JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (39 page)

Kharlamov kept smiling. “Just wait, my friend,” he said.

When Kharlamov was inside the room, his words came tumbling out. His urgent message to John Kennedy from Nikita Khrushchev was that Khrushchev “was now willing, for the first time, to consider American proposals for a rapprochement on Berlin.”
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The Soviet premier hoped he and Kennedy could arrange a summit meeting as soon as possible. Kharlamov said Khrushchev was feeling intense pressure from the communist bloc to keep pushing Kennedy on the German question. However, the Soviet leader felt himself that it was time for a settlement on Berlin. He was afraid that a major military incident there could spark terrible consequences.

Kharlamov ended Khrushchev’s message to Kennedy with an appeal: “He hopes your President’s speech to the UN won’t be another warlike ultimatum like the one on July 25 [when Kennedy had said the U.S. was willing to wage war to stop the Soviets in Germany]. He didn’t like that at all.”
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It was obvious that Khrushchev wanted Kennedy to know his more conciliatory attitude on Germany before the president made his UN speech.

Salinger conveyed Khrushchev’s message personally to the president at 1:00 a.m. Kennedy had been sitting up reading in his hotel bed. He asked his press secretary to repeat the key points carefully. Then he got up, went to a window, and stood for a long time in his white pajamas gazing at the lights of the Manhattan skyline.

Finally he said, “There’s only one way you can read it. If Khrushchev is ready to listen to our views on Germany, he’s not going to recognize the [Walter] Ulbricht [East German] regime—not this year, at least—and that’s good news.”
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He dictated a message to Khrushchev, for Salinger to give verbally to Kharlamov, that he was “cautiously receptive to Khrushchev’s proposal for an early summit on Berlin. But first there should be a demonstration of Soviet good faith in Laos,” according to the agreement they had reached in Vienna.
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Berlin and Laos were linked. The Communist Pathet Lao army needed to back off and allow the neutralist Souvanna Phouma to form a coalition government, just as he and Khrushchev had agreed in Vienna. He would return to this theme repeatedly in his messages to Khrushchev.

The president’s more substantive response to the premier’s secretly conveyed “good news” was the speech he gave on September 25 to the United Nations. The speech had been written before he received Khrushchev’s message, but he reviewed it in his hotel room in that light. Like his opponent, Kennedy had already felt the need to back away from the brink in Berlin. He saw that he didn’t have to revise the speech’s text.

His central theme, in contrast to his speech of July 25, was disarmament. He told the United Nations that disarmament was not an option but an absolute imperative:

“Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable. Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.

“. . . It is therefore our intention to challenge the Soviet Union, not to an arms race, but to a peace race—to advance together step by step, stage by stage, until general and complete disarmament has been achieved.”
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How much did he mean it? Nikita Khrushchev wasn’t sure and wouldn’t be until the American University address two years later. But he already knew enough about Kennedy by October 1961 to doubt if it was he who was behind the reported plans to demolish the Berlin Wall. That had to be the work of other minds and hands. As Sergei Khrushchev commented, “It seemed to Father that other forces, bypassing the president, were interfering.”
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The irony was that Kennedy had appointed the man, retired general Lucius Clay, who was now suddenly leading those forces into darkness. However, Lucius Clay, like Kennedy’s Pentagon generals, had a mind of his own when it came to a young president’s naïve belief that he could win a struggle with evil without going to war. As an old World War II general, Clay knew better. When an October controversy arose at the Berlin Wall over the showing of allied credentials, General Clay seized the opportunity as a personal mandate.

On October 27, ten American M-48 tanks, with bulldozers mounted on the lead tanks, ground their way up to Checkpoint Charlie at the center of the Berlin Wall. They were confronted by ten Soviet tanks, which had been waiting for them quietly on the side streets of East Berlin. A well-briefed Nikita Khrushchev and his advisers had set their counterplan in motion. Twenty more Soviet tanks arrived soon after as reinforcements, and twenty more U.S. tanks moved up from the allied side. The American and Russian tanks faced off, with their long-nosed guns trained on one another, ready to fire. Throughout the night and for a total of sixteen hours, the confrontation continued.

Soviet foreign affairs adviser Valentin Falin was beside Khrushchev throughout the crisis. Falin said later that if the U.S. tanks and bulldozers had advanced farther, the Soviet tanks would have fired on them, bringing the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. “closer to the third world war than ever . . . Had the tank duel started then in Berlin—and everything was running toward it—the events most probably would have gone beyond any possibility of control.”
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An alarmed President Kennedy phoned Lucius Clay. Although Kennedy left no record of the conversation, Clay claims the president said, “I know you people over there haven’t lost your nerve.” Clay said his bold reply was: “Mr. President, we’re not worried about our nerves. We’re worrying about those of you people in Washington.”
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At that point the president sent an urgent message to Khrushchev via the back channel. Robert Kennedy contacted Soviet press attaché Georgi Bolshakov. RFK said that if Khrushchev would withdraw his tanks within twenty-four hours, JFK would do the same within thirty minutes later.
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The president then ordered Lucius Clay to be ready to carry out the U.S. side of such a withdrawal.

The next morning the Soviet tanks backed away, and the U.S. tanks followed suit in thirty minutes. The Checkpoint Charlie crisis was over. Its resolution prefigured that of the Cuban Missile Crisis one year later. In both cases Kennedy asked Khrushchev to take the first step. The Soviet leader did so, in gracious recognition that Kennedy was under even more intense pressure than he was. In both cases a back-channel communication via Robert Kennedy was critical. And in both cases Khrushchev, in withdrawing his tanks and later his missiles, achieved his own objectives in exchange from Kennedy: the removal of U.S. threats to bulldoze the Wall and to invade Cuba, and the withdrawal of U.S. missiles from Turkey and Italy.

