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JFK and the UNSPEAKABLE

Why He Died and Why It Matters

JAMES W. DOUGLASS

Founded in 1970, Orbis Books endeavors to publish works that enlighten the mind,

nourish the spirit, and challenge the conscience. The publishing arm of the Mary-

knoll Fathers and Brothers, Orbis seeks to explore the global dimensions of the Chris-

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Copyright © 2008 by James W. Douglass.

Published by Orbis Books, Maryknoll, NY 10545-0308.

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Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Douglass, James W.

JFK and the unspeakable : why he died and why it matters / James W.

Douglass.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-57075-755-6

1. Kennedy, John F. (John Fitzgerald), 1917-1963—Assassination. 2.

Presidents—United States—Biography. I. Title.

E842.9.D68 2008

364.152'4—dc22

2007031902

1

CHAPTER ONE

A Cold Warrior Turns

As Albert Einstein said, with the unleashing of the power of the atom,

humanity reached a new age. The atomic bombing of Hiroshima marked

a crossroads: either we would end war or war would end us. In her reflec-

tions on Hiroshima in the September 1945 issue of the Catholic Worker,

Dorothy Day wrote: “Mr. Truman was jubilant. President Truman. True

man; what a strange name, come to think of it. We refer to Jesus Christ as

true God and true Man. Truman is a true man of his time in that he was

jubilant.”1

President Truman was aboard the cruiser Augusta, returning from the

Potsdam conference, when he was informed of the United States’ incinera-

tion of Hiroshima by the atomic bomb. Truman was exultant. He declared,

“This is the greatest thing in history!” He went from person to person on the

ship, officers and crew alike, telling them the great news like a town crier.

Dorothy Day observed: “‘Jubilant’ the newspapers said. Jubilate Deo. We

have killed 318,000 Japanese.”

Seventeen years later, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, another president,

John F. Kennedy, under enormous pressure, almost committed the United

States to a nuclear holocaust that would have multiplied the explosive power

of the Hiroshima bomb thousands of times. Kennedy’s saving grace was that

unlike Truman he recognized the evil of nuclear weapons. Kennedy resisted

the Joint Chiefs of Staff and most of his civilian advisers, who pressured him

for a preemptive attack on Soviet missile sites in Cuba. Thanks to the sheer

grace of God, to Kennedy’s resistance to his advisers, and to Nikita

Khrushchev’s willingness to retreat, humanity survived the crisis.

Kennedy, however, survived it for only a little more than a year. As we

shall see, because of his continuing turn from nuclear war toward a vision of

peace in the thirteen months remaining to him, he was executed by the

powers that be.

2

JFK and the Unspeakable

Two critical questions converge at Kennedy’s assassination. The first is:

Why did his assassins risk exposure and a shameful downfall by covertly

murdering a beloved president? The second is: Why was John Kennedy pre-

pared to give his life for peace, when he saw death coming?

The second question may be key to the first, because there is nothing so

threatening to systemic evil as those willing to stand against it regardless of

the consequences. So we will try to see this story initially through the life of

John Kennedy, to understand why he became so threatening to the most pow-

erful military-economic coalition in history that its wielders of power were

willing to risk everything they had in order to kill him.

In assessing the formation of John Kennedy’s character, biographers have

zeroed in on his upbringing as a rich young man in a dysfunctional mar-

riage. Seen through that lens, Kennedy was a reckless playboy from youth to

death, under the abiding influence of a domineering, womanizing father and

an emotionally distant, strictly Catholic mother. These half-truths miss the

mark. They do not explain the later fact of President Kennedy’s steely resist-

ance to the pressures of a military-intelligence elite focused on waging war.

Kennedy’s life was formed, first of all, by death—the hovering angel of

death reaching down for his life. He suffered long periods of illness. He saw

death approach repeatedly—from scarlet fever when he was two and three

years old, from a succession of childhood and teen illnesses, from a chronic

blood condition in boarding school, from what doctors thought was a com-

bination of colitis and ulcers, from intestinal ailments during his years at

Harvard, from osteoporosis and crippling back problems intensified by war

injuries that plagued him the rest of his life, from the adrenal insufficiency of

Addison’s disease2 . . . To family and friends, Jack Kennedy always seemed

to be sick and dying.

Yet he exuded an ironic joy in life. Both the weaknesses and strengths of

his character drew on his deeply held belief that death would come soon.

“The point is,” he told a friend during a long talk on death, “that you’ve got

to live every day like it’s your last day on earth. That’s what I’m doing.”3

From that perspective, he could indeed be reckless, as he was in sexual

escapades that after his death would become a media focus on his life. He

could also be courageous to the point of heroism. Death was not to be feared.

As president, he often joked about his death’s approach. The angel of death

was his companion. By smiling at his own death, he was free to resist oth-

ers’ deaths.

John Kennedy’s World War II experience was characterized by a willing-

ness to give his life for his friends. Two years before the Hiroshima bomb-

ing, Kennedy was a PT boat commander in the South Pacific. On the night

of August 1-2, 1943, he was at the wheel of his PT 109, patrolling Blackett

Strait in the Solomon Islands, a corridor of water used by Japanese destroy-

ers. It was a moonless night. A ship suddenly broke through the black,

A Cold Warrior Turns

3

headed for the 109. As a man forward shouted, “Ship at two o’clock!”

Kennedy spun the wheel. The Japanese destroyer smashed into the 109 and

cut a giant strip off its starboard side. “This is how it feels to be killed,”

Kennedy thought, while being thrown through the cockpit. There was a ter-

rific roar, as the gasoline aboard went up in flames.

The section of the boat Kennedy was on stayed afloat. He discovered four

of his twelve crewmembers still on it. Two others were never seen or heard

from again. Six more were scattered in the water but alive. Kennedy, who had

been on the Harvard swimming team, swam through the dark to shouts,

finding his badly burned engineer, McMahon. He coaxed and cajoled others

not to give up, then towed McMahon a hundred yards back to the floating

hulk identified by a crew member’s blinking light. All the survivors in the

water reached the tilted deck and collapsed on it. They wondered how long

it would take for them to be rescued by PTs from their base on Rendova

Island, forty miles away.

When daylight and noon came with no rescue, the group abandoned the

sinking hulk. They swam to a small, deserted island, in the midst of larger

islands with Japanese soldiers. Nine of the crew held onto a two-by-six tim-

ber and kicked and paddled their way to the island. Kennedy again towed

McMahon, holding a strap from McMahon’s life preserver in his teeth.

Kennedy would swim in ten-minute spurts, then pause to rest and check

on McMahon. A chronicler of this episode described it from McMahon’s

point of view:

“Being a sensitive person, McMahon would have found the swim unbear-

able if he had realized that Kennedy was hauling him through three miles or

so of water with a bad back. He was miserable enough without knowing it.

Floating on his back with his burned hands trailing at his sides, McMahon

could see little but the sky and the flattened cone of [the volcanic island]

Kolombangara. He could not see the other men, though while all of them

were still together, he could hear them puffing and splashing. He could not

see Kennedy but he could feel the tugs forward with each stretch of

Kennedy’s shoulder muscles and could hear his labored breathing.

“McMahon tried kicking now and then but he was extremely weary. The

swim seemed endless, and he doubted that it would lead to salvation. He

was hungry and thirsty and fearful that they would be attacked by sharks.

The awareness that he could do nothing to save himself from the currents,

the sharks or the enemy oppressed him. His fate, he well knew, was at the end

of a strap in Kennedy’s teeth.”4

With Kennedy and McMahon leading the way, it took the eleven men

four hours to reach the little island. They staggered up the beach and ducked

under trees, barely avoiding a Japanese barge that chugged by and failed to

see them.

When early evening came with no sign of help, Kennedy told the crew he

would swim from the island out into Ferguson Passage, a mile and a half

away, where the PT boats usually patrolled after dark. He took the 109’s

4

JFK and the Unspeakable

lantern, wrapped in a life jacket, to signal the boats. Kennedy swam for half

an hour, forded a reef, then swam for another hour, reaching his intended

point of interception. He treaded water, waiting in the darkness. After a

while, he saw the flares of an action beyond the island of Gizo, ten miles

away. The PT boats had taken a different route.

Kennedy tried to swim back to his men. He was very tired. The swift cur-

rent carried him past the island, toward open water.

New Yorker writer John Hersey interviewed PT 109 crewmembers and

wrote their story of survival. He described Kennedy’s hours of drifting

toward almost certain death: “He thought he had never known such deep

trouble, but something he did shows that unconsciously he had not given up

hope. He dropped his shoes, but he held onto the heavy lantern, his symbol

of contact with his fellows. He stopped trying to swim. He seemed to stop

caring. His body drifted through the wet hours, and he was very cold. His

mind was a jumble. A few hours before he had wanted desperately to get to

the base at Rendova. Now he only wanted to get back to the little island he

had left that night, but he didn’t try to get there; he just wanted to. His mind

seemed to float away from his body. Darkness and time took the place of a

mind in his skull. For a long time he slept, or was crazy, or floated in a chill

trance.

“The currents of the Solomon Islands are queer. The tide shoves and sucks

through the islands and makes the currents curl in odd patterns. It was a

fateful pattern into which Jack Kennedy drifted. He drifted in it all night.

His mind was blank, but his fist was tightly clenched on the kapok around

the lantern. The current moved in a huge circle—west past Gizo, then north

and east past Kolombangara, then south into Ferguson Passage. Early in the

morning the sky turned from black to gray, and so did Kennedy’s mind. Light

came to both at about six. Kennedy looked around and saw that he was

exactly where he had been the night before when he saw the flares beyond

Gizo.”5

Kennedy swam back to the island, stumbled up on the beach, and col-

lapsed in the arms of his crew. He said later of the experience, “I never prayed

so much in my life.”6

As is well known from the story of PT 109, eventually Melanesian natives

came to the aid of the eleven Americans. The natives carried Kennedy’s SOS

message, scratched on a coconut shell, to an Australian Navy coastwatcher,

Reg Evans, who was working behind enemy lines. Evans radioed the U.S.

Navy for assistance.

In the meantime, Kennedy and fellow officer Barney Ross, not realizing the

nearness of their rescue, almost died in another failed effort to signal PTs at

night in Ferguson Passage. They found a dugout canoe, and paddled it into

high waves in the darkness. The canoe was swamped. The waves threw the

two men against a reef, but they again survived.

Kennedy’s crew never forgot his commitment to their lives. They reunited

with him periodically after the war. What Kennedy took first from his war

A Cold Warrior Turns

5

experience was a heightened sense of the precious value of his friends’ lives.

Among the wartime deaths he mourned besides the PT boat casualties were

those of his brother Joe Kennedy, Jr., and brother-in-law Billy Hartington. He

knew many others who died. He reflected, too, on the repeated nearness of

his own death. As we have seen, since childhood chronically poor health had

brought him near death many times. Illness, pain, and the process of almost

dying came as a lifelong discipline.

After JFK’s assassination, Robert Kennedy wrote of his brother: “At least

one half of the days that he spent on this earth were days of intense physical

pain. He had scarlet fever when he was very young, and serious back trou-

ble when he was older. In between he had almost every other conceivable

ailment. When we were growing up together we used to laugh about the

great risk a mosquito took in biting Jack Kennedy—with some of his blood

the mosquito was almost sure to die. He was in Chelsea Naval Hospital for

an extended period of time after the war, had a major and painful operation

on his back in 1955, campaigned on crutches in 1958. In 1951 on a trip we

took around the world he became ill. We flew to the military hospital in Oki-

nawa and he had a temperature of over 106 degrees. They didn’t think he

would live.

“But during all this time, I never heard him complain. I never heard him

say anything that would indicate that he felt God had dealt with him unjustly.

Those who knew him well would know he was suffering only because his

face was a little whiter, the lines around his eyes were a little deeper, his

words a little sharper. Those who did not know him well detected nothing.”7

After the PT 109 crew’s rescue, Kennedy wondered at the purpose of a life

that had been spared again, this time through the circular pattern of deep-

running currents and the compassion of Melanesian natives.8

Preventing another war became John Kennedy’s main motivation for

entering politics after the Second World War. When he announced his can-

didacy for Congress on April 22, 1946, in Boston, Kennedy sounded more

like he was running for president on a peace ticket than for a first term as a

Democratic member of Congress from Massachusetts: “What we do now

will shape the history of civilization for many years to come. We have a

weary world trying to bind the wounds of a fierce struggle. That is dire

enough. What is infinitely far worse is that we have a world which has

unleashed the terrible powers of atomic energy. We have a world capable of

destroying itself. The days which lie ahead are most difficult ones. Above all,

day and night, with every ounce of ingenuity and industry we possess, we

must work for peace. We must not have another war.”9

Where had this twenty-eight-year-old candidate for Congress forged such

a vision of peace in the nuclear age?

After his bad back and colitis had forced his discharge from the Navy,

Kennedy had attended the San Francisco conference that founded the United

Nations in April-May 1945, as a journalist for the Hearst press. He later

told friends it was his experience at the UN meeting and at the Potsdam con-

6

JFK and the Unspeakable

ference in July that made him realize that the political arena, “whether you

really liked it or not, was the place where you personally could do the most

to prevent another war.”10

However, what he witnessed in San Francisco, even before the war was

over, was an intense conflict between wartime allies. On April 30 he warned

his readers that “this week at San Francisco” would be “the real test of

whether the Russians and the Americans can get along.”11

The power struggle he saw at the UN moved Kennedy to write to a PT

boat friend: “When I think of how much this war has cost us, of the deaths

of Cy and Peter and Orv and Gil and Demi and Joe and Billy and all of those

thousands and millions who have died with them—when I think of all those

gallant acts that I have seen or anyone has seen who has been to the war—

it would be a very easy thing to feel disappointed and somewhat betrayed . . .

You have seen battlefields where sacrifice was the order of the day and to

compare that sacrifice to the timidity and selfishness of the nations gathered

at San Francisco must inevitably be disillusioning.”12

In a notebook, Kennedy identified an ultimate solution to the problem of

war and the difficulty in realizing it: “Admittedly world organization with

common obedience to law would be solution. Not that easy. If there is not

the feeling that war is the ultimate evil, a feeling strong enough to drive them

together, then you can’t work out this internationalist plan.”13

“Things cannot be forced from the top,” the future president wrote his PT

boat friend. He then expressed a prophetic, long-range view: “The interna-

tional relinquishing of sovereignty would have to spring from the people—

it would have to be so strong that the elected delegates would be turned out

of office if they failed to do it . . . War will exist until that distant day when

the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the

warrior does today.”14

Kennedy had reason to refer again to that distant day of the conscientious

objector while he was traveling through postwar Europe in the summer of

1945. On July 1 in London, he had dinner with William Douglas-Home, a

former captain in the British army who had been sentenced to a year in jail

for refusing an order to fire on civilians. Douglas-Home became his lifelong

friend. Kennedy observed in his diary, “prowess in war is still deeply

respected. The day of the conscientious objector is not yet at hand.”15

In the same diary, he anticipated the impact of world-destructive weapons.

In the entry dated July 10, 1945, six days before the first atomic test in Alam-

ogordo, New Mexico, Kennedy envisioned such a terrible weapon and spec-

ulated on its meaning in relation to Russia: “The clash [with Russia] may be

finally and indefinitely postponed by the eventual discovery of a weapon so

horrible that it will truthfully mean the abolishment of all the nations

employing it.”16

During his legislative career in the House and Senate, John Kennedy’s aspi-

rations to be a post–World War II peacemaker were submerged beneath the

seas of the Cold War. His more bellicose views in the fifties reflected the book

A Cold Warrior Turns

7

he had written in 1940, Why England Slept, an expansion of his Harvard

senior thesis. Kennedy’s book found Britain too slow in rearming to resist

Nazi Germany. He applied the lesson uncritically to United States–Soviet

policies. As a freshman senator in June 1954, he led a Democratic effort to

add $350 million to the defense budget to restore two Army divisions that

President Eisenhower had cut and thus guarantee “a clear margin of victory

over our enemies.”17 Kennedy was challenging Secretary of State John Fos-

ter Dulles in his reliance on the massive threat of nuclear weapons. Kennedy’s

amendment failed, but his commitment to a “flexible” Cold War strategy

emphasizing conventional forces and “smaller” nuclear weapons would be

carried over into his presidency. It was an illusory policy supported by

Democrats that could easily have led to the same global destruction threat-

ened by the Dulles doctrine.

In 1958, Senator John Kennedy delivered a major speech attacking the

Eisenhower administration for allowing a “missile gap” to open up between

allegedly superior Soviet forces and those of the United States. Kennedy

repeated the charge of a missile gap in his successful 1960 presidential cam-

paign, developing it into an argument for increased military spending. When

he became president, his science adviser, Jerome Wiesner, informed him in

February 1961 that “the missile gap was a fiction”—to which Kennedy

replied with a single expletive, “delivered,” Wiesner said, “more in anger

than in relief.”18 The United States in fact held an overwhelming strategic

advantage over the Soviets’ missile force.19 Whether or not Kennedy already

suspected the truth, he had taken a Cold War myth, had campaigned on it,

and now partly on its basis, was engaged in a dangerous military buildup as

president. Marcus Raskin, an early Kennedy administration analyst who left

his access to power to become its critic, summarized the ominous direction

in which the new president was headed: “The United States intended under

Kennedy to develop a war-fighting capability on all levels of violence from

thermonuclear war to counterinsurgency.”20

Yet, as we shall see, Raskin also observed a significant change in Kennedy

after the Cuban Missile Crisis, a development of more positive instincts in the

president that were already in evidence. Even in his years espousing Cold

War principles of defense, Senator Kennedy had occasionally broken ranks

with the West on its colonial wars, particularly in Indochina and Algeria.

