JFK’s Russian Conspiracy
Kennedy had his own secret back
channel with Moscow. It may have kept the superpowers from going to war.
John F. Kennedy would have been 100
this Monday.
On a day in early December, one of
Moscow’s agents in the United States, working undercover as a journalist for Izvestia,
reported a private meeting with the president-elect’s “closest adviser.” The
adviser, who met privately with the Russian spy, was frank and hopeful about a
significant improvement in relations from the previous administration. He
“stressed that was not merely expressing his personal opinion but the position
of the future president.” The two men met alone, and there was no American
record made of the encounter.
This is not a report about Lt. Gen.
Michael Flynn, whose activities during the transition are now being
investigated. Nor it is about Jared Kushner, who, the Washington Post reported on Friday, approached Russian
Ambassador Sergey Kislyak last December to propose a secret communications
channel. The meeting described above took place in 1960, and the “close
adviser” was the incoming president’s brother, Robert F. Kennedy. It is not
unusual for the Russians to want to establish contacts with an incoming
presidential administration, especially when there is tension between the two
countries. It is also not unusual for an American administration to use back
channels to probe the intentions of adversarial powers.
But December 1960 was
not December 2016. The RFK meeting likely came at the request of the Russians,
not the Americans. It was not held in secret—it was noted on RFK’s telephone
log. And Robert Kennedy, despite general encouraging words, made no promises,
suggested no follow-up, and was in no way working against the outgoing
Eisenhower administration. The Russians were smart in focusing attention on the
president-elect’s brother. He would eventually be involved in historic back
channel activity, but well after the inauguration. And all these years later,
such communications have been revealed as a canny and patriotic initiative by
the Kennedy administration.
John F. Kennedy was not only less
hawkish than his public rhetoric, he was less hawkish than the American people.
This Monday John F. Kennedy would
have turned 100, and it has taken nearly this long to develop a full picture of
his presidency: The more we learn about it, the more impressive he becomes.
Much of the biographical work until recently has been filling in the gaps
created by censors—mainly close allies and family members—who did not want the
public image of the fallen leader to be tarnished by his addiction to sex and
his physical frailties. But what should most dramatically change how we view
his presidency is the flood of new information (and some of it not new but
underappreciated from Russian records) about how he did his job. JFK had a
taping system installed in the White House a decade before Nixon, and these
recordings have only been fully opened since late 2012. Unlike the technophobic
Nixon, whose taping system would turn on at the literal drop of a hat,
Kennedy’s was controlled by a button usually pressed by him alone. The Kennedy
tapes, and the increasing release of that era’s national security documents,
are revising the picture of a very creative moment in U.S. foreign policy.
JFK’s Russian conspiracy did not
begin during his campaign. In the summer of 1960, the Soviet Foreign Ministry
and the KGB relied mainly on publicly available information to imagine what
Kennedy would be like as president if he won. They had no informants near the
young leader’s circle, the “New Frontiersmen.” Soviet diplomats were more
dismissive than the KGB of Kennedy, thinking him “unlikely to possess the
qualities of an outstanding person.” Both institutions worried he was overly
influenced by his father, Joseph, the conservative multimillionaire and former
head of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Soviet intelligence initially
suspected Kennedy might be more welcomingly inventive in U.S.–Soviet relations.
But neither side apparently got any help in testing their theories from the
Kennedys or their advisers until November.
After Kennedy’s very close election,
Soviet diplomats and the KGB made separate approaches to Kennedy insiders to
get a read on the future leader of the free world. The meeting of the
undercover spy with RFK on Dec. 1, 1960, seemed to be the KGB’s effort to
contrive a summit invitation from the president-elect and deliver it on a
silver platter to the Kremlin.
Although the Kennedys were new at
the White House business, they were not easily impressed by Soviet attention,
and they played these approaches carefully, being encouraging only under the
right circumstances. The president-elect refused to promise an early summit,
though he would not rule one out. “In principle,” the KGB reported RFK as
saying in that December meeting:
Kennedy would like to meet with you
[Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev] and hopes that his relations with the Soviet
leader will be better than Eisenhower had. However, he will not agree to a
summit if he doubts that positive results will ensue. In the first three or
four months of his presidency, before he has presented his domestic program to
Congress, Kennedy would not be able to participate in a summit.
And the Kennedys mixed spice with
the sugar. The KGB reported that RFK also warned Moscow not to test the
incoming administration over Berlin, a symbol of the administration’s
commitment to defending the West. JFK would wait until he had taken office and
then used the formal channels of the State Department to schedule a summit with
Khrushchev.
After the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs
in April, however, coupled with Kennedy’s deep concern about the stability of
the Southeast Asian country of Laos in the face of a Soviet-backed insurgency,
the Kennedy brothers decided to explore the Russian love for secret back
channels. Starting in late May 1961, Robert would meet at least 35 times—an
extraordinary number—over the next 19 months with a Soviet intelligence officer
named Georgi Bolshakov (of the military intelligence service, then as now
called the GRU) to voice his brother’s hope for a lessening of tensions between
the superpowers. Unsurprisingly, the press and public knew nothing about these
meetings. But Kennedy also kept most of them a secret from the rest of his
administration. National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy would not know the
extent of these meetings until three decades later. Kennedy’s most influential
biographer, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., and his close aide and speechwriter
Theodore Sorensen knew little of these contacts at the time. Robert often met
with the Soviet agent in his office at DOJ; the FBI might have caught whiff of
these tête-à-têtes, but the CIA was in the dark.
