Countless individuals have noted that the President’s death affected them even more deeply than the death of their own parents. The reason, I believe, is that the latter situation most often represented a loss of the past—while the assassination of President Kennedy represented an incalculable loss of the future.
—Theodore C. Sorensen, December 1963
BY 1963 IT WAS CLEAR to all who saw him in the White House that Kennedy enjoyed being president. One of the first things visitors to the Oval Office noticed was how much he had put his stamp on the decor; a naval motif expressed his love of the sea, and his desk, which had belonged to President Hayes, was constructed from timbers of the H.M.S. Resolute. Aside from an alligator desk set, a gift from de Gaulle, naval artifacts covered the desk: the coconut shell with the message that helped rescue the PT-109 crew, two whale teeth engraved with sailing ships and a third with the presidential seal, a ten-inch glass ornament etched with a likeness of PT-109, and bookends with replicas of brass cannons on the U.S.S. Constitution. The walls flanking the fireplace held pictures of the famous naval engagement in 1812 between the Constitution and the British frigate Guerriere. Above the mantel was a picture of the September 1779 engagement between the Bonhomme Richard and the British ships Serapis and Countess of Scarborough. The sword of naval hero John Barry, crossed with a boarding saber, hung on another wall.
Kennedy “loved being President,” Schlesinger said, “and at times he could hardly remember that he had ever been anything else. He never complained about the ‘terrible loneliness’ of the office or its ‘awesome burdens.’ ” Dave Powers echoed Schlesinger’s recollection: “John F. Kennedy enjoyed being President. He loved being where the action was. He was always at his best under pressure. He became more determined after each disappointment.” This attitude partly explains why Kennedy saw his health problems not as a deterrent to becoming president but as a challenge he enjoyed overcoming.
Yet, not everything was dandy. In July 1963, O’Donnell and Powers recalled that Kennedy was frustrated over the tax cut, civil rights, and problems with Vietnam. His inability to win congressional approval for education and Medicare bills also troubled him. “We will probably get our jocks knocked off on this aid to education,” he told Sorensen earlier in the year. Nor did he always find the compulsory socializing at the White House appealing. One evening in January, when Jackie and her sister, Lee Radziwill, had arranged a dinner party with several Hollywood entertainers, Kennedy asked, “Are they all coming to dinner?” When told yes, he said, “You girls must be crazy, but I guess there isn’t anything I can do now.” Yet in spite of these occasional annoyances, O’Donnell and Powers remember Kennedy at this time as “more forceful and sure of himself, and more relaxed and happier than we had ever seen him.”
In April 1963, when Newsweek journalist James M. Cannon interviewed the president for an article about his brother Joe, Cannon “was struck first by the serenity of the [Oval Office] surroundings and the self-possession of the principal.” Cannon recorded in some notes he made on the meeting, “In this man, at this moment, there was no evidence that he was worn with the cares of office. He was casual. He was affable. He was unhurried, unbadgered …. ‘How are you doing?’ I said. ‘I must say you look fine. From all appearances, the job seems to be agreeing with you.’ ‘Well,’ he said, with a big smile, ‘I think it’s going well. As you know we do have our ups and downs, the tides ebb and flow …. [But] in general, I think things are going well.’ ”
Kennedy’s self-assurance registered not only on White House insiders and Americans more generally but also on Western Europeans. His popularity with them, Time magazine journalist John Steele privately told the White House, was “at an exceedingly high, really inspired level.” The British were ready to consider Kennedy the initiator of a family dynasty: They expected the president to have a second term, followed by the attorney general for eight years and then the senator from Massachusetts. (“Whatever other deficiencies the family may have, it is abundantly supplied with heirs,” one English writer observed.) Pressed to provide some philosophical wisdom about the position, Kennedy joked, “I have a nice home, the office is close by and the pay is good.” His quick wit about his family and politics was on display at a 1963 gala: “I was proud of the Attorney General’s first appearance before the Supreme Court yesterday,” he solemnly declared. “He did a very good job, according to everyone I talked to: Ethel, Jackie, Teddy.” Bobby’s performance showed that “he does have broader interests—that he isn’t limited to the slogan: ‘Stop the world—I want to get Hoffa.’ ” Kennedy also made light of the resistance to his legislative proposals: “With all our contacts in show business and culture,” he said, “the Democrats should make some progress. I’m trying to get [television series doctors] Dr. Kildare and Ben Casey to support my Medicare bill. And Kirk Douglas said he would support my proposals to strengthen the nation’s economy with a tax cut. In fact, he said he’s willing to go all the way and pay no taxes at all.” During a presidential briefing breakfast with economic advisers, Kennedy turned aside criticism with good humor. When a favorable review for right-wing columnist Victor Lasky’s book JFK: The Man and the Myth came up, the president recalled the only time he had been at the reviewer’s home, where he had been served “some kind of orange pop, and people sat stiffly around.” Kennedy jokingly added, “Never trust a man who serves only soft drinks.”
By October 1963, Kennedy had established the sort of rapport with the public that had made Theodore Roosevelt, FDR, Truman in 1948, and Ike so popular. The death in August 1963 of Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, a baby born five weeks before term, only deepened the public’s ties to the president and Jackie. The loss registered on millions of Americans, who sympathized with the Kennedys and identified with their vulnerability to human suffering. Picking up on an item in the New York Times—”As they walked out of the Presidential office, Mr. Kennedy took a white handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the boy’s nose”—New Yorker editor E. B. White composed an affectionate poem about JFK:
A President’s work is never done,
His burdens press from sun to sun:
A Berlin wall, a racial brew,
A tax cut bill, a Madame Nhu.
One crisis ebbs, another flows—
And here comes John with a runny nose:
A President must rise and dress,
See senators, and meet the press,
Be always bold, be sometimes wary,
Be kind to foreign dignitary,
And while he’s fending off our foes
Bend down and wipe a little boy’s nose.
BUT FOR ALL his occasional insouciance, Kennedy never lost sight of the limitations and frustrations all presidents face. “Every President,” he wrote in 1963, “must endure a gap between what he would like and what is possible.” He was also fond of FDR’s observation that “Lincoln was a sad man because he couldn’t get it all at once. And nobody can.” When James Reston pressed him to say what he hoped to achieve by the end of his term, Kennedy, Reston said, “looked at me as if I were a dreaming child. I tried again: Did he not feel the need of some goal to help guide his day-to-day decisions and priorities? Again a ghastly pause. It was only when I turned the question to immediate, tangible problems that he seized the point and rolled off a torrent of statistics.” It was not that Kennedy was without larger hopes and goals—better race relations and less poverty in America and improved East-West relations, with diminished likelihood of nuclear war, were never far from his mind. But it was the practical daily challenges standing in the way of larger designs that held his attention and seemed to him the principal stuff of being president.
By 1963 Kennedy had few doubts about his suitability for the presidency. But his self-confidence did not include the conviction that he was politically invulnerable. He understood that his political fortunes could change overnight—that unanticipated events could suddenly undermine his popularity and make him vulnerable to defeat in 1964. And the source of his eclipse could come from revelations about private behavior as well as from a downturn in public affairs or a stumble in handling a domestic or foreign crisis.
In March, when Schlesinger returned from a trip to England, he had given the president news of an emerging embarrassment involving John Profumo, Macmillan’s war minister, who had been having an extramarital affair with Christine Keeler, a twenty-one-year-old call girl who was also the mistress of a Soviet deputy naval attaché. Even though no one could prove that Profumo had given away state secrets, his indiscretion made Macmillan’s government vulnerable to collapse. A Gallup poll Schlesinger brought to Kennedy’s attention in June showed 71 percent of British voters favoring either Macmillan’s resignation or dissolution of parliament and a test of his popularity in a general election.
Kennedy’s interest in the scandal had been evident to Ben Bradlee, who later described the president as having “devoured every word about the Profumo case; it combined so many of the things that interested him: low doings in high places, the British nobility, sex and spying.” After someone in the state department sent Kennedy a cable from U.S. ambassador David Bruce recounting the details of the case, Kennedy “ordered all further cables from Bruce on that subject sent to him immediately.” And it was concern about Profumo fallout that led Kennedy to visit Macmillan in Sussex instead of London.
Kennedy saw the Profumo scandal as a cautionary tale. In June, when he discussed civil rights with Martin Luther King at the White House, he took King for a walk in the Rose Garden, where he warned him to disassociate himself from Levison and O’Dell. “You’ve read about Profumo in the newspapers?” the president asked King. “That was an example of friendship and loyalty carried too far. Macmillan is likely to lose his government because he has been loyal to his friend. You must take care not to lose your cause for the same reason.” King replied that the accusations against Levison could not be true. (King remembered that Kennedy “turned red and shook.” But understanding that continuing ties to O’Dell would strain relations with Kennedy and might weaken administration support for reform legislation, King put O’Dell on notice that he would have to quit the SCLC. Because Kennedy wanted O’Dell fired immediately, the White House leaked a story to the Birmingham News about his communist ties that forced King to act at once. Similarly, the Kennedys brought additional pressure to bear on King to distance himself from Levison. When King tried to finesse the issue by proposing to communicate with Levison only through a mutual friend, Bobby ordered FBI wiretaps on the friend. Levison himself solved the problem by volunteering to break off all communications with King.)
Kennedy also worried that the Profumo scandal might directly embarrass him. On June 29, a week after he had spoken with King, the New York Journal-American published a front-page story about a “high elected American official” and Suzy Chang, a New York prostitute, who was living in England and was part of the Keeler vice or “V-girl” ring. Chang privately claimed that she had slept with Kennedy and eaten dinner with him at the “21” club in New York when he was a senator. To head off potential damage to his brother, on July 1 Bobby asked the two Journal-American reporters who had published the story to meet with him at the Justice Department. They claimed that the “high official” was the president of the United States. Bobby chided them for publishing a story “without any further check to get to the truth of the matter.” One of the reporters said “he had other sources of a confidential nature.” An FBI agent, who sat in on the meeting, reported to Hoover that Bobby “treated the newspaper representatives at arms’ length and the conference ended most coolly and, in fact, there was almost an air of hostility between the Attorney General and the reporters.” According to Seymour Hersh, Bobby used his considerable influence with the Hearst family, who owned the Journal-American, to squelch the story.
Yet Bobby and his brother understood, as their friend Charlie Bartlett pointed out in a 1963 syndicated column, that no president has an iron-clad hold on the press: “Gratitude stirred by favors has an immensely transient quality, particularly among newsmen whose attentions must shift rapidly, and the solid ingratiation of a vast press corps with an independent tradition would be an enterprise beyond the capacities of any set of officials.”
Two days after Bobby saw the Journal-American reporters, he confronted another potential scandal that seemed even more threatening to the president’s political future. On July 3, Hoover advised Bobby of accusations that Kennedy had been involved with a German-born twenty-seven-year-old call girl, Ellen Rometsch, who might be an East German spy. Rometsch had grown up in East Germany, where she had belonged to communist youth groups and allegedly worked as a secretary for Walter Ulbricht, the head of the DDR, before fleeing to the West. A dark-haired beauty described as an Elizabeth Taylor lookalike, Rometsch was introduced to Kennedy by Senate secretary Bobby Baker, who had long made call girls available to senators and other high-government officials. In the spring and summer of 1963, Rometsch apparently made repeated visits to the White House, where she attended naked pool parties and had sex with Kennedy.
The danger from any revelations about the president’s involvement with Rometsch was not lost on Bobby. Though he told Hoover’s assistant Courtney Evans, who briefed Bobby on the rumors, that unfounded allegations about prominent people were common, Evans recorded that the attorney general “made particular note of Rometsch’s name.” Bobby also expressed appreciation for Hoover’s discretion in privately informing him of the stories. While the FBI investigated the accusations, Bobby ensured that Rometsch herself would not embarrass the president with leaks to the press about their trysts. On August 21, he arranged to have her deported to West Germany. Her escort on the flight to Europe was LaVern Duffy, an old Bobby associate on the Senate Rackets Committee in the fifties, who had been seeing Rometsch romantically for months and now became the conduit for Kennedy money buying her silence.
But Rometsch’s distance from potentially inquisitive American reporters and an agreement not to discuss her relations with Kennedy did not eliminate the possibility of a public scandal. In September 1963, Republicans on the Senate Rules Committee began looking into allegations that Bobby Baker had engaged in influence peddling and other ethical violations. On October 7, Baker gave up his Senate position and devoted himself to combating the investigation. Understanding that the White House and Senate Democrats could squelch the probe, Baker tried to enlist Bobby’s support. The unspoken understanding between them was that Bobby—who disliked Baker and his strongest ally, Johnson—would not encourage the Senate inquiry, and in turn, Baker would sit on information about the president and Rometsch. But with evidence of Baker’s wrongdoing mounting, no one could hold back an investigation.
Moreover, a story on October 26 in the Des Moines Register by the well-regarded investigative reporter Clark Mollenhoff brought the Rometsch scandal to public attention. Mollenhoff raised questions about Rometsch’s deportation and cited allegations of associations between the “party girl” and “several high executive branch officials” described as “prominent New Frontiersmen from the executive branch of government.” The story more than caught Kennedy’s attention. “The President came in all excited about the news reports concerning the German woman & other prostitutes getting mixed up with government officials, Congressmen, etc.,” Evelyn Lincoln noted in her diary on Monday, October 28. “He called Mike Mansfield to come to the office to discuss the playing down of this news report.” Mollenhoff’s story said nothing about Rometsch’s possible East German ties, which would have made his revelations as sensational as those about Profumo and would have made Kennedy as vulnerable as Macmillan, who lost power in October 1963. The president instructed O’Donnell to get every White House aide on record as having had nothing to do with any Baker call girls.
