Before the Storm

by Rick Perlstein

  There was no mistaking it, though: the large majority of Americans adored their dashing young President. He enjoyed a 79 percent approval rating at the beginning of April, 83 percent after the Bay of Pigs. All the same, it was strange: even as the slice of America that disdained Kennedy grew slimmer, it was growing more distinct, better organized, more articulate. This constituency was on the move. It had a hero. Barry Goldwater gave 225 speeches on the road in 1961. He was becoming, in the words of an astute young Fortune reporter, “the favorite son of a state of mind.” And by the end of the summer, events would see to it that this state of mind would spread impressively.

  8

  APOCALYPTICS

  In the midst of one of those myriad foreign policy crises of his Administration when a wrong decision might doom the entire earth, the bedraggled President looked up at aide Walt Whitman Rostow and muttered, “Sometimes, I’m afraid that the good Lord put me on earth to start a nuclear war.”

  Leading the free world in 1961 was enough to haunt any man. In the Southeast Asian nation of Laos, a pro-American regime was defending itself against a guerrilla band backed by Communist North Vietnam. In Berlin the problem was more immediate. The two Germanys were in a kind of bureaucratic limbo, still officially “occupation zones.” That made Berlin, divided by postwar agreement but deep within the Soviet zone, the one place in the world where the forces of the West (12,000 troops) and the East (500,000 troops) mingled at the distance of a shouted insult or a tossed grenade. For the Soviets, Berlin was an open wound through which East Germany’s most gifted citizens bled. For the NATO countries, the tumbledown misery of the Soviet district was a splendid everyday rebuke to propaganda that Communism could build a paradise on earth. Militarily, the city carried incredible strategic value. It was, said Khrushchev in November of 1958 before demanding that the U.S. accede to placing Berlin under Soviet control, “the testicles of the West,” which he need only squeeze to make Presidents scream.

  The 1958 crisis dissolved with Eisenhower’s invitation to Khrushchev to visit the United States. In 1961 Berlin heated up again because of a chain of events taking place half a world away. On April I Khrushchev agreed to meet with Kennedy in Vienna in June over Laos. Two weeks later, the Bay of Pigs shattered the young, untested President’s bargaining position. Kennedy well remembered the only other time he had met the Soviet premier: when he paid court to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during his September 1959 visit, Khrushchev said that Kennedy looked awfully young to be a senator. In anticipation of the April meeting with the premier, Kennedy frantically backfilled to broadcast his toughness and resolve by calling up twelve thousand new Marines.

  It was harder to control events at home. An inconvenience of making foreign policy during the high tide of the American Century was that since the nation was possessed of a simple faith in its omnipotence, any presidential compromise looked like failure, even unto treason—thereby minting new right-wing critics continually. Kennedy was trying to bargain with Castro to free the prisoners from the Bay of Pigs in exchange for a shipment of American tractors. In Rockford, Illinois, Barry Goldwater held an audience spellbound bemoaning “the disgusting, sickening spectacle of four Americans groveling before a cheap, dirty dictator” (the audience, and Goldwater, didn’t know about the $50 million budget for CIA efforts to overthrow Castro). The appearance of national disunity would hurt Kennedy in Vienna. So would the latest outbreak of civil rights disturbances in the South: young activists from the Congress of Racial Equality testing the Supreme Court ban on segregation in interstate bus facilities on a dramatic “Freedom Ride” through the region. In Birmingham they were beaten, in Anniston their bus was torched, in Montgomery they hid from a mob in a church like cornered rats.

  In Vienna, just as Kennedy feared, Khrushchev came after him like a playground bully, brazenly repeating his 1958 ultimatum: NATO must remove its troops from Berlin or the Soviet Union would sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany making it an “independent” nation with sole rights to the city. “And if that means war,” the premier fulminated, “the Soviet Union will accept the challenge.” The next day he went on Moscow TV to say that the treaty would be signed within the year. If America tried to stop them, he boomed, “it would mean war, and a thermonuclear war at that.”

