01-06-2013, 08:41 PM
7/12/1963 Washington Star quoted William Foster, director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency: "Everyone feels that if we can't negotiate a test ban - when we are so close - that we can't negotiate any other part of the disarmament program."
7/25/1963 During the negotiations, Kennedy spent hours in the cramped White House Situation Room, editing the U.S. position as if he were at the Moscow table himself. Soviet ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin was astounded at the president's command of every stage of the process. "Harriman would just get on the phone with Kennedy, " he said, " and things would be decided. It was amazing. " The president's peacemaking had moved beyond any effective military control or even monitoring. In the test-ban talks, the military weren't in the loop. Kennedy had made a quick end run around them to negotiate the treaty. As JFK biographer Richard Reeves observed, " By moving so swiftly on the Moscow negotiations, Kennedy politically outflanked his own military on the most important military question of the time. " (Reeves, Profile of Power) Kennedy pointed out to Norman Cousins that he and Khrushchev had come to have more in common with each other than either had with his own military establishment: " One of the ironic things about this entire situation is that Mr. Khrushchev and I occupy approximately the same political positions inside our governments. He would like to prevent a nuclear war but is under severe pressure from his hard-line crowd, which interprets every move in that direction as appeasement. I've got similar problems. " (Cousins, Improbable Triumvirate, pp. 113-14) On July 25, 1963 , when the final text was ready, Harriman phoned Kennedy and read it to him twice. The president said, " Okay, great! " Harriman returned to the conference room and initialed the Limited Test Ban Treaty, outlawing nuclear tests "in the atmosphere, beyond its limits, including outer space, or under water, including territorial waters or high seas. " At the Spiridonovska Palace, Moscow, representatives of the US, Britain and USSR initial the Limited Test-Ban Treaty. In Moscow, on behalf of President Kennedy, U.S. negotiator Averell Harriman agrees with Soviet negotiators to the Limited Test Ban Treaty, outlawing nuclear tests " in the atmosphere, beyond its limits, including outer space, or under water, including territorial waters or high seas."
7/26/1963 Tonight, President Kennedy makes a television appeal to the nation for support of the test ban treaty, quoting Nikita Khrushchev on a nuclear war they both hope to avoid: "The survivors would envy the dead." JFK calls the test ban treaty "a victory for mankind." "Yesterday, a shaft of light cut into the darkness. Negotiations were concluded in Moscow on a treaty to ban all nuclear tests in the atmosphere, in outer space and under water. ... Now, for the first time in may years, the path of peace may be open. No one can be certain what the future will bring. No one can say whether the time can come for an easing of the struggle. But history and our own conscience will judge us harsher if we do not now make every effort to test our hopes by action, and this is the place to begin. According to the ancient Chinese proverb, A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.' My fellow Americans, let us take that first step. Let us, if we can, get back from the shadows of war and seek out the way of peace. And if that journey is 1,000 miles, or even more, let history record that we, in this land, at this time, took the first step."
When Kennedy told Galbraith in August 1963 that after the election he might replace Rusk with McNamara as his Secretary of State, he said revealingly, " But then if I don't have McNamara at Defense to control the generals, I won't have a foreign policy. " (John Kenneth Galbraith, A Life in Our Times ( Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981)
The August 5, 1963, U. S. News and World Report carried a major article headlined, "Is U.S. Giving up in the Arms Race ? " The article cited "many authorities in the military establishment, who now are silenced, "as thinking that the Kennedy administration's" new strategy adds up to a type of intentional and one-sided disarmament. "
8/7/1963 Cold War influences so dominated the U.S. Congress that the president felt getting Senate ratification of a test ban agreement would be " almost in the nature of a miracle, " as he described the task to advisers today. He said that if a Senate vote were held right then it would fall far short of the necessary two-thirds. Larry O'Brien, his liaison aide with the Congress, confirmed the accuracy of the president's estimate. Congressional mail was running about fifteen to one against a test ban. Kennedy initiated a whirlwind public education campaign on the treaty, coordinated by Norman Cousins. The president told an August 7 meeting of key organizers that they were taking on a very tough job and had his total support. Led by Cousins and calling themselves the Citizens Committee, the group mounted a national campaign for Senate ratification. The National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, which had been formed in 1958 to dramatize the dangers of nuclear testing, played a key role in the campaign. Kennedy and Cousins also successfully sought help from the National Council of Churches, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, Catholic Archbishop John Wright of Pittsburgh and Cardinal Richard Cushing of Boston, union leaders, sympathetic business executives, leading scientists and academics, Nobel Laureates, and, at a special meeting with the president, the editors of the nation's leading women's magazines, who gave their enthusiastic support. As the campaign grew, public opinion began to shift. By the end of August, the tide of congressional mail had gone from fifteen to one against a test ban to three to two against. The president and his committee of activists hoped that in a month public opinion would be on their side. (Cousins, Improbable Triumvirate)
The alarm was sounded even more loudly in the August 12 U.S. News and World Report with an article headlined, " If Peace Does Come-What Happens to Business? " The article began: "This question once again is being raised: If peace does come, what happens to business? Will the bottom drop out if defense spending is cut ? "There is a lull in the cold war. Before the U.S. Senate is a treaty calling for an end to testing of nuclear weapons in the air or under water. A nonaggression agreement is being proposed by Russia's Khrushchev. "Talk of peace is catching on. Before shouting, however, it is important to bear some other things in mind. " U.S. News went on to reassure its readers that defense spending would be sustained by such Cold War factors as Cuba remaining "a Russian base, occupied by Russian troops " and " the guerrilla war in South Vietnam " where " the Red Chinese, in an ugly mood, are capable of starting a big war in Asia at any time."
