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 of the National Security Council. At the same time, John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev, the two men most responsible for the Cuban Missile Crisis, seemed locked in a hopeless ideological conflict. The U.S. and Soviet leaders had been following Cold War policies that now seemed to be moving inexorably toward a war of extermination.
Yet, as we have since learned, Kennedy and Khrushchev had been engaged in a secret correspondence for over a year that gave signs of hope. Even as they moved publicly step by step toward a Cold War climax that would almost take the world over the edge with them, they were at the same time smuggling confidential letters back and forth that recognized each other’s humanity and hope for a solution. They were public enemies who, in the midst of deepening turmoil, were secretly learning something approaching trust in each other.
I re-read several of these letters yesterday. A man was asking me to read them to him over the radio. I was struck especially by the first things that Khrushchev says in his first letter to JFK when he is sitting by the Black Sea in his home.
He’s looking our over the water and it’s a very beautiful letter, beginning of the letter especially. He looks out over the water and he reflects on what he’s seeing and how what a contrast this is to what they’re trying to address.
He says I want to suggest to you Mr. President a symbol of our problem. This is Khrushchev, the communist:
‘It’s Noah’s Ark. Let’s not try to distinguish who are the clean and the unclean on this Ark Mr. President. We’re in a sea of nuclear weapons. Let’s just keep the Ark afloat.’
Kennedy, who after this letter was smuggled to him in a newspaper to his press secretary, wondered,
‘Why do I want a newspaper given to me by a KGB agent?’
He found out there was a 26-page letter to the President inside it from Nikita Khrushchev.
When Kennedy responded to this he was sitting by the Atlantic Ocean in Hyannis Port. He talks about the beauty there and says, ‘Yes, Mr. Chairman, Noah’ Ark – that’s our symbol. We have to keep the Ark afloat.’
So even in the midst of the missile crises these two men had begun to, through their secret communications, they had begun, almost beyond their intentions, to develop a bit of trust in each other.
On what seemed the darkest day in the crisis, when a Soviet missile had shot down a U2 spy plane over Cuba, intensifying the already overwhelming pressures on Kennedy to bomb Cuba, the president sent his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, secretly to Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. RFK told Dobrynin, as Dobrynin reported to Khrushchev, that the president
“didn’t know how to resolve the situation. The military is putting great pressure on him . . . Even if he doesn’t want or desire a war, something irreversible could occur against his will. That is why the President is asking for help to solve this problem.”
In his memoirs, Khrushchev recalled a further, chilling sentence from Robert Kennedy’s appeal to Dobrynin:
“If the situation continues much longer, the President is not sure that the military will not overthrow him and seize power.”
The editor to Khrushchev’s memoirs felt he had to stick a endnote in there and say, There’s no evidence of this. There’s no evidence of this. [Laughter] Well, apparently, the president thought there was some.
Sergei Khrushchev, Nikita’s son (who as you probably know is now in this country and is a citizen), has [recounted] the thoughts his father described to him when he read Dobrynin’s wired report relaying John Kennedy’s plea:
“The president was calling for help: that was how father interpreted Robert Kennedy’s talk with our ambassador.”
So at a moment when the world was falling into darkness, Kennedy did what from his generals’ standpoint was intolerable and unforgivable. JFK not only rejected [his] generals’ pressures for war. Even worse, the president then reached out to their enemy, asking for help. That was treason.
When Nikita Khrushchev had received Kennedy’s plea for help in Moscow, he turned to his Foreign Minister, Andrei Gromyko and said,
“We have to let Kennedy know that we want to help him.”
Khrushchev stunned himself by what he had just said: Did he really want to help his enemy, Kennedy? Yes, he did. He repeated the word to his foreign minister:
“Yes, help. We now have a common cause, to save the world from those pushing us toward war.”
How do we understand that moment? The two most heavily armed leaders in history, on the verge of total nuclear war, joined hands against those on both sides pressuring them to attack. Khrushchev ordered the immediate withdrawal of his missiles, in return for Kennedy’s public pledge never to invade Cuba and his secret promise to withdraw U.S. missiles from Turkey – as he would in fact do.
By the way, I was in Rome, Italy at this time. I didn’t know, of course, the secret pledge that Kennedy had given to Khrushchev or that he would in fact withdraw his missiles from Turkey. So I wrote an article for Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker newspaper – the most radical Catholic paper in the country if not in existence – and proposed what I thought was outrageous (and Dorothy published it right away), that what we should do is in exchange for Khrushchev withdrawing the missiles from Cuba, Kennedy should have had the guts to withdraw his missiles from Turkey.
This was outrageous for this to even be suggested in the most radical publication I could find in my particular community. Kennedy did it. Kennedy did it. I remember that history. I remember what was unthinkable for him to do such a thing.
The two Cold War enemies – both of them – had turned, so that each now had more in common with his opponent than either had with his own generals. As a result of that turn toward peace, one leader would be assassinated thirteen months later. The other, left without his peacemaking partner, would be overthrown the following year. Yet because of their turn away from nuclear war, today we are still living and struggling for peace on this earth. Hope is alive. We still have a chance.
What can we call that transforming moment when Kennedy asked his enemy for help and Khrushchev gave it?
From a Buddhist standpoint, it was enlightenment of a cosmic kind. Others might call it – from their perspective – a divine miracle. Readers of the Christian Gospels could say that Kennedy and Khrushchev were only doing what Jesus said: “Love your enemies.” That would be “love” as Gandhi understood it. Love as the other side of truth; a respect and understanding of our opponents that goes far enough to integrate their truth into our own. In the last few months of Kennedy’s life, he and Khrushchev were walking that extra mile where each was beginning to see the other’s truth.
