A Thousand Days

by Arthur M. Schlesinger

  This proposal greatly attracted both Bundy and me. But Arthur Dean feared that any retreat from the comprehensive treaty would be taken as a general weakening of our position. When the matter was brought to the President, he readily came up with a compromise—that Dean should fight for the whole treaty in Geneva, but, if nothing happened, we could come out for the limited ban later. In mid-August the President concluded that, when Dean returned from Geneva and the Defense Department had completed its review of weapon requirements, the Atomic Energy Commission might announce contingency preparations for underground testing, though this would not mean that we had actually decided to resume tests.

  On August 28, the Foreign Broadcast Information Service recorded a Soviet broadcast warning aircraft to stay out of a designated area over Siberia. This bulletin seemed the result of some slipup in Moscow, and Wiesner and Kaysen, in a state of high excitement, rushed the item to the President, venturing that this was an indication we were soon to have a Russian test in the atmosphere. Kennedy, who was just getting up from an afternoon nap, read the bulletin, grimaced and said bitterly: “Bitched again.” They did not soon forget the look of profound discouragement on his face. Two days later came Moscow’s official announcement of its decision to resume.

  We were still waiting for the actual tests. At three o’clock on September 1, I was chatting in my office with Richard Wilbur and Peter Viereck, who were leaving that afternoon for the Soviet Union on a mission of cultural goodwill. In a minute Bundy called to say that it looked as if the first Soviet explosion had taken place. “The President is still napping,” he said, “and we haven’t wakened him. We’re trying to figure out what to say. You had better come over.”

  An argument was taking place in Bundy’s office when I arrived. Arthur Dean, who had just returned from Geneva, and McCloy favored an immediate announcement of our own determination to resume. Murrow, Wiesner, Bundy and the others favored a declaration calling on the world to condemn the Russians for their action. After discussion it was decided to bring both statements to the President.

  We trooped over to the Mansion. In a moment Kennedy came out of his bedroom in a dressing-gown. He listened a little impatiently to the definition of issues, then asked for the drafts. McCloy argued that the American President had to show now that he was capable of hard and tough leadership—that he could not continue to stand by and let the communists kick us in the teeth. Murrow contended that we had nothing to gain and much to lose by precipitate action. The President was in no mood to listen to prolonged debate. Knowing what each side was going to say, he completed our sentences, slashed each statement to bits and said that, while he was not inclined to announce our resumption at this point, he did not know how much longer he could refrain from doing so. Then he briskly ushered us out.

  He still hoped to avert a new sequence of atmospheric testing and spare the world a new rain of radioactivity. The time had now come for the Thompson proposal. On September 3 he joined with Macmillan in offering Khrushchev an agreement not to conduct tests which produced fallout, pointing out that such a pact could rely on existing means of detection and would not require additional controls. But later the same day, while cruising off Hyannis Port, he received word of a second Soviet test. If a Soviet series were to constitute the only answer to the offer of an atmospheric ban, Kennedy saw no choice, given the Berlin crisis, but to order United States resumption. When on Monday our detection system picked up a third Soviet test, Kennedy, back in Washington, immediately announced American preparation for tests “in the laboratory and underground, with no fallout. . . . In view of the acts of the Soviet Government, we must now take those steps which prudent men find essential.” He wrote Macmillan that we had to show both our friends and our own people that we were ready to meet our own needs in the face of these new Soviet acts; at this hour the gravest danger was that we might seem less determined than Khrushchev.