8/20/1963 JCS recommended to McNamara that no decision be made to withdraw US forces until the end of October. (In Retrospect p49) At the Pentagon, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were dragging their heels on the Vietnam withdrawal plan. The chiefs used the Buddhist crisis as a rationale for bogging down McNamara's May order that a specific plan be prepared for the withdrawal of one thousand military personnel by the end of 1963. On August 20, the chiefs wrote to McNamara that " until the political and religious tensions now confronting the Government of Vietnam have eased, " " no US units should be withdrawn from the Republic of Vietnam. " The chiefs argued, for the same reason, that " the final decision to implement the withdrawal plan should be withheld until late October"-one month before Kennedy would be assassinated. But Kennedy and McNamara sped up the process. The decision for withdrawal would in fact be made in early October.
9/12/1963 At a National Security Council meeting, the Joint Chiefs of Staff again present a report evaluating a projected nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union, in a time scheme of 1964 through 1968. President Kennedy turns the discussion to his conclusion: " Preemption is not possible for us. " He passes over without comment the report's implication that the remaining months of 1963 are still the most advantageous time for the United States to launch a preemptive strike. But this time, rather than stalking out of the meeting, Kennedy engaged his military in order to get a more exact idea of what they were up to. At least Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was on his side. Here are some of the relevant excerpts from a summary of the meeting:
PRES. KENNEDY: De Gaulle believes even the small nuclear force he is planning will be big enough to cause unacceptable damage to the USSR… Why do we need to have as much defense as we have if, as it appears, the strategy is based on the assumption that even if we strike first we cannot protect the security of the U.S. in nuclear warfare?
GEN LEON W. JOHNSON: No matter what we do we can't get below 51 million casualties (to the United States) in the event of a nuclear exchange. We can, however, bring down this number by undertaking additional weapons programs.
PRES. KENNEDY: Doesn't that get us into the overkill business?
GEN. JOHNSON: No, sir. We can cut down U.S. losses if we knock out more Soviet missiles by having more U.S. missiles and more accurate U.S. missiles. The more Soviet missiles we can destroy the less the loss to us…
Each of the strategies (recommended in the report) used against the USSR results in at least 140 million fatalities in the USSR. Our problem is how to catch more of the Soviet missiles before they are launched and how to destroy more of the missiles in the air over the U.S….
SEC. MCNAMARA: There is no way of launching a no-alert attack against the USSR which would be acceptable. No such attack… could be carried out without 30 million U.S. fatalities an obviously unacceptable number… The President deserves an answer to his question as to why we have to have so large a force….
PRES. KENNEDY: I understand… Preemption is not possible for us. This is a valuable conclusion growing out of an excellent report…
GEN. JOHNSON: I would be very disturbed if the President considered this report indicated that we could reduce our forces and/or not continue to increase those programmed…I have concluded from the calculations that we could fight a limited war using nuclear weapons without fear that the Soviets would reply by going to all-out war.
PRES. KENNEDY: I have been told that if I ever released a nuclear weapon on the battlefield, I should start a pre-emptive attack on the Soviet Union as the use of nuclear weapons was bound to escalate and we might as well get the advantage by going first…
Air Force Lieutenant General David Burchinal (U.S.A.F. Chief of Staff LeMay's deputy for operations), recalled the Cuban Missile Crisis and the value of strategic superiority:
"It [value of superiority] was totally missed by the Kennedy administration... They did not understand what had been created and handed to them... Fortunately, there was enough panic in Washington when they saw those missiles going in... they gave only the broadest indication of what they wanted in terms of support for the President. So we were able at the military level, from the JCS on down (without involving the politicians) to put SAC on a one-third airborne alert, to disperse part of the force to civilian airfields [and take other alert measures] ... These were things that would be visible to the Soviets... We could have written our own book at the time, but our politicians did not understand what happens when you have such a degree of superiority as we had, or they simply didn't know how to use it. They were busily engaged in saving face for the Soviets and making concessions, giving up the IRBMs, the Thors and Jupiters deployed overseas -- when all we had to do was write our own ticket."
A few moments later in this interview, U.S.A.F. General Leon Johnson (Chairman, Net Evaluation Subcommittee, National Security Council) said about the political leadership: "They were very good at putting out brave words, but they didn't do a bloody thing to back them up except what, inadvertently, we did."
To which LeMay confirmed: "That was the mood prevalent with the top civilian leadership; you are quite correct" (Richard H. Kohn and Joseph P. Harahan, eds., Strategic Air Warfare: An Interview with Generals Curtis E. LeMay, Leon W. Johnson, David A. Burchinal, and Jack J. Catton(Washington, DC: Office of Air Force History, 1988), pp. 113-114, 119.)
9/1963 SAC Commander Gen. Thomas Power had attacked the Test Ban treaty before the Senate Armed Services Committee. When General LeMay was named vice chief of staff of the Air Force in 1957, General Power became commander in chief of SAC and was promoted to four-star rank. But although Power was LeMay's protégé, LeMay himself was quoted as privately saying that Power was mentally "not stable" and a "sadist". When RAND proposed a counterforce strategy which required SAC to restrain itself from striking Soviet cities in the beginning of a war, Power countered with: "Restraint? Why are you so concerned with saving their lives? The whole idea is to kill the bastards. At the end of the war if there are two Americans and one Russian left alive, we win!"
Right-wing Texas historian J. Evetts Haley said the treaty was a "betrayal of America" "flew in the face of all the lessons of survival in history, as well as the intuitive wisdom of every healthy American." (A Texan Looks at Lyndon p166)
Kennedy had finally obtained the support of the Joint Chiefs for the test ban treaty, although Air Force chief LeMay said he would have opposed it had it not already been signed. Other military leaders testified against the test ban. Admiral Lewis Strauss said, "I am not sure that the reduction of tensions is necessarily a good thing. " Admiral Arthur Radford, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said, " I join with many of my former colleagues in expressing deep concern for our future security . . . The decision of the Senate of the United States in connection with this treaty will change the course of world history. "
The Generals realized that the test ban treaty constituted a step towards general disarmament. General Thomas D. White, former head of the Army chiefs of Staff, remarked, "True security lies in unlimited nuclear superiority."
