An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (49 page)

“Foreign policy for the first time in many years will be the great issue, as Mr. Nixon has so often told us,” Kennedy wrote former secretary of state Dean Acheson, and despite Nixon’s credentials as an anticommunist, Kennedy believed that his own travels, writings, public addresses, and service on the Foreign Relations Committee made him more than a match for the vice president. Kennedy’s 1958
Foreign Affairs
article, “A Democrat Looks at Foreign Policy,” and a 225-page book published in 1960,
The Strategy of Peace,
a compilation of his recent speeches on international affairs and national security, were meant to show that he had prepared himself to manage the great overseas challenges certain to confront the next president.

In July 1960, Gallup reported that “the overwhelming majority of those interviewed regard relations with Russia and the rest of the world as being the primary problem facing the nation today.” Fidel Castro’s pro-Soviet regime in Cuba, coupled with Khrushchev’s warnings that Moscow was grinding out missiles like sausages and that communism would bury capitalism, stirred fears of attack against which the United States had no apparent defense. When people in cities around the world were asked if U.S. prestige had increased or decreased in the last year, 45 percent said it had decreased and only 22 percent believed it had increased.

Kennedy saw clear political advantages in emphasizing international dangers to the United States. In August 1958, he had given his notable Senate speech on the missile gap. Warning that America was about to lose its advantage over the Soviet Union in nuclear weapons, he quoted air force general James Gavin, who saw “our own offensive and defensive Missile capabilities” lagging “so far behind those of the Soviets as to place us in a position of great peril.” Kennedy asserted that the Soviet combination of intercontinental and intermediate-range missiles, “history’s largest fleet of submarines,” and long-range supersonic jet bombers might give them the ability to “destroy 85 percent of our industry, 43 of our 50 largest cities, and most of the Nation’s population.” He added, “We tailored our strategy and military requirements to fit our budget”—instead of the other way around. Over the next two years, Kennedy repeatedly came back to this problem in his public pronouncements, so much so that in September 1960, John Kenneth Galbraith complained to Lou Harris, “J.F.K. has made the point that he isn’t soft. Henceforth he can only frighten.”

In August 1960, when the public gave higher marks to the Republicans than the Democrats as the party best able to manage world peace, Kennedy intensified his efforts to publicize the Eisenhower-Nixon shortcomings on defense. But his focus on relative U.S. military weakness was not strictly motivated by politics. He had genuine concerns that America was facing a crisis that demanded new thinking and initiatives. In this, he was following the lead of many defense experts who warned that the United States was falling behind the Soviets. In addition to Gavin, H. Rowan Gaither Jr., of the Ford Foundation, who had chaired a committee studying national security in the atomic age, concluded that “our active defenses are not adequate” and our passive or civilian defenses “insignificant.” “Gaither practically predicted the end of Western civilization,” one historian said. Gaither also described the Soviets as having a more expansive economy than the United States, as spending more on defense, and as out-building the U.S. in nuclear weapons, ICBMs, IRBMs, submarines, and air defenses, not to mention space technology.

Whether the gap existed was, even at the time, debatable. Eisenhower had solid evidence from U-2 spy planes that there was no missile gap, and he instructed his military chiefs to persuade Kennedy of this, but Eisenhower’s fear of leaks and his conviction that Kennedy would lose made him reluctant to share his sources. He also believed that authoritative denials of a gap would agitate the Soviets into a buildup; as long as the public record suggested that Moscow was getting ahead of the United States, Ike assumed that Khrushchev would hold back from investing in a large, costly expansion of ICBMs. But the administration’s reluctance to give Kennedy fuller information persuaded Jack that Eisenhower did not want to acknowledge a failing that could cost Nixon the election. Kennedy was in possession of numbers showing frightening and growing gaps between Soviet and American military strength. When he asked CIA director Allen Dulles about the missile gap, Dulles replied that only the Pentagon could properly answer the question. It was a signal to Kennedy that Dulles did not have enough information to rule out the possibility of a significant Soviet advantage.

