My memorandum probably pushed the inexorability thesis too far, and I believe the President could never rid his mind of the thought that, if this or that had been done differently, it might have been possible to avoid the impasse of 1963. His interest in de Gaulle never flagged. The General was one of the heroes: he had rallied the Free French in the war; he had liberated Algeria; he had given unquestioning support at the time of a missile crisis; he was a great writer. Yet, while making due allowance for the bitterness generated by de Gaulle’s frustrations during the war, the President also felt that rancor demeaned the man and distorted his policy. Kennedy would ask everyone who knew him—his two ambassadors. James M. Gavin and Charles E. Bohlen, Cyrus Sulzberger of the New York Times and particularly Malraux—to explain why so obviously great a man took such incomprehensible and petty positions. Gavin recalls the President’s saying from time to time, as though to himself, “What can you do with a man like that?” Kennedy also had contempt for the spitefulness of official French pronouncements, especially those emanating from Alain Peyrefitte and the Ministry of Information, and he was angry at the clandestine French campaigns against the United States in Africa and Asia.
Nevertheless, if he had his troubles with the General, there was, as he said at the Malraux dinner in 1962, an American “tradition in that regard, with Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower.* . . . I know that there are sometimes difficulties, but I hope that those who live in both our countries realize how fortunate we are in the last two decades to be associated in the great effort with him.” He came in the end to feel that de Gaulle was operating out of a consistent, if not convincing, conception of France’s interests and that the General evidently believed he needed some sort of friction with the United States. Kennedy, however, never regarded him as beyond rational discourse. “If I can put all that effort into the Russians,” he once said, “I can put some of it into the French.” He hoped to see de Gaulle again; a visit was scheduled for February 1964. In a conversation with Gavin in late October 1963, Kennedy said, rather happily, Gavin thought, “Well, I am going to see the General in the next few months, and I think that we will be able to get something done together.”
2. MLF
January 14 unavoidably produced the usual reaction—“what can you do with a man like that?”—but in a short while Kennedy accepted the new reality. “From a strictly economic viewpoint,” he said to me somewhat sardonically a few days later, “we have known all along that British membership in the Common Market would be bad for us; so we are now better off. On the political side, our chief object was to tie Germany more firmly into the structure of Western Europe. Now de Gaulle is doing, that in his own way.”He was referring to the Franco-German treaty of cooperation, which Adenauer had signed on January 22. Asked at a press conference in February whether he intended to take measures of economic or political reprisal against de Gaulle, he said, “No . . . definitely not.” At a White House meeting, he said that he thought our best policy was just to let the dust settle. Dean Acheson, who was present and had tried letting the dust settle after the communists had taken over China, observed quickly, “Mr. President, I would not advise putting it in quite that way.”
But the Europeanists did not want to let the dust settle. Ball, uncharacteristically letting his rhetoric run away with him, discoursed publicly about unspecified European leaders dominated “by a nostalgic longing for a world that never was” and seeking to revive the “vanquished symbols of beglamored centuries.” In particular, Ball’s January visit to Adenauer had given a new spurt of life to the MLF. If de Gaulle meant to make West Germany choose between France and the United States, the MLF in Washington’s view was the way to make it clear that Bonn would find greater security in the Atlantic relationship. To strengthen this point, Kennedy decided in mid-January to visit Germany on a spring trip to Europe. Soon afterward Ambassador Livingston Merchant, an experienced career officer, was directed to work with Finletter in preparing and negotiating American proposals on the MLF.
Kennedy accepted the need to reassure the Germans and show NATO that there were alternatives to Gaullism. But he retained a certain skepticism about the MLF. He felt first of all that the MLF campaign diverted interest from more serious problems of the planet. “The whole debate about an atomic force in Europe,” he told Spaak of Belgium in May, “is really useless, because Berlin is secure, and Europe as a whole is well protected. What really matters at this point is the rest of the world.” As for the MLF per se, he really considered that, so long as the United States retained its veto (and he never mentioned renunciation as a possibility, though other members of his government did), the MLF was something of a fake. Though he was willing to try it, he could not see why Europeans would be interested in making enormous financial contributions toward a force over which they had no real control.
The MLF advocates replied primarily by talking about West Germany. Bonn wanted the MLF because it was a status symbol, marking a form of accession to the nuclear club; because it gave West Germany an indissoluble nuclear association with the United States and a sense of nuclear equality with Britain; because it would avert pressures for an independent German deterrent; because they hoped that in a few years the control issue would be re-examined on its merits; in short, because MLF provided a self-respecting role in nuclear deterrence. If MLF failed, its apostles continued, moderate leadership in Bonn would be undermined, West Germany would start pressing for nationally manned and owned missiles and, if denied them by us, a right-wing government might turn to the French.
