From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (114 page)

The Cold War played an important part in the 1960 presidential campaign. The U-2 affair, Castro's move toward the USSR, the cancellation of Eisenhower's trip to Japan, and a summer crisis in the newly independent Congo all kept the nation's attention focused on foreign policy. Khrushchev's stormy autumn visit to the United States, complete with a fiery speech before the United Nations and the bizarre spectacle of the Soviet premier removing his shoe and pounding it furiously on the podium—amusing, had it not seemed so ominous—kept the Cold War threat very much alive for Americans. Following themes his party had exploited since
Sputnik,
Democratic candidate John Kennedy repeatedly criticized the Republicans for permitting the nation to fall behind militarily and suffer a huge loss of prestige in the world. He called for "new men to cope with new problems and new opportunities."
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While touting his own proximity to power and foreign policy résumé, the Republican candidate, Vice President Nixon, questioned Kennedy's experience, maturity, and judgment. In the nation's first televised presidential debates and countless stump speeches, the candidates tangled over hot-button foreign policy issues. Kennedy questioned the wisdom of Nixon's commitment to defend Quemoy and Matsu, an entirely sensible stance but one the vice president cleverly twisted to depict his opponent as an appeaser. The Massachusetts senator blasted the Eisenhower administration for failing to prevent the rise of Castro. JFK won the election by a razor-thin margin, gaining a majority of neither the popular vote nor the states. He effectively hammered home his point about the nation's decline of prestige and played on Americans' fears of military weakness, but he nearly lost by mishandling foreign policy issues late in the campaign. What stands out in retrospect is the broad area of agreement between the two candidates, a clear reflection of the dominance of the Cold War consensus.
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E
ISENHOWER'S STOCK HAS
risen markedly in recent years. No longer dismissed as an intellectual lightweight and political babe-in-the-woods, he is generally recognized as a self-assured and prudent leader who understood politics and, having seen war firsthand, appreciated the limits of military power.
¹³⁵
Despite frequent crises and the recurrent threat of war, he managed to keep the peace during his time in office. He worked out with the European allies and the Soviet Union the basis for a viable if by no means perfect settlement in Europe—Berlin, of course, the major exception—the foundation for what historian John Lewis Gaddis has called the "Long Peace."
¹³⁶
He adjusted America's relations with its crucial East Asian ally Japan in the direction of a more equal partnership, not always easy for a hegemonic power to do. He avoided open-ended military commitments and took the first hesitant steps toward nuclear arms limitations. Even during the post-
Sputnik
hysteria, he remained calm and kept the military budget under some semblance of control. He perceived and feared the way the Cold War was reshaping the U.S. economy and in his farewell address warned of the rising power of a military-industrial complex.

As critics have pointed out, to stop there is to provide only a one-dimensional assessment of Eisenhower's foreign policy legacy.
¹³⁷
Not surprisingly, given the New Look reliance on nuclear weapons, the U.S. nuclear arsenal grew to elephantine proportions during his presidency. By 1961, the United States had more than two thousand bombers, one hundred missiles, with many more on the planning board, and submarines capable of launching rockets with nuclear warheads. From 1958 to 1960 alone, the number of nuclear weapons increased from six thousand to eighteen thousand, overkill by any standard. Much like Truman and Acheson, Eisenhower failed most notably in dealing with Third World nationalism. He and his advisers persisted in viewing the new nations primarily in terms of the Cold War. They exaggerated the Soviet threat. They never fully appreciated the primal force of nationalism, the
new nations' entirely understandable hypersensitivity to outside influence, especially Western, and their neutralist tendencies. In the Middle East and South Asia, the administration exacerbated regional tensions and aroused sometimes fierce anti-Americanism. It tightened U.S. ties with right-wing dictatorships in South Korea and Taiwan, thus inhibiting its foreign policy flexibility and making adjustments with the People's Republic of China next to impossible. It avoided military intervention in Vietnam in 1954, but its subsequent political commitments to South Vietnam left difficult decisions about war for future leaders. Its rampant interventionism, including assassination plots against numerous Third World leaders and the overthrow of popularly elected governments, seemed necessary—and in some cases successful—at the time but violated long-standing U.S. principles and had baneful long-term consequences in terms of "blowback" for the peoples involved and for the United States. For the short term, with Cuba and Berlin unresolved and Americans increasingly anxious, the administration bequeathed its successor problems that would lead to the most dangerous period of the Cold War.

