An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 by Robert Dallek
Kennedy received justifiable plaudits for resolving the crisis. Yet he had no illusion that his response was the principal reason for success. Rather, America’s local military superiority, Moscow’s limited national security stake in keeping missiles in Cuba, and the Soviets’ difficulty justifying to world opinion a possible nuclear conflict over Cuba were of greater importance in persuading Khrushchev to back down. Still, Kennedy’s resistance to pressure from military chiefs for air attacks and an invasion, and his understanding that patient diplomacy and measured pressure could persuade the Soviets to remove the missiles were essential contributions to the peaceful outcome of the crisis.
Of course, Kennedy’s problem with Cuba was not strictly of his making, but partly the consequence of an “unimaginative and sterile” policy in 1959-1960. “Probably no United States policy could have prevented Castro’s movement into the Soviet orbit,” Schlesinger wrote Kennedy in November 1962, but “a more imaginative U.S. policy could have made it much harder for Castro to join the Soviet bloc.” Indeed, a greater measure of sympathy for a government striving to right the many wrongs visited on Cuba by a U.S.-backed Batista regime was a regrettable Eisenhower omission. And indeed, some historians believe that Kennedy’s role in provoking the confrontation makes him less than heroic in resolving it. As Barton J. Bernstein has said, “a different president than Kennedy might well have chosen not to launch the Bay of Pigs venture, not to pursue clandestine activities against Cuba and Castro, not to build up the American nuclear arsenal well beyond the size of the Soviets’, and not to place the Jupiters in Turkey.” Bernstein believes that these actions, but especially plotting against Castro and indications of a possible invasion, provoked Khrushchev into his Cuban missile adventure.
Bernstein’s argument has merit. Without Kennedy’s Cuban provocations, Khrushchev would have been hard-pressed to justify placing missiles on the island. The administration’s anti-Castro actions gave Moscow an inviting opportunity to use Cuba to reduce America’s nuclear advantage over the USSR and/or force a favorable resolution of the Berlin problem. Yet, as Ernest May and Philip Zelikow have pointed out, Khrushchev probably acted “more from instinct than from calculation. Whether Berlin or the strategic balance or concern about Cuba was uppermost in his mind at the time he ordered the missiles sent to Cuba, he himself could probably not have said.” Khrushchev, in the view of two close aides, was a “reckless” gambler or “hothead,” who made a big bet in hopes of getting a huge payoff. Having stumbled badly in advancing his country’s economic well-being and believing that Kennedy would wilt in a confrontation rather than go to war, Khrushchev sent the missiles to Cuba hoping to win a big foreign policy victory that could secure his political fortunes. He was wrong, and the consequences of his error were nearly fatal. But his ultimate good sense joined with Kennedy’s wise judgment to avert a disaster that the president believed would have been described as the “final human failure.”
Forty years after the crisis, historians almost uniformly agree that this was the most dangerous moment in the forty-five-year Cold War. Moreover, despite his part in provoking the crisis, they generally have high praise for Kennedy’s performance. His restraint in resisting a military solution that would almost certainly have triggered a nuclear exchange makes him a model of wise statesmanship in a dire situation. One need only compare his performance with that of Europe’s heads of government before World War I—a disaster that cost millions of lives and wasted unprecedented sums of wealth—to understand how important effective leadership can be in times of international strife. October 1962 was not only Kennedy’s finest hour in the White House; it was also an imperishable example of how one man prevented a catastrophe that may yet afflict the world.
CHAPTER 17
New Departures: Domestic Affairs
The winds of change appear to be blowing more strongly than ever, in the world of communism as well as our own. For 175 years we have sailed with those winds at our back. . . . Today we still welcome those winds of change—and we have every reason to believe that our tide is running strong.
— John F. Kennedy, State of the Union Message, January 14, 1963
KENNEDY’S HIGHEST PRIORITIES during the missile crisis had been to rid Cuba of Soviet missiles without a nuclear war and to ensure against a future confrontation by convincing Khrushchev that there could be no payoff from attempted nuclear blackmail. At the same time, however, he was mindful of the political consequences to his administration. With midterm congressional elections only a week away when Khrushchev pledged to remove the missiles, Kennedy appreciated that a failure to deal effectively with the crisis would have been a terrible blow to the future of his presidency.
Kennedy’s successful diplomacy gave the Democrats an advantage in the November elections that he was happy to exploit. The White House welcomed descriptions by Acheson, Bundy, Harriman, Norman Cousins of The Saturday Review, and General Norstad of a president who had been “extraordinarily skillful,” “firm,” ”reasonable,” and “calm.” It also took satisfaction from Newsweek’s assertion that Kennedy “had given Americans a sense of deep confidence in their President and the team he had working with him.”
