Read Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 Online
Authors: James T. Patterson
Tags: #Oxford History of the United States, #Retail, #20th Century, #History, #American History
Administration pressure to moderate the protest continued right up to the day of the march itself on August 28.
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When Kennedy aides and other speakers saw a draft of a fiery speech that Lewis intended to make, they pressed him to soften it. At the last minute other black leaders, feeling the pressure, got Lewis to tone it down a little. Kennedy aides stood prepared to disconnect the public address system in case things went awry. Malcolm X later observed, "There wasn't a simple logistics aspect uncontrolled," and he branded the march the "Farce on Washington."
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The vast majority of the hopeful and non-violent throng, however, were unaware of the angry negotiations that were taking place near the podium. It was indeed a large crowd, estimated at around 250,000 people—the biggest to that time for a political assembly in the United States. Of this number, an estimated 50,000 were white. Among the marchers were many celebrities and performers, including Joan Baez, Josh White, Odetta, Bob Dylan, and Peter, Paul, and Mary. Marian Anderson and Mahalia Jackson sang movingly during the official program at the Lincoln Memorial. But it was King who gave the most memorable speech. Finishing his prepared remarks, he seemed ready to sit down, when Mahalia Jackson called out from behind him, "Tell them about your dream, Martin! Tell them about the dream!" King obliged, setting forth his dream (which he had told on earlier occasions) in the rolling cadences that made him such a powerful orator:
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident—that all men are created equal."
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state sweltering with the people's injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. . . .
With many in the crowd in tears, King closed with a famous peroration:
When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of that old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God almighty, we are free at last!"
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Thanks in part to King's speech, the March on Washington was celebrated by liberals at the time as a tremendous outpouring of egalitarian, interracial, and non-violent spirit. That it was. But Lewis and other activists could not forget how they had been pressured into accepting a one-day event. And black people throughout the nation, however moved they may have been by the activity, gained nothing substantial from it. As before they confronted galling daily reminders of their second-class status.
The march also failed to change opinions on Capitol Hill. Hubert Humphrey, a leading liberal, concluded ruefully that the march had not affected a single vote on the slow-moving civil rights bill. Joseph Rauh, a leading liberal lobbyist, added later, "The March was a beautiful expression of all that's best in America. But I would find it unreal to suggest that it had anything to do with passing the civil rights bill, because three months later, when Kennedy was killed, it was absolutely bogged down."
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Rauh was right, for the civil rights measure crept slowly through the congressional process in the next few months. Renewed violence, meanwhile, stained the South; in September a bomb blew up in a Birmingham church, killing four black little girls, and nearly sparking a riot.
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By the end of October a weak new section was added to the bill that provided for an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which was to have investigatory powers. But the bill was snarled in the House and had not escaped Congressman Smith's hostile Rules Committee in late November. Although it was expected to pass the House, it was certain to encounter a filibuster in the Senate. Prospects for enactment of the bill seemed remote indeed, and the soaring rhetoric of Martin Luther King on August 28 seemed all but forgotten on the Hill.
The deadlock delaying the bill served as an apt symbol of Kennedy's larger record in the field of domestic policy between 1961 and late 1963. Indeed, his prospects in Congress (where Democrats had lost five seats in the House in 1962) seemed no better in 1963 than they had been earlier. On November 12, 1963, the
New York Times
noted, "Rarely has there been such a pervasive attitude of discouragement around Capitol Hill and such a feeling of helplessness to deal with it. This has been one of the least productive sessions of Congress within the memory of most of its members." This was a glum but accurate description of the prospects for domestic change at the time. Kennedy had aroused liberal expectations but had failed to overcome the long-entrenched power of the conservative coalition in Congress. New frontiers still stood in the distance.
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JFK and the World
In September 1960, Kennedy gave one of his most anti-Communist campaign speeches, in Salt Lake City. It captured well the incendiary Cold War rhetoric of the era and summarized a widely held American view of the world. "The enemy," he said, "is the Communist system itself—implacable, insatiable, increasing in its drive for world domination. . . . This is not a struggle for supremacy of arms alone. It is also a struggle for supremacy between two conflicting ideologies: freedom under God versus ruthless, godless tyranny."
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Kennedy often spoke this way (though usually without the religious emphasis), describing a bipolar world of good versus evil. His warnings about the "missile gap" reinforced this Manichean perspective. His dramatic inaugural address, while containing conciliatory passages regarding negotiations, was best remembered for its oft-cited lines "We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty." The oration reiterated the grimness that he felt about the Cold War, as well as his determination to do whatever it took to stop the advance of Communism.