  It might come to World War III over Berlin: Kennedy spent the summer thinking of little else. Again and again he worked through the military scenarios with his advisers. They all boiled down to one of two options: surrender or nuclear war. They differed only in the number of steps it took to get there. A nuclear first strike was considered, then the pulverization of a Hiroshima-sized Russian city at the first sign of a Soviet move. Dean Acheson told Kennedy that America should be put on immediate footing for total war, including wage and price controls. Finally, at the Kennedy family compound in Hyannisport, an initial course of action was decided upon. The gambit would be a speech, delivered on television on July 25. It was the most terrifying of the Cold War. Later Barry Goldwater would say the same kinds of things during the 1964 presidential campaign, and people would call him a madman.

  Kennedy spoke in front of a flag emblazoned with the presidential seal, draped in such a way that, intentionally or not, the only part visible was the clutch of arrows in the eagle’s right talon, not the olive branch in its left. “An attack on that city will be regarded as an attack upon us all ... we cannot separate its safety from our own.” Berlin was “the great testing place of Western courage and will, a focal point where our solemn commitments stretching back over the years since 1945, and Soviet ambitions, now meet in basic confrontation.” Our only course there was to find a path between “humiliation” and “all-out nuclear action.” The Soviets had made the “mistake of assuming that the West was too selfish and too soft and too divided to resist invasions of freedom in other lands.” They were wrong. He explained that he would ask Congress for $3.2 billion in new military appropriations, triple draft calls, order reserve and National Guard units to active duty, and put long-range bombers on fifteen minutes’ alert. In previous wars, he said, “serious misjudgments were made on both sides of the intentions of others, which brought about great devastation. Now, in the thermonuclear age, misjudgment on either side about the intentions of the other could rain more devastation in several hours than has been wrought in all the wars of human history.” Americans must begin preparing for that eventuality immediately: “In the event of an attack, the lives of those families which are not hit in a nuclear blast can still be saved-if they can be warned to take shelter and if that shelter is available.”

  In the space of an evening the end of the world became routine business. The bomb shelter—only recently the province of neighborhood eccentrics—was now presidential mandate. Thomas J. Watson of IBM gave his employees $1,000 loans to build them; the Rabbinical Council of America recommended construction of bomb shelters beneath all new synagogues. New companies sprang up: Acme Bomb and Fallout Shelter Company, Peace-O-Mind Shelter Company, Nuclear Survival Company. Specialized products appeared on shelves: “Foam-Ettes—the Toothpaste Tablet You Can Use ANYTIME, ANYWHERE—WHEREVER YOU ARE, even in a family fallout shelter.”

  The grim trade illuminated dark corners of the American psyche. An article called “Gun Thy Neighbor” in Time reported on a suburban Chicagoan who planned to mount a machine gun on the hatch of his shelter, and described a civil defense coordinator for Riverside County in southern California who recommended that families stock survival kits with pistols to ward off Angelenos who might head for the sticks. The article appeared in Time’s religion section. Its main point was that religious leaders were sanctioning this kind of thing. “If you allow a tramp to take the place of your children in your shelter, you are in error,” said the dean of a Baptist seminary. “A Christian has the obligation to ensure the safety of those who depend on him.” Jesuit father L. C. McHugh branded as “misguided charity” the refusal to repel invaders by “whatever means to effectively de
ter their assault.” Rod Serling rushed into production an episode of The Twilight Zone to run September 29—if the world made it that far. It depicted a neighborhood birthday party for the beloved town doctor, interrupted by a radio announcement of imminent alien attack. The doctor takes his wife and son to the family shelter and battens down the hatches. Just as the shelterless mob pounds their way in, the radio informs them it was a false alarm. The people face each other in shame, their trust in one another forever shattered.

  The situation in Europe escalated. On August 12, East German soldiers began sealing off the Soviet sector with barbed wire; within days there was a concrete wall, interrupted only by watchtowers. West Berlin mayor Willy Brandt sent Kennedy an open letter demanding “not merely words but political action” to preserve his city. Berlin students sent the President a Neville Chamberlain—style umbrella—a sucker punch to the man whose father was famous, while serving as ambassador to Great Britain, for having a soft spot for Hitler. Kennedy sent Lyndon Johnson to Berlin to pledge “our lives, our fortunes, our sacred honor” to Berlin’s defense. Then he sent a fifteen-hundred-man battle group along the 110-mile single roadway that linked the West to Berlin—a game of chicken that so whitened his knuckles that talking to him, according to an aide, was like talking to a statue. The Soviets announced that they would resume atmospheric nuclear tests. Then they exploded a bomb bigger than all the tonnage in World War II put together. The White House scuttled ongoing disarmament talks.