The public had only a limited understanding of how resolute Kennedy had been. Health problems continued to dog him during the crisis. He took his usual doses of antispasmodics to control his colitis; antibiotics for a flareup of his urinary tract problem and a bout of sinusitis; and increased amounts of hydrocortisone and testosterone as well as salt tablets to control his Addison’s disease and increase his energy. Judging from the tape recordings of conversations made during the crisis, the medications were no impediment to long days and lucid thought; to the contrary, Kennedy would have been significantly less effective without them and might not even have been able to function. But the medicines were only one element in helping him focus on the crisis; his strength of will was indispensable. With so much at stake in the Soviet-American confrontation, he was not about to let personal pain or physical problems deter him from the most important business of his presidency. He undoubtedly had his own experience in mind when he wrote in an article on physical fitness for Look magazine in 1963, “Whether it is the astronaut exploring the boundaries of space, or the overworked civil servant laboring into the night to keep a Government program going, the effectiveness and creativity of the individual must rest, in large measure, on his physical fitness and vitality.”
This is not to suggest that Kennedy was superhuman or to exaggerate his invulnerability to physical and emotional ills. On November 2, he took 10 additional milligrams of hydrocortisone and 10 grains of salt to boost him before giving a brief report to the American people on the dismantling of the Soviet missile bases in Cuba. In December, Jackie asked the president’s gastroenterologist, Dr. Russell Boles, to eliminate antihistamines for food allergies. She described them as having a “depressing action” on the president and asked Boles to prescribe something that would ensure “mood elevation without irritation to the gastrointestinal tract.” Boles prescribed 1 milligram twice a day of Stelazine, an antipsychotic that was also used as an anti-anxiety medication. When Kennedy showed marked improvement in two days, they removed the Stelazine from his daily medications.
Kennedy burnished his image as the principal architect of Soviet defeat by allowing journalists to draw comparisons with Adlai Stevenson. In December, when Stewart Alsop and Charles Bartlett published a Saturday Evening Post article on the crisis, which Kennedy had seen in draft form, they contrasted Kennedy’s firmness with Stevenson’s soft approach; Stevenson wanted “a Munich,” they said. It is true that Stevenson exceeded Kennedy’s readiness to make concessions, including especially a willingness to close the U.S. military base at Guantanamo. But in fact he had been in sync with the president on avoiding an air strike or a premature invasion and was an early supporter of the quarantine idea. When the press interpreted the Alsop-Bartlett article as an indirect request from the president for Stevenson’s res
Kennedy understood that a strong showing in the November elections could make Congress more receptive to his major domestic proposals. Although his administration publicly made much of its legislative record, privately it was unhappy. The president had won between 81 and 85 percent of the roll call votes on domestic proposals in 1961 and 1962. And on roll calls involving foreign policy, he had received 96.5 percent backing. But his overall record was much less noteworthy. Many of the bills Congress passed were relatively minor reforms, like temporarily reducing duty exemptions on Americans returning from abroad, authorizing an additional assistant secretary of labor, extending the Sugar Act of 1948, or reorganizing the Federal Home Loan Bank Board. Most of his legislative requests—56 percent in 1962, to be exact—had never emerged from House and Senate committees, where conservative chairmen bottled them up.
Johnson and Hubert Humphrey were so concerned about Kennedy’s ineffective congressional leadership that in August 1962 they suggested ways to improve it. They wanted him to make his presence and influence more visible on the Hill. “[Both men] were talking quite honestly about the problem of getting effective results,” Bundy told the president. “I did not detect any personal soreness in either of them, and both spoke in the framework of great commitment to your program and to you.” So did Truman, who wrote Kennedy at the same time: “The President is just as great as the Congress—and really greater—when he exercises his Constitutional Prerogatives. You are going through the same situations and troubles that Franklin Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln and I had to meet. Don’t like to put myself in that high class—but I had a hell of a time. You meet ’em, cuss ’em & give ’em hell and you’ll win in 1964.”
Kennedy saw no point in risking prestige or expending political capital by openly campaigning for particular candidates. Instead, he worked behind the scenes to advance the political fortunes of vulnerable Democrats. Moreover, Kennedy took Lou Harris’s advice that his best means of influencing the electorate was to speak “over and over again” about the measures needed to get the country moving forward. Harris was convinced that the people were eager to be led and that once “aroused and mobilized, Congress, business, and all groups will respond as a man to the reverberating chorus.”
During the summer and fall, Kennedy crisscrossed the country in support of a Democratic Congress. He said that the nation’s well-being—its future prosperity and social advance—depended on electing more House and Senate Democrats who would vote for his programs. Since 1938, the Congress had been more or less deadlocked in its consideration of new progressive measures. He described himself as fighting the same battles Wilson, FDR, and Truman had faced “to provide progress for our people.” “I believe we should have the opportunity and not have the kind of balance in the Congress which will mean two . . . more years of inertia and inaction. That’s why this is an important election. Five, ten seats one way or the other can vitally affect the balance of power in the Congress and vitally affect our future. . . . So this is not an off-year, it is an important year.” Kennedy catalogued his legislative victories and defeats, pointing out, “We have won fights by 3 or 4 votes in the House of Representatives, and we have lost fights by 3 or 4 votes.” Ignoring the opposition to his proposals of conservative southern Democrats, he blamed Republicans for his problems: 75 percent of them had voted against his higher education bill; 84 percent of Republican senators had opposed extended unemployment benefits; 81 percent and 95 percent of House Republicans had voted against his area redevelopment and public housing bills, respectively; and 80 percent of House Republicans had resisted increasing the minimum wage to $1.25. “On a bill to provide medical care for our older citizens . . . seven-eighths of the Republican Members of the Senate voted ‘no,’ just as their fathers before them had voted 90 percent against the social security [bill] in the 1930’s.” As he came closer to the election, Kennedy acknowledged that conservative Democrats were also a problem. If liberal Democrats failed to vote, he told an audience in Pittsburgh on October 12, every proposal that we bring before the Eighty-eighth Congress in January 1963, “will be in the control of a dominant Republican-Conservative Democratic coalition that will defeat progress on every single one of these measures.”
