Kennedy, Khrushchev and John XXIII: The Story of an Unexpected Peace
Kennedy, Khrushchev and John XXIII: The Story of an Unexpected Peace
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In 1962, with the Cuba crisis, the world plunges toward nuclear war. The catastrophe is averted only by the decision of the two leaders, John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev, to trust each other against the advice of their respective advisers. From where did they draw inspiration for such a courageous act? What influence did John XXIII and his message of peace and renewal have? And what links can we trace between that decision for peace and Kennedy's subsequent assassination? At crucial moments a single person can make a difference, provided he or she has built the possibility, but not without accepting responsibility for the consequences of one's choices.
On the day President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated, a Divine Word seminarian climbed the hill where our family's apartment in Rome was located to bring my wife Sally and me the terrible news. Seeking a word of wisdom and comfort, I wrote to Dorothy Day, who had been with us the previous spring on a pilgrimage to Rome to thank Pope John XXIII for Pacem interris (1963), a momentous encyclical on global peace and civil rights.
Dorothy responded by suggesting that I focus my attention on Kennedy's life, recommending that I read a biography of him, acknowledgements for dissertation. She said that in a context of unrelenting violence, she would direct her prayers to John F. Kennedy (underlining that "a") and encouraged me to reflect on St. Paul's words, "we know that all things contribute to the good of those who love God" (Romans 8:28).
Dorothy Day (New York,1897-1980) was an American anarchist activist and journalist. She spent herself in the defense of the poorest and, after converting to Catholicism in 1927, founded the Catholic Worker Movement in 1933, which advocated the value of nonviolence and hospitality for the destitute. She founded a shelter in New York City, and from there her movement spread throughout the U.S., Canada and Britain. In 2000 she was declared a Servant of God by John Paul II.
In November 1963 I was in Rome, busy trying to convince the Council Fathers to condemn total war and support conscientious objection. Drawing inspiration from Pope John's call for mutual trust between Cold War rivals, I had written in The Catholic Worker newspaper that Kennedy should resolve the Cuban missile crisis through a (politically unthinkable) exchange of missile bases with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev.
At the time, I had no suspicion that Kennedy secretly really took this big step toward Khrushchev at the same time that he publicly pledged not to invade Cuba, a fact that infuriated his General Staff. Because of the breakthrough for peace with his Communist enemies, announced on June 10, 1963 in his speech at American University, Kennedy put his own life at risk, as the Trappist monk and American writer Thomas Merton (1915-1968) had unwittingly prophesied a short time earlier. In January 1962 Merton wrote to a friend that he had "little confidence" in Kennedy's ability to escape the nuclear crisis because he did not possess the necessary gifts of depth, humanity, selflessness and mercy. "Perhaps Kennedy will make it in the future, by some miracle," Merton wrote, " but these kinds of people soon become the target of political assassination.
Internal opposition
Thirty years later I finally decided to take Dorothy Day's words seriously and devoted myself to studying in detail Kennedy's life and death. For twelve years I examined national security documents concerning the moments of crisis he went through during the Cold War, especially those made public by Congress through the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. I tracked down and interviewed a number of witnesses to his assassination and began to sense the light of redemption from the events in Dallas that Dorothy had perceived in November 1963 through her love for God.
The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act, which went into effect on Oct. 26, 1992, marks the creation of the Assassination Record Review Board, a body that was responsible for inventorying and making public the material available to the various U.S. agencies regarding President Kennedy's assassination.
Searching the depths of systemic evil for the light that Merton called "the Unspeakable "(1) (the unspeakable, the inexplicable), described in his work Raids on the Unspeakable (1966), brings us to a kind of gospel tale. Kennedy was learning to see through the eyes of his Communist opponents. At great personal risk, he was moving from war to peacebuilding. I was deeply surprised by the grace-permeated story of a U.S. president choosing peace at the risk of his own life.
The mystery surrounding Kennedy's assassination stretches back to a meeting on Oct. 19, 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, in which the president resisted pressure from his top generals to bomb and invade Cuba. When he left the room, a hidden tape recorder continued to play, capturing the generals' contempt for the President and their determination to take the conflict all the way to total nuclear war. They wanted to win the Cold War.
General Curtis E. LeMay, chief of the Air Staff, put that intention into action. In the midst of the Cuban crisis, he ordered his bombers, armed with nuclear warheads, to overshoot the turnaround point toward the Soviet Union and launch a test ballistic missile to provoke an adversary reaction that would, in turn, trigger an all-out nuclear strike by superior U.S. forces. Fortunately, the Soviets did not take the bait.
