The debate on the nuclear test ban treaty got under way with exactly eight members of the U.S. Senate on hand. Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, reasoning that more Senators should be present for the occasion, moved a quorum call. Still, few showed up, so Mansfield rescinded the call.
It was not as if the treaty were a cut-and-dried issue. For two months it had stirred controversy across the U.S., and even as the Senate began its debate the Armed Services' Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee was distributing a 25-page report, supported by six of its seven members, claiming that ratification would result in "serious, and perhaps formidable, military and technical disadvantages" to the U.S.
Who's the Harshest? But for all such doubts and disagreements, there was an air of somnolence about the debate. In the first couple of days, the biggest attraction was Actress Marlene Dietrich, who turned up for a while in the gallery. Rhode Island Democrat John Pastore, chairman of the Joint Atomic Energy Committee, wasted a fiery speech on a near-empty chamber. Pastore passionately flung open his blue blazer, clapped his hand over his chest and declared: "I say to those who have doubts about the treaty that I want them to open their hearts and look into their consciences. I want them to realize what they might be doing. If by their vote they destroy and kill the treaty, I say God help us, God help us!"
Even when Barry Goldwater, one of the treaty's principal opponents, rose to speak, there were just three Senators present—all Democrats ready to pounce on him. Barry soon gave them a chance. Reiterating his stand that the U.S. ought to demand the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Cuba as its price for the treaty, he admitted that even if the Russians complied he would still vote against it. How come, asked one Democrat, when he had said only the week before that such a rider would make the treaty "perfectly acceptable even to its harshest critics"? Well, Barry allowed weakly, he probably was not the treaty's "harshest" critic.
The Old Orator. Only when word got around that Republican Leader Everett McKinley Dirksen was scheduled to speak did the Senate begin to fill. It was known that Dirksen, after harboring "grave doubts," had come around to approval. It was also known that in order to dispel some of the doubts about the treaty, Dirksen and Majority Leader Mansfield had asked President Kennedy to write a letter that Ev would read to the Senate. In his letter, the President offered Senate doubters "unqualified and unequivocal assurances" that the U.S. would maintain its readiness to resume testing, that it would "take all necessary action" if Russia used Cuba to circumvent the test ban in any way, and that the treaty would not bar the U.S. from using nuclear weapons for defense; as if to punctuate his letter, the Atomic Energy Commission set off two more nuclear blasts at its underground test site in Nevada.