10/1963 "NATO leaders were disturbed in October when US Deputy Defense Secretary Roswell Gilpatric, speaking in Chicago, declared that American forces abroad could be thinned out without weakening the nation's capacity to deal with Soviet aggression. This speech, coming in the midst of Operation Big Lift' in which the United States flew a 15,000-man division from Texas to West Germany, suggested that henceforth the United States would station more of its troops at home." (1964 Collier's Encyclopedia Yearbook)
11/1/1963 Secretary of the Navy Fred Korth resigned. John McClellan, chairman of the Permanent Investigations Committee, continued looking into the activities of Billie Sol Estes and Bobby Baker. During this investigation evidence emerged that Lyndon B. Johnson was also involved in political corruption. This included the award of a $7 billion contract for a fighter plane, the TFX, to General Dynamics, a company based in Texas. It was discovered that the Continental National Bank of Fort Worth was the principal money source for the General Dynamics plant. As a result of this revelation Korth resigned from office.
11/19/1963 Look magazine ran a photo essay by Fletcher Knebel on the making of the film Seven Days in May. The journalist revealed the rampant anxieties that the film's production had set off in Washington. "At the outset of filming, the moviemakers had a call from still another arm of government. The Secret Service was alarmed at a spurious report that the movie involved a President's assassination."
11/21/1963 The Dallas Times Herald "Final Edition" for November 21, 1963 reported "U2 Found in Gulf; Pilot Not in Jet." It was believed to have been on a routine recon mission over Cuba before it left a visible oil slick in the Caribbean.
11/22/1963
12:40pm In Washington, McGeorge Bundy and Commander Oliver Hallet man the Situation Room in the White House. Much of their information is coming from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in the Pentagon. Officials in the Pentagon are calling the White House switchboard at the Dallas-Sheraton Hotel asking who is now in command. An officer -- a member of the Presidential party -- will eventually grab the microphone and assure the Pentagon that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and the Joint Chiefs of Staff are now the President.
The day Kennedy was assassinated, Paramount Pictures, the distributor of the film Seven Days in May, planned to run an ad for the film, using a quote from one of its fictional military conspirators: "Impeach him, hell. There are better ways of getting rid of him." The studio quickly yanked the ad at the last minute, fearing it was too provocative, "narrowly avoiding an embarrassing coincidence on the very day the president was shot," Variety reported 12/4/1963.
1:50 PM Around this time, says FBI agent Jim Hosty, "I learned after the assassination from two independent sources [that] fully armed warplanes were sent screaming toward Cuba. Just before they entered Cuban airspace, they were hastily called back...the entire US military went on alert. The Pentagon ordered us to Defense Condition 3...Def Con 3..." (Hosty, Assignment Oswald p219) These planes probably would have been launched from the U.S. Strike Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida.
A cable from U.S. Army Intelligence in Texas, dated November 22, 1963, telling the Strike Command (falsely) that Oswald had defected to Cuba in 1959 and was "a card-carrying member of the Communist Party." (Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press), 1966), 275; Deep Politics II, 80-85.)
M.S. Arnoni, writing in December 1963 in The Minority of One (published January 1964):
" Let us make the "fantastic" assumption that President Lyndon Johnson and Attorney-General Robert F. Kennedy know or believe that the murder was planned by a group of high-ranking officers who would stop at nothing to end American-Soviet negotiations. However strong their desire to avenge John F. Kennedy, what course would be open to them? To move against such formidable conspirators might start a disastrous chain of events. It could lead to American troops shooting at other American troops. It could lead to a direct take-over by a military clique. To avert such catastrophes, it might well be considered prudent to pretend utter ignorance, in the hope that the conspirators might be removed from power discreetly, at a later date, one by one.
Of course, this theory sounds absolutely fantastic. But if we are to think about the issues without "patriotic" prejudice, it is necessary to test its plausibility by imagining it to be an explanation of the assassination of the head of another country. Few people in America would have difficulty accepting such a theory about the assassination of a Soviet, Latin American or Southeast Asian leader; and chances are that its incredulity in our own case is merely a measure of our ill-conceived national exceptionalism."
1/29/1964 Stanley Kubrick's satirical anti-nuclear, anti-Cold War film, Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb, premiered. The NYT fears that it shows "contempt for our whole military establishment" and the Washington Post calls it "anti-American." It concerns a mad general who is convinced that the Communists are polluting his 'precious bodily fluids' and decides to launch a nuclear strike. The President tries to recall the bombers, while battling with his hawkish advisers. The film's London release date (12-12-63) was pushed backed until 1964 due to the assassination. The screening for the critics was to be shown on 11/22/63, but was cancelled when word of the President's death was announced. Also, the line "A fella could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas" was originally "A fella could have a pretty good weekend in Dallas," but was changed after the assassination.
2/12/1964 The John Frankenheimer film Seven Days in May premieres. It was filmed apparently in spring-summer 1963. Originally a bestselling political thriller by Charles Waldo Bailey II and Fletcher Knebel (published 1962 by Harper and Row). It concerns a liberal President who makes a disarmament treaty with the Soviets, only to find his hard-line Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff plotting to oust him in a coup. The coup is designed to take place during wargames maneuvers, which the President is to attend as a spectator, while the Vice President and much of the cabinet are out of the country. In the end, the attempted coup is hidden from the country and the plotters in the JCS are forced to resign; the reason given to the public is their differences with the President over the treaty.
2/28/1964 Robert Kennedy did a recorded interview with John Bartlow Martin. He and JFK anticipated that LBJ would be the front-runner in 1968, and they wanted to back McNamara: "The President didn't really have much respect for Johnson...as he said to Jackie on Thursday night, November 21 [1963], Lyndon Johnson was incapable of telling the truth...It wasn't until after the Bay of Pigs that [JFK] found out that he couldn't rely on people [in the military and the CIA]..."
