The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960–1963

By Michael Beschloss

The groundbreaking and revelatory tale of the most dangerous years of the Cold War and the two leaders who held the fate of the world in their hands.

This bestselling history takes us into the tumultuous period from 1960 through 1963 when the Berlin Wall was built and the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the United States and Soviet Union to the abyss. In this compelling narrative, author Michael Beschloss, praised by Newsweek as “the nation’s leading Presidential historian,” draws on declassified American documents and interviews with Kennedy aides and Soviet sources to reveal the inner workings of the CIA, Pentagon, White House, KGB, and politburo, and show us the complex private relationship between President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev.
 
Beschloss discards previous myths to show how the miscalculations and conflicting ambitions of those leaders caused a nuclear confrontation that could have killed tens of millions of people. Among the cast of characters are Robert Kennedy, Robert McNamara, Adlai Stevenson, Fidel Castro, Willy Brandt, Leonid Brezhnev, and Andrei Gromyko. The Bay of Pigs invasion, the Vienna Summit, the Berlin Crisis, and what followed are rendered with urgency and intimacy as the author puts these dangerous years in the context of world history.
 
“Impressively researched and engrossingly narrated” (Los Angeles Times), The Crisis Years brings to vivid life a crucial epoch in a book that David Remnick of the New Yorker has called the “definitive” history of John F. Kennedy and the Cold War.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Aug 16, 2016
• ISBN: 9781504039376

Michael Beschloss

Michael Beschloss is a historian and the New York Times–bestselling author of nine books, including Kennedy and Roosevelt: The Uneasy Alliance (1980); Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and the U-2 Affair (1986); The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960–1963 (1991); The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman, and the Destruction of Hitler’s Germany (2002); and Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America, 1789–1989 (2007). Born in Chicago and educated at Williams College and Harvard University, Beschloss is a contributor to NBC News, PBS NewsHour, and the New York Times, and has been called “the nation’s leading presidential historian” by Newsweek. He lives with his wife in Washington, DC.  

Book preview

PREFACE

This volume examines the relationship of John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev and its impact on the Cold War. Why did these two leaders, who both came to power with genuine hopes of reducing the harshness of Soviet-American relations, take humankind instead to the edge of nuclear disaster and into the most ferocious arms race in world history?

The book benefits from new scholarship and new information on the Kennedy-Khrushchev period. Like every scholar, I stand on the shoulders of many others and am happy to here express my debt to all of those who have gone before me. Recent years have seen the opening of the majority of John Kennedy’s papers bearing on the Soviet Union and of other archives shedding light on his relations with Nikita Khrushchev. American political, military, and intelligence officials of the period have become more willing to be interviewed at length about sensitive aspects of their service. Thanks to a Harvard group, Soviet and American officials and historians have gathered to reexamine the crises over Berlin and Cuba.

In my last book, Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev and the U-2 Affair,* I complained about the paucity of Soviet sources open to Western scholars. The increased openness of the Soviet government has excited expectations that at last historians can write with equal access to Soviet and American sources. This book does benefit from hundreds of oral and written reminiscences by Soviet figures that were not until recently available. These expand our knowledge and understanding of Soviet decision-making.

Still I have used them with considerable self-restraint, for they are subject to the same partisan motives, faulty memories, and other limitations that distort Western oral history and memoir. Unlike in the West, we do not yet have access to a substantial number of contemporaneous official Soviet documents that might help us to better judge their accuracy. Until the Soviet government opens its classified archives to Western scholars, volumes such as this one must be more tentative in their treatment of the Soviet than the Western side. Until that time, no scholar can aspire to write a fully comprehensive or reliable history of any portion of the Cold War.

Information is not the only ingredient vital to historiography. So is the passage of time. It is difficult to think of two leaders whose reputations have oscillated more wildly in three decades than those of Khrushchev and Kennedy. The distance of thirty years allows us to look at both men with greater dispassion.

The end of the Cold War enables us to study that dangerous half century not as an earlier phase of current politics but as a discrete epoch. By exploiting the assets of retrospect and increasing information, historians in both East and West can begin to work toward consensus on the overarching questions of why that epoch started, why it ended, and how to prevent another such tragic and costly struggle.

MICHAEL R. BESCHLOSS

Washington, D.C.

March 1991

*Harper & Row, 1986, p. xvi.

CHAPTER 1

Almost Midnight

On Sunday morning, October 14, 1962, John Fitzgerald Kennedy awoke at the Penn Sheraton Hotel in Pittsburgh, there to campaign for Democrats running in the 1962 elections. He did not know it yet, but this was the eve of a military confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union that was potentially the most dangerous ever.

The President attended Sunday Mass and flew to Niagara Falls, New York, where he climbed into an open car for a motorcade into Buffalo. A girl jumped up and down, shouting, I can see his hair! I can see his hair! After speaking on the steps of the Buffalo City Hall, he was scheduled to fly back to Washington in midafternoon.

Then his press secretary, Pierre Salinger, told reporters that there had been a sudden shift of plans: now the President would stop in New York City on Sunday evening to consult with Adlai Stevenson, his Ambassador to the United Nations.

Stevenson had been spending a weekend with friends at Rhinebeck on the Hudson when asked to rush to the President’s side. Flown by helicopter to New York City’s Idlewild Airport at 6:35 P.M., he was still wearing a country tweed jacket and sweater when he shook Kennedy’s hand and followed him into the presidential limousine.

The two men were driven to the Carlyle Hotel, where the President kept a thirty-fourth-floor duplex with antique French furniture and glittering night views of Manhattan. He chatted with Stevenson for an hour about Cuba and the Congo. Then Stevenson left the hotel, telling reporters, Just a routine briefing.

The newsmen did not discover that Stevenson was quietly followed into Kennedy’s suite by the President’s gregarious old Harvard roommate, Torbert Macdonald, a Congressman from Malden, Massachusetts. Dinner was brought in. After three hours, Kennedy and Macdonald emerged from the Carlyle and were driven to La Guardia Airport, where they boarded Air Force One, bound for Washington.

Far below the presidential plane as it swept over Washington was an outpost of the Central Intelligence Agency, hidden on an upper floor of a car dealership five blocks from the floodlit U.S. Capitol. Inside the darkened suite, photo experts leaned over light boxes, staring at images taken that morning of Fidel Castro’s Cuba. A U-2 spy plane had provided the first close look in five weeks at the western reaches of the island.

