Foreign Policy under John F. Kennedy (1961-1963)
I. International Conditions
1. In January 1961, Nikita Khrushchev delivered a ringing declaration that revolutions in less-industrialized countries were the wave of the future; the Soviet system—not the American—was best able, he proclaimed, to ride that wave.
2. New nations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America watched the prices of their raw materials sink 22% between 1950 and 1964 as compared to the prices of manufactured goods they bought from Europeans, Japanese, and Americans. The rich were getting richer, the poor poorer.
3. The poor were also becoming more numerous. The world population of 2.8 billion in 1960 was projected to reach 7.0 billion by the year 2000.
i. John Spanier estimated that the Asians were doubling their birth rate over that of Europeans, while Latin Americans were roughly doing the same over that of North Americans.
II. Latin America and the Alliance for Progress
1. In his January 1961 speech, Khrushchev pointed to Castro's victory in Cuba as a sign that the "onslaught of the imperialists was being destroyed with a triumphant "war of national liberation."
2. Between 1946 and 1960, the United States gave about $60 billion in foreign aid, but less than 7 percent of it went to Latin America, and most of that directly benefited U.S. corporations operating in the region.
3. On March 13, 1961, Kennedy proposed to Latin American ambassadors the Alliance for Progress. Over the next ten years, $100 billion ($20 billion from North Americans and $80 billion from Latin Americans) had to be made available for development, and U.S. aid would thus multiply many times. In return, Kennedy asked for land and tax reforms so that the money would benefit the poor and middle classes.
i. The alliance was organized at Punta del Este, Uruguay, in August1 961, when the hemisphere's nations, except for Cuba, pledged to make the reforms in return for money.
4. The Alliance for Progress was unsuccessful for a number of reasons, and by 1970 Latin America was worse off than in 1961.
i. First, most southern nations were ruled by small, rich elites, or oligarchs, who controlled the best lands who were not willing to give them up and tax themselves. The oligarchs took the dollars but also kept their wealth.
a. To make the alliance work first required political change to remove these elites but U.S. officials did not want to remove these stable, pro-Washington oligarchs.
ii. Second, Congress directly ordered no U.S. funds to be used to carry out the heart of the program—that is, land redistribution to the poor. Taking from the rich and giving to the poor was too socialist for Congress.
iii. Third, most Roman Catholic Latin Americans rejected birth-control methods needed to curb the population increase.
a. Latin American politicians warned that birth control was a Yankee plot to keep southern nations weak.
b. With high infant mortality as well as the need for many cheap hands in the villages, southern Americans believed they needed large families to survive.
iv. Fourth, the Latin elites put alliance funds not into staple foods (such as beans) to feed the poor, but into export crops (such as cotton and coffee). The elites profited from their export trade, while the poor starved.
v. Fifth, U.S. officials were never able to create a plan or an organization to resolve these problems. The officials wanted slow reform and believed that measures proven effective under the Marshall Plan could work in Latin America.
a. Latin American economies were radically different from democratic European societies that only needed capital to rebuild war-devastated industries. In Latin America, fundamental change, not just money, was needed.
5. By the mid- 1960s the alliance reached its target of an annual 5.5 percent growth rate in the region. However, of every $100 of new income produced, only $2 went to the poorest 20 percent of the people.
i. Anger and frustration grew until terrorism and revolution burst out in Venezuela, Colombia, Bolivia, and Guatemala. Latin American military forces often responded brutally.
ii. By 1970, military rule had replaced thirteen constitutional governments since 1960, usually by forceful overthrow.
III. The Bay of Pigs
1. One month after announcing the Alliance for Progress, Kennedy launched an invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs to overthrow Cuban leader Fidel Castro in April 1961.
i. In 1960, Eisenhower had ordered the CIA to train several hundred Cuban exiles for a military offensive. The agency believed that a small invasion would trigger an uprising against Castro
a. As it had in the invasion of Guatemala in 1954 caused the overthrow of that government.
ii. By April 1961, the invasion force had grown to 1,500.
iii. Kennedy had decided not to provide U.S. air cover. He feared that if the United States became directly involved, Khrushchev would perhaps retaliate by invading West Berlin.
2. In early April, White House aide Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., wrote a public white paper to justify an invasion on the ground that Castro had betrayed the Cuban Revolution.
i. The white paper was mostly propaganda, especially since Castro himself had largely defined that revolution.
