All the President is, is a glorified public relations man who spends his time flattering, kissing and kicking people to get them to do what they are supposed to do anyway.
—Harry S Truman, November 14, 1947
AFTER A YEAR in the presidency, it was easy for Kennedy to think of himself as a crisis manager—a Chief Executive trying to keep problems with the Soviets, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam from turning into catastrophes, and difficulties with the economy and civil rights from destabilizing the country and embarrassing it overseas. But in the midst of all his difficulties—“the fix that he was in as President of the United States,” as Sorensen described it—Kennedy maintained his objectivity and sense of humor. His ability to detach himself and avoid turning a dilemma into a strictly personal challenge was a singularly useful attribute in dealing with awesome burdens. He also took comfort in his faith. During the flight home from Europe in June 1961, where discussions with Khrushchev made a nuclear war seem all too possible, Evelyn Lincoln, while clearing the president’s desk of papers, found a note written in Kennedy’s hand. It recalled Abraham Lincoln’s reassurance to himself on the eve of the Civil War: “I know that there is a God and I see a storm coming. If he has a place for me I am ready.”
No rational person faced with possible responsibility for a nuclear war, in which tens of millions of people would die, could live without substantial tension. Yet that tension was never evident from what Kennedy said to friends, all of whom, with the exception of Bobby, he kept at arms’ length. There was no one who could readily describe himself as a close Kennedy friend—not any of the White House insiders, not Sorensen or Schlesinger, nor any of the three members of the Irish mafia, O’Brien, O’Donnell, and Powers. “He and I continued to be close in a peculiarly impersonal way,” Sorensen said later. And pre-presidential friends like Billings, Paul Fay, Torby Macdonald, Smathers, and Walton were less close than before.
Although he kept his counsel about his innermost feelings, people around the president detected signs of stress. “He was tired and a little cranky,” Evelyn Lincoln recorded in a diary entry describing one instance of the president’s response to his burdens. “So much depends on my actions, so I am seeing fewer people, simplifying my life, organizing it so that I am not always on the edge of irritability,” he told Dave Powers. In the summer of 1961, after a meeting with the president, Averell Harriman thought Kennedy was “less tense than when I saw him last, but his hands are still constantly in motion.” In October 1961, when reporters asked Bobby, “Do you think your brother can handle the Presidency without harming his health?” he replied that the demands on him were no greater than what he had faced during the presidential campaign. But he acknowledged that “the responsibilities are so great and weigh so heavily that it is bound” to have an impact.
Personal problems added to the strains of office, testing Kennedy’s physical and emotional endurance. His health troubles were a constant strain on his ability to meet presidential responsibilities. The records of his maladies for August 1961 provide a window into his struggle to remain effectively attentive to the public’s business. His stomach and urinary ailments were a daily distraction. On August 9, for example, he complained of “gut” problems, “loose stool,” and “cramps.” On the morning of the eleventh, he woke up at 5:00 A.M. with abdominal discomfort. On August 23, tests showed an “E. coli” urinary tract infection at the same time he was suffering “acute diarrhea” and the usual back miseries. Codeine sulfate and procaine injections for his pain, penicillin for his infection, cortisone for his Addison’s, Bentyl, Lomotil, Transentine, and paregoric for his colitis, testosterone to counter weight loss, and Ritalin for night rest gave him some relief, but they caused him to complain of feeling “tired,” “groggy,” and “sleepy.” “He was being treated with narcotics all the time,” Dr. Jeffrey Kelman, a physician who reviewed JFK’s medical records said. “He was tired because he was being doped up.”
Kennedy’s back pain was his greatest physical distraction, not simply because it made it harder to focus his attention but because it was more difficult to hide from a public that thought of him as athletic and robust. Something as simple as bending over a lectern to read a speech caused him terrible pain. Out of sight of the press, he went up and down helicopter stairs one step at a time. Janet Travell worked with engineers to design a reading stand that would reduce the strain, but solving the lectern problem was no cure-all. (His friend Charlie Bartlett thought that diet was at the root of JFK’s difficulties. Bartlett saw the richness of the White House food and all that wine and “those damned daiquiris” he was consuming as the culprits.) In June 1961, after the administration’s food for peace program director George McGovern had expressed sympathy to Bobby about JFK’s suffering, Bobby acknowledged the seriousness of the difficulty. If it were not for Travell’s care during the last several years, Bobby wrote, his brother “would not presently be President of the United States.” To relieve his suffering, which in the spring and summer of 1961 had become almost unbearable, Travell injected him with procaine two or three times a day. On August 27 she noted in her records that Kennedy’s cries of pain in response to the injections brought Jackie in from another room to see what was wrong. Travell’s shots were in addition to the concoction of painkillers and amphetamines that Max Jacobson was administering.
White House physician Admiral George Burkley believed that the injections as well as the back braces and positioning devices that immobilized Kennedy were doing more harm than good. Burkley and some Secret Service men who observed the president’s difficulties getting up from a chair and his reliance on crutches feared that he would soon be unable to walk and might end up in a wheelchair. During Kennedy’s meeting with Harold Macmillan in Bermuda in December, the prime minister recorded that, “in health, I thought the President not in good shape. His back is hurting. He cannot sit long without pain.” Burkley now insisted that Dr. Hans Kraus, a New York orthopedic surgeon, be consulted. Eugene Cohen, an endocrinologist who had been treating Kennedy’s Addison’s disease, directly urged him not to rely on Travell for the treatment of his back problems but instead to follow Burkley’s recommendations. When Travell resisted Burkley’s suggestion that they consult Kraus, Burkley threatened to go to the president.
Kraus confirmed Burkley’s worst concerns. A brusque Austrian émigré, Kraus told Kennedy that if he continued the injections and did not begin regular exercise therapy to strengthen his back and abdominal muscles, he would become a cripple. Fearful that Kraus’s visits to the White House might trigger press inquiries and unwanted speculation about his health, Kennedy was reluctant to accept his recommendation. The lost medical kit and apparent attempts to steal his medical records during the 1960 campaign had put Kennedy on edge about the potential political harm from opponents armed with information about his health problems.
Kennedy’s ailments were not life threatening, unlike those faced by several earlier presidents, principally Cleveland, Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt. But because ignoring Kraus’s advice might have eventually confined him to a wheelchair, Kennedy accepted that something had to be done. He and Kraus agreed to describe the therapy as exercises improving the president’s condition from very good to excellent. He began a regimen of three exercise sessions a week in a small White House gymnasium next to the basement swimming pool. Barring Travell from treating Kennedy, Burkley and Kraus used exercises, massages, and heat therapy to ease his back spasms. A telephone in Kraus’s car gave the president immediate access to him. Becoming part of Kennedy’s daily routine, the exercises reduced his pain and increased his mobility. Performed against a backdrop of his favorite country-and-western and show tunes, the exercise therapy became a pleasant respite from the pressures of daily meetings and demands that crowded Kennedy’s schedule. By January 1962, Burkley and Kraus saw him having a better month than at any time in 1961. At the end of February, they described the past four weeks, “medically speaking,” as the “most uneventful month since the inauguration; since the 1960 campaign, for that matter.” And in April they pronounced his “general condition excellent.” Nevertheless, Kennedy remained so concerned to hide the truth about his health that on April 10 O’Donnell ordered Travell and Burkley to “have all medical records, including all notes relating to the health of the President … stored in the vault maintained by Mrs. Lincoln.”
