JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (13 page)

In the aftermath of the missile crisis, he was alternately hopeful and frustrated. The imminence of holocaust had pushed him and Khrushchev toward a new commitment to negotiations. Yet in the months following the crisis, the Cold War opponents seemed unable to seize the moment.

They agreed that a ban on nuclear testing was a critical next step away from the brink. Yet both men had a history of conducting nuclear tests that contaminated the atmosphere and heightened the tensions between them. In response to the Soviet Union’s nuclear tests in the summer of 1961, Kennedy had resumed U.S. atmospheric tests on April 25, 1962. The United States then carried out a series of twenty-four nuclear blasts in the South Pacific from April to November of 1962.
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In the context of their precarious resolution of the missile crisis and their tit-for-tat nuclear testing, Kennedy and Khrushchev struggled to agree on a test ban. Khrushchev said the United States was using its condition of on-site inspections as a strategy for spying on the U.S.S.R. For the sake of peace, he had already agreed to the U.S. position of three annual inspections, only to see the Americans suddenly demand more. Kennedy said Khrushchev had mistaken the original U.S. position. Khrushchev replied pointedly through an intermediary:

“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.”
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Kennedy accepted Khrushchev’s challenge. His American University address broke the deadlock by transforming the context. By the empathy he expressed toward the Russian perspective, Kennedy created a bridge to Khrushchev. They would then have five and a half months left to make peace before JFK’s murder. At the same time as Kennedy’s speech reached out to Khrushchev, it opened a still wider chasm between the president and his own military and intelligence advisers. To the Pentagon and CIA, the president’s words of peace at American University seemed to put him on the enemy’s side.

Their resistance to Kennedy’s stand can be understood from the standpoint of the independent power base they had developed during the Cold War. We have already seen how President Truman exulted at the bombing of Hiroshima. From a failure to internalize the suffering beneath the mushroom clouds at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Truman administration began an era of atomic diplomacy based on hubris. Truman, supremely confident because he had unilateral possession of the atomic bomb, tried to dictate postwar terms in Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union. A month after Hiroshima, the Soviets rejected U.S. demands backed by the bomb at the London Council of Foreign Ministers. John Foster Dulles, who attended the London meeting, regarded it as the beginning of the Cold War.
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President Truman then announced in September 1945 that he was not interested in seeking international control over nuclear weapons. If other nations wanted to “catch up” with the United States, he said, “they [would] have to do it on their own hook, just as we did.” Truman agreed with a friend’s comment on the implications of this policy: “Then Mister President, what it amounts to is this. That the armaments race is on.”
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Truman continued to use the bomb as a threat to force Soviet concessions. He felt he did so successfully in Iran just seven months after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Russian army was prolonging a wartime occupation in northern Iran, seeking Soviet oil leases like those of the British in the south. Truman later told Senator Henry Jackson that he had summoned Soviet Ambassador Andrei Gromyko to the White House. The president demanded that the Russian troops evacuate Iran within forty-eight hours or the United States would use the atomic weapon that only it possessed. “We’re going to drop it on you,” he told Gromyko. The troops moved in twenty-four hours.
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On a wider front, the United States enforced a Cold War strategy of containing the Soviet Union. The containment policy was formulated by State Department diplomat George Kennan, writing as “X” in the July 1947
Foreign
Affairs
. Although Kennan said the purpose of containment was more diplomatic and political than military, the Pentagon carried it out by encircling the U.S.S.R. with U.S. bases and patrolling forces.

To match the efficiency of a totalitarian enemy, U.S. military leaders urged legislation that would mobilize the nation to a state of constant readiness for war. Thus the National Security Act of 1947 laid the foundations of a national security state: the National Security Council (NSC), the National Security Resources Board (NSRB), the Munitions Board, the Research and Development Board, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
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Before the act was passed, Secretary of State George Marshall warned President Truman that it granted the new intelligence agency in particular powers that were ”almost unlimited,”
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a criticism of the CIA that Truman would echo much too late—soon after the assassination of John Kennedy.

On June 18, 1948, Truman’s National Security Council took a further step into a CIA quicksand and approved top-secret directive NSC 10/2, which sanctioned U.S. intelligence to carry out a broad range of covert operations: “propaganda, economic warfare, preventive direct action including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas, and refugee liberation groups.”
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The CIA was now empowered to be a paramilitary organization. George Kennan, who sponsored NSC 10/2, said later in the light of history that it was “the greatest mistake I ever made.”
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Since NSC 10/2 authorized violations of international law, it also established official lying as their indispensable cover. All such activities had to be “so planned and executed that any US government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorized persons, and that if uncovered the US government can plausibly deny any responsibility for them.”
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The national security doctrine of “plausible deniability” combined lying with hypocrisy. It marked the creation of a Frankenstein monster.

Plausible deniability encouraged the autonomy of the CIA and other covert-action (“intelligence”) agencies from the government that created them. In order to protect the visible authorities of the government from protest and censure, the CIA was authorized not only to violate international law but to do so with as little consultation as possible. CIA autonomy went hand in glove with plausible deniability. The less explicit an order from the president, the better it was for “plausible deniability.” And the less consultation there was, the more creative CIA authorities could become in interpreting the mind of the president, especially the mind of a president so uncooperative that he wanted to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.

