A Thousand Days

by Arthur M. Schlesinger

  From Washington’s viewpoint, the second reason was more attractive than the first; for the Common Market presented the United States with economic problems which British membership would only enhance. Some in the administration agreed with J. K. Galbraith that it was foolish to increase our own balance of payments troubles by promoting a strong high-tariff trading bloc against ourselves. Kennedy fully understood the economic difficulties British entry would bring to the United States. But these were, in his mind, overborne by the political benefits. If Britain joined the Market, London could offset the eccentricities of policy in Paris and Bonn; moreover, Britain, with its world obligations, could keep the EEC from becoming a high-tariff, inward-looking, white man’s club. Above all, with British membership, the Market could become the basis for a true political federation of Europe. Accordingly Kennedy raised the matter on Britain’s behalf with de Gaulle in Paris in June 1961; this was when de Gaulle turned him aside by politely doubting whether Britain really wanted unconditional membership. Early in 1962, when Hugh Gaitskell came to Washington, Kennedy mobilized half the cabinet to tell him that Britain must plunge into Europe.

  In the meantime, Kennedy took precautions to protect American economic interests. When Macmillan revisited Washington in April 1962, the President made it clear that the United States was backing British membership for political, not for economic reasons, that Britain must not expect to take care of everyone in its economic wake—either in the Commonwealth or in the European Free Trade Association—at America’s expense. In particular, while we recognized the need for transitional arrangements, we could hardly accept a system which would give Commonwealth farm products a permanent position in the Common Market more favorable than that enjoyed by competing products from the United States.

  But agriculture formed only part of the problem which British entry might create. The larger risk was that it might defeat the whole conception of Atlantic partnership by breaking the Atlantic community up into two angrily competitive trading blocs. It was this situation which led Kennedy in early 1962 to request far-reaching authority from Congress to engage in tariff bargaining with an enlarged Common Market, the authority to be used, of course, to bring barriers down and thereby promote world trade. As Monnet’s Action Committee declared in June, “Only through the economic and political unification of Europe, including the United Kingdom, and the establishment of a partnership between equals of Europe and the United States can the West be strengthened . . . a relationship of two separate but equally powerful entities, each bearing its share of common responsibilities.”

  Ball and Robert Schaetzel in the State Department and Howard Petersen as a special White House adviser on trade had prepared versions of a trade expansion act in the course of 1961. Ball, looking toward a basic reconstruction of American commercial policy, wanted to let the existing Trade Agreements Act expire and send a wholly new bill to Congress in 1963. Petersen recommended the amendment of the existing act and, to make this easier, the retention of some of its restrictive features. The President, consuiting with his congressional specialists, was urged by Lawrence O’Brien to go ahead in 1962 and decided to do so in the spirt of the Ball approach.

  The trade expansion fight became the major legislative issue of 1962. A country-wide campaign was organized, a potent Committee for a National Trade Policy set up; business and labor were enlisted, Congressmen pressed and persuaded. “The two great Atlantic markets,” the President told Congress, “will either grow together or they will grow apart. . . . That decision will either mark the beginning of a new chapter in the alliance of free nations—or a threat to the growth of Western unity.” As the trade expansion bill mystique grew, it was even argued (most urgently by Joseph Kraft) that the new policy would provide the means of getting America moving again and become “the unifying intellectual principle of the New Frontier”; if the bill failed, “the United States will have to default on power, resign from history.” Such language, coming from an intelligent and ordinarily detached observer, suggests the evangelical mood.

  Some of us felt all this to be a misdirection of the administration’s limited political resources. Getting America moving again, we thought, required economic stimulus at home; the impact of foreign trade on employment and business activity was limited. Moreover, a significant part of the bill hinged on Britain’s entry into the Market, which was still problematic. And purists of the administration opposed an amendment, offered by Henry Reuss of Wisconsin and Paul Douglas of Illinois and adopted in the Senate, which would have made the tariff reduction part of the act fully operative even if Britain did not join the Market. Their fear, as George Ball suggested in the hearings, was that this provision would strengthen the hands of the anti-Common Marketeers in England by enabling them to say “there was an alternative presented to Britain which had not been available before.” The bill, in short, as Reuss later put it, was tailored to force Britain in. In addition, one was not clear whether the advocates of the bill understood that, if the partnership were really to meet the hopes of many European federalists, it would have to go beyond tariff reduction to the economically difficult and politically hazardous realm of common agricultural and monetary policies.

  Nevertheless, though the measure had its defects and its significance was exaggerated, it represented a wholly useful revision of commercial policy and a wise signal to Europe both of our desire for cooperation and of our vision of a desirable world economic order. Nor could the campaign have been more astutely managed. Among other things, it offered enlightened New York lawyers and bankers a pleasing sense of virtue and audacity in speaking out boldly for tariff reform, just as their grandfathers had done in the Cleveland administration. The thought of consolidating relations with this powerful group may not have been absent from the President’s mind when he embarked on the fight. In any case, contrary to predictions, the bill passed rather easily—the House by 298 to 125 and the Senate by 78 to 8. When the President signed the Trade Expansion Act in October, he said, “By means of agreements authorized by the act, we can move forward to partnership with the nations of the Atlantic Community.”