Jacqueline Kennedy both eased and added to her husband’s burdens. Her distaste for politics and the obligations of being First Lady irritated Kennedy. During the presidential campaign, she told Johnson’s secretary that she felt “so totally inadequate, so totally at a loss, and I’m pregnant; and I don’t know how to do anything.” Early in the presidency, Kennedy asked Angier Biddle Duke, White House chief of protocol, to discuss the First Lady’s role with Jackie. When Duke explained the usual ceremonial duties of the job and asked her what else she might like to do, she replied, “As little as possible. I’m a mother. I’m a wife. I’m not a public official.” Cass Canfield, the editor of Harper’s, recalled a visit with Jackie at the White House: “I don’t think she enjoyed political life much, although she forced herself to become accustomed to it …. It was perfectly evident to me that Jackie K was looking forward to a long weekend in Middleburg [Virginia, at the Kennedy’s Glen Ora estate] and was more interested in what she was doing there than in the White House.” A Secret Service agent, who spoke to journalist Seymour Hersh about his two-year assignment at the Kennedy White House, recalled feeling “sorry for Jackie. She was real lonesome. She seemed sad—just a sad lady.”
There is testimony from Jackie’s own hand of her initial unhappiness as First Lady. In a June 1962 eleven-page letter to Bill Walton, she asked him to become head of her Fine Arts Commission. She acknowledged that “it would be cruel to put all the ritual and paperwork into your life—Like me—you hate it and 9/10 of it is unnecessary …. Before you cringe completely from what looks like a big headache—just let me tell you what I did—I was tired—and I wanted to see my children—so I just told Tish [Baldrige, the White House social secretary]—who nearly died from the shock—that I would NEVER go out—lunches, teas, degrees, speeches, etc. For 2 months it was a flap. Now it is a precedent established …. I have learned one thing—and now my life here which I dreaded—and which at first overwhelmed me—is now all under control and the happiest time I have ever known—not for the position—but for the closeness of one’s family—the last thing I expected to find in the W. House …. And now my life is the way I want it—though deadly little details always do crop up.”
One of those “little details” that incensed JFK was Jackie’s extravagance. She spent without regard for cost, and Kennedy complained that she was reducing his capital. The official White House entertainment budget could not begin to cover her outlays, which Kennedy then had to pay himself. The overruns bothered him so much that he asked a prominent accountant to help rein in Jackie’s spending on ceremonial functions. According to one historian, Jackie’s personal expenses in 1961 and 1962 exceeded her husband’s annual $100,000 salary; nearly half went for clothing. One day, when a congressman entered the Oval Office for a meeting, an agitated Kennedy showed him $40,000 worth of bills for Jackie’s clothes. “What would you do if your wife did that?” JFK asked. That evening Kennedy confronted Jackie in front of Ben Bradlee and his wife. “What about this?” he asked. Jackie lamely countered that she knew nothing about it. After all, she said, it was not as if she had bought a sable coat or anything like it.
Far more distressing, in December 1961 Joe Kennedy suffered a stroke. Although urged by doctors to counter warning signs of such an event by taking anticoagulants, Joe, who disliked being out of control and refused to acknowledge any vulnerability, had rejected the advice. While playing golf at his Palm Beach club during Christmas week 1961, he became ill and was rushed to a local hospital, where a priest administered last rites. When informed that a life-threatening stroke had felled his father, Kennedy flew to his bedside. Although conscious, Joe could not recognize his son for two days. The stroke left Joe paralyzed on his right side and unable to speak clearly. For the remaining eight years of his life, he struggled to talk and walk. His immobility was complicated by two later heart attacks. One can only imagine how much Joe’s impaired, barely coherent speech and loss of physical vigor upset his son. A family premium on athleticism, physical beauty, and self-control must have made Joe’s dependency on others for his most basic human needs a painful reminder to JFK of his own vulnerability.
One response to all the difficulties crowding in on Kennedy was a more frenetic pace of womanizing than ever. The sources of his pre-presidential affinity for philandering—the examples set by the English aristocrats he admired, like Lord Melbourne, and his father, together with his sense of mortality engendered by health problems and the premature deaths of his brother and sister—still shaped his behavior. His knowledge of how close the world might be to a nuclear war only heightened Kennedy’s impulse to live life to the fullest—or with as much private self-indulgence as possible. Truman and Eisenhower, of course, shouldered the same burden without this sort of behavior. But with Kennedy’s womanizing an already well-developed habit, the doomsday prospect may have added to his rationalization for what he probably would have been doing anyway.
Kennedy’s womanizing had, of course, always been a form of amusement, but it now also gave him a release from unprecedented daily tensions. Kennedy had affairs with several women, including Pamela Turnure, Jackie’s press secretary; Mary Pinchot Meyer, Ben Bradlee’s sister-in-law; two White House secretaries playfully dubbed Fiddle and Faddle; Judith Campbell Exner, whose connections to mob figures like Sam Giancana made her the object of FBI scrutiny; and Mimi Beardsley, a “tall, slender, beautiful” nineteen-year-old college sophomore and White House intern, who worked in the press office during two summers. (She “had no skills,” a member of the press staff recalled. “She couldn’t type.”) There were also Hollywood stars and starlets and call girls paid by Dave Powers, the court jester and facilitator of Kennedy’s indulgences, who arranged trysts in hotels and swimming pools in California, Florida, and at the White House.
There was something almost madcap about Kennedy’s behavior. He told Harold Macmillan during their Bermuda meeting in December 1961 that if he did not have a woman every three days, he would have a terrible headache. But sometimes his trysts involved more than sex. Tensions in his marriage and his public position, which barred a divorce, may have made his affair with Mary Meyer understandable. Meyer was a beautiful, intelligent, and sophisticated woman from the politically prominent Pinchot family. More important, she was a source of comfort to him. “He could enjoy life with her,” JFK biographer Herbert Parmet has written. “He could talk in ways she understood, and their trust was mutual …. She was an important support. She understood all about the pompous asses he had to put up with. When he was with her, the rest of the world could go to hell. He could laugh with her at the absurdity of the things he saw all around his center of power.” Meyer believed that Kennedy loved her and that were it not for uncontrollable circumstances they would have been permanently together. Kennedy apparently thought otherwise, saying more than once to Ben Bradlee, “Mary would be rough to live with.” But there was no doubt that Meyer meant something more to him than many of the other women did.
Kennedy also must have taken comfort from the fact that he was able to hide his affair with Mary Meyer from Ben Bradlee. Bradlee said that he had “heard stories about how he had slept around in his bachelor days …. I heard people described as ‘one of Jack’s girlfriends’ from time to time. It was never topic A among my reporter friends, while he was a candidate …. In those days reporters did not feel compelled to conduct full FBI field investigations about a politician friend. My friends have always had trouble believing my innocence of his activities, especially after it was revealed that … Mary Meyer had been one of Kennedy’s girlfriends. So be it. I can only repeat my ignorance of Kennedy’s sex life, and state that I am appalled by the details that have emerged, appalled by the recklessness, by the subterfuge that must have been involved.”
If Kennedy had concerns about Jackie’s feelings, she helped him minimize them by discreetly avoiding a head-on clash with him over his womanizing. But she had no illusions about her husband’s behavior. At the end of their visit to Canada in 1961, while the president and Jackie were saying good-bye to people in a receiving line that included a “blonde bimbo,” as JFK’s military aide General Godfrey McHugh described her, Jackie “wheeled around in fury” and said in French to McHugh and Dave Powers standing behind her, “Isn’t it bad enough that you solicit this woman for my husband, but then you insult me by asking me to shake her hand!” One day, as she escorted a Paris journalist around the White House, she said to him in French, as they walked past “Fiddle,” “This is the girl who supposedly is sleeping with my husband.” Jackie seemed to have assumed that her remark would not shock a sophisticated Frenchman, but he said to one of Salinger’s aides, “What is going on here?”
