But over the weekend Bowles’s friends swung into action. On Monday morning, July 17, the Times had a front-page story saying that the President intended to ask for Bowles’s resignation that day. Kennedy read that story with a connoisseur’s interest on the plane back from the Cape to Washington. “You can tell how that story was written,” he said. “You can tell where every paragraph came from. One paragraph is from Bowles or his people. The next paragraph is from someone at State trying to make a case against Bowles.” He mused about the situation as he sipped his after-breakfast coffee. “I received a cable from Adlai this morning,” he said. (Stevenson, who was in Italy, had been reached by transatlantic telephone.) “Soapy [Williams] has been calling me. . . . This started out as a management problem. But these stories today have transformed it into a political problem. It’s no longer a personnel question; now it has become a symbolic question. When it comes to issues, there is no great difference between Chester and me. . . . I’ve asked Rusk to meet me as soon as I arrive. Chester is coming over later.”
The result of the Bowles counteroffensive was a reprieve. The President reassured Bowles and on Wednesday made a nimble and complicated statement at his press conference, expressing his warm personal confidence in the Under Secretary but refraining from any permanent commitment to anyone for any job. With this statement, the excitement subsided.
9. THE STATE DEPARTMENT REORGANIZATION
But the problem was as far as ever from solution. A few days later Bowles, who was about to leave Washington to take part in a series of regional conferences of United States ambassadors, sent the President a thoughtful memorandum on the organizational needs of the Department of State. He argued that Kennedy’s approach to foreign affairs was “inadequately understood by many of the able career officers of the Department who have attained senior rank in the last ten years. . . . There has been resistance to fresh thinking and a continuing attachment to the sterile assumptions and negative policies that we criticized so vigorously when we were out of office.” His solution was to bring more people “who understand the Kennedy policies and believe in them” into top positions.
There was much sense in this, though the structural problems of the Department were deeper than the memorandum suggested. But Bowles was unable to take advantage of the reprieve. His own position had been weakened; his mandate was still ill-defined; and power did not, in Rusk’s phrase, gravitate toward him. Moreover, the July counteroffensive depleted his political ammunition. The President, absorbed in Berlin, made no moves, but continued to ponder how he could strengthen the Department. He accepted, I think, the justice of Bowles’s point about needing more New Frontiersmen in top positions. It was this which turned his attention increasingly to Averell Harriman.
The contrast between Bowles and Harriman was instructive to a student of Washington. Both men were experienced in government and politics, and both held much the same view of the world. But where Bowles dissipated his authority by diffusing his energy, Harriman seized hold of one hard problem—Laos—and, by mastering it, re-established himself as a force in foreign affairs. Where Bowles tried to fight every battle on every front at once, Harriman picked the battles he knew he could win, or affect, and for the rest bided his time. He was one to whom power gravitated. Theodore H. White’s letter from the Far East suggested the next step. We need, he had written, “an Assistant Secretary of State for the Far East who would be of enough rank and eminence to shake the whole China service out of its sloth, and of enough virility to face [Admiral] Felt, CIA and others as equal in impact and influence.” White made no nominations, but there were not many around to fit the specifications.
It was Bowles himself, with his sure instinct for appointments, who first proposed putting Harriman in charge of Far Eastern affairs. One night I tentatively mentioned the idea to Harriman, wondering a little what a man of his experience would think of being asked to take so modest a job. But Harriman, always more interested in power than in status, responded that he would serve wherever the President wished. He stipulated only that he report directly to the Secretary and not through Foreign Service channels. I passed this on to Kennedy, who remarked that he was thinking about Averell as Assistant Secretary for European Affairs. Later he mentioned this possibility to Harriman. In the end, however, Dean Rusk called Harriman in Geneva to say that the President wished after all to appoint him to the Far East. The announcement was to be delayed until other changes could be made at State.
That autumn Bowles was abroad a good deal of the time, and Ball was assuming more and more administrative responsibility within the Department. The final act took place in November on the weekend of the Harvard-Yale game. I ran into Bowles between the halves in the crowd swirling around the Yale Bowl. He said in a puzzled way that Rusk had phoned him that morning, asking him to come to Washington right away; apparently he wanted to discuss some personnel problems. Bowles had replied that he had thirty people coming to his house in Essex for dinner that evening: surely the business could wait until Monday? “He was awfully insistent, and I have finally agreed to go down tomorrow. All this fuss just to rearrange some ambassadors!”
After the game Richard Goodwin reached me by telephone at a party deep in Fairfield County. The President, he said, was going to act over the weekend. George Ball would become Under Secretary; George McGhee would move from the Policy Planning Council to replace Ball as the second Under Secretary (though for Political rather than for Economic Affairs); Harriman would become Assistant Secretary for the Far East; and, from the White House, Walt Rostow would go over to State as counselor and chief of the Policy Planning Council, Fred Dutton as Assistant Secretary for Congressional Relations and Goodwin himself as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs. As for Bowles, the President wanted him to take a new assignment in relation to the underdeveloped world. The next day Rusk broke the news to Bowles. Later Ted Sorensen, after a long talk, persuaded Bowles to become Special Representative and Adviser to the President for African, Asian and Latin American Affairs.
