Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) (12 page)

With his youth, Catholicism, movie-star looks, and progressive appeal, JFK thought he could out-market even the dashing Fidel and Che in the war of ideas, selling democratic reform as an alternative to armed revolution. Kennedy did, in fact, succeed in electrifying Latin America during his brief presidency, during which he made three trips to the region. Huge crowds inevitably greeted his appearances with a frantic adoration that threatened not just Castro, but the beribboned generals and wealthy despots who stiffly greeted the American president. On Kennedy’s trip to Bogotá, Colombia in December 1961, a crowd of 500,000—nearly half the city’s population—poured into the streets to greet him. While there, Kennedy attacked dictatorships of the left and the right, and declared that his Alliance for Progress program could only be accomplished within the framework of democratic societies. At a dinner hosted by Colombia’s president, Kennedy insisted that democracy had an “unparalleled power” to reshape societies and that it could meet “new needs without violence, without repression.”

Castro was intrigued by Kennedy’s Latin America offensive, years later admitting to Szulc that JFK’s Alliance for Progress was an “intelligent strategy” that sought the same goals as the early phase of the Cuban revolution, including agrarian reform, social justice, and a better distribution of wealth. But, like Guevara, he believed it was doomed to fail because the region’s ruling cliques would not allow real reform. Castro’s prediction seemed borne out during the Kennedy years, when reactionary forces responded to the winds of change that the Alliance for Progress had helped set loose in the continent by overthrowing democracies in Brazil, Argentina, and Peru. The Kennedy administration made known its displeasure at these antidemocratic coups, withholding recognition of the puppet government that replaced President Arturo Frondizi in Buenos Aires for nearly three weeks—longer than it took the Soviet Union—and slapping economic, diplomatic, and military sanctions on the military junta that took over following the July 1962 putsch in Peru. The
New York Times
proclaimed Kennedy’s response to the Peruvian coup “the most significant turn in U.S. hemispheric foreign policy since the inception of the Alliance for Progress 16 months ago.”

Kennedy’s action put the administration on the side of democratic reform in a region where the U.S. historically supported repression. Eduardo Frei, one of Chile’s last democratic presidents before his country’s 1973 fall into military tyranny, expressed his amazement over Kennedy’s progressive policies in a letter to Dick Goodwin, which the aide framed and hung in his White House office: “Latins were astonished that this young Yankee was trying to force them to agree on radical social change. It was as if the positions of decades had been reversed.”

President Kennedy was serious about reforming U.S. policy in Latin America, according to Goodwin. Soon after moving into the White House, Kennedy summoned Goodwin to the Oval Office, where the aide found him poring over congratulatory telegrams from Latin leaders. “There’s even one from that bastard Somoza,” said Kennedy, referring to Nicaragua’s gangster-like dictator, “saying that my election has given him new hope for Nicaragua’s democracy. Draft an answer saying that’s my hope too—democracy for Nicaragua. That ought to scare him.”

Later in their conversation, Kennedy ripped into the United States’ Latin policy, in impassioned language that could have come from Castro or Guevara: “We can’t embrace every tinhorn dictator who tells us he’s anticommunist while he’s sitting on the necks of his own people. And the United States government is not the representative of private business. Do you know in Chile the American copper companies control about 80 percent of all the foreign exchange? We wouldn’t stand for that here. And there’s no reason they should stand for it. All those people want is a chance for a decent life, and we’ve let them think that we’re on the side of those who are holding them down. There’s a revolution going on down there, and I want to be on the right side of it. Hell, we are on the right side. But we have to let them know it, that things have changed.”

But, as Goodwin discovered, Kennedy’s foreign policy bureaucracy was not ready for the sweeping changes in Latin policy that he had in mind.

The former Kennedy advisor is now standing in the study of his Concord home, as an evening snow falls gently outside. His mane has grown long now, his eyebrows are more impressively lawless than ever. The room is crowded with Kennedy memorabilia. He picks up an object, a box with a polished sheen. It’s empty of Che’s cigars now, but he’s kept it all these years as a reminder of a different time, when anything seemed possible.

