Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House
The administration’s travails at home and abroad convinced Kennedy that he needed to restate his determination and plans to get the country moving again. On May 25, 1961, almost four months after his State of the Union message, Kennedy took the unusual step of appearing before a joint congressional session to present a “Special Message on Urgent National Needs.” It was a transparent attempt to rebuild public confidence in administration policies by giving a second State of the Union speech.
Kennedy began by condemning an unnamed aggressor’s assault on freedom around the globe. His spoken presentation omitted a paragraph identifying the culprit as “a closed society without dissent or free information, and long experience in the techniques of violence and subversion.” The omission softened the verbal attack on Moscow, which was evident when he said, “[W]e are engaged in a world-wide struggle in which we bear a heavy burden to preserve and promote the ideals that we share with all mankind.” Several paragraphs on the administration’s attentiveness to expanding the country’s capacity to resist nonnuclear aggression and develop its civil defense programs as a guard against the possibility of an accidental war were intended to reassure Americans after the Cuban failure that their security from attack was the administration’s highest priority.
The longest part of the speech was devoted to a great new enterprise in space. It was calculated to dispel additional concerns about national security that had been triggered on April 12 by Moscow’s success in sending Yuri Gagarin, a Russian cosmonaut, into an orbit around the earth, the world’s first manned spaceflight. The combination of this scientific breakthrough and the Bay of Pigs fiasco made Kennedy a little desperate to identify some way of bolstering U.S. spirits in the Cold War.
On hearing the news, Kennedy had instructed Sorensen to assemble a group of scientists who could suggest a U.S. response. The meeting initially added to the gloom that recent setbacks had provoked. The scientists concluded that the Soviets had a considerable advantage in the space race. Specifically, they held an edge on the United States in sending a two-man spacecraft aloft, orbiting a space platform or laboratory, exploring the far reaches of space, and landing an unmanned vehicle on the moon. The one hopeful note was that the United States might be able to beat the Soviets to the moon with a manned spaceship. The challenge was so great that neither the United States nor Moscow had begun to move toward that goal.
On April 20, Kennedy sent Johnson, who headed the administration’s space council, an urgent query: “Do we have a chance of beating the Soviets by putting a laboratory in space, or by a trip around the moon, or by a rocket to land on the moon, or by a rocket to go to the moon and back with a man? Is there any other space program, which promises dramatic results, in which we could win? . . . Are we working 24 hours a day on existing programs? If not, why not? . . . I would appreciate a report on this at the earliest possible moment.”
Kennedy largely knew what Johnson’s answers would be. Everything about the six-foot-two-and-a-half-inch Texan’s career bespoke grand designs. As a senator, he worked to become the chamber’s greatest majority leader in history, with an unprecedented record of achievement that future leaders could not easily surpass. As the Senate’s architect of NASA and an outspoken critic of Eisenhower for not being more aggressive about putting the United States ahead of Russia in a competition for dominance in space, Johnson was more than ready to expand America’s program. It appealed to his hopes of becoming a memorable vice president.
Johnson believed that the United States should try to land a man on the moon and that getting there ahead of the Soviets was vital in convincing people everywhere that American institutions and technology were preferable to what the communists had. As he told Kennedy, the Soviets had eclipsed us “in world prestige attained through technological accomplishments in space.” But “manned exploration of the moon” would be “an achievement with great propaganda value” and would allow us to win “control over . . . men’s minds.” Johnson had an apocalyptic view of the competition: It would “determine which system of society and government dominate the future. . . . In the eyes of the world, first in space means first, period; second in space is second in everything.” Johnson brushed aside complaints about the proposed costs of a moon mission by saying, “Now, would you rather have us be a second-rate nation or should we spend a little money?” Nor did he reflect on the relatively low Soviet standard of living. In 1961, fear of Soviet might eclipsed all realistic assessments of Russia’s economic weakness. Russia was not even a model for China, the other communist giant, which was struggling to emerge from centuries of feudalism. Only after the collapse of Soviet rule in Russia in 1991 did many in the United States concede that the communists never had a chance to catch or exceed America’s economic output.
McNamara and Rusk agreed with Johnson’s exaggerated view of the benefits from space accomplishments in the competition with communism. Understanding how badly Kennedy needed to distract the country from recent setbacks with a bold initiative, McNamara echoed Johnson’s call for an all-out effort: “Major achievements in space contribute to national prestige,” he told the vice president. “What the Soviets do and what they are likely to do are therefore matters of great importance from the viewpoint of national prestige.” Or, he might have said, favorable comparisons with Moscow were essential in rekindling domestic and international support. Johnson prodded Rusk into telling the Senate Space Committee, “We must respond to their conditions; otherwise we risk a basic misunderstanding on the part of the uncommitted countries, the Soviet Union, and possibly our allies concerning the direction in which power is moving and where long-term advantage lies.”