3. A CIA agent refused to tell the anti-Castro underground inside Cuba when the invasion would begin, which was a weakness in the plan.
i. The agent declared: "I don't trust any goddamn Cuban"
4. The leader of the CIA operation, Richard Bissell, knew little about Cuba, its people, and the Bay of Pigs
i. The CIA thought that photos of sharp coral reefs that wrecked landing craft revealed only seaweed.
5. The invasion began on April 17 1961. Within hours, it was wiped out by Castro's forces.
i. Castro had learned the real lesson of the 1954 Guatemala operation: he made the government and the army one unit and therefore they never deserted.
6. The Bay of Pigs invasion was a failure and Kennedy was humiliated. However, public-opinion polls gave him the highest ratings of support during his entire presidency immediately after this disaster.
7. Kennedy and his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, secretly set up a $100 million plan—code-named Operation Mongoose—employing several thousand people to wage a covert war against Castro.
i. The president ordered the CIA to sabotage the Cuban economy.
ii. The agency also planned to kill Castro, plans apparently worked out in cooperation with U.S. mob figures.
a. One plan was to give Castro exploding cigars.
b. Another plan called “Elimination by Illumination” was to spread the word in Cuba that the Lord's Second Coming was about to occur, but that the Lord hated Castro. On the day of the Lord's supposed appearance, a U.S. submarine would surface along the coast, set off fireworks, and so frighten the Cubans that they would then overthrow Castro.
iii. Operation Mongoose made Castro more popular and powerful than ever.
8. In a televised speech of April 20, 1961, the president took full responsibility for the invasion fiasco and called on Americans to rally around him to fight a new kind of cold war in, among other places, Vietnam (not covered in this note).
IV. The Berlin Wall
1. Khrushchev renewed his 1958 demands that the Allies turn West Berlin over to the Communist East German regime. Kennedy was determined not to give way on the German question.
2. The two leaders met in Vienna summit during June 1961. Kennedy warned that neither side should try to upset the balance of power, especially in the newly emerging world. Khrushchev retorted that the Soviets would continue to support "wars of national liberation." The two men engaged in a heated ideological debate. The two leaders became increasingly frustrated at the lack of progress of the negotiations.
3. Khrushchev threatened in July to move on Berlin.
4. On national television Kennedy warned that the United States would tolerate no changes. To make his point, he ordered 150,000 reservists to active duty, tripled the number of draft calls for young men, asked for an immediate $3.2 billion to spend on defense (Eisenhower’s arms budget of nearly $46 billion in 1960 was on its way to becoming $54 billion by the end of 1963.), and demanded $207 million for more civil defense in anticipation of possible nuclear war.
i. But the president also knew by mid-1961 that the “missile gap” did exist overwhelmingly in his favour. The U.S. Samos II spy satellites revealed that instead of the 400 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that Kennedy feared the Soviets possessed, only 4 existed.
5. As tension thickened in early August 1961, East Germans left their Communist home in greater numbers.
6. On August 13, Khrushchev solved this problem by starting construction of cement-block wall, topped with barbed wire and sentry houses, to seal off East Berlin and, later most of East German, from the West. This was known as the Berlin Wall.
i. Skilled East Germans could no longer leave for work in Western Europe.
ii. The wall was built on Soviet-controlled territory.
iii. Kennedy could only have destroyed it by invading East Germany. He instead sent Vice-President Johnson to buck up West German morale.
iv. West German officials angrily demanded more and better U.S. protection. In June 1963, the president made a visit to West Berlin.
V. Arms Race continued
1. Despite American rhetoric, the wall stood and the military build-up accelerated on both sides.
2. Kennedy's NSC adviser, McGeorge Bundy, told him during the 1961 crisis that if force had to be used, the current military plan requires for the use of nuclear weapons.
3. To gain flexibility, the president stopped Eisenhower's plan to depend on nuclear weapons and instead listened to Paul Nitze, whose NSC-68 in 1950 urged a conventional force build-up.
i. He and McNamara also continued developing their nuclear stockpile of ICBMs
4. By 1962, Kennedy and top Pentagon officials realized the extent of their force superiority.
i. They began to discuss openly the possibilities of a U.S. first strike, to which the Soviets could not respond
ii. They discussed making nuclear war more attractive by using their new, more accurate weapons to hit only military targets (a "counterforce" strategy) instead of civilian targets. Furious Soviet officials denied that such targets could be so neatly separated.
