Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [150]
October 1, 1962
35
Sargent Shriver, Peace Corps Director
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
ZENITH
I felt I was walking with destiny and all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.
—Winston Churchill, May 10, 1940
Jack Kennedy’s victories had taught him essential lessons. He recognized the edge a candidate receives when he’s made the earliest start and kept at it. He realized the importance of the vital energy gained by building a trusted team. He discovered the power derived when a politician grasps the nature of the times and wields that understanding.
But failures also offer education. The Bay of Pigs taught him something more critical: When the stakes are the highest and most desperate, there must be both clarity and completion. Know the enemy and your goal, and hold fast to what you’re attempting. Should any oppose your course, fight them with all your resolve.
Throughout the summer of 1961, Jack Kennedy had managed to sustain his hopes for a ban on nuclear arms testing to which the Soviets would agree. At the very heart of his presidency was his mission to keep his country from nuclear war. It would be, he knew, a battle from which no winners could emerge. In 1946, the young journalist John Hersey had published in the New Yorker his account of the survivors of the attack on Hiroshima; no one who’d read it would ever forget it.
We’d agreed, as had the Soviets, to halt nuclear testing in 1958. Yet, in July, a Gallup poll had indicated that public support for the resumption of U.S. nuclear testing stood at two to one. The other side, exhibiting its greater aggression, suddenly showed its hand. August brought Moscow’s shocking announcement of its unilateral decision to resume nuclear testing in the atmosphere. Kennedy’s reaction—“fucked again!”—was deep and personal. Even before this horrifying news hit the headlines, Americans had gotten reports that the milk drunk by Russian children across the country contained detectable traces of radioactivity. Had the Russians treacherously been testing underground all along, even if they’d sworn not to? And was this a clue? And, if so, what were we going to do about it?
Over the next three months the Soviet Union would go on to conduct thirty-one such tests, including the exploding of the largest bomb in history—58 megatons, four thousand times more powerful than the one dropped over Hiroshima in 1945. Despite partisan pressure to respond by resuming U.S. testing, Kennedy resisted. He persisted in believing in the possibility of a comprehensive ban on all forms of nuclear arms testing, atmospheric and underground as well. “Mankind must put an end to war—or war will put an end to mankind.” Yet as the leader of the Free World, he couldn’t allow the Soviets to proceed without a U.S. response. With this in mind, the president instructed Defense Secretary McNamara to begin testing underground.
The United States had tested its first nuclear weapon at the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico in July 1945, a month before the U.S. fighters flew off to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those attacks, of course, brought about the Japanese surrender and ended World War II. Seven years later, the United States tested the first hydrogen bomb in the isolated Marshall Islands in the western Pacific in early November 1952. It was one of the last acts of the Truman administration before the election on November 4 ushered in the Eisenhower era.
Truman himself had presided over the dawn of the nuclear era by signing off on the Hiroshima and Nagasaki missions. Other peacetime nuclear explosions—military tests of new, far deadlier weapons—followed on his watch. Then, under President Eisenhower, the number doubled or even tripled. For a dozen years, from 1946 to 1958, the Marshall Islands, a U.S. Trust Territory until 1986, bore the brunt of America’s experimentation. For the Soviets, the testing of their nuclear weapons secretly in their vast territory had begun in 1949. They had selected sites in remote