Speaking in the Senate on April 6, 1954, Kennedy critiqued predictions of a

U.S.-sponsored French victory in Vietnam over Ho Chi Minh’s revolutionary

forces. “No amount of American military assistance in Indochina,” Kennedy

warned in words he would be forced to recall as president, “can conquer an

enemy which is everywhere and at the same time nowhere, ‘an enemy of the

people’ which has the sympathy and covert support of the people.”21 In an

exchange with Senator Everett Dirksen, Kennedy said he envisioned two

peace treaties for Vietnam, “one granting the Vietnamese people complete

independence,” the other “a tie binding them to the French Union on the

basis of full equality.”22

8

JFK and the Unspeakable

In 1957 Kennedy came out in support of Algerian independence. That

spring he talked with Algerians who were seeking a hearing at the United

Nations for their national liberation movement. In July 1957, he gave a

major Senate speech in their support, saying, “No amount of mutual polite-

ness, wishful thinking, nostalgia, or regret should blind either France or the

United States to the fact that, if France and the West at large are to have a

continuing influence in North Africa . . . the essential first step is the inde-

pendence of Algeria.”23 The speech created a furor. Kennedy was widely

attacked for imperiling the unity of NATO. His biographer, Arthur M.

Schlesinger, Jr., wrote of the episode, “Even Democrats drew back. Dean

Acheson attacked him scornfully. Adlai Stevenson thought he had gone too

far. For the next year or two, respectable people cited Kennedy’s Algerian

speech as evidence of his irresponsibility in foreign affairs.”24 However, in

Europe the speech provoked positive attention, and in Africa excitement.

When Kennedy then became chair of the African Subcommittee, he told

the Senate in 1959: “Call it nationalism, call it anti-colonialism, call it what

you will, Africa is going through a revolution . . . The word is out—and

spreading like wildfire in nearly a thousand languages and dialects—that it

is no longer necessary to remain forever poor or in bondage.” He therefore

advocated “sympathy with the independence movement, programs of eco-

nomic and educational assistance and, as the goal of American policy, ‘a

strong Africa.’”25 Historians have scarcely noticed JFK’s continuing support

for a free Africa during his 1960 presidential campaign and in the presidency

itself, documented in Richard D. Mahoney’s comprehensive study JFK:

Ordeal in Africa.26

Equally overlooked, and in tension with his campaign claim of a missile

gap, was Kennedy’s renewal of his purpose in entering politics: the attain-

ment of peace in the nuclear age. As the 1960 primaries increased his presi-

dential prospects, Kennedy told a journalist visiting his Senate office that the

most valuable resource he could bring to the presidency, based on personal

experience, was his horror of war. Kennedy said he “had read the books of

great military strategists—Carl Von Clausewitz, Alfred Thayer Mahan, and

Basil Henry Liddell Hart—and he wondered if their theories of total vio-

lence made sense in the nuclear age. He expressed his contempt for the old

military minds, exempting the U.S.’s big three, George Marshall, Douglas

MacArthur, and Dwight Eisenhower . . . War with all of its modern horror

would be his biggest concern if he got to the White House, Kennedy said.”27

The journalist who had listened to Senator Kennedy’s 1960 reflections on

war, Hugh Sidey, wrote thirty-five years later in a retrospective essay: “If I

had to single out one element in Kennedy’s life that more than anything else

influenced his later leadership it would be a horror of war, a total revulsion

over the terrible toll that modern war had taken on individuals, nations, and

societies, and the even worse prospects in the nuclear age as noted earlier. It

ran even deeper than his considerable public rhetoric on the issue.”28

In his inaugural address on January 20, 1961, John Kennedy’s Cold War

A Cold Warrior Turns

9

convictions were interlaced with statements of hope for people around the

world who were unaccustomed to having a U.S. president address their con-

cerns. He both inspired and warned them. For example, emerging nonaligned

leaders, some of whom received Kennedy’s support in the Senate, heard this

pledge:

“To those new states whom we welcome to the ranks of the free, we

pledge our word that one form of colonial control shall not have passed

away merely to be replaced by a far more iron tyranny. We shall not always

expect to find them supporting our view. But we shall always hope to find

them strongly supporting their own freedom—and to remember that, in the

past, those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended

up inside.”29

The new president’s tiger parable could cut in opposite directions. What

to an American audience was a cunning communist tiger was to nonaligned

listeners at least as likely to have capitalist as communist stripes. That would

prove to be the case in Kennedy’s presidency by his support of U.S. counter -

insurgent warfare in South Vietnam, where a client government would then

wind up inside the U.S. tiger it had been riding.

One of Kennedy’s worst decisions as president would be to develop the

role of counterinsurgent warfare by enlarging the U.S. Army’s Special Forces,

then re-baptizing them as the Green Berets. Kennedy promoted the Green

Berets as a response to communist guerrillas, failing to recognize that counter-

insurgent warfare would turn into a form of terrorism. The idea that the

United States could deploy Green Beret forces in client states “to win the

hearts and minds of the people” was a contradiction that would become a

negative part of Kennedy’s legacy.

In his inaugural address, the new president recognized no such conflict. He

combined his pledge to the world’s poor with a disclaimer of Cold War

motives: “To those peoples in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling

to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them

help themselves, for whatever period is required—not because the communists

may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right.”

At the heart of his inaugural, Kennedy turned to the enemy and his own

deepest preoccupation, peace: “Finally, to those nations who would make

themselves our adversary, we offer not a pledge but a request: that both sides

begin anew the quest for peace, before the dark powers of destruction

unleashed by science engulf all humanity in planned or accidental self-

destruction.”

Again there was the warning: “We dare not tempt them with weakness.

For only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be certain

beyond doubt that they will never be employed.”

And the hope: “Let both sides explore what problems unite us instead of

belaboring those problems which divide us . . .

“Let both sides unite to heed in all corners of the earth the command of

Isaiah—to ‘undo the heavy burdens . . . (and) let the oppressed go free.’”

10

JFK and the Unspeakable

What is noteworthy about John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address is that it

reflects accurately the profound tensions of his political philosophy. In the

nuclear age, how were his experience of the horror of war and his commit-

ment to peacemaking to be reconciled with his passionate resistance to a

totalitarian enemy? From the lives he had seen lost in World War II, Kennedy

had envisioned in 1945 “the day of the conscientious objector,” with an

international relinquishing of sovereignty and the abolition of war by pop-

ular demand. However, as he took his oath of office, no such day was at

hand. Moreover, John Kennedy remained a Cold Warrior in his under-

standing of the means needed to resist tyranny—armaments that had now

gone beyond all measure of destruction. For the sake of both peace and free-

dom, he therefore had no way out except to negotiate a just peace with the

enemy, within the context of the most dangerous political conflict in world

history. He would learn just how dangerous it was, from his own side of that

conflict, to push through such negotiations.

As the reader knows from the introduction to this book, my perspective on

the assassination of President Kennedy comes from the writings of the

Trappist monk Thomas Merton, perhaps an unlikely source. The two men’s

personal histories were worlds apart. While John Kennedy in 1943 was being

carried by the movements of a Pacific current, Thomas Merton was a novice

monk at the Abbey of Gethsemani in the hills of Kentucky. Yet one can dis-

cern a providential hand saving each of their lives for a further purpose. As

readers of Merton’s autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, know, the

ex-Cambridge and Columbia University man-about-campus came to Geth-

semani on currents as unpredictably merciful as those that brought John

Kennedy around to his dawn awakening in Blackett Strait and through a

series of life-threatening illnesses. What Kennedy half-dreamed that night in

the Pacific in relation to the little island his men were on could be said also

of Merton’s spiritual journey to Gethsemani. He didn’t try to get there. He

just wanted to, in a heartfelt prayer that had no fixed attachment to its goal.

Merton arriving at Gethsemani was like Kennedy stumbling up on the beach

and collapsing in the arms of his crew.

In the early sixties, Thomas Merton began responding to the imminent

threat of an inconceivable evil, total nuclear war. His writings on the nuclear

crisis, which drew him into what he called “the Unspeakable,” are an illu-

minating context in which to view the presidential struggles and Cold War

murder of John F. Kennedy. As Merton wrote impassioned articles protest-

ing the nuclear buildup, he became a controversial figure. His alarmed

monastic superiors ordered him to stop publishing on peace. Merton was

obedient, yet deeply determined to keep articulating a gospel truth, if not in

a forbidden format. Even before he experienced the inevitable crackdown

on his published work, he had already found another way to follow his con-

science—by writing a voluminous series of letters on peace.

A Cold Warrior Turns

11

For a year at the center of the Kennedy presidency, from October 1961

(shortly after the Berlin crisis) to October 1962 (just after the Cuban Missile

Crisis), Merton wrote letters on war and peace to a wide circle of corre-

spondents. They included psychologists Erich Fromm and Karl Stern, poet

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Archbishop Thomas Roberts, Ethel Kennedy, Dorothy

Day, Clare Boothel Luce, nuclear physicist Leo Szilard, novelist Henry Miller,

Shinzo Hamai, the mayor of Hiroshima, and Evora Arca de Sardinia, the

wife of a Cuban exile leader in the CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion. Mer-

ton collected over a hundred of these letters, had them mimeographed and

bound, and sent them out to friends in January 1963. He called this infor-

mal volume of reflections “The Cold War Letters.”

In his preface to the letters, Merton identified the forces in the United

States that threatened a nuclear holocaust: “In actual fact it would seem that

during the Cold War, if not during World War II, this country has become

frankly a warfare state built on affluence, a power structure in which the

interests of big business, the obsessions of the military, and the phobias of

political extremists both dominate and dictate our national policy. It also

seems that the people of the country are by and large reduced to passivity,

confusion, resentment, frustration, thoughtlessness and ignorance, so that

they blindly follow any line that is unraveled for them by the mass media.”30

Merton wrote that the protest in his letters was not only against the dan-

ger or horror of war. It was “not merely against physical destruction, still less

against physical danger, but against a suicidal moral evil and a total lack of

ethics and rationality with which international policies tend to be conducted.

True,” he added, “President Kennedy is a shrewd and sometimes adventur-

ous leader. He means well and has the highest motives, and he is, without

doubt, in a position sometimes so impossible as to be absurd.”31

As we follow “a shrewd and sometimes adventurous leader” on his jour-

ney into a deeper darkness than he ever faced in the Pacific, the letters of an

observer in a Kentucky monastery will serve as a commentary on a time that

placed John Kennedy “in a position sometimes so impossible as to be absurd.”

Merton did not always feel such sympathy for President Kennedy. In a

critical, prophetic letter a year earlier to his friend W. H. Ferry, he wrote: “I

have little confidence in Kennedy, I think he cannot fully measure up to the

magnitude of his task, and lacks creative imagination and the deeper kind of

sensitivity that is needed. Too much the Time and Life mentality, than which

I can imagine nothing further, in reality, from, say, Lincoln. What is needed

is really not shrewdness or craft, but what the politicians don’t have: depth,

humanity and a certain totality of self forgetfulness and compassion, not just

for individuals but for man as a whole: a deeper kind of dedication. Maybe,”

Merton speculates in an inspired insight, “Kennedy will break through into

that someday by miracle. But such people are before long marked out for

assassination.”32

Thomas Merton’s sense of what Kennedy needed to break through to,

and the likely consequences if he did so, call to mind a scene early in

12

JFK and the Unspeakable

Kennedy’s presidency. He had just met with Soviet premier Nikita

Khrushchev in Vienna. Late at night on the June 5, 1961, flight back to

Washington, the weary president asked his secretary Evelyn Lincoln if she

would please file the documents he had been working on. As she started to

clear the table, Lincoln noticed a little slip of paper that had fallen on the

floor. On it were two lines in Kennedy’s handwriting, a favorite saying of his

from Abraham Lincoln:

“I know there is a God—and I see a storm coming;

If he has a place for me, I believe that I am ready.”33

The summit meeting with Khrushchev had deeply disturbed Kennedy. The

revelation of a storm coming had occurred at the end of the meeting, as the

two men faced each other across a table. Kennedy’s gift to Khrushchev, a

model of the USS Constitution, lay between them. Kennedy pointed out that

the ship’s cannons had been able to fire half a mile and kill a few people. But

if he and Khrushchev failed to negotiate peace, the two of them could kill sev-

enty million people in the opening exchange of a nuclear war. Kennedy

looked at Khrushchev. Khrushchev gave him a blank stare, as if to say, “So

what?” Kennedy was shocked at what he felt was his counterpart’s lack of

response. “There was no area of accommodation with him,” he said later.34

Khrushchev may have felt the same way about Kennedy. The result of their

unsuccessful meeting would be an ever more threatening conflict. As Evelyn

Lincoln thought when she read what the president had written, “‘I see a

storm coming’ was no idle phrase.”35

While reflecting that night on such a storm, John Kennedy echoing Lin-

coln had written first to himself, “I know there is a God.” Thomas Merton

in his initial sense of Kennedy had doubted if JFK, by falling short of Lin-

coln’s character, was capable of weathering a storm. Kennedy, continuing

Lincoln’s saying, prayed and hoped that he was: “If [God] has a place for me,

I believe that I am ready.”

Merton saw that if Kennedy became what he needed to be, he would be

“marked out for assassination.” How clearly did Kennedy see the dangers to

himself of meeting the coming storm as faithfully as he hoped to?

The president’s friend Paul Fay, Jr., told of an incident that showed JFK

was keenly conscious of the peril of a military coup d’état. One summer week-

end in 1962 while out sailing with friends, Kennedy was asked what he

thought of Seven Days in May, a best-selling novel that described a military

takeover in the United States. JFK said he would read the book. He did so that

night. The next day Kennedy discussed with his friends the possibility of their

seeing such a coup in the United States. Consider that he said these words

after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion and before the Cuban Missile Crisis:

“It’s possible. It could happen in this country, but the conditions would

have to be just right. If, for example, the country had a young President, and

he had a Bay of Pigs, there would be a certain uneasiness. Maybe the mili-

tary would do a little criticizing behind his back, but this would be written

off as the usual military dissatisfaction with civilian control. Then if there

A Cold Warrior Turns

13

were another Bay of Pigs, the reaction of the country would be, ‘Is he too

young and inexperienced?’ The military would almost feel that it was their

patriotic obligation to stand ready to preserve the integrity of the nation,

and only God knows just what segment of democracy they would be defend-

ing if they overthrew the elected establishment.”

Pausing a moment, he went on, “Then, if there were a third Bay of Pigs,

it could happen.” Waiting again until his listeners absorbed his meaning, he

concluded with an old Navy phrase, “But it won’t happen on my watch.”36

On another occasion Kennedy said of the novel’s plot about a few mili-

tary commanders taking over the country, “I know a couple who might wish

they could.”37 The statement is cited by biographer Theodore Sorensen as a

joke. However, John Kennedy used humor in pointed ways, and Sorensen’s

preceding sentence is not a joke: “Communications between the Chiefs of

Staff and their Commander in Chief remained unsatisfactory for a large part

of his term.”38

Director John Frankenheimer was encouraged by President Kennedy to

film Seven Days in May “as a warning to the republic.”39 Frankenheimer

said, “The Pentagon didn’t want it done. Kennedy said that when we wanted

to shoot at the White House he would conveniently go to Hyannis Port that

weekend.”40

As we know, the young president John Kennedy did have a Bay of Pigs. It

was a covert project initiated by his predecessor, President Dwight D.

Eisenhower.41 By late summer 1960, when Kennedy became the Democratic

nominee for president, the CIA had already begun training fifteen hundred

Cuban exile troops at a secret base in Guatemala for an invasion of Cuba.42

As the new president in March 1961, Kennedy rejected the CIA’s current

Trinidad Plan for “an amphibious/airborne assault” on Cuba, favoring a

quiet landing at night in which there would be “no basis for American mil-

itary intervention.”43 When a skeptical Kennedy finally approved the CIA’s

revised plan for the Bay of Pigs landing in April, he reemphasized that he

would not intervene by introducing U.S. troops, even if the exile brigade

faced defeat on the beachhead. The CIA’s covert-action chief, Richard Bissell,

reassured him there would be only a minimum need for air strikes and that

Cubans on the island would join the brigade in a successful revolt against

Castro.44

At dawn on April 15, 1961, eight B-26 bombers of the Cuban Expedi-

tionary Force carried out air strikes to destroy the Cuban Air Force on the

ground, achieving only partial success. Premier Castro then ordered his pilots

“to sleep under the wings of the planes,” ready to take off immediately.45

The next night, as the exile brigade prepared for its overnight landing at the

Bay of Pigs, Kennedy’s National Security Adviser, McGeorge Bundy, phoned

CIA deputy director General Charles P. Cabell to say that “the dawn air

strikes the following morning should not be launched until planes can con-

14

JFK and the Unspeakable

duct them from a strip within the beachhead.”46 Since no such opportunity

came, this order in effect canceled the air strikes. Castro’s army surrounded

the invading force in the following days. The exile brigade surrendered on

April 19, 1961. More than one thousand members were taken prisoner.47

The new president had bitterly disappointed the CIA and the military by

his decision to accept defeat at the Bay of Pigs rather than escalate the bat-

tle. Kennedy realized after the fact that he had been drawn into a CIA

scenario that was a trap. Its authors assumed he would be forced by cir-

cumstances to drop his advance restrictions against the use of U.S. combat

forces.

