A Thousand Days

by Arthur M. Schlesinger

  The discussions, beginning in New York in January, took place in darkening domestic weather. Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York, nominally considered a liberal Republican, now denounced the idea of a test ban. “This has become an exercise not in negotiation,” said Senator Everett Dirksen, the Republican leader of the Senate, “but in give-away.” In the House of Representatives Craig Hosmer of California rallied Dr. Edward Teller, Admiral Lewis Strauss and other traditional foes of the ban for a new campaign. In February Senator Thomas J. Dodd of Connecticut, observing that too many concessions had already been made, condemned the comprehensive ban on the ground that it would stop the development of the neutron bomb and of anti-missile missiles. Within the government, the Joint Chiefs of Staff declared themselves opposed to a comprehensive ban under almost any terms and pronounced six annual inspections especially unacceptable.

  Actually, Wiesner and a number of scientists had arrived at the “firm opinion . . . that the possibility of five inspections per year would have provided adequate security against clandestine nuclear testing”; and McNamara was ready in February to settle for six. But with the intense military and partisan opposition and the senatorial battle looming ahead, it seemed impossible politically to go below eight or, at the least, seven. As for the Russians, they not only declined to go above three but showed little curiosity about the way the inspections were to be conducted. In effect, we refused to discuss numbers until they discussed modalities, and they refused to discuss modalities until we accepted their numbers. The conclusion in the State Department and the Foreign Office was that the Kremlin, immobilized by its problems with China, could not conceivably join hands with the nation China hated most in permanently excluding China from the nuclear club. The announcement of a Russo-Chinese ideological conference for Moscow in July convinced the experts that for the time being the ban was out of the question.

  But, despite the failure of the New York negotiations and the pessimism of the professional diplomats, Kennedy and Macmillan persisted in their pursuit of a treaty. “I am haunted,” the President said in March, “by the feeling that by 1970, unless we are successful, there may be ten nuclear powers instead of four, and by 1975, fifteen or twenty. . . . I see the possibility in the 1970s of the President of the United States having to face a world in which fifteen or twenty nations may have these weapons. I regard that as the greatest possible danger.” In March and April the President and the Prime Minister passed back and forth across the Atlantic drafts of a new approach to Khrushchev.

  The Soviet leader was not in a receptive mood. When Norman Cousins saw him at his Black Sea retreat on April 12, Khrushchev complained that, after he had induced the Council of Ministers to accept three inspections on the guarantee that it would produce a treaty, the Americans had then insisted on eight: “So once again I was made to look foolish. But I can tell you this: it won’t happen again. . . . We cannot make another offer. I cannot go back to the Council. It is now up to the United States. Frankly, we feel we were misled.” (This last was a peculiar objection from the government which had denied it was sending nuclear missiles to Cuba.) Me went on: ‘‘When I go up to Moscow next week I expect to serve notice that we will not consider ourselves bound by three inspections. If you can go from three to eight, we can go from three to zero.”

  Four days after the meeting with Cousins, the new Kennedy-Macmillan letter arrived in Moscow. The Anglo-American proposal noted that the west had already reduced its inspection quota from twenty to seven and mentioned an idea, backed by the neutral nations at the disarmament conference, of spreading the quota over several years. We all, Kennedy and Macmillan said, owe a duty to our own security, but we also have a duty to humanity, and this requires one more serious attempt to stop testing and prevent the further proliferation of nuclear weapons. The letter concluded by saying that the writers would be ready in due course to send to Moscow very senior representatives empowered to speak for them directly with Khrushchev.

  Khrushchev’s reply in early May could hardly have been more declamatory and rude. There was no point, he suggested, in going through all these arguments again; we have learned your test ban proposals by heart just as we used to learn “Pater Noster.” The Soviet Union, he continued, regarded the western demand for inspection as no more than an effort to introduce NATO intelligence agents into Soviet territory. When he had consented to two or three inspections in December, he said, this was because he wanted to help the President with his Senate, not because he thought inspection necessary or sensible. Instead of a positive reply to this great Soviet concession all he had had since was western haggling over the number of inspections and the conditions for conducting them. To judge your position by your proposals, Khrushchev told the western leaders, the only conclusion could be that you were not serious: one wondered whether you were not going through the motions for domestic political reasons. If there were no real hope for agreement, the Soviet Union had no choice but to take measures to strengthen its own security. In a perfunctory final paragraph, Khrushchev, referring to the notion of sending senior representatives to Moscow, said, in effect, so be it; the Russians were even prepared to try this method of discussion.

  Kennedy began to feel that the test ban was slipping away. “I’m not hopeful, I’m not hopeful,” he said on the day he received Khrushchev’s letter. “There doesn’t seem to be any sense of movement since December.” And two weeks later: “I have said from the beginning that [it] seemed to me that the pace of events was such in the world that unless we could get an agreement now, I would think the chance of getting it would be comparatively slight. We are therefore going to continue to push very hard in May and June and July in every forum to see if we can get an agreement.”

