The Soviet leader did not have long to savor the praise this statement produced before events in the Congo reminded him of the chronic weakness of the Soviet position in the third world.46 Patrice Lumumba had remained in the custody of the Congolese Army chief, Joseph Mobutu, since his arrest on December 2. In mid-January the Kremlin was elated by news that Lumumba had provoked a mutiny among the soldiers holding him and had escaped. Four days later, January 17, optimism turned once again to anger. Lumumba had been recaptured by Mobutu’s forces and sent to the headquarters of Moise Tshombe in secessionist Katanga Province, home base of the one man in the Congo who hated Lumumba more than Joseph Mobutu did. Lumumba was never again seen alive. When Khrushchev learned of Lumumba’s assassination, he ordered that the Friendship University be renamed in his honor. The Soviet leader still believed the future held great promise for socialism worldwide, but the struggles of the present worried him.
AS HE LEFT OFFICE, Dwight Eisenhower had no sense of how vulnerable Nikita Khrushchev felt in the third world. On the contrary, the president seemed annoyed at the fact that he was bequeathing Soviet gains in Cuba and Laos to his successor. Despite recent successes in the Congo, Eisenhower was still seized with the fear and alarm that had spawned the CIA’s assassination plans in August 1960. Lumumba was gone, but Eisenhower decided to leave to his successor, John F. Kennedy, the question of what to do about Fidel Castro.
In a farewell meeting with the president-elect on January 19, Eisenhower also made a point of stressing the importance of Laos. The outgoing president believed that the future of the entire region hinged on the fate of this tiny country. “It is the cork in the bottle,” he said. Little known to the American people, the civil war in Laos had been elevated to a new level of importance in December 1960, when the Soviet Union began its airlift from Hanoi to the left-leaning government forces. For the Eisenhower administration Khrushchev’s move presaged a new offensive, suggesting that the Soviets had decided to pick up the cudgels in a fight led to that point only by its socialist allies North Vietnam and to a lesser extent the People’s Republic of China.
The new president brought some knowledge of his own to the Laos problem. Kennedy had visited Southeast Asia as a young congressman in 1951. On this extensive tour, which involved stops in Indochina, Japan, India, and Korea, he had done a lot of listening. He had returned energized by seeing nationalism in action and deeply concerned about the inability of even his fellow Democrats to appreciate that nationalism not only was here to stay but, if properly encouraged, could be a force for good in the developing world. Following the bitter debate in Congress in the early 1950s over who had “lost” China to Mao Zedong, in which Kennedy had been as much a partisan of the “we could have prevented it” line as any other congressman, U.S. legislators shied away from even appearing to support any neutralist movement that might have the potential to turn Communist.47 First as representative and later as a senator, Kennedy took a more nuanced line on policy in the developing world, ultimately publicly supporting decolonization as well as anticommunism in both Indochina and Algeria.48
Now on the verge of the presidency, Khrushchev’s future adversary had not yet decided what his policies would be in either Cuba or Laos. What he did know was that more often than not inflexible policy ideas or awkward diplomats had failed to make the friends for the United States that they should have. Like the Soviet leader, Kennedy understood that across the former European empires, “the fires of nationalism so long dormant…are now ablaze…. Colonialism is not a topic for tea-talk discussion; it is the daily fare of millions of men.”49 Kennedy expected the third world to be a principal focus of the Cold War for his administration.
Khrushchev, however, had his own idea of where the Cold War was headed. Hopeful that his more muscular approach to defending young postcolonial allies would deter future crises in the third world, he looked to focus Kennedy’s attention on areas of more central concern to the Kremlin.
