AFTER DOZENS OF test flights, the first class of U-2 pilots had sufficiently “checked out” the new aircraft for efficiency and performance. The spy plane had a range of 2,950 miles, meaning that it could cross continents, and its altitude ceiling of 72,000 feet was beyond the reach of Soviet radar. It was now time to put these strange birds to the test.
Dick Bissell began searching for operational bases in Europe. Great Britain was the first logical choice as the United States’ closest ally, and the U-2 squadron could fly out of Lakenheath Royal Air Force (RAF) Base in Suffolk, England, also home to the Strategic Air Command’s 307th Bombardment Wing. The CIA sent four spy planes to England in late April 1956.
British prime minister Anthony Eden had initially approved the idea but got spooked when Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev paid his first official visit to the United Kingdom that same month. Khrushchev was riding a positive wave of international support after denouncing the purges and crimes of his predecessor, Joseph Stalin, earlier in the year. Khrushchev and his top deputy, Nikolai Bulganin, had traveled to England aboard the Soviet cruiser Ordzhonikidze. The diplomatic mission turned haywire when Lionel Crabbe, a frogman employed by the British spymasters at MI-6, tried to inspect the vessel’s propeller in Portsmouth Harbor. The incident sparked a formal protest from the Soviets and caused major commotion in the halls of Parliament. The diver was never seen alive again. Two fishermen discovered Crabbe’s remains—minus his head and both hands—more than a year later.
The prime minister became leery of further weakening his country’s relations with Russia. Bissell promised Eden that only one U-2 would be based at Lakenheath. He lied. The CIA flew four spy planes out of England, including one U-2 that later penetrated the British radar network. Believing an enemy aircraft was flying over its soil, the RAF scrambled fighter planes to intercept the aerial invader. The American pilot was forced to identify himself or be shot out of the sky. Overflights from Britain were immediately suspended.
President Dwight Eisenhower was also concerned that the top-secret program could heat up the Cold War. He believed that the United States would lose the moral high ground it had attained over the Soviet Union after World War II if the U-2 program were compromised and exposed. But the fear that the Soviet Union had surpassed the United States in long-range bomber and missile technology also weighed heavily on the commander in chief. The blustery Khrushchev predicted the Soviet Union was close to achieving air superiority in the spring of 1956.
“I am quite sure that we shall have very soon a guided missile with a hydrogen bomb warhead which could hit any point in the world,” Khrushchev boasted.1
These sobering words from the Russian leader proved the deciding factor in Eisenhower’s decision to approve reconnaissance flights over the Soviet Union.
Bissell then moved the four U-2s from Lakenheath RAF Base to an American airfield in Wiesbaden, West Germany—without notifying West German officials.
U-2 pilot Carl Overstreet flew the first operational mission of America’s new spy plane on June 20, 1956. A native of Bedford County, Virginia, Overstreet had been flying since he was sixteen years old. Like Rudy Anderson and Chuck Maultsby, he piloted jets for the air force in Korea before the CIA recruited him to fly over Soviet satellite countries. Overstreet’s mission was to fly over Poland and East Germany, which he did undetected by enemy radar. The CIA flew two more missions over Eastern Europe in early July with equal stealth and success. Initial reports satisfied Eisenhower, and Bissell told him that his pilots were “ready and eager to go in beyond the [Soviet] satellites.”2
On July 4, 1956, the U-2 program celebrated America’s Independence Day with its first overflight of the Soviet Union itself. The pilot at the controls was Hervey Stockman of Princeton, New Jersey. With a youthful smile and tousled hair, Stockman, or “Studdie,” as his friends called him, had attended Princeton University before joining the Army Air Corps in World War II, flying P-51 Mustangs out of England. Now he was back in Europe and about to fly the most important mission of his life.
In the cockpit of a U-2 equipped with an A-2 camera, Stockman took off into dark skies from Wiesbaden just before 6 a.m. During the mission, he soared over Poland and Belorussia before turning north to Leningrad. He took photos of the city’s naval shipyards, where the Soviets had concentrated their growing submarine program, and made an inventory of Russia’s new Bison long-range heavy bombers, which were fueled up and ready to engage. Stockman was not sure whether Soviet radar had painted the U-2, but he managed to return to Wiesbaden safely despite heavy wind damage to the plane’s fuel tank.
According to his family, the ruptured fuel tank caused gas to spill out all over the runway, causing concern that the plane would blow up. But Stockman refused to leave the cockpit until he had finished his flight log. “I had just flown the length of the Soviet Union,” he said. “I wasn’t concerned about a leaky gas tank.”3
The next day, Stockman’s squadron mate Carmine Vito continued the search for the Soviets’ dreaded Bison Bomber on a flight that took him more than two hundred kilometers past Moscow. Vito captured photographs of the airframe plant where the Bisons were built and the bomber arsenal where they were tested, as well as a missile plant and a rocket-engine plant.
