XXXIV
THE PROBLEMS WITHIN THE WESTERN ALLIANCE, as Kennedy well understood, were part of the price the west was paying for a certain ebbing in the cold war. But, unlike some of his colleagues in the American government who looked back with nostalgia to the good old days when Khrushchev could be relied on to maintain discipline in western ranks, Kennedy was rather more impressed by the risks of war than by the risks of détente. So his first instinct after the missile crisis had been to restore communication with his adversary and resume the search for areas of common interest.
Though Kennedy did not suppose that the humiliation of the missile crisis would transform the Kremlin overnight, he did hope that his restraint in the aftermath might convince the Russians that the American menace to their security was hardly enough to justify the desperate act which had brought on the crisis. Obviously if the United States had been waiting for an excuse to use its considerable nuclear superiority against the Soviet Union, it could hardly expect a better one than the sneak nuclearization of Cuba. Yet Washington had stayed its hand. Still, with his capacity to understand the problems of others, the President could see how threatening the world might have looked to the Kremlin. Reading Khrushchev’s speech to the Supreme Soviet of December 12, 1962, he expressed, as he had before, his wonder that the Soviet leader was making much the same set of charges against the west that the west was making against him: the language was almost interchangeable. Kennedy gave Khrushchev credit for sincerity in this—“I do think,” he soon said publicly, “his speech shows that he realizes how dangerous a world we live in”—and the mirror effect reinforced his own refusal to regard the global competition as a holy war. If the Russians would “devote their energies to demonstrating how their system works in the Soviet Union, it seems to me his vital interests are easily protected with the power he had, and we could have a long period of peace. . . . But instead, by these constant desires to change the balance of power in the world, that is what, it seems to me, introduces the dangerous element.”
This is precisely what they had debated the year before in Vienna, and Cuba, for a moment at least, had settled the debate in Kennedy’s favor. Khrushchev’s retreat meant a clear victory of the American over the Soviet definition of the status quo. And, by accepting the status quo in the form of the existing equilibrium of power rather than of the communist revolution, Khrushchev swallowed not only the dialectic of Vienna but the rhetoric of his flamboyant speech six months earlier proclaiming the historic inevitability of a communist world. It was not, of course, that he was abandoning his beliefs; like devotees of older religions, he was perhaps beginning to reserve them for heavenly fulfillment.
Indeed, the very Cuban adventure had implied a Soviet conclusion that history was not doing the job fast enough and required some sharp encouragement. For in January 1961 the world had seemed ripe for plucking. Asia, Africa, Latin America were all rising against their western masters and appeared to be running in the communist direction. The existence of the nuclear stalemate reduced the credibility of the American deterrent and freed the Soviet Union for nuclear diplomacy—i.e., terrorizing other nations by the manipulation of the threat of nuclear war. The United States itself seemed militarily vulnerable, politically aimless and economically stagnant. The Soviet Union, reviewing its impressive industrial gains of the fifties, could dream of overtaking and surpassing the American economy by the seventies. The communist empire still cherished the hope of unity. These were to have been the glorious years of the final offensive.
By the summer of 1962 that offensive was in ruins. The third world remained obstinately a third world. Nationalism had proved stronger than Marxism; and communism had encountered one frustration after another in Laos, in the Congo, in Latin America. Kennedy’s firmness over Berlin had re-established the credibility of the deterrent (for the Russians, if not for General de Gaulle) and handed Moscow still another frustration. The Cuban adventure represented a bold effort to turn the western flank at Berlin by altering the nuclear balance. At the same time, it was a tacit confession of Soviet nuclear inferiority. Its failure struck from Soviet hands, one hoped permanently, the weapon of nuclear blackmail Khrushchev had brandished so long and so jovially and forced the Russians to re-examine their whole strategic position. In the meantime, while the United States was recovering economic momentum and political purpose, the Soviet Union was sinking into ever more worrying agricultural, industrial and intellectual difficulties. The communist empire itself, after the truce of 1960, was clearly splitting into hostile blocs. The high hopes of January 1961 were giving way to bleak realities.
So on November 19, 1962, a month after his defeat in the Caribbean, Khrushchev, in a 30,000 word report to the central committee of the Soviet Communist Party, implicitly called off the world offensive and demanded concentration on the tasks of the Soviet economy. In January 1963 in East Berlin he said that the erection of the Wall had diminished the need for a separate German peace treaty; in effect, he decided to live with the bone in his throat, thereby again accepting Kennedy’s version of the status quo. (The Berlin negotiations eventually trailed off; the west, despite periodic Soviet stamps on the corns, retained its presence and its rights; and the future of West Berlin rested with the larger movements of history.)
Clearly the Soviet leaders had decided on a breathing spell. There was nothing new about this, of course; throughout the history of communism pause had alternated with pressure. Lenin in 1921 and Stalin in 1935 had made departures in policy which for a moment impressed men of goodwill in the west as basic transformations but which turned out to be no more than new tactics for achieving the old goal of world communization. Yet Khrushchev’s situation in 1963 differed in important respects from Stalin’s in 1935 or Lenin’s in 1921.
For one thing, the Soviet Union itself had undergone changes. Half a century had transformed it from a revolution dedicated to overturning the existing order to an establishment with heavy vested interests in the status quo. Moreover, in the last decade the revulsion against Stalinism, against forced labor camps, against arbitrary arrests, against the drabness and meanness of daily life, had coincided with the emergence of technical and managerial groups who insisted on a predictable and comfortable existence and whose active loyalty was indispensable to the power of the state. Those outside the Soviet Union might not be so persuaded as Soviet citizens themselves that this process of normalization was irreversible. Nor was it prudent to confuse normalization, which related to personal security, with liberalization, which related to personal freedom (and there was little enough evidence of the second). Yet the Soviet Union of Khrushchev obviously differed in notable ways from the Soviet Union of Stalin. Without accepting Lord Home’s thesis that a fat communist would always be better for the world than a skinny communist, one could hope that further progress toward affluence in Russia would enlarge the sense of having a stake in things as they were, further attenuate the old revolutionary messianism, and end the need for tension with the world as a way to justify tyranny at home.
For another thing, the mystique of Marxism itself was dying. This was in part for internal reasons: Khrushchev’s indictment of Stalin had permanently discredited the notion that any individual could be the infallible expositor of the creed. And it was in even greater jeopardy for external reasons: Tito had vindicated the right to heresy in 1948, and by 1963 Mao Tse-tung was establishing a rival church. If Marxism had been anything, it had been a universal ideology overriding all national and ethnic interests and dissolving all historic conflicts. Now it was unveiled as one more ideology which individuals, nations and (if Mao were right) races were using and distorting for their own purposes. This decay of Marxist legitimacy reduced the Soviet Union itself to just another state scrapping for leadership within the communist empire.
These changes both inside the Soviet Union and inside the communist world placed Khrushchev’s desire for a breathing spell in a new frame. And the onset of the nuclear age completed the transformation of the context. Sitting on a nuclear stockpile was not the most comfortable position in the world. As statesmen, generals and scientists tried to figure out how irrational weapons could be put to rational use, they were likely—especially when there was a chance that the weapons might be used against themselves—to develop a certain wariness. Prolonged contemplation of the nuclear effect could lead even the most bellicose to the conclusion that mutual incineration was of dubious benefit. Peking could afford to be nonchalant because, having no nuclear weapons, it had not had to work out the calculus of nuclear exchange. But Moscow, like Washington, had had to explore the rigorous and terrible logic of holocaust.
