JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (105 page)

Cousins reported on his visit with Khrushchev.

Pope John smiled and said, “Much depends now on keeping open and strengthening all possible lines of communication. As you know, I asked the statesmen [in October] to exercise the greatest restraint and to do all that had to be done to reduce the terrible tension. My appeal was given prominent attention inside the Soviet Union. I was glad that this was so. This is a good sign.

“World peace is mankind’s greatest need. I am old but I will do what I can in the time I have.”
[730]

In early January 1963, Norman Cousins was invited by Ambassador Dobrynin to have lunch with him at the Soviet Embassy in Washington. Dobrynin then informed him that Archbishop Slipyi was about to be released.

“The Chairman,” Dobrynin said, “has undertaken this action in the spirit of his conversation with you, in which the importance of strengthening the peace was recognized, and as a manifestation of his high regard for Pope John and the efforts being made by His Holiness in behalf of world peace.”
[731]

Two days after Archbishop Slipyi’s release, Dobrynin phoned Cousins again, this time to read to him a news story just published under the headline: “BISHOP TELLS OF RED TORTURE.”
[732]

Cousins was appalled. He phoned the Vatican. He was assured Slipyi had spoken with no reporters. The following day, the Vatican newspaper,
Osservatore Romano
, carried the pope’s front-page statement repudiating the news stories about Archbishop Slipyi. Cousins pointed all this out in an apologetic letter to Khrushchev. The Soviet leader did not respond to Cousins in the three months before he agreed to see him again.
[733]

To the discouragement of both Kennedy and Khrushchev, the late winter and early spring of 1963 marked a cooling off of their dialogue. Their distancing was accomplished partly by militant Cold War forces in the U.S. government. From Cuba to Vietnam, the CIA was systematically undermining Kennedy’s peace initiatives and antagonizing Khrushchev.

Directed by the CIA’s David Atlee Phillips, the Cuban exile group Alpha 66 repeatedly attacked Soviet ships in Cuban waters in March. The avowed purpose of the CIA-sponsored attacks, as revealed later by Alpha 66 leader Antonio Veciana, was “to publicly embarrass Kennedy and force him to move against Castro.”
[734]
Khrushchev naturally held Kennedy responsible for what he suspected rightly were CIA-directed attacks on Soviet ships. He raised angry objections until the president abruptly cracked down on the exiles’ raids, arresting their leaders and confining them to the Miami area.
[735]

In Vietnam, Kennedy’s plans for a U.S. withdrawal, complemented by Ngo Dinh Diem’s growing desire for the same, were disrupted by a CIA-planted plastic bomb in Hue, killing Buddhist demonstrators.
[736]
The explosion, attributed to the Diem government, deepened and widened the Buddhist Crisis. The popular Buddhist uprising destroyed Diem’s already impaired ability to govern, setting the stage for his CIA-facilitated assassination in the fall. The CIA’s Saigon maneuvers set back Kennedy’s hope to neutralize Vietnam in parallel to Laos, a plan that JFK repeatedly emphasized to his aide on Vietnam, Roger Hilsman.
[737]

Kennedy saw a nuclear test ban as an overarching way to redirect U.S.–Soviet relations toward peace, defuse each of these conflicts, and initiate an end to the Cold War. Although Khrushchev shared that hope, the Soviet leader was adamant on a sticking point that blocked further test-ban negotiations. Convinced that inspections were only an excuse for espionage, Khrushchev felt double-crossed after he got his government to concede a U.S. demand for three annual inspections. U.S. negotiators then said they hadn’t meant three and really needed eight to verify compliance with a test ban. Kennedy said the conflicting interpretations must have been due to an honest misunderstanding, which Khrushchev insisted was impossible. In any case, Kennedy knew—as he told Cousins to inform Khrushchev in their next meeting—that he could never get the Senate to ratify a treaty that called for only three inspections per year.

With the test-ban negotiations stalled, Kennedy and Khrushchev were under mounting political pressures from each of their governments to conduct more nuclear tests as soon as possible. A new cycle of poisonous atmospheric testing, with an accompanying escalation in the nuclear arms race, seemed imminent. A deeply alarmed Pope John prepared to respond to the threat with the most important statement of his papacy, an encyclical letter given the title of his primary concern, “Peace on Earth” (or
Pacem in Terris
in the original Latin).

When Cousins met with Khrushchev in April at the Soviet leader’s estate by the Black Sea, they dealt with questions of mistrust. Cousins repeated the regrets of Vatican officials at “what had appeared to be a breach of faith in some of the news coverage that followed [Archbishop Slipyi’s] release.”

Khrushchev voiced no skepticism. He said he understood. He asked about Pope John’s health, adding, “I have often thought of, and been inspired by, Pope John’s desire to contribute to world peace in whatever time remains to him.”

Cousins thought this an appropriate time to present to Khrushchev from Pope John an advance copy, translated into Russian, of
Pacem in Terris
. The premier of the Soviet Union would perhaps be the first person outside the Vatican to read the pope’s great letter on peace.

After expressing his pleasure, Khrushchev asked, “Are there any parts of the encyclical that ought to be discussed now?”
[738]

Cousins then brought to the attention of his Communist partner in dialogue the key passages of
Pacem in Terris
. They included: “If [disarmament] is to come about, the fundamental principle on which our present peace depends must be replaced by another, which declares that the true and solid peace of nations can consist, not in equality of arms, but in mutual trust alone.”
[739]

Khrushchev nodded. He again praised “Pope John’s service to world peace.” He said he would study the encyclical carefully. Thus challenged by the pope to deepen in trust, Khrushchev and Cousins turned to an issue of mutual distrust between their nations, the continuing stalemate on inspections.

