“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 in August, when the Strategic Air Command briefed Kennedy in Omaha, the candidate was annoyed not to be given a full top-secret accounting of American-Soviet bomber and missile power. He complained that he had been given more information as a member of the Foreign Relations Committee: if SAC and the Air Force were this complacent, he would remember next year at budget time. Assured that there was no missile gap during a Joint Chiefs of Staff briefing in September, Kennedy said, “Don’t you have any doubting Thomases in the Pentagon?”
Kennedy could argue that he had not been shown the raw intelligence that had persuaded the President there was no missile gap. But Eisenhower, the Joint Chiefs, and SAC had all affirmed that if there was a missile gap it was strongly in America’s favor. Despite this considerable body of evidence, Kennedy persisted in exploiting the issue.
He knew this would frighten Americans and limit the next President’s freedom to act by generating public pressure on him to escalate the arms race. He knew it might goad the Soviets to respond, if he was elected, in kind. He did exercise some caution by referring to the Soviet missile “advantage,” avoiding numbers and dates, citing non-partisan experts. But he continued to issue the accusation, telling crowds that Republicans were “the party which gave us the missile gap.”
More fairly, Kennedy charged the administration with overreliance on nuclear weapons, “tying our hands in a limited war.” He promised a conventional defense buildup and efforts to keep the United States from being second in science, education, and outer space.
He issued the specious complaint that the Soviet Union enjoyed “an economic growth of two or three times as much as the great productive country of the United States” and that in 1959 “the United States had the lowest percentage of economic growth increase of any major industrial society in the world.” Sophisticated as he was about the severe limitations of the command economy and Kremlin manipulation of Soviet growth figures, Kennedy knew full well that the United States was not in danger that the Soviet economy would soon exceed America’s.
The disturbing statistics he cited were a manipulation. The American figure was artificially low because 1959 was a recession year, the Soviet figure artificially high because it reflected the Soviet Union’s recovery from the devastation of World War II. In 1960, the Soviet economy was still a fraction of the size of America’s. The United States was producing nearly one third of the world’s goods.
Kennedy charged that the incumbents had let down American world prestige. He noted secret United States Information Agency surveys that found sagging American prestige and demanded their release.* By November, a Gallup poll found that nearly half of Americans felt that world respect for the United States had declined in the past year.
In one of his standard lines, Kennedy said, “I ask you to join with me in a journey into the 1960s, whereby we will mold our strength and become first again. Not first if. Not first but. Not first when. But first period. I want the people of the world to wonder not what Mr. Khrushchev is doing. I want them to wonder what the United States is doing.”*
American presidential campaigns are inclined to treat foreign issues with cartoonish simplicity. Nineteen-sixty was no exception. Kennedy’s utterances offered little insight into how he would act on the two Cold War trouble spots that would prove to dominate his term as President—Cuba and Berlin.
He found that voters asked him more often about Cuba and Castro than any other foreign issue. As his speech writer Richard Goodwin recalled, the emergence of a pro-Soviet dictator ninety miles off the American coast had done “more than Khrushchev could to anger and alarm the American people.” Cuba gave Kennedy another chance to attack Nixon from the right. He asked his staff, “How would we have saved Cuba if we had the power?” Then: “What the hell, they never told us how they would have saved China.”
He scored the Republicans for permitting “a Communist menace” to arise “only eight jet minutes from Florida”: “We must make clear our intention not to let the Soviet Union turn Cuba into its base in the Caribbean—and our intention to enforce the Monroe Doctrine.” He demanded more propaganda and sanctions to “quarantine” the Cuban revolution, more support for Cubans who opposed the Castro regime. His campaign manager, Robert Kennedy, worried that the Eisenhower administration might invade Cuba before the election, thereby improving Nixon’s election chances.
In late October, flying to New York, the candidate told Goodwin to “get ready a real blast for Nixon.” That evening Goodwin drafted a new assault for the morning papers on the Republicans and Cuba: the United States must strengthen democratic anti-Castro Cubans “who offer eventual hope of overthrowing Castro. Thus far these fighters for freedom have had virtually no support from our government.” According to Goodwin, Kennedy was asleep when the draft was finished and it became the only such statement in the campaign to be released without the candidate’s clearance.
When Nixon saw the morning headlines (KENNEDY ADVOCATES U.S. INTERVENTION IN CUBA), he was furious. He assumed that Dulles had briefed his opponent on the CIA’s plans to invade Cuba; was Kennedy so craven that he would jeopardize the operation for votes? On a secure line, his adviser Fred Seaton, Secretary of the Interior, called General Andrew Goodpaster, the President’s staff secretary, who informed him that Kennedy had been “fully briefed.”*
Nixon called the White House and said he felt he had been “put into a corner by this.” After consulting the President, he tried to preserve the operation’s secrecy by saying the opposite of what he actually believed. In their fourth television debate, he attacked Kennedy’s idea as “the most dangerously irresponsible recommendation that he’s made during the course of this campaign.… It would be an open invitation for Mr. Khrushchev to come in, to come into Latin America and engage us in a civil war, and possibly even worse than that.”
In response to this and to liberal criticism, Kennedy said he did not favor intervention that would violate American treaty obligations, only letting the freedom fighters know that America “sympathized with them.” The New York Times called the reversal a “major blunder.” Adlai Stevenson privately wrote a friend that Kennedy’s mistake on Cuba had been “appalling.”
The bizarre result was that many Americans who did not wish to intervene in Cuba voted for Nixon, who was privately prodding the CIA to get the job done before Election Day. Many Americans Who wanted more militance against Castro voted for Kennedy, who was privately ambivalent at best about ousting Castro by force.
Kennedy said even less about what he intended to do about Berlin. The reason for this was statesmanlike. In August 1960, Stevenson had privately advised him to avoid “extended discussion” of the issue because it would be “difficult to say anything very constructive about a settlement in Berlin without embarrassing future negotiations. Beyond a declaration of our intention to preserve our rights and do our duty lies the temptation to assert greater rigidity and inflexibility than the other fellow.”
Stevenson recalled that, as Democratic nominee, “I ‘unilaterally’ took a similar position in September 1956—that I would not discuss Suez because the situation was ‘too delicate,’ although I was aching to have at ’em. A month later came the disaster and Eisenhower was the beneficiary of my restraint. So I write you with misgivings and diffidence.”
Throughout the fall of 1960, Kennedy raised the Berlin issue in only a half dozen speeches, and then in nothing more than a single applause line: “Can you possibly say that our power is increasing when you know that next winter and next spring the United States will face a most serious crisis over Berlin at a time when our strength is not rising in relation to that of the Communists?”
He devoted greater attention to Quemoy and Matsu, challenging the administration’s implied pledge to defend the long-disputed Chinese offshore islands, perhaps at risk of nuclear war. He accused Nixon of eagerness to “involve American boys in an unnecessary and futile war.” Republicans called Kennedy’s comments “an open invitation” for the Chinese Communists to “take these islands the day Kennedy takes office, if he does.” He announced that “in the interests of bipartisanship” he would drop the issue.
During his twenty-five days in New York, sitting upstairs in the old beaux arts Eben Pyne mansion on Park Avenue that served as the Soviet mission, Khrushchev was no doubt delighted by how frequently his name popped up during the first two Kennedy-Nixon debates.
During his opening statement in the first debate, Kennedy said, “Mr. Khrushchev is in New York, and he maintains the Communist offensive throughout the world because of the productive power of the Soviet Union itself.” In the second debate, Nixon on the U-2: “I don’t intend ever to express regrets to Mr. Khrushchev or anybody else if I’m doing something … for the purpose of protecting the security of the United States.”