Bobby became the point man in heading off possible damage to his brother and others at the White House. He sent word to Hoover asking him to discourage any Senate investigation of the Rometsch allegations. Bobby said he was “greatly concerned, as was the President, with the possible harm which will come to the United States if irresponsible action is taken on the Hill in connection with the Ellen Rometsch allegations.” Hoover suggested that they stop Rometsch from getting a visa to return to the United States, so that it would be difficult for the Senate to probe her White House involvements. Bobby, speaking for the president, asked Hoover to meet with Senate leaders, which he did. In a conversation with Mansfield and Everett Dirksen at Mansfield’s apartment in northwest Washington, Hoover assured them that an FBI investigation had turned up no evidence that Rometsch was a spy or a visitor to the White House. He did have, however, plenty of evidence that Baker’s call girls had serviced various senators. Not surprisingly, Hoover’s initiative convinced the Senate to stay away entirely from Baker’s call girls. To further discourage any investigation, JFK told Ben Bradlee that Hoover had lots of “dirt” on senators, which Kennedy implied Bradlee might want to uncover if they began looking into anyone else’s sexual misdeeds.
The Baker probe also raised concerns at the White House. Johnson had not only been Baker’s mentor in the fifties, when Lyndon had been majority leader, he had also publicly attended the opening of a luxury motel in Ocean City, Maryland, in 1962, where Baker, a part owner, entertained “the advise-and-consent set.” Allegations of corrupt dealings by Baker put Johnson under suspicion of unethical behavior. The president had a “keen interest” in the Baker case, and Bobby monitored the probe for evidence of any wrongdoing by the vice president. Johnson believed that Bobby, who obviously disliked him, saw him as of little help to the administration and had instigated the Baker investigation in order to throw him off the ticket in 1964.
In fact, Johnson’s suspicions were largely unfounded, but once the stories about Baker became public, the Kennedys shrewdly encouraged rumors that LBJ would be dropped in the following year. The simultaneous leaks and reassurances were smart politics. If Johnson were implicated in any of Baker’s misdeeds, the Kennedys could follow through on the rumors and rid themselves of a political liability. If the talk of Johnson’s wrongdoing proved false, which it did, the White House could simply echo earlier reassurances about keeping him as the ideal running mate.
IN PREPARATION FOR THE 1964 ELECTIONS, the Senate Democratic policy committee and the White House began discussions of how to deal with the country’s concerns and turn them into political advantages over the GOP. Specifically, the administration complained about the “stubborn and destructive obstructionism” of congressional Republicans to tax reforms that could expand the economy, inhibit inflation, and reduce unemployment. Opinion polls in the spring of 1963 had revealed that national defense, nuclear war, communist subversion, education, inflation, unemployment, and racial tensions were principal public worries.
Kennedy believed that the upcoming campaign would largely be about his record. He had every confidence that he would win, especially if the Republicans made conservative senator Barry Goldwater their nominee. But nothing could be taken for granted about the economy, civil rights, space exploration, Cuba, and Vietnam, which impressed him as the problems that needed the greatest attention in the next year and a half. He did not expect to resolve these difficulties in the near term. Instead, he would be content to keep them under control or frame them as challenges that might be effectively addressed in the future. His immediate goal, then, was to put conditions in place that would advance his administration toward a greater mastery of the country’s most compelling dilemmas in a second term.
By the fall of 1963, the president remained focused on the economy and how it would fare in the coming year without tax reform, which was on indefinite hold in Congress. Economic growth in the first quarter of the year had exceeded expectations, making a recession and a tax reduction unlikely. CEA predictions in the summer and fall that the first half of 1964 would see a significant slowdown unless there were a tax cut had no significant impact on Congress. Senators in particular were determined to resist reductions in tax revenues without assurances of a balanced budget. Ten of seventeen senators on the Finance Committee, for example, supported chairman Robert Byrd’s determination to hold up the bill until he had such a commitment from the White House. And even if the administration could promise this unlikely result, there seemed little chance of winning major tax revisions in an election year without a recession.
Since Kennedy believed that a slowdown would occur, if not in 1964 then certainly in his second term, he was confident that he could eventually win his tax cut. He intended to couple it with an attack on poverty. John Kenneth Galbraith’s assertion in his 1958 book, The Affluent Society, that the country had a permanent class of impoverished citizens had brought the issue to Kennedy’s attention. But it was Michael Harrington’s compelling book, The Other America, describing the suffering of forty to sixty million Americans, coupled with Dwight Macdonald’s fifty-page New Yorker essay-review on the invisible poor, that stirred Kennedy to plan a post-’64 election campaign to break the cycle of poverty in which so many elderly and minority Americans lived.
In October 1963, Kennedy discussed the issue with Walter Heller. A New York Times story on Kentucky underscored for Kennedy that “there was [a] tremendous problem to be met.” He wanted to make “a two- or three-day trip to some of the key poverty-stricken areas to focus the spotlight and arouse the American conscience on this problem from which we are so often shielded. It’s perfectly clear,” Heller said in a note to himself, “that he is aroused about this and if we could really produce a program to fill the bill, he would be inclined to run with it.” When they revisited the subject in November, Kennedy said he remained “very much in favor of doing something,” but he wanted Heller to “make clear that we’re doing something for the middle-income man in the suburbs as well.” Kennedy understood that the success of any big social program like Social Security partly depended on including the middle class as well as the poor.
CIVIL RIGHTS, which had become a more compelling issue in May and June, now stood at the center of domestic affairs. The chances of passing Kennedy’s civil rights bill, however, were poor. Getting a strong bill through the House seemed possible: Northern Democrats would likely join with moderate Republicans to outvote southern Democrats; they might even be able to end discrimination in places of public accommodation and re-create a Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC), the two most controversial civil rights reforms. But the twenty-two southern senators from the old Confederacy were confident of finding twelve conservative allies to defeat Kennedy’s bill. In addition, the Senate had never been able to muster the two-thirds-plus-one vote to stop a civil rights filibuster. If the White House agreed to quietly abandon the issue of segregation in public accommodations, Mansfield believed that they might bring enough Republicans along to win a limited civil rights law. “The assumption is that it is better to secure passage of as much of the Administration’s legislative proposals on civil rights as is possible,” Mansfield told the president, “rather than to run the very real risk of losing all in an effort to obtain all.”
The White House had some small hope that it might convince “a leading southern Senator … to play the role that [Michigan senator] Arthur Vandenberg [had] played in the isolationist fight” at the start of the Cold War. Eventually, some southerner was going to say that “the world had changed, that the struggle for equal rights was irresistible and that the South, instead of wasting its energies in vain recrimination and resistance,” needed to accept “a constructive resolution” to a problem that undermined the country’s domestic and international well-being. Lister Hill of Alabama, a New Dealer, who did not have to run again until 1968, when he would be seventy-four and might not stand for reelection anyway, seemed a good choice. But Hill, like his fellow southerners in both Houses, would not break a commitment to the region’s mores.
It was clear to Kennedy that getting any kind of civil rights law would require an all-out lobbying effort. He needed to enlist as many groups as possible in bringing pressure to bear on uncommitted congressmen and senators. As Johnson had pointed out to civil rights leaders in June, the administration began with about two-to-one support in the Senate for a bill, but what he meant was that there were only fifty votes for and twenty-two against. The remaining twenty-eight uncommitted senators would decide the issue, which meant selling civil rights to them and their constituents during the few months left in the congressional session. Educators, women, and labor and religious leaders who were already sympathetic to legislative action were asked at White House meetings to educate others about the destructive effects of discrimination and personally do all they could to advance social justice. Businessmen, especially those most affected by the law’s provision that would end segregation in places of public accommodation, were urged to understand the national need for such a reform.
Yet Kennedy remained uncertain that he could sway Congress, and he worried that failure might be disastrous for his administration. In a White House meeting with civil rights leaders on June 22, he predicted a hard struggle that might cost him dearly. “The Vice President and I know what it will mean if we fail,” Kennedy said. “I have just seen a new poll—national approval of the administration has fallen from 60 to 47 percent.” (No one ever located the poll Kennedy cited; his Gallup approval rating at the time was, in fact, 61 percent.) “A good many programs I care about may go down the drain as a result of this,” he said, “so we are putting a lot on the line.” He added, “I may lose the next election because of this.” On August 1, a reporter at a news conference asked Kennedy to comment on “indications lately that your policies on civil rights are costing you heavily in political prestige and popularity.” The reporter asked Kennedy to say “whether civil rights are worth an election.” Kennedy replied “[I] assume what you say is probably right.” But because civil rights currently represented “a national crisis of great proportions,” he believed that “whoever was President would meet his responsibilities” by advancing the rights of all citizens to equal opportunity.
Kennedy’s dire predictions were partly aimed at convincing civil rights advocates to accept a compromise bill, which was the only sort of measure he believed could pass. “The worst trouble of all would be to lose the fight in the Congress,” he asserted. He wanted to discourage the gathering on the twenty-second of rights activists King, James Farmer, A. Philip Randolph, Joe Rauh, Walter Reuther, Bayard Rustin, Roy Wilkins, and Whitney Young from doing anything that jeopardized passage of even a watered-down law.
Kennedy was especially negative about a march on the Capitol. White House press leaks were already discouraging the idea when the Urban League’s Whitney Young asked him at the meeting whether newspaper reports about the president’s opposition were accurate. Kennedy responded, “We want success in the Congress, not a big show on the Capitol.” He acknowledged that civil rights demonstrations had pushed the administration and Congress into consideration of a major reform bill, “but now we are in a new phase,” he said, “the legislative phase, and results are essential. The wrong kind of demonstration at the wrong time will give those fellows [on the Hill] a chance to say that they have to prove their courage by voting against us. To get the votes we need we have, first, to oppose demonstrations which lead to violence, and, second, give Congress a fair chance to work its will.”
Randolph, King, and others defended the idea of a march and said they could not stop it. “There will be a march,” Randolph declared; the principal question was whether it would be violent or nonviolent. King argued the case for a march as good politics. It could dramatize the issue and “[mobilize] support in parts of the country that don’t know about the problem firsthand. I think it will serve a purpose. It may seem ill-timed. Frankly, I have never engaged in a direct-action movement that did not seem ill-timed. Some people thought Birmingham was ill-timed,” King said. “Including the Attorney General,” Kennedy interjected, acknowledging that his administration had a less than perfect record in the fight for civil rights.
Also present was Johnson, who invoked his authority as a past majority leader and explained that Kennedy was taking the right approach to Congress. He would move them by arm twisting, deal making, and corridor politics, where the president could call on them to think of the larger picture and do right by the country. Publicly challenging the Congress on moral grounds had its limits, but a president who knew each member’s personal wants and could make arrangements with them privately, quietly, would achieve more than a crowd of marchers flaunting their sense of moral indignation at lawmakers refusing to act.
When others at the meeting explained that resistance on their part to a march would alienate them from the membership of their organizations, Kennedy said, “Well, we all have our problems. You have your problems. I have my problems,” mentioning Congress, the Soviets, NATO, and de Gaulle. As he left for a briefing on what to expect in Europe during his upcoming trip, he concluded by saying that they should work together and stay in touch. Though they would disagree from time to time on tactics, their strength was in unity of purpose.
Since it was now clear that they would be unable to stop the August 28 march, the Kennedys tried to ensure its success. Worried about an all-black demonstration, which would encourage assertions that whites had no serious interest in a comprehensive reform law, Kennedy asked Walter Reuther, head of the Automobile Workers union, to arrange substantial white participation by church and labor union members. Kennedy also worried that a small turnout would defeat march purposes, but black and white organizers answered this concern by mobilizing over 250,000 demonstrators. To ensure that as little as possible went wrong, Bobby directed his Civil Division assistant attorney general to devote himself full-time for five weeks to guarding against potential mishaps, like insufficient food and toilet facilities or the presence of police dogs, which would draw comparisons to Bull Connor in Birmingham. Moreover, winning agreement to a route running from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial precluded the demonstration at the Capitol that the president feared would antagonize the Congress.
The march marked a memorable moment in a century-long crusade for black equality, its distinctive features not violence or narrow partisanship on behalf of one group’s special interest but a dignified display of faith on the part of blacks and whites that America remained the world’s last best hope of freedom and equality for all: that the fundamental promise of American life—the triumph of individualism over collectivism or racial or group identity—might yet be fulfilled.
Nothing caught the spirit of the moment better, or did more to advance it, than Martin Luther King’s concluding speech in the shadow of Lincoln’s memorial. In his remarks to the massive audience, which was nearly exhausted by the long afternoon of oratory, King had spoken for five minutes from his prepared text when he extemporaneously began to preach in the familiar cadence that had helped make him so effective a voice in the movement: “I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit together at the table of brotherhood …. I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together …. And when this happens … we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’ ”
As the marchers dispersed, many walked hand in hand singing the movement’s anthem:
We shall overcome, we shall overcome,
We shall overcome, some day.
Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe,
We shall overcome some day.
Despite the success of the march, which received broad network TV coverage, Kennedy remained uncertain about prospects for a bill of any kind. But he was genuinely impressed and moved by King’s speech. “I have a dream,” he greeted King at a White House meeting with march organizers that evening. (When King asked if the president had heard Walter Reuther’s excellent speech, which had indirectly chided Kennedy for doing more to defend freedom in Berlin than Birmingham, Kennedy replied, “Oh, I’ve heard him plenty of times.”)
