What is there in this place that a man should ever want to get into it?
—President James A. Garfield, 1881
IN THE SPRING of 1962, a reporter asked the president about the frustration mobilized reservists were feeling at being held in the service while other young men enjoyed a “normal life.” Kennedy praised the reservists’ contribution to the nation’s security and sympathized with their complaints. “There is always inequity in life,” he observed. “Some men are killed in war and some men are wounded, and some men never leave the country, and some men are stationed in the Antarctic and some are stationed in San Francisco. It’s very hard in military or in personal life to assure complete equality. Life is unfair. Some people are sick and others are well.”
His observation was grounded in his own life experience. His good fortune in being a privileged American, his health problems (which his family’s wealth and status could not prevent or master), his brother Joe’s and sister Kathleen’s accidental deaths, his sister Rosemary’s retardation, his brush with death during the war, and the circumstances that had elevated him to the presidency by the narrowest of margins had made Kennedy philosophical about the uncertainties affecting everyone’s life.
He saw his time in office as partly a case study in the fortuitous—a coming together of uncontrollable events challenging his judgment and resiliency. Nothing had been easy. Despite an eighty-eight-seat margin in the House and a twenty-nine-seat advantage in the Senate, the Congress had bottled up his principal legislative initiatives. Rhetorical and administrative expressions of support for civil rights had won little appreciation from liberals and angered many in the South. In response to continuing economic sluggishness, tensions with business chiefs, and talk of a recession in 1964, critics complained that he was an ineffective domestic leader. The Bay of Pigs failure, the acrimonious exchanges with Khrushchev in Vienna, the crisis over Berlin, the collapse of arms control talks and the resumption of nuclear testing, Western European questions about U.S. commitments to the region’s defense, doubts about the Alliance for Progress, the uncertain settlement in Laos, and the continuing crisis in South Vietnam had raised questions about his mastery of foreign affairs also.
All these difficulties made Kennedy think that he might be a one-term president. He intended to fight as hard as he could for reelection and hoped that events might favor him in the next two and a half years, but he knew how quickly public sentiment could change. Though he still enjoyed solid backing from the public, by the summer of 1962 his approval ratings had dropped from the 70s into the 60s.
As a realist, someone who prided himself on not blinking away unpleasant facts about his political fortunes, Kennedy began to think about his legacy, or the way in which historians would view his presidency. He was eager to ensure that they saw all its complexities and gave a sympathetic hearing to the many challenges he or any other president would have faced in the 1960s. As an amateur historian with two books to his credit, he knew how important a detailed contemporary record was to an accurate reconstruction of the past. After reading Barbara Tuchman’s bestselling 1962 book, The Guns of August, a recounting of the miscalculations that drove the great powers into World War I, Kennedy focused on a 1914 conversation between two German leaders. “How did it all happen?” one asked. “Ah,” the other replied, “if only one knew.” Kennedy told White House staff members, “If this planet is ever ravaged by nuclear war—and if the survivors of that devastation can then endure the fire, poison, chaos and catastrophe—I do not want one of those survivors to ask another, ‘How did it all happen?’ and to receive the incredible reply: ‘Ah, if only one knew.’ ”
With this in mind, in July 1962, Kennedy installed taping systems in the White House. Kennedy instructed a secret service agent to install recording devices in the Cabinet Room, Oval Office, and the library of the executive mansion. The agent placed reel-to-reel tape recorders in a basement room of the West Wing and connected them by wires to microphones hidden behind wall drapes in the Cabinet Room and under the president’s desk and a coffee table in the Oval Office. Inconspicuous buttons at the Cabinet Room table and the president’s desk allowed Kennedy to record conversations as he chose. A Dictaphone connected to an Oval Office telephone allowed him to record phone conversations as well. Initially, only two secret service agents and Evelyn Lincoln knew about the tapes, though by 1963 Bobby and his secretary, Angie Novello, also knew. The 260 hours of recordings—248 hours of meetings and 12 hours of telephone conversations—provide an important window on Kennedy’s decision making over the next sixteen months. The tapes demonstrate more clearly than any other source can the daunting domestic and foreign problems that threatened to unhinge the economy, provoke civil strife, and, worst of all, trigger a nuclear war.
Kennedy was not simply self-serving in deciding what to tape. He wanted a realistic record of what shaped events. If he hoped to demonstrate the inhibitions placed on presidential achievements, he could not solely tape flattering depictions of his effectiveness. The tapes certainly include discussions that little serve his historical reputation. Nor did he use the tapes to make speeches that would impress future listeners. As scholars Philip Zelikow and Ernest May have pointed out, he “could hardly have known just what statements or positions would look good to posterity, for neither he nor his colleagues could know how the stories would turn out.”
That said, holes remain. Three tapes, Zelikow and May add, may have been “cut and spliced, for two of these tapes … concerned intelligence issues and may have involved discussion of covert efforts to assassinate Castro.” It is also possible that embarrassing passages involving Marilyn Monroe and Judith Campbell Exner were removed. In addition, a small number of tapes may have been destroyed or lost. There are, for example, unopened transcripts at the Kennedy Library for four missing tapes, which may contain embarrassing revelations or national security secrets. By and large, however, the tapes seem to provide a faithful record of some of the most important events in Kennedy’s presidency, and of the constant burdens of a working president.
MAINTAINING ECONOMIC GROWTH and lowering the unemployment rate were constant, daunting concerns in 1962. The stock market tumble on May 28 sent a wave of fear through the White House. Memos flew back and forth on how to bolster business and consumer confidence. Should the president make a statement? Kennedy’s advisers opposed the idea as likely to do more harm than good. Instead, Kennedy asked Congress to cut taxes.
From the perspective of forty years later, after Richard Nixon’s announcement in 1971 that “we are all Keynesians now,” and Republican advocacy under Reagan and both George Bushes of lower taxes, it is difficult to recapture the boldness attached to Kennedy’s requests in June 1962 for an immediate 40 percent reduction in corporate tax rates and comprehensive tax reform beginning in January 1963. Kennedy was convinced that America’s tax system was a drag on the economy, and he looked particularly to Western Europe, where tax rates were lower and growth double that of the United States. Heller concurred. Though Kennedy was not ready to provide details on “the range of the net tax cut,” it was clear that he would ask for a substantial reduction in the 50 percent rate that Americans in the $32,000 to $36,000 income bracket were paying and a cut in the 91 percent assessment on marginal income over $400,000.
In a national culture that put a high premium on frugality and balanced budgets, Kennedy faced considerable hostility from an orthodoxy preaching the economic and moral dangers of deficits and debt. A Gallup poll asking whether people favored a tax cut if it increased government debt showed 72 percent opposed and only 19 percent in favor. To contain public concern that he might be jeopardizing the nation’s future by risking unbalanced budgets, Kennedy described the tax reductions in terms of millions rather than billions: business was to get a $1,300 million tax credit rather than a $1.3 billion reduction; the potential budget surplus of $8,000 million, however, was stated as $8 billion, and the increase in the gross national product was also described as in the billions.
Opposition to tax cuts was not just on the conservative side. Ken Galbraith warned the president that “a very large part of American conservative and business opinion” would “argue with great enthusiasm for a tax reduction …. Of course, after the taxes are reduced, these people will … attack you for an unbalanced budget.” Galbraith saw “a nasty congressional brawl with a disagreeable aftermath. What will satisfy the liberals will outrage the rich and vice-versa. Both, in the end, will be angry at the Administration.” When JFK lectured Galbraith on the virtues of Keynesianism, Galbraith acknowledged his standing as “a charter member of the worshipful following,” but observed that “the orthodoxy is always one step behind the problem. And so it is now that Keynes is official.” Instead of a tax cut, Galbraith wanted an attack on “the infinity of problems that beset a growing population and an increasingly complex society in an increasingly competitive world. To do this well,” Galbraith advised, “costs the money that the reducers would deny.”
