A Thousand Days
Page 134
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* Haynes Johnson, The Bay of Pigs (New York, 1964 [Dell edition]), 73–74.
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* Johnson, The Bay of Pigs, 83.
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* Johnson, The Bay of Pigs, 139.
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* The Militant, May 1, 1961.
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* Richard M. Nixon, “Cuba, Castro and John F. Kennedy,” Reader’s Digest, November 1964.
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* Emily Morison Beck, the editor of the new edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, informs me that she knows of no previous use of this “old saying.”
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* Mythologists have even talked about a supposed presidential decision to “withdraw United States air cover.” There was never, of course, any plan for United States air cover, and no air cover for the landing forces was withdrawn.
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* The proponents of the limited-war thesis also favored the development of tactical nuclear weapons but hoped never to use them. A few—notably Henry Kissinger in Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1957)—believed for a time in the possibility of limited nuclear war, but Kissinger abandoned this position by 1960, and the predominant feeling among the critics of massive retaliation was always that limited nuclear war would billow up quickly (in the jargon, “escalate”) into full nuclear war.
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* Not all Democrats espoused the limited-war thesis in the fifties. Stuart Symington, Thomas K. Finletter and Roswell Gilpatric believed, in Finletter’s words, that only when the needs of the air-atomic retaliatory force were fully satisfied “would we allocate money to other military tasks.” Symington and Finletter had both been Secretaries of the Air Force under Truman and Gilpatric Under Secretary.
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* Another fake issue, much fancied by the Democrats in the Eisenhower period, was the objection that under Eisenhower the budget determined defense needs rather than vice versa. While George Humphrey’s antique fiscal views undoubtedly imposed irrational constraints on Eisenhower’s defense policy, the Democrats never really believed that the Pentagon’s view of its own requirements should be decisive. As Charles Hitch put it in his Rand days, “There is nothing absolute about national security, especially in this thermonuclear era. Some notion of cost, however imprecise, is implicit in the recognition of any limitation. . . . For the logic of choice demands that alternatives be costed, in some appropriate way, prior to choice. It tells us that the choices that maximize military power with given resources are the same choices that minimize the resource cost of attaining that level of power.” (“Economics and Military Operations Research,” Review of Economics and Statistics, August, 1958.) The Kennedy Administration proved to be as concerned as the Eisenhower Administration with the balancing of the defense effort against the other demands of the economy, but it believed—correctly—that the balance could be achieved at a much higher level. The two administrations differed, not in their basic attitude toward the idea of budgetary limits on defense spending, but in their estimates as to how much defense spending the economy could stand. As a party used to spending, the Democrats had fewer inhibitions.
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* Mike Mansfield, “Reprieve in Viet Nam,” Harper’s Magazine, January 1956.
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* Richard M. Nixon, “Cuba, Castro and John F. Kennedy,” Reader’s Digest, November 1964.
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* I am grateful to Senator Benton for letting me see the memorandum of his interview with Chairman Khrushchev on May 28, 1964.
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* My italics.
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** Meet the Press, December 2, 1951.
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* Mark Epernay, The McLandress Dimension (Boston, 1963), 61, 67.
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** It was a losing fight. As I write—on May 9, 1965—I note Thomas C. Mann, Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs, running on in an interview with the New York Times about “instruments of Sino-Soviet military power” and “orders from the Sino-Soviet military bloc.”
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* On the death of his father in 1964, Ormsby Gore became Lord Harlech.
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* With the exception of underground tests producing signals of less than 4.75 seismic magnitude; it was expected that this threshold would be lowered as seismic research improved detection capabilities.
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** In 1960 the Scientists’ Committee of the Democratic Advisory Council estimated that the hole required to hide a seventy-kiloton explosion would cost $25 to $50 million and require the excavation of an amount of material greater than the country’s annual production of anthracite coal. In the Kennedy administration the Atomic Energy Commission, after several years of effort and at the cost of $20 million, detonated an explosion less than one-tenth that size—and discovered that the signal was enhanced in certain directions. In retrospect, the ‘big hole’ scare could not seem more dubious.
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* Michael Wright, Disarm and Verify (London, 1964), 120.
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* The idea of a National Peace Agency was first submitted to the DAC by Trevor Gardner, who had served briefly as Assistant Secretary of the Air Force in the Eisenhower administration, and Dr. Harrison Brown of the California Institute of Technology. It was revised and approved by the Advisory Committee on Science and Technology and adopted by the DAC, with Kennedy’s specific endorsement, on December 5, 1959.
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* After further revision, designed mostly to make the political changes between the stages more explicit, the American disarmament plan in its final form was submitted to the eighteen-nation Disarmament Committee in Geneva on April 18, 1962.