Almost euphoric over the size of the turnout and the well-behaved, dignified demeanor of the marchers, Wilkins, Randolph, and Reuther expressed confidence that the House would pass a far-reaching bill, which would put unprecedented pressure on the Senate to act. Kennedy offered a two-pronged defense of continuing caution. First, he said, though “this doesn’t have anything to do with what we have been talking about,” the group should exercise their substantial influence in the Negro community by doing something that “the Jewish community has done,” putting an emphasis on “educating their children, on making them study, making them stay in school and all the rest.” The looks of uncertainty, if not disbelief, on the faces of the civil rights leaders toward a proposal that, at best, would take a generation to implement moved Kennedy to follow on with a practical explanation for restraint in dealing with Congress. He read from a list prepared by special assistant for congressional relations Larry O’Brien of likely votes in the House and Senate. The dominance of negative congressmen blunted suggestions that Kennedy could win passage of anything more than a limited measure, and even that was in doubt.
Kennedy’s analysis of congressional resistance moved Randolph to ask the president to mount “a crusade” by going directly to the country for support. Kennedy countered by suggesting that rights leaders pressure the Republican party to back the fight for equal rights. He believed that the Republicans would turn a crusade by the administration into a political liability for the Democrats among white voters. And certainly bipartisan consensus would better serve a push for civil rights than a one-sided campaign by liberal Democrats. King asked if an appeal to Eisenhower might help enlist Republican backing generally and the support of House minority leader Charlie Halleck in particular. Kennedy did not think that an appeal to Eisenhower would have any impact on Halleck, but he liked the idea of sending a secret delegation made up of religious clerics and businessmen to see the former president. (Signaling his unaltered conviction that the “bomb throwers”—as Johnson called uncompromising liberals—would do more to retard than advance a civil rights bill, Kennedy jokingly advised against including Walter Reuther in the delegation seeing Ike.) In the end, Kennedy concluded the one-hour-and-ten-minute meeting by promising nothing more than reports on likely votes in the House and the Senate. It was transparent to more than the civil rights leaders that Kennedy saw a compromise or bipartisan civil rights measure as his only chance for success.
On September 2, when he gave CBS anchor Walter Cronkite an interview at Hyannis Port, Kennedy did not blink at the likelihood that his support of major reforms, especially civil rights, would hurt him in the South. But he tried to blunt potential Republican gains and advance the civil rights bill by asking Republicans to “commit themselves to the same objective of equality of opportunity. I would be surprised,” he said, “if the Republican Party, which, after all, is the party of Lincoln and is proud of that fact, as it should be … if they did not also support the right of every citizen to have equal opportunities, equal chance under the Constitution.”
A bombing at a church in Birmingham on September 15, which killed four young black girls, made the sense of urgency greater than ever. On the nineteenth, King and a group of black Birmingham leaders met with Kennedy at the White House to discuss ways to avert further violence against blacks and preserve the city’s tranquillity. King described the situation in Birmingham as so serious that it not only threatened the stability of the city “and Alabama but of the whole nation …. More bombings of churches and homes have taken place in Birmingham than any city in the United States and not a one of these bombings over the last fifteen to twenty years has been solved,” King told the president. “The Negro community is about to reach a breaking point …. There is a feeling of being alone and not being protected …. If something isn’t done to give the Negro a new sense of hope and a sense of protection,” King warned, “ … then we will have the worst race rioting we have ever seen in this country.” The presence of state troopers was no help. To the contrary, “their methods,” King said, were “just unbelievable and barbaric …. We feel that these troopers should be removed, and be replaced with federal troops, to protect the people.” Second, King urged the cancellation of federal government contracts with Birmingham businesses that continued to discriminate against blacks.
Kennedy resisted both suggestions. If conditions in Birmingham continued to deteriorate, he promised to consider dispatching troops, but he believed that once he sent in federal forces, he would have “an awful time getting them out” (as he feared would be the case in Vietnam). He thought it essential for the black community to avoid violence. “If the Negroes begin to respond, shoot at whites, you lose,” he said. “Because when everybody starts going for guns, they’ll shoot some innocent people, and they’ll be white and then that will just wipe away” any white goodwill toward blacks. “I can’t do very much,” Kennedy added. “Congress can’t do very much unless we keep the support of the white community throughout the country.” If that disappears, “then we’re pretty much down to a racial struggle, so that I think we’ve just got to tell the Negro community that this is a very hard price they have to pay to get this job done.” All Kennedy would commit to was sending former Secretary of the Army Kenneth Royall and former West Point football coach Colonel Earl Blaik to mediate the crisis. Kennedy saw their national status as so high that they would be able to draw Birmingham’s white moderates into some kind of agreement with the city’s black leaders, which Governor Wallace would find difficult to challenge. He also met with Birmingham officials at the White House. He had no illusion, he told them, that the desire for segregation would disappear, and he predicted that a city with a 40 or 45 percent black population could not cling to traditional habits without increasing tensions and racial violence. He urged the hiring of some Negro policeman and clerks in department stores as a useful way to head off further agitation. The alternative was a city that would likely disintegrate as a viable community.
When the city fathers complained that these steps would probably lead to integration in places of public accommodation, Kennedy encouraged them to develop a sense of proportion about what they faced. Integrating the police force and department stores or even public accommodations like hotels and motels would be relatively painless, he said. There would be few black policemen and clerks; nor, he said with a slight condescending twinge, would many blacks have the financial wherewithal to stay at hotels and motels. The greatest difficulty he saw would be in integrating elementary and secondary schools, where classes would be almost evenly divided between blacks and whites. When the city fathers complained that outside agitators like King, Fred Shuttlesworth, and Young were a principal source of their problem, Kennedy replied that even without black activists from outside the state, Birmingham’s problem would not go away. In addition, if moderates like King stood aside, more radical groups like SNCC would take their place, and “they’re sons of bitches,” Kennedy emphasized. He ended by asking his visitors to support the Royall-Blaik initiative, which would allow the federal government to stay out of Birmingham and create some sense of progress and provide a breathing spell from more violence. As newcomers to the city’s government, the city officials pleaded for time to establish their administration before addressing so controversial an issue as civil rights.
Kennedy knew that it would take years and years to resolve race relations in the South, but he still believed that passage of a limited civil rights bill would be “very helpful” in buying time for the country to advance toward a peaceful solution to its greatest domestic social problem. But it was not to be. Between the end of September and the third week in November, House Democrats and Republicans—liberals and conservatives—entered into self-interested maneuvering over the administration’s civil rights proposals. A lot of “these fellas would rather have an issue than a bill,” Kennedy said about liberals and conservatives. He was so discouraged by late October over the “bad news” coming out of the House that he told Evelyn Lincoln, “he felt like packing his bags and leaving.” He also complained that the Republicans were tempted “to think that they’re never going to get very far with the Negroes anyway—so they might as well play the white game in the South.” Still, because he believed that it would be “a great disaster for us to be beaten in the House,” he made a substantial effort to arrange a legislative bargain. Kennedy’s intervention in a meeting with Democratic and Republican House leaders on October 23 produced a compromise bill that passed the Judiciary Committee by 20 to 14 on November 20. But the Rules Committee remained a problem. Larry O’Brien and Ted Sorensen asked the president how they could possibly get the bill past Committee chairman Howard Smith, the Virginia segregationist, who was determined to stop it from getting to the House floor in the 1963 session. Kennedy left for a political trip to Dallas on November 21 without an answer to their question. If, as seemed most likely, Smith could keep the bill bottled up in his committee for just one month, it would go over to the 1964 session, when so controversial a measure would have little chance of surviving in an election year.
Yet the news on civil rights was not all bad for Kennedy. After a visit to Arkansas in October, where he spoke about the state, the South, and the country, the Arkansas Gazette declared his visit a “solid success,” that “suggests that the Republicans may be counting prematurely in adding up all those electoral votes for 1964 from a Solid Republican South.” The paper acknowledged that the president was “probably … beyond help in Mississippi and Alabama, but then Mississippi and Alabama weren’t even with him the last time around.” Southern moderates saw Kennedy as a voice of reason in the shrill debate over civil rights. The president “came to Arkansas as a friend and not to do battle with anyone,” the Gazette declared. “He said the state and national governments should be partners, not antagonists. His good humor was evident, along with a flashing wit, and his habit of mixing with the crowds stands him in good stead. There is not much question that the President, as they say, did himself some good on this venture into the South.”
If Kennedy’s political problems in the South were less than he feared, the racial divide in the region remained a problem that seemed certain to dog the country and his administration for the foreseeable future. Even in the unlikely event that the administration’s November 20 bill won House and Senate approval, it would not have satisfied civil rights advocates for long. The bill had eliminated retail stores and personal services from the public accommodations section, included no Fair Employment Practices Commission, sharply restricted EEOC enforcement powers and federally assisted programs that had to meet desegregation standards, and limited voting rights to federal elections. Constrained by fear of white resistance, including possible violence, to a comprehensive civil rights statute and by concerns about southern support in 1964, Kennedy had reached for compromise solutions that could buy time and allow him to address the issue again in a second term.
In doing so, Kennedy misread the situation, as he had in dealing with southern congressional Democrats in the Eighty-seventh and Eighty-eighth Congresses between 1961 and 1963. His hope that avoiding a confrontation with southern congressmen and senators over civil rights might help win passage of other administration priorities, like a tax cut, Medicare, and federal aid to education, proved false. Would a strong appeal for civil rights legislation from the first have better served Kennedy’s legislative agenda? Almost certainly not, but given congressional resistance to his initiatives, it wouldn’t have hurt it, either. And it would have put the administration in a stronger position to win passage of a comprehensive civil rights bill in 1963. If Kennedy had urged such a law from the start of his presidency, he could then have argued that his bill would have prevented the racial strife in Mississippi and Alabama in 1962 and 1963. It would have been a forceful justification for enactment of civil rights legislation in the summer of 1963.
Kennedy also failed to see that even the most committed segregationist senators and congressmen and the great majority of southern whites would accept a congressionally mandated civil rights bill. In August 1963, no less than Bonnie Faubus Salcido wrote him “to give you hope in the fight for civil rights. I want you to know there are many in the South who are for you tho [sic] are afraid to speak out. I am the sister of [Orval Faubus] the Governor of Arkansas …. Five of my brothers and sisters are for you also.” Having fought and lost the civil war over slavery and states rights, most southerners were not about to urge another secession crisis in response to federal imposition of the Constitution’s equal protection clauses. Except for a tiny minority of racist extremists, they could imagine nothing less than a unified nation in the face of an international communist threat.
Moreover, Kennedy did not fully understand what Johnson was telling him about the importance of taking a moral stand on civil rights and leading a crusade for something that could be defined as fundamental American values. To be sure, Kennedy’s June appeals for civil rights legislation rested on forceful statements of this kind. But his willingness to reach compromises with various congressional groups undermined his ability to press the issue. It did not need to be so. As Kennedy himself said in one of his conversations in October, while polls showed that most Americans were not ready to have Negroes living next door to them, they did support a defense of constitutional rights. With majority sentiment thus favoring congressional action if couched correctly, Kennedy could have taken the moral high ground and invoked the dangers to the national well-being from a failure to enact a bill that could largely ensure equal treatment under the law. His attempt to find a middle ground made him less effective in a fight that required unqualified expressions of faith in the righteousness of the cause. Since civil rights—more so than any other national issue confronting him—raised fundamental ethical questions, he certainly could have made it the one great domestic moral cause of his presidency.
BY CONTRAST WITH his uncertain handling of civil rights, Kennedy had no doubts about the wisdom of landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade. Budget deficits and demands for greater spending on domestic programs could not deter him from a commitment he believed essential to America’s international prestige. In June 1962, after the successful orbital flights by Alan Shepard and John Glenn, Kennedy told a press conference that he had no intention of diverting money from space programs. “I do not think the United States can afford to become second in space because I think that space has too many implications militarily, politically, psychologically, and all the rest.” He cited a survey of French students, two-thirds of whom regarded the Soviet Union as being first in science and technology. “I think the fact that the Soviet Union was … first in space in the fifties had a tremendous impact upon a good many people who were attempting to make a determination as to whether they could meet their economic problems without engaging in a Marxist form of government. I think the United States cannot permit the Soviet Union to become dominant in the sea of space.” Kennedy partly justified the lunar program’s costs by citing its “many industrial benefits.” “No one can tell me that the United States cannot afford to do what the Soviet Union has done so successfully with a national income of less than half of ours,” he said.
In 1962, a double orbit by two Soviet cosmonauts and continuing advantages in the “size and total of weights placed in orbit, in the thrust of their operational rocket engines, and in the development of” space rendezvousing techniques strengthened Kennedy’s commitment to the Apollo program. Surveys of West European opinion on the Soviet-American space competition showed a growing regard for U.S. capabilities, further bolstering Kennedy’s determination to advance the lunar landing. In August, to counter allegations that Apollo primarily aimed to give the United States a military advantage in space, Kennedy directed the National Security Council to encourage public understanding of America’s peaceful intentions. (The NSC was a peculiar choice as spokesman for the administration’s opposition to militarizing space.)
Kennedy also urged NASA officials to consider accelerating the manned lunar mission by diverting monies from other space projects. At a meeting with budget advisers in November, he clashed with NASA head Jim Webb, who opposed putting more money into the lunar program to advance the landing date. A forceful, overbearing character who did not like being contradicted, Webb bristled at Kennedy’s policy directives, interrupting and speaking over the president. Webb urged a balanced program of space exploration that did not overemphasize the lunar probes. He described the moon walk as just one of several space priorities and invoked the authority of scientists, who “think the highest priority is to understand the environment of space.”
Believing that public support for his space program would weaken without clearly tying it to the Soviet-American competition for space dominance, Kennedy rejected Webb’s advice. While only 33 percent of the public endorsed the expenditure of $40 billion on the manned moon mission, Kennedy saw a well-defined and dramatic achievement as essential to sustain national backing. And he saw that backing as vital to a larger national security goal. “Everything we do ought to really be tied in to getting on to the moon ahead of the Russians,” he told Webb. “Otherwise we shouldn’t be spending that kind of money, because I’m not interested in space …. [The costs] wreck our budget on all these other domestic programs, and the only justification for it … is because we hope to beat them to demonstrate that instead of being behind by a couple of years, by God we passed them.”