Only two men on the planet had been exposed to the absolute pressure of nuclear decision; and even for them it was not till the missile crisis that what was perceived intellectually was experienced emotionally. Khrushchev recorded his reaction in his poignant personal letter to Kennedy on the Friday night of the second Cuba week. As for Kennedy, his feelings underwent a qualitative change after Cuba: a world in which nations threatened each other with nuclear weapons now seemed to him not just an irrational but an intolerable and impossible world. Cuba thus made vivid the sense that all humanity had a common interest in the prevention of nuclear war—an interest far above those national and ideological interests which had once seemed ultimate.
Though the United States had resumed atmospheric testing in the Pacific in April 1962, both Kennedy and Macmillan continued to keep the idea of a test ban alive between themselves, exchanging through the year thoughts about the form and timing of a new approach to Moscow. The President was particularly interested in the possibility of lowering the required quota of annual on-site inspections from the existing figure of twenty. Spurred on by presidential concern, scientists worked to refine techniques of detection and identification. The discovery that Russian earthquakes were less frequent than we had supposed and occurred mostly in areas where testing would be extremely difficult also cut down the need for inspection to distinguish between natural and man-made earth shocks.
Opponents of a test ban disputed the new technical evidence. But Arthur Dean, still our ambassador to the disarmament conference in Geneva and still eager to win his case, told reporters at the Geneva airport in July 1962 that it was now possible to make a substantial reduction in the requirement for on-site inspections. He did this without instructions or clearance; perhaps he intended to force the issue in Washington. In any case, that was the entirely useful effect, and Kennedy quickly came down on Dean’s side.
The question of on-site inspections was political as well as technical. A test ban treaty required Senate ratification. To win the necessary two-thirds vote, in view especially of the strong military opposition, the treaty would have to give every appearance of safeguarding national security against Soviet cheating: the ‘big hole’ obsession had not died. But the inspection issue pertained, of course, to a comprehensive test ban. In the meantime, the idea of a limited ban, covering self-policing environments, remained under consideration; indeed, the fact that our resumption of atmospheric testing in April 1962 had produced far more outcry than our resumption of underground testing in September 1961 suggested that the world cared primarily about explosions producing radioactive fallout. At the end of July Kennedy consequently proposed to Macmillan the possibility of offering simultaneous treaties at Geneva: a comprehensive ban with much reduced onsite inspection—this Kennedy preferred because of its greater effect on nuclear proliferation—with an atmospheric test ban as a reasonable second best. The Russians, however, lost no time in turning both down at the end of August—the limited ban because it would allegedly legalize underground testing and thus “raise the nuclear temperature,” the comprehensive ban because it called for inspection. They suggested instead an immediate ban on atmospheric tests accompanied by a moratorium on underground tests until a treaty could be worked out. But the west, remembering who had terminated the last moratorium, was not impressed.
No doubt Soviet minds were in the Caribbean at this point; but, when the disarmament conference resumed a month after Cuba, one hoped that the mood might be changing. By this time the Soviet Union was winding up its 1962 series of atmospheric tests. We were also completing our own series; and the President’s sense of the meagerness of their results after the clamor about their necessity—all the tests seemed to have proved was the need for more tests—made him more determined than ever to bring the whole thing to an end.* Conceivably Khrushchev might have similar feelings. Moreover, the Soviet Union had accepted the principle of international verification in the case of the Cuban missiles. And in November it had supported the election of U Thant to his full term as Secretary General of the United Nations: this presumably meant that we had heard the last of the troika.
Hoping that all this might portend comparable progress on the inspection problem, Jerome Wiesner had suggested to the Soviet scientist Yevgenii Federov that, since the American scientists had persuaded their government to go down on the number of inspections, perhaps the Soviet scientists could persuade their government to come up until agreement could be reached. Though Wiesner had been careful to mention no figures, Federov evidently emerged with the impression that the Americans would accept three or four inspections. About the same time V. V. Kuznetsov, the Soviet disarmament negotiator, acquired a similar impression from Dean in a talk in New York. When all this was reported to Moscow, Khrushchev, if one can believe the account he gave to Norman Cousins of the Saturday Review, told the Council of Ministers, “We can have an agreement with the United States to stop nuclear tests if we agree to three inspections. I know that three inspections are not necessary, and that the policing can be done adequately from outside our borders. But the American Congress has convinced itself that on-site inspection is necessary and the President cannot get a treaty through the Senate without it. Very well, then, let us accommodate the President.” He added to Cousins: “Finally I persuaded them.”
“It seems to me, Mr. President,” Khrushchev wrote Kennedy on December 19, 1962, “that time has come now to put an end once and for all to nuclear tests, to draw a line through such tests.” We believe, Khrushchev continued, that national means of detection are sufficient to police underground as well as atmospheric tests; but we understand your need for “at least a minimum number” of inspections for the ratification of the treaty. “Well, if this is the only difficulty on the way to agreement, then for the noble and humane goal of ceasing nuclear weapons tests we are ready to meet you halfway.” Citing the Kuznetsov-Dean conversations, Khrushchev proposed agreement on two to three annual inspections limited to earthquake areas. If this were accepted, “the world can be relieved of the roar of nuclear explosions.”
Kennedy, who received the letter at Nassau, was exhilarated: it looked as if the Russians were really interested in a modus vivendi. However, the inspection quota still presented difficulties. Dean told the President that the only numbers he had mentioned in his talks with Kuznetsov were between eight and ten. Moreover, the Soviet figure of two or three represented not a real concession but a reversion to a position the Russians had taken in earlier stages of the negotiation and abandoned in November 1961. In replying to Khrushchev, Kennedy remarked on the “misunderstanding” of Dean’s statement, sought to reassure him that inspection could be hedged around to prevent espionage and pointed out the difficulties raised by the confinement of inspection to seismic areas. He concluded: “Notwithstanding these problems, I am encouraged by your letter.” The next step, he suggested, might be technical discussions between representatives of the two governments.
The discussions, beginning in New York in January, took place in darkening domestic weather. Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York, nominally considered a liberal Republican, now denounced the idea of a test ban. “This has become an exercise not in negotiation,” said Senator Everett Dirksen, the Republican leader of the Senate, “but in give-away.” In the House of Representatives Craig Hosmer of California rallied Dr. Edward Teller, Admiral Lewis Strauss and other traditional foes of the ban for a new campaign. In February Senator Thomas J. Dodd of Connecticut, observing that too many concessions had already been made, condemned the comprehensive ban on the ground that it would stop the development of the neutron bomb and of anti-missile missiles. Within the government, the Joint Chiefs of Staff declared themselves opposed to a comprehensive ban under almost any terms and pronounced six annual inspections especially unacceptable.
Actually, Wiesner and a number of scientists had arrived at the “firm opinion . . . that the possibility of five inspections per year would have provided adequate security against clandestine nuclear testing”; and McNamara was ready in February to settle for six. But with the intense military and partisan opposition and the senatorial battle looming ahead, it seemed impossible politically to go below eight or, at the least, seven. As for the Russians, they not only declined to go above three but showed little curiosity about the way the inspections were to be conducted. In effect, we refused to discuss numbers until they discussed modalities, and they refused to discuss modalities until we accepted their numbers. The conclusion in the State Department and the Foreign Office was that the Kremlin, immobilized by its problems with China, could not conceivably join hands with the nation China hated most in permanently excluding China from the nuclear club. The announcement of a Russo-Chinese ideological conference for Moscow in July convinced the experts that for the time being the ban was out of the question.
But, despite the failure of the New York negotiations and the pessimism of the professional diplomats, Kennedy and Macmillan persisted in their pursuit of a treaty. “I am haunted,” the President said in March, “by the feeling that by 1970, unless we are successful, there may be ten nuclear powers instead of four, and by 1975, fifteen or twenty. . . . I see the possibility in the 1970s of the President of the United States having to face a world in which fifteen or twenty nations may have these weapons. I regard that as the greatest possible danger.” In March and April the President and the Prime Minister passed back and forth across the Atlantic drafts of a new approach to Khrushchev.