However, both the mini-crisis at the Berlin Wall and the huge one over Cuban missiles revealed the shakiness of Kennedy’s position in relation to his own military. In the crisis at the wall, Khrushchev knew more about the U.S. plans for attack than Kennedy did. Fortunately Khrushchev was sensitive to the forces subverting JFK, beginning at the wall with General Lucius Clay. Although Clay was technically a civilian and theoretically the president’s representative, he acted like a free-wheeling Cold War general. His attitude toward the president’s order that he withdraw U.S. tanks from the wall anticipated the Joint Chiefs’ anger a year later at their commander-in-chief’s pledge not to invade Cuba. Two and a half weeks after the tanks confrontation that threatened a nuclear holocaust, its instigator, Lucius Clay, sent a telegram to Secretary of State Dean Rusk in which he stated:

“Today, we have the nuclear strength to assure victory at awful cost. It no longer suffices to consider our strength as a deterrent only and to plan to use it only in retaliation. No ground probes on the highway which would use force should or could be undertaken unless we are prepared instantly to follow them with a nuclear strike. It is certain that within two or more years retaliatory power will be useless as whoever strikes first will strike last.”
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To Lucius Clay’s regret, the president had not been prepared instantly to follow Clay’s assault on the Berlin Wall with a nuclear first strike. Like his cohorts in the Pentagon at the height of the missile crisis, Clay wanted to seize the moment, so the United States could “win” the Cold War by striking first. His analysis, like theirs, was that time was running out. In the meantime, the military conscience was coming to see the president’s conscience as a threat to the nation’s survival. Moreover, his deepening collusion with Khrushchev seemed treasonous.

As a committed Cold Warrior, John Kennedy from the first moments of his presidency had wanted to “let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”
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Kennedy was a true believer in his inaugural’s collective adaptation of Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death.” He was articulating a vision of political freedom, however one-sided its implications, that not only most Americans but hundreds of millions of allies believed in fervently at the time. It was set against a countervision of economic freedom believed by hundreds of millions of Communist opponents. Thus arose the thousand-day-long series of crises between those two opposite believers, John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev, who almost unwillingly then became co-creators of a new, more peaceful vision. Both the crises, which were beginning to fade away, and the new vision that was taking their place ended with Kennedy’s assassination.

From Kennedy’s side of their dogmatic battle, the saving factor was what few commentators have remembered from his inaugural address but what he believed in just as profoundly as he did freedom—peace in the nuclear age, through negotiation with the enemy:

“Finally, to those nations who would make themselves our adversary, we offer not a pledge but a request: that both sides begin anew the quest for peace, before the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science engulf all humanity in planned or accidental self-destruction.”
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How to square the circle, or negotiate his way out of a circular conflict, was not evident to Kennedy at the beginning. His conflicting commitments to freedom (backed by world-ending weapons) and to peace (backed by an openness to dialogue) were not easily reconciled. In the context of his own struggle to resolve those beliefs, we can understand his more visible struggle with Nikita Khrushchev, particularly on Laos and Vietnam.

Kennedy thought he and Khrushchev had in effect settled the issue of Laos at their Vienna meeting. He said so repeatedly in their secret communications. In his October 16, 1961, letter to Khrushchev, Kennedy said, as he had in his verbal message through Salinger and Kharlamov three weeks before, that any second summit meeting should be preceded by a peaceful resolution of Laos: “Indeed I do not see how we can expect to reach a settlement on so bitter and complex an issue as Berlin, where both of us have vital interests at stake, if we cannot come to a final agreement on Laos, which we have previously agreed should be neutral and independent after the fashion of Burma and Cambodia.”
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In Khrushchev’s first private letter to Kennedy, on September 29, 1961, the Soviet premier had written: “I note with gratification that you and I are of the same opinion as to the need for the withdrawal of foreign troops from the territory of Laos.”
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In Kennedy’s October 16 response, he underlined their agreement on foreign troop withdrawals and stressed the need to verify such withdrawals through the work of the International Control Commission (ICC):

“As you note, the withdrawal of foreign troops from the territory of Laos is an essential condition to preserving that nation’s independence and neutrality. There are other, similar conditions, and we must be certain that the ICC has the power and the flexibility to verify the existence of these conditions to the satisfaction of everyone concerned.”
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At this juncture, Kennedy identified the specific Laos–Vietnam connection that would prove critical to an expanding war in Vietnam: “In addition to so instructing your spokesmen at Geneva [to support the ICC’s verification of troop withdrawals], I hope you will increasingly exercise your influence in this direction on all of your “corresponding quarters” [meaning especially the North Vietnamese]; for the acceleration of attacks on South Viet-Nam, many of them from within Laotian territory, are a very grave threat to peace in that area and to the entire kind of world-wide accommodation you and I recognize to be necessary.”
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The strategic location of Laos, just to the west of Vietnam, made its eastern highlands an ideal conduit for North Vietnamese troops moving covertly into South Vietnam, as would happen increasingly over the remaining two years of Kennedy’s presidency. That continuing military buildup via the “Ho Chi Minh Trail” in Laos would make inevitable a Communist victory in Vietnam, while disrupting the “neutral and independent Laos” Kennedy and Khrushchev had already agreed to. However, Khrushchev was powerless to stop it even if he wanted to. Just as Kennedy would discover he had no control over Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam, neither was Khrushchev able to control Ho Chi Minh in North Vietnam. Diem and Ho had minds and policies of their own.