“Do you still have the same enthusiasm and high hopes for the results of the vast outlays we have undertaken in the space projects … [as] when you first started into these?” a reporter asked Kennedy in December 1962. He acknowledged that $5 billion in the coming year was a lot to spend on the program but pointed to the “tremendous effect” that Sputnik had in the fifties. It made people everywhere believe that Moscow had “the secret of the organization of society.” He also urged the reporters to keep in mind that space expenditures translated into new industries and new technical skills.
Kennedy’s commitment to the moon landing did not insulate the administration from growing complaints about the “moon-doggle,” as critics began calling it. U.S. scientists were among the most outspoken critics. They asserted that “large-scale applied research ought to concentrate on problems ‘here on earth’: Medicine, Third World development, urban renewal” were all more worthy of investment and study than the moon program. Liberals joined the attack by pointing out that space spending could be funding valuable social programs. On the other side of the fence, Republicans, led by Eisenhower, weighed in with complaints that Kennedy’s moon project was too focused on America’s international prestige and too little on gaining military advantages in space. Eisenhower said that spending a total of $40 billion to reach the moon was “just nuts.”
In the spring of 1963, Kennedy launched an aggressive response to his critics. In April, he asked Johnson to tell him what technical and scientific accomplishments might result from space exploration. At the same time, Kennedy told the press that nothing had changed his mind about “the desirability of continuing this program. Now, some people say that we should take the money we are putting into space and put it into housing or education,” but, Kennedy asserted, if they “cut the space program … you would not get additional funds for education.” Instead, the Congress would use the monies to balance budgets. Slowing or eliminating the manned moon mission would only produce later recriminations over our failure to keep up with the Soviets.
At the end of July, to blunt continuing attacks on Apollo, Kennedy wanted Johnson to tell him whether the Eisenhower administration had ever had a moon program, what its time schedule was, and how much they had planned to spend on it. He also asked Johnson to report on how much of the space program was militarily useful. The vice president replied that Eisenhower had no moon program and that it was impossible “to ascribe a quantitative measure to the military spin-offs from the non-military portion of the space program.” However, Johnson confidently asserted that everything they were doing in space was both directly and indirectly of military value, concluding that the “space program is expensive, but it can be justified as a solid investment which will give ample returns in security, prestige, knowledge, and material benefits.”
When reports about Soviet second thoughts on a manned moon mission surfaced in the summer, Kennedy came under additional pressure to reconsider the U.S. program. He refused. He continued to see substantial Soviet gains in prestige from space exploration. According to a USIA worldwide opinion survey asking which country was “ahead in space developments,” people everywhere believed the Soviets had the advantage. In Japan, 69 percent of the poll saw Moscow in the lead, while only 6 percent said the United States; in Britain, the split was 59 to 13, and in France, opinion ran 68 percent to 5 percent against the U.S.; in Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela, only 10 to 18 percent believed that the United States was winning the space race. “Are we going to divert ourselves from our effort in an area where the Soviet Union has a lead, is making every effort to maintain that lead, in an area which could affect our national security as well as great peaceful development?” Kennedy rhetorically asked reporters in July.
To increase public support for Apollo, Kennedy emphasized the idealistic as well as the practical advantages of his policy. In particular, he publicly urged Soviet-American cooperation in outer space. In a September 20, 1963, speech before the United Nations General Assembly, he underscored the rising hopes for peace resulting from reduced tensions over Berlin, Laos, and the Congo and the test ban treaty. “In a field where the United States and Soviet Union have a special capacity—in the field of space—there is room for new cooperation,” Kennedy declared, “for further joint efforts in the regulation and exploration of space. I include among these possibilities a joint expedition to the moon …. Why … should man’s first flight to the moon be a matter of national competition?” There was no need for the immense duplication of research, construction, and expenditure. “Surely we should explore whether the scientists and astronauts of our two countries—indeed of all the world—cannot work together in the conquest of space, sending some day in this decade to the moon not the representatives of a single nation, but the representatives of all of our countries.” Though Khrushchev gave no response to Kennedy’s proposal, in November, JFK instructed Webb personally to assume responsibility for exploring possibilities of Soviet-American cooperation and to report back to him on “the progress of our planning by December 15.”
At the end of October, when Khrushchev told journalists that they were “not at present planning flight by cosmonauts to the moon,” American newspapers gave his remarks front-page coverage. (Khrushchev reflected Soviet ambivalence about a manned moon mission; it was not until 1964 that Russian leaders formally committed themselves to enter this competition.) But Kennedy refused to take Khrushchev’s statement as an excuse to quit the moon race. “I would not make any bets at all upon Soviet intentions,” he told the press. When Khrushchev confirmed to reporters that Moscow had not dropped out of the moon race, Kennedy accepted it as vindication of his policy. “An energetic continuation of our strong space effort is essential,” Kennedy told Congressman Albert Thomas. “In the larger sense, this is not merely an effort to put a man on the moon; it is a means and a stimulus for all the advances in technology, in understanding and in experience, which can move us forward toward man’s mastery of space.”
As demonstrated by a 1965 survey showing 58 percent of Americans endorsing the country’s moon mission, Kennedy accurately assessed a shift toward increased public backing for the expensive space effort. As important, the success of the manned moon landing program by 1969—the end of the decade, as Kennedy had promised—ensured an enduring U.S. commitment to space exploration. He had indeed helped open a new frontier.
IN 1963, along with the battle to keep the moon mission on track, Kennedy struggled to find answers to continuing difficulties with Cuba and South Vietnam. At the center of his policies toward both countries was a search for effective compromises that would free his administration to focus on bigger challenges from Moscow and at home, where a presidential campaign was certain to consume considerable energy, and his plans for a tax cut, civil rights, Medicare, and aid to education had been stalled.
Cuba, which had been a constant concern since January 1961, seemed especially in need of some fresh thinking. Kennedy’s eagerness to settle the Cuban problem without overt military action had been evident since the Bay of Pigs and was as apparent during the missile crisis. His affinity for finding compromises on Cuba surfaced again in November 1962, when he agreed to give up on-site inspections in return for removal of the IL-28s.
But tensions remained. Khrushchev wanted an unqualified noninvasion pledge, but the best he could get, Kennedy told him on November 21, was that “there need be no fear of any invasion of Cuba while matters take their present favorable course.” In response, Khrushchev asked Kennedy to “clearly confirm … the pledge of non-invasion of Cuba by the United States and your allies.” Kennedy replied on December 14 that “it is clearly in the interest of both sides that we reach agreement on how finally to dispose of the Cuban crisis …. We have never wanted to be driven by the acts of others into war in Cuba. The other side of the coin, however, is that we do need to have adequate assurances that all offensive weapons are removed from Cuba and are not reintroduced, and that Cuba itself commits no aggressive acts against any of the nations of the Western Hemisphere.”
Through the fall of 1963, Kennedy remained open to the possibility that Cuban aggression or developments on the island could compel U.S. military action. At a Palm Beach conference with defense and military chiefs in December 1962, he told them that despite the lull in Cuban difficulties, “we must assume that someday we may have to go into Cuba, and when it happens, we must be prepared to do it as quickly as possible.” He asked them to plan an invasion “one, two, three, or four years ahead.” On February 28, when the Chiefs advised him that it would take almost three weeks to launch an attack, he wanted suggestions on how to get “some troops quickly into Cuba in the event of a general uprising.” At the end of April, he asked McNamara, “Are we keeping our Cuban contingency invasion plans up to date?” In October 1963, he told McNamara that “the situation could develop in the Caribbean which would require active United States military intervention.” He doubted that the United States was “prepared for this satisfactorily,” and he asked McNamara to give such plans “the highest priority.” The 150,000 Cuban exiles in Florida also pressed Kennedy to act against Castro or at least to allow them to act on their own. (Kennedy made futile efforts to persuade the exiles to settle in other states, which would blunt their political influence in a presidential contest for Florida’s votes.)
In a speech in Miami’s Orange Bowl to welcome members of the Cuban brigade, whom Castro had released after twenty months of imprisonment, Kennedy celebrated their courage and devotion to Cuba’s freedom. Few of the forty thousand Cuban exiles listening to the president’s speech could imagine that he had anything in mind for Cuba other than its eventual liberation from Castro’s rule. Presented with the brigade’s flag for safekeeping until it could be returned to Havana, Kennedy in emotional, unrehearsed remarks declared, “I can assure you that this flag will be returned to this brigade in a free Havana.” The president’s speech triggered shouts from the crowd of “Guerra! Guerra!”
The presence of thousands of Soviet troops in Cuba gave Castro’s elimination an enduring appeal, but subversion remained a greater concern. At a post–missile crisis meeting on November 3, when Rusk cited sabotage in Venezuela that was “instigated by a pro-Castro group of Cubans,” Kennedy responded, “We should be as tough as we can in dealing with such situations.” To reduce Cuban influence all over the hemisphere, Kennedy asked U.S. national security officials to pressure Latin governments into lessening, and possibly eliminating, “the flow of students, labor leaders, etc., who go to Cuba for training and indoctrination and then go back to their own country as possible communist organizers.”
In January 1963, an Interdepartmental Coordinating Committee on Cuban Affairs had been set up to replace the failed Mongoose. The unauthorized decision of William Harvey, CIA Mongoose coordinator, to send reconnaissance teams into Cuba during the missile crisis had provoked a Harvey-Bobby shouting match, which, following a blowup between them in September over other Cuban missteps, spelled the end of Mongoose. The new ICC was “to work out an improved arrangement for our handling of Cuban policy and action,” including the creation of a subcommittee on Cuban subversion. It was to gather information on the dissemination of communist propaganda, arms shipments, and transfers of funds to other Latin American countries. In September 1963, Llewellyn Thompson, relying on the subcommittee’s findings, told Dobrynin that Cuban-trained guerrillas were engaged in “terroristic activities” all over the hemisphere; that Cuba was “furnishing funds to revolutionary groups”; and that Castro and other Cuban leaders were publicly exhorting revolutionaries “to resort to sabotage, terrorism and guerrilla action.”
Yet despite continuing interest in ousting Castro, renewed discussions yielded no better plans than in the previous two years. The ICC wished to encourage “developments within Cuba that offer the possibility of divorcing the Cuban government from its support of Sino-Soviet Communist purposes.” But how? The ICC could only suggest applying “increasing degrees of political, economic, psychological and military pressures … until the Castro/Communist regime is overthrown.” It offered no explanation of just how this would be done or why it would work. And though the CIA had resumed covert activities, including new assassination plots against Castro, they were as ineffective as before. Indeed, their schemes were often ludicrous. In 1962, for example, McCone suggested they could acquire a Soviet fighter plane through defection, purchase, or U.S. manufacture. The plane could then be used “in a provocation operation in which Soviet aircraft would appear to attack U.S. or friendly installations in order to provide an excuse for U.S. intervention.” Although McCone made no mention of Cuba in his memo, the U.S. base at Guantanamo was a perfect fit for his idea. The White House ignored the proposal.
According to Lawrence Freedman, “Kennedy was maintaining his military options [against Cuba] for no better reason than his preference for never closing any options off, just in case circumstances changed.” JFK’s affinity for competing rapprochement proposals makes Freedman’s assertion convincing. In November, as the Cuban missile crisis ended, Castro’s anger at Khrushchev for giving in to U.S. pressure and agreeing to on-site inspections raised the possibility that Castro might actually welcome a rapprochement with the United States. In fact, Castro announced himself ready for an agreement with Washington, but his conditions for an accommodation—an end to Washington’s economic embargo, subversion, exile raids, U-2 overflights, and control of Guantanamo—were more than any American government could accept, especially if it hoped to avoid a firestorm of criticism from Cuban exiles and their American allies.
Castro’s demands did not kill Kennedy’s interest in reducing Cuban-American tensions. In February, after an NSC staffer urged him to talk publicly about isolating Cuba from the Soviet bloc and not other hemisphere countries, Kennedy told newsmen that the communist threat in the hemisphere did not emanate “primarily” from Cuba. Instead, it fed on economic “hardships” suffered by Latin American peoples. If Cuban subversion disappeared, a communist threat would still exist. A few days later, when a Cuban MIG fighter fired at an American shrimp boat in the Caribbean, the administration’s measured protest and a “soft” Cuban reply avoided an escalation in Cuban-American tensions, and, as the New York Times reported, became instead an opportunity for the two sides to discuss their overall differences.
Bobby remained the principal voice in the administration for anti-Castro action, and the failure of Mongoose and the CIA to propose practical means of ousting Castro moved him to look to Cuban exiles to rescue their country. In March 1963, when McCone told an NSC meeting that an internal military coup in Cuba was more likely than a civil uprising facilitated from the outside and predicted that congressional pressure over Cuba would ease, Bobby disputed his analysis. He also took exception to Rusk’s advice against giving the Cuban exiles false hopes. The next day, he sent his brother a memo urging “periodic meetings of half a dozen or so top officials of the Government to consider Cuba and Latin America.” He felt that the NSC meeting showed an insufficient commitment to new anti-Castro actions. They needed to “come up with a plan for a future Cuba.” “I would not like it said a year from now,” he explained, “that we could have had this internal breakup in Cuba but we just did not set the stage for it.”
When the President ignored Bobby’s recommendations, Bobby wrote his brother: “Do you think there was any merit to my last memo? … In any case, is there anything else on this matter?” Another Bobby suggestion in early April that the administration support a five-hundred-man raiding party also received no reply.