What we now know from these efforts
is that John F. Kennedy was not only far less hawkish than his public rhetoric,
but he was far less hawkish than the American people. He was certainly
anti-communist and mistrusted pro-Kremlin revolutionaries, but he believed, as
he would reveal publicly in his American University address in June 1963, that
Americans had an irrational fear of Russians and that both peoples shared an
aversion to nuclear war. It would take public acclaim of his leadership after
the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 for Kennedy to feel he had the
political capital to tell the American people what they were not prepared to
hear before. But long before then, the historical record now shows, he was
willing to let the Soviets know his private views and explore a possible
détente to lower the level of nuclear danger, while holding firm to American
global security obligations.
Kennedy’s Russian conspiracy was
designed not for personal benefit, and at personal risk, to avoid mutual
annihilation.
The Kennedys loved keeping secrets,
and they were good at it. They kept these meetings secret because JFK was
trying to advance negotiating positions as trial balloons that he knew would be
shot down if revealed prematurely in Washington.
On the important matter of the
number of on-site inspections of suspicious seismic events in seismically
active USSR—an issue that kept the two sides from seriously negotiating a
nuclear test ban in the Eisenhower years—Kennedy revealed to Moscow a private
position of 10 inspections when the U.S. government’s public position was 20
inspections. “The USA could compromise,” RFK told his Soviet contact, “if this
were in response to a Soviet proposal.” At the same time, the president’s
brother underscored that an arms-control agreement would only come if the
Soviets stopped underestimating U.S. power and causing trouble in divided
Berlin and Southeast Asia. The Kennedys also refused to soften their hard line
on Fidel Castro or even discuss it with Moscow. “Cuba is a dead issue,”
explained RFK.
Some of this was naïve—Khrushchev
did not want an arms-control agreement as much as Kennedy did and was
suspicious of the president’s gesture—and all of it was politically dangerous
at home for JFK. Had these secret discussions ever become public, RFK, let
alone his brother, might well have been charged with being pro-Soviet. They
weren’t, but in Washington at the time there was no acceptable difference
between seeking compromise and being perceived as soft on the Soviets.
In
retrospect, however, it is hard to argue that these risks were not worth taking
at the height of the Cold War. Robert’s secret meetings may not have made a
major arms-control agreement more likely, but they certainly helped to make an
accidental war less likely. At their one and only summit in Vienna in June
1961, Kennedy and Khrushchev agreed to a neutral Laos, a new status for the
war-torn country that JFK had proposed earlier via the back channel. A few
months later during the Berlin Crisis, when Soviet and American tanks were in a
standoff at Checkpoint Charlie, RFK’s back-channeling may have been the reason
the Kremlin withdrew its 30 tanks without incident. In the fall of 1962, when
the Kennedy brothers suspected RFK’s interlocutor of having become a source of
disinformation about Soviet missile activities in Cuba, they switched the back
channel from Bolshakov to the Soviet ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin. This secret
contact, as many now know, would be influential in securing a peaceful end to
the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Kennedy brothers’ Russian conspiracy was designed
not for personal benefit, and at personal risk, to test the limits of Soviet
desire in avoiding the mutual annihilation that seemed so plausible at the
time.
A secret back channel to prevent
accidental nuclear annihilation versus a secret back channel to let a foreign
power control US policy, get their preferred people installed in the new
administration and complete business deals to enrich the president and...
More...
JFK has long been something of a
puzzle. He was a liberal who dragged his feet on civil rights until his third
year in office and then embraced the struggle as a moral imperative—consciously
forsaking the Democratic Party’s base in the segregationist South. In the
mosaic of new information about his presidency, we can see patterns. Kennedy
sought liberal outcomes while abhorring instability and uncertainty. But, in
the end, he could and would take risks. He assumed his Russian outreach would
have to remain secret, not only to satisfy the Soviets that it was not a
publicity trick, but to give him time to sway American public opinion for
whatever agreement that would follow.
Six decades later the FBI believes
there is probable cause to investigate the potential relationship, and denial
thereof, between Russia and the winner of the most recent presidential
election. It is very human—and sometimes politically useful—to see parallels in
history. But any comparison between these two cases requires first asking the simple
question: Who benefits? Given the financial entanglements and conflicts of
interests surrounding this president, and the activities of the Russian
government in trying to bring him into office, such a relationship, if it
exists, is likely to be revealed as very different from the one encouraged by
the Kennedys years ago. In the 1960s, we know now, a president and his closest
adviser took creative and audacious steps to make the world a safer place.
Happy 100th birthday, JFK.
No comments:
Post a Comment