When Kennedy blinked--Why he does not belong on a list of great Presidents
Cover of John F. KennedyReaders skeptical of the Camelot myth may experience twinges of schadenfreude while reading this meticulously researched, elegantly written account of John F. Kennedy's mortifying encounters with the Soviet Union's Nikita Khrushchev during the first year of his presidency. Others, on coming to the end of Frederick Kempe's molecule-by-molecule deconstruction of the Kennedy reputation for toughness, vigor, smarts and unshakable cool, are more likely to breathe a sigh of relief that civilization somehow survived the confrontation.There is much more.
"Berlin 1961" revolves around the question of whether Kennedy's decision to countenance the erection of the Berlin Wall was, in Mr. Kempe's words, "a successful means of avoiding war, or . . . the unhappy result of his missing backbone." On those terms, the book is a scholarly history of the crisis that culminated on Aug. 13, 1961, when East Germany, convinced that its economic and political survival depended on stopping the hemorrhage of refugees to the West, cut the city in two with the Berlin Wall, thereby imprisoning its people for the next 26 years. Since 1945, 2.8 million, or one in every six East Germans, had fled their benighted country.
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Khrushchev's intention at Vienna was to test Kennedy's nerve and to put on record the Soviet Union's intentions in Berlin and East Germany as a whole. Four days after the summit was announced, he called in Ambassador Thompson and laid down a marker. Whether Kennedy liked it or not, "he would take unilateral action in the fall or winter to give control of the city to the East Germans and end all occupation rights." This breathtaking maneuver would provide Walter Ulbricht, the East German leader, with the authority to truncate Berlin and stop the stampede of refugees. Khrushchev believed that he could accomplish this with impunity, telling his inner circle, in Mr. Kempe's paraphrase, "that Kennedy so feared war that he would not react militarily." Others, at home and abroad, thought that the president had no other option but to meet bluster with strength. Charles de Gaulle, speaking to Kennedy in Paris hours before the summit, told him that "any retreat from Berlin, any change of status. . . would mean defeat," adding: "If [Khrushchev] wants war, we must make it clear that he will have it."
In Vienna, however, Kennedy took a persistently conciliatory line. Early on, he told Khrushchev that communism could remain where it was already established in the world but could not occupy new territory. Startled American diplomats regarded this as a signal of the president's willingness, contrary to longstanding U.S. policy, to accept the existing division of Europe into Soviet and Western spheres of influence. Khrushchev said that it was beyond his powers to guarantee that communist ideas would not proliferate beyond present borders.
Kennedy attempted to raise the question of a nuclear-test-ban treaty, his first priority, but Khrushchev pounced instead on the Berlin question. "If the United States refuses to sign a peace treaty [with Germany]," he said, "the Soviet Union will do so and nothing will stop it." After one day of talks, he was more certain than ever that Kennedy was hopelessly weak. "This man is very inexperienced, even immature," Khrushchev told his interpreter.
Kennedy was exhausted. On ordinary days he took five hot baths or showers to ease excruciating lower back pain. He wore a tight corset. In private he often used crutches. From his personal doctor he received two or three daily injections of procaine, a stronger version of Novocain, and several other drugs. A medical hanger-on, Dr. Max Jacobson ("Dr. Feelgood" to his celebrity patients), administered injections that contained hormones, steroids, vitamins, enzymes, animal cells and amphetamines. Warned after laboratory analysis that Jacobson's nostrums were dangerous, the agonized Kennedy said: "I don't care if it's horse piss. It works."
"Between doses," Mr. Kempe writes, pondering what effect the injections might have had on Kennedy's behavior in Vienna, "his mood could swing violently from overconfidence to bouts of depression."
On the second and final day of the summit, Kennedy continued his attempts to establish empathy and introduced more new terminology, repeatedly referring to the allied zones of Berlin as "West" Berlin. This provocative usage, which implied that Berlin could become two separate cities without American objection, did not pass unnoticed. As Mr. Kempe puts it: "In perhaps the most important manhood moment of his presidency, Kennedy had made a unilateral concession."
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I think his weakness in Vienna is what led to the Cuban missile crisis. Khrushchev thought Kennedy could be rolled. While it was a major miscalculation it is one that Kennedy was responsible for by his conduct in Vienna.
I don't know if knowledge of his incompetence will change the romantic memory of his Presidency by many Americans, but history is starting to reach a very different conclusion than previously presented about President Kennedy.
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