Kennedy was in no mood to exacerbate tensions with Cuba. In March, after Cuban exiles attacked Soviets ships and installations in Cuba, Kennedy expressed concern at the potential damage to Soviet-American relations and the need to prevent further assaults. He told an NSC meeting that “these in-and-out raids were probably exciting and rather pleasant for those who engage in them. They were in danger for less than an hour. This exciting activity was more fun than living in the hills of Escambray, pursued by Castro’s military forces.” McCone warned against openly cutting off the commandos; it would produce “intense public and press criticism” as well as congressional complaints. And while he acknowledged that the raids would probably increase difficulties with Castro and the Soviets, he also saw potential benefits, including a Soviet reappraisal of their Cuban commitment, which might cause them “to open a discussion of their presence [in Cuba] with the United States.” Kennedy was not convinced. Although he was willing to consider encouraging the raiders to strike only at Cuban targets, this was as much to give himself political cover as to promote Castro’s demise. Negotiations with Castro for the release of twenty-two American citizens held in Cuban prisons as CIA agents were one reason for discouraging exile attacks. James B. Donovan, a New York lawyer who had negotiated the release of the nearly twelve hundred exile Cubans captured at the Bay of Pigs in exchange for $53 million worth of medicines, had Kennedy’s approval for these additional talks. In April, Kennedy privately made clear to the exiles that for the time being he wanted no more attacks. By May, the CIA described the exile groups as “puzzled with regard to the American policy toward Cuba and the exile community.” Exile leaders, the CIA also reported, saw “[no] real reason for unity because obviously there is no moral or financial support forthcoming from the U.S. government and without this support there is no point to unity.”
Though Donovan was careful to emphasize his status as a private citizen during his April visit, Castro and Kennedy saw him as an intermediary who might help initiate better Cuban-American relations. During his five days in Cuba, Donovan spent more than twenty-four hours in conversations with Castro. A first meeting on Sunday, April 7, lasted from 1:00 A.M. to 6:30 A.M. Castro asked Donovan for suggestions on “how relationships could be established with the United States.” When Donovan replied that American public sentiment toward Castro might be changing, as White House limits on the exiles and majority opinion against a war with Cuba demonstrated, Castro declared that a future “ideal” Cuban government “was not to be Soviet oriented …. There was absolutely no chance that Cuba would become a Soviet satellite.” He also stated that “Cuba was not exporting subversion to other Latin American countries.” He pressed Donovan to say how Havana and Washington could achieve better political relations and raised the possibility that Donovan be given some official status that would allow him to continue these discussions in Havana. Castro saw official relations with the United States as a “necessity,” but explained that “certain Cuban Government officials, communists,” currently limited what he could do. A report from Donovan greatly interested Kennedy, especially the part about Castro’s eagerness for better relations and his description of communist constraints.
In May, when Castro visited Moscow for a month, the CIA, White House, and State Department tried to decipher the consequences for Cuban-American relations. Was Castro’s visit meant to remind the United States that no attack on Cuba would be tolerated? Was it an effort to reduce Soviet-Cuban tensions and head off a U.S.-Cuban accommodation? Or was it a demonstration of Khrushchev’s conviction that a Cuban “rapprochement with the U.S. [was] a necessity” and that Castro needed “indoctrination to this end”? Although the State Department acknowledged that the visit might signal the start of a campaign to improve Cuban-American relations, it argued against a rapprochement: An agreement with Castro would be destructive to the development of democracy in Latin America and would touch off a firestorm of domestic political opposition. Yet Kennedy did not want to close off the possibility of reaching an accommodation with Castro. As the NSC conceded at the end of May, all of the existing courses of action proposed for toppling Castro “were singularly unpromising.” Bundy was even more emphatic: The anti-Castro measures being considered “will not result in his overthrow.”
Pessimism about U.S. capacity to alter conditions in Cuba, however, did not deter the administration from agreeing to renewed raids and sabotage. The political consequences of open efforts at rapprochement were more than Kennedy felt he could risk a year before his reelection campaign. Though raids and sabotage would not unseat Castro, they would meet continuing domestic pressures for action and encourage the belief that he was vulnerable to defeat. In September and October, respectively, when Dobrynin and Foreign Minister Andrey Gromyko told Kennedy of Khrushchev’s unhappiness with these raids, Kennedy conceded that they were serving “no useful purpose.”
Consequently, albeit secretly, Kennedy agreed to further explore the possibility of improved relations. The principal advocate of change was William Attwood, a former Look magazine editor, who had interviewed Castro and had served from March 1961 to May 1963 as ambassador to Guinea, where he had helped bring a government friendly to Moscow into the Western camp. Appointed an adviser to the United States Mission to the U.N. in the summer of 1963, Attwood listened attentively to “neutral diplomats,” who suggested “a course of action which, if successful, could remove the Cuban issue from the 1964 campaign.” Stripping the Republicans of the Cuban matter by “neutralizing Cuba on our terms” had considerable appeal to Kennedy. It would also eliminate international embarrassment over the image of a superpower America bullying a weak island country. If rapprochement included the removal of all Soviet forces from Cuba, an end to Cuba’s hemisphere subversion, and Havana’s commitment to nonalignment in the Cold War, Kennedy believed he could sell it to the American public.
With Adlai Stevenson’s support and the president’s approval, Attwood secretly discussed the possibility of a Cuban-American dialogue with Carlos Lechuga, Cuba’s U.N. ambassador. Lechuga urged that someone travel to Havana for an initial talk with Castro. Attwood was not hopeful. Lechuga and Castro might be interested, but they were “too well boxed in by such hardliners as Guevara to be able to maneuver much.” But Attwood, who believed that he could handle the assignment in secret, was eager to try. After a meeting with Bobby about possible negotiations, Attwood suggested to Lechuga that they hold secret talks at the U.N. “The ball is in Cuban hands and the door is ajar,” Attwood told Bundy in October.
Kennedy’s receptivity to a possible accommodation with Castro registered forcefully on Jean Daniel, a French journalist on his way to Havana at the end of October. Agreeing to a meeting with Daniel at Ben Bradlee’s urging, Kennedy did not want to talk about Vietnam or say much about de Gaulle. “I’d like to talk to you about Cuba,” Kennedy said. He began by acknowledging U.S. responsibility for Cuban miseries perpetrated by Batista. “I believe that we created, built and manufactured the Castro movement out of whole cloth and without realizing it,” he declared. Batista was “the incarnation of a number of sins on the part of the United States.” All this, which Kennedy assumed would be repeated to Castro, was meant to suggest that he had genuine concern for Cuba’s well-being. Castro’s willingness to act as an agent of Soviet communism in Cuba and the hemisphere, Kennedy added, had put them at odds; indeed, Castro had brought the world to the brink of a nuclear war. Kennedy did not know whether Castro understood this or even cared. Kennedy stood up at this point to signal an end to the conversation, but Daniel asked him about the economic blockade of Cuba. The end of subversive activities in the hemisphere could bring an end to the blockade, Kennedy replied. Kennedy asked Daniel to see him again after returning from Cuba. “Castro’s reactions interest me,” he said.
Castro surprised the Americans by sending word that he “would very much like to talk,” but that it would have to be in Cuba, not at the U.N. He “appreciated the importance of discretion” and offered to send a plane to Mexico or Key West to fly an American official to Cuba, where they could meet in a secret airfield near Havana. Castro did not wish to be seen as in any way soliciting U.S. friendship. As a Greek intermediary told Attwood, “Castro would welcome a normalization of relations with the United States if he could do so without losing too much face.” Similarly, Bobby told Attwood that the administration could not risk accusations that it was “trying to make a deal with Castro.”
On November 12, Bundy advised Attwood that the president saw the visit of any U.S. official to Cuba now as impractical. Instead, he, as Bobby had before him, suggested that Castro send his personal envoy to see Attwood in New York. Kennedy wanted Castro to say first whether there was any prospect of Cuban independence from Moscow and an end to hemisphere subversion. “Without an indication of readiness to move in these directions, it is hard for us to see what could be accomplished by a visit to Cuba.” Bundy advised Attwood to make clear to the Cubans “that we were not supplicants in this matter and the initiative for exploratory conversations was coming from the Cubans.” On the eighteenth, Castro sent word to Attwood that the invitation to come to Cuba remained open and that the security of the visit was guaranteed. When Attwood said that a preliminary meeting “was essential to make sure there was something useful to talk about,” Castro’s emissary promised to send an “agenda” for discussion between Attwood and Lechuga as a prelude to a future meeting with Castro.
On the same day, Kennedy spoke in Miami before the Inter-American Press Association. His speech included veiled references to an altered relationship with Cuba. Latin America’s problems would “not be solved simply by complaining about Castro, by blaming all problems on communism, or generals or nationalism,” he said. He declared it “important to restate what now divides Cuba from my country and from the other countries of this hemisphere. It is the fact that a small band of conspirators has stripped the Cuban people of their freedom and handed over the independence and sovereignty of the Cuban nation to forces beyond the hemisphere. They have made Cuba … a weapon in an effort dictated by external powers to subvert the other American Republics. This, and this alone, divides us. As long as this is true, nothing is possible. Without it, everything is possible. Once this barrier is removed, we will be ready and anxious to work with the Cuban people in pursuit of those progressive goals which a few short years ago stirred their hopes and the sympathy of many people throughout the hemisphere.”
The Cuban community in Florida did not miss the president’s implied receptivity to a fresh start in relations with Cuba. In general, the exiles saw the speech as “expressions of willingness to accept ‘Fidelismo sin Fidel.’ ” This did not please the substantial number of conservatives in the community. If they had known about the Attwood initiative and the Daniel conversation, they would have been up in arms.
There was still intense pressure for covert action. On October 1, Desmond Fitzgerald, the CIA’s director of planning and new head of secret operations, described a 5 to 7 percent decline in Cuban production, with a 20 percent drop in the sugar harvest, which had caused a deterioration in living conditions and undermined Castro’s popularity. The fact that the economic downturn had not yet affected the Cuban military made it difficult to foresee a coup. But when the decline continued into November, “causing increasing hardships to the civilian population,” U.S. analysts thought that Castro’s “grip [was] weakening.” Since U.S.-sponsored sabotage seemed likely to further weaken the economy and Castro’s popularity, McCone urged a continuation of such harassment.
Kennedy, however, had heard too much optimistic talk about bringing down Castro to trust current assessments and predictions. At a November 12 meeting on Cuba, he asked whether the sabotage program “was worthwhile and whether it would accomplish our purpose.” Nevertheless, his unresolved problems with Cuba and continuing worries about threats to the hemisphere and his own reelection made him reluctantly receptive to continuing subversion. Indeed, no one listening to his Inter-American Press Association speech on the eighteenth could have doubted that overturning Castro’s government remained an active option.
Kennedy’s dual-track Cuban policy in 1963 did not, however, include assassinating Castro. A CIA scheme (or, more precisely, a Desmond Fitzgerald scheme) set in motion on November 22, to have Rolando Cubela Secades, an anti-Castro member of the Cuban government, kill Castro with an injection from a hypodermic needle hidden in a ballpoint pen, was directly at odds with Kennedy’s policies. It was one thing to hope that hit-and-run raids and economic sanctions could provoke an internal uprising, but assassinating Castro seemed certain to make things worse. The devoted communists, who were allegedly holding Castro back from a rapprochement, seemed likely to react to a martyred Castro by ending any chance of accommodation.
No one knows what the future of Cuban-American relations would have been after November 22 or during a second Kennedy term, when he would not have had to answer to American voters again. The great likelihood that Castro was going to outlast U.S. plotting against him made it almost certain that Kennedy would have had to deal with him during that second term. And given the growing interest in moving beyond the stale conflict of the previous five years, who can doubt that a Cuban-American accommodation might have been an achievement of Kennedy’s second four years? Whatever the uncertainties in November 1963 about future Castro-Kennedy dealings, it is clear that they signaled a mutual interest in finding a way through their antagonisms, which were doing neither of them any good.
UNCERTAINTIES OVER CUBA were matched by those on Vietnam. Back in February 1962, after the administration announced the creation of Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), and an anonymous official told the press that the United States was determined “to win” the war, a reporter had pressed the president to answer a Republican charge that he had been less than candid with the public about U.S. involvement. Kennedy had reviewed the “long history” of U.S. commitment, urged a continuation of the “very strong bipartisan consensus,” and described U.S. assistance as logistics and “training missions,” not combat. In March and April, reporters had only three brief questions about Vietnam: How was the war going? Would he ask Congress for approval before sending combat troops? And what did he intend to do about American soldiers being killed? Kennedy’s assurances that the South Vietnamese were holding their own, that he did not plan to send combat troops, and that the handful of losses were regrettable accidents of war had satisfied the press, which asked nothing more about the war in the President’s twice monthly news conferences during the rest of the year.
The lull in discussion about Vietnam, however, ended in November and December 1962 when conflicting reports about progress in the strategic hamlet program reached Washington and then leaked to the press. Indications that Diem saw the program more as a way to control rural areas than to ensure their security, coupled with a paucity of hard information from the hamlets themselves, provoked questions in the executive branch about the program’s effectiveness. In early November, Mike Forrestal, the State Department’s official most responsible for Vietnam, told Bobby that “Averell and I feel that the war is not going as well out there as one might be led to believe …. The political problem is growing relatively worse …. The major fault lies with the GVN.” To get a clearer picture of developments, Kennedy asked Mike Mansfield, who enjoyed a reputation as an Asian expert, to visit Vietnam.
On December 18, Kennedy received two conflicting reports on Vietnamese conditions and prospects. Theodore Heaver, the State Department’s Vietnam specialist, who had spent March and April in the country and then another forty days visiting seventeen provinces in the fall of 1962, acknowledged that “fact is not always easy to come by in Viet-Nam.” He had concluded nevertheless that a standoff in the war was now more likely than Saigon’s defeat. “But the tide has not turned. The VC are still very strong, and our key programs are still in many respects experimental.” If they worked, he foresaw a GVN standing on its own “with greatly reduced US military assistance.”