  3. INTERDEPENDENCE

  At the same time that economics was prescribing a transatlantic partnership between two separate and equal entities, defense strategy was arguing for a unified Atlantic military community based on the American nuclear deterrent. The discrepancy between these two conceptions was not always clearly recognized. But it led to continuous though murky debate within the American government and the west, and it represented a lurking vulnerability within the Grand Design.

  Secretary McNamara laid down the strategic position in his forthright way at the Athens NATO ministerial meeting in the spring of 1962 and repeated it publicly in his Ann Arbor speech in June. “There must not be,” he said, “competing and conflicting strategies to meet the contingency of nuclear war. We are convinced that a general nuclear war target system is indivisible, and if, despite all our efforts, nuclear war should occur, our best hope lies in conducting a centrally controlled campaign against all of the enemy’s vital nuclear capabilities.”

  The nature of nuclear war, in McNamara’s view, thus made a unified deterrent imperative. He regarded “relatively weak national nuclear forces with enemy cities as their targets” as perilous in peace, because they might invité pre-emptive first strikes, and disastrous in war. The rational policy, in his belief, was in peace to avoid “the proliferation of nuclear power with all of its attendant dangers” and in war to enforce a no-cities strategy on the enemy. His conclusion was clear: “Limited nuclear capabilities, operating independently, are dangerous, expensive, prone to obsolescence, and lacking in credibility as a deterrent.”

  In response to wails from London McNamara hastened to explain that this last sentence was not directed at the British deterrent since it did not operate independently. Actually the McNamara doctrine saw little role even for dependent national deterrents; and the President had privately urged on Macmillan in
February 1962 that a British effort to maintain its deterrent through the sixties might both confirm de Gaulle in his own course and hasten the day when the Germans would demand nuclear weapons for themselves. (He added that he would not raise a matter of this sort with any other head of government and did so only because he was so confident of their continuing understanding. Macmillan, surprised but appreciative, responded warmly to the confidence if not to the argument; he began his next letter “Dear Friend,” the salutation he used for the rest of their association.) The French independent deterrent, weaker and cruder than the British, was left as the target of American public disapproval, an impression which did not stir pro-American féelings at the Elysée.

  The indispensability of nuclear centralization, as Kennedy told Macmillan, called for a NATO solution in order to head off independent national aspirations; or, as McNamara put it at Ann Arbor, it emphasized the “interdependence” of national security interests on both sides of the Atlantic. With this mellifluous but misleading term McNamara indicated the line of debate between the strategists and the economists: Atlantic interdependence vs. transatlantic partnership. “Interdependence” was misleading because what McNamara mean at bottom was precisely the dependence of western security on a nuclear deterrent under American control. Yet his resort to the word also suggested his recognition of a problem, even if, in stating the problem, his ordinarily cogent exposition trailed off into generality: “We want and need a greater degree of Alliance participation in formulating nuclear weapons policy to the greatest extent possible.” But what Alliance participation would be possible, except in marginal and symbolic forms, so long as the United States retained its veto over the use of nuclear weapons?—and obviously neither prudence nor the American Congress would permit the renunciation of the veto. Still, the European desire for such participation was deemed real; and, if quasi-solutions were to be found, they had to come not through partnership with a still nonexistent and (at least in nuclear strength) inherently unequal European entity but within the single Atlantic framework of NATO.

  The search for devices to give the NATO allies a greater sense of participating in nuclear decisions had begun five years earlier. When sputnik dramatized the Soviet achievements in 1957, Britain, Turkey and Italy accepted nuclear missiles under an agreement by which the United States retained custody of the warheads and both the United States and the recipient could veto their use: these were the Jupiters which caused such argument during the Cuba crisis. No one liked the Jupiters very much, but the emergence of the Polaris missile at the end of the decade introduced new possibilities. In 1959 Secretary of Defense Thomas Gates considered selling Polaris missiles to interested allies on condition that they be assigned to NATO; and in the same year General Lauris Norstad, the NATO Supreme Commander, proposed that NATO itself become a fourth nuclear power, with its own nuclear force. These suggestions were evidently responsive to sentiment of some sort in Europe; but the nature of this sentiment remained hard to define. Clearly there was no popular pressure for the weapons. But a discontent with the American monopoly was rising in top military and government circles. Given the uncertainties of American politics, the new vulnerability of America to Soviet nuclear attack and the new selfconfidence of Western Europe, why should not Western Europe have nuclear resources of its own? There was, in addition, the everpresent problem of tying West Germany firmly into the defense structure of the west.

