Kennedy: The Classic Biography (104 page)

In this context, proposals for a NATO nuclear force had been under study since first publicly aired by Eisenhower’s Secretary of State Christian Herter in 1960. Kennedy, in a May, 1961, address at Ottawa, had pledged to the NATO command five Polaris submarines, which would remain under U.S. control. At the same time he had talked vaguely of an eventual “NATO seaborne force, which would be truly multilateral in ownership and control, if this should be desired and found feasible by our allies, once NATO’s nonnuclear goals have been achieved.” That deliberately left the initiative with our allies to come forward with a feasible plan and first to fulfill their conventional force quotas. Inasmuch as he doubted that they would do either, Kennedy had at that time paid little further attention to the matter. Certainly it was to have no priority until after further steps toward European unity—especially British membership in the EEC—had been taken.

But at Nassau the pressure was on Kennedy to come forward with some plan “to meet our obligation to the British,” as he put it. He finally offered Polaris missiles (not submarines or warheads) to Macmillan in the NATO context. The Nassau Pact of December, 1962, declared that the British-built submarines carrying these missiles—except when “supreme national interests are at stake”—would be assigned to the NATO command and, upon its development, to a multilateral NATO nuclear force. NATO, in short, was to have two elements, one nationally directed and manned, the other internationally owned and “mixed-manned” by nationals of member governments. By calling both elements “multilateral,” the Nassau communiqué caused some confusion, and thereafter we reserved the term for the second element, which became known as the MLF. But because both sides were uncertain of just what was meant and wanted, in the absence of both State Department experts and an agreed U.S. position, the communiqué contained other deliberate ambiguities; and it was thereafter read with different interpretations and emphasis by the British, the State Department and the Pentagon.

The merit of a multilateral force, as distinguished from a series of independent nuclear forces, was obvious. Nevertheless, from that hopeful day in Nassau forward, the concept of MLF was a source of confusion and dissension within the Alliance. The Nassau Pact itself showed signs of hasty improvisation and high-level imprecision, of decisions taken by the President in Nassau before he was ready to take them in” Washington, of excellent motivation and poor preparation. The pact was accompanied by an offer to the French “similar” to Kennedy’s offer to the British, but the French promptly rejected it. The MLF idea envisioned an all-NATO force; but the British began to back away from it, the Greeks and Turks couldn’t afford it, the Italian elections avoided it, only the Germans clearly wanted it, and the prospect of an exclusive German-American force was not appealing, particularly if the Germans’ real desire, as many supposed, was to ease out in time the American veto on the nuclear trigger. In this country, MLF had no warm backers in the Congress and few in the military. It presented major legal and legislative problems on the disclosure of nuclear information, the custody of nuclear warheads and—until a surface fleet was substituted—the use of nuclear-powered submarines.

The decisions taken at Nassau had been put forward for many reasons:

1. To prevent an independent West German nuclear force—yet they led to cries on both sides of the Wall that we were needlessly placing Germans too close to our force.

2. To minimize this country’s preferential treatment of Great Britain—yet they seemed in some quarters only to emphasize it.

3. To meet charges of an American nuclear monopoly—yet, by retaining an American veto, the MLF concept produced fresh attacks upon that monopoly.

4. To strengthen Western Strategic defense forces—yet no one denied that the real purpose of MLF was political and that it could increase those forces by no more than 1 or 2 percent.

Gradually in 1963 the MLF proposal fell from the top of the President’s agenda toward the bottom. He would not remove it altogether from his agenda. He understood the desire of allies who lived in the shadow of Russia’s medium-range missiles to join the prestigious “nuclear club” and to have some voice in decisions affecting their security. He did not make a fetish out of national sovereignty, and was willing to accept more direct European participation in the nuclear deterrent to prevent a proliferation of national nuclear forces. Judging from the reaction in Europe, MLF was apparently not the answer. But “there are shortcomings to every proposal,” he said, “and those who do not like our proposal should suggest one of their own.”

