An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 by Robert Dallek
Kennedy’s worries about his public image extended to medical matters. Because he believed that revelations about his health problems were more likely (and more likely to be damaging) than about his sexual escapades, he became more cautious about publicizing his interactions with his many physicians. According to George Burkley, Kennedy was so concerned about not giving the impression that he was “physically impaired . . . and required the constant supervision of a physician” that he shunned having “a medical man in near proximity to him at all times.”
Kennedy especially felt compelled to quell private concerns about the injections Travell and Jacobson were giving him. Hans Kraus told him in December 1962 “that if I ever heard he took another shot, I’d make sure it was known. No President with his finger on the red button has any business taking stuff like that.” In addition, Kraus told Evelyn Lincoln “that if Dr. Travell was going to continue making suggestions and innuendos concerning the President’s health he was going to get out of the picture. He said it had to be ‘Yes’ or ‘No’—that he was not interested in half way tactics.” Eugene Cohen also warned Kennedy that Travell was a “potential threat to your well-being.” Kennedy agreed to take control of his back treatments away from Travell and turn it entirely over to Burkley and Kraus. To ensure against alienating Travell, however, and risking leaks from her to the press about his condition, Kennedy kept her on as White House physician and continued to identify her as the principal doctor in charge of his health care. In fact, however, beginning in June 1963, she could not order medical services at Walter Reed Army Medical Center for anyone at the White House without Burkley’s approval.
Nevertheless, though Jacobson and Travell played diminished roles in Kennedy’s treatment, neither of them was without some continuing part in his care. Through much of 1962, Jacobson made occasional professional visits to the White House. It is well known that in June Bobby instructed an FBI laboratory to analyze the substance Jacobson was injecting into his brother’s back. Bobby was concerned that the president might become addicted to the amphetamines Jacobson was using. Inconclusive lab tests, however, allowed Jacobson to continue treating Kennedy through at least the fall of 1962.
Similarly, for all the limitations Burkley, Cohen, and Kraus imposed on Travell, she remained more than a presence at the White House, though in a diminished capacity, something she complained about to Jackie. Her records indicate that she kept close track of the president’s condition and use of medicines and may have had an ongoing part in medicating him. But according to Dr. James M. Young, a thirty-three-year-old marine captain who became Burkley’s principal assistant in June 1963, Travell was without a say in managing Kennedy’s health care during the five months after he came to the White House; she was never at twice-a-month medical evaluation meetings Young attended with Kennedy. But Young acknowledged that her records suggest that she may have had a behind-the-scenes role.
Young’s meetings with Kennedy convinced him that the president was in “robust health having no difficulty with his chronic back problems. He was well-controlled on his other medications—even so much as to say finitely controlled,” Young remembered. This is difficult to square with Travell’s records, which describe substantial ongoing problems. Was Kennedy setting Young up for a part in the 1964 campaign, when he might want a medical authority to testify to his physical capacity to remain as president? Kennedy’s attentiveness to managing his image as someone in excellent health makes such a manipulation plausible.
KENNEDY KNEW that shielding himself from bad publicity to maintain his personal public standing would not give his administration the sort of momentum he hoped to bring to a reelection campaign. The perception of a vigorous president was important, but it was no substitute for a healthy economy and a record of social advancements.
“The Congress looks more powerful sitting here than it did when I was there in the Congress,” Kennedy told some journalists in December 1962. If a president puts forward a significant program, he told them, it will affect powerful interests and produce a fight in which “the President is never wholly successful.” With this understanding, he had to decide whether to focus exclusively on the tax cut or to supplement it with renewed requests for education and health insurance reforms and an Urban Affairs Department. Walter Heller also asked him to consider proposing new laws affecting farm programs, immigration, presidential campaign finance, the Taft-Hartley Labor Act, and consumer protections.
Economic advance had to come first. As Phil Graham told him, “The economic conditions of the Western World are not good. And a sudden shock could lead to a very serious panic. . . . The greatest force the Communists ever had working for them—greater even than the Red Army—was the terrible depression of the 1930’s. The military power of Communism is blocked today. We must not allow them to advance by reason of the chaos and despair of a major depression.”
Whether Graham, who would take his life in the coming year, accurately reflected the state of western economies or his own despair, Kennedy felt he could not ignore the warning. Any sign of a recession or economic slowdown evoked memories for millions of Americans of 1930s breadlines. In the closing weeks of 1962, Kennedy made boosting the economy his highest priority. More than ever, he believed that long-term growth required a tax cut and tax reforms. In December 1962, Kennedy took up the cause of tax reform in another public address, which he compared with his appearance before the Houston Protestant ministers’ conference during the presidential campaign: He saw a national commitment to a tax cut that increased federal deficits as comparable to convincing voters that a Catholic could be a good president.