Secret agents and Cuban exiles had reported to the CIA that the Soviet Union was moving missiles into western Cuba capable of launching nuclear warheads against the United States. Kennedy had sent the U-2 to assure himself that these reports were wrong.

His Sovietologists had reminded him that Nikita Khrushchev had never allowed Soviet nuclear missiles to go outside the Soviet Union. They had insisted that the Chairman would never be so reckless as to send them in secret to an area so close to the United States and an island ruled by a leader so erratic and unpredictable as Castro.

On Monday, weary from campaigning and his late night at the Carlyle, the President did not arrive at the Oval Office until 11:27 A.M., almost three hours later than usual. As he sat down at the famous desk carved from the timbers of the H.M.S. Resolute, his back hurt. On the South Grounds of the White House, the Army Band was tuning up and crowds were gathering for the landing by Marine helicopter of Ahmed Ben Bella, Prime Minister of newly independent Algeria.

Every morning, in bed or in his office, Kennedy donned the horn-rimmed reading glasses he never wore in public and looked through a top-secret document called The President’s Intelligence Checklist. The CIA tailored this paper to the reading habits of each President it served. Under Kennedy, the Checklist used the almost wise-guy language that the President and his intimates used in private.

This morning’s edition said, The Saudis, fed up with the unending overflights of their territory by Egyptian aircraft, have obliquely warned Cairo to knock it off.… A well-placed source in Vientiane tells us that the cabinet on Friday was treated to a blistering harangue by Phoumi Vongvichit of the Pathet Lao.

The men at the Agency knew that this President’s attention could be caught by salacious secrets about foreign leaders. Kennedy was intrigued to hear that the President of Brazil, João Goulart, had had his wife’s lover shot to death. He was given a transcript showing what the belligerent West German Defense Minister, Franz-Josef Strauss, talks like when drunk.

Ben Bella’s chopper landed on the South Grounds at Monday noon. As the President and his dark young state guest marched past an honor guard, the nearly five-year-old Caroline Kennedy and her kindergarten class watched from an upstairs window of the White House. Each time the cannon boomed in its twenty-one-gun salute, the children cried out, Bang! The President looked up at the window and barely managed not to smile.

Charles de Gaulle, with his exquisite conception of statesmanlike behavior, would have been outraged. The Algerian was charmed. Kennedy led him into the Rose Garden, where his wife, Jacqueline, was crouching with her arms around little John, Jr., who was frightened by the sound of the cannon. Grinning, Ben Bella pinched the cheek of the President’s son.

In the aerie above the car dealership, a CIA man cried, Take a look at this! Bleary-eyed colleagues looked over his shoulder at a blowup of San Cristóbal, one hundred miles west of Havana. He showed them a rude series of tents, propellant vehicles, missile transporters, erectors, and a launching pad. His superior, Arthur Lundahl, said, Don’t leave this room. We might be sitting on the biggest story of our time.

Lundahl dialed Ray Cline, the CIA’s Deputy Director for Intelligence, who said, You know all the shit is going to hit the fan when you tell him that. Feeling that he lacked the seniority to give Kennedy the grim news, Cline called the President’s national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, whom he had known since they were both Junior Fellows at Harvard in 1941.

Bundy and his wife, Mary, were giving a small dinner for Charles and Avis Bohlen, who were about to sail for Paris, where the lifelong diplomat and Soviet expert was to accept the difficult mission of serving as Kennedy’s envoy to de Gaulle. When the telephone rang, Bundy left the room to take the call. Cline spoke guardedly: Those things we’ve been worrying about—it looks as though we’ve really got something.

Bundy asked, You sure? Cline was sure. Bundy said, I’ll handle it at my end. Will you guys be ready in the morning?

Bundy knew that within hours the United States and Soviet Union would probably be closer to nuclear war than at any time during the age of the atom. His telephone call to the President could prove more fateful than the call to Franklin Roosevelt after Pearl Harbor or to Harry Truman after North Koreans swarmed across the Thirty-eighth Parallel.

Then he thought again: why call the President now? Among the dinner guests talking and laughing in the next room were French diplomats and at least one reporter. The group would clearly be startled if the dinner party broke up, or if I spent the evening on the phone, because it could only be the President and nobody else. The highest officials of the U.S. government were scattered around town. If the President convened them all tonight, everyone in the city could learn the secret.

Bundy knew that his boss was tired after his late flight from New York. As he told Kennedy much later, I decided that a quiet evening and a night of sleep were the best preparation you could have in the light of what would face you in the next days.

At eight-thirty on Tuesday morning, October 16, Bundy took the tiny elevator up to the family quarters on the second floor of the White House. He walked down the wide hall past paintings by Catlin, Homer, Prendergast, and Sargent and paused before the oaken door to the President’s bedchamber. Once inside the room, he saw Kennedy sitting in a wing chair, wearing a nightshirt and slippers and eating breakfast from a tray.

Bundy told him that the worst had come to pass. The angry President’s first reaction was a sense that Khrushchev can’t do this to me. He was certain that one way or another, the missiles have to go. Both he and Bundy knew without saying it that bombing the missile sites could sentence millions of Americans, Europeans, and Soviets to their deaths.

Kennedy lowered himself into a steaming bath with his children’s toy yellow dogs and pink pigs along the rim of the tub. Then, as he quickly dressed, he told Bundy to call an urgent secret meeting in the Cabinet Room and rattled off names to be invited. He telephoned his brother Robert, Attorney General of the United States, and told him they were facing great trouble.

At the Justice Department, Robert Kennedy kept a morning appointment with Richard Helms, the CIA’s poker-faced Deputy Director for Plans. Helms had asked to see the Attorney General about a recent Soviet defector, knowing that Kennedy rarely minced words. Once when Helms told him of a plan to use a Latin American Jesuit order in a CIA operation, the Attorney General shook his head: You can’t trust the Jesuits.

As Helms walked into the vaulted office, his piercing eyes took in the crayon drawings by Kennedy’s children tacked onto the mahogany-paneled walls. The shirtsleeved Kennedy looked up from behind his big desk. Dick, is it true they’ve found Russian missiles in Cuba?

Yes, Bob, they have.

"Shit!"

Helms and Kennedy discussed the defector, but their attention remained on Cuba. Later in the morning, the two men went to the old Executive Office Building, across from the White House, for a scheduled engagement with the Special Group (Augmented), a group invented by the President to oversee covert action against the island. Few of its members were cleared to know about the missiles in Cuba. Helms and Kennedy knew that canceling the meeting might arouse suspicions.