The mystery surrounding the events in Dallas goes back even further, to the failed invasion of the Bay of Pigs in April 1961 by Cuban exiles trained by the U.S.Central IntelligenceAgency (CIA). Kennedy later realized that the CIA had misled him about the impending Cuban popular uprising against Fidel Castro and about the guerrilla warfare that the Cuban exile brigade would unleash. They had tried to force the president to authorize an invasion by strike forces to save the day. Kennedy, however, had the courage to accept defeat. As he himself had occasion to tell friends later, "They could not believe that a new president like me could not panic and not at least try to save face. Well, they didn't understand anything about me." Kennedy was furious with the CIA over the incident. The New York Times later reported that Kennedy told one of the highest officials in his administration that he wanted to "cut the CIA into a thousand pieces and throw them to the wind."
Effectively, Kennedy had fired CIA Director Allen Dulles and his deputies, Richard M. Bissell Jr. and General Charles P. Cabell. Allen Dulles was probably the most powerful figure involved in the Cold War. He returned to power as a member of the Warren Commission, charged with investigating the Dallas bombing, and in 1964 pushed it to adopt the isolated assassin conclusion.
Building a relationship
During the missile crisis, Kennedy became a convert to peace. When it came to the breaking point of the terrible conflict that his own policies against Fidel Castro had helped precipitate, he sought a way out, which his generals found utterly inexcusable. Not only did he reject their pressure to attack Cuba and the Soviet Union: worse, he turned to the enemy for help. This could have been seen as an act of treason. Khrushchev, on the other hand, saw it as a sign of hope.
Robert F. Kennedy, then Attorney General and head of the Ministry of Justice, had secretly met with Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin in Washington on October 27, 1962, warning him that the president was about to lose control of his generals and needed Soviet help. When Khrushchev received Kennedy's appeal in Moscow, he turned to his foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, saying, "We must let Kennedy know that we want to help him." Khrushchev hesitated at the idea of helping the enemy, but repeated, "Yes, let's help him. Now we have a common cause, to save the world from those who are pushing us toward war."
How can we be able to understand that moment? The two most heavily armed leaders in all of history, on the brink of total nuclear war, suddenly joined hands to oppose those on both sides urging them to attack. Khrushchev ordered the immediate withdrawal of his missiles, in exchange for Kennedy's public pledge not to invade Cuba and a secret promise to withdraw U.S. missiles from Turkey, as he would later actually do. The two protagonists of the Cold War had changed; each had at this point much more in common with his adversary than with his generals.
Neither Kennedy nor Khrushchev were saints. Both were deeply involved in the political choices that brought humanity to the brink of nuclear war. But when they encountered what Thomas Merton called "the emptiness of That which is not expressible," each sought help from the other. Thus, they led humanity toward the hope of a peaceful planet.
The genesis of Kennedy and Khrushchev's transformation at the time of the missile crisis can be found in their secret correspondence, which began about a year earlier. After their failed meeting in Vienna in June 1961, Khrushchev wrote a momentous letter to the American president on September 29 of that year. To get the core of his message across, the Communist leader resorted to an analogy from the Bible, comparing his and Kennedy's situation to Noah's ark. Thus he wrote: "In Noah's ark both the 'pure' and the 'impure' found shelter and escape. But regardless of who considered themselves 'pure' and who was on the list of the 'impure,' they all equally had only one thing at heart, that the ark could successfully continue its journey. We too have no other alternative: either we live in peace, cooperating so that the ark can continue to float, or it will go down."
Kennedy replied on Oct. 16, "I really like the simile with Noah's ark, where 'pure' and 'impure' are equally determined to keep it afloat."
Thus, through their secret correspondence, the two men struggled to achieve a better knowledge of each other and a greater understanding of their differences. The Cuban missile crisis a year later proved that they had by no means resolved their conflicts, yet it was through the secret letters that each understood that the other was a human being worthy of respect. They also knew that they had agreed once before on one thing: that the world was an ark. They had to keep the ark afloat. And they succeeded, right at the moment of greatest danger.
The mutual search for peace
After Kennedy and Khrushchev allied in the missile crisis, they began "conspiring" to keep the peace. The acme was Kennedy's speech at American University in June 1963. He presented his vision of peace as a response to the suffering endured by the Russian people during World War II, thus succeeding in bridging the furrow dividing the two adversaries. Khrushchev would later tell American diplomat W. Averell Harriman that "it was the greatest speech given by an American president since Roosevelt."
Kennedy's announcement at that time of the unilateral cessation of nuclear tests in the atmosphere and the hope expressed for treaty negotiations in Moscow opened the door. Within six weeks, Kennedy and Khrushchev signed the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. It was a sign that confirmed their common resolve to end the Cold War.
The Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, signed in Moscow on August 5, 1963, was an international partial nuclear test ban treaty born out of the need to curb the proliferation of nuclear tests that occurred indiscriminately from 1945 to 1960 in numerous parts of the world, and which came to fruition in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Another sign was Khrushchev's advice to Fidel Castro to begin cooperating with Kennedy. Castro was furious that Khrushchev had withdrawn the missiles at the last moment without consulting the Cuban ally, in exchange only for the promise of a capitalist. On January 31, 1963, Khrushchev wrote to Castro seeking reconciliation and peace with the Cuban ally, a letter that corresponded to the Noah's Ark letter sent to Kennedy. Castro accepted the invitation to travel to the Soviet Union.
Castro's visit to Khrushchev took place in May and June 1963. The two leaders traveled together visiting the Soviet Union.Castro later reported that Khrushchev imparted to him a real training course on the need to give Kennedy confidence. Day after day, Khrushchev read aloud to Castro his correspondence with Kennedy, emphasizing the hope for peace they could now hold because of their cooperation with the U.S. president.
Khrushchev was putting into practice what Pope John-whom the Communist leader had come to love-had recommended in Pacem in Terris, when he wrote "to the criterion of peace which rests on the balance of armaments, let the principle be substituted that true peace can be built only in mutual trust" (No. 61). The Pontiff had sent Khrushchev a papal medal and a copy in Russian of the encyclical on peace, predating its official publication. Khrushchev was moved by this.
In September 1963 Kennedy took another huge step toward mutual trust, intended as a new basis for peace. He initiated a secret dialogue with Fidel Castro, through U.S. diplomat William Attwood, serving at the United Nations, for the purpose of normalizing U.S.-Cuba relations. Castro responded enthusiastically and began astringing secret arrangements to meet with Attwood. Kennedy gave a strong boost to the whole process by resorting to an unofficial and confidential channel to communicate with Castro. His unofficial representative, French correspondent Jean Daniel, was engaged in his second meeting with Castro on the afternoon of November 22November 1963, when the news of the President's death reached them.Castro stood up, looked at Daniel and said, "Everything has changed. Everything will change." The dialogue between the United States and Cuba also died in Dallas.
Shortly before his death, Kennedy had also moved to end U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. National Security Action Memorandum No. 263, issued Oct. 11, 1963, states that at a meeting held six days earlier Kennedy had approved a program to train the Vietnamese so that "one thousand U.S. soldiers could be withdrawn by the end of 1963" and "the entire contingent of U.S. military personnel by the end of 1965." Kennedy's successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson, completely ignored such plans. In Dallas, the war in Vietnam flared up again.
Appointment with death
Kennedy's courageous turn from global war to peace strategy explains the reasons for his assassination. In light of the Cold War dogmas that imprisoned his administration and his turn toward peace, Kennedy's assassination became a logical, natural consequence. It was clearly a political act, yet it delivers the hope of transformation.
Hope? How can we find reasons for hope in the assassination of a president who was turning from war to peace?
If we face the "Inexpressible" in our history, we can glimpse amidst the darkness a light of redemption. Pressed insistently to declare war, Kennedy ordered his government, after the missile crisis, to pursue a policy of "complete and general disarmament" (see National Security Action Memorandum No. 263 of May 6, 1963). The President's courageous conversion and his willingness to sacrifice his life for the sake of peace thwarted the determination of the CIA and the General Staff to win the Cold War the only way they knew how. That conversion and sacrifice saved all of us from destruction and the nuclear wasteland. We still have a chance. But are we willing to pursue peace, accepting the cost?
Because of the almost constant state of illness in which he had been living, Kennedy had heard the voice of death within him for years. Her favorite poem was Alan Seeger's I Have a Rendezvous With Death. Jacqueline Kennedy taught poetry to her daughter Caroline, who was then five years old. On a beautiful October day in 1963, during a meeting with national security advisers in the Rose Garden, Caroline caught her father's eye and, looking into his eyes, recited the poem, which ends thus:
"But I have an appointment with Death.
At midnight in some burning city.
When spring again heads north this year.
But I am true to my word
And I will not miss that appointment."
On the overnight flight back from Vienna after meeting with Khrushchev two years earlier, Kennedy had written on a slip of paper his favorite of Abraham Lincoln's quotes:
"I know there is God - and I see the storm approaching;
If He has a place for me, I think I am ready."
The storm he feared was nuclear war. If God had a place for him-the appointment with death-that could turn the storm away from humanity, well, he was sure he was ready. That appointment would not be missed.
by James W. Douglass
American theologian and writer, author of JFK and the Unspeakable.
Why He Died and Why It Matters, Orbis Books, New York2008
1 See MERTON T.(1966), Raids on theUnspeakable, New Directions Books, New York.
Article published in Social Updates, March 2014 (239-246).
Translation by Elvira Fugazza from "A President for Peace. The deadly consequences of J.F.K.'s attempts at reconciliation," in America, Nov. 18, 2013, 13-16.