Looking back, Goodwin now sees a link between Kennedy and Guevara as “children of the ’60s”: Despite their obvious political differences, they both believed that the world could be changed through heroic exertions. “That is why, as the times changed,” he would write in
Remembering America
, his memoir of the decade, leaders like this “would have no successors. There would be no place for romantics in the triumphant ascendance of bureaucracy.”

Goodwin said that as a young, progressive White House aide, he never felt any personal antagonism from hard-line opponents in the government “except when I dealt with Latin America—then I got it from these old-line CIA guys down there who would be pulling off various capers. They were totally Cold Warriors. Kennedy took a longer view of our future and the hemisphere, of how to build a solid bulwark of democracy there. But they were fighting the Cold War…they were just concerned with individuals and regimes, whether we liked them or didn’t like them. And anybody who seemed the least like a socialist was a threat, whereas that was not Kennedy. He wanted to ally himself with the democratic left in Latin America, so he had a whole different outlook and approach.”

Dick Goodwin was a benign influence in White House foreign policy councils. His advice that President Kennedy defuse the Cuba crisis by simply ignoring Castro became the prevailing sentiment in the White House in the months after Punta del Este. In a September 1, 1961, memo, he told the president that “our public posture toward Cuba should be as quiet as possible.” Kennedy agreed. The Castro threat should be handled through a multilateral Latin American strategy involving economic and diplomatic measures, the president told a visiting South American leader, rather than turning it into a high-drama showdown of “Castro versus Kennedy, because a debate of this kind would only enhance Castro’s prestige.”

As long as the maverick Goodwin was in the West Wing, the president was assured of a partner in his ongoing battles with the hard liners on Latin policy. But, as with Chester Bowles, the young aide increasingly became a target of conservatives and JFK’s own foreign policy bureaucracy, which resented Goodwin’s trespassing on its turf. The Cold War regime that had taken over in Washington after World War II, dominating the presidencies of Democrat Truman as well as Republican Eisenhower, was not prepared to cede power to the new Kennedy government. This was soon made clear to the president’s team by the nation’s top military commanders.

“CERTAINLY WE DID NOT
control the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” said Arthur Schlesinger when asked near the end of his life about the extent to which President Kennedy controlled his own government. The eminent historian, who played the roles of court chronicler and roving liberal conscience in the Kennedy White House, spoke in a voice feeble with age. But his words were nonetheless chilling, considering the high nuclear stakes of the Kennedy years.

In a 1994 interview with the
Boston Globe
, Schlesinger elaborated on Kennedy’s fears about the military. “Kennedy’s concern was not that Khrushchev would initiate something, but that something would go wrong in a
Dr. Strangelove
kind of way,” he said, referring to Stanley Kubrick’s macabre Cold War satire in which a rabidly anticommunist Air Force general loses his marbles and launches World War III. Haunted by fears of an accidental nuclear war, Kennedy strived to keep “tight controls [on the military] right down the line.” But he never fully succeeded.

President Kennedy’s tensions with the Joint Chiefs during his first year in office were aggravated by the strenuous efforts of his defense secretary, Robert McNamara, to gain control of the “military-industrial complex”—the increasingly powerful “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry” that Eisenhower warned about as he bade farewell to the nation in what would become his most famous speech. The old general could have added bellicose members of Congress to this militaristic nexus—and in fact his original draft called it a “military-industrial-congressional complex”—as well as the octopus of far-right organizations, retired military officers’ associations, and defense industry trade groups that had sprung up during the Cold War to lobby for higher arms spending and belligerent policies. During his eight years in office, Eisenhower battled heroically to restrain the defense budget against relentless pressure from this complex. But he did little to change the Cold War policies that fueled this militaristic fervor. Kennedy, on the other hand, came into office committed to a major defense buildup as well as a deescalation of the Cold War. By pumping more money into the military-industrial complex, he made it even more powerful, complicating his efforts to slow the momentum towards war.

