To Move the World (7 page)
Authors: Jeffrey D. Sachs
The correspondence between the two leaders in the months that followed shows how the prospects for an agreement had markedly brightened. Some historians argue that this was because Khrushchev had lost the battle with Kennedy and now had to give ground. I think rather it was because both leaders recognized their shared desire to avoid war, and their stark realization that many of
the generals and advisers on both sides had urged a military response that would have threatened all human survival. Khrushchev praised Kennedy for holding back the more militaristic views:
You evidently held to a restraining position with regard to those forces which suffered from militaristic itching. And we take a notice of that. I don’t know, perhaps I am wrong, but in this letter I am making the conclusion on the basis that in your country the situation is such that the decisive word rests with the President and if he took an extreme stand there would be no one to restrain him and war would be unleashed. But as this did not happen and we found a reasonable compromise having made mutual concessions to each other and on this basis eliminated the crisis which could explode in the catastrophe of a thermonuclear war, then, evidently, your role was restraining. We so believe, and we note and appreciate it.
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Both sides, therefore, began to step back from the abyss, determined to expand the peaceful resolution of the crisis into longer-lasting diplomatic results. This was a chance for the United States and the Soviet Union to conclude at long last the negotiations on arms control that had proven elusive for nearly a decade. It would be Khrushchev and Kennedy’s culminating work—Khrushchev in his final full year of power, Kennedy in his last year of life.
*
Key members of the ExComm included Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Secretary of the Treasury Douglas Dillon, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, CIA director John McCone (who was one of the earliest officials to accurately warn of the threat of Soviet missiles in Cuba, but whose assessment was undercut by his subsequent departure for his honeymoon), Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman General Maxwell Taylor, Undersecretary of State George Ball, ambassador to the Soviet Union Llewellyn Thompson, Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric, former secretary of state Dean Acheson, special assistants to the president Kenneth O’Donnell, David Powers, and Theodore Sorensen, and adviser Paul Nitze.
†
Psychologist Daniel Kahneman has described the distinctive mental pathways of “slow” rational thought in the prefrontal cortex and “fast” emotional thought involving other parts of the brain. Daniel Kahneman,
Thinking, Fast and Slow
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011).
‡
Once this deal was made public, adviser McGeorge Bundy, one of the few who knew about it, noted, “There was no leak. As far as I know, none of the nine of us told anyone else what had happened. We denied in every forum that there was any deal.” McGeorge Bundy,
Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years
(New York: Random House, 1988).
.
PRELUDE TO PEACEKENNEDY HAD COME
to office inexperienced. He had a lot to learn about presidential leadership, and he needed time and experience to assess the quality of the advice he was receiving. He also needed time to build up his own credibility. He would have to face down a lot of domestic opposition to succeed in negotiations with the Soviet Union, given the previous fifteen years of confrontation, arms race, and anti-Soviet rhetoric. From the start, Kennedy composed his foreign policy team of establishment heavyweights—McGeorge Bundy, Robert McNamara, Douglas Dillon, Dean Rusk, Averell Harriman, Paul Nitze, and others—yet it took time to make them a team, and indeed his team.
*
He also suffered the powerful holdovers from the political right, even the far right, including CIA director Allen Dulles, CIA deputy director Richard Bissell (both of whom Kennedy forced to resign after the Bay of Pigs debacle), and J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI. And Kennedy himself lacked experience in executive organization, foreign policy leadership, and dealing with both the Soviet Union and his own noisy and opportunistic allies across Europe and Asia.
Kennedy meets with State Department officials. Far side of table: U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union Llewellyn Thompson; Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson; ambassador at large Averell Harriman; special assistant to the secretary of state Charles Bohlen. With backs to camera, left to right: ambassador-designate to Yugoslavia George Kennan; President Kennedy; Secretary of State Dean Rusk (February 11, 1961).
His first two years in office were marked by an unending series of crises: the Bay of Pigs, the Vienna Summit, the Berlin Wall, skirmishes in Laos and Vietnam, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Kennedy learned quickly and grew markedly from these experiences. The Cuban Missile Crisis was the catharsis and turning point. From then to the end of his life a year later, Kennedy led. He became a master of events, not their pawn. He envisioned a pathway to peace, and achieved it. He was a changed man, and he changed the world.
In his final and commanding year, Kennedy implemented a strategy of peacemaking, one deeply grounded in both concept and experience. He was both idealist and realist, visionary and arm-twisting politician. The two approaches, one soaring and one with feet firmly on the ground, were necessary for success. He had mastered the double-barreled strategy he much admired in Churchill.