Dick Bissell soon learned that Soviet radar had discovered the first two flights over the Soviet Union and that the Russians had tried to intercept the spy planes but been unsuccessful because the radar could not track them consistently. The CIA also learned that the Soviets’ radar coverage was most vulnerable around their most vital military installations.
Film from the initial flights was flown back to the United States for developing, and the quality of the photographs was considered acceptable despite occasional cloud cover. Most alarming, however, were miniscule images of Soviet MiGs in pursuit of the U-2s—proof that the Soviets had tracked the spy planes long enough to launch their warplanes and also that the MiGs were no match for the U-2s at ultrahigh altitude.
The Russians responded immediately with a protest letter hand-delivered to the US embassy in Moscow. The Soviets expressed outrage that American twin-engine medium-range bombers had made overflights across their country. They made no mention of an odd-looking glider-type aircraft. No Russian pilot got a clear enough visual on the U-2, so the project remained secret for the time being.
Still, the note disturbed President Eisenhower enough to suspend the flights. His main concern was that the American people would lose confidence in his administration if the program—hence, violation of international law—were exposed.
Bissell continued to stress the need for such flights, but his arguments had hit the White House wall.
THROUGHOUT HIS ADMINISTRATION, President Eisenhower worked tirelessly to strengthen relations with the Soviet Union, even though many in-and outside the United States government were working against him. The so-called Communist threat had become a cottage industry for politicians, civic leaders, and businessmen who preyed upon the collective fear that Red Army tanks would one day roll down Pennsylvania Avenue. To ease Cold War tensions, Eisenhower and Khrushchev agreed to an exchange of visits to further the cause of peace. The trips to Washington, DC, and Moscow, planned for the fall of 1959, would mark the first time leaders of both the United States and the Soviet Union paid an official visit to the other’s country.
Premier Khrushchev’s twelve-day tour of America included a private summit with the president and a formal tea with members of the Foreign Relations Committee. Several senators refused the invitation on the grounds that they would not entertain conversation of any kind with a man they considered America’s archenemy and a clear and present danger to the United States. One lawmaker who did not consider turning down such an opportunity was Jack Kennedy, the junior US senator from Massachusetts, then building the foundation for a run at the White House in 1960.
Kennedy arrived late at the heavily guarded, soundproof ceremonial chamber of the Foreign Relations Committee for his audience with Khrushchev on September 16, 1959.
The Russian premier had only been on US soil for two days, but his crooked smile had already begun to fade; it didn’t brighten at the sight of the young American politician who had strolled in late yet seemed completely unruffled and unhurried. As a junior committee member, Kennedy was relegated to the sidelines for the ninety-minute meeting, at which discussion ranged from American overseas bases to Russian subversion and the space race. Khrushchev’s words were important, but equally important to Kennedy were his mannerisms. The young senator kept a watchful eye on the Soviet leader and wrote, “Tea—vodka—if we drank all the time, we could not launch rockets to the moon.”
He then jotted down his thoughts on Khrushchev’s appearance. “Tan suit—French cuffs—short, stocky, two red ribbons, two stars.”4
After the meeting, Kennedy was introduced to Khrushchev, who remarked that he looked too young to be a senator.
“I’ve heard a lot about you,” Khrushchev said. “People say you have a great future ahead of you in politics.”
The Russian had no idea at the time how their lives would become intertwined. And to gain better perspective about Kennedy’s possible future in politics, Nikita Khrushchev would have been well served to examine the man’s past.
AFTER SURVIVING THE ramming of his patrol torpedo boat in August 1943, Jack Kennedy was declared a hero for the lengths to which he went to save the lives of his crewmen in the Solomon Islands. The New York Times headline read, “Kennedy’s Son Is Hero in Pacific as Destroyer Splits His PT Boat.” Not to be outdone, editors at the Herald Tribune called Kennedy’s actions a “blazing new saga in PT boat annals.”
Jack Kennedy was uncomfortable with the attention foisted on him by the media in a story no doubt foisted on them by his father, Joseph Kennedy Sr., a multimillionaire banker, film mogul, and former US ambassador to Great Britain. Countless servicemen performed heroic and courageous acts on a daily basis during the height of the war, and each deserved his own banner headline. When asked much later about his gallantry, Jack Kennedy responded sheepishly that he did not feel like much of a hero because the Japanese had cut his PT boat in half, killing two of his crew. In a letter to his parents after the incident, Kennedy reflected on the loss of those men and the futility of war.