But Kennedy saw Galbraith’s iconoclasm as less convincing than Heller’s. The great economic challenge for Americans, Kennedy believed, was to abandon outworn clichés about deficits. In a commencement address at Yale in June, he asserted that “the great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie … but the myth,” the dogged attachment “to the clichés of our forebears … the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.” And the myths about fiscal policy, he said, “are legion and the truth hard to find.” The experience of the last fifteen years demonstrated that old slogans about deficits creating inflation and surpluses preventing it were out of date. Public and private debt could fuel expansion and strength.
Kennedy’s sense of urgency about the tax cut increased at the end of June when Heller recounted the “storm signals … rolling in at a rapid rate …. A dozen top economists—of varying political and methodological hues—agreed that there was little hope for a spontaneous revival in the months ahead.” Moreover, in July, Heller worried that the “millions of stockholders who have recently taken a drubbing feel the Administration is rather detached and inert about the whole thing.” Toward the end of the month, it was clear that the economy remained sluggish. Although consumer purchasing had remained steady and some corporate profits were better than expected, business investment, on which economic expansion and lower unemployment depended, remained below expectations.
Yet the Congress was not ready, one opposing congressman even charging that the president had used “rigged data” to support a tax reduction. “It is clear,” Ted Sorensen told the president on August 9, “on the basis of the hearings now completed that neither this committee nor the Congress would approve an immediate tax cut before adjourning next month.”
Despite a jump in unemployment from 5.3 to 5.8 percent in August, and gloomy September estimates on the economy, Kennedy decided that political resistance made an immediate tax cut impossible. Believing it essential for the next year, however, he began trying to convert Wilbur Mills, the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, to the idea. In two White House conversations in August, they agreed that the economy remained sluggish and would not expand as fast as they had hoped. But unless Congress saw the country as at least in a recession, Mills said, it would be reluctant to follow Kennedy’s lead. Kennedy conceded that a proposal would complicate the political lives of Democrats running for reelection in November. “If I go up and ask for a tax cut now,” he told Mills, it might suggest that the economy was troubled, that “the Democrats have failed to bring the economy back,” and that “they’re fiscally irresponsible. And a lot of bastards then come out and say they’re not for a tax cut, and … [they] will break with me. And in other words, it will make our problem almost impossible come November.”
With additional evidence in September and October that the economic expansion of 1961–62 was “running out of gas,” and that the AFL-CIO was increasingly unhappy with an administration that promised more than it delivered, Kennedy stiffened his resolve to press Congress to enact a landmark tax bill in 1963. But for now, he expected nothing.
In July, the White House had begun a series of meetings—luncheons, dinners, discussions—with business leaders and the business press. The president, the CEA, and cabinet officials briefed corporate chiefs on the state of the economy and the need for a tax cut to fuel expansion. Kennedy believed that the meetings were doing some good. After one July luncheon of businessmen at the White House, Thomas Lamont of IBM told the president that he seemed to be “fully aware of the important role which business plays in our national economy” and that his detailed knowledge of the problems businessmen faced had impressed his guests. In addition, his appeal to them for modern policies that left outdated economic thinking behind had had some effect.
Nevertheless Kennedy resented having to cultivate educated and generally sophisticated executives, many of whom seemed blinded by bias and self-doubt. The business community had lost confidence in itself, Kennedy told Schlesinger. “Whenever I say anything that upsets them, businessmen just die. I have to spend time and energy trying to prop them up.” A Gallup poll showing that only one in five businessmen labeled Kennedy as “anti-business” failed to convince the president that he could take them for granted.
The only unqualified point of agreement Kennedy had with his business antagonists was the need to reduce the unfavorable balance of payments. He still shared corporate fears of a gold drain that could force devaluation of the dollar and bring on economic disaster. His answer to the problem was the Trade Expansion bill he had put before Congress in January 1962, which would allow him to negotiate lower tariffs with Europe’s Common Market countries and increase U.S. exports. Seven months later, the bill still not passed, Kennedy called it “the most important measure to be considered by many a Congress … vital to the future of this country …. If we cannot make new trade bargains with the Common Market in the coming year,” he said, “our export surplus will decline, more plants will move to Europe, and the flow of gold away from these shores will become more intensified.” Kennedy predicted that expanded trade arising from passage of his bill would boost employment in the United States as well as bring the balance of payments under control.
Some opponents worried that the law would give the Japanese and Europeans trade advantages harmful to a variety of industries in the United States. But supporters of the bill invested it with miraculous powers. One distinguished columnist with a reputation for detached analysis saw the bill as “the unifying intellectual principle of the New Frontier.” Its failure would cause the United States “to default on power [and] resign from history.” Evangelists for the law like George Ball made a point of wearing “a suit made in Britain, shoes manufactured in Hong Kong, and a silk tie made in France.”
If Kennedy’s support did not run to that extreme, he nevertheless saw the bill as easing some of his difficulties with the U.S. business community as well as serving the national well-being. After the bill passed Congress by lopsided margins in October, he called it “the most important international piece of legislation … affecting economics since the Marshall Plan. It marks a decisive point for the future of our economy, for our relations with our friends and allies, and for the prospects of free institutions and free societies everywhere.” Yet as the coming year would demonstrate, the bill was no nostrum for the balance of payments, the U.S. economy, or the progress of freedom around the globe. Myth and illusion were not the exclusive preserve of the country’s business community or Americans wedded to balanced budgets.
THROUGHOUT 1962, civil rights remained a distinctly secondary concern alongside domestic worries about the economy and the gold drain. In the first two months after he began taping important conversations, for example, Kennedy recorded numerous discussions about international affairs and domestic economic problems but absolutely nothing about civil rights, except for one brief discussion with Johnson about the CEEO. At the end of March, an unsigned White House memo pointed out that “the proper groundwork has not been laid for [civil rights] legislation in Congress. Negroes are not convinced that the Administration is really on their side. Southern whites still believe that the turmoil is a combination of ‘ward politics’ and ‘outside agitators.’ … If legislation is submitted to Congress before the moral issue is clearly drawn, the result will be disaster. The country will be exposed to several weeks of divisive and inflammatory debate. The debate is likely to come to no conclusion—thus disillusioning the Negroes and strengthening the bigots in their conclusion that the country is ‘really with’ them. The Republicans will have a field day. And in addition to the civil rights cause, the President’s whole program will go down the drain.”
The burden was on Kennedy, who needed to “make the kind of moral commitment” that would “rescue the situation and restore unity,” the memo advised. He should ask the three former presidents, Hoover, Eisenhower, and Truman, and Republican congressional leaders for help and to make clear to blacks that “he is on their side because they are right.” He also needed to make the moral case for civil rights in a nationwide TV speech and to hold face-to-face conversations with people across the South—“not as their antagonist, but as their President”—to educate them about “the simple rights and wrongs of the situation.”
It is not clear that Kennedy ever saw this memo, but he felt the heat anyway from civil rights advocates pressing for bolder action. The Civil Rights Commission urged him to support a voting rights law, but the president and Bobby were committed to a less comprehensive strategy—lawsuits against the worst offending southern counties. Seeing this as a form of incrementalism producing uncertain results, the commission planned to hold hearings in Louisiana and Mississippi, where the most pronounced abuses existed, to underscore the need for legislation. Afraid that the commission’s presence in the Deep South would touch off “large scale” violence, Kennedy’s Justice Department resisted.