Despite not risking his presidential standing by investing excessively in any single congressional race, Kennedy’s general endorsement of Democrats sympathetic to his legislative agenda tested his personal influence. He approached the campaign confident that his presidential performance had given him a stronger hold on the electorate than he had had in 1960. He understood that, whatever the appeal of his message, the public liked him. His good looks, intelligence, wit, and charm, which were so regularly and exuberantly on display at press conferences, now drew large audiences to hear him on the campaign trail. Some inside the administration could see Kennedy’s obvious imperfections—the insatiable sexual appetite contradicting the picture of the ideal family man married to a perfect wife; the manipulation of image to hide missteps; the fierce competitiveness to win, which made him and Bobby all too willing to exploit friends; and the private physical suffering, which occasionally made him glum and cranky. Yet no one could doubt that Kennedy’s two years in the White House had created an imperishable view of him as a significant American president worthy of the office.
Still, the reality was that Kennedy had no real hope of breaking the congressional deadlock. Though preelection polls showed 56 percent of voters favoring Democrats over Republicans, a significant part of this support was for southern members of the party, who were unsympathetic to progressive measures. So, despite a satisfying gain of four Democratic seats in the Senate and the loss of only four seats in the House, which made this, except for FDR’s, the best midterm showing for any incumbent president in the twentieth century, Kennedy acknowledged that “we’ll probably be in a position somewhat comparable to what we were in for the last two years.” If they could maintain the unity of congressional Democrats and win some support from moderate Republicans, he foresaw legislative gains. But he believed it more likely that they would struggle, as they had during his first two years, with narrow margins of victory and defeat. He was gratified that brother Ted had won his Senate race in Massachusetts, which he had helped, or at least hoped would help, by appointing Cleveland mayor Anthony Celebrezze as HEW secretary, a choice that appealed to Italian American voters in Massachusetts. But beyond Ted’s victory, Kennedy saw little to cheer about.
There was other bad news. Despite a 12-point jump in his approval rating to 74 percent and what was being hailed as “your excellent showing in congressional races and your net pick-up in the Senate,” urban areas in “pivotal industrial states” had, according to Lou Harris, shown some “big Democratic slippage over 1960” among Catholic and Jewish voters. To some extent, Kennedy’s abnormally high Catholic vote in 1960 made a decline among this bloc predictable. More troubling was the fact that Irish Catholics were becoming more conservative, or Republican, in their voting, while Polish and Italian Catholics, unhappy with recent Democratic failures to provide greater economic benefits, were simply voting in smaller numbers for the party. Moreover, Kennedy’s perceived sympathy for disadvantaged blacks, who were in growing competition with big-city ethnics for jobs and housing, antagonized blue-collar Catholics. In reaction to civil rights pressures, the traditional Democratic South was becoming
DESPITE THE TRENDS, and possibly because of them, Kennedy could not ignore black claims on equal treatment under the law; African American voters remained the Democratic party’s most reliable supporters. For both political and moral reasons, then, on November 20, Kennedy finally announced his decision to sign an Executive Order integrating federally supported public housing.
While he waited for any backlash that might accompany his signing of the Executive Order, Kennedy worried about increasing negative revelations about his personal life and how they might jeopardize his presidency. He remained confident that the mainstream press would not publicize his womanizing. But when rumors of a Marilyn Monroe-JFK affair began appearing in gossip columns, Kennedy made a concerted effort to squelch them. He asked former journalist and inspector general of the Peace Corps William Haddad to “see the editors. Tell them you are speaking for me and that it’s just not true,” Kennedy said. Haddad later told Richard Reeves, “He lied to me. He used my credibility with people I knew.” Haddad obviously came to believe the many stories circulated about JFK and Marilyn. Almost as much ink has been spilled over their alleged relationship and one between Bobby and Marilyn as over the Cuban missile crisis. Peter Lawford, the actor and Kennedy brother-in-law, dismissed these speculations as “garbage.” But numerous phone calls listed in White House logs from Monroe to Kennedy suggest something more than a casual acquaintance. Whatever the truth, Kennedy obviously understood that no good could come to his presidency from gossip about an affair with someone as famously promiscuous and troubled as Monroe.