CHAPTER 21

The Spirit of Moscow

Kennedy’s European trip was intended to improve his standing among the Allies and hence his freedom of action on the world stage. A left-wing French newspaper called it “Kennedy’s seduction voyage.”

The President knew that the one leader in Western Europe least open to seduction was Charles de Gaulle. It did not go unnoticed that his schedule did not include a visit to Paris. De Gaulle was as unhappy about a détente with Khrushchev as about American pressure to sign a test ban treaty that would force him to give up his dream of a mighty French nuclear arsenal, enshrining his country as a major world power.

Bohlen had quietly told the French Foreign Minister, Maurice Couve de Murville, that Kennedy wanted de Gaulle to pay a return visit to Washington sometime in 1963: if France would join “any test ban agreement which might be reached,” forswearing its own nuclear program, the President “would be prepared to discuss what the U.S. might do to help in those circumstances.”

To show his lack of interest, de Gaulle replied that a trip in 1963 would not be very convenient: that fall he must entertain the Grand Duchess of Luxembourg and visit the Shah of Iran. Instead, he would be pleased to call on Kennedy around Easter 1964—but not in Washington, where the visit would be too highly publicized. Bohlen cabled Washington that de Gaulle was stalling in order to ensure “some concrete beginning at least of his nuclear force.”

During the overnight air journey from Washington to Bonn, the President recalled driving through Germany in 1939 with his friend Byron White, now one of his appointees on the Supreme Court. Young Nazis with armbands had thrown bricks at their car with its English license plates. He remembered the hate in their faces.

In a welcoming address at the Bonn airport, Adenauer wasted no time in reminding his visitor that at American University “you said, Mr. President, that the United States would make no deal with the Soviet Union at the expense of other nations.”

In Cologne, Frankfurt, and other cities, hundreds of thousands of West Germans shouted “Ken-ne-dy! Ken-ne-dy!” William Tyler of State felt that the President’s popularity “went far beyond anything that could be accounted for by any act.… Something about him … just seemed to echo in the hearts and voices of all the people when they greeted him.”

Kennedy told the Chancellor, “Don’t tell me these families just happened to have American flags in their homes.” Riding into Wiesbaden, with its large American population, he passed a sign saying, “Ask Not What You Can Do for Your Ford Dealer, Ask What Your Ford Dealer Can Do for You.”

At the General von Steuben Hotel, he met with Kohler, who had flown in with his wife from Moscow to obtain “fresh views and instructions from the ‘big boss,’” as he wrote a friend. He reported that Khrushchev seemed ready for a test ban: he needed something to justify his split with the Chinese and his efforts for peaceful coexistence.

As they departed, Phyllis Kohler turned around and saw the President standing on a balcony, “waving and smiling and looking like a Greek god.” Disapproving of what she had heard of his private life, she silently mused about how in politics image did not always conform to reality.

Kennedy arrived in West Berlin on Wednesday, June 26, in time for the fifteenth anniversary of the Berlin Airlift. Lucius Clay had been worried that a trip to Berlin might endanger the President’s life. When he found that Kennedy was unfazed by his warning, he said, “You haven’t had any reception yet. You just wait until you get to Berlin. You’re going to see something you’ve never really seen before.”

Shortly after noon, the President mounted a flag-draped platform on the steps of the City Hall, where in August 1961 crowds had cried out against their “betrayal” by the West.

Today a million roaring West Berliners jammed the plaza. Standing among the “enormous, swelling, heaving, delirious multitude that was capable of almost anything,” William Manchester noted that Kennedy looked “handsome, virile, and—yes—Aryan.” Trained by hard experience to distrust such mass emotion, Adenauer asked Rusk, “Does this mean Germany can one day have another Hitler?”

Back in Washington, Robert Kennedy had urged his brother to say something to the West Berliners in German. Flying in on Air Force One, the President had asked O’Donnell, “What was the proud boast of the Romans? … Send Bundy up here. He’ll know how to translate it into German.” Bundy later recalled that his boss “had no feeling for any foreign language. So there we were on the goddamn airplane coming down on Berlin while he repeated the phrase over and over again … and it worked. God, how it worked!”

As the crowds shrieked, Kennedy spoke in rhythmic, precisely delineated phrases that turned his words into a kind of angry poetry:

Two thousand years ago,

two thousand years ago,

the proudest boast was

“Civis Romanus sum.”

Today,

in the world of freedom,

the proudest boast is

“Ich / bin / ein / Berliner!”*

Theatrically he swept his hand across his abdomen, snatched up his pages of text, and turned his profile to the crowd.

Hearing this boast in German from the leader on whom their city depended for its life, the West Berliners let out almost an animal howl.* Gerhard Wessel, Adenauer’s military intelligence chief, said years later, “Never underestimate the psychological influence of this one sentence.… With the Germans, it was the decisive sentence that changed the feeling, made them feel that Kennedy was a great President and a friend of the Germans.”

Kennedy was moved and disconcerted by the emotion. Toying with his tie and lower lapel, he took the edge off what he had said by evoking laughter: “I appreciate my interpreter translating my German!”

He had always resolved to avoid the crowd-baiting demagoguery of his political Boston grandfathers, but not today. His juices were flowing from the most responsive audience of his life, his admiration for the West Berliners’ bravery, his eagerness to reassure them that he would not sell them down the river to Khrushchev as part of a détente.

He may have been affected by whatever sense of guilt he felt about his complicity in the Berlin Wall, which he had seen for the first time that morning. Just as when he had remorsefully greeted the Bay of Pigs prisoners at the Orange Bowl, he allowed the emotions of this day to carry him beyond what he had wanted to say:

There are many people

in the world

who really don’t understand,

or say they don’t,

what is the great issue

between the Free World

and the Communist world.

Let them come to BERLIN!

There are some who say

that communism

is the wave of the future.

Let them come to BERLIN! …

And there are even a few

who say

that it’s true

that communism is an evil system,

but it permits us to make economic progress.

Lass’ sie nach Berlin kommen.

Let THEM come to Berlin!

For the first time in his life, the President publicly denounced the Berlin Wall:

Freedom has many difficulties,

and democracy is not perfect.

But we have never had to put a wall up

to keep our people in,

to prevent them from leaving us!

He went on, “It is, as your Mayor has said”—even in this agitated mood, Kennedy was cautious enough to put his words in Willy Brandt’s mouth—“an offense not only against history but an offense against humanity, separating families, dividing husbands and wives and brothers and sisters, and dividing a people who wish to be joined together.” With the exception of three tiny references later in his tour, each less than a sentence, the President never publicly mentioned the Berlin Wall again.

The speech has been best remembered for the line “Ich bin ein Berliner.” Three decades later, after the end of the Cold War and reunification of Germany, the peroration of Kennedy’s address has far greater impact:

So let me ask you

as I close

to lift your eyes beyond the dangers of today

to the hopes of tomorrow,

beyond the freedom merely of this city of Berlin,

or your country of Germany

to the advance of freedom everywhere,

beyond the Wall

to the day of peace with justice.…

Then we can look forward

to that day

when this city will be joined as one—

and this country and this great continent of Europe—

in a peaceful and hopeful globe.

When that day finally comes—

as it will—

the people of West Berlin

can take sober satisfaction in the fact

that they were in the front lines.

Had Khrushchev taken Kennedy’s city hall oration as literally as Kennedy had his Wars of Liberation address in 1961, the good done by the American University speech might have been eroded. Luckily the Chairman took the longer view and wrote it off as Cold War rabble-rousing, a rhetorical form with which he had had no small acquaintance.*

American diplomats in Europe were told to explain to their host governments that the President had not quite meant to say that the West could not work with the Communists. To counteract the impassioned words at the city hall, Bundy inserted some conciliatory language into the next speech of Kennedy’s tour.

When the President left the divided country, he was so cheered by the four-day adulation that he told a German crowd he would leave an envelope for his successor, saying, “To be opened at a time of some discouragement.” In it would be a note: GO TO GERMANY. He added, “I may open that envelope myself some day.” After the plane was airborne, he told Sorensen, “We’ll never have another day like this one as long as we live.”

Bundy had given his boss a West German poll: “You beat de Gaulle in a close election in Germany—but his popularity was then and yours is now.”

From Berlin, the President flew to Ireland. Bundy had felt that the stop would unnecessarily prolong the trip. O’Donnell told Kennedy that he scarcely needed more Irish-American votes: “People will just say it’s a pleasure trip.” But his boss replied, “I am the President of the United States—not you.”

Arriving in Dublin, Kennedy announced that he would support the 1968 candidate for President of the United States who would appoint him ambassador to Ireland. He met cousins in Dunganstown, sang “Danny Boy” with balladeers at Bunratty Castle, and quoted Joyce before the Irish parliament, the first time the blasphemer had been mentioned in that chamber, except during debates on censorship.

Flying on to England, the President went to the great house Chatsworth and knelt at his sister Kathleen’s grave before taking a helicopter to Macmillan’s country house, Birch Grove, in Sussex, where they were to discuss test ban strategy.

Depressed more than usual, the Prime Minister was reeling from a sex-and-security scandal. His Defense Minister, John Profumo, had that month admitted that he had shared the chorine Christine Keeler with a Soviet military attaché, Captain Yevgeny Ivanov, and then lied about it.* David Bruce had cabled Washington that most British voters thought Macmillan should leave office: “Conservatives are now beginning actively to consider when and by whom Macmillan should be replaced.”

Kennedy’s special relationship with the Prime Minister had its limits. Disturbed by the possibility of sharing Macmillan’s bad publicity, especially while he was building support for better relations with Moscow, he had pondered canceling the visit.† Instead, his staff had informed the British he regretfully could not stay longer than twenty-four hours (this after four days spent touring Ireland!) and to ask for a change of venue from London to Sussex, where the meeting would attract less attention.‡

Macmillan wrote in his diary of his irritation by stories “that the President has ‘snubbed me’”: the truth would one day out if and when Kennedy revealed his “self-invitation” to Birch Grove.

The day before he left for Europe, Kennedy complained, “I don’t know why we didn’t get wind of this Profumo thing ages ago. After all, we give our military secrets to Britain and we have to check the character of its high officers.… But then, the CIA never does tell me anything.”

Bruce sent him an “eyes only” message in Bonn: “current gossip” about the Profumo affair, and “many other people totally unconnected with it, is of a variety and virulence almost inconceivable.… Thus far, no American government official has, to my knowledge, been involved … nor have I reason to believe any will become so, unless by innuendo.”

Last on the schedule was two days in Italy, where Kennedy met the newly elected Pope Paul VI, President Antonio Segni, Prime Minister Giovanni Leone, and other Italian leaders. Kennedy had asked Rusk to arrange a night for him in a relaxing, beautiful spot somewhere in Italy. The Secretary of State secured the Rockefeller Foundation’s magnificent villa on Lake Como. Years later he recalled that when the President arrived, he dismissed the servants and security men: “It was strongly suspected that Kennedy had not spent the night alone.”

On Monday, July 1, while the President was on Lake Como, his Attorney General saw James Horan and Dom Frasca of the New York Journal American. They had published a front-page story that one of the “biggest names in American politics” had been involved with a New York woman named Suzy Chang, who had been associated with Christine Keeler and her friend Mandy Rice-Davies during a Manhattan visit in 1962.

Robert Kennedy asked who the high official was. The newsmen said, “The President.” They played back a tape of their telephone interview with one of Miss Chang’s acquaintances. Robert asked whether the story was corroborated by another source. They answered affirmatively but refused to reveal it. Courtney Evans of the FBI, whom Robert had asked to monitor the meeting, recorded that it “ended most coolly” amid “almost an air of hostility between the Attorney General and the reporters.”

The next day Robert asked J. Edgar Hoover if the Bureau could find out exactly what Keeler and Rice-Davies had been doing in New York. There turned out to be no convincing evidence that Chang, Keeler, or Rice-Davies were among the women said to sometimes drift into the President’s Carlyle penthouse. Nonetheless the Attorney General would not have been overanxious to fear that the Profumo-Keeler furor would make the sexual entanglements of national leaders fair game for the press.

The British scandal had shown that if a public figure was involved in a liaison that could damage him if revealed, he might be vulnerable to blackmail. Reporters might now assert that it was in the public interest to reveal what they knew of the private affairs of those leaders most responsible for the security of the West. For the Attorney General, this was not an enchanting prospect. In July 1963, the President was himself in danger of suffering his own sex-and-security scandal.

A comprehensive history of John Kennedy’s sexual behavior is far outside the scope of this volume, but what we know of the President’s relationships with women raises an important question about his leadership and diplomacy.

Kennedy knew that sexual compromise and blackmail was one of the oldest instruments of espionage. In the America of the early 1960s, if the President was shown to have slept with a woman not his wife, his political career would have been gravely damaged. If that woman was shown to be connected in some important way with a Soviet bloc government, he would have almost surely been thrown out of office.

Every one of his major foreign policy decisions would be called into question: had the Soviets blackmailed the President to pull punches toward the Soviet Union or its allies out of fear of exposure? Other American leaders would be investigated for signs of similar compromise in a red scare that would dwarf the McCarthy period.

Whether the President wished to sleep with women not his wife does not concern the historian of his diplomacy. What is of importance is that from all the evidence we have, Kennedy made no systematic effort to ensure, by security investigation or otherwise, that all of the women with whom he was involved lacked the motive or the ability to use evidence of their relationship to blackmail him on behalf of a hostile government or organization.

Herve Alphand, the French Ambassador in Washington, wrote in his diary that the President’s “desires are difficult to satisfy without raising fears of scandal and its use by his political enemies. This might happen one day, because he does not take sufficient precautions in this Puritan country.”

If Sam Giancana ever threatened, for instance, to publicize evidence of Kennedy’s relationship with Judith Campbell, the President could have been faced with a choice between giving in to whatever demands Giancana made or allowing himself to be driven out of office. What President could survive the revelation that he had knowingly slept with the mistress of a Mafia chief?*

We know that during the 1950s and early 1960s, there was a serious effort by Soviet bloc intelligence to sexually compromise Western officials who exerted major influence on their countries’ policy toward the Soviet Union. In 1958, for example, the French Ambassador in Paris, Maurice Dejean, known to be close to de Gaulle, was enticed into an affair with a KGB swallow, then beaten up by a thug posing as her husband.

According to a defector, the Soviet secret police had been told that “Nikita Sergeyevich himself” wanted Dejean caught. The Ambassador was inevitably called on by a Soviet official, who assured him that while it “took a lot of doing,” the thug would “keep quiet in the interest of Soviet-French relations.”

Since Dejean was considered to have a promising future in French politics, the Soviets evidently did not try to push him into a major act of disloyalty while in Moscow. Presumably they felt that he would be more useful once he was back in Paris and more able to further the old Soviet goal of dislodging France from the Western orbit.†

The Secret Service lacked the resources or the mandate to investigate the background of each woman who arrived in the presidential bedroom.‡ The Service had to take the same approach to the matter as Dean Rusk, who said years later that he was Kennedy’s Secretary of State, “not his chaperone.”

The President was hardly unaware that the Soviets used sex for blackmail. When Thompson once explained to him how unmarried young Marines guarded the Moscow Embassy, he found Kennedy “very upset” by the possibility of compromise by the Soviets: “Jesus, Tommy! You mean to tell me that they’re in there and they have no women for one solid year? My God, what do they do about women?”*

Once before, a romance had threatened Kennedy’s career. It was in early 1942, as a Naval Intelligence officer, that he was involved with Inga Arvad Fejos, a married woman and reputed recent mistress of Axel Wenner-gren, a Swede blacklisted by the State Department for his close association with Hermann Göring and other Nazi leaders. She was photographed at the 1936 Olympics sitting with Hitler, who found her “the perfect example of Nordic beauty.”

She was a tall, blond former Miss Denmark who declaimed against the “damned dirty Jews” and was, by specific order of Franklin Roosevelt’s Attorney General, under FBI surveillance as a possible Nazi spy. This resulted in such entries in her Bureau file as the following: “On February 6, 1942, she visited Kennedy in Charleston, South Carolina, the two spending three nights together in the same hotel room and engaging in sexual relations on numerous occasions.”

Testimony to Kennedy’s political cynicism at the time was his willingness to be involved with a woman who was hardly critical about Hitler† and whose movements and connections he knew to have inspired official concern that she was working against the United States. That winter he wrote her, “I’ve returned from an interesting trip, about which I won’t bore you with the details, as if you are a spy I shouldn’t tell you and if your [sic] not you won’t be interested. But I missed you.”‡

In March 1942, Kennedy wrote Lem Billings that Arvad was “heading for Reno. It would be certainly ironical if I should get married while you were visiting Germany.” That summer: “As you probably have not heard—Inga-Binga got married—and not to me—She evidently wanted to leave Washington and get to N.Y. so she married someone she had known for years but whom she didn’t love. I think it would have been much smarter for her to take the train.… Anyway she’s fine—and that leaves the situation rather blank.”

The affair almost caused Kennedy to be cashiered from the Navy. It was later said that to disrupt the relationship, which had the potential to harm not only Kennedy’s future but that of his older brother and father, Joseph Kennedy used his influence with the Roosevelt administration to have him transferred to a PT-boat in the Pacific. Privately the President recalled, “They shagged my ass out of town to break us up.” J. Edgar Hoover came to regret his role in the episode, telling an aide that if Kennedy had not commanded the PT-109, he would never have become President.*

Perhaps the knowledge that he had cheated fate by winning the Presidency in spite of the Arvad files reinforced Kennedy’s sense that his private behavior was unlikely to cause him public embarrassment. His lawyers, his father, and his brother Robert evidently used financial payoffs, legal action, and other kinds of threats to silence women who had been involved with Kennedy and, for breach of promise or other reasons, threatened to go public.

Kennedy knew the rules of the game in that era compelled opposing candidates and the mainstream press not to use sordid information learned about a leader’s private life unless it was judged to affect his public performance. During the 1952 Senate campaign against Henry Cabot Lodge, when someone unearthed a picture of Kennedy and a naked woman on a beach, he said, “Don’t worry. Cabot will never use it.” He was right, but the naked woman was neither a Soviet bloc agent nor a Mafia moll.

Although he was fascinated by what he learned about the love lives of Castro, Goulart, and other leaders, the President felt that the private behavior of a chief of government should be beyond the vulgar curiosity of the public. Over a private dinner at the White House, when someone once brought up the subject of Lenin’s mistresses, he received a stony stare from the head of the table.

For Kennedy, a security check performed on every woman he saw before he saw her might have removed some of the appeal of the tryst. Like his father, he enjoyed defying the rules and getting away with it. It is hard to imagine Truman or Eisenhower forming a gambling pool with close friends, as this President is said to have done, to be claimed by “the first man to have sex with someone other than his spouse inside the Lincoln Bedroom.”