  On September 9 Khrushchev made his formal reply to the Kennedy-Macmillan proposal. “Cessation of one kind of test only—in the atmosphere,” he wrote, “—would be a disservice to the cause of peace.” So, in the name of peace, he reopened the nuclear race. Soon he was boasting to the Communist 22nd Congress of his intention to detonate a 50-megaton bomb—2500 times bigger than the one which had killed 100,000 people at Hiroshima and five times larger than the total of all high explosives used in all the wars of human history. Between September 1 and November 4 the Soviet Union carried out at least thirty major tests, nearly all in the atmosphere. By this time, though there had been fewer Russian than western tests since testing began, the Soviet Union had discharged more radioactive poison into the air than the United States, Britain and France together. The total force over the years of Khrushchev’s atmospheric explosions was about 170 megatons, equal to 170 million tons of TNT, as against about 125 megatons for the United States and a few megatons for the other two countries. As the new series continued, I noted. “I fear that Khrushchev has decided to make the USSR the embodiment of terror and power in the world in the expectation that all ‘lovers’ of peace, terrified of war and recognizing the futility of trying to alter Soviet policy, will concentrate their energies on making the west give way over Berlin. This is brinksmanship with a vengeance, and it may get us very close indeed to war.”

  4. APPEAL TO THE UNITED NATIONS

  But the President was not ready to accept the challenge of terror without one more appeal to reason. There still remained the General Assembly of the United Nations, gathering in New York in mid-September for its sixteenth session.

  In July Kennedy had asked me to follow United Nations matters for the White House. This put me in the not unfamiliar but still sometimes uncomfortable position of middleman between Kennedy and Stevenson—two men whom I so much admired but whose own rapport was perhaps less than perfect. In this assignment I had the good fortune to work closely with Assistant Secretary of State Harlan Cleveland and the excellent staff of his Bureau of International Organization Affairs.

  Cleveland was a man of varied experience: a Rhodes Scholar (like Kermit Gordon, he had had Harold Wilson as a tutor at Oxford), then the Board of Economic Warfare, and UNRRA in Italy and China, then to the Marshall Plan (where in 1950 he invented the phrase, so thrashed to death in later years, “the revolution of rising expectations”), then publisher of The Reporter magazine and finally dean of the Maxwell School at Syracuse University before Kennedy and Stevenson brought him back to Washington. His intelligence, imagination, good sense and good humor were indispensable not just in working out our UN policy but in preserving communication and confidence within the eternal triangle of the State Department, the United States Mission in New York and the White House.

  Kennedy, who had an essential respect and liking for Stevenson, tried, when he thought of it, to make their relationship effective. He understood Stevenson’s standing in the world and his influence on liberal opinion in the United States, admired his public presence and wit, valued his skills as diplomat and orator, and considered him, unlike most of the State Department, capable of original thought. He also respected Stevenson’s taste in people. Of the men who had gathered a decade before at the Elk’s Club in Springfield to work for Adlai’s first campaign, J. Edward Day, Willard Wirtz and George Ball were now in the cabinet or sub-cabinet; Kenneth Galbraith, William Blair, John Bartlow Martin and William Rivkin were ambassadors; David Bell was director of the Budget, Newton Minow chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Carl McGowan a federal judge, Clayton Fritchey and Philip Stem were in the State Department, and I was in the White House.

  Kennedy fully expected, moreover, that people (including some of his own loyalists who still had not forgiven Stevenson for Los Angeles in 1960) would try to make trouble between Adlai and himself, and generally shrugged off the tales helpfully repeated to him of petulance or discontent in New York. On the other hand, certain of Stevenson’s idiosyncrasies did try him; and his own effect On Stevenson in face-to-face encounter was unfor
tunately to heighten those which tried him most. The relationship was of course harder for Stevenson. He was the older man, and in one way or another Kennedy had denied him his highest hopes. Though Stevenson greatly respected the President’s intelligence and judgment, he never seemed wholly at ease on visits to the White House. He tended to freeze a little, much as he used to do in the fifties on television shows like the Meet the Press, and, instead of the pungent, astute and beguiling man he characteristically was, he would seem stiff, even at times solemn and pedantic.