Mike Mansfield had been less confident. He said, “[It distresses me] to hear the situation described in much the same terms as on my last visit, although it is seven years and billions of dollars later. In short, it would be well to face the fact that we are once again at the beginning of the beginning.” He certainly had heard “extremely optimistic” evaluations of the strategic hamlet program, which Vietnamese and Americans in Saigon predicted would solve the insurgency problem in a year or two. But having heard optimistic talk like this from the French in the early 1950s, he doubted the wisdom of uncritically accepting such current hopes. The “real tests [of strategic hamlets] are yet to come.” They involved “an immense job of social engineering, dependent on great outlays of aid on our part for many years and a most responsive, alert and enlightened leadership in the government of Vietnam.” If current remedies failed, Mansfield foresaw “a truly massive commitment of American military personnel and other resources—in short, going to war fully ourselves against the guerrillas—and the establishment of some form of neocolonial rule in South Vietnam. That is an alternative which I most emphatically do not recommend,” he had told Kennedy. “Our role is and must remain secondary …. It is their country, their future which is most at stake, not ours.” The alternative to being trapped in unwanted commitments in Vietnam was to press for negotiations that could neutralize all of Southeast Asia.
At a December 1962 news conference, Kennedy took a wait-and-see attitude. “As you know, we have about 10 or 11 times as many men there as we had a year ago. We’ve had a number of casualties. We put in an awful lot of equipment. We are going ahead with the strategic hamlet proposal.” But he acknowledged “the great difficulty … in fighting a guerrilla war … especially in terrain as difficult as South Viet-Nam. So we don’t see the end of the tunnel, but I must say I don’t think it is darker than it was a year ago, and in some ways lighter.” Privately, Kennedy was less sanguine. He had angrily told Mansfield during a meeting in Palm Beach that his advisers were giving him more optimistic assessments of what to expect in Vietnam. “I got angry with Mike for disagreeing with our policy so completely,” Kennedy later told O’Donnell, “and I got angry with myself because I found myself agreeing with him.” Kennedy’s public conformity with optimistic estimates, however, served a useful political purpose: If he was going to get out of Vietnam, it was essential to encourage the idea that there was progress in the war and that the United States could soon reduce its role in the fighting. As Defense Department public affairs officer Arthur Sylvester famously said, “It’s inherent in [the] government’s right, if necessary, to lie to save itself.”
On February 1, Kennedy met with army Chief of Staff General Wheeler, who had assessed conditions in Vietnam during a January visit. Wheeler frustrated and irritated Kennedy with a report Forrestal described as “rosy euphoria” and “a complete waste of … time.” Wheeler also was no help in suggesting how to bring the GVN more closely into line with “U.S. views on fighting the war and on foreign policy,” or how to “develop gradually a more independent posture for the U.S. in South Vietnam and very carefully dissociate ourselves from those policies and practices of the GVN of which we disapprove.”
Troubled by the different assessments of South Vietnamese effectiveness, Kennedy sent Roger Hilsman, still the head of the State Department’s intelligence division, and Forrestal to Vietnam to give him their appraisal of the war. Although they believed that things were “going much better than they were a year ago,” they did not see them “going nearly so well as the people here in Saigon both military and civilian think they are.” The Viet Cong were “being hurt,” but “the negative side of the ledger” was “still awesome.” Their overall judgment was that the United States was “probably winning, but certainly more slowly than we had hoped,” and they expected the war to “last longer than we would like, cost more in terms of both lives and money than we anticipated, and prolong the period in which a sudden and dramatic event would upset the gains already made.” The CIA, which weighed in with a report now as well, said “the war remains a slowly escalating stalemate.”
While Kennedy announced in the opening paragraphs of his January 1963 State of the Union Message that “the spearpoint of aggression has been blunted in Viet-Nam,” he also publicly conceded that Vietnam, along with Berlin, the Congo, Cuba, Laos, and the Middle East, remained “points of uncertainty.” He could not see how South Vietnam would survive without substantial U.S. economic and military aid. “I think that unless you want to withdraw from the field and decide that it is in the national interest to permit that area to collapse,” he told a news conference on March 6, the United States had to continue providing support. In an April 2 special message to Congress on economic and military aid to nations battling communist subversion, Kennedy said that assistance to beleaguered countries like Vietnam should not be reduced, however strong the desire to help balance the U.S. budget by cutting foreign aid. Of course he was eager to protect Vietnam from a communist takeover. But by 1963 he was more skeptical than ever about putting in ground forces, which would suffer losses and increase pressure on him to commit additional men to the fighting. He wished to mute America’s role in the conflict and leave himself free to withdraw sixteen thousand U.S. military “advisers” now on the ground (about twenty times the number that had been there at the start of 1961), some of whom, he publicly acknowledged, were being killed in combat. At the end of January, Kennedy instructed Harriman to clear all visits to Vietnam. According to Hilsman, the president called him to complain about “press reports of unscheduled visits by senior U.S. officials to Vietnam.” The stories appeared to increase the U.S. commitment in Vietnam. “That is exactly what I don’t want to do,” he told Hilsman.
A Washington Post interview published on May 12 with Ngo Dinh Nhu, Diem’s brother and director of the strategic hamlet program, increased Kennedy’s interest in withdrawal. Nhu complained that there were too many U.S. military advisers in Vietnam and that at least half could be safely withdrawn. At a news conference on the twenty-second, when asked to comment on Nhu’s remarks, Kennedy testily declared the United States ready to withdraw “any number of troops, any time the Government of South Vietnam would suggest it. The day after it was suggested, we would have some troops on their way home.”
That month, Kennedy began planning the withdrawal of U.S. military advisers. But a plan was not a commitment. O’Donnell remembered a conversation between the president and Mansfield that month in which Kennedy said that he “now agreed with the Senator’s thinking on the need for a complete withdrawal from Vietnam. ‘But I can’t do it until 1965—after I’m reelected.’ ” A withdrawal in 1963 or 1964, Kennedy feared, would jeopardize his chances for a second term. After Mansfield left, according to O’Donnell, Kennedy told him, “If I tried to pull out completely now from Vietnam, we would have another Joe McCarthy scare on our hands, but I can do it after I’m reelected. So we had better make damned sure that I am reelected.” In the 1970s, Mansfield confirmed that Kennedy had told him of his interest in withdrawing military advisers. He “felt that even then with 16,000 troops we were in too deep.”
However calculating Kennedy was about politics—and he and Bobby did not hesitate to cut lots of corners—it is hard to credit his willingness to let boys die in Vietnam for the sake of his reelection. What seems more plausible is that Kennedy never forgot that politics and policy making were the art of the possible. He had no intention of being drawn into an expansion of American ground forces in Vietnam and the possibility of an open-ended war. At the same time, however, he was not ready to say just when he would reduce U.S. forces and ultimately bring them all home. There was always the chance that if his actions backfired politically and he was voted out, the next president would send even more troops. Barry Goldwater had certainly given no sign of desiring any sort of Vietnam pullback.
Diem undermined Kennedy’s political strategy by provoking a crisis with his country’s Buddhist majority. Between May and July, Buddhist demonstrations, including self-immolations by monks, against repressive government policies embarrassed Washington. The abuse of a religious majority by Diem’s Catholic minority regime particularly discomfited Kennedy. On July 17, a reporter asked the president whether the conflict between Diem’s government and the Buddhists, which had stirred “a good deal of public concern” in the United States, had become “an impediment to the effectiveness of American aid in the war against the Viet Cong?” Kennedy thought it had and regretted the conflict at a time when the military effort had begun to show progress.
During the summer of 1963, Kennedy largely left management of U.S.-Vietnamese relations to subordinates. The civil rights crisis, his trip to Europe, the tax cut, negotiation of the test ban treaty, and the campaign to ensure its Senate approval claimed most of his attention. Experience had taught him that appearing indecisive was better than rushing into a policy that ended up failing and having ongoing negative consequences, like the Bay of Pigs. In the six months between May 22 and November 22, for example, none of the 115 telephone conversations he chose to record was about Vietnam. Of the 107 taped meetings the Kennedy Library has for this period, only 14 include discussions about Vietnam, and all but one of these were in the three months between August and November, when problems with Diem reached a breaking point. In June, after the State Department warned Diem that unless he worked out an accommodation with the Buddhists, the United States would “have to re-examine our entire relationship with his regime,” Kennedy temporarily reclaimed control of Vietnam policy by embargoing any further warnings or ultimatums to Diem without his clearance. On July 3, Max Frankel of the New York Times described Kennedy’s concern to keep uncertainties about Vietnam as quiet as possible. “Once in a while,” he wrote, “Washington remembers that there is a war on in Vietnam …. But for long stretches, the war against communist-led guerrillas in Vietnam fades from memory here, not because no one cares, but because the men who care most decided long ago to discuss it as little as possible.”
Kennedy’s hesitancy over what to do about Vietnam registered strongly with his advisers in conversations between June and October. Or, more to the point, his uncertainty about how to lead Vietnam toward greater stability and freedom from communist control without a significant increase in U.S. aid, especially American combat troops, was evident to aides battling to push him in one direction or another. His indecisiveness was partly the result of an argument among his advisers about what would work. A few even thought there was nothing that could be done. Like Kennedy, Paul Kattenburg, a State Department Asian expert and chairman of an interdepartmental working group on Vietnam, listened to the debate with mounting doubts that anyone in Washington or Saigon had a solution to the Vietnam problem. Neither supporters of Diem and strategic hamlets nor advocates of a new government led by a military chief who would follow a more aggressive counterinsurgency plan convinced him that they knew how to save South Vietnam from communism. He urged withdrawal.
Kennedy decided to make Henry Cabot Lodge ambassador to Saigon. He saw the appointment as good politics and a boost for effective policy. Possibly remembering FDR’s selection of Herbert Hoover’s secretary of war Patrick J. Hurley as ambassador to China in 1944 to negotiate a coalition between the nationalists and the communists, Kennedy understood that sending a prominent Republican to Saigon would give him some political cover should Vietnam collapse. A fresh ambassador would also allow the U.S. embassy to renew efforts to bend Diem to Washington’s will and control American correspondents in Saigon, whose front-page reports on the Buddhist crisis were undermining Kennedy’s efforts to mute Vietnam as a compelling issue in the United States. Diem certainly saw Lodge’s selection as evidence that Kennedy intended to control or unseat him. “They can send ten Lodges,” Diem said defiantly, “but I will not permit myself or my country to be humiliated.”
At a July 4 meeting with Bundy, Harriman, Ball, Hilsman, and Forrestal, Kennedy had heard mostly bad news. Diem’s uncompromising antagonism to the Buddhists might force the United States “publicly to disassociate itself from the GVN’s Buddhist policy.” Forcing Diem’s brother and sister-in-law, the Nhus, out of the government seemed like a good but undoable proposal. Coup attempts over the next several months with unpredictable results seemed likely. In keeping with his reluctance to decide anything about Vietnam or to wait on events before acting, Kennedy’s only response was to get Lodge to Saigon as soon as possible, though he told Hilsman to work out the actual timing. Moreover, on July 8, when Kennedy met with outgoing ambassador Fred Nolting, he decided against sending Diem a personal message pressing him to initiate reforms (despite a New York Times report to the contrary). He also ignored the urging of State Department officials during the next month to pressure journalists to accept the “official” view of “the Vietnamese situation” and to encourage greater aggressiveness by U.S. officials pushing Diem to accept a policy of conciliation with the Buddhists.
His unresponsiveness reflected not indifference but a continuing sense of limitations. With Diem’s government apparently self-destructing, Kennedy wanted to keep his distance from any direct involvement in the growing crisis. Compared to the many lengthy meetings he had on Cuba and other foreign and domestic matters, a thirty-five-minute discussion with an ambassador heading into a firestorm without any but the most general presidential directive speaks loudly about Kennedy’s intentions. He remained uncertain about what to do and worried about being trapped in an unwinnable war.
A New York Times David Halberstam story saying things were going badly in the fighting heightened Kennedy’s concern about the war effort, as demonstrated by a request on August 15 to McNamara and Rusk for an update on the effectiveness of “military operations in Vietnam.” The following day marine corps general Victor Krulak told McNamara that Halberstam’s article not only suffered from “factual and statistical weaknesses” but also exhibited “a lack of understanding of our entire Vietnam strategy.” Halberstam, Krulak said, missed the fact that we were “driving the Viet Cong southward—away from their sources of strength and compressing them in the southernmost area of the peninsula.” The hope was to trap and let them “rot there. If Halberstam understood clearly this strategy, he might not have undertaken to write his disingenuous article.” Krulak repeated his optimistic assessment of conditions in Vietnam in a meeting with the president on August 21.
At the same time, Mansfield weighed in with renewed warnings to Kennedy that regardless of whether “[we dealt] with the present government or with a replacement—we are in for a very long haul to develop even a modicum of stability in Viet Nam. And, in the end, the costs in men and money could go at least as high as those in Korea.” Mansfield urged Kennedy to ask himself “the fundamental question: Is South Viet Nam as important to us as the premise on which we are now apparently operating indicates?” Mansfield advised the president to begin stressing “the relatively limited importance of the area in terms of specific U.S. interests” and consider withdrawing 10 percent of our advisers from Vietnam as a “symbolic gesture” and indication that under certain circumstances we would end our commitment to Vietnam.