By 1962, Father Hesburgh and Bobby were locked in a bureaucratic conflict that stunned Harris Wofford and provoked the president’s intervention. Bobby called the commissioners a bunch of “second-guessers” and complained that they were making it more difficult for him to accomplish what needed to be done. “I didn’t have any great feeling that they were accomplishing anything of a positive nature,” Bobby recalled. “It was almost like the House Un-American Activities Committee investigating Communism. They were investigating violations of civil rights in areas in which we were making investigations. I thought that they could do more in the North.” “It’s easy to play Jesus and it’s fun to get into bed with the civil rights movement,” a Justice Department attorney said, “but all of the noise they make doesn’t do as much good as one case.” But Hesburgh, who saw the commission as a “burr under the saddle of the administration,” refused to back off.
Although Bobby was able to delay commission hearings in Louisiana and Mississippi for a while, he lacked authority to stop them. The hearings, which refused to shade the truth and mute tensions between the administration and the white South, described Mississippi as using terror tactics against aspiring black voters. Kennedy himself lobbied against publication of the commission’s report, which recommended withholding federal funds from the state until it demonstrated its “compliance with the Constitution and laws of the United States.” “You’re making my life difficult,” he told two commissioners. When he heard that the commission, including Harvard Law School dean Erwin Griswold, was unanimous in its determination to go ahead, Kennedy asked, “Who the hell appointed Griswold?” “You did,” the commission’s chairman replied. “Probably on the recommendation of Harris Wofford,” Kennedy said, acknowledging his inattentiveness to the commission’s operations.
In July 1962, Martin Luther King Jr. added to Kennedy’s difficulties with a public statement that the president “could do more in the area of moral persuasion by occasionally speaking out against segregation and counseling the Nation on the moral aspects of this problem.” Kennedy answered cryptically that his commitment to full constitutional rights for all Americans had been made very clear and that his administration had “taken a whole variety of very effective steps to improve the equal opportunities for all Americans and would continue to do so.” But the president’s words did little to advance the cause of civil rights or ease the tensions that were erupting in sporadic violence.
Kennedy’s frustration at the impasse between the growing movement of black activists practicing nonviolent opposition and defenders of segregation registered clearly in his response to clashes in the southwest Georgia city of Albany, where blacks had launched the “Albany Movement” to challenge the city’s segregation laws. On August 1, when Kennedy was asked his reaction to a Justice Department report on conditions in Albany, he explained that he had “been in constant touch with the Attorney General,” who had “been in daily touch with the authorities in Albany in an attempt to provide a solution.” He all but acknowledged a sense of powerlessness. “I find it wholly inexplicable,” he told reporters, “why the City Council of Albany will not sit down with the citizens of Albany, who may be Negroes, and attempt to secure them, in a peaceful way, their rights. The United States Government is involved in sitting down at Geneva with the Soviet Union. I can’t understand why the government of Albany … cannot do the same for American citizens.”
Bureaucratic infighting and limited advances added to Kennedy’s sense of frustration. By August, conflicts between Johnson and Robert Troutman, Kennedy’s Georgia friend who had originated Plans for Progress, and complaints of too few gains forced Troutman’s resignation from the CEEO. Although the president lauded the “immediate and dramatic results” of Troutman’s efforts, it was an open secret that he was leaving because he and the vice president were at odds over the CEEO’s poor performance. With Troutman going, Kennedy agreed to make Hobart Taylor Jr., a black attorney from Michigan with roots in Texas, where Johnson had known him, CEEO executive vice chairman. To draw attention away from the fact that he was replacing a white southerner with an African American, Kennedy delayed announcing Taylor’s appointment for several days.
But an appointment was far from enough. As Arthur Schlesinger Jr. later said, “The Kennedy civil rights strategy, however appropriate to the congressional mood of 1961, miscalculated the dynamism of a revolutionary movement.” It was clear to King and other civil rights activists that the president remained reluctant to take significant political risks for the sake of black equality. King released a telegram to Kennedy “asking for Federal action against anti-Negro terrorism in the South,” and one civil rights group threatened to picket the White House unless the president did more to protect blacks. In September, when reporters pressed him to say what he was doing about King’s demand for protective action, Kennedy’s frustration with the situation and southern resistance to black complaints of inequality and abuse was palpable. “I don’t know any more outrageous action which I have seen occur in this country for a good many months or years than the burning of a church—two churches—because of the effort made by Negroes to vote,” he told a news conference. “To shoot, as we saw in the case of Mississippi, two young people who were involved in an effort to register people, to burn churches as a reprisal” for asking for voting rights was “both cowardly as well as outrageous.” He promised that FBI agents would bring the perpetrators to justice and said that “all of our talk about freedom [was] hollow” unless we could assure citizens the right to vote. The rhetoric was all civil rights advocates and anyone devoted to the rule of law could ask. But conditions in the South cried out not for prose but for action, and action now.
IN SEPTEMBER, James Meredith, a black Mississippian, tried to break the color line at the state’s lily-white university in Oxford. Meredith, a twenty-eight-year-old air force veteran with a sense of divine mission to overturn segregation, had been fighting since January 1961 to gain admission to Ole Miss. Supported by the NAACP in a series of court contests, Meredith won an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court on September 10, 1962, ordering the university to end its “calculated campaign of delay, harassment, and masterly inactivity,” and admit him.
Three days later, Mississippi governor Ross Barnett, a devoted segregationist, whom Bobby later described as “an agreeable rogue and weak,” spoke on statewide television. Denouncing the federal government’s assault on Mississippi’s freedom to choose its way of life, the governor invoked the repudiated pre–Civil War doctrine of interposition, the right of a state to interpose itself between the U.S. government and the citizens of a state. Emotionally promising not to “surrender to the evil and illegal forces of tyranny,” he theatrically declared, “we must either submit to the unlawful dictates of the federal government or stand up like men and tell them ‘NEVER.’ ”
The governor’s defiance, supported by the state legislature with resolutions blocking Meredith’s registration, forced the White House to enter the conflict. In twenty conversations with Barnett between September 15 and 28, Bobby expressed sympathy for Barnett’s political problem and raised no moral questions about the transparent unfairness of unequal treatment of blacks. Instead, he emphasized the need to obey the law and made clear that the president intended to enforce the court’s directives. Barnett shared an interest with the Kennedys in getting Meredith enrolled without violence. But his strategy—which he did not share with the Kennedys—was to submit to federal authority with a show of cynical resistance that would enhance his popularity in Mississippi. Barnett and the White House thus struggled for political advantage. Neither side doubted that federal authority would ultimately prevail, but how it occurred had large consequences.
Former Mississippi governor James Coleman, a moderate, urged Bobby not to use troops, which would be “fatal,” or to make Barnett a martyr by jailing him, but to cut off all federal aid to the state, including old age assistance. Because Mississippi received $668 million in federal monies—some $300 million more than it sent to Washington in taxes—a reduction in federal largesse was one means to force Barnett’s hand. Ted Sorensen counseled the president to threaten the businessmen backing the governor by holding up NASA, defense, and other federal contracts. The possible suspension of accreditation, disruption of the university’s football schedule, and loss of postseason eligibility for bowl games seemed like promising means to dampen student enthusiasm for mob opposition to federal authority.
But the threat of reduced federal outlays in the state was insufficient to bring Barnett into line. “I won’t agree to let that boy get to Ole Miss,” Barnett told Bobby on September 25. “I will never agree to that. I would rather spend the rest of my life in a penitentiary than do that.” The same day, Barnett, who was more interested in scoring political points than ensuring law and order, personally blocked Meredith’s registration in a confrontation at the trustee’s room in a state office building in Jackson, the capital. On the twenty-sixth, Lieutenant Governor Paul Johnson, supported by state police and county sheriffs, stopped Meredith and federal marshals accompanying him from reaching the Oxford campus. On the twenty-seventh, a crowd of two thousand protesters blocked marshals, forcing Barnett to abandon a cynical plan to allow Meredith to register if it was done before cameras showing federal marshals with drawn pistols. By this means, Barnett had hoped to avoid violence, which would further blight Mississippi’s good name, and also obtain political cover with segregationists, who would see him and his state as the victims of superior federal power.
Believing that Barnett’s “defiance should be against the majesty of the United States” rather than against John Kennedy, the president had left private and public discussions of the issues to the attorney general. By September 29, however, he felt compelled to pressure Barnett directly. Despite coming across in telephone conversations as “a soft pillow” who would ultimately agree to Meredith’s registration, Barnett gave no guarantee that it would be done peacefully. Kennedy wired Barnett, citing the “breakdown of law and order in Mississippi” and asking if he intended to keep the peace when court directives were executed. Unsatisfied with Barnett’s responses, late that night Kennedy signed an order federalizing units of the Mississippi National Guard. After discussing the document with Norbert Schlei, a White House legal counsel, who assured him that it was like one Eisenhower had signed in the Little Rock crisis of 1957, Kennedy tapped the table they had been sitting at and said, “That’s General Grant’s table.” Eager as much as possible to soften the use of his authority against a southern state, he told Schlei not to tell waiting reporters anything about the furniture.
The next morning Bobby told Barnett that the president would speak to the nation that evening and say that he had called up the guard because the governor had reneged on an agreement to let Meredith register. Barnett promised to cooperate if Kennedy did not mention their agreement. Kennedy thus believed he had assurances that Meredith would be able to register without incident. Consequently, on the evening of September 30, he told the nation that court orders “are beginning to be carried out” and that “Meredith is now in residence on the campus of the University.” This had been accomplished without the use of the National Guard, and he hoped that the combination of state law enforcement officials and U.S. marshals would be able to keep the future peace. His address celebrated American reliance on the rule of law and praised Mississippi for its contributions to the national good ahead of the sectional good. He saw “no reason why the books on this case cannot now be quickly and quietly closed.”
Kennedy’s speech demonstrated his limited feel for the passion and volatility surrounding race relations across the South. It was a mistake to trust Barnett’s promises, for one thing. In fact, the night of the speech, as soon as a mob showed up, Barnett withdrew the state’s highway patrol officers who were supposed to assist in the protection of Meredith. Left behind were the five hundred marshals, no match for a mob of between two thousand and four thousand people. Kennedy sent in regular army troops, but it took several hours to get to Oxford from Memphis, where most of them were quartered. Before they arrived, a local resident of Oxford and a foreign journalist had been killed and 160 marshals had been injured, including 27 with gunshot wounds.
Kennedy was furious at the army’s ineptitude in getting the troops to Oxford promptly. Bobby later recalled that “President Kennedy had one of the worst and harshest conversations with [Secretary of the Army] Cy Vance and with the general [in command] that I think I’ve ever heard.” The incident immediately intensified Kennedy’s distrust of the military, which kept saying the troops were on the way when they had not even left their bases, and reminded Bobby of the poor advice the chiefs had given the president about Laos. Kennedy himself said, “They always give you their bullshit about their instant reaction and their split-second timing, but it never works out. No wonder it’s so hard to win a war.” When he heard that retired general Edwin Walker, a right-wing extremist, was in Oxford encouraging people to oppose desegregation, the president said, “Imagine that son of a bitch having been a commander of a division up till last year. And the Army promoting him.”
“I haven’t had such an interesting time since the Bay of Pigs,” Kennedy added with evident irony during a vigil lasting until 5:30 in the morning. Said Bobby, “We are going to have a hell of a problem about why we didn’t handle the situation better …. We are going to have to figure out what we are going to say …. We are going to take a lot of knocks because of people getting killed, the fact that I didn’t get the people up there in time.” Bobby later remembered how concerned they were about explaining “this whole thing, because it looked like it was one of the big botches.”
In fact, Kennedy escaped from the clash with relatively little political damage. True, some newspapers criticized his handling of Oxford. The press also described the vice president as unhappy with Kennedy’s failure to consult him. But the good news was that the administration got Meredith enrolled. “Forget the Monday morning quarterbacks and the myopic few among the journalists,” Phil Graham told Bobby. “Accept instead the feeling of a wide majority of thoughtful men: That the President and you deserve well of the Republic.” Johnson, who was out of the country, sent word to the president that “the situation in Mississippi had been handled better than he could ever have thought of handling it.” Polls of northern industrial states showed the president enjoying between 4–1 and 3–1 backing on Mississippi. Pollster Lou Harris advised him that every Democrat outside the South who was “running for major office should put front and center that this country needs firm and resolute leadership such as the President demonstrated in the Mississippi case.” Foreign press opinion showed a “startling similarity.” Whether in Africa, Latin America, the Far East, Middle East, South Asia, or Western Europe, the media cited the administration’s “firmness and determination … in enforcing law and order,” while also finding it difficult to understand how “racial tension could persist in an advanced country like the U.S.”
However the press and public saw the crisis, the loss of life and rioting over Meredith’s enrollment were partly the consequence of Kennedy’s misreading of southern racism. He knew that most southern whites had an irrational contempt for blacks. But he could not quite understand how educated southern leaders could be so impractical as to believe that they could permanently maintain their outmoded system of apartheid. He had contempt for the unreasonable attitude southern whites had toward African Americans. They seemed incapable of practical good sense in their dealings with blacks. He puzzled over their intransigence in denying the franchise to blacks. Could they not see that if they conceded the vote and accepted desegregated schools, they would probably be able to extend the life of segregation in other walks of life? Kennedy saw this as a viable compromise. But it was certainly not an accommodation African Americans would any longer accept.
Kennedy had a highly imperfect understanding of African American impatience with racial divides. He understood the black fight against segregation as a well-justified struggle for self-interest. He also admired the courage shown by black demonstrators against superior state-controlled force. But he believed that national security and domestic reforms advancing prosperity, education, and health care for all trumped the needs and wishes of blacks. To some extent, his response to civil rights upheavals was a shortsighted curse on both houses. With so much else at stake, especially overseas, he felt compelled to make civil rights a secondary concern. But even if international dangers had not preoccupied Kennedy, it is doubtful that he would have acted more aggressively in support of black rights in 1962. Fears of civil strife across the South, with negative political repercussions for North and South, were enough to make Kennedy a temporizer on an issue he wished to keep as quiet as possible.
AS THE SOUTH HEATED UP, Kennedy saw no easing of the international problems that had confronted him in the first fifteen months of his term. If anything, they were even more troubling than before. In March the journalist William Haddad, who had joined the United States Information Agency, told Kennedy that he doubted if the United States “[could] ever have a ‘policy’ ” for Latin America. “At best,” he said, “we will have a country-by-country, crisis-by-crisis standard.” An Inter-American Development Bank official advised Kennedy that without “a massive information program” to mobilize Latin American public opinion, the president would never reach his goals. Despite spending a billion dollars in a year, “not a single Latin American nation is embarked on a development program under the Alliance for Progress.” As to why not, the explanation was “the political instability of Latin American countries, their inability to concentrate on development, [and] their ingrained cynicism about the U.S …. But even within these very real and important political limitations things have not gone as well as they should.”
That instability was far from hidden. At the end of March, a military coup against Argentina’s President Arturo Frondizi was a serious setback to democratic hopes in the hemisphere, and it caused discouraging speculation that a Washington-sponsored austerity program to stabilize the economy had helped provoke the military’s action. “The International Monetary Fund has had a complete lack of success in stabilizing economies in Latin America without the Government falling from power,” Schlesinger told the NSC on April 2. In May, Teodoro Moscoso, an Agency for International Development official and Alliance coordinator, advised the president that the Alliance was “facing stormy weather.” Latin leaders simply saw the program as “a money-lending operation …. And no money-lender in history has ever evoked great enthusiasm.” Moreover, the Alliance had in no way been wedded to Latin American nationalism; it looked “ ‘foreign’ and ‘imported’ … a ‘Made in the U.S.A.’ product.”
