Henry A. Kissinger was left behind in Cambridge on January 20, 1961, when McGeorge Bundy and other colleagues on the Harvard faculty moved to top jobs in the Kennedy administration. Kissinger, a German-born professor of government, was named a consultant on European affairs to the National Security Council, and in the early summer of 1961 he was invited to a Cabinet Room meeting on the Berlin crisis. It was his first inside look at the Kennedy administration, and the A team, including Robert Kennedy, was there, seated around a conference table. The president’s men all stood, as is the custom, when he arrived to open the meeting. Within a few moments, a White House steward entered the room with a tureen of clam chowder. He served soup and crackers to the president and then moved around the room to Bobby Kennedy, who also got a bowl of soup. No one else was served.
When Kissinger returned to Harvard, he described the scene to Morton Halperin, one of his teaching fellows, speaking, Halperin recalled in an interview for this book, of the king and his duke and their misguided “sense of entitlement.”
In fact, Robert Kennedy became, after the Bay of Pigs, not a duke but his brother’s prime minister—the second most powerful man in the United States. The attorney general, through a Soviet intelligence officer in Washington, and with the president’s approval, began back-channel communications with Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet premier. The two Kennedys spent the next eighteen months negotiating foreign policy with Khrushchev through a secret intermediary. They did so despite opposition from their Soviet experts, who were aware of the back channel but rarely knew what was being discussed or agreed to. Bobby Kennedy’s portfolio by the middle of 1961 was staggering: he was the president’s legal adviser, his political adviser, his protector, his best friend, and his most influential foreign affairs adviser.
The history of the Kennedy administration and its dealings in the Cold War is incomplete without a full understanding of the president-to-premier agreements reached in Washington and Moscow. And yet not one official document dealing with the Kennedy-Khrushchev relationship through the back channel has been made public by the John F. Kennedy Library; the most detailed information has come from Soviet archives opened after the fall of communism. Robert Kennedy, in a 1964 interview with the Kennedy Library—published in part by family biographer and historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in 1978—revealed that the Soviet he met with in Washington was Georgi N. Bolshakov, an intelligence officer posing as a journalist. Kennedy added, almost casually, “Most of the major matters dealing with the Soviet Union and the United States were discussed and arrangements were made between Georgi Bolshakov and myself.… We used to meet maybe once every two weeks.”
Georgi Bolshakov was a professional intelligence agent whose résumé dated back to World War II service with GRU, the intelligence branch of the Soviet army. His fluent command of English led him to an assignment in Washington in 1951, ostensibly serving as an editor for TASS, the Soviet news agency. In 1955 he was transferred to the staff of General Georgi Zhukov, the war hero who was the Soviet minister of defense. In 1959 he was sent again to Washington, where he maintained a long-standing Soviet relationship with Frank Holeman, a reporter for the New York Daily News, who was one of the few journalists unafraid to have occasional lunches with Soviet diplomats. Holeman was friendly with Edwin O. Guthman, a former reporter who was Bobby Kennedy’s press secretary at the Justice Department. It was on Holeman’s recommendation that Kennedy and the seemingly moderate and understanding Bolshakov first met, three weeks after the Bay of Pigs.*
Over the next eighteen months, Bolshakov became a central figure for the president and his brother, as the middleman in the most intense confrontations of the Kennedy administration: the Vienna summit, the Berlin crisis, and the Cuban missile crisis. The full story of Georgi Bolshakov’s contacts with Bobby Kennedy during those crucial days may never be known. “I don’t know why they [the Soviets] wanted to proceed in that fashion,” Kennedy told the library, “but they didn’t want to go through their ambassador” in Washington. The Soviet ambassador, Mikhail Menshikov, “handled the regular routine matters, and he—Bolshakov—handled other things.… I met with him about all kinds of things.”
The American bureaucracy was also cut out, Kennedy acknowledged, and knew little of what was being said by the president and his brother to the Soviet leadership. “Unfortunately, stupidly,” Robert Kennedy told the library, “I didn’t write many of the things down. I just delivered the messages verbally to my brother, and he’d act on them. I think sometimes he’d tell the State Department—and sometimes he didn’t.” Kennedy was, once again, being less than candid about a vital matter: in fact, he did document some of the meetings with Bolshakov, but those papers, if they still exist, remain locked away in his personal files in the Kennedy Library.
Bolshakov was well known to the Washington press corps in the early 1960s and known to be friendly with the Kennedys. But no reporter realized his importance. In his 1975 memoir Conversations with Kennedy, Ben Bradlee, then with Newsweek magazine, wrote about an evening he and his wife spent with the president and the first lady in her bedroom at the White House, watching a television special on the Kremlin. “While the President walked around in his underdrawers and wondered what life must be like in that mausoleum,” Bradlee wrote,
Jackie told us about the day that Bobby Kennedy had called the Kremlin in a rage about something, a story that had been kicking around town for some time and had been denied often. He was apparently calling Georgi N. Bolshakov, the Washington press corps’ and the New Frontier’s favorite Soviet diplomat [presumably then in Moscow], who was carried on the Soviet embassy’s rolls as a journalist but who was felt by all of us to be a spy, like all Soviet diplomats. If so, he was a gregarious spy, could drink up a storm, and liked to arm wrestle. Anyway, Jackie was now confirming that story that had been so often denied. But, she reported, there had been no answer at the Kremlin when the United States attorney general had called late at night.