3/1, 4/13, 4/30 and 5/14/1964 Robert Kennedy, in a series of recorded interviews with John Bartlow Martin, recalled that JFK had been strongly assured by the CIA and military that the Bay of Pigs plan would succeed: "If he hadn't gone ahead with it, everybody would have said it showed he had no courage because...it was Eisenhower's plan, Eisenhower's people all said it would succeed...We found out later that, despite the President's orders that no American forces would be used, the first two people who landed on the Bay of Pigs were Americans - CIA sent them in....It was clearly understood in all the instructions that there weren't going to be any military forces of the United States." They had been repeatedly assured that even if the invasion went badly, the Cubans could disappear into the mountains and become guerrillas. "It turned out that, when they talked about this guerrilla territory, it was guerrilla territory back in 1890. Now it was a swamp...After Cuba [JFK] continuously prodded and probed to bring out all the facts...he made an effort to find out himself...I then became involved on every major and all the international questions...the President spoke to me about becoming head of the CIA. I said I didn't want to...I don't know who suggested John McCone originally. Maybe Scoop Jackson did...The President was never very enthusiastic about the [nuclear] testing...Most of the testing was aimed at developing smaller bombs with bigger punch. He wasn't convinced that was so necessary...There was a strong feeling by the scientific community that we should test...He reached the conclusion that probably it was worthwhile [staying in Vietnam] for psychological, [world] political reasons more than anything else."
He was asked if JFK was "concerned about the rightist upsurge" in the country; RFK replied, "Not really, no....He thought it was silly, that [Gen.] Walker was crazy...But it was more humorous than anything else." He recalled that JFK's policy in Latin America was to do more than just side with anti-Communist dictatorships. He denied that the administration was behind the Trujillo assassination, then added, "To my knowledge, this isn't true. I got into that planning, and I expect I probably would have known...Lyndon Johnson said to Pierre Salinger that he wasn't sure but that the assassination of President Kennedy didn't take place in retribution for his participation in the assassinations of Trujillo and President Diem...divine retribution...There was never any intention of dropping [LBJ from the ticket]. There was never even any discussion about dropping him...After the missiles [crisis], Dean Rusk said that Castro would collapse or be replaced within two months."
RFK confirmed that Kennedy was trying to improve relations with Castro in 1963, but only if Castro cut off military ties with the Soviets and stopped trying to export revolution. He said that there were no assassination attempts on Castro, not even any planning for it. He commented that when JFK visited Venezuela "we had a real check on whether all the Communists and fellow travelers were picked up and the guards were adequate...I often think that's the kind of arrangement when you were going into a crazy city like Dallas, Texas. It should have been done." He emphasized that JFK thought Vietnam was very important to the security of the whole region, had no intention of completely pulling out, but also was not going to go in with combat troops: "because everybody, including General MacArthur, felt that land conflict between our troops - white troops and Asian - would only end in disaster. So we went in as advisers to try to get the Vietnamese to fight, themselves, because we couldn't win the war for them." He was asked, "And if the Vietnamese were about to lose it, would he propose to go in on land if he had to?" RFK replied, "We'd face that when we came to it...we were winning the war in 1962 and 1963. Up until May or so of 1963, the situation was getting progressively better." He recalled that on the question of supporting a coup in Saigon, "the government split in two," with JFK, Taylor, McNamara and McCone opposed to it. (RFK In His Own Words)
2/27/1965 Robert Kennedy records an oral history interview with Art Schlesinger:
"The Bay of Pigs was the best thing that happened to the administration, because if it hadn't been for the Bay of Pigs, we would have sent troops into Laos...[JFK] started asking questions that were not asked at the Bay of Pigs..." He recalled that the JCS told him they could land 1000 troops a day into Laos, but when Kennedy asked how the early arrivals would fight off thousands of Pathet Lao guerillas, "Well, they said, they really hadn't thought about that....They just wanted to go in and drop bombs on people. Even after the Cuban missile crisis, two of the Chiefs of Staff were really mad. One of them suggested that we go and bomb them anyway on Monday, and the other one said, 'We've been sold out.'....LeMay and Anderson. That's really the reason why the President got rid of Anderson." He said that LBJ played little part in foreign policy: "he was never in on any of the real meetings...he was their for the first meeting, I think. Then he went to Hawaii...He wasn't there at all when the decisions were being made. He came back on the Sunday night before the Russians withdrew their missiles from Cuba...He was displeased with what we were doing, although he never made it clear what he would do. He said he had the feeling that we were being too weak...[LBJ] liked Diem...Johnson is...incapable of telling the truth...And my experience with him since then is that he lies all the time. I'm telling you, he just lies continuously, about everything. In every conversation I have with him, he lies. As I've said, he lies even when he doesn't have to...At one time, you know, I liked John Connally. I don't like him now...He's been very ungracious. I really dislike him..."
2/1967 I.F. Stone wrote that "it is the prestige of the Machine that is at stake in Vietnam. It is Boeing and General Electric and Goodyear and General Dynamics. It is the electronic range finder and the amphibious truck and the night-piercing radar. It is the defoliant, and the herbicide, and the deodorant, and the depilatory. It is the products and the brand names we have been conditioned since childhood to revere. Down there in the jungles, unregenerate, ingenius, tricky...emerged a strange creature whose potency we had almost forgotten - Man."
2/20/1967 Retired Gen. David M. Shoup, former Marine Corps Commandant, told the Senate, "You read, you're televised to, you're radioed to, you're preached to, that it is necessary that we have our armed forces fight, get killed and maimed, and kill and maim other human beings including women and children because now is the time we must stop some kind of unwanted ideology from creeping up on this nation. The place we chose to do this is 8000 miles away...I don't think the whole of South East Asia, as related to the present and future safety and freedom of the people of this country, is worth the life or limb of a single American. I believe that if we had and would keep our dirty, bloody, dollar-crooked fingers out of the business of these nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own."
Sen. Thruston B. Morton (R-Kentucky) warned in a filmed interview (probably 1968's "In The Year of the Pig"): "I think that there's a great danger in this country because of the fact that so much of our economy is geared in the military area. There is grave danger of the military-industrial alliance of a kind actually affecting policy."
2/24/1968 Gen. James M. Gavin wrote an article in the Saturday Evening Post: "There has been much speculation about what President Kennedy would or would not have done in Vietnam had he lived. Having discussed military affairs with him often and in detail for 15 years, I know he was totally opposed to the introduction of combat troops in Southeast Asia. His public statements just before his murder support this view. Let us not lay on the dead the blame for our own failures."
