A Thousand Days

by Arthur M. Schlesinger

  The trip represented President Kennedy’s effort to move the European discussion beyond the technicalities of structure to the realities of life. As he knew better than anyone, the impact of an outsider on a continent at once so ancient and so alive as Europe could only be meager. His objectives were limited, but he attained most of them. He defined a democratic alternative to de Gaulle. He made it clear that Europeans must build European unity. He also made it clear that America was not obsessed with the nuclear issue to the exclusion of the urgent social questions of the new Europe. He surmounted the barriers of diplomacy to carry his message to the people. “He spoke to us for the first time in the language of the present generation,” wrote Countess Marion Dönhoff, the acute political commentator for Die Zeit; “a man who was able to project a vision of the future without moving an inch away from the reality of our time; a man whose many-faceted intellect grasped the essence of power; a man who knew every trick in the political game without having become a cynic in the process.” He left behind an indelible memory of a young, vibrant, tough-minded and idealistic America.

  Before the Irish Parliament, he had recalled the lines from Back to Methuselah: “You see things; and you say ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say ‘Why not?’” Shaking off the splintered fragments of the doctrinaire Grand Design of 1961, he now rescued its essence—the hope of a creative west united in common allegiance to progressive democracy—and gave it new identity and purpose. In the summer of 1963, John F. Kennedy could have carried every country in Europe.

  XXXIV

  The Pursuit of Peace

  THE PROBLEMS WITHIN THE WESTERN ALLIANCE, as Kennedy well understood, were part of the price the west was paying for a certain ebbing in the cold war. But, unlike some of his colleagues in the American government who looked back with nostalgia to the good old days when Khrushchev could be relied on to maintain discipline in western ranks, Kennedy was rather more impressed by the risks of war than by the risks of détente. So his first instinct after the missile crisis had been to restore communication with his adversary and resume the search for areas of common interest.

  Though Kennedy did not suppose that the humiliation of the missile crisis would transform the Kremlin overnight, he did hope that his restraint in the aftermath might convince the Russians that the American menace to their security was hardly enough to justify the desperate act which had brought on the crisis. Obviously if the United States had been waiting for an excuse to use its considerable nuclear superiority against the Soviet Union, it could hardly expect a better one than the sneak nuclearization of Cuba. Yet Washington had stayed its hand. Still, with his capacity to understand the problems of others, the President could see how threatening the world might have looked to the Kremlin. Reading Khrushchev’s speech to the Supreme Soviet of December 12, 1962, he expressed, as he had before, his wonder that the Soviet leader was making much the same set of charges against the west that the west was making against him: the language was almost interchangeable. Kennedy gave Khrushchev credit for sincerity in this—“I do think,” he soon said publicly, “his speech shows that he realizes how dangerous a world we live in”—and the mirror effect reinforced his own refusal to regard the global competition as a holy war. If the Russians would “devote their energies to demonstrating how their system works in the Soviet Union, it seems to me his vital interests are easily protected with the power he had, and we could have a long period of peace. . . . But instead, by these constant desires to change the balance of power in the world, that is what, it seems to me, introduces the dangerous element.”

  1. INTIMATIONS OF DÉTENTE

  This is precisely what they had debated the year before in Vienna, and Cuba, for a moment at least, had settled the debate in Kennedy’s favor. Khrushchev’s retreat meant a clear victory of the American over the Soviet definition of the status quo. And, by accepting the status quo in the form of the existing equilibrium of power rather than of the communist revolution, Khrushchev swallowed not only the dialectic of Vienna but the rhetoric of his flamboyant speech six months earlier proclaiming the historic inevitability of a communist world. It was not, of course, that he was abandoning his beliefs; like devotees of older religions, he was perhaps beginning to reserve them for heavenly fulfillment.

  Indeed, the very Cuban adventure had implied a Soviet conclusion that history was not doing the job fast enough and required some sharp encouragement. For in January 1961 the world had seemed ripe for plucking. Asia, Africa, Latin America were all rising against their western masters and appeared to be running in the communist direction. The existence of the nuclear stalemate reduced the credibility of the American deterrent and freed the Soviet Union for nuclear diplomacy—i.e., terrorizing other nations by the manipulation of the threat of nuclear war. The United States itself seemed militarily vulnerable, politically aimless and economically stagnant. The Soviet Union, reviewing its impressive industrial gains of the fifties, could dream of overtaking and surpassing the American economy by the seventies. The communist empire still cherished the hope of unity. These were to have been the glorious years of the final offensive.

  By the summer of 1962 that offensive was in ruins. The third world remained obstinately a third world. Nationalism had proved stronger than Marxism; and communism had encountered one frustration after another in Laos, in the Congo, in Latin America. Kennedy’s firmness over Berlin had re-established the credibility of the deterrent (for the Russians, if not for General de Gaulle) and handed Moscow still another frustration. The Cuban adventure represented a bold effort to turn the western flank at Berlin by altering the nuclear balance. At the same time, it was a tacit confession of Soviet nuclear inferiority. Its failure struck from Soviet hands, one hoped permanently, the weapon of nuclear blackmail Khrushchev had brandished so long and so jovially and forced the Russians to re-examine their whole strategic position. In the meantime, while the United States was recovering economic momentum and political purpose, the Soviet Union was sinking into ever more worrying agricultural, industrial and intellectual difficulties. The communist empire itself, after the truce of 1960, was clearly splitting into hostile blocs. The high hopes of January 1961 were giving way to bleak realities.