Some of Kennedy's alarmist statements reflected political calculations. As a partisan presidential candidate he assailed the record of Eisenhower even though he recognized that Ike, like most American political leaders, was as much of a Cold Warrior as he was. In so doing Kennedy (like Ike) missed a chance to talk some sense to the public. Indeed, JFK, who cared above all about foreign policy, was better informed about it than he was about many domestic affairs. He knew that the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China bitterly opposed each other, that neither Communist power was ready or anxious for war, and that the restless drives of nationalism and anti-colonialism in Asia and Africa posed perhaps greater threats to world stability than did international Communism. To channel these drives and to tap the energy of idealistic American volunteers he established a Peace Corps, which worked at promoting economic development throughout the world.
His rhetoric notwithstanding, Kennedy also understood that there was no missile gap. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara candidly acknowledged as much to Congress early in 1961. Kennedy was realist enough finally to understand that the United States could not and should not try to remake the world. He hoped to pursue a slightly less ambitious agenda: to contain Communism and to shape a balance of power more favorable than before to the United States and its allies.
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To place JFK's statements in context, however, is not to argue that foreign policies under his watch only echoed those of Eisenhower and Truman. To the contrary, Kennedy's personal approach to foreign affairs—combined with forces mostly beyond his control—helped in his first two years in office to escalate tensions with the Soviet Union. These represented the most frightening years of the Cold War.
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Three outside forces constrained Kennedy's freedom of action in foreign policy and further hardened the Cold War in the early 1960s. One was the continuing power of what Eisenhower's farewell address had labeled the military-industrial complex. Arms contractors and military leaders, gladly reinforcing talk about a missile gap, stepped up their demands for ever-larger defense expenditures. They maintained especially strong influence in Congress. Ike, a military officer for much of his life, had managed to resist some of these demands. His successor had no such prestige or predilection.
The heated nature of anti-Communist public opinion in the United States was a second outside force. There was nothing new about this opinion, but the rise of Fidel Castro in Cuba and Khrushchev's truculence following the U-2 Affair had further inflamed it. So had rhetoric such as Kennedy's in Salt Lake City. Newspaper and magazine stories whipped up fears during Kennedy's first months in office.
Time
carried a major story in January arguing that the "underlying conflict between the West and communism" was erupting on three fronts, in Cuba, in Laos, and in the Congo.
Newsweek
followed with a special section on January 23. "Around the restive globe from Berlin to Laos," it began, "the Communist threat seethed, and nowhere more ominously than in Cuba." It closed by warning, "The greatest single problem that faces John Kennedy—and the key to most of his other problems—is how to meet the aggressive power of the Communist bloc."
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A third outside force was the provocative behavior of Khrushchev. On January 6 the Soviet leader gave a specially belligerent speech that was released two days before Kennedy's inauguration. Among other things it pledged the USSR to support "wars of national liberation." Experts on the Kremlin told Kennedy that Khrushchev had said similar things before, but the President reacted sharply, telling all his top aides to study the address with care. "Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest it," he insisted.
On this occasion Kennedy overreacted, but he had ample reason to worry about his adversary. Khrushchev went out of his way to crow about Soviet achievements, such as the historic orbiting of the earth by Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin on April 12. He was rude to Kennedy when the two leaders met at Vienna in June, and he blustered about Soviet power during the next two years.
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Why Khrushchev acted so provocatively is still unclear; the Soviets remained extraordinarily secretive. Perhaps he wanted to impress China with his ability to stand up to adversaries, perhaps he felt pressure from military leaders at home, perhaps he considered the youthful Kennedy to be weak. In any event Soviet behavior between 1961 and 1963 seemed unusually truculent. It induced in Kennedy and his advisers a profound unease and reinforced a toughness of their own.
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No President facing such outside circumstances would have found it easy to negotiate thoughtfully with the Soviet Union. Still, Kennedy brought with him assumptions and attitudes that further increased Cold War tensions. One was his belief in a defense policy of "flexible response," as it came to be called. Like many Americans, Kennedy had long deplored what he felt was the Eisenhower administration's overreliance on nuclear weapons. These, he said repeatedly, were of little use in regional conflicts. The United States must build up more conventional forces so that it could respond flexibly to circumstances. As he put it in July 1961, "We intend to have a wider choice than humiliation or all-out war."
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In calling for increased spending on conventional weapons Kennedy exhibited few of the fiscal concerns that had motivated Eisenhower. This was one of the major differences between the foreign policies of Democratic liberals and Republican conservatives from 1953 on. Instead, JFK listened to Establishment figures such as Paul Nitze, who chaired a pre-inaugural task force on national security. Nitze, the guiding force behind the hawkish NSC-68 in 1950, again argued that the United States could easily afford, and badly needed, increased defense spending. Economic advisers, including Walter Heller, concurred and maintained that such expenditures would stimulate the economy. This was military Keynesianism. "Any stepping up of these [defense] programs that is deemed desirable for its own sake," a pre-inaugural task force report on the economy advised, "can only help rather than hinder the health of our economy in the period immediately ahead."