7/25/1963 During the negotiations, Kennedy spent hours in the cramped White House Situation Room, editing the U.S. position as if he were at the Moscow table himself. Soviet ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin was astounded at the president's command of every stage of the process. "Harriman would just get on the phone with Kennedy, " he said, " and things would be decided. It was amazing. " The president's peacemaking had moved beyond any effective military control or even monitoring. In the test-ban talks, the military weren't in the loop. Kennedy had made a quick end run around them to negotiate the treaty. As JFK biographer Richard Reeves observed, " By moving so swiftly on the Moscow negotiations, Kennedy politically outflanked his own military on the most important military question of the time. " (Reeves, Profile of Power) Kennedy pointed out to Norman Cousins that he and Khrushchev had come to have more in common with each other than either had with his own military establishment: " One of the ironic things about this entire situation is that Mr. Khrushchev and I occupy approximately the same political positions inside our governments. He would like to prevent a nuclear war but is under severe pressure from his hard-line crowd, which interprets every move in that direction as appeasement. I've got similar problems. " (Cousins, Improbable Triumvirate, pp. 113-14) On July 25, 1963 , when the final text was ready, Harriman phoned Kennedy and read it to him twice. The president said, " Okay, great! " Harriman returned to the conference room and initialed the Limited Test Ban Treaty, outlawing nuclear tests "in the atmosphere, beyond its limits, including outer space, or under water, including territorial waters or high seas. " At the Spiridonovska Palace, Moscow, representatives of the US, Britain and USSR initial the Limited Test-Ban Treaty. In Moscow, on behalf of President Kennedy, U.S. negotiator Averell Harriman agrees with Soviet negotiators to the Limited Test Ban Treaty, outlawing nuclear tests " in the atmosphere, beyond its limits, including outer space, or under water, including territorial waters or high seas."
7/26/1963 Tonight, President Kennedy makes a television appeal to the nation for support of the test ban treaty, quoting Nikita Khrushchev on a nuclear war they both hope to avoid: "The survivors would envy the dead." JFK calls the test ban treaty "a victory for mankind." "Yesterday, a shaft of light cut into the darkness. Negotiations were concluded in Moscow on a treaty to ban all nuclear tests in the atmosphere, in outer space and under water. ... Now, for the first time in may years, the path of peace may be open. No one can be certain what the future will bring. No one can say whether the time can come for an easing of the struggle. But history and our own conscience will judge us harsher if we do not now make every effort to test our hopes by action, and this is the place to begin. According to the ancient Chinese proverb, A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.' My fellow Americans, let us take that first step. Let us, if we can, get back from the shadows of war and seek out the way of peace. And if that journey is 1,000 miles, or even more, let history record that we, in this land, at this time, took the first step."
When Kennedy told Galbraith in August 1963 that after the election he might replace Rusk with McNamara as his Secretary of State, he said revealingly, " But then if I don't have McNamara at Defense to control the generals, I won't have a foreign policy. " (John Kenneth Galbraith, A Life in Our Times ( Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981)
The August 5, 1963, U. S. News and World Report carried a major article headlined, "Is U.S. Giving up in the Arms Race ? " The article cited "many authorities in the military establishment, who now are silenced, "as thinking that the Kennedy administration's" new strategy adds up to a type of intentional and one-sided disarmament. "
8/7/1963 Cold War influences so dominated the U.S. Congress that the president felt getting Senate ratification of a test ban agreement would be " almost in the nature of a miracle, " as he described the task to advisers today. He said that if a Senate vote were held right then it would fall far short of the necessary two-thirds. Larry O'Brien, his liaison aide with the Congress, confirmed the accuracy of the president's estimate. Congressional mail was running about fifteen to one against a test ban. Kennedy initiated a whirlwind public education campaign on the treaty, coordinated by Norman Cousins. The president told an August 7 meeting of key organizers that they were taking on a very tough job and had his total support. Led by Cousins and calling themselves the Citizens Committee, the group mounted a national campaign for Senate ratification. The National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, which had been formed in 1958 to dramatize the dangers of nuclear testing, played a key role in the campaign. Kennedy and Cousins also successfully sought help from the National Council of Churches, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, Catholic Archbishop John Wright of Pittsburgh and Cardinal Richard Cushing of Boston, union leaders, sympathetic business executives, leading scientists and academics, Nobel Laureates, and, at a special meeting with the president, the editors of the nation's leading women's magazines, who gave their enthusiastic support. As the campaign grew, public opinion began to shift. By the end of August, the tide of congressional mail had gone from fifteen to one against a test ban to three to two against. The president and his committee of activists hoped that in a month public opinion would be on their side. (Cousins, Improbable Triumvirate)
The alarm was sounded even more loudly in the August 12 U.S. News and World Report with an article headlined, " If Peace Does Come-What Happens to Business? " The article began: "This question once again is being raised: If peace does come, what happens to business? Will the bottom drop out if defense spending is cut ? "There is a lull in the cold war. Before the U.S. Senate is a treaty calling for an end to testing of nuclear weapons in the air or under water. A nonaggression agreement is being proposed by Russia's Khrushchev. "Talk of peace is catching on. Before shouting, however, it is important to bear some other things in mind. " U.S. News went on to reassure its readers that defense spending would be sustained by such Cold War factors as Cuba remaining "a Russian base, occupied by Russian troops " and " the guerrilla war in South Vietnam " where " the Red Chinese, in an ugly mood, are capable of starting a big war in Asia at any time."
8/20/1963 JCS recommended to McNamara that no decision be made to withdraw US forces until the end of October. (In Retrospect p49) At the Pentagon, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were dragging their heels on the Vietnam withdrawal plan. The chiefs used the Buddhist crisis as a rationale for bogging down McNamara's May order that a specific plan be prepared for the withdrawal of one thousand military personnel by the end of 1963. On August 20, the chiefs wrote to McNamara that " until the political and religious tensions now confronting the Government of Vietnam have eased, " " no US units should be withdrawn from the Republic of Vietnam. " The chiefs argued, for the same reason, that " the final decision to implement the withdrawal plan should be withheld until late October"-one month before Kennedy would be assassinated. But Kennedy and McNamara sped up the process. The decision for withdrawal would in fact be made in early October.