How else, he asked his friends Dave Powers and Ken O’Donnell, could the

Joint Chiefs have approved such a plan? “They were sure I’d give in to them

and send the go-ahead order to the [Navy’s aircraft carrier] Essex,” he said.

“They couldn’t believe that a new President like me wouldn’t panic and try

to save his own face. Well, they had me figured all wrong.”48

The major players in deceiving Kennedy were his CIA advisers, especially

Director Allen Dulles. As Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., observed, “the Joint

Chiefs of Staff had only approved the Bay of Pigs. The CIA had invented it.”49

At his death Allen Dulles left the unpublished drafts of an article that

scholar Lucien S. Vandenbroucke has titled “The ‘Confessions’ of Allen

Dulles.” In these handwritten, coffee-stained notes, Dulles explained how

CIA advisers who knew better drew John Kennedy into a plan whose pre-

requisites for success contradicted the president’s own rules for engagement

that precluded any combat action by U.S. military forces. Although Dulles

and his associates knew this condition conflicted with the plan they were

foisting on Kennedy, they discreetly kept silent in the belief, Dulles wrote,

that “the realities of the situation” would force the president to carry through

to the end they wished:

“[We] did not want to raise these issues—in an [undecipherable word]

discussion—which might only harden the decision against the type of action

we required. We felt that when the chips were down—when the crisis arose

in reality, any action required for success would be authorized rather than

permit the enterprise to fail.”50 But again, as Kennedy said, “They had me fig-

ured all wrong.”

Four decades after the Bay of Pigs, we have learned that the CIA scenario

to trap Kennedy was more concrete than Dulles admitted in his handwritten

notes. A conference on the Bay of Pigs was held in Cuba March 23-25, 2001,

which included “ex-CIA operatives, retired military commanders, scholars,

and journalists.”51 News analyst Daniel Schorr reported on National Public

Radio that “from the many hours of talk and the heaps of declassified secret

documents” he had gained one new perception of the Bay of Pigs:

“It was that the CIA overlords of the invasion, director Allen Dulles and

deputy Richard Bissell, had their own plan of how to bring the United States

into the conflict. It appears that they never really expected an uprising against

Castro when the liberators landed as described in their memos to the White

A Cold Warrior Turns

15

House. What they did expect was that the invaders would establish and

secure a beachhead, announce the creation of a counterrevolutionary gov-

ernment and appeal for aid from the United States and the Organization of

American States. The assumption was that President Kennedy, who had

emphatically banned direct American involvement, would be forced by pub-

lic opinion to come to the aid of the returning patriots. American forces,

probably Marines, would come in to expand the beachhead.

“In effect, President Kennedy was the target of a CIA covert operation

that collapsed when the invasion collapsed.”52

Even if President Kennedy had said no at the eleventh hour to the whole

Bay of Pigs idea (as he was contemplating doing), the CIA, as it turned out,

had a plan to supersede his decision. When the four anti-Castro brigade lead-

ers told their story to writer Haynes Johnson, they revealed how the Agency

was prepared to circumvent a presidential veto. The Cubans’ chief CIA mil-

itary adviser, whom they knew only as “Frank,” told them what to do if he

secretly informed them that the entire project had been blocked by the admin-

istration: “If this happens you come here and make some kind of show, as if

you were putting us, the advisers, in prison, and you go ahead with the pro-

gram as we have talked about it, and we will give you the whole plan, even

if we are your prisoners.”53

The brigade leaders said “Frank” was quite specific in his instructions to

them for “capturing” their CIA advisers if the administration should attempt

to stop the plan: “they were to place an armed Brigade soldier at each Amer-

ican’s door, cut communications with the outside, and continue the training

until he told them when, and how, to leave for Trampoline base [their assem-

bly point in Nicaragua].”54 When Robert Kennedy learned of this contin-

gency plan to override the president, he called it “virtually treason.”55

John Kennedy reacted to the CIA’s plotting with a vehemence that went

unreported until after his death and has been little noted since then. In a

1966 New York Times feature article on the CIA, this statement by JFK

appeared without further comment: “President Kennedy, as the enormity of

the Bay of Pigs disaster came home to him, said to one of the highest officials

of his Administration that he wanted ‘to splinter the C.I.A. in a thousand

pieces and scatter it to the winds.’”56

Presidential adviser Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., said the president told him,

while the Bay of Pigs battle was still going on, “It’s a hell of a way to learn

things, but I have learned one thing from this business—that is, that we will

have to deal with CIA . . . no one has dealt with CIA.”57

In his short presidency, Kennedy began to take steps to deal with the CIA.

He tried to redefine the CIA’s mandate and to reduce its power in his

National Security Action Memoranda (NSAMs) 55 and 57, which took

military-type operations out of the hands of the CIA. Kennedy’s NSAM 55

informed the Joint Chiefs of Staff that it was they (not the CIA) who were

his principal military advisers in peacetime as well as wartime. Air Force

Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, who at the time was in charge of providing mil-

16

JFK and the Unspeakable

itary support for the CIA’s clandestine operations, described the impact of

NSAM 55 addressed to General Lyman Lemnitzer, Chairman of the Joint

Chiefs:

“I can’t overemphasize the shock—not simply the words—that procedure

caused in Washington: to the Secretary of State, to the Secretary of Defense,

and particularly to the Director of Central Intelligence. Because Allen Dulles,

who was still the Director, had just lived through the shambles of the Bay of

Pigs and now he finds out that what Kennedy does as a result of all this is to

say that, ‘you, General Lemnitzer, are to be my Advisor’. In other words, I’m

not going to depend on Allen Dulles and the CIA. Historians have glossed

over that or don’t know about it.”58

President Kennedy then asked the three principal CIA planners for the

Bay of Pigs to resign: Director Allen Dulles, Deputy Director Richard Bis-

sell, Jr., and Deputy Director General Charles Cabell. JFK also “moved qui-

etly,” as Schlesinger put it, “to cut the CIA budget in 1962 and again in

1963, aiming at a 20 per cent reduction by 1966.”59 He never managed to

splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds. But

Kennedy’s firing of Dulles, Bissell, and Cabell, his reduction of the CIA

budget, and his clear determination to deal with the Agency placed him in

direct conflict with a Cold War institution that had come to hold itself

accountable to no one.

After John Kennedy’s assassination, Allen Dulles returned to prominence

in a curious way. Foreign observers, many more familiar than Americans

with Dulles’s history in assassination plots and the overthrow of govern-

ments, wondered at the former CIA director’s possible involvement in the

murder of the man who had fired him and then tried to rein in the CIA. How-

ever, far from being considered a suspect, one week after the assassination

Dulles was appointed by the new president Lyndon Johnson to serve on the

Warren Commission. He thus directed an investigation that pointed toward

himself.60

Allen Dulles’s own closely guarded feelings toward John Kennedy were

revealed years later in a remark to a prospective ghostwriter. Harper’s young

assistant editor Willie Morris had gone to Dulles’s Georgetown mansion in

Washington to collaborate with him on a piece in defense of the CIA’s role

in the Bay of Pigs—a never-to-be-published article whose most revealing,

handwritten notes would one day be cited in “The ‘Confessions’ of Allen

Dulles.” In one discussion they had about President Kennedy, Dulles stunned

Morris with an abrupt comment. “That little Kennedy,” Dulles said, “. . . he

thought he was a god.” “Even now,” Morris wrote over a quarter of a cen-

tury later, “those words leap out at me, the only strident ones I would hear

from my unlikely collaborator.”61

The Bay of Pigs awakened President Kennedy to internal forces he feared

he might never control. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas recalled

Kennedy saying what the Bay of Pigs taught him about the CIA and the Pen-

A Cold Warrior Turns

17

tagon: “This episode seared him. He had experienced the extreme power

that these groups had, these various insidious influences of the CIA and the

Pentagon on civilian policy, and I think it raised in his own mind the specter:

Can Jack Kennedy, President of the United States, ever be strong enough to

really rule these two powerful agencies?”62

It was while John Kennedy was being steered into combat by the CIA and

the Pentagon at the Bay of Pigs that Thomas Merton was being blocked

from publishing his thoughts on nuclear war by his monastic superiors. Mer-

ton, like Kennedy, decided to find another way. The words pouring out of

Merton’s typewriter were spilling over from unpublished manuscripts into his

Cold War letters. As he wrote in one such letter to antinuclear archbishop

Thomas Roberts, “At present my feeling is that the most urgent thing is to

say what has to be said and say it in any possible way. If it cannot be printed,

then let it be mimeographed. If it cannot be mimeographed, then let it be

written on the backs of envelopes, as long as it gets said.”63

Thomas Merton saw the Bay of Pigs incident especially through the eyes

of one of his Cold War correspondents, Evora Arca de Sardinia in Miami. She

wrote to Merton saying that her husband, a leader of the anti-Castro forces

in the invasion, had been taken prisoner in Cuba. Merton replied to her on

the day he received her letter, May 15, 1961, expressing his “deep compas-

sion and concern in this moment of anguish.”64

In their subsequent correspondence, Thomas Merton gave spiritual direc-

tion to Evora Arca de Sardinia as she became concerned at the divisions and

spirit of revenge in the Cuban exile movement. In January 1962 he wrote to

her: “The great error of the aggressive Catholics who want to preserve their

power and social status at all costs is that they believe this can be done by

force, and thus they prepare the way to lose everything they want to save.”65

While President Kennedy and his brother Attorney General Robert

Kennedy were working to raise a ransom to free the Bay of Pigs prisoners,

Merton was warning Evora Arca de Sardinia about the militant context in

which she was living, which questioned the process of such a ransom. In the

Miami Cuba colony, as she had written to Merton, paying a ransom to an

evil force (the communist Fidel Castro), even to free their loved ones, was

considered a breach of ethics and loyalty.

Merton wrote back: “One thing I have always felt increases the trouble

and the sorrow which rack you is the fact that living and working among the

Cuban émigrés in Miami, and surrounded by the noise of hate and propa-

ganda, you are naturally under a great stress and in a sense you are ‘forced’

against your will to take an aggressive and belligerent attitude which your

conscience, in its depth, tells you is wrong.”66

As Merton knew, his concern about a surrounding stress applied not only

to his friend in the midst of Cuban émigrés in Miami but to everyone living

18

JFK and the Unspeakable

in Cold War America, a nation whose anti-communism and commitment to

nuclear supremacy had placed, for example, its newly elected president “in

a position sometimes so impossible as to be absurd.”

On December 31, 1961, Merton wrote a letter anticipating the Cuban

Missile Crisis ten months later. It was addressed to Clare Boothe Luce, the

wife of Time-Life-Fortune owner Henry Luce, a Cold War media baron

whose editorial policies demonized the communist enemy. Clare Boothe

Luce, celebrated speaker, writer, and diplomat, shared Henry Luce’s Cold

War theology. In 1975 Clare Boothe Luce would lead investigators into the

JFK assassination, working for the House Select Committee on Assassina-

tions (HSCA), on a time-consuming wild goose chase based on disinforma-

tion. HSCA analyst Gaeton Fonzi discovered that Luce at the time was on the

board of directors of the CIA-sponsored Association of Former Intelligence

Officers.67 Even in the early sixties, Merton with his extraordinary sensitiv-

ity may have suspected Luce’s intelligence connections. In any case he knew

her as one of the wealthiest, most influential women in the world, with a

decidedly anti-communist mind-set. He welcomed her, as he did one and all,

into his circle of correspondents.

In his New Year’s Eve letter to Clare Boothe Luce, Merton said he thought

the next year would be momentous. “Though ‘all manner of things shall be

well,’” he wrote, “we cannot help but be aware, on the threshold of 1962,

that we have enormous responsibilities and tasks of which we are perhaps no

longer capable. Our sudden, unbalanced, top-heavy rush into technological

mastery,” Merton saw, had now made us servants of our own weapons of

war. “Our weapons dictate what we are to do. They force us into awful cor-

ners. They give us our living, they sustain our economy, they bolster up our

politicians, they sell our mass media, in short we live by them. But if they con-

tinue to rule us we will also most surely die by them.”68

Merton was a cloistered monk who watched no television and saw only

an occasional newspaper. However, he had far-flung correspondents and spir-

itual antennae that were always on the alert. He could thus identify in his let-

ter to Clare Boothe Luce the strategic nuclear issue that would bring

humanity to the brink in October 1962: “For [our weapons] have now made

it plain that they are the friends of the ‘preemptive strike’. They are most

advantageous to those who use them first. And consequently nobody wants

to be too late in using them second. Hence the weapons keep us in a state of

fury and desperation, with our fingers poised over the button and our eyes

glued on the radar screen. You know what happens when you keep your eye

fixed on something. You begin to see things that aren’t there. It is very pos-

sible that in 1962 the weapons will tell someone that there has been long

enough waiting, and he will obey, and we will all have had it.”69

“We have to be articulate and sane,” Merton concluded, “and speak

wisely on every occasion where we can speak, and to those who are willing

to listen. That is why for one I speak to you,” he said hopefully to Luce.

“We have to try to some extent to preserve the sanity of this nation, and

A Cold Warrior Turns

19

keep it from going berserk which will be its destruction, and ours, and per-

haps also the destruction of Christendom.”70

As Merton challenged the Cold War dogmas of Clare Boothe Luce, he

was raising similar questions of conscience to another powerfully situated

woman, Ethel Kennedy. This was the period in which Merton still had little

confidence in John Kennedy. He was nevertheless beginning to catch glimpses

of a man who, like himself, was deeply troubled by the prevailing Cold War

atmosphere. He began a December 1961 letter to Ethel Kennedy by noting

a parallel between JFK’s and his own thinking: “I liked very much the Pres-

ident’s speech at Seattle which encouraged me a bit as I had just written

something along those same lines.”71 Merton was referring to John Kennedy’s

rejection, like his own, of the false alternatives “Red or dead” in a speech the

president gave at the University of Washington in November 1961. Kennedy

had said of this false dilemma and those who chose either side of it: “It is a

curious fact that each of these extreme opposites resembles the other. Each

believes that we have only two choices: appeasement or war, suicide or sur-

render, humiliation or holocaust, to be either Red or dead.”72

Merton made an extended analysis of the same Cold War cliché, “Red or

dead,” in the book his monastic superiors blocked from publication, Peace

in the Post-Christian Era. There he observed: “We strive to soothe our mad-

ness by intoning more and more vacuous cliches. And at such times, far from

being as innocuous as they are absurd, empty slogans take on a dreadful

power.”73

The slogan he and Kennedy saw exemplifying such emptiness had begun

in Germany in the form, “Better Red than dead.” “It was deftly fielded on the

first bounce by the Americans,” Merton said, “and came back in reverse, thus

acquiring an air of challenge and defiance. ‘Better dead than Red’ was a reply

to effete and decadent cynicism. It was a condemnation of ‘appeasement’.

(Anything short of a nuclear attack on Russia rates as ‘appeasement’.)”

What the heroic emptiness of “Better dead than Red” ignored was “the

real bravery of patient, humble, persevering labor to effect, step by step,

through honest negotiation, a gradual understanding that can eventually

relieve tensions and bring about some agreement upon which serious disar-

mament measures can be based”74—precisely what he hoped Ethel Kennedy’s

brother-in-law would do from the White House. In his letter to her, Merton

therefore went on to praise John Kennedy, yet did so while encouraging him

to break through Cold War propaganda and speak the truth: “I think that

the fact that the President works overtime at trying to get people to face the

situation as it really is may be the greatest thing he is doing. Certainly our

basic need is for truth, and not for ‘images’ and slogans that ‘engineer con-

sent.’ We are living in a dream world. We do not know ourselves or our

adversaries. We are myths to ourselves and they are myths to us. And we are

secretly persuaded that we can shoot it out like the sheriffs on TV. This is not

reality and the President can do a tremendous amount to get people to see

the facts, more than any single person.”75

20

JFK and the Unspeakable

With inclusive language that did not single out JFK, but again with heavy

implications for the president, Merton continued: “We cannot go on indefi-

nitely relying on the kind of provisional framework of a balance of terror. If

as Christians we were more certain of our duty, it might put us in a very tight

spot politically but it would also merit for us special graces from God, and

these we need badly.”76

Merton was praying that Christians in particular—and a particular Chris-

tian, John Kennedy—would become more certain of their duty to take a

stand against nuclear terror, which would place JFK especially “in a very

tight spot politically.” Besides praying, Merton was doing more than writing

words of protest on the backs of envelopes. He was appealing to the presi-

dent, through Ethel Kennedy, for a courageous stand in conscience. Whether

or not JFK ever read Merton’s graceful letter to his sister-in-law, he would

soon have to respond, in October 1962, to “special graces from God” if

humanity were to survive.