  So on November 19, 1962, a month after his defeat in the Caribbean, Khrushchev, in a 30,000 word report to the central committee of the Soviet Communist Party, implicitly called off the world offensive and demanded concentration on the tasks of the Soviet economy. In January 1963 in East Berlin he said that the erection of the Wall had diminished the need for a separate German peace treaty; in effect, he decided to live with the bone in his throat, thereby again accepting Kennedy’s version of the status quo. (The Berlin negotiations eventually trailed off; the west, despite periodic Soviet stamps on the corns, retained its presence and its rights; and the future of West Berlin rested with the larger movements of history.)

  Clearly the Soviet leaders had decided on a breathing spell. There was nothing new about this, of course; throughout the history of communism pause had alternated with pressure. Lenin in 1921 and Stalin in 1935 had made departures in policy which for a moment impressed men of goodwill in the west as basic transformations but which turned out to be no more than new tactics for achieving the old goal of world communization. Yet Khrushchev’s situation in 1963 differed in important respects from Stalin’s in 1935 or Lenin’s in 1921.

  For one thing, the Soviet Union itself had undergone changes. Half a century had transformed it from a revolution dedicated to overturning the existing order to an establishment with heavy vested interests in the status quo. Moreover, in the last decade the revulsion against Stalinism, against forced labor camps, against arbitrary arrests, against the drabness and meanness of daily life, had coincided with the emergence of technical and managerial groups who insisted on a predictable and comfortable existence and whose active loyalty was indispensable to the power of the state. Those outside the Soviet Union might not be so persuaded as Soviet citizens t
hemselves that this process of normalization was irreversible. Nor was it prudent to confuse normalization, which related to personal security, with liberalization, which related to personal freedom (and there was little enough evidence of the second). Yet the Soviet Union of Khrushchev obviously differed in notable ways from the Soviet Union of Stalin. Without accepting Lord Home’s thesis that a fat communist would always be better for the world than a skinny communist, one could hope that further progress toward affluence in Russia would enlarge the sense of having a stake in things as they were, further attenuate the old revolutionary messianism, and end the need for tension with the world as a way to justify tyranny at home.

  For another thing, the mystique of Marxism itself was dying. This was in part for internal reasons: Khrushchev’s indictment of Stalin had permanently discredited the notion that any individual could be the infallible expositor of the creed. And it was in even greater jeopardy for external reasons: Tito had vindicated the right to heresy in 1948, and by 1963 Mao Tse-tung was establishing a rival church. If Marxism had been anything, it had been a universal ideology overriding all national and ethnic interests and dissolving all historic conflicts. Now it was unveiled as one more ideology which individuals, nations and (if Mao were right) races were using and distorting for their own purposes. This decay of Marxist legitimacy reduced the Soviet Union itself to just another state scrapping for leadership within the communist empire.

  These changes both inside the Soviet Union and inside the communist world placed Khrushchev’s desire for a breathing spell in a new frame. And the onset of the nuclear age completed the transformation of the context. Sitting on a nuclear stockpile was not the most comfortable position in the world. As statesmen, generals and scientists tried to figure out how irrational weapons could be put to rational use, they were likely—especially when there was a chance that the weapons might be used against themselves—to develop a certain wariness. Prolonged contemplation of the nuclear effect could lead even the most bellicose to the conclusion that mutual incineration was of dubious benefit. Peking could afford to be nonchalant because, having no nuclear weapons, it had not had to work out the calculus of nuclear exchange. But Moscow, like Washington, had had to explore the rigorous and terrible logic of holocaust.

  Only two men on the planet had been exposed to the absolute pressure of nuclear decision; and even for them it was not till the missile crisis that what was perceived intellectually was experienced emotionally. Khrushchev recorded his reaction in his poignant personal letter to Kennedy on the Friday night of the second Cuba week. As for Kennedy, his feelings underwent a qualitative change after Cuba: a world in which nations threatened each other with nuclear weapons now seemed to him not just an irrational but an intolerable and impossible world. Cuba thus made vivid the sense that all humanity had a common interest in the prevention of nuclear war—an interest far above those national and ideological interests which had once seemed ultimate.

  2. BACK TO THE TEST BAN

  Though the United States had resumed atmospheric testing in the Pacific in April 1962, both Kennedy and Macmillan continued to keep the idea of a test ban alive between themselves, exchanging through the year thoughts about the form and timing of a new approach to Moscow. The President was particularly interested in the possibility of lowering the required quota of annual on-site inspections from the existing figure of twenty. Spurred on by presidential concern, scientists worked to refine techniques of detection and identification. The discovery that Russian earthquakes were less frequent than we had supposed and occurred mostly in areas where testing would be extremely difficult also cut down the need for inspection to distinguish between natural and man-made earth shocks.

