Kennedy: The Classic Biography (136 page)

The next problem was the Congress. The granting of export licenses to sell wheat to the Russians was not prohibited under any of the statutes limiting commercial transactions with the Communists. But Congress had added to the Agricultural Act of 1961 an amendment opposing the sale of subsidized agricultural commodities to unfriendly nations. Republican legislators were already invoking this provision as an obstacle to any sale. Kennedy decided to ignore it, and offered ample reason. It was only a nonbinding declaration of interest. It had been adopted at the height of the Berlin crisis in a wholly different climate. It had been assumed by at least some members of Congress to apply to a different kind of sale. And it made no sense when we had been selling the Russians nonsurplus agricultural commodities and dozens of other items for many years. The subsidy went not to the foreign buyer but to the American wheat farmer, regardless of where and whether the wheat was sold.

As the Republicans would later charge, the President did not “consult” the Congressional leaders, he merely informed them. Certain that the information would leak promptly once it left the Executive Branch, he scheduled his meeting with the legislators for 4
P.M
., October 9, two hours before the press conference at which his decision would be announced. With Dirksen and Hickenlooper absent, only the House Republicans were negative;
⁶
and Kennedy’s announcement that evening, long and factual, was unchanged by their opposition. Asked immediately whether he feared “political repercussions,” he replied matter-of-factly, “I suppose there will be some who will disagree with this decision. That is true about most decisions. But I have considered it very carefully and I think it is very much in the interest of the United States….”

The next day, beginning with a comprehensive report to the Congress, he set the wheels in motion for obtaining public support. He sought help from several of the same civic and religious leaders who had helped on the test ban. He armed friendly members of Congress with speeches and statistics. He persuaded Polish-language newspapers in Chicago and elsewhere to endorse his decision. Told at the next pre-press conference breakfast that Nixon had attacked it, he expressed his belief that the American people preferred his view to Nixon’s (adding that they had so demonstrated in 1960—“a somewhat
thin
answer,” Walter Heller observed afterward).

In time he overcame attempted Congressional restrictions, attempted longshoreman boycotts, Soviet haggling about freight rates, disagreements between Agriculture and State, disagreements between Labor and Commerce, disputes over financing and a host of other obstacles. The export licenses were granted, the wheat was sold, and the President hoped that more trade in nonstrategic goods would follow.

Still other agreements were in the air: new interest in serious first-stage disarmament measures, prospects for breaks in the Berlin Wall and near-accord on a new Soviet-American civil air agreement and consular treaty. Even a ban on underground testing, the President believed, would come when science outmoded the argument of three versus seven inspections.

Added to the list of agreements actually concluded was a ban on nuclear weapons in outer space, a measure with no immediate military consequences for either nation but a sign, nevertheless, of easing tensions. Dubious over its enforceability as well as the desirability of sending it to the Senate, the President agreed instead that both nations simply pledge their support of a UN resolution of October 17 against placing weapons of mass destruction in orbit or on celestial bodies. “There is not an agreement…[and] no way we can verify…Soviet intentions,” he said. “But we are glad to hear the intention.”

Addressing the United Nations General Assembly on September 20, and commenting on the improved outlook for peace since his address some twenty-four months earlier, he called—again on his own initiative, with only a minimum of checking with his space and foreign policy officers—for increased U.S.-Soviet space cooperation, including specifically a joint expedition to the moon. Both powers having forsworn any territorial rights in outer space, he said, why engage in costly duplication?

The Soviets were still negative. Perhaps they understood better than those Congressmen attacking the proposal that a cooperative approach would just as effectively bar a Soviet militarization or monopoly of outer space, and a Soviet claim to pre-eminence in science, as an American first-place finish in the space race. Our effort in that race, Kennedy reassured the Congress, “permits us now to offer increased cooperation with no suspicion anywhere that we speak from weakness.”

His UN speech listed other areas in which he hoped early agreement could be reached:

…measures which prevent war by accident or miscalculation…safeguards against surprise attack, including observation posts at key points…further measures to curb the nuclear arms race, by controlling the transfer of nuclear weapons, converting fissionable materials to peaceful purposes and banning underground testing, with adequate inspection and enforcement…agreement on a freer flow of information and people from East to West and West to East.

The speech was built on the foundations laid at American University. It defined the real and major differences between the Soviets and ourselves, differences which “set limits to agreement and…forbid the relaxation of our vigilance.” But it also called for “further agreements…which spring from our mutual interest in avoiding mutual destruction,” for “a new approach to the Cold War” on both sides, and for changes in the UN Charter to enable “the conventions of peace [to]…pull abreast and then ahead of the inventions of war…. But peace,” he said, in a near-paraphrase of Judge Learned Hand’s discourse on liberty,

does not rest in charters and covenants alone. It lies in the hearts and minds of all people. And if it is cast out there, then no act, no pact, no treaty, no organization can hope to preserve it…. So let us not rest all our hopes on parchment and on paper. Let us strive to build…a desire for peace…in the hearts and minds of all of our people.

Four days later he set out to help build that desire in the hearts and minds of his own people. As already mentioned, the stated subject of that five-day, eleven-state tour was conservation. Increasingly, however, his extemporaneous interpolations related the strength of our resources to the maintenance of freedom and peace. (The foreign policy topics to which he devoted his major addresses at the close of the tour had already been planned before he left Washington, however, and were not, as some speculated, the results of his findings while en route.) Many of his talks were in the heart of right-wing territory. Yet he struck boldly at those who yearned for a return to isolationism or offered oversimplified answers to world problems. The Test Ban Treaty, he found, elicited far greater applause than support of a local dam or mineral.