No direct record exists of what Kennedy thought about Krulak’s assessment or Mansfield’s recommendations. But a White House memo on August 20 from Max Taylor to McNamara reflected both contradictory analyses. As a follow-up to Kennedy’s May directive on U.S. troop strength in Vietnam, Taylor outlined a plan for the withdrawal of one thousand advisers by the end of 1963. Though the final decision to implement the plan was to be withheld until late October, the pullback was to be well publicized in order “to produce the desired psychological impact, both domestic and foreign.” The plan fit perfectly with Kennedy’s apparent eagerness either to seize upon battlefield gains to announce reduced U.S. commitments or to declare an American withdrawal in response to Saigon’s political instability and failure to fight effectively.
When Lodge arrived in Saigon on August 22, the prospect of a South Vietnamese collapse seemed more likely than a victory. On the twenty-first, despite promises to Nolting that he would be conciliatory toward the Buddhists and would expel Madame Nhu (who had applauded Buddhist immolations and openly advocated uncompromising repression of dissident monks), Diem had unleashed a nationwide attack on pagodas to crush Buddhist opposition. Kennedy now felt compelled to instruct Lodge to inform Diem that he must rid himself of the Nhus’ influence; should he refuse, Lodge was to tell Vietnamese military chiefs that we could no longer support Diem. Lodge was to “examine all possible alternative leadership and make detailed plans as to how we might bring about Diem’s replacement if this should become necessary.” Kennedy directed that Lodge and General Paul Harkins, the head of MACV, have the freedom to implement the department’s instructions by whatever means they believed wise. When Lodge responded that chances of persuading Diem to act against the Nhus were nil and asked permission to go directly to the generals, Kennedy agreed.
Almost at once, however, Kennedy began to have second thoughts. He felt pressured by Halberstam’s stories that were critical of Diem and by State Department advocates who saw no alternative to dumping Diem. “Diem and his brother, however repugnant in some respects, have done a great deal along the lines that we desire,” Kennedy said, “and when we move to eliminate this government, it should not be a result of New York Times pressure.” (At a meeting on August 26, Kennedy told state and defense officials that “we [should] not permit Halberstam unduly to influence our actions.”) Again recalling the Bay of Pigs failure, Kennedy worried that he was being drawn into a similar misstep in Vietnam. Kennedy wanted to know what chance of succeeding a coup had, and he wanted to ensure that whatever the United States did would remain hidden from public view. Kennedy also asked “what would happen if we find we are faced with having to live with Diem and Nhu.” Hilsman said it would be “horrible,” and Rusk advised that unless there were a major change in GVN policy, the United States would either have to leave or send in combat troops.
At another meeting the next day, Kennedy peppered his aides with questions about prospects for a successful coup. Nolting doubted the likelihood of a “clean coup” and dismissed the Vietnamese generals as lacking “the guts of Diem or Nhu.” Krulak assured the president that the current civil disturbances were having no significant impact on the military campaign against the communists. Kennedy responded that he saw “no point in trying a coup unless there was a chance of its success.” Moreover, unpersuaded by Krulak’s assurance, he thought that it was possible to delay a coup and wait to see if internal divisions were undermining the war effort. Kennedy ended the meeting by repeating Nolting’s doubts about the ability of the Vietnamese generals to replace Diem, emphasizing the need to hide any U.S. role in a coup, and directing that Lodge and Harkins be asked for their opinions on “whether we should proceed with the generals or wait.”
But despite Kennedy’s doubts, the pressure to support a coup was now too great to reverse. The CIA analysts in Saigon warned that if Diem and the Nhus continued in power, “they and Vietnam [would] stagger on to final defeat at the hands of their own people and the VC” and “American public opinion and Congress, as well as world opinion, would force withdrawal or reduction of American support for VN.” Lodge and Harkins also recommended a coup, and at a meeting on the twenty-eighth, George Ball said that it would be “difficult if not impossible” for the United States to live with the existing government in Saigon. He added that as for a coup, the administration was already “beyond the point of no return.” Kennedy disagreed, and Nolting opposed a coup as a breach of faith with Diem. But Ball objected that it was Diem, not the United States, that had broken promises. Harriman was even more emphatic, giving Nolting a tongue-lashing that embarrassed everyone in the room. Diem had double-crossed us, Harriman snapped, and without a successful coup we would face defeat in Vietnam. Nevertheless, Max Taylor, McNamara, McCone, and Johnson shared Nolting’s doubts. “The government split in two,” Bobby said. “It was the only time really, in three years, the government was broken in two.” The debate over what to do became so heated that Kennedy told Charlie Bartlett, “My God! My government’s coming apart!”
The passions reflected memories and assessments of the recent past. If only the United States had found a reliable replacement for Chiang Kai-shek, the logic went, it might have saved China from communist control. However costly American losses in Korea, U.S. intervention had certainly rescued Seoul from Pyongyang. And coup advocates saw little resemblance between Cuba and South Vietnam, where the United States could act decisively with generals ready to follow our lead.
After hearing Lodge argue that “any course is risky, and no action at all is perhaps the riskiest of all,” and “we are launched on a course from which there is no respectable turning back: The overthrow of the Diem government,” Kennedy agreed to a U.S.-backed coup. As with the Bay of Pigs, however, he wished to mute America’s role as much as possible. To ensure against another embarrassing defeat, Kennedy sent Lodge a top secret or strictly personal cable marked “no Department or other distribution whatever.” “Until the very moment of the go signal for the operation by the Generals,” Kennedy wrote, “I must reserve a contingent right to change course and reverse previous instructions. While fully aware of your assessment of the consequences of such a reversal, I know from experience that failure is more destructive than an appearance of indecision …. When we go, we must go to win, but it will be better to change our minds than fail. And if our national interest should require a change of mind, we must not be afraid of it.” Lodge did not dispute the president’s authority, but he warned that the coup would have to be “a Vietnamese affair with a momentum of its own. Should this happen you may not be able to control it, i.e. the ‘go signal’ may be given by the Generals.”
The accuracy of Lodge’s analysis became apparent the next day. By the afternoon of August 30, U.S. officials agreed that “the Generals were either backing off or were wallowing,” and that prospects for a change of government were “very thin.” On the thirty-first, the CIA station in Saigon reported that “this particular coup is finished.” The Vietnamese told Harkin that they “did not feel ready and did not have sufficient balance of forces.” Lodge cabled the State Department that evening: “There is neither the will nor the organization among the generals to accomplish anything.” Rusk now felt that they were back to where they had been on August 21, and that they needed to reopen communications with Diem. He also stated, “We, first, should decide that we will not pull out of Viet-Nam and, second, that the US is not going to operate a coup d’etat itself.” McNamara, Taylor, and LBJ agreed. Johnson thought it would be a disaster to pull out or stage a coup. Instead of “playing cops and robbers,” he said, we should get on with winning the war.
Only Paul Kattenburg dissented. He thought the advisers around Kennedy were “hopeless …. There was not a single person there that knew what he was talking about …. They didn’t know Vietnam. They didn’t know the past …. The more this meeting went on, the more I sat there and thought, ‘God, we’re walking into a major disaster.’ ” Unable to contain himself, Kattenburg declared that he had known Diem for ten years, and the South Vietnamese leader was incapable of change. He predicted steady deterioration in Saigon and advised a dignified withdrawal.
In CBS and NBC interviews during the first two weeks of September, Kennedy tried to pressure Saigon into establishing greater popular control and to remind the American people why we were involved in Southeast Asia: “I don’t think … unless a greater effort is made by the Government to win popular support that the war can be won out there. In the final analysis, it is their war. They are the ones who have to win it or lose it. We can help them, we can give them equipment, we can send our men out there as advisers, but they have to win it, the people of Viet-Nam against the Communists …. But I don’t agree with those who say we should withdraw. That would be a great mistake …. This is a very important struggle even though it is far away. We … made this effort to defend Europe. Now Europe is quite secure. We also have to participate—we may not like it—in the defense of Asia.” Did he believe in the “domino theory”? Chet Huntley asked him. “I believe [in] it,” Kennedy declared. The loss of Vietnam would “[give] the impression that the wave of the future in southeast Asia was China and the Communists.”The interviews not only signaled Diem that Washington insisted on greater popular rule and encouraged Americans to back a limited war effort but also implied, despite Kennedy’s denials and domino theory conceits, that he would consider withdrawing unless the South Vietnamese effectively met the communist threat.
Having used his television appearances to prod Diem and suggest future U.S. options, Kennedy now wanted to get Vietnam off the front pages. Its continued presence seemed likely to undermine relations with Saigon and provoke a public debate between those advocating a greater military effort and those eager to abandon a repressive regime fighting an unsuccessful civil war. A public argument over what to do about Vietnam seemed certain to increase Kennedy’s problems. Consequently, on September 3, Kennedy told State Department public affairs officer Robert Manning that it would be a good idea to avoid press interviews and television appearances on Vietnam. When Manning reported that “Hilsman had been turning down press calls and TV requests, the President agreed that was wise.”
Privately, Kennedy simultaneously pursued two options. He increased pressure on Diem to reform his government while also signaling the Vietnamese generals that the United States remained interested in a coup. “We should wait for the generals to contact us,” he said in a meeting on September 3. “When they come to us we will talk to them. [But] we should avoid letting the generals think that the U.S. [has] backed off.”
In the meantime, he tried again to persuade Diem to abandon repressive, anti-Buddhist policies. At a White House meeting on September 6, Bobby said, “We have to be tough …. Lodge has to do more than say our President is unhappy. We have to tell Diem that he must do the things we demand or we will have to cut down our effort as forced by the U.S. public.” The president was particularly concerned about “shutting up” Madame Nhu, “if only for the public relations problem here in this country.” Madame Nhu had publicly claimed that the CIA was planning a coup and that Lodge was trying to remove her from Vietnam or even have her “murdered.” (Told of Madame Nhu’s actions, Kennedy facetiously suggested a publicity release pointing out that in one week Madame Nhu, Castro, Governor George Wallace, and Mao Tse-tung had all attacked him.) The CIA also reported that Nhu had “ordered Vietnamese soldiers to open fire on Americans or foreigners involved in acts hostile to the GVN.” The State Department now cabled Lodge that “from the viewpoint of Vietnamese solidarity and world and domestic US opinion, it is important that Nhu not have a key role.”
Conflicting assessments of the war made Kennedy’s decisions on Vietnam as difficult as ever. Reports from Krulak and Harkins on Krulak’s visit to interview U.S. military advisers could not have been more upbeat. They described the Vietnamese military as “attentive to fighting the war, certain that steady progress is being made, convinced that present thrust will ultimately bring victory, [and] assured that their units are worrying about the Viet Cong and not about politics or religion.” If there had been any change in the war effort, it was “small.” Krulak predicted that “the Viet Cong war will be won if the current U.S. military and sociological programs are pursued, irrespective of the grave defects in the ruling regime.”
But Hilsman and Harriman were “sore as hell” over these reports that said “everything’s wonderful in Vietnam.” Joseph Mendenhall, another Asian expert in the State Department, who visited Vietnam with Krulak, disputed the general’s assessment. He saw “a virtual breakdown of the civil government in Saigon as well as a pervasive atmosphere of fear and hate arising from the police reign of terror and the arrests of students. The war against the Viet Cong has become secondary to the ‘war’ against the regime.” Mendenhall concluded that “the war against the Viet Cong could not be won if Nhu remains in Vietnam.” Referring to Krulak and Mendenhall, Kennedy asked, “The two of you did visit the same country, didn’t you?”
Kennedy’s frustration was reflected in his comments and questions to advisers at a September 10 meeting. He “recalled that he had made a number of public statements condemning the Vietnamese Government’s actions but this has ignited nothing.” When Rufus Phillips, a director of rural operations in Vietnam, suggested cuts in U.S. aid, Kennedy asked, “What about the possibility that Nhu’s response would be to withdraw funds from the war and field to Saigon—retreating to Saigon and charging publicly that the US was causing them to lose the war?” He also wanted to know how Krulak’s differences with Mendenhall and Phillips could be explained. Krulak responded that “the battle was not being lost in a purely military sense.” Phillips countered that “this was not a military war but a political war. It was a war for men’s minds more than battles against the Viet Cong.”
The only immediate effective step Kennedy saw was to rein in the American press war over differences in U.S. policy toward Vietnam. He declared himself “disturbed at the tendency both in Washington and Saigon to fight our own battles via the newspapers …. He said he wanted these different views fought out at this table and not indirectly through the newspapers.” He saw only negative results from this bad publicity—pressure to escalate our commitments without sufficient consideration of consequences or to withdraw support before it seemed wise to do so.
Kennedy continued to temporize for the next several weeks. With his advisers remaining sharply divided and CIA reports of new plans to oust Diem and Nhu and, if necessary, assassinate them, Kennedy believed it best to wait on developments, so he sent McNamara and Taylor to Saigon on yet another fact-finding mission. Lodge believed it a poor idea. It would “be taken here as [a] sign that we have decided to forgive and forget and will be regarded as marking the end of our period of disapproval of the oppressive measures …. It would certainly put a wet blanket on those working for a change of government.” Lodge also feared that it would take the pressure off Diem to respond to his push for reforms. Kennedy, however, believed that they could “stage manage” the mission so as not to give Diem any comfort or undercut Lodge.
On October 2, in a report to Kennedy on their trip, McNamara and Taylor cited “great progress” in the military campaign, acknowledged “serious political tensions in Saigon,” and saw small likelihood of a successful coup, although assassination of Diem or Nhu was “always a possibility.” They had little hope that American pressure would “move Diem and Nhu toward moderation,” but without such pressure they seemed “certain to continue past patterns of behavior.” McNamara and Taylor suggested the suspension of some economic aid to deter Diem from further political repression but recommended waiting two to four months to see his response before considering more drastic action. They also counseled against actively encouraging a change in government, though building contacts with “an alternative leadership” seemed like a good idea on the off chance that unforeseen factors might precipitate a coup.