In his inaugural address, delivered on a blustery, bitterly cold day in January 1961, John F. Kennedy set forth in the starkest terms his nation's universalist approach to foreign policy in the heyday of the Cold War. The United States, he vowed, would "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and success of liberty."
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In practice, Kennedy found the world much less susceptible to U.S. influence than his soaring inaugural rhetoric proclaimed. By the time of his November 1963 assassination, he had begun to reassess some of the most basic Cold War assumptions. But it was his successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who would confront head-on the limits of U.S. power in a changing international system. LBJ's drastic 1965 escalation of the war in Vietnam produced no more than a stalemate. His withdrawal from the presidential race on March 31, 1968, just seven years after Kennedy's inauguration, the product in large part of simultaneous foreign policy crises in North Korea, the world economy, and Vietnam, made clear the inability of the nation to bear the burden as Kennedy had pledged. March 1968, in the words of authors Evan Thomas and Walter Isaacson, represented the "high-water mark of U.S. [postwar] hegemony."
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Kennedy was only forty-three years old when he assumed the presidency, and his accession marked the coming of age of the World War II generation. The son of a wealthy Boston Irish financier and former ambassador to England, the new president, a war hero himself, was strikingly handsome, bright, witty, charming, and ambitious. He attained no better than a lackluster record in the Senate and was looked upon—with good reason—as a playboy. Indeed, as president, he recklessly carried on dalliances with
secretaries, movie stars, and even a Mafia moll. As a senator, he did acquire some foreign policy expertise, taking a special interest in decolonization. He consciously styled his presidency after his illustrious Democratic predecessors Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. At home he committed himself to an extension of FDR's New Deal, the New Frontier, he called it. Like many of his generation, he was certain that foreign policy was the most exciting and urgent challenge a president faced. "I mean who gives a shit if the minimum wage is $1.15 or $1.25," he confided to kindred spirit (at least on that issue) Richard Nixon.
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In foreign policy, JFK sought to recapture the blend of idealism and pragmatism that had stamped FDR's leadership in World War II. He gathered about him a young, energetic corps of advisers from the top echelons of academia and business, self-confident, activist men—"action intellectuals," they were called—who shared his determination to "get the country moving again." The youthful and acerbic Harvard College dean and Henry Stimson protégé McGeorge Bundy was named national security adviser; World War II systems analysis "whiz kid" and Ford Motor Company boss Robert McNamara, secretary of defense. The president's younger brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, became his alter ego and closest adviser, even on foreign policy. In the aftermath of the Vietnam debacle, they would be labeled—with more than a touch of irony—the "best and the brightest."
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The dynamics of policymaking changed significantly. Appointment of the soft-spoken and retiring Georgian Dean Rusk as secretary of state suggested that the president, like FDR, planned to keep the reins of foreign policy tightly in his own hands. Kennedy quickly scrapped Eisenhower's formal, highly bureaucratized National Security Council structure in favor of a more freewheeling apparatus that left him at the center of decision-making and assured him the widest range of options. In the eyes of critics, the new system was disorderly, even chaotic, failed to ensure follow-up, and left major players uninformed. Under Bundy, an enlarged and reinvigorated NSC supplanted State as the key player in foreign affairs.
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The military's role became especially contentious. Civil-military relations deteriorated sharply in the Kennedy years, manifested in the popular culture through such films as
Seven Days in May
and
Dr. Strangelove,
which warned respectively of a military coup and a U.S.-initiated nuclear war brought about through a combination of military madness, standard operating procedures, and ingenuity. Youthful and insecure civilian leaders feared the growing power of the top brass, its ties to right-wing politicians, and its clout in Congress. They fretted about the Joint Chiefs' lack of political sophistication and their perceived eagerness to employ nuclear weapons. Military leaders such as the cigar-chomping Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Curtis LeMay scarcely concealed their contempt for the inexperienced civilians in the White House, especially the Ivy League intellectuals—"the computer types," Gen. Thomas Powers snarled, who "don't know their ass from a hole in the ground."
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From the outset, Kennedy struggled to keep the military in line without provoking open rebellion.