In an attempt to exploit Cold War fears, Kennedy described the country’s national security as directly bound up with its economic performance. Addressing familiar concerns that tax cuts would lead to larger deficits and runaway inflation, Kennedy said, “The lesson of the last decade is that budget deficits are not caused by wild-eyed spenders but by slow economic growth and periodic recessions. . . . In short, it is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut rates now.” He said that “the hope of all free nations” was riding on the tax cut; America’s safety and that of the free world depended on the United States’ continuing capacity to outproduce the Soviet Union.
Nevertheless, a request to Congress for these measures in January 1963 seemed certain to arouse renewed skepticism and opposition. Wilbur Mills in the House and Albert Gore in the Senate, key Democratic figures in the looming battle over the tax legislation, remained unsympathetic to prompt action. Mills saw no need for a tax bill as long as the economy was not in a recession or slowing down and substantial federal budget deficits continued to threaten confidence in the “fiscal responsibility of the government.” He was willing to support changes in individual and corporate tax rates as a way to promote long-term economic expansion but not before January 1964 and not unless reductions in nondefense spending matched tax cuts. Gore warned the president that “a reduction in revenue will set off a howling campaign for reduction in expenditures and your administration will be put in an economic straight jacket. The ax would most likely fall heaviest on foreign aid and on programs that may be needed to stimulate the economy, such as public works.” Gore also feared that tax reform would favor the rich and shortchange the poor. “People with large incomes would have their take-home pay (income after taxes) increased 50%, 100% and, in some instances even 200%, while the average tax payer would have an increase of less than 10%, most of them only 3% to 5%. This simply cannot be justified—socially, economically or politically. And I hold these sentiments passionately! This is something that no Republican administration has dared do; it is something you must not do.”
By late December, it was clear to Kennedy that a tax cut and a bold reform agenda would have little chance of enactment in 1963. Bobby Baker, the secretary to Senate majority leader Mike Mansfield, who kept close tabs
Nevertheless, Kennedy refused to give in to counsels of caution. A failure to present a bold domestic program would make him look timid and resigned to conservative influence. Besides, if Congress rejected his proposals, it would more clearly set him apart from conservative opponents in a 1964 campaign.
Kennedy also hoped that appeals to the national well-being might sway congressional majorities to support a tax cut and other reforms. In his January 1963 State of the Union Message, he announced a program of changes, which he described as essential to the nation’s future. Although the most recent recession was over, with a million more people working than two years before, this was no time to relax: “The mere absence of recession is not growth,” he said. To achieve greater expansion, “one step, above all, is essential—the enactment this year of a substantial reduction and revision in Federal income taxes. . . . It is increasingly clear . . . that our obsolete tax system exerts too heavy a drag on private purchasing power, profits and employment.” He proposed to lower tax liabilities by $13.5 billion, $11 billion on individuals and $2.5 billion on corporations. Individual tax rates were to drop from between 20 and 91 percent “to a more sensible range of 14 to 65 percent.” The corporate rate would drop 5 points from 52 to 47 percent. To combat the temporary deficits anticipated from the cuts, Kennedy proposed phasing them in over three years and holding expenditures, except for defense and space, below current levels.
IN OCTOBER 1962, when he prepared his 1963 budget, he privately acknowledged that education reforms, which would increase the annual deficit, were “not going to pass.” We should “just . . . start off with that realization,” he told budget director Dave Bell. No one could doubt his eagerness for federal support of elementary, secondary, and higher education. During 1963, he repeatedly quoted Jefferson: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, . . . it expects what never was and never will be.” In a seventy-five-hundred-word message to Congress, he described education as “the keystone in the arch of freedom and progress.” He believed that federal monies could improve the “quality of instruction” and reduce “alarming” dropout rates. Federal dollars were also needed to help colleges meet a 100 percent increase in enrollments by 1970, and secondary schools a 50 percent rise in students attending. “Soviet institutions of higher education are graduating 3 times as many engineers and 4 times as many physicians as the United States,” Kennedy said. “While trailing behind this country in aggregate annual numbers of higher education graduates, the Soviets are maintaining an annual flow of scientific and technical professional manpower more than twice as large as our own.” Yet for all his outspokenness on the importance of education, Kennedy made it a lower budget priority in 1963 than defense and space, and continuing political tensions over aid to parochial schools and racial integration discouraged the president from stronger support of congressional action.