In the terminology of his own reflection on a military coup, John Kennedy

did have a second “Bay of Pigs.” The president alienated the CIA and the

military a second time by his decisions during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The Cuban Missile Crisis may have been the most dangerous moment in

human history. In the thirteen days from October 16 to 28, 1962, as the

Soviet Union installed nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba, President Kennedy

demanded publicly that Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev dismantle and

withdraw the missiles immediately. Kennedy also set up a naval “quaran-

tine” that blockaded Soviet ships proceeding to the island. Ignoring the par-

allel of the already existing deployment of U.S. missiles in Turkey alongside

the Soviet Union, Kennedy declared that the deployment of Soviet missiles in

Cuba was “a deliberately provocative and unjustified change in the status

quo which cannot be accepted by this country.”77 In spite of Kennedy’s mil-

itant stand, his and Khrushchev’s eventual resolution of the crisis by mutual

concessions was not viewed favorably by Cold War hard-liners.

The missile crisis arose because, as Nikita Khrushchev wrote in his mem-

oirs, “we were quite certain that the [Bay of Pigs] invasion was only the begin-

ning and that the Americans would not let Cuba alone.”78 To defend Cuba

from the threat of another U.S. invasion, Khrushchev said he “had the idea

of installing missiles with nuclear warheads in Cuba without letting the United

States find out they were there until it was too late to do anything about

them.”79 His strategy was twofold: “The main thing was that the installation

of our missiles in Cuba would, I thought, restrain the United States from pre-

cipitous military action against Castro’s government. In addition to protect-

ing Cuba, our missiles would have equalized what the West likes to call ‘the

balance of power.’ The Americans had surrounded our country with military

bases and threatened us with nuclear weapons, and now they would learn

just what it feels like to have enemy missiles pointing at you.”80

A Cold Warrior Turns

21

Khrushchev’s logic overlooked the frenzied mind of Cold War America. As

Merton put it in a March 1962 letter, “the first and greatest of all com-

mandments is that America shall not and must not be beaten in the Cold

War, and the second is like unto this, that if a hot war is necessary to prevent

defeat in the Cold War, then a hot war must be fought even if civilization is

to be destroyed.”81 In that context, the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba

placed President Kennedy in what Merton described as “a position so impos-

sible as to be absurd.” In a struggle between good and evil involving world-

destructive weapons, the installation of Soviet missiles ninety miles from

Florida brought home to Washington the temptation to strike first. Merton’s

warning to Clare Boothe Luce about a preemptive strike that year was com-

ing true. As the construction of Soviet missile sites in Cuba accelerated, the

pressures on President Kennedy for a preemptive U.S. strike became over-

whelming. However, Kennedy resisted his advisers’ push toward a nuclear

war that he told them would obviously be “the final failure.”82

He secretly taped the White House meetings during the crisis. The tapes

were declassified, transcribed, and published in the late 1990s.83 The tran-

scripts reveal how isolated the president was in choosing to blockade fur-

ther Soviet missile shipments rather than bomb and invade Cuba. Nowhere

does he stand more alone against the pressures for a sudden, massive air

strike than in his October 19, 1962, meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

In this encounter the Chiefs’ disdain for their young commander-in-chief is

embodied by Air Force Chief of Staff General Curtis LeMay, who challenges

the president:

LEMAY: “This [blockade and political action] is almost as bad as the

appeasement at Munich [a 1938 conference in Munich at which Britain,

trying to avoid war with Nazi Germany, compelled Czechoslovakia to

cede territory to Hitler] . . . I just don’t see any other solution except direct

military intervention right now.”

A historian who has studied the missile crisis tapes for over twenty years,

Sheldon Stern, has noted a pause in the conversation at this point, during

which the Joint Chiefs “must have held their collective breath waiting for a

reaction from the President. The general had gone well beyond merely giv-

ing advice or even disagreeing with his commander-in-chief. He had taken

their generation’s ultimate metaphor for shortsightedness and cowardice, the

1938 appeasement of Hitler at Munich, and flung it in the President’s face.”

“President Kennedy,” Stern says, “in a remarkable display of sang froid

refused to take the bait; he said absolutely nothing.”84

Ending the awkward silence, the Navy, Army, and Marine Corps Chiefs

of Staff argue for the prompt military action of bombing and invading Cuba.

General LeMay breaks in, reminding Kennedy of his strong statements about

responding to offensive weapons in Cuba. He almost taunts the president:

22

JFK and the Unspeakable

LEMAY: “I think that a blockade and political talk would be consid-

ered by a lot of our friends and neutrals as bein’ a pretty weak response

to this. And I’m sure a lot of our own citizens would feel that way, too.

“In other words, you’re in a pretty bad fix at the present time.”

KENNEDY: “What’d you say?”

LEMAY: “I say, you’re in a pretty bad fix.”

KENNEDY: [laughing] “You’re in with me, personally.”85

The discussion continues, with Kennedy probing the Chiefs for further

information and LeMay pushing the president to authorize a massive attack

on Soviet missiles, Cuban air defenses, and all communications systems. As

the meeting draws to a close, Kennedy rejects the arguments for a quick,

massive attack and thanks his military commanders.

KENNEDY: “I appreciate your views. As I said, I’m sure we all under-

stand how rather unsatisfactory our alternatives are.”86

A few minutes later, the president leaves the room, but the tape keeps on

recording. General LeMay, Army Chief of Staff General Earle Wheeler, and

Marine Corps Commandant General David Shoup remain. Shoup, who is

usually the most supportive of the Joint Chiefs toward Kennedy, praises

LeMay’s attack on the president:

SHOUP: “You were a . . . You pulled the rug right out from under him.”

LEMAY: “Jesus Christ. What the hell do you mean?”

SHOUP: “. . . He’s finally getting around to the word ‘escalation.’ . . .

When he says ‘escalation,’ that’s it. If somebody could keep ‘em from

doing the goddamn thing piecemeal, that’s our problem . . . ”

LEMAY: “That’s right.”

SHOUP: “You’re screwed, screwed, screwed. He could say, ‘either do

the son of a bitch and do it right and quit friggin’ around.’”

LEMAY: “That was my contention.”87

The White House tapes show Kennedy questioning and resisting the

mounting pressure to bomb Cuba coming from both the Joint Chiefs and

the Executive Committee (ExComm) of the National Security Council. One

statement by Robert Kennedy that may have strengthened the president’s

resolve against a preemptive strike is unheard on the tapes. In his memoir of

the missile crisis, Thirteen Days, RFK wrote that, while listening to the pro-

posals for attack, he passed a note to the president: “I now know how Tojo

felt when he was planning Pearl Harbor.”88

How John and Robert Kennedy felt together is best conveyed by Robert’s

description of his brother at one of the most terrible moments of the crisis.

On Wednesday, October 24, a report came in that a Soviet submarine was

about to be intercepted by U.S. helicopters with depth charges, unless by

A Cold Warrior Turns

23

some miracle the two Soviet ships it was accompanying turned back from the

U.S. “quarantine” line. The president feared he had lost all control of the

situation and that nuclear war was imminent. Robert looked at his brother:

“His hand went up to his face and covered his mouth. He opened and

closed his fist. His face seemed drawn, his eyes pained, almost gray. We stared

at each other across the table. For a few fleeting seconds, it was almost as

though no one else was there and he was no longer the president.

“Inexplicably, I thought of when he was ill and almost died; when he lost

his child; when we learned that our oldest brother had been killed; of per-

sonal times of strain and hurt. The voices droned on . . .”89

The miracle occurred—through the enemy, Nikita Khrushchev. Khrush -

chev ordered the Soviet ships to stop dead in the water rather than challenge

the U.S. quarantine. At that moment he saved John Kennedy and everyone

else.

What moved Khrushchev to his decision? The incident goes unmentioned

in his memoirs, as does another, hidden chapter of events that may help to

explain it—Nikita Khrushchev’s secret correspondence with John Kennedy.

In July 1993, the U.S. State Department, in response to a Freedom of

Information Act request by a Canadian newspaper, declassified twenty-one

secret letters between John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev.90 These pri-

vate, confidential letters between the Cold War leaders, begun in September

1961 and continued for two years, will be examined here for the bright light

they shed on a relationship critical to the world’s preservation.

Khrushchev had sent his first private letter to Kennedy on September 29,

1961, during the Berlin crisis. Wrapped in a newspaper, it was brought to

Kennedy’s press secretary Pierre Salinger at a New York hotel room by a

Soviet “magazine editor” and KGB agent, Georgi Bolshakov, whom

Khrushchev trusted to maintain silence. The secrecy was at least as much to

avoid Soviet attention as American. As presidential aide Theodore Sorensen

said three decades later, Khrushchev was “taking his risks, assuming that

these letters were, as we believe, being kept secret from the (Soviet) military,

from the foreign service, from the top people in the Kremlin. He was taking

some risk that if discovered, they would be very unhappy with him.”91

Khrushchev’s first letter was written from a retreat beside the Black Sea.

While the Berlin crisis was still not over, the Soviet premier began the corre-

spondence with his enemy by meditating on the beauty of the sea and the

threat of war. “Dear Mr. President,” he wrote, “At present I am on the shore

of the Black Sea . . . This is indeed a wonderful place. As a former Naval offi-

cer you would surely appreciate the merits of these surroundings, the beauty

of the sea and the grandeur of the Caucasian mountains. Under this bright

southern sun it is even somehow hard to believe that there still exist prob-

lems in the world which, due to lack of solutions, cast a sinister shadow on

peaceful life, on the future of millions of people.”92

Kennedy had been stunned in Vienna by what he felt was Khrushchev’s

hardness of heart toward a nuclear war and his unwillingness to compro-

24

JFK and the Unspeakable

mise. Now as the threat of war over Berlin continued, Khrushchev expressed

a regret about Vienna. He said he had “given much thought of late to the

development of international events since our meeting in Vienna, and I have

decided to approach you with this letter. The whole world hopefully expected

that our meeting and a frank exchange of views would have a soothing effect,

would turn relations between our countries into the correct channel and pro-

mote the adoption of decisions which would give the peoples confidence that

at last peace on earth will be secured. To my regret—and, I believe, to

yours—this did not happen.”93

However, Kennedy’s abiding hopes for peace, beneath the bellicose rhet-

oric that he and Khrushchev exchanged publicly, had somehow gotten

through to his counterpart. Khrushchev continued with deepening respect:

“I listened with great interest to the account which our journalists Adjubei

and Kharlamov gave of the meeting they had with you in Washington. They

gave me many interesting details and I questioned them most thoroughly.

You prepossessed them by your informality, modesty and frankness which

are not to be found very often in men who occupy such a high position.”

Again Khrushchev mentioned Vienna, this time as a backdrop to his deci-

sion to write such a letter:

“My thoughts have more than once returned to our meetings in Vienna.

I remember you emphasized that you did not want to proceed towards war

and favored living in peace with our country while competing in the peace-

ful domain. And though subsequent events did not proceed in the way that

could be desired, I thought it might be useful in a purely informal and per-

sonal way to approach you and share some of my ideas. If you do not agree

with me you can consider that this letter did not exist while naturally I, for

my part, will not use this correspondence in my public statements. After all

only in confidential correspondence can you say what you think without a

backward glance at the press, at the journalists.”

“As you see,” he added apologetically, “I started out by describing the

delights of the Black Sea coast, but then I nevertheless turned to politics. But

that cannot be helped. They say that you sometimes cast politics out through

the door but it climbs back through the window, particularly when the win-

dows are open.”94

Khrushchev’s first private letter to Kennedy was twenty-six pages long. It

did deal passionately with politics, in particular Berlin (where the two lead-

ers backed away from war but never reached agreement) and the civil war

in Laos (where they agreed to recognize a neutral government). Even though

in the process Khrushchev forgot his Black Sea calm and argued his points

with a vengeance, he was as insistent on the fundamental need for peace as

Kennedy had been in Vienna. The communist emphasized their common

ground with a biblical analogy. Khrushchev liked, he said, the comparison of

their situation “with Noah’s Ark where both the ‘clean’ and the ‘unclean’

found sanctuary. But regardless of who lists himself with the ‘clean’ and who

is considered to be ‘unclean,’ they are all equally interested in one thing and

that is that the Ark should successfully continue its cruise. And we have no

A Cold Warrior Turns

25

other alternative: either we should live in peace and cooperation so that the

Ark maintains its buoyancy, or else it sinks.”95

Kennedy responded privately to Khrushchev on October 16, 1961, from

his own place of retreat beside the ocean, Hyannis Port. He began in a sim-

ilar vein:

“My family has had a home here overlooking the Atlantic for many years.

My father and brothers own homes near my own, and my children always

have a large group of cousins for company. So this is an ideal place for me

to spend my weekends during the summer and fall, to relax, to think, to

devote my time to major tasks instead of constant appointments, telephone

calls and details. Thus, I know how you must feel about the spot on the Black

Sea from which your letter was written, for I value my own opportunities to

get a clearer and quieter perspective away from the din of Washington.”

He thanked Khrushchev for initiating the correspondence and agreed to

keep it quiet: “Certainly you are correct in emphasizing that this correspon-

dence must be kept wholly private, not to be hinted at in public statements,

much less disclosed to the press.” Their private letters should supplement

public statements “and give us each a chance to address the other in frank,

realistic and fundamental terms. Neither of us is going to convert the other

to a new social, economic or political point of view. Neither of us will be

induced by a letter to desert or subvert his own cause. So these letters can be

free from the polemics of the ‘cold war’ debate.”

Kennedy agreed wholeheartedly with Khrushchev’s biblical image: “I like

very much your analogy of Noah’s Ark, with both the ‘clean’ and the

‘unclean’ determined that it stay afloat. Whatever our differences, our col-

laboration to keep the peace is as urgent—if not more urgent—than our col-

laboration to win the last world war.”96

After a year of private letters that included more than a little “cold war

debate,” Kennedy and Khrushchev had by October 1962 not resolved their

most dangerous differences. The missile crisis was proof of that. Their mutual

respect had given way to mistrust, counter-challenges, and steps toward the

war they both abhorred. In the weeks leading up to the crisis, Khrushchev felt

betrayed by Kennedy’s contingency plans for another Cuba invasion, whereas

Kennedy thought Khrushchev was betraying him by sneaking nuclear missiles

into Cuba. Both were again acting out Cold War beliefs that threatened

everyone on earth. Nevertheless, as they faced each other and issued poten-

tially world-destructive orders, it was still thanks to the Vienna meeting and

their secret letters that each knew the other as a human being he could

respect. They also knew they had once agreed warmly that the world was a

Noah’s Ark, where both the “clean” and the “unclean” had to keep it afloat.

It was in just such a world, where “clean” and “unclean” were together

under a nuclear threat, that Khrushchev stopped his ships dead in the water

and the Ark remained afloat.

However, the crisis was not over. Work on the missile sites was in fact

speeding up. Pentagon and ExComm advisers increased their pressures on the

president for a preventive strike.

26

JFK and the Unspeakable

On Friday night, October 26, Kennedy received a hopeful letter from

Khrushchev in which the Soviet premier agreed to withdraw his missiles. In

exchange, Kennedy would pledge not to invade Cuba. However, on Saturday

morning, Kennedy received a second, more problematic letter from Khrush -

chev adding to those terms the demand for a U.S. commitment to remove its

analogous missiles from Turkey. In exchange, Khrushchev would pledge not

to invade Turkey. Tit for tat.

Kennedy was perplexed. Khrushchev’s second proposal was reasonable

in its symmetry. However, Kennedy felt he could not suddenly surrender a

NATO ally’s defenses under a threat, failing to recognize for the moment

that he was demanding Khrushchev do the equivalent with his ally Castro.

While the Joint Chiefs pressed their demands on the president for an air

strike on Monday, an urgent message arrived heightening those pressures.

Early that Saturday morning, a Soviet surface-to-air missile (SAM) had shot

down a U-2 reconnaissance plane over Cuba, killing the Air Force pilot,

Major Rudolf Anderson, Jr. The Joint Chiefs and ExComm had already rec-

ommended immediate retaliation in such a case. They now urged an attack

early the next morning to destroy the SAM sites. “There was the feeling,”

said Robert Kennedy, “that the noose was tightening on all of us, on Amer-

icans, on mankind, and that the bridges to escape were crumbling.”97 “But

again,” he adds, “the President pulled everyone back.”98 JFK called off the

Air Force reprisal for the U-2’s downing. He continued the search for a peace-

ful resolution. The Joint Chiefs were dismayed. Robert Kennedy and

Theodore Sorensen then drafted a letter accepting Khrushchev’s first pro-

posal, while ignoring the later demand that the United States withdraw its

missiles from Turkey.

As the war currents swirled around the White House, John and Robert

Kennedy met in the Oval Office. Robert described later the thoughts his

brother shared with him.