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Kennedy's support of higher defense spending depended heavily on a man who from the start became one of his most valued advisers, Defense Secretary McNamara. A highly articulate and extraordinarily well prepared spokesman, McNamara reassured members of Congress by laying out for them a reorganization of the way the Pentagon would henceforth conduct its business. His reorganization, which featured a Planning-Programming-Budgeting System, or PPBS, promised to reduce interservice bickering, collusive bidding, and waste. As it turned out, military-industrial connections were so well entrenched that not even McNamara and his much-ballyhooed aides, employing modern methods of management and computerization, could radically change things at the Pentagon. Still, in 1961 he seemed a dazzlingly competent new face.
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Congress, welcoming the chance to promote business growth and employment, gladly approved the new defense policies. During the next three years defense expenditures rose 13 percent, from $47.4 billion in fiscal 1961 to $53.6 billion in 1964. Despite Kennedy's criticisms of overreliance on nuclear weapons, much of this increase went for additions to the nation's already capacious nuclear arsenal, including construction of ten additional Polaris submarines (for a total of twenty-nine) and of 400 more Minuteman missiles (for a total of 800).
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The administration, having conceded that there was no missile gap, was taking no chances.
The increases were in fact not enormous in all respects. The number of military personnel grew only gradually, from 2.5 million in 1960 to 2.7 million in 1964. In part because the GNP rose rapidly during this period, the percentage of it spent on defense actually declined a little, from 9.1 percent of GNP in fiscal 1961 to 8.5 percent in fiscal 1964. Still, the growth was considerable by contrast to the last two years of the Eisenhower administration. Moreover, Kennedy obviously assigned very high priority to defense. He gave special attention to the development of "counter-insurgency" forces, such as the Green Berets. For a while he proudly displayed a green beret on his desk.
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Kennedy's supporters naturally hailed these changes as improving the nation's capacity to respond in new and flexible ways. This was true to a degree. Without the resources given to the Special Forces, as they were called, the administration might have moved more carefully in places like Vietnam. At the same time, however, JFK tended on occasion to gloat about American readiness. When he let it be known in unprecedented detail in October 1961 that the United States had a huge margin of nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union, he may have caused Khrushchev deep embarrassment at home. This may have heightened Soviet fears, always profound, about the West.
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Whether Kennedy had this impact on the Soviets cannot be proved.
Still, there was no doubting that JFK stamped a personal, activist pattern on the foreign policies of his administration. While he relied on McNamara, his brother Robert, and a few others, he made it clear that he was in command. He had little use for for the "striped-pants boys" in the State Department—he thought they dithered and shuffled papers—and he came to despair at the Buddha-like inscrutability of Dean Rusk, his loyal but bland Secretary of State. Rusk, he told Theodore White, "never gives me anything to chew on, never puts it on the line. You never know what he is thinking."
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Kennedy preferred decisive, tough-minded advisers, and he had little time for doubters. As Chester Bowles, Kennedy's increasingly disillusioned Undersecretary of State, complained at the time, the men in Kennedy's inner circle were "full of belligerence." They were "sort of looking for a chance to prove their muscle."
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Kennedy's passion for decisive action in foreign policy had varied sources. One may have been his tiny margin of victory in 1960: acting boldly might rally the patriotic and expand his base of political support. In this frame of mind he announced his backing in May 1961 of the so-called Apollo program, to make the United States the first to place a man on the moon. This major effort cost some $25 to $35 billion before Neil Armstrong and two others reached the moon in 1969, and it produced relatively little scientific knowledge. But, as JFK anticipated, it enjoyed considerable support from proud and patriotic American people.
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Another source of Kennedy's boldness was constitutional: as commander-in-chief Kennedy enjoyed much more discretion than he did in domestic matters, and he was temperamentally inclined to use it. A third source was his continuing fear and uncertainty about Khrushchev, whose provocative behavior aroused his competitive instincts. Finally, Kennedy, like other postwar Presidents who had been tested by World War II, heeded what he thought were the lessons of history. To show indecisiveness, as Western countries had done with Hitler in the 1930s, was to encourage aggressive behavior. Only firm and unflinching direction could preserve the all-important "credibility" of the United States, defender of the "Free World."
The President's activism in foreign affairs had a special edge of toughness about it. To critics then and later it contained a potentially dangerous machismo. Some people thought this machismo arose from his upbringing in an extraordinarily competitive family. Robert displayed it, too. Others attributed it to his need to prove himself, the youngest elected President in American history, as worthy of his office. Whatever the sources, Kennedy exhibited an intense desire to demonstrate his mettle. To face crisis and to prevail was to demonstrate one's strength and to assert one's manhood. As he prepared in May for his summit meeting with Khrushchev, he said, "I'll have to show him that we can be as tough as he is. . . . I'll have to sit down and let him see who he is dealing with."
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