The New Frontiersmen accepted without question the basic assumptions of the containment policy. They perceived the tensions between Moscow and Beijing, but they still viewed Communism as monolithic and a mortal threat to the United States. They also believed, as Kennedy put it, that they must "move forward to meet Communism, rather than waiting for it to come to us and then reacting to it."
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Coming of age during World War II, they feared another global conflagration. They were also exhilarated by the prospect of leading the nation through perilous times to the ultimate victory. They shared a Wilsonian view that destiny had singled out their nation and themselves to defend the democratic ideal. Reflecting the mood of the time, they believed they could do anything—hence the expansive rhetoric of Kennedy's inaugural address and his firm commitment to land an American on the moon. They also recognized the domestic political importance of foreign policy success. During the campaign, JFK had repeatedly charged the Republicans with indecisiveness and promised to regain the upper hand in the Cold War. Elected by a precariously narrow margin, he kept a wary eye on his domestic flank, ever sensitive to opposition charges of appeasement.

Like Eisenhower, Kennedy altered existing Cold War policies mainly in terms of the means to be employed. Although he quickly discovered that the missile gap actually favored the United States, JFK ordered an immediate and massive buildup of nuclear weapons, missile-firing submarines, and long-range missiles to establish clear superiority over the USSR. He also recognized that the frightful consequences of nuclear war
limited the utility of nuclear weapons. Persuaded by Gen. Maxwell Taylor's book
The Uncertain Trumpet
that Eisenhower's reliance on nuclear weapons had left the United States muscle-bound in many Cold War situations, Kennedy expanded and modernized the nation's conventional forces to permit a "flexible response" to various kinds of threats. Certain that the emerging nations provided the principal battleground for Cold War competition, the administration sought ways to combat guerrilla warfare—"an international disease" the United States must learn to "destroy."
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The president pushed the military to study counterinsurgency methods and create elite units to employ them. He took particular pride in the green beret worn by the army's Special Forces. He also felt that America must strike at the source of the disease. He pushed for economic and technical assistance programs to eliminate the conditions in which Communism flourished and channel revolutionary forces along democratic paths.

Throughout the campaign, Kennedy had ominously warned of the perils the nation faced, but he himself appears to have been unprepared for the magnitude of the problems. Khrushchev's threat to resolve the status of divided Berlin on his own terms held out the possibility of superpower confrontation. In January 1961, the Soviet premier delivered a seemingly militant speech pledging support for wars of national liberation. In fact, the statement defied Kremlin hard-liners and the Chinese by renouncing nuclear and conventional war. It may even have been intended to reassure the West. To the untutored ears of a new administration, it appeared a virtual declaration of war, and stepped-up Soviet aid to Castro's Cuba and insurgents in the Congo and Laos seemed to confirm the danger.
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Such was the siege mentality that gripped the White House in early 1961 that the president on one occasion greeted his advisers by grimly asking, "What's gone against us today?"
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Cuba was the most vexing problem, and Kennedy early made a fateful decision. He had inherited CIA plans for a covert operation to overthrow Castro. Deferring to the presumed experts in the CIA and the military, the latter of whom had deep but unstated reservations about the workability of the plan, he did not closely scrutinize it. He and his advisers were not disposed to critique something that had been endorsed by one of the great military heroes of the century. The administration had dismantled an NSC organization that might have provided some institutional safeguards
against harebrained plots. Rusk did not voice his grave doubts, and Kennedy rebuffed those advisers who expressed skepticism. Despite misgivings himself, he approved the plan in hopes of gaining a major victory in his first months and because not to do so would leave him vulnerable to Republican attacks. To conceal the U.S. role, he refused to provide air support.