JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (106 page)

After Cousins’s visit with Khrushchev in April, Castro became the Soviet leader’s guest in May for an entire month. Castro was still angry with Khrushchev for having apparently sold him out in the Missile Crisis. When Khrushchev averted disaster by announcing his abrupt decision to withdraw the Soviet missiles, he infuriated Castro.
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Without consulting the Cuban government, Khrushchev had taken away Cuba’s deterrent to a U.S. invasion only days after the missiles were put in place. In return Khrushchev got nothing more for Cuba than a noninvasion pledge by a capitalist president. Now Khrushchev was trying to mollify Castro while taking him on a friendship tour of the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, for the sake of a larger peace, Khrushchev once again risked a strain in his relationship with the Cuban premier. He urged Castro to see the practical wisdom of trusting their enemy, John F. Kennedy.

Castro has described the remarkable month-long tutorial he received from Khrushchev, who schooled him patiently on just how the Missile Crisis was resolved peacefully: “for hours [Khrushchev] read many messages to me, messages from President Kennedy, messages sometimes delivered through Robert Kennedy . . . There was a translator, and Khrushchev read and read the letters sent back and forth.”
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As Sergei Khrushchev described Nikita’s conversations with Fidel, “Father tried to persuade Castro that the U.S. president would keep his word and that Cuba was guaranteed six years of peaceful development, which was how long Father thought Kennedy would be in the White House. Six years! Almost an eternity!”
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In the end, Castro chose to follow his Communist elder’s advice. He freed himself from his attachment to an almost disastrous effort to deter the United States with Soviet missiles. He turned instead to Pope John’s (and now Nikita Khrushchev’s) alternate principle of peace, the prospect of avoiding war not by threatening the use of massive weapons but by building trust. As CIA covert-action director Richard Helms noted in a June 5 memorandum, “at the request of Khrushchev, Castro was returning to Cuba with the intention of adopting a conciliatory policy toward the Kennedy administration ‘for the time being.’”
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At the same time, John Kennedy was preparing to talk peace. On June 10 at American University, JFK took Norman Cousins’s idea of a visionary peacemaking speech and made it his own. A saintly pope, whose influence the Catholic president, John Kennedy, could never acknowledge, was also in the background of the speech.
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After
Pacem in Terris
appeared that spring of 1963, there was a hopeful shift in the East–West spiritual climate, as seen in Khrushchev’s dialogue with Castro on making peace with Kennedy. The president had felt the change. He chose that moment to take a huge risk for global peace.

The American University address owed much to
Pacem in Terris
. The papal encyclical had stated, in a clear reference to working with Communists: “teachings [that may be false regarding the nature, origin, and destiny of humanity], once they are drawn up and defined, remain always the same, while the movements, working in constantly evolving historical situations, cannot but be influenced by these latter and cannot avoid, therefore, being subject to changes, even of a profound nature. Besides, who can deny that those movements, insofar as they conform to the dictates of right reason and are interpreters of the lawful aspirations of the human person, contain elements that are positive and deserving of approval?

“It can happen, then, that meetings for the attainment of some practical end, which formerly were deemed inopportune or unproductive, might now or in the future be considered opportune and useful.”
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The pope knew from Norman Cousins just how “opportune and useful” such “meetings for the attainment of some practical end” could be. It was that same month when Cousins gave Nikita Khrushchev the pope’s gift of an advance, Russian-language copy of
Pacem in Terris
. The Cousins–Khrushchev dialogue, followed by Khrushchev’s study of the encyclical, strengthened the Russian’s resistance to his own bomb-makers and renewed his commitment to making peace with Kennedy.

The U.S. president in his greatest speech echoed the call of
Pacem in Terris
for cooperation with an ideological opponent. In the American University address, Kennedy made the same kind of distinction the pope did:

“No government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue. 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.”

Kennedy then took the pope’s theme and ran with it. He first cited Russians’ and Americans’ mutual disgust with war, reminding his American audience of what war had done to the Soviet Union and what it could do now to the entire planet:

“Among the many traits the peoples of our two countries have in common, none is stronger than our mutual abhorrence of war. Almost unique, among the major world powers, we have never been at war with each other. And no nation in the history of battle ever suffered more than the Soviet Union suffered in the course of the Second World War. At least 20 million lost their lives. Countless millions of homes and farms were burned or sacked. A third of the nation’s territory, including nearly two thirds of its industrial base, was turned into a wasteland—a loss equivalent to the devastation of this country east of Chicago.

“Today, should total war ever break out again—no matter how—our two countries would become the primary targets. It is an ironic but accurate fact that the two strongest powers are the two in the most danger of devastation. All we have built, all we have worked for, would be destroyed in the first 24 hours.”

Following up Pope John’s support of “meetings [with ideological opponents] for the attainment of some practical end,” Kennedy praised agreements with the Soviet Union as essential to ending the arms race before it was too late:

“In short, both the United States and its allies, and the Soviet Union and its allies, have a mutually deep interest in a just and genuine peace and in halting the arms race. Agreements to this end are in the interests of the Soviet Union as well as ours—and even the most hostile nations can be relied upon to accept and keep those treaty obligations, and only those treaty obligations, which are in their own interest.”

