A Thousand Days

by Arthur M. Schlesinger

  On Monday noon Pierre Salinger put out a statement, which Stevenson had seen and approved, expressing the President’s full confidence in his ambassador to the United Nations and saying, in effect, that nothing which took place in the Executive Committee would be disclosed. This statement caused immediate dissatisfaction among the reporters, who pointed out that it did not explicitly deny the Bartlett-Alsop allegations. They recalled that an earlier Bartlett column had preceded the transfer of Chester Bowles; obviously the pattern was repeating itself; obviously Charlie would never have dared write that way unless he were pretty sure he was saying what Kennedy wanted. What was worse, one or two of his friends in the press convinced Stevenson of this; and, when I talked to him later in the afternoon, he said grimly that, if the President wanted him to go, he did not have to go about it in this circuitous fashion.

  Much troubled, I went to Kennedy. After a moment’s chat, I said, “Mr. President, everyone in town thinks that the Bartlett article is a signal from the White House that you want to get rid of Stevenson. You know that, if you really want Stevenson’s resignation, you have only to say a word now and he will resign immediately without any fuss or controversy.” The President, swearing briefly, said, “Of course I don’t want Stevenson to resign. I would regard his resignation as a disaster. Look at it logically. What in the world would I have to gain from his resignation? In the first place, where could I possibly find anyone who could do half as good a job at the UN? Look at the alternatives—Adlai would do a far better job than any of the others. In the second place, from a realistic political viewpoint, it is better for me to have Adlai in the government than out. In the third place, if I were trying to get him out, Charlie Bartlett is a good friend, but he’s the last medium I would use.”

  That night at Averell Harriman’s, Stevenson seemed profoundly depressed. When I reported what the President had said, he answered shortly, “That’s fine, but will he say it publicly?” Later he and Fritchey took the sleeper to New York. The next morning Clayton called to read the headline from the Daily News: ADLAI ON SKIDS OVER PACIFIST STAND IN CUBA. Stevenson’s morale, Fritchey said, was lower than ever. When I told this to Kennedy, however, he observed, “I’m not impressed by the Daily News. They spend all their time attacking us. This goes on all the time. Just tell Adlai to sit tight and everything will subside. This is one of those forty-eight-hour wonders. Tell them about all those fights in the New Deal. Just get them to relax.”

  But the clamor did not subside so simply. Harlan Cleveland, after a day in New York, told me that public action by the President was essential to restore not only Stevenson’s morale but his effectiveness in the UN. Kennedy had already a draft of a personal letter to Stevenson reaffirming his confidence and mentioning the problem of having a friend who was also a reporter: “I did not feel I could tel] him or any other friend in the press what subject to write or not write about.” I was then instructed to deliver the letter personally to Stevenson. By the time I reached New York, the President had decided that the best way to handle the matter was to let the newspapers have the letter. This meant that the references to Bartlett were to be eliminated and the letter to become primarily an expression of confidence in Stevenson. Fritchey and I phoned the President, who edited and strengthened the letter himself, adding that Stevenson’s work at the UN was of “inestimable” national importance. If not a forty-eight-hour wonder, the furor died away in the next few days.

  6. AFTERMATH

  The President had one other item of unfinished Cuban business—this one left over from the Bay of Pigs. He had never forgotten the men his government had put on the Cuban beaches, and he had been determined in one way or another to free them from Castro’s prisons. In May 1961, when Castro had proposed an exchange of the surviving members of Brigade 2506 for five hundred bulldozers, or, as he soon said, $28 million, Kennedy had instigated the organization of a private Tractors for Freedom Committee led by Mrs. Roosevelt, Walter Reuther and Milton Eisenhower. But the project soon bogged down in domestic political controversy. Republican congressional leaders denounced it as “another blow to our world leadership.” “Human lives,” said Richard Nixon in one of his communiqués on public morality, “are not something to be bartered.” Dr. Eisenhower retreated under the pressure, and three months later negotiations were broken off.

  At the end of March 1962, the captives went on trial in Havana. Members of the Brigade who had escaped to Florida now made a new attempt to seek government support. They found an immediate sympathizer in Robert Kennedy, who, with Richard Goodwin’s assistance, set to work to mobilize hemisphere opinion to persuade Castro to spare the lives of the prisoners. Then the possibility of ransoming the Brigade revived in Havana, though Castro now lifted the price to 162 million. This sum seemed beyond hope of raising, and in June the Attorney General recommended that the Cuban exiles ask James B. Donovan of New York, a lawyer who had been general counsel of OSS in the Second World War, to intercede with Castro. Donovan, flying to Havana in late August, persuaded Castro to accept food and drugs instead of money. Negotiations dragged on into October and into the missile crisis; but Donovan persisted and arranged a deal. After the crisis, the Attorney General, taking personal command, mobilized the Department of Justice, much of the rest of the government and much of the drug industry to get the men out by Christmas. Time was pressing; for the prisoners themselves, underfed and sick, were beginning to look, as one who had visited them told Robert Kennedy, like animals who were about to die. It was an undertaking of extraordinary drive and enterprise, and it succeeded. On December 21 Donovan and Castro signed a memorandum of agreement. Two days later the first prisoners arrived in Florida. After Christmas the Brigade leaders, gaunt and wasted, were received by the President at Palm Beach.

