An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 by Robert Dallek
The speech was one of the great state papers of any twentieth-century American presidency. Kennedy’s topic was the “most important . . . on earth: world peace. What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war,” he said, with the Soviets and China particularly in mind. “Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave.” In that one brief sentence, he dismissed both the kind of peace that would follow a cataclysmic nuclear war, which “hard-liners” in Moscow, Peking, and Washington seemed ready to fight, and the sort of peace a generation reared on memories of appeasement feared might come out of negotiations limiting American armaments. This was to be “not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women—not merely peace in our time but peace for all time”—the realization of Woodrow Wilson’s ideal, announced in response to the century’s first great war.
To fulfill so bold a vision, it would not be enough for the Soviet Union to adopt a more enlightened attitude. It was also essential that “[we] reexamine our own attitude—as individuals and as a Nation—for our attitude is as essential as theirs.” There was too much defeatism about peace in the United States, too much inclination to see war as inevitable and mankind as doomed. “We need not accept that view,” Kennedy asserted. “Our problems are manmade—therefore, they can be solved by man.” This would not require a change in human nature, only a change in outlook that leads to “a series of concrete actions and effective agreements which are in the interest of all concerned.” The goal was not a world without tensions but a kind of community peace in which “mutual tolerance” eased quarrels and conflicting interests.
Specifically, Kennedy urged a reexamination of our attitude toward the Soviet Union. “As Americans, we find communism profoundly repugnant as a negation of personal freedom and dignity. But we can still hail the Russian people for their many achievements—in science and space, in economic and industrial growth, in culture and in acts of courage.” Americans needed to remember the terrible suffering of the Russian people in World War II and understand that a Soviet-American conflict would within twenty-four hours destroy “all we have built [and] all we have worked for.”
To avert such a disaster, it seemed essential to improve communications and understanding between Moscow and Washington. One step toward that end was the creation of a “hot line”; another was mutual commitments to arms control, and a test ban in particular, which could discourage the spread of nuclear weapons. An agreement was in sight, but a fresh start was badly needed, Kennedy said. To this end, he announced the agreement to begin high-level talks in Moscow and a pledge not to resume “nuclear tests in the atmosphere so long as other states do not do so.” With an eye on the U.S. Senate, which would have to ratify any treaty, Kennedy declared that no agreement could “provide absolute security against the risks of deception and evasion. But it can—if it is sufficiently effective in its enforcement and if it is sufficiently in the interests of its signers—offer far more security and far fewer risks than an unabated, uncontrolled, unpredictable arms race.”
Like Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, Kennedy’s peace speech did not have much initial resonance. As historian Lawrence Freedman has pointed out, Kennedy’s bold address “hardly electrified the American people. It received barely a mention in the press, and the White House mailbag failed to bulge.” In the seventeen days after June 10, Kennedy received 1,677 letters about the speech; only 30 of them were negative. But at the same time, almost 52,000 letters flooded in about a freight rate bill. Disgusted, Kennedy said, “That is why I tell people in Congress that they’re crazy if they take their mail seriously.” Predictably, unbending congressional Republicans denounced the speech as “a soft line that can accomplish nothing . . . a shot from the hip . . . a dreadful mistake.”
The Soviet reaction was much more encouraging. The Soviet press published uncensored copies of the speech, and the government broke precedent by allowing the Voice of America to broadcast the speech in Russian with only one paragraph deleted, and in its entirety in a rebroadcast. The Soviets then suspended all jamming of the VOA, which the State Department believed showed their desire for “an atmosphere of détente with the West in order to deal as effectively as possible with pressing intra-bloc problems and Chinese rivalry in the international communist movement.” Khrushchev initially told British Labour Party leader Harold Wilson that Kennedy’s willingness to say what he had in public deeply impressed him. Later in the summer, Khrushchev described the speech to Harriman as “the best statement made by any President since Roosevelt.” Glenn Seaborg said, “It was as though Khrushchev had been looking for a weapon to use against Chinese criticism of his policies toward the United States and Kennedy had provided it.”
Though the peaceful end of the Cold War makes it difficult to understand now, public cant about communist dangers in the fifties and sixties made it almost impossible for an American politician to make the sort of speech Kennedy gave. It was a tremendously bold address that carried substantial risks. By taking advantage of his recent success in facing down Khrushchev in Cuba, Kennedy gave voice to his own and the country’s best hopes for rational exchange between adversaries that could turn the East-West competition away from the growing arms race.