Schlesinger was given unprecedented access to Bobby Kennedy’s oral history, and to a few of his personal notes, while researching his authorized biography, Robert Kennedy and His Times, published in 1978. But he was unable to deal substantively with the possibility that Jack and Robert Kennedy, two men Schlesinger dearly admired, had been talking with the Kremlin behind the backs of all who were serving in the government. He trivialized Bolshakov as being “full of chaff and badinage,” and said that one of Bobby Kennedy’s aides, who could not have known of Bolshakov’s secret role, depicted Bolshakov as full of “self-deprecating nods, smiles, and circus English” and benefiting from “Bobby’s predilection for harmless buffoons.”
The need for secrecy was great because the risks of the Kennedy-Khrushchev back channel were high. The president was making strategic decisions without the informed advice of the men and women in the State Department, Defense Department, and CIA who had served in the Soviet Union and who knew the language, people, and history. “Jack was his own secretary of state,” Bobby Kennedy told the library.
Jack and Bobby Kennedy defied the experts and nay-sayers in their government—some of the same experts, the president had come to believe, who had assured him that the invasion at the Bay of Pigs would work. With their daring, the Kennedys seized control of America’s Cold War policy; it was a heady time for two brothers who were inexperienced in the workings of the foreign policy establishment.
The back channel, and Bobby Kennedy’s ascendancy, had their beginnings in the disastrous spring of 1961. On May 9, according to Soviet files summarized in “One Hell of a Gamble,” by the historians Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, Bobby Kennedy and Bolshakov had their first exploratory meeting in Washington: the issue was the pending summit in Vienna, about which Jack Kennedy was justifiably very nervous. Kennedy and Bolshakov met and telephoned each other at least six times before the summit in early June, but failed to resolve any of the outstanding issues. A precedent was set, however, and an important message communicated, according to Fursenko and Naftali: Robert Kennedy told the Soviets that the tough language his brother was using in public did not indicate “any lessening of commitment to a constructive meeting with Khrushchev.” The Soviets were being told to watch what Kennedy did and not to listen to what he said.
The summit was brutal. Khrushchev bullied and threatened the unprepared Kennedy over the question of allowing the Western Allies continued access to West Berlin. After World War II, Germany was divided into zones of occupation, and Berlin, deep inside the Soviet zone, was itself divided. Thousands of East Germans, including many intellectuals and scientists, were fleeing from communism by walking across the checkpoints between East and West Berlin; the brain drain was humiliating to the East German government and deleterious to the state’s long-term economic well-being. Khrushchev gave Kennedy an ultimatum: the United States, Britain, and France had six months to negotiate, in consultation with the Soviet Union, a postwar peace treaty that would resolve the status of Germany and confirm East German control over traffic into West Berlin. The United States was reluctant to agree, since that would amount to de facto recognition of the division of the country. If the Allies did not consent, Khrushchev threatened, the Soviets would go it alone and sign a separate treaty with East Germany. Without a settlement, Khrushchev said, there could be nuclear war. Kennedy, badly shaken, told his longtime friend LeMoyne Billings that he had “never come face to face with such evil before.” He fumed to his aide Kenny O’Donnell that Khrushchev was a “bastard” and a “son of a bitch.”
Kennedy linked the dispute to the failure in Cuba. “The Russians thought they could kick [the president] around,” Robert Kennedy explained in his interviews for the Kennedy Library. “Khrushchev got the idea … that he was dealing with a rather weak figure because [JFK] didn’t do what Khrushchev would have done in Cuba, in not going and taking Cuba … that he was dealing with a young figure who perhaps had no confidence. It was a shock to [Jack] that somebody would be as harsh and definitive, definite, as this.”
A few favored members of the Washington press corps learned how thoroughly rattled President Kennedy had been by his confrontation with Khrushchev at Vienna, but they did not share that information with their readers—as Kennedy knew they would not. In Deadline, his memoir, James Reston told how he had been smuggled into the American Embassy in Vienna on a Saturday morning for an exclusive interview with Kennedy after one of the summit meetings. The president, wearing a hat pulled over his forehead, arrived
over an hour late, shaken and angry, … sat down on a couch beside me, and sighed. I said it must have been a rough session. Much rougher than he had expected, he said. Khrushchev had threatened him over Berlin.… He felt sure Khrushchev thought that anybody who had made such a mess of the Cuban invasion had no judgment, and any president who had made such a blunder but then didn’t see it through had no guts.… He had tried to convince Khrushchev of U.S. determination but had failed. It was now essential to demonstrate our firmness, and the place to do it, he remarked to my astonishment, was Vietnam! I don’t think I swallowed his hat but I was speechless.… Khrushchev had treated Kennedy with contempt, and … he felt he had to act.