CHAPTER 14
“HE IS A SON OF A BITCH”
KHRUSHCHEV SAW the political victory of the young John F. Kennedy in November 1960 as an important opportunity to push his national security agenda. Soviet Ambassador Mikhail “Smiling Mike” Menshikov hinted to almost anybody with a plausible link to Kennedy that Khrushchev was eager to resume the process of relaxing international tensions largely abandoned after the Paris summit.1 The Soviet Union sent a strong signal of its hope for better relations with the incoming administration by unconditionally releasing two RB-47 pilots it had detained since July 1960. And it seemed clear to the foreign policy community in Washington that the Kremlin was brushing aside any potential concerns about John Kennedy’s razor-thin victory margin, immediately treating him as a leader with a mandate to change the Cold War.
It was an indication of how much he disliked Richard Nixon that Khrushchev greeted the Democratic victor so eagerly. From everything Khrushchev had learned about Jack Kennedy, he had little reason to harbor high hopes for this particular American politician. On the campaign trail, Kennedy had criticized the outgoing administration for failing to meet the Soviet challenge vigorously enough. “I don’t want to be the President of a nation perishing under the mushroom cloud of a nuclear warhead,” Kennedy had told crowds of American World War II veterans like himself in the final weeks of the campaign. “But neither do I wish to be the President of a nation which is being driven back, which is on the defensive, because of its unwillingness to face the facts of our national existence, to tell the truth, to bear the burdens which freedom demands, a nation which may be declining in relative strength, and with the world coming to an end as T. S. Eliot said, ‘Not with a bang, but with a whimper.’” 2
On the two issues that mattered most to Khrushchev, disarmament and the German question, Kennedy during the campaign seemed to take positions that were tougher than those of his rival, Nixon. Kennedy assured voters that the priority of his administration would be to build up U.S. strength—accelerate missile development, expand conventional forces, restore America’s international prestige—before starting another round of talks with Khrushchev. He made repeated promises to defend West Berlin’s security and Western access to the city. Moreover, though he assured his audiences that the next U.S. president would have to negotiate with Khrushchev on Berlin, at no point in the campaign did Kennedy offer a diplomatic plan for solving the problem.3
Another source of potential disappointment for Khrushchev was Kennedy’s repeated criticism of Soviet gains in the third world. “[T]he great struggle in foreign policy in the next decade will not take place in Western Europe and will not be directly between the Soviet Union and the United States,” said the candidate. “The great test will be which system travels better, which system solves the problems of the people of Latin America and Africa and Asia.”4 Among the places where communism had already traveled, Kennedy was most concerned about Cuba. “Castro is not just another Latin American dictator—a petty tyrant bent merely on personal power and gain. His ambitions extend far beyond his own shores. He has transformed the island of Cuba into a hostile and militant Communist satellite—a base from which to carry Communist infiltration and subversion throughout the Americas.”5 “[T]he United States,” Kennedy added, “…can hardly close its eyes to a potential enemy missile or submarine base only 90 miles from our shores.”6
The main biographical information on the new U.S. president available to Khrushchev also argued for caution. Born in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1917, Kennedy was a child of privilege. A graduate of Choate and then Harvard, he gained an unusual political education when President Franklin Roosevelt appointed his father U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. In London Joseph P. Kennedy courted notoriety with statements suggesting that the British would wilt under the pressure of fighting the Nazis and advocating that the United States stay out of the European contest altogether. Joe Kennedy seemed to worry more about the threat from Stalin than about anything Hitler could do to America. Kremlin staffe
rs pointed out to Khrushchev the possible effect that the elder Kennedy might have on John Kennedy’s views on foreign policy. Both the Foreign Ministry and the KGB, in their biographical sketches of the new president, pointed out Kennedy’s strident rhetoric in the campaign and awkwardly tied it to the notorious anti-communism of his father.7
The Foreign Ministry did describe John Kennedy as “a typical pragmatist” but was much less sanguine about the prospects for successful negotiations on any of the issues that mattered to Khrushchev.8 “[O]n relations between the USA and the USSR,” Khrushchev was informed, “Kennedy’s position…is quite contradictory.” The KGB saw a little more liberalism than pragmatism in the new leader. Khrushchev’s key foreign spies had concluded that Kennedy was from the liberal Adlai Stevenson wing of the Democratic Party, which believed in seeking diplomatic compromises wherever possible to reduce Cold War tensions, thus making it more likely that Kennedy would consider innovative approaches to bilateral problems.9 Although the KGB and the Soviet Foreign Ministry disagreed on the extent to which the son shared the severe views of the father, analysts in both institutions noted that Kennedy accepted the fallacy of the missile gap and was unlikely to engage in any worthwhile negotiations before he had built up U.S. military power.