He wanted the Europeans to decide whether or not they wanted an MLF in their own interest, not to accept it as a favor to the United States or because he had coerced them—that would only renew their complaints. Total abandonment of the effort, he felt, would renew French charges against the unreliable American monopoly and West German pressures to obtain their own nuclear force. Moreover, many of the State Department professionals, enthusiastic about MLF as an instrument for European integration, were optimistic about its acceptance. They pushed it harder than the President intended, in the belief that Western Europe would embrace it if we did. Kennedy, while still backing MLF within the Alliance, was increasingly skeptical. “How does it feel,” he asked one chief advocate, “to be an admiral without a fleet?” The very issue giving rise to the plan—the distribution of nuclear decision-making—was also its most insurmountable difficulty. “To do something more than merely provide…a different facade of United States control,” he said candidly, “will require a good deal of negotiation and imagination….”

The negotiations continued intermittently throughout 1963, but showed no burst of imagination that impressed him. To Richard Neustadt, whom he commissioned to write a comprehensive account of the Skybolt-Nassau-MLF affair (in his most serious organized effort to meet his responsibility to future historians as well as to review the adequacy of his policy-makers and methods), he expressed his growing doubts:

There is no “Europe.” I understand their objection to my speaking for them on nuclear matters, but who’s to be my opposite number? I can’t share this decision with a whole lot of differently motivated and differently responsible people. What one man is it to be shared with—De Gaulle, Adenauer, Macmillan? None of them can speak for Europe.

Since 1958, however, General Charles de Gaulle did presume to speak for Europe—at least for continental Western Europe. The Cuban missile crisis and its outcome enabled De Gaulle to argue that Berlin and Western Europe were no longer in real danger from a chastened Khrushchev, that nuclear, not conventional, forces made the difference and that the defense of Europe had “moved into second place” in American military priorities.
⁷
Nassau enabled De Gaulle to argue that continental Europe’s chances for nuclear independence were about to be submerged in the Atlantic Alliance, that Europe was being asked to pay part of the cost of America’s deterrent, and that Macmillan (with whom he had met only a few days earlier at Rambouillet and who had not offered
him
any nuclear assistance) had chosen to tie “insular, maritime” Britain to the United States instead of to Europe. Further emboldened by continuing weakness in this country’s balance of payments position, he moved with more speed than tact—beginning with a caustic January, 1963, press conference—(a) to reject the Polaris offer and the MLF concept, insisting once again on an independent French nuclear force; (b) to veto Britain’s entry into the Common Market, just as the long negotiations for that entry neared success, suggesting that Britain was too closely tied to the United States; (c) to sign with Adenauer a new treaty of unity, thus implicitly tying West Germany to his position; (d) to withdraw still more French forces from NATO; and (e) to frustrate the efforts of the Common Market countries to proceed more quickly to political integration.

In his famous press conference as in subsequent statements in defense of these bombshells, De Gaulle cleverly played on European resentment of both the American nuclear monopoly and the influence in Europe’s affairs of our massive military, economic and political presence. He also appealed to European pride in refusing to rely on a distant nation for the means and decisions of survival and to European suspicions that England and America wished to dominate. He exploited European fears that the U.S. would not risk its cities to save theirs, that Kennedy’s nagging about nonnuclear forces meant a weakening of our nuclear commitment and that Kennedy’s stance at Cuba proved the danger of a Soviet-American deal or war in which Western Europe could be sacrificed. He appealed to European complacency and parsimony to forget the build-up of ground troops and rely on the French nuclear force’s presence to convince Moscow that the American nuclear force would be dragged in. Now that America, too, was subject to attack, said De Gaulle, “no one in the world—
particularly
no one in America—can say if, where, when, how and to what extent the American nuclear weapons would be used to defend Europe.”

The angry initial reaction in the United States and Great Britain was due in part to surprise—not at De Gaulle’s attitudes, which were old, but at his tactics, his willingness to act so abruptly, brazenly and brutally, and with so little notice to his allies, when he might have blocked all the same efforts more subtly and gradually. De Gaulle had originally taken the position that Britain belonged in the Common Market. The American Embassy in Paris had recently reported that the French were resigned to U.K. membership in the Common Market. Even after Nassau, De Gaulle’s Foreign Minister had flatly stated that “no power on earth could keep Britain out of the Common Market.” (It was later speculated that this may not have applied to the General.) At Nassau Macmillan had assured Kennedy that nothing more than a dispute on agriculture stood between his somewhat dilatory negotiators and admission to the Common Market.
⁸

