An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (102 page)

Kennedy hoped that the Soviet-American thaw might encourage more sophisticated thinking in the United States about world affairs. “I do think we have a tendency to think of the world as Communist and free,” Kennedy mused at the end of 1962, “as if it were two units. The fact of the matter is our world is so divided, so poverty stricken, so desperate in many conditions, that we have a full-time job just strengthening the section of the world which is not Communist, all of Africa, newly independent and poverty stricken.” Latin America, where people lived on $100 a year, was another tempting ground for communist subversion. If the United States could raise standards of living in these Third World areas, he said, “then I think we can be successful.”

Attention to problems with European allies, however, had to precede détente with the Soviets and greater attention to the Third World. In the winter of 1962-63, difficulties with Britain, Germany, and France crowded out bold initiatives elsewhere. Seeing unity with Europe as essential to other advances overseas, and remembering that the history of any alliance is the history of mutual recrimination, Kennedy worked to ease tensions.

Kennedy’s decision to drop Skybolt had greatly upset the British, who had had the wherewithal to build nuclear warheads but not the missiles to which they were attached. Macmillan had staked British prestige on having an independent nuclear deterrent, which the air-to-ground missile—Eisenhower had promised to supply—was supposed to give them. Kennedy’s policy reversal threatened to topple Macmillan’s government and leave his successor skeptical of any future U.S. commitment. Some in Britain now echoed Chamberlain’s observation in the thirties that it was best not to rely on the Americans for anything.

Kennedy felt compelled to bail Macmillan out. Leaving him without some fallback would have not only betrayed his closest European ally but added to feelings in France and Germany that Washington was insensitive to the political and security needs of its friends. When he met Macmillan at a conference in Bermuda on December 18 and 19, Kennedy offered to continue Skybolt’s development if the British agreed to share the building costs. But Macmillan no longer saw the missile as being of any use. Not only had the political damage been done, but in the interim the Skybolt had failed during routine testing. (“The Lady had been violated in public,” Macmillan said with reference to reports of failed Skybolt tests and Kennedy’s public comments.) With Macmillan now predicting a rift with the United States unless some new agreement were reached at once, Kennedy found a formula that satisfied British amour propre: The United States would scrap Skybolt and instead with Britain jointly build nuclear submarines armed with Polaris missiles. The weapons would technically be part of a multilateral NATO force, but an agreement to let London use them unilaterally in time of “supreme peril” would preserve the fiction of an independent British nuclear deterrent.

The British now satisfied, Kennedy rested assured that Skybolt was dead. But just three days after the Bermuda meeting, while Kennedy was vacationing in Palm Beach, he received word that there had been a successful Skybolt test. He was mystified that McNamara had approved the test after he had decided to scrap the missile. Evelyn Lincoln remembers Kennedy sitting by the pool getting a manicure and trying to get hold of McNamara, who was on his way to Aspen, Colorado. Instead, he reached Gilpatric, to whom he read “the riot act. . . . I can’t understand McNamara doing this,” Kennedy said to Lincoln. “He is generally so good on everything.” But Kennedy, despite believing otherwise, had failed to make his intent clear to his defense secretary. Kennedy felt compelled to discount the importance of the test to the press, and to emphasize U.S. commitment to the Nassau Agreement, as the Bermuda understanding was called. A highly visible misstep like this injured the administration’s recently established reputation for foreign policy mastery. Kennedy was so annoyed by the incident that in March 1963, he asked Richard Neustadt to review the episode and explain to him what had gone wrong. How could he have gotten at cross-purposes with his closest ally and its prime minister, whom he held in higher regard than any other foreign leader? Why were the British so surprised by the Skybolt decision? Hadn’t we given them ample notice? Was there a failure of communication? And if so, by whom and for what reasons? Neustadt concluded that there had indeed been a failure of communication between both sides at the highest levels of government.