Since the failed effort to retake the island by landing at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961, Helms had felt what he called white heat from the President about Cuba. In the absence of intolerable provocation by Castro or the Soviets, Kennedy lacked the stomach to approve a full-scale American military invasion that could cost more than a hundred thousand lives. The American war against Castro would thus have to be a secret campaign.

As Helms recalled, "The whip was on the Agency all the time from the President through Bobby: ‘Get on with this thing! God, you’ve got to do something about it!’ He wanted Castro out of there. In January 1962, Robert Kennedy had called Helms to his office and told him that getting rid of Castro was the top priority in the U.S. government. All else is secondary. No time, money, effort, or manpower is to be spared."

The result was Operation Mongoose, which soon became the largest of the CIA’s covert operations. The program consisted of at least thirty-three different schemes intended to culminate in Castro’s removal—paramilitary raids, espionage, counterfeiting of money and ration books, and attacks on oil refineries and farms that would make the Cuban economy scream. The CIA contaminated Cuban sugar fields, detonated bombs in department stores, set factories aflame.

For two years, Helms and his men had also collaborated with Mafia leaders like Sam Giancana of Chicago to murder Fidel Castro. By October 1962, Helms had concluded that the plots were going nowhere. He suspected that at least one of the Mob’s hit squads in Cuba had been captured and tortured by Castro’s forces. But as he recalled years later, he saw little harm in letting the gangsters keep on trying to kill the dictator in order to see whether the Mafia actually had any valuable intelligence assets on the island.

During this morning’s Special Group session, to avoid betraying the secret of the missiles on Cuba, Robert Kennedy behaved as if there were no special news from the island. With more heat than usual, he complained that the job of Castro’s removal had been botched. Mongoose had been going for a year without success. Why couldn’t they do something? The President was not happy.

After the meeting, he went to Bundy’s office in the White House basement to look at the U-2 pictures for himself. Bending over the pictures with a magnifying glass, he hissed, "Shit! Shit! Shit!"

In the Oval Office, the President asked his close aide and speech writer Theodore Sorensen to look up what kind of public warning he had issued against Soviet offensive missiles in Cuba. The answer: before July 1962, Kennedy had never formally cautioned the Soviet Union against such an installation on the island. By then, the missiles had to have been already on their way.

White House aides not cleared to know the Cuba secret wondered why Kennedy was so edgy this morning. He kept pulling at the wattle under his chin, tracing his lips with his index finger, jamming his foot against the drawers of his desk, and bouncing his knee up and down. David Powers, the man-of-all-work who had served the President since his first campaign for Congress in 1946, thought, God, he looks like someone has just told him the house is on fire.

Salinger assumed that Kennedy was angry about Ben Bella. After the imposing White House welcome and what the President had thought was an amiable conversation in the Oval Office, the Algerian had confirmed Kennedy’s private prejudices about the opportunism of nonaligned leaders by flying straight to Havana and joining Castro to demand that the United States abandon the ninety-nine-year lease to its Guantanamo naval base on the island.

At 11:50 A.M., Kennedy walked into the Cabinet Room and sat down with Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and other liege men around the coffin-shaped table. The President was the only one present who knew that he had ordered this session secretly recorded by a tape machine connected to microphones hidden in the draperies.

As the reels began to turn, Kennedy asked Arthur Lundahl and a CIA missile expert, Sidney Graybeal, to explain the U-2 pictures to the laymen present. The tape of the dialogue has been preserved:

This same morning in Moscow, Kennedy’s new Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Foy Kohler, had gone to the Kremlin for his first official audience with the man who was both Chairman of the Council of Ministers and First Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party’s Central Committee.

Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev’s face was still pink and glowing from two months of swimming, sunbathing, and badminton-playing with his wife, son, daughters, and grandchildren at his estate at Pitsunda on the Black Sea. The two months were not merely frivolous. Since the days of Stalin, who rarely left Moscow, Soviet leaders had been almost honor-bound to spend long periods away from the capital as earnest of their intention not to reimpose a Stalin-style rule.

While relaxing at Pitsunda, Khrushchev liked to stroll the beaches and woods and ponder what he insisted was the radiant future of the Soviet Union. With his eyes half closed, he stayed up late into the night with friends and family, singing folk songs from his Ukrainian childhood like The Wide Dnieper Roars and Moans, Black Lashes, Brown Eyes, and I Wonder at the Sky. Semiliterate into his thirties, he now professed to read War and Peace at least once a year.

At the Kremlin, standing behind Khrushchev as he greeted Kohler and his political counselor, Richard Davies, were Vasily Kuznetsov and Mikhail Smirnovsky of the Soviet Foreign Ministry and the Chairman’s crack young translator, Viktor Sukhodrev. As always, the Americans were seated across from Khrushchev at the green-baize-draped table, the sun streaming into their eyes.

Khrushchev complained that American spy planes were harassing Soviet merchant ships heading for Cuba. Why was the United States so worried about Cuba? The Soviet government had no intention of putting any offensive weapons in there. Kohler explained that one reason Americans were so worried about Cuba was Castro’s recent announcement that the Soviet Union was building a new port on the island.

The Chairman said, Just because I am building a fishing port in Cuba, you want to go to war. After all, I’m not doing anything you haven’t done to me in Turkey and Iran. He inveighed against the Jupiter missiles placed by the United States in 1959 along the Soviet border in Turkey. While insisting that the Cuban port would have no military value, he conceded that Castro’s announcement had caused Kennedy political trouble: If I had been in Moscow, the announcement would never have been made.… After the elections, there will be, plenty of time to talk about these things.

After returning to the American Embassy, Kohler cabled Washington that Khrushchev had been charming and extremely amiable. In his ignorance about the missiles in Cuba, Kohler reported that the conversation had been very reassuring.

In the afternoon, the President went to the State Department auditorium for an off-the-record session with five hundred editorial writers and broadcasters. Several in the audience wondered why Kennedy seemed so distracted and intense.

He declared that the overriding problem for the United States was to ensure the survival of our country without igniting the third and perhaps the last war. He recited a Spanish bullfighter’s verse that Robert Kennedy carried in his wallet:

Bullfight critics ranked in rows

Crowd the enormous Plaza full;

But only one is there who knows.

And he’s the man who fights the bull.

That evening, after another Cabinet Room council on the missiles, he and Jacqueline were driven to Georgetown for a dinner given by the columnist Joseph Alsop and his wife, Susan Mary. As Alsop recalled, the President sat at the head of the table and damn near threw a ruin on the evening because he was in such a deep brown study. Twice Kennedy asked two other guests, Chip Bohlen and the Oxford historian Isaiah Berlin, what the Soviets had done in the past when backed into a corner.