In public, Kennedy continued to speak hopefully about the Alliance, but privately he doubted that it could generate enough progress in the near term to sustain congressional commitments to “necessary funds.” In July, the Peruvian military added to Kennedy’s skepticism by overturning an election it described as fraudulent and arresting President Manuel Prado. Although Kennedy withheld recognition of the junta for a month, he eventually accepted its promises of future free elections and a return to constitutional government as reason for the resumption of diplomatic relations. But publicly describing the coup as “a grave setback to the principles agreed to under the Alliance for Progress,” the administration delayed the reinstatement of full military assistance to Lima until a crisis with Cuba in October compelled a need for hemisphere “solidarity.”
British Guiana remained another troubling problem. By February 1962, the state department was expressing doubts that “a working relationship [could] be established with Jagan which would prevent the emergence of a communist or Castro-type state in South America.” In March, Schlesinger told Kennedy that both the State Department and the CIA were “under the impression that a firm decision has been taken to get rid of the Jagan government …. British Guiana has 600,000 inhabitants. Jagan would no doubt be gratified to know that the American and British governments are spending more man-hours per capita on British Guiana than on any other current problem!” Although London did not see any “communist threat to British Guiana,” the administration persisted in believing that after independence it “would go the way of Castro” and that the United States needed to support “a policy of getting rid of Jagan.” In the summer of 1962, the CIA was hard at work on covert plans to oust him from power. Because chances of carrying out “a really covert operation” seemed so small, however, the administration discouraged the British government from giving Guiana independence until Kennedy and Prime Minister Macmillan could further discuss the issue in 1963. Despite any certainty as to Jagan’s course, exaggerated fears of what another radical regime in Latin America—however limited its reach—might mean led Kennedy to favor a policy of ousting Jagan, ignoring all the administration’s professions of regard for national self-determination throughout the hemisphere.
But it was Brazil, potentially the most important Latin member of the Alliance, that concerned Kennedy more than any other hemisphere country aside from Cuba. In 1961, Brazilian president Juscelino Kubitschek described his country as “the playboy of economic development.” Impressive increases in national output were accompanied by destabilizing graft and inflation. Jânio Quadros, who replaced Kubitschek as president in 1961, promised more measured expansion, but he disappointed such hopes by resigning in August in a ploy to extract greater executive authority from the Brazilian Congress. Instead, the Congress accepted Vice President João Goulart, a member of Brazil’s Labor party, as the new president. The Brazilian military saw Goulart as a dangerous leftist and refused to sanction his succession. Despite his own doubts about Goulart, Kennedy announced that this was “a matter which should be left to the people of Brazil. It is their country, their constitution, their decisions, and their government.” Brazil’s Congress resolved the crisis with a constitutional amendment creating a parliamentary system that included both a president and a strong prime minister. The compromise allowed Goulart to assume the presidency, and Tancredo Neves, a fiscal conservative, to become prime minister.
By November 1961, American defense officials warned of a distinct leftward shift in Rio. A shake-up in the Brazilian military, which had replaced anticommunist officers with men “suspected of being Communist sympathizers or even secret agents,” paralleled the “infiltration of the civilian branches of the government” with possible pro-communist officials. These developments foretold a possible “foreign policy oriented increasingly toward the Soviet bloc in world affairs and toward the Castro regime in inter-American affairs.” The expropriation in February 1962 of American-owned International Telephone & Telegraph (IT&T) property by the state of Rio Grande do Sul strengthened the conviction that Brazil was drifting to the left and would be unreceptive to better relations with the United States and a principal role in the Alliance. In April, however, despite misgivings, Kennedy agreed to release $129 million in funding for a Brazilian stabilization program that he hoped could increase U.S. influence over Brazil’s domestic politics.
During the summer and fall of 1962, White House concerns that Goulart was trying to subvert Brazil’s parliamentary system and use October elections to expand his power provoked covert intervention. At a July 30 meeting with Kennedy, U.S. ambassador to Brazil Lincoln Gordon described Goulart’s reach for greater control through an anti-American and anti-Alliance strategy. Because “the elections really could be a turning point,” Kennedy agreed to have the CIA spend “$5 million funding the campaigns of anti-Goulart candidates for 15 federal seats, 8 state governorships, 250 federal deputy seats, and some 600 seats for state legislatures.” He was also receptive to letting the Brazilian military know that the administration would support a coup against Goulart if it were clear that he was “giving the damn country away to the—Communists.” Although he believed that Goulart was more of a populist dictator and an opportunist than a communist, Kennedy saw him as a menace to stability in the hemisphere and an imperfect partner in trying to advance the Alliance.
Cuban efforts to export communism to other hemisphere countries gave further urgency to problems with Brazil. Cuban intelligence officers under the direct supervision of Castro were providing three- to five-day courses on subversion to radicals from Venezuela, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay, Panama, Honduras, and Nicaragua. The objective was “to train a large number of guerrillas in a hurry.” Concerned that Soviet military representatives in Cuba would try to restrain Havana from a program that could further unsettle relations with the United States, Castro hid as much of this operation as possible from Moscow.
In December 1962, Kennedy told President Jorge Alessandri of Chile that some people think “the Alliance for Progress has not been successful … that the problems in Latin America have become more serious, that the standard of living of the people has not risen.” Kennedy publicly acknowledged hemisphere problems as “staggering.” But he waxed optimistic about the future, urging against “impatience with failure” and seeing no reason to “desist because we’ve not solved all the problems overnight.”
Privately he knew better. An August 1962 State Department survey of American business communities in Latin America had revealed that “virtually nothing is being done in the name of the Alliance for Progress.” Moreover, how could he have much hope for hemisphere democracy when military chiefs in Argentina and Peru had taken the rule of law into their hands and leaders like Quadros and Goulart refused to respect Brazil’s constitution? And how could he square professions of self-determination—a central principle of the Alliance—with the reality of secret American interventions in Cuba, Brazil, British Guiana, Peru, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and every country that seemed vulnerable to left-wing subversion? (And that was just the beginning: A June National Security directive approved by the president had listed four additional Latin American countries “sufficiently threatened by Communist-inspired insurgency”—Ecuador, Colombia, Guatemala, and Venezuela—as requiring the attention of the “Special Group” responsible for counterinsurgency.) In its brief eighteen-month life, the Alliance had become an imperfect cover for traditional actions serving perceived U.S. national security.
THE NOVEMBER 1961 NEUTRALITY AGREEMENT on Laos, which required a coalition government to become effective, fell apart in the winter of 1961–62. General Nosavan Phoumi, America’s client in the struggle between the pro-communist Pathet Lao and centrist Prince Souvanna Phouma, resisted sharing power with his two rivals. Despite threats of reduced U.S. aid, Phoumi, who believed that Washington would not abandon him, provoked a battle with Pathet Lao forces at Nam Tha, near the border with Thailand. There he was completely routed. The U.S. adviser on the ground, putting the best possible face on the defeat, advised Washington, “The morale of my battalion is substantially better than in our last engagement. The last time, they dropped their weapons and ran. This time, they took their weapons with them.”
Although U.S. officials believed that Phoumi might have contrived his retreat as a way to increase American involvement, the White House did not believe it could abandon Phoumi or simply leave Laos to the communists. Kennedy agreed that a failure to do anything would encourage the Pathet Lao, but he insisted that U.S. action not “provoke the Viet Minh or the Chinese into large-scale counter-action, but rather … suggest to them that we [are] prepared to resist encroachments beyond the cease-fire line.”