The Nassau Agreement made for additional difficulties. To appease French sensibilities, which would also have been offended by a follow-through on Skybolt, Kennedy offered de Gaulle the same deal he had made with London. But de Gaulle wanted no part of it. Unlike the British, the French still lacked the ability to make nuclear warheads, though successful nuclear detonations convinced de Gaulle that it was only a matter of time. De Gaulle still did not trust Washington to defend Europe with nuclear weapons, believing that the administration would rather let Western Europe fall under communist control than risk a Soviet nuclear attack on American cities. De Gaulle intended to build an independent nuclear arm that would be immune from any American coordination or restriction. He also wanted to keep the British, whom he saw as ciphers of the Americans, at a distance. To drive this point home, on January 14, 1963, in a well-prepared performance at a semi-annual press conference, de Gaulle announced a French veto of British membership in the European Economic Community (EEC). Less than two decades after World War II, he now saw Germany as a more reliable French ally.

Not surprisingly, the Germans were receptive to his overtures. Adenauer, like de Gaulle, distrusted U.S. determination to stand up to the Soviets in a European crisis and correctly understood that Washington might ultimately recognize East Germany and resist German reunification. In February 1963, Bonn signed a mutual defense pact with Paris that implied diminished Franco-German reliance on NATO and American power. De Gaulle was receptive to having Germany follow him into the family of nuclear nations, and Adenauer was interested, having long resented a Kennedy public declaration to the Russians in November 1961 that “if Germany developed an atomic capability of its own, if it developed many missiles, or a strong national army that threatened war, then I would understand your concern, and I would share it.”

Kennedy feared that Adenauer and de Gaulle were putting NATO at risk and making Europe less, rather then more, secure. “What is your judgment about the course of events?” Kennedy asked Macmillan in a January telephone conversation. “I think this man’s gone crazy,” Macmillan replied. “Absolutely crazy.” Macmillan added that de Gaulle wanted to be “the cock on a small dung hill instead of having two cocks on a larger one.” Crazy or not, de Gaulle had to be dealt with. Franco-German independence defied Kennedy’s plans for continuing American leadership of Europe’s defense, which he considered essential to deter Soviet aggression on the continent. “There is always the argument in Europe that the United States might leave Europe, which is, of course, in my opinion, fallacious, because the United States can never leave Europe,” he said at an off-the-record press conference on December 31. “We are too much bound together. If we left Europe, Europe would be more exposed to the Communists.”

In January 1963, Kennedy decided that he would make a midyear visit to rally the allies. He told ambassador to France James M. Gavin, “Well, I am going to see the General in the next few months, and I think that we will be able to get something done together.” Kennedy shared Acheson’s conviction that it was “not possible to persuade, bribe, or coerce General de Gaulle from following a course upon which he is set. But he can and does in time recognize the inevitable and adjust his conduct to it, as in Algeria. Years ago I asked Justice Brandeis whether a certain man was intelligent,” Acheson related. “‘Yes,’ he said. ‘He has the sort of intelligence which leads a man not to stand in front of a locomotive.’” Acheson believed that de Gaulle would come to his senses when he understood that France simply could not afford the cost of developing its own nuclear deterrent.

Sufficiently strong ties between Paris, Berlin, and Washington encouraged hopes that better relations were not out of reach. In early January, when André Malraux, French minister of cultural affairs, brought the
Mona Lisa
to Washington for an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, he graciously marked the occasion by recalling the contribution of American fighting men to French victory and liberation in the two world wars. “[This] is a painting,” Malraux said, “which he [the American soldier] has saved.” Despite Kennedy’s unhappiness with de Gaulle, who, he said privately, “relies on our power to protect him while he launches his policies based solely on the self-interest of France,” he responded with good humor. “I want to make it clear that grateful as we are for this painting,” he told Malraux, “we will continue to press ahead with the effort to develop an independent artistic force and power of our own.”

KENNEDY’S RESPONSE
to European crosscurrents demonstrated his growing mastery of foreign affairs. He realized that America’s European allies could not be taken for granted and that by traveling to Europe in 1963 he could sustain ties essential to future Western security. But more specifically, he saw the road to peace not through hectoring France and Germany into agreements they were resisting, but through broader arrangements on nuclear weapons and better relations with Moscow, which could make NATO less important. While the French and Germans busied themselves pointing fingers, he would leapfrog them and take care of the real business at hand.

