An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 by Robert Dallek
After he had issued his public statement on the disorders in Alabama, Kennedy met with a group of liberals, including the actor Harry Belafonte and Eugene Rostow, the dean of the Yale School and W. W. Rostow’s brother. Belafonte respectfully asked if the president “could say something a little more about the Freedom Riders.” No less respectfully, but more forcefully, Rostow urged “the need for moral leadership on the substantive issue of equal access to public facilities.” After they left, Kennedy asked Wofford, “What in the world does [Rostow] think I should do? Doesn’t he know I’ve done more for civil rights than any President in American history? How could any man have done more than I’ve done?” There was something to be said for Kennedy’s point, but not as much as he thought. He had gone beyond other presidents, but it was not enough to keep up with the determined efforts of African Americans to end two centuries of oppression.
When the Freedom Riders returned to Washington after serving time in a Jackson, Mississippi, jail, Kennedy refused to see them at the White House. Nor would he follow Wofford’s suggestion that he issue a statement, which “Eisenhower never did . . . to give clear moral expression to the issues involved. The only effective time for such moral leadership is during an occasion of moral crisis,” Wofford asserted. “This is the time when your words would mean most.” Black leaders and newspaper editorials were complaining that “despite your criticism of Eisenhower on this score, you have not chosen yet to say anything about the right of Americans to travel without discrimination.” Because making the moral case for a statement seemed unlikely to persuade Kennedy, Wofford also emphasized its impact on foreign affairs. “Some such vigorous statement and public appeal, on top of the effective actions of the Attorney General, past and planned, should have a good effect abroad. I note from reading the foreign press that some strong Presidential statement is awaited.”
Kennedy’s refusal to follow Wofford’s suggestion rested on his conviction that he had done as much as he could. He understood the sense of injustice that blacks felt toward a system of apartheid in a country priding itself on traditions of freedom and equal opportunity. Southern abuse of blacks, including physical intimidation of courageous men and women practicing nonviolent protest, was not lost on him. He knew this was not simply a five-or-ten-cent increase in the minimum wage but an issue that contradicted the country’s credo. Nonetheless, he gave it a lower priority than the danger of a nuclear war in which tens of millions of people could be killed and the planet suffer damages that would jeopardize human survival. He seemed to operate on the false assumption that openly and aggressively committing himself to equal rights for black Americans would somehow undermine his pursuit of world peace. Many civil rights activists justifiably concluded that Kennedy simply did not have the moral commitment to their cause, that his background as a rich man insulated from contacts with African Americans and their plight made him more an interested observer than a visceral proponent, like Hubert Humphrey, of using federal power to cure the country’s greatest social ill.
FROM MAY 16 to 18, in the midst of the strife in Alabama, Kennedy made his first trip as president abroad, to Canada. Although he knew that the timing of his visit might anger civil rights activists, he saw conversations in Ottawa as too important to be deferred. Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, who wished to separate Canada from U.S. Cold War policies, opposed Washington’s pressure for Canadian membership in the Organization of American States and requests to deploy nuclear weapons on Canadian soil. Because Kennedy had no hope of changing Diefenbaker’s mind through private conversations, he used a speech before Parliament to plead the case for U.S. policies. He described America’s historic friendship with Canada as the “unity of equal and independent nations,” and urged Canadians to join the OAS as one way to make “this entire area more secure against aggression of all kinds.” He emphasized how heartened the OAS would be by Canada’s participation. As important, he urged the deployment of nuclear weapons for the defense of all NATO areas, meaning Canada as well as Europe, and warned, “Our opponents are watching to see if we in the West are divided. They take courage when we are.”
Diefenbaker resented Kennedy’s attempt to force him into unwanted actions, and after Kennedy returned to the United States, the prime minister threatened him with the publication of a memo in which Kennedy allegedly described Diefenbaker as an S.O.B. Ted Sorensen claimed that the handwritten note included an illegible reference to the OAS and nothing about Diefenbaker. After the memo incident, Bobby recalled that his brother “hated . . . Diefenbaker—had contempt for him.” In a private, candid response to the flap over the memo, Kennedy said, “I didn’t think Diefenbaker was a son of a bitch, I thought he was a prick.” (“I couldn’t have called him an S.O.B.,” Kennedy joked. “I didn’t know he was one—at that time.”) Personal animus aside, the visit to Canada added to Kennedy’s foreign policy worries. Like Churchill during World War II, he could complain that the only thing worse than having allies was not having them.