As for the U.S. role in the war, McNamara and Taylor recommended stepped-up training “so that essential functions now performed by U.S. military personnel can be carried out by Vietnamese by the end of 1965. It should be possible to withdraw the bulk of U.S. personnel by that time.” In accordance with this program, “the Defense Department should announce in the very near future … plans to withdraw 1000 U.S. military personnel by the end of 1963.” The publication of this plan should be “explained in low key [terms] as an initial step in a long-term program to replace U.S. personnel with Vietnamese without impairment of the war effort.”
The report was hardly a vote of confidence in Diem’s regime—it was more a confession of bankruptcy than a viable statement of how to compel reform in Saigon and preserve South Vietnam’s autonomy. Asked at an October 9 news conference how U.S. policy was progressing in Vietnam, Kennedy frankly stated, “I don’t think that there have been changes in the situation in the last month. I think we are still dealing with the same problems.”
Unable to compel changes in Vietnam, Kennedy focused instead on getting the U.S. government to speak with one voice and ensure that U.S. newspaper reports did not generate pressure on him to take unwise steps. Bundy directed state, CIA, DOD, USIA, and JCS to clear with the White House all cabled instructions to “the field.” Bundy did not underestimate the resentment such an order might generate from officials convinced they had a “right” not to be monitored so closely from above. “But,” Bundy told Kennedy, “your interest is not served by the uncritical acceptance of that right.”
At the same time, Kennedy tried to curtail critical press reports coming from Saigon. In September, when Halberstam reported a split between U.S. military advisers and the Vietnamese on the strategic hamlet program, Kennedy had asked McNamara to assess the accuracy of the story. McNamara’s reply that the article was inaccurate and that Halberstam’s objectivity was open to question heightened Kennedy’s irritation with a press corps that he believed demonstrated an excessively “zealous spirit of criticism and complaint.” On October 21, during a lunch with Arthur “Punch” Sulzberger, the new publisher of the New York Times, Kennedy urged him to get Halberstam out of Vietnam. Sulzberger refused, and Kennedy was left to worry all the more.
Kennedy worried that publicly promising to withdraw one thousand troops by the end of the year might undermine larger withdrawal plans if conditions made it unwise. Should the United States have to back away from an announced withdrawal, it seemed likely to encourage press discussion of the need for an expanded U.S. effort. But McNamara’s argument that an announcement had “great value” as a way to answer complaints that we were becoming “bogged down forever in Vietnam” persuaded Kennedy to go ahead as planned. Kennedy did not dispute McNamara’s additional statement at an October 2 meeting: “We need a way to get out of Vietnam, and this is a way of doing it.”
At the close of the meeting, Pierre Salinger publicly announced the president’s endorsement of the McNamara-Taylor recommendations. He accepted “their judgment that the major part of the U.S. military task can be completed by the end of 1965 …. They reported that by the end of this year, the U.S. program for training Vietnamese should have progressed to the point where 1,000 U.S. military personnel assigned to South Viet Nam can be withdrawn.” Kennedy had not wanted Diem to see the announcement as part of the pressure on him to abandon political repression, which is exactly what some Kennedy advisers hoped it might do. (Max Taylor said, “Well, goddammit, we’ve got to make these people put their noses to the wheel—or the grindstone or whatever. If we don’t give them some indication that we’re going to get out sometime, they’re just going to be leaning on us forever.”) Thus, Kennedy instructed that the decision to remove advisers “not be raised formally with Diem. Instead, the action should be carried out routinely as part of our general posture of withdrawing people when they are no longer needed.” This would also free him to alter the end-of-year timetable without a press flap about progress in the war.
The decisions on troop withdrawals were given official expression in a National Security Action Memorandum on October 11 with the proviso that “no formal announcement be made of the implementation of plans to withdraw 1,000 U.S. military personnel by the end of 1963.” News of Defense Department steps to bring U.S. troops out of Vietnam was to be done by a “leak to the press.” But on October 31, during a news conference, Kennedy himself acknowledged the plan to remove one thousand troops from Vietnam before the end of the year. “If we are able to do that,” he said, “that would be our schedule.”
Kennedy’s announcement was a public confirmation of a private conclusion. It had become crystal clear to him after hearing from McNamara and Taylor on October 2, if not before, that Diem’s regime was incapable of winning the war. Major General Duong Van Minh (“Big Minh”) told Taylor, “[My country is] in chains with no way to shake them off.” On October 5, Minh asked Lieutenant Colonel Lucien Conein, a CIA contact in Saigon, to see him at his headquarters. After getting Lodge’s approval, Conein and Minh met alone for over an hour. During their conversation, Minh declared the need for a prompt statement of Washington’s attitude toward a change of government in the “very near future.” Minh predicted that without action soon, the war would be lost to the Viet Cong. He wanted assurances “that the USG will not attempt to thwart this plan.” Conein promised nothing, but agreed to report back on his government’s attitude. Lodge urged conformity with Minh’s request for assurances and a promise to Minh of continued U.S. military support for a new government devoted to defeating the communists. After discussion with Kennedy, McCone advised Lodge that they did not wish “to stimulate [a] coup,” but they would not thwart one or deny support to a new, more effective regime. “We certainly would not favor assassination of Diem,” McCone added, but “we are in no way responsible for stopping every such threat of which we might receive even partial knowledge.” As always, Kennedy saw “deniability” of direct U.S. involvement as of utmost importance should a coup occur.
As more information came in during the next two weeks, the White House became concerned that a coup, for which the United States would be held responsible, might fail and embarrass the administration. “We are particularly concerned about hazard that an unsuccessful coup … will be laid at our door by public opinion almost everywhere,” Bundy cabled Lodge on October 25. “Therefore, while sharing your view that we should not be in position of thwarting coup, we would like to have option of judging and warning on any plan with poor prospects of success. We recognize that this is a large order, but President wants you to know of our concern.”
Lodge believed that the White House was asking for something beyond the embassy’s control. He cabled Rusk on October 29, “It would appear that a coup attempt by the Generals’ group is imminent; that whether this coup fails or succeeds, the USG must be prepared to accept the fact that we will be blamed, however unjustifiably; and finally, that no positive action by the USG can prevent a coup attempt.” Since the plotters promised to give Lodge only four hours notice, he saw no way that the United States could “significantly influence [the] course of events.”
Still, Kennedy wanted him to try. If the coup failed, Bobby predicted, “Diem will throw us out.” Rusk countered that if the United States opposed the uprising, “the coup-minded military leaders will turn against us and the war effort will drop off rapidly.” Taylor and McCone thought that a failed revolt would be “a disaster and a successful coup would have a harmful effect on the war effort.” Harriman disagreed, arguing that Diem could not win the war. With pro- and anti-Diem forces in Vietnam so equally divided, Kennedy thought a coup “silly,” and wanted Lodge to discourage an uprising. “If we miscalculated,” Kennedy said, “we could lose our entire position in Southeast Asia overnight.” But it was too late. Despite additional appeals to Lodge over the next forty-eight hours to restrain the generals, the coup was launched at 1:45 P.M. on November 1. And once it began, as Bundy had cabled Lodge on the thirtieth, it was “in the interest of the U.S. Government that it should succeed.” At a meeting following news of the coup, Kennedy emphasized “the importance of making clear publicly that this was not a U.S. coup.” Contrary reports about who at any given moment held the upper hand in Saigon made this even more complicated. When Diem called Lodge at 4:30 P.M. to ask, “What is the attitude of the United States?” he replied evasively, “I do not feel well enough informed to be able to tell you …. It is 4:30 A.M. in Washington and U.S. Government cannot possibly have a view.” Lodge added, “I am worried about your physical safety,” and offered to help get him out of the country if Diem asked. Rusk at once counseled Lodge against premature recognition lest the coup be described as “American-inspired and manipulated.”
On the morning of November 2, Diem and Nhu, who had taken refuge in a private residence in suburban Saigon, offered to surrender to the generals if they guaranteed them safe conduct out of the country. When the generals made no firm promise of safe passage and troops tried to seize them, Diem and Nhu took refuge in a Catholic church, where they were arrested and placed in an armored personnel carrier. Early on the morning of the second, Conein received a call from Minh asking him to provide a plane for Diem’s exile. Still reluctant to give any indications of U.S. involvement, CIA operatives falsely answered that no aircraft with sufficient range to fly Diem to an asylum country was available for at least twenty-four hours. Before any plane became accessible, Diem and Nhu were assassinated in the personnel carrier. Even had a plane been available, it is doubtful that the generals would have allowed Diem or the Nhus to leave the country and set up a government in exile.
The news of their deaths reached Kennedy during a morning meeting with the National Security Council. According to Taylor, the president at once “leaped to his feet and rushed from the room with a look of shock and dismay on his face,” which Taylor had never seen before. Taylor attributed Kennedy’s reaction to his having been led to believe or having persuaded himself that a change in government could be carried out without bloodshed. Schlesinger, who saw the president shortly after, found him “somber and shaken.” He had “not seen him so depressed since the Bay of Pigs.” Kennedy refused to believe that Diem and Nhu, devout Catholics, would have killed themselves, as the Vietnamese generals were claiming. “He said that Diem had fought for his country for twenty years and that it should not have ended like this.” The fact that Diem had a million dollars in large denominations in a briefcase when he died added to Kennedy’s skepticism about the generals’ suicide account. So large a sum of money suggested that Diem intended to make himself comfortable in exile. Indeed, it was possible that the CIA had given him the money as an inducement to leave the country.
Kennedy tried to assuage his guilt about the assassinations by taping a statement in the Oval Office that future historians could consult. “Monday, November 4, 1963,” he began. “Over the weekend, the coup in Saigon took place. It culminated three months of conversations about a coup, conversations that divided the government here and in Saigon.” He listed Washington opponents as Taylor, his brother, McNamara (“to a somewhat lesser degree”), and McCone—”partly because of an old hostility to Lodge,” whose judgment he distrusted. The advocates were at state, “led by Averell Harriman, George Ball, Roger Hilsman, supported by Mike Forrestal at the White House.”
Kennedy did not spare himself from blame: “I feel that we [at the White House] must bear a good deal of responsibility for it, beginning with our cable of early August in which we suggested the coup. In my judgment that wire was badly drafted. It should never have been sent on a Saturday. I should not have given my consent to it without a roundtable conference at which McNamara and Taylor could have presented their views. While we did redress that balance in later wires, that first wire encouraged Lodge along a course to which he was in any case inclined. Harkins continued to oppose the coup on the ground that the military effort was doing well …. Politically the situation was deteriorating, militarily it had not had its effect. There was a feeling, however, that it would.”
Kennedy then turned to the assassinations: “I was shocked by the death of Diem and Nhu. I’d met Diem with Justice Douglas many years ago. He was an extraordinary character. While he became increasingly difficult in the last months, nevertheless over a ten-year period, he’d held his country together, maintained its independence under very adverse conditions. The way he was killed made it particularly abhorrent. The question now is whether the generals can stay together and build a stable government or whether Saigon will begin—whether public opinion in Saigon, the intellectuals, students, etc.—will turn on this government as repressive and undemocratic in the not too distant future.” Kennedy then matter-of-factly turned away from Vietnam to discuss other current events.
His truncated discussion was a sign that he had made up his mind. The lesson Kennedy seemed to take from all this was that U.S. involvement in so unstable a country was a poor idea. He was immediately dismissive of the new government and its prospects for survival. And having been so concerned, as he had told McNamara on November 5, not to get “bogged down” in Cuba as the British, the Russians, and the Americans had in South Africa, Finland, and North Korea, respectively, it was hardly conceivable that Kennedy would have sent tens of thousands more Americans to fight in so inhospitable a place as Vietnam. Reduced commitments, especially of military personnel, during a second Kennedy term were a more likely development. The failed coup had—just as the Bay of Pigs had in Cuba—pushed Kennedy further away from direct engagement.
Kennedy’s official and public statements about Vietnam were predictably upbeat. On November 6, he cabled Lodge, “Now that there is a new Government, which we are about to recognize, we must all intensify our efforts to help it deal with its many hard problems.” The fact that the administration had encouraged a change of government created a responsibility for it “to help this new government to be effective in every way that we can.” The goal was to concentrate on “effectiveness rather than upon external appearances.” The new regime needed to “limit confusion and intrigue among its members, and concentrate its energies upon the real problems of winning the contest against the Communists.” If it could do this, “it would have met and passed a severe test.”
At a press conference on November 14, two days after the State Department announced a Honolulu conference of U.S. officials on Vietnam, Kennedy offered an “appraisal of the situation in South Viet-Nam” and the goals of the Hawaii meeting scheduled for November 20. The Honolulu conference would be an “attempt to assess the situation: what American policy should be, and what our aid policy should be, how we can intensify the struggle, how we can bring Americans out of there. Now, that is our objective,”he emphasized, “to bring Americans home, permit the South Vietnamese to maintain themselves as a free and independent country, and permit democratic forces within the country to operate.”
Bundy returned from Honolulu with the impression that “the course the US country team will chart in Vietnam is by no means decided upon …. Briefings of McNamara tend[ed] to be sessions where people [tried] to fool him, and he tried to convince them they cannot.” As for the new regime, Bundy said, “it was too early to see what course it might follow, but it was clear that the coalition of generals might not last.” Were it not for the fact that influential defense, state, national security, and military officials remained determined to continue the fight, newspaper editorials advocating negotiations with North Vietnam aimed at neutralization might have convinced Kennedy. But the likely internal and congressional hullabaloo over such a strategy, the hope that the new government might fight the war more effectively, and the indifference of most Americans to our involvement made such a policy difficult to embrace just yet.
Nevertheless, somebody in the administration took seriously Kennedy’s apparent interest in eliminating U.S. military commitments in South Vietnam. In an undated, unsigned memo in the president’s office files from the late summer or fall of 1963, possibly even after November 1, