All this made strategic analysis far less exact than the pseudoprecision of its terminology suggested, and it permitted a variety of interpretations of diverse strategic postures. But no one who listened to the anguished musings of Kennedy and McNamara on nuclear weapons could doubt their unalterable opposition to preventive or pre-emptive nuclear war. The Berlin situation prevented the President from making a public declaration against the first use of nuclear weapons once war had begun; as he had explained to de Gaulle and Macmillan, he was prepared to go to nuclear weapons if Soviet conventional forces began a war in Europe. But Kennedy and McNamara well knew that no American first strike could wipe out the Soviet capacity to retaliate and that retaliation, even from a doomed opponent, would be dreadful beyond imagination. “Our arms,” the President had said early in his administration, “will never be used to strike the first blow. . . . We are not creating forces for a first strike against any other nation.” “My personal opinion,” said McNamara, “is . . . we cannot win a nuclear war, a strategic nuclear war, in the normal meaning of the word ‘win.’”
They were seeking a second-strike capacity and, both for deterrent and for political reasons, one large enough to exceed the weight of any first strike directed against the United States. We probably attained this state of beatitude by 1962, but the administration took no chances. The decisions of the Kennedy years gave the United States by 1964 1100 intercontinental bombers, of which more than 500 were on fifteen-minute alert, as against 250 Soviet bombers capable of reaching American shores; more than 800 ICBMs, aimed and fueled, nearly all in hardened and dispersed silos, as against the less than 200 Soviet ICBMs poised in far more vulnerable sites; and 250 Polaris missiles deployed in submarines, as against a much smaller Soviet underwater missile capacity with a much more limited range.
7. THE DISARMAMENT FIGHT GOES ON
Kennedy faced no harder problem of public education than that of convincing both Capitol Hill and the Kremlin that his demands for strength and for disarmament, far from being contradictory, were complementary. His view was that, unless we convinced the Russians we could stay in the arms race as long as they could, we would remove the incentive most likely to make them accept general disarmament; for obviously, if we let them win the arms race, they would see no reason to abandon their military superiority and expose their society to external inspection. Both the securing of a second-strike capacity and the diversification of the defense establishment seemed to him, moreover, vital parts of the strategy of deterrence and arms control.
But the notion that these were all actions for peace and not for war required a more sophisticated analysis of the strategic situation than existed in Moscow—or for that matter in Western Europe. In Russia, given what Robert Komer had called the cultural lag, the Soviet leaders could derive little comfort from the inevitably menacing aspect of American nuclear superiority. And even some in the United States tended to feel there was an inconsistency between building military strength, on the one hand, and working for disarmament, on the other. Some who allowed that the two courses might be logically consistent still considered them psychologically incompatible. They opposed the test ban, for example, not because they thought it a significant military risk but because, as Roswell Gilpatric put it, “they feared that any easing of tension would soon find the western democracies inviting disaster by letting down their guard.” Others argued against a high defense budget, even for the sake of diversification, because defense spending per se was supposed to incite the ‘cold war mentality.’
If this array of paradoxes bewildered Americans, it doubtless bewildered the Russians even more. But the budget remained a solid indicator of something; and in the end budget-watching—what Khrushchev came to call the “policy of mutual example”—may have been the most effective means of slowing down the arms race in these years, especially as the Soviet analysis of the American budget became more sophisticated. Still, this form of indirect communication and tacit restraint was slow and chancy, and it did nothing to build the international machinery of peace. Thus, while Kennedy, McNamara, Kaysen and Wiesner were always alert to possibilities of reciprocated unilateral action, they could not settle for it as a substitute for multilateral disarmament.
The President therefore maintained a steady pressure on the executive branch to keep the negotiating effort alive. Wiesner and Kaysen, flourishing the White House mandate, were tireless in needling the bureaucracy and forcing disarmament issues; and Bundy intervened valuably at critical moments. Wiesner often carried the brunt of the argument against the Pentagon in meetings before the President. After one contentious session, he told me that he was afraid he had talked too much and might be wearing out Kennedy’s patience. Later the President asked me about the meeting. I said it had filled me with gloom, that only Wiesner had made much sense and that he was afraid he had done more than his share of speaking. Kennedy smiled and said, “Sometimes I think Jerry talks too much, but I didn’t think so yesterday. Tell him that I thought he made a series of excellent points and that I want him to keep it up.”
Next to the President, McNamara, with the able backing of John McNaughton, probably did more than anyone eke to sustain the disarmament drive. With his sense of the horror of nuclear conflict, his understanding of the adequacy of existing stockpiles, his fear of nuclear proliferation, his analytic command of the weapons problem and his managerial instinct to do something about an irrational situation, he forever sought new ways of controlling the arms race. His contribution was especially crucial in dealing with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, possessed as they were by the conviction that they alone understood the requirements of American safety. Nor was the invocation of national security confined to the JCS. Once, at a meeting of the Committee of Principals, someone from ACDA objected to a proposed arms control measure on the ground that it might imperil the nation. McNamara said sharply, “If I’m not afraid of it, I don’t see why you should be. You take care of disarmament. Let me worry about the national security of the United States.”
William Foster, while sensitive to congressional reactions, proved a calm director of ACDA, and in Adrian Fisher he had a stalwart and effective deputy. Among the civilians concerned, the Secretary of State proved the main source of indifference. This came partly, I think, from his concern about the Bonn government, which disliked disarmament since it did not want a reduction of east-west tension until the problem of German unification was solved; partly because he anticipated that disarmament would cause trouble on the Hill; and partly because of his chronically cautious cast of mind. Presiding over the Committee of Principals, he often gave the impression that he regarded disarmament as an essay in futility, if not in folly. One participant in the meetings later reported his impression that Rusk “feared living in a world in which predominant military power was not his major tool.”
It was easy to understand this skepticism, and a number of thoughtful people shared it. Senator Fulbright, for example, dismissed “general and complete disarmament” as “an exercise in Cold War fantasy, a manifestation of the deception and pretense of the new diplomacy.” Yet in retrospect those long, laborious talks at Geneva played, I believe, a vital role in widening understanding between the United States and the Soviet Union. We were fortunate in having Arthur Dean as our negotiator through the endless spring and summer of 1962. Though Dean was willful, long-winded, sometimes imprecise, very often tactless, and not a little vain, he was also an exceedingly able lawyer and a man of endless patience and enthusiasm. Above all, he deeply wanted to accomplish something. Once, when receiving instructions in Washington, he said with exasperation to the timid people from ACDA who, he felt, were putting obstacles in his path, “Do you want to win the case or not? I want to win the case.” He left no doubt that he did want to win the case, and his conviction and energy perhaps had more effect on the Russians than he or anyone else thought at the time.
Certainly the disarmament talks forced the Russians to think through the intricate proble
ms of nuclear survival, to examine their own strategic limitations and capabilities, and to ponder the riddle of the nuclear equilibrium. In time they evidently began to master the concept of stable nuclear deterrence and to see that arms control might be a means of approaching rather than avoiding general and complete disarmament. The talks may also have done something to convince them that the Americans honestly wanted to stabilize the weapons situation. Even though so little appeared to be accomplished at the time in the antiseptic conference rooms beside the quiet lake at Geneva, the disarmament negotiations turned out in the end to be a good deal more than exercises in political warfare or theological disputation. They became a form of communication and education, a means of overcoming the cultural lag, an encouragement to parallel voluntary action by the two great nuclear powers and even perhaps a prelude to détente.
XIX
New Directions in the Third World
THOUGH KENNEDY WAS deeply concerned with the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, he did not consider that conflict the source of all mankind’s troubles. In 1961 this was still rather a novel viewpoint for an American President. The tendency in the years after the Second World War had been to see the planet as tidily polarized between America and Russia. In the 1950s John Foster Dulles had transmuted this from an assumption into a dogma. The Dulles world rested on unitary conceptions of the opposing blocs: on the one hand, the ‘free world,’ capaciously defined to include such places as Spain, Paraguay, Batista’s Cuba and Mississippi and destined ultimately for the private enterprise of the Secretary of Commerce and the god of the Secretary of State; and, on the other, the ‘communist camp,’ a monolithic conspiracy with headquarters in Moscow, enslaving captive peoples and orchestrating global crises according to a comprehensive master plan.
Countries which did not fit into one category or the other were regarded as anomalies. Dulles, it is true, was no great believer in the virtues of European colonialism. In certain moods, he even took a missionary’s relish in discomfiting the empires of mammon. But, like a missionary, he expected the primitive peoples to accept the true faith, only instead of gathering them down by the river for a mass baptism he tried to herd them into the military pacts he scattered across the face of Asia. If they declined to ally themselves to the United States or went their own way in the United Nations or indulged in tirades against the west or engaged in social revolution, it was due to inherent moral weakness compounded by the unsleeping activity of the minions of a communist Satan. Summing up his creed in 1956, Dulles described neutralism as the principle “which pretends that a nation can best gain safety for itself by being indifferent to the fate of others” and excommunicated its devotees as “immoral.” Though the Dulles doctrine was considerably tempered in application, he succeeded in implanting both in American policy and in opinion the idea that those who were not with us around the earth were against us.
Of the various transformations wrought in the Kennedy years none was less noted or more notable than the revolution in American attitudes toward the uncommitted world.
1. KENNEDY AND THE THIRD WORLD
As Senator, Kennedy had come to object to the Dulles doctrine both as morally self-righteous and as politically self-defeating.
Thus, where Dulles saw neutralism as immoral, Kennedy felt that the new states, absorbed in the travail of nationhood, were as naturally indifferent to the ‘moral’ issues in the cold war as Americans in a comparable stage of development had been to the moral issues in the Napoleonic wars. The spread of neutralism consequently neither surprised nor appalled him. “Oh, I think it’s inevitable,” he told John Fischer of Harper’s in 1959. “During the immediate years ahead this is likely to be an increasing trend in Africa and probably also in Latin America. . . . The desire to be independent and free carries with it the desire not to become engaged as a satellite of the Soviet Union or too closely allied to the United States. We have to live with that, and if neutrality is the result of concentration on internal problems, raising the standard of living of the people and so on, particularly in the underdeveloped countries, I would accept that. It’s part of our own history for over a hundred years.”
He felt, moreover, that the third world had now become the critical battleground between democracy and communism and that the practical effect of Dulles’s bell, book and candle against neutralism could only be to prejudice the American case and drive the developing nations toward Moscow and Peking. The battle for Europe, Kennedy believed, had been, except for Berlin, essentially won by the end of the forties. “Today’s struggle does not lie there,” he told Paul-Henri Spaak of Belgium in the spring of 1963, “but rather in Asia, Latin America and Africa.” Where Dulles divided the world on the question of whether nations would sign up in a crusade against communism, thereby forcing the neutrals to the other side of the line, Kennedy, by making national independence the crucial question, invited the neutrals to find a common interest with us in resisting communist expansion.
As for anti-colonialism, which Dulles approved only so long as it remained within the bounds of gentility, Kennedy saw it as inherently non-genteel and probably inseparable from disorder, excess and a certain bitterness toward the west. The issue, he said in 1959, “is one of timing—and whether once that freedom is achieved, they will regard the United States as friend or foe.” Even if the new countries declined to adopt the free enterprise system or enlist in the cold war, the strengthening of their independence was still likely to be a positive good for the United States. In the end, the secure achievement of national identity, he thought, could only set back the Soviet conception of the future world order and strengthen the American. “The ‘magic power’ on our side,” he said in 1959 to James MacGregor Burns, “is the desire of every person to be free, of every nation to be independent. . . . It is because I believe our system is more in keeping with the fundamentals of human nature that I believe we are ultimately going to be successful.”
It was partly knowledge of these views and partly also his youth and the sense he gave of freedom from preconception which led the third world to take heart from his election in 1960. Even that most irascible of neutralists, Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia, later remarked how the news “was welcomed in Cambodia, where nerves had become somewhat frayed by the obvious determination of the outgoing government to ignore the powerful forces making for change . . . a tendency sometimes to be found among older men, who have failed to keep abreast of the times.” This was typical of the sense of relief, curiosity and hope Kennedy’s accession to office stirred in neutral capitals.
In Washington the President’s desire to give our relations with the uncommitted world a new cast received ardent support from Chester Bowles, Adlai Stevenson, Averell Harriman, Mennen Williams, Harlan Cleveland and Edward R. Murrow as well as from Robert Kennedy. In the White House we were all sympathetic; and Robert Komer, who patrolled the gray areas from Casablanca to West New Guinea, and Walt Rostow gave particular attention to these matters. Still the policy remained peculiarly an exercise in presidential diplomacy. Kennedy became, in effect, Secretary of State for the third world. With his consuming intellectual curiosity, he generally knew more about the Middle East, for example, than most of the officials on the seventh floor of the State Department; and the Assistant Secretaries in charge of the developing areas dealt as much with him as with the Secretary of State. Moreover, he conducted his third world campaign to an unprecedented degree through talks and correspondence with heads of state. He well understood that personalities exert a disproportionate influence in new states without stable political systems, and he resolved to turn this situation to his own purposes.
The leaders of the new nations, it must be said, did not always make this task any easier. They were often ungenerous and resentful, driven by historic frustrations and rancors and brimming over with sensitivity and vanity. Moreover, anti-American bravado was always a sure way to excite a crowd and strike a pose of national virility. The President, understa
nding this as part of the process, resolved not to be diverted by pinpricks. He was sometimes greatly tried, and on occasion the dignity of the United States required some form of response. But most of the time he was faithful to the spirit of Andrew Jackson who in 1829 had called on his fellow countrymen, in the event of foreign provocation, “to exhibit the forbearance becoming a powerful nation rather than the sensibility belonging to a gallant people.”
And so the new President set out to adjust American thinking to a world where the cold war was no longer the single reality and to help the new countries find their own roads to national dignity and international harmony. But in his own government he immediately ran head-on against a set of inherited policies on colonialism, on neutralism and on foreign assistance, deeply imbedded in the minds of government officials and the structure of the executive branch.
2. KENNEDY AND COLONIALISM: THE ANGOLA RESOLUTION
The first problem was colonialism. This was, in one sense, a dying issue. In the fifteen years of the United Nations some forty countries, containing nearly a billion people, had won their independence. In Africa, the colonial continent par excellence, there were twenty-two new states. Yet these successes had only increased the sense of grievance in Asia and Africa about the dependencies which remained. And anti-colonialism was still the most convenient outlet for the revolt of the rest of the world against the historic domination of the west—that revolt so long suppressed, now bursting out on every side.
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