The Soviet leader was not in a receptive mood. When Norman Cousins saw him at his Black Sea retreat on April 12, Khrushchev complained that, after he had induced the Council of Ministers to accept three inspections on the guarantee that it would produce a treaty, the Americans had then insisted on eight: “So once again I was made to look foolish. But I can tell you this: it won’t happen again. . . . We cannot make another offer. I cannot go back to the Council. It is now up to the United States. Frankly, we feel we were misled.” (This last was a peculiar objection from the government which had denied it was sending nuclear missiles to Cuba.) Me went on: ‘‘When I go up to Moscow next week I expect to serve notice that we will not consider ourselves bound by three inspections. If you can go from three to eight, we can go from three to zero.”
Four days after the meeting with Cousins, the new Kennedy-Macmillan letter arrived in Moscow. The Anglo-American proposal noted that the west had already reduced its inspection quota from twenty to seven and mentioned an idea, backed by the neutral nations at the disarmament conference, of spreading the quota over several years. We all, Kennedy and Macmillan said, owe a duty to our own security, but we also have a duty to humanity, and this requires one more serious attempt to stop testing and prevent the further proliferation of nuclear weapons. The letter concluded by saying that the writers would be ready in due course to send to Moscow very senior representatives empowered to speak for them directly with Khrushchev.
Khrushchev’s reply in early May could hardly have been more declamatory and rude. There was no point, he suggested, in going through all these arguments again; we have learned your test ban proposals by heart just as we used to learn “Pater Noster.” The Soviet Union, he continued, regarded the western demand for inspection as no more than an effort to introduce NATO intelligence agents into Soviet territory. When he had consented to two or three inspections in December, he said, this was because he wanted to help the President with his Senate, not because he thought inspection necessary or sensible. Instead of a positive reply to this great Soviet concession all he had had since was western haggling over the number of inspections and the conditions for conducting them. To judge your position by your proposals, Khrushchev told the western leaders, the only conclusion could be that you were not serious: one wondered whether you were not going through the motions for domestic political reasons. If there were no real hope for agreement, the Soviet Union had no choice but to take measures to strengthen its own security. In a perfunctory final paragraph, Khrushchev, referring to the notion of sending senior representatives to Moscow, said, in effect, so be it; the Russians were even prepared to try this method of discussion.
Kennedy began to feel that the test ban was slipping away. “I’m not hopeful, I’m not hopeful,” he said on the day he received Khrushchev’s letter. “There doesn’t seem to be any sense of movement since December.” And two weeks later: “I have said from the beginning that [it] seemed to me that the pace of events was such in the world that unless we could get an agreement now, I would think the chance of getting it would be comparatively slight. We are therefore going to continue to push very hard in May and June and July in every forum to see if we can get an agreement.”
Washington and London meanwhile brooded over the reply to Khrushchev’s latest unpromising message. The first draft was a debater’s screed, dealing seriatim with Khrushchev’s points. But David Ormsby Gore, picking up Khrushchev’s grudging final paragraph, suggested bypassing the debate and concentrating instead on the special emissaries. Macmillan strongly supported this view, and Kennedy readily agreed. Finally on May 30 a brief letter went to Khrushchev, touching lightly on a couple of the familiar arguments but centering on the proposal that American and British emissaries go to Moscow at the end of June or early in July.
In the meantime, the debate in the United States had been producing a certain clarification of issues. Senator Dodd’s attack on the ban in February had led to a thoughtful exchange of letters between Dodd and Adrian Fisher of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. The correspondence brought new points to Dodd’s attention, and the Connecticut Senator had the grace to change his mind. On May 27 he joined with Hubert Humphrey and thirty-two other Senators in introducing a resolution declaring it “the sense of the Senate” that the United States should again offer the Soviet Union a limited test ban; if the Russians rejected the plan, the United States should nevertheless “pursue it with vigor, seeking the widest possible international support,” at the same time pledging no more tests in the atmosphere or under water so long as the Soviet Union also abstained. The President had some concern that this approach might undercut the comprehensive ban; but the effect of the Dodd-Humphrey Resolution was to strengthen the antitesting case. Moreover, a series of hearings in the spring before the Stennis subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee gave the administration a chance to organize its ranks and hold, in effect, a dry run of testimony in case a test ban treaty itself ever came up for ratification. In press conferences and in conversations with leaders of opinion, Kennedy hammered away at the dangers of nuclear proliferation.
One day late in May McGeorge Bundy told several of us that the President had decided the time had come for a major address on peace. He had evidently concluded that a fresh context was required to save the dying negotiation. We were asked to send our best thoughts to Ted Sorensen and to say nothing about this to anybody. The President meanwhile outlined his own views to Ted, who set to work. The speech was scheduled for the American University commencement on the morning of Monday, June 10. On June 7 Bundy convened a small group—Kaysen, Rostow, Tom Sorensen and me—to look at Ted’s draft.
It was affirmative in tone, elevated in language, wise and subtle in analysis. Its central substantive proposal was a moratorium on atmospheric testing; but its effect was to redefine the whole national attitude toward the cold war. It was a brilliant and faithful reproduction of the President’s views, and we read it with mounting admiration and excitement. Kennedy, in the meantime, had gone to California for a speech at San Diego; on June 9 he was going to Honolulu to address the Conference of Mayors. Kaysen was assigned the job of checking the speech with State and Defense, neither of which had yet been involved, while Sorensen flew to the coast to meet the President on his return from Hawaii.
Then on Saturday morning Khrushchev unexpectedly replied to the proposal about the special emissaries. His letter, ungracious and sulky, still doubted the sincerity of the Anglo-American effort and still complained about inspection. But he said at least that he would receive the emissaries; their success, he observed sullenly, depended on what they brought in their baggage to Moscow. For all the querulousness, he had agreed to let the negotiations begin.
On Monday the President addressed himself in the open air on the American University campus to what he called “the most important topic on earth: world peace.” By peace, he said, he did not mean “a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war,” nor did he mean the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. He meant peace which enabled men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children, “not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.” In the nuclear age, peace had become “the necessary rational end of rational men.” It was said, he continued, that it was idle to dream of peace until the Soviet leaders adopted a more enlightened attitude. “I hope they do. I believe we can help them do it.” He added, in a sentence capable of revolutionizing the whole American view of the cold war, “But I also believe that we must reexamine our own attitude—as individuals and as a Nation—for our attitude is as essential as theirs.”
Too many Americans, he went on, regarded peace as impossible and therefore war as inevitable. “We need not accept that view. Our problems are manmade—therefore, they can be solved by man.” Nor was it correct to suppose that peace would end all quarrels and conflict. It “does not require that each man love his neighbor—it requires only that they live together in mutual tolerance.” History taught us, moreover, that enmities between states did not last forever; “the tide of time and events will often bring surprising changes in the relations between nations.”*
The communists were of course trapped in conspiratorial hallucinations about the United States; but that should warn us “not to fall into the same trap as the Soviets, not to see only a distorted and desperate view of the other side, not to see conflict as inevitable, accommodation as impossible and communication as nothing more than an exchange of threats. No government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue.” Among many traits Americans and Russians had in common was an abhorrence of war. “No nation in the history of battle,” he reminded his listeners, “ever suffered more than the Soviet Union suffered in the course of the Second World War.” If world war should come again, all both sides had built, “all we have worked for, would be destroyed in the first twenty-four hours.” Yet “we are both caught up in a vicious and dangerous cycle in which suspicion on one side breeds suspicion on the other, and new weapons beget counterweapons.”