Possible public pressure from Eisenhower to intervene especially worried Kennedy. Eisenhower had said in April that “he might make a public statement under some conditions. If it is so, we will be in a tough position,” Kennedy told George Ball. Kennedy told other advisers that an Eisenhower statement would put domestic pressure on him for military action leading to a possible war, or, if he resisted sending troops and Laos fell, it would politically embarrass him. A conversation between Eisenhower and CIA director John McCone added to Kennedy’s concern. Eisenhower said that if the United States sent troops to Laos, it needed to follow up “with whatever support was necessary to achieve the objectives of their mission, including—if necessary—the use of tactical nuclear weapons.”
In response, the president sent McCone, McNamara, and Lemnitzer to see Eisenhower. They informed him that Kennedy was ordering units of the Seventh Fleet into the South China Sea toward the Gulf of Siam and would deploy some eighteen hundred men plus two air squadrons in Thailand on the border with Laos. Eisenhower, who believed the loss of Laos jeopardized South Vietnam and Thailand, “indicated both his support of a dynamic effort and a willingness to try to influence [the] political leadership of his party from entering into public debate on the question.” He also promised that “he would not at this time privately or publicly urge moving U.S. combat troops into Laos.”
Eisenhower thus under wraps, Kennedy now encouraged press and public uncertainty about U.S. intentions toward Laos. He wanted “to maintain vis-a-vis the Communist bloc an attitude of ‘veiled ambiguity,’ ” he told his advisers. He also wanted Phoumi to understand that the administration had no confidence in him and would not intervene in Laos on his behalf. “All United States moves,” Kennedy said, “should be designed (a) to bring Phoumi to the conference table, and (b) to have the desired effect on the Soviets and on the Chinese.” But he wanted no irreversible commitments that might drag the country into an unwanted war. He “wished to retain the element of reversibility in all military actions. He wanted no public announcement of landings until after he had ordered such landings. Furthermore, he wanted it again made clear to the Lao that we were undertaking no new commitments toward them.” Compared to Latin America, where fears of Cuban subversion throughout the hemisphere had agitated Kennedy into anticommunist excesses, policy toward Laos was a model of sensible restraint.
U.S. military threats produced a quick response. Since Moscow and Peking had no intention of risking a wider war for control of Laos, the Pathet Lao responded to American troop movements by immediately resuming negotiations. On June 12, after the Laotian factions agreed to form a coalition government under Souvanna Phouma, Khrushchev wired Kennedy: “Good news has come from Laos.” The political accommodation seemed likely to serve both the Laotian people and peace in Southeast Asia. The result also strengthened the conviction that other unresolved international problems might yield to reasonable exchange. Kennedy answered Khrushchev: The Laotian solution “will surely have a significant and positive effect far beyond the borders of Laos.”
Khrushchev reiterated his enthusiasm for the settlement in a message through Georgi Bolshakov, the ostensible Soviet embassy press officer in Washington. To take advantage of JFK’s wish to bypass his own national security bureaucracy, Khrushchev used Bolshakov, really a high-ranking military intelligence agent, to speak to the president through Bobby Kennedy, with whom Bolshakov met every couple of weeks. A report in the Times of London that the CIA was “actively opposing US policy in Laos and working against a neutral government” may have moved Khrushchev to tell Kennedy that “the settlement in Laos was an extremely important step forward in the relationship of the Soviet Union and the United States.” JFK valued Khrushchev’s message, which he hoped signaled an interest in other agreements. The Times account of CIA opposition worried him. When Pierre Salinger told him of his intention to deny the Times story as “preposterous and untrue,” Kennedy replied, “The story I assume is untrue—Do they offer evidence?” Kennedy had learned the hard way that the CIA could not always be trusted, and he now wondered if the Times might be onto something.
AFTER THE LAOTIANS SIGNED a neutrality declaration in July, Kennedy instructed Harriman to explore the possibility of negotiations with the North Vietnamese. He hoped that Hanoi and Moscow, especially after Khrushchev’s comments, might be willing to neutralize all of Indochina as a way to limit Chinese control in the region. But at a secret meeting with North Vietnam’s foreign minister in a Geneva hotel suite, Harriman and William Sullivan, his deputy, hit a stone wall. “We got absolutely nowhere,” Sullivan said.
The alternative was to continue helping Saigon. Reports from American military and civilian officials there in the spring of 1962 that U.S. aid was turning the tide in South Vietnam made this acceptable, and even appealing. McNamara told a House committee that the administration was hoping to clean up the conflict in Vietnam by “terminating subversion, covert aggression, and combat operations.” He saw no need for U.S. combat troops. In May, at the end of a two-day trip to Vietnam, his first, McNamara, unshaven and dressed in rumpled khaki shirt and trousers and hiking boots dusty from his travels in the countryside, carried data-filled notebooks into a press conference at the ambassador’s residence. “I’ve seen nothing but progress and hopeful indications of further progress,” he declared. Pressed by reporters to move beyond declarations of good news boosting Saigon’s morale, McNamara, UPI’s Neil Sheehan recorded, was “a Gibraltar of optimism.” Following him out to his car, Sheehan asked the secretary to speak the truth off the record. Fixing Sheehan with a cold stare, McNamara replied, “Every quantitative measurement we have shows we’re winning this war.” By July, reinforced by a military briefing in Honolulu that predicted a U.S. military exit one year after South Vietnamese forces had become “fully operational” in 1964, McNamara could see “tremendous progress to date.”
In September 1962, after his first visit to Vietnam since the fall of 1961, Max Taylor also reported that “much progress has been accomplished …. The most notable perhaps is the snowballing of the strategic hamlet program which has resulted in some 5,000 hamlets being fortified or in process of fortification.” Dating from February 1962, the hamlets were supposedly winning the support of Vietnamese farmers by creating allegedly safe havens against the Viet Cong with South Vietnamese forces. Conversations with junior U.S. officers attached to South Vietnamese units led Taylor to tell Kennedy, “You have to be on the ground to sense a lift in the national morale …. I’m sure you would get a great deal of encouragement out of hearing these young officers.” U.S. embassy officials in Saigon confirmed Taylor’s impressions, reporting in September that they were “tremendously encouraged …. The military progress had been little short of sensational …. The strategic hamlet program had transformed the countryside and … the Viet Cong could not now destroy the program.” After receiving these reports, Kennedy told Nguyen Dinh Thuan, Diem’s cabinet secretary, who was visiting Washington, that recent reports from Saigon were encouraging. The president expressed “admiration for the progress being made in Viet-Nam against the Communists.”
Optimism—or wishful thinking—was so strong now that Kennedy ordered McNamara to begin planning a U.S. military exit from Vietnam. According to Deputy Defense Secretary Gilpatric, the president “made clear to McNamara and me that he wanted to not only hold the level of U.S. military presence in Vietnam down, but he wanted to reverse the flow.” To that end, McNamara drew up a three-year plan for the reduction of U.S. forces in Vietnam. U.S. military planners told him that “advisers” could leave by 1965, but McNamara extended the date to 1968. By then, he hoped to withdraw the last fifteen hundred U.S. troops and reduce military assistance payments to $40.8 million, less than a quarter of 1962 layouts. McNamara rationalized the plan by saying that “it might be difficult to retain public support for U.S. operations in Vietnam indefinitely. Political pressures would build up as losses continued. Therefore … planning must be undertaken now and a program devised to phase out U.S. military involvement.”
There is no direct record of Kennedy’s agreement with McNamara’s plan, but it is difficult to believe that McNamara did not have the president’s approval. They were close, very close, or as close as anyone in the administration was to the president, aside from Bobby. McNamara was Kennedy’s idea of a first-rate deputy. The president “thought very highly of Bob McNamara,” Bobby recalled, “very highly of him …. He was head and shoulders above everybody else …. In the area of foreign policy or defense,” Bobby added, “obviously, it was Bob McNamara, not Dean Rusk.” With his affinity for numbers, for unsentimental calculation, McNamara “symbolized the idea that [the administration] could manage and control events, in an intelligent, rational way …. He was so impressive and loyal,” David Halberstam wrote later, “that it was hard to believe, in the halcyon days of 1963 when his reputation was at its height, that anything he took command of could go wrong.” Kennedy himself said, McNamara would “come in with his twenty options and then say, ‘Mr. President, I think we should do this.’ I like that. Makes the job easier.”