Kennedy considered his public performance and his private behavior to be two areas of his life that had no serious connection. He conducted the former with a consistent sense of responsibility, the latter with the fatalism that Billings noted, living “for the moment, treating each day as if it were his last, demanding of life constant intensity, adventure, and pleasure.” Of his relations with women, the President is said to have told an intimate, “They can’t touch me while I’m alive. And after I’m dead, who cares?”

During the 1950s, his father and his lawyers might have been relied upon to constrain forces that wished to do him ill. But once he moved into the White House, the stakes were no longer one Senator’s career but the entire world. By pursuing women whose full backgrounds he evidently could not know, Kennedy caused his Presidency to be a potential hostage to any resourceful group in American society that might have wished to bring him down—the Teamsters, the Mafia, the Radical Right—and every hostile intelligence service in the world.

Ellen Fimmel Rometsch was the twenty-seven-year-old wife of a West German airman attached to the West German military mission in Washington. Born in Kleinitz, East Germany, she was a member of two Communist Party organizations before fleeing to the West in 1953 at the age of seventeen. Her parents and other relatives stayed behind.

In April 1961, she and her second husband, Sergeant Rolf Rometsch, arrived in Washington. “We were so hard up that Ellen did some work on the side as a model,” he later said. “I had no idea of irregular conduct.” Working at all hours of the day and night, she told friends that she was a model.

Clad in a skin-tight costume with black fishnet stockings, she started working as a hostess at the Quorum Club, the private suite in the Carroll Arms Hotel across from the Senate office buildings frequented by members of Congress, their staff, and lobbyists. The club’s proprietor was Bobby Baker of Alabama, the onetime protégé of Lyndon Johnson, fixer and secretary of the Senate known as “the hundred-and-first Senator.”

Later Rometsch attended the notorious parties held at Baker’s Southwest Washington town house. Rometsch’s quickly expanding acquaintanceship on Capitol Hill and Embassy Row and in the Executive Branch evidently included at least one member of the Soviet Embassy and, according to the FBI, the President.

Her loud name-dropping and conspicuous spending were what attracted the FBI’s attention. Informed of the Bureau’s investigation in late July or early August 1963, Robert Kennedy demanded her immediate expulsion from the country. With less than a week’s notice, Rometsch and her husband were rushed to West Germany by one of Robert’s aides. “My chief at the Embassy told me I had to go back to Germany because of my wife’s behavior,” Rolf said later. “I was told it was because of security reasons.”

Here the matter might have rested but for the gathering Senate probe into Baker’s kickbacks, favors, and women that later sent the Alabaman to prison. On October 26, 1963, the Des Moines Register reported Rometsch’s expulsion and said she had been “associating with congressional leaders and some prominent New Frontiersmen” and that she was angry that her “important friends” had not prevented her departure. Republican Senator John J. Williams of Delaware demanded an inquiry.

Robert Kennedy asked his trusted friend LaVern Duffy, an investigator who had worked closely with him, Salinger, and O’Donnell on the Labor Rackets Committee, to fly immediately to West Germany, calm the woman down, and keep her quiet. By the time reporters were swarming around her family house in Linderhausen, a guard was there to wave them off with a shotgun. Perhaps tipped off by Washington and uneager to antagonize the Americans, the Bonn government issued a statement that Rometsch had had no East German contacts: “The whole thing seems harmless.”

The Attorney General asked J. Edgar Hoover to help persuade the Senate leaders, Dirksen and Mansfield, to avert a Senate investigation that, he warned, would taint Republicans as well as Democrats. Sticking in the knife, Hoover replied that Robert already had “a complete memorandum upon this matter,” which he should read to Mansfield and Dirksen himself. Kennedy was reduced to making his request again. The Director acceded.

As a result of Hoover’s meeting with the two Senators at Mansfield’s home, Rometsch’s relationship with the President remained a national secret. FBI agents stormed the office of a congressional photographer, confiscating prints and negatives of the German woman. The President and his brother acquired one more unwanted debt to Hoover.

The following week, the President passed out some disinformation to Ben Bradlee. He told the Newsweek man that he intended to see Hoover regularly, as Franklin Roosevelt had done, “with rumors flying, and every indication of a dirty campaign coming up.” He shook his head: “Boy, the dirt he has on those Senators. You wouldn’t believe it.”

He described a picture of Ellen Rometsch that, he said, the Director had brought to a recent lunch, showing her to be “a really beautiful woman.” Hoover had told him, he said, that she now wanted to return to the United States to marry a Senate investigator: the Senate aide “was getting for free what Elly was charging others a couple of hundred dollars a night.” As for Baker, Kennedy had told Bradlee the previous month that he was “primarily a rogue, not a crook. He was always telling me he knew where he could get me the cutest girls, but he never did.”

In a 1965 oral history interview, Robert Kennedy put his own slant on what little was publicly known about the Rometsch episode: “I spoke to the President about it—and it didn’t involve anybody at the White House—but I thought that it would just destroy the confidence that the people in the United States had in their government and really make us a laughingstock around the world. I suggested that maybe Hoover should meet with Mike Mansfield and Dirksen and explain what was in the files.… Some of the girls just obviously told lies about it.… But we had it under control.”

Had the Attorney General and Hoover failed to get the Rometsch matter “under control,” were the President forced to resign in 1963 or 1964 in a sex-and-security scandal, the politics of the United States could have been poisoned for a generation. The American Right and others might have explained Kennedy’s failure to exploit the American nuclear advantage at the Bay of Pigs, in Laos and Berlin, and during the Missile Crisis as the result of the President’s compromise by Soviet bloc intelligence.

In a climate in which every American decision of the Cold War would be scrutinized for signs that American officials were secretly laboring under the thumb of the Russians, what American leader would have had the courage to bring similar suspicion on himself by pressing ahead for better relations with the Soviet Union?

On Tuesday, July 2, 1963, at an East Berlin sports arena, Nikita Khrushchev praised the “sober appraisal” of the world in Kennedy’s American University speech. Before thousands of cheering Communists, he said that the Soviet Union was ready to agree on a limited test ban, covering the atmosphere, outer space, and under water. Combined with the “simultaneous signing of a nonaggression pact” between East and West, such a treaty would create a “fresh international climate.”

The Chairman dropped his earlier demand for an unpoliced moratorium on underground testing but withdrew his offer of on-site inspections: the Soviet Union would never “open its doors to NATO spies.” He later said that the Soviet Union would no more allow inspectors to travel about than Orientals would allow other men into their harems.

Kennedy heard about Khrushchev’s speech while flying from Naples to Andrews. Thompson advised that by withdrawing his offer of on-site inspections, the Chairman had probably “yielded to military pressure.”

Carl Kaysen wrote Willy Brandt from Washington that while Khrushchev had proposed only a limited test ban, it “could go a long way toward helping to close the door to further diffusion of nuclear weapons.” Perhaps the Russians were “feeling the same concern” as the United States about China: “The President is sure that it would be unwise for us to ignore the opportunity that this signal might present.”

On the fourth of July, Mikoyan attended the Independence Day reception at Spaso House. He told Kohler, “We are for ending the Cold War.” The next day, when Chinese officials arrived in the Soviet capital for their much-ballyhooed talks, Khrushchev insulted them by flying from East Berlin to Kiev without stopping in Moscow.

At his river dacha in Kiev, with crops being harvested in the distance, the Chairman told Paul-Henri Spaak, the NATO Secretary-General, that there would be no war, probably none for generations, but it was up to the West whether or not the Soviet Union adopted a hard or soft policy.

Turning to Berlin, he told the Chekhov story of the peasant arrested for stealing bolts from the railroad track for fishing lines. He told the judge that an accident was impossible: villagers had been stealing them for years. Khrushchev told his visitor that he would keep taking bolts from Berlin, but never too many at a time. Spaak warned him not to link the issue to a test ban: “You will lose all in an impasse if you adopt this.”

Harold Macmillan wrote Kennedy that if the Chairman “really drops the offer of inspection,” they should seek the “very big prize” of a limited ban: “Then we may be able to approach much more effectively the problems that we have with France, Germany, etc., and Khrushchev also may be able to do something with China.”

Drafting negotiating instructions for Harriman, the President considered how the negotiations might be shaped to keep China from going nuclear.* He had warned André Malraux, the French Culture Minister, in January that a nuclear China would be a “great menace in the future to humanity, the Free World, and freedom on earth” and was ready to sacrifice hundreds of millions of its own people for its “aggressive and militant policies.” Kennedy had told aides that he was even willing to accept some Soviet cheating as long as a comprehensive test ban denied China the Bomb.

By 1963, Peking required no further Soviet help to join the nuclear club. A comprehensive test ban might deny China the excuse that its nuclear testing was merely in emulation of the Soviets and Americans. It might embolden Khrushchev to impose new political and economic sanctions, but in recent years these had failed to dampen Chinese radicalism.

There were top-secret proposals in the State Department to ask the Soviets to remove their nuclear umbrella from China in exchange for “a secret undertaking not to support Chiang’s efforts to return to the mainland” or abandonment of the American commitment to German reunification. Thompson told the President that the Soviets might warn those Chinese leaders eager for nuclear weapons, “Don’t do this, or else,” leaving open the possibility of a preemptive strike against Chinese nuclear installations.

