An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 by Robert Dallek
Despite his high approval ratings, Kennedy was disappointed with the results of his first hundred days. To be sure, he had established himself as an attractive and even inspirational leader, but rising tensions with Castro and ongoing communist insurgencies in Southeast Asia and Africa joined with a sluggish economy and civil rights divisions at home to shake Kennedy’s confidence in mastering the challenges of his presidency. The May 5 edition of Time declared, “Last week, as John Kennedy closed out the first 100 days of his administration, the U.S. suffered a month-long series of setbacks rare in the history of the Republic.” Asked how he liked being president, Kennedy replied that he liked it better before the Bay of Pigs. He also described himself as “always on the edge of irritability.” “Sons of bitches,” Kennedy said after reading Time’s critical assessment of his first hundred days. “If they want this job they can have it tomorrow.”
Yet however frustrated he was by events and his own stumbles, Kennedy was determined to use the problems of his first months as object lessons in how to be more effective. His resolve stood him in good stead: He managed coming crises with greater skill and a growing conviction that he might be an above average and maybe even a memorable president after all.
CHAPTER 11
A World of Troubles
We face a relentless struggle in every corner of the globe.
— John F. Kennedy, April 20, 1961
IN THE FIFTEEN YEARS since the onset of the Cold War, Americans had struggled with their fears. The long tradition of “free security,” weak neighbors, and vast oceans, which had insulated the country from foreign dangers, had done little to prepare it for a drawn-out contest with a hostile superpower convinced that its ideology and that of the United States could not coexist. The tensions over the East-West divide and America’s apparently unprecedented vulnerability to attack tested the country’s self-confidence.
In the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy mirrored this national anxiety. In a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors on April 20, he spoke apocalyptically about the Cold War. “If the self-discipline of the free cannot match the iron discipline of the mailed fist—in economic, political, [and] scientific . . . struggles as well as the military—then the peril to freedom will continue to rise,” he predicted. Cuba was a case in point. “The evidence is clear—and the hour is late,” he said. “We and our Latin friends will have to face the fact that we cannot postpone any longer the real issue of survival of freedom in this hemisphere itself.” It was “clearer than ever that we face a relentless struggle in every corner of the globe that goes beyond the clash of armies or even nuclear weapons. . . . We dare not fail to see the insidious nature of this new and deeper struggle . . . [which] is taking place every day, without fanfare, in thousands of villages and markets—day and night—and in classrooms all over the globe.” The message underlying this clash was that “the complacent, the self-indulgent, the soft societies are about to be swept away with the debris of history. Only the strong, only the industrious, only the determined, only the courageous, only the visionary who determine the real nature of our struggle can survive.” It sounded like Theodore Roosevelt and what Kennedy himself had said in the forties in response to earlier foreign threats.
In the spring of 1961, Labor Secretary Arthur Goldberg reported that Soviet steel production had equaled that of the United States in the fourth quarter of 1960. As more thoughtful observers understood then and as we know now, Soviet competitiveness, except in armaments, was illusory. Back in 1958, Willard Mathias in the Office of National Estimates had predicted that communism’s inability to produce sufficient consumer goods and resistance to sharing power with a growing middle class of Soviet professionals and technocrats would ultimately destroy the party’s power. (Six years later, Mathias would describe this “evolution” as “probably irreversible.”) In June 1961, Walter Heller told JFK that “the Soviets have no reasonable hope of outproducing us in the next 10-25 years unless the U.S. economy slows down miserably. . . . On a per capita basis, the Soviet GNP in 1959 was only 39% of ours.” The Soviets could not equal U.S. output until 1990, Heller said—and that was in the unlikely event they maintained a 6 percent annual growth rate; it would probably not be until 2010 that the Soviets caught up to the United States, if even then. But such assessments of Soviet weakness were frowned upon in the fifties and sixties. An American army general told Mathias that he was “suspected of being a communist agent because [he had] not been tough enough on the Russians.” And for the moment, Kennedy was as much in the grip of conventional Cold War thinking as most other Americans. The keen analytic powers and wise judgments displayed in his pre-presidential views on colonialism temporarily deserted him.
Convinced that the Bay of Pigs failure could be attributed partly to press stories that had alerted Castro to an invasion, Kennedy used an April address to the American Newspaper Publishers Association to urge the country to sacrifice some of its traditional freedoms. Kennedy twitted the largely Republican audience by suggesting that his talk might better be called “The President Versus the Press” rather than “The President and the Press.” He denied an intention to impose any form of censorship or to establish an “official secrets act,” as Allen Dulles suggested, or to control the flow of information through an office of war information, but he urged the publishers to ask themselves if what they printed was not only news but “in the interest of national security.” Seeing Kennedy’s remarks as an implicit threat, several editors and publishers requested a meeting at the White House. Kennedy agreed, and at the meeting they pressed him to cite examples of irresponsible reporting. Kennedy singled out the New York Times and revelations about the Cuban invasion. At the close of the meeting, however, in an aside to Times editor Turner Catledge, Kennedy acknowledged the essential role of a critical free press: “Maybe if you had printed more about the operation,” he said, “you would have saved us from a colossal mistake.”
KENNEDY’S TENSIONS with the press extended to worries about invasions of his privacy. In his address to the publishers, he denied that his remarks were “intended to examine the proper degree of privacy which the press should allow to any President and his family.” He wryly observed that the attendance of reporters and photographers at weekly church services had “surely done them no harm.” He was unapologetic about breaking with Eisenhower’s practice of letting journalists attend his golf games. But then, Kennedy noted with charming self-deprecation, Ike’s golfing accomplishments did not include the beaning of a Secret Service agent.
But Kennedy’s concern was not with the usual press aggressiveness in covering a president’s family and recreational activities. Rather, he was increasingly worried about disclosures detailing his much-rumored womanizing. Almost everyone in the press corps knew about or at least suspected his philandering, columnist Bob Novak later said. From the start of his presidency, some ultra-right-wing papers and what one historian called the “underground market” were swamped with exposés about JFK’s hidden, illicit romances. But the mainstream press resisted such scandal mongering. Lyndon Johnson’s hideaway office on Capitol Hill, for example, where he indulged in recreational sex, was an open secret during his vice presidency; reporters privately joked about LBJ’s “nooky room.” Yet nobody in the mainstream press thought it was worth writing about.
The fact that such gossip was confined to a fringe media, which earned a living from unsubstantiated rumors, made Kennedy himself largely indifferent to these articles at the start of his presidency. The fact that the gossip, much of which was true, might trouble Jackie was not enough to rein him in. Indeed, such talk, which added to a romantic, macho image that contrasted sharply with that of his stodgy predecessor, may even have appealed to JFK. Nevertheless, despite the press restraint, people around the president worried about his vulnerability to enemies who might try to break tradition and embarrass him with published accounts of his affairs. Ten days after Kennedy became president, J. Edgar Hoover passed along a r
THERE IS NO EVIDENCE that rumors about Kennedy’s sex life or, for that matter, the escapades themselves distracted him from important business in the first months of his term. Between November and February he had exchanged conciliatory messages with Khrushchev, and on February 22, he expressed the hope that they might be able to meet soon “for an informal exchange of views,” which could contribute to “a more harmonious relationship between our two countries.” But the Bay of Pigs invasion undermined whatever goodwill the initial Kennedy-Khrushchev exchanges had generated. Seeing Kennedy as thrown on the defensive by his embarrassing failure, Khrushchev went on the attack. “It is a secret to no one,” he wrote Kennedy, “that the armed bands invading” Cuba “were trained, equipped and armed in the United States of America.” He promised to give Cuba “all necessary help to repel armed attack” and warned that “conflagration in one region could endanger settlements elsewhere.”
Kennedy manfully responded that the invasion was a demonstration of brave patriots determined to restore freedom to Cuba. He emphasized that the United States intended no military intervention on the island but was obliged “to protect this hemisphere against external aggression.” Kennedy also warned against using Cuba as a pretext for inflaming other areas of the world, which would endanger the general peace. He asked Khrushchev to “recognize that free people in all parts of the world do not accept the claim of historical inevitability for Communist revolution. What your government believes is its own business; what it does in the world is the world’s business. The great revolution in the history of man, past, present, and future, is the revolution of those determined to be free.”
Kennedy’s greatest fear was that Moscow might use Cuba as an excuse to close off West Berlin, to which many educated East Germans and other East Europeans were fleeing from communism. When Nixon had urged JFK to find an excuse for invading Cuba, Kennedy had replied that an invasion would risk a war with Russia over Berlin and his priority had to be world peace. If there was to be a next world war, Berlin, Kennedy believed, would be where it began.
Khrushchev answered Kennedy with a fifteen-page letter reiterating his accusations about U.S. interference in Cuba and restating his warnings that this was no way to ease Soviet-American tensions. Kennedy wisely left Khrushchev’s letter unanswered. Still, because Khrushchev was as intent as Kennedy on avoiding a nuclear conflict, the Soviet leader seized upon the president’s February proposal for a meeting in Vienna on June 3 to 4. Although Khrushchev did not say so, it was clear to Kennedy that Berlin, which Khrushchev described as “a dangerous source of tension in the very heart of Europe,” was also his greatest concern.
KENNEDY’S FIRST THREE MONTHS in office had confirmed his belief that overseas perils should take priority over economic and social reforms, but because he believed that an effective foreign policy partly depended on a strong economy and social cohesion at home, he felt compelled to strike a balance between external and internal initiatives. His dilemma, as he saw it, was that domestic proposals could do more to divide than unite the country.
On April 18, in the midst of the Bay of Pigs crisis, he asked Congress to create a new cabinet department of urban affairs and housing as a way to halt “the appalling deterioration of many of our country’s urban areas,” rehabilitate the nation’s cities, where 70 percent of Americans lived, and ensure “adequate housing for all segments of our population.” It seemed like an apple pie and motherhood proposal, but it quickly ran into opposition from southern senators and congressmen representing rural areas and small cities. A greater emphasis in a revised bill on small communities promised to neutralize the latter, but southern opposition to an act that could primarily serve inner-city blacks and make Housing and Home Finance Agency administrator Robert Weaver the first African American cabinet secretary was unyielding. The bill was also held hostage to budget constraints imposed by the improving but still sluggish economy and increasing defense expenditures. Kennedy’s reluctance to fight for something he saw as a secondary priority was as much a drag on aggressive action as the economy and southern opposition.
Consequently, in May, Kennedy proposed legislation that would stimulate the economy with limited tax reductions tied to revenue gains. He described his proposal as “a first though urgent step along the road to constructive reform.” He said he planned to send a more comprehensive tax reform program to the Congress in 1962 that would stimulate “a higher rate of economic growth, [and create] a more equitable tax structure, and a simpler tax law.” In the meantime, he proposed a tax incentive to businesses in the form of a credit for modernization and expansion of plant and equipment. To make up for lost income here, he proposed the end of tax exemptions for Americans earning incomes abroad in economically advanced countries and for estate taxes on overseas properties, withholding taxes on interest and dividend payments, the continuation of corporate and excise taxes scheduled to be reduced or ended in July, and a tax on civil aviation providers to help pay for the operation and improvement of the federal airways system.
Business leaders, who preferred liberalized depreciation allowances to tax credits for new plant and equipment costs, successfully blocked Kennedy’s bill, demonstrating both their power as a lobby and White House inattentiveness or carelessness. Fearful of sharing the spotlight and thus diminishing JFK’s standing as a domestic leader, the White House had barred Lyndon Johnson, the most skilled legislator in the administration, from a meaningful role in dealing with Congress. Instead, Kennedy, who had never shown an affinity for the sort of cooperative endeavor needed to enact major bills, relied on inexperienced aides to advance his legislative agenda. Complaining that his contacts on the Hill were not being used, Johnson said, “You know, they never once asked me about that!” The result, predictably, was a stumbling Kennedy legislative effort.
Despite his defeats on creating a housing department and tax reform, Kennedy could point to some gains in domestic affairs. The Congress agreed to an Area Redevelopment Act that fulfilled his campaign promise to help ease chronic unemployment in West Virginia and nine other states. In addition, the Congress gave Kennedy significant additions to several existing programs: expanded unemployment benefits, a higher minimum wage that included 3.6 million uncovered workers, increases in Social Security, aid to cities to improve housing and transportation, a water pollution control act to protect the country’s rivers and streams, funds to continue the building of a national highway system begun under Eisenhower, and an agriculture act to raise farmers’ incomes and perpetuate “a most outstanding accomplishment of our civilization . . . to produce more food with less people than any country on earth.”
Despite these advances, the administration could not take much satisfaction from its initial domestic record. Aside from area redevelopment, the White House had no major legislative achievements. Kennedy’s “highest-priority items,” tax reform, federal aid to elementary and secondary education, college scholarships, and health insurance for the aged, never got out of congressional committees. Historian Irving Bernstein, who closely studied the struggles over the education and health bills, described them as political snake pits. Federal involvement in education was anathema to conservatives, who wished to preserve local control. Emotional arguments about public funding for parochial schools opened an unbridgeable gap between Catholics and Protestants. Determined to keep his campaign pledges on separation of church and sta
Supporters of the education and health bills blamed Kennedy for not providing stronger leadership. He had in fact spoken forcefully for both measures during the presidential campaign, describing them as legislative priorities. But Richard Neustadt’s recent book Presidential Power had deepened Kennedy’s understanding of a president’s limited personal influence and the folly of fighting for lost causes in a Congress dominated by conservative southern Democrats allied with Republicans. The almost certain defeat of these bills in the first session of the 87th Congress made him reluctant to spend much political capital on them.