On June 20, Moscow gave Kennedy additional reason to believe that something might now come of test ban talks. The Soviets signed an agreement in Geneva establishing “a direct communications link between their respective capitals. . . . Both Governments,” the White House announced, “have taken a first step to help reduce the risk of war . . . by accident or miscalculation. . . . We hope agreement on other more encompassing measures will follow. We shall bend every effort to go on from this first step.” An American test message—“The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”—puzzled Kremlin recipients, who must have wondered whether the device would increase or reduce misunderstanding between the two sides.
During June and early July, the administration struggled to produce a realistic agenda for the talks. Before the White House could even settle on a set of instructions, it had to ensure that the Joint Chiefs, who were scheduled to testify in July before the Senate Armed Services Committee, would not foreclose approval in the Upper House if and when an agreement arrived there. “I regard the Chiefs as key to this thing,” Kennedy told Mike Mansfield. “If we don’t get the Chiefs just right, we can . . . get blown.” The Chiefs have “always been our problem,” Kennedy added. The Chiefs did in fact oppose both a comprehensive and a more limited test ban. In their view, a prohibition on all testing without sufficient surveillance would allow the Soviets to cheat and work toward parity with America’s nuclear arsenal. They further believed that a more limited agreement, which did not bar underground tests, would still permit Moscow to gain ground on the United States. To head off any discussion of divisions within the administration, which could become a rallying cry for treaty opponents, Kennedy instructed McNamara not to ask the Chiefs for their collective judgment or for a formal statement of their position. In addition, he excluded any military officers from the American delegation to the talks and made sure that cables coming from Moscow describing the progress of the negotiations did not go to the Defense Department.
Warnings that a limited ban would produce public pressure for a moratorium on underground tests did not dissuade Kennedy from the attractions of a limited treaty. Nor did he believe that Soviet underground testing would bring them up to par with the United States as a nuclear power or change the existing strategic balance. When Khrushchev announced on July 2 that he preferred a comprehensive treaty without inspections—Moscow would not “open its doors to NATO spies”—but would agree to more limited test bans above ground and underwater, Kennedy instructed Harriman—whom he had chosen, despite objections from the State Department, to be the leader of the negotiating team—to accept such a proposal.
Kennedy also directed Harriman to seek an agreement with Khrushchev on inhibiting Chi
BEFORE HARRIMAN WENT to Moscow, Kennedy followed through on his promise to visit Europe to build support for the negotiations and provide reassurance of U.S. determination to defend NATO allies against Soviet aggression. A Soviet proposal to make a nonaggression pact between Eastern- and Western-bloc countries part of a test ban treaty had further chilled the West Germans, who saw it as consolidating existing European boundaries and conditions. The White House viewed the trip partly as a chance to have the president bypass or speak over the heads of state and reach out to ordinary Europeans, many of whom seemed to share Kennedy’s preference for nonproliferation over Franco-German acquisition of nuclear arms.
The trip from June 23 to July 2 was a grand triumph of public diplomacy. Pointedly avoiding a visit to Paris and de Gaulle and stopping for only one day in England (in Sussex, at the prime minister’s country home, rather than in London, where a sex scandal had put Macmillan’s government in jeopardy and might tarnish Kennedy), JFK spent four days each in Germany and Ireland and two in Italy. Though the visits to Ireland and Italy deepened impressions of Kennedy as an exceptionally popular world leader who inspired worshipful support for himself and American values, it was in Germany that he received his greatest ovations and effectively demonstrated that no German government could tie itself too closely to France at the expense of good relations with Washington.
Kennedy assured a Bonn audience that just as Germany had freed itself from “the forces of tyranny and aggression,” so the United States had freed itself from “the long process of isolation. . . . The United States is here on this continent to stay. So long as our presence is desired and required, our forces and commitments will remain.” Americans, he said, did not see their part “in the great fight for freedom all around the globe . . . as a burden. They regard it as a privilege to play their part in these great days.” In fact, Kennedy had privately complained that “Europe is getting a ‘free ride’ and that on both the political and defense side, this situation with our NATO allies had to be changed this year.” As he had told the Joint Chiefs, his administration had “put more money in defense in the past two years than any other previous Administration. . . . We had gone from $44 billion up to $49 billion and . . . are now at $52 billion.” In urging Europe’s full partnership in the alliance, Kennedy was thinking not only of its independence but also of its contributions that could reduce U.S. budget and balance-of-payment deficits.
At a press conference in Bonn, Kennedy was asked if he saw “any chance of overcoming the division of Germany.” Although he could not mark out a date when this might happen, he replied that it was very likely and urged Germans not to despair. He denied that any consideration was being given to an exchange of nonaggression statements with Moscow, which would amount to recognition of East Germany. As the negotiations in Moscow would shortly demonstrate, however, Kennedy had not ruled out this concession to Khrushchev as a way to advance détente with the Soviets.
