A Thousand Days

by Arthur M. Schlesinger

  THE INITIATION had been harsh: but then no one had expected the Presidency to be easy. And, though geography gave the Cuban problem a certain intimacy and intensity, it remained a side issue. The great challenge lay not in Havana but in Moscow. The supreme test lay in Kennedy’s capacity to deal not with Fidel Castro but with N. S. Khrushchev.

  Kennedy approached the Soviet Union without illusion about the character of Russian polity and purpose but also with considerable weariness over the rhetoric of the cold war. The John Foster Dulles contrast between the God-anointed apostles of free enterprise and the regimented hordes of atheistic communism bored him. Seeing the world as an historian rather than as a moralist, he could not utter without embarrassment the self-serving platitudes about the total virtue of one side and the total evil of the other. In 1958 he had called on Americans to renounce the proposition that “we should enter every military conflict as a moral crusade requiring the unconditional surrender of the enemy.” The stereotypes of the fifties, he thought, were not only self-serving, but, worse, they simply did not provide a useful way of thinking about international affairs.

  With his historian’s perspective, he was disposed to view the conflict in national rather than ideological terms. He tended to discount, at times perhaps unduly, the role of dogma in Soviet policy. Marxism-Leninism impressed him less as a body of doctrine than as a mystique capable of uniting masses of men for disciplined action. He did not take Soviet theoreticians seriously; their function seemed to him no more than to rationalize the aims of the Russian state. While he recognized that ideology gave Moscow a potent international weapon, especially in the developing world, he was sure that the Soviet leaders would always use it in their own national interest. He cared less about the clash of abstractions than about the practical problem of living on the same planet with a great and powerful despotism, ambitious enough to seize all it could but sober enough not to wish to blow up the world.

  He was an American, holding that a free democracy was the best form of government, and he was ready to go to war, if necessary, to save democracy from extinction. But he saw not a final battle between democratic good and communist evil but an obscure and intricate drama, where men, institutions and ideals, all bedeviled by the sin of self-righteousness, threatened to rush humanity to the edge of destruction, and where salvation lay in man’s liberation from myth, stereotype and fanaticism. The cold war was a reality and would remain so as long as the Communists refused to acknowledge the permanence of the non-communist world. But he was determined to take the hysteria out of the cold war and get down to the business at hand.

  1. FIRST APPROACHES

  The new administration had the benefit of considerable discussion of foreign affairs during the Democratic party’s interlude in the opposition. Much of this discussion had taken place in the Democratic Advisory Council, and in the course of the decade two divergent schools had emerged. Both opposed the main aspects of the Dulles policy—its exclusive reliance on nuclear power, its faith in military pacts, its intolerance of neutrals and its conception of diplomacy as a sub-branch of theology. But beyond this common ground they disagreed somewhat in diagnosis and prescription.

  Dean Acheson led one school, very often with the support of Paul Nitze and one or two others. Acheson’s ideas had grown out of his own brilliant period as Secretary of State, when the Soviet Union first became a nuclear power, a disorganized western Europe lay under the Soviet guns and the communists were attempting direct aggression in Korea. Those years had demanded, above all, a revival of military will and power in the west. Now, a decade later, Acheson took the view that, in spite of the death of Stalin, very little had changed in the Soviet Union. The communist purpose of world domination through the threat of military showdown seemed to him unalterable; and he was increasingly concerned lest the United States allow itself to be diverted from the main battleground of Europe into sentimental crusades against colonialism and hopeless efforts to democratize the underdeveloped world. Though Acheson himself had been the father of the Marshall Plan and retained a lively interest in the reconstruction of the international monetary system, he tended to regard ‘hard’ military measures as more significant in the cold war than ‘soft’ economic programs. He expounded his viewpoint with superb style and scathing wit, contriving to leave the impression that anyone who differed was a muddlehead or a ninny.