One of Harriman’s briefing papers proposed “radical steps in cooperation with the U.S.S.R.,” such as “Soviet or possibly joint U.S.-U.S.S.R. use of military force” against China. One proposal was to order Soviet and American bombers to drop explosives on the Chinese nuclear facility at Lop Nor. Only one would detonate: no one would ever know which. Another idea was to use Nationalist Chinese agents to sabotage the installation in a fashion that appeared to be an industrial accident.

Walt Rostow wrote the President, “We have both a national interest and a duty to history in conducting the Harriman probe.” Thompson advised that it was almost impossible to prod Khrushchev into any serious discussion of China, but Kennedy asked Harriman to go as far as he could to explore some kind of understanding on the problem. Harriman told him that to succeed he would need something to sweeten the pot: one “obvious possibility” was the Multilateral Force (MLF).

In 1962, the Kennedy government had promoted this plan for a nuclear arsenal under joint European-American control in order to alleviate doubts by Western European leaders, especially de Gaulle, that the United States would risk nuclear war for them. The impetus for MLF faded as France pulled away from the Western military alliance. And after the Missile Crisis, few wondered whether Kennedy would risk nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union.* When Bundy observed that MLF had “had it,” the President replied, “Where have you been?”

Kennedy now told Harriman that he should use MLF as a bargaining chip with Khrushchev if it could purchase an understanding on China. Other advisers felt that the President was willing to trade MLF for a comprehensive test ban with an acceptable quota of inspections. Kennedy told Harriman that with the success of his trip to West Germany he now had some “cash in the bank there” and would “draw on it if you think I should.”†

Macmillan was pressing for an American-Soviet-British summit to be convened at the time a test ban was signed. With elections ahead and the Profumo scandal still unfolding, his party was in need of a shot in the arm. The Prime Minister wished to restore the tradition of British participation in East-West summits, broken at Camp David and Vienna, and to end his career by basking in the acclaim for the test ban for which he had fought so long.

Kennedy told Harriman that if a summit would clinch Khrushchev’s approval of a treaty, he was willing to have a summit. But he thought that the French and West Germans would be provoked by the presence of the dovish Macmillan, and that the size of such a meeting would make it too formal.

The President felt that any summit should be choreographed for the purpose of gaining congressional and public support in the United States for the finished treaty. He remembered how Wilson in 1919 had met in triumph with the leaders of Europe and then returned home to have the Senate thwart his dream of American membership in a vibrant League of Nations.

On Monday, July 15, Harriman’s five-man delegation and a British team led by Macmillan’s Minister for Science, Lord Hailsham, arrived in Moscow.* Harriman told reporters that if Khrushchev was as interested in a test ban as Kennedy and Macmillan, “we ought to be out of here in two weeks.” Gromyko led the Soviet delegation, which Harriman and Hailsham considered a good omen.

The Chairman greeted the negotiators at the Kremlin: “Why don’t we have a test ban? Why don’t we sign it now and let the experts work out the details?” Harriman pushed forward a blank pad: “Here, Mr. Khrushchev, you sign first and I’ll sign underneath.”

He gave Khrushchev a letter from Kennedy. Commending Harriman, the President wrote that he still hoped to achieve a comprehensive test ban and regretted their disagreements about inspections: “I can only repeat again that there simply is not any interest in using such inspections for espionage of any sort, but I know from your recent statements that you have not accepted this explanation.”

Nevertheless the Chairman told Harriman that he had no further interest in inspections: “The trouble with you is that you want to spy.… You’re trying to tell me that if there’s a piece of cheese in the room … the mouse won’t go and take the cheese.”

He produced a draft of a limited test ban that would take effect upon signature by the Soviets, Americans, British, and French. Harriman and Hailsham naturally insisted on the deletion of France, while conceding that France’s later adherence to the treaty would be “very important.” Harriman took the opportunity to mention the danger from China. Khrushchev replied that Peking would not have nuclear weapons “for years” and that their arsenal could not remotely compete with those of the United States and the Soviet Union.

He also presented the draft of a nonaggression pact. The Russians had for years tried to interest the Americans in such a treaty.* Harriman declared that such an accord would require extensive consultation with America’s Western allies that might delay a test ban for a long time. He did not see how the United States could accept it unless aggression was defined to include interference with access to West Berlin.

Khrushchev charged that Bonn was preventing Kennedy from accepting a nonaggression pact: “You conquered the Germans and now you are afraid of them.”

Kennedy kept tight strings on Harriman and his colleagues. He had told Harriman that he did not want daily summaries of the test ban talks but a blow-by-blow description of every meeting “so we can appraise it ourselves.” To prevent leaks, he established a secret channel, code-named BAN: outside the West Wing, Harriman’s cables were shared only with Rusk, McNamara, McCone, Thompson, and William Foster of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.

After reading Harriman’s report of his meeting with Khrushchev, the President cabled back, “You are right to keep French out of initial treaty, though I continue to be prepared to work on French if Soviets will work on Chinese.” He was still “convinced that Chinese problem is more serious than Khrushchev suggests.”

In a private meeting, Harriman should remind the Chairman “that relatively small forces in hands of people like Chicoms” could be very dangerous to us all. “You should try to elicit Khrushchev’s view of means of limiting or preventing Chinese nuclear development and his willingness to take Soviet action or to accept U.S. action aimed in this direction.”

Walking into Spiridonovka Palace for the first day of formal talks, Harriman told his colleagues that the first time he had been in that building was in 1943, for an American-Soviet conference on a postwar United Nations.

When the sessions began, he demanded improvement of foggy language that seemed to prevent use of nuclear weapons even in self-defense. An Anglo-American draft would allow peaceful nuclear explosions in the prohibited environments if all signatories agreed. Gromyko complained that this would reduce the treaty’s appeal to other potential signatories.

Another Anglo-American clause allowed a signatory to withdraw from the treaty if some other country set off a nuclear explosion that it considered a danger to its security. Gromyko complained that this clause would raise doubts about the seriousness of the signatories. What was more, the Soviet Union claimed as its inherent right the abrogation of any treaty that violated its national interest.

Harriman knew that without a withdrawal clause, the Senate might refuse to ratify the treaty out of fear that it would allow China to move ahead of Moscow and Washington in nuclear development. The talk grew so heated that at one point he picked up his papers and threatened to leave. Finally, the Westerners traded the peaceful explosions clause in exchange for a weasel-worded provision for withdrawal.

Gromyko made such a fierce demand for a nonaggression pact that Harriman wondered whether the Russians would walk out of the talks. He promised Gromyko to send the President a sympathetic report on the Soviet position. In Washington, Thompson thought that had gone “a little bit beyond” Harriman’s instructions and was “an unnecessary concession.” But it worked.

The final obstacle: how could nations not formally recognized by others, such as East Germany and China, sign the treaty without being recognized? Hailsham complained to Macmillan by cable that Harriman’s rigidity on this issue was in danger of scuttling the talks.

At Thursday noon, July 25, Ormsby-Gore arrived at the White House to argue against Harriman’s position. The Americans had just called from Moscow to say that a solution had been found: each nation would sign the treaty in association with only those nations it approved of. Kennedy was on the telephone with Macmillan. Grinning, he told the Prime Minister, “Don’t worry. David is right here. It’s been worked out and I’ve told them to go ahead.”

Macmillan was jubilant. As he wrote in his diary, he had “prayed hard for this, night after night.” He rushed out of the room to tell his wife the joyful news, after which he burst into tears. He cabled the President, “I found myself unable to express my real feelings on the telephone tonight.… I do understand the high degree of courage and faith which you have shown.”

That evening, Harriman, Hailsham, and Gromyko initialed the most important arms-control accord since the start of the Cold War. Harriman looked at Hailsham’s ornate initial and said, “Did you see his ‘H?’ It was very beautiful!”

During the talks, at a reception for the Hungarian Prime Minister, Janos Kadar, Khrushchev had told Harriman he was glad to see “the imperialist.” The American replied, “When you came to my house in New York, you called me a capitalist. Is this a promotion or a demotion?”

Khrushchev said, “A promotion.… An imperialist is a capitalist who interferes in other countries—for example, as you are in South Vietnam.” He went on to ask, “Why don’t we have a nonaggression pact?” Harriman had a “better idea”: swap commanders. The new NATO commander, General Lemnitzer, could go to Warsaw and Marshal Andrei Grechko to Paris. The Chairman called Grechko over: “I understand you are going to Paris.” When the Marshal shook his head, Khrushchev said, “No, let’s have a nonaggression pact.”

Harriman reminded him that an Amateur Athletic Union team from the United States was competing against a Soviet team in Lenin Stadium. The Chairman said he had never been to a track meet. He turned up at the stadium with Kadar, Brezhnev, and their wives. Harriman and the Kohlers joined them in the official box. As American and Soviet runners strode the field, arm in arm, Harriman and Khrushchev rose to accept a vast ovation. Harriman saw tears in the Chairman’s eyes.

After the treaty was initialed, Harriman went to the Kremlin. Reaching up with both arms, Khrushchev gave his tall friend a bear hug and cried, “Maladyets!”* As arranged with Kennedy, Harriman raised the subject of China.† He said that the President felt “great concern over Chinese development of nuclear weapons” and tried to explore Khrushchev’s knowledge and attitude about Peking’s nuclear program. Khrushchev was monosyllabic.