Look at the true destructive power of the atom today, and what we and the Soviet Union could do to each other in the world in an hour…. I passed over yesterday the Little Big Horn where General Custer was slain—a massacre which has lived in history—four or five hundred men. We are talking about three hundred million men and women in twenty-four hours…. That is why I support the Test Ban Treaty…because we have a chance to avoid being burned.

Four weeks later he carried the same message to New England and the University of Maine.

While maintaining our readiness for war, let us exhaust every avenue for peace…. Let us not waste the present pause by either a needless renewal of tensions or a needless relaxation of vigilance.
⁷

Two weeks later he told a Democratic rally in Philadelphia that America. was “stronger than ever before, and the possibilities of peace brighter…than ever before.”

Each time the response was enthusiastic. The President had once remarked that he would gladly forfeit his re-election, if necessary, for the sake of the Test Ban Treaty. But in the autumn of 1963 he saw that its approval had helped register a new national consensus—that “peace” was an issue in his favor—and that his posture of maintaining both strength and goodwill had been embraced by the American people. (A Gallup Poll revealed that, for the first time, the Democrats were regarded by the public as the “peace party,” best able to keep this country out of war.)

Kennedy did not minimize the problems that remained—particularly Red China and Southeast Asia. Nor did he claim that the Soviets had undergone a fundamental change of heart. Conflicts of interest as well as ideology would persist—and a local conflict in a peripheral area could still drag both powers into a suddenly escalating fight. But the events of the past twelve months—since he had declared the Cuban quarantine—had shown the Soviets more willing to accept at least tacitly both this nation’s superiority in strategic power and our restraint in exercising it. Despite an autumn incident on the
Autobahn
, they seemed more interested in effective agreements, less interested in military expansion, more interested in normal relations, less interested in belligerent speeches. West Berlin remained free, and the dangers of another direct nuclear confrontation were more remote than ever.

The breathing spell had become a pause, the pause was becoming a
detente
and no one could foresee what further changes lay ahead. With the gradual rise in the living standard, education and outside contacts of the Russian people—with the gradual economic and political erosion of the barriers which kept Eastern Europe dependent on the Soviets and separated from the West—no European accommodation looked impossible in the long run. Kennedy’s stand in the Cuban missile crisis, said a European political leader in my office, may well be like the Greek stand against the Persians at Salamis in 400 B.C.—not only a great turning point in history, but the start of a true Golden Age.

In November President Kennedy, at the height of his confidence, pursued further his theme of peace through strength—with the release of a statement to American women on their role in the quest for peace, with an address to New York’s Protestant Council on understanding the emerging peoples, with a strongly worded and successful protest to the Soviets over their detention of an American professor, and with a series of speeches in New York and in Florida. On November 20 he transmitted an optimistic report to the Congress on our participation in the United Nations. On November 21 he started another tour into the heartland of the opposition, this time in Texas. That evening, in Houston, he talked of “an America that is both powerful and peaceful, with a people that are both prosperous and just.” The next morning, in Fort Worth, he expressed confidence that “because we are stronger…our chances for security, our chances for peace, are better than they have been in the past.” That afternoon, in Dallas, he was shot dead.

1
The Prime Minister, speculated Kennedy, since he sounded so much more optimistic than our scientists on seismic identification, might well have been the source of Khrushchev’s confusion on the acceptable number of inspections.

2
Although Dirksen and Iowa’s influential Hickenlooper refused to go. Also not making the trip was Adlai Stevenson, who justifiably viewed the treaty as a vindication of his 1956 campaign fight, but whom the President regretfully excluded to prevent reminders of a partisan nature.

3
Eisenhower had referred vaguely to a “reservation” on this last point. A formal reservation would have required renegotiation of the treaty.

4
At a news conference, after he had refuted a Goldwater assertion about a secret “deal” on Cuba as a part of the test-ban negotiations, the President was asked if he cared “to comment further on this type of attack by Senator Goldwater.” “No,” said the President, “not yet, not yet.”

5
Nor could anything have pleased me more than his decision to give me one of the pens he used in signing the official instrument of ratification. Inasmuch as I saw no hurry about getting an autographed picture from a man I saw daily, that pen is now a prized possession.

6
Congresswoman Frances Bolton of Ohio startled the President by suddenly asking, “Mr. President, aren’t we at war?”

7
This equal emphasis on vigilance and strength caused the Soviet Ambassador to inquire whether it was possible that the same speech-writer had worked on the American University and University of Maine addresses. He had.

EPILOGUE

J
OHN FITZGERALD KENNEDY had no fear or premonition of dying. Having narrowly survived death in the war and in the hospital, having tragically suffered the death of a brother and a sister, having been told as a young man that his adrenal deficiency might well cut short his years, he did not need to be reminded that the life he loved was a precious, impermanent gift, not to be wasted for a moment. But neither could he ever again be worried or frightened by the presence of death amidst life. “I know nothing can happen to him,” his father once said. “I’ve stood by his deathbed four times. Each time I said good-bye to him, and he always came back.”

John Kennedy could speak of death like all other subjects, candidly, objectively and at times humorously. The possibility of his own assassination he regarded as simply one more way in which his plans for the future might be thwarted. Yet he rarely mentioned death in a personal way and, to my knowledge, never spoke seriously about his own, once he recovered his health. He looked forward to a long life, never talking, for example, about arrangements for his burial or a memorial. He had a will drawn up, to be sure, but that was an act of prudence, not premonition; and asking Ted Reardon and me to witness it on June 18, 1954, he had made it the occasion for a joke: “It’s legal for you to do this—because I can assure you there’s nothing in here for either of you.” Two years later, driving me home one evening at high speed, he humorously speculated on whom the Nebraska headlines would feature if we were killed together in a crash.