To Move the World

by Jeffrey D. Sachs

  I am of course grateful to the late Theodore Sorensen, most of all for his inspiration and vast contribution to our world, but also for having the confidence that I could write a book on his favorite of all JFK speeches. That encouragement propelled me throughout the project, as did the warmth and continuing assistance of Gillian Sorensen, Ted’s wonderful wife and senior UN diplomat.

  Many great scholars helped me to understand Kennedy’s peace initiative. I am especially thankful to Professor Marc Trachtenberg, whose wise and penetrating scholarship on the Cold War in A Constructed Peace and other works deeply informed my understanding of Kennedy’s challenges and triumphs. Professor Trachtenberg kindly gave suggestions on an early draft of the manuscript. I also thank Professor Amitai Etzioni, a longtime champion of peace and psychological interpreter of foreign affairs, whose seminal work The Hard Way to Peace deepened my understanding of the Cold War and the reasons for Kennedy’s approach and success. My colleague Professor Richard Gardner, leading diplomat and State Department official in the Kennedy administration, generously offered his important insights and advice.

  My wife, Sonia, children Lisa, Adam, and Hannah, and son-in-law, Matt, as always, have been intimately engaged in this work at every stage. They have been pressed into service in countless ways: listening with me on endless occasions to the recorded speeches; discussing their meaning and beauty; hearing my theories on this or that aspect of JFK’s presidency; reading the manuscript; and of course suffering the long hours of my diverted attention in a house strewn with books and papers. I especially thank Adam, a writer and thinker of exceptional brilliance, for helping me at every turn of the writing. His contributions are reflected throughout the manuscript, though all clumsy phrasing that remains is surely my own.

  As always, my literary agent, Andrew Wylie, and Random House editor, Jonathan Jao, have enabled me to give life to an idea. Andrew’s support and encouragement, and Jonathan’s trenchant advice and editing, make my book writing possible and a joyful experience for me. I also thank all of the remarkable professionals at Random House for their care, advice, and support.

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  NOTES

  PREFACE

  1. Graham T. Allison and Philip Zelikow, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, 2nd ed. (New York: Longman, 1999), 240.

  2. In a private letter to Khrushchev on October 28, a day after the incident, Kennedy wrote, “I regret this incident and will see to it that every precaution is taken to prevent recurrence.” John F. Kennedy and Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, Top Secret: The Kennedy-Khrushchev Letters, ed. Thomas Fensch (The Woodlands, TX: New Century Books, 2001), 341.

  3. Jeffrey Sachs, “The Great Convergence,” The Reith Lectures, BBC Radio 4 (2007).

  CHAPTER 1: THE QUEST FOR PEACE

  1. Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917–1963 (Boston: Little, Brown, 2003); Richard Reeves, President Kennedy: Profile of Power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993); Alan Brinkley, John F. Kennedy (New York: Times Books, 2012); Barbara Leaming, Jack Kennedy: The Education of a Statesman (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006).

  2. Winston Churchill, The World Crisis, 1911–1918 (New York: Free Press, 2005).

  3. Martin Gilbert, Winston Churchill (London: Oxford University Press, 1966).

  4. Neville Chamberlain, “Peace for Our Time” (speech, London, September 30, 1938), Britannia Historical Documents, http://​www.​britannia.​com/​history/​docs/​peacetime.​html.

  5. David Nasaw, The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy (New York: Penguin Press, 2012).

  6. John F. Kennedy, Why England Slept (New York: W. Funk, 1940).

  7. Stephen J. Majeski, “Arms Races as Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma Games,” Mathematical Social Sciences 7, no. 3 (June 3, 1984): 253–266; Robert M. Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 2006).

  8. Robert Jervis, “Cooperation Under the Security Dilemma,” World Politics 30, no. 2 (1978): 167–214.

  9. Ibid., 189.

  10. “Deployment by Country, 1951–1977,” National Security Archive, http://​www.​gwu.​edu/​~nsarchiv/​news/​19991020/​04-​46.​htm.

  11. W. H. Lawrence, “Churchill Urges Patience in Coping with Red Dangers,” New York Times, June 27, 1954, 1.

  12. Winston Churchill, Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches, 1897–1963, ed. Robert Rhodes James (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1974), 8257.

  13. John F. Kennedy, “Speech of Senator John F. Kennedy, Civic Auditorium, Seattle, WA” (speech, Seattle, September 6, 1960), The American Presidency Project, ed. Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, http://​www.​presidency.​ucsb.​edu/​ws/?​pid=​25654.

  14. Amitai Etzioni, The Hard Way to Peace: A New Strategy (New York: Collier Books, 1962).

  15. Ibid., 102.

  16. John F. Kennedy, “Inaugural Address” (speech, Washington, DC, January 20, 1961), Miller Center, http://​millercenter.​org/​president/​speeches/​detail/​3365.

  17. Quoted in Christopher A. Preble, “ ‘Who Ever Believed in the “Missile Gap”?’: John F. Kennedy and the Politics of National Security,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 33, no. 4 (December 2003): 805–806.

  18. Kennedy and Khrushchev, Top Secret, 70.

  19. Robert S. Norris and Hans M. Kristensen, “Global Nuclear Stockpiles, 1945–2006,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 62, no. 4 (2006): 66.