Mrs. Alsop was surprised that the President wanted to go back for more on a subject that didn’t even seem interesting. That night in bed, she told her husband, I may be crazy, but I think something is going on. Berlin left the dinner wondering whether deep in the President’s mind he may not have a presentiment that he may not live a long time … and that he must make his mark on history quickly.

Buoyancy and optimism were hallmarks of Kennedy’s political persona. Like a lot of flags on a ship, observed his Harvard friend Charles Spalding. But as his admirer the historian William Manchester observed, Under the facade there is, though scarcely suspected, a dark vein of sadness. The President’s foreign policy aide Walt Rostow noticed that Kennedy’s voracious enjoyment of life was always balanced against a sense of the possibility of failure and tragedy.

Fatalism was a rational response to Kennedy’s life experience. Son of a deeply pessimistic Irish father, he never lost sight of how his own career had been shaped by accident. Had his father not amassed a fortune, had his older brother, Joe, survived World War II to enter politics, had one voter per precinct in 1960 changed his vote to Nixon, he probably would never have become President of the United States. He privately joked that he owed his job to Cook County, Illinois.

He was fascinated by the subject of death by violence and accident. His friend Senator George Smathers of Florida recalled that twenty times or more Kennedy asked him what would be the best way to die: What would it be like to drown? Would you rather be in an airplane and crash? Would you rather be shot? Is it the best way to get hit in the head or in your chest somewhere and have time? He wondered whether you would think about all the good things that had happened to you, or regret all the things you hadn’t done.

Sitting on the Honey Fitz, the presidential yacht he had renamed for his maternal grandfather, Mayor John Fitzgerald of Boston, Kennedy would watch a passing jet and wonder whether if the pilot died, he could fly it, wrestling with the controls. As a macabre joke while relaxing with Jacqueline and friends at Newport, he once pantomimed his own death, clutching his chest and falling to the ground with make-believe blood gushing from his mouth as a friend’s motion picture camera rolled.

Kennedy’s Choate School friend LeMoyne Billings felt that in the late 1940s, after Kennedy’s beloved sister Kathleen was killed in an air crash and he was told that he too might soon die of Addison’s disease, he just figured there was no sense in planning ahead anymore. The only thing that made sense … was to live for the moment, treating each day as if it were his last, demanding of life constant intensity, adventure, and pleasure.

Even as President, Kennedy’s tomorrow-we-die streak remained, evinced by his promiscuity with women and his indifference to physical risk. Secret Service men complained that he was a notoriously poor driver who drove through red lights and took many unnecessary chances. Sometimes he dismissed the agents, saying, Whoever wants to get me will get me.

In November 1963, the weekend before he left for Texas, he told Lyndon Johnson, Get in my plane. The agents pleaded with him to follow custom and let the Vice President fly in a separate aircraft. Kennedy laughed. Don’t you fellows want McCormack as President?*

Once at a Washington horse show, the novelist and playwright Gore Vidal, whose mother and Jacqueline’s had successively married the same man, remarked to Kennedy on how easy it would be for someone to shoot the President—only they’d probably miss and hit me. Kennedy chuckled: No great loss.

The President went on to relate the surprise ending of the thriller Twenty-four Hours by Edgar Wallace. A British prime minister was told he would be assassinated at midnight. Guards from Scotland Yard surrounded Number Ten Downing Street. Midnight came and went. The telephone rang. Relieved, the prime minister picked up the receiver—and was electrocuted.

Near midnight, driven away from the Alsop house in his black Lincoln with Jacqueline sitting on his left, Kennedy stared out at the almost-deserted streets of Washington.

He often said that being President would be the best job in the world if it weren’t for the Russians.… You never know what those bastards are up to. That afternoon Rusk had brought him Kohler’s cables from Moscow about his conversation with Khrushchev. Kennedy had flushed with anger. No offensive weapons in Cuba? No desire to embarrass him before the elections? When had a Soviet leader told an American President more brazen lies?

The President told his brother that Khrushchev’s behavior was how an immoral gangster would act, and not as a statesman, not as a person with a sense of responsibility. As Robert later said, It had all been lies. One gigantic fabric of lies. We had been deceived by Khrushchev, but we had also fooled ourselves.

Kennedy knew what thermonuclear war would mean: the flight to the underground presidential Doomsday headquarters in Virginia, the rioting and panic, the death clouds over American and Soviet cities. Within days, he and Khrushchev would embody the image that Dwight Eisenhower had used in 1953 to describe the Cold War: two colossi eying each other across a trembling world.

The President could not later ignore the irony that this global confrontation had been ushered in by accident and miscalculation, exactly the dangers he had preached against in public and private for two years. In the fall of 1962, he was reading the best-selling thriller Fail Safe by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler, about the accidental release of an American nuclear bomber, leading to the incineration of Moscow and New York.

This October evening was three years and one month to the day after Kennedy’s first encounter with the leader of the Soviet Union, during Khrushchev’s American tour. Kennedy was a junior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and, as the Chairman never forgot, he was late.

*John McCormack of Massachusetts, the parochial Speaker of the House and sometime Kennedy foe, was in his seventy-second year and uncertain health.

CHAPTER 2

He’s Younger Than My Own Son

On Wednesday afternoon, September l6, 1959, the junior Senator from Massachusetts stepped out of his family’s new eighteen-seat Convair, the Caroline, at National Airport in Washington, D.C. He found his driver, a Last Hurrah Bostonian named Muggsy O’Leary, and slipped behind the wheel of his battered blue Pontiac convertible. O’Leary sat in what he called the death seat for one of his boss’s breakneck rides to the Old Senate Office Building.

Kennedy had interrupted what his office called a pulse-feeling tour of Ohio in order to take tea at the Capitol with Nikita Khrushchev, leaders of the Senate, and fellow members of the Foreign Relations Committee, led by its chairman, J. William Fulbright of Arkansas. Several Senators had announced their refusal to sit in the same room as the best-known Communist on the planet.

Khrushchev was in Washington for the first American visit by a supreme Soviet leader. His week-long rail and air journey to New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Des Moines, and Pittsburgh was scheduled to end with a private weekend with President Eisenhower and their chief aides at Camp David.

Usually Kennedy was irritated by having to rush back to Washington for an important Senate vote or another mandatory occasion. Not this time. He was curious to see Khrushchev in person, and he could ill afford to be seen skipping the chance to do so in order to barnstorm in Ohio.