Macmillan had also argued to Kennedy that De Gaulle, as a believer in national deterrents, would have no objection to a U.S.-U.K. deal on Polaris. The General himself, less than two
weeks
before he slammed the door on JFK’s “similar” Polaris offer, had indicated that it would take two
months
to evaluate. Moreover, wholly apart from the events at Nassau, optimism in Washington on the prospects for European integration had long been on the rise. This was partly because the administration’s deep admiration for such advocates as Spaak and Jean Monnet had produced a false expectancy that their logic would prevail. It was also because De Gaulle’s own political position the previous year had seemed so shaky, after the loss of Algeria, that much of the State-CIA-White House speculation had been not how he would block Western unity but who or what would succeed him.
⁹

De Gaulle’s tactics, however, had often surprised even his own Cabinet with their unexpected turns. Thus Kennedy was briefly startled early in 1963 by a foreign intelligence report of doubtful authenticity. “Rumors from regular and reliable sources” maintained that De Gaulle and the Soviet Union had made or were about to make a secret deal, calling for a demilitarized Central Europe, including all Germany, Greece and Turkey, the progressive withdrawal of American troops from France as well as Germany, and a recognition of the Oder-Neisse line. The report was sufficiently consistent with the needs and desires of both Khrushchev and De Gaulle—to spite the U.S. and dominate Europe “from the Atlantic to the Urals” (a favorite De Gaulle phrase)—to deserve checking. Fortunately it proved groundless; but this possibility motivated many of Kennedy’s inquiries in the round of meetings that followed.

Commissioning papers by David Bruce and Dean Acheson, summoning to a series of lengthy conferences in January and February all the ambassadors and experts on the West, the President explored, probed and reappraised. On the basis of these meetings, he decided that no basic change in strategy was required for four reasons:

1. Even the proudest and most suspicious Europeans refused to join in De Gaulle’s attacks on NATO and the Americans, whose ties they valued and whose association was preferable to Russia’s in the long years before De Gaulle’s dreams could be realized. Nor would their interest in European unity be satisfied by a paternalistic De Gaulle-Adenauer domination.

2. De Gaulle’s goal of a united Europe enveloping a reconciled Germany was Kennedy’s goal as well. They fundamentally disagreed over means and over Anglo-American participation; but “the unity of freedom,” said the President,

has never relied on uniformity of opinion…. Whatever success we may have had in reducing the threat…to Berlin, we pay for by increased problems within the Alliance…. [On] those questions that involve the atom…there are bound to be differences of opinion—and there should be, because they involve life and death.

Moreover, contrary to press talk about De Gaulle’s “Grand Design” frustrating Kennedy’s “Grand Design,” Kennedy had never looked upon either MLF or British entry into the EEC as pillars of American policy. Nor had he regarded the pace, process and personalities of European integration as matters for us to decide.

3. Although he quietly withdrew an earlier arrangement to sell nuclear-powered Skipjack submarines to France, any effort to punish the General, to trade insults with him or to compete with him for the allegiance of Germany and others would only play into De Gaulle’s hands. No previous American President had been able to curb De Gaulle’s disrespect for NATO and insistence on his own nuclear force; and all the proposals to isolate him now by new military or economic arrangements with others, or withdrawals of American pledges, would only retard long-range progress toward Atlantic Partnership.

4. Finally, he saw no value in appeasing De Gaulle by offering him nuclear weapons on his terms. A year earlier, despite the General’s repeated assertion that France was asking (and offering) nothing, the President—at the urging of the Pentagon and our Ambassador in Paris, and over the opposition of most White House and State Department advisers—had re-examined this nation’s opposition to aiding the French nuclear development. He had decided then that such aid would not win General De Gaulle to our purposes but only strengthen him in his. While minor military benefits might have been received in return, the General’s desire to speak for all Europe, free from British and American influence, would not have been altered. His desire to be independent of NATO, and to form a three-power nuclear directorate outside of NATO, would only have been encouraged. And the West Germans, more pointedly excluded than ever, would surely have reappraised their attitude toward the Atlantic Alliance and toward the acquisition of their own nuclear weapons. “I do not believe it is in the interest of the United States,” the President wrote to a prominent critic in February, 1963, who demanded that he give France nuclear weapons (thus enabling De Gaulle’s tiny force to trigger our own),