To Move the World (15 page)
Authors: Jeffrey D. Sachs
Walter Lippmann, the most redoubtable political commentator of the era, gave his support as well:
We on our part and the Russians on their part have raised higher than the iron curtain an impenetrable fog of suspicion … The President’s address is more than a talk. It is a wise and shrewd action intended primarily to improve the climate of East-West relations.
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Lippmann rightly pointed out that for Kennedy and Khrushchev, the idea that one side can “bury the other” (as Khrushchev had famously proclaimed) had become “nonsensical.” “In the age of nuclear parity,” he wrote, echoing both Kennedy and Khrushchev, “there is no alternative to coexistence.”
There was also plenty of critical U.S. press. Columnist Roscoe Drummond of
The Christian Science Monitor
, for example, dismissed Kennedy’s hope of making the world safe for diversity. “This is not the Soviet objective,” he wrote. “Undoubtedly the Kremlin wants to avoid nuclear war, but short of nuclear war to make the world unsafe for diversity.” There was little to do to ease tensions because “the Soviet determination to impose its political will and economy system on others” was “basic Communist doctrine.”
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The international press reaction was almost universally positive, with two notable and predictable exceptions: China and France. Both planned to build their own nuclear arsenals, as they viewed nuclear weapons as the ultimate guarantor of national power and independence, and did not trust their nuclear-armed allies to defend them. Indeed, by 1963, the Soviet Union and China were essentially antagonists rather than allies. China, in addition to its own nuclear aspirations, had long harangued the Soviet Union for any hints of rapprochement or détente with the United States. The French press expressed skepticism that any effective agreement would emerge from the coming negotiations. The U.S. Information Agency report on international reactions to the speech (coincidentally written by USIA deputy director Thomas Sorensen, Ted’s brother) noted that “[s]ome [French] papers suggested that both Macmillan and the President need a foreign success for domestic reasons, and thus may be prepared to make some concessions—especially at France’s expense. They also emphasized that a test ban treaty would not bind France or Communist China.”
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For the rest of the world, though, the speech raised hopes, albeit hopes tempered by the long history of diplomatic dead ends.
The greatest enthusiasm was in the United Kingdom, which was to be the third signatory of the pending treaty. Among the allies, Prime Minister Macmillan had been the strongest and most persistent proponent of reopening negotiations, and he had
worked closely with Kennedy to achieve it. The
Daily Mail
called the American University address Kennedy’s “greatest speech.” The
Evening Standard
noted a “political climate that is more refreshing and hopeful than for a very long time.”
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The Times
of London praised Kennedy’s “particular contribution” of emphasizing “the need to respect each other’s interests, to accept honest differences, and to refrain from imposing alien systems on smaller countries.”
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In
The Guardian
, the British parliamentarian Richard Crossman called the speech “the most significant American policy declaration for many years,” adding, “The more carefully one reads the speech, the more clear it becomes that the President has at last found the courage to call off the cold war.”
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Soviet reactions would be most vital to success. The White House carefully monitored the early Soviet reactions via U.S. government cables sent from Moscow. The news was encouraging. First, the two major newspapers
Pravda
and
Izvestiya
, which had a combined circulation of ten million readers, both carried the text of the president’s speech in full, a rarity for the Soviet press.
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Second, the Soviets allowed the Voice of America and the BBC to transmit the speech by radio without the usual jamming of the airwaves. Clearly, the Soviet authorities were intent on making the Soviet people aware of the speech. The media reactions were also generally favorable. One U.S. report cited a Soviet news commentator’s statement that “hopes have emerged for a radical improvement of the international climate.”
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The general tenor of the Soviet media was that Kennedy’s new policy proposals were a step forward, in line with the long-standing Soviet call for “peaceful coexistence.”
Of greatest importance were the reactions of the Soviet leadership. Khrushchev’s reception of the speech was just as Kennedy
intended: extremely positive and open to a treaty. British opposition leader Harold Wilson met Khrushchev soon after the speech, and according to Kennedy’s special assistant, the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Wilson “found [Khrushchev] deeply impressed and considerably more open minded about the test ban.”
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Khrushchev called in Kennedy’s envoy Averell Harriman to tell him that Kennedy’s “was the greatest speech by any American President since Roosevelt.”