Khrushchev had never had much respect for the American electoral process. “The American people have practically no influence on the policies of the U.S.A.,” he had once said. “They are cleverly tricked during election campaigns and virtually do not even know for what they are voting.” His experience in New York did not change his mind: “The battle between the Democrats and Republicans is like a circus wrestling match. The wrestlers arrange in advance who will be the loser before they even enter the arena.”
He later said that “political advertising in America is quite noisy and, I would say, theatrical. Imagine it! Into the head of the poor voter, around the clock from morning to night, pour torrents of television speeches by representatives of a donkey or an elephant.”
Despite his fealty to Marxist notions that personalities were far less important than grand historical forces, he knew that America’s choice in 1960 could do much to determine his country’s fate and his own. The year before, after Camp David, he had assured members of the Presidium that Eisenhower was a “sincere” man with whom he could do business. By sending the U-2 a fortnight before the Paris summit, Eisenhower had made him look like a fool and caused Kremlin colleagues to question his judgment. Now Khrushchev wished to ensure that the President in 1961 would be someone with whom he could deal.
His official preference was Gus Hall, the old warhorse of the American Communist Party. But, as Khrushchev conceded, America’s inevitable march toward communism was not yet advanced enough to let Comrade Hall enter the White House. So he began 1960 as a partisan of Adlai Stevenson, whom he considered to have “a tolerant—I’d even say friendly and trustworthy—attitude toward the Soviet Union.” They had met in 1958 when the Governor toured the Soviet Union with two sons. Khrushchev advised the boys to marry Soviet girls and told their father, “In 1956, I voted for you in my heart.”*
During the 1956 campaign, Khrushchev had clumsily arranged for his then–Prime Minister, Nikolai Bulganin, to issue a public letter lauding “certain public figures” for endorsing a nuclear test ban. Eisenhower fired off an angry complaint about Soviet meddling “in our internal affairs.” Richard Nixon used the Soviet letter to show how Stevenson’s “dangerous scheme” would play “disastrously into the Communists’ hands.”
This time Khrushchev was determined not to meddle in a way that would boomerang against him. In late 1959, when Ambassador Menshikov took home leave in Moscow, Khrushchev asked him to pay a secret call on Stevenson and ask “which way we can be of assistance.”
Stevenson thought Menshikov a mildly comic figure; he told friends how, at a Georgetown garden party, the envoy insisted on using his not-quite-working English to toast the ladies present, saying, “Up your bottoms!” In January 1960, he accepted the envoy’s invitation to the old George Pullman mansion on Sixteenth Street in Washington that housed the Soviet Embassy.
Over caviar, fruit, and drinks, Menshikov told him that Khrushchev thought Stevenson more likely to “understand Soviet anxieties and purposes” than other presidential candidates. Should the Soviet press praise him, and for what? Should it criticize him, and for what?
Afterward Stevenson wrote a friend, “As I think about it, I get more and more indignant about being ‘propositioned’ that way, and at the same time, more and more perplexed, if that’s the word, by the confidence they have in me. I shall do one thing only now: politely and decisively reject the proposal—and pray that it will never leak, lest I lose that potentially valuable confidence.”
After Nixon and Kennedy were nominated, Khrushchev told colleagues in Moscow that they had to “make a choice in our own minds”: “We can influence the American election.” Richard Nixon was his nemesis, a “puppet” of the American Cold War establishment, an “unprincipled careerist,” an ally of “that devil of darkness McCarthy.” Khrushchev’s anxieties may have been somewhat eased by the fact that the Vice President was no longer quite the anti-Communist of old, but, he feared, “We’ll never be able to find a common language with him.”
Still, the choice was not so easy. “We had little, knowledge of John Kennedy,” Khrushchev later said. “He was a young man, very promising and very rich, a millionaire. We knew from the press that he was distinguished by his intelligence, his education, and his political skill.”
He and his advisers realized that Kennedy’s world view had grown more rounded since the anti-Soviet oratory of his House and early Senate years. The Senator favored a nuclear test ban and wider Soviet-American contacts. Khrushchev liked his regret over the U-2 and his vow to observe Eisenhower’s pledge of no more such spy flights. But he worried about Kennedy’s rhetoric about the missile gap and the need to rebuild American defense.