It certainly brought home how real the war is—and when I read the papers from home—how superficial is most of the talking and thinking about it. When I read that we will fight Japs for years if necessary and will sacrifice hundreds of thousands if we must—I always like to check from where he’s talking—it’s seldom out here [in the war zone]. People get so used to talking about billions of dollars and millions of soldiers that thousands dead sounds like drops in a bucket. But if those thousands want to live as much as the ten I saw—they should measure their words with great care.5
Kennedy would experience the heavy toll of war once again the following year when his older brother, Joe, a twenty-nine-year-old US Navy lieutenant, died while piloting a B-24 Liberator packed with 20,000 pounds of explosives. The aircraft exploded in midair over the English Channel with Kennedy and others on board.
The loss devastated the Kennedy clan, particularly Joe Sr., who had been grooming his eldest son for a career in politics and pursuit of the presidency. Now that torch would pass to Jack.
The younger Kennedy was undoubtedly up to the task intellectually. He had the right background—the best private schools and a degree from Harvard. But could he handle the physical rigors of a long, grueling campaign?
Jack had been dealing with lower-back problems since his football-playing days in prep school and had long slept with a plywood board under his mattress for support. The collision in the South Pacific, followed by days of grueling swims, had nearly crippled him. Life as a politician only compounded the problem. Years of travel in planes, trains, and automobiles, crisscrossing the country on the campaign trail, would increasingly endanger Kennedy’s health, already jeopardized by Addison’s disease, a withering of the adrenal glands, which produce adrenaline and other hormones. Kennedy had collapsed twice, once during a parade while campaigning for a congressional seat in Boston in 1946 and again a year later during a congressional visit to Great Britain. The second scare landed him in a London hospital, where his chronic condition was officially diagnosed. A London doctor told Kennedy confidante Pamela Churchill, Winston Churchill’s daughter, “That American friend of yours, he hasn’t got a year to live.”6
This refrain was familiar to Joseph Kennedy and his wife, Rose, who had worried about Jack’s physical welfare since his birth in 1917. In his youth, he had always been suffering or recovering from one malady or another. Be it a bout with scarlet fever at the age of three or severe abdominal issues that caused drastic weight loss during his boarding school days at the posh Choate Academy, Jack Kennedy’s health had always been a grave concern for his parents and medical professionals.
By the time he entered the US Senate in 1954, the pain in his lower back had become intolerable—he needed crutches just to climb a flight of stairs. X-rays revealed that his fourth lumbar vertebra had narrowed, causing the bones supporting his spinal column to collapse. Later X-rays showed that his fifth lumbar vertebra had fully collapsed. Doctors warned Kennedy that he could lose the ability to walk and suggested an operation to strengthen his lower back through fusions of the spine and sacroiliac. The surgery would be risky under normal circumstances, but the Addison’s disease made it truly life threatening. Because the steroids used to control that condition weakened his immune system, there was a strong risk of deadly infection. Believing surgery his only option, Kennedy was willing to take the gamble.
“Even if the risks are fifty-fifty,” he explained to his father, “I’d rather be dead than spend the rest of my life hobbling on crutches and paralyzed by pain.”7
Kennedy entered the New York Hospital for Special Surgery on October 10, 1954, but did not receive the operation until eleven days later. Surgeons had to postpone the procedure three times to ensure an extended metabolic workup prior to, during, and after surgery. During the operation, which lasted three hours, a metal plate was inserted to stabilize Kennedy’s lower spine. While everything went as planned on the operating table, doctors knew the biggest threat to Kennedy’s life would lay in his recovery. Almost immediately after the procedure the young senator suffered a urinary tract infection that sent him into a coma. Joe Sr. sent for the family priest, Father John Cavanaugh, who arrived at the hospital a short time later to administer Last Rites.
But Jack eventually regained consciousness, and his condition slowly improved. This Lazarus-like recovery was a testament to the young politician’s uncanny will. But unlike the PT-109 incident, this story could not be shared with the press corps as it could cause irreparable harm to the junior senator from Massachusetts, who, unbeknownst to many, aspired to the executive office.
Spinal-fusion surgery did little to alleviate the pain in Kennedy’s back. Over the next three years, he would be hospitalized nine more times for a total of forty-five days. He could no longer bend over or grab an object out of his immediate reach. Yet, during this time, he campaigned vigorously for the 1956 vice presidential nomination as running mate to Democratic nominee Adlai Stevenson, former governor of Illinois, who had decided that delegates at the Democratic National Convention would choose his running mate. The delegates selected Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver. Stevenson’s decision outraged Kennedy, but it turned out to be a blessing for him as Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard M. Nixon steamrolled the Democratic ticket in the general election. Spared the stain of defeat, Kennedy slowly began to mount his own campaign to succeed Eisenhower in the Oval Office.