9/12/1963 At a National Security Council meeting, the Joint Chiefs of Staff again present a report evaluating a projected nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union, in a time scheme of 1964 through 1968. President Kennedy turns the discussion to his conclusion: " Preemption is not possible for us. " He passes over without comment the report's implication that the remaining months of 1963 are still the most advantageous time for the United States to launch a preemptive strike. But this time, rather than stalking out of the meeting, Kennedy engaged his military in order to get a more exact idea of what they were up to. At least Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was on his side. Here are some of the relevant excerpts from a summary of the meeting:
PRES. KENNEDY: De Gaulle believes even the small nuclear force he is planning will be big enough to cause unacceptable damage to the USSR… Why do we need to have as much defense as we have if, as it appears, the strategy is based on the assumption that even if we strike first we cannot protect the security of the U.S. in nuclear warfare?
GEN LEON W. JOHNSON: No matter what we do we can't get below 51 million casualties (to the United States) in the event of a nuclear exchange. We can, however, bring down this number by undertaking additional weapons programs.
PRES. KENNEDY: Doesn't that get us into the overkill business?
GEN. JOHNSON: No, sir. We can cut down U.S. losses if we knock out more Soviet missiles by having more U.S. missiles and more accurate U.S. missiles. The more Soviet missiles we can destroy the less the loss to us…
Each of the strategies (recommended in the report) used against the USSR results in at least 140 million fatalities in the USSR. Our problem is how to catch more of the Soviet missiles before they are launched and how to destroy more of the missiles in the air over the U.S….
SEC. MCNAMARA: There is no way of launching a no-alert attack against the USSR which would be acceptable. No such attack… could be carried out without 30 million U.S. fatalities an obviously unacceptable number… The President deserves an answer to his question as to why we have to have so large a force….
PRES. KENNEDY: I understand… Preemption is not possible for us. This is a valuable conclusion growing out of an excellent report…
GEN. JOHNSON: I would be very disturbed if the President considered this report indicated that we could reduce our forces and/or not continue to increase those programmed…I have concluded from the calculations that we could fight a limited war using nuclear weapons without fear that the Soviets would reply by going to all-out war.
PRES. KENNEDY: I have been told that if I ever released a nuclear weapon on the battlefield, I should start a pre-emptive attack on the Soviet Union as the use of nuclear weapons was bound to escalate and we might as well get the advantage by going first…
Air Force Lieutenant General David Burchinal (U.S.A.F. Chief of Staff LeMay's deputy for operations), recalled the Cuban Missile Crisis and the value of strategic superiority:
"It [value of superiority] was totally missed by the Kennedy administration... They did not understand what had been created and handed to them... Fortunately, there was enough panic in Washington when they saw those missiles going in... they gave only the broadest indication of what they wanted in terms of support for the President. So we were able at the military level, from the JCS on down (without involving the politicians) to put SAC on a one-third airborne alert, to disperse part of the force to civilian airfields [and take other alert measures] ... These were things that would be visible to the Soviets... We could have written our own book at the time, but our politicians did not understand what happens when you have such a degree of superiority as we had, or they simply didn't know how to use it. They were busily engaged in saving face for the Soviets and making concessions, giving up the IRBMs, the Thors and Jupiters deployed overseas -- when all we had to do was write our own ticket."
A few moments later in this interview, U.S.A.F. General Leon Johnson (Chairman, Net Evaluation Subcommittee, National Security Council) said about the political leadership: "They were very good at putting out brave words, but they didn't do a bloody thing to back them up except what, inadvertently, we did."
To which LeMay confirmed: "That was the mood prevalent with the top civilian leadership; you are quite correct" (Richard H. Kohn and Joseph P. Harahan, eds., Strategic Air Warfare: An Interview with Generals Curtis E. LeMay, Leon W. Johnson, David A. Burchinal, and Jack J. Catton(Washington, DC: Office of Air Force History, 1988), pp. 113-114, 119.)
9/1963 SAC Commander Gen. Thomas Power had attacked the Test Ban treaty before the Senate Armed Services Committee. When General LeMay was named vice chief of staff of the Air Force in 1957, General Power became commander in chief of SAC and was promoted to four-star rank. But although Power was LeMay's protégé, LeMay himself was quoted as privately saying that Power was mentally "not stable" and a "sadist". When RAND proposed a counterforce strategy which required SAC to restrain itself from striking Soviet cities in the beginning of a war, Power countered with: "Restraint? Why are you so concerned with saving their lives? The whole idea is to kill the bastards. At the end of the war if there are two Americans and one Russian left alive, we win!"
Right-wing Texas historian J. Evetts Haley said the treaty was a "betrayal of America" "flew in the face of all the lessons of survival in history, as well as the intuitive wisdom of every healthy American." (A Texan Looks at Lyndon p166)
Kennedy had finally obtained the support of the Joint Chiefs for the test ban treaty, although Air Force chief LeMay said he would have opposed it had it not already been signed. Other military leaders testified against the test ban. Admiral Lewis Strauss said, "I am not sure that the reduction of tensions is necessarily a good thing. " Admiral Arthur Radford, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said, " I join with many of my former colleagues in expressing deep concern for our future security . . . The decision of the Senate of the United States in connection with this treaty will change the course of world history. "
The Generals realized that the test ban treaty constituted a step towards general disarmament. General Thomas D. White, former head of the Army chiefs of Staff, remarked, "True security lies in unlimited nuclear superiority."