Jackie’s pattern was similar to Rose’s denial of Joe’s affairs and her refusal to confront him. Jackie made a point of keeping Kennedy’s staff informed about her absences from and returns to the White House so that, as one naval aide put it, the president could get his “friends” out of the way. This is not to say that Jackie approved of her husband’s infidelity. It obviously made her angry and unhappy, but she chose to live with it.
Did potential whistle-blowers in the press put Kennedy in political jeopardy? He did not think so. In 1962, he continued to assume that while fringe newspapers and magazines might pick up on gossip about his sex life, the mainstream press would hold to traditional limits when discussing a president’s private behavior. He received some reassurance from a case involving one of his principal aides, a married man whose girlfriend had become pregnant. The press office received word that a reporter was going to ask Kennedy about the affair at a news conference. Kennedy took special care that day to call on only journalists he trusted, and the threat never materialized. Besides, as Salinger aide Barbara Gamarekian concluded, so many people in the press were sleeping around that for them to have gone after Kennedy would have been an act of embarrassing hypocrisy.
Kennedy also sent signals that the press should be careful. In February 1962 Time did an article that referred to a Gentlemen’s Quarterly cover story about the president. Kennedy called Time correspondent Hugh Sidey to the White House. “I never posed for any picture,” he berated Sidey. “Any President who would pose for GQ [a magazine allegedly with special appeal to homosexuals] would be out of his mind …. I’m not kidding,” Kennedy said menacingly. “I’m goddamn sick and tired of it. This is all a lie …. What are you trying to do to me? What do you think you’re doing?” Kennedy intimidated Sidey into promising a retraction.
Similarly, in May 1962, after a well-publicized forty-fifth-birthday party for JFK at Madison Square Garden, during which movie actress Marilyn Monroe entertained the president in a skin-tight, silver-sequined dress with a breathless rendering of “Happy Birthday,” rumors of a Kennedy-Monroe affair threatened to become an embarrassment to the White House. Kennedy enlisted a former New York reporter who was a member of his administration in a campaign to squelch the talk. He asked his aide to tell editors that he was speaking for the president and that stories about him and Marilyn simply were not true.
Kennedy also believed that reporters liked him and would be reluctant to embarrass him by publishing stories about his sex life. Of course, he understood that a president’s relations with the press are always to some degree adversarial. But throughout his political career and even more so when he began running for president, he made himself available to the press, and by so doing created subtle ties that reporters were loathe to undermine. At the 1956 convention, when Kennedy, in T-shirt and undershorts, began to leave his hotel bedroom to take a phone call in the sitting room, an aide said, “You can’t go out there in your shorts, there are reporters and photographers there.” “I know these fellows,” Kennedy replied loudly enough for them to hear. “They’re not going to take advantage of me.”
Kennedy’s wit and articulateness especially endeared him to those journalists who had soldiered through the Eisenhower years with a president who often left the press puzzling over what he had actually said or meant to say. Two taped TV specials on President’s Day that gave Americans an unprecedented view of Kennedy at work, and a February 1962 guided tour by Jackie of the executive mansion that described the restoration of the White House heightened media regard for the Kennedys and made it unlikely that reporters would debunk JFK’s attractive image as a family man.
Kennedy’s popularity with the press and public also partly rested on the glamour he and Jackie brought to the White House. Though most Americans did not think of themselves as connoisseurs of highbrow culture, they saw the president and First Lady as American aristocrats. Their stylish White House soirees—the president in white tie and tails and Mrs. Kennedy in the most fashionable of gowns—interest in the arts, and association with the best and the brightest at home and abroad made the country feel good about itself. To millions of Americans, under JFK the United States was reestablishing itself not only as the world’s premier power but also as the new center of progressive good taste, a nation with not only the highest standard of living but also a president and First Lady who compared favorably with sophisticated European aristocrats. However overdrawn some of this may have been, it was excellent politics for a Kennedy White House working to maintain its hold on the public imagination.
By contrast with the press and public, Kennedy was not so sure he could control the FBI. After Hoover made clear to Kennedy in March 1962 that he had information about Judith Campbell Exner’s ties to mob figures, Kennedy stopped seeing her. Nor apparently would he take her phone calls. Hoover did not, as Johnson told some reporters, have “Jack Kennedy by the balls.” Hoover was past retirement age, and his continuation in office depended on Kennedy’s goodwill. Still, Kennedy might have assumed that if Hoover was ready to call it quits, he would try to take him down before leaving.
Did Kennedy’s compulsive womanizing distract him from public business? Some historians think so, especially when it comes to Vietnam. Kennedy’s reluctance, however, to focus the sort of attention on Vietnam he gave to Berlin or other foreign and domestic concerns is not evidence of a distracted president, but of a determination to keep Vietnam from becoming more important to his administration than he wished it to be. Certainly, when one reviews Kennedy’s White House schedules, he does not seem to have been derelict about anything he considered a major problem. One can certainly argue that his judgment was imperfect about what should have been his highest priorities. A number of domestic matters received relatively less attention than foreign policy issues. But the supposition that he was too busy chasing women or satisfying his sexual passions to attend to important presidential business is not borne out by the record of his daily activities. And according to Richard Reeves, another Kennedy historian, the womanizing generally “took less time than tennis.” By the spring of 1962, after fifteen months in the White House, Kennedy had little reason to believe that his philandering was an impediment to his ability to govern and lead.
BY AUGUST 1961, Heller and Federal Reserve chairman Martin had told Kennedy that the economy was in a vigorous recovery like those that had followed the two previous recessions in the fifties. Martin believed that the economy was in better shape than it had been for a long time and that the country could look forward to “a non-inflationary period of expansion and growth.” Holding down deficits and inflation now replaced talk of tax cuts as higher priorities.
Corporate views of Kennedy as a traditional “tax and spend” Democrat had made him eager to convince the business community that his administration was not “engaged upon a reckless program of [defense] spending beyond control and of artificially easy money.” In September 1961, he instructed Heller, budget director David Bell, and White House aide Fred Dutton to describe expanded spending on defense as fueling the recovery. He also asked them to rebut articles in Reader’s Digest and Life describing a large increase in welfare programs. The Digest’s assertion that his programs would cost taxpayers “18 billion dollars annually in a few years,” was, he stated, “wholly untrue and we ought to make him [the article’s author] eat it.”
Kennedy’s courting of business partly rested on doubts that the economy would hold up through the next presidential election. “On a number of occasions … you have expressed concern about the duration of the current business upswing,” the CEA told him in September. Kennedy wanted assurances that the economy would be “on the upgrade in the summer and fall of 1964.” Heller responded that to ensure against a recession then “would require action in 1962.” He saw the need for a bill promoting capital or infrastructure improvements and “a flexible tax proposal” triggering tax cuts. “Lord, that’s a tough one,” Kennedy replied. Kennedy feared that legislation requiring tax cuts in response to economic slowing would be seen as restricting congressional control over the economy or trampling on Congress’s “fiscal prerogatives.” Moreover, in the fall of 1961, Kennedy continued to worry that tax cuts would increase deficits and mark him out as a liberal Keynesian at odds with balanced budgets and fiscal conservatives.
