Listening In (35 page)

CALL TO PRESIDENT HERBERT HOOVER, OCTOBER 28, 1962

HOOVER:
… it seems to me these recent events are rather incredible.

JFK:
They are incredible. I just, we got a message on Friday night which was rather forthcoming from them. And then on Saturday we got the one on Turkey. Then this morning we got the one going back to their more reasonable position. So we’re going to stay right on it and see if we can work up satisfactory verification procedures, but I just wanted to bring you up-to-date on it. We got a lot of problems still to go, but I think we’ve made some progress.

HOOVER:
This represents a good triumph for you.

JFK:
Well, I think we just have to, the rhythm of these things, we’ll see what happens this week. But I just wanted you to know. I’ll keep in touch with you and keep you up-to-date.

HOOVER:
Thank you.

JFK:
Thank you, Mr. President. Bye-bye.

PRESIDENT KENNEDY WITH PRESIDENT HERBERT HOOVER, NEW YORK, NEW YORK, APRIL 28, 1961

PRESIDENT KENNEDY OBSERVES THE FIRING OF A POLARIS MISSILE BY THE SUBMARINE USS
ANDREW JACKSON
OFF THE COAST OF FLORIDA, NOVEMBER 16, 1963

I
n his inaugural address, President Kennedy pledged that the United States would “bear any burden” to assure the success of liberty and in so doing that we would never “fear to negotiate.” In the aftermath of the Missile Crisis, he acted on the second impulse. In these tapes, it is clear that he was willing to invest political capital to make sure the world would never come as close to the brink again.

No one would ever accuse President Kennedy of naïve pacifism. In 1961, he went to Congress three times to ask for military funding, and the result was an extraordinary increase in production—from ten Polaris submarines a year to twenty, a 50 percent increase in Strategic Air Command bombers on alert, a thousand new intercontinental ballistic missiles, nuclear-tipped, with bombs eighty times more lethal than the one dropped on Hiroshima. All told, he increased U.S. defense spending 14 percent in 1961 alone, and that was after President Eisenhower warned of a military-industrial complex. To an extent, this was the fulfillment of a campaign promise to close the so-called missile gap, and to increase the security of the United States.

But Kennedy also felt an instinctive abhorrence of nuclear weapons and the complacent strategic thinking they encouraged. He was concerned by the quickness with which his military advisors went to the final option in their scenarios, dropping a nuclear weapon on a large Communist army they could not defeat by other means. On September 13, 1961, he was presented with the defense plan of last resort, “a massive, total, comprehensive obliterating strategic attack … on everything Red.” Within fifteen minutes of his command, missiles and bombers would be flying toward 3,729 targets in Russia and China.

On October 28, 1962, the day the crisis ended, Khrushchev had written, “We should like to continue the exchange of views on the prohibition of atomic and thermonuclear weapons, general disarmament, and other problems relating to the relaxation of international tension.” Kennedy now took steps to return to their earlier, better aspirations. If it was not possible to rid the world of nuclear weapons, then they could at least prevent the testing of weapons in the earth’s atmosphere, underwater, and in space.

Khrushchev had actually proposed a test ban years earlier, in 1955, as scientists began to discover the lethal effects of radioactive fallout. Kennedy had also voiced support in the 1950s, as a young senator frustrated by the Eisenhower administration’s rigid dependence on its nuclear arsenal. But the volatility of Cold War tensions had led to continued testing, including by the United States, which resumed tests, in response to Soviet testing, in April 1962. With the solidarity of Prime Minister Macmillan, a new dialogue began that began to pay dividends over the spring of 1963. In March, Kennedy said, “I am haunted by the feeling that by 1970, unless we are successful, there may be ten nuclear powers instead of four, and by 1975, fifteen or twenty.” In June, Kennedy gave a speech at American University that revealed how profoundly his thinking had evolved from the brinksmanship of October 1962, and invited the Russians to join him in a renewed quest for a test ban. Khrushchev, who had evolved in his own way, did not miss the opportunity. The three powers met under improved conditions in July 1963, and signed the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty on August 5, which was then ratified by the U.S. Senate on September 24. On October 10, it went into effect. Within a year, much had changed. Nine days later, reflecting on the first anniversary of the crisis, Kennedy spoke at the University of Maine and urged his listeners, “Let us resolve to be the masters, not the victims, of our history.”

MEETING ABOUT DEFENSE BUDGET, DECEMBER 5, 1962

This short excerpt reveals Kennedy thinking expansively about the logic of a nuclear attack on an adversary certain to retaliate, or, in the parlance of the day, Mutually Assured Destruction. Clearly, he is tending toward a new strategic vision.

JFK:
The other question is, the, we didn’t talk about our strategic so much, whether we’re, if our purpose of our strategic buildup is to deter the Russians, number one, and number two, to attack them if it looks like they are about to attack us, or to make, be able to, lessen the impact they would have on us, in an attack. I think, they concentrate on our cities, we can’t be sure enough of their targets, or they may be hard, or they may have submarines, or we can’t acceptably carry out a first strike without taking, as I understood the secretary’s position, an inordinate amount of damage.

If our point really then is to deter them, it seems to me that we’re getting an awful lot of the Polaris submarines and planes that we have, and the navy’s strategic force, and the ballistic missiles we have, an awful lot of megatonnage put on the Soviets sufficient to deter them from ever using nuclear weapons.

However, unless we accept … otherwise, what good are they? I don’t know, you can’t use them as a first weapon yourself. They’re only good for deterring, and if they attack us, if we fail to deter them, and they attack us, then it’s just, just destroy them, out of, fulfill your part of the contract, just drop it on their cities, and destroy them … Russians. I don’t quite see why we’re building as many as we’re building.

PRESIDENT KENNEDY ABOARD THE USS
OBSERVATION ISLAND
, AUTHORIZING THE LAUNCH OF A POLARIS MISSILE, NOVEMBER 16, 1963

MEETING WITH NORMAN COUSINS, APRIL 22, 1963

The Kennedy tapes reveal a surprising diversity of conversationalists, and now and then President Kennedy would welcome in iconoclastic thinkers to offer viewpoints from beyond the Beltway. The journalist Norman Cousins (1915–1990) fit that description well; as the editor of the widely read
Saturday Review
, he dispensed opinions on a broad range of topics. But one was paramount: since the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima he had been a leading advocate for nuclear disarmament, and in the early 1960s, his advocacy climbed to a higher level as he brought personal messages between the Kremlin and the White House. He also consulted the Vatican extensively, a fact of consequence in the spring of 1963, as Pope John XXIII drew up his final encyclical,
Pacem in Terris,
calling for peace, human rights, and the calming of the nuclear terror. In a long meeting on April 22, 1963, he told President Kennedy in great detail about his recent visit to see Nikita Khrushchev at his dacha, including gossipy stories of badminton and badinage with the Soviet leader. They also spoke about the world picture, and the deepening involvement of the United States in Southeast Asia. Kennedy indicated a desire to extricate, and a refusal to become trapped in a protracted war (“we’re not going to do that”), but also signaled a desire to adhere to the Geneva Accords, and to maintain some form of support for South Vietnam.