  By 1960 the sharing of nuclear control was thus a live issue. Norstad continued his campaign, now with Bonn’s support, for a land-based NATO nuclear force. In Washington a feeling arose that the United States should devise a solution of its own before the demand got out of control. Gerard Smith of the State Department, enlisting Professor Robert Bowie, who had been head of the Policy Planning Council in the early Dulles years and was now at Harvard, began the search for a NATO nuclear formula which would give the allies a sense of participation but would discourage proliferation and could not be unscrambled for individual national use. In a memorandum of 1960 Bowie argued for a force which would be mixed-manned (i.e., the crew of each unit should be drawn from a variety of nations) and seaborne; this would prevent any single nation from claiming proprietary rights. In December 1960 the Eisenhower administration, with due lame-duck tentativeness and in general language, laid before the NATO ministerial meeting in Paris the possibility of giving NATO five ballistic missile submarines with eighty Polaris missiles before 1963 if a system of multilateral control could be devised. The if was enormous, and the proposal attracted only mild interest. Nevertheless it represented a first step in the direction of nuclear sharing; and, for those trained in the Monnet school, an institution once established could acquire a life of its own.

  4. FLEXIBLE RESPONSE VS. NUCLEAR CENTRALIZATION

  After reflection, the new administration decided to continue along these lines. In Ottawa in May 1961 Kennedy said that the United States was ready to commit to NATO five or more Polaris atomic missile submarines, “subject to any agreed NATO guidelines on their control and use, and responsive to the needs of all members but [sic] still credible in an emergency”; beyond this, he looked forward to the possibility of a NATO seaborne force, “truly multilateral in ownership and control, if this should be desired and found feasible by our Allies, once NATO’s non-nuclear goals have been achieved.”

  The control problem in this formulation remained, however, as obscure as ever. In any case the last clause (my italics) contained a major catch from the European viewpoint, and therefore the Ottawa proposal elicited no immediate European enthusiasm. The Eisenhower multilateral force had been within the context of massive retaliation, empty as that doctrine had become by 1960. But the Kennedy proposal was’ within the context of the novel and unfamiliar doctrine of flexible response. This new doctrine made the strengthening of the conventional forces of the Alliance, as Kennedy said at Ottawa, the “matter of the highest priority” if, in McNamara’s phrase, western strategy was going to multiply its options. The whole conception of graduated deterrence, however, emerged from a careful and exacting process of strategic analysis in the United States to which Europe, deprived of the tutelage of the new caste of military intellectuals, had not yet been exposed. The incoming administration, assuming that the Europeans were more sophisticated in matters of nuclear strategy than they were, and in any case neglecting to consult them in a systematic way, now presented them with the new strategy as a fait accompli.

  The Berlin crisis of the summer of 1961 revealed some of the difficulties of the European reaction. McNamara, despite heroic efforts, could not bring the Pentagon and the NATO command to consensus on the western military response. While everyone agreed that a Soviet blockade of West Berlin would have to be countered first by a western thrust along the Autobahn, there was disagreement between those, like General Norstad, who wanted the probe in order to create a situation where the west could use nuclear weapons and those, like Kennedy and McNamara, who wanted the probe in order to postpone that situation. And, while everyone agreed that we might eventually have to go on to nuclear war, there was disagreement between those who favored a single definitive salvo against the Soviet Union and those who favored careful and discriminate attack.

  These were tricky problems because of their political implications as well as because of their inherent difficulty. Washington had been persuading Western Europe for a decade of the infallibility of nuclear protection. The new American passion for conventional force now led many Europeans to believe, or profess to believe, that, in view of our own vulnerability to nuclear attack, we were no longer prepared to go to nuclear war at all. They contended that the Soviet Union would be far more effectively deterred if it knew the United States had no alternative to instant nuclear retaliation. Building up conventional strength, in their view, only weakened the credibility of the nuclear deterrent. (This seemed mad to McNamara, who did not regard nuclear weapons as things to be dropped lightly; “a credible deterrent,” he once said, “cannot
be based on an incredible act.”) Moreover, conventional forces, it was argued, were expensive; they were politically unpopular; they could never be large enough to defeat the Red Army; their use would convert Europe into a battleground while America and Russia remained privileged sanctuaries; and in any case no one believed in the likelihood of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe unless the Russians thought themselves exempt from nuclear reprisal (and, except for Berlin, not many believed it likely then). Thus Norstad, coming to Washington in October 1961, told Kennedy that every document we submitted stressing conventional warfare cast doubt on our nuclear resolve.

  Kennedy tried to counter this current of thought by assuring de Gaulle and others that the United States would use nuclear weapons in case of a massive conventional attack on Western Europe. But de Gaulle, thinking always in terms of the narrow interests of the nation-state, did not see why the United States should do so unless its own territory was under assault; presumably he wouldn’t if he were the American President. Believing this, he believed all the more fervently in the necessity of the French independent deterrent. Even the British in early 1962 officially suggested to the Defense Department that a substantial increase in conventional forces in Europe might discredit the deterrent and asked whether the United States contemplated a major conventional battle over a long time and a large area.