963 he saw that its approval had helped register a new national consensus—that “peace” was an issue in his favor—and that his posture of maintaining both strength and goodwill had been embraced by the American people. (A Gallup Poll revealed that, for the first time, the Democrats were regarded by the public as the “peace party,” best able to keep this country out of war.)

  Kennedy did not minimize the problems that remained—particularly Red China and Southeast Asia. Nor did he claim that the Soviets had undergone a fundamental change of heart. Conflicts of interest as well as ideology would persist—and a local conflict in a peripheral area could still drag both powers into a suddenly escalating fight. But the events of the past twelve months—since he had declared the Cuban quarantine—had shown the Soviets more willing to accept at least tacitly both this nation’s superiority in strategic power and our restraint in exercising it. Despite an autumn incident on the Autobahn, they seemed more interested in effective agreements, less interested in military expansion, more interested in normal relations, less interested in belligerent speeches. West Berlin remained free, and the dangers of another direct nuclear confrontation were more remote than ever.