In short, both countries had ‘‘a mutually deep interest in a just and genuine peace and in halting the arms race. . . . If we cannot end now all our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”
So we must re-examine our attitude toward the cold war, “remembering that we are not engaged in a debate, seeking to pile up debating points. We are not here distributing blame or pointing the finger of judgment.” Our purpose must be to conduct our affairs so that the Russians would see it in their own interest to move toward genuine peace; “we can seek a relaxation of tensions without relaxing our guard.” To move toward peace would “require increased understanding between the Soviets and ourselves . . . increased contact and communication.” In particular, it would require new progress toward general and complete disarmament. And in the area of disarmament one problem “where the end is in sight, yet where a fresh start is badly needed, is . . . a treaty to outlaw nuclear tests.” The President then announced that discussions would soon begin in Moscow “looking toward early agreement on a comprehensive test ban treaty” and that the United States would conduct no atmospheric tests so long as other states did not do so; “we will not be the first to resume.” No treaty could provide “absolute security” against deception and evasion; but if it were sufficiently effective in its enforcement and sufficiently in the interests of its signers, it could “offer far more security and far fewer risks than an unabated, uncontrolled, unpredictable arms race.”
It had first been supposed that John J. McCloy, with his experience in disarmament negotiations and his friendly associations with Khrushchev, would be the American negotiator in Moscow. But McCloy turned out not to be available in June or July. When Kaysen discussed Khrushchev’s acceptance of the emissaries with Secretary Rusk, they had chatted for a moment about possible alternatives. Somewhat tentatively Rusk mentioned Averell Harriman. Kaysen immediately reported this to Kennedy, sending along word at the same time to the entourage that the President had better settle on Harriman before the Department had a chance to change its mind. As anticipated, State developed second thoughts in the next twenty-four hours. But by this time Kennedy had given word to go ahead with Averell.
For reasons which the White House could never understand, or perhaps understood all too well, Harriman, in spite of his almost unsurpassed Russian experience, was rather systematically excluded in the State Department from Soviet affairs. Yet from the viewpoint not only of ability and qualification but of persuading the Russians we meant business, he was the ideal choice. “As soon as I heard that Harriman was going,” someone from the Soviet Embassy remarked to me, “I knew you were serious.” As Khrushchev said to William Benton the next spring, “Harriman is a responsible man.”
Harriman set about his preparations in his usual astute, detailed and all-encompassing manner. The question whether we should try for a comprehensive or limited ban was still unresolved. The British were in favor of reducing the inspection quota still further, arguing that, even on the unlikely chance that the Russians were disposed to try a few clandestine tests underground, these tests could not possibly affect the balance of military power. As for Harriman, he was sure the Russians would not agree to an inspection quota acceptable to us unless he had, as he liked to put it, “some goodies in his luggage.” He thus regretted the fact that we had unilaterally pulled the Jupiters out of Turkey and Italy three months earlier: if only he had them to trade now! (not that the Russians had illusions about their military importance; but it would have given Khrushchev something to show his own people and the Chinese).
The problem of China was increasingly on the President’s mind—indeed, on the minds of everyone except those in the Department of State who were still babbling about the “Sino-Soviet bloc.” By 1963 Kennedy and Macmillan were reaching the conclusion that China presented the long-term danger to the peace. Kennedy had tried to make this point to de Gaulle through Malraux; but the French, who wanted, like the Chinese, to prevent a Soviet-American détente, were not interested (For de Gaulle, in addition, Chinese hegemony in Siberia was essential if he were to realize his dream of restoring Russia to a Europe “from the Atlantic to the Urals.”) Britain, however, grasped the point completely. One day when the President and the Prime Minister were discussing the problem of a new commander for NATO, Macmillan said breezily, “I suppose it should be a Russian.”
Harriman and Kaysen had a final meeting with the President before the mission’s departure for Moscow. Kennedy said that Harriman could go as far as he wished in exploring the possibility of a Soviet-American understanding with regard to China. Averell responded that he would more than ever need something to sweeten the package. Kennedy mentioned possible concessions. The President added, “I have some cash in the bank in West Germany and am prepared to draw on it if you think I should.”
In the meantime, the Russians had had a chance to study the American University speech. One cannot know; but it seems probable that that address gave Khrushchev both personal reassurance and a weapon he could me against the Chinese. Harold Wilson, who saw him immediately afterward, found him deeply impressed and considerably more open-minded about the test ban. Khrushchev himself later told Harriman with evident feeling that it was “the greatest speech by any American President since Roosevelt.” At any rate, on July 2 in Berlin, after describing it as “notable for its sober appraisal of the international situation,” he offered his answer—a limited ban, outlawing tests in the atmosphere, in outer space and under water. “If the western powers now accept this proposal,” he said, “the question of inspection no longer arises.” He did not this time insist on a concurrent and unpoliced moratorium on underground tests; but he said that “on the conclusion of a test ban agreement” it would also be necessary “to take another big step toward easing international tension”—a nonaggression treaty between the NATO and the Warsaw Pact states. A test ban agreement, “combined with the simultaneous signing of a non-aggression pact,” would create a “fresh international climate.”
Two days later Khrushchev, turning his face from west to east, said that “only madmen” could hope to destroy capitalism by nuclear war; “a million workers would be destroyed for each capitalist. . . . There are people who see things differently. Let them. History will teach them.” The next day the delegation of those who saw things differently arrived in Moscow, and the Russo-Chinese ideological talks began. They dragged on in the greatest secrecy from July 5 to adjournment, without communiqué, on July 20. But a long and emotional statement by the central committee of the Soviet Communist Party on July 14 suggested how things were going. Citing Mao Tse-tung as prepared to sacrifice millions of lives in nuclear war, the Russians replied that they could not “share the views of the Chinese leadership about creating ‘a thousand times higher civilization’ on the corpses of hundreds of millions of people.” Such views were “in crying contradiction to the ideas of Marxism-Leninism.” The nuclear bomb “does not distinguish between imperialists and working people: it devastates entire areas.”
This was the mood in Moscow when on the following day the American and British delegations began discussion of the test ban. Harriman had a delegation according to his own specifications: small and brilliant. It included Carl Kaysen, Adrian Fisher, William Tyler and John McNaughton. Macmillan had originally wanted David Ormsby Gore to head the British delegation, but the Ambassador felt that, from the Prime Minister’s own viewpoint, it would be better to have someone of cabinet rank who could not be considered an American stooge. The choice fell on Quintin Hogg, then Lord Hailsham, Minister of Science and an accomplished if impetuous lawyer. (Macmillan later confided to newspapermen that he had sent Hailsham because he thought he might amuse Khrushchev.) Hailsham, relying on the British amateur tradition, was ill prepared on the technicalities of the problem and was consumed by a desire to get a treaty at almost any cost.
The first meeting took place with Khrushchev in the Kremlin. The Soviet leader began by talking expansively and irrelevantly about farm policy—“like a county agent,” one of the American participants said later—discoursing at particular length about the virtues of investment in chemical fertilizer. Then, turning to the question of a comprehensive test ban, he said the Russians still considered inspection to be espionage; they did not think you could let the cat in the kitchen only to hunt the mice and not to drink the milk. Since the British and Americans disagreed, there was no point in wasting time in further argument. With the comprehensive ban thus dismissed, the limited ban was left on the table. Khrushchev now said nothing about his earlier idea of a concurrent moratorium on underground testing, but he did bring up the nonaggression pact he had mentioned in East Berlin.
Harriman quickly replied that the test ban treaty was something the three nations could complete in a few days in Moscow. The non-aggression pact would require extensive consultation with allies, and it might hold up the test ban for a long time. Moreover, he did not see how such a pact would be possible without assurance that interference with access to West Berlin would be considered aggression—a proposition which obviously irritated the Soviet leader. Assuming that the Americans were opposed because of Bonn’s hostility to the idea, Khrushchev observed sarcastically, “You conquered the Germans, and now you are afraid of them.” Harriman did assure Khrushchev, however, in accordance with his instructions from Washington, that the United States would consult with its allies in good faith about the possibility of a nonaggression pact.