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* A number of points in this discussion have been clarified by Thomas C. Schelling; see especially “The State of the Arms Race” in J. E. Dougherty, ed., The Prospects for Arms Control (New York, 1965), 52–55.
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* The Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (1954) and the Central Treaty Organization (1959).
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* This process of letting political necessity shape the aid program had actually begun in the last Truman years. In 1951, Harriman, with whom I had worked in Paris in 1948 on the Marshall Plan, called me to Washington to help on the President’s aid message. There I first met David E. Bell, Richard Neustadt and Harlan Cleveland and participated with them in the invention of the concept of ‘defense support’—a means of bringing in economic aid which could be justified as militarily essential.
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* Odiously termed ‘know-how’ in the bureaucracy.
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* Kusum Nair, Blossoms in the Dust: The Human Element in Indian Development (London, 1961), xxiii.
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* He is also the author of Witness for Aid (Boston, 1964), a sensitive discussion of aid issues.
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* I am conscious of the spurious precision of such figures and of all statistics from developing countries (indeed, from developed countries as well); see Oskar Morgenstern, On the Accuracy of Economic Observations (2nd edition; Princeton, 1963).
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* Eisenhower abandoned this position in later years.
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* “Death to Betancou
rt,” “Death to Kennedy.”
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* Historians will note that the debate between the structuralists and the fiscalists was a new and more analytical phase of the old New Deal debate between the institutionalists of the First New Deal (Tugwell, Berle, Hugh Johnson), who wanted to restore the economy through reorganization of social structure, and the Keynesians of the Second New Deal (Eccles, Currie, Ben Cohen, Henderson), who proposed to end the depression through deficit spending.
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* Grant McConnell, Steel and the Presidency—1962 (New York, 1963), 75.
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* In 1965 eight major companies, headed by U. S. Steel, pleaded nolo contendere to charges of price-fixing between 1955 and 1961. Each company received the maximum fine under the anti-trust laws.
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* The Research Institute of America on June 30, 1962, reported the results of a survey of 6000 business executives. Fifty-two per cent described the administration as “strongly anti-business,” 36 per cent as “moderately anti-business,” and only 9 per cent as “neutral” or “pro-business.”
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* Oddly not published until February 1963, by which time the prospect of a Kennedy recession was long in the past.
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* Taylor’s extravagance did not flag in later years. Thus on April 17, 1965, “It’s astounding, but true, that the Communist Party, U.S.A., actually planned the Johnson administration’s Voting Rights Act of 1965.”
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* He was interested, however, that one of his staff should contribute film reviews to Show magazine, and with his curiosity about everything he would often have suggestions about critiques he thought should be written. Before beginning the assignment, I sent him a memorandum asking whether it would be any embarrassment to him if I became a film critic on my own time. The message came back through Evelyn Lincoln: “The President says it is fine for you to write for Show as long as you treat Peter Lawford with respect.”
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* In the spring of 1962, Alfred M. Landon of Kansas, the Republican candidate for President in 1936 and one of the most likable men in American politics, paid a call on Kennedy. “Our conversation drifted from North to South and from South back to North,” Landon later told me, “like the smoke from a hookah.” I asked him whether Kennedy reminded him at all of Roosevelt. Landon said, “No. Kennedy is very frank and straightforward. Roosevelt was always on the stage, always giving a performance.” He went on to describe Truman: “For the first two years he was too humble. Thereafter he became too cocky. Kennedy is neither humble nor cocky.” (Subsequently Kennedy said about Landon, “I liked him. Very Trumanesque.”)
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* October 2, 1963.
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* One can find even in his Public Papers a reference to “the tremendous landslide that swept the Vice President and I into office by one-tenth of one per cent.” (1963, 444)
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* A reference to the hazards of replenishing the water supply when an encampment was under Indian assault in frontier days.
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* In Louisiana, however, the Catholic and Negro vote seems to have been chiefly responsible for Kennedy’s gains over Stevenson in 1956.
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* W. S. White, The Professional: Lyndon B. Johnson (Boston, 1964), 228.
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* 1961: Peace Corps; Alliance for Progress; Arms Control and Disarmament Administration; area redevelopment; general housing act; extension of unemployment compensation; aid to dependent children of unemployed; increase in minimum wage; water pollution control; juvenile delinquency program; community health facilities.
1962: Trade Expansion Act; UN bond issue; tax bill; investment tax credit; communications satellite; manpower development and training; accelerated public works; drug labeling; restraints on conflict of interest; federal pay reform; federal assistance for the immunization of children; constitutional amendment abolishing the poll tax in federal elections; farm bill with wheat controls.