Reston’s reports made headline news in the New York Times during the summit, but Reston wrote nothing in his dispatches about the Khrushchev ultimatum or Kennedy’s tough talk on Vietnam.* The columnist did share what he learned with at least one colleague. In an interview with a group of academics in 1978, Joseph Alsop described seeing a “very gray” Kennedy at a diplomatic reception in London a day after the summit. “I really didn’t know what had happened in Vienna,” Alsop recalled. “Scotty Reston did, but naturally it horrified him so that he didn’t write about it properly. The president backed me against the wall and said, ‘I just want you to know, Joe, I don’t care what happens, I won’t give way, I won’t give up, and I’ll do whatever’s necessary.’ It was a little chilling.… I hadn’t the vaguest idea that there was anything to give way or to give up about. I knew there was pressure on Berlin, but I didn’t know there had been an ultimatum.” Alsop, like Reston, did not write about the encounter.
In an interview for this book, Hugh Sidey recalled a private chat with Kennedy after his return from Vienna. “I asked him, ‘What’s Khrushchev like? Tell me.’ And he said, ‘I never met a man like this. [I] talked about how a nuclear exchange would kill seventy million people in ten minutes and he just looked at me as if to say, “So what?” My impression was that he just didn’t give a damn if it came to that.’” Sidey later described the president’s distress to Robert Kennedy and asked, “Did you talk to him about that?” Bobby, in his response, seemed eager to convince Sidey that he and the president were one. “Oh yes, we talk all the time, about everything,” the attorney general said, adding that he had never known Jack to be “so upset. I’ve never seen my brother cry before about something like this. I was up in the bedroom with him and he looked at me and said, ‘Bobby, if nuclear exchange comes, it doesn’t matter about us. We’ve had a good life, we’re adults. We bring these things on ourselves. The thought, though, of women and children perishing in a nuclear exchange. I can’t adjust to that.’” Tears ran down the president’s cheeks, Bobby Kennedy told Sidey.*
Just when and how Georgi Bolshakov and Robert Kennedy linked up again after the summit is not known; no Soviet documents dealing with the period have been made public, and Kennedy did not say in his library interviews. The Kennedy brothers allowed other government officials only a glimpse of the give-and-take of the Bolshakov back channel; not surprisingly, the few officials who knew of it thought it was—as one said—a “dangerous game.” An obvious pitfall was the huge discrepancy in status between Kennedy and Bolshakov. Robert Kennedy was indispensable to the running of his government; Bolshakov was not. Any disinformation relayed by Kennedy would immediately taint the president; Bolshakov, if caught lying, could be accused of having gotten the story wrong and be recalled to Moscow, if necessary, or reassigned. The most outspoken critic of the Bolshakov channel was Llewellyn E. Thompson, Jr., the ambassador to the Soviet Union, who after his return from Moscow in mid-1962 was named Kennedy’s special assistant on Soviet affairs. “This was a great mistake,” Thompson, who died in 1972, told the Kennedy Library in an oral history. The Kennedy brothers, he said, “tried to sell the idea, ‘Well, the State Department is so biased against us that we can’t get anywhere. If we could just get direct contact, why, we could do this.’ This way, they hoped to avoid any staff and to avoid having all the facts known.” Thompson worried that Jack or Bobby Kennedy would not be precise in conversations with Bolshakov, to be relayed to Khrushchev, and the Soviet “might attach great importance to careless remarks.”
Thompson’s interview was done after Jack Kennedy’s assassination; it’s not known what, if anything, he said earlier to the president or his brother. But there is little reason to believe that any complaints would have been heeded. Bobby Kennedy made it clear in his Kennedy Library interviews that he cared little for the opinions and expertise of the American ambassador in Moscow. Asked whether the ambassador there made any difference, Kennedy said, “I don’t know whether he does. I think that [the Soviets] had some confidence in Thompson. I don’t know whether he becomes just a messenger. Perhaps for the first two or three months [the American ambassador] has some effect, when they think he’s in touch with the president.” Asked specifically whether the ambassador was bypassed by the Bolshakov back channel, Kennedy responded tersely, “I suppose he was.”
Another State Department concern, surely, was the fact that the Kennedys simply did not know as much as they thought they did about communism and international affairs. In early 1962 David Herbert Donald, a Harvard historian widely respected for his scholarly research and writings on the Lincoln presidency, was invited to give an informal talk at a meeting in the private quarters of the White House with the president, first lady, and a small group of friends and administration officials. Donald spoke about Reconstruction for forty minutes and then took questions, half of which came from an attentive president. Donald afterward had a private meeting with Kennedy and came away with grave reservations, as he wrote a friend a few weeks later. His letter, made available for this book, was caustic: “I did not think his mastery of American history particularly impressive; not surprisingly, it reflected a sort of general textbook knowledge of about twenty-five years ago and not much familiarity with recent literature or findings. His view of history, it is clear, is very largely in personal terms—great men and their influence. This is a man,” Donald wrote, “determined to go down in our history books as a great President, and he wants to know the secret.”