Kennedy had come to office with four basic precepts, to which he added a fifth and sixth. First, he had long recognized that the arms race under way in the 1950s and early 1960s was a prisoner’s dilemma. Both sides had amassed nuclear weapons to the point of massive overkill, and the arms spiral was largely self-fulfilling. As Kennedy declared in the inaugural address:
[N]either can two great and powerful groups of nations take comfort from our present course—both sides overburdened by the cost of modern weapons, both rightly alarmed by the steady spread of the deadly atom, yet both racing to alter that uncertain balance of terror that stays the hand of mankind’s final war.
The implication of the prisoner’s dilemma is that there are large
mutual
gains from cooperation. Peace is worth pursuing for both sides. The Cold War was not a struggle in which the gains of one side equaled the losses of the other. The belief in mutual gains from peace is fundamentally different from the conception of the Cold War as a zero-sum struggle, a titanic fight to the death between competing ideologies, of God-fearing freedom versus atheistic tyranny (in the view of U.S. hardliners), or of rapacious global capitalism versus historically ascendant communism (as it was seen by the Soviet hardliners).
The mutual gains, Kennedy felt, could be immense. Again, from the inaugural address:
Let both sides seek to invoke the wonders of science instead of its terrors. Together let us explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease, tap the ocean depths, and encourage the arts and commerce.
And if a beachhead of cooperation may push back the jungle of suspicion, let both sides join in creating a new endeavor, not a new balance of power, but a new world of law, where the strong are just and the weak secure and the peace preserved.
Kennedy’s second precept was that the arms race was not only costly, but also inherently unstable. The idea propounded by many nuclear strategists of a “stable balance of terror” was naïve. The rapid buildup of arms gives rise to a rapid buildup of risks as well, of accidents and unintended consequences, as the mishaps from the Bay of Pigs to the Cuban Missile Crisis amply demonstrated. When he became president, Kennedy frequently recalled the calamity of World War I, a war that resulted from a series of interlocking misjudgments and false perceptions among military and political leaders. By the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis he was horrified that he had nearly committed the same missteps.
In the vision of war by mishap, Kennedy had been deeply influenced, as we have seen, by Churchill’s description of World War I in
The World Crisis
, a book that he had read as a fifteen-year-old and that weighed on his mind ever after. More recently, Kennedy had been moved by historian Barbara Tuchman’s
The Guns of August
, a neo-Churchillian account that described the false premises, errors, miscalculations, and flawed military doctrines that led to the war.
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Kennedy was so much influenced by it that he gave a copy to the secretary of the army, Elvis Stahr Jr., telling him, “I want you to read this. And I want every officer in the Army to read
it.” Stahr had the book placed in every officers’ day room around the world, with a note saying that it came from the president.
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Kennedy had also been affected by the wisdom of British war theorist B. H. Liddell Hart, whose book
Deterrent or Defense
Kennedy had reviewed favorably for the
Saturday Review
during the 1960 campaign. Liddell Hart wrote:
The study of war has taught me that almost every war was avoidable, and that the outbreak was most often produced by peace-desiring statesmen losing their heads, or their patience, and putting their opponent in a position where he could not draw back without serious loss of “face” …
The best safeguard of all is for all of us to keep cool … War is not a way
out
from danger and strain. It’s a way
down
into a pit—of unknown depth.
On the other hand, tension so intense as it has been during the last decade [the 1950s] is almost bound to relax eventually if war is postponed long enough. This has happened often before in history, for situations change. They never remain static. But it is always dangerous to be too dynamic, and impatient, in trying to force the pace. A war-charged situation can only change in two ways. It is bound to become better, eventually, if war is avoided without surrender. Such logic has been confirmed by experience.
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Kennedy had adopted Liddell Hart’s precept of patience as the guiding principle for managing the Cuban Missile Crisis. Find time. Delay. Allow the other side to do the same, and find a way for the aggressor to retreat with some dignity. Don’t shoot first, to “get it over with.” The Liddell Hart approach had worked. Kennedy was determined to keep this lesson in mind as he pursued a longer-lasting peace.
Kennedy was also becoming increasingly aware of technological breakdowns that could trigger a nuclear war that nobody wanted. The command-and-control systems governing complex military systems were highly vulnerable to breakdown. At the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis his orders to suspend U-2 flights inadvertently went unheeded by at least one pilot. He learned in horror how that pilot had then accidentally gone off course into Russian airspace. In addition, numerous phenomena caused false alerts of Soviet nuclear attacks, which might have triggered a disastrous response. These included the aurora borealis (the northern lights), space debris, a full moon, computer errors, and a Norwegian weather research rocket.
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