For his part Harriman presented the idea of a non-proliferation treaty, forbidding the transfer of nuclear weapons from one country to another. Khrushchev drew back from this, arguing that as other nations signed the test ban treaty, it would have an anti-proliferation effect; but a no-transfer treaty should be deferred for future consideration.
The opening talk cleared away a certain number of issues. Then the hard negotiation began. The meetings took place at the Spiri-donka Palace, a castellated Gothic structure marked by a weird medley of architectural styles. Gromyko for the Russians and Harriman for the west began a close analysis of the treaty draft. Several issues gave special trouble. One arose from foggy language in the preamble seeming to ban the use of nuclear weapons even in self-defense. Harriman, knowing that this was inconsistent with our own stated policy and would cause trouble on the Hill, demanded that the wording be cleared up. A second problem was that of the withdrawal clause. Khrushchev, in an inadvertent admission of the Leninist view of treaties, had argued that a nation always retained the sovereign right to withdraw from a treaty which no longer served its interest; to include an explicit withdrawal clause in this treaty would therefore imply a diminution of that right in other treaties. Harriman knew that the Senate, faced with the probability that China would refuse to sign and then might become a nuclear power on its own, would insist on such a clause. In the end he flatly told Gromyko that, without a withdrawal clause, there could be no treaty. The result was the curious compromise phraseology in Article IV: “Each Party shall in exercising its national sovereignty have the right to withdraw from the Treaty if it decides that extraordinary events, related to the subject matter of this Treaty, have jeopardized the supreme interests of its country.’’
A third problem was that of accession to the treaty. The issue here was how to arrange for states not recognized by other states to join them in signing the treaty without thereby receiving implicit recognition. Our concern, of course, was to avoid conferring an inadvertent blessing on East Germany and China. Our first solution was an explicit statement that accession did not mean recognition by signatories of other signatories. The Russians, who wanted to improve the international status of East Germany, naturally objected.
The discussions proved long and difficult. Harriman, who dominated the negotiations on the western side, was evidently at his best—correct, forceful, his restraint masking a capacity for toughness and even anger. A member of the British delegation later called him “the great man of the meeting.” He would not give ground; and, as the talks dragged on, Hailsham became increasingly restive and unhappy. Soon he was complaining to London that Harriman’s rigidity might lose the whole treaty. His reports disturbed Macmillan, who finally instructed Ormsby Gore to call on the President and register official British anxiety.
Harriman, however, had negotiated with the Russians before and knew precisely what he was doing. “I am always right when I know I am right,” he said on his return. “Sometimes I only guess I am right, and then I may be wrong. This time I knew I was right.” When Ormsby Gore arrived at the White House, a call came in from Kaysen in Moscow just as the President initiated a call to Macmillan in London. Kaysen’s report was optimistic. The Russians had accepted a revision of the preamble eliminating the language which we had disliked. As for accession, the lawyers Fisher and McNaughton had worked out an ingenious system of multiple depositaries, leaving every signatory free to sign only in association with nations of which it approved. (This idea offended the purists of international law, since it seemed to mean that no one could definitively know who the signatories were, but it did not bother practical minds.) Kaysen recommended that this solution be accepted, and the President nodded his approval to Bundy, who was conducting the conversation. Just at this point, the London call was completed. Macmillan came on the phone with a certain elaborateness: he was terribly sorry, he told the President, but he had had to ask David to express his concern about the progress of the Moscow negotiations. Kennedy, a broad smile on his face, broke in: “Don’t worry. David is right here. It’s been worked out, and I’ve told them to go ahead.” Macmillan, having accomplished one of the dreams of his life (and at the same time having strengthened his government against the problems of John Profumo, Miss Keeler and Dr. Ward) was deeply moved.
In Moscow, after the treaty had been initialed, Harriman and Khrushchev took up the questions of France and China. The American found the Russian prickly and adamant. China was another socialist country, Khrushchev said, and he did not propose to discuss it with a capitalist. Harriman persisted: “Suppose we can get France to sign the treaty? Can you deliver China?” Khrushchev replied cryptically, “That’s your problem.” Harriman tried again: “Suppose their rockets are targeted against you?” Khrushchev did not answer.
In due course Khrushchev said, ‘‘Let us walk over together to our dinner.” They left his office and strolled through the Kremlin, once Stalin’s gloomy fortress, now a public park, toward the Old Palace. Harriman remarked that he saw few security men around. “I don’t like being surrounded by security men,” Khrushchev said. ‘‘In Stalin’s time we never knew whether they were protecting us or watching us.” As they walked, a large crowd collected behind them. Khrushchev turned and said, “This is Gospodin Garriman. We’ve just signed a test-ban treaty. I’m going to take him to dinner. Do you think he’s earned his dinner?” The people applauded and applauded. On his return Harriman went straight to Hyannis Port. The President, without ceremony, said, “Well, this is a good job.”
It was a good job, and it would not have come about without the intense personal commitment of Kennedy and Macmillan. America and Britain had offered the Soviet Union a limited test ban four times in four years; now it was accepted the fifth time around—two less than Robert Bruce and the spider. Left to itself, the Soviet Union, to judge from Khrushchev’s attitude in the spring of 1963, would not have perceived that a test ban was to its own interest and would not have understood its potentialities as a key to the future. Left to itself, the Department of State would not have persevered with the issue, nor would it have ever proposed an American University speech—that speech which, in its modesty, clarity and perception, repudiated the self-righteous cold war rhetoric of a succession of Secretaries of State. Mao Tse-tung was also entitled to credit for his indispensable assistance in making the treaty possible.
One more man deserved mention. When Harriman arrived in Washington on July 28, his Georgetown neighbors staged an impromptu welcome for him. Bearing torches and candles, they marched to his house on P Street, serenading him with “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” and then one of his old campaign songs, adapted from George M. Cohan, “H-A-double-R-I-M-A-N spells Harriman.” Finally Averell, tieless and in shirtsleeves, came out on his front steps and spoke a few quiet words of thanks. One girl with a very small baby in her arms said to him, “I brought my baby because what you did in Moscow will make it possible for him to look ahead to a full and happy life.”
Negotiation, however, was only half the problem; ratification remained. The President regarded the test ban treaty as the most serious congressional issue he had thus far faced. He was, he told us, determined to win if it cost him the 1964 election. But the opposition was organized and strong; and, while he felt sure the great majority of the people were for it, he was not sure they could make themselves heard in time. I happened to be with him ten days after the American University speech when someone brought in the mail report. He noted that the mail received in the White House in the week ending June 20 totaled 50,010 letters as compared to 24,888 a year earlier and 9482 in the comparable period of the last Eisenhower year. Then he looked at the breakdown. Of this vast accumulation, the American University speech had provoked 896 letters—861 favorable and 25 hostile. In the same period, 28,232 people had sent letters about a freight rate bill. The President, tossing the report aside, said, with disgust, “That is why I tell people in Congress that they’re crazy if they take their mail seriously.”*
Addressing the nation the day after the treaty was initialed in Moscow, Kennedy recalled mankind’s struggle “to escape from the darkening prospects of mass destruction.” “Yesterday,” he said, “a shaft of light cut into the darkness.” He did not exaggerate the significance of the agreement. It was not the millennium: it would not resolve all conflicts, reduce nuclear stockpiles, check the production of nuclear weapons or restrict their use in case of war. But it was “an important first step—a step toward peace—a step toward reason—a step away from war.” He concluded with the Chinese proverb he had put to Khrushchev two years before in Vienna: “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.”