Bowles, the hapless victim of the conditions which he had diagnosed better than anybody else, behaved with characteristic nobility and was soon hard at work in his new assignment. He wrote wise memoranda about the aid program. He conducted useful inspections of overseas operations. He brought forward new ideas for policy in the underdeveloped world. He gave a series of excellent speeches through the country. But he was outside the chain of command, and the job was doomed to frustration. Kennedy felt that his abilities were wasted and made occasional efforts to give him operating responsibilities. In the summer of 1962, he asked him to take over the Alliance for Progress; but Bowles thought, with considerable justice, that political and economic policies could not be separated and that the chief of the Alliance should also be Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs. Kennedy said he was right, but that no one was ready for this yet; it would create too many problems. Later the President suggested his going as ambassador to Indonesia or Canada. After he declined, Kennedy observed, “If I were Chet, I would rather be first in an Iberian village than second in Rome. I guess he would rather be thirty-fifth in Rome.” Finally, in December 1962, Bowles decided that his assignment had not worked out and offered his resignation. Kennedy, who had sent Galbraith to New Delhi for a two-year tour (later somewhat extended), now asked Bowles to take his place. Here, back where he had served so well a decade before, Bowles at last found an outlet for his distinguished abilities.
The purpose of the reorganization of November 1961, and especially of the blood transfusion from the White House, was to revitalize the Department and redress the imbalance in the foreign affairs partnership; it was one more expression of Kennedy’s effort to make the Department the fulcrum of foreign policy. As he explained to Rostow, “Over here in the White House we have to play with a very narrow range of choices. We are pretty much restricted to the ideas coming out of the bureaucracy. We can’t do long-range planning; it has to be done over there. I w
ant you to go over there and catch hold of the process at the level where it counts.”
The upheaval somewhat improved the situation. Though Ball remained a lawyer and not a manager, he had the talents of speed and decision and gave the President at least hope that his questions would be answered and his instructions executed. Rostow, perfectly cast, made the Policy Planning Council a bustle of intellectual activity and helped shape policy on a dozen fronts. Dutton joined policy sophistication with political skill in running congressional relations. Goodwin, until he was eventually cut off and isolated by the bureaucracy, brought new imagination and drive to Latin American affairs. Above all, Harriman not only gave Far Eastern policy a coherence and force it had not had for years but rapidly became the particular champion of the New Frontier within the State Department.
One could not but marvel at the inexhaustible vitality of this man, now in his seventies, the most tested of American diplomats, who, after living at the summit with Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin twenty years earlier, was now cheerfully settled in a job of lower rank than any he had held for a generation. This was part of his attraction. One felt that here was a free man without personal ambition who said what he believed and cared not a damn for anything but getting the policy right. The downrightness of his reactions stimulated a bureaucracy too long accustomed to postponement and evasion. He became known with affection as ‘The Crocodile’ for his habit of abruptly biting off proposals which seemed to him stupid or irrelevant. He was the inveterate foe of platitude, rigidity and the conventional wisdom. He had been around too long to be impressed by the generals, tycoons, security officers and legislators who had so long intimidated the Department. He believed in giving good men their head. When long, detailed instructions would come across his desk intended for ambassadors in the field—‘scenarios,’ in the jargon, designed to deprive envoys abroad of all discretion—Harriman, before clearing the message, liked to add a liberating introductory sentence: “For your guidance, you may wish to consider the following.” He tried in particular to bring forward the youthful, bright, audacious people; he thought that, if a person did not have a chance to exercise responsibility before he was forty, he probably would not be much good at it thereafter. He once delighted Walter and Victor Reuther by saying with great emphasis at the age of seventy-one: “Do you know what this damned Department needs? Young blood!” The young, detecting a kindred spirit, looked on him with tremendous admiration and devotion. Inside the government, the New Frontiersmen, within and without the State Department, regarded him as their champion. Perhaps no one else, except the President and the Attorney General, had such a stimulating influence on policy.
Power continued to gravitate toward him. In 1963, when George McGhee went on to become ambassador to Bonn, Harriman took his place as Under Secretary for Political Affairs. At the swearing-in George Ball gave a graceful speech, recalling that he had first met Harriman in the early days of the New Deal when people believed that anything was possible and that whatever had been done before was wrong. Averell picked up the theme in his own remarks. He said that he had lived through four times of great creativity in government—during the early New Deal, the Second World War, the Marshall Plan and the Kennedy years. He talked of the mission of the State Department in carrying the New Frontier to the world. After the ceremony, he beckoned me into his office and said, “Of course I had to say all those nice things about the spirit in the State Department today. What I want to do is to give it a little of the crusading spirit of those earlier times. I want to bring it to life.” He never quite succeeded, but he enlivened everything he touched.
To the end, the Department remained a puzzle to the President. No one ran it; Rusk, Ball and Harriman constituted a loose triumvirate on the seventh floor and, passing things back and forth among themselves, managed to keep a few steps ahead of crisis. But with all the problems and frustrations, Kennedy had gone far toward infusing a new energy into American diplomacy and a new spirit into the conduct of foreign affairs.