The trip to Canada and a special message to Congress on May 25, a week after his return from Ottawa, reflected Kennedy’s ongoing concern to restore confidence in his foreign policy leadership after the Bay of Pigs failure. Normally, he explained, a president spoke only annually on the state of the union, but these were “extraordinary times” confronting Americans with an “extraordinary challenge.” Delivering his speech from the well of the House before a joint session, Kennedy solemnly reminded the Congress that the U.S. had become the world’s “leader in freedom’s cause. . . . The great battleground for the defense and expansion of freedom today,” he said, “is the whole southern half of the globe—Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East—the lands of the rising peoples.” The adversaries of freedom were working to capture this revolution and turn it to their advantage. And although they possessed “a powerful intercontinental striking force, [and] large forces for conventional war,” their “aggression is more often concealed than open.”
Since America’s advantage in numbers of nuclear weapons and capacity to deliver them was secondary in this “battle for minds and souls,” Kennedy omitted mention of it. Nor did he feel compelled to include the civil rights movement across the South as part of the struggle of oppressed peoples against “injustice, tyranny, and exploitation.” It would be no selling point to southern congressmen and senators, whose votes were essential to increase appropriations for national defense.
The nation’s security, he explained, depended first on a stronger American economy. And this meant reducing unemployment through a Manpower Development and Training program that would give hundreds of thousands of workers displaced by technological changes new job skills. Second, business and labor needed to improve America’s balance of payments at the same time they held down prices and wages. He also proposed a new Act for International Development that could raise living standards in developing countries and make them less vulnerable to communist subversion. An increase in funding for the United States Information Agency would also combat communism in the propaganda wars being waged on radio and television in Latin America and Asia.
Expanded military assistance programs for Southeast Asian, Latin American, and African countries were no less important. In addition, spending on new kinds of forces and weapons would give the United States greater flexibility to fight either a traditional ground war or an unconventional guerrilla conflict. This was not a recommendation for diminished nuclear fighting capacity; Kennedy believed it essential to maintain the country’s nuclear arsenal at the highest level as well. Improved intelligence, especially after the Bay of Pigs, was yet another priority. It was “both legitimate and necessary as a means of self-defense in an age of hidden perils.”
Halfway through his speech, Kennedy came to even bigger ticket items. He wanted to triple spending on civil defense, with additional large increases in the future. “Apathy, indifference, and skepticism” had greeted past suggestions for a national civil defense policy, Kennedy decla
Initially, Kennedy himself had been skeptical of investing in a costly fallout shelter program. In early May, when he met with several governors urging an expanded program, he had doubts that a more extensive civil defense plan would “really do the job.” Marcus Raskin, an aide at the NSC, reinforced Kennedy’s skepticism. Raskin expressed “great fears for this civil defense program,” which he did not think would “decrease the probabilities of war” and might even increase them. Moreover, any proposal seemed likely to intensify an unresolvable argument over whether blast or fallout shelters would save more lives.
But shelter advocates gave Kennedy two reasons for going ahead. Publicizing a shelter program “would show the world that the U.S . . . is really prepared to suffer the consequences” of a war and “would thus strengthen our negotiating position” and allied confidence in America’s willingness to protect them against Soviet aggression. Second, an expanded civil defense program would put additional strains on the Soviet economy by forcing them to spend more on nuclear arms—in retrospect, an amazing, even nutty, prescription for protecting Americans from a potential nuclear attack.
There was more. Kennedy described the program as an insurance policy, “which we could never forgive ourselves for forgoing in the event of catastrophe.” The slightest possibility that millions of lives could be saved was enough to convince any president that he needed to make it part of the country’s national defense. Criticism from New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, a likely Republican opponent in 1964, of the administration’s “complacency” on the issue was not lost on Kennedy. Indeed, Rockefeller’s political challenge was more important than any real hope that the so-called shelters could save millions of Americans from an initial nuclear blast or the subsequent radiation fallout.
Kennedy’s other major initiative in his speech was a declaration of intent to land a man on the moon and return him to earth before the end of the decade. Such a mission, he believed, would be of compelling value in the contest with the Soviets for international prestige, as well as a way to convince allies and neutral Third World nations of American superiority. Because he saw such a commitment as certain to divert resources from other essential needs for years to come, he believed Americans would be reluctant to embrace the idea. Indeed, Sorensen noted that the only time Kennedy ever departed extensively from a prepared text in speaking to Congress was in emphasizing the pointlessness of going ahead with a manned moon landing unless the country was willing to make the necessary sacrifices. “There is no sense in agreeing or desiring that the United States take an affirmative position in outer space, unless we are prepared to do the work and bear the burdens,” he said. And, as he anticipated, Kennedy faced substantial opposition—both among the general public and within the government. A panel of scientists Eisenhower had asked to evaluate a moon flight had believed it worth doing, but Eisenhower saw a manned moon landing as a “stunt” and said privately that he “couldn’t care less whether a man ever reached the moon.” Kennedy’s science advisers conceded that successful space probes could advance America’s international prestige, but they doubted that the U.S. could beat the Russians to the moon and warned that such a project could be prohibitively expensive. David Bell, Kennedy’s budget director, wondered whether the benefits of manned space flights would exceed the costs and said that the administration could find better and cheaper means of raising America’s international standing. A majority of Americans agreed: 58 percent of the public thought it a poor idea to spend an estimated $40 billion—roughly $225 per person—on something the Soviets might beat them at.