  Actually most of his colleagues on the Foreign Policy Committee of the Democratic Advisory Council differed a good deal. The other school was led by Adlai Stevenson and included Averell Harriman, George Kennan, Chester Bowles, Thomas K. Finletter, Mennen Williams, J. K. Galbraith and Ben Cohen as well as Senators like J. William Fulbright and Mike Mansfield. These men believed that the world had indeed changed since 1950, that the conflict between Russia and China was real, that the military threat to western Europe had receded, that the underdeveloped world was the new battleground and that military measures had to be supplemented if not superseded by vigorous political and economic programs. In short, the policy of 1949–52, however sound at the time, was no longer adequate; a changing world called for flexibility and initiative. There were variations within this group, though more in tone than in substance. Bowles and Williams were particular targets of those who regarded large foreign aid efforts and liberal rhetoric as evidence of ‘softness.’ Harriman and Finletter, on the other hand, because one had warned against the Soviet Union in 1945 and the other had been Secretary of the Air Force, and because both had a certain unsentimentality of personality, managed to present much the same views while preserving a reputation for toughness.

  Though Kennedy had, in the main, stayed aloof from the DAC debates, he was clearly aligned with the Stevenson-Harriman-Bowles position, if more in the Harriman than in the Bowles mood. A sharp critic of the tendency to suppose that all problems had military solutions, he was a strong advocate of economic assistance to the uncommitted world. His reactions in 1960 to the shooting down of the U-2 over the Soviet Union and to the Quemoy-Matsu issue showed his dislike for rigid interpretations of the cold war. He did not suppose that the United States had it within its power to work overnight changes in the Soviet Union; but he did not suppose either that the Soviet Union was fixed forever in its present mold. He therefore favored a policy of reasoned firmness accompanied by a determination to explore all possibilities of reasonable accommodation.

  The Soviet Union watched the arrival of the new administration with marked interest. Khrushchev, who had given up on Eisenhower after the U-2 incident and the collapse of the Paris summit in May 1960, seized several opportunities to semaphore his hopes for Kennedy. His messages to Harriman and others after the election were followed by a Pugwash meeting on disarmament in Moscow in December. These gatherings, so called because they had begun with a conference called by the Cleveland financier, Cyrus Eaton, at his summer place in Pugwash, Nova Scotia, brought together disarmament experts from both sides in supposedly unofficial exchanges. Walt Rostow and Jerome B. Wiesner, who were among the Americans at the Moscow meeting, saw V. V. Kuznetsov of the Soviet Foreign Office and urged the release of two American RB-47 fliers, shot down over the Arctic the preceding July. In the course of their talk Kuznetsov mentioned the campaign furore about a ‘missile gap” and suggested that, if the new administration went in for massive rearmament, it could not expect the Russians to sit still. Rostow replied that any Kennedy rearmament would be designed to improve the stability of the deterrent, and that the Soviet Union should recognize this as in the interests of peace; but Kuznetsov, innocent of the higher calculus of deterrence as recently developed in the United States, brusquely dismissed the explanation.

  Rostow and Wiesner returned from the disarmament talks with the feeling that the Russians might be prepared for action in arms control, though they also warned the President-elect that the Kremlin would give no ground on Berlin and would press its advantages in the underdeveloped world. Later Khrushchev’s warm congratulatory message to Kennedy at the
inaugural and his release of the RB-47 fliers a few days after—an act deliberately postponed, as Khrushchev made clear to Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson, to benefit the Democrats rather than the Republicans—reinforced the sense that Moscow desired, in the phrase of the moment, a reduction of tensions.

  Yet the Soviet Union, as usual, was pursuing a double policy; and Khrushchev disclosed its other face in an elaborate speech in Moscow on January 6. This speech made a conspicuous impression on the new President, who took it as an authoritative exposition of Soviet intentions, discussed it with his staff and read excerpts from it aloud to the National Security Council.