XVII
Peril in the Skies
KENNEDY HAD COME TO THE White House without illusion about peace in our time with the communist states. But he did hope that the Soviet leaders, as rational men, might at least agree on the value of moderating the cold war. The Vienna meeting shook this hope, and the Soviet announcement on August 30 of a decision to resume nuclear testing in the atmosphere almost shattered it. The President’s response was prompt and bitter. The Soviet course, he said, “presents a hazard to every human being throughout the world by increasing the dangers of nuclear fallout.” It “indicates the complete hypocrisy” of Soviet professions about disarmament. It increases “the danger of a thermo-nuclear holocaust.” It “will be met with deepest concern and resentment throughout the world.”
It certainly was met with the deepest concern in the United States. The next morning, newspapers denounced the Soviet move and Senators demanded that the United States imitate it. The atmosphere was tense in the White House when the President called the National Security Council together at ten o’clock in the Cabinet Room in preparation for a meeting with the congressional leaders at ten forty-five. The faces around the table—Johnson, Rusk, McNamara, General Taylor, General Lemnitzer, Jerome Wiesner, Allen Dulles, Glenn Seaborg of the Atomic Energy Commission, Edward R. Murrow and a few others—were set and anxious. The time was short, and the Secretary of State quickly submitted a draft presidential statement announcing an immediate American decision to resume tests—essential, he thought, both to demonstrate our resolution on Berlin and to satisfy the domestic clamor.
The President dissented. “Why should we put ourselves into this business right away?” he asked. “Nehru said last year that whoever resumed testing would win the opprobrium of mankind. There may be a storm of exasperation in the United States if we don’t announce resumption, but we can stand that for a few days.” He looked across the table at the Vice-President and asked about the mood on the Hill. Johnson mentioned the belligerent Senators of the morning. “There will be a lot of talk of this sort,” the Vice-President said. “But I personally think it would be a good thing if you let Khrushchev take the heat for a little while. Also, you ought not to give the impression of reacting every time he does something. I think you should say these things to the congressional leaders, while at the same time saying that preparations for the resumption of testing are under way.”
The Russians thus far had only said they would resume testing; they had not yet tested. We speculated as to when their series would begin and what they could expect to learn from it. The President summed it up: “If you aren’t fully briefed in this area, you have vague fears—that a month will make a difference, that testing would give the Soviet Union a major strategic advantage, that testing might give us great new weapons. But in fact the advantages we would gain from a resumption of testing would be relatively marginal and sophisticated.” Meanwhile, pencil in hand, he edited the Rusk statement to make it announce, not a decision to resume, but a decision to begin preparations for resumption.
In the back of the room Ted Sorensen and I whispered to each other that the edited statement would be almost as effective as the original in wasting the political opportunities the Soviet Union had given us. We passed this thought on to Ed Murrow, who said he agreed and was about to say so. Murrow did not often talk in these meetings, and his observations in consequence had particular impact. “If we issue that statement,” he said in a moment, “we destroy the advantages of the greatest propaganda gift we have had for a long time.” Rusk now supported Murrow. Kennedy said, “The Russians are not fools. They thought they would lose less than they would gain by this decision. They must believe they will gain most by appearing tough and mean.” But he put the statement aside.
At this point, Hubert Humphrey entered the Cabinet Room, thinking that the congressional meeting had already started; and we broke up. Later in the day the President in a brief statement characterized the Soviet announcement as �
��primarily a form of atomic blackmail, designed to substitute terror for reason in the present international scene,” and said nothing about American testing.
1. THE TEST BAN TRAVAIL
The idea of a test ban first arose in the early fifties in response to the development of the hydrogen bomb. In the summer of 1952, Dr. Vannevar Bush, who had mobilized American science during the Second World War, proposed to Dean Acheson, then Secretary of State, that, before trying out the new bomb, the United States seek a no-testing agreement with the Soviet Union. Bush’s effort failed, and the United States shortly began a series of nuclear explosions in the atmosphere.
The fission bombs dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 had produced little radioactive debris. But the hydrogen super-bombs of the fifties were another matter. The detonation of the first fission-fusion-fission bomb in the Bikini Atoll in 1954 sent great sinister clouds floating over the lonely Pacific; and, when the “ashy rain” fell on the Japanese tuna fishermen of the Lucky Dragon, leaving them with charred skins and a terrible sickness, the world suddenly learned about the new horror of radioactive fallout. Labour party members in England and Prime Minister Nehru in India called for a standstill agreement on testing. As scientists analyzed the effects of radioactive contamination on bones, blood and germ plasm, fear of testing grew. In the next years people began to hear more and more about strontium-90, carbon-14, cesium-137 and the other poisons generated by nuclear explosions. And the physiological argument for a test ban was soon reinforced by a political argument: that the only way to crack Soviet resistance to comprehensive schemes, like the Baruch Plan for the international control of atomic energy, was to demonstrate cooperation and create confidence in smaller and more manageable areas. The test ban seemed the ideal ‘first step’ toward general disarmament.
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