The matter was one of fantastic complexity, and the plan was a remarkable intellectual feat. It was based on Wiesner’s conviction that arms control and stabilized deterrence offered the way to general and complete disarmament. With immense ingenuity it worked out in three stages the progressive reduction and eventual abolition of all kinds of national armed force. It laid primary stress on the elimination of delivery vehicles for weapons of mass destruction—and also on unilateral and reciprocal measures to lessen the risk of war by accident or miscalculation. It provided for the parallel development and strengthening of peace-keeping institutions. The plan raised the most intricate questions of ‘linkage’ among the various categories of armaments (nuclear weapons, delivery vehicles, conventional forces) within the several stages, lest the balance of deterrence be altered as the level of arms declined. The multiplicity of variables produced a bewildering scholasticism of discourse, and I was constantly impressed by the sobriety with which the Committee of Principals tackled these entangled and almost impenetrable problems. In its essence, so far as one could judge, it was a serious and realistic proposal, at least in the first two stages.
I found myself, however, in the unaccustomed position of sharing the doubts of the Joint Chiefs of Staff about Stage III. By this time, according to the plan, disarmament and international law would develop to a point where “no State would have the military power to challenge the progressively strengthened United Nations Peace Force and all international disputes would be settled according to the agreed principles of international conduct.” I suppose some attempt had to be made to visualize a world without national armaments; but Stage III seemed essentially an exercise in millennial rhetoric, and I tried in vain to persuade McCloy to abandon at least a phrase contemplating the day when the United Nations would be able “to assure peace and the just settlement of differences in a disarmed world.” It appeared doubtful whether, short of the millennium, any human contrivance would be able to “assure” justice, but the objection glanced off McCloy’s faith in the rule of law.
The plan circulated around the government and was vetted, revised, diluted and supplemented; McCloy, William Foster, Robert Matteson and the disarmament staff came up with a new version; the Principals brooded over it; the Joint Chiefs accepted some of the plan and watered down more; our allies made comments, all favorable except for the French, who felt as usual that this was the wrong time to present anything; and early in August a final meeting of the Principals approved the plan in substance. In mid-August the President cleared it. Early in September the American program for “General and Complete Disarmament in a Peaceful World” was ready for submission to the United Nations.*
XVIII
No Truce to Terror
AUGUST 5 WAS A gray and dreary Saturday in Hyannis Port when Adlai Stevenson, Harlan Cleveland and I arrived at the Kennedy compound to discuss United States strategy in the impending session of the United Nations General Assembly. We found the President in a blue sports shirt and chinos, determined, despite the sullen weather, to take us all out for luncheon on his boat in the spund. A chilling wind sprang up over the water, and, while Jacqueline and two of her sisters-in-law huddled forward, the rest of us talked about the UN in the stern.
The first problem was choosing the major theme of the American presentation. Stevenson renewed his proposal of disarmament. Kennedy observed that disarmament did not seem a popular issue in the United States; he could detect no great congressional ardor, for example, for the bill establishing the Disarmament Agency. On the other hand, he knew how much the hope of disarmament meant to the rest of the world. Moreover, it was an issue on which we could make time against the Soviet Union: “We are ready for inspection; they aren’t; and we should take all the advantage of this we can.” Stevenson of course agreed but added earnestly, “We can’t do this effectively if we ourselves equivocate. Your first decision, Mr. President, must be to make sure that you yourself are genuinely for general and complete disarmament. We must go for that. Everything else in our program derives from it. Only total disarmament will save the world from the horror of nuclear war as well as from the mounting expenses of the arms race. Your basic decision must be to identify yourself with a new approach to disarmament. This must be our principal initiative in the United Nations.”
1. STRATEGY FOR THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY
Kennedy listened with interest but also with a slight tinge of skepticism. With his profoundly realistic mind, he saw little present chance of significant progress and therefore looked to disarmament primarily as a measure of political warfare, feeling at the same time that, if the political warfare were to be effective, our plan, unlike its predecessors in the fifties, must offer an honest basis for negotiation. Now he said that he well understood the “propaganda” importance of the disarmament drive.
This casual remark stung Stevenson; he seemed seized for an instant as if by an anguished feeling that Kennedy did not really care about disarmament at all. While Cleveland and I, both anxious to keep our principals together, watched a little helplessly, Stevenson returned to the attack, telling the President in effect that he just had to have faith. This was not an argument likely to move Kennedy, and I never felt so keenly the way these two men, so united in their objectives, could so inadvertently arrive at cross-purposes. Cleveland fortunately intervened at this point. The trouble, he said, had been that the Soviet Union had always talked in the UN about general and complete disarmament, while we had talked about “next steps,” thus letting the world feel that the Russians were more devoted to disarmament than we were. If we now accepted general and complete disarmament as the goal, this would cast all subsequent debate in terms of “next steps,” and here our specific proposals could test or expose the real Soviet desire for arms reduction. Kennedy readily assented, and the matter passed over.
Next came the question of Communist China—at which point the President, calling forward, said, “Jackie, we need the Bloody Marys now.” For several years the United States had been staving off the entry of Peking into the UN, and the question was certain to arise with new intensity this year. Kennedy, who considered the state of our relations with Communist China as irrational, did not exclude the possibility of doing something to change them in the course of his administration. But he never supposed that admission to the UN would work any miraculous conversion in Peking, and he had no doubt in 1961 that the international gains (if any) of admission would be far outweighed by the uproar it would cause at home. Eisenhower, for example, had told him in their last meeting before the inauguration that he hoped to support the new administration on all foreign policy issues but would consider it necessary to return to public life if Communist China threatened to enter the UN. With his slim majority, Kennedy felt that he could not take on the China problem this year.
As for Stevenson, he had long argued as a private citizen that we must deal with realities and perhaps move toward a solution which would seat both Chinese governments. We now discussed various parliamentary approaches which might stall Peking’s admission. When Stevenson objected to one stratagem as “too transparent,” Kennedy said, “What do you think we ought to do? If you’re not for this policy, we shouldn’t try it.” Stevenson, a little embarrassed, replied, “I will be for it if you decide it’s the policy.” Kennedy said, “If we can buy twelve months, it will be more than worth it. We may be preparing the way for the admission of Peiping in another year; but in another year things will be different.”
(In another year things were not so different after all. It was ironic that in 1961, as in 1949, when an American President was preparing to reconsider the problem of Communist China, Peking itself should elect a course of militance and declare war—in the one case, on South Korea; in the other, on most of the world. In the next Kennedy years, as the traditional advocates, India and the Soviet Union, lost their crusading zeal for Chinese admission, the matter did not prove so pressing again.)
The strategy of keeping Peking out in 196
1 involved the question of Outer Mongolia, a pro-Russian communist state on China’s western border. Chester Bowles had argued persuasively that it would be to the American interest to recognize Outer Mongolia, both to gain an observation post in central Asia and to nourish the growing mistrust between Russia and China. But Nationalist China bitterly opposed this idea, as did its Republican allies in the American Congress—so much so that the recognition plan was dropped in midsummer. In addition, however, Outer Mongolia was itself a candidate for admission to the UN. If Nationalist China used its power as a permanent member of the Security Council to veto the application, the Soviet Union would presumably retaliate by vetoing Mauritania, and the African members might in turn retaliate by backing the admission of Communist China. We needed African votes, or at least abstentions, to keep Communist China out, and we therefore wanted Outer Mongolia in.
Kennedy had just discussed these questions in Washington with an emissary from Chiang Kai-shek named General Chen Cheng. “He is the most mysterious Chinese I have ever met,” the President told us. “All he did was to repeat instructions. We never had any communication.” He had gone as far as he could with General Chen on Outer Mongolia, he said, and he thought there was a reasonable chance of persuading the Chinese Nationalists to withhold their veto—unless, he added, “Chiang’s Götterdämmerung mood” might lead to a desperate assault on the mainland.
The conversation grew steadily more relaxed through the day. In midafternoon we returned to the compound for tennis and swimming and the Kennedys’ Finnish sauna. Dinner in the evening was gay and easy. The President produced a copy of Theodore White’s The Making of the President: 1960 and expressed his admiration for it. The only trouble was, he said, that Teddy made his characters larger than life; this was the occupational defect of historians. Turning to me, he said, “When I read your Roosevelt books, I thought what towering figures those men around Roosevelt were—Moley and Tugwell and Berle and the others. Then I read Teddy’s book and realized that they were just Sorensen and Goodwin and you.”
2. THE PRESIDENT AT THE UNITED NATIONS
The Soviet resumption of testing four weeks later gave the September session of the General Assembly even more importance than we had expected. For a moment, Cleveland argued that the resumption itself should be brought before the Security Council, but McCloy and Arthur Dean opposed this on the ground that we would gain nothing and might restrict our own freedom of action. When Cleveland mentioned the effect on world opinion, McCloy exploded: “World opinion? I don’t believe in world opinion. The only thing that matters is power. What we have to do now is to show that we are a powerful nation and not spend our time trailing after the phantom of world opinion.” This was by now a familiar debate in the councils around the President; and, while the term ‘world opinion’ was unquestionably glib and the people who invoked it often exaggerated its significance, one could not but reflect that the capacity to move opinion was itself an element of power, a fact well understood by the American Presidents who had wielded most power in the world, Wilson and Roosevelt.
In any case, when I carried this particular UN problem to Kennedy, he was talking over the phone to John McCormack about the most recent setback to the foreign aid bill; one always tended to forget how many problems assailed a President beyond one’s own. Finishing his conversation, he listened to the UN question; then, silent in his chair, went through a process of almost visible cerebration, as he thought his way into the issue. Finally he said, “I don’t see how we can do it. It would look hypocritical for us to take the question to the Security Council if we have already decided to resume testing. The two things seem to me incompatible.”
This decision, of course, was based on a belief in the reality of world opinion. And, because, like Wilson and Roosevelt, he regarded opinion as a basic constituent of power, the President now, after the Russian tests, decided to go to New York and address the General Assembly later in the month. On September 5, the day he ordered the resumption of our own underground tests, he called in Rusk, Stevenson, Cleveland, Bundy, Sorensen and me to consider what he might say.
For a while we discussed Berlin, the President rattling off a series of ideas which might constitute part of a negotiating position. Stevenson then urged that he hold a special press conference to emphasize his interest in Berlin negotiations and at the same time unveil the new American disarmament plan; he feared that the Soviet Union might respond to the Kennedy-Macmillan note on an atmospheric test ban by talking once more about general and complete disarmament and thereby scooping our own disarmament initiative. In a moment he expressed his personal regret at the day’s decision to resume testing.
Kennedy quickly said, “What choice did we have? They had spit in our eye three times. We couldn’t possibly sit back and do nothing at all. We had to do this.” Stevenson remarked, “But we were ahead in the propaganda battle.” Kennedy said, “What does that mean? I don’t hear of any windows broken because of the Soviet decision. The neutrals have been terrible. The Russians made two tests after our note calling for a ban on atmospheric testing. Maybe they couldn’t have stopped the first, but they could have stopped the second. . . . All this makes Khrushchev look pretty tough. He has had a succession of apparent victories—space, Cuba, the thirteenth of August [the Berlin Wall], though I don’t myself regard this as a Soviet victory. He wants to give out the feeling that he has us on the run. The third test was a contemptuous response to our note. . . . Anyway, the decision has been made. I’m not saying that it was the right decision. Who the hell knows? But it is the decision which has been taken.”
The talk then turned to China. The State Department reported that Chiang still seemed determined to veto Outer Mongolia. Rusk asked the President whether Stevenson could be authorized to inform other delegations discreetly that the United States did not exclude the possibility that a study committee might recommend for the consideration of the General Assembly in 1962 an essentially “two China” solution based on the successor state approach—the theory that, if an original UN member broke up into two separate states, each new state would be entitled to a seat in the General Assembly. Kennedy said that Stevenson could proceed along these lines. He then expressed his own sympathy with Stevenson’s position: “You have the hardest thing in the world to sell. It really doesn’t make any sense—the idea that Taiwan represents China. But, if we lost this fight, if Red China comes into the UN during our first year in town, your first year and mine, they’ll run us both out. We have to lick them this year. We’ll take our chances next year. It will be an election year; but we can delay the admission of Red China till after the election. So far as this year is concerned, you must do everything you can to keep them out. Whatever is required is OK by me.” Stevenson asked, “Do you mean to keep them out permanently or for a year?” Kennedy said, “At least for a year. I am for any strategy which works. You can vote on Outer Mongolia as you think best. I am going to send a new letter to Chiang Kai-shek, based on what is good for us, not what is good for Formosa. We’ll get Cabot Lodge to talk to Luce—Adlai, you talk to Roy Howard—I will talk to Walter Judd. We’ll have to get all these people to make it clear to Chiang that he can’t expect to make a domestic political issue out of our strategy in the UN.”
Over the next week we began work on the President’s UN speech. But, as the days passed, opposition began to arise to the idea of his going to New York, or, if he did go, to his making disarmament his major theme. Lyndon Johnson argued to the President that he could not demand disarmament in New York and then return to Washington and call out more divisions; the contradiction, the Vice-President believed, would baffle our own people and confuse the world. But others of us questioned whether this was really a contradiction, for obviously disarmament negotiations would be predicated on the resolution of the Berlin crisis. Moreover, we considered it a mistake to identify the President with menacing talk, leaving the ambassador to the UN as the champion of peace, as if the United States Mission in New
York were conducting its own foreign policy.
Cleveland sent over a strong memorandum setting forth nine reasons why the President should go to New York; and Robert Komer of Bundy’s staff summed up the disarmament argument in a forceful paper. With Russia’s test resumption, Komer pointed out, we finally had the Soviets “on the defensive re disarmament, an issue devoid at this point of any practical negotiating possibilities but of tremendous psychological significance, particularly as the world moves closer to the brink on Berlin.” And, as apprehension was rising over Berlin, “it is more important than ever to look peaceful as well as resolute, to point out how, in contrast to Soviet threats and truculence, we remain genuinely interested in a disarmed world.” Of course we were making a bid for “world opinion”; but “to contend that only power talks, even in a Berlin crisis, is as dangerously narrow as to argue that we must always trim our sails to the prevailing public wind.” We could not in any case avoid a UN disarmament debate, Komer concluded, and “we have never been in a better position to win it.”
On September 18 the tragic news of Dag Hammarskjöld’s death in a plane crash in Africa settled whatever doubts the President may have had about going to New York. Hearing the word while receiving a delegation at the White House, he expressed deep sorrow, adding sadly, “I expect my whole time in office to be filled with dangers and difficulties.” The Russians would now undoubtedly use the struggle over the succession to press their campaign to replace a single Secretary-General with the troika. Ted Sorensen, taking drafts from Cleveland and myself, began to prepare the final version of the speech.
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