Kennedy’s two greatest economic worries between September 1961 and June 1962 were the country’s balance-of-payment problems, which reduced the strength of the dollar, and inflation. With inflation running at only a little over 1 percent a year since 1958, most commentators were hard-pressed to understand Kennedy’s concern. But his worry, which the CEA shared, rested largely on the conviction that any sign of “upward price movements would tilt the Fed, the Treasury, and the conservatives in Congress against an expansionary fiscal policy and the reduction of unemployment.” As for balance-of-payment issues, the fear was that foreign holders of dollars might exercise their right to convert them into gold, causing a destabilizing drain on U.S. gold reserves and diminished confidence in the greenback. Sorensen recalled Kennedy’s near obsession with the issue: “ ‘I know everyone thinks I worry about this too much,’ he said to me one day as we pored over what seemed like the millionth report on the subject. ‘But if there is ever a run on the bank, and I have to devalue the dollar or bring home our troops, as the British did, I’m the one who will take the heat. Besides it’s a club that de Gaulle and all the others hang over my head. Any time there’s a crisis or a quarrel, they can cash in all their dollars and where are we?’ ”
Kennedy’s balance-of-payments concern was a case study in applying a lesson of the past inappropriately to a present dilemma. And the conviction that something had to be done about the problem presented, in Heller’s words, “a cruel dilemma.” Domestic economic expansion would increase imports and temporarily worsen the balance of payments. But checking the outflow of dollars by raising interest rates and taxes and cutting government expenditures would impede or stop the domestic recovery and increase unemployment. “The pressures to grasp the second horn of the dilemma,” Heller warned, “are going to be very strong. But we [at the CEA] urge you to resist them. We believe that it would be shortsighted folly to sacrifice the domestic economy for quick improvement in the balance of payments.”
Nevertheless, demands for action on the problem continued from Federal Reserve chairman Martin, Treasury officials, and Kennedy himself. At a meeting in late August, Martin described the balance of payments as the economic “cloud on the horizon,” and Dillon “agreed with Martin that we must be very careful to present a posture of responsibility in fiscal and financial affairs in order to keep our European friends from becoming jittery about the dollar.” It was apparent to those at this meeting that Kennedy was “greatly concerned about the future of the balance of payments and that this was the main economic problem that was really worrying both Dillon and the President.”
But despite his constant attention to the difficulty, requesting regular reports on estimated gold losses and discussing draconian reforms, Kennedy would not sacrifice domestic recovery for greater dollar stability. He signed on to several stopgap measures—increased foreign buying of military equipment, reduced reliance of U.S. agencies on overseas offices, mandatory use of American goods for foreign aid, more tourism to the United States, and systematic expansion of foreign trade—that helped reduce the loss of U.S. gold reserves from $1.977 billion to $459 million in the ten months after January 1961. But beyond joking that he might reduce the outflow of gold to France by keeping his father at home and encouraging his wife to see America first, that was all Kennedy would do until a more effective solution to the difficulty arrived with the Trade Expansion Act he put before Congress in his January 1962 State of the Union Message.
WHEN KENNEDY ASKED CONGRESS in July 1961 for increased defense outlays to meet the Berlin crisis, he had announced a potential tax increase in January 1962 if it were needed to maintain a balanced budget and low inflation. He gave especially close attention to steel prices, which he saw as the major threat to price stability. The industry bulked so large “in the manufacturing sector of the economy” that it could “upset the price applecart all by itself,” Heller told him. Between 1947 and 1958, Heller added, “forty percent of the rise in the Wholesale Price Index was due to the fact that steel prices rose more than the average of all other prices.”
Armed with statistics from the CEA, Kennedy began “jawboning” the steel industry not to raise prices after a scheduled October 1, 1961, increase. In September, he sent letters to the CEOs of the twelve largest steel companies and to the Steelworkers Union urging responsible price and wage actions in negotiations that were about to begin for a new contract. When the steel companies agreed not to increase their prices in the last quarter of 1961, Kennedy hoped that both sides in the negotiations would follow his lead on holding down inflation.
But reactions from labor and corporate chiefs to Kennedy’s pressure were more antagonistic than cooperative. When Arthur Goldberg lectured delegates at an AFL-CIO convention in December on the need for wage restraints and nonstrike settlements, they booed him publicly and privately warned him not to interfere in union negotiations with industry. Similarly, business chiefs applauded the administration’s pressure on labor but rejected any government say in determining prices in 1962.
Despite business-labor resistance, Kennedy refused to back off. If the steelworkers struck, half a million workers would be idle, plus thousands more in mining and transportation. Besides, Kennedy believed he could effectively press the case for a settlement. In December 1961, Goldberg met with Dave McDonald, the head of the steelworkers, and R. Conrad Cooper, U.S. Steel Corporation’s vice president for industrial relations. He urged a settlement as being in the national interest and warned that obstructionism by either side would antagonize the administration. At the same time, Kennedy addressed the AFL-CIO’s annual convention in Miami. Putting aside his text to speak more informally and passionately, he emphasized “the heavy responsibility” labor shouldered for the country’s well-being in this “most critical time” of global challenges. His praise for America’s free labor movement found a warm reception. “After your speech,” Arthur Goldberg told Kennedy, “President Meany stated: ‘ … We are delighted that we have a Chief Executive in the White House who understands the ideals and the aspirations of our people … and merely say to you, Don’t worry about us. We will cooperate 1,000 percent.’ ”
In January 1962, Kennedy met secretly with Roger Blough, chairman of U.S. Steel’s board, McDonald, and Goldberg at the White House. He persuaded the two sides to enter into early negotiations to work out a noninflationary agreement. The discussions from the middle of February to the beginning of April produced a contract with a ten-cent-an-hour boost in pension contributions and steps to reduce unemployment among steelworkers but no wage increase.
Kennedy, Goldberg, and Heller were “jubilant.” The president publicly congratulated both sides for “the early and responsible settlement,” calling their contract “a document of high industrial statesmanship.” They had fully justified his belief that they would put the national interest ahead of any selfish interest. He also said that the agreement was “obviously non-inflationary and should provide a solid base for continued price stability.”
But on April 10, the steel companies broke faith with Kennedy by announcing a 3.5 percent price hike. Blough, who received an appointment to see Kennedy that afternoon, brought a copy of a statement on the increases that was being released as they met. Kennedy was understandably furious. “You have made a terrible mistake,” he told Blough. “You double-crossed me.” (Kennedy told Kenny O’Donnell that talking to Blough was like interacting with “a wet fish,” nothing but silence and formal responses.) The country now seemed likely to suffer inflation and an economic slowdown. In addition, the unions felt deceived and betrayed, and Kennedy looked weak and ineffective. Having worked so hard to repair the damage to his standing after the Bay of Pigs and the difficult exchanges with Khrushchev at Vienna, he found himself once more on the defensive—a Chief Executive unable to bend a formidable adversary to his will.
At a meeting of White House aides, Bobby, and the CEA following Blough’s departure, the president was seething. Those present had never seen him so angry. O’Donnell remembered Kennedy as “livid with rage—white with anger.” He let off steam by almost furious motion in his rocking chair, pacing the room, and scathing remarks about Blough and other steel executives who were falling into line with U.S. Steel’s increases. “He fucked me. They fucked us and we’ve got to try to fuck them,” he exclaimed. Steel had “made a fool of him.” “My father told me businessmen were all pricks, but I didn’t really believe he was right until now …. God, I hate the bastards.” He told Dave McDonald, “You’ve been screwed and I’ve been screwed.” He suspected a conspiracy with Nixon. Steel had promised Nixon “not to raise prices until after the election,” he told Ben Bradlee. “Then came the recession, and they didn’t want to raise prices. Then when we pulled out of the recession they said, ‘Let Kennedy squeeze the unions first, before we raise prices. So I squeezed McDonald …. And they kicked us right in the balls …. The question really is: are we supposed to sit there and take a cold deliberate fucking?” Goldberg was “terribly depressed,” and told Kennedy, “Shit, I might as well quit. There’s nothing I can do now.”