Harriman persisted. “Suppose we can get France to sign the treaty? Can you deliver China?” The Chairman said, “That is your problem.” Harriman tried again: “Suppose their rockets are targeted against you.” Again Khrushchev was silent. Harriman did not raise the possibility of an American-Soviet attack on Chinese nuclear sites.*

Brightening, the Chairman took his visitor across the Kremlin courtyard, shaking hands and pinching a girl on the cheek. Introducing “Gospodin Garriman,” he shouted, “We’ve just signed the Test Ban Treaty! I’m going to take him to dinner. Do you think he deserves it?” The slaves of communism cheered.†

During dinner, Harriman mentioned that Robert Kennedy would “very much like to visit the U.S.S.R.”; perhaps the Chairman could invite him. Khrushchev replied that if he did so he would be expelled from the Party, given some of the Attorney General’s anti-Soviet speeches.

Later he wrote the President, “Mr. Harriman showed himself worthy of the recommendation that you gave him in your letter. Furthermore we never doubted this.” Ormsby-Gore reported to Kennedy that Macmillan was in “a state of euphoria.” Arthur Schlesinger wrote Harriman, “I am damn glad that you are in the government!” The editors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of their Doomsday Clock back to twelve minutes before midnight.

When the impending treaty was announced, the Chinese delegates sent to Moscow to discuss their differences with the Russians had stalked home and excoriated the test ban as a device to perpetuate the Soviet-American monopoly on power. The Sino-Soviet divorce came into full public view.

Harriman had cabled Washington, “It is becoming crystal clear that the Soviets have as their objective … an attempt to isolate the Chicoms.” He felt that by including many other countries, “particularly the underdeveloped,” in the treaty, Khrushchev felt he could pressure Peking to stop its nuclear program.

This was why the Chairman placed “maximum importance” on getting France to sign. That summer he joked, “De Gaulle has said that he wanted his own nuclear umbrella, but to construct a nuclear umbrella is not such a simple thing. One may end up both without one’s pants and without the umbrella!”

Kennedy had earlier written de Gaulle that a test ban treaty was important as a means to limit the dangerous increase in the number of nuclear powers: “I must say frankly, they occupy me considerably.” He tried to entice the Frenchman by offering him the technical information that he would have otherwise acquired through atmospheric testing. Under the terms of the Atomic Energy Act, he declared France a nuclear power, making it eligible for nuclear assistance without new legislation.

After the treaty was initialed, the President beseeched de Gaulle by letter not to “make an early final decision”: “We have always hoped to have the participation of France in banning tests.… All that I am urging now is that it would be to our common advantage for our three Governments to explore these questions.”

In Paris, the French President declared that as long as Russia and America retained their capacity to destroy the world, France would not be diverted “from equipping herself with the same sources of strength.”* Several days later he added that he was not impressed by the adhesion of dozens of Third World nations: “It is rather like asking people to promise not to swim the Channel.” He rejected the President’s offer of nuclear cooperation as a violation of French sovereignty.†

Kennedy was disappointed and angry. He knew that a boycott by the French and Chinese meant that the treaty would probably fail as a means of stopping the spread of nuclear weapons. With more emotion than foresight, he carped that “Charles de Gaulle will be remembered for one thing only—his refusal to take that treaty.”

Nevertheless on Friday evening, July 26, the President spoke on television from the Oval Office “in a spirit of hope”: the worlds of communism and free choice had been caught for eighteen years in a “vicious circle of conflicting ideology and interest.… Yesterday a shaft of light cut into the darkness.”

The Limited Test Ban was the product of “patience and vigilance. We have made clear, most recently in Berlin and Cuba, our deep resolve to protect our security and our freedom against any form of aggression.… This treaty is not the millennium.… But it is an important first step, a step towards peace, a step towards reason, a step away from war.…”

If it proved to “symbolize the end of one era and the beginning of another,” both sides could “gain confidence and experience in peaceful collaboration.” Less than an hour’s nuclear exchange “could wipe out more than three hundred million Americans, Europeans, and Russians, as well as untold numbers elsewhere.” As Khrushchev had warned the Chinese, “the survivors would envy the dead.”

The treaty would reduce radioactive fallout and retard “the spread of nuclear weapons to nations not now possessing them.… I ask you to stop and think for a moment what it would mean to have nuclear weapons … in the hands of countries … stable and unstable, responsible and irresponsible, scattered throughout the world.”

While danger remained “in Cuba, in Southeast Asia, in Berlin,” for the first time in years “the path to peace may be open. No one can be certain what the future will bring.… But history and our own conscience will judge us harsher if we do not now make every effort to test our hopes by action.”

Without revealing its provenance, Kennedy quoted the same Chinese proverb he had quoted to Khrushchev at Vienna: “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step. My fellow Americans, let us take that first step.”

The President flew to Hyannis Port, where Harriman arrived on Sunday with a great jar of caviar from Khrushchev: “But I’m not sure you like caviar very much.” Recalling his difficulty in extracting thirty-five thousand dollars from the multimillionaire in 1960, Kennedy replied, “We’re going to take it whether we like it or not.”

The President sent a copy of the treaty to Harry Truman in Independence, Missouri. With his tape recorder running, he called his predecessor and said, “Well, I think Averell Harriman did a good job.” Truman replied, “I’m writing you a personal, confidential letter about certain paragraphs in it.… But I’m in complete agreement with what—what it provides.… My goodness life, maybe we can save a total war with it.”*

Kennedy was more anxious about Eisenhower. When the Moscow negotiations were almost finished, he had sent Rusk and McCone up to Gettysburg. Eisenhower told them, “The big stumbling block to the treaty will be China and France.” Rusk predicted that the Soviets might impose sanctions against Peking. McCone said that “China’s possession of the Bomb” was still “several years off.”

The General was not sold on the treaty. More conservative than during his Presidency, he was also influenced by his friend Lewis Strauss, an old warrior against a test ban who had preceded McCone as Chairman of his Atomic Energy Commission.† He told Rusk and McCone, “Five years ago, we were fully confident of our own superiority in nuclear science.” But now the Soviets might be ahead in antimissile development: “An agreement would favor them.”

He did not like the President’s compromise on the withdrawal clause: “We might not be able to disclose the intelligence sources that tell us the Russians have been cheating.”

Rusk assured him that “there is no direct relationship between this treaty and other issues such as Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam.” The Limited Test Ban was “not an indication that we are ready to accept the status quo.” The United States would “continue to push in these unrelated areas.”

Kennedy abandoned the idea of signing the treaty at a Moscow summit with Khrushchev. He did not want to have to fight off Macmillan, whose presence might encourage the Chairman to pressure him for further concessions. He did not like the imagery of going to Khrushchev’s lair to sign a document that his domestic foes would portray as a gift to the Russians.

Instead he decided to implicate key Senators—the more conservative, the better—by sending them to Moscow in a delegation headed by Rusk. Republicans were resistant. Everett Dirksen and Bourke Hickenlooper refused to make the trip. George Aiken of Vermont recalled that Mansfield twisted his arm: “Mike started out by saying ‘Don’t say no, don’t say no.’ … Although I would have given anything not to have gone, I agreed.” He was joined by Leverett Saltonstall of Massachusetts.

The Democrats were represented by Senators Fulbright, John Sparkman of Alabama, and John Pastore of Rhode Island. Rusk had advised the President that “rather than fool around and sort of reach out into left field for somebody like Keating … we go with these three Democrats and two Republicans. And then if the Republicans appear … to be niggardly about this, I think they’ll be the ones to suffer.”

Kennedy was worried that Stevenson’s presence might incite the American Right. As Sorensen recalled, “Adlai wanted to go. He deserved to go. But Kennedy was alarmed about Woodrow Wilson and the Senate.” Stevenson reminded the President that with his 1956 test ban proposal, he had “started this whole thing.”* Khrushchev made it easier by insisting that U Thant attend the signing. Kennedy called Rusk: “If U Thant goes, then Adlai can go.… It ought to be sold on that basis.”

In Moscow on Monday morning, August 5, Rusk called on Gromyko at the Foreign Ministry. Showing that his office windows faced westward, Gromyko told Rusk that he often looked out and wondered what was “really happening” in the West.

When the Americans went to the Kremlin, Khrushchev told Rusk that the Limited Test Ban was merely a first step. They must now face the problem of Germany. Rusk politely said that Germany was “fundamental” and that Americans understood why the Soviet Union was so concerned.

The Chairman chided him for referring to some countries as “the East” instead of “socialist.” Rusk noted that some Americans regarded the Kennedy administration as socialist. Khrushchev asked, “What kind of a man would say a thing like that?”

Fulbright recalled the Chairman’s tea with the Foreign Relations Committee four years before: if the American South could get along with the “damned Yankees,” the United States and the Soviet Union could get along.

Khrushchev needled Stevenson about his harassment of Zorin in the Security Council during the Missile Crisis: “What’s happened to you, Stevenson, since you started working for the United States government? We don’t like to be interrogated like a prisoner in the dock.” Wounded, Stevenson later lamented that the Chairman no longer thought him “objective.”

After a gala luncheon, brandy, and speeches, a Soviet orchestra played Gershwin’s “Love Walked In” as the beaming Khrushchev led Thant and the Americans, British, and Russians into a white marble Kremlin hall, gleaming under television lights. Rusk, Gromyko, and the Earl of Home signed the treaty. As they clinked glasses of champagne, Russians cried out, “Peace and friendship!” Glenn Seaborg wrote in his diary, “A glorious day!”