All this rested on the premise that the Germans were hellbent on having nuclear weapons and, if they could not get them multilaterally, would seek them bilaterally, even at the expense of the American relationship. Though this proposition had been hackneyed around the American government, it did not seem to some, especially the British, all that self-evident. Macmillan had long deprecated this notion; and, spending a few days in London in early 1963, I encountered general doubt. Jo Grimond, the leader of the Liberal party, who had just returned from a trip to Germany and France, said he had come upon no significant German demand for nuclear weapons.* Grimond, George Brown of the Labour party and other British political leaders all feared, however, that the Merchant mission was having the effect of generating such a demand where none existed before. They added ominously that, if such a demand ever came into being, it was not likely to be satisfied by the secondary symbolism of mixed-manning.
“The self-fulfilling prophecy,” Robert K. Merton has written, “is, in the beginning, a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the originally false conception come true.’’ This seemed to be the logic of the MLF. Perhaps by 1963 it had awakened the German demand it had premised; perhaps its advocates were right in thinking that the demand was inevitable, that the Germans would never accept second-class nuclear status as a permanent condition. The President asked David Bruce, in whose steadiness of judgment he had great confidence, to return from London in early February and reappraise our European policy. Without associating himself with the MLF mystique, Bruce recommended it as a useful instrument for moving toward our basic objectives in Europe. Kennedy agreed with this pragmatic reaction: MLF was the best available tool to reconcile interdependence—the indivisibility of the deterrent—with partnership—the building of a united Western Europe; moreover, it would fill a vacuum into which, otherwise, Gaullism might seep. He reached one final decision in February. A discussion with Admiral Hyman Rickover persuaded him that making MLF a submarine force would raise security problems. As the proposal developed in 1963, it now contemplated twenty-five specially constructed surface vessels equipped with eight Polaris missiles each and carrying crews drawn from at least three different nationalities. The cost would be $5 billion over ten years, the United States paying around one-third. In press conferences Kennedy said, “We think the multilateral force represents the best solution to hold the alliance together,” though always emphasizing
that if “Europe decides that this isn’t what they want, we would be glad to hear other proposals.” MLF in his view was not a demarche but a response. When he sent emissaries to discuss it with European leaders, he instructed them not to talk as if they were reflecting a personal preoccupation of the American President’s.
But our Europeanists, seeing the MLF as the last chance of strengthening allied cooperation and of securing Adenauer against the temptation of de Gaulle, pushed the idea with greater zeal than the President intended. The Merchant mission of March and April evolved mysteriously from a modest and quiet exploratory inquiry into an oversized thirty-two-man group, charging around Europe in a Convair, giving the impression of a major American campaign and stirring opposition wherever it went. A USIA survey of the West European press reported early in April overwhelming rejection of the MLF. Wits dubbed it the multilateral farce. Moreover, as the campaign roared along, it began to exude the pent-up and-de Gaulle feeling in State—Gavin remembers a State Department officer calling de Gaulle “a bastard who is out to get us.” Apart from Germany, the response was meager; and, as the MLF appeared likely to dwindle into a Washington-Bonn operation, which the President would never have accepted, its supporters had to redouble their efforts elsewhere.
In October 1963 when Lord Home, soon to be translated into Sir Alec Douglas-Home and Prime Minister, visited Washington, he said that the British saw the point of MLF but were bothered by the insistence with which the American government was pushing it. Kennedy, a little taken aback, said he had no desire to bring pressure; the decision was Europe’s; where had Alec got this impression? Home replied that it was the impression conveyed by Kennedy’s own people. The President reaffirmed his feeling that MLF’s basic principle was interesting and important; it would give non-nuclear powers a sense of participation in nuclear decisions without making them nuclear powers. But in his view we should go at it slowly. The experimental working group, just formed by interested countries, and the proposed mixed-manned ship, would show what the MLF meant practically. These steps would take eighteen months to two years, during which time the whole problem could be talked out. “Bill Tyler may still be around,” the President said, referring to the senior State Department official present, “but some of the rest of us might not be.”
3. ITALY
By 1963 the MLF zealots had become known in the government as the “theologians.” One was indeed sometimes oppressed by the long abstract discussions of partnership and interdependence and by the interminable efforts to make the integrated deterrent and the separate and equal economic entities dance on the head of the same pin. The whole debate, useful as it was, appeared at times to involve an increasingly fruitless preoccupation with architecture at the expense of content. Was the critical question really whether a united Europe should be federal or confederal, whether it should be a separate partner or absorbed in the Atlantic community? or was it whether the result was to be an authoritarian or democratic Europe? If a line were to be drawn against de Gaulle, might it not be drawn most persuasively, not against his concept of Europe or of Atlantica, but against his concept of freedom?
If anything was clear about the new Europe, it was that the economic revival was transforming the mood and expectations of the working classes. By showing that a free economic system could raise mass living standards, it was attenuating their commitment to classical socialism. At the same time, it was inciting them to demand larger shares of the affluence they saw flowing around them. And meanwhile the very abundance of consumer goods was creating a spiritual disquietude among the intellectuals, fearful of materialism and seeking some higher public purpose. All this was producing a ferment in the broad political zone lying between traditional conservatism on one side and communism on the other.
