Nuclear Limitations and Memories of the Umbrella Man

I was in my 40’s before I made the pilgrimage to Dealey Plaza in Dallas. I walked along the grassy knoll. I looked through a window near to that used by the assassin as he took aim at the President of the United States. Most modern reconstructions of the murder are very close to the original report published by the investigating commission led by Chief Justice Earl Warren.

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The idea that John F. Kennedy was killed by a delusional gunman, a gunman convinced that he would play some important role in a post-revolutionary America, was worse than absurd. It cast the tragedy as a hopelessly morbid joke, robbing a singularly significant death of meaning beyond the mortality common to us all. It would have been as if the President had died choking on a chicken bone.

But the weight of available evidence took a toll on my youthful mind as I slowly graduated to the beginnings of adulthood. Now, in middle age, I looked out the window onto the street below.

It was less than small. It was crazy tiny. The street, the curve, a nearby tree, the entire setting had been made familiar by decades of photographs and enactments. Imagination, having little for comparison, had made the area much bigger. Looking down from what had been the Texas Schoolbook Depository, the site of the murder became a scale model of itself.

A couple of early conspiracy theories had included a mysterious man across the street from the building. He had a dark umbrella open, although the sun had shown brightly and the weather was moderate that November afternoon. There had seemed to be no reason for an umbrella on a clear day.

In fact, the black umbrella had been a symbol adopted by conservatives for several months. It was intended as a reminder of Neville Chamberlain the British Prime Minister of the 1930s who had made a deal with Adolph Hitler in Munich and declared the achievement of “peace in our time.”

The charge, widespread in conservative circles, was that President Kennedy had pretty much surrendered everything that could be given up to the Soviet Union when he negotiated the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. The umbrella became a conservative sign of protest, appearing periodically at public events. President Kennedy had become a new generation’s Neville Chamberlain, naively trusting the USSR, center of the worldwide communist conspiracy, to keep its nuclear word.

This is almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich.

– General Curtis LeMay, to the Joint Chiefs of Staff

In fact, the agreement had very little to do with trust. Its provisions were based on distrust. The limited nature of the agreement was a result of that distrust.

The Soviet Union wanted a comprehensive agreement banning all nuclear testing. But they refused to have international inspectors visit their testing sites to verify compliance.

Kennedy was only willing to agree to a total test ban if inspections on both sides were allowed. Later technology would make more remote verification reliable, but that technology did not exist in 1963. Underground testing would continue for years.

Above ground testing was reliably detectable, so the United States could easily tell whether the Soviet Union was keeping its word. So both sides agreed to a ban on above-ground nuclear tests.

But conservatives kept the drumbeat of accusation going. John F. Kennedy was making deals with the enemy of freedom. Kennedy was naive, trusting the Russians to keep their word.

The President was Neville Chamberlain. The agreement was Munich.

I remembered the conservative hysteria of 1963, comparing President Kennedy to Neville Chamberlain, as I heard reactions on television to the agreement cutting off Iran’s production of future nuclear weapons.

The deal is an American Munich. Barack Obama is trying to appease the mullahs in Tehran by making one concession after another.

— Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, July 14, 2015

It’s unfair to Neville Chamberlain to compare him to Barack Obama.

– Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR), April, 2015

He’s the Neville Chamberlain of our time, who believes that, over the next fifteen years, Iran is going to change their behavior.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), July 21, 2015

One national Republican goes further. Mike Huckabee does not compare President Obama with Neville Chamberlain. He goes directly to the giant of twentieth century evil himself. Obama is Hitler.

…he will take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven.

– Mike Huckabee, July 25, 2015

Today, the 1963 agreement is seen as breakthrough, making the world much safer, making the United States more secure. It is the other side, the side of conservatives, that appears in retrospect to be naive. The overblown talk of Chamberlain and Munich and too much trust seems deceitful at best, dumb at worst.

The Soviet Union did keep its word, under the watchful eye of the United States. Distrust and verification worked.

As in 1963, there are legitimate issues of war and peace that need to be examined and debated. Details are important and they should be put to the test of legitimate scrutiny. Memories of Munich, comparisons to Chamberlain or Hitler, charges of naivety or worse are a reminder of the sad condition of contemporary conservative thought.

If they are remembered a generation or two from now, the personal accusations against President Obama will be seen as little more than a reflexive appeal to the worst impulses of what has become the Republican base.

The umbrella man of Dealey Plaza was never a serious analyst of nuclear limits.

He wasn’t in 1963.

He isn’t today.

This article is a collaboration between MadMikesAmerica and FairandUnbalanced.com.

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