Then came the heart of the speech, the most eloquent statement of John F. Kennedy’s presidency:

“So, let us not be blind to our differences—but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”
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Because we all share this small planet, because we all hope for our children’s future, and because we are all mortal, Kennedy asked us all to “reexamine our attitude toward the Cold War, remembering that we are not engaged in a debate, seeking to pile up debating points. We are not here distributing blame or pointing the finger of judgment.”

Given everything we shared and our common need to leave the finger of judgment behind, it was not strange where he hoped to go in the Geneva arms negotiations: “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.”

A first act in the process was at hand, “a treaty to outlaw nuclear tests.” To jump-start that process, Kennedy made a unilateral pledge:

“To make clear our good faith and solemn convictions on the matter, I now declare that the United States does not propose to conduct nuclear tests in the atmosphere so long as other states do not do so. We will not be the first to resume.”
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When Kennedy talked peace from his heart at American University, Khrushchev had ears to hear. He said it was “the greatest speech by any American President since Roosevelt.”
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They were now on the same wavelength. Within two months, they signed the Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty. In less than a year after they had brought the world to the edge of destruction, the same two men, chastened by their experience, were beginning to work together for a peaceful future.

Pope John XXIII died of cancer on June 3, 1963, one week before Kennedy gave his American University address. With the publication of
Pacem in Terris
, the pope’s work for world peace was done. On his deathbed, he felt it was far too little. He feared that his family, all of humanity, would experience the agony of another terrible war. His private secretary, Monsignor Loris Capovilla, said, “That one avoid war was the thought that assailed the dying Pontiff.”
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Had Pope John lived two more months, he would have rejoiced in the test ban treaty as a sign of hope.

Norman Cousins, the pope’s “unofficial and unattached” emissary of peace, had not, as he feared, been a failure—to either Khrushchev or Kennedy. By conveying to the two Cold War leaders a courageous vision of “Peace on Earth,” based on honest dialogue and a growing trust of one’s opponent, Norman Cousins—and the dying pope behind him—strengthened the mutual resolve of Kennedy and Khrushchev to wage peace rather than war. The immediate legacy of
Pacem in Terris
was the increasingly hopeful Kennedy–Khrushchev détente. The two surviving members of “the improbable triumvirate” were on the verge of shifting their policies from a suicidal reliance on nuclear arms to a step-by-step realization of the pope’s principle of disarmament, mutual trust alone.

However, Kennedy’s and Khrushchev’s days were also numbered. Their more peaceful visions of the future had set them at odds with their respective military establishments, which began to plot their demise.

The previous February Khrushchev had proposed to his Defense Council a complete restructuring of the Soviet military. When the commander-in-chief of the Warsaw Pact forces, Marshal Andrei Grechko, argued with Khrushchev that he should equip the Army with tactical nuclear weapons, the Soviet leader refused for a concrete reason. “I don’t have the money,” he said.
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He then unveiled his radical vision for the Soviet armed forces. To reduce sharply an economically self-destructive defense budget, what he wanted was “only a very small, but very highly qualified, army.” Beyond a nucleus of strategic missile forces, he said, “the rest of the army should be organized on the basis of regional militias. Its soldiers could live at home, do useful work, and spend some time on military training. They would be mobilized only if the country was really in danger.”

Even the Soviet missile forces could be reduced to a minimum, Khrushchev said. The factories that made the missiles could then be converted to the peaceful production of ships for Soviet rivers.
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Khrushchev’s February 1963 proposal for a radically reorganized Army, and for the peace conversion of Soviet missile factories, astonished his Defense Council. To the consternation of his generals, he continued to return to his peace conversion plan as late as October 1964, the month before the generals helped remove him from power.
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By then, however, the premier’s proposal was little more than a relic. It had rested on the hope of a reign of peace through mutual trust with a now-dead president, John F. Kennedy. After the murder of the president whom he had counted on being in office for another six years, Khrushchev’s hope for an end to the Cold War collapsed. The end of his own rule came eleven months later.

In the case of Kennedy, after Pope John’s death, the president’s break with his military establishment was even more consequential than Khrushchev’s. Kennedy’s declaration of peace at American University, his successful negotiation of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, his opening to Fidel Castro, and his decision to withdraw from Vietnam added up to a presidency that was no longer acceptable to power. Kennedy had traveled beyond the Cold War point of no return. His journey of peace would mean his soon experiencing firsthand the truth he stated at American University—that we are all mortal.

Norman Cousins was right in foreseeing the transforming effect Kennedy’s speech would have in the Soviet Union, but wrong in imagining a similar impact in the president’s own country. At the same time that the American University address was highlighted by the Soviet media, it was ignored or downplayed in the United States.
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Few Americans even knew Kennedy had given a groundbreaking speech on peace, much less what was in it. That has remained true to this day. The American media response to the speech was, and has been, almost total silence. It was as if someone had unplugged the president’s microphone as soon as he began talking about peace.

At American University, in a speech to his fellow citizens, President John F. Kennedy declared peace with our Cold War enemies. But only our enemies were able to hear him.