  20. John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy During the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 198–236; Lawrence Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989); Joseph M. Siracusa and David G. Coleman, “Scaling the Nuclear Ladder: Deterrence from Truman to Clinton,” Australian Journal of International Affairs 54, no. 3 (2000): 285–288.

  21. David Alan Rosenberg, “The Origins of Overkill: Nuclear Weapons and American Strategy,” International Security 7, no. 4 (Spring 1983): 66.

  22. Marifeli Pérez-Stable, The Cuban Revolution: Origins, Course and Legacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

  23. Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy J. Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble”: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958–1964 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 82–100; Michael R. Beschloss, The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960–1963 (New York: Edward Burlingame Books, 1991); Trumbull Higgins, The Perfect Failure: Kennedy, Eisenhower, and the CIA at the Bay of Pigs (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987); Piero Gleijeses, “Ships in the Night: The CIA, the White House and the Bay of Pigs,” Journal of Latin American Studies 27, no. 1 (February 1995): 1–42.

  24. Beschloss, The Crisis Years, 145.

  25. Dallek, An Unfinished Life, 368.

  26. John F. Kennedy, “Special Message to the Congress on Urgent National Needs” (speech, Washington, DC, May 25, 1961), The American Presidency Project, ed. Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, http://​www.​presidency.​ucsb.​edu/​ws/​?pid=​8151.

  27. Fursenko and Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble,” 146–150, 156–158; Edward Lansdale, “Operation Mongoose: The Cuba Project,” February 20, 1962, Cuban History Archive, http://​www.​marxists.​org/​history/​cuba/​subject/​cia/​mongoose/​c-​project.​htm.

  28. Kennedy and Khrushchev, Top Secret, 2.

  29. Ibid., 2–3.

  30. Ibid., 3.

  31. Ibid., 13–14.

  32. Ibid., 16.

  33. Ibid., 18–19.

  34. Ibid., 25.

  35. Foreign Relations of the United States: Diplomatic Papers; The Conference of Berlin (Potsdam Conference, 1945), 2 vols. (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1960).

  36. Fraser J. Harbutt, Yalta 1945: Europe and America at the Crossroads (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

  37. Frederick H. Gareau, “Morgenthau’s Plan for Industrial Disarmament in Germany,” Western Political Quarterly 14, no. 2 (June 1961): 517–534.

  38. James F. Byrnes, “Restatement of Policy on Germany” (speech, Stuttgart, September 6, 1946), United States Diplomatic Mission to Germany, http://​usa.​usembassy.​de/​etexts/​ga4-​460906.​htm.

  39. Marc Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945–1963 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 146–149.

  40. Ibid.

  41. Ibid., 212–213.

  42. Quoted in Fursenko and Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble,” 123.

  43. Quoted in Beschloss, The Crisis Years, 224.

  44. Quoted in ibid., 217.

  45. Kennedy and Khrushchev, Top Secret, 218.

  46. Quoted in Beschloss, The Crisis Years, 218.

  47. Frederick Kempe, Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2011), 257.

  48. Deborah Welch Larson, Anatomy of Mistrust: U.S.-Soviet Relations During the Cold War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 133.

  49. “Facts About the Berlin Wall,” Agence France-Presse, accessed February 14, 2013, http://​www.​abs-​cbnnews.​com/​features/​11/​09/​09/​facts-​about-​berlin-​wall.

  50. Quoted in Beschloss, The Crisis Years, 225.

  CHAPTER 2: TO THE BRINK

  1. Beschloss, The Crisis Years, 291.

  2. Ibid.

  3. “30 October 1961—The Tsar Bomba,” Comprehensive Nuclear-Test Ban Treaty Organization Preparatory Commission, accessed February 14, 2013, http://​www.​ctbto.​org/​spe
cials/​infamous-​anniversaries/​30-​october-​1961-​the-​tsar-​bomba/.

  4. Quoted in Beschloss, The Crisis Years, 307.

  5. Quoted in Dallek, An Unfinished Life, 463.

  6. Roswell Gilpatric, “Address by Deputy Secretary of Defense Gilpatric to the Business Council” (1961), in Meena Bose, Shaping and Signaling Presidential Policy: The National Security Decision Making of Eisenhower and Kennedy (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1998), 149–156.

  7. Allison and Zelikow, Essence of Decision.

  8. Beschloss, The Crisis Years, 387.

  9. Ibid., 388–389.

  10. For more detailed analysis and information on the Cuban Missile Crisis, see Allison and Zelikow, Essence of Decision; James A. Nathan, ed., The Cuban Missile Crisis Revisited (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992); Fursenko and Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble”; Ernest R. May and Philip Zelikow, eds., The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002); James G. Blight, Bruce J. Allyn, David A. Welch, and David Lewis, eds., Cuba on the Brink: Castro, the Missile Crisis, and the Soviet Collapse (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993); Michael Dobbs, One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War (New York: Vintage Books, 2009).

  11. John F. Kennedy, “The President’s News Conference,” September 13, 1962, The American Presidency Project, ed. Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, http://​www.​presidency.​ucsb.​edu/​ws/?​pid=​8867.

  12. Theodore C. Sorensen, Kennedy (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 705.

  13. May and Zelikow, eds., The Kennedy Tapes, 62.

  14. Quoted in Richard Ned Lebow, “The Cuban Missile Crisis: Reading the Lessons Correctly,” Political Science Quarterly 98, no. 3 (Autumn 1983): 443.