A Gallup poll released this week showed that in a presidential trial heat, Richard Nixon had surged ahead of Kennedy for the first time this year. The Vice President’s new lead was attributed to his kitchen debate with the Soviet leader in Moscow in July, allowing him to advertise himself as the man who had stood up to Khrushchev. Kennedy knew that attending a Senate tea with the Chairman was a meager substitute, but it would at least enable him to tell voters that he too had dealt with the leader of the Soviet Union.

Kennedy envied the prestige that Hubert Humphrey had gained from seeing Khrushchev in Moscow for twelve well-publicized hours in 1958. Only four years after the plague time of Joseph McCarthy, the Minnesota Senator had managed to win the approval even of Henry Luce’s Life in a glowing cover story. Kennedy thought briefly of trying to arrange his own audience with Khrushchev but abandoned the idea so as not to seem to be imitating Humphrey.

Early in 1959, the unctuous American-baiting Soviet Ambassador Mikhail Menshikov, sardonically known in Washington as Smiling Mike, began calling on Senators cited as presidential possibilities in 1960. When, Menshikov came by the Kennedy office, the Senator gave him very short shrift, as his foreign affairs adviser Frederick, Holborn recalled. Kennedy was very resistant to dealing directly with Soviets.… It didn’t last very long and Kennedy wasn’t very interested in having any significant conversation. I think he was just very wary. He didn’t know what Menshikov would say or try to—he didn’t like the politics of it.

Some weeks later, Menshikov invited Kennedy by letter to come for a weekend at the Soviet estate on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Holborn noted that Kennedy’s response was wry but contemptuous: he disliked the Ambassador, feared that the Soviets or the Right might use the visit to embarrass him, and was certain he would be bored to death.

Arriving at his Senate office, Room 362, Kennedy looked through his telephone messages. Some concerned Ohio. Last night in Columbus, Kennedy and his twenty-seven-year-old brother, Edward, had dined with the state’s rotund Democratic Governor, Michael DiSalle (the Washington Evening Star: LOOK-ALIKE KENNEDYS MEET GOVERNOR). Two and a half hours of haggling had failed to capture DiSalle’s early endorsement for 1960.

Now it was almost five o’clock. The Khrushchev meeting was about to begin. Kennedy brushed aside a warning that he would be late. He returned some political telephone calls, then walked with Holborn to the Capitol, where they had never seen so many security men. Americans and Soviets with screeching walkie-talkies were guarding the soundproof door of F-53, the ceremonial chamber of the Foreign Relations Committee.

As Kennedy was let into the room, Khrushchev looked up. Although the Senator was only a few minutes late, five years as the most powerful man in the Kremlin had made the Chairman unaccustomed to tardiness. Always alert to the remotest hint of American affront, he may have wondered whether this was a deliberate insult. Was the young man showing his contempt for the great socialist state and its leader?

By laws of seniority, Kennedy was compelled to remain silent while Senate elders like Fulbright, Lyndon Johnson, Everett Dirksen, Richard Russell, Theodore Green, and Carl Hayden badgered Khrushchev about American overseas bases, outer space, Soviet subversion, censorship, and radio jamming. As Kennedy sat and listened, he took notes: Tea—vodka—if we drank vodka all the time, we could not launch rockets to the moon.… Tan suit—French cuffs—short, stocky, two red ribbons, two stars.

At the end of the ninety minutes, Fulbright introduced the guest of honor to each Senator. Kennedy was impressed by the way Khrushchev seemed to know exactly who in the room had enough influence in the Senate or presidential potential to merit special attention. Khrushchev told him that he looked too young to be a Senator: I’ve heard a lot about you. People say you have a great future ahead of you. Walking back to his office, Kennedy told Mike Mansfield, It was very important to see Khrushchev in the flesh.

Dictating his memoirs years later, Khrushchev said he was impressed with Kennedy. I remember liking his face, which was sometimes stern but which often broke into a good-natured smile. The Soviet diplomat Georgi Kornienko recalled that when Khrushchev asked Menshikov and his embassy staff about Kennedy, I gave the most positive picture. I said that, while Kennedy was not yet another Roosevelt, he was independent and intelligent and could be counted on for new departures. Khrushchev listened.

Several weeks later, Kennedy received a note from Fulbright along with his place card from the Khrushchev tea, which the Chairman had autographed for each Senator: Dear Jack.… Maybe this will enable you to get out of jail when the revolution comes, but it may have some other value that I do not now recognize.

Too junior to be invited to Khrushchev’s dinner for Eisenhower at the Soviet Embassy that evening, Kennedy flew back to Columbus and arrived late for an address to the Ohio Bankers Association. Reporting on his meeting, Kennedy said that Khrushchev had an inferiority complex, which surfaced in his answers to harmless questions: He has a sense of humor that runs through everything. He looks tireless.… He is built close to the ground, and it looks as if he will survive for a long time.

In speech after speech during the year to come, Kennedy noted Khrushchev’s prediction to the Senators on the Foreign Relations Committee that their children and grandchildren would live under communism: "I don’t believe it.… I believe his children can be free. But it depends on us."

As an adolescent in the 1930s, John Kennedy was considerably more aware of foreign affairs than the average Choate or Harvard student. During these years, his father was increasingly drawn to the international arena, doing film and liquor business in Europe, negotiating with bankers, businessmen, and foreign officials as chairman of Franklin Roosevelt’s Securities and Exchange Commission and Maritime Commission, and dealing with Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill in London during his fateful term as Roosevelt’s Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s.

Believing that commanding knowledge of world affairs would help them to have the social and political eminence he wished for them, Joseph Kennedy led his sons in the famous family dinner table arguments, sent them on foreign trips, and, while serving in London, hired Joe, Jr., and Jack for various tasks in the Embassy.

In the spring of 1934, carrying a tennis racket, Joe, Jr., boarded a train to Moscow and Leningrad with Harold Laski, the British Socialist with whom he was studying at the London School of Economics. When he returned home with enthusiastic tales of Soviet life and challenged his father on capitalism versus communism, his brother Jack gibed that Joe seems to understand the situation a little better than Dad.

In 1936, Rose Kennedy and her eldest daughter, Kathleen, went to see the mysterious land for themselves. In Moscow, they stayed at Spaso House with Ambassador William Bullitt, whom Roosevelt had appointed after recognizing Stalin’s regime in November 1933. Mrs. Kennedy was dismayed by the compulsory atheism and the secret police but enthralled by Moscow’s new Metro, finding every station a work of art in marble and mosaic.* By tour’s end, she conceded that the masses were better off in a good many ways than they had been under the czarist system.

