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Chapter 5 The Senate Steps In A lthough the House was generally more aggressive about trying to poke holes in the administration’s account of the Soviet build-up, it was a Senate inquiry that would cause the White House the greatest anxiety.1 This postmortem was conducted by one of that chamber’s most elite bodies: the Senate Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee (SPIS), the investigating arm of the Armed Services Committee.The SPIS had a sterling reputation and was known for its “pitiless but not petty, vigorous but not virulent” inquiries, as one contemporary observer put it.2 It had first achieved renown as the Truman committee, monitoring defense contracts during World War II. A decade later, during the Eisenhower administration, Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson (D-TX) used the SPIS to investigate the alleged “missile gap” of the late 1950s. The committee also produced a long series of respected reports about the material needs of the armed forces. Its increased influence and activities during the early decades of the Cold War paralleled broader congressional trends. As historian Joseph Fry has noted, “After the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946 empowered subcommittee chairs to hire staff, the number of Senate foreign policy-related subcommittees jumped from seven in 1946 to thirty-one in 1966.” By the 1960s, the SPIS and other subcommittees rivaled the venerable Committee on Foreign Relations in terms of influence.3 Harry Truman’s chairmanship of the SPIS had helped vault him into the White House, and Lyndon Johnson had undoubtedly hoped lightning would strike twice. But the chairman in 1963, John Stennis (D-MS), harbored no such ambitions. Stennis had not been seeking the post when Richard Russell designated him chairman in January 1961. Russell, one of Washington’s most powerful politicians, viewed Stennis as his natural successor. Running the prestigious subcommittee was to be part of Stennis’s maturation. “I think in determining the extent of the subcommittee’s activities,” Russell wrote Stennis upon his appointment, “you would be well-advised to remember the 69 The Senate Steps In likelihood of your later becoming chairman of the full committee and to avoid any precedents that might plague you then. . . . The best advice I can offer at the moment is not to spread yourself too thin by undertaking too many subjects initially.”4 A former judge, Stennis had a self-effacing, exceedingly polite manner that belied a shrewd intellect and at least occasional courage. He had been the first Democrat to demand the censure of Joe McCarthy (R-WI) in 1954. During his first two years as chair, he conducted many meat-and-potato investigations , none designed with headlines in mind. They concerned such issues as housing for military families, construction costs of missile bases, and the cost-effectiveness of the Minuteman and Polaris missiles. Stennis did become involved in one of the hottest issues of 1962, the so-called “muzzling” of the military by Robert McNamara’s Pentagon, but this was only because the SPIS, which by then had six professional staff investigators, was the logical body to look into the matter.5 The probe—the most sensitive one involving the armed forces since Russell’s investigation a decade earlier into the firing of Gen. Douglas MacArthur—could easily have turned into another congressional witch hunt. But Stennis kept tight rein on it.6 In the process, he earned the disdain of his colleague on the committee, Strom Thurmond (D-SC), a dynamic that would come into play in 1963.7 Stennis had taken nearly as hard a line as anyone in Congress on the issue of Soviet aid to Cuba. He had advocated a blockade of the island well before the Soviets’ nuclear-tipped missiles were discovered, and their removal did nothing to alter his position.8 As the crisis intensified, Stennis contacted his subcommittee colleagues about incorporating Cuba into an ongoing study of the adequacy of US forces, given their global commitments.9 Most, including the ranking member, Leverett Saltonstall (R-MA), quickly agreed.10 But a wholly separate probe involving Cuba was not on the SPIS agenda when the new Congress began; for one thing, ten other investigations were already under way.11 Even as Stennis became persuaded, in mid-January, that the SPIS was the best venue for a separate inquiry into the missile crisis, he was decidedly against incorporating a review of the intelligence community’s performance, probably on the grounds that anything having to do with the CIA was Russell...

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