  It wasn’t just international strategy; it was domestic politics. The growing popularity of Goldwaterite conservatism and popular resentment over the failure at the Bay of Pigs were very much in the President’s thoughts. “They’d kick me in the nuts,” Kennedy told an adviser who warned against a game of tit-for-tat on nuclear testing. “I couldn’t get away with it.” On September 5 he announced that the United States, too, would resume tests.

  The Cold War social contract was stretched near the breaking point. Life manfully tried to make it all sound like an episode out of the era of Teddy Roosevelt: “the American people are willing to face nuclear war for Berlin,” an editorial boasted, citing “our spontaneous boom in shelter building as proof.” The issue that followed, introduced by a letter from President Kennedy, demonstrated how, “prepared, you and your family could have 97 chances out of 100 to survive.” (Time Inc. even helped the Administration draft a civil defense pamphlet to send to every family in the country, part of which would explain that community fallout shelters could double as “after school hang-outs” where “gregarious teenagers” could “relax with sodas and play the jukebox.”) General Eisenhower was so disgusted by the charade that he came out and said that America could “survive” a nuclear attack only as a garrison state. “I would not want to face that kind of world,” he proclaimed.

  But in fact the crisis was over. Kennedy’s July 25 speech had telegraphed a sort of coded message to the Soviets proposing a middle course between surrender and war: that America would not fight over what Khrushchev did on his side of Berlin. While Kennedy publicly professed outrage at the concrete monstrosity dividing Berlin, privately, he was relieved: “A wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”

  The near miss was a hinge in the history of the Cold War. “Now we have a problem in making our power credible,” Kennedy told James “Scotty” Reston of the New York Times, “and Vietnam is the place.” Kennedy meant that it was the safest place: one could signal resolve to draw the line against Communist aggression in a land so godforsaken that neither the Soviets nor China would ever risk escalation over it—escalation that could only lead, inexorably, to nuclear war. It was one of those secrets that only the President and a few of his closest advisers were allowed to know: amidst all the bluster, the only Cold War option conscience truly allowed was local, limited war. The ultramilitant publisher of the Dallas Morning News, E. M. Dealey, as guest at the White House, once insulted President Kennedy to his face: “We need a man on horseback to lead this nation, and many people in Texas and the Southwest think that you are riding Caroline’s bicycle.” The President replied sternly: “I have the responsibility for the lives of 180 million Americans, which you have not.” Only those who didn’t have all the facts could counsel unchecked belligerence.

  On October 26, Kennedy sent President Ngo Dinh Diem, whose brutal South Vietnamese government existed at the sufferance of the U.S., a note promising continued American assistance. In November, Walt Rostow and General Maxwell Taylor recommended adding 8,000 “advisers” to the 800 already stationed in Vietnam. Secretary of State Dean Rusk agreed, with one eye on the Goldwater boom: losing Vietnam “would stimulate bitter domestic controversies in the United States and would be seized upon by extreme elements to divide the country and harass the administration.” At mid-month Kennedy sat down with his Joint Chiefs of Staff to discuss the idea. They thought it splendid. Kennedy was ambivalent, worried about justifying sending thousands of troops to Southeast Asia given that he had sent none to Cuba, 90 miles from our shores. The abrasive chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Lyman Lemnitzer, spat out that the Chiefs thought the United States should pour troops into Cuba, too.

  This intemperate, nearly insubordinate, right-wing drift of certain top military brass and an accompanying militant cast infecting much of the body politic were worries very much on Kennedy’s mind then. He was giving a speech on the subject in Seattle in two days, in fact.

  It was as if the fear he was addressing had flowed uninterrupted from Berlin.