In a 1996 interview for this book, Donald recalled his disquiet after the talk. The president was fascinated with Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, because “he thought to be a great president you had to be a wartime president. That was scary to me,” Donald said. “I came away feeling that this is a young man who doesn’t understand history.”
But the young president, even in serene settings—as with Professor Donald—was careful to muffle his real strategy. Kennedy understood that Berlin was not the place to make his stand against Khrushchev. The president and his brother evolved a pattern during the crisis there in mid-1961 that would be essential to superpower negotiations over the next eighteen months—talk tough in public and compromise in private to keep from going to war.
A flaw in Kennedy’s approach was that the adoring men who served JFK as national security advisers saw only his toughness and unwillingness to yield. Being as tough in a crisis as the president became a mantra in the administration; senior officials who advocated compromise and conciliation—such as Adlai Stevenson, the ambassador to the UN, and Chester Bowles, the liberal undersecretary of state—soon found themselves isolated, their advice disregarded. In the summer and fall of 1961, the president’s advisers gave him a list of options to resolve foreign policy issues in Germany, Cuba, and South Vietnam. The options were all tough.
The embattled Kennedy seemed to be heroic and unyielding in public in the weeks after the Vienna summit, as he struggled to regain his poise and as his administration wrestled over the appropriate response to what was seen as Khrushchev’s challenge to the postwar status of Berlin. Khrushchev renewed his threat to limit the movement of American troops into and out of West Berlin, and the unrelenting president dealt in kind. There was an atmosphere of crisis. On July 25, 1961, Kennedy, in a televised speech to the nation that echoed the themes of his inaugural address, called the nation to arms in defense of West Berlin, which he depicted as “the great testing place of Western courage and will.… We are clear about what must be done—and we intend to do it.”
America, the young president said, must “have a wider choice than humiliation or all-out nuclear action.” He announced a dramatic series of military escalations. He tripled draft calls, added more than 200,000 personnel to the army, navy, and air force, and gave the Pentagon new authorization to call up reservists and extend tours of duty. If more military manpower and higher taxes were needed, he said, “I shall not hesitate to ask for them.” He also announced a $3.25 billion increase in defense spending and urged Americans to prepare for the worst by constructing nuclear fallout shelters in basements and backyards. More than $200 million was added to the defense budget for civil defense, triggering what would become a bitter national debate over the morality of digging a shelter and then arming family members against those less-prudent neighbors who in moments of nuclear peril found themselves without their own shelters.
The imminent Soviet threats to freedom and peace were depicted in the president’s speech as being not only in Berlin but—echoing the post-Bay of Pigs view of Walt Rostow—in South Vietnam. “There is also a challenge in Southeast Asia,” the president said, “where the borders are less guarded, the enemy harder to find, and the dangers of communism less apparent to those who have so little.… We will at all times be ready to talk, if talk will help. But we must also be ready to resist with force, if force is used upon us.”
Other moves, not made public, were designed to signal American seriousness to the Soviet high command. Robert Kennedy, in his interview with the Kennedy Library, revealed that the American submarine fleet had been redeployed in the North Atlantic that August and elements of the Strategic Air Command placed on heightened alert. Military leaves were canceled and shipments to Europe of military hardware and munitions stepped up.
Kennedy’s speech was a spectacular public relations success. A vast majority of Americans rallied around their handsome young president, as they had after the Bay of Pigs. White House mail ran better than 100 to 1 in support of the president’s firm stand in the threat of crisis; there also was a quick response from Congress, which overwhelmingly voted to authorize the increased defense spending. A Gallup poll showed that more than 85 percent of those polled expressed a willingness to keep American troops in West Berlin; 67 percent favored sending troops to fight their way into the city if the Soviets dared block access. In an editorial the New York Times described Kennedy as “at once solemn, determined, and conciliatory.” The president, it added, “last night reasserted American leadership of the free world.… We are confident that the American people and free men everywhere will support him.”
Khrushchev’s solution was to permanently isolate East from West. Early on the morning of August 13, East German state police began laying wire along the twenty-seven-mile border dividing East and West Germany—the first step in erecting what was to become the Berlin Wall. The Kennedy administration did nothing to stop construction of the wall, provoking enormous anxiety—and much anti-American sentiment—among West Berliners. Kennedy reaffirmed the U.S. commitment within days by sending a battle group of fifteen hundred Americans through East German corridors into West Berlin; on August 30 he announced the appointment of General Lucius Clay, the retired army hero of the 1948 Berlin blockade, as his special envoy. Clay was a hard-line anticommunist who was openly skeptical of Kennedy’s decision to accept the wall. But the wall remained.
