Book review
Kennedy’s Wars
Berlin, Cuba, Laos and Vietnam
by Lawrence Freedman
Oxford University Press, £20
528pp
In the middle of the Cuban Bay of Pigs fiasco, the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff came to President Kennedy and gave him the bad news. The Cuban-exile troops were trapped on the beach. Kennedy would have to reverse his public pledge and openly introduce American air and naval power if the invasion to topple Castro were to succeed.
Kennedy’s reaction was interesting. He did not say, as he well might have, that he could not risk such a move because it would provoke Moscow. Instead he was inclined to agree to protect his public image. He said he would “rather be called an aggressor than a bum.”
But when his military advisers failed to come up with a clear and credible proposal to save the invasion, Kennedy’s political instincts took over. Faced with impending failure, he either had to raise the stakes and risk conflict with the Soviet Union or quit. As this brilliant and perceptive study makes clear, Kennedy’s claim to be a great American president probably rests on that single strength--he knew when to quit.
Kennedy was in charge during some of the most dangerous days of the Cold War. He confronted communism in Berlin, Cuba, Laos and Vietnam. He and the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev took the world to the brink of a nuclear holocaust during the Cuban missile crisis of 1963. But again Kennedy knew when to quit and Khrushchev responded to his mood and quit too--just in time.
Freedman, who has made full use of all the new sources available since the fall of Communism, says that the wars which often seemed so close during Kennedy’s few years in office, were in the end not fought--at least by Americans. “He left the Cold War in a far less dangerous state than he found it.”
Freeman is a sympathetic historian. He points out that the historian knows what happened next and therefore has to resist the temptation to highlight missed opportunities, recklessness, misperceptions and miscalculations. Kennedy never knew that his enemy, Castro, would outlast another seven American presidents with his revolution intact, that Vietnam would turn into a cruel and tragic war, and--most important of all--that Soviet Communism would collapse.
He had to fight the Cold War on a day-by-day basis, defend the free world with all the vigour he could muster and yet avoid a nuclear war that could end civilisation as we know it. His strength was that he had a strategy for doing just that. Freedman explains this with admirable clarity--and throws in a few surprises.
For example, he says that Kennedy had respect for the Soviet Union as a competitor for international influence, believed that there could be peaceful co-existence, had no plan for winning the Cold War and wanted a nuclear test ban treaty from the start of his administration. This was no “better dead than Red” president.
Yes, he made mistakes. He had an exaggerated view of the extent to which communist insurgencies around the world were controlled by Moscow. Only late his in presidency did he realise that these conflicts were better dealt with on their own terms rather than by big power bargaining.
He thought the Soviet economy could sustain the growth of its military indefinitely and he took Khrushchev’s bluster seriously. “It took until 1963 for him to get the measure of Khrushchev and start to appreciate the severity of his opponent’s problems--in agriculture, economics and alliance measurement.”
Kennedy’s strategy for handling the Soviet Union developed over the years. It was one that came naturally to him as a politician but, says Freedman, might well have been taken from a book, “Deterrence or Defence” written by the British strategist Basil Liddell Hart and which Kennnedy had reviewed for the Saturday Evening Post in 1960:
“Keep strong, if possible. In any case, keep cool. Have unlimited patience. Never corner an opponent and always assist him to save his face. Put yourself in his shoes--so as to see things through his eyes. Avoid self-righteousness like the devil--nothing is so blinding.”
As applied by Kennedy, this became known as the graduated or flexible response, moving forward in crises one step at a time, raising at each stage pressure on opponents, probing their will, exploring opportunities for a settlement even while preparing to up the ante.
For Kennedy it seemed to work. He looked for military measures that were enough to satisfy conservatives at home without risking major war while “negotiated outcomes were pursued to the extent that any conservative revolt could be contained.”
In this he was helped by Khrushchev, especially during the Cuban missile crisis. Khrushchev listened to the trigger-happy exhortations of his own generals, put himself in Kennedy’s shoes and decided that Kennedy to had to cope with a military establishment itching for battle. Further, Khrushchev was worried that the American military might overthrow Kennedy and seize power.
Freedman says that this issue was not wholly a Soviet fantasy. Two Washington journalists, Fletcher Knebel and Charles Bailey had recently published “Seven Days in May”, describing how a military coup might occur in Washington, and Kennedy had not dismissed such an idea completely.
The behaviour of the air force chief, General Curtis LeMay, certainly suggests that a coup could have been a possibility. LeMay told the president that his handling of the Cuban crisis in the early stages was “almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich”. When Kennedy and Khrushchev reached a settlement, LeMay railed at Kennedy that this was “the greatest defeat in our history”. He even considered ignoring Kennedy’s deal and attacking in any case.
This book is scholarly yet very readable. It shows a new and softer side to Kennedy. Freedman suggests that Kennedy was lucky in that he presided over a turning point in the Cold War that was not so much to do with American policy as the fact that the Soviet challenge simply ran out of steam.
But he still gives Kennedy full credit for demonstrating in words and deeds that the superpowers had to co-operate to prevent a nuclear catastrophe--a lesson that has the same relevance today as it did during John F. Kennedy’s bright but all too brief reign.
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