He talked first about Major Anderson and how the brave died while politi-

cians sat home pontificating about great issues. He talked about miscalcula-

tions leading to war, a war Russians didn’t want any more than Americans

did. He wanted to make sure he had done everything conceivable to prevent

a terrible outcome, especially by giving the Russians every opportunity for a

peaceful settlement that would neither diminish their security nor humiliate

them. But “the thought that disturbed him the most,” Robert said, “and that

made the prospect of war much more fearful than it would otherwise have

been, was the specter of the death of the children of this country and all the

world—the young people who had no role, who had no say, who knew noth-

ing even of the confrontation, but whose lives would be snuffed out like

everyone else’s. They would never have a chance to make a decision, to vote

in an election, to run for office, to lead a revolution, to determine their own

destinies.”

“It was this,” wrote Robert in a work published after his own assassina-

tion, “that troubled him most, that gave him such pain. And it was then that

A Cold Warrior Turns

27

he and Secretary Rusk decided that I should visit with Ambassador Dobrynin

and personally convey the President’s great concern.”99

Robert Kennedy’s climactic meeting with Soviet Ambassador Anatoly

Dobrynin became the moving force for Khrushchev’s dramatic announce-

ment that he was withdrawing the missiles. Khrushchev wrote in his mem-

oirs what he thought Robert Kennedy told Dobrynin, who had relayed it to

Khrushchev:

“‘The President is in a grave situation,’ Robert Kennedy said, ‘and he does

not know how to get out of it. We are under very severe stress. In fact we are

under pressure from our military to use force against Cuba . . . We want to

ask you, Mr. Dobrynin, to pass President Kennedy’s message to Chairman

Khrushchev through unofficial channels . . . Even though the President him-

self is very much against starting a war over Cuba, an irreversible chain of

events could occur against his will. That is why the President is appealing

directly to Chairman Khrushchev for his help in liquidating this conflict. If

the situation continues much longer, the President is not sure that the mili-

tary will not overthrow him and seize power.’”100

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian Foreign Ministry declassi-

fied Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin’s October 27, 1962, cable describing his

critical one-on-one meeting with Robert Kennedy. Dobrynin’s report offers

a less dramatic version than Khrushchev’s memoirs of Robert Kennedy’s

words concerning the military pressures on President Kennedy: “taking time

to find a way out [of the situation] is very risky. (Here R. Kennedy mentioned

as if in passing that there are many unreasonable heads among the generals,

and not only among the generals, who ‘are itching for a fight.’) The situation

might get out of control, with irreversible consequences.”101

In Robert Kennedy’s own account of the meeting in Thirteen Days, he

does not mention telling Dobrynin of the military pressures on the president.

However, his friend and biographer Arthur Schlesinger says, whatever the

Attorney General said to Dobrynin, RFK was himself of the opinion there

were many generals eager for a fight. Robert thought the situation could get

totally out of control.102

In any case, Khrushchev felt the urgency of the pressures on the president.

He responded by withdrawing his missiles.

Is there any evidence U.S. military leaders took advantage of the missile

crisis, not to overthrow President Kennedy but to bypass him? Were they

trying to trigger a war they felt they could win?

According to political scientist Scott Sagan in his book The Limits of

Safety, the U.S. Air Force launched an intercontinental ballistic missile from

Vandenberg Air Force Base on October 26, 1962, the day before the U-2

was shot down. The ICBM was unarmed, a test missile destined for Kwa-

jalein in the Marshall Islands. The Soviet Union could easily have thought

otherwise. Three days before, a test missile at Vandenberg had received a

nuclear warhead, changing it to full alert status for the crisis. By October

30, nine Vandenberg “test” missiles were armed for use against the Sovi-

28

JFK and the Unspeakable

ets.103 At the height of the missile crisis, the Air Force’s October 26th launch

of its missile could have been seen by the Soviets as the beginning of an

attack. It was a dangerous provocation. Had the Soviets been suckered into

giving any sign of a launch of their own, the entire array of U.S. missiles and

bombers were poised to preempt them. They were already at the top rung of

their nuclear war status, DefCon (Defense Condition)-2, totally prepared for

a massive strike.

Also at the height of the crisis, as writer Richard Rhodes learned from a

retired Air Force commander, “SAC [Strategic Air Command] airborne-alert

bombers deliberately flew past their customary turnaround points toward

the Soviet Union—an unambiguous threat that Soviet radar operators would

certainly have recognized and reported.”104 With their far superior number

of missiles and bombers, U.S. forces were prepared for a preemptive attack

at the slightest sign of a Soviet response to their provocation. Fortunately

the Soviets didn’t bite.

President Kennedy had reason to feel he was being circumvented by the

military so they could win a nuclear showdown. Kennedy may also have

recalled that Khrushchev, in his second secret letter to the president, on

November 9, 1961, regarding Berlin, had hinted that belligerent pressures in

Moscow made compromise difficult from his own side. “You have to under-

stand,” he implored Kennedy, “I have no ground to retreat further, there is

a precipice behind.”105 Kennedy had not pushed him. Now there was a

precipice behind Kennedy, and Khrushchev understood.

Khrushchev recalled the conclusion of Dobrynin’s report as Robert

Kennedy’s words, “I don’t know how much longer we can hold out against

our generals.”106 Since Khrushchev had also just received an urgent message

from Castro that a U.S. attack on Cuba was “almost imminent,”107 he has-

tened to respond: “We could see that we had to reorient our position swiftly

. . . We sent the Americans a note saying that we agreed to remove our mis-

siles and bombers on the condition that the President give us his assurance

that there would be no invasion of Cuba by the forces of the United States

or anybody else.”108

Kennedy agreed, and Khrushchev began removing the Soviet missiles. The

crisis was over.109 Neither side revealed that, as part of the agreement, on the

analogous issue of U.S. missiles in Turkey Robert Kennedy had in fact prom-

ised Anatoly Dobrynin that they, too, would be withdrawn but not immedi-

ately.110 It could not be done unilaterally at a moment’s notice. The promise

was fulfilled. Six months later the United States took its missiles out of

Turkey.

Twenty-five years after the missile crisis, Secretary of State Dean Rusk

would reveal that President Kennedy was prepared to make a further con-

cession to Khrushchev in order to avoid war. Rusk said that on October 27,

after Robert Kennedy left to meet Dobrynin, the president “instructed me to

telephone the late Andrew Cordier, then [president] at Columbia University,

and dictate to him a statement which would be made by U Thant, the Sec-

A Cold Warrior Turns

29

retary General of the United Nations [and a friend of Cordier], proposing the

removal of the Jupiters [in Turkey] and the missiles in Cuba. Mr. Cordier

was to put that statement in the hands of U Thant only after further signal

from us.”111 Rusk phoned the statement to Cordier. However, when

Khrushchev accepted Robert Kennedy’s promise to Dobrynin that the Jupiter

missiles would be removed, Kennedy’s further readiness for a public trade

mediated by U Thant became unnecessary. The president’s willingness to go

that extra mile with Khrushchev, at a heavy political cost to himself, shocked

the former ExComm members to whom Rusk revealed it for the first time at

the Hawk’s Cay (Florida) Conference on March 7, 1987.

The extent to which Kennedy’s willingness to trade away missiles with

Khrushchev was beyond political orthodoxy at the time can be illustrated

by my own experience. In May 1963 I wrote an article on Pope John XXIII’s

encyclical Pacem in Terris. It was published by Dorothy Day in her radically

pacifist Catholic Worker newspaper. The article said that, in harmony with

Pope John’s theme of increasing mutual trust as the basis for peace, the

United States should have resolved the Cuban Missile Crisis by negotiating

a mutual withdrawal of missile bases with the Soviet Union. Unknown to

Dorothy Day and myself, our politically unacceptable view was what Presi-

dent Kennedy had committed himself to doing in the midst of that crisis, at

whatever political cost, and had in fact carried through secretly with Nikita

Khrushchev.112

How close did the United States and the Soviet Union come to a nuclear

holocaust?

From the Joint Chiefs’ standpoint, not close enough. The only real dan-

ger, they thought, came from the President’s lack of will in not attacking the

Russians in Cuba.

At the October 19 meeting between the president and the Chiefs, when

General LeMay argued for a surprise attack on the Russian missiles as soon

as possible, President Kennedy had asked him skeptically, “What do you

think their reprisal would be?”

LeMay said there would be no reprisal so long as Kennedy warned

Khrushchev that he was ready to fight also in Berlin.

After Admiral George Anderson made the same point, Kennedy said

sharply, “They can’t let us just take out, after all their statements, take out

their missiles, kill a lot of Russians, and not do . . . not do anything.”113

After the meeting, the President recounted the conversation to his aide

Dave Powers and said, “Can you imagine LeMay saying a thing like that?

These brass hats have one great advantage in their favor. If we listen to them,

and do what they want us to do, none of us will be alive later to tell them

that they were wrong.”114

In a conversation that fall with his friend John Kenneth Galbraith,

Kennedy again spoke angrily of the reckless pressures his advisers, both mil-

itary and civilian, had put on him to bomb the Cuban missile sites. “I never

had the slightest intention of doing so,” said the president.115

30

JFK and the Unspeakable

Thirty years after the crisis, Kennedy’s Defense Secretary Robert McNamara

was surprised to learn the contents of a November 1992 article in the Russ-

ian press. The article revealed that at the height of the crisis Soviet forces in

Cuba had possessed a total of 162 nuclear warheads. The more critical strate-

gic fact, unknown to the United States at the time, was that these weapons

were ready to be fired. On October 26, 1962, the day before the U-2 was shot

down, the nuclear warheads in Cuba had been prepared for launching.

Enlightened by this knowledge, McNamara wrote in his memoirs:

“Clearly, there was a high risk that, in the face of a U.S. attack—which,

as I have said, many in the U.S. government, military and civilian alike, were

prepared to recommend to President Kennedy—the Soviet forces in Cuba

would have decided to use their nuclear weapons rather than lose them.

“We need not speculate about what would have happened in that event.

We can predict the results with certainty . . . And where would it have ended?

In utter disaster.”116

In the climactic moments of the Cold War, John Kennedy’s resistance to

pressures for a first strike, combined with Nikita Khrushchev’s quick under-

standing and retreat, saved the lives of millions of people, perhaps the life of

the planet.

In those days, however, when compromise was regarded as treason, U.S.

military leaders were not pleased by the Kennedy-Khrushchev resolution of

the crisis. The Joint Chiefs of Staff were outraged at Kennedy’s refusal to

attack Cuba and even his known concessions to Khrushchev. McNamara

recalled how strongly the Chiefs expressed their feelings to the president.

“After Khrushchev had agreed to remove the missiles, President Kennedy

invited the Chiefs to the White House so that he could thank them for their

support during the crisis, and there was one hell of a scene. LeMay came out

saying, ‘We lost! We ought to just go in there today and knock ‘em off!’”117

Robert Kennedy was also struck by the Chiefs’ anger at the president.

“Admiral [George] Anderson’s reaction to the news,” he said, “was ‘We have

been had.’”118

“The military are mad,” President Kennedy told Arthur Schlesinger, “They

wanted to do this.”119 Yet as angry as the Chiefs were at Kennedy’s handling

of the missile crisis, their anger would deepen in the following year. They

would witness a Cold War president not only refusing their first-strike man-

date but also turning decisively toward peace with the enemy.

On Sunday morning, October 28, after Kennedy and Khrushchev had

agreed mutually to withdraw their most threatening missiles, JFK went to

Mass in Washington to pray in thanksgiving. As he and Dave Powers were

about to get into the White House car, Kennedy looked at Powers and said,

“Dave, this morning we have an extra reason to pray.”120

At the Abbey of Gethsemani, Thomas Merton’s response to the Cuban

Missile Crisis was also a prayer of thanksgiving. He wrote Daniel Berrigan:

“As for Cuba, well thank God we escaped the results of our own folly this

time. We excel in getting ourselves into positions where we ‘have to’ press the

A Cold Warrior Turns

31

button, or the next thing to it. I realize more and more that this whole war

question is nine-tenths our own fabricated illusion . . . I think Kennedy has

enough sense to avoid the worst injustices, he acts as if he knew the score.

But few others seem to.”121

Regarding the president’s handling of the crisis, Merton wrote Etta Gul-

lick in England: “Of course things being what they were, Kennedy hardly

had any alternative. My objection is to things being as they are, through the

stupidity and shortsightedness of politicians who have no politics.”122

To Ethel Kennedy he said further: “The Cuba business was a close call, but

in the circumstances I think JFK handled it very well. I say in the circum-

stances, because only a short-term look at it makes one very happy. It was a

crisis and something had to be done and there was only a choice of various

evils. He chose the best evil, and it worked. The whole thing continues to be

nasty.”123

On Sunday afternoon, October 28, with the crisis over, Robert Kennedy

returned to the White House and talked with the president for a long time.

When Robert got ready to leave, John said, in reference to the death of Abra-

ham Lincoln, “This is the night I should go to the theater.” His brother

replied, “If you go, I want to go with you.”124 They would both go soon.

John Kennedy’s third Bay of Pigs was his Commencement Address at Amer-

ican University in Washington. Saturday Review editor Norman Cousins

summed up the significance of this remarkable speech: “At American Uni-

versity on June 10, 1963, President Kennedy proposed an end to the Cold

War.”125

The Cold Warrior John F. Kennedy was turning, in the root biblical sense

of the word “turning”—teshuvah in the Hebrew Scriptures, metanoia in the

Greek, “repentance” in English. In the Cuban Missile Crisis John Kennedy

as president of the United States had begun to turn away from, to repent

from, his own complicity with the worst of U.S. imperialism—its willingness

to destroy the world in order to “save it” from Communism. Nevertheless,

in the process of turning from the brink, Kennedy seemed unable to begin

walking in a new direction.

In the aftermath of the missile crisis, he was alternately hopeful and frus-

trated. The imminence of holocaust had pushed him and Khrushchev toward

a new commitment to negotiations. Yet in the months following the crisis, the

Cold War opponents seemed unable to seize the moment.

They agreed that a ban on nuclear testing was a critical next step away

from the brink. Yet both men had a history of conducting nuclear tests that

contaminated the atmosphere and heightened the tensions between them. In

response to the Soviet Union’s nuclear tests in the summer of 1961, Kennedy

had resumed U.S. atmospheric tests on April 25, 1962. The United States

then carried out a series of twenty-four nuclear blasts in the South Pacific

from April to November of 1962.126

32

JFK and the Unspeakable

In the context of their precarious resolution of the missile crisis and their

tit-for-tat nuclear testing, Kennedy and Khrushchev struggled to agree on a

test ban. Khrushchev said the United States was using its condition of on-site

inspections as a strategy for spying on the U.S.S.R. For the sake of peace, he

had already agreed to the U.S. position of three annual inspections, only to

see the Americans suddenly demand more. Kennedy said Khrushchev had

mistaken the original U.S. position. Khrushchev replied pointedly through an

intermediary:

“You can tell the President I accept his explanation of an honest misun-

derstanding and suggest that we get moving. But the next move is up to

him.”127

Kennedy accepted Khrushchev’s challenge. His American University

address broke the deadlock by transforming the context. By the empathy he

expressed toward the Russian perspective, Kennedy created a bridge to

Khrushchev. They would then have five and a half months left to make peace

before JFK’s murder. At the same time as Kennedy’s speech reached out to

Khrushchev, it opened a still wider chasm between the president and his own

military and intelligence advisers. To the Pentagon and CIA, the president’s

words of peace at American University seemed to put him on the enemy’s

side.

Their resistance to Kennedy’s stand can be understood from the stand-

point of the independent power base they had developed during the Cold

War. We have already seen how President Truman exulted at the bombing of

Hiroshima. From a failure to internalize the suffering beneath the mushroom

clouds at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Truman administration began an era

of atomic diplomacy based on hubris. Truman, supremely confident because

he had unilateral possession of the atomic bomb, tried to dictate postwar

terms in Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union. A month after Hiroshima, the

Soviets rejected U.S. demands backed by the bomb at the London Council of

Foreign Ministers. John Foster Dulles, who attended the London meeting,

regarded it as the beginning of the Cold War.128 President Truman then

announced in September 1945 that he was not interested in seeking interna-

tional control over nuclear weapons. If other nations wanted to “catch up”

with the United States, he said, “they [would] have to do it on their own

hook, just as we did.” Truman agreed with a friend’s comment on the impli-

cations of this policy: “Then Mister President, what it amounts to is this.

That the armaments race is on.”129

Truman continued to use the bomb as a threat to force Soviet concessions.

He felt he did so successfully in Iran just seven months after Hiroshima and

Nagasaki. The Russian army was prolonging a wartime occupation in north-

ern Iran, seeking Soviet oil leases like those of the British in the south. Tru-

man later told Senator Henry Jackson that he had summoned Soviet

Ambassador Andrei Gromyko to the White House. The president demanded

that the Russian troops evacuate Iran within forty-eight hours or the United

States would use the atomic weapon that only it possessed. “We’re going to

A Cold Warrior Turns

33

drop it on you,” he told Gromyko. The troops moved in twenty-four

hours.130

On a wider front, the United States enforced a Cold War strategy of con-

taining the Soviet Union. The containment policy was formulated by State

Department diplomat George Kennan, writing as “X” in the July 1947 For-

eign Affairs. Although Kennan said the purpose of containment was more

diplomatic and political than military, the Pentagon carried it out by encir-

cling the U.S.S.R. with U.S. bases and patrolling forces.