At the 1975 Senate hearings on U.S. intelligence operations chaired by Senator Frank Church, CIA officials testified reluctantly on their efforts to kill Fidel Castro. In late 1960, without the knowledge of President Dwight Eisenhower, the CIA had contacted underworld figures John Rosselli, Sam Giancana, and Santos Trafficante, offering them $150,000 for Castro’s assassination.
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The gangsters were happy to be hired by the U.S. government to murder the man who had shut down their gambling casinos in Cuba. If they were successful, they hoped a U.S.-sponsored successor to Castro would allow them to reopen the casinos.

In the spring of 1961, without the knowledge of the new president John Kennedy, the CIA’s Technical Services Division prepared a batch of poison pills for Castro. The pills were sent to Cuba through John Rosselli. The murder plot failed because the CIA’s Cuban assets were unable to get close enough to Castro to poison him.
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The CIA’s purpose was to kill Castro just before the Bay of Pigs invasion. As Bay of Pigs planner Richard Bissell said later, “Assassination was intended to reinforce the [invasion] plan. There was the thought that Castro would be dead before the landing. Very few, however, knew of this aspect of the plan.”
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After President Kennedy fired Bissell from the CIA for his role in the Bay of Pigs, Richard Helms, his successor as Deputy Director of Plans, took up where Bissell had left off in conspiring to kill Castro. Helms testified to the Church Committee that he never informed either the president or his newly appointed CIA director John McCone of the assassination plots. Nor did he inform any other officials in the Kennedy administration. Helms said he sought no approval for the murder attempts because assassination was not a subject that should be aired with higher authority.
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When he was asked if President Kennedy had been informed, Helms said that “nobody wants to embarrass a President of the United States by discussing the assassination of foreign leaders in his presence.”
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He also didn’t seek the approval of the Special Group Augmented that oversaw the anti-Castro program because, he said, “I didn’t see how one would have expected that a thing like killing or murdering or assassination would become a part of a large group of people sitting around a table in the United States Government.”
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John McCone and the other surviving members of the Kennedy Administration testified that “assassination was outside the parameters of the Administration’s anti-Castro program.”
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Yet Richard Helms and other CIA insiders kept running assassination plots in conflict with the president’s wishes.

In November 1961, seven months after the Bay of Pigs invasion, John Kennedy asked journalist Tad Szulc in a private conversation in the Oval Office, “What would you think if I ordered Castro to be assassinated?” The startled Szulc said he was against political assassination in principle and in any case doubted if it would solve the Cuban problem. The president leaned back in his rocking chair, smiled, and said he had been testing Szulc and agreed with his answer. Kennedy said “he was under great pressure from advisors in the Intelligence Community (whom he did not name) to have Castro killed, but that he himself violently opposed it on the grounds that for moral reasons the United States should never be party to political assassinations.”

“I’m glad you feel the same way,” Kennedy told Szulc.
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Richard Helms, however, did not feel the same way. Helms was known as “the man who kept the secrets,” the title of his biography.
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He was a master of the possibilities beneath plausible deniability, exemplified by his command and control of the CIA’s plots to kill Castro. As Helms demonstrated in his Church Committee testimony, he and other CIA Cold War veterans thought they knew the president’s mind better than the president did himself. This assumed responsibility became a problem for the CIA and its Pentagon allies when President Kennedy acted with a mind of his own and decided to end the Cold War.

In the weeks leading up to his American University address, Kennedy prepared the ground carefully for the leap of peace he planned to take. He first joined British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan in proposing to Khrushchev new high-level talks on a test ban treaty. They suggested that Moscow be the site for the talks, itself an act of trust. Khrushchev accepted.

To reinforce the seriousness of the negotiations, Kennedy decided to suspend U.S. tests in the atmosphere unilaterally. Surrounded by Cold War advisers, he reached his decision independently—without their recommendations or consultation. He knew few would support him as he went out on that limb; others might cut it down before he could get there. He announced his unilateral initiative at American University, as a way of jump-starting the test-ban negotiations.

In both speech and action, Kennedy was trying to reverse eighteen years of U.S.–Soviet polarization. He had seen U.S. belligerence toward the Russians build to the point of Pentagon pressures for preemptive strikes on the Cuban missile sites. In his decision in the spring of 1963 to turn from a demonizing Cold War theology, Kennedy knew he had few allies within his own ruling circles.

He outlined his thoughts for what he called “the peace speech” to adviser and speechwriter Sorensen, and told him to go to work. Only a handful of advisers knew anything about the project. Arthur Schlesinger, who was one of them, said, “We were asked to send our best thoughts to Ted Sorensen and to say nothing about this to anybody.”
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On the eve of the speech, Soviet officials and White House correspondents were alerted in general terms. The speech, they were informed, would be of major importance.
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On June 10, 1963, President Kennedy introduced his subject to the graduating class at American University as “the most important topic on earth: world peace.”

“What kind of peace do I mean?” he asked, “What kind of peace do we seek?”

“Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children—not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women—not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.”
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