Thread by @RealLoriSpencer

At the height of #ColdWar tensions with #Russia, the Soviets might have been pleased—or understandably frightened—to know that #JFK distrusted America’s military and intelligence establishment almost as much as they did. theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…

Kennedy had barely settled into the Oval Office when Admiral Arleigh Burke planned to publicly assail “the Soviet Union from hell to breakfast” in a speech.

#JFK ordered the admiral to back off & required all military officers to clear any public speeches with the White House!

President Kennedy’s biggest worry about the military was not the personalities involved but rather the freedom of field commanders to launch nuclear weapons without explicit permission from the commander in chief.

So he issued orders that no nuclear launch without POTUS approval

As Roswell L. Gilpatric, President Kennedy’s deputy defense secretary, recalled, “We became increasingly horrified over how little positive control the president really had over the use of this great arsenal of nuclear weapons” at a time when America and #Russia were toe-to-toe.

When #JFK’s Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, visited #NATO’s strategic military command in Belgium, they asked whether Commander Norstad’s primary obligation was to the United States or to its European allies.

“My first instinct was to hit” one of the Cabinet members for “challenging my loyalty,” the Supreme Commander of #NATO recalled later.

Instead, he tried to smile and said, “ ‘Gentlemen, I think that ends this meeting.’ Whereupon I walked out and slammed the door.”

General Power, too, was openly opposed to limiting the use of America’s ultimate weapons.

“Why are you so concerned with saving their lives?” he once asked. “The whole idea is to kill the bastards … At the end of the war, if there are two Americans and one Russian, we win.”

When Sec’y Bundy asked the Joint Chiefs’ staff director for a copy of the blueprint for #nuclearwar, the general at the other end of the line said, “We never release that.”

Bundy explained, “I don’t think you understand. I’m calling for the president and he wants to see [it].”

The chiefs’ Joint Strategic Capabilities Plan foresaw the use of 170 atomic and hydrogen bombs in #Moscow alone; the destruction of every major Soviet, Chinese, and Eastern European city; and hundreds of millions of deaths.

Sickened after a formal briefing on the first-strike nuclear attack plan against #communist nations, President Kennedy turned to a senior administration official and said, “And we call ourselves the human race.”

The military and the CIA “couldn’t believe that a new president like me wouldn’t panic and try to save his own face,” Kennedy later told his aide Dave Powers about the Bay of Pigs failed invasion of #Cuba.

“Well, they had me figured all wrong.”

Afterward, Kennedy accused himself of naïveté for trusting the military’s judgment that the Cuban operation was well thought-out and capable of success.

“Those sons of bitches with all the fruit salad just sat there nodding, saying it would work,” Kennedy said of the chiefs.

The disaster at the Bay of Pigs intensified Kennedy’s doubts about listening to advisers from the CIA, the Pentagon, or the State Department who had either deliberately misled him or allowed him to accept lousy advice.

In other discussions about fighting in North Vietnam and China or elsewhere in Southeast Asia, Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer promised #JFK, “If we are given the right to use nuclear weapons, we can guarantee victory.”

Kennedy was surrounded by lunatics who were itching to use nukes.

The clash with Admiral Burke, tensions over nuclear-war planning, and the Bay of Pigs convinced Kennedy that a primary task of his presidency was to bring the military under strict control.

#JFK told his press secretary, Pierre Salinger, “This shit has got to stop.”

The biggest decision, #JFK reflected, was determining which action “lessens the chances of a nuclear exchange w/ Russia, which obviously is the final failure.”

Kennedy told his paramour something he could never have admitted in public: “I’d rather my children be red than dead.”

“These brass hats have one great advantage,” Kennedy told his longtime aide Kenny O’Donnell during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 — a nuclear showdown w/ #Russia.

“If we … do what they want us to do, none of us will be alive later to tell them that they were wrong.”

After the crisis ended, #JFK met with some of the military chiefs to thank them for their help.
They made no secret of their disdain. Gen. LeMay portrayed the settlement as “the greatest defeat in our history” and said the only remedy was a prompt ground & air invasion of #Cuba!

The Joint Chiefs were ready to use “nuclear weapons for limited war operations in the Cuban area,” saying “collateral damage to nonmilitary facilities and population casualties will be held to a minimum consistent with military necessity”—an assertion they surely knew was BS.

“What good are they?,” President Kennedy asked Def. Sec. McNamara and the military chiefs a few weeks after the Cuban missile crisis. “You can’t use them as a first weapon yourself. They are only good for deterring. I don’t see quite why we’re building as many as we’re building.”

“The first thing I’m going to tell my successor,” #JFK told guests at the White House in 1963, “is to watch the generals, and to avoid feeling that just because they were military men, their opinions on military matters were worth a damn.”

Too bad #LBJ didn’t heed his warning.