THE BEGINNING
PROGRESSIVE The Beginning President John F. Kennedy's inaugural summons to the Soviets to join with us in embarking anew on the quest for peace marked the hopeful beginning of the Administration...
...Cuba, of course, is only one phase of the deeper problem of all Latin America—a problem greatly exacerbated by a decade of neglect and indifference on the part of both the Truman and Eisenhower Administrations...
...Our enthuiasm for some of the others is more restrained...
...Not because the Communists are doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right...
...When invasion jitters were reaching their frenzied peak on the unhappy island, we dispatched twice the usual number of men and guns to Latin American waters for a "long planned" training mission...
...But he also finds something he had not expected and that depresses him: a feeling of near-panic among many Westerners that this awakening is too big for the West to handle...
...Perhaps it is too late, but the Castro government has hinted that it would welcome a chance to talk with the new Administration...
...For many patience-cracking months he represented us in the nuclear test talks in Geneva and thereafter served with distinction as ambassador to the United Nations...
...Kennedy's ambassador-atlarge, has had enormous experience, but he seems to us to live too much in the past...
...One of the most urgent facts of life that the Kennedy Administration confronts is that this is true all over the world...
...The CIA has become a government within a government, operating in darkest secrecy in the most sensitive areas of American foreign policy...
...He finds something he had expected: the eager and purposeful Soviet campaign to get an economic foothold in Africa...
...We hope Mr...
...But we share the concern of Washington columnist Marquis W. Childs over whether he possesses the "boldness and imagination to rise to the challenge of the extraordinarily difficult disarmament tangle...
...If the free society cannot help the many who are poor, it can never save the few who are rich...
...As a group, they are cool, competent, devoted men, and some would seem to have considerable capacity...
...Latin America is in a revolutionary mood," he said...
...The three younger liberals in the Cabinet are excellent choices...
...Paul H. Nitze, Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Affairs, and Mc-George Bundy, top security officer, are able men but too much wedded, for our money, to the rigidly negative views of Dean Acheson...
...To those people in the huts and villages of half the world struggling to break the bonds of mass misery [we pledge] our best efforts to help them help themselves...
...Few problems are immediately so challenging and demanding as those of Latin America, and Mr...
...Senor Figueres warned that the United States has failed to respond to the deep stirrings in this hemisphere—and the Communists have...
...Kennedy offered to cooperate with the Communist rulers in the pursuit of peace "before the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science engulf all humanity in planned or accidental self-destruction...
...A. M. Rosenthal, roving correspondent for the New York Times, recently reported after a swing through Africa: "Everywhere the visitor goes in Africa he feels the stirring and the demand...
...Secretary of State Dean Rusk remains an enigma to us, but we have a feeling he will be a considerable improvement over his most recent predecessors...
...It has a great deal to change...
...This is the kind of perilous folly that President Kennedy must end...
...It represents, in our judgment, a disturbing failure to recognize that there is no halfway house in the arms race, that nothing short of complete, universal disarmament will banish the corroding fear of a nuclear holocaust...
...Our own government has maintained a tight-lipped silence...
...To return to the beginnings of the Kennedy Administration, what we liked most about the inaugural address was the President's firm insistence that we will help the underprivileged of the world—not because it helps us in combating Communism, but because it is the right thing to do...
...His desperate cry seemed to sum up both the plight of our present position and the opportunity that confronts us...
...In this connection, it is deeply significant to ponder the farewell words of James J. Wadsworth as he retired from his post as our ambassador to the United Nations...
...If he couldn't be Secretary of State, Adlai E. Stevenson is the perfect choice as ambassador to the United Nations...
...Let both sides, for the first time, formulate serious and precise proposals for the inspection and control of arms—and bring the absolute power to destroy other nations under the absolute control of all nations...
...His will be a tough road—and a lonely one...
...They are a mixed bag, and we have mixed reactions...
...John Connally, appointed Secretary of the Navy, is reported to be waist-deep in some of the less savory aspects of oil politics...
...Why should we be afraid of it...
...Such a course may not be popular at the moment with a populace driven to hate by hysterical headlines, but we remain convinced that it would be an act of great statesmanship for Mr...
...Its recent handling of the crisis over Cuba was morally wrong and incredibly stupid...
...Isn't this really what we want and what we are supposed to stand for...
...Here, in the anguished lament of a frustrated American in Africa, is the challenge that confronts the Kennedy Administration...
...PROGRESSIVE The Beginning President John F. Kennedy's inaugural summons to the Soviets to join with us in embarking anew on the quest for peace marked the hopeful beginning of the Administration of the nation's thirty-fifth President...
...Chester Bowles should make a creative Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs, although we confess to some dismay over what seemed to us a weaseling position when he testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee prior to his confirmation...
...Kennedy spoke little of domestic affairs in his inaugural address...
...A Wall Street lawyer and banker, McCloy is a man of considerable charm, superior ability, and undoubted integrity...
...he demanded...
...The tendency to emphasize control instead of disarmament has cropped up before in Administration circles...
...If this is so, why has it enforced so much secrecy, and why is it building its defensive field and training center on the opposite end of its country from which an invasion from Cuba could come...
...But let us never fear to negotiate...
...Kennedy managed to reassert his campaign insistence on the deterrent power of massive armed might and to reaffirm a rather truculent adherence to the Monroe Doctrine, but mostly he talked of the compelling need for negotiated peace...
...The new Administration takes office at a time of unparalleled crisis and opportunity...
...From their vantage posts of seniority, and emboldened by their bargaining power with conservative Republicans, Southern Senators and Representatives are kicking up their heels in preparation for their struggle against a progressive program...
...Wadsworth's good-by comments have special importance because few if any Americans have worked as long and as closely in negotiation with the Soviets as he has...
...That is why we were so happy to hear President Kennedy say on Inauguration Day that our best efforts to break the bonds of mass misery in the world will come—not because these efforts will win votes or because the Communists are "doing it"—but because these efforts are right...
...The President's reference to arms control rather than disarmament diluted some of our enthusiasm for an otherwise excellent presentation of the need for negotiation...
...No phase of the foreign policy field strikes us as more demanding than disarmament, but even now there is disturbing emphasis in Administration circles on "arms control" rather than complete, universal disarmament, as we indicated above...
...Most of them seem bland and passionless, lacking in zest and zeal for great adventure...
...Clearly Mr...
...The Guatemalan government, which is very much our baby, denies that the field and the forces are being readied for invasion of Cuba- and insists that its purpose is purely defensive...
...Kennedy's goals range much wider than that, and that McCloy will soon make this clear to the country and the world...
...it succeeded only in playing into the hands of those we sought to intimidate and humiliate...
...But we have a hunch he may turn out to be the big and pleasant surprise in the Cabinet...
...Equally disturbing is the disclosure that American money and men are being used to build a secret airfield and train mysterious commando-like forces in the Retalhuleu area in Guatemala...
...Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Abraham Ribicoff is almost equally conservative but less gifted...
...At the very moment that the emotional Cuban leader was warning his people of invasion, we sent a super-carrier to Guantanamo Bay, its decks crammed with jet aircraft...
...President Kennedy will be heading in the right direction if he ponders and acts on the warning of one of our best and best informed friends in all Latin America, Jose Figueres, former president of Costa Rica and confidant and consultant on Latin American affairs to government officials...
...Kennedy had put together his team of assistants...
...In an interview that was almost wholly ignored by the nation's press, Wadsworth, a conservative Republican with impeccable anti-Communist credentials, asserted that "the Soviet government has every intention of living up to any agreement it may make from the standpoint of nuclear tests or on broader disarmament issues...
...When a reporter asked a State Department specialist in Latin American affairs about the secret base, he responded: "Don't ask us about it, ask the spooks—the Central Intelligence Agency...
...Newton N. Minow as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, and W. Willard Wirtz as Undersecretary of Labor, two Stevenson law partners, are superior selections...
...Before his inauguration Mr...
...This flip reply tended to strengthen fears that the CIA is masterminding a multi-million dollar anti-Castro operation in Central America...
...The Kennedy appointment that gives us the most trouble is that of John J. McCloy, who was chosen to head our disarmament effort...
...Rosenthal encountered one young American diplomat in Africa who had not yet bowed to the immensity of the challenge...
...We look to them to provide what thunder from the left will be heard at Cabinet meetings...
...The forces of reaction are massing against the liberal planks of the Democratic platform...
...President Kennedy must apply a firm hand to this runaway agency before it launches the nation on an irreversible course of suicidal aggression...
...Kennedy to seek a new approach to the crisis of Cuba...
...The three most conservative members of the Cabinet, Treasury Secretary C. Douglas Dillon, Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, and Commerce Secretary Luther Hodges, are unusually gifted men—patriots in the best sense of the word—but conservatives nonetheless...
...Mennen Williams, we imagine, will do a first-class job as Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs...
...he has neither the training nor the devotion to civil liberties the job demands...
...With hardly a fortnight left to serve, and only hours before United Nations debate on Cuban charges of United States aggression was to begin, President Eisenhower clumsily broke off diplomatic relations with the Castro regime...
...Kennedy expects to be his own Secretary of State...
...Let us never negotiate out of fear...
...The appointment of Robert Kennedy as Attorney General strikes us as a mistake...
...This sentiment made us happy...
...It is too late for a slow-paced revolution...
...Kennedy showed his awareness of this fact of life by giving special attention to our southern neighbors in his inaugural address...
...Let us begin anew—remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof," he declared...
...That will come later when he fires a series of messages to the Eighty-seventh Congress...
...Labor Secretary Arthur Goldberg, Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman, and Interior Secretary Stewart Udall have proved their capacity and demonstrated their progressivism under fire...
...But they hardly add up to the team you would choose to blast a roadway across the New Frontier...
...Why can't we help it and shape it instead of biting our fingernails...
...More affirmatively, however, President Kennedy is faced with the compelling need to embark on a wide-ranging review of all the factors that contributed to the collapse of Cuban-American relations in the hope that some common ground can be found for negotiation...
...Averell Har-riman, Mr...
...Had President Kennedy gone on to propose, as have so many forward-looking Americans, that we make available, without any strings, some of the food piled high in our bulging bins, to the Russians and the Chinese, who have suffered severe crop failures, our rejoicing would have been even greater...
...Curiously, President Kennedy showed a greater willingness to appoint men of nerve, verve, and imagination to posts of secondary rank than to his Cabinet...
...The Eisenhower Administration fumbled the problem for eight years and, in its closing weeks, stumbled to the edge of disaster...
Vol. 25 • February 1961 • No. 2