In the summer of 1937, Jack toured France, Italy, and Spain and read John Gunther’s bestseller Inside Europe, which described Stalin’s purges and show trials as well as the rising Soviet standard of living. Gunther concluded that however much world revolution still lurked in Stalin’s mind, Soviet foreign policy could be expressed in one word—peace.

Kennedy wrote in his journal, Finished Gunther and have come to the decision that Facism [sic] is the thing for Germany and Italy, Communism for Russia, and Democracy for America and England. As a Harvard junior in 1938, he took a popular Russian history course taught by Professor Michael Karpovich, a White Russian émigré, who gave him a B-minus.

He left Harvard in the spring of 1939 to take a job arranged by his father in the American Embassy in Paris, where Bullitt was now Ambassador. In May, Jack wrote his Choate friend Lem Billings, now at Princeton, Am living it up at the Embassy and living like a King.… Big Bull Bullitt is his usual genial self and has been as a matter of fact very nice to me.†

Carrying a letter of introduction from Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Kennedy traveled to Poland, Latvia, Moscow, Leningrad, and the Crimea, Turkey, Palestine, and the Balkans. There is little record of his journey through the Soviet Union. Kennedy found it a crude, backward, hopelessly bureaucratic country. Later he suggested that his mother read Alice-Leone Moats’s Blind Date with Mars, which limned a grim, regimented Soviet people resigned to eternal imprisonment.

Assigned to entertain Joseph Kennedy’s son at the American Embassy in Moscow, Chip and Avis Bohlen were both struck by what Bohlen later called the young man’s charm and quick mind—especially his openmindedness about the Soviet Union, which Bohlen called a rare quality in those prewar days.

Had a great trip, Jack wrote Billings from London in mid-July. "The only way you can really know what is going to go on is to go to all the countries—I still don’t think there will be a war this year.… Germany will try to break Danzig off gradually making it difficult for Poland to say that at this point her independence is being threatened.* However, I don’t think she will succeed. After the outbreak of war in September, he returned to Harvard to write his senior honors thesis on Appeasement at Munich," which was published in July 1940 as the bestseller Why England Slept.

After Pearl Harbor, by then a lieutenant in Naval Intelligence, Kennedy wrote Billings, who was on his way to North Africa, "It seems a rather strange commentary that it will take death in large quantities to wake us up, but I really don’t think anything else ever will. I don’t think anyone realizes that nothing stands between us and the defeat of our Christian crusade against paganism except a lot of chinks who never heard of God, and a lot of Russians who have heard about Him but don’t want Him.

"I suppose we can’t afford to be very choosy at a time like this. When you get to Africa make friends with any brown, black, or yellow man you happen to meet. In The Decline of the West, Mr. Spengler, after carefully studying the waves of civilization, prophesied that the next few centuries belonged to the yellow man. After the Japs get through uniting Asia it looks as though Mrs. Lindbergh’s ‘wave of the future’ will certainly have a yellow look."

In May 1945, returned from his PT-109 adventure in the South Pacific, he covered the United Nations’ founding conference at San Francisco for the Hearst papers. From the turbulent meetings and talk of fighting the Russians in the next ten or fifteen years he concluded that much time would have to pass before the Soviets entrusted their safety to anyone but the Red Army: There is a heritage of twenty-five years of distrust between Russia and the rest of the world that cannot be overcome completely for a good many years.

After Kennedy was elected to Congress in 1946 from an ethnic working-class district in Massachusetts, his pronouncements on the Cold War reflected his constituents’ fury about Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. Kennedy told a Polish-American group that Franklin Roosevelt had given Poland to the Communists because he did not understand the Russian mind. In 1949, he lambasted a sick Roosevelt for giving up the Kurile Islands and strategic Chinese ports at Yalta.

Travel and ambitions for higher office helped to pull Kennedy’s views toward the mainstream of the national Democratic Party. A 1951 trip to Western Europe reassured him that a Red Army invasion was unlikely. In Paris, he asked General Eisenhower if there was not a great danger that Western military preparations in Europe might provoke Russia to attack. In his notes he recorded Eisenhower’s view "that these were only two chances for a deliberate war: 1st, If the Russians believed they could win a quick victory; 2nd, If they could win a long war of exhaustion. They can’t do either of these now.

He doesn’t eliminate the possibility of an accidental war. I asked him what he would do if he were advisor to the Russians. He replied that he would advise them to continue doing exactly what they are now doing—but more so, would keep up the pressure in the hopes of an economic collapse in the U.S. ‘or these countries here’ falling into Russian hands.… Said $64 question was whether Kremlin leaders were fanatical doctrinaires or just ruthless men determined to hold on to power. If first, chances of peace much less than 2nd.

By the time Kennedy reached the Senate in 1953, he had discarded much of his brash critique of the Roosevelt-Truman approach to the world. But only in 1957, as a new member of the Foreign Relations Committee preparing to run for President, did he move strongly into foreign affairs. In July, speaking on the Senate floor, he antagonized much of the American foreign policy establishment by endorsing Algerian independence from the French. The next month, in another floor speech, he called for the United States to promote diversity in Poland and other Soviet bloc countries through trade and economic assistance.

By the late 1950s, the Democratic Party was divided about how to deal with the Soviets. Dean Acheson and kindred spirits argued that the world had changed little since his term as Truman’s Secretary of State and that Khrushchev’s nuclear threats were intended to achieve Stalin’s old goal of world domination. Adlai Stevenson, Chester Bowles, Averell Harriman, and other Democrats believed that Khrushchev genuinely wished to reduce his military budget in order to improve the Soviet standard of living.

Kennedy was too allergic to ideology and too eager for broad Democratic support in 1960 to side with either camp. He used Cold War language that a Stevenson would never have used. After the Geneva summit of 1955: The barbarian may have taken the knife out of his teeth to smile, but the knife itself is still in his fist. When George Kennan in 1957 made his controversial proposal for East-West talks on disengagement from Central and Eastern Europe, Kennedy wrote him to praise its brilliance and stimulation.

In 1958 and 1959, he jabbed at the Eisenhower diplomacy from both left and right: the President was laggard on arms control, over-reliant on nuclear weapons, indifferent to the Third World and to the Soviet missile buildup. Along with other Democrats and Republicans he warned of a missile gap that would give the Soviets a new shortcut to world domination through Sputnik diplomacy, limited brushfire wars, indirect non-overt aggression, intimidation and subversion, internal revolution … and the vicious blackmail of our allies. The periphery of the free world will slowly be nibbled away.