10/1963 "NATO leaders were disturbed in October when US Deputy Defense Secretary Roswell Gilpatric, speaking in Chicago, declared that American forces abroad could be thinned out without weakening the nation's capacity to deal with Soviet aggression. This speech, coming in the midst of Operation Big Lift' in which the United States flew a 15,000-man division from Texas to West Germany, suggested that henceforth the United States would station more of its troops at home." (1964 Collier's Encyclopedia Yearbook)
11/1/1963 Secretary of the Navy Fred Korth resigned. John McClellan, chairman of the Permanent Investigations Committee, continued looking into the activities of Billie Sol Estes and Bobby Baker. During this investigation evidence emerged that Lyndon B. Johnson was also involved in political corruption. This included the award of a $7 billion contract for a fighter plane, the TFX, to General Dynamics, a company based in Texas. It was discovered that the Continental National Bank of Fort Worth was the principal money source for the General Dynamics plant. As a result of this revelation Korth resigned from office.
11/19/1963 Look magazine ran a photo essay by Fletcher Knebel on the making of the film Seven Days in May. The journalist revealed the rampant anxieties that the film's production had set off in Washington. "At the outset of filming, the moviemakers had a call from still another arm of government. The Secret Service was alarmed at a spurious report that the movie involved a President's assassination."
11/21/1963 The Dallas Times Herald "Final Edition" for November 21, 1963 reported "U2 Found in Gulf; Pilot Not in Jet." It was believed to have been on a routine recon mission over Cuba before it left a visible oil slick in the Caribbean.
11/22/1963
12:40pm In Washington, McGeorge Bundy and Commander Oliver Hallet man the Situation Room in the White House. Much of their information is coming from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in the Pentagon. Officials in the Pentagon are calling the White House switchboard at the Dallas-Sheraton Hotel asking who is now in command. An officer -- a member of the Presidential party -- will eventually grab the microphone and assure the Pentagon that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and the Joint Chiefs of Staff are now the President.
The day Kennedy was assassinated, Paramount Pictures, the distributor of the film Seven Days in May, planned to run an ad for the film, using a quote from one of its fictional military conspirators: "Impeach him, hell. There are better ways of getting rid of him." The studio quickly yanked the ad at the last minute, fearing it was too provocative, "narrowly avoiding an embarrassing coincidence on the very day the president was shot," Variety reported 12/4/1963.
1:50 PM Around this time, says FBI agent Jim Hosty, "I learned after the assassination from two independent sources [that] fully armed warplanes were sent screaming toward Cuba. Just before they entered Cuban airspace, they were hastily called back...the entire US military went on alert. The Pentagon ordered us to Defense Condition 3...Def Con 3..." (Hosty, Assignment Oswald p219) These planes probably would have been launched from the U.S. Strike Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida.
A cable from U.S. Army Intelligence in Texas, dated November 22, 1963, telling the Strike Command (falsely) that Oswald had defected to Cuba in 1959 and was "a card-carrying member of the Communist Party." (Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press), 1966), 275; Deep Politics II, 80-85.)
M.S. Arnoni, writing in December 1963 in The Minority of One (published January 1964):
" Let us make the "fantastic" assumption that President Lyndon Johnson and Attorney-General Robert F. Kennedy know or believe that the murder was planned by a group of high-ranking officers who would stop at nothing to end American-Soviet negotiations. However strong their desire to avenge John F. Kennedy, what course would be open to them? To move against such formidable conspirators might start a disastrous chain of events. It could lead to American troops shooting at other American troops. It could lead to a direct take-over by a military clique. To avert such catastrophes, it might well be considered prudent to pretend utter ignorance, in the hope that the conspirators might be removed from power discreetly, at a later date, one by one.
Of course, this theory sounds absolutely fantastic. But if we are to think about the issues without "patriotic" prejudice, it is necessary to test its plausibility by imagining it to be an explanation of the assassination of the head of another country. Few people in America would have difficulty accepting such a theory about the assassination of a Soviet, Latin American or Southeast Asian leader; and chances are that its incredulity in our own case is merely a measure of our ill-conceived national exceptionalism."
1/29/1964 Stanley Kubrick's satirical anti-nuclear, anti-Cold War film, Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb, premiered. The NYT fears that it shows "contempt for our whole military establishment" and the Washington Post calls it "anti-American." It concerns a mad general who is convinced that the Communists are polluting his 'precious bodily fluids' and decides to launch a nuclear strike. The President tries to recall the bombers, while battling with his hawkish advisers. The film's London release date (12-12-63) was pushed backed until 1964 due to the assassination. The screening for the critics was to be shown on 11/22/63, but was cancelled when word of the President's death was announced. Also, the line "A fella could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas" was originally "A fella could have a pretty good weekend in Dallas," but was changed after the assassination.
2/12/1964 The John Frankenheimer film Seven Days in May premieres. It was filmed apparently in spring-summer 1963. Originally a bestselling political thriller by Charles Waldo Bailey II and Fletcher Knebel (published 1962 by Harper and Row). It concerns a liberal President who makes a disarmament treaty with the Soviets, only to find his hard-line Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff plotting to oust him in a coup. The coup is designed to take place during wargames maneuvers, which the President is to attend as a spectator, while the Vice President and much of the cabinet are out of the country. In the end, the attempted coup is hidden from the country and the plotters in the JCS are forced to resign; the reason given to the public is their differences with the President over the treaty.
2/28/1964 Robert Kennedy did a recorded interview with John Bartlow Martin. He and JFK anticipated that LBJ would be the front-runner in 1968, and they wanted to back McNamara: "The President didn't really have much respect for Johnson...as he said to Jackie on Thursday night, November 21 [1963], Lyndon Johnson was incapable of telling the truth...It wasn't until after the Bay of Pigs that [JFK] found out that he couldn't rely on people [in the military and the CIA]..."