The statistics for these two years show 53 total major recommendations in 1961, of which 33 were enacted into law; 54 in 1962, of which 40 were enacted into law. “Summary of the Three-Year Kennedy Record and Digest of Major Accomplishments of the 87th Congress and the 88th Congress First Session,” 88 Cong., 1 Sess., Sen. Doc. No. 53, 55–60.
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* The breakdown is as follows: 1933, 4; 1934, 2; 1935, 1; 1936, 1; 1937, 3; 1938, 2: 1939, 1; 1940, 2; 1941, 3; 1942, 4; 1943, 4; 1944, 3; 1945, o.
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* And expected everyone else to do likewise. No experience was more frequent for members of his staff than to be called by the President early in the morning for discussion of an item in the papers; in my case the calls regularly came before I had had a chance to read the papers. Averell Harriman once told a congressional committee, “A man cannot serve President Kennedy unless he reads the newspaper carefully. He won’t last very long if he doesn’t, in this administration.”
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* The speaker was J. Evetts Haley, whose book, A Texan Looks at Lyndon, was one of the more scurrilous contributions to the 1964 campaign.
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* The contrast between two memoranda sent over to the White House from the State Department on the same day that summer makes the point. One discussed a gift to Kennedy from President Betancourt of Venezuela of a specially bound and inscribed collection of his speeches. State recommended against any formal acknowledgment and proposed that the Department convey the President’s thanks informally to Betancourt through the Venezuelan Embassy. The second memorandum discussed a gift to the President from a Paraguayan Ambassador of a book which the memorandum described as “essentially an apologia for the current Paraguayan regime.” Accompanying the book was a letter from its author stigmatizing the opponents of the regime, some of whom had just signed a statement in support of the Alliance for Progress, as “in league with communism.” In this case the Department had composed an effusive letter of thanks to the author, which they wanted someone in the White House to sign. Our view in the White House was exactly the opposite—that we should indicate sympathy with Betancourt’s progressive regime and detachment from Stroessner’s dictatorship, and that Betancourt should therefore receive a presidential letter and the Paraguayan informal thanks through his embassy.
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* John Bartlow Martin, whom Kennedy soon sent to Santo Domingo as United States Ambassador, will tell the story in detail in his book Overtaken by Events.
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* In the end, after new problems, we never built the airport.
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* Morrison describes this in his own memoir of the period, Latin American Mission (New York, 1965), 225.
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* The Soviet Union had under construction in Cuba twenty-four launch pads for medium-range and sixteen for intermediate-range missiles. The medium-range launch pads could be re-used. Forty-two medium-range missiles were brought to Cuba; it seems reasonable to presume that at least six more were on the way, so that each pad would have two. Apparently no intermediate-range missiles ever arrived. It took much longer to construct bases for them, and there may have seemed no point in sending the missiles until the bases were nearer completion. At any rate, the Soviet plan seems to have contemplated the installation of a minimum of sixty-four missiles.
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* The Secretary of State took little part in these discussions. John M. Hightower, who covers the State Department
for the Associated Press, wrote on August 22, 1965: “Criticism over his role in the missile crisis angered Rusk to the point that he heatedly defended it in talks with newsmen on one or two occasions. He said that the responsibility of the Secretary of State was to advise the President and he did not think he should commit himself before all the facts were in. Therefore he withdrew himself from the argument for several days though Under Secretary of State George Ball, instructed by Rusk to take a free hand, presented the State Department viewpoint.”
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* It was passed unanimously. Uruguay, still awaiting instructions, abstained on Tuesday but changed its vote to affirmative on Wednesday.
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* Actually Khrushchev never made this remark; it was Frost’s interpretation in a New York press conference after a transatlantic flight of an anecdote cited by Khrushchev from Gorki’s memoirs where Tolstoy described himself as “too weak and too infirm to do it but still having the desire.” Khrushchev was applying this to nations: the United States as old, the Soviet Union as young. Frost, yielding to prejudices of his own, transposed it into a remark about liberals. See Franklin D. Reeve, Robert Frost in Russia (Boston, 1964), 115, 120—123.
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* In his brilliant essay on the missile crisis Collision Course (New York, 1963), 67–68.
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* Hopefully to be enlarged by the addition of Great Britain and other members of the European Free Trade Association. Proponents of this conception mysteriously insisted for a time on calling it the ‘dumbbell’ theory.
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* Remaining perplexed, he asked Richard Neustadt in March 1963 to undertake a study designed to find out how two close allies could have miscalculated each other and fallen into a surely avoidable crisis. Neustadt spent the summer on the inquiry and submitted the result to the President on November 15, 1963. The President read it with care and on November 20 told Bundy to tell Neustadt that “I want to see him after I get back from Texas.”
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* One observer said of Jackson, “He would sometimes extemporize a fit of passion in order to overwhelm an adversary, when certain of being in the right, but his self-command was always perfect.”
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