The text of a tape-recorded conversation in July 1959 with his first biographer, James MacGregor Burns, reveals Kennedy’s private pessimism about improving relations with Moscow:

You have to first decide what is the motive force of the Soviet Union. Is it merely to provide security for them, and in order to provide security for the Russian mainland, do they have to have friendly countries on the borders? … Or is it evangelical, that communists can, by continuing to press on us, weaken us so that eventually they can—the world revolution?

I guess probably, obviously, a combination of the two. So therefore, I don’t think that there is any button that you press that reaches an accommodation with the Soviet Union which is hard and fast.… What it is is a constant day-to-day struggle with an enemy who is constantly attempting to expand his power.… You have two people, neither of whom—who are both of goodwill, but neither of whom can communicate because of a language difference.…

I don’t think there’s any magic solution to solve or really ease East-West at the present time. Now maybe a successor to Khrushchev—or even Khrushchev himself.… It’s like those ads you see in the Sunday [New York] Times in the back about some fellow with a beard about he releases the magic powers within you. The magic power really is the desire of everyone to be independent and every nation to be independent. That’s the basic force which is really, I think, the strong force on our side. That’s the magic power, and that’s what’s going to screw the Russians ultimately.

Khrushchev’s Camp David weekend with Eisenhower brought unexpected results. He suspended his demand that the West get out of Berlin. The two leaders agreed to a full-fledged summit with the leaders of Britain and France, after which Eisenhower would tour the Soviet Union with Khrushchev at his side. Despite the President’s caution, newsmen heralded a Spirit of Camp David that would begin to rid the world of Cold War.

Republican campaigners were delirious: Eisenhower would sign ground-breaking accords with the Soviets, travel the Soviet Union one month before the party conventions, and sweep Richard Nixon into the White House as the man to continue the President’s work for peace.

At the University of Rochester, Kennedy scoffed: the Khrushchev he had met had not in the slightest changed his belief in the inevitable triumph of communism. The real roots of the Soviet-American conflict cannot be easily settled by negotiations. Our basic national interests and their basic national interest clash—in Europe, in the Middle East, and around the world. The Washington Star felt that Kennedy’s speech showed that he at this stage of the game does not know which Way to jump. If we were in his shoes, we wouldn’t know either.

In the early spring of 1960, neither Kennedy nor his rivals wished to undercut the President as he prepared for the mid-May Paris summit at which he would bargain with Khrushchev over Berlin and a nuclear test ban treaty. As Kennedy won primaries in New Hampshire, Wisconsin, and Indiana, he stuck mainly to domestic issues.

Then, on May Day, an American U-2 crashed thirteen hundred miles inside the Soviet Union. Eisenhower pledged to stop further such flights but refused Khrushchev’s demand for an apology. The Chairman stalked out of the summit meeting in Paris, revoked his invitation to the Soviet Union, and declared that he would deal only with the next American President.

Campaigning in Oregon, Kennedy said that Khrushchev had made a clumsy attempt to divide us along partisan lines. He promised, if elected, to maintain Eisenhower’s ban on future espionage flights, but said that the President should never have let the risk of war hang on the possibility of an engine failure. As a result of the U-2 affair Americans were now living through the most dangerous time since the Korean War.

Two mornings after the summit collapse, a high school student in St. Helens, Oregon, asked Kennedy what he would have done in Eisenhower’s place. He replied that Khrushchev had set two conditions to continue the summit: First, that we apologize. I think that that might have been possible to do. And that, second, we try those responsible for the flight. We could not do that.… It was a condition Mr. Khrushchev knew we couldn’t meet, and therefore it indicated that he wanted to break it up.

Kennedy instantly knew that he should have been more careful. He had someone call the Portland Oregonian’s political reporter, Mervin Shoemaker, who was present, to say he had meant to say express regrets. But Shoemaker wrote a story accusing Kennedy’s henchmen of semantic sidestepping to explain away a statement by Kennedy that they fear might have important aftereffects.

Wire services sent Kennedy’s gaffe all over America. On the Senate floor, Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania demanded that he relieve himself of the suspicion of appeasement—a word that had a special sting for the son of Joseph Kennedy. Before replying, Kennedy wanted to make sure that he had undeniably said apologize. He called the St. Helens principal, who located a tape of his appearance and played it for him over the long-distance telephone.

On the Senate floor, he argued that he could not have proposed apologizing to Khrushchev to save the summit because the summit was by then already beyond saving. But bundles of angry telegrams descended on Room 362: When one apologizes to Khrushchev, it’s the same as apologizing to the Devil.… Saying or implying Eisenhower goofed at the summit will breed disgust for you and your party.… YOU’RE UNFIT TO BE PRESIDENT. They need your kind of double-dealers in Russia. Go to Russia.

Lyndon Johnson, campaigning in the Northwest, asked audiences, "I’m not prepared to apologize to Mr. Khrushchev—are you? (No-o-o-o-o-o! they cried.) David Kendall of the White House staff told colleagues that Kennedy had made himself the candidate of the Kremlin."

Richard Nixon called Kennedy’s naive comments new evidence of his inexperience: no President must ever apologize for trying to defend the United States. Time reported that the new cold air mass from Moscow had brought an entirely new atmosphere in U.S. political life. Senator Henry Jackson of Washington said, The public is going to expect a tough, tough line.

With Kennedy on the threshold of the Democratic nomination, surveys now showed that Americans were having second thoughts about entrusting their security to a forty-three-year-old back-bench Senator. The new atmosphere did not cause Kennedy to lose the remaining primaries, but had the U-2 wrecked the Paris summit in March rather than May, he might have been defeated by someone such as Adlai Stevenson who was more experienced in world affairs.

In June 1960, on the Senate floor, Kennedy proposed a twelve-point plan including increased defense spending to resist the Soviet program for world domination: As a substitute for policy, President Eisenhower has tried smiling at the Russians, our State Department has tried frowning at them, and Mr. Nixon has tried both.… So long as Mr. Khrushchev is convinced that the balance of power is shifting his way, no amount of either smiles or toughness—neither Camp David talks nor Kitchen Debates—can compel him to enter fruitful negotiations.

That summer, in Havana, Castro expropriated American property and asked for Soviet aid. Anti-American rioters in Tokyo forced the President to cancel a visit to Japan. Soviet forces were invited to the Congo. The Soviets walked out of Geneva disarmament talks. In July, they downed an American RB-47 over the Barents Sea and jailed the two survivors. In August, they subjected the U-2 pilot, Francis Gary Powers, to a humiliating show trial ending in a prison sentence.