The two great groups historically inhabiting the center-left were the Christian democrats and the social democrats. Though they had long been at odds over such issues as government aid to church schools, the fellowship of the Resistance during the war had encouraged tentative experiments in collaboration. If they could only work steadily together now, might they not give Western Europe the social leadership it needed to meet its new problems? At the moment such a rapprochement seemed most likely in Italy. If the center-left coalition succeeded there, the alliance between progressive Catholics and democratic Socialists might offer a model for other nations—for Germany after Adenauer, for France after de Gaulle, even for Spain after Franco. The consolidation of a Western European center-left would also be the best guarantee against the communist effort to revive the prewar united front with the Socialists.
A united front between Communists and Socialists had existed for some years after the war in Italy. In the late forties one wing of the Socialists, objecting to the pro-Soviet tendency of the majority, had split off and established the Social Democratic party under the courageous leadership of Giuseppe Saragat. Pietro Nenni, who remained as the head of the Socialist majority, mingled a rhetorical maximalism in politics with a genially humane and fundamentally democratic personality. The Soviet intervention in Hungary in 1956 proved too much for him and many of his comrades. In 1957 Nenni began to move away from the Communist Party. By 1960 his break was complete, though Socialist-Communist coalitions still lingered in many localities.
The movement of the Nenni Socialists led some in the democratic parties to see at last the chance to end the immobilism which had cursed Italian politics since the death of De Gasperi. The thesis thus arose among the Christian Democrats of an apertura a sinistra—an opening to the left—calling for a center-left government, composed of the Christian Democratic, Social Democratic and Republican parties with, initially, ‘outside’ support (i.e., benevolent parliamentary abstention) by the Nenni Socialists, to be followed in due course by active voting support and eventually by participation in a governing coalition.
The policy of the United States before Kennedy had been one of purposeful opposition to the opening to the left. The reasons were clear enough: the Eisenhower administration did not trust Nenni; it believed him to be a neutralist if not still at heart a fellow traveler; and it did not want social and economic reform in Italy. The issue had become so tense in our embassy in Rome that one younger officer, as noted earlier, was disciplined in 1960 for carrying the case for the apertura past the deputy chief of mission to the ambassador.
That policy was appropriate for the Eisenhower administration and possibly even for the conditions of the fifties. But by 1961 no one could doubt Nenni’s break with the Communists. Moreover, by ingenious reinterpretation, Nenni had defined his party’s traditional neutralism as meaning the preservation of the existing European equilibrium; since Italian withdrawal from NATO would threaten that equilibrium, Nenni explicitly opposed such withdrawal as an unneutral act. Moreover, a progressive administration in Washington should certainly not be in the position of discouraging progressive policies in Rome, especially when social reform was required to isolate the Communists, eliminate the conditions which bred them and begin the reclamation of the working class for democracy.
For all these reasons it seemed to me and my White House colleague Robert Komer that the time had come to end the American opposition to the apertura and make it clear that the United States welcomed a government in Italy which addressed itself to the social and economic needs of the people. Prime Minister Amintore Fanfani’s visit to Washington in June 1961 provided an obvious opportunity to signalize the new departure. President Kennedy, who had some acquaintance with the Italian situation, readily agreed that the United States from now on should indicate discreet sympathy for the opening to the left.
Fanfani and Kennedy had first met at the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1956. Kennedy then had delighted the Italian by saying that he had read his book Catholicism, Protestantism and Capitalism. When they met again in 1961, a fortnight after Khrushchev in Vienna and in the midst of the Berlin crisis, Fanfani, as he told me later, found a new Kennedy, strong, grave and stamped with t
he burden of world responsibility. Their talk was a rather routine canvass of the issues; occasionally it passed to larger questions. Fanfani made one general point which especially impressed the President: “It is an irony that the communists, who believe in dictatorship, are always addressing the masses; while the west, which believes in democracy, is always addressing the leaders.” Though the apertura was not on the formal agenda, Kennedy told Fanfani privately that, if the Italian Prime Minister thought it a good idea (as he did), we would watch developments with sympathy.
The presidential decision was, of course, at once communicated to the State Department, and this should have ended the matter. In fact, it only marked the beginning of a long and exasperating fight. In the end it took nearly two years to induce the Department of State to follow the President’s policy. The stratagems of obstruction and delay were manifold, and the motives mixed. It was partly, I imagine, the chronic difficulty of changing established policies; partly the patriotic conviction on the part of certain Foreign Service officers that they owned American foreign policy and, in any case, knew better than the White House; partly an innate Foreign Service preference for conservatives over progressives along with a traditional weakness for the Roman aristocracy. Whatever the motives, the sages on State’s Italian desk spent 1961 predicting that the opening to the left would not come for years. Then, as the apertura gathered momentum, they produced an alternative argument: that it was coming anyway and therefore did not require our blessing. The pervading attitude was that in no case should we encourage a development which would constitute a crushing blow to communism in Italy and throughout Europe; rather Nenni and his party must meet a series of purity tests before they could qualify for American approval: as usual risks were more impressive than opportunities.
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