The prospective end of radioactive fallout was, of course, an immense boon for humanity. But I think that Kennedy saw the main point of the treaty as a means of moving toward his Vienna goal of stabilizing the international equilibrium of power. After all, both America and Russia knew that each had enough nuclear strength to survive a surprise attack and still wreak fearful destruction on the other: the test ban now indicated a mutual willingness to halt the weapons race more or less where it was. In the Soviet case this meant acquiescence in American nuclear superiority. Though our superiority was not decisive, it was still considerable; in 1964 the Defense Department said that we had twice as many intercontinental bombers on constant alert and at least four times as many intercontinental ballistic missiles. The Russian willingness to accept such margins showed not only a post-Cuba confidence in American restraint but a new understanding of the theories of stable nuclear deterrence. And, in addition to slowing down the bilateral arms race, the treaty held out the hope of preventing the spread of nuclear weapons to new nations. Moreover, the effect, both practical and symbolic, of Soviet-American collaboration in stopping nuclear tests and dispersion might well lead to future agreement on more general disarmament issues.
So the supporters of the treaty saw it. But sections of the military and scientific community continued in strong opposition. Some, like General Thomas D. White, a former Air Chief, considered the whole theory of stable deterrence as “next to unilateral disarmament . . . the most misleading and misguided military theme yet conceived.” True security, he and others argued, lay in unlimited nuclear supremacy, and this required unlimited testing. Much of the dissent focused on the contention that the ban would block the development of an anti-missile missile—this in spite of firm statements by McNamara, General Maxwell Taylor and a number of scientists that the hard problems here were nonnuclear and required analysis in the laboratories, not testing in the atmosphere. Edward Teller predictably called for the immediate resumption of atmospheric testing, though he was willing to ration this to one megaton of radioactivity a year. To the Senators Teller cried: “If you ratify this treaty . . . you will have given away the future safety of this country.” Admiral Lewis Strauss said, “I am not sure that the reduction of tensions is necessarily a good thing.” Admiral Arthur Radford, a former Chairman of the Chiefs, said, “I join with many of my former colleagues in expressing deep concern for our future security. . . . The decision of the Senate of the United States in connection with this treaty will change the course of world history.” General Thomas Power, the chief of the Strategic Air Command, attacked the treaty in secret hearings before the Armed Services Committee.
The assault had its effect, if not on the treaty itself, on the nature of the Senate debate. Given such opposition, ratification would be impossible without the support of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In the spring the Chiefs had opposed a comprehensive test ban on the ground that the Russians would assuredly cheat; and General Curtis LeMay, the Air Force chief, testified now that he would have opposed the limited ban if the signing of the treaty had not created a situation where its rejection would have serious international consequences. (People sometimes wondered why Kennedy kept on Chiefs who occasionally seemed so much out of sympathy with his policy. The reason was that, in his view, their job was not policy but soldiering, and he admired them sis soldiers. “It’s good to have men like Curt LeMay and Arleigh Burke commanding troops once you decide to go in,” he told Hugh Sidey. “But these men aren’t the only ones you should listen to when you decide whether to go in or not. I like having LeMay head the Air Force. Everybody knows how he feels. That’s a good thing.” He was in addition sensitive to the soldier’s role—dangerous in war and thankless in peace. He had copied an old verse in his commonplace book of 1945–46 and often quoted it later:
In time of trouble and no more;
For when War is over and all things righted,
God is neglected—the old soldier slighted.*)
Now the Chiefs, in effect, exacted a price for their support. General Maxwell Taylor, whom Kennedy had appointed Chairman of the Chiefs in August 1962 and who had played a judicious and effective role in bringing his brethren along, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that “the most serious reservations” of the Chiefs had to do with “the fear of a euphoria in the West which will eventually reduce our vigilance.” The Chiefs accordingly attached “safeguards” to their support: vigorous continuation of underground testing; readiness to resume atmospheric testing on short notice; strengthening of detection capabilities; and the maintenance of nuclear laboratories. The President, determined that the treaty should be ratified, gave his “unqualified and unequivocal assurances” that the conditions would be met. Secretary McNamara, while questioning whether “the vast increases in our nuclear forces” had “produced a comparable enhancement in our security,” nevertheless assured the Senate that he would move in the next years further to raise “the megatonnage of our strategic alert forces.” Senators, reluctant to be associated with what critics might regard as disarmament, seized with delight on the chance of interpreting the renunciation of atmospheric tests as a green light for underground tests. The effect for a moment, as Richard Rovere put it, was to turn “an agreement intended to limit nuclear testing into a limited warrant for increasing nuclear testing.”
The President was prepared to pay this price to commit the nation to a treaty outlawing atmospheric tests. He had called the treaty a “step toward reason.” For all the concessions in the presentation to the Senate, his reliance on reason was now being broadly vindicated. For two and a half years he had quietly striven to free his countrymen from the clichés of the cold war. In speech after speech he had questioned the prejudices and platitudes of the fifties, cautioned against extreme solutions and defined the shape of terror in the nuclear age. The American University speech was the climax of a long campaign. If it had produced few letters to the White House, this might have been a measure of the extent to which people read it as sheer common sense. The absence of major criticism, whether in Congress or the press, showed the transformation which, despite Berlin and despite Cuba, the President had wrought in the mind of the nation. Public opinion polls indicated a marked swing in favor of the treaty—80 per cent by September. And on September 24 the Senate gave its consent to ratification by the vote of 80 to 19—fourteen more than the required two-thirds. The action, Kennedy said, was “a welcome culmination of this effort to lead the world once again to the path of peace.”
If the treaty were to have its full effect, it would have to include all present and potential nuclear powers. This gave Khrushchev the problem of signing up China, as it gave Kennedy the problem of signing up France. These were not easy assignments. Neither Peking nor Paris shared the Washington-London-Moscow view that the treaty was a noble and selfless act on behalf of humanity. After all, America, Britain and Russia had all the nuclear weapons they needed: now, in effect, they proposed to close down the store. To Mao Tse-tung and de Gaulle, the treaty sounded more like a hypocritical conspiracy by the nuclear monopolists to make their supremacy permanent lest new nations enter the club and challenge their control of world affairs.
One does not know what effort, if any, Khrushchev made to get China to sign, or North Korea, North Vietnam and Albania, or even Cuba, where Castro, still smarting from the missile crisis, took the occasion to make clear that Moscow could not deliver him on the world scene. The rest of Khrushchev’s flock ambled in without delay. As for France, Kennedy made a determined attempt to persuade de Gaulle by offering him the technical data atmospheric testing would otherwise give him. He declared France a nuclear power in the terms of the Atomic Energy Act, thereby making it eligible for nuclear assistance without new legislation and, as soon as the treaty was initialed, sent Paris a formal proposal.
The General made his first response four days later via a press conference. After expressing polite pleasure that “the Soviets and the Anglo-Saxons” were discontinuing atmospheric tests, he dismissed the treaty as “of limited practical importance.” So long as Russia and America retained their capacity to destroy the world, agreement between them would “not divert France from equipping herself with the same sources of strength.” Nor was he impressed by the adhesion of other nations because, as he put it a few days later, “hardly any of them are in a position to carry out tests. It is rather like asking people to promise not to swim the Channel.” On August 4 he formally rejected Kennedy’s offer, arguing that the treaty and even nuclear cooperation with the United States would violate the apparently infinitely violable sovereignty of France. As Kennedy told Macmillan, de Gaulle’s answer made it clear that he wished neither Anglo-American nuclear assistance nor even a serious discussion. But though the President was not surprised, he was nonetheless bitterly disappointed. The French declination, on top of the Chinese, meant that the treaty would fail as a means of stopping major proliferation. “Charles de Gaulle,” Kennedy told David Brinkley, “will be remembered for one thing only, his refusal to take that treaty.”