But Kennedy refused to accept what he saw as a timid approach to space exploration. Acknowledging in his speech that the Soviets had a lead on the United States and that no one could guarantee “that we shall one day be first,” he did “guarantee that any failure to make this effort will make us last.” Psychologically, the challenge of putting a man on the moon and beating the Russians in the effort to do it resonated with Kennedy’s affinity for heroic causes and the whole spirit of the New Frontier. For Kennedy, it was “clearly one of the great human adventures of modern history.” As he said in a later speech, “But why, some say, the moon? . . . And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, thirty-five years ago, fly the Atlantic? . . . We choose to go to the moon in this decade, and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.”
Other considerations were at work in shaping Kennedy’s decision. He shared with James Webb, the head of NASA, and Johnson, the chairman of Kennedy’s National Space Council, the conviction that a manned mission would yield technological, economic, and political advantages. The thirty to forty billion dollars the government seemed likely to spend on the project promised to advance America’s ability to predict the weather and achieve high-speed electronic communications with satellites. Space spending would also provide jobs, and the political gains in the South and West, where NASA would primarily spend its funds, were not lost on savvy politicians like Kennedy and Johnson.
More important to Kennedy, however, than any tangible benefit was the potential boost to America’s world image. In April, after Soviet cosmonaut Yury Gagarin had orbited the earth and the Bay of Pigs had humiliated the administration, Kennedy had asked Johnson to make “an overall survey of where we stand in space. Do we have a chance of beating the Soviets by putting a laboratory in space, or by a trip around the moon, or by a rocket to land on the moon, or by a rocket to go to the moon and back with a man? Is there any other space program that promises dramatic results in which we could win?” Johnson had confirmed Kennedy’s supposition that a strong effort was needed at once to catch and surpass the Soviets if the United States wanted to win “control over . . . men’s minds through space accomplishments.” Landing a man on the moon would have “great propaganda value. The real ‘competition’ in outer space,” Johnson had added, was between the communist and U.S. social systems. Control of outer space would “determine which system of society and government [would] dominate the future. . . . In the eyes of the world, first in space means first, period; second in space is second in everything.” When people complained about the costs of the moon mission, Johnson replied, “Now, would you rather have us be a second-rate nation or should we spend a little money?” The president obviously agreed.
Kennedy’s concern about the impact of space travel on the country’s morale and its hold on world opinion registered clearly before NASA’s first manned mission. Prior to Commander Alan Shepard’s brief but successful space flight on May 5, Kennedy talked to Rusk and Webb about the risks of television coverage. The president “is afraid of the reaction of the public in case there is a mishap in the firing,” Evelyn Lincoln noted in her diary on May 1. Webb told Kennedy that “he had tried to keep the press away from this and likewise the TV but they had been given the go sign long before he took over. In fact, the previous administration had sold rights to Life magazine on reports of this launching.” Kennedy, Lincoln added, had tried unsuccessfully to reach the network executive in charge of the TV coverage “to play down the publicity and this
By contrast with civil defense, which in time proved to be a wasteful, foolish idea, a manned moon mission amounted to a highly constructive program with benefits much beyond the boost to America’s international prestige. When the Shepard mission was a success, the television and magazine coverage was greatly appreciated by the administration, which realized that similar reporting could galvanize public support for the moon program.
In June, as Johnson rode in a car with the president, FCC director Newton Minow, and Shepard to a National Convention of Broadcasters, Kennedy poked the vice president and said, “You know, Lyndon, nobody knows that the Vice President is the Chairman of the Space Council. But if that flight had been a flop, I guarantee you that everybody would have known that you were the Chairman.” Everyone laughed except Johnson, who looked glum and angry, especially after Minow chimed in, “Mr. President, if the flight would have been a flop, the Vice President would have been the next astronaut.”
KENNEDY’S MAY 25 ADDRESS was also a forum for justifying a trip to Europe to meet with de Gaulle in Paris and Khrushchev in Vienna. He described discussions with de Gaulle as “permitting the kind of close and ranging consultation that will strengthen both our countries.” Left unsaid were differences with the French that—like those with Canada—seemed harmful to U.S. national security. Kennedy hinted at the problems, saying in his May 25 speech, “Such serious conversations do not require a pale unanimity—they are rather the instruments of trust and understanding over a long road.”