Washington Rules_ America's Path to Permanent War - Andrew J. Bacevich [37]
In navigating a way out of a predicament that his own intemperate actions had helped induce, Kennedy did exhibit admirable coolness and sophistication. He ignored the goading of those, Maxwell Taylor and Curtis LeMay prominent among them, who insisted that (in LeMay’s words) “we don’t have any choice except direct military action.” He opted instead for indirect action, a naval blockade styled as a “quarantine.” In a Joint Chiefs of Staff meeting with the president, LeMay derided this decision as “almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich.”44 In fact, LeMay knew only half the story. In exchange for Khrushchev’s promise to remove Soviet nuclear weapons from Cuba, Kennedy was secretly offering the Russian leader important concessions. These included a pledge not to invade Cuba and a promise to quietly withdraw the Jupiters from Italy and Turkey. “Appeasement” by almost any definition of the term, this approach worked, at least in defusing the immediate crisis.
OVER THE EDGE
What had Kennedy and his men learned from their brush with Armageddon? The conventional view is that they learned a lot, the chief evidence offered being a speech the president gave at American University on June 10, 1963. In this address, Kennedy vowed that the United States would do its “part to build a world of peace where the weak are safe and the strong are just.” He invited Americans to rethink the Cold War, quit blaming the Soviet Union for the world’s ills, and “help make the world safe for diversity.” To emphasize his administration’s support for a proposed permanent global ban on the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons, he announced a unilateral suspension of further atmospheric tests by the Pentagon.
The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war. We do not want a war. We do not now expect a war. This generation of Americans has already had enough—more than enough—of war and hate and oppression.
As interpreted by his admirers, the president’s remarks heralded a major policy shift, with the United States henceforth oriented, in Kennedy’s words, “not towards a strategy of annihilation but towards a strategy of peace.”45 In fact, the shift entailed far less than was advertised. Having barely avoided war in the Caribbean, the United States was even then hurtling toward war in Southeast Asia.
The previous October during secret White House deliberations while the United States stood eyeball-to-eyeball with the Soviet Union, Maxwell Taylor had predicted that “if we do not destroy the missiles and bombers, we will have to change our entire military way of dealing with external threats.”46 As the JCS chairman saw it, to give way over Cuba would be tantamount to abandoning the essential premises of national security policy.
Taylor need not have worried. Even though the United States did not destroy the Soviet missiles and bombers deployed to Cuba, the standard U.S. response to perceived external threats, emphasizing global military presence, power projection capabilities, and intervention, survived without a scratch. The peaceful resolution of the missile crisis in no way dampened the Kennedy administration’s enthusiasm for flexible response or enriching the options available to the president for employing force. In this regard, the course of events in Vietnam testifies to the realities of U.S. policy far more accurately than does Kennedy’s oft-cited speech at American University.
To be fair, Kennedy inherited a mess in Vietnam. Yet over the course of his brief tenure in office, he compounded that mess, passing to his successor a far more difficult situation. There is no evidence that any lessons drawn from his administration’s Cuban encounters had a positive effect on the way it dealt with Vietnam.
Whenever the subject of Vietnam comes up, Kennedy’s defenders invariably explain what the president would have done had he not been assassinated in November 1963. Once elected to a second term, they insist, he intended to pull the plug on the American commitment to South Vietnam. “I think it highly