5. Khrushchev halted his three-year nuclear test ban in September 1961 by exploding huge but primitive weapons.
6. Kennedy also resumed testing in the same month, despite the U.S. lead and pleas from the British that he not do so.
VI. Cuban Missile Crisis
1. While re-evoking the U.S.-USSR nuclear relationship, U.S.-Cuban relations had also worsened since the Bay of Pigs.
i. In early 1962, Kennedy was able to have Cuba expelled from the Organization of American States (OAS) and an economic embargo imposed on the island.
ii. Castro moved closer to Khrushchev. By mid-1962, estimates placed more than 20,000 Soviet advisers inside Cuba.
iii. Reports circulated that Soviet missiles and IL-28 jet bombers were in place.
iv. Kennedy’s CIA Director, John McCone, had warned the president in August 1962 that Khrushchev might move missiles and bombers into Cuba.
v. In September, the CIA warned Kennedy that a surface-to-surface missile system might be moving into Cuba, the White House ordered the information kept completely away from the American public.
a. There was fear of this information entering the press and becoming an issue in the 1962 political campaign. This would affect Kennedy’s independence to act.
2. On October 14, 1962, however, a U-2 plane filmed medium-range (1,000 mile) missiles on Cuban launching pads. Intermediate (2,000 mile) missiles also appeared to be under construction.
3. Khrushchev gave two reasons to close advisers for the placing the missiles:
i. The Americans intended to invade Cuba with their own forces
ii. Khrushchev wanted a Soviet base near America as the Americans had several bases around the USSR
iii. A third reason was also Castro so strongly wanted nuclear protection against the United States that, ultimately, he was willing to incinerate his island if only Khrushchev would strike the United States first. In June, Fidel's brother, Raul, had flown to Moscow to work out the plan. By October 14, missiles and warheads were in Cuba when the U-2 spotted the sites.
4. On August 16, Kennedy convened a special group of top officials known as the ExComm (Executive Committee) to discuss policy in strict secrecy.
i. Theodore Sorenson and Robert McNamara doubted that the missiles significantly altered the balance of power
ii. The Joint Chiefs of Staff argued that the power balance was substantially changed.
iii. ExComm and President Kennedy decided to set up a blockade (or "quarantine") that would cut off Cuba and force Khrushchev and Castro into removing the missiles.
a. Also if it did not work he could then escalate to a military option.
5. In a television speech on October 22, the president announced the naval "quarantine," demanded the removal of the missiles, and warned that if any of the weapons were launched against the United States, he would fully respond against the Soviet Union itself.
i. Within forty-eight hours, the western European allies endorsed his policy.
ii. The OAS unanimously supported the blockade.
iii. Five army divisions prepared to invade Cuba.
iv. The U.S. Strategic Air Command (SAC) went on its biggest airborne alert, with part of the B‐ 52 bomber force, loaded with nuclear bombs, in the air at all times. The SAC commander raised his forces to the next-to-highest level of alert in an uncoded order so the Soviets could read it (which they did).
v. Khrushchev never ordered his forces to go on alert. "
vi. On October 24, twelve of the twenty-five Soviet ships headed for Cuba changed course to return home. The remaining vessels carried no missiles.
6. In a letter of October 26, Khrushchev indicated that he would dismantle the missiles in return for Kennedy's pledge never to invade Cuba.
7. On October 27, a quite different note arrived: a demand that fifteen U.S. Jupiter missiles be removed from Turkey in return for dismantling the Cuban weapons.
i. Months before, Kennedy had moved to take out the unneeded Jupiters; but any removal now could appear to give Khrushchev a major public victory.
ii. Just as Khrushchev's tougher note arrived, Kennedy learned that one of his U-2 planes had been shot down over Cuba and its pilot killed.
iii. McNamara believed that new orders had been given to Soviet and Cuban soldiers on the island, perhaps in preparation for war.
8. At that moment, Kennedy received yet another piece of bad news: the Soviet technicians had moved the warheads closer to the missiles, possibly in preparation for a strike.