Izvestia echoed Khrushchev’s misgivings about the Democrat—not by accident, for its editor was Khrushchev’s son-in-law and close adviser Alexei Adzhubei: “He is furiously attacking the Eisenhower-Nixon policies but has not yet proposed anything to replace them.” Another Soviet journal found Kennedy a straddler, a “young millionaire who promises everything to everyone.” He had taken the “flexible if not to say unprincipled position” of siding sometimes with Big Labor, sometimes with Big Business; all sorts of “bourgeois political leaders—conservatives and liberals alike” saw Kennedy as “their man.”
However, Kennedy’s anti-Sovietism had lacked Nixon’s consistency. He was surrounded by such moderate figures as Stevenson, Bowles, Fulbright, Mansfield, and Harriman. As the junior Foreign Ministry official and later defector Arkady Shevchenko recalled, Khrushchev “saw what he wanted to see” in Kennedy’s calls for negotiation. Khrushchev himself later said, “We thought we would have some hope, of improving Soviet-American relations if Kennedy were in the White House.”
He may have thought that Kennedy would be easier than Nixon to hornswoggle. He knew that much of the Washington establishment considered Kennedy a light and insubstantial figure, a playboy. (In 1959, James Reston of the New York Times asked Rostow, “Do you really believe that man can be President of the United States?”) When Kennedy retreated under campaign fire on Quemoy and Matsu and Cuba, the Soviets noticed.
No one exulted more in his own rise from obscurity than Khrushchev. “You all went to great schools, to famous universities—to Harvard, Oxford, the Sorbonne,” he once told Western diplomats. “I never had any proper schooling. I went about barefoot and in rags. When you were in the nursery, I was herding cows for two kopeks.… And yet here we are, and I can run rings around you all.… Tell me, gentlemen, why?”
Since 1917, the very year Kennedy was born, Khrushchev had been clawing his way up the treacherous Soviet hierarchy, enticing and betraying patrons, sending thousands to death during the purges and the war, resisting Stalin’s paranoia to keep his job and his life and then, at the pinnacle of power, resisting two coups d’état by his own colleagues. This induced self-confidence in his powers against a man who rode on the back of a millionaire father.
Khrushchev could not fathom how a man who had been so junior in the American government could suddenly become President. KGB psychological profiles suggested that a Kennedy presidency would be more unpredictable than Eisenhower’s. Khrushchev privately noted, “He’s younger than my own son.”*
In public, Khrushchev put on a show of dazzling nonpartisanship. “Mr. Nixon has dressed himself in the garb of an anti-Communist,” he declared in Moscow in August. “Well, he will not be the first to demonstrate that this raincoat does not cover the nakedness of the capitalist world or hide its sores.… Of Mr. Kennedy I know less. I met him when I was in Washington and we exchanged a few sentences. But I do know that both Nixon and Kennedy are both servants of monopoly capital.… As we Russians say, they are two boots of the same pair: which is better, the left or the right boot?” While in New York, asked which candidate he favored, Khrushchev invoked the patron saint of Soviet-American cooperation: “Roosevelt!”
Both Nixon and Kennedy knew that if Khrushchev so desired, he could influence the election by causing some kind of international incident designed either to stampede voters to the more experienced candidate or to show Eisenhower’s and Nixon’s inability to handle the Soviets. Neither candidate was willing to leave this wild card wholly up to chance. Unbeknownst to the American people, key supporters of both Nixon and Kennedy made confidential contact with Khrushchev and asked him to do things to help their man.
In February 1960, Henry Cabot Lodge, who had served Eisenhower for seven years as Ambassador to the UN, went to the Soviet Union. Meeting with the Chairman in Moscow, Lodge said that as “a man who deeply hopes for good relations between the U.S.S.R. and the United States,” he felt he should point out that “there is always a minimum of flexibility in foreign relations in the United States in an election year. What is hard or impossible to do in 1952 or 1956 or 1960 is often quite susceptible of accomplishment in 1953 or 1957 or 1961.”
He assured Khrushchev that he could work with Nixon: “Don’t pay any attention to the campaign speeches. Remember, they’re just political statements. Once Mr. Nixon is in the White House, I’m sure—I’m absolutely certain—he’ll take a position of preserving and perhaps even improving our relations.” On his return, he told the Vice President that he had “had a talk with Khrushchev” that he had “not reported to the State Department.”
Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson wrote Nixon from Moscow, “Several top Soviets have indicated to me their opposition to you. I have always taken the line with them that you are a staunch and effective anti-Communist just as they are staunch anticapitalists, but that they made a mistake in assuming that you were opposed to negotiations or agreements with the Soviet Union whenever these were possible with benefit to both sides.”
Khrushchev’s chief link to the Democrats was Averell Harriman, the Union Pacific heir and two-time presidential candidate who had served as Franklin Roosevelt’s wartime envoy to Stalin. Defeated in 1958 by Nelson Rockefeller for reelection as Governor of New York, Harriman may have been considered out of power by Americans, but Khrushchev had no doubt who ruled Washington. In September 1959, Harriman entertained the Chairman at his Upper East Side brownstone, inviting a small pantheon of the American financial establishment. In October 1960, through Menshikov, Harriman reminded Khrushchev to be tough on both candidates: the surest way to elect Nixon was to praise Kennedy in public.
That fall, the Eisenhower government was quietly pressing the Soviets to release Francis Gary Powers and the RB-47 fliers. As Khrushchev recalled, a high-ranking Republican “with whom I had established not bad relations at the time of my trip to the U.S.A.” met with Ambassador Menshikov and appealed for the airmen’s freedom: if Nixon became President, the old Eisenhower policies would be reviewed. “We, of course, understood that Nixon wished to make political capital out of this for himself in advance of the elections.… Nixon wanted to make it appear as if he had already arranged certain contacts with the Soviet government.”
In Moscow, Khrushchev told his colleagues, “We would never give Nixon such a present.” The two candidates were in stalemate. “If we give the slightest boost to Nixon, it will be interpreted as an expression of our willingness to see him in the White House.” Khrushchev kept the fliers in prison and thereby cast his early ballot against “that son of a bitch Richard Nixon.”
At Spaso House, on Wednesday, November 9, Llewellyn and Jane Thompson held an Election Day luncheon. A large Zenith radio was set up so that guests could listen through static to the Voice of America’s election coverage.
An American correspondent among the guests asked the Ambassador whom he would have voted for. Thompson replied that he was a Foreign Service officer: Washington, D.C., was his official address, so he couldn’t have voted anyway.* His daughter Jenny evoked laughter when she piped up, “Don’t be silly, Daddy. You’d have voted for Kennedy!” The group responded to the news of Kennedy’s victory with applause and cheers. Thompson’s sea-blue eyes gleamed. As his wife recalled, he was “delighted and thrilled.”
Thompson had known the new President since 1951, when as counselor in Rome he had given a luncheon for Kennedy and other visiting Congressmen. That same year, Jane Thompson entertained Jacqueline and Lee Bouvier, daughters of her friend Janet Auchincloss, who were touring Europe that summer. In 1953, the Thompsons were invited to the Kennedy-Bouvier wedding in Newport but had to remain at their post.
During the middle 1950s, as U.S. High Commissioner in Austria, Thompson would drop in on Kennedy when in Washington to defend his budget before Congress. During a closed Foreign Relations Committee session, Thompson referred to a recent book and was “much impressed” by the fact that Kennedy was “the only member of the Committee to get the name of the book and its author from me.”
Thompson was a Democrat, but he adeptly hid his sympathies. Even Khrushchev, who knew him well and who saw messages intercepted between the American Embassy and Washington, had him pegged as a Nixon supporter. On November 7, at a Kremlin celebration of the forty-third anniversary of the Russian Revolution, he said, “I know who you’re going to vote for.”