Neither John Kennedy nor Nikita Khrushchev was a saint. Each was deeply complicit in policies that brought humankind to the brink of nuclear war. Yet, when they encountered the void – that Merton, for example, was talking about – then by turning to each other for help, they turned humanity toward the hope of a peaceful planet.
John Kennedy’s next “Bay of Pigs,” his next critical conflict with his national security state, was his American University Address. Saturday Review editor Norman Cousins summed up the significance of that remarkable speech: “At American University on June 10, 1963, President Kennedy proposed an end to the Cold War.”
I believe it is almost impossible to overemphasize the importance of President Kennedy’s American University address.
It was a decisive signal to both Nikita Khrushchev, on the one hand, and JFK’s national security advisers, on the other, that he was serious about making peace with the Communists. After he told the graduating class at American University that the subject of his speech was “the most important topic on earth: world peace,” he asked:
“What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek?” He answered, “Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war.”
Kennedy’s rejection of “a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war” was an act of resistance to the military-industrial complex. 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 indispensable, hugely profitable means of containing and defeating Communism. At his own risk Kennedy was rejecting the very foundation of the Cold War system.
In its place, as a foundation for peace, the president put [forward] a compassionate description of the suffering of the enemy, the Russian people. They had been our allies during World War Two and had suffered mightily.[36] Yet even their World War Two devastation he said, would be small compared to the effects of a nuclear war on both their country and ours.
In his speech, Kennedy turned around the question – I heard this question all the time in the 1960s, every time in the peace movement we tried to suggest alternatives – that question that was always asked when it came to prospects for peace was, “What about the Russians?” It was assumed the Russians would take advantage of any move we might make toward peace.
Kennedy asked instead, “What about us?” He said, “[O]ur attitude [toward peace] is as essential as theirs.” What about our attitude toward war and the nuclear arms race?
Within the overarching theology [of our country] – the Cold War was a big theology – a theology of total good versus total evil (and you know who the total good is, it’s us), Kennedy was asking a heretical question, coming especially from the president of the United States.
Kennedy said he wanted to negotiate then, a nuclear test ban treaty. Where did he want to do it? With the Soviet Union in Moscow. He wants to go to Moscow. He doesn’t trust, trying to negotiate a nuclear test ban treaty in Washington. He says I want to go to Moscow, in their capitol, not ours, as soon as possible.
So to clear the way for such a treaty what does he do? He said he was suspending U.S. atmospheric tests unilaterally. He is doing unilateral renunciation of his testing before anything with Khrushchev.
John Kennedy’s strategy of peace penetrated the Soviet government’s defenses far more effectively than any missile could ever have done. The Soviet press, which was accustomed to censoring U.S. government statements, published the entire speech all across the country. Soviet radio stations broadcast and rebroadcast the speech to the Soviet people. In response to Kennedy’s turn toward peace, the Soviet government even stopped jamming all Western broadcasts into their country.
Nikita Khrushchev was deeply moved by the American University Address. He said Kennedy had given “the greatest speech by any American President since Roosevelt.”
JFK’s speech was received less favorably – where? – 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.”
In contrast to the Soviet media that were electrified by the speech, the U.S. media ignored or downplayed it (as they’re done to the present). For the first time, Americans had less opportunity to read and hear their president’s words than did the Russian people. A turn-around 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.
President Kennedy’s next critical conflict with his national security state, propelling him toward the coup d’etat he saw as possible (this was number 4), was the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty that he signed with Nikita Khrushchev on July 25, 1963, just six weeks (if you can imagine that – six weeks to negotiate that treaty) after the American University Address.
The way he did it was he sent Averell Harriman as his representative to Moscow. Every time Averell Harriman had a question from the Soviet negotiators, he said, ‘Excuse me please.’ He ran to a telephone and he ran back with the answer. The telephone was directly to Kennedy. Kennedy negotiated that treaty point by point, personally, right straight through. That’s why it happened in six weeks.
The president did a total end run around his military advisers [the Joint Chiefs of Staff] who were opposed to it. He didn’t even consult them on it.
He was fiercely determined but he was not optimistic that the Test Ban Treaty [would] be ratified by the defense-conscious Senate. In early August, he told his advisers that getting Senate ratification of the agreement would be “almost in the nature of a miracle.” And we can understand, given what is happening in Congress today, what he faced in terms of at the height of the Cold War, getting a nuclear test ban treaty through the Senate. He said if a Senate vote were held right then, on August 7, it would fall far short of the necessary two-thirds.
What did he do? He initiated a whirlwind public education campaign on the treaty, coordinated by Saturday Review editor Norman Cousins, who directed a committee of – whom? – people like us – peace activists. He also got business leaders, he got labor leaders, he got editors of women’s magazines, he got everybody he could together with Norman Cousins doing all the coordinating. They went out and they did a job, a furious round of public education.
In September public opinion polls showed a turnaround – 80 percent of the American people were now in favor of the Test Ban Treaty. On September 24, 1963, the Senate approved the treaty by a vote of 80 to 19 – 14 more than the required two-thirds. No other single accomplishment in the White House gave Kennedy greater satisfaction.
On September 20, when Kennedy spoke at the United Nations, he suggested that its members see the Test Ban Treaty as a beginning and engage together in an experiment in peace:
