An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (84 page)

In June, after Ted won a majority of delegates at the state convention and Edward McCormack decided to contest his nomination in a September primary, a wave of criticism threatened to make Ted’s candidacy an issue in the fall elections. Did the president think Ted was up to the job? a reporter asked, and would his candidacy have some negative fallout in November? The voters of Massachusetts would decide the matter, Kennedy answered diplomatically, but he could not resist making the case for his brother. Ted had managed his successful reelection campaign in 1958 and managed the preconvention fight for western state delegates and then the presidential contest in the same states. “I have confidence in his ability,” Kennedy declared.

BECAUSE THE TRUMAN
and Eisenhower presidencies had suffered from embarrassing scandals that had undermined their credibility, Kennedy was determined to ensure against any wrongdoing that would weaken his ability to govern or lead. Thus, a scandal involving Billy Sol Estes, a Texas businessman, and the administration’s Agriculture Department was more worrisome to the president than his brother’s Senate campaign. When information emerged in March about Estes’s payoffs to four Agriculture Department officials to obtain grain and cotton storage contracts, the White House assigned seventy-five FBI agents to the case, and the Justice Department made certain that Agriculture secretary Orville Freeman and undersecretary Charles Murphy were untainted. Kennedy assured the press that his administration had given Justice and the IRS carte blanche to ferret out improper actions and that no guilty official would go unpunished.

Nevertheless, the political heat was intense. Eisenhower publicly suggested that because all the investigative agencies in the administration and the Congress were under Democratic control, some Republicans ought to be brought into the process. At the same time, the
New York Herald Tribune
began describing the case as another Teapot Dome and predicting that Secretary Freeman would have to resign. The
Tribune
also printed a picture of Kennedy’s Inaugural Address signed by him to Estes. Kennedy’s explanation that the DNC had distributed sixty thousand copies of the photo with machine-signed signatures without his knowledge of the recipients insulated him from charges of any direct involvement with Estes, but the death of Henry H. Marshall, an Agriculture Department official investigating the Estes case, raised additional questions. Although Marshall had bruises on his hands, arms, and face and had been shot five times with a bolt-action rifle that had to be pumped each time to eject a shell, a Texas grand jury ruled the death a suicide. Reports in the
Dallas Morning News
that the president had taken a personal interest in the Marshall case and that the attorney general had repeatedly called the judge presiding over the grand jury embarrassed the White House. A
Newsweek
report that Marshall’s death was the result of “an extra-curricular romance,” relieved Kennedy and Bobby, who told Ben Bradlee, “That explains it perfectly, and to think those bastards on the
Herald Tribune
must have known this and were still writing it as Billy Sol Estes.” The fact that the
Tribune
hadgiven less coverage to a comparable scandal involving George M. Humphrey, Eisenhower’s secretary of the treasury, particularly incensed the Kennedys, who attributed the paper’s emphasis to a Republican bias.

Throughout the uproar, the president and Bobby were less worried about their involvement than Johnson’s. His reputation as a fabulous wheeler-dealer who had won a Senate seat with tainted ballots in 1948 and had accumulated a $15-million fortune in radio, television, real estate, and bank holdings with influence peddling had made him an object of press speculation. Estes was, after all, his fellow Texan, and rumors abounded about joint business ventures, lobbying at agriculture in Estes’s behalf, gifts—including an airplane used to fly to the 414-acre Johnson ranch with a sixty-three-hundred-foot landing strip—and efforts to impede the FBI’s investigation. Kennedy and Bobby kept close tabs on these allegations, especially one, that a Republican congressman was preparing impeachment proceedings against the vice president. Although Johnson and his staff dismissed the charges as baseless, Bobby insisted on a thorough FBI investigation of the stories. It turned up nothing, and though some later historians of the FBI speculated that Hoover might have suppressed information tying Johnson to Estes’s crimes or that Johnson arranged to have incriminating files destroyed, a reading of FBI materials obtained through a Freedom of Information request demonstrates that the Bureau indeed made a rigorous effort to find the truth. As Johnson said later, “The damn press always accused me of things I didn’t do. They never once found out about the things I did do.”