9. That Saturday, the 27th, ExComm held a meeting where members approached a decision about attacking Cuba. Kennedy finally accepted a suggestion from his brother, Robert Kennedy the attorney general, to ignore the last note from Moscow and accept Khrushchev's suggestion of October 26.
i. A virtual ultimatum cabled to Moscow demanded that the Soviets immediately stop work on the missiles. Kennedy also gave vague assurances of no invasion of Cuba.
ii. Moreover, he sent Robert Kennedy to inform a Soviet diplomat privately that the president had ordered the removal of the Jupiter missiles at NATO bases in Turkey and Italy, but also that if the Cuban missiles were not dismantled in forty-eight hours, the United States would take military action.
iii. Kennedy gave UN Secretary General U Thant a statement that the Jupiters would be removed if the Cuban weapons were dismantled. The statement was to be made public if Khrushchev rejected the ultimatum.
10. On the Soviet side of the situation:
i. On the 26th, the Khrushchev received a secret letter from Castro begging him to launch a nuclear strike on the United States if Kennedy tried to invade Cuba.
ii. Khrushchev further learned of incidents that were erupting between Soviet and Cuban military and considered the shooting down of the U-2 dangerously irresponsible.
iii. Khrushchev had also placed in Cuba Luna missiles with nuclear warheads that had a range of twenty-five miles.
a. If U.S. forces invaded, and communications with Moscow were cut, the Soviet commander in Cuba had the authority to use these nuclear weapons against the invaders.
11. On October 28, Khrushchev accepted Kennedy's public offer of taking out the missiles in return for a no-invasion pledge.
i. The world stepped back from nuclear annihilation.
ii. Castro angrily castigated Khrushchev, refused to receive the Soviet ambassador to Cuba, and did his best to prevent a UN team from verifying that the missiles had indeed been taken down.
12. Kennedy escaped with a spectacular victory.
i. It later became apparent that he left a loophole in his no-invasion pledge: he promised no invasion if the missiles were removed and if "Cuba itself commits no aggressive acts against any of the nations of the Western Hemisphere." That loophole could have allowed his successors in the White House to invade Cuba.
ii. In Moscow, Khrushchev's power never recovered. As the Sino-Soviet split widened and Soviet-Cuban relations worsened, Khrushchev's Politburo finally removed him from power in October 1964 for public failures both abroad and at home (especially in collective agriculture).
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Foreign Policy under Lyndon Johnson (1963-1969)
I. Johnson’s Policies
1. Vice-President Lyndon Baines Johnson was sworn into presidency on November 22 1963 following President John F. Kennedy’s assassination.
2. At home, he acted to eradicate poverty and racial discrimination and to improve education by implementing his domestic policy, the “Great Society”.
3. Abroad, he tried to achieve a working relationship with the Soviet Union so the two superpowers could conduct their disagreements peacefully.
i. Conflicts in Vietnam however would dominate his foreign policy and overshadow his ambitious domestic programs.
II. The Gulf of Tonkin: Vietnam
1. The situation in Vietnam in 1964 was critical because of the weakness of the post-Diem governments in South Vietnam. Regimes were constantly shifting.
2. Johnson could not negotiate a settlement with Ho Chi Minh's Communist regime in North Vietnam while holding such a weak hand.
3. Amid this frustration, North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked a U.S. warship on August 2 in the Gulf of Tonkin. Two days later, another attack supposedly occurred.
4. Johnson ordered U.S. planes to bomb the north's ships and bases. LBJ then asked Congress to pass a Gulf of Tonkin resolution giving him the right "to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression."
i. The resolution passed the House by a vote of 416 to 0 and The Senate passed the resolution 88 to 2 on August 7, 1964.
ii. Oregon Democrat Wayne Morse and Alaskan Democrat Ernest Gruening warned that the measure gave the president a blank check to use force as he wished in Southeast Asia.
5. Johnson pledged that "we are not about to send American boys 9 or 10,000 miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves", and ordered air attacks on North Vietnam
6. Over the next four years, evidence appeared that the Gulf of Tonkin attack was not unprovoked. The U.S. ships were accompanying sabotage operations against North Vietnam. Moreover, the second attack had probably never occurred.
III. The Johnson Doctrine: Latin America
1. In Latin America, the Alliance for Progress was creating an immense foreign debt, military rulers, and revolutions, not progress. Johnson feared revolution and had grown to mistrust the alliance. He wanted stability and order. U.S. training for Latin American police and military was increased.