But their anger was a source of energy, too. “This is war,” Goldberg said. And Kennedy began plotting the campaign to force capitulation. The White House leaked Kennedy’s remarks about businessmen, but cleaned up the language a bit by calling them “sons of bitches” rather than pricks. (Kennedy himself never remembered whether he called them “sons of bitches, or bastards, or pricks.”) The next day Kennedy used a press conference to denounce the companies. He was determined first to bring public opinion to his side. His remarks were caustic. The price rise was “a wholly unjustifiable and irresponsible defiance of the public interest,” he said. Citing statistics to demonstrate that there was “no justification for an increase in steel prices,” he denounced steel’s “ruthless disregard of their public responsibilities.” The steel companies were not only playing fast and loose with the country’s economic health, they were also jeopardizing its national security.
“In this serious hour in our Nation’s history,” Kennedy declared, “when we are confronted with grave crises in Berlin and Southeast Asia, when we are devoting our energies to economic recovery and stability, when we are asking reservists to leave their homes and families for months on end and servicemen to risk their lives—and four were killed in the last two days in Vietnam—and asking union members to hold down their wage requests at a time when restraint and sacrifice are being asked of every citizen, the American people will find it hard, as I do, to accept a situation in which a tiny handful of steel executives whose pursuit of private power and profit exceeds their sense of public responsibility can show such utter contempt for the interests of 185 million Americans.”
The public left no doubt where it stood. By a 58 to 22 percent margin, it approved of the president’s pressure to force the steel companies to reverse course. Not surprisingly, two-thirds of the nation’s blue-collar workers backed Kennedy. And even business and professional people came down on his side by 45 to 34 percent. His general approval rating stood at 73 percent. If Kennedy were running against Nixon now, Gallup asked, whom would you favor? Two-thirds of the respondents chose Kennedy.
Kennedy was not confident he could force a price rollback, but he felt compelled to try. “I can’t go make a speech like that … and then go sit on my ass,” he told Bradlee. Bobby agreed, seeing inaction as “bad for the country—it would have been bad internally—and it would have been bad all around the world, because it would have indicated that the country was run by a few manufacturers. I don’t think we would ever have reestablished ourselves.” Kennedy ordered Bobby to have his antitrust division investigate possible steel collusion, urged Congress to conduct its own investigation, and directed Solicitor General Archibald Cox to draft legislation requiring a rollback. Anyone in the administration acquainted with a steel executive was directed to pressure him. The Defense Department began shifting contracts to smaller steel companies that were holding the price line. Bobby turned loose the FBI to speak to steel executives and reporters about price-fixing. An FBI agent phoned an A.P. journalist at 3:00 A.M. and insisted on interviewing him an hour later at his house about a story he had written on the steel companies. Bobby later described how they went for broke in investigating the steel executives: “Their expense accounts and where they’d been and what they were doing. I picked up all their records and told the FBI to interview them all—march into their offices the next day. We weren’t going to go slowly …. All of them were hit with meetings the next morning by agents. All of them were subpoenaed for their personal records. All of them were subpoenaed for their company records …. It was a tough way to operate. But under the circumstances, we couldn’t afford to lose.”
Kennedy also enlisted Clark Clifford in the campaign. “Can’t you just see Clifford outlining the possible courses of action the Government can take if they showed signs of not moving?” Kennedy asked navy undersecretary Paul “Red” Fay. “Do you know what you’re doing when you start bucking the power of the President of the United States? I don’t think U.S. Steel or any other of the major steel companies wants to have Internal Revenue agents checking all the expense accounts of their top executives …. Too many hotel bills and night club expenses would be hard to get by the weekly wives’ bridge group out at the Country Club.”
Convinced that they were acting in the national interest and knowing the public was decisively on their side, the Kennedys felt free to pressure the steel executives by all possible means—even if it meant crossing legal boundaries. Since they believed that Blough and his collaborators had acted ruthlessly, they saw no reason to worry about legal niceties or be less than ruthless in return. Besides, as Kennedy’s jocular comments on Bobby’s actions demonstrated, he and his brother enjoyed the forceful response they gave the steel men. It was all reminiscent of their college sporting contests in which the toughest competitor won. And they had won.
The pressure was more than the steel industry could bear. Inland Steel, the most productive and profitable of all the companies, led by Joseph Block, a Blough adversary and a Kennedy admirer, declared that it felt very strongly about holding down prices. When Kaiser and Armco agreed, and Bethlehem, the second-largest company, fearing losses to competitors with lower prices, announced a change of policy, all the other offenders gave in. Blough tried to save face and profits by asking how Kennedy would respond to a 50 percent reduction in the price hike, but Kennedy insisted on a full rollback. He instructed his aides to guard against any public gloating. He would have enough difficulties with the hard feelings bound to surface in the business community and among conservatives over his take-no-prisoners approach to the steel executives. But in private, he could not resist some mirth over his victory. When Schlesinger asked him how a White House meeting with Blough on April 17, four days after the reversal, had gone, Kennedy, remembering Grant and Lee at Appomattox, joked, “I told him that his men could keep their horses for the spring plowing.” And at a private White House dinner with family members and close friends, Kennedy offered a toast to Bobby. He reported a conversation with Republic Steel president Jim Patton: “I was telling Patton what a son of a bitch he was,” Kennedy said to much laughter, “and he was proving it. Patton asked me, ‘Why is it that all the telephone calls of all the steel executives in all the country are being tapped?’ And I told him that … he was being wholly unfair to the attorney general and that I was sure that it wasn’t true. And he asked me, ‘Why is it that all the income tax returns of all the steel executives in all the country are being scrutinized?’ And I told him that, too, was wholly unfair, that the attorney general wouldn’t do any such thing,” Kennedy said with mock horror. “And then I called the attorney general and asked him why he was tapping the telephones of all the steel executives and examining all [their] tax returns … and the attorney general told me that was wholly untrue and unfair. And of course, Patton was right.” To the further amusement of the guests, Bobby interrupted to explain, “They were mean to my brother. They can’t do that to my brother.”
In public, Kennedy tried to ease tensions with the country’s business leaders. At an April 18 press conference, he announced that the administration “harbors no ill will against any individual, any industry, corporation, or segment of the American economy.” He decried feelings of hostility or vindictiveness as destructive to economic growth and price stability. “When a mistake has been retracted and the public interest preserved, nothing is to be gained from further public recrimination …. And we agree on the necessity of preserving the Nation’s confidence in free, private, collective bargaining and price decisions, holding the role of Government to the minimum level needed to protect the public interest.” In a speech to the chamber of commerce at the end of the month, he discussed present and future government relations with business and tried to clear away “the dust of controversy that occasionally rises to obscure the basic issues and the basic relationships.” He assured his audience that he did not wish to add decisions about prices for particular goods to the burdens he confronted as president. He also assured them that no administration could survive if it were anti-business and anti-growth. Quoting the Bible, he described “ ‘a time for every purpose under the heaven … a time to cast away stones and a time to gather stones together.’ And ladies and gentlemen, I believe it is time for us all to gather stones together to build this country as it must be built in the coming years.”
But businessmen and conservative publications were unforgiving. They complained of price-fixing by the White House and the administration’s police state tactics. They compared Kennedy to Mussolini, called his actions “quasi-Fascist” and better suited to the Soviet Union than a free enterprise America. Conservative Arizona senator Barry Goldwater described the president as trying to “socialize the business of the country.” Businessmen proudly wore buttons identifying them as members of the “S.O.B. Club.”Bumper stickers announced: “Help Kennedy Stamp Out Free Enterprise,” and “I Miss Ike—Hell, I Even Miss Harry.” On May 28, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell almost 6.5 percent, the greatest one-day decline since the market collapse on October 28, 1929, investors blamed it on the administration’s “anti-business” views and the steel rollback in particular. Wall Street joked that the drop caused Joe to speak for the first time since his stroke: “To think I voted for that son-of-a-bitch.”
When the White House rashly canceled its subscription to the New York Herald Tribune in anger over stories that Kennedy saw as “patently false articles”—including an accusation that his steel actions would win Khrushchev’s approval—he gracefully acknowledged his mistake to the press. “Well, I am reading more and enjoying it less,” he told a May news conference. The press was “doing their task, as a critical branch, the fourth estate. And I am attempting to do mine. And we are going to live together for a period, and then go our separate ways,” he said to the amusement of the reporters. Kennedy also had to defend the FBI’s “nocturnal activities” or postmidnight interviews with reporters about their sources for stories on price-fixing.
Whatever Kennedy’s overreach in pressuring steel into a stand-down, it would have all but crippled his presidency to have passively accepted a price increase that could have deepened the country’s economic problems. And regardless of what it did to the economy, accepting the increase would have made him look weak, and, in the eyes of many abroad, like a cipher who took his marching orders from business moguls. Worse, it would have added to the feeling in Moscow that he could be had—that, as Theodore Roosevelt said of McKinley, he had the backbone of a chocolate éclair. Meeting the challenge from the steel executives head-on was possibly even more essential for the success of Kennedy’s foreign policy than for the management of his many problems at home, a classic example of a challenge in one sphere whose ultimate effects are felt in another.
AT THE END OF 1961, Richard Neustadt gave the White House a one-year assessment of Kennedy’s presidential leadership. The president had established himself as an impressive leader, Neustadt asserted. His high Gallup approval ratings were “no accident,” but the product of smart politics, which was “an enormous asset for the President and for our government.” Part of Kennedy’s success resulted from his sensible efforts “to scale down public expectations of the future, to promote realism about our situation in the world, our power and our prospects. For the first time since World War II,”Neustadt wrote, “we’ve been offered no ‘light at the end of the tunnel,’ no assurance that this next effort … will turn the tide or do the trick. Instead, the theme has been cool, relatively unimpassioned: if we persevere we may end neither red nor dead …. From what I can observe of his sense of timing, Cuba aside, Kennedy strikes me more than ever as the ablest politician who has emerged in our age-group, very conceivably the ablest since FDR.”
Neustadt’s analysis gratified Kennedy, but at the start of 1962, he understood that he was a long way from significant presidential achievements. And before he could lay claim to noteworthy gains, he would have to hold the Congress for his party, and—more important but less likely—help elect additional cooperative congressmen and senators. History made it seem like a nearly impossible task: Only once in the last hundred years—1934—had a president managed to strengthen his hold on Congress in midterm elections. To have any chance, Kennedy believed that he would have to shift ground from his first year and give higher priority to domestic issues than to foreign affairs and convince Americans that effective reforms depended on their giving him a more supportive Congress.
Kennedy’s State of the Union Message on January 11 reflected his eagerness for domestic advance. “Our overriding obligation in the months ahead,” he declared, “is to fulfill the world’s hopes by fulfilling our own faith.” Unless we could achieve our national ideals, others around the globe would see no reason to follow our lead. During the past year, the economy had left “the valley of recession” for “the high road of recovery and growth.” America’s economy, which Khrushchev had called a “stumbling horse,” was “racing to new records in consumer spending, labor income, and industrial production.” Yet unemployment remained at over 6 percent, and legislation to train people for a changed job market coupled with an 8 percent investment tax credit to spur greater productivity were essential to additional economic expansion. And to bar against another recession, Kennedy asked for standby authority to reduce taxes and speed up federally aided capital-improvement programs, and for permanent higher unemployment benefits. Kennedy also asked for help in achieving a balanced budget, urban renewal, and a new comprehensive farm program to sustain production and conservation. These measures would show the world that “a free economy need not be an unstable economy,” but the most productive and “most stable form of organization yet fashioned by man.”
Civil rights, health and welfare, and education reforms were necessary complements to economic advance. Full and equal rights—to vote, to travel without hindrance across state lines, and to have access to free public education—required fresh actions by the executive, the courts, and the Congress. The acts of every branch of government, Kennedy said, should make the hundredth anniversary in January 1963 of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation a demonstration that “righteousness does exalt a nation.” Help to the indigent, stressing “services instead of support, rehabilitation instead of relief, and training for useful work instead of prolonged dependency,” would mark America out as a compassionate nation. So would improvements in the country’s health care system, including the creation of National Institutes of Health to expand research, a mass immunization program to stamp out polio, diphtheria, whooping cough, and tetanus among children, improved food and drug regulation, and, most of all, health insurance for the aged. Education was no less important. Kennedy declared his intention to press the case for a program to overcome illiteracy of eight million Americans and to renew his call for federal aid to elementary, secondary, and higher education. “Civilization,” Kennedy said, quoting H. G. Wells, “is a race between education and catastrophe. It is up to you in this Congress to determine the winner of that race.”
In the following week, Kennedy held two White House meetings with congressional Democrats to arm them for the 1962 elections and encourage their cooperation with his agenda in the coming congressional session. He pointed to favorable Gallup polls: a 77 percent approval rating; 56 percent who believed that they had an improved standard of living; and millions of Americans who supported welfare reforms, health insurance for the elderly, and federal aid to education. An opinion survey that indicated a 60 to 40 percent split favoring Democratic control of Congress gave Kennedy additional ammunition to press for greater cooperation than in the previous year.
In a document (stamped “Propaganda”) describing the challenge in the House and the Senate to win majority votes and the first session’s major accomplishments, Kennedy emphasized the difficulties of overcoming a southern Democratic–Republican coalition, and the administration’s considerable success in passing thirty-three major bills, compared with eleven during FDR’s 1933 session and twelve in Ike’s 1953 session. Journalists made privy to the administration’s argument responded skeptically, pointing out that Kennedy had lost his aid to education and Medicare fights and that many of the Kennedy laws were not New Frontier measures but extensions of earlier programs. Nevertheless, Kennedy put a briefing paper before the legislators making the case for his successes: No one could attack his government for communist subversion, corruption, inflation, or appeasement; he expected to balance the budget in fiscal 1963; he had avoided a Korea-type war; defense appropriations were up 15 percent; the religion and youth arguments against him had all but disappeared; prosperity was increasing; and farmers were less discontented.
For all Kennedy’s efforts to talk up his legislative accomplishments, a defensive tone revealed his own doubts and his limited interest in domestic affairs. And despite leading his State of the Union Message with a discussion of domestic issues, he focused nearly 60 percent of the address on international affairs: national security, the U.N., Latin America, new and developing nations, the Atlantic community, the balance of payments, and trade.
The discrepancy was further reflected in Kennedy’s limited domestic accomplishments during the first half of 1962. His strong remarks about civil rights in his State of the Union speech did not translate into significant gains between January and July. Limited public support for aggressive actions made the White House reluctant to ask for a civil rights bill or to step up the use of Executive Orders. In April, when Gallup asked, “What do you think is the most important problem facing the country?” only 6 percent said racial problems or segregation, compared with 63 percent who answered, “War, peace, international tension.” In May, 67 percent of an opinion survey thought that the administration was pushing integration either enough or too fast; only 11 percent believed it was not fast enough. Kennedy was too much of a politician to challenge such numbers, however sad was the nation’s seeming indifference to the moral imperative of ending segregation.
The Kennedys remained sensitive to black complaints about ongoing racial bias, but they continued to hope that executive action would be sufficient. Although Johnson and the CEEO had managed to get a majority of the government’s largest contractors to sign up for the Plans for Progress program, by the fall of 1961, the New York Times reported that solid gains in black employment were not evident. One CEEO staff member described company commitments to more jobs for blacks as not “worth the paper they were written on, they were just absolutely meaningless documents.” Kennedy himself worried that Plans would “turn out to be a fraud or a delusion or an illusion, that there were a lot of plans signed and then no Negroes would be hired.” A staff shake-up in the program and a shift from voluntary to compulsory compliance made for some advances in black hiring but hardly enough to make a dent in the double-digit unemployment of African Americans, twice that of whites.
Although the bad news overshadowed the modest gains in the program, it was the first time any White House had made a serious effort to compel integration by companies on government contracts. Moreover, Plans for Progress heightened public consciousness of racial bias, which excluded blacks from jobs or kept them in the lowest ranks of company employees. The administration also prided itself on other substantive and symbolic civil rights initiatives: an advisory committee on integration in the armed forces; Justice Department suits in behalf of school integration in seven southern states; investigations and suits in seventy-five southern counties over excluding blacks from the polls; and a successful appeal to use the 1957 Civil Rights Act against arbitrary state prosecutions of blacks. At the same time, the Kennedys resigned their memberships in the Metropolitan and Cosmos clubs in Washington, D.C., in protest against a whites-only policy and pressured restaurant owners along Highway 40 in Maryland north of Baltimore, the most traveled route by African diplomats between Washington and the United Nations, to serve customers without regard for race.
At the same time, however, the White House continued to be less than forthcoming in fulfilling its promise to integrate federally financed housing. In the fall of 1961, Wofford told Kennedy that his housing pledge was his most specific commitment on civil rights and “certainly the best remembered by Negroes.” A failure to issue an Executive Order “would seriously jeopardize all our gains to date.” But in January 1962, when a reporter asked Kennedy why he intended to postpone this integration order “for some time,” he answered defensively that his administration had “made more progress in the field of civil rights on a whole variety of fronts than were made in the last 8 years.” He added that he would meet his responsibilities on the housing matter when he believed it would be in the public interest. In April, he publicly welcomed a Civil Rights Commission inquiry into equal opportunity in housing in Washington, D.C., but continued to resist pressure for an Executive Order. In August, when a White House counsel prepared an Executive Order, the president asked that the document remain confidential; he continued to believe that it would undermine his 1962 legislative program and weaken Democratic chances in November by antagonizing southern congressmen and voters. Allowing politics to trump a transparently moral commitment served neither JFK’s legislative agenda nor his reputation for acting in behalf of social arrangements that did the nation’s democratic traditions proud.
Civil rights advocates were also ambivalent about the administration’s record on judicial appointments. During the first eighteen months of his term, the president nominated Thurgood Marshall to join William H. Hastie as the only blacks ever chosen for appointment to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Moreover, in the spring of 1962, when Kennedy had the chance to make his first Supreme Court selection, he considered nominating Hastie, but Chief Justice Earl Warren and Associate Justice William O. Douglas opposed him on the grounds that Hastie was insufficiently liberal. Kennedy then turned to Deputy Attorney General Byron White, but told Schlesinger, “I figure that I will have several more appointments before I am through, and I mean to appoint [Paul] Freund [at the Harvard Law School], Arthur Goldberg and Bill Hastie.”
Limited actions and hopes to expand the number of African Americans on the bench, however, could not balance the five southern racists Kennedy appointed to federal judgeships: Clarence Allgood and Walter Gewin of Alabama, Robert Elliott of Georgia, E. Gordon West of Louisiana, and William Harold Cox of Mississippi. During their tenure, they did all in their power to obstruct school integration and deny voting rights to blacks. West dismissed the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling as “one of the truly regrettable decisions of all time.” Cox, whose opinions were often reversed by higher courts, was an even more outspoken opponent of civil rights. His injudiciousness was stunning. In open court, he shouted at black plaintiffs that they were “a bunch of niggers … acting like a bunch of chimpanzees.”
None of this should have surprised the president and attorney general. Early on, NAACP executive secretary Roy Wilkins had wired the president about Cox: On the bench, he would stand for “the mores of 1861. For 986,000 Negro Mississippians Judge Cox will be another strand in their barbed wire fence, another cross over their weary shoulders and another rock in the road up which their young people must struggle.” Furthermore, Bobby had interviewed Cox at the Justice Department. “We sat on my couch in my office, and I talked to him. And I said that the great reservation that I had was whether he’d enforce the law and live up to the Constitution …. He assured me that he would. He was really, I think, the only judge whom I’ve ever had that kind of conversation with. He was very gracious. He said that there wouldn’t be any problem …. I was convinced that he was honest with me and he wasn’t.”
There was much more at work here than Bobby’s naïveté. The tradition of deferring to Senate prerogative and assuring cooperation on a legislative program were more compelling than anything Cox told him. Cox was a good friend of Mississippi’s Senator James Eastland, actually his college roommate, and Eastland’s power as chairman of the Judiciary Committee was enough to produce the deference Eastland expected for his choice. Though Bobby denied discussing Cox with Eastland, he later told an interviewer, “The President of the United States is attempting to obtain the passage of important legislation in many, many fields, and the appointment of a judge who is recommended by the chairman of a committee or a key figure on a committee can make the whole difference on his legislative program.”
Though Wilkins told Kennedy that he had not “gained anything [in 1961] by refusing to put a civil rights bill before” Congress, Kennedy hoped that his restraint might pay off in the Eighty-seventh Congress’s second session. “He wasn’t a man to give up easily,” Wilkins admitted, though it was more than stubbornness motivating Kennedy. In fact, Kennedy had few hopes his patience would now result in less legislative friction over civil rights. Instead, he felt that his deference to the southerners on civil rights might get them to act on education or Medicare, issues that politically would be much more advantageous for him.
But it was a hope misplaced. In October 1961, HEW secretary Abe Ribicoff had told him that “the passage of any broad-scale education legislation will be a most difficult task.” A personal survey of congressional and public sentiment had convinced Ribicoff not to expect any affirmative action. “A broad program of grants to States for public school construction and teacher’s salaries is virtually impossible to pass. There is substantial Southern opposition to any bill for elementary and secondary schools …. Republican opposition to any general aid bill is strong, and is overwhelming against teachers’ salaries.” Ribicoff saw three principal impediments to reform: southern determination to preserve segregated schools, opposition to eroding local control over education, and resistance to providing aid to private or religion-based schools. Although he suggested a piecemeal approach in the coming session as an alternative to the failed comprehensive one in 1961, Ribicoff also believed that another unsuccessful effort at a more comprehensive bill might turn out to be useful in the upcoming elections.
Kennedy agreed, which is not to suggest that he saw education as principally a political tool. He strongly believed in the need for federal aid to education at all levels as essential to progress at home and abroad. But taking a bold stand on education, despite its poor legislative prospects, seemed a good way to counter liberal complaints about his timidity on civil rights and win Democratic backing in 1962.
It was much the same with medical insurance for the elderly. In February 1962, Kennedy reintroduced his bill to provide health coverage for the aged under Social Security. He encouraged public rallies to pressure Congress, publicly thanked a group of physicians favoring his program, spoke passionately in support of his bill before twenty thousand people at Madison Square Garden, and took on the American Medical Association for opposing Social Security and calling his proposal “a cruel hoax.” But Kennedy’s passion (and that of organized labor and senior citizens) was insufficient to identify a formula that would disarm conservative opponents and satisfy a majority of liberal advocates. In July, the administration’s medical insurance bill failed in the Senate, where it fell short by 52 to 48. One newspaper summarized the defeat as “Kennedy’s Blackest Week with Congress.” Kennedy himself called the vote “a most serious defeat for every American family.” Once again, the only good news here was the political advantage it seemed to give Kennedy in pressing his party’s case for more congressional seats. (When asked if the fact that twenty-one Senate Democrats voted against him on the insurance plan would tend “to inhibit [him] in setting this forth as an issue,” Kennedy replied that it would not: “The fact of the matter is this administration is for Medicare and two-thirds of the Democrats are for Medicare and seven-eighths of the Republicans are against it. And that seems to me to be the issue.”)
Other domestic problems dogged him during the first half of 1962. In April, he sent Congress a special message on the nation’s transportation system, which he described as vital to domestic growth and productivity and the ability to compete abroad. “A chaotic patchwork of inconsistent and often obsolete legislation and regulation” burdened the country’s movement by air, ground, rail, and water. “Fundamental and far-reaching” changes in federal policies were essential to ensure the national well-being. And while he went on to describe in detail the many difficulties besetting everything from interstate highways to international aviation and inner-city traffic, he acknowledged that he had no clear answers and that Congress would need to “devote considerable time and effort” to identifying means to fend off “permanent loss of essential services,” which would then compel “even more difficult and costly solutions in the not-too-distant future.”
POLITICS WAS ANOTHER CHALLENGE. After Kennedy’s election as president, the family had decided to run brother Edward—Ted, as he was called—for Jack’s vacant Senate seat. But Ted could not hold the office until 1962, when he would turn thirty, the minimum age required by the Constitution. In December 1961, Jack tested the waters with a rumor published in the Boston Globe about Ted’s candidacy. When House majority leader John W. McCormack called the president to propose his own nephew, Massachusetts attorney general Edward McCormack, as an interim appointment, Kennedy had replied, “I’m putting someone in. I want to save that seat for my brother.”
Though the governor of Massachusetts technically held the appointment power, the selection was Kennedy’s call. The interim appointee was Benjamin A. Smith, Kennedy’s college friend, who was to stand aside for Ted in two years. Assumptions that Bobby was in line for the seat and that a likely political backlash against Kennedy nepotism would derail the plan both proved false. With regard to the former, Bobby’s collaboration with his brother inside the administration made him too valuable to send to the Senate. Besides, Ted was eager to run, and Joe insisted on it. Bobby remembered Joe as the moving force behind the decision. “He just felt that Teddy had worked all this time during the campaign and sacrificed himself for his older brother,” Bobby said, “that we had our positions, and so he should have the right to run.”
But Kennedy himself had doubts. Teddy was twenty-nine in 1961, with no credentials to speak of other than having worked on his brother’s 1958 and 1960 campaigns. He told Ted to test the waters in Massachusetts by speaking around the state. “I’ll hear whether you are really making a mark up there,” Kennedy told him. “I will tell you whether this is something that you ought to seriously consider.” But Joe saw no need for an apprenticeship or any test. “He felt that it was a mistake to run for any position lower than [U.S. senator],” Bobby remembered. “Certainly, he was as qualified as Eddie McCormack to run for the Senate or anybody else who was being mentioned in Massachusetts, [people] who were perhaps older but weren’t particularly outstanding figures.”
Kennedy remained uncertain nevertheless. In January 1962, a reporter asked the president, “Your brother, Teddy, in Massachusetts, seems to be running for something but none of us are very certain just what it is. Could you tell us if you have had an opportunity to discuss this with him and whether you can tell us the secret?” Kennedy replied, “Well, I think he’s the man … who’s running and he’s the man to discuss it with.” In March, when Ted announced his candidacy, he stated his opposition to his brother’s involvement in his campaign. It was a strategy for reducing the president’s political liability. “Well, in part, I am aware of the campaign,” Kennedy told the press, “but my brother is carrying this campaign on his own and will conduct it in that way.” In May, when a reporter asked the president about reports of “administration aid and comfort to [Ted’s] senatorial campaign,” Kennedy reiterated his distance from the primary contest. “What about your associates, sir?” a reporter probed further. “No member of the White House staff is planning to go to the [state] convention, nor will be, to the best of my knowledge, in Massachusetts between now and the convention.”
But of course, JFK, Bobby, and the White House were deeply involved. For starters, they schooled Ted to talk of a Kennedy dynasty with good-natured humor. When Kennedy biographer James MacGregor Burns told JFK of his interest in the seat and declared, “I ’m sure I’m about number 99 on your list,” Jack graciously, but evasively, replied, “Oh, no, Jim, you’re number two or three.” When a reporter complained of “too many Kennedys,” Ted joked, “You should have taken that up with my mother and father.” Reluctant to step on Ted’s line, Kennedy responded to the same complaint with the deadpan observation, as “my brother pointed out, there are nine members of my family. It is a big family. They are all interested in public life.” And the great issues were, after all, centered in the nation’s capital.
According to Adam Clymer, Ted’s biographer, Kennedy “made it clear that a defeat would be not just Ted’s loss, but his own, too, and would not be tolerated.” In March, as Ted prepared to go on Meet the Press, Kennedy brought him into the Oval Office, sat him down behind his desk, and questioned him like a prosecuting attorney. (Kennedy ultimately was too nervous to watch his brother’s performance, which was more than adequate.) At a secret White House meeting of Massachusetts politicians in April, some of whom flew in from Boston under assumed names, the president pressured everyone to advance Ted’s candidacy. He “suggested discreetly using patronage.” And though few jobs were apparently delivered, “the hope of them was certainly dangled before a lot of ambitious politicians.” Ted Sorensen provided quotes for speeches and one administration aide took a leave of absence to work directly on Teddy’s campaign.
Kennedy himself dealt with the most potentially explosive issue jeopardizing Ted’s candidacy. In 1951, during Ted’s freshman year at Harvard, the university expelled him for having a classmate take his final exam in Spanish. After almost two years in the army, he returned to Harvard, in September 1953. He graduated in 1956 and went on to the University of Virginia Law School. Fearful that the cheating scandal would become a prominent story in the Boston Globe, the Kennedys decided to keep control of the issue by revealing it themselves. The president invited a Globe reporter to the White House, where he offered to provide Ted’s Harvard file if the reporter would mute the incident by including it in a biographical profile. Though the Globe insisted on making the profile a front-page story, it buried the details of the scandal in the fifth paragraph of an account innocuously headlined “Ted Kennedy Tells About Harvard Examination Incident.” Other papers featured the story the next day, but they were no more than echoes of the Globe’s report. And with the Globe, now the state’s leading newspaper, downplaying the incident, Ted’s vulnerability was greatly reduced. It was an emphatic demonstration of shrewd politics and the press’s friendly attitude toward a president they liked and were reluctant to undermine.
Kennedy worried nevertheless that the scandal would hurt Ted’s chances of election. “It won’t go over with the WASPs,” he told Ben Bradlee. “They take a very dim view of looking over your shoulder at someone else’s exam paper. They go in more for stealing from stockholders and bankers.” The president urged Bradlee to have Newsweek look into the record of Eddie McCormack, Ted’s likely primary opponent. “I asked him what he meant,” Bradlee recalled, “and [he] told me that McCormack had resigned his commission in the Navy on the day he graduated from Annapolis on a medical disability. ‘Half of it was nerves and half of it was a bad back,’ ” Kennedy explained, “ ‘and he’s been drawing a 60 percent disability ever since up until six months ago.’ ” It was a perfect example of Kennedy hardball politics. Bradlee never investigated the allegation, but it put him in mind of the maxim “Don’t get mad, get even.”
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 had given 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.”