A Thousand Days

by Arthur M. Schlesinger

  Between us.

  Forgotten intrigues

  With their spider’s web

  Snare our hands.

  But his sense of mission was invincible. Mysticism carried him nearly to the point of identification with Christ: “I am the vessel. The draught is God’s. And God is the thirsty one. . . . He who has surrendered himself to it knows that the Way ends on the Cross.” With the resourcefulness of a bureaucrat and the fervor of a saint, he sought to make the UN the chosen instrument of mankind in its quest for salvation.

  Keeping out of areas of direct Soviet-American confrontation, like Berlin, he concentrated instead on peacekeeping in the third world—in the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Africa. He saw the new nations, which entered the General Assembly in increasing numbers after 1954, as his special constituency and sought to persuade them that the UN was their fortress. His initiative succeeded brilliantly until his entry into the Congo in 1960. Then Khrushchev, perceiving that UN intervention would prevent a communist victory, reached his conclusion that there was no such thing as a neutral person—above all Hammarskjöld—and opened the campaign first to force Hammarskjöld’s resignation and then to replace the single Secretary-General with the troika.

  The United States strongly backed Hammarskjöld, partly no doubt because we agreed with what he was doing in the Congo, but partly also because of a genuine desire to strengthen the capacity of the UN to keep the peace. From our viewpoint the UN, however much it may have fallen short of the dreams of 1945, had amply vindicated itself as a force for stability in a highly unstable world. The very complexity of its procedures and incoherence of its judgments had often provided an invaluable means of muffling and confusing hostilities. Moreover, in its more purposeful moments it had played an indispensable role in averting clashes between the Soviet Union and the west, both by offering a cover for quiet talks, like those which ended the Berlin blockade in 1949, and by containing local crises before the nuclear powers were irretrievably involved, as in the Suez affair in 1956. And the UN represented the best hope of keeping the newly independent nations from sliding into aggression or collapse and of incorporating them into an order of rational development. Despite the rush of the ex-colonial states into the organization, we remained confident that we could mobilize the one-third plus one of the General Assembly necessary to block action against our interests. The meeting of the 16th General Assembly now offered the new President an opportunity to affirm the American concern for peace and to recall the world to its senses.

  6. THE DRIVE FOR DISARMAMENT

  “I can think of no better position for the United States in the forthcoming General Assembly,” Stevenson had written Kennedy in early July, “than the earnest advocacy of disarmament as our top priority national interest. . . . [We must] seize the initiative in disarmament which the Russians have held too long. . . . The United States must appear second to none in its desire for disarmament.”

  This theme Kennedy himself had expounded for a long time. ‘‘The price of running this arms race to the end is death,” he had warned in 1959 . . . We must design and propose a program that combines disarmament with the strengthening of the United Nations and with world development.” Arms control, he wrote in 1960 in a review of Liddell Hart’s Deterrent or Defense, would not happen ‘‘in a romantic moment of human redemption,” but it might come with “careful, detailed and well-staffed proposals” because of the “overlapping interest between Russians and Americans” in the prevention of nuclear war. During the campaign he repeatedly condemned the Eisenhower administration on the ground that “in the entire U.S. Government we have had fewer than one hundred men working on the complex problems of arms control.” Taking up the Democratic Advisory Council’s proposal of a National Peace Agency,* Kennedy promised to establish a new organization to work for disarmament and declared that “the fight for disarmament must command the personal attention and concern of the President of the United States.”

  The quest for disarmament had been long and discouraging. Men of goodwill had preached the perils of the arms race for many years. After the First World War the great powers had engaged in ritualistic disarmament discussions and even completed some treaties; but little had happened. Now nuclear weapons were giving disarmament a new and dreadful urgency. For the first time in history one nation could absolutely obliterate another, and very likely the rest of the world in the process. The arms race, which realists could plausibly dismiss in earlier years as no more than a reflection of international rivalries, had clearly become in the nuclear age a source of tension in itself.

  But still little happened. The Russians rejected the Baruch Plan; and the UN Disarmament Commission, established in 1952, degenerated into a sort of gladiatorial combat where the contestants waged unrelenting political warfare, brandishing their schemes and retreating in confusion whenever the other side showed any tendency to accept them. The Soviet Union put forward a grandiose proposal for “general and complete disarmament” and in 1959 even secured the General Assembly’s endorsement, not for the details of the plan, but for its title. The Soviet plan, however, was self-evidently a fake, for any scheme proposing to combine total disarmament with the creation of an international police force looked either to world government or to world communism; and world government was obviously the last thing the Soviet Union wanted, as its advocacy of the troika showed. As for America, in spite of Harold Stassen’s valiant efforts during his time as disarmament negotiator, our policy remained formalistic, like the Soviet’s—dedicated to developing positions, not for negotiation, but for propaganda.

  The formalism of the fifties produced a spreading frustration about the theory of total disarmament by a single agreement. At the same time, the development of the intercontinental ballistic missile was introducing a new factor which had to be incorporated into disarmament doctrine. In the United States especially, the new strategic analysis carried out in the Rand Corporation and elsewhere was yielding important insights into the character of the arms problem. The men who had invented nuclear weapons now began to give hard thought to the idea, not of abolishing them at one stroke, but of regulating them in the interest of stability. Out of this discussion emerged a new approach to the arms race under the banner of ‘arms control.’ The thinking was particularly hard along the banks of the Charles River, where Jerome Wiesner, Thomas C. Schelling, Henry Kissinger and others worked out the strategy of equilibrium in the nuclear age. A series of seminars and study groups at the end of the fifties culminated in a highly influential paper by Wiesner in Daedalus magazine in the winter of 1960.

  The essence of arms control was ‘stable nuclear deterrence’—the view, that is, that the best hope for peace and for ultimate disarmament lay in creating a situation where, in Wiesner’s words, “a surprise attack by one side cannot prevent retaliation by the other.” The temptation of surprise attack in a nuclear age was the hope of knocking out the opposing nuclear capability. If each side knew that both its own and the enemy nuclear forces could survive any conceivable assaults—through making missile bases, for example, ‘hard’ or mobile—then neither side would rationally initiate an attack which would only result in its own destruction. Stable deterrence had interesting implications—among them that the United States would be better off if the Russian striking force were invulnerable than if it were vulnerable—and most of its proponents were prepared to follow their logic to this conclusion. A stable deterrent system, they further agreed, would make it possible to limit the size of the deterrent and thereby end the nuclear race.

  The gospel of stable deterrence enlisted support in the Navy, which saw an expanded role for its Polaris missiles, and in the Army, which resented the funds channeled to the Air Force. But it antagonized those, as in the Air Force, who yearned for unlimited American nuclear supremacy. It also for subtler reasons antagonized some who yearned for total disarmament. An extreme school of ‘disarmers’ pronounced stable deterrence a dangerous deception. It might be a de
fense against rational enemy decision, they said, but it was little use against irrationality; so long as missiles rested on launching pads, accident or insanity might still rush the world to nuclear holocaust. This school objected in addition that stable deterrence would make disarmament forever impossible by requiring each side to maintain a sizable nuclear establishment. The argument was that, the smaller the opposing nuclear forces became, the more unstable the equilibrium; for the reason that, as the level of force declined, the capacity of cheating to upset the balance increased. If each side, for example, had five hundred legal missiles, hiding two more from the inspectors would make little difference, but, if each side had only five legal missiles, the extra two might be decisive. On these various grounds the once-and-for-all disarmers condemned arms control as an elegant rationalization for a permanent arms race and proclaimed the need for immediate and total abolition of nuclear weapons.

  Some arms controllers did indeed think that stabilization of the arms race was the most the world could realistically hope for. But others, like Wiesner himself, rightly doubted that total disarmament was at the moment politically relevant and saw stable deterrence as the best means of creating the atmosphere in which tensions could be reduced, further agreement achieved and, eventually, total disarmament attained. Walt Rostow coined the term ‘transitional deterrent’ to make this point. As the experience of agreement developed the habits and techniques of inspection and enlarged mutual confidence, the world could begin to cut back military forces and stockpiles and move toward final disarmament. For the interim period, the arms controllers had a variety of proposals designed to reduce the dangers of surprise attack and accidental war.

  The Charles River doctrine, in short, appeared to offer a way of reconciling the objective of comprehensive disarmament with the interim requirements of national security. Its evident practicality appealed to Kennedy, and its emergence in 1960 gave him the opportunity for a new start in disarmament policy.

  7. ORGANIZING FOR DISARMAMENT

  After the election the President-elect had first to decide how to organize his disarmament effort in order to give it the power and priority it had lacked under Eisenhower. Knowing he had to protect disarmament against suspicions of softness, idealism, one-world-ism and so on, he followed his customary practice of seeking a conservative to execute a liberal policy. The appointment of John J. McCloy as his special disarmament adviser was thus a deliberate effort to prepare the political ground by placing disarmament in charge of a figure whose background unassailably combined the Republican party, the Pentagon, the Ford Foundation, the Chase Manhattan Bank, Cravath, Swaine & Moore, the Brook and the Links.

  The next question was the location of the new disarmament agency. Kennedy’s “superficial preference,” as he told Richard Neustadt, was to put it in the Executive Office of the President; nothing, he felt, could demonstrate more effectively the new status and seriousness of the American purpose. On the other hand, as Neustadt persuasively replied, taking disarmament out of the State Department would conflict with the policy of making State the agent of coordination in foreign affairs; “the Secretary ought to have a run for the money.” Moreover, if McCloy headed the staff, the new agency would have independence, access to the President and influence at the Pentagon wherever it was. Neustadt therefore recommended that it be set up as an autonomous unit within the State Department. Kennedy received a similar recommendation from his old friend Edmund Gullion, who had worked on disarmament as a Special Assistant to Acheson in the Truman administration and was now head of a “disarmament administration” hastily improvised in State during the campaign in answer to Kennedy’s criticisms.

  The disarmament agency accordingly came into being as a semidetached part of State. Because of his commitments as a lawyer, McCloy could not give full time to Washington; so Adrian Fisher, who had once clerked for Justice Frankfurter and had later been Legal Adviser to the State Department under Acheson, and Gullion became his deputies. In September the new agency received its statutory basis when Congress established the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency; the very title was an attempt to liquidate the quarrel between the two approaches. At this point, McCloy had to return to his private affairs and, in another exercise in protective coloration, William Foster, the public-spirited businessman who had originally been considered for Under-Secretary of State for Economic Affairs, was appointed head of ACDA. Foster had met Wiesner and other scientists and received his initiation into disarmament mysteries when he led the American delegation to the 1958 Geneva conference on the prevention of surprise attack.

  During the spring McCloy had concentrated on general disarmament policy, leaving the test ban to Arthur Dean and congressional problems to Fisher. A good many cooks helped stir the broth—Wiesner and Kaysen at the White House; Stevenson at the United Nations; Leland Haworth and Glenn Seaborg at the Atomic Energy Commission; Rusk, Abram Chayes and Cleveland at State; McNamara, Gilpatric, John McNaughton and the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon. Periodically a so-called Committee of Principals assembled to wrangle over American policy.

  The basic problem was to weld balanced deterrents and total disarmament into a single negotiating proposal. Stevenson, Wiesner and Gullion all felt that arms control by itself would not be enough, that the United Nations and world opinion demanded that the sword of Damocles be not only balanced but eventually lifted. After all, the United States had nominally accepted “general and complete disarmament” in the 1959 UN resolution, even if our actual proposals before and after had suggested that we were interested only in partial measures and unwilling to go the distance. Any retreat from the goal of general and complete disarmament by the new administration, Stevenson warned, would be disastrous, and we had to put forward a strong and convincing plan if we were to strengthen allied unity and beat the Soviet Union in the UN.

  The Joint Chiefs of Staff, however, and an extreme faction of arms controllers opposed general and complete disarmament on the ground that it was either Madison Avenue huckstering or else a plan for world government and hence utopian. As for McCloy, his original intention was to work toward a somewhat vague conception of the “rule of law.” When he and Stevenson debated disarmament policy before the President in mid-March, Kennedy ruled in favor of general and complete disarmament. McCloy accepted this as the objective but, boggling at the phrase lest it imply an endorsement of the Soviet plan, proposed to substitute “total and universal disarmament.”

  In the early spring Stevenson and Gromyko agreed that there should be an exchange of views between the United States and the Soviet Union to permit a renewal of disarmament negotiations. In July McCloy went to Moscow and engaged in extensive talks with V. A. Zorin, the Deputy Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union. Though “total and universal disarmament” was now the accepted government objective, the phrase concealed a good deal of confusion and disagreement. When someone on McCloy’s plane to Moscow pointed out that the plan involved the reduction of national forces in the final phase to the level required to maintain internal security and meant therefore the disappearance of all national nuclear establishments, a representative of the Navy objected that this was wrong; a nuclear arsenal would still be necessary “to maintain internal security against the Russians.”

  For two weeks in Moscow, McCloy and Zorin read back and forth across the table elaborate prepared speeches, each always ending up with a plea to the other to accept “total and universal disarmament” or “general and complete disarmament.” The two phrases were, in fact, identical in Russian; and toward the end the punch-drunk Soviet interpreter electrified the conference when he concluded his English translation of Zorin’s speech by proclaiming the unalterable Soviet devotion to “total and universal disarmament.” Zorin peered at McCloy and, speaking his first words in English during the whole proceedings, said, “You know, Mr. McCloy, it looks as if he is going over to your side.” The unfortunate interpreter disappeared, perhaps to Siberia; and the episode illustrated the fatuity
of the semantic struggle. After McCloy returned to Washington, Rusk stopped the nonsense by pointing out that the two expressions tended to be the same in most languages; in any case, he said, we weren’t going to get absolute disarmament for many, many years and, if there were any difference between the two formulas, it was a metaphysical one which did not comport with the dignity of the United States to insist upon.

  For a long time Zorin had declined to entertain the idea of any negotiation at all until both countries agreed on the basic provisions of a specific plan; but in Moscow McCloy finally got the Soviet Union to change its position and consider a statement of principles. When negotiations resumed in New York in September, the Russians resisted the American contention that the verification machinery should cover not only the arms and forces abandoned but those retained. “While being for effective control over disarmament,” Zorin said, “. . . the Soviet Union at the same time resolutely opposes establishment of control over armaments.” This left a considerable gap in the disarmament design; but nevertheless concurrence became possible on a general statement defining the framework for future multilateral talks. The Americans now accepted the Russian point that disarmament should be “general and complete,” leaving nations only the forces necessary to maintain internal order; while the Russians accepted two theses which McCloy had made the center of his argument—that the process should take place in stages “under such strict and effective international control as would provide firm assurance that all parties are honoring their obligations,” and that it should go hand in hand with the development of international peace-keeping institutions.

  During the spring and early summer, while this was going on, Washington had been involved in a complicated effort to work out the details of a new disarmament plan. Panels were convened, experts summoned from all over the country, studies commissioned, meetings held. Finally Wiesner and Spurgeon Keeney of his staff spent a weekend assembling all the ideas of value, including anything of interest they could find in the Soviet disarmament proposals of the five years preceding, and put together a plan.