To match the efficiency of a totalitarian enemy, U.S. military leaders urged

legislation that would mobilize the nation to a state of constant readiness

for war. Thus the National Security Act of 1947 laid the foundations of a

national security state: the National Security Council (NSC), the National

Security Resources Board (NSRB), the Munitions Board, the Research and

Development Board, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs

of Staff, and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).131 Before the act was

passed, Secretary of State George Marshall warned President Truman that it

granted the new intelligence agency in particular powers that were ”almost

unlimited,”132 a criticism of the CIA that Truman would echo much too

late—soon after the assassination of John Kennedy.

On June 18, 1948, Truman’s National Security Council took a further

step into a CIA quicksand and approved top-secret directive NSC 10/2,

which sanctioned U.S. intelligence to carry out a broad range of covert oper-

ations: “propaganda, economic warfare, preventive direct action including

sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion

against hostile states including assistance to underground resistance move-

ments, guerrillas, and refugee liberation groups.”133 The CIA was now

empowered to be a paramilitary organization. George Kennan, who spon-

sored NSC 10/2, said later in the light of history that it was “the greatest

mistake I ever made.”134

Since NSC 10/2 authorized violations of international law, it also estab-

lished official lying as their indispensable cover. All such activities had to be

“so planned and executed that any US government responsibility for them is

not evident to unauthorized persons, and that if uncovered the US govern-

ment can plausibly deny any responsibility for them.”135 The national secu-

rity doctrine of “plausible deniability” combined lying with hypocrisy. It

marked the creation of a Frankenstein monster.

Plausible deniability encouraged the autonomy of the CIA and other

covert-action (“intelligence”) agencies from the government that created

them. In order to protect the visible authorities of the government from

protest and censure, the CIA was authorized not only to violate international

law but to do so with as little consultation as possible. CIA autonomy went

hand in glove with plausible deniability. The less explicit an order from the

president, the better it was for “plausible deniability.” And the less consul-

tation there was, the more creative CIA authorities could become in inter-

preting the mind of the president, especially the mind of a president so

34

JFK and the Unspeakable

uncooperative that he wanted to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and

scatter it to the winds.

At the 1975 Senate hearings on U.S. intelligence operations chaired by

Senator Frank Church, CIA officials testified reluctantly on their efforts to

kill Fidel Castro. In late 1960, without the knowledge of President Dwight

Eisenhower, the CIA had contacted underworld figures John Rosselli, Sam

Giancana, and Santos Trafficante, offering them $150,000 for Castro’s assas-

sination.136 The gangsters were happy to be hired by the U.S. government to

murder the man who had shut down their gambling casinos in Cuba. If they

were successful, they hoped a U.S.-sponsored successor to Castro would

allow them to reopen the casinos.

In the spring of 1961, without the knowledge of the new president John

Kennedy, the CIA’s Technical Services Division prepared a batch of poison

pills for Castro. The pills were sent to Cuba through John Rosselli. The mur-

der plot failed because the CIA’s Cuban assets were unable to get close

enough to Castro to poison him.137 The CIA’s purpose was to kill Castro just

before the Bay of Pigs invasion. As Bay of Pigs planner Richard Bissell said

later, “Assassination was intended to reinforce the [invasion] plan. There

was the thought that Castro would be dead before the landing. Very few,

however, knew of this aspect of the plan.”138

After President Kennedy fired Bissell from the CIA for his role in the Bay

of Pigs, Richard Helms, his successor as Deputy Director of Plans, took up

where Bissell had left off in conspiring to kill Castro. Helms testified to the

Church Committee that he never informed either the president or his newly

appointed CIA director John McCone of the assassination plots. Nor did he

inform any other officials in the Kennedy administration. Helms said he

sought no approval for the murder attempts because assassination was not

a subject that should be aired with higher authority.139 When he was asked

if President Kennedy had been informed, Helms said that “nobody wants to

embarrass a President of the United States by discussing the assassination of

foreign leaders in his presence.”140 He also didn’t seek the approval of the

Special Group Augmented that oversaw the anti-Castro program because,

he said, “I didn’t see how one would have expected that a thing like killing

or murdering or assassination would become a part of a large group of peo-

ple sitting around a table in the United States Government.”141

John McCone and the other surviving members of the Kennedy Admin-

istration testified that “assassination was outside the parameters of the

Administration’s anti-Castro program.”142 Yet Richard Helms and other CIA

insiders kept running assassination plots in conflict with the president’s

wishes.

In November 1961, seven months after the Bay of Pigs invasion, John

Kennedy asked journalist Tad Szulc in a private conversation in the Oval

Office, “What would you think if I ordered Castro to be assassinated?” The

startled Szulc said he was against political assassination in principle and in any

case doubted if it would solve the Cuban problem. The president leaned back

A Cold Warrior Turns

35

in his rocking chair, smiled, and said he had been testing Szulc and agreed

with his answer. Kennedy said “he was under great pressure from advisors in

the Intelligence Community (whom he did not name) to have Castro killed,

but that he himself violently opposed it on the grounds that for moral reasons

the United States should never be party to political assassinations.”

“I’m glad you feel the same way,” Kennedy told Szulc.143

Richard Helms, however, did not feel the same way. Helms was known as

“the man who kept the secrets,” the title of his biography.144 He was a mas-

ter of the possibilities beneath plausible deniability, exemplified by his com-

mand and control of the CIA’s plots to kill Castro. As Helms demonstrated

in his Church Committee testimony, he and other CIA Cold War veterans

thought they knew the president’s mind better than the president did himself.

This assumed responsibility became a problem for the CIA and its Pentagon

allies when President Kennedy acted with a mind of his own and decided to

end the Cold War.

In the weeks leading up to his American University address, Kennedy pre-

pared the ground carefully for the leap of peace he planned to take. He first

joined British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan in proposing to Khrushchev

new high-level talks on a test ban treaty. They suggested that Moscow be

the site for the talks, itself an act of trust. Khrushchev accepted.

To reinforce the seriousness of the negotiations, Kennedy decided to sus-

pend U.S. tests in the atmosphere unilaterally. Surrounded by Cold War

advisers, he reached his decision independently—without their recommen-

dations or consultation. He knew few would support him as he went out on

that limb; others might cut it down before he could get there. He announced

his unilateral initiative at American University, as a way of jump-starting the

test-ban negotiations.

In both speech and action, Kennedy was trying to reverse eighteen years

of U.S.–Soviet polarization. He had seen U.S. belligerence toward the Rus-

sians build to the point of Pentagon pressures for preemptive strikes on the

Cuban missile sites. In his decision in the spring of 1963 to turn from a demo-

nizing Cold War theology, Kennedy knew he had few allies within his own

ruling circles.

He outlined his thoughts for what he called “the peace speech” to speech-

writer Sorensen, and told him to go to work. Only a handful of advisers

knew anything about the project. Arthur Schlesinger, who was one of them,

said, “We were asked to send our best thoughts to Ted Sorensen and to say

nothing about this to anybody.”145 On the eve of the speech, Soviet officials

and White House correspondents were alerted in general terms. The speech,

they were informed, would be of major importance.146

On June 10, 1963, President Kennedy introduced his subject to the grad-

uating class at American University as “the most important topic on earth:

world peace.”

“What kind of peace do I mean?” he asked, “What kind of peace do we

seek?”

36

JFK and the Unspeakable

“Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of

war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking

about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living,

the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a

better life for their children—not merely peace for Americans but peace for

all men and women—not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.”147

Kennedy’s rejection of “a Pax Americana enforced on the world by Amer-

ican weapons of war” was an act of resistance to what President Eisenhower

had identified in his Farewell Address as the military-industrial complex.

“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms

industry,” Eisenhower had warned three days before Kennedy’s inaugura-

tion, “is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic,

political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every State house, every office

of the Federal government . . .”

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of

unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-indus-

trial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists

and will persist.”148

What Eisenhower in the final hours of his presidency revealed as the great-

est threat to our democracy Kennedy in the midst of his presidency chose to

resist. The military-industrial complex was totally dependent on “a Pax

Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war.” That Pax

Americana policed by the Pentagon was considered the system’s indispensa-

ble, hugely profitable means of containing and defeating Communism. At

great risk Kennedy was rejecting the foundation of the Cold War system.

In his introduction at American University, President Kennedy noted the

standard objection to the view he was opening up: What about the Russians?

“Some say that it is useless to speak of world peace or world law or world

government—and that it will be useless until the leaders of the Soviet Union

adopt a more enlightened attitude. I hope they do. I believe we can help them

do it.”

He then countered our own prejudice with what Schlesinger called “a sen-

tence capable of revolutionizing the whole American view of the cold war”:

“But I also believe that we must reexamine our own attitude—as individu-

als and as a Nation—for our attitude is as essential as theirs.”

Kennedy’s turn here corresponds to the Gospel insight: “Why do you see

the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?”

(Luke 6:41).

The nonviolent theme of the American University Address is that self-

examination is the beginning of peace. Kennedy was proposing to the Amer-

ican University graduates (and the national audience behind them) that they

unite this inner journey of peace with an outer journey that could transform

the Cold War landscape.

“Every graduate of this school, every thoughtful citizen who despairs of

war and wishes to bring peace, should begin by looking inward—by exam-

A Cold Warrior Turns

37

ining his own attitude toward the possibilities of peace, toward the Soviet

Union, toward the course of the cold war and toward freedom and peace

here at home.”

Thus ended Kennedy’s groundbreaking preamble, an exhortation to per-

sonal and national self-examination as the spiritually liberating way to over-

come Cold War divisions and achieve “not merely peace in our time but

peace for all time.” In his American University address, John Kennedy was

proclaiming a way out of the Cold War and into a new human possibility.

One pawn in the Cold War who needed a way out before it was too late

was a young ex-Marine, Lee Harvey Oswald.

In following Kennedy’s path through a series of critical conflicts, we have

been moving more deeply into the question: Why was John F. Kennedy mur-

dered? Now as we begin to trace Oswald’s path, which will converge with

Kennedy’s, we can see the emergence of a strangely complementary ques-

tion: Why was Lee Harvey Oswald so tolerated and supported by the gov-

ernment he betrayed?

On October 31, 1959, Lee Harvey Oswald, who had been discharged two

months earlier from the U.S. Marine Corps in California, presented himself

at the American Embassy in Moscow to Consul Richard E. Snyder. Oswald

said his purpose in coming was to renounce his U.S. citizenship. He handed

Snyder a note he had written, in which he requested that his citizenship be

revoked and affirmed that “my allegiance is to the Union of Soviet Socialist

Republics.”149 According to the Warren Report, “Oswald stated to Snyder

that he had voluntarily told Soviet officials that he would make known to

them all information concerning the Marine Corps and his specialty therein,

radar operation, as he possessed.”150 To the Soviet officials who received his

offer, Oswald said he “intimated that he might know something of special

interest.”151

The Soviets had reason to think Oswald knew “something of special inter-

est.” From September 1957 to November 1958 Oswald had been a Marine

Corps radar operator at Atsugi Air Force Base in Japan. Atsugi, located

about thirty-five miles southwest of Tokyo, served as the CIA’s main opera-

tional base in the Far East. It was one of two bases from which the CIA’s

top-secret U-2 spy planes took off on their flights over the Soviet Union and

China. The U-2 was the creation of the CIA’s Richard Bissell, also the main

author of the Bay of Pigs scenario. Bissell worked closely on the U-2’s Soviet

overflights with CIA director Allen Dulles. Radar operator Oswald was a

small cog in the machine, but he was learning how it worked. From his radar

control room at Atsugi, where he had a “crypto” clearance (higher than “top

secret”), Oswald listened regularly to the U-2’s radio communications.152

After Atsugi, Oswald was reassigned as a radar operator to Marine Air

Control Squadron No. 9 in Santa Ana, California, which was attached to

the larger Marine Air Station in El Toro. Oswald continued to have access

38

JFK and the Unspeakable

to secret information that would have been of interest to a Cold War enemy.

Former Marine Corps Lieutenant John E. Donovan, who was Oswald’s offi-

cer in the Santa Ana radar unit, testified to the Warren Commission that

Oswald “had the access to the location of all bases in the west coast area, all

radio frequencies for all squadrons, all tactical call signs, and the relative

strength of all squadrons, number and type of aircraft in a squadron, who

was the commanding officer, the authentication code of entering and exiting

the ADIZ, which stands for Air Defense Identification Zone. He knew the

range of our radar. He knew the range of our radio. And he knew the range

of the surrounding units’ radio and radar.”153

However, Donovan’s knowledge of Oswald’s connection to the top-secret

U-2 was clearly off limits for his Warren Commission questioners. Their

avoidance of the U-2 puzzled Donovan. Wasn’t Oswald’s possible access to

top-secret U-2 information a critical issue to probe in relation to his defec-

tion? Donovan told author John Newman years later that, at the end of his

testimony, he asked a Warren Commission lawyer, “Don’t you want to know

anything about the U-2?” The lawyer said, “We asked you exactly what we

wanted to know from you and we asked you everything we wanted for now

and that is all. And if there is anything else we want to ask you, we will.”

Donovan asked a fellow witness who also knew Oswald’s U-2 connection,

“Did they ask you about the U-2?” He said, “No, not a thing.”154

On May 1, 1960, six months after Oswald defected to the Soviet Union,

a U-2 was shot down by the Soviets for the first time. The downing of the U-

2, piloted by Francis Gary Powers, wrecked the Paris summit meeting

between President Eisenhower and Premier Khrushchev. Gary Powers later

raised the question whether his plane may not have been shot down as a

result of information Oswald handed over to the Soviets.155 Powers’s ques-

tion was at least reasonable. It reinforces the case that Oswald’s volunteer-

ing all the information he had as a Marine radar specialist to the Soviets was

an apparently criminal act.

Yet when Oswald returned to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow after working

for over a year at a Soviet factory in Minsk, he was welcomed back by Amer-

ican officials with open arms. Not only did the United States make no move

to prosecute him, but the embassy gave him a loan to return to the country

he had betrayed.156 The toleration of Oswald’s apparent treason extended to

his later obtaining a new passport overnight. On June 25, 1963, Oswald was

miraculously issued a passport in New Orleans twenty-four hours after his

application.157 He identified his destination as the Soviet Union.158

After analyzing this strange history in her classic work on the Warren

Commission, Accessories after the Fact, Sylvia Meagher concluded: “Deci-

sion after decision, the [State] Department removed every obstacle before

Oswald—a defector and would-be expatriate, self-declared enemy of his

native country, self-proclaimed discloser of classified military information,

and later self-appointed propagandist for Fidel Castro—on his path from

Minsk to Dallas.”159

A Cold Warrior Turns

39

The process would, of course, be reversed in Dallas. There Oswald would

be arrested and killed quickly, before he could say what he knew of the pres-

ident’s murder. In Dallas whatever light Oswald might cast on the assassi-

nation would be switched at once into darkness.

The Warren Commission dealt with the U.S. government’s odd toleration

of the apparently treasonous Oswald, first of all, by a selective reading of

his history. When the authors of the Warren Report mentioned Oswald’s

work in the Marine Corps as a radar operator, they neglected to point out

that the future defector had a “Crypto” clearance, which was higher than

“Top Secret,” and that his work immersed him in information about the

CIA’s super-secret U-2 flights.160 By omitting such facts, the government’s

story was able to sidestep questions arising from Oswald’s offer of U-2 infor-

mation to the Soviet Union, his defection to that Cold War enemy, and his

wondrous acceptance back into the good graces of the U.S. government.

According to the Warren Report, Lee Harvey Oswald had been a lone

assassin in the making for years, “moved by an overriding hostility to his

environment.”161 In the government’s story, Oswald became a defector to

Russia, a Fair Play For Cuba Committee demonstrator in New Orleans, and

a presidential assassin for psychological reasons: “He does not appear to

have been able to establish meaningful relationships with other people. He

was perpetually disconnected with the world around him. Long before the

assassination he expressed his hatred for American society and acted in

protest against it.”162 The Warren Report portrayed Oswald as a young man

alienated from society who then became an angry Marxist, abandoned his

country, and killed its president. In the Report’s conclusion on Oswald’s moti-

vation, the commission attributed his assassin’s impulse to a megalomania

tinged with Marxism: “He sought for himself a place in history—a role as the

‘great man’ who would be recognized as having been in advance of his times.

His commitment to Marxism and communism appears to have been another

important factor in his motivation.”163

If we turn from Warren Report psychology to Cold War history, why was

the ex-Marine Lee Harvey Oswald not arrested and charged a year and a

half before the assassination when he came back to the United States from

the Soviet Union, where he had announced at the American Embassy in

Moscow that he would hand over military secrets (about U-2 flights) to the

Soviets? Whereas in Dallas Oswald would be arrested and murdered before

we knew it, on his preceding odyssey as a traitor in and out of Russia and

back to the United States he overcame government barriers with an almost

supernatural ease. What was the secret of Oswald’s immunity to prosecu-

tion for having criminally betrayed the United States at the height of the Cold

War? How did this unrepentant enemy of his country merit treatment as a

prodigal son, embraced by his government with financial help and preferen-

tial passport rulings while he continued to proclaim allegiance to the USSR

and Cuba?