  Kennedy consequently never saw Stevenson at his best. Their meetings were always friendly—if Kennedy seldom called Rusk “Dean,” he generally called Stevenson “Adlai”—but at times they only confirmed Kennedy’s theory of Stevenson’s supposed inability to make up his mind. To me and to others who knew Stevenson, this theory seemed exaggerated; Stevenson was occasionally indecisive about himself but rarely about his policies. It was his manner, deliberately self-deprecatory, that conveyed an appearance of indecision which did not really exist. Even here the President, though at times ironic, was not unsympathetic. He once remarked that one could not fairly judge what kind of man Stevenson might have become, for no experience could have been more destructive of self-confidence than to have been twice defeated for President; victory would have changed him in another direction. And, though Kennedy expected a certain softness in Stevenson’s recommendations and was occasionally ironic about this too, he knew that his Ambassador to the UN had to be responsive to his constituency and, on balance, welcomed Stevenson’s advocacy of the claims of American idealism and of the international community, if only to counterbalance the hard-nosed, Europe-obsessed mood of the State Department. When Stevenson wrote the President a week after the erection of the Berlin Wall, “It would be extremely dangerous for us to allow our attention to be so absorbed by Berlin that we overlook attitudes in Asia, Africa and Latin America, or take decisions or public positions based in the exigencies of our NATO allies rather than the exigencies of those areas,” the President, for all his own absorption in the Berlin crisis, recognized the justice of the point.

  Quite apart from the amiable but sometimes formal personal contacts, there were problems inherent in the relationship between Washington and any ambassador to the UN. Stevenson was of course invited to meetings of the cabinet and the National Security Council, but he was very often detained at the UN when large decisions impended at the Department or the White House. Though both Kennedy and Rusk tried to remember to keep Stevenson abreast of policy, especially after the Bay of Pigs, consultation over the long-distance telephone never proved enough. To influence the making of policy it was really necessary to be in the room. Nearly every significant decision had a UN angle; and this meant that the ambassador to the UN sometimes had the sense of having to defend a world he never made. Cleveland and I did our best to see that the UN interest was represented in policy discussions, but we were often not in the room ourselves.

  Washington, moreover, had an ineradicable tendency to think of foreign policy as a matter between the United States and another nation or, at most, as between the United States and an alliance. The idea of policy as lying between the United States and the mess of a hundred nations in New York was alien and uncongenial. The Foreign Service particularly appeared to regard multilateral diplomacy as somehow inferior and nonprofessional—an attitude reinforced by the fact that service in the U.S. Mission to the UN counted less in advancing a career than a Third Secretaryship in Stockholm or Pretoria.

  If the atmosphere in Washington made people think too little about the UN, the atmosphere in the headquarters in New York made people think of nothing else. To outsiders the UN often seemed a vast and picturesque form of make-believe, whose excitements bore little connection with serious issues; but to those who lived every day in the all-enveloping UN environment, it became the ultimate reality. Not until I began making regular visits to the great glass tower glittering above the East River did I start to grasp the intensity of the UN life. It was a world of its own, separate, self-contained and in chronic crisis, where a dozen unrelated emergencies might explode at once, demanding immediate reactions across the government and decisions (or at least speeches) in New York. It had its own ethos, its own rules and its own language: delegates would argue interminably over whether to “note” or to “reaffirm” a past resolution, to “deplore” or “regret” or “condemn” a present action. It had its own social life, an endless and obligatory round of evening receptions, where American nonattendance might be taken as an insult and lose a vote on an important resolution.

  Stevenson, presiding over this hectic outpost of American diplomacy, had a far more arduous and exhausting job than most Washingtonians appreciated; and, because he had the grace of making everything look easy and the habit of disparaging his own success, people in Washington did not realize how superbly he was discharging an impossible assignment. In New York, however, his public stature, his exceptional personal charm and his realistic faith in the UN as an institution enabled him to recover quickly from the embarrassments of the Bay of Pigs and to assume a role of leadership. He had a gifted group of associates at the United States Mission, especially Ambassador Charles W. Yost, a superb Foreign Service officer, quiet, reflective and tough. On political and press matters the White House often dealt with Clayton Fritchey, an old friend of the President’s and my own, an experienced newspaperman who had been General Marshall’s director of public information in the Defense Department and a Special Assistant to President Truman before he joined the Stevenson campaign staff in 1952. In the fifties Fritchey served as deputy chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Now back with Stevenson, he handled a whole range of delicate matters with imperturbable resourcefulness.

  Though Kennedy had retained from the founding conference in San Francisco a soberly favorable view of the UN, I do not think he had thought about it intensively before he entered the White House. But the 15th General Assembly resumed its session after the inauguration; and the President was quick to note that, next to himself, his ambassador to the United Nations was the most conspicuous voice of American foreign policy. Day after day, UN stories would dominate the front page of the New York Times. This was due partly, no doubt, to Stevenson but even more to the issues which crowded the UN agenda. It was then that Kennedy began to develop his avid interest in how the United States was going to vote on UN resolutions; he hated to learn things about his own government in the press. The Bay of Pigs further emphasized the role of the UN; for, as a result of the Cuban debate and of the parliamentary necessity of using the ‘right to reply’ without delay, the first statements of United States policy at almost every stage were made at the UN.

  Plainly the UN was now as much a fact of international life as NATO or Khrushchev’s nuclear tests in Siberia; and this Kennedy fully recognized. I noted in October 1961: “Considering the fact that JFK is surrounded every day by State Department people, who believe essentially in bilateral diplomacy, and by generals and admirals, who don’t believe in diplomacy at all, I think he does exceedingly well to keep the UN as considerably in the forefront of his attention as he does.” In this he had the assistance of Rusk, who had held Cleveland’s post in the Truman administration and retained a sure technical command of UN problems, and very often (though the U.S. Mission to the UN would never believe this) of McGeorge Bundy. Kennedy’s interest in the UN, however, was primarily as an instrument of political and economic action. Here and elsewhere, the idea of ‘institution-building,’ which meant so much to a political scientist like Harlan Cleveland, did not have great reality for him. Since I suffered from this same disability, I was inclined to attribute it to the cast of mind of the historian, who assumes that, if developments did not generate institutions, no amount of institution-building could control developments.

  5. STATE OF THE UN

  The UN remained a congeries of institutions, and it was now, as it had been since 1945, in a state of constitutional ev
olution. The San Francisco Charter had envisaged a benign, great-power overlordship, with the Security Council as the organization’s executive arm. But it had also given each permanent member of the Security Council a veto, and this could render the Council impotent whenever the permanent members were in serious disagreement (provided that they were in attendance, as the Soviet Union was not at the time of Korea). As for the General Assembly, for all the powers it gained from the Uniting for Peace resolution of 1950, it had proved too divided and unwieldy for executive action; despite the later theories about the dominance of the Assembly in this period, nearly all UN peace-keeping operations continued to be authorized by the Council.

  The single clear point in the confusion was the Secretary-General. Dag Hammarskjöld, especially after his re-election in 1957, disclosed a presidential conception of the Secretary-General’s “duty to use his office and, indeed, the machinery of the Organization to its utmost capacity.” He considered it his obligation to act on his own, without guidance from the organization or the Charter, if this should seem “necessary in order to help in filling any vacuum that may appear in the systems which the Charter and traditional diplomacy provide for the safeguarding of peace and security.” He charged this conception with the quasi-messianic passion of an extraordinary personality. Half international civil servant in the tradition of the League of Nations, half Scandinavian visionary in the tradition of Swedenborg and Kierkegaard, he inscribed in his journal his belief that “in our era, the road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action.” From his lofty eminence as (in a phrase he once used in a talk with W. H. Auden) secular Pope, the proceedings below sometimes seemed empty gabble:

  Words without import

  Are lobbed to and fro