Worries about Johnson extended to his management of the space program. Despite the success of Alan Shepard’s suborbital flight in May 1961, by February 1962 NASA had still not matched cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s orbital success the previous April. Bad weather and technical problems had aborted ten televised U.S. planned launchings between May and February. But on February 20, John Glenn’s spaceship orbited the earth three times in just under five hours before a pinpoint landing in the Atlantic near Bermuda, where helicopters from a nearby U.S. cruiser waited to lift Glenn and his capsule from the ocean. The White House was jubilant, especially because it knew that problems with the capsule’s heat shield had brought the mission close to disaster. Another successful flight by Scott Carpenter in May gave Kennedy—in contrast with the steel price conflict, stock market downturn, and Estes scandal—something to cheer about. (If only Glenn “were a Negro,” Johnson told Kennedy, who laughed at what became his favorite example of Lyndon’s constant preoccupation with political calculations.)

Glenn’s successful mission allowed Kennedy to encourage common actions with Moscow in space exploration. He publicly suggested a joint weather-satellite system, “operational tracking services from each other’s territories,” cooperative efforts to map the earth’s magnetic field from space, joint communications satellites, and shared information on space medicine as preludes to wider cooperation in unmanned lunar exploration and possible manned flights to Mars or Venus. But fearing that any such commitment would reveal the limits of the Soviet Union’s military rockets and space programs and would burden already strained defense budgets, Khrushchev turned aside the president’s suggestions by insisting that a general and complete disarmament agreement had to precede cooperative space exploration.

Public gains from the orbital missions counteracted behind-the-scenes worries that NASA contracts might open the administration to charges of sweetheart deals arranged by Johnson. With plans in tow to shift half of NASA’s operations from Florida’s Cape Canaveral to a command center in Houston, Johnson came under attack for serving his own and his state’s special interests. In 1962, lobbyists and congressmen from outside the South began complaining about a southwestern monopoly on NASA contracts. Johnson, Bobby said later, was “awarding these contracts badly, and they were getting in the wrong hands.” Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania representatives objected to a loss of contracts, and reporters pressed the president for an explanation. He answered that they were looking to see if “the distribution of contracts is as equitable as it can be.” Nixon, who, in 1962, was running for governor of California, attacked the Kennedy administration for “injecting politics in the allocation of defense contracts.” Because defense expenditures in California were higher than they had been under Eisenhower and Nixon, Kennedy did not think “that that was a fuse sufficient to light off Mr. Nixon.” But politics was politics, and to rein in Johnson’s influence, Kennedy made congressional staffer Richard Callaghan an aide to NASA chief James Webb. Callaghan was instructed to ensure a more geographically diverse distribution of contracts and to find out whether Johnson was pulling any strings at NASA for his supporters. Callaghan told
Time-Life
reporter Robert Sherrod that Kenny O’Donnell, Kennedy’s liaison to Congress, “wasn’t only interested in getting the contractors [and congressmen] off his back.” He wanted to know about Johnson’s “influence on the Space Agency.” O’Donnell later told Sherrod that they had found no wrongdoing. Consequently, in May, when a reporter asked the president about rumors that Johnson would be dropped from the ticket in 1964, Kennedy emphatically denied them, describing Johnson as “invaluable” to the administration.

In March 1962, after Teddy announced his Senate candidacy, a journalist told Kennedy that Teddy had said on television that “after seeing the cares of office on you, he wasn’t sure he’d ever be interested in being the President. I wonder if you could tell us whether if you had it to do over again, you would work for the presidency and whether you can recommend the job to others.” Kennedy replied, “Well, the answer is—to the first is ‘yes’ and the second is ‘no.’ I don’t recommend it to others—[laughter]—at least for a while.”

CHAPTER 15

Frustrations and “Botches”

What is there in this place that a man should ever want to get into it?

— President James A. Garfield, 1881

IN THE SPRING
of 1962, a reporter asked the president about the frustration mobilized reservists were feeling at being held in the service while other young men enjoyed a “normal life.” Kennedy praised the reservists’ contribution to the nation’s security and sympathized with their complaints. “There is always inequity in life,” he observed. “Some men are killed in war and some men are wounded, and some men never leave the country, and some men are stationed in the Antarctic and some are stationed in San Francisco. It’s very hard in military or in personal life to assure complete equality. Life is unfair. Some people are sick and others are well.”

His observation was grounded in his own life experience. His good fortune in being a privileged American, his health problems (which his family’s wealth and status could not prevent or master), his brother Joe’s and sister Kathleen’s accidental deaths, his sister Rosemary’s retardation, his brush with death during the war, and the circumstances that had elevated him to the presidency by the narrowest of margins had made Kennedy philosophical about the uncertainties affecting everyone’s life.

He saw his time in office as partly a case study in the fortuitous—a coming together of uncontrollable events challenging his judgment and resiliency. Nothing had been easy. Despite an eighty-eight-seat margin in the House and a twenty-nine-seat advantage in the Senate, the Congress had bottled up his principal legislative initiatives. Rhetorical and administrative expressions of support for civil rights had won little appreciation from liberals and angered many in the South. In response to continuing economic sluggishness, tensions with business chiefs, and talk of a recession in 1964, critics complained that he was an ineffective domestic leader. The Bay of Pigs failure, the acrimonious exchanges with Khrushchev in Vienna, the crisis over Berlin, the collapse of arms control talks and the resumption of nuclear testing, Western European questions about U.S. commitments to the region’s defense, doubts about the Alliance for Progress, the uncertain settlement in Laos, and the continuing crisis in South Vietnam had raised questions about his mastery of foreign affairs also.

All these difficulties made Kennedy think that he might be a one-term president. He intended to fight as hard as he could for reelection and hoped that events might favor him in the next two and a half years, but he knew how quickly public sentiment could change. Though he still enjoyed solid backing from the public, by the summer of 1962 his approval ratings had dropped from the 70s into the 60s.

As a realist, someone who prided himself on not blinking away unpleasant facts about his political fortunes, Kennedy began to think about his legacy, or the way in which historians would view his presidency. He was eager to ensure that they saw all its complexities and gave a sympathetic hearing to the many challenges he or any other president would have faced in the 1960s. As an amateur historian with two books to his credit, he knew how important a detailed contemporary record was to an accurate reconstruction of the past. After reading Barbara Tuchman’s bestselling 1962 book,
The Guns of August,
a recounting of the miscalculations that drove the great powers into World War I, Kennedy focused on a 1914 conversation between two German leaders. “How did it all happen?” one asked. “Ah,” the other replied, “if only one knew.” Kennedy told White House staff members, “If this planet is ever ravaged by nuclear war—and if the survivors of that devastation can then endure the fire, poison, chaos and catastrophe—I do not want one of those survivors to ask another, ‘How did it all happen?’ and to receive the incredible reply: ‘Ah, if only one knew.’”

With this in mind, in July 1962, Kennedy installed taping systems in the White House. Kennedy instructed a secret service agent to install recording devices in the Cabinet Room, Oval Office, and the library of the executive mansion. The agent placed reel-to-reel tape recorders in a basement room of the West Wing and connected them by wires to microphones hidden behind wall drapes in the Cabinet Room and under the president’s desk and a coffee table in the Oval Office. Inconspicuous buttons at the Cabinet Room table and the president’s desk allowed Kennedy to record conversations as he chose. A Dictaphone connected to an Oval Office telephone allowed him to record phone conversations as well. Initially, only two secret service agents and Evelyn Lincoln knew about the tapes, though by 1963 Bobby and his secretary, Angie Novello, also knew. The 260 hours of recordings—248 hours of meetings and 12 hours of telephone conversations—provide an important window on Kennedy’s decision making over the next sixteen months. The tapes demonstrate more clearly than any other source can the daunting domestic and foreign problems that threatened to unhinge the economy, provoke civil strife, and, worst of all, trigger a nuclear war.