  Washington and London meanwhile brooded over the reply to Khrushchev’s latest unpromising message. The first draft was a debater’s screed, dealing seriatim with Khrushchev’s points. But David Ormsby Gore, picking up Khrushchev’s grudging final paragraph, suggested bypassing the debate and concentrating instead on the special emissaries. Macmillan strongly supported this view, and Kennedy readily agreed. Finally on May 30 a brief letter went to Khrushchev, touching lightly on a couple of the familiar arguments but centering on the proposal that American and British emissaries go to Moscow at the end of June or early in July.

  3. APPEAL AT AMERICAN UNIVERSITY

  In the meantime, the debate in the United States had been producing a certain clarification of issues. Senator Dodd’s attack on the ban in February had led to a thoughtful exchange of letters between Dodd and Adrian Fisher of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. The correspondence brought new points to Dodd’s attention, and the Connecticut Senator had the grace to change his mind. On May 27 he joined with Hubert Humphrey and thirty-two other Senators in introducing a resolution declaring it “the sense of the Senate” that the United States should again offer the Soviet Union a limited test ban; if the Russians rejected the plan, the United States should nevertheless “pursue it with vigor, seeking the widest possible international support,” at the same time pledging no more tests in the atmosphere or under water so long as the Soviet Union also abstained. The President had some concern that this approach might undercut the comprehensive ban; but the effect of the Dodd-Humphrey Resolution was to strengthen the antitesting case. Moreover, a series of hearings in the spring before the Stennis subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee gave the administration a chance to organize its ranks and hold, in effect, a dry run of testimony in case a test ban treaty itself ever came up for ratification. In press conferences and in conversations with leaders of opinion, Kennedy hammered away at the dangers of nuclear proliferation.

  One day late in May McGeorge Bundy told several of us that the President had decided the time had come for a major address on peace. He had evidently concluded that a fresh context was required to save the dying negotiation. We were asked to send our best thoughts to Ted Sorensen and to say nothing about this to anybody. The Pres
ident meanwhile outlined his own views to Ted, who set to work. The speech was scheduled for the American University commencement on the morning of Monday, June 10. On June 7 Bundy convened a small group—Kaysen, Rostow, Tom Sorensen and me—to look at Ted’s draft.

  It was affirmative in tone, elevated in language, wise and subtle in analysis. Its central substantive proposal was a moratorium on atmospheric testing; but its effect was to redefine the whole national attitude toward the cold war. It was a brilliant and faithful reproduction of the President’s views, and we read it with mounting admiration and excitement. Kennedy, in the meantime, had gone to California for a speech at San Diego; on June 9 he was going to Honolulu to address the Conference of Mayors. Kaysen was assigned the job of checking the speech with State and Defense, neither of which had yet been involved, while Sorensen flew to the coast to meet the President on his return from Hawaii.

  Then on Saturday morning Khrushchev unexpectedly replied to the proposal about the special emissaries. His letter, ungracious and sulky, still doubted the sincerity of the Anglo-American effort and still complained about inspection. But he said at least that he would receive the emissaries; their success, he observed sullenly, depended on what they brought in their baggage to Moscow. For all the querulousness, he had agreed to let the negotiations begin.

  On Monday the President addressed himself in the open air on the American University campus to what he called “the most important topic on earth: world peace.” By peace, he said, he did not mean “a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war,” nor did he mean the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. He meant peace which enabled men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children, “not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.” In the nuclear age, peace had become “the necessary rational end of rational men.” It was said, he continued, that it was idle to dream of peace until the Soviet leaders adopted a more enlightened attitude. “I hope they do. I believe we can help them do it.” He added, in a sentence capable of revolutionizing the whole American view of the cold war, “But I also believe that we must reexamine our own attitude—as individuals and as a Nation—for our attitude is as essential as theirs.”

  Too many Americans, he went on, regarded peace as impossible and therefore war as inevitable. “We need not accept that view. Our problems are manmade—therefore, they can be solved by man.” Nor was it correct to suppose that peace would end all quarrels and conflict. It “does not require that each man love his neighbor—it requires only that they live together in mutual tolerance.” History taught us, moreover, that enmities between states did not last forever; “the tide of time and events will often bring surprising changes in the relations between nations.”*

  The communists were of course trapped in conspiratorial hallucinations about the United States; but that should warn us “not to fall into the same trap as the Soviets, not to see only a distorted and desperate view of the other side, not to see conflict as inevitable, accommodation as impossible and communication as nothing more than an exchange of threats. No government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue.” Among many traits Americans and Russians had in common was an abhorrence of war. “No nation in the history of battle,” he reminded his listeners, “ever suffered more than the Soviet Union suffered in the course of the Second World War.” If world war should come again, all both sides had built, “all we have worked for, would be destroyed in the first twenty-four hours.” Yet “we are both caught up in a vicious and dangerous cycle in which suspicion on one side breeds suspicion on the other, and new weapons beget counterweapons.”