Yet, if the test ban was not to stop national nuclear weapons development completely, it still denied at least its signatories—soon more than a hundred—the most convenient means of pursuing the nuclear dream. And it still offered the prospect of a détente between the two superpowers.
The Soviet Union obviously had tactical reasons of its own to seek a lull in world tensions. The agreement gave the Kremlin its international breathing spell at very small cost. It held out the hope of keeping Soviet defense spending down and enabling Khrushchev to reorganize his domestic economy, invest in his chemical fertilizers and deal with his restless intellectuals. It might encourage a reduction of western military budgets and political pressures. It would give the quarrels within the west a chance to grow and flourish. It could possibly stabilize the communist position in East Germany and Eastern Europe. Above all, perhaps, it provided Khrushchev’s coexistence policy a visible success with which he could move to isolate the Chinese in the communist civil war.
Washington was well aware of these tactical purposes. Yet there were other considerations also. America and Russia appeared now to have developed comparable interests in the preservation both of their own societies and of an international order under their own control: history had made these two once revolutionary nations champions of the status quo in a world where revolution had spun beyond them. And, as Marshall Shulman of the Fletcher School emphasized in the test ban hearings, the new Soviet course might have “unintended effects” broader than the conscious aims of the leadership. “Indeed, the most striking characteristic of recent Soviet foreign policy,” Shulman observed, “has been the way in which policies undertaken for short-term, expediential purposes have tended to elongate in time, and become imbedded in doctrine and political strategy.” This development could be under stood as a process of adaptation to a new “terrain of international politics.” The question whether it could lead to “a long-term modification of Soviet policies and the Soviet system in a benign direction,” he concluded, depended “upon the effectiveness of our own process of adaptation to this environment.”
Khrushchev himself appeared ready for next steps. In statements on July 19 and July 26, he laid out a series of possibilities: the non-aggression pact between the NATO and Warsaw Pact countries; the freezing or “still better” the cutting of defense budgets; measures to prevent surprise attack, including reciprocal observation teams and inspection posts in East and West Germany; and the reduction of foreign forces in both German states. Of all these, the non-aggression pact seemed closest to his heart. Harriman and Kaysen had the impression that it might almost be a precondition to further progress.
They had rigorously kept the non-aggression pact out of the test ban negotiations. But both Harriman and Kaysen returned from Moscow convinced that the idea should be seriously considered. They did not suppose that negotiating a non-aggression pact would be easy. But, if we decided in advance that nothing could be done, negotiations would obviously fail. On the other hand, if we approached the problem with an open mind, some mutually desirable arrangement could be worked out. In any case, we had told the Russians that we would explore it in good faith.
The Russians plainly wanted the pact in order to achieve their old-time goal of consolidating the communist position in East Germany and Eastern Europe. But was this now so self-evidently against our interest? Judging by past experience, stability would lead to a better life with somewhat more independence for the peoples of Eastern Europe. It would reduce the threat of war. In the case of East Germany, it would promote greater intercourse with West Germany not only in trade and cultural exchanges but in personal and family contacts; it might even lead in time to the settlement of the Berlin problem and the replacement of the Ulbricht regime by a government more on the Polish model. As for Eastern Europe, stability would diminish the excuse for Soviet occupation and control, encourage a relaxation of ties to Moscow and allow the satellite countries to look increasingly to the west. This had already happened in Hungary and to some degree in Poland. A non-aggression pact might make it happen elsewhere.
For a moment the treaty seemed to be opening up a whole new range of possibilities. This prospect was deeply disturbing to those accustomed to the familiar simplifications of the cold war. They did not like the idea of swimming in uncharted waters; one felt an almost panicky desire in some parts of the government to return things to pre-test ban normal as speedily as possible. The critical question was whether it was to our advantage to maintain or decrease tension in Europe. The emphasis on the perils of euphoria in the Senate debate strengthened those who took the traditional view that a reduction of tension was a bad thing—bad, if only because Moscow liked it and Bonn didn’t. Adenauer, whom the treaty had caught off guard, was now sending out signals of vast discontent; and this too troubled the traditionalists. Since the days of Acheson the relationship with West Germany had been a pivot of our European policy; under Dulles it had often appeared the pivot. Outsiders might feel that in the fifties we had permitted the West Germans to use us for their own interests and might wish now to distinguish what was good for America from what was good for Adenauer; but those reared in the pure school doubted whether there was such a distinction and thought the first order of business was to repair relations with Bonn. As for Adenauer, his view was simple and understandable: he did not want any change in east-west relations which did not involve progress toward the reunification of Germany. He particularly did not want a nonaggression pact which might confer status on East Germany as one of the Warsaw Treaty countries.
The President hoped to maintain the momentum generated by the Moscow negotiations; but his primary concern was to get the treaty through the Senate. He did not want new diplomatic steps to be taken before ratification, and he was skeptical whether there was much in the non-aggression pact for the United States. The Secretary of State was certain there was not. Such a pact might induce the euphoria so feared by the Joint Chiefs; in any case, Rusk was well aware of a concern, not confined to Bonn, that Russia and America were trying to settle the questions of Europe in the absence of Europeans. As for next steps, he had told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, during the test ban hearings, “I cannot report that there is another question which is highly promising as this—as of today.” He saw his first obligation, as one understood his view, as not to press forward with Moscow but to reassure NATO.
When Rusk went to Moscow early in August to sign the test ban treaty, Khrushchev tried to explain to him that the non-aggression pact was like mineral water—refreshing, involving no gains or losses and invigorating in its effect. The Secretary evidently replied that it was more like the Kellogg Pact. In any case, he told Khrushchev, it was something to come at the end of the road rather than at the beginning. Rusk then went on to Bonn where Adenauer complained bitterly that the test ban treaty had contributed to the prestige of the East German government. The Secretary patiently answered the legal points until Adenauer finally agreed that West Germany would sign the treaty. But the Chancellor achieved what may have been his essential objective by leaving the vivid impression that a non-aggression pact on top of the treaty would be just too much.
In these weeks foreign offices everywhere, eager to regain their control over foreign affairs, appeared to be moving to seal up the uncertainties, whether risks or possibilities, which the test ban had momentarily opened up. When Rusk and Gromyko held long talks at the UN in New York in the fall, it was a meeting of two professionals with a common interest in tidying up the mess created by amateurs. And in due course the professionals brought things back to normal. The non-aggression pact fell by the wayside. The inspection issue blocked the extension of the ban to underground tests. The Americans, returning to the familiar ground of the multilateral force, set up the MLF working group in October; this enabled the Russians to resume their familiar complaint that the United States was planning to give nuclear weapons to West Germany. Everyone felt more secure in the old rubrics, and foreign policy slipped back from men to institutions.
One cannot know what might have happened in these months if Kennedy and Khrushchev, both of whom had urgent preoccupations of their own—the civil rights crisis in the United States, the agricultural crisis in the Soviet Union, as well as respective troubles with de Gaulle and Mao—had been free to deal with their foreign affairs bureaucracies. But, if opportunities were lost, they were probably not decisive ones. Both sides needed time to digest the test ban before they would be ready for a next large step. What was lost rather was a shaping of the atmosphere, a continuation of the momentum, which might have made the next steps quicker and easier.
This was much on Kennedy’s mind, especially as he watched the progress of the test ban debate, and it confirmed his decision to speak for a second time before the UN General Assembly. “The treaty is being so chewed up in the Senate,” he said on September 9, two weeks before ratification, “and we’ve had to make so many concessions to make sure it passes, that we’ve got to do something to prove to the world we still mean it. If we have to go to all this trouble over one small treaty, people are likely to think we can’t function at all—unless I can dispel some doubts in New York.”