During dinner, Khrushchev recalled the failed “Spirit of Geneva” and the failed “Spirit of Camp David.” Now he said, “Let’s create a new Spirit—of Moscow!”

At Spiridonovka Palace, Rusk fulfilled Harriman’s pledge by discussing a nonaggression pact with Gromyko. Khrushchev had earlier assured him that such an agreement was like mineral water, refreshing and invigorating: no one would win, no one would lose. Rusk had told him it was more like the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, which had aspired to outlaw war but had left Americans in “considerable frustration.”

He told Gromyko that the United States hoped to reduce its military budget, but this would depend on other East-West agreements. Washington was ready to discuss how to prevent new tensions over Germany, including new arrangements for access to West Berlin. His talks with Dobrynin had succeeded only in “boring each other.”

Perhaps he and Gromyko could take a “fresh look” at the problem during the UN General Assembly session in the fall: “We don’t believe this matter is urgent or critical unless one chooses to make it so.… We readily concede that the Soviet Union is a great power, but so are we.”

Rusk, Dobrynin, Gromyko, Foy and Phyllis Kohler, and Llewellyn and Jane Thompson flew to Gagra and motored to Pitsunda. Neither American Ambassador had ever been honored with an invitation to Khrushchev’s Black Sea estate. Gromyko laughingly warned Rusk not to swim toward Turkey. The Secretary of State may have wondered whether Gromyko was making an oblique, taunting reference to Kennedy’s Turkish missile concession.

When they arrived, the Chairman showed off his indoor-outdoor pool, pressing a button to open the glass wall: “We close it in the winter.… You get the illusion of the sea.” At the mandatory huge lunch, Phyllis Kohler was placed at the Chairman’s right. Khrushchev murmured to Jane Thompson, “These stupid protocol men! This is not the seating I asked for.”

The Chairman could not resist challenging his guest of honor to badminton, which they played on the large Oriental rug, the French doors opened to the breeze. After losing by four to one, Rusk later said, “Khrushchev is pretty good with a racket. Basketball is my game, and we didn’t play that.”

The two men strolled off into the woods and stopped under a tree. Khrushchev told him, “I’ve never understood why you Americans are so stubborn about Berlin. De Gaulle doesn’t want a war over Berlin and Macmillan certainly doesn’t. Why is it only the Americans?” Rusk thought to himself, What do I tell the son of a bitch? He improvised: “Mr. Khrushchev, you’ve just got to assume the Americans are goddamn fools.”

After the Americans departed, Khrushchev learned of the death of the Kennedys’ prematurely born second son, Patrick. He called Rusk in Moscow and asked him to convey his sympathies.

Kennedy sometimes derided large families, saying that state nurseries would do the job better. As Jacqueline recalled in her notes, “He never wanted them all crowded together like Bobby and Ethel—so small children in the middle were miserable and their parents harassed—But he always wanted a baby coming along when its predecessor was coming up—That is why he was so glad when he learned I was having Patrick.”

For the President, the baby’s death cast a shadow across the success of the Limited Test Ban. Macmillan wrote him by hand, “The burdens of public affairs are more or less tolerable, because they are, in a sense, impersonal. But private grief is poignant and cruel.”

With the approaching test ban fight in the Senate, Kennedy had little time to linger on his private grief. He feared that the coalition of Southern Democrats and Republicans that was blocking his civil rights bill would deny him the needed two-thirds vote for his test ban treaty. Already Senators were charging that Harriman had made a “secret deal with Khrushchev” to win an agreement.

McNamara privately told the Joint Chiefs, “If you insist in opposing this treaty, well and good, but I am not going to let anyone oppose it out of emotion or ignorance.” During a fortnight of meetings he resolved their anxieties about Soviet cheating and promised to improve detection methods, prepare for atmospheric tests on short notice if the treaty were abrogated, and continue underground testing. General LeMay was persuaded that the treaty would help to divide the Chinese and Russians.

The President was told that congressional mail was running fifteen to one against the treaty.* His aides were astonished when he told them that, if necessary, he would “gladly” forfeit his reelection for the sake of the treaty. In early August, he said he could name fifteen Senators who would probably oppose anything with his name attached, “and not all of them are Republicans.” If the vote were held that day, he thought the treaty would be defeated.

Before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, McNamara made a conservative argument for the treaty, warning that if testing continued in all environments, the United States would probably lose its technical lead. Kennedy told Senators that the nation did not need a hundred-megaton bomb, that neither side needed further tests to develop an antimissile missile, and that no amount of Soviet underground testing or undetected cheating could reverse the American lead.

The President was furious to hear that McCone was sending CIA nuclear specialists to persuade Senators that the Soviets had cheated during the testing moratorium. His relations with McCone had plummeted since the Missile Crisis. Robert Kennedy complained that when the Cuban issue was reinflamed in February, McCone had hurt the President by reminding Senators that he had not been the one to underestimate the possibility of missiles in Cuba in the summer of 1962.†

The Attorney General suspected that with an election year looming, McCone might now be a Trojan horse, “playing with the Republicans.” Bundy told a CIA man, “I’m so tired of listening to John McCone say he was right I never want to hear it again.”

Spearhead of the opposition to what it called “the Treaty of Moscow” was the deeply anticommunist physicist Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb. In confidential testimony, he insisted that the United States must continue its secret high-altitude testing if it hoped to develop a means of destroying Soviet missiles in flight; the Russians had performed antimissile tests during their 1962 series.* A later witness warned that this could place the United States “at the mercy of the dictators who already control a third of the world.”

Others demanded that reservations be attached to the treaty. Arthur Dean warned against such renegotiation with Moscow and the more than a hundred nations expected to sign, perhaps “throwing away any possibility of further negotiations with the Soviet Union.” Hickenlooper demanded to see Khrushchev’s private correspondence with Kennedy.

Rusk volunteered to show the letters to Senate leaders. Smathers warned colleagues that if they became public, Khrushchev might say, “The hell with you, Mr. Kennedy, I am never going to write a letter to you again.”

Richard Russell opposed the treaty on grounds that it lacked safeguards against cheating: “Those Russians … have never yet carried out any agreement they’ve made.” Bundy later thought that had the President been willing to ask Lyndon Johnson to work on Russell, the Georgian might have changed his mind. But as with Stevenson, by 1963 Kennedy was less willing than ever to give his Vice President a chance to renew his political influence.

Foreign Relations recommended the Limited Test Ban Treaty to the Senate with only one dissenting vote, cast by Democrat Russell Long of Louisiana. Barry Goldwater demanded that ratification be contingent on withdrawal of all Soviet forces from Cuba. He claimed that not “ten men in America” knew the full truth about Cuba, the test ban treaty, or other commitments made to governments “dedicated to our destruction.”

Kennedy replied at a press conference: “There are no commitments, and I think that Senator Goldwater is at least one of the ten men in America who would know that is not true.” Asked if he cared to comment further, the President had 1964 in mind: “No, not yet, not yet.”

As the treaty went to the Senate floor, Kennedy was still worried about Eisenhower’s ability to sink it. The President had one particular source of leverage. Soon after the Inauguration, his Justice Department had interviewed Bernard Goldfine, the Boston textile manufacturer whose favors to Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Sherman Adams, had forced Adams to resign.

Suffering from arteriosclerosis, Goldfine now claimed that his gifts to Adams had included not only lodging and the famous vicuna coat and rugs but more than $150,000, slipped to Adams over five years. The accusations seemed to be corroborated by a series of cashier’s checks that Adams had given his Washington landlady.

Robert Kennedy’s lieutenants worried that Goldfine’s flagging memory and crying jags, evidently induced by his illness, might impede his credibility on the witness stand. Aides to Mortimer Caplin, Director of the Internal Revenue Service, felt that the paper trail demonstrated Adams’s guilt. They strongly recommended prosecution.

The Attorney General could not have been displeased by the prospect of using Adams to tarnish the record of Eisenhower, who so disapproved of his brother and who still commanded such influence on public opinion. In February 1961, he wrote in his notes that he was “not optimistic” about winning the case but thought “there is probably a fifty-fifty chance.”

He gave the case to William Hundley, conveniently an Eisenhower holdover at Justice. Adams admitted receiving money from unremembered donors, but not from Goldfine. Citing Goldfine’s weakness as a witness, the gaps in the evidence, and the possibility that people might claim that they had given Adams money out of disinterested patriotism, the Attorney General’s subordinates recommended against prosecution. Internal Revenue officials wondered whether the case was quashed for political reasons.

The President later told Joseph Alsop that he sent the evidence against Adams to Eisenhower at Gettysburg. No doubt Kennedy believed that if Adams were not prosecuted, Eisenhower might feel grateful. According to Alsop, the General sent word back that he hoped Adams would be spared further humiliation. Robert Kennedy later insisted that this was not the reason he ultimately decided against prosecution. Nevertheless the President was evidently content to let Eisenhower think so.

Bobby Baker claimed in 1978 that when Eisenhower learned of the evidence against Adams, he instructed Everett Dirksen to ask Kennedy, “as a personal favor to me,” to kill the case: “He’ll have a blank check in my bank if he will grant me this favor.” According to Baker, the President agreed: when his brother balked, he said, “If you can’t comply with my request, then your resignation will be accepted.”

A cryptic exchange of letters between Eisenhower and Dirksen in 1962 suggests that Baker’s story may be accurate. In a January 10 letter to the General, Dirksen wrote that Eisenhower’s old congressional liaison Bryce Harlow “spoke to me about one of your former staff members—I am sure you will recall it—and I discussed it with the President on Monday morning at breakfast. I believe everything is in proper order.” Eisenhower replied, “I am particularly indebted to you for following through the matter mentioned in your second paragraph.”