  Opponents of a test ban disputed the new technical evidence. But Arthur Dean, still our ambassador to the disarmament conference in Geneva and still eager to win his case, told reporters at the Geneva airport in July 1962 that it was now possible to make a substantial reduction in the requirement for on-site inspections. He did this without instructions or clearance; perhaps he intended to force the issue in Washington. In any case, that was the entirely useful effect, and Kennedy quickly came down on Dean’s side.

  The question of on-site inspections was political as well as technical. A test ban treaty required Senate ratification. To win the necessary two-thirds vote, in view especially of the strong military opposition, the treaty would have to give every appearance of safeguarding national security against Soviet cheating: the ‘big hole’ obsession had not died. But the inspection issue pertained, of course, to a comprehensive test ban. In the meantime, the idea of a limited ban, covering self-policing environments, remained under consideration; indeed, the fact that our resumption of atmospheric testing in April 1962 had produced far more outcry than our resumption of underground testing in September 1961 suggested that the world cared primarily about explosions producing radioactive fallout. At the end of July Kennedy consequently proposed to Macmillan the possibility of offering simultaneous treaties at Geneva: a comprehensive ban with much reduced onsite inspection—this Kennedy preferred because of its greater effect on nuclear proliferation—with an atmospheric test ban as a reasonable second best. The Russians, however, lost no time in turning both down at the end of August—the limited ban because it would allegedly legalize underground testing and thus “raise the nuclear temperature,” the comprehensive ban because it called for inspection. They suggested instead an immediate ban on atmospheric tests accompanied by a moratorium on underground tests until a treaty could be worked out. But the west, remembering who had terminated the last moratorium, was not impressed.

  No doubt Soviet minds were in the Caribbean at this point; but, when the disarmament conference resumed a month after Cuba, one hoped that the mood might be changing. By this time the Soviet Union was winding up its 1962 series of atmospheric tests. We were also completing our own series; and the President’s sense of the meagerness of their results after the clamor about their necessity—all the tests seemed to have proved was the need for more tests—made him more determined than ever to bring the whole thing to an end.* Conceivably Khrushchev might have similar feelings. Moreover, the Soviet Union had accepted the principle of international verification in the case of the Cuban missiles. And in November it had supported the election of U Thant to his full term as Secretary General of the United Nations: this presumably meant that we had heard the last of the troika.

  Hoping that all this might portend comparable progress on the inspection problem, Jerome Wiesner had suggested to the Soviet scientist Yevgenii Federov that, since the American scientists had persuaded their government to go down on the number of inspections, perhaps the Soviet scientists could persuade their government to come up until agreement could be reached. Though Wiesner had been careful to mention no figures, Federov evidently emerged with the impression that the Americans would accept three or four inspections. About the same time V. V. Kuznetsov, the Soviet disarmament negotiator, acquired a similar impression from Dean in a talk in New York. When all this was reported to Moscow, Khrushchev, if one can believe the account he gave to Norman Cousins of the Saturday Review, told the Council of Ministers, “We can have an agreement with the United States to stop nuclear tests if we agree to three inspections. I know that three inspections are not necessary, and that the policing can be done adequately from outside our borders. But the American Congress has convinced itself that on-site inspection is necessary and the President cannot get a treaty through the Senate without it. Very well, then, let us accommodate the President.” He added to Cousins: “Finally I persuaded them.”

  “It seems to me, Mr. President,” Khrushchev wrote Kennedy on December 19, 1962, “that time has come now to put an end once and for all to nuclear tests, to draw a line through such tests.” We believe, Khrushchev continued, that national means of detection are sufficient to police underground as well as atmospheric tests; but we understand your need for “at least a minimum number” of inspections f
or the ratification of the treaty. “Well, if this is the only difficulty on the way to agreement, then for the noble and humane goal of ceasing nuclear weapons tests we are ready to meet you halfway.” Citing the Kuznetsov-Dean conversations, Khrushchev proposed agreement on two to three annual inspections limited to earthquake areas. If this were accepted, “the world can be relieved of the roar of nuclear explosions.”

  Kennedy, who received the letter at Nassau, was exhilarated: it looked as if the Russians were really interested in a modus vivendi. However, the inspection quota still presented difficulties. Dean told the President that the only numbers he had mentioned in his talks with Kuznetsov were between eight and ten. Moreover, the Soviet figure of two or three represented not a real concession but a reversion to a position the Russians had taken in earlier stages of the negotiation and abandoned in November 1961. In replying to Khrushchev, Kennedy remarked on the “misunderstanding” of Dean’s statement, sought to reassure him that inspection could be hedged around to prevent espionage and pointed out the difficulties raised by the confinement of inspection to seismic areas. He concluded: “Notwithstanding these problems, I am encouraged by your letter.” The next step, he suggested, might be technical discussions between representatives of the two governments.