Nikita Khrushchev had already twice remolded the 1960 campaign, first by meeting Eisenhower at Camp David and then by destroying the Paris summit. In September, emboldened by his summer’s gains, he sailed to New York to attend the UN General Assembly. For twenty-five days, he competed with the two presidential nominees for the attention of nervous Americans, giving press conferences from the balcony of the Soviet mission, embracing Castro in Harlem, gasconading at the UN, and, in the most famous gesture of his career, removing his shoe and beating his fists on the desktop.

The 1952 election had not been particularly fought in the vernacular of which candidate could stand up to Stalin. But Khrushchev’s three meetings with Eisenhower, his rocket-rattling, and his flamboyant visits to the United States had so personalized Soviet behavior that Americans in 1960 thought in terms of which man could best confront Khrushchev. Nixon boasted of his encounters with the Chairman and warned that Kennedy was rash and immature, the kind of man Mr. Khrushchev would make mincemeat of.

The truth was that neither candidate enjoyed the towering experience in foreign affairs that Nixon claimed for himself. Indeed, the Vice President had traveled on numerous vice presidential goodwill trips, including the Soviet tour in 1959 that included the kitchen debate with Khrushchev. He boasted about his talks with thirty-five presidents, nine prime ministers, two emperors, and one shah. His campaign used the slogan It’s Experience That Counts.

But for the past seven years, the small circle on whom Eisenhower called for foreign affairs and defense advice had seldom included Nixon; when it did, the President tended to consult him about the domestic context. The Vice President privately complained that Eisenhower regards me as a political expert only. If I try to speak up on defense matters, say, from a strictly military point of view, he says, ‘What does this guy know about it?’

Despite Kennedy’s international-minded upbringing and foreign travel, his writing and speaking, he had no serious history in diplomatic bargaining or managing an organization. Critics noted that the largest enterprise he had ever run was the PT-109, which had been sunk. During his three years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he was largely away from Washington campaigning.

In his campaign broadside Kennedy or Nixon: Does It Make Any Difference? the Harvard historian and Kennedy supporter Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., sensibly did not try to argue that his man had a deep foreign policy background: Experience is helpful. Especially experience in doing good things. But experience in doing stupid things is no advantage. Years later Schlesinger wrote that anyone with political judgment, intellectual curiosity, a retentive memory, a disciplined temperament, and sense of the way history runs can grasp the dynamics of foreign policy quickly enough.*

Kennedy defended himself with a strong offense: Mr. Nixon is experienced—experienced in policies of retreat, defeat, and weakness.… Waving your finger under Khrushchev’s face does not increase the strength of the United States.†

Still, Kennedy’s polls showed that Khrushchev’s rantings at the UN were scaring voters into the Nixon camp. He privately expected Nixon to try to put us on the defensive as the soft-on-communism party. Walt Rostow warned him that this was the only way Nixon knows how to operate.… Don’t leave any fishhooks lying around. Be prepared for the issue and the thrust.

Rostow was correct. Nixon quietly asked his friend William Rogers, the Attorney General, to try your hand at speech material, noting that Kennedy would be a very dangerous President, dangerous to the cause of peace and dangerous from the standpoint of surrender. Here we can put a fear into them.

Kennedy thus began the fall campaign with anti-Communist rhetoric that would have pleased John Foster Dulles. In September, at the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City, he said, The enemy is the Communist system itself—implacable, insatiable, unceasing in its drive for world domination.… This is not a struggle for supremacy of arms alone. It is also a struggle, for supremacy between two conflicting ideologies: freedom under God versus ruthless, godless tyranny.

The Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith soon wrote the Kennedy pollster Louis Harris, JFK has made the point that he isn’t soft. Henceforth he can only frighten. The Senator’s chief foreign policy adviser, Chester Bowles, wrote him that he had brilliantly brought the campaign to a point where no one can call us soft on communism.

But Kennedy’s problems in the fall of 1960 ran far beyond the need to assert his anticommunism. He had the unhappy task of running against the heir to a President who had brought the United States to the zenith of its power and influence in the Cold War. The nation enjoyed a preponderance in nuclear strength and economic productivity it would never know again.

Aware of the fact that he could not easily win unless he gave voters a bleaker portrait of the American position in the world, Kennedy fashioned an argument that the United States was behind or falling behind the Soviet Union in long-range missiles, economic growth, and political influence.

Central to Kennedy’s charge that Eisenhower and Nixon had weakened the nation was his use of the missile gap issue. In its purest form, the argument ran that Eisenhower’s obsessive concern with a balanced budget had forced him to shortchange the intercontinental ballistic missile program: while the United States built ICBMs at a leisurely pace, Soviet factories were, as Khrushchev bragged, turning out ICBMs like sausages.

This issue allowed Kennedy to assert his toughness and show that Democratic doctrine on the value of deficit spending was compatible with the building of American strength. The problem was that there was no missile gap. Eisenhower had access to closely held U-2 and other intelligence that was enough to convince him that, whatever Khrushchev’s boasts, there had been no crash Soviet buildup: the United States was firmly in the lead.

Nixon wanted the President to kill the issue by sharing the facts of American nuclear superiority with the American people. But Eisenhower did not wish to compromise secret intelligence sources. Nor did he wish to disrupt the tacit agreement he had developed with Khrushchev.

When confronted in public with the Chairman’s boasts that the Soviet Union was outproducing America in ICBMs, Eisenhower simply summoned his credibility as the hero of World War II and replied that American strength was awesome and sufficient. As long as Eisenhower did not disturb the illusion that the Soviets exceeded the United States in long-range missile strength, Khrushchev was willing to forego the huge expenditure that a crash Soviet ICBM buildup would actually require.

The President indirectly tried to signal Kennedy not to disturb this delicate arrangement and scare the nation about a missile gap that did not exist. One of Eisenhower’s science advisers, Jerome Wiesner of MIT, who had seen the intelligence showing American superiority, was astounded when the President approved his request to advise Kennedy during the campaign. Wiesner thought that Eisenhower’s intention was to let the Democrat know the truth about the missile gap.

In August, before CIA Director Allen Dulles went to Hyannis Port for the intelligence briefing offered to both presidential candidates, Eisenhower asked him to stress America’s commanding military strength. But when Kennedy asked Dulles how the nation stood in the missile race, the CIA man coyly replied that only the Pentagon could properly answer the question.*

Later