That said, the United States had no intention of reducing its defense spending or determination to develop more effective weapons systems, Kennedy said in his State of the Union Message. But, he stated, “our commitment to national safety is not a commitment to expand our military establishment indefinitely.” The fact that the British, French, and Germans devoted about 28 or 29 percent of their respective annual budgets to defense, which was about half the percentage spent by the United States, including space costs, frustrated him. Public and congressional resistance to providing foreign aid also troubled him. Like Eisenhower, who had won appropriations for language and regional studies programs in universities by including them in a bill titled the National Defense Education Act, Kennedy urged his budget director to rename foreign aid “international security.” Appropriations to “strengthen the security of the free world” or to combat communism would find greater receptivity than anything that seemed like a giveaway to dependent developing nations asking for American help.

In hopes of reducing America’s heavy defense burdens and the unfavorable balance of payments roiling the dollar, Kennedy saw disarmament as something more than “an idle dream.” He firmly believed that a test ban could significantly slow, if not halt, proliferation of nuclear weapons. His advisers had told him that continued U.S. and Soviet testing would make it cheaper and easier to produce bombs. “It might go down by a factor as large as ten or a hundred,” Kennedy was told, “so that it will cost very little to produce nuclear weapons. . . . And furthermore, the diffusion of nuclear technology is to be anticipated if both of us test this knowledge. . . . This does seep out.” In twenty-five years, “in the absence of a test ban, the risk of diffusion would be very great indeed.”

Khrushchev shared Kennedy’s concern to find some way out of the escalating arms race. Because the Soviets were so far behind the United States in the development and building of intercontinental ballistic missiles, they intended to work toward parity as soon as possible, especially after the failure to reduce the missile gap by placing IRBMs and MRBMs in Cuba. But they hoped to slow the U.S. pace of building and possibly prevent Chinese advances by reaching a ban of some kind on nuclear tests. In a message to Kennedy on November 12, 1962, Khrushchev stated his belief that “conditions are emerging now for reaching an agreement on the prohibition of nuclear weapons, [and the] cessation of all types of nuclear weapons tests.” Khrushchev also believed that such agreements could rein in Chinese development of nuclear arms, the prospect of which alarmed him as much as Russia’s military inferiority to the United States. On December 19, he expressed a sense of urgency about ending nuclear tests “once and for all.” The end of the Cuban crisis had “untied our hands to engage closely in other urgent international matters and, in particular, in such a problem which has been ripe for so long as cessation of nuclear tests.”

Kennedy was eager for negotiations. A test ban could possibly inhibit France, Germany, China, and Israel from building bombs that seemed likely to increase the risks of a nuclear war. In addition, Kennedy was uncertain that the latest round of U.S. tests had contributed much, if anything, to America’s strategic advantage over the Soviets. While the tests, Glenn Seaborg told the president, “achieved much in improving our weapons capability,” their impact on the Soviet-American military balance was less certain. In November 1962, Kennedy instructed national security officials and science advisers to report to him on this matter. And when an assessment of the tests became available in December, it confirmed Kennedy’s suspicions that they were of little value to America’s national defense.

After announcing the Polaris agreement with Macmillan, Kennedy promptly assured Khrushchev that this was not a step on the road to proliferation; to the contrary, it was a way to inhibit it. He sent Khrushchev a message through Dobrynin that the British Polaris missiles “assigned to NATO” would not become operational until 1969 or 1970. His objective “in making these missiles available was to prevent, or at least delay, the development of national nuclear capabilities.” Without this commitment, the British would try “to create their own missile, not tied into NATO controls,” and they might then cooperate with the French and the Germans in helping them build nuclear arsenals. The commitment to London, he said, was “[keeping] open the possibility of agreement on the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons and has gained time for our further efforts in the field of disarmament.” Kennedy assured Khrushchev that any disarmament pact “would take priority over any such arrangements which were made in the absence of a disarmament agreement.”