The Testing of a President

Most Americans alive today are not old enough to remember him in office, yet John F. Kennedy retains a hold on the popular imagination. There was a time when opinions about him served as a kind of political Rorschach test. Conservatives admired him for his tough anti-communism and his commitment to lower taxes; liberals loved him because of his intelligence and because of a faith in his unrealized potential. Those distinctions have blurred by now into bipartisan respect.

But historians don’t like icons; after all, if the world were made of perfect people, what would there be to write about? But Kennedy is an especially challenging subject. As most everyone knows, he could be very human in his appetites, or superhuman if all the pillow talk is to be believed. However, the more important arguments are not over how much this philandering mattered but on the question of how Kennedy handled his Cold War challenges. Between 1961 and 1963, the world saw two of the greatest events of the Cold War--the building of the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis--and during this time the American tragedy in Vietnam had its start. It is fair to say that Kennedy would have wanted judgments of his presidency to rest on his handling of these crises. Though he worked to cut taxes to stimulate the economy and the African American struggle for civil rights attracted his attention, the events of World War II had ingrained in Kennedy the belief that the true test of American leadership came in foreign affairs.

Lawrence Freedman’s important book, “Kennedy’s Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam,” incorporates new materials from the Kennedy library and recent scholarship on the Soviet Union to scrutinize Kennedy’s handling of his greatest foreign policy challenges. The book is wise and judicious. Freedman argues that Kennedy was resolute about ends if unsure about means. Whether it was for Berlin, Cuba or Southeast Asia, he was not committed to any particular course of action. Instead he worked a problem and pushed his advisors to come up with better solutions. Freedman’s careful reconstruction of these cases dispels myths of Kennedy’s recklessness or insatiable will to victory. Instead, Freedman offers a portrait of a sometimes tentative statesman. It was not that Kennedy was indecisive by nature, but he hated to foreclose options, preferring to “wait and see” when the stakes were high. The problem was that the stakes were inordinately high in his short time as president. The Soviets seemed to be on the offensive; American allies on the defensive. Meanwhile at home, Congress and the American people were not sure which they feared more: war or the “loss” of another country to communism.

Kennedy’s chief foreign policy goals were the reduction of Cold War tensions in Europe and the containment of Sino-Soviet influence in the Third World. By starting his book with a study of how Kennedy handled the Berlin crisis, Freedman does an excellent job of identifying the security of West Berlin as Kennedy’s greatest worry. Locked 100 miles inside East Germany, West Berlin was indefensible. In 1948 Stalin had blockaded the city in the hope of driving the West out. The Allied airlift that saved the city established a new level of Western commitment to its people. When Kennedy announced in the summer of 1963, “Ich bin ein Berliner,” he was only enunciating what every president since Franklin Roosevelt understood about that city: It so symbolized the cause of a free Europe that it was home territory for an American.

To ensure peace, Kennedy, when he first took office, intended to accept things as they were in Europe: Germany divided and Western troops in West Berlin. He was prepared to recognize the German Democratic Republic as the sovereign government of the people in the Soviet occupation zone. He was ready to apply pressure on West Germany to swear off the acquisition of nuclear weapons and accept the Oder-Neisse line as the border between Poland and Germany.

But Khrushchev had his own ideas. He opposed NATO troops in West Berlin and any official link between West Berlin and West Germany. Freedman details how hard Kennedy probed for any give in the Soviet position. In the hope of inspiring some Soviet concessions, Kennedy went so far as to look away when the East Germans divided Berlin with a wall. Although he had every right to protest under the agreements that ended World War II, Kennedy was not prepared to go to war to stop the Soviets from incorporating the eastern occupation zone of Berlin into East Germany. “There’s not a damn thing I can do about it,” Kennedy said, but when it came to West Berlin, he stood his ground and hoped the Soviets would stop pushing. They never did.

Berlin cast a long shadow over Kennedy’s foreign policymaking. In 1962, he assumed Germany would be the focus of the next big crisis with Moscow. Once again, Khrushchev surprised him. Freedman’s discussion of Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis draws heavily on recent analyses of the crisis that highlight Kennedy’s leadership skills. Using transcripts of recordings Kennedy made secretly in the White House, Ernest May and Philip Zelikow (“The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis”) argued persuasively in 1997 that Kennedy had been prudent and wise in his approach to the discovery of a Soviet missile base in Cuba. Freedman agrees, praising Kennedy for allowing a free-flowing discussion among his principals that gave him time to ask the right questions and adopt a graduated approach to the crisis. The United States announced a naval blockade of Cuba hoping Khrushchev would reassess and give in. And the Soviet leader did.

Kennedy’s judgment served him well in October 1962. But as Freedman illustrates, Kennedy’s open-mindedness, his love of discussion and his preference for keeping options open had its disadvantages. These characteristics occasionally resulted in mixed signals being sent abroad, and at home the best and the brightest in the administration learned that no policy debate was ever quite over. In two areas--the nuclear arms race and Southeast Asia--the Kennedy style produced unfortunate outcomes.

American nuclear policy was confused in the Kennedy years. As a senator, Kennedy had had real doubts about the Eisenhower administration’s heavy reliance on nuclear weapons to deter Soviet aggression. He disliked the arms race, feared the proliferation of nuclear weapons to new countries and wanted a comprehensive nuclear ban. Kennedy preferred the views of D-day hero Gen. Maxwell Taylor, who believed the U.S. military should have credible nonnuclear responses to any Soviet military action. Yet as President, Kennedy let his Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara give high-profile speeches outlining a nuclear war-winning strategy, in which U.S. nuclear weapons would be targeted on Soviet nuclear installations and not on Soviet cities. And Kennedy himself even asked the Joint Chiefs of Staff whether it would be possible to knock out all Soviet nuclear weapons with a preemptive strike. There is no reason to believe Kennedy or his defense department was considering launching a first strike against Moscow, but this loose talk reached the Kremlin and undermined the president’s genuine desire to slow the arms race.

But the worst example of Kennedy’s leadership came in Vietnam. In 1963, he discovered unhappily that his administration was implicated in the assassination of America’s longtime ally, President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam. Kennedy had known there was a problem with his Vietnam policy; he had not been able to resolve the differences among his advisors. Diem and the Saigon government were crusading against Buddhists in a country that had a Buddhist majority. It was an unpopular stance that undermined Diem’s legitimacy, and Washington was divided over what to do about it. McNamara and the Pentagon favored using threats to reform Diem. A group of firebrands in the State Department and the U.S. ambassador in Saigon, however, were more blunt: They wanted Diem out, the sooner the better. All Kennedy wanted was a strong anti-communist government that could win the war with as little American involvement as possible. He hoped Diem could be reformed, but he understood that a military coup might resolve the situation.

In this crisis, the middle road led to disaster. “I know from experience that failure is more destructive than an appearance of indecision,” Kennedy explained to his advisors in the summer of 1963, yet his indecision was real, and it opened the door to men who knew what they wanted. Henry Cabot Lodge, the U.S. ambassador to Vietnam, encouraged the top South Vietnamese generals to do something about Diem. And in November, the generals killed him, an event that tied the United States more closely to the fate of South Vietnam. The generals had no idea how to run a country, and things would soon fall apart. When Kennedy died three weeks later, his Vietnam policy was a shambles.

Freedman offers a nuanced portrait of a Cold War president. Readers may be surprised that in “Kennedy’s Wars,” Kennedy is portrayed as often in the role of Hamlet as Henry V. Nevertheless, it is hard to read this book without concluding that when faced with the unpalatable choices of the early 1960s, Kennedy served his country well. It is equally hard to imagine any of his contemporaries doing better.