  In California, Democratic governor Pat Brown had ordered his attorney general, Stanley Mosk, to submit a report on the John Birch Society. It came out in July and was excerpted in the New York Times Magazine in August. Mosk reported that Birchers defined Communism as “any idea differing from their own,” that to fight it they were “willing to give up a large measure of the freedoms guaranteed them by the United States Constitution in favor of accepting the dictates of their founder,” and that they sought “by fair means or foul, to force the rest of us to follow their example.” Birchers “do the work of the Communists,” Mosk concluded, by undermining the integrity of the United States.

  It had been only three weeks since a shocking memo from Democratic senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, addressed to Kennedy’s defense secretary, Robert McNamara, had been made public. In 1956 Army psychiatrist William E. Mayer released a report, which became a media sensation, that Korean War POWs had been brainwashed with alarming ease because they had been sent out into the field with a profound lack of understanding of the meaning of America. It led in 1958 to a National Security Council directive that military authorities begin educating the troops in their charge, and the public in their community, in basic facts about the Cold War. Commanding officers were supplied literature and suggestions but were allowed wide latitude in carrying out the directive. And in some cases that latitude, Fulbright reported, had created a monster. A private outfit, the Foreign Policy Research Institute, bankrolled by the conservative Richardson Foundation, was being retained by military bases nationwide—and by the Army War College, under the auspices of no less than the Joint Chiefs of Staff—to convene “strategy seminars” to carry out the NSC Cold War directive. Among their teachings was that Defense Secretary McNamara’s project to replace bombers with missiles as the centerpiece of American nuclear strategy was in fact a deliberate, covert plan for unilateral disarmament. The civilian arm of the Foreign Policy Research Institute instructed civic leaders on how entire American states might be turned into “civilian war colleges” to train the populace in “Catonic” strategy—the right-wing doctrine, named for the Roman general who ended his every Senate speech with the declaration “Carthage must be destroyed,” that preparations for protracted total war to annihilate the Soviet Union should begin immediately.

  In Pensacola (a town so dominated by the right that a local theater company presenting Arthur Miller’s The Crucible interpreted the play as a cr
itique of the persecution of anticommunists), the chief of naval air training set up a series of mandatory, weeklong seminars for officers that taught that the progressive income tax, the Federal Reserve, and increased business regulations were, just as Robert Welch believed, part of the Soviet takeover of the United States. Then the show was taken on the road in mass rallies for civilians. At one of them, in Los Angeles, Loyd Wright educated the audience on the imperative of “preventive war”—a doctrine proposed in 1953 by Air Force general Jimmy Doolittle, rejected with horror by President Eisenhower, to issue an ultimatum that the Soviet Union leave Eastern Europe by a certain date on pain of nuclear retaliation. “If we have to blow up Moscow,” said Wright, “that’s too bad.”

  Fulbright’s startling revelation that military personnel were being indoctrinated with the idea that the policies of the Commander in Chief were treasonous dovetailed with the return to the news of the strange case of General Edwin Walker. Walker had always been an odd one; he volunteered to lead a paratroopers unit in World War II without ever having jumped out of a plane (“How do you put this thing on?” he reportedly asked a subordinate as the plane took off for his first jump). His long, spectacular disillusionment with his civilian masters began in the Korean War. “I saw stalemate become the substitute for victory,” he later recalled. The disillusionment continued when he served as a military adviser for Chiang Kai-shek: Why wasn’t America preparing Taiwan for the final assault on the mainland? (The Cold War was a war, and Walker, like all West Point graduates, had been taught that in a war, “the only real victory was total victory, the complete annihilation of the enemy and its power to wage war.”) Fulbright gained public prominence in 1957 by commanding the regiment guarding Little Rock’s Central High. And this bastardization of the military was the last straw. “In my opinion the 5th column conspiracy and influence in the United States minimize or nullify the effectiveness of my ideals and principles,” he soon wrote in a letter resigning from the Army. His resignation was refused. If every old salt who felt the same way were to leave, it would decimate the officer corps. Instead Walker was promoted, sent to command the Twenty-fourth Infantry Division in Augsberg, Germany. And immediately upon arrival, he set to work implementing the National Security Council Cold War directive.