“No, you don’t,” replied Thompson with his crinkle-eyed smile.
“Yes, I do. I wish Nixon would win because I’d know how to cope with him. Kennedy is an unknown quantity.” Khrushchev voiced his apprehension about Kennedy’s youth and ambiguous record. Republicans, he said, made no secret of their subservience to Wall Street and Cold War weapons makers. Democrats tried to hide it and were therefore less predictable. Khrushchev said his advisers were telling him Kennedy would win.
Thompson now allowed himself to dream of having the President’s ear. Since his arrival in Moscow three years earlier, he had been frustrated that Eisenhower had paid his cables and other advice so little heed. The President and Foster Dulles had sought little advice on Soviet policy: for seven years, it had been the Dark Age for Soviet experts like George Kennan and Harriman, whom Eisenhower classed with Truman and the Democrats.
Thompson thought Kennedy “more intelligent and well read” than Eisenhower. Now, as the newsmen left Spaso House to file their stories, Thompson went to his embassy office and began planning the education of the next President.
In Hyannis Port, after accepting victory on national television at the local armory, John Kennedy lunched at his father’s house with his wife, brothers, and sisters, his painter friend William Walton, and Ted Sorensen. Freed from last night’s tension, they laughed and argued over who had performed best in the campaign and needled those responsible for states lost to Nixon.
After rising from the table, the President-elect was handed a telegram from Nikita Khrushchev expressing the hope that Soviet-American relations would return to the warmth of Franklin Roosevelt’s time. All mankind, it said, was “longing for deliverance from the threat of a new war.… There are no insurmountable obstacles to the preservation and consolidation of peace.” Worried that an ill-chosen word might start things off with Khrushchev on a bad note, Kennedy telephoned Chip Bohlen at the State Department.
*Construction of the subway had been overseen by Nikita Khrushchev of the city’s Communist Party.
†Bullitt assigned him to his aide Carmel Offie, a homosexual whom Jack called “La Belle Offlet.” He wrote Billings, “Offie has just rung for me so I guess have to get the old paper ready and go in and wipe his arse.” He complained that Bullitt’s aide “is always trying, unsuccessfully, to pour Champagne down my gullet.” He added, “Met a girl who used to live with the Duke of Kent and who is as she says ‘a member of the British Royal family by injections.’ She has terrific diamond bracelets that he gave her and a big ruby that the Marajah [sic] of Nepal gave her. I don’t know what she thinks she is going to get out of me but we’ll see.”
*This is almost word for word the way President Kennedy described his anxiety about what Khrushchev might do to West Berlin in 1961.
*In 1965, Jacqueline Kennedy bridled when she read in a draft of Schlesinger’s A Thousand Days that her husband had entered the White House “knowing more about domestic than foreign matters.” With more loyalty than historical judgment, she insisted to the historian that her husband “knew as much about foreign as domestic affairs & certainly more than any other American President coming into office.” Schlesinger chivalrously revised his text to say that Kennedy “had had a considerably more varied and extensive international experience than most men elected President.”
†Stevenson had written Kennedy after his nomination that “the ‘youth and inexperience’ argument is an essentially false argument.… You either have leadership qualities or you don’t.… Since it is apparent that the Republican emphasis will be on Nixon’s ‘experience’ in dealing with the Communists … it is essential to make it clear that … the question is not who can face a mob or shake his finger in a dictator’s face, but who can build a program and supply a leadership which will prevent such incidents from occurring.”
*Dulles later explained his caution by saying that, until the United States enjoyed full satellite coverage of the Soviet Union, a missile gap could not be absolutely ruled out. Richard Nixon later suspected that Dulles had framed his answer in order to allow Kennedy to keep exploiting the issue—a favor that a victorious Kennedy might remember after the election when pondering whether or not to replace him.