  In short, both countries had ‘‘a mutually deep interest in a just and genuine peace and in halting the arms race. . . . If we cannot end now all our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”

  So we must re-examine our attitude toward the cold war, “remembering that we are not engaged in a debate, seeking to pile up debating points. We are not here distributing blame or pointing the finger of judgment.” Our purpose must be to conduct our affairs so that the Russians would see it in their own interest to move toward genuine peace; “we can seek a relaxation of tensions without relaxing our guard.” To move toward peace would “require increased understanding between the Soviets and ourselves . . . increased contact and communication.” In particular, it would require new progress toward general and complete disarmament. And in the area of disarmament one problem “where the end is in sight, yet where a fresh start is badly needed, is . . . a treaty to outlaw nuclear tests.” The President then announced that discussions would soon begin in Moscow “looking toward early agreement on a comprehensive test ban treaty” and that the United States would conduct no atmospheric tests so long as other states did not do so; “we will not be the first to resume.” No treaty could provide “absolute security” against deception and evasion; but if it were sufficiently effective in its enforcement and sufficiently in the interests of its signers, it could “offer far more security and far fewer risks than an unabated, uncontrolled, unpredictable arms race.”

  4. MISSION TO MOSCOW

  It had first been supposed that John J. McCloy, with his experience in disarmament negotiations and his friendly associations with Khrushchev, would be the American negotiator in Moscow. But McCloy turned out not to be available in June or July. When Kaysen discussed Khrushchev’s acceptance of the emissaries with Secretary Rusk, they had chatted for a moment about possible alternatives. Somewhat tentatively Rusk mentioned Averell Harriman. Kaysen immediately reported this to Kennedy, sending along word at the same time to the entourage that the President had better settle on Harriman before the Department had a chance to change its mind. As anticipated, State developed second thoughts in the next twenty-four hours. But by this time Kennedy had given word to go ahead with Averell.

  For reasons which the White House could never understand, or perhaps understood all too well, Harriman, in spite of his almost unsurpassed Russian experience, was rather systematically excluded in the State Department from Soviet affairs. Yet from the viewpoint not only of ability and qualification but of persuading the Russians we meant business, he was the ideal choice. “As soon as I heard that Harriman was going,” someone from the Soviet Embassy remarked to me, “I knew you were serious.” As Khrushchev said to William Benton the next spring, “Harriman is a responsible man.”

  Harriman set about his preparations in his usual astute, detailed and all-encompassing manner. The question whether we should try for a comprehensive or limited ban was still unresolved. The British were in favor of reducing the inspection quota still further, arguing that, even on the unlikely chance that the Russians were disposed to try a few clandestine tests underground, these tests could not possibly affect the balance of military power. As for Harriman, he was sure the Russians would not agree to an inspection quota acceptable to us unless he had, as he liked to put it, “some goodies in his luggage.” He thus regretted the fact that we had unilaterally pulled the Jupiters out of Turkey and Italy three months earlier: if only he had them to trade now! (not that the Russians had illusions about their military importance; but it would have given Khrushchev something to show his own people and the Chinese).

  The problem of China was increasingly on the President’s mind—indeed, on the minds of everyone except those in the Department of State who were still babbling about the “Sino-Soviet bloc.” By 1963 Kennedy and Macmillan were reaching the conclusion that China presented the long-term danger to the peace. Kennedy had tried to make this point to de Gaulle through Malraux; but the French, who wanted, like the Chinese, to prevent a Soviet-American détente, were not interested (For de Gaulle, in addition, Chinese hegemony in Siberia was essential if he were to realize his dr
eam of restoring Russia to a Europe “from the Atlantic to the Urals.”) Britain, however, grasped the point completely. One day when the President and the Prime Minister were discussing the problem of a new commander for NATO, Macmillan said breezily, “I suppose it should be a Russian.”

  Harriman and Kaysen had a final meeting with the President before the mission’s departure for Moscow. Kennedy said that Harriman could go as far as he wished in exploring the possibility of a Soviet-American understanding with regard to China. Averell responded that he would more than ever need something to sweeten the package. Kennedy mentioned possible concessions. The President added, “I have some cash in the bank in West Germany and am prepared to draw on it if you think I should.”

  In the meantime, the Russians had had a chance to study the American University speech. One cannot know; but it seems probable that that address gave Khrushchev both personal reassurance and a weapon he could me against the Chinese. Harold Wilson, who saw him immediately afterward, found him deeply impressed and considerably more open-minded about the test ban. Khrushchev himself later told Harriman with evident feeling that it was “the greatest speech by any American President since Roosevelt.” At any rate, on July 2 in Berlin, after describing it as “notable for its sober appraisal of the international situation,” he offered his answer—a limited ban, outlawing tests in the atmosphere, in outer space and under water. “If the western powers now accept this proposal,” he said, “the question of inspection no longer arises.” He did not this time insist on a concurrent and unpoliced moratorium on underground tests; but he said that “on the conclusion of a test ban agreement” it would also be necessary “to take another big step toward easing international tension”—a nonaggression treaty between the NATO and the Warsaw Pact states. A test ban agreement, “combined with the simultaneous signing of a non-aggression pact,” would create a “fresh international climate.”