Kennedy ordered the admiral to back off and required all military officers on active duty to clear any public speeches with the White House. Kennedy had barely settled into the Oval Office when Burke planned to publicly assail “the Soviet Union from hell to breakfast,” according to Arthur Sylvester, a Kennedy-appointed Pentagon press officer who brought the proposed speech text to the president’s attention. This presented an early problem for Kennedy, in that Burke “pushed his black-and-white views of international affairs with bluff naval persistence,” the Kennedy aide and historian Arthur M. military officials needed to intimidate Moscow with threatening rhetoric. An Annapolis graduate with 37 years of service, Burke was an anti-Soviet hawk who believed that U.S.

This reinforced the general’s belief that Kennedy didn’t sufficiently understand the challenges before him.Īdmiral Arleigh Burke, the 59-year-old chief of naval operations, shared Lemnitzer’s doubts. Since Eisenhower’s departure, he lamented in shorthand, no longer was “a Pres with mil exp available to guide JCS.” When the four-star general presented the ex-skipper with a detailed briefing on emergency procedures for responding to a foreign military threat, Kennedy seemed preoccupied with possibly having to make “a snap decision” about whether to launch a nuclear response to a Soviet first strike, by Lemnitzer’s account. Sensing Kennedy’s skepticism about nukes, Lemnitzer questioned the new president’s qualifications to manage the country’s defense. The president thought a nuclear war would bring mutually assured destruction- MAD, in the shorthand of the day-while the Joint Chiefs believed the United States could fight such a conflict and win.

To Kennedy, Lemnitzer embodied the military’s old thinking about nuclear weapons. Also like Ike, he wasn’t bookish or particularly drawn to grand strategy or big-picture thinking-he was a nuts-and-bolts sort of general who made his mark managing day-to-day problems. More important, he shared his mentor’s talent for maneuvering through Army and Washington politics. Lemnitzer’s passion for golf and his ability to drive a ball 250 yards down a fairway endeared him to Eisenhower. The 61-year-old general, little known outside military circles, stood 6 feet tall and weighed 200 pounds, with a bearlike frame, booming voice, and deep, infectious laugh. Lemnitzer was a West Point graduate who had risen in the ranks of Eisenhower’s World War II staff and helped plan the successful invasions of North Africa and Sicily. Eisenhower, the former five-star general Kennedy had succeeded. Lemnitzer made no secret of his discomfort with a 43-year-old president who he felt could not measure up to Dwight D. The Joint Chiefs of Staff reciprocated the new president’s doubts. The Soviets might have been pleased-or understandably frightened-to know that Kennedy distrusted America’s military establishment almost as much as they did. But less recognized is how much both of these agreements rested on Kennedy’s ability to rein in and sidestep his own military chiefs.įrom the start of his presidency, Kennedy feared that the Pentagon brass would overreact to Soviet provocations and drive the country into a disastrous nuclear conflict. By persuading the Soviet leader to remove missiles from Fidel Castro’s Cuba and agree to a ban on nuclear tests in the atmosphere, underwater, and in outer space, Kennedy avoided a nuclear war and kept radioactive fallout from the air and the oceans, thereby earning the country’s enduring regard for his effectiveness as a crisis manager and negotiator. In comparison, Nikita Khrushchev was a pushover, at least during the events that brought President Kennedy’s most-notable achievements. Mutual respect, from the first, was in short supply. “Here was a president who had no military experience at all, sort of a patrol-boat skipper in World War II,” Joint Chiefs Chairman Lyman Lemnitzer later said of Kennedy. In the White House, he fought-and defeated-his most determined military foes, just across the Potomac: the members of the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff. Kennedy, lieutenant, junior grade, in the South Pacific after his PT‑109 was sunk in 1943 eased his way, 17 years later, to being elected the nation’s commander in chief. Every enlisted man dreams of it: pulling rank on the military’s highest brass.

Commander in chief of the military