Buried in these papers, which Khrushchev may or may not have read, was a nugget that suggested some interesting corridor gossip in and around the Kremlin. Although the KGB was not yet ready to put on paper its verdict on the new president’s leadership abilities, the Foreign Ministry was prepared to characterize him as “unlikely to possess the qualities of an outstanding person.” There was a sense among some in Moscow that this scion of a wealthy American family, who lacked serious legislative or executive experience, was a lightweight.
It would have come as a surprise to many Western cold warriors, but this was not the kind of adversary that Khrushchev welcomed. He wanted a strong-minded pragmatist who could stand up to the forces of militarism and reaction, which he assumed were rampant in Washington. The experiences of 1960, culminating in the U-2 incident, served to reinforce his belief that U.S. foreign policy was inherently unstable. Khrushchev still believed that Eisenhower was a man of peace whose good instincts had been undermined by the CIA and the Pentagon. If John Kennedy were a strong leader, Khrushchev would expect him to tame these forces and negotiate in good faith with Moscow.10 Essential to this view was the Soviet leader’s belief that his own proposals, whether regarding Western access to Berlin or superpower disarmament, were eminently reasonable.
In late November at the Kremlin Khrushchev outlined his strategy for dealing with the new president for the East German leader Walter Ulbricht. The Soviet leader intended to solve the Berlin problem in early 1961 at a summit with Kennedy. In a departure, Khrushchev would seek a one-on-one meeting, not a four-power gathering, and planned to offer the Berlin “concession” originally prepared for Eisenhower, an interim agreement on West Berlin with a fixed time limit, after which West Berlin would become a free city without any occupation forces or special access routes for NATO forces. If Kennedy proved unwilling to negotiate a reasonable agreement, then the Soviet bloc would again resort to an ultimatum.
Khrushchev’s decision to force the Berlin issue early in Kennedy’s first year in office came as a surprise to Ulbricht, who hadn’t been warned that the Soviets were considering another ultimatum.11 The bruising experience of the 1958 ultimatum had made the German skeptical of Khrushchev’s resolve. “Among our population,” said Ulbricht, “there is already a mood taking shape where they say you only talk about a peace treaty, but don’t do anything about it. We cannot act the same [way we did]….”12 Khrushchev assured him that things would be different this time. “[I]f there is not an interim agreement, then we will sign a peace treaty with the GDR and let them see their defeat.” Khrushchev was confident that though this push would result in a period of tension, it would not spark a world war. “Of course, in signing a peace treaty,” he said, “we will have to put our rockets on military alert. But, luckily, our adversaries still haven’t gone crazy; they still think and their nerves aren’t bad.”13 What Khrushchev refused to predict was whether a crisis would occur. Perhaps Kennedy would agree to their demands.