While presiding over a massive arms buildup, Defense Secretary McNamara simultaneously tried to impose rational controls over the spending, bringing a cost-benefit managerial philosophy from his days as a Ford executive that was alien to the Pentagon, where the military services indulged freely in expensive cost overruns and duplicate weapons systems. The military chiefs, backed by their defense industry and congressional allies, strongly resisted as McNamara and his young, horn-rimmed “whiz kids” tried to take control of the defense spending process.

The warrior culture also raged against the efforts of McNamara—and the young defense intellectuals from the Rand Corporation he brought into the Pentagon—to transform the country’s nuclear strategy. Alarmed by the massive overkill of the Joint Chiefs’ SIOP (Single Integrated Operational Plan), the military blueprint that called for a planet-threatening fusillade of nuclear fire in the event of war, Kennedy and McNamara ordered the exploration of limited nuclear war scenarios and sought to impose tighter civilian controls over the country’s vast nuclear arsenal. War in the nuclear age, Kennedy told advisors, was too important to be left in the hands of generals.

General Curtis LeMay—the cigar-chomping, notoriously gung-ho Air Force chief upon whom actor Sterling Hayden would model the demented General Jack D. Ripper in
Dr. Strangelove
—made no secret of his loathing for the administration. “Everyone that came in with the Kennedy administration…were the most egotistical people that I ever saw in my life,” snarled LeMay. “They had no faith in the military; they had no respect for the military at all. They felt that the Harvard Business School method of solving problems would solve any problem in the world…. As a matter of fact, I had a man tell me, ‘No, General, this is not the kind of weapon system that you want to use, this is what you need.’ This man was in knee pants when I was commanding the division in combat. He had no experience in the use of weapons at all.”

Years after he left the Air Force, in an oral history for the Lyndon Johnson Library, LeMay was still venting in remarkably savage terms, calling the Kennedy crowd “ruthless,” “vindictive,” morally debased vermin whom LBJ should have “stepped on” when he took over the White House, “like the cockroaches they were.”

Despite the Kennedy team’s “ruthless” reputation, LeMay showed no reluctance to publicly challenge the administration’s defense policies during its first year in office. The Air Force chief stunned the capital in July when
Washington Post
columnist Marquis Childs reported that he casually predicted that nuclear war would break out in the final weeks of the year. LeMay made the hair-raising announcement to a senator’s wife at a Georgetown dinner party, telling the shocked woman that war was “inevitable” and that it would likely incinerate such major U.S. cities as Washington, New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Detroit as well as level most Soviet cities. Asked by the senator’s wife if there was anywhere she could flee to safety with her children and grandchildren, LeMay advised her she might try deserted sage brush country in the far West. After the ensuing uproar in Washington, LeMay felt compelled to deny the story. But Kennedy officials knew it reflected the Air Force general’s true beliefs.

Years later, an elderly McNamara reflected on the man who ran his Air Force. As always, the former defense secretary was coolly rational in his assessment of LeMay. But his description of the man who presided over most of the nation’s nuclear arsenal was no less jolting for its matter-of-fact tone. Here was a top military leader, McNamara acknowledged, who frankly and firmly advocated a preemptive nuclear war to rid the world of the Soviet threat. “LeMay clearly had a different view of the Soviet problem than most of the rest of us did,” McNamara said. “LeMay’s view was very simple. He thought the West, and the U.S. in particular, was going to have to fight a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, and he was absolutely certain of that. Therefore, he believed that we should fight it sooner rather than later, when we had a greater advantage in nuclear power, and it would result in fewer casualties in the United States.”

McNamara took issue with his Air Force chief, telling him that even though the United States enjoyed a clear nuclear advantage over the Soviet Union, we could not be certain of destroying the enemy’s ability to respond. “I believed then, and I think I was absolutely right, that we did not have a first-strike capability. We couldn’t launch our 5,000 missiles and destroy so many of their 350 missiles that we could be assured that the remainder would not inflict unacceptable damage on us. Therefore LeMay and I were just totally opposed. I told him, ‘Look, you’re probably right that
if
we had to fight a war with the Soviet Union, we’d have fewer casualties today than if we had to do it later. But it’s not clear that we have to fight them. So for God’s sake, let’s try to avoid it.’”