*When these polls were leaked to the press, a furious Eisenhower had the same suspicions about USIA Director George Allen that Nixon did about Allen Dulles. He privately carped that the USIA man was “playing politics” to keep his job in the event of a Kennedy victory.
*With such statements he rejected Nixon’s public suggestion that neither candidate discuss the subject of national weakness while Khrushchev was in the country. “I want to make it clear that nothing I am saying will give Mr. Khrushchev the slightest encouragement,” Kennedy told crowds. “He is encouraged enough.” He proposed to “discourage him” by “rebuilding national strength and vitality. The most ominous sound that Mr. Khrushchev can hear … is not of a debate in the United States but the sound of America on the move, ready to move again.”
*In March 1962, Nixon’s memoir Six Crises, charging that Kennedy had subordinated national security to political ambition, caused a public sensation. Nixon wrote that Dulles had told the Democratic nominee that for months the CIA had “not only been supporting and assisting, but actually training Cuban exiles for the eventual purpose of supporting an invasion of Cuba itself.”
McGeorge Bundy wrote the President, “This subject turns out to be more complicated than I had hoped.” He had talked to the retired Dulles and his colleagues, who “agree that you did not receive any briefing on an actual plan for an invasion of Cuba, but unfortunately this is not what Nixon asserts.… Allen Dulles reports that his notes for a July briefing do indicate that he was prepared to tell you that CIA was training Cuban exiles as guerrilla leaders.… He says he could not have briefed you on anything beyond that because nothing beyond this then existed.… But it can be argued that what Nixon says is not wrong.
“On the other hand … it appears that you had only sketchy and fragmentary information about covert relations to Cuban exiles and no briefing at all on any specific plan for an invasion. The difficulty is that the notes that Dulles has would give some support to Nixon’s stated position. Dulles is obviously in the middle and I am sure his preference will be to keep out of it if he can.”
Bundy recommended issuing a statement that the President was given a “general briefing” by Dulles in July, but that not until after the election did the CIA Director “give the President-elect a full briefing on covert plans relating to Cuba.” Kennedy did not heed this graceful effort to repair his political problems without resorting to a presidential lie. On March 20, the White House flatly announced that Kennedy “was not told before the election of 1960 of the training of troops outside of Cuba or of any plans for ‘supporting an invasion of Cuba.’”
The President also asked Dulles to issue a statement saying “that the President never knew about it.” But Dulles told reporters only that Nixon must be victim of “an honest misunderstanding.” Soon thereafter, he was stripped of certain of his CIA retirement privileges. On the day of Dulles’s statement, John McCone called Nixon in California and told him “categorically” that Dulles had actually informed him privately that he had “told Kennedy about, the covert operation” in 1960. He added that Senator Smathers had confirmed for him that Kennedy knew about the Cuban plans “before the election.”
Goodpaster informed this author that Allen Dulles told him in October 1960 that he had indeed briefed Kennedy “about the planning, which was to form the unit and to train the unit, that this was what had been approved.” Richard Goodwin said in 1981 that Kennedy “may very well have known” in October 1960 about the CIA’s invasion planning. In his 1988 memoir Remembering America, Goodwin wrote more directly that Kennedy’s CIA briefings during the campaign “revealed that we were training a force of Cuban exiles for a possible invasion of the Cuban mainland.” One may safely presume that this whole episode did nothing to relieve Nixon’s already-great bitterness toward the Kennedys, Dulles, and the CIA.
*Khrushchev did not mind telling a whopper if unlikely to be caught. When Anastas Mikoyan saw Eisenhower in the Oval Office in January 1959, he said that Khrushchev had confided to him that had he been permitted to vote in the 1956 American elections, he would have voted for the President!
*Leonid Khrushchev, evidently born in 1917, was killed in June 1943 on the Voronezh front. His widow, Lyubov, was imprisoned on charges of being some sort of “Swedish spy” and was not released until after Stalin’s death in 1953.
*Nineteen-sixty was the last year in which the Constitution forebade citizens of Washington, D.C., from casting ballots for President.