Medicare presented similar dilemmas. Although he spoke out forcefully at the beginning of 1963 for health reform legislation and health insurance for seniors in particular, the familiar litany of national needs could not break resistance in the House and the Senate to initiating new and potentially costly welfare programs. Special messages to the Congress in February on improving the nation’s health and the needs of the nation’s senior citizens did no more than put Kennedy back on record as favoring help for America’s seventeen and a half million elderly. There was no shortage of talk and goodwill in Congress toward seniors, including thirty-six bills proposing ways to insure everyone over sixty-five. But a focus on Kennedy’s suggested tax cut and increased deficits pushed health proposals aside. The House Ways and Means Committee did not agree even to hold hearings on health insurance until November.
By the spring of 1963, Kennedy had accepted the political realities working against legislative health reforms. Between April and October, aside from brief remarks in the White House Rose Garden to the National Council of Senior Citizens urging a congressional vote on medical care for the aged under Social Security, he said nothing in public and put no pressure on Congress to act. In May, he told HEW secretary Anthony Celebrezze, “There seems to be some speculation that we have abandoned health insurance for this year. While it may be that events will not permit legislative action in 1963, I believe we should proceed on the assumption that we are attempting to secure it. The failure then will not be ours.” In November, when a reporter asked if he would press Mills to send Medicare to the House floor for a vote, Kennedy replied, “I think we are going to get that bill out of committee—not this year, but next year—and I think we will have a vote on it and I think it will pass.” Believing that congressmen and senators would court the elderly in 1964 by backing health reforms, Kennedy predicted that “this is going to be an 18-month delivery!”
By contrast with education and Medicare, which Kennedy believed would have improved chances of congressional action in the next year, he doubted that a tax cut would gain any legislative momentum in the coming months. There were, granted, some glimmers of hope. The president’s appearances in support of tax reform were paying dividends, Heller advised. He said he saw “a lot of willingness to help put the tax program through. . . . To mobilize this aid and convert it into votes in Congress should be a major part of our tax offensive.” He also reported that a survey of consumers showed 63 percent in favor of a tax cut. Dillon advised Kennedy that concerns about the cut disproportionately favoring the rich were unfounded. But throughout 1963, conventional thinking about the danger of increased deficits from a tax reduction sustained conservative opposition to Kennedy’s tax proposals. We “favor . . . a reduction in both individual and corporate tax rates,” Republican legislators declared. “However, we believe that a tax cut of more than $11 billion, with no hope of a balanced budget for the foreseeable future, is both morally and fiscally wrong.” The prospect of larger deficits so bothered Eisenhower that he joined the chorus of opposition. He declared a tax cut “highly desirable but only if the persistent and frightening increase in Federal expenditures is halted in its tracks.” Mills’s Ways and Means Committee would not budge on the tax bill unless the White House made clear how it intended to reduce federal spending over the next several years.
The strength of the economy in 1963 also worked against prompt action on Kennedy’s tax bill. Steady GNP expansion between 1961 and 1963 and stable unemployment at 5.7 percent had convinced congressional majorities that any additional economic stimulus was unnecessary. Kennedy himself acknowledged that over the last two years the GNP had expanded by 20 percent, industrial production was up 22 percent, and personal income had risen 15 percent. Nevertheless, he believed it shortsighted to assume that strong growth could be sustained without lower taxes. Business cycles in the past decade had produced three recessions, and he expected another downturn by the middle of 1964 unless Congress cut taxes.
In August, when Ways and Means finally voted out of committee a tax bill, Kennedy thanked it for a measure that would “provide much needed jobs for our economy, increase our rate of economic growth, promote balance in our international payments and benefit the individual and corporate tax payer.” The long-range result of their action would be “a balanced budget in a balanced full-employment economy. It is clear that this goal cannot be achieved w
Kennedy was no less emphatic in private, telling Congresswoman Martha W. Griffiths of Michigan, “We’ve got the best means of insuring that 1964 isn’t a recession year. That’s why I’m hanging on.” Despite the likelihood that some corporation presidents favored the tax cut in order “to use the money to try to [beat] us,” Kennedy did not “mind that,” he told Griffiths, because he believed the bill would be “a terrific asset to us [the Democrats].” He urged Heller to pressure labor economists to lobby Congress and “get us some votes for Christ sakes.” The oil and gas lobbyists, who were fighting a reduction in their industry’s depletion allowance, which would increase federal revenues and lower the deficit, particularly angered him. “Those robbing bastards,” he told Heller. “The day’s gonna come when we’re gonna have the Congress and the President financed by the government” rather than corporations like the oil companies, Kennedy told Mills. “And it’ll be the best thing that ever happened. God, you know those oil companies. . . . I don’t mind anybody getting away with some, but what they get away with.”