JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (116 page)

[
61
]. Memorandum for Vice President Lyndon Johnson, “Notes on National Security Council Meeting, July 20, 1961,” by Colonel Howard Burris, Johnson’s military aide; reproduced in Purcell and Galbraith, “Did the U.S. Military Plan,” p. 89.

[
62
]. Ibid.

[
63
]. Roswell Gilpatric, in recorded interview by D. J. O’Brien, August 12, 1970, p. 117; JFK Library Oral History Program. Cf. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.,
Robert Kennedy and His Times
(New York: Ballantine Books, 1978), p. 483.

[
64
]. Schlesinger,
Robert Kennedy,
p. 483; McGeorge Bundy,
Danger and Survival: Choices about the Bomb in the First Fifty Years
(New York: Random House, 1988), p. 354. Dean Rusk,
As I
Saw It
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), pp. 246-47.

[
65
]. Schlesinger,
Robert Kennedy,
p. 483.

[
66
]. Bundy,
Danger and Survival,
p. 354.

[
67
]. Rusk,
As I Saw It,
pp. 246-47; Bundy,
Danger and Survival,
p. 354.

[
68
]. Merton,
Peace in the Post-Christian Era
, p. 16.

[
69
]. Stewart Alsop, “Kennedy’s Grand Strategy,”
Saturday Evening Post
(March 31, 1962), p. 14 (Alsop’s emphasis).

[
70
]. Pierre Salinger,
With Kennedy
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966), p. 227.

[
71
]. Ibid.

[
72
]. Ibid.

[
73
]. Pierre Salinger was in Moscow May 11-15, 1963.
With Kennedy
, p. 220. On May 17, while Nikita Khrushchev was visiting Bulgaria, he got the idea of placing Soviet missiles in Cuba.
Khrushchev
Remembers
, edited by Strobe Talbott (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), p. 493. Sergei N. Khrushchev,
Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower
(University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), p. 483.

[
74
]. Talbott,
Khrushchev Remembers
, p. 493.

[
75
]. Salinger,
With Kennedy
, p. 228.

[
76
]. Either Khrushchev did not mention in his story, or Salinger did not include in his narration of it, that JFK had specifically asked the Soviet Leader (via Robert Kennedy’s back-channel meeting with Soviet Embassy attaché Georgi Bolshakov) to pull back his tanks from the confrontation at the Wall. That part of the tanks story was revealed by Robert Kennedy in his oral history,
Robert Kennedy in His Own Words
, edited by Edwin O. Guthman and Jeffrey Shulman (New York: Bantam Books, 1988), pp. 259-60.

[
77
]. Ibid.

[
78
].
Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), 1961-1963, Volume VIII: National Security Policy
(Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1996), p. 388.

[
79
]. Ibid., p. 403.

[
80
]. Ibid.

[
81
]. Ibid., pp. 403, 405.

[
82
]. Ibid., p. 499, footnote 1.

[
83
]. The State Department history,
National Security Policy
(for 1961-1963), provides both a Summary Record and a Resume of Discussion for the September 12, 1963, meeting of the National Security Council. Each document helps to illuminate the other, and the two together enable us to follow the meeting’s discussion. Ibid., pp. 499-503, 503-7.

[
84
]. Ibid., pp. 499-500.

[
85
]. Ibid., pp. 500, 503.

[
86
]. Ibid., p. 503.

[
87
]. Ibid., p. 500.

[
88
]. Ibid., pp. 500, 503.

[
89
]. Ibid.

[
90
]. Ibid., pp. 500, 504.

[
91
]. Ibid.

[
92
]. Ibid., pp. 500-501.

[
93
]. Ibid., p. 501 (emphasis added).

[
94
]. Ibid.

[
95
]. Ibid.

[
96
]. Ibid., p. 505.

[
97
]. Ibid., p. 502.

[
98
]. Ibid., p. 506.

[
99
]. Ibid., p. 502.

[
100
]. Ibid., p. 509.

[
101
]. Ibid., p. 506 (emphasis added).

[
102
]. Ibid.

[
103
]. Ibid.

[
104
]. Burris Memorandum, Purcell and Galbraith, “Did the U.S. Military Plan,” p. 89.

[
105
].
FRUS, 1961-1963,
vol. VIII, p. 499, footnote 1.

[
106
]. Memorandum for Mr. Bundy by W. Y. Smith, Subject: Net Evaluation Sub-Committee (NESC), August 28, 1963, p. 1 (emphasis added). National Defense University, Maxwell D. Taylor Papers, Box 27, Folder E, WYS Chron File (Apr.-Sept. 63), Item 24. This important, top-secret document was completely declassified by the National Security Council on December 16, 2005, and by the Department of Defense on January 13, 2006, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request made by the author on March 11, 2005.

Colonel Smith’s memorandum made a recommendation that was at direct odds with the president: “The study raises one major and interesting issue: our offensive and defensive weapons currently programmed will not reduce damage from a full nuclear exchange to an acceptable level. Consequently, there is a need for development of new offensive and defensive weapons.” Ibid.

The specific “need” Smith identifies, on behalf of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is the need for an updated first-strike system, a combination of “offensive and defensive weapons” that could both preempt and deflect the fewer Soviet missiles that constituted the U.S.S.R. deterrent to a U.S. attack. If Pentagon strategists were able to reduce such damage “to an acceptable level” in their prewar planning, they would thereby nullify the Soviet deterrent. The war system’s constant purpose after the death of Kennedy, who rejected first-strike planning, would be to regain a first strike capability over newer Soviet weapons. The strategic factor behind the nuclear arms race until the breakup of the Soviet Union was the unrelenting U.S. push for a first-strike capability and Cold War dominance. See Robert C. Aldridge,
First Strike! The Pentagon’s Strategy for Nuclear War
(Boston: South End Press, 1983).

Colonel Smith’s memorandum also reflects his awareness that the president wanted no more first-strike reports or recommendations, and in fact wanted to abolish the Net Evaluation Sub-Committee that was coming up with them. Smith notes an observer’s impression from a previous meeting “that Secretary McNamara [representing the president’s view] believed the NESC had largely fulfilled its usefulness.” Ibid.

As a result of the Kennedy/McNamara opposition to the sub-committee and its first-strike scenarios, its head, General Johnson, had already given his staff other “useful things” to do, as Smith states in his memorandum. He specifies this presumed change of focus: “The NESC staff was given the task of conducting a 4-month study (
to be completed in November
) on the termination of war problems . . .” (ibid., p. 2; emphasis added), another study that was in fact complementary to a first-strike plan.

How to deal with the “termination of war problems” was critical to a “successful” preemptive attack that would involve the “acceptable” loss of several million U.S. citizens, as well as 140 million Soviet citizens. There would indeed be “problems” involved in the “termination” of such a war. The four-month study’s November 1963 completion corresponded to Kennedy’s assassination and to the “late 1963” time line that the generals in their first Net Report had projected for a preemptive attack on the Soviet Union, before their window of opportunity closed as the Russians developed their missile force into a more effective deterrent.

[
107
]. Burris Memorandum, Purcell and Galbraith, “Did the U.S. Military Plan,” p. 89.

[
108
]. Richard H. Popkin,
The Second Oswald
(New York: Avon, 1966), p. 92; Matthew Smith,
JFK: The
Second Plot
(Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1992), p. 269.

[
109
]. Smith,
JFK: The Second Plot,
p. 269.

[
110
]. Popkin,
Second Oswald,
p. 92; Smith,
JFK: The Second Plot,
p. 270.