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A CIA report the day after the speech noted:
The Soviets were favorably surprised by the tenor of President Kennedy’s 10 June speech because it reflected a broad progressive approach toward solving current problems. The atmosphere created by this speech is now such that the possibilities of agreeing on a test ban treaty are very good. No chief of state would make such a speech unless he were completely convinced that agreement was probable. The only problem in the past which prevented a test ban treaty was Soviet doubt of the sincerity of U.S. intentions to enter into such an agreement … President Kennedy’s speech has gone a long way toward assuaging Soviet doubts of U.S. sincerity.
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In Khrushchev’s first public remarks on the speech, made in an interview with
Pravda
and
Izvestiya
on June 14, he was more measured and circumspect. He deemed it “a step forward in a realistic appraisal of the international situation,” and one that “stressed the need of finding ways which would rid mankind of the arms race and the threat of a thermonuclear world war.”
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Yet he also signaled many points of disagreement, including inspections, U.S. overseas bases, and the U.S. suppression of national liberation movements. Khrushchev’s hedging was likely connected to strained relations with the Chinese, who had sent a critical open letter to the Soviet Communist Party the same day.
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While the signals were not perfect, it did seem that the Soviet Union was ready for at least some agreements. To bolster those prospects and to meet with key allies in the midst of these negotiations, Kennedy headed to Europe in late June. His travels took him to raucously enthusiastic public events in Germany and Ireland, and less public stops in England and Rome. The whirlwind trip, from June 23 to July 2, was among the most memorable nine days of Kennedy’s presidency, and indeed of his life.
John Kennedy’s arrival in Europe in late June in many ways recalled Woodrow Wilson’s arrival in Europe forty-five years earlier. In both cases, Europeans looked to the American president for deliverance. Wilson personified Europe’s hope for a just and lasting peace after the most devastating war in the continent’s long and bloody history. Kennedy embodied the hopes of Western Europe for peace and economic dynamism in the Cold War era. To a war-weary continent, Kennedy offered youth, charm, and American optimism. He no doubt had Wilson very much on his mind for more reasons than their similar receptions. Wilson’s triumphant European arrival was bookended by his failure to win Senate confirmation of the Paris peace treaty, which doomed the new League of Nations. Wilson drove himself nearly to death in his frenzied campaign for treaty ratification, suffering an incapacitating stroke in the process.
Wilson had arrived in Europe to adoring masses. “As soon as he set foot on French soil, an explosion of celebrations began. French and American soldiers lined the streets of Brest as the Wilsons rode in an open car under triumphal arches of flowers … Hordes of cheering people packed the sidewalks and hung out of every window.”
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Kennedy’s greeting was no less euphoric. Schlesinger
described Kennedy’s entrance into Berlin, with “three-fifths of the population of West Berlin streaming into the streets, clapping, waving, crying, cheering, as if it were the second coming.”
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Kennedy’s itinerary was geared to the treaty negotiations. The first stops were in Germany, first Frankfurt and then Berlin, the front line of the Cold War, with a political leadership that had to be handled with care. West German leaders, especially Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, reacted nervously to any signs of U.S. rapprochement with the Soviet Union, out of fear that West Germany’s interests might be undermined in some grand bargain on European security. Whenever Kennedy took pains to emphasize that he would make no agreements at the expense of the Western allies, he had West Germany first in mind.
*
The speech in Berlin marked the most remarkable occasion of the whole European trip.
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After taking a tour of the western part of the city, including a solemn visit to the Berlin Wall, Kennedy’s car slowly proceeded through throngs of cheering people, finally arriving in the city center. Kennedy’s visit was an unprecedented public event. Over 1,500 journalists were accredited to cover it,
†
and many businesses and schools were closed for the day.
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Hundreds of thousands of people filled the square; the empty streets of East Berlin could be seen just over the Berlin Wall. It was an emotional crowd that, in turn, moved Kennedy into a flight of improvised rhetoric that went further than he himself had intended in the prepared draft.
Kennedy delivers his
“Ich bin ein Berliner”
speech in Rudolph Wilde Platz, Berlin (June 26, 1963).