A solution to the mystery was suggested by former CIA agent Victor Mar-

40

JFK and the Unspeakable

chetti, who resigned from the Agency in disillusionment after being execu-

tive assistant to the Deputy Director. The CIA fought a legal battle to sup-

press Marchetti’s book The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. In regard to

Oswald, Marchetti told author Anthony Summers of a CIA-connected Naval

intelligence program in 1959, the same year Oswald defected to the USSR:

“At the time, in 1959, the United States was having real difficulty in acquir-

ing information out of the Soviet Union; the technical systems had, of course,

not developed to the point that they are at today, and we were resorting to

all sorts of activities. One of these activities was an ONI [Office of Naval

Intelligence] program which involved three dozen, maybe forty, young men

who were made to appear disenchanted, poor American youths who had

become turned off and wanted to see what communism was all about. Some

of these people lasted only a few weeks. They were sent into the Soviet Union,

or into eastern Europe, with the specific intention the Soviets would pick

them up and ‘double’ them if they suspected them of being U.S. agents, or

recruit them as KGB agents. They were trained at various naval installations

both here and abroad, but the operation was being run out of Nag’s Head,

North Carolina.”164

The counterintelligence program described by Marchetti dovetails with

the Oswald story. It provides an explanation for the U.S. government’s indul-

gence of his behavior. That Oswald was in fact a participant in such a pro-

gram was the belief of James Botelho, his former roommate in Santa Ana.

Botelho, who later became a California judge, stated in an interview with

Mark Lane that Oswald’s Communism was a pose. Botelho said: “I’m very

conservative now [in 1978] and I was at least as conservative at that time.

Oswald was not a Communist or a Marxist. If he was I would have taken

violent action against him and so would many of the other Marines in the

unit.”165

Judge Botelho said Oswald’s “defection” was nothing but a U.S. intelli-

gence ploy: “I knew Oswald was not a Communist and was, in fact, anti-

Soviet. Then, when no real investigation occurred at the base [after Oswald’s

presence in the Soviet Union was made public], I was sure that Oswald was

on an intelligence assignment in Russia . . . Two civilians dropped in [at Santa

Ana], asked a few questions, took no written statements, and recorded no

interviews with witnesses. It was the most casual of investigations. It was a

cover-investigation so that it could be said there had been an investigation . . .

Oswald, it was said, was the only Marine ever to defect from his country to

another country, a Communist country, during peacetime. That was a major

event. When the Marine Corps and American intelligence decided not to

probe the reasons for the ‘defection,’ I knew then what I know now: Oswald

was on an assignment in Russia for American intelligence.”166

As we continue to reflect on John Kennedy’s vision at American Univer-

sity, which sought a way of peace, we can foresee the falling stars of lives that

would be brought down with the death of that vision. Among them would

be Lee Harvey Oswald, a young man on assignment in Russia for American

A Cold Warrior Turns

41

intelligence. Oswald’s trajectory, which would end up meeting Kennedy’s in

Dallas, was guided not by the heavens or fate or even, as the Warren Report

would have it, by a disturbed psyche. Oswald was guided by intelligence

handlers. Lee Harvey Oswald was a pawn in the game. He was a minor piece

in the deadly game Kennedy wanted to end. Oswald was being moved square

by square across a giant board stretching from Atsugi to Moscow to Minsk

to Dallas. For the sake of victory in the Cold War, the hands moving Oswald

were prepared to sacrifice him and any other piece on the board. However,

there was one player, John Kennedy, who no longer believed in the game and

was threatening to turn over the board.

Self-examination, Kennedy said at American University, was the founda-

tion of peace. In that speech he asked Americans to examine four basic

attitudes in ourselves that were critical obstacles to peace.

“First: Let us examine our attitude toward peace itself. Too many of us

think it is impossible. Too many think it unreal. But that is a dangerous,

defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable—that

mankind is doomed—that we are gripped by forces we cannot control.”

I remember well the United States’ warring spirit when President Kennedy

said those words. Our deeply rooted prejudice, cultivated by years of prop-

aganda, was that peace with Communists was impossible. The dogmas in

our Cold War catechism ruled out peace with the enemy: You can’t trust the

Russians. Communism could undermine the very nature of freedom. One

had to fight fire with fire against such an enemy. In the nuclear age, that

meant being prepared to destroy the world to save it from Communism.

Sophisticated analysts called it “the nuclear dilemma.”

With the acceptance of such attitudes, despair of peace was a given.

Thomas Merton wrote of this Cold War mentality: “The great danger is that

under the pressures of anxiety and fear, the alternation of crisis and relax-

ation and new crisis, the people of the world will come to accept gradually

the idea of war, the idea of submission to total power, and the abdication of

reason, spirit and individual conscience. The great peril of the cold war is the

progressive deadening of conscience.”167 As Kennedy observed, in such an

atmosphere peace seemed impossible, as in fact it was, unless underlying atti-

tudes changed. But how to change them?

Kennedy suggested a step-by-step way out of our despair. It corresponded

in the world of diplomacy to what Gandhi had called “experiments in truth.”

Kennedy said we could overcome despair by focusing “on a series of concrete

actions and effective agreements which are in the interest of all concerned.”

In spite of our warring ideologies, peace could become visible again by our

acting in response to particular, concrete problems that stood in its way.

As JFK was learning himself from his intense dialogue with Khrushchev,

the practice of seeking peace through definable goals drew one irresistibly

deeper. Violent ideologies then fell away in the process of realizing peace.

42

JFK and the Unspeakable

“Peace need not be impracticable, and war need not be inevitable,” he

said in reference to his own experience. “By defining our goal more clearly,

by making it seem more manageable and less remote, we can help all peoples

to see it, to draw hope from it, and to move irresistibly toward it.”

The second point in Kennedy’s theme was that self-examination was

needed with respect to our opponent: “Let us examine our attitude toward

the Soviet Union.” We needed to examine the root cause of our despair,

namely, our attitude toward our enemy.

Kennedy cited anti-American propaganda from a Soviet military text and

observed, “It is sad to read these Soviet statements—to realize the extent of

the gulf between us.”

Then with his listeners’ defenses down, he brought the theme of self-

examination home again: “But it is also a warning—a warning to the Amer-

ican people not to fall into the same trap as the Soviets, not to see only a

distorted and desperate view of the other side, not to see conflict as inevitable,

accommodation as impossible, and communication as nothing more than an

exchange of threats.”

It was a summary of our own Cold War perspective. The key question

was not: What about the Russians? It was rather: What about our own atti-

tude that can’t get beyond “What about the Russians”? The point was again

not the speck in our neighbor’s eye but the log in our own.

Kennedy’s next sentence was a nonviolent distinction between a system

and its people: “No government or social system is so evil that its people

must be considered as lacking in virtue.” With these words President John

Kennedy was echoing a theme of Pope John XXIII’s papal encyclical Pacem

in Terris (“Peace on Earth”), published two months earlier on April 11, 1963.

In response to the threat of nuclear war, Pope John had issued his hope-

ful letter to the world just before he took leave of it. He died of cancer one

week before Kennedy’s speech. In Pacem in Terris Pope John drew a careful

distinction between “false philosophical teachings regarding the nature, ori-

gin and destiny of the universe and of humanity” and “historical movements

that have economic, social, cultural or political ends, . . . even when these

movements have originated from those teachings and have drawn and still

draw inspiration therefrom.” Pope John said that while such teachings

remained the same, the movements arising from them underwent changes

“of a profound nature.”168

The pope then struck down what seemed at the time to be insurmountable

barriers to dialogue and collaboration with a militantly atheist opponent:

“Who can deny that those movements, insofar as they conform to the dic-

tates of right reason and are interpreters of the lawful aspirations of the

human person, contain elements that are positive and deserving of approval?

“It can happen, then, that meetings for the attainment of some practical

end, which formerly were deemed inopportune or unproductive, might now

or in the future be considered opportune and useful.”169

The pope’s actions were ahead of his words. He was already in friendly

A Cold Warrior Turns

43

communication with Nikita Khrushchev, sending him appeals for peace and

religious freedom. His unofficial emissary to the Soviet premier, Norman

Cousins, had delivered a Russian translation of Pacem in Terris personally

to Khrushchev, even before the encyclical was issued to the rest of the

world.170 Khrushchev displayed proudly to Communist Party co-workers the

papal medallion that Pope John had sent him.171

John Kennedy took heart from the elder John’s faith that peace was made

possible through such trust and communication with an enemy. Kennedy

knew from Cousins the details of his meetings with Khrushchev on behalf of

Pope John. Kennedy sent along with Cousins backdoor messages of his own

to the Soviet premier, as Cousins describes in his book The Improbable Tri-

umvirate: John F. Kennedy, Pope John, Nikita Khrushchev. Something was

going on here behind the scenes of Christian–Communist conflict that was

breathtaking in the then-dominant context of Armageddon theologies.

So it was natural for John Kennedy to speak at American University with

empathy about the suffering of the Soviet Union. “No nation in the history

of battle ever suffered more than the Soviet Union suffered in the course of

the Second World War,” he said. “At least 20 million lost their lives. Count-

less millions of homes and farms were burned or sacked. A third of the

nation’s territory, including nearly two thirds of its industrial base, was

turned into a wasteland—a loss equivalent to the devastation of this coun-

try east of Chicago.”

The suffering that the Russian people had already experienced was

Kennedy’s backdrop for addressing the evil of nuclear war, as it would affect

simultaneously the U.S., the U.S.S.R., and the rest of the world: “All we have

built, all we have worked for, would be destroyed in the first 24 hours.”

“In short,” he said, “both the United States and its allies, and the Soviet

Union and its allies, have a mutually deep interest in a just and genuine peace

and in halting the arms race.” He added, in an ironic play on Woodrow Wil-

son’s slogan for entering World War I: “If we cannot end now our differ-

ences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity.”

John Kennedy, portrayed by unsympathetic writers as a man with few

feelings, had broken through to the feelings of our Cold War enemy, not only

the ruler Nikita Khrushchev but an entire people decimated in World War II.

What about the Russians? Kennedy’s answer was that when we felt the

enemy’s pain, peace was not only possible. It was necessary. It was as neces-

sary as the life of one’s own family, seen truly for the first time. The vision

that John F. Kennedy had been given was radically simple: Our side and their

side were the same side.

“For, in the final analysis,” Kennedy said, summing up his vision of inter-

dependence, “our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small

planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And

we are all mortal.”

If we could accept such compassion for the enemy, Kennedy’s third, most

crucial appeal for self-examination could become more possible for his Amer-

44

JFK and the Unspeakable

ican audience. “Third: Let us reexamine our attitude toward the cold war,

remembering that we are not engaged in a debate, seeking to pile up debat-

ing points.”

When the missile crisis was resolved, the president stringently avoided,

and ordered his staff to avoid, any talk of victory or defeat concerning

Khrushchev. The only victory was avoiding war. Yet for Khrushchev’s crit-

ics in the Communist world who could tolerate no retreat from the capital-

ist enemy, the Soviet premier had suffered a humiliating defeat. For that

reason alone, Kennedy believed, there must never be another missile crisis,

for it would only repeat pressures for terrible choices that had very nearly

resulted in total war.

“Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must

avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a

humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the

nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy—or of

a collective death-wish for the world.”

Kennedy moved on to concrete steps, already in progress, toward realizing

his vision of world peace. He announced first the decision made by Macmil-

lan, Khrushchev, and himself to hold discussions in Moscow on a test ban

treaty. He then proclaimed his unilateral initiative, a suspension of atmos-

pheric tests, with the explicit hope that it would foster trust with the enemy:

“To make clear our good faith and solemn convictions on the matter [of

a comprehensive test ban treaty], I now declare that the United States does

not propose to conduct nuclear tests in the atmosphere so long as other states

do not do so. We will not be the first to resume.”

For those who knew the strength of will behind Kennedy’s vision, there

was something either inspiring or threatening in his next statement of “our

primary long-range interest”: “general and complete disarmament—designed

to take place by stages, permitting parallel political developments to build the

new institutions of peace which would take the place of arms.” As we shall

see, Kennedy meant what he said, and U.S. intelligence agencies knew it. So

did the corporate power brokers who had clashed with him the year before

in the steel crisis, an overlooked chapter in the Kennedy presidency that we

will explore. The military-industrial complex did not receive his swords-into-

plowshares vision as good news.

In the fourth and final section of his plea for self-examination, JFK

appealed to his American audience to examine the quality of life within our

own borders: “Let us examine our attitude toward peace and freedom here

at home . . . In too many of our cities today, the peace is not secure because

freedom is incomplete.”

He would say more on this subject the following night in his ground-

breaking civil rights speech. On the day after President Kennedy spoke at

American University, Alabama governor George Wallace let the president’s

will prevail and backed away from blocking a door at the University of Ala-

bama, allowing two black students to register. That night in a televised

A Cold Warrior Turns

45

address to the nation, Kennedy described the suffering of black Americans

under racism with a strength of feeling that recalled his compassion the day

before for the Russian people in World War II:

“The Negro baby born in America today, regardless of the section of the

Nation in which he is born, has about one-half as much chance of complet-

ing a high school as a white baby born in the same place on the same day,

one-third as much chance of completing college, one-third as much chance

of becoming a professional man, twice as much chance of becoming unem-

ployed, about one-seventh as much chance of earning $10,000 a year, a life

expectance which is 7 years shorter, and the prospects of earning only half

as much.

“We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the scrip-

tures and is as clear as the American Constitution.”172

In his American University address, after Kennedy identified “peace and

freedom here at home” as a critical dimension of world peace, he went on

to identify peace itself as a fundamental human right: “And is not peace, in

the last analysis, basically a matter of human rights—the right to live out

our lives without fear of devastation—the right to breathe air as nature pro-

vided it—the right of future generations to a healthy existence?”

Kennedy concluded his “peace speech” with a promise whose beginning

fulfillment in the next five months would confirm his own death sentence:

“Confident and unafraid, we labor on—not toward a strategy of annihilation

but toward a strategy of peace.”

John Kennedy’s greatest statement of his turn toward peace was his Amer-

ican University address. In an ironic turn of events, the Soviet Union became

its principal venue. JFK’s identification with the Russian people’s suffering

penetrated their government’s defenses far more effectively than any missile

could have. Sorensen described the speech’s impact on the other side of the

Cold War:

“The full text of the speech was published in the Soviet press. Still more

striking was the fact that it was heard as well as read throughout the U.S.S.R.

After fifteen years of almost uninterrupted jamming of Western broadcasts,

by means of a network of over three thousand transmitters and at an annual

cost of several hundred million dollars, the Soviets jammed only one para-

graph of the speech when relayed by the Voice of America in Russian (that

dealing with their ‘baseless’ claims of U.S. aims)—then did not jam any of it

upon rebroadcast—and then suddenly stopped jamming all Western broad-

casts, including even Russian-language newscasts on foreign affairs. Equally

suddenly they agreed in Vienna to the principle of inspection by the Inter-

national Atomic Energy Agency to make certain that Agency’s reactors were

used for peaceful purposes. And equally suddenly the outlook for some kind

of test-ban agreement turned from hopeless to hopeful.”173

Nikita Khrushchev was deeply moved. He told test-ban negotiator Averell

Harriman that Kennedy had given “the greatest speech by any American

President since Roosevelt.”174 Khrushchev responded by proposing to

46

JFK and the Unspeakable

Kennedy that they now consider a limited test ban encompassing the atmos-

phere, outer space, and water, so that the disputed question of inspections

would no longer arise. He also suggested a nonaggression pact between

NATO and the Warsaw Pact to create a “fresh international climate.”175

Kennedy’s speech was received less favorably in his own country. The New

York Times reported his government’s skepticism: “Generally there was not

much optimism in official Washington that the President’s conciliation

address at American University would produce agreement on a test ban treaty

or anything else.”176 In contrast to the Soviet media, which were electrified

by the speech, the U.S. media ignored or downplayed it. For the first time

Americans had less opportunity to read and hear their president’s words than

did the Russian people. A turnabout was occurring in the world on different

levels. Whereas nuclear disarmament had suddenly become feasible,

Kennedy’s position in his own government had become precarious. Kennedy

was turning faster than was safe for a Cold War leader.

After the American University address, John Kennedy and Nikita

Khrushchev began to act like competitors in peace. They were both turning.

However, Kennedy’s rejection of Cold War politics was considered treason-

ous by forces in his own government. In that context, which Kennedy knew

well, the American University address was a profile in courage with lethal

consequences. President Kennedy’s June 10, 1963, call for an end to the Cold

War, five and one-half months before his assassination, anticipates Dr. King’s

courage in his April 4, 1967, Riverside Church address calling for an end to

the Vietnam War, exactly one year before his assassination. Each of those

transforming speeches was a prophetic statement provoking the reward a

prophet traditionally receives. John Kennedy’s American University address

was to his death in Dallas as Martin Luther King’s Riverside Church address

was to his death in Memphis.

On June 13, 1962, Lee Harvey Oswald returned to the United States after

his defection to the Soviet Union. He was not met by arrest and prose-

cution. Nor was he confronted in any way by the government he had

betrayed. Instead Oswald was welcomed by order of the U.S. government,

as he and his Russian wife Marina disembarked with their infant daughter

June from the ocean liner Maasdam in Hoboken, New Jersey. The Warren

Report tells us that, on the recommendation of the State Department, the

Oswalds were greeted at the dock by Spas T. Raikin, a representative of the

Traveler’s Aid Society.177 The Warren Report does not mention, however,

that Raikin was at the same time secretary-general of the American Friends

of the Anti-Bolshevik Nations, an anti-communist organization with exten-

sive intelligence connections178—like the American government, an unlikely

source of support for a traitor. The Warren Report does say that, with Spas

T. Raikin’s help, the Oswald family passed smoothly through immigration

and customs.

In the summer of 1962 the Oswalds settled in Fort Worth, Texas. They

A Cold Warrior Turns

47

were welcomed by a local White Russian community characterized by its

pronounced anti-communist view of the world. Lee was befriended by

George de Mohrenschildt, the son of a czarist official. “The Baron,” as he

liked to be called, traveled around the world as a geologist, consulting for

Texas oil companies and doubling as an intelligence asset. In 1957 the CIA’s

Richard Helms wrote a memo saying that de Mohrenschildt, after making a

trip as a consultant in Yugoslavia, provided the CIA with “foreign intelli-

gence which was promptly disseminated to other federal agencies in 10 sep-

arate reports.”179 De Mohrenschildt would admit in a 1977 interview that he

had been given a go-ahead to meet Oswald by J. Walton Moore, the Dallas

CIA Domestic Contacts Service chief.180

In that March 29, 1977, interview, the last he would ever give, George de

Mohrenschildt told author Edward Jay Epstein he had “on occasion done

favors” since the early 1950s for government officials connected with the

CIA. It was a mutually beneficial relationship. The CIA contacts then helped

de Mohrenschildt arrange profitable business connections overseas.

De Mohrenschildt said that in late 1961 he had met in Dallas with the

CIA’s J. Walton Moore, who began to tell him about “an ex-American

Marine who had worked in an electronics factory in Minsk for the past year

and in whom there was ‘interest.’”181 The Baron had grown up in Minsk, as

Moore seemed to know before being told. The ex-Marine, Moore said,

would be returning to the Dallas area. De Mohrenschildt felt he was being

primed.

In the summer of 1962, de Mohrenschildt said, he was handed Lee Har-

vey Oswald’s address in Fort Worth by “one of Moore’s associates,” who

suggested that de Mohrenschildt meet Oswald. De Mohrenschildt then

phoned Moore to confirm such a mission and set up another mutually ben-

eficial relationship. He told Moore he would appreciate help from the U.S.

embassy in Haiti in arranging approval by Haitian dictator “Papa Doc”

Duvalier for an oil exploration deal. Moore then gave de Mohrenschildt the

go-ahead to befriend the Oswalds, which de Mohrenschildt promptly did—

with the firm understanding that he was carrying out the CIA’s wishes. “I

would never have contacted Oswald in a million years if Moore had not

sanctioned it,” de Mohrenschildt said in his final interview. “Too much was

at stake.”182

On October 7, 1962, nine days before the Cuban Missile Crisis began, de

Mohrenschildt urged his new friend Lee Harvey Oswald to move to Dallas,

where more of the Russian immigrants lived. Oswald took him so seriously

that the next day he quit his job at a Fort Worth welding company and made

the move.183 De Mohrenschildt then became Oswald’s mentor in Dallas. The

Baron’s wife and daughter said it was he who organized Oswald’s securing

a new job, four days after his move, with a Dallas graphic arts company,

Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall.184 The official record is that Louise Latham of the

Texas Employment Commission sent Oswald to the firm. Author Henry Hurt

interviewed Ms. Latham, who denied that de Mohrenschildt got the job for

Oswald.185

48

JFK and the Unspeakable

Whoever was responsible for Oswald’s immediate hiring, it was a remark-

able achievement. Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall, described by the Warren Commis-

sion simply as “a commercial advertising photography firm,”186 had

contracts with the U.S. Army Map Service. Its classified work connected with

Oswald’s history as an apparent traitor. From interviews with Jaggars-Chiles-

Stovall employees, Hurt concluded, “Part of the work appears to have been

related to the top secret U-2 missions, some of which were then making

flights over Cuba.”187 Four days before President Kennedy was shown U-2

photos that confirmed Soviet missiles in Cuba, Lee Harvey Oswald reported

to work at a defense contractor that was apparently involved in logistics sup-

port for the U-2 mission. According to Oswald’s co-workers, some of them

were setting type for Cuban place names to go on maps188—probably for the

same spy planes whose radar secrets the ex-Marine had already offered to the

Soviet Union. Oswald was once again, through the intervention of under-

cover angels, defying the normal laws of government security barriers.

As it turned out, in mid-March 1963 George de Mohrenschildt did receive

a Haitian government contract for $285,000.189 In April he left Dallas, and

in May he met in Washington, D.C., with CIA and U.S. Army intelligence

contacts to further his Haitian connections.190 De Mohrenschildt then

departed for Haiti. He never saw Oswald again.

None of George de Mohrenschildt’s extensive U.S. intelligence connec-

tions are mentioned in the Warren Report, which describes him vaguely as

“a highly individualistic person of varied interests” who befriended

Oswald.191 Relying on U.S. intelligence for its questions and answers, the

Report concludes concerning George and his wife, Jeanne de Mohrenschildt:

“Neither the FBI, CIA, nor any witness contacted by the Commission has

provided any information linking the de Mohrenschildts to subversive or

extremist organizations.”192

New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison in his investigation of the

Kennedy assassination asked a different kind of question about George de

Mohrenschildt. Garrison identified de Mohrenschildt as one of Oswald’s CIA

“baby-sitters,” “assigned to protect or otherwise see to the general welfare

of a particular individual.”193 Garrison concluded from his conversations

with George and Jeanne de Mohrenschildt that the Baron was in some sense

an unwitting baby-sitter, without foreknowledge of what was in store for

the “baby” in his custody. Both de Mohrenschildts, Garrison said, were vig-

orous in their insistence to him that Oswald had been the assassination scape-

goat.194

On March 29, 1977, three hours after his revelation of the CIA’s sanc-

tioning his contact with Oswald, George de Mohrenschildt was found shot

to death in the house where he was staying in Manalapan, Florida. His death

also occurred on the day Gaeton Fonzi, an investigator for the House Select

Committee on Assassinations, left his card with de Mohrenschildt’s daugh-

ter and told her he would be calling her father that evening for an appoint-

ment to question him. Soon after de Mohrenschildt took the card and put it

A Cold Warrior Turns

49

in his pocket, he went upstairs, then apparently put the barrel of a .20-gauge

shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.195

Though he had been Oswald’s CIA-approved shepherd in Dallas, George

de Mohrenschildt had no “need to know,” and thus probably no under-

standing in advance of the scapegoat role that lay ahead for his young friend.

In the years after John Kennedy and Lee Oswald were gunned down, the de

Mohrenschildts seemed to grow in remorse for the evil in which they had

become enmeshed. Jim Garrison said, “I was particularly affected by the

depth of their unhappiness at what had been done not only to John Kennedy

but to Lee Oswald as well.”196 George de Mohrenschildt was another casu-

alty of Dallas. Like Oswald, he, too, was a pawn in the game.

President Kennedy’s fourth Bay of Pigs toward the coup d’état he saw as

possible was the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty that he and Nikita

Khrushchev signed.

In the months before his American University address, Kennedy had

become increasingly pessimistic about achieving a test ban. Domestic oppo-

sition was rising. Liberal Republican governor Nelson Rockefeller of New

York denounced the idea of a test ban. Senate Republican leader Everett

Dirksen said of Kennedy’s efforts to gain one, “This has become an exercise

not in negotiation but in give-away.” The Joint Chiefs of Staff declared them-

selves “opposed to a comprehensive ban under almost any terms.”197

In Geneva the U.S.–Soviet negotiations were at a deadlock over the ques-

tion of on-site inspections. Meanwhile, the Atomic Energy Commission was

pushing Kennedy to schedule another series of atmospheric tests. The U.S.

Congress had similar views. Kennedy supporter Senator John O. Pastore of

Rhode Island, chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, wrote

the president that even if the current U.S. test ban proposal were accepted by

the Soviets, “on the basis of informal discussions with other Senate leaders

I am afraid that ratification of such a treaty could only be obtained with the

greatest difficulty.” Moreover, Pastore added, “I personally have reservations

as to whether such a treaty would be in the best interests of the United States

at this time.”198

At his March 21, 1963, news conference, the president was asked if he still

had hopes of arriving at a test-ban agreement. He replied doggedly, “Well,

my hopes are dimmed, but nevertheless, I still hope.”199 Only three weeks

before the American University address, he answered another test-ban ques-

tion with even less optimism, “No, I’m not hopeful, I’m not hopeful . . . We

have tried to get an agreement [with the Soviets] on all the rest of it and then

come to the question of the number of inspections, but we were unable to get

that. So I would say I am not hopeful at all.”200

He felt, nevertheless, the time to push for a treaty was right then: “I have

said from the beginning that [it] seemed to me that the pace of events was

such in the world that unless we could get an agreement now, I would think

50

JFK and the Unspeakable

the chance of getting it would be comparatively slight. We are therefore going

to continue to push very hard in May and June in every forum to see if we

can get an agreement.”201

So while not hopeful, Kennedy was more determined than ever to turn

the corner on a test ban treaty. It was then, on June 10, that he launched the

peace initiative of his American University address, which broke through

Soviet defenses. In response, Khrushchev made preparations to welcome the

U.S. test-ban negotiators to Moscow. Kennedy saw the moment was ripe for

at least a partial test ban, bypassing the negotiators’ impasse on inspections.

At this point Glenn T. Seaborg, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commis-

sion, noted in his journal that whereas JFK had been dedicated to a test ban

since the beginning of his presidency, “Now, he decided to really go for it!”202

He did so at a personal cost. As we have seen, the response to the Amer-

ican University address was much warmer on the Soviet side than the Amer-

ican. The Joint Chiefs and CIA were adamantly opposed to Kennedy’s turn

toward peace. 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.203

That process, miraculous or not, was engineered humanly by a president

committed at all costs to seeing it accomplished.

Kennedy named Averell Harriman, former ambassador to the U.S.S.R.,

his top negotiator in the Moscow talks. Known as a tough bargainer, Harri-

man was liked and respected by the Russians. They saw his appointment as

a sign of the president’s seriousness in wanting a test-ban agreement.

Kennedy personally prepared the negotiators. He emphasized the impor-

tance of their mission—perhaps a last chance to stop the spread of testing and

radioactive fallout. If they were successful, it would mean a concrete step

toward mutual trust with the Russians. In both literal and symbolic senses,

they stood to achieve a more peaceful atmosphere in the world.204 Their head

negotiator would be, in effect, not Harriman but the president himself. He

would stay in regular communication with them from Washington. He

underlined confidentiality. No one outside a tight circle of officials person-

ally approved by him was to know any of the details.205

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.”206

On July 25, 1963, when the final text was ready, Harriman phoned

Kennedy and read it to him twice. The president said, “Okay, great!” Har-

riman returned to the conference room and initialed the Limited Test Ban

Treaty, outlawing nuclear tests “in the atmosphere, beyond its limits, includ-

ing outer space, or under water, including territorial waters or high seas.”207

The next night President Kennedy made a television appeal to the nation

A Cold Warrior Turns

51

for support of the test ban treaty. Against the advice of Secretary of State

Dean Rusk, Kennedy had decided to take the issue of ratification immediately

to the people. He wanted to do everything he could to turn public opinion

around as quickly as possible. “We’ve got to hit the country while the coun-

try’s hot,” he told Rusk, “That’s the only thing that makes any impression

to these god-damned Senators . . . They’ll move as the country moves.”208

In his speech Kennedy said, “This treaty is not the millennium . . . But it

is an important first step—a step toward peace—a step toward reason—a

step away from war.”209

As in the American University address, he opened up a vision beyond the

Cold War, that of an era of mutual peacemaking. “Nuclear test ban negoti-

ations have long been a symbol of East-West disagreement.” Perhaps “this

treaty can also be a symbol—if it can symbolize the end of one era and the

beginning of another—if both sides can by this treaty gain confidence and

experience in peaceful collaboration.”

He reiterated the consequences of a nuclear war: “A full-scale nuclear

exchange, lasting less than 60 minutes, with the weapons now in existence,

could wipe out more than 300 million Americans, Europeans, and Russians,

as well as untold numbers elsewhere.” He quoted Chairman Khrushchev:

“The survivors would envy the dead.”

Besides helping to prevent war, he said, the test ban treaty “can be a step

towards freeing the world from the fears and dangers of radioactive fallout.”

He called to mind “the number of children and grandchildren with cancer in

their bones, with leukemia in their blood, or with poison in their lungs . . .

this is not a natural health hazard—and it is not a statistical issue. The loss

of even one human life, or the malformation of even one baby—who may be

born long after we are gone—should be of concern to us all. Our children

and grandchildren are not merely statistics toward which we can be

indifferent.”

Kennedy’s sense of the vulnerability of children was again the force behind

some of his most deeply felt words: “[This treaty] is particularly for our chil-

dren and our grandchildren, and they have no lobby here in Washington.”

After reminding his listeners of “the familiar places of danger and con-

flict”—Cuba, Southeast Asia, Berlin, and all around the globe—he concluded

with the expression of a deep hope, less than four months before his assas-

sination:

“But now, for the first time in many 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 has 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, step

back from the shadows of war and seek out the way of peace. And if that

52

JFK and the Unspeakable

journey is a thousand miles, or even more, let history record that we, in this

land, at this time, took the first step.”

Kennedy was fiercely determined but not optimistic that the test ban treaty

would be ratified by the defense-conscious Senate. It was on August 7, 1963,

that he made his comment to advisers that a near-miracle was needed. He

said that if a Senate vote were held right then it would fall far short of the

necessary two-thirds.210 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.211

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 Coun-

cil 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 enthu-

siastic 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.

In the meantime, they were bucking the military-industrial complex,

which had become alarmed at the president’s sudden turn toward peace and

his alliance with peace activists in support of the test ban. 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.”212

The alarm was sounded even more loudly in the August 12 U.S. News

with an article headlined, “If Peace Does Come—What Happens to Busi-

ness?” The article began:

“This question once again is being raised: If peace does come, what hap-

pens 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 nonag-

gression 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

A Cold Warrior Turns

53

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.” 213

However, an insider could have asked, what would it mean to defense

contractors if Kennedy extended his peacemaking to Cuba and Vietnam?

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.”214

Kennedy pointed out to 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.”215

Almost four decades later, Nikita Khrushchev’s son Sergei would provide

a wistful footnote to John Kennedy’s political empathy with his father. On

February 4, 2001, Sergei Khrushchev, by then a senior fellow in international

studies at Brown University, in the course of commenting on the film Thir-

teen Days (a dramatization of the Cuban Missile Crisis), wrote in The New

York Times:

“A great deal changed after the [missile] crisis: A direct communication

link between Moscow and Washington was established, nuclear testing

(except for underground tests) was banned, and the confrontation over Berlin

was ended.

“But there was much that President Kennedy and my father did not suc-

ceed in seeing through to the end. I am convinced that if history had allowed

them another six years, they would have brought the cold war to a close

before the end of the 1960’s. I say this with good reason, because in 1963 my

father made an official announcement to a session of the U.S.S.R. Defense

Council that he intended to sharply reduce Soviet armed forces from 2.5 mil-

lion men to half a million and to stop the production of tanks and other

offensive weapons.

“He thought that 200 to 300 intercontinental nuclear missiles made an

attack on the Soviet Union impossible, while the money freed up by reduc-

ing the size of the army would be put to better use in agriculture and hous-

ing construction.

“But fate decreed otherwise, and the window of opportunity, barely

cracked open, closed at once. In 1963 President Kennedy was killed, and a

year later, in October 1964, my father was removed from power. The cold

war continued for another quarter of a century . . .”216

54

JFK and the Unspeakable

Kennedy 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.217 Strategic Air Command general Thomas Power

denounced the treaty.218 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.”219

The Citizens Committee continued its campaign in support of the test ban.

In September public opinion polls showed a turnaround—80 percent in favor

of the treaty. The Senate vote on ratification was held on September 24, 1963.

The Senate approved the test ban treaty by a vote of 80 to 19—14 more than

the required two-thirds. Sorensen noted that no other single accomplishment

in the White House gave the president greater satisfaction.220

Before he initiated his all-out campaign for approval of the test ban,

Kennedy told his staff that the treaty was the most serious congressional

issue he had faced. He was, he said, determined to win if it cost him the 1964

election.221 He did win. But did it cost him his life?