McNamara was one of only two members of the cabinet—the other being Douglas Dillon—who enjoyed a consistent social relationship with the Kennedys. Charming, gay, gregarious, a sort of modern Renaissance man with a capacity to discuss the arts and literature, he became a favorite of Jacqueline Kennedy’s. “Men can’t understand his sex appeal,” Jackie said. “Why is it,” Bobby wondered, “that they call him ‘the computer’ and yet he’s the one all my sisters want to sit next to at dinner?”
In proposing to get out of Vietnam before it turned into a political liability in the United States, McNamara reflected the president’s thinking. Kennedy wanted the lowest possible profile for U.S. involvement in the conflict. In May, he instructed that there be no “unnecessary trips to Vietnam, especially by high ranking officers,” who might draw more attention to America’s role in the fighting. In a meeting with congressional leaders, Kennedy made it clear that he did not want to announce increases in U.S. troops. The objective for JFK, Fulbright said, was to keep the United States from becoming “formally involved.” The increase in advisers was less important than keeping things “on an informal basis, because … we couldn’t withdraw if it gets too formal.” In October, Kennedy reluctantly agreed to let the military destroy crops in Viet Cong–controlled areas. It was a small concession to the Joint Chiefs, who were pressing him to use more muscle in Vietnam. “His main train of thinking,” an NSC member told Bundy, “was that you cannot say no to your military advisers all the time.” But he wanted to be sure that crop destruction did not become an embarrassment to the administration. “What can we do about keeping it from becoming an American enterprise which would be surfaced with [or described as] poisoning food?” Kennedy asked his advisers.
Knowing nothing of the Kennedy-McNamara plan to reduce military commitments to Vietnam, American correspondents in Saigon remained highly critical of administration policy. Seeing U.S. officials as misled by the Vietnamese and their own illusions, reporters disputed Diem-embassy assertions of steady progress in the conflict. In October 1962, Halberstam, speaking for many of his colleagues, said, “The closer one gets to the actual contact level of the war, the further one gets from official optimism.” By protecting Diem from criticism, Halberstam added, the U.S. embassy was turning into “the adjunct of a dictatorship,” and if reporters accepted the official line on Diem and the war, they would “become the adjuncts of a tyranny.”
The press, an embassy official reported in September, “believes that the situation in Viet Nam is going to pieces and that we have been unable to convince them otherwise.” Taylor said that American journalists in Saigon “remained uninformed and often belligerently adverse to the programs of the U.S. and SVN Governments.” His observations and discussions in Vietnam told him that press reports of difficulties between U.S. military advisers and South Vietnamese officers were false. The administration needed to push publishers into “responsible reporting,” he said. In his conversation with Thuan, Kennedy urged “the GVN not to be too concerned by press reports. He assured Mr. Thuan that the U.S. government did not accept everything the correspondents wrote even if it appeared in the New York Times. He emphasized that if the Vietnamese government was successful, the public image would take care of itself.” The president added that “inaccurate press reporting … occurred every day in Washington.”
This last statement was said with real conviction. Kennedy was not as tolerant of the press as he seemed. He believed that its affinity for the sensational and its instinctive impulse to be critical of the White House had repeatedly produced unfair attacks on his administration. Time magazine’s coverage of his presidency particularly irritated him. He viewed it as inconsistent and much more friendly to his predecessor. Complaints to Time publisher Henry Luce evoked a strong defense of the magazine’s performance but left Kennedy unconvinced.
Kennedy sympathized with the belief in Saigon that American reporters were opportunists trying to build reputations with controversial stories belittling Diem and progress in the war. This allowed him to rationalize new October directives to the State and Defense departments about press interviews. In response to national security leaks, including those involving Vietnam, Kennedy ordered officials not to hold one-on-one meetings with reporters, and if they did, “to report promptly and in writing on any conversation with ‘news media’ representatives.” A leak to New York Times military correspondent Hanson Baldwin, which seemed to compromise U.S. satellite intelligence on Soviet ICBM installations, especially upset the president. He saw the press and the New York Times in particular as “the most privileged group,” who regarded any attempt to rein them in “as a limitation on their civil rights. And they are not very used to it.” Joe Alsop called the restrictions on interviews “news-control devices” that threatened healthy democratic debate about vital issues. But Kennedy refused to back down. The restrictions were “aimed at the protection of genuinely sensitive information,” he told Alsop through Bundy. Nor would the directives prevent “responsible reporters from doing their job.” The president’s order “was so rarely and humorously observed,” Sorensen remembered, “that it soon fell into disuse.” Nevertheless, the directives undermined Kennedy’s generally good relations with the press and made reporters more distrustful of White House pronouncements on everything.
Kennedy believed that newspaper stories from Saigon, whatever their accuracy, made it difficult for him to follow a cautious policy of limited involvement. If people believed that we were losing the conflict, it would create additional pressure to expand U.S. commitments. His political strategy was to keep the war off the front pages of America’s newspapers. Press accounts arousing controversy drew more attention to Vietnam than he wanted, and an inflamed public debate would make it difficult to hold down commitments and maintain his freedom to withdraw when he saw fit. As with Laos, and, again, unlike with Latin America, Kennedy maintained a good sense of proportion about the limits of Vietnam’s importance in the overall scheme of U.S. national security. But his good sense of proportion could not withstand other pressures.
AS KENNEDY BEGAN to pay more attention to Vietnam, he could not neglect larger threats. After announcing plans to resume atmospheric tests at the end of April, he made last-ditch efforts to halt the slide into an escalating arms race. On March 5, he thanked Khrushchev for agreeing to have their foreign ministers open a new round of disarmament talks in Geneva on March 14. He also urged against additional “sterile exchanges of propaganda.” He proposed, “Let us, instead, join in giving our close personal support and direction to the work of our representatives, and let us join in working for their success.”
But Kennedy could not persuade the Soviets that international verification was essential to a comprehensive test ban treaty. The sticking point in Soviet-American discussions was on-site investigation of seismic shocks. The Americans insisted that only direct observation could establish the difference between an earthquake and a nuclear explosion, “a natural and an artificial seismic event.” The Soviets rejected the distinction as an American espionage ploy. Gromyko privately told Rusk that “even one foreigner loose in the Soviet Union could find things out that could be most damaging to the USSR.” Although it was possible to ascribe Soviet suspicion to paranoid fears of foreigners, Macmillan saw more rational calculation at work. Convinced that on-site investigations would reveal nuclear inferiority to the West and eager to use American tests as an excuse for additional tests of their own, the Soviets were resigned to pushing the United States into atmospheric explosions. (Much later, Khrushchev admitted as much.)
The administration suffered a public relations setback after the Defense Department released preliminary results of a seismic research study concluding that international detection stations in the Soviet Union might not be essential to monitor underground nuclear explosions. When Arthur Dean, U.S. ambassador to the disarmament talks, publicly acknowledged this as a possibility, it gave the Soviets a propaganda bonanza. In fact, although the seismic study weakened the case for on-site inspection stations, the Pentagon maintained that they were still essential to prevent Soviet cheating. But that now seemed like a secondary detail, and because Moscow continued to reject inspections, prospects for a comprehensive test ban largely disappeared. At a July 27 White House meeting on arms control, Kennedy vented his irritation at the premature release of the report. “We had messed up the handling of the new data,” he said. “Information about it was all over town before we had decided what effect it would have on our policy.”