We had the usual series of meetings to recommend to the President what he might say. The Secretary of State proposed what he called an Alliance for Man designed to show how America, Russia and the rest of the UN could work together on issues beyond politics—health, nutrition, agricultural productivity, resources development. It seemed a promising idea; but, when Richard Gardner of the State Department and I canvassed the scientific and technical agencies of the government, we discovered that specific proposals of American-Soviet collaboration seemed trivial compared to the enormities of the space age. As we began casting about for more dramatic forms of cooperation, there swam into our minds the thought of merging the Russian and American expeditions to the moon.
The proposal of a joint moonshot would be a tangible and impressive offer of cooperation; it would mean a substantial budgetary saving for both countries; and it would be an effective political gesture at home and abroad. Gardner warned me, however, that it would cause trouble in the bureaucracy. Only recently someone in the National Aeronautics and Space Adiminstration had asked for a letter from the State Department requesting a study of the problems and possibilities of a joint moonshot; NASA, it developed, feared to proceed on its own without political clearance. Then State declined to send the letter lest it in turn be held accountable for so subversive an inquiry. One thought, what the hell; and on speculation I wrote the idea into an early draft of the President’s UN address. I had forgotten that the President had himself suggested this to Khrushchev in Vienna in 1961, or I would have been better prepared for his quick approval. He discussed it with James Webb, the head of NASA; and, when we went over the draft a few days later with representatives from State, Defense and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, no one voiced objection. Then at the UN in New York on September 20, he said: “Surely we should explore whether the scientists and astronauts of our two countries—indeed of all the world—cannot work together in the conquest of space, sending some day in this decade to the moon not the representatives of a single nation but the representatives of all of our countries.”
The speech was a sober and effective plea for new steps toward peaceful cooperation. “If this pause in the cold war merely leads to its renewal and not to its end,” he said, “—then the indictment of posterity will rightly point its finger at us all.” Other moves were meanwhile carrying forward the hope of détente in one way or another. Least heralded but perhaps most important was the tacit acceptance of reciprocal aerial reconnaissance from space satellites—the American Samos and the Soviet Cosmos. By supplying a partial substitute for organized international inspection, the satellites provided mutual reassurance and thus strengthened the system of stable nuclear deterrence. The Russians further displayed their new sophistication in the higher strategy when Gromyko at the UN in September modified the Soviet program for general and complete disarmament by abandoning the demand for the elimination of all nuclear weapons and delivery vehicles in the first stage and suggesting instead, in the best arms control manner, that America and Russia retain a limited number of missiles and warheads on their own territory until the end of the disarmament process.
In the meantime, the so-called hot line—an emergency communications link between the White House and the Kremlin—had been installed over the summer. Then, early in October, Kennedy authorized the sale of surplus wheat to the Soviet Union as “one more hopeful sign that a more peaceful world is both possible and beneficial to us all”—a project which, though the Vice-President considered it for a moment as “the worst political mistake we have made in foreign policy in this administration,” did not turn out too tragically. Later in the month the UN, with enthusiastic American and Russian support and much mutual self-congratulation, passed a resolution calling on all states to refrain from “placing in orbit around the earth any objects carrying nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction” and from “installing such weapons on celestial bodies.” This resolution, along with the Moscow treaty’s abolition of testing in outer space and the adoption by the General Assembly in December of a Declaration of Legal Principles for Outer Space, represented the bold attempt of the earthlings to keep the nuclear race out of the firmament.
All these things were helpful; but much remained on the agenda: the completion of the nuclear test ban; new measures to restrain nuclear proliferation, to which Robert Kennedy gave special attention in later years; further possibilities in reciprocal/unilateral arms reduction and control, as suggested by Roswell Gilpatric and Jerome Wiesner; the cut-off of production of fissionable materials for weapons use, undertaken by both superpowers in 1964; and the old dream of general and complete disarmament.
Yet, had all these measures and others like them been accomplished, they still would not have produced a true détente. For in the end a philosophical gap could not be bridged by technical agreements. The ‘mirror image’ of American and Soviet societies was valid only up to a point; the mirror reflected common anxieties, not common values. The Soviet Union remained a system consecrated to the infallibility of a single body of dogma, a single analysis of history and a single political party. Khrushchev seized many occasions in 1963 to make it clear that lull abroad did not mean liberty at home. As he admonished a group of Soviet artists and intellectuals on March 8, 1963, “We are against peaceful coexistence in the ideological field.”
By this he did not mean anything so simple as the proposition that, whatever the condition of détente, the ideological debate between communism and democracy must continue. He meant, indeed, the exact opposite. He meant that the ideological debate must not take place at all—at least not within the Soviet Union. “Soviet society,” he warned his intellectuals in March, “has reached the stage now when complete monolithic unity . . . has been achieved.” The Central Committee of the Party “will demand from everybody—from the most honored and renowned worker of literature and art as well as from the young, budding artist—unswerving abidance by the Party line.” Anyone “who advocates the idea of peaceful coexistence in ideology is objectively sliding down to the position of anti-communism.” And so Russia defended its prohibition of non-communist books, magazines and newspapers from the west as well as its censorship not only of books and magazines but of personal mail at home. With all the Soviet talk about peaceful competition, the Communists evidently flinched from such competition where it mattered most: in the realm of ideas.
The President was nonetheless determined to persevere in the search. “Let us exhaust every avenue for peace,” he said at the University of Maine exactly a year after the missile crisis. “Let us always make clear our willingness to talk, if talk will help, and our readiness to fight, if fight we must. Let us resolve to be the masters, not the victims, of our history.” Yet he warned his listeners to distinguish between hopes and illusions. “Mr. Khrushchev himself has said there can be no coexistence in the field of ideology. . . . The United States and the Soviet Union still have wholly different conceptions of the world, its freedom, its future. . . . So long as these basic differences continue, they . . . set limits to the possibilities of agreement.”
All this defined the boundaries of détente. Obviously the technical measures were of the greatest value. Obviously a world with increased security against self-destruction, a world slowing down the arms race and moving toward general and complete disarmament, a world enlarging its cooperation in economic and scientific matters, a world collaborating on an expedition to the moon and on the conquest of space—such a world would be far better than the world we had. But it would not be a genuine international community, nor would so tense and dour a form of coexistence constitute, except in the minimal sense, peace.
It was because the President understood this so well that he reacted so sharply in November 1963 when Professor Frederick Barghoorn of Yale, a scholar pursuing his studies in the Soviet Union, was arrested on accusations of espionage. The “reasonable” atmosphere between the two countries, the President said, “has been badly damaged by the Barghoorn arrest. . . . Professor Barghoorn I regard as a very serious matter.” “In view,” the Soviet authorities explained, “of the personal concern expressed by President Kennedy,” Barghoorn was released after a few days. But the charges were not withdrawn, and the incident was a useful reminder not only of the fragility of the détente but of the profound differences which separated communism from democracy, the monolithic world from the world of diversity.
“We must never forget,” Kennedy had said a few days earlier in making his own comment on society and the arts in a speech at Amherst, “that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth. . . . In free society art is not a weapon and it does not belong to the sphere of polemics and ideology. Artists are not engineers of the soul. It may be different elsewhere. But democratic society—in it, the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may. In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation.”
So long as one power insisted that it had exclusive possession of the truth, that it would permit no competing truths within its domain and that it could not wait until its absolute truth obliterated competing truths in the rest of the planet, so long as it declined to accept the permanence of a diverse world, so long the cold war would continue. In the end, peaceful coexistence had to mean the free circulation of ideas among all countries or it would mean very little.