Other Democrats warned Kennedy that Nixon would not only deny the reality of our defense problem but, if this did not work, would then try to blame the country’s vulnerability on the Democrats. Indeed, Nixon hoped to scare voters into thinking that Kennedy would either risk war with an unnecessary buildup or continue his party’s alleged policies of failing to invest enough in defense. Kennedy may have known about a Nixon memo to Attorney General William Rogers asking him to supply information for speeches showing that JFK “would be a very dangerous President, dangerous to the cause of peace and dangerous from the standpoint of surrender.” But it was a tactical blunder: The missile gap was an easy issue to explain to voters, and it was hard for Nixon to escape the box Eisenhower and Kennedy had put him in.

While Kennedy truly cared about the possibility of a missile gap, political opportunism was more at work in his response to Castro’s Cuba. Frustration at the rise of a communist regime “ninety miles from America’s shore” was an irresistible campaign issue, especially in Florida, an electoral battleground. To be sure, Kennedy was sincerely concerned about the potential dangers to the United States from a communist regime in Latin America. “What are the Soviets’ eventual intentions?” a prescient staff memo written early in the campaign asked. “Do they intend to use Cuba as a center for Communist expansion in Latin America, or as a missile base to offset ours in other countries?” Dean Acheson counseled Kennedy to “stop talking about Cuba—I didn’t think this was getting anywhere. . . . He was likely to get himself hooked into positions which would be difficult afterwards,” Acheson remembered later. He urged Kennedy to focus instead on broad foreign policy questions. But the political advantage in emphasizing that Castro’s ascent had come on the Eisenhower-Nixon watch was too inviting to ignore. The potency of the issue led to overreach: In October the campaign issued a statement that suggested Kennedy favored unilateral intervention in Cuba. The outcry from liberals, who warned against ignoring Latin American sensibilities, and from Nixon, who favored intervention but cynically condemned Kennedy’s statement as a dangerous challenge to Moscow, forced Jack to amend the statement and take Acheson’s advice about dropping Cuba as a fit topic of discussion.

Civil rights was an even more difficult issue to manage in the campaign. The conflict between pressures for economic, political, and social justice for black Americans and southern determination to maintain the system of de jure and de facto segregation presented Kennedy with no good political options. He was mindful of the political advantages to himself from a large black turnout, and of the transparent moral claims to equal treatment under the law for an abused and disadvantaged minority. But he was also greatly concerned with the counterpressure from white southerners who were antagonistic to the Democratic party’s advanced position on civil rights. Virginia senator A. Willis Robertson reflected the division in the party in a letter to Kennedy saying he would support the entire party ticket in November but refused to “endorse and support the civil rights plank that was written into our Party platform over the protests of the delegates from Virginia and other Southern States.” LBJ’s vice presidential nomination had been, as intended, some solace to southerners, but not enough to counter Kennedy’s aggressive commitment to civil rights.

Once again, political imperatives determined Kennedy’s course of action. Liberals were already angry at Johnson’s selection, and if Kennedy gave in to southern pressure on civil rights, it would mean losing their support (not to mention black votes). Kennedy signaled his intentions by writing Robertson, “I understand the problem the platform presents to you,” but he offered nothing more than the “hope [that] it will be possible for us to work together in the fall.”

Kennedy was not happy about having to choose between the party’s competing factions, but once he chose, he moved forward. When he saw civil rights advocate Harris Wofford in August, he said, “Now in five minutes, tick off the ten things a President ought to do to clean up this goddamn civil rights mess.” Although he was uncomfortable adopting an aggressive civil rights agenda, he nevertheless followed all of Wofford’s suggestions: They set up a civil rights section in the campaign and appointed Marjorie Lawson, a black woman, and William Dawson of Chicago, the senior black congressman, to head the division; chose Frank Reeves, who had NAACP contacts all over the country, to travel with Kennedy; enlisted the help of Louis Martin, a black publisher, to handle a variety of media assignments; paid $50,000 to New York congressman Adam Clayton Powell, who enjoyed “wide popular appeal among blacks,” to give ten speeches; and encouraged the Reverend Joseph Jackson of Chicago to organize a National Fellowship of Ministers and Laymen to lead a nationwide voter registration drive among blacks. By the end of a special congressional session in August, it had become clear to Senator Richard Russell of Georgia that “Kennedy will implement the Democratic platform and advocate civil rights legislation beyond what is contained in the platform.”

Kennedy agreed to speak before several black conventions, praised peaceful sit-ins at segregated public facilities across the South, criticized Eisenhower for failing to integrate public housing “with one stroke of the pen,” and sponsored a national advisory conference on civil rights. In a speech, he described civil rights as a “moral question” and promised not only to support legislation but also to take executive action “on a bold and large scale.” And the more he said, the more he felt. By the close of the campaign, he had warmed to the issue and spoke with indignation about American racism. After Henry Cabot Lodge announced that Nixon would appoint a black to his cabinet—which angered Nixon—Kennedy declared on
Meet the Press
that jobs in government should go to the best-qualified people, regardless of race or ethnicity. But he emphasized the need to bring blacks into the higher reaches of government. “There are no Federal District Judges—there are 200-odd of them; not a one is a Negro,” he said. “We have about 26 Negroes in the entire Foreign Service of 6,000, so that particularly now with the importance of Africa, Asia and all the rest, I do believe we should make a greater effort to encourage fuller participation on all levels, of all the talent we can get—Negro, white, of any race.”

Nothing tested Kennedy’s support of black rights during the campaign more than the jailing of Martin Luther King. Arrested for trying to integrate a restaurant in an Atlanta department store and then sentenced to a four-month prison term at hard labor for violating his probation on a minor, trumped-up traffic violation, King was sent to a rural Georgia prison. His wife, who was five months pregnant, feared for his life. In October, two weeks before the election, she called Wofford to ask his help in arranging King’s release. The desperation in her voice moved Wofford to call Sargent Shriver and ask for Kennedy’s moral support. After O’Donnell, Salinger, and Sorensen—who, fearful of losing southern votes, seemed certain to object—had left the room, Shriver urged Jack to call Mrs. King. Kennedy, partly out of political calculation and partly from sympathy for the Kings, made the call at once. Jack expressed concern for King’s well-being and offered to help in any way he could.

When Bobby Kennedy learned of the call, he upbraided the instigators for risking Jack’s defeat in three southern states that might decide the election. Still, Bobby was personally outraged at the injustice of the sentence and the embarrassment to the country from the actions of a judge he privately called a “bastard” and “a son of a bitch.” With the story in the news, he decided to phone the judge, who had promised Georgia’s governor, Ernest Vandiver, that he would release King if he got political cover for himself—namely a phone call from Jack or Bobby. Bobby’s call freed King. The Kennedy phone calls and Nixon’s failure to do anything gave Jack a big advantage among blacks and may have helped swing five states—Delaware, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, and South Carolina—to his side.

And as election day results showed, every vote and every state mattered. By the middle of October, Kennedy had surged to a 51 to 45 percent lead. On October 20, veteran Democrat Jim Farley believed that “the situation looks marvelous” and predicted that Kennedy would not lose many states. But with Eisenhower agreeing to put aside health concerns and campaign in late October, and with the public possibly having second thoughts about giving the White House to so untested a young man, whose religion also continued to leave doubts, Nixon closed the gap. The final Gallup poll, three days before the election, showed a dead heat: Kennedy-Johnson, 50.5 percent, to Nixon-Lodge, 49.5 percent.

But Kennedy held an edge in a different way. At the start of the campaign, newspaper columnist Eric Sevareid had complained that Kennedy and Nixon were the same: tidy, buttoned-down junior executives on the make. He saw no political passion in either man; they were both part of the Fraternity Row crowd, “wearing the proper clothes, thinking the proper thoughts, cultivating the proper people.” It seemed to some that the choice was between “the lesser of two evils.” By November, however, observers saw a striking change in the two men. Nixon, who had started out projecting “an image of calm, of maturity, the dignity of the experienced statesman,” had become angry and grim. A posture of indignation had replaced the earlier “quiet, chatty manner.” Harrison Salisbury of the
New York Times
said, “The crowds tensed him up. I watched him ball his fists, set his jaw, hurl himself stiff-legged to the barriers at the airports and begin shaking hands. He was wound up like a watch spring. . . . No ease.”