A day or so after Ulbricht left the Kremlin, Khrushchev received an encouraging top secret message from Washington. On December 1, 1960, the president-elect’s brother and victorious campaign manager, Robert F. Kennedy, granted a thirty-minute interview to a KGB officer working undercover as a Soviet journalist. It is doubtful that Robert Kennedy knew for sure that this journalist had special access to the leadership; the future U.S. attorney general probably had just assumed—rightly, as it turned out—that most Soviet journalists were spies. Using the KGB man, Robert sent a message to Moscow on behalf of his brother. The president-elect, Robert said, “was seriously concerned about the situation in Berlin and will strive to find the means to reach a settlement of the Berlin problem. However, if in the next few months the Soviet Union applies pressure on this question, then Kennedy will certainly defend the position of the West.”14 Khrushchev wrote Ulbricht a few weeks later to explain that the Americans were rethinking their Berlin policy, as he had hoped.15
KENNEDY CAME to office intending to pick up the pieces of the diplomatic process that had exploded with Francis Gary Powers’s plane over Sverdlovsk. For all his tough talk in the campaign about the Soviet challenge, Kennedy’s ultimate goal was to engage the Kremlin and reduce the dangers of the Cold War. “We arm to parlay,” he had also said frequently in the campaign, invoking Winston Churchill.16 Kennedy believed that Eisenhower had fumbled the handling of the U-2 affair, thereby squandering a real opportunity to establish a modus vivendi with the Soviets that could have reduced the risk of war in Central Europe. “It would have been better,” Kennedy told reporters later, “for the President to express regret at the [U-2] crash on Soviet territory rather than putting out a lie, as he did, which was later proved to be a lie before world opinion.”17
During the ten-week transition between the election and the inauguration, the Kennedy team assembled experts to examine policy on all aspects of the U.S. relationship with the Soviet Union. Ideas for new proposals and strategies to ease the relationship came from these groups. It was suggested that the United States and the Soviet Union increase cultural exchanges, there were proposals that trade between the two countries be expanded beyond the sales of crab meat, and there were recommendations of possible cooperation in space.
But no new ideas on Berlin came Kennedy’s way. Kennedy had brought Harry Truman’s secretary of state, Dean Acheson, out of retirement to consider a way out of the Berlin impasse. Even before this process was over, however, longtime State Department German specialist Martin Hillenbrand expressed the problem for the Acheson group. “We can live with the status quo in Berlin but can take no real initiative to change it for the better,” he wrote in January 1961. “To a greater or lesser degree, the Soviets and East Germans can, whenever they are willing to assume the political consequences, change it for the worse.”18 Since 1948, when Stalin first tried to remove the Western allies from West Berlin, the defense of the city and its 2.2 million residents was a touchstone for U.S. prestige in postwar Europe. No president could consider giving it away. Ultimately each of the men Kennedy asked to review the problem reached Hillenbrand’s un-Kennedy-like conclusion: “However impelling the urge to find some new approach to the problem, the ineluctable facts of the situation strictly limit the practical courses of actions open to the West.”19
YET ANOTHER POLICY review of immediate significance remained hidden from the Kremlin’s view. The final months of the Eisenhower administration brought an acceleration of covert preparations for removing Fidel Castro from office. Despite substantial fears in Moscow and Havana, the administration had never planned an operation to kill or forcibly to remove Castro in a bid to ensure Richard Nixon’s election to the presidency. Nevertheless, a team of CIA officers, led by the former s
upervisor of the U-2 program, Richard Bissell, worked tirelessly to provide an array of covert options to the White House. By the time the guard changed, the specialists had come to believe that a force of about a thousand Cuban émigrés, trained in guerrilla warfare at secret facilities in Louisiana and Guatemala, could deliver a knockout blow against the regime.
A friend of Kennedy’s from the Georgetown cocktail circuit, Bissell was likely the first person to have hinted to him that the CIA hoped to get White House approval for something dramatic in Cuba early in the new administration. After a meeting on November 18, 1960, at which Kennedy received his first formal briefing on the Cuban planning, both the CIA director, Allen Dulles, and Bissell came away confident that the new administration would continue what Eisenhower had started.20 There would be no change in the policy of removing Castro. In February 1961 the CIA completed its program of action, which the Joint Chiefs of Staff then received for their review and ultimately approved. In April Kennedy gave his provisional approval, though he always retained the right to cancel the operation at the last moment.
Although the Kremlin was not completely ignorant about Washington’s anti-Castro activities, Khrushchev allowed himself to be lulled into a sense of complacency about Kennedy’s intentions. Just as events in Eastern Europe in the fall of 1956 had clouded Khrushchev’s analysis of the threat to Nasser in the Middle East, so events at home in early 1961 had a similar effect on the Soviet leader.
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