Kennedy was less inclined to believe that beating the Soviets in a space race would determine the outcome of the Cold War. But he shared the conviction that a major victory in space was a way to score political points and win hearts and minds at home and abroad. Moreover, if he were to convince the Congress to spend billions on an unproved scientific and engineering experiment, he needed to overstate the benefits. Buoyed by a successful suborbital flight by the U.S. astronaut Alan Shepard on May 5, Kennedy told the Congress, “If we are to win the battle that is now going on around the world between freedom and tyranny, the dramatic achievements in space which occurred in recent weeks should have made clear to all of us, as did the Sputnik in 1957, the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere, who are attempting to make a determination of which road they should take. . . . Now it is time . . . for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key to our future on earth.” Kennedy proposed to land a man on the moon and return him safely to earth before the end of the decade. Nothing could be more difficult or expensive, but it would be the work of the entire nation.
Kennedy saw serious risks in gambling so much of his administration’s prestige and the nation’s money on so uncertain an enterprise. When Shepard met him at the White House after his successful mission, he thought Kennedy was nervous about his association with a program with such uncertain prospects. Kennedy joked with Johnson, “Nobody knows that the Vice President is the Chairman of the Space Council. But if that flight had been a flop, I guarantee you that everybody would have known that you were the Chairman.” Newton Minow, the head of the Federal Communications Commission, chimed in, to Kennedy’s amusement, “Mr. President, if the flight had been a flop, the Vice President would have been the next astronaut.” Johnson did not share in the mirth, understanding that as the principal subordinate responsible for the moon shot, he would have to take the fall for a failure. Kennedy, however, knew that, as with the Bay of Pigs, he would be the one to suffer the greatest consequences. In joking about shifting blame for any failure to Johnson, he was acknowledging that he was betting a great deal on a space initiative to improve his public image as a dynamic leader intent on winning the Cold War.
Kennedy’s speech also came against the backdrop of grave concerns about Soviet threats to West Berlin.
Since 1945 the city had been divided into eastern and western zones, with West Berlin 110 miles inside the Soviets’ East German area of occupation. In 1948, Moscow had responded to a western plan to rebuild West Germany by blockading access to West Berlin, which the Allies overcame through a fifteen-month airlift bringing supplies into the isolated city. The rescue of the city from communist control made West Berlin a symbol of the East-West struggle between freedom and authoritarian rule.
In a January 1961 speech, Khrushchev warned of his intention to sign a peace treaty with the East Germans, who would then control the 110-mile route from West Germany to West Berlin and would insist on integrating the western part of the city into the eastern zone. Leaving it to the East Germans to block access to West Berlin would give Khrushchev some means to avoid a direct confrontation with the United States. But it was a thinly veiled ploy that represented a renewed assault on the independence of a free community at odds with communist Russia. Kennedy had considered addressing the issue in his State of the Union speech at the end of January, but his advisers had persuaded him to mute the threat. Existing conditions in Berlin, however, threatened to destabilize East Germany and other communist satellites: The flow of talented migrants escaping the East through Berlin and West Berlin’s relative prosperity and freedom formed a painful contrast with the austerity and repression in Eastern Europe’s communist regimes.
Kennedy was keen to avoid a crisis with Moscow over Berlin, but the Konrad Adenauer government in Bonn was pressing for private and public reassurances of the new administration’s intentions to defend West Berlin. On March 10, when Kennedy met at the White House with Ambassador Wilhelm Grewe, he assured Grewe that the United States was determined to defend West Germany and West Berlin. But he rejected public pronouncements as seeming to challenge Moscow. Fearful that the coming assault on the Bay of Pigs would raise concerns that he might be recklessly aggressive toward the communists, Kennedy wanted any Soviet-American crisis to be triggered by Moscow, not the United States.
In a meeting a few days later with West Berlin mayor Willy Brandt, Kennedy complained that the West’s most difficult post–World War II legacy was Berlin and that they would just have to live with the situation for the time being. By meeting with Brandt, a Social Democrat who was planning to run against Adenauer for the chancellorship, Kennedy was projecting himself into West Germany’s political divide and creating tensions with the existing government. It carried serious risks: The eighty-five-year-old Adenauer, the Alte, or “Old One,” who had become a symbol of Western resistance to Soviet expansion, enjoyed considerable standing across Western Europe. But by openly conferring with the younger, forty-eight-year-old Brandt, who had fled the Nazis, lived in Norway during World War II, and established himself in postwar Germany as a progressive proponent of European reconciliation, Kennedy was hoping to get fresh suggestions of how to resolve or at least mute difficulties over Berlin. He had little expectation that Adenauer, with whom he was to meet later in the spring, would offer anything but familiar hard-line anticommunist rhetoric.
Brandt, however, had little to suggest beyond asking Khrushchev for assurances that if he signed a peace treaty with East Germany, the German communists would not precipitate a crisis by trying to seize the city’s western zone. Kennedy pressed him for some more proactive way to resolve the Berlin problem with Moscow and East Germany. Kennedy asked him what he thought of George Kennan’s 1957 proposal to neutralize Central Europe by ending Soviet dominance of Eastern Europe, demilitarizing Germany, and ending Cold War tensions over this contested ground. Brandt saw no realistic possibility that the Soviets would relax their grip on their East European satellites.