Dirksen wrote him the next month that “the matter which you asked Bryce to talk to me about quite a while back about an individual has been gotten back on track.” Eisenhower thanked him “for your effort on behalf of an individual for whom we both have a high regard. I cannot tell you how delighted I am that, finally, he seems assured that the matter is indeed on the track.”

Late in the test ban struggle, Dirksen was still publicly undecided. Frederick Dutton of State felt that the Republican leader had “backed and filled” to prevent the treaty from becoming a “clear-cut accomplishment of the Administration useful in ’64.” Smathers recalled that Kennedy thought of Dirksen as “a fellow who could go either way at most any time.” The President laughed about having heard Dirksen give the best speech ever made for the Marshall Plan while in the House and the best speech against it while in the Senate.

By Baker’s account, Kennedy called Dirksen to the White House to ask for support on the test ban treaty: “Ike said I had coin in his bank and you say I have coin in yours.… I want you to reverse yourself and come out for the treaty. I also want Ike’s public endorsement of the treaty before the Senate votes. We’ll call it square on that other matter.” According to Baker, Dirksen replied, “Mr. President, you’re a hell of a horse trader. But I’ll honor my commitment, and I’m sure that General Eisenhower will.”

Dirksen endorsed the treaty, reminding other Republicans that their 1960 platform had called for a test ban. By his own account, he told the President, “My mind is made up. I shall support the treaty, and I expect some castigation for my vote.” Kennedy replied, “Everett, have you read The Man and the Myth? … You do not know what castigation is.”*

Despite his earlier coolness, Eisenhower also backed the treaty, adding that he presumed it would not prevent the use of nuclear weapons in the event of war.† He may or may not have pulled his punches in exchange for the President’s decision to spare Adams, but on November 23, 1963, he privately complained to Lyndon Johnson about the “tactics” employed by Kennedy’s Justice Department and IRS.

The Limited Test Ban passed the Senate on Tuesday, September 24. Eleven Democrats were opposed—all Southerners, except for the maverick conservative Frank Lausche of Ohio. Eight Republicans were opposed—all Westerners, except for Margaret Chase Smith of Maine. Sorensen felt that “no other accomplishment in the White House ever gave Kennedy greater satisfaction.”

The President departed that day for a western “conservation” tour in preparation for 1964. He would need new sources of support to make up for the southern states he expected to fall away as a result of his support for civil rights. In 1960, the only western states he had carried were Nevada, New Mexico, and Hawaii.

Starting in Duluth, Bismarck, Cheyenne, and Laramie, Kennedy spoke on conservation and did not say a word about the Limited Test Ban. Presidential aides feared that if he mentioned the treaty, he might be booed. But when he spoke in Billings, Montana, he could not help but praise Mansfield for his help in passing a treaty that was a first step toward “a more secure world.” The audience cheered.

Kennedy told another Montana audience that while the competition with communism would dominate the rest of their lives, the United States should compete not in nuclear violence but to show the world which society was “happier.”

On Thursday, September 26, he went to the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City. This was where, exactly three years before, the Democratic nominee had strained to affirm his anticommunism, branding Khrushchev the “dictator” of the “enemy” Communist system, “implacable, insatiable, unceasing” in its drive for world domination.

Now he said that “the Communist offensive, which claimed to be riding the tide of historic inevitability, has been thwarted and turned back in recent months.” The Limited Test Ban was “important as a first step, perhaps to be disappointed, perhaps to be ultimately set back. But at least in 1963, the United States committed itself, and the Senate of the United States, by an overwhelming vote, to one chance to end the radiation and the possibilities of burning.”

The day before he had flown over the Little Big Horn, “where General Custer was slain, a massacre which has lived in history, four hundred or five hundred men. We are talking about three hundred million men and women in twenty-four hours. I think it is wise to take a first step to lessen the possibility of that happening.” The crowd gave him a standing ovation.

Reporters told Salinger that Kennedy seemed to have found a powerful new issue for 1964. “Yes, you’re right,” he replied. “We’ve found that peace is an issue.” After his return to Washington, the President told Ormsby-Gore over dinner that he was determined to maintain the momentum of the test ban treaty and that he hoped to visit the Soviet Union at the first suitable moment.

The Limited Test Ban never fulfilled Kennedy’s and Khrushchev’s hopes. The treaty reduced the amount of strontium 90 in the atmosphere, but its failure to stop all forms of nuclear testing kept it from throwing a serious damper on the nuclear arms race.

Had the President been willing to seize Khrushchev’s offer of two to three on-site inspections in December 1962, he might have had a chance to close a comprehensive test ban. But that month he was still enmeshed in the unresolved issues of the Missile Crisis. Had he sprung such a surprise on the American people so soon after the shock of Cuba, his critics might well have killed it by charging that the test ban was part of some secret concession to Khrushchev in return for withdrawing the missiles.

By the time Kennedy might have been ready to fight for a comprehensive treaty in the spring of 1963, Soviet hard-liners had pushed the Chairman to withdraw his proposal for on-site inspections and retreat to a limited test ban. In May 1960, the world was robbed of the chance for a comprehensive ban by the U-2 affair and the collapse of the Paris summit. Three years later, the stars once again fell out of alignment. The nuclear arms race roared on.*

William Attwood was a former Look editor who had served for two years as Kennedy’s Ambassador to Guinea and was now an American delegate to the UN. On Monday, September 23, he stood in the corner at a New York cocktail party given by an ABC correspondent named Lisa Howard.

The Cuban Ambassador to the UN, Carlos Lechuga, told Attwood that Castro had hoped to establish some sort of contact with Kennedy in 1961, but the Bay of Pigs had ended any chance of that. He complained about the continuing exile raids against Cuba but said that Castro had liked the tone of Kennedy’s American University speech. Perhaps Attwood could make a quiet visit to Havana.

The encounter was not accidental. Lisa Howard had told Attwood that after interviewing Castro in April she was convinced he wished to restore communications with the United States. She offered to hold a party at which he could speak informally with Lechuga.

Before Attwood agreed, he wrote a memo asking for permission to make “a discreet inquiry into the possibility of neutralizing Cuba on our terms.” There was reason to believe that Castro was unhappy with the Russians and suffering from the American trade embargo. If the approach proved successful, it could “remove the Cuban issue from the 1964 campaign. He showed his memo to Stevenson, who said, “Unfortunately the CIA is still in charge of Cuba.” Stevenson mentioned the initiative to Kennedy and reported to Attwood that the President had not objected.

Attwood saw Robert Kennedy the day after his rendezvous with Lechuga. Robert told Attwood that a Havana visit would be too risky. It was bound to leak. If it failed, the Republicans would call it “appeasement” and demand a congressional investigation. But the general idea was worth pursuing. He told Attwood to stay in touch with Bundy and his staff man on Cuban affairs, Gordon Chase.

The Attorney General consulted his brother, who declared himself willing to normalize relations if Castro ended the Soviet bloc military presence on his island, broke ties with the Cuban Communists, and stopped the subversion of Latin America.*

The CIA forged ahead with the sabotage program approved by the President in June to foster “a spirit of resistance and disaffection which could lead to significant defections and other by-products of unrest.”†

As Robert Kennedy recalled, “There were ten or twenty thousand tons of sugar cane that was being burned every week through internal uprisings.” Bundy gave the President “the after-action report on the Sawmill sabotage enterprise.… A quick first glance suggests that it is a businesslike report of adventure which you would find interesting.”

The NSC’s Standing Group on Cuba had asked the CIA in the spring of 1963 to assess the effects of Castro’s possible death. The Agency replied that “his brother Raul or some other figure in the regime would, with Soviet backing and help, take over.” If Castro were by chance assassinated, “the U.S. would be widely charged with complicity.”

The CIA resumed its plotting against the Cuban leader. In January 1963, Desmond FitzGerald, who had replaced William Harvey as manager of covert action against Cuba, suggested that a tiny explosive be installed in a rare seashell to be left in a place where Castro might skin-dive and pick it up. This proved to be beyond the Agency’s technical capability.

At the beginning of September, a CIA man in São Paulo, Brazil, met with a well-placed Cuban official named Rolando Cubela. Codenamed AM/LASH, Cubela was a doctor and onetime student guerrilla leader who had murdered Batista’s military intelligence chief in 1956 and seized the Presidential Palace in advance of Castro’s arrival. Cubela said that he resented the Soviet presence in Cuba and that Castro had betrayed the revolution: he was ready to attempt an “inside job.”

Soon after the meeting, Castro went to a Brazilian Embassy reception in Havana and warned that if American leaders tried to do away with the leaders of Cuba, “we are prepared to fight them and answer in kind. United States leaders should think if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe.” Nervous CIA men wondered whether Castro had chosen the Brazilian Embassy to make his threat in order to signal his knowledge of the São Paulo meeting.

Gordon Chase of the NSC gave Bundy a copy of a press account of Castro’s Embassy appearance, writing that a friend had speculated “that Castro may have had a few too many to drink at the cocktail party.”

*In his Boston accent, this came out, “Ish/been/ine/Bee-leen-ah!”

*With some chagrin Bundy later realized that Kennedy should have said “Ich bin Berliner” because this was more grammatical—“and also because ‘ein Berliner’ colloquially can mean a doughnut. Fortunately the crowd in Berlin was untroubled by my mistake; no one in the square confused JFK with a doughnut.”