3/1, 4/13, 4/30 and 5/14/1964 Robert Kennedy, in a series of recorded interviews with John Bartlow Martin, recalled that JFK had been strongly assured by the CIA and military that the Bay of Pigs plan would succeed: "If he hadn't gone ahead with it, everybody would have said it showed he had no courage because...it was Eisenhower's plan, Eisenhower's people all said it would succeed...We found out later that, despite the President's orders that no American forces would be used, the first two people who landed on the Bay of Pigs were Americans - CIA sent them in....It was clearly understood in all the instructions that there weren't going to be any military forces of the United States." They had been repeatedly assured that even if the invasion went badly, the Cubans could disappear into the mountains and become guerrillas. "It turned out that, when they talked about this guerrilla territory, it was guerrilla territory back in 1890. Now it was a swamp...After Cuba [JFK] continuously prodded and probed to bring out all the facts...he made an effort to find out himself...I then became involved on every major and all the international questions...the President spoke to me about becoming head of the CIA. I said I didn't want to...I don't know who suggested John McCone originally. Maybe Scoop Jackson did...The President was never very enthusiastic about the [nuclear] testing...Most of the testing was aimed at developing smaller bombs with bigger punch. He wasn't convinced that was so necessary...There was a strong feeling by the scientific community that we should test...He reached the conclusion that probably it was worthwhile [staying in Vietnam] for psychological, [world] political reasons more than anything else."
He was asked if JFK was "concerned about the rightist upsurge" in the country; RFK replied, "Not really, no....He thought it was silly, that [Gen.] Walker was crazy...But it was more humorous than anything else." He recalled that JFK's policy in Latin America was to do more than just side with anti-Communist dictatorships. He denied that the administration was behind the Trujillo assassination, then added, "To my knowledge, this isn't true. I got into that planning, and I expect I probably would have known...Lyndon Johnson said to Pierre Salinger that he wasn't sure but that the assassination of President Kennedy didn't take place in retribution for his participation in the assassinations of Trujillo and President Diem...divine retribution...There was never any intention of dropping [LBJ from the ticket]. There was never even any discussion about dropping him...After the missiles [crisis], Dean Rusk said that Castro would collapse or be replaced within two months."
RFK confirmed that Kennedy was trying to improve relations with Castro in 1963, but only if Castro cut off military ties with the Soviets and stopped trying to export revolution. He said that there were no assassination attempts on Castro, not even any planning for it. He commented that when JFK visited Venezuela "we had a real check on whether all the Communists and fellow travelers were picked up and the guards were adequate...I often think that's the kind of arrangement when you were going into a crazy city like Dallas, Texas. It should have been done." He emphasized that JFK thought Vietnam was very important to the security of the whole region, had no intention of completely pulling out, but also was not going to go in with combat troops: "because everybody, including General MacArthur, felt that land conflict between our troops - white troops and Asian - would only end in disaster. So we went in as advisers to try to get the Vietnamese to fight, themselves, because we couldn't win the war for them." He was asked, "And if the Vietnamese were about to lose it, would he propose to go in on land if he had to?" RFK replied, "We'd face that when we came to it...we were winning the war in 1962 and 1963. Up until May or so of 1963, the situation was getting progressively better." He recalled that on the question of supporting a coup in Saigon, "the government split in two," with JFK, Taylor, McNamara and McCone opposed to it. (RFK In His Own Words)
2/27/1965 Robert Kennedy records an oral history interview with Art Schlesinger:
"The Bay of Pigs was the best thing that happened to the administration, because if it hadn't been for the Bay of Pigs, we would have sent troops into Laos...[JFK] started asking questions that were not asked at the Bay of Pigs..." He recalled that the JCS told him they could land 1000 troops a day into Laos, but when Kennedy asked how the early arrivals would fight off thousands of Pathet Lao guerillas, "Well, they said, they really hadn't thought about that....They just wanted to go in and drop bombs on people. Even after the Cuban missile crisis, two of the Chiefs of Staff were really mad. One of them suggested that we go and bomb them anyway on Monday, and the other one said, 'We've been sold out.'....LeMay and Anderson. That's really the reason why the President got rid of Anderson." He said that LBJ played little part in foreign policy: "he was never in on any of the real meetings...he was their for the first meeting, I think. Then he went to Hawaii...He wasn't there at all when the decisions were being made. He came back on the Sunday night before the Russians withdrew their missiles from Cuba...He was displeased with what we were doing, although he never made it clear what he would do. He said he had the feeling that we were being too weak...[LBJ] liked Diem...Johnson is...incapable of telling the truth...And my experience with him since then is that he lies all the time. I'm telling you, he just lies continuously, about everything. In every conversation I have with him, he lies. As I've said, he lies even when he doesn't have to...At one time, you know, I liked John Connally. I don't like him now...He's been very ungracious. I really dislike him..."
2/1967 I.F. Stone wrote that "it is the prestige of the Machine that is at stake in Vietnam. It is Boeing and General Electric and Goodyear and General Dynamics. It is the electronic range finder and the amphibious truck and the night-piercing radar. It is the defoliant, and the herbicide, and the deodorant, and the depilatory. It is the products and the brand names we have been conditioned since childhood to revere. Down there in the jungles, unregenerate, ingenius, tricky...emerged a strange creature whose potency we had almost forgotten - Man."
2/20/1967 Retired Gen. David M. Shoup, former Marine Corps Commandant, told the Senate, "You read, you're televised to, you're radioed to, you're preached to, that it is necessary that we have our armed forces fight, get killed and maimed, and kill and maim other human beings including women and children because now is the time we must stop some kind of unwanted ideology from creeping up on this nation. The place we chose to do this is 8000 miles away...I don't think the whole of South East Asia, as related to the present and future safety and freedom of the people of this country, is worth the life or limb of a single American. I believe that if we had and would keep our dirty, bloody, dollar-crooked fingers out of the business of these nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own."
Sen. Thruston B. Morton (R-Kentucky) warned in a filmed interview (probably 1968's "In The Year of the Pig"): "I think that there's a great danger in this country because of the fact that so much of our economy is geared in the military area. There is grave danger of the military-industrial alliance of a kind actually affecting policy."
2/24/1968 Gen. James M. Gavin wrote an article in the Saturday Evening Post: "There has been much speculation about what President Kennedy would or would not have done in Vietnam had he lived. Having discussed military affairs with him often and in detail for 15 years, I know he was totally opposed to the introduction of combat troops in Southeast Asia. His public statements just before his murder support this view. Let us not lay on the dead the blame for our own failures."