Historians today have obtained access to documents in Washington and Moscow that demonstrate what was not known for more than two decades: the Kennedy White House had concluded well before August 1961 that the United States could not and would not do anything to prevent the erection of a physical barrier. The president correctly understood, as history has shown, that Nikita Khrushchev and his colleagues needed a peaceful way to prevent the hemorrhaging of East Germany’s best and brightest to the West. The wall, odious as it was to many Americans—especially those who responded to the rhetoric of the president—could defuse the Berlin crisis. Some in his administration viewed the wall as a provocation, and the beginning of what could be an all-out Soviet push into West Berlin. But not the president. “Why would Khrushchev put up a wall if he really intended to seize West Berlin?” Kennedy rhetorically asked Kenny O’Donnell, according to O’Donnell’s memoir. “This is his way out of his predicament. It’s not a very nice solution, but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.” There was family agreement on the president’s caution. Joseph Kennedy told the writer William Manchester, then doing a book on the Kennedy White House, that trying to hold Berlin would be “a bloody mistake.”
Did John Kennedy use the back channel to let Khrushchev know that the United States would do nothing about the wall? In his Kennedy Library interview Robert Kennedy said only that he had repeatedly warned Bolshakov before the wall was put up that the United States “would go to war on Berlin,” and quoted Bolshakov as responding that he was “sending back that message.” Kennedy added that he cut off relations with Bolshakov “for a while” after the Soviets built the wall “because I was disgusted with the fact that they had done so.” But the breach, if there was one, was brief. The back channel played a key role two months later in resolving a contretemps between Soviet and American tanks at Berlin’s Checkpoint Charlie.
Robert Kennedy’s account of his “disgust” over the wall may have been fabricated, or exaggerated, to hide the White House’s secret dealings with Khrushchev. It is not known what, if anything, Khrushchev communicated to Kennedy before the wall went up; one Berlin expert, David E. Murphy, who was in charge of the CIA’s intelligence operations in Berlin in 1961, believes that there was no need for Kennedy and Khrushchev to discuss the wall specifically in their back-channel exchanges. Kennedy “was sending message after message” in public and private to Khrushchev in the summer of 1961, Murphy said in a 1997 interview for this book. “No one used the term wall. What Kennedy did make clear was that they [the Soviets] had the right to control movement through their sector.” Murphy was formally assigned in August 1961 as chief of the Berlin operations base, the focal point for the CIA’s intelligence and espionage efforts in East Berlin and East Germany. In his view the Kennedy administration conveyed all it needed to convey on July 30, 1961, when Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, publicly declared in a television interview, “I don’t understand why the East Germans don’t close their border, because I think they have the right to close it.” That statement, Murphy said, could not have been made without advance presidential approval. It was understood inside the CIA station, he added, that Kennedy “never had any intention of challenging the wall. Everybody knew that.”
As a senior intelligence officer, Murphy was aware that Kennedy’s options in Berlin were extremely limited. In March 1961 Henry Kissinger, as the National Security Council’s consultant on Germany, asked the CIA to review possible clandestine action that “could be undertaken in support of the U.S. position on Berlin.” The answer, reported by Murphy in his 1997 book, Battleground Berlin, written in collaboration with Sergei A. Kondrashev, his KGB counterpart, was disappointing. Some propaganda activities would perhaps be useful, the CIA replied. But open insurrection against the government—as was being urged for Cuba—was “not a feasible clandestine action” in East Berlin. Three months later, Murphy wrote, the CIA’s William Harvey, who had directed clandestine operations in Berlin for seven years in the 1950s, told a meeting at CIA headquarters in Washington that it would be “unrealistic” for America’s policymakers to conclude that the agency could be effective in organizing resistance groups inside East Germany. “Our abilities are not equal to this task,” Murphy quoted Harvey as explaining, “when balanced against the defensive capability” of the East German security services. Murphy, who published little about his intelligence work prior to Battleground Berlin, also reported that the Kennedy administration informed the American Embassy in Bonn in a cable in late July that “there is not much the United States could do” if the East German government tightened controls in Berlin.
The president’s technique in superpower confrontations would become ingrained by the Cuban missile crisis in late 1962. The president would speak with resolve to his aides and in public, but privately do everything—using Georgi Bolshakov, if he was available—to settle the dispute. He used this technique again in late October 1961, when American and Soviet tanks squared off against each other at Checkpoint Charlie, a highly publicized gate in the Berlin Wall formally known as the Friedrichstrasse crossing. The tanks were armed and had authority to fire.
The dispute began when East German border guards stopped the automobile of Allan Lightner, the senior American diplomat in Berlin, who with his wife was going into East Berlin to attend an opera. The guards asked to see Lightner’s passport. He refused, since to show it would have suggested American recognition of the authority of East Germany, and not the Soviet Union, in East Berlin, a concession the United States did not wish to make. Lightner was refused access to the East, and returned with a squad of American soldiers, backed up by four tanks. The border guards stepped aside and Lightner and his wife were allowed to drive through. General Clay telephoned the president and won approval to escalate the issue. American civilians, ignoring the border guards, thus began to drive into East Berlin, accompanied by ever-increasing numbers of American troops. On October 26, a battalion of thirty-three Soviet tanks entered East Berlin, precisely matching the number of American tanks in reserve on the other side. The formal standoff began a day later, when ten Soviet tanks moved up to the East German side of the checkpoint, facing ten American tanks, which also moved forward.