*In a speech two weeks later Khrushchev said, “If one reads what he said in West Germany, and especially in West Berlin, and compares this with the speech at the American University, one would think that the speeches were made by two different Presidents.” Kennedy was “competing with the President of France in courting the old West German widow. Both try to win her heart, which has already grown cold and which often prompts its possessor to utterly unconstructive thoughts. And if this widow is courted the way these two wooers woo her … the widow can become conceited and think that the solution of world problems really depends on her.”

*In 1989, Ivanov said, “When I read that I’d tried to get Keeler to ask Profumo about rockets, I had to laugh. It would have been moronic to even think about it.” He attributed the scandal to “some sort of group” that was “interested in Profumo’s downfall. What group, I don’t know. He had enemies and they needed material to compromise him.” He claimed to know that Khrushchev “didn’t spend one second on the whole thing.”

†The Washington News, for instance, demanded that the President cancel his visit because it would lend “prestige and support for the foundering government of Prime Minister Macmillan.… We can think of no better time for an American President to stay as far as possible from England.”

‡From Birch Grove, the President called O’Donnell and Powers in Brighton, where they were planning a party with reporters and the Air Force One crew: “Thanks for leaving me stranded. I suppose you’ve been cooking up this little party for a week or more. Who’s there? What’s going on? I suppose you’ve got a big drink in your hand.”

*From the available information, Kennedy did not know of Campbell’s relationship with Giancana at the time they met but continued the affair after he found out, perhaps as a method to keep in touch with the Mob boss, possibly out of worry that if he broke it off too hastily, she would be more likely to lash out against him.

†Richard Davies of the American Embassy recalled the Llewellyn Thompsons as “envious” of the fact that Soviet painters, writers, and composers barred from their embassy were officially encouraged to frequent the Dejeans’ salon. After the French learned from a Soviet defector in 1963 that the Ambassador had been compromised, de Gaulle ordered an investigation. Dejean was recalled from Moscow and interrogated. He was later said to have been brought to the Élysée Palace, where the President looked down his nose and dismissed him with a single sentence: “Eh bien, Dejean, on couche!” (“So, Dejean, one enjoys the women!”)

During the same period, the KGB evidently made an effort to bring the Canadian Ambassador to Moscow, John Watkins, a secret homosexual, into camp. And according to a Czech defector, a KGB seductress was photographed in the early 1960s in bed with a Conservative member of the British Parliament. When the Tory refused to work for the Soviets, the pictures were published in a leaflet and sent to the London press. He was defeated for reelection.

‡One agent is said to have said that the Service’s worst fear was that the Soviets would “plant a broad” on the President.

*Kennedy’s worry proved to be farsighted three decades later when Marine guards at the Embassy were accused of having traded sex for secrets.

†Of an interview with Hitler, she wrote that he was “exceedingly human, very kind, very charming.… He is not evil as he is depicted by the enemies of Germany. He is without a doubt an idealist; he believes that he is doing the right thing for Germany and his interests do not go any further.”

‡Another letter Kennedy wrote her from Charleston, South Carolina, sounded as if it had been written by Kennedy’s father: “Don’t you people in Washington have anything to talk about except a fan dancer and a movie actor being paid $ 1200 a year? With everything in the world going down the drain and … especially all that dough being spent, they just boil and stew over a stinking little bit of New Dealism of which there have been other and better examples for the last ten years. I think that everything up there has gotten too complex for the average Congressman.… The only thing that continually measures up to expectations is you.”

*Charles Colson of the Nixon White House recalled in 1975 that the FBI furnished him information on the Kennedy-Arvad affair in 1971 or 1972, presumably for use against the Democrats.

*Preparing for Vienna two years earlier, Kennedy’s advisers had proposed suggesting to Khrushchev an American-Soviet condominium for a “stable, viable world order,” including restraint of China’s radical aggressiveness. But in 1961, the Chairman had not yet decided to jeopardize his alliance with Peking.

*The European allies might have wondered about his commitment to NATO had they known about his secret deal to give up the Turkish missiles.

†Harriman had earlier told Schlesinger he was certain the Soviet Union would not agree to an acceptable inspections quota unless he had “some goodies in my luggage.” Unaware of the secret Missile Crisis settlement, he said he regretted that the United States had “unilaterally” pulled the Jupiters out of Turkey: he wished he could trade them now.

*Macmillan had initially wanted Ormsby-Gore to head his delegation but decided that the leader should be someone of Cabinet rank who was not so close to Kennedy. Harriman privately thought Hailsham too much a product of the British amateur tradition, ill-prepared and consumed with desire to get a treaty at almost any cost. In return, Hailsham thought Harriman “a man very much after his best, tired and becoming a little deaf.”

*Before Harriman’s departure from Washington, Alexander Zinchuk of the Soviet Embassy had told an American official that a nonaggression pact was needed to reassure those concerned that a limited test ban would not include a moratorium on underground testing.

*“Good work!” or “Well done!”

†When Harriman had stopped in London to see Macmillan, the Prime Minister took him aside and agreed that the China issue was “so sensitive” that Harriman should raise it alone with the Chairman, without Hailsham present.

*A State Department official recorded in October 1964 that “a search of our records of the Test Ban Treaty negotiations in Moscow fails to reveal any Harriman proposal for a joint U.S.-U.S.S.R. effort to slow down Red China’s nuclear weapons development.”

†Harriman later recorded that the “manner in which he takes advantage of any opportunity to talk to the people” was “typical of Khrushchev.” He remembered how when Stalin left the Kremlin to go to his dacha, “he traveled at high speed.… Traffic at intersections was held up as he sped through, behind bulletproof glass, with the blinds of his car windows drawn.”

*David Klein of the NSC reported, “Curiously enough, he chose not to denounce the test ban agreement but merely to minimize it.… This probably reflects an awareness on his part that even in France there is popular support for the Moscow action.”

†Ormsby-Gore cabled Macmillan, “The President has just heard that the French Ambassador in Moscow was advising de Gaulle to try to do a deal with the Soviet Union to obtain nuclear information in order to rid himself of his hateful Atlantic links.” This referred to Maurice Dejean, whose ridiculous suggestion possibly reflected the strength of his compromise by Soviet intelligence, of which Western authorities were still unaware.

*Not by accident did Kennedy mention Harriman, to whom Truman was still close. The former President sent him three minor quibbles with treaty language. The President replied, “You have flagged three of the difficult and sensitive parts of the treaty, and I want you to know that if you ever want the assignment of keeping an eye on Averell Harriman, we will be delighted to have your help.”

†Strauss had written him in March, “I should remind you that the Russians proposed three on-site inspections during your Administration (in 1960) and the proposal was treated by us as totally inadequate.… We may be on the point of stopping our development of small, clean weapons again while the Russians continue to impose on our good faith.”

*Recalling the “abusive attacks” Stevenson had endured in 1956, John Steinbeck wrote him that he had suffered from “the dangers of getting seven years ahead of history.”

*Scanning a report on White House mail, the President observed, “The category that leads the list again this week is requests to the Kennedy family for money.… I also see that we have received more letters on the White House animal pets than on the financial crisis of the United Nations. Nuclear testing is far down the list, but most of the people who write … are against the ban.” (As reported by the New York Times, Khrushchev’s gift dog Pushinka and Caroline’s terrier Charley were the new parents of a litter of puppies. Many Americans had written to the President offering to adopt them.)

†Richard Helms recalled, “It was ironic, as far as I was concerned, to hear that the President’s intelligence chief, the one guy who for whatever reason was right—that this should have soured his relationship with the President.”

*Fulbright warned the President by telephone that “Teller made some impression on some of the members.… He is such an actor. I mean, he’s John L. Lewis and Billy Sunday all wrapped up in one.” Kennedy replied, “Well, there’s no … doubt that any man with complete conviction, particularly who’s an expert, is bound to shake anybody who’s got an open mind.”

*J.F.K.: The Man and the Myth was a hostile biography of the President by Victor Lasky that made national bestseller lists. In his history of the treaty, Glenn Seaborg concluded that the test ban would not have been defeated had Dirksen maintained his opposition but that the margin of victory would have been “certainly affected.”

†He did not publicly mention his concerns about the withdrawal clause or about the fact that it might allow the Soviets to leap ahead of the West in antimissile weapons.

*In the 1980s, horrified at the escalation of the nuclear arms race, Macmillan scored Kennedy for his failure to risk a fight for a comprehensive test ban: “I mean weakened by constantly having all those girls, every day.… He was weak in pressing the Russians for seven inspections instead of three. If we could have had that, it would have eventually led to no testing in the air at all.”

*During his visit with Khrushchev in August, Rusk had once again asked him to reduce the Soviet presence on Cuba.

†George Denney of State proposed that some Central American leader “be induced to assume a David role in which he employs ridicule and invective to make of Castro an enraged and impotent Goliath, thereby substantially reducing Castro’s prestige and conspiratorial effectiveness throughout Latin America.” Radio Havana’s broadcasts of Castro’s speeches could be interrupted by “someone with a quick and acid wit” to taunt the Cuban leader by “mimicking his voice” or saying, “Fidel, you are lying! … Come on, Fidel, shave.… Fidel, you butcher! … You’re lying again, you ape.” Denney felt that such “affronts to Castro’s personal vanity might make him wilder and more open to terror than existing economic and political pressures.”