  Moscow had its own euphoria in January 1961, and the Khrushchev speech gave it truculent expression. The Soviet leader undoubtedly felt then and for the rest of the year, as he could never feel again, that communism was riding the crest of history. Since the death of Stalin, the end of the Korean War and the relaxation of the western rearmament drive, one event after another had strengthened the conviction of inevitable victory. The Soviet rate of industrial growth had been considerably higher than that of the United States. Success in developing the hydrogen bomb and surpassing America in long-range missiles gave the Soviet leaders confidence in their own technological prowess as well as, for the first time in the history of the Bolshevik Revolution, assurance against foreign attack. At the same time, the revolutionary ferment in the underdeveloped countries from Vietnam to Cuba seemed to foreshadow the humiliation of the ‘imperialist’ powers and the passage of the third world into the communist camp. Moreover, the meeting of communist leaders from eighty-one countries the previous November appeared for a moment to have composed the argument between Moscow and Peking. Indeed, Khrushchev’s January speech was an interpretation to his own people of the unity statement adopted by the communist parties at the conclusion of the November meeting. Underneath the canonical beat of language, the oration sounded a brutal joy over a world where democracy was everywhere on the retreat and communism everywhere on the march.

  Khrushchev began by saying that “analysis of the world situation as it appeared at the beginning of the sixties” showed a state of affairs which “greatly exceeded the boldest and most optimistic predictions and expectations.” History and communism were inseparable partners: “there is no longer any force in the world capable of barring the road to socialism.” He then reviewed the possible ways to triumph. World wars and “local wars” he categorically rejected as leading directly or progressively to nuclear holocaust. “Wars of liberation or popular uprisings” were quite another matter. He defined “national-liberation wars” as those “which began as uprisings of colonial peoples against their oppressors [and] developed into guerrilla wars.” “What is the attitude of the Marxists to such uprisings?” he asked. “A most favorable attitude,” he replied. “. . . The Communists support just wars of this kind wholeheartedly and without reservation and they march in the van of the peoples fighting for liberation.” He named Cuba, Vietnam and Algeria as examples and added that the “multiplying of the forces of the national-liberation movement” in recent years stemmed largely from the opening of the new front against American imperialism in Latin America. As for “peaceful coexistence,” this was, “so far as its social content is concerned, a form of intense economic, political and ideological struggle between the proletariat and the aggressive forces of imperialism in the world arena.”

  In a significant aside Khrushchev brought up Berlin. “The positions of the U.S.A., Britain and France have proved to be especially vulnerable in West Berlin,” he said. “These powers . . . cannot fail to realize that sooner or later the occupation regime in that city must be ended. It is necessary to go ahead with bringing the aggressive-minded imperialists to their senses, and compelling them to reckon with the real situation. And should they balk, then we will take resolute measures, we will sign a peace treaty with the German Democratic Republic.”

  Kennedy, reading the speech, accepted Khrushchev’s rejection of nuclear war as honest enough; any other position in the President’s view would have been mad. But the bellicose confidence which surged through the rest of the speech and especially the declared faith in victory through rebellion, subversion and guerrilla warfare alarmed Kennedy more than Moscow’s amiable signals assuaged him. The references to Russia and China in his State of the Union message constituted Kennedy’s response. “We must never be lulled,” he said, “into believing that either power has yielded its ambitions for world domination—ambitions which they forcefully restated only a short time ago. On the contrary, our task is to convince them that aggression and subversion will not be profitable routes to pursue these ends.” He added: “Open and peaceful competition—for prestige, for markets, for scientific achievement, even for men’s minds—is something else again. For if Freedom and Communism were to compete for man’s allegiance in a world at peace, I would look to the future with ever increasing confidence.”