Publicly, as Clay told his biographer Jean Edward Smith, Kennedy backed him all the way. The president telephoned during the crisis and urged him to not “lose your nerve.” Clay responded, he said, “Mr. President, we’re not worried about losing our nerve over here. What we’re worried about is whether you people in Washington are losing yours.” Kennedy said, “I’ve got a lot of people here that have, but I haven’t.” In private, of course, Kennedy was agitated by the dispute, telling an aide, “We didn’t send him [Allan Lightner] over there to go to the opera in East Berlin.” The president and his brother turned once again to Georgi Bolshakov. In his interview with the Kennedy Library, Robert Kennedy said, “I got in touch with Bolshakov and said the president would like them to take their tanks out of there in twenty-four hours. He said he’d speak to Khrushchev, and they took their tanks out in twenty-four hours. He delivered effectively when it was a matter that was important.”
In a little-noted analysis published thirty years later in Foreign Policy magazine, Raymond L. Garthoff, a former CIA and State Department official who has written widely on U.S.-USSR affairs, wrote about the Checkpoint Charlie incident from the Soviet point of view. In Soviet archives and through interviews in Moscow, Garthoff discovered that—apparently unknown to the Kennedy brothers—General Clay had that fall secretly replicated a section of the wall in a secluded area of West Berlin and was practicing, with army combat engineers, effective ways to tear it down. The Soviet high command learned of Clay’s activities, which it assumed had been approved by the Kennedy White House, and concluded that an American military invasion of East Berlin was being considered. Garthoff interviewed a senior Communist Party official, Valentin Falin, then part of Khrushchev’s brain trust, who told him that Soviet intelligence agents had documented Clay’s training activities with photographs and had presented their evidence to the Soviet leadership by October 21.
On that day, too, Roswell Gilpatric, the deputy secretary of defense, gave a speech, personally reviewed by the president, in which he revealed more than had ever been said publicly before about America’s nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union. Citing specific numbers, and referring directly to Berlin, Gilpatric declared that America “has a nuclear retaliatory force of such lethal power that an enemy move which brought it into play would be an act of self-destruction on his part.… Therefore, we are confident that the Soviets will not provoke a major nuclear conflict.… The United States does not intend to be defeated.” Gilpatric’s jingoistic speech, which put an end to any concern about an American “missile gap,” had been planned long in advance, but Moscow didn’t know that. The Soviets’ Twenty-second Party Congress was in session at the time, and the party leaders were struggling over dissent in Albania and China. They feared, Garthoff was told years later in Moscow, that the United States might seek to open a “second front” in Europe while the Soviet leadership was distracted. There was an added reason for concern: four days earlier, in his opening speech to the Party Congress, Khrushchev had publicly withdrawn his ultimatum that America negotiate a postwar peace treaty with Germany by the end of 1961—the ultimatum that had caused Kennedy so much distress at Vienna. The Gilpatric speech seemed to be Kennedy’s response to the Soviet retreat.
These factors led Khrushchev and his advisers to conclude, Valentin Falin told Garthoff, that Clay’s decision a few days later to begin moving American tanks up “seemed deliberate and sinister.” Were the Americans going to breach the wall and being pouring troops and tanks into East Berlin? It was at this point, Falin said, that the Kennedy-Bolshakov back channel got active. The exchange was far more complex—and more important—than that described by Robert Kennedy.
“President Kennedy,” Garthoff reported in Foreign Policy, “did ask Khrushchev to remove the Soviet tanks—but only to do so first in the context of a mutual disengagement. Kennedy promised that if Khrushchev did so, the American tanks would withdraw in turn.” The back-channel message, far from seeking a unilateral Soviet withdrawal, as depicted by Robert Kennedy, “was a plea from the president for mutual restraint and deescalation, asking Khrushchev to take the initial step.” Khrushchev, in his memoirs, did not mention his back channel to Kennedy, but he said that he instructed his commanders in Berlin to withdraw their tanks first. He quoted himself as saying, of the Americans, “They’re looking for a way out, I’m sure, so let’s give them one. We’ll remove our tanks, and they’ll follow our example.” Khrushchev’s published claim, Garthoff added, that he removed his tanks confident of a reciprocal U.S. response “had heretofore been considered a belated invention or a lucky gamble. Now it is clear that Khrushchev had Kennedy’s prior assurance.”
It was also clear, Garthoff wrote, “why some Soviets, including Falin, regarded this as perhaps the most dangerous confrontation of the Cold War. Such claims now make sense—a U.S. breach of the Berlin Wall would have violated a vital Soviet interest.”
The flare-up at Checkpoint Charlie, Garthoff concluded, was “the last serious challenge of the Berlin crisis.” The city remained divided for the next three decades.
