JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (81 page)

Khrushchev said he had told his Defense Minister, Marshal Rodion Malinovsky, “to back up our tanks a little bit and hide them behind buildings where the Americans couldn’t see them. If we do this, I said to Malinovsky, the American tanks will also move back within twenty minutes and we will have no more crisis.”

Khrushchev grinned at Salinger. “It was just as I said it would be. We pulled back. You pulled back. Now that’s generalship!”
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Khrushchev’s generous retreat at the Berlin Wall, made in response to a back-channel appeal by Kennedy,
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would be repeated in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

As we saw, the pressures on Kennedy for an attack on the Soviet missile sites in Cuba were overwhelming, from both his military and civilian advisers. He resisted those pressures and instead worked out the mutual concessions with Khrushchev that resolved the crisis. The Joint Chiefs of Staff were infuriated by his steadfast refusal to launch an attack.

The president said to Arthur Schlesinger, “The military are mad. They wanted to do this.”
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By “this” he meant an attack on Cuba, perhaps involving also a preemptive strike on the Soviet Union. For the Joint Chiefs, Kennedy’s peaceful resolution of the crisis with Khrushchev meant a lost opportunity to defeat the enemy, the best opportunity they ever had to “win” the Cold War.

Following the peaceful outcome of the Missile Crisis, during the year Kennedy had left as president, he resisted his military command’s continuing pressures for a preemptive strike strategy.

One month after the Missile Crisis, the Joint Chiefs pushed for a buildup in U.S. strategic forces to a disarming first-strike capability. On November 20, 1962, they sent a memorandum to Secretary of Defense McNamara stating: “The Joint Chiefs of Staff consider that a first-strike capability is both feasible and desirable . . .”
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McNamara, reflecting what he knew was Kennedy’s position, wrote the president on the same day about the challenge they faced: “It has become clear to me that the Air Force proposals, both for the RS-70 [Bomber] and for the rest of their Strategic Retaliatory Forces, are based on the objective of achieving a first-strike capability.”
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McNamara told the president what was at issue with the Air Force was whether U.S. forces should “attempt to achieve a capability to start a thermonuclear war in which the resulting damage to ourselves and our Allies could be considered acceptable on some reasonable definition of the term.”
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McNamara said he believed that a first-strike capability “should be rejected as a U.S. policy objective,” and that the U.S. should not augment its forces for a first-strike capability.
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Two months before Kennedy’s assassination, the president was given another “Net Evaluation Subcommittee Report” on preemptive war planning. This time around, Kennedy was prepared by two years of struggle with his military commanders for what he was about to hear. This time he was not about to walk out on them.

State Department historians have reported that the “Net Evaluation Subcommittee Report” that was presented to President Kennedy at the September 12, 1963, National Security Council Meeting “has not been found.”
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However, we do have a revealing record of the meeting’s discussion.
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As in 1961, the evident premise of the report is a U.S. first strike against the Soviet Union.

After he heard the Net Subcommittee Report from General Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Kennedy engaged in a cat-and-mouse game with his generals. He opened the discussion with a question whose premise was the first-strike strategy he knew they wanted in place. Yet its judge, under his euphemism, “political leaders,” was himself, their deeply resistant commander-in-chief.

The president asked, “Even if we attack the USSR first, would the loss to the U.S. be unacceptable to political leaders?”

Air Force general Leon Johnson, representing the Net Subcommittee, answered, “It would be. Even if we preempt, surviving Soviet capability is sufficient to produce an unacceptable loss in the U.S.”
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Kennedy could only have been relieved by Johnson’s reply. The window of opportunity for a “successful” U.S. preemptive strike on the Soviets by Kennedy’s generals was apparently closed. The U.S.S.R. had by now apparently deployed too many missiles in hardened underground silos for superior U.S. forces to be able to destroy a retaliatory force in a first strike. That meant Kennedy’s military command could not pressure him with the same urgency for a preemptive strike. However, as we shall see, Johnson’s answer was deceptive in terms of the time span it covered.

Kennedy pressed his advantage by asking Johnson, “Are we then in fact in a period of nuclear stalemate?”

General Johnson admitted that we were.

The President said, “I have read the statement in this morning’s paper by the Air Force Association recommending nuclear superiority. What do they mean by ‘nuclear superiority versus nuclear stalemate’? How could you get superiority?”
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Kennedy knew very well what the Air Force Association meant by “nuclear superiority versus nuclear stalemate.” The Committee of the Air Force Association was pushing for the same first-strike capability that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had long advocated. Kennedy wanted Johnson’s comment on a policy that the Air Force Association, like the Joint Chiefs, was pursuing without saying so against a resistant president.

General Johnson said carefully, measuring his words, “I believe the members of the Committee of the Air Force Association which drafted the resolution did not have the facts as brought out in the report being presented at this time.”
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According to the minutes of the meeting, General Johnson, under the president’s persistent questioning, then “acknowledged that it would be impossible for us to achieve nuclear superiority.”
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Defense Secretary McNamara interjected to reinforce the president’s case against a preemptive strike. He said, “Even if we spend $80 billion more [for shelters and increased weapons systems] than we are now spending, we would still have at least 30 million casualties in the U.S. in the 1968 time period, even if we made the first strike against the USSR.”
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The president said, “Those fatality figures are much higher than I heard recently in Omaha. As I recall, SAC [Strategic Air Command] estimated that, if we preempt, we would have 12 million casualties.”
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Kennedy was probing his military command for the truth behind their statistical efforts to advance a first-strike policy. In the Vietnam War, their figures had been manufactured to fit their arguments for the deployment of U.S. troops.

He pressed on, saying, “Why do we need as much as we’ve got? De Gaulle believes even the small nuclear force he is planning will be big enough to cause unacceptable damage to the USSR.”
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General Johnson tried to explain to his skeptical commander-in-chief that they could bring down the number of casualties “by undertaking additional weapons programs.” Kennedy wasn’t buying it.

“Doesn’t that just get us into the overkill business?” he asked.
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General Johnson countered, “No, sir. We can cut down U.S. losses if we knock out more Soviet missiles by having more U.S. missiles and more accurate U.S. missiles. The more Soviet missiles we can destroy the less the loss to us.”
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Kennedy’s questions were smoking out the underlying purpose of the “additional weapons programs” the Joint Chiefs were urging on him. The “more missiles and more accurate missiles” they wanted would be further steps toward a U.S. capability to destroy the Soviet retaliatory force in a disarming first strike before it could be launched.

Under Kennedy’s questioning gaze, Johnson then made explicit the consequences and the purpose of the Joint Chiefs’ thinking. He said, “Each of the [Net report] strategies used against the USSR
resulted in
at least 140 million fatalities in the USSR
.
Our problem
is
how to catch more of the Soviet missiles before they are launched
and how to destroy more of the missiles in the air over the U.S.”
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This was roughly the point at which Kennedy had walked out in disgust two years earlier, saying to Rusk, “And we call ourselves the human race.” Both then and now, it had become clear that a nuclear first strike meant genocide to the people attacked. Now in September 1963, the National Security Council had once again reached the point of blandly considering the killing of 140 million Soviet citizens in a U.S. effort to beat their leaders to the nuclear punch.

However, this time Kennedy did not walk out on his military commanders. He continued to probe their preemptive-war planning. He wanted to know as much as he could, for a purpose different from theirs. His purpose in terms of people, as opposed to their purpose in terms of missiles, was how to keep such a slaughter from ever happening.

McNamara reiterated, on behalf of Kennedy, that “there was no way of launching a no-alert attack against the USSR which would be acceptable. No such attack, according to the calculations, could be carried out without 30 million U.S. fatalities—an obviously unacceptable number.”
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McNamara added, “The President deserves an answer to his question as to why we have to have so large a force.”

The painfully obvious answer was that the Joint Chiefs wanted to be able to preempt the Soviets. Kennedy, on the other hand, saw such an option as a danger within his own government.

McNamara, caught between his president and his military chiefs, tried to explain away their conflict. He said, “The answer lies in the fact that there are many uncertainties in the equations presented in today’s report.”
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The president shifted gears. He asked why the Soviet Union “does have a smaller force” than the U.S., implying that the U.S. might want to follow their example rather than vice versa.

After granting that the Soviets might think they had enough to deter the U.S., General Johnson said apprehensively, “I would be very disturbed if the President considered this report indicated that we could reduce our forces and/or not continue to increase to those programmed. If a reduction should take place, the relative position of the U.S. and Soviets would become less in our favor.”
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Kennedy, who wanted to negotiate an end to the Cold War with the Soviets, said to his general, “I understand.”

After further discussion, JFK summed up the meeting in as hopeful a way as he could to his entrenched military command: “Preemption is not possible for us. This is a valuable conclusion growing out of an excellent report.”
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He also said, “This argues in favor of a conventional force [rather than nuclear weapons].”
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General Johnson differed, saying, “I have concluded from the calculations [showing U.S. nuclear dominance] that we could fight a limited war using nuclear weapons without fear that the Soviets would reply by going to all-out war.”
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Kennedy was familiar with arguments designed to lure him past the point of no return. He said, “I have been told that if I ever released a nuclear weapon on the battlefield, I should start a pre-emptive attack on the Soviet Union as the use of nuclear weapons was bound to escalate and we might as well get the advantage by going first.”
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If the president’s listeners did not agree with where he came out on the Net report, his questions had at least brought their preemptive-war thinking to the surface. However, he had also raised one particular question to which the National Security Council gave no answer at all. It bore on the strategic situation in the fall of 1963.

Kennedy had asked, in the middle of the discussion, “What about the case of preempting
today
with the Soviets in a low state of alert?”
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McNamara was the only person who ventured a reply. He said, “In the studies I have had done for me, I have not found a situation in which a pre-empt during a low-alert condition would be advantageous . . .”
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An unidentified reporter of this National Security Council meeting added a parenthetical comment, after McNamara’s name and before his above statement: “(Today’s situation not actually answered.)”
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Nor did any of Kennedy’s other advisers offer an opinion in response to his question about a U.S. preemptive strike at the particular time in which they were then living. Moreover, their discussion of a preemptive war had been carried out, from beginning to end, in relation to a projected time scheme of 1964 through 1968. The situation in the remaining three and one-half months of 1963 was a question left untouched, even after Kennedy explicitly raised it.