  He designed these last words to help bring things into proportion. For the Khrushchev speech, though sufficiently tough, confined its bellicosity in the main to the underdeveloped world; and here, as Kennedy understood, the Russians were confronted by opportunities which they could not easily resist. Discussing the speech one day with Lippmann, Kennedy observed that, while Khrushchev sounded like a committed revolutionist, he would not press revolution to the point where it might threaten nuclear war. Kennedy consequently persevered in his task of de-emotionalizing the cold war at home. American admirals and generals, long accustomed to touring the country with ritualistic exhortations against the Soviet Union, were instructed to tone their speeches down. The administration relaxed on a number of minor matters: it sent Moscow an invitation to resume civil aviation talks, broken off a year before; it permitted the import of Soviet crab meat, banned for a decade because it had once been produced by forced labor; it ended post office censorship of Soviet publications in the mails. When the Soviet Union railed against the United Nations and the west after the murder of Lumumba in the Congo in mid-February and the State Department cranked out its usual fustian in response, Kennedy wrote with Adlai Stevenson an equally resolute but less declamatory statement. Most important of all, he ordered a review of the American negotiating position on a test ban agreement in an attempt to break the deadlock in the talks which had been proceeding dilatorily in Geneva since the end of 1958. He described his broad policy to Hugh Sidey of Time as one of holding firm but probing around the edges “to see if we can’t communicate in some ways.”

  Ambassador Thompson came home from Moscow in February, and Kennedy soon summoned him along with three former ambassadors to Russia—Harriman, Bohlen and George Kennan—for an extended discussion at the White House of Soviet problems. The new President, saying little himself, threw out questions to stimulate the experts. Finally he wondered aloud whether he should not consider a meeting with Khrushchev. Kennedy had a natural curiosity about Khrushchev; what Isaiah Berlin once called the royal-cousins approach to diplomacy has an allure, sometimes fatal, for all heads of state. Moreover, Kennedy, unlike Rusk, had no doctrinaire opposition to the idea of summitry. “It is far better,” he had observed in 1959, “that we meet at the summit than at the brink.”

  The experts agreed that a face-to-face talk might be a good idea. Thompson in particular felt that it was impossible for the new President to get at second hand the full flavor of what he was up against in the Soviet leader. And Bohlen, who had already watched three Presidents go through the process of learning about the Soviet Union, thought that Kennedy, “like almost every person that I ran into during the course of my specialization in that field, really felt he had to find out for himself. The issues and consequences of mistakes of a serious nature in dealing with the Soviet Union are so great that no man of any character or intelligence will really wholeheartedly accept the views of anybody else.” Thompson carried back to Moscow a presidential letter of February 22 suggesting a rendezvous in the late spring at Vienna or Stockholm. When he caught
up with Khrushchev in Siberia on March 9, the Soviet leader, though showing no inclination to yield on issues, appeared pleased at the prospect of a meeting.

  But already hopes for better relations were beginning to fade. One could have expected Moscow to continue its support for what it considered a national-liberation war in Laos, but the bleak Russian reaction to the new test ban proposals in Geneva was unexpected. When Ambassador Arthur H. Dean set forth the revised Anglo-American position in March, the Soviet representative, instead of welcoming an obvious attempt to resolve outstanding differences, responded by withdrawing Soviet assent to points already agreed upon and by introducing an unacceptable new proposal—that the organization policing the ban be directed by a tripartite board, representing the Soviet Union, the democracies and the neutrals, and required to act in unanimity. The troika doctrine meant, in effect, a Soviet veto on the verification process. It would have made the ban a farce, and the proposal ended any immediate prospect of agreement.

  2. STATE OF THE NATION’S DEFENSE

  The policy of probing around the edges would work in any case, Kennedy believed, only so long as the United States preserved its capacity to hold firm. This meant the existence of military power sufficient to restrain the Soviet Union from aggression. The next problem then was the condition of American defenses and the purpose of American strategy. Here again the new administration liad the benefit of past discussions. Robert McNamara, as the new Secretary of Defense, was the residuary legatee of a body of doctrine which had taken form under the Truman administration in the late forties and gained clarity and force in a series of debates within and without the Eisenhower administration through the fifties.

  In the years when the United States had a nuclear monopoly, the problem of American strategy did not at first appear very complicated. The atomic bomb and the Strategic Air Command were supposed to insure military supremacy; and, so long as they were adequately nourished, the rest of the military establishment did not much matter. In this belief, defense spending had been dropped to a level of $13 billion in the late forties. By early 1950, the Army had only about ten divisions, few of which were fully manned and equipped.