John Kennedy had exercised restraint, in secret, to head off potentially devastating confrontations over Berlin with the Soviet Union. The men in charge of the Kremlin understood Kennedy’s instinctive caution, but the men around the president, who knew little or nothing of the back channel, saw Khrushchev’s “retreat” in Berlin as validation of the president’s toughness. That fall Bobby Kennedy had declared during an appearance on Meet the Press, the Sunday morning TV interview show, that there “is no question” his brother would order the use of nuclear weapons if he considered it essential to safeguard freedom in West Berlin. Reporters were later told that Kennedy’s statement was “no accident,” as the New York Times put it the next day. Echoing the public theme, Arthur Schlesinger declared in A Thousand Days: “Kennedy’s determination to rebuild the military power of the West had shown Khrushchev that he could not obtain his maximum objectives by bluff.”
The president was getting a lot of hard-line advice that fall. In South Vietnam he had been urged by every senior adviser, with the exception of Secretary of State Dean Rusk, to escalate the American commitment dramatically by stationing at least eight thousand American soldiers there. The president’s newly named military adviser, General Maxwell Taylor, a disciple of counterinsurgency warfare, had traveled to Vietnam in October and provided a very aggressive recommendation that, as the future would show, was wrong in every detail. In urging the deployment of troops, Taylor depicted South Vietnam as “not an excessively difficult or unpleasant place to operate” for American soldiers. Much of the terrain, he said, “is comparable to parts of Korea where U.S. troops learned to live and work without too much effort.” Taylor further assured Kennedy that North Vietnam “is extremely vulnerable to conventional bombing.”
Presidential notes from one key meeting show that Kennedy expressed fears about a “two-front war,” asking if the commitment of American troops in South Vietnam would jeopardize the tenuous Berlin stalemate that he and Khrushchev had worked out. Kennedy eventually rejected Taylor’s call for troops, but agreed to a steady, and secret, incremental increase in American support for the South Vietnamese government. Two fully operational American helicopter companies were quietly transferred to South Vietnam, and the president allowed air force “trainers” to begin flying combat operations in the South. By the end of 1961, at Kennedy’s direction, there were 2,200 American advisers assigned to South Vietnamese combat units, a nearly 300 percent increase since January. Americans were beginning to die in combat—with no public announcement of the deaths—and so were many more Vietnamese, combatants and noncombatants alike. The president, despite his hesitancy about a manpower commitment to the Saigon regime, had no objection to what amounted to a continuous increase in covert operations, including the use, as of January 1962, of U.S. aircraft to spray virulent herbicide defoliants in areas where the Viet Cong guerrillas were concentrated. The goal of the operation, code-named Ranch Hand, was to deny the enemy jungle cover and deny him food. The American activities were in direct violation of the 1954 Geneva Accords, partitioning North and South Vietnam, to which the United States was a signatory.
Kennedy’s low-profile approach to the expanding war in South Vietnam masked the extent of his commitment. The policy debate on Vietnam, as captured in the Pentagon Papers, was not about whether to save the nation from communism, but how to do it. After one early meeting, General Lionel McGarr, chief of the military advisory group in Saigon, informed his superiors in the Pacific Command that President Kennedy and General Lyman Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “have repeatedly stated Vietnam is not to go behind [the] Bamboo Curtain under any circumstances, and we must do all that is necessary to prevent this from happening.” McGarr was told that the president believed this was “a primarily military problem,” and that the American officials in Saigon should not be restricted by the Geneva Accords.
Kennedy had a chance in 1961 to disengage from an American involvement in South Vietnam. He instead chose, quietly and indirectly, to go to war, with the vast majority of his senior advisers solidly in front of him, urging him to send in American troops and confront Soviet expansionism in Southeast Asia.
Kennedy’s instinctive caution in Berlin and fear of Soviet reprisal did not play a part in his thinking about South Vietnam—or even about Fidel Castro. The Cuban leader continued to be targeted, and so did his potential allies.
On October 25, 1961, as American and Soviet tanks were jousting for position near Checkpoint Charlie, President Kennedy held what seemed a routine morning meeting with Dr. Cheddi Jagan, the first native-born prime minister of British Guiana, whose socialist People’s Progressive Party had swept into power in elections the month before. The tiny Latin American nation of 600,000 citizens, divided between East Indians and blacks, was still a British colony, but was soon to obtain independence (as Guyana); Jagan came to Washington to plead for American foreign aid.
Jagan’s financial needs, Arthur Schlesinger noted in A Thousand Days, were viewed in the White House in Cold War terms: How much foreign aid would it take to keep Jagan from turning, as many thought was his predilection, to the Soviet Union? During the meeting with Kennedy, Schlesinger wrote, Jagan “turned out to be a personable and fluent East Indian but endowed, it seemed to those of us present, with an unconquerable romanticism or naïveté.” Jagan’s mistake, apparently, was to tell the president that, as a committed socialist, he believed in state planning. Kennedy’s response, according to Schlesinger, was gracious: “We have often helped countries which have little personal freedom, like Yugoslavia, if they maintain their national independence. That is the basic thing. So long as you do that, we don’t care if you are socialist, capitalist, pragmatist or whatever.”
