JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (101 page)

“He seemed to indicate,” Dorothy Hutchinson thought, “that he had gone as far as he can alone.”
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Yet the plain-speaking Quakers, who challenged the president in unique ways to go much farther than he had, paradoxically made JFK feel less alone. When Kenny O’Donnell came in to point out that his next appointment was waiting, Kennedy replied, “Let them wait. I’m learning things from these Quakers.”
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After keeping the Friends another five minutes, he was still talking while walking them to the door. In saying goodbye to Henry Cadbury, he mentioned that he had known of him as a beloved professor at the Harvard Divinity School, when JFK was an undergraduate.

“I never spent much time at the Divinity School,” he said. “Now it’s maybe regrettable that I didn’t.”
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The Quakers, on the basis of beliefs and scriptures they held in common with Kennedy, had sympathetically yet truthfully pushed the president toward bold initiatives for peace, such as halting nuclear testing and sharing food with China. They had also encouraged him toward the seemingly impossible, yet necessary, goal in a nuclear age of general and complete disarmament.

What struck them as amazing was that Kennedy listened to them.

David Hartsough said, “He didn’t just let you say something for a minute, and then go on to his next agenda item. His humanity really impressed me. Here’s the president of the United States, sitting in his rocking chair, listening to this bunch of Quakers. And he was listening at least as much as he was talking.”
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Dorothy Hutchinson said, “I think it’s fair to say that he was positively friendly, and the interview was in excellent spirit and informal . . . and I would say, if it hadn’t been such a serious interview, delightful.”
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George Willoughby, a pioneer in nonviolent action who had been jailed for sailing into a nuclear test site, noticed Kennedy treated them as equals: “Really he was very friendly and warm to us, as prevailed through the entire twenty minutes. He listened, spoke when he wanted to . . . But when you interrupted him [as Willoughby confessed to having done “once or twice”], he didn’t get mad or pull rank on us or anything.”
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Edward Snyder, executive secretary of the Friends Committee on National Legislation, said, “I think he was really listening. There was a real dialogue.”
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Kennedy’s dialogue with the Quakers was a hopeful sign of what would come in the last year of his presidency, when he would make a crucial turn toward peace.

From a perspective in the administration working under McGeorge Bundy, Marcus Raskin saw the Cuban Missile Crisis as the event that was the catalyst in JFK’s change. Reflecting decades later on the shift he had seen then in Kennedy’s attitude, Raskin said:

“After the Cuban Missile Crisis, it became clear to him that there had to be a way out of the arms race. He really was frightened, truly frightened of it in ways he understood before, but not in an existential way. I would argue that it was at that moment when very serious discussions began going on internally within the administration.”
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Raskin credits Jerome Wiesner, Kennedy’s science adviser, with playing an important role in this dynamic. Five weeks after the Missile Crisis, on December 4, 1962, Wiesner sent Kennedy a memorandum stating that, as Raskin puts it, “the McNamara defense build-up was an unmitigated disaster for the national security of the United States, that it forced the Soviets to follow the United States in the arms race, thereby making the United States less secure.”
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Having been shaken by the October crisis into a deeper awareness of impending nuclear war, Kennedy realized Wiesner was right.

With the help of Marcus Raskin and JFK Library Archives Technician Sharon Kelly, I found Wiesner’s December 4, 1962, memorandum for the president in the JFK Library’s National Security Files. Although much of the memorandum remains classified, we can see in its opening paragraphs why Wiesner’s critique of McNamara would have convinced Kennedy, for Wiesner takes up McNamara’s own argument on behalf of the president against the Joint Chiefs’ first-strike policy. However, using McNamara’s logic, Wiesner says that unfortunately the Defense Secretary’s actual force recommendations end up playing into the Joint Chiefs’ logic, thereby heightening Soviet fears of a first strike—justifiably so. Wiesner writes:

“There is no question but that the recommended force levels are greatly in excess of those required to maintain a secure deterrent . . . Despite Secretary McNamara’s assertion, with which I am in full agreement, that a really acceptable first strike posture cannot be achieved, the size and rate of build-up of the recommended force levels could easily be interpreted by the Soviets as an attempt on our part to achieve such a posture. The distinction between a ‘creditable first strike’ capability and a strong second strike counterforce capability is very difficult for an enemy with inferior forces to judge . . . I believe that the net effect of the resulting build-up of Soviet missile forces will be an over-all reduction in this country’s security in the years to come.”
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Wiesner’s convincing critique of McNamara left the president significantly to the left of the Defense Secretary, the same man he was relying on to control the Joint Chiefs’ ambitions for a Cold War “victory” that could destroy the world. Kennedy felt he could not afford to veto his loyal but wrong Defense Secretary’s force recommendations simply on the basis of his science adviser’s more astute reading of nuclear strategy. JFK’s position was becoming increasingly untenable. Yet with an insight that went to the heart of the symptoms plaguing his presidency in Cuba, Vietnam, and on every Cold War front, Kennedy decided to transform the context of spreading global illnesses by ending the Cold War itself.

I know of no evidence that the president ever even referred again to the radical counsel he received from his six Quaker critics, who pushed him to act consistently with his own underlying vision of world order. Yet he in effect adopted the Quakers’ recommendations as a strategy for his goal of ending the Cold War.

To work his way out of the arms race (and free from the kind of dilemma that arose from his science adviser knowing more about nuclear war, even its strategy, than his Defense Secretary), Kennedy decided to create a series of peace initiatives. He began with the American University address, the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, National Security Action Memorandum 263 withdrawing U.S. troops from Vietnam, and a covert dialogue with Fidel Castro.

During his final months in office, he went further. Compelled by the near-holocaust of the Missile Crisis, he tried to transcend the government’s (and his own) disastrous Cold War assumptions by taking a visionary stand for general and complete disarmament.

On May 6, 1963, President Kennedy issued National Security Action Memorandum Number 239, ordering his principal national security advisers to pursue both a nuclear test ban and a policy of general and complete disarmament. NSAM 239 reads in full:

Washington, May 6, 1963.

TO

The Director, U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency

The Committee of Principals [namely the already-mentioned Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Chairman of the Atomic Energy Committee, Director of Central Intelligence, Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, and Special Assistant to the President for Science and Technology]
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SUBJECT

U.S. Disarmament Proposals

1. Discussions in the 18 Nation Disarmament Conference at Geneva on both
general and complete disarmament
and a
nuclear test ban treaty
have unfortunately resulted in almost no progress. There has been no serious discussion of
general and
complete disarmament
for some time. While discussions of a
test ban treaty
have shown important developments since the beginning of the 18 Nation Conference, they are now stalled.

2. I have in no way changed my views of the desirability of a
test ban treaty
or the value of our proposals on
general and complete disarmament
. Further, the events of the last two years have increased my concern for the consequences of an un-checked continuation of the arms race between ourselves and the Soviet Bloc.

3. We now expect the 18 Nation Disarmament Committee in Geneva to recess shortly for six weeks to two months. I should like the interval to be used for an urgent re-examination of the possibilities of new approaches to significant measures short of
general and complete disarmament
which it would be in the interest of the United States to propose in the resumed session of the Geneva Conference. ACDA will, in accordance with its statutory responsibilities, take the leadership in this effort and coordinate with the other agencies concerned through the usual procedures of the Committee of Principals. I should like to review the results at an appropriate time in the process.

John F. Kennedy
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Marcus Raskin has commented on the meaning of this document: “The President said, ‘Look, we’ve really got to figure out how to get out of this arms race. This is just impossible. Give me a plan, the first stage at least of how we’re going to get out of the arms race.’

“This would be a 30% cut of arms. Then move from that stage to the next stage. He was into that. There’s no question about it.”
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In the three paragraphs of NSAM 239, Kennedy uses the phrase “general and complete disarmament” four times—twice in the opening paragraph, once each in the final two paragraphs. It is clearly the central focus of the order he is issuing.

The president’s accompanying, secondary emphasis is on “a nuclear test ban treaty,” which he mentions three times. It is his secondary focus that shows just how strongly he is committed to NSAM 239’s higher priority, general and complete disarmament. For we know that in the three months after NSAM 239 was issued, JFK concentrated his energy on negotiating a nuclear test ban agreement with Khrushchev, a goal he accomplished.

General and complete disarmament is the more ambitious project in which he says he wants immediate steps to be taken: “an urgent re-examination of the possibilities of new approaches to significant measures short of general and complete disarmament,” such as the 30 percent cut in arms mentioned by Raskin.

In his American University address the following month, he reiterates: “Our primary long-range interest [in the Geneva talks] is general and complete disarmament—designed to take place by stages, permitting parallel political developments to build the new institutions of peace which would take the place of arms.”
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The American University address and the test ban treaty opened the door to the long-range project that was necessary for the survival of humanity in the nuclear age. The test ban treaty was JFK’s critically important way to initiate with Khrushchev the end of the Cold War and their joint leadership in the United Nations for the redemptive process of general and complete disarmament.

In NSAM 239, Kennedy said why he was prepared to pursue such a radical program: “the events of the last two years have increased my concern for the consequences of an un-checked continuation of the arms race between ourselves and the Soviet Bloc.”

Having been shaken and enlightened by the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy had the courage to recognize, as head of the most disastrously armed nation in history, that humanity could not survive the nuclear age unless the United States was willing to lead the world to general and complete disarmament.

“You believe in redemption don’t you?” Kennedy had said to his Quaker visitors. As usual, his irony told the truth and doubled back on himself. Ted Sorensen observed that when it came to disarmament, “The President underwent a degree of redemption himself.”
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JFK took no action on the Quakers’ other major recommendation to him—food for China. However, in the fall of 1963, when the Soviet Union experienced a severe grain shortage, Kennedy decided to sell wheat to the Russians. Taking a leaf from the Quakers’ book (which was his book as well), he chose to help feed the same Cold War enemies whom the year before he had struggled with on the brink of nuclear war. Others in the government said in effect to him what he had said to the Quakers: Would you feed an enemy who has his hands on your throat?

Vice President Lyndon Johnson said to Kenny O’Donnell, “Selling this wheat to Russia would be the worst political mistake he ever made.”
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The members of Kennedy’s political staff, led by O’Donnell, were dead set against the grain sale to Russia. They were certain that, as O’Donnell put it, “lending such a helpful hand to Khrushchev would bring strong political repercussions against the administration, particularly from the anti-Communist Americans of German and Polish descent, as well as from Irish Catholics.”
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The president granted that his staff’s political fears were justified.