2. Throughout the twentieth century, Brazil had been Washington's closest Latin American partner. By 1964, however, the government of João Goulart was in deep economic trouble and Johnson cut off U.S. aid.
i. Inflation went out of control
ii. Goulart then moved to seize U.S. properties
iii. Encouraged by officials from the U.S. Embassy, the Brazilian military overthrew Goulart, while Washington ordered its fleet to stand off the coast
iv. The Brazilian military established a brutal twenty-year dictatorship
3. Johnson cut off money to Peru's civilian government after the Peruvians tried to gain control of their country's major oil company, a firm owned by Standard Oil of New Jersey.
4. Since the 1930s a U.S. Marine-trained dictator, Rafael Trujillo, had ruled the Dominican Republic and supported Washington's policies. In 1956-1958, his police agents carried out kidnappings and murders of Trujillo's opponents in the United States. His methods seemed to be creating conditions for another Castro to come to power.
i. President Eisenhower sent weapons to the Dominican military who opposed Trujillo and In May 1961 he was gunned down.
ii. Juan Bosch, a moderate, won election to the presidency. By 1963-1964, the military had deposed Bosch and regained power.
iii. The Dominican military divided into factions and In April 1965 Civil war erupted. Bosch's supporters gained strength, and U.S. officials believed he was a Communist.
iv. On April 28, 1965, a panicked U.S. Embassy told Johnson that "Castro-type elements" might win.
v. The president sent 22,000 U.S. and OAS troops to the Dominican Republic to stop the fighting and install a conservative regime. He claimed on television on May 2, 1965, that a "communist dictatorship" threatened.
5. The Johnson Doctrine (1965) was declared shortly after the incidents in the Dominican. It stated that the president could use military force whenever he thought communism threatened the hemisphere.
i. It caused an angry uproar in both Latin America and the United States. The doctrine directly contradicted the non-intervention clause in the OAS charter signed in 1948
IV. Johnson and Vietnam (not covered in this note)
V. US Relations with beyond Vietnam
1. The conflict in Vietnam prevented the administration from dealing more effectively with other troubles and opportunities in the world
2. Along with Southeast Asia and Latin America, Africa was transformed between 1958 and 1968. Dominated by European colonial powers in the mid-1950s, within a decade it was a huge continent of independent nations. The United States publicly supported this anti-colonial movement.
i. However, in South Africa, where a white minority of 4 million oppressed some 20 million blacks through a system of Apartheid (rigid, legal, police-enforced racial separation.)
ii. Apartheid had begun in 1948 when the white Nationalist Party responded to the worldwide explosions of anti-colonialism and demands for racial equality, which appeared during and after World War II
iii. Under Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, U.S. policy accepted apartheid because officials cared much more about South Africa's strategic location and, above all, its rich uranium mines
iv. Moreover, the segregation of the races was accepted by Americans in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
v. The 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education that finally outlawed racial segregation in the United States, President Kennedy, understanding the contradiction in professing democracy and supporting South African apartheid, finally cut off arms sales and government loans to the white government.
3. After the Cuban missile crisis, the United States continued its nuclear build-up, while the Soviets built up even faster to catch up with the Americans.
i. By 1967, the president, and especially Defence Secretary McNamara, feared that the race was getting out of hand.
ii. The United States had 1,054 ICBMs, and the Soviets approached 900 in their arsenal.
iii. Also a problem was a Soviet antiballistic missile (ABM) system that could possibly make Communist cities less vulnerable to U.S. missiles.
iv. Johnson accelerated U.S. development of an ABM, and the Americans also stepped up work on Multiple Independent Re‐entry Vehicles (MIRVs)—nuclear warheads that were launched on a single missile and, in flight, separated to fly off in as many as ten different directions to hit targets.
4. In a speech at Montreal in 1967, McNamara warned that "bridges" had to be built to Moscow, even to Beijing ( Peking), to stop the arms build-up. He, Johnson, and Soviet president Aleksei Kosygin met for a hastily planned summit conference (Glassboro summit) at Glassboro, New Jersey, in 1967.
i. Kosygin refused to agree with McNamara, but the two sides signed
a historic treaty to halt the proliferation of their nuclear weapons (to third powers such as China or the two Germanies, for example).
a historic treaty to halt the proliferation of their nuclear weapons (to third powers such as China or the two Germanies, for example).
ii. In 1968, fifty-seven other nations also signed the non-proliferation pact.
iii. Direct air service opened between New York and Moscow.
iv. Johnson planned to visit Moscow in 1968 to help continue thawing the cold war. Before he could do so in August 1968 the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia.
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