  On December 29, 1962, the President went over to Miami to inspect the Brigade in the Orange Bowl. Pepe San Román, still pale from prison, presented the President with the Brigade banner which had flown on the beach on those bitter April days twenty months before. Kennedy, deeply moved, said, “I can assure you that this flag will be returned to this brigade in a free Havana.” Then he spoke again of the democratic revolution of the Americas:

  Under the Alianza para el Progreso, we support for Cuba and for all the countries of this hemisphere the right of free elections and the free exercise of basic human freedoms. We support land reform and the right of every campesino to own the land he tills. We support the effort of every free nation to pursue programs of economic progress. We support the right of every free people to freely transform the economic and political institutions of society so that they may serve the welfare of all.

  He added that he believed there were men who held to this faith “all over the island of Cuba, in the government itself, in the Army and in the militia.”

  Then Jacqueline Kennedy, speaking in Spanish, expressed pride that young John had met the officers of the Brigade. “He is still too young to realize what has happened here, but I will make it my business to tell him the story of your courage as he grows up. It is my wish and my hope that some day he may be a man at least half as brave as the members of Brigade 2506.”

  But the ultimate impact of the missile crisis was wider than Cuba, wider even than the western hemisphere. To the whole world it displayed the ripening of an American leadership unsurpassed in the responsible management of power. From the moment of challenge the American President never had a doubt about the need for a hard response. But throughout the crisis he coolly and exactly measured the level of force necessary to deal with the level of threat. Defining a clear and limited objective, he moved with mathematical precision to accomplish it. At every stage he gave his adversary time for reflection and reappraisal, taking care not to force him into ‘spasm’ reactions or to cut off his retreat.

  Moreover, despite strong pressure to take action repugnant to our national traditions, he always linked his use of power to the ideals of the country and to the necessities of the world which would have
to go on after the conflict. By his own composure, clarity and control, he held the country behind him. It was almost as if he had begun to reshape the nation in his own image, for the American people, so many of whom had been in a frenzy about air-raid shelters a year before, so many of whom still longed for total solutions, went through the Cuba week without panic or hysteria, with few cries of “better red than dead” and fewer demands (until the crisis was safely over) for “total victory.”

  In a toast to Chancellor Adenauer two weeks afterward, Kennedy spoke of “an important turning point, possibly, in the history of the relations between East and West.” He meant, as he later explained, that this was the first time that the United States and the Soviet Union had ever directly challenged each other with nuclear weapons as the issue; and in his sense of “a climactic period” he associated the missile crisis with the growing conflict between China and Russia and the Chinese attack on India. All this, he said, was “bound to have its effects, even though they can’t be fully perceived now.”

  He did not exaggerate the significance of the Cuban victory in itself. He recognized that he had enjoyed advantages in this specific contest—because Cuba did not lie within the reach of Soviet conventional power or within the scope of Soviet vital interests, and because the Russians knew they could not sustain this particular course of deceit and irresponsibility before the world. These conditions might not be present the next time. But he hoped that he had made to Khrushchev in the Atlantic in October 1962 the point he had failed to make sixteen months before in Vienna—that neither side dare tamper carelessly with the delicate and complex equilibrium of world power. “If we suffer a major defeat, if they suffer a major defeat,” he mused with newspapermen at Palm Beach on the last day of the year, “it may change the balance of power. . . . It also increases possibly the chance of war.”

  This was why, when Khrushchev backed down, Kennedy refrained from calling the American victory a victory or the Russian rout a rout. “Every setback,” Kennedy said later, “has the seeds of its own reprisal, if the country is powerful enough.” So the German invasion of Czechoslovakia in the winter of 1939 had led to the British guarantee of Poland. “We tried to make their setback in Cuba not the kind that would bring about an increase in hostility but perhaps provide for an easing of relations.”

  It was this combination of toughness and restraint, of will, nerve and wisdom, so brilliantly controlled, so matchlessly calibrated, that dazzled the world. Before the missile crisis people might have feared that we would use our power extravagantly or not use it at all. But the thirteen days gave the world—even the Soviet Union—a sense of American determination and responsibility in the use of power which, if sustained, might indeed become a turning point in the history of the relations between east and west.

  XXXII

  The Not So Grand Design

  YET, EVEN AS THE PRESIDENT had won the most decisive victory of west over east since the start of the cold war and in a style which promised the relief rather than the rise of international tension, he faced a setback within the west itself. The concept of a unified democratic Europe as part of a freely trading Atlantic community had been a basic element of Kennedy’s world strategy. In a sympathetic and illuminating book of 1962 called The Grand Design, Joseph Kraft had set forth the administration’s vision of North America and Western Europe happily joined by policies and institutions in common pursuit of economic expansion and military defense. Now in the moment of triumph the Grand Design was shaken by brusque challenge bursting out of the heart of the western alliance itself.