“Frankly,” Khrushchev said, “We feel we were misled. If you can go from three [inspections] to eight, we can go from three to zero.”

The Russian leaned forward in his chair.

“As you know, we have already successfully tested a 100-megaton bomb [the largest weapons blast in history], but [Soviet scientists and generals] want to follow this up with more variations. They say the United States has carried out seventy percent more tests than the Soviet Union and that the world will understand if we seek to reduce this gap. My scientists want a green light to go ahead; I think I may decide to give it to them.”

Cousins remained silent.

“Well?” said Khrushchev.

“You are looking at a depressed man,” Cousins said. “I came here for the purpose of bearing witness to the President’s good faith. You have apparently placed little weight on this. Your final response is that you are probably going to resume atmospheric tests. If you do, I cannot imagine that the United States will stand still and let its lead dwindle. So we will test again, and you will test, and we will test, and so on. This destroys any possibility that other nations can be persuaded not to test. The poisons in the air will multiply. None of this adds either to American or Russian security.

“There is something else that occurs to me at this point,” Cousins continued. He decided to risk making an undiplomatic parallel. “Last summer President Kennedy was informed by a Soviet representative that missile bases were not being installed in Cuba. Perhaps it will be said that this was a misunderstanding. Under the circumstances, perhaps one misunderstanding can cancel out another.”

Khrushchev looked at Cousins severely.

“Very well,” he said, “You want me to accept President Kennedy’s good faith? All right, I accept President Kennedy’s good faith. You want me to believe that the United States sincerely wants a treaty banning nuclear tests? All right, I believe the United States is sincere. You want me to set all misunderstandings aside and make a fresh start? All right, I agree to make a fresh start.”

Khrushchev sighed and sat back in his chair.

He said, “You can tell the President I accept his explanation of an honest misunderstanding and suggest that we get moving. But the next move is up to him.”
[740]

On April 22, eleven days after
Pacem in Terris
was published in Rome, Cousins reported to Kennedy in the White House on his conversation with Khrushchev. A large part of their dialogue, he said, had been “directed to the misunderstanding over the number of inspections.” Cousins recounted Khrushchev’s adamant interpretation of the apparent U.S. change in the number of inspections and the premier’s unwillingness to consider any more than three. To the listening president, the Soviet position ruled out any chance of a treaty that could be passed by the U.S. Senate. He and Khrushchev had reached an impossible negotiating situation that Khrushchev, through Cousins, had just tossed back to Kennedy: “the next move is up to him.”

Kennedy, sitting in his rocker, listened quietly. “His feeling,” Cousins wrote later in a note to himself, “seemed to be one of considerable sadness.”
[741]

Then the president said: “You know, the more I learn about this business, the more I learn how difficult it is to communicate on the really important matters.”

Cousins described the mounting pressures being put on Khrushchev from his own government to adopt a hard line.

Kennedy said: “One of the ironic things about this entire situation is that Mr. Khrushchev and I occupy approximately the same political positions inside our governments. He would like to prevent a nuclear war but is under severe pressure from his hard-line crowd, which interprets every move in that direction as appeasement. I’ve got similar problems. Meanwhile, the lack of progress in reaching agreements between our two countries gives strength to the hard-line boys in both, with the result that the hard-liners in the Soviet Union and the United States feed on one another, each using the actions of the other to justify its own position.”
[742]

Cousins told the president he regretted deeply that he had failed in his mission to Moscow.

Kennedy said, “I can’t accept the fact of failure. We have to try and find some way of getting through and breaking the deadlock.”

He was looking intently at Cousins.

“Do you have any suggestions?” he asked.

Cousins said, “I feel the stage may be set now for what might be the most important single speech since you came into office. Perhaps what is needed is a breathtaking new approach toward the Russian people, calling for an end to the Cold War and a fresh start in American-Russian relationships.”

The president lit a thin cigar.

“I’d like to think about it,” he said. He asked Cousins to write a memorandum for him on the subject.
[743]

Norman Cousins’s memorandum was sent as a letter to President Kennedy on April 30, 1963. It expanded on his response to the president’s request for suggestions:

“The moment is now at hand for the most important single speech of your Presidency. It should be a speech which, in its breathtaking proposals for genuine peace, in its tone of friendliness for the Soviet people and its understanding of their ordeal during the last war, in its inspired advocacy of the human interest, would create a world groundswell of support for American leadership.

“More than anything else, it would create a whole new context for the pursuit of peace. I doubt that there is any issue that reaches more deeply into the American people—indeed, all peoples—than this. There is a terrible sense of foreboding and ominous drift. The advocacy of powerful ideas directed to the peace produces vast new sources of energy.

“One of the striking achievements of your September 1961 speech before the United Nations [in which Kennedy challenged the Soviet Union to “a peace race,” a term he had in turn adopted from Cousins’s anti-nuclear organization, SANE]
[744]
was that it created a surging tide that swept along many of the hard-liners . . . In any case, a re-definition right now of our peace aims, including an inspiring offer to the peoples on the other side, would blanket the opposition, internal and external.”
[745]

Two weeks after Cousins sent his letter-memorandum to the president, he was invited to meet at the White House with Ted Sorensen, Kennedy’s speechwriter. Sorensen said the president had given him Cousins’s memorandum about a speech with a dramatic peace offer. “He wants to pursue it,” Sorensen said. “He would like you to send in some ideas for the text of a commencement talk he’ll be giving at American University on June 10.”
[746]

While John Kennedy was deciding to risk everything in a groundbreaking speech on peace, Nikita Khrushchev was risking his alliance with Fidel Castro by encouraging him to trust Kennedy.