Jagan didn’t get his money. Within months race riots and labor unrest broke out, with the loss of more than one hundred lives. The center of downtown Georgetown, British Guiana’s capital, burned down in February 1962, in the aftermath of a riot. British troops were called in to maintain law and order. New radio stations went on the air and newspapers began printing false stories. Jagan clung to power until late 1964, when a coalition government under Forbes Burnham, a black who was strongly anticommunist, was elected.
Thirty-three years after Cheddi Jagan’s visit to Washington, the New York Times reported what had happened in the hours after he left Kennedy’s office. “Kennedy met in secret with his top national security officers,” the Times’s Tim Weiner wrote. “A pragmatic plan took shape. Still-classified documents depict in unusual detail a direct order from the President to unseat Dr. Jagan.” The Times, quoting unnamed government officials said to be “familiar with the secret documents,” reported that the CIA’s classified files on the Jagan operation “are a rare smoking gun: a clear written record, without veiled words or plausible denials, of the President’s command to depose a Prime Minister.”*
The CIA’s men inside the Guianan labor movement triggered the riots, the CIA’s money financed the new radio stations, and the CIA’s propaganda experts produced the phony newspaper stories that heightened the unrest.
Arthur Schlesinger, asked to comment in 1994, blamed the CIA, as he had done after the Bay of Pigs, and not the president. Jagan “wasn’t a communist,” he told the Times. “The CIA decided this was some great menace, and they got the bit between their teeth.… We misunderstood the whole struggle down there.”*
Jack Kennedy, as Schlesinger perhaps did not know or could not acknowledge, had behaved in the Oval Office like a bully at the beach, flinging sand in the face of a weaker man. The president was sending no diplomatic signal in the destruction of Cheddi Jagan, no implicit warning to Nikita Khrushchev about further restrictions of access to West Berlin. Cheddi Jagan was a surrogate for the real target of presidential obsession—Fidel Castro. In Cuba, the president could meet his need to live on the edge without jeopardizing all of mankind.
* There is some evidence that the GRU and the KGB, the main Soviet intelligence service, might have been skeptical about Robert Kennedy as a secret conduit. The skepticism was linked to a 1955 visit to the Soviet Union that Robert Kennedy made at the invitation of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who was one of Joe Kennedy’s close friends. During their research for “One Hell of a Gamble,” Fursenko and Naftali were given access to the KGB’s files on the Kennedy-Douglas trip. The KGB concluded, in a report to Khrushchev, that Kennedy was a provocateur who had a “negative opinion of the Soviet Union” and constantly sought to uncover secret intelligence. He expressed an interest “in the techniques of tapping telephone conversations, secret censorship of mail, Soviet intelligence activities abroad, the system of repression, including the means of punishing captured foreign spies.” Kennedy also displayed the family weakness, Fursenko and Naftali wrote, by cavalierly requesting his Soviet Intourist guide to “send a woman of loose morals” to his hotel room. In 1961, with the ascent of the Kennedy administration, the attorney general was assessed as a “troublemaker” by the Soviets.
* On Sunday, June 4, Reston described the atmosphere of the Kennedy-Khrushchev talks as “apparently more cordial than had been expected after the rising controversies of the last few months.” In his dispatch published Monday, Reston reported that the summit had ended with “hard controversy,” but added that “there were no ultimatums and few bitter or menacing exchanges.” Khrushchev was quoted as saying that the meetings were a “very good beginning.” Kennedy was not directly quoted in either Reston article.
* Sidey did not include the Bobby Kennedy anecdote in his 1963 biography, John F. Kennedy, President, published by Atheneum.
* The thrust of Weiner’s story was that the CIA and State Department were refusing to declassify the file on the anti-Jagan operations in British Guiana, and other potentially embarrassing activities, despite a law mandating the declassification of government papers after thirty years unless the release would compromise national security secrets. The release of a historical volume on Guyana had been prepared, but later withheld, Weiner was told, because of a reluctance to declassify the Jagan papers. Someone involved in the process provided the gist of the embarrassing material to Weiner.
* Robert Kennedy, in one of his 1964 interviews for the Kennedy Library, was once again glib, in concealing what really happened to Cheddi Jagan. The interviewer, John Barlow Martin, who served in the Kennedy administration as ambassador to the Dominican Republic, cited Jack Kennedy’s private meeting with Jagan and commented, “The president seems to have gone to a good deal of trouble to be nice to him.” Martin apparently did not know of the CIA operations in British Guiana. Bobby Kennedy explained that the meeting took place because his brother had been “concerned” about the spread of communism in the Western Hemisphere and was “convinced that Jagan was probably a communist.” But, added Kennedy, the president wanted to “see whether we could work something out with him.… There were various plans we went through … of trying to get the British to come up with something … I think there was an election coming on [in British Guiana] … Most of our efforts were to try to get the British to recognize the concern that we had and ask them to take action to control the situation. They were reluctant.” Asked why, Kennedy explained that the British “were not as concerned about him and about the situation.” At that point, Martin noted, “But it’s a very small country.” Kennedy responded: “Well, I suppose Cuba is too. It’s caused us a lot of trouble.” Nothing more about Jagan was said.