In Berlin, where three-fifths of the city turned out to greet him, “clapping, waving, crying, cheering, as if it were the second coming,” Schlesinger recalled, Kennedy gave his most heartfelt statements of support. After visiting the Berlin Wall, which “shocked and appalled” him, he spoke to a million people gathered in front of the city hall, “a sea of human faces,” Sorensen remembers, “chanting ‘Kenne-dy,’ ‘Kenne-dy.’” His speech was an uncharacteristically passionate recitation that stirred the crowd to something resembling the communal outbursts at Nazi rallies. (The crowd’s vigorous response was so extreme as to upset Adenauer, who said to Rusk, “Does this mean Germany can one day have another Hitler?” It also troubled Kennedy, who said to his military aide General McHugh, “If I told them to go tear down the Berlin Wall, they would do it.”
“Two thousand years ago,” Kennedy proclaimed, “the proudest boast was ‘civis Romanus sum.’ Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’ . . . There are many people in the world who really don’t understand, or say they don’t, what is the great issue between the free world and the communist world. Let them come to Berlin. There are some who say that communism is the wave of the future. Let them come to Berlin. And there are some who say in Europe and elsewhere we can work with the Communists. Let them come to Berlin. And there are even a few who say that it is true that communism is an evil system, but it permits us to make economic progress. Lass’ sie nach Berlin kommen. Let them come to Berlin.” In the midst of so tumultuous a reception, no one was ready to complain that Kennedy should have said, “Ich bin Berliner” instead of “ein Berliner,” which was colloquial German for a jelly doughnut. Nor did anyone compare his American University appeal for rational exchange with Moscow to his dismissive “some who say . . . we can work with the Communists.” (Later that day, in more measured remarks at the Free University of Berlin, he declared that “when the possibilities of reconciliation appear, we in the West will make it clear that we are not hostile to any people or system providing they choose their own destiny without interfering with the free choice of others.”) Instead, the crowd roared in approval.
Kennedy departed Germany with a sense of exhilaration. He told the crowd bidding him farewell at Berlin’s Tegel Airport that he planned “to leave a note for my successor which would say, ‘To be opened at a time of some discouragement,’ and in it would be written three words: ‘Go to Germany.’ I may open that note myself someday.” On the plane flying to Dublin, he told Sorensen, who had crafted most of the words he had spoken to the Germans, “We’ll never have another day like this one as long as we live.”
The visit to Ireland was supposedly a vacation that Kennedy had insisted on. Kenny O’Donnell told him, “It would be a waste of time. It wouldn’t do you much good politically. You’ve got all the Irish votes in this country that you’ll ever get. If you go to Ireland, people will say it’s just a pleasure trip.” But a “pleasure trip” was just what Kennedy wanted.
Still, the stop in Ireland was more than a sentimental journey to the land of his origins. It also allowed him to emphasize the interconnectedness of all peoples and the importance of small nations in holding to ideals that influenced the entire world. In a brilliant speech full of literary references before the Irish Parliament, he declared, “Modern economics, weaponry and communications have made us realize more than ever that we are one human family and this one planet is our home.” Kennedy quoted George Bernard Shaw on the influence of the Irish: “Speaking as an Irishman, [Shaw] summed up an approach to life: Other people . . . ‘see things and . . . say: Why? . . . But I dream things that never were—and I say: Why not?’” A small nation like Ireland, Kennedy said, would continue to play a significant part in advancing the cause of liberty around the globe.
KENNEDY’S TRIUMPHANT TOUR of Europe increased his freedom to have Harriman negotiate a test ban treaty. The opening conversations in Moscow made clear to the U.S. delegation that the Soviets were eager for an agreement. Khrushchev’s remarks to Harriman and Lord Hailsham, his British counterpart, “on desirability of relaxation of tensions and protection against risk of nuclear war” was only
Khrushchev still considered inspections unacceptable, which precluded U.S. acceptance of a ban on underground tests, but he was ready to embrace a limited agreement covering the atmosphere, outer space, and underwater. He wished to tie such a treaty to a nonaggression pact, but—believing it would be a long time before Peking could build nuclear weapons and before Paris could accumulate stockpiles comparable to those of the U.S. and USSR—saw no need to include France and China in the arms control agreement. He also expected a treaty would isolate China and put it under pressure from developing countries to sign a test ban. Harriman declared a U.S. preference for a comprehensive treaty and for excluding nonaggression clauses from any test ban accord but stated American willingness to accept limited bans and to leave talks on nonaggression arrangements for a later time. One essential ingredient Kennedy saw in an agreement was a clause allowing the United States to escape from the treaty if a nonsignatory exploded a nuclear weapon that seemed to jeopardize American national security. The provision was a prerequisite for getting a test ban through the U.S. Senate.