  On January 14, 1963, eleven weeks after his prompt support of the United States during the missile crisis, General Charles de Gaulle held one of his periodic press conferences. In two sharp and elegant strokes, he knocked out the economic and military pillars of Atlantic unity. If Great Britain were admitted to the Common Market, the General said, it would transform the character of the European Economic Community and “finally it would appear as a colossal Atlantic community under American domination and direction.” As for a coordinated western nuclear policy, “France intends to have her own national defense. . . . For us, in present circumstances, integration is something which is not imaginable.” He concluded suavely about the French nuclear force: “It is entirely understandable that this French enterprise should not seem very satisfactory to certain American quarters. In politics and strategy, as in economics, monopoly naturally appears to him who enjoys it as the best possible system.”

  1. THE METAMORPHOSIS OF WESTERN EUROPE

  The de Gaulle press conference was the ironic result of a series of changes the United States itself had set in motion fifteen years earlier. The Second World War had left Western Europe in a state of spiritual and physical shock: France, Italy and Germany had suffered deep national humiliation; Britain was weary and spent; the smaller countries realized more than ever their helplessness in the modern world. The cradle of western civilization seemed to Churchill in 1947 “a rubble heap, a charnel house, a breeding ground for pestilence and hate.” The loss of overseas empires intensified the sense of impotence; so too did Western Europe’s knowledge of its absolute dependence on the United States for economic reconstruction and military protection.

  The Marshall Plan and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization constituted the two sides of the American response. Behind the NATO shield, the nations of Western Europe with Marshall aid set to work rebuilding and modernizing their economies. In France Jean Monnet laid down the bases for national planning. A man of profound practicality, spacious imagination, infinite patience and total disinterestedness, he looked beyond the restoration of France to the restoration of Europe. The unification of Europe, sooner or later, seemed to him a necessity of history. With quiet American collaboration, Monnet began a step-by-step realization of his vision. The Coal and Steel Community was set up in 1951; Monnet became its first president. The failure of the project of a European Defense Community in 1954 only confirmed his belief that economic integration had to precede political integration. The next year he resigned his official post in order to work for economic unity through the Action Committee for a United States of Europe, whose membership included political and labor leaders from the six nations of the Coal and Steel Community—France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg. In 1957 these countries signed the Treaty of Rome, organizing the European Economic Community. The EEC further stimulated the renaissance of Western Europe. Soon the EEC’s Common Market became the world’s largest importer and greatest trading community.

  By 1960 the economic dependence on the United States had largely disappeared. Western Europe had been growing twice as fast as America for a decade; it had been drawing gold reserves from America; it had been outproducing America in coal. Americans were flocking across the Atlantic to learn the secrets of the economic miracle. And, at the same time, the military dependence had taken new and perplexing forms. If the prospect of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe had ever been real, few Europeans believed in it any longer. Moreover, the Soviet nuclear achievement, putting the United States for the first time in its history under threat of devastating attack, had devalued the American deterrent in European eyes. These developments meant that the conditions which had given rise to the Marshall Plan and NATO were substantially gone. The new Europe would not be content to remain an economic or military satellite of America. The problem now was to work out the next phase in the Atlantic relationship.

  This problem received much hard thought on both sides of the Atlantic in the late fifties; and the search for a solution began to move in two somewhat different directions. Those concerned with the economic and political aspects of the relationship were thinking more and more in terms of a dual Atlantic partnership resting on two distinct entities, the United States and the European Economic Community.* Those concerned with the military aspects were thinking more and more in terms of a single Atlantic community based on NATO and the indivisibility of the nuclear
deterrent. The divergence was, in the language of the American civil rights movement, between ‘separate but equal’ and ‘integration.’

  2. PARTNERSHIP

  The existence of the Common Market and its external tariffs, creating the need for reciprocal tariff adjustments with other nations and areas, made the idea of Atlantic partnership almost irresistible to economists both in Europe and the United States. When Jean Monnet carried the gospel to Washington early in 1961, he found the ground already well tilled in the new administration. George Ball, his associate for many years, had begun during the interregnum to formulate the revision of trade policy required to prepare the American economy to live with a unified Western Europe. Soon Ball became Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs; on entering his impressive new office in the State Department, he is said to have gaily remarked, “Monnet isn’t everything.” But Monnet remained a great deal. Ball’s first move was to secure the ratification of the convention establishing the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The OECD, Kennedy said, would become “one of the principal institutions through which we pursue the great aim of consolidating the Atlantic community.”

  The next step was taken in London. When Harold Macmillan came to Washington in April 1961, he informed the President that Britain had resolved to apply for membership in the Common Market. This was an extraordinary decision; it represented, as Hugh Gaitskell later complained, the reversal of a thousand years of English history. The decision had two main grounds: the economic hope that the competitive stimulus of continental industry in a larger market would speed the modernization of British industry; and the political hope that, in the twilight of empire, Britain could find a new role of leadership in Europe.