Brandt’s pessimism about finding a way out of a potential clash with Moscow over Berlin frustrated Kennedy, who feared the situation could escalate into a crisis. As Llewellyn Thompson, the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, told him in a dispatch from Moscow, without some kind of negotiation and settlement with Khrushchev beyond telling him that “we would fight rather than abandon people of West Berlin . . . it could involve real possibility of world war.” At a minimum, heightened tensions over Berlin would almost certainly intensify Cold War differences.
Over the next two months, Kennedy cast a broad net in search of some answer to the Berlin question. The State Department, Harvard national security expert Henry Kissinger, former secretary of state Dean Acheson, several U.S. ambassadors, and Germany’s Chancellor and foreign minister weighed in. It was a demoralizing exercise. The State Department, for which Kennedy already had little regard, had no good ideas about what to do. The best it could offer was “the possibility of developing and strengthening deterrents other than the pure threat of ultimate thermonuclear war.” Kissinger, who struck Kennedy as “pompous and long-winded,” urged Kennedy to consider visiting Berlin during a European trip in June. “The Soviets may construe such an action as a provocation,” but Kissinger believed that worrying about that would be excessively timid. The Soviets were not going to let the issue rest: Kissinger’s answer was to confront them head-on, which was exactly what Kennedy didn’t want to do.
Acheson shared Kissinger’s call for firmness. He saw Berlin as of the greatest importance and pressed Kennedy to adopt some sort of military response. He suggested that two divisions of ground forces be deployed to ensure continued access to West Berlin. Foy Kohler, the assistant secretary of state for European affairs, echoed the State Department–Acheson–Kissinger view that offering to negotiate wouldn’t serve any good purpose. A display of toughness was the best idea. David Bruce and Charles Bohlen, both with decades of experience as U.S. diplomats in Europe, agreed that negotiations with Moscow over Berlin offered no satisfactory outcome. The pessimism of these experts and seasoned diplomats exasperated Kennedy. He diplomatically put them off by saying that he had not yet decided what to do.
Kennedy was not happy with the sterile approach to so volatile a problem. Schlesinger recalled Kennedy sitting “poker-faced, confining himself to questions about the adequacy of existing military plans.” Schlesinger later remembered him as more than frustrated by “the apparent impossibility of developing a negotiating position on Berlin.” It “left Kennedy with little doubt that the State Department was not yet an instrumentality fully and promptly responsive to presidential purpose.” He could have said the same about Acheson and Kissinger, who seemed to have less aversion to a military confrontation with Moscow than Kennedy. By contrast with them, however, Kennedy would have to bear the burden of risking the many lives that could be consumed in a war.
Schlesinger could have told him that nothing had changed since Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency. “You should go through the experience of trying to get any changes in the thinking, policy and action of the career diplomats and then you’d know what a real problem was,” FDR told a friend. He dismissed the Foreign Service professionals as the “boys in striped pants,” “old maids,” and “stuffed shirts.” Echoing FDR, Kennedy complained about the State Department that “they never have any ideas over there, never come up with anything new.” Kennedy toyed with the possibility of having “a secret office of thirty people or so to run foreign policy while maintaining the State Department as a façade in which people might contentedly carry papers from bureau to bureau.”
Conversations with Adenauer and German foreign minister Heinrich von Brentano in mid-April yielded little more than platitudes. Kennedy explained that the United States and Britain were still considering what to do about Moscow’s threat to Berlin. When he asked Adenauer what he thought might happen in Berlin this summer, “the Chancellor smilingly replied that he was no prophet.” But he and Brentano left no doubt that they saw the very future of Germany at stake. “If Berlin fell, . . . it would mean the death sentence for Europe and the Western World.”
In 1961, in the immediate aftermath of the Bay of Pigs failure, no issue troubled Kennedy and his advisers more than Berlin. It was the international trouble spot most likely to trigger a Soviet
-American confrontation and a disastrous war. At the beginning of May, when McNamara sketched out military plans to counter a threatened communist takeover of Berlin, he reminded Kennedy that Eisenhower was prepared to fight a full-scale war to defend the city. But McNamara thought that massive retaliation should be preceded by a reliance on conventional forces. Nonetheless, the possibility of a nuclear exchange remained a serious contingency that frightened Kennedy and made him eager to meet with Khrushchev to persuade him to back away from a confrontation over Berlin.
A conversation between Llewellyn Thompson and Khrushchev on May 24 underscored the need for an early summit discussion that could emphasize the dangers to both sides in any Soviet effort to alter the status of West Berlin. Khrushchev declared his intention to sign a peace treaty with East Germany in the fall or winter. But it hardly signaled the end of communist dominance. A Germany under Moscow’s control remained a vital part of Soviet national security. A treaty would give the East Germans ostensible control of access to West Berlin. Khrushchev said “he realized this would bring a period of great tension but was convinced would not lead to war.” He also declared that “German reunification was impossible and in fact no one really wanted it.” When Thompson warned him that the West would respond to any threat to West Berlin with force, Khrushchev waved aside the warning, saying “if we wanted war we would get it but he was convinced only madmen would want war.”