Kennedy’s frustration with professional diplomats and military officers who, in addition to Dean, had undermined America’s position in the test ban talks was part of a larger concern. On July 30, three days after complaining about the Pentagon’s misstep, he expressed his low opinion of America’s professional diplomats and military chiefs. In a taped conversation with Rusk, Bundy, and Ball, Kennedy described U.S. career envoys as weak or spineless: “I just see an awful lot of fellows who … don’t seem to have cojones.” By contrast, “the Defense Department looks as if that’s all they’ve got. They haven’t any brains …. You get all this sort of virility … at the Pentagon and you get a lot of Arleigh Burkes: admirable nice figure without any brains.”
In fact, the Pentagon’s premature release of a report undermining a White House policy was partly the consequence of bureaucratic chaos. The New York Times, in particular, had frequently complained about the hit-or-miss procedures of a government poorly coordinated by the White House. Kennedy was not unsympathetic to the Times’ argument. He had already expended more energy than he cared to on trying to bring greater order to his foreign policy agencies—defense, state, and the CIA. Predictably, domestic red tape bothered him less than poorly functioning foreign policy machinery; he was fond of saying, “Domestic policy can only defeat us; foreign policy can kill us.” But there seemed only so much that could be done. Certainly, Kennedy was temperamentally uncomfortable with managing everything from the White House. Why had he surrounded himself with so many talented people if he were going to oversee every agency? And perhaps some disorder was even a good thing. “Creative governments will always be ‘out of channels,’ ” Schlesinger told Times publisher Orvil Dryfoos. “[They] will always present aspects of ‘confusion’ and ‘meddling’; [they] will always discomfit officials whose routine is being disturbed or whose security is being threatened. But all this is inseparable from the process by which new ideas and new institutions enable government to meet new challenges. Orderly governments are very rarely creative; and creative governments are almost never orderly.” The balance between constructive chaos and bureaucratic mess seemed hard to maintain, however.
In September, the Soviets rejected U.S. proposals for both comprehensive and limited test bans, proposing instead a nonbinding ban on atmospheric explosions and a moratorium on underground detonations, both to begin on January 1, 1963. Kennedy accepted the cutoff date, but insisted at an August 29 press conference that it should rest on “workable international agreements; gentlemen’s agreements and moratoria do not provide the types of guarantees that are necessary …. This is the lesson of the Soviet government’s tragic decision to renew testing just a year ago.” On September 7, when the Geneva talks recessed to make way for the U.N. General Assembly session in New York, a reliable test ban agreement of any kind remained an uncertain hope.
INTO 1962 KENNEDY STRUGGLED to find some formula for accommodation with Moscow over Germany and Berlin. In November 1961, the president suggested the creation of an International Access Authority made up of NATO, Warsaw Pact, and neutral representatives to eliminate the possibility of confrontations over Allied movements in and out of Berlin. Although the East Germans promptly rejected this plan as colonialist, Kennedy expanded the idea to include flights, over which East Germany had no control. Seeing the suggestion as a way to block productive talks, the Soviets began harassing civil aircraft flying in the Berlin air corridors.
Despite mutual recognition of the importance of Berlin to improved Soviet-American relations, both sides doggedly stuck to their positions: The United States would not give up access to Berlin or concede to a permanent division of Germany, both changes Moscow believed essential to its future national security. Although Kennedy persuaded Khrushchev to end the buzzing of air traffic, they could not break the impasse. By June, Kennedy saw no point in continuing the exchange of private messages on Germany. “Matters relating to Berlin are currently being discussed in careful detail by Secretary Rusk and Ambassador Dobrynin,” he wrote Khrushchev, “and I think it may be best to leave the discussion in their capable hands at this time.” In July, when Khrushchev answered with a stale proposal for the replacement of western occupation forces with U.N. troops, Kennedy dismissed the suggestion as an extension of Moscow’s “consistent failure … to take any real account of what we have made clear are the vital interests of the United States and its Allies.”
An incident at the Berlin Wall, in which East German security guards killed a defector, together with Khrushchev’s fears of a U.S. first strike against the Soviet Union, heightened tensions between Moscow and Washington in the summer. In March, Adenauer had told Bobby that Khrushchev told him that he genuinely believed that “the United States wants to destroy the Soviet Union.” In an interview with journalist Stewart Alsop, Kennedy said that, “in some circumstances we must be prepared to use the nuclear weapon at the start, come what may—a clear attack on Western Europe, for example.” Khrushchev told Salinger that this “new doctrine” was “a very bad mistake for which [the President] will have to pay!” Although Kennedy’s full statement left little doubt that his concern was with avoiding nuclear war, Khrushchev ordered a special military alert in response to the article.
In June, Bolshakov reported a conversation with Bobby Kennedy that renewed Khrushchev’s worries about a U.S. nuclear attack. Do war hawks enjoy special influence in the United States? Bolshakov had asked Bobby. “In the government, no,” he had replied, “[b]ut among the generals in the Pentagon … there are such people. Recently,” Bobby had added, “the [Joint] Chiefs [of Staff] offered the President a report in which they confirmed that the United States is currently ahead of the Soviet Union in military power and that in extremis it would be possible to probe the forces of the Soviet Union.”
Although Bobby Kennedy assured Bolshakov that the president “had decisively rejected any attempt by zealous advocates of a clash between the United States and the Soviet Union … to [get him to] accept their point of view,” the conversation upset Khrushchev. If Bobby’s “candor” was aimed at encouraging Khrushchev to reach agreements on Berlin and test bans, it backfired. Khrushchev sent back a message through Bolshakov restating his determination to sign a peace treaty with East Germany that would liquidate “war remnants … and on this basis the situation in West Berlin—a free demilitarized city—would be normalized.” To underscore Soviet determination not to be intimidated by U.S. military might, Khrushchev told Interior Secretary Stewart Udall during a September visit to Russia that if “any lunatics in your country want war, Western Europe will hold them back. War in this day and age means no Paris and no France, all in the space of an hour. It’s been a long time since you could spank us like a little boy—now we can swat your ass.”
Nevertheless, because Khrushchev was eager to help the president in the congressional elections, he sent a message asking if Kennedy preferred that he wait on a Berlin treaty until after November 6. After Sorensen told Dobrynin that the president “could not possibly lay himself open to Republican charges of appeasement in his response to any buildup in Berlin pressures between now and November 6,” Khrushchev promised not to “hurt [his] chances in the November elections.” Khrushchev said that he intended to give Kennedy a choice after the elections: “go to war, or sign a peace treaty. We will not allow your troops to be in Berlin. We will permit access to West Berlin for economic or commercial purposes, but not for military purposes. Everybody is saying nowadays that there will be a war. I don’t agree. Sensible people won’t start a war. What is Berlin to the United States? … Do you need Berlin? Like hell you need it. Nor do we need it.”
It was not clear to Kennedy why Khrushchev had reverted to such belligerence. He concluded that Khrushchev was an unstable personality, an irresponsible character carried away by delusions. He was wildly erratic and unpredictable, friendly one day and unfriendly the next. He was “like the gangsters both of us had dealt with,” Bobby said. “Khrushchev’s kind of action—what he did and how he acted—was how an immoral gangster would act and not … a statesman, not as a person with a sense of responsibility.” Khrushchev, Kennedy told Cyrus Sulzberger of the New York Times, reminded him of Joe McCarthy and Jimmy Hoffa—rough, tough characters who could disarm people with their politeness. Llewellyn Thompson shared Kennedy’s view. There was “a kind of hypocrisy” to the man, Thompson told Kennedy during a conversation about Khrushchev in August. “It’s like dealing with a bunch of bootleggers or gangsters.” Yet Kennedy also knew that Khrushchev was a shrewd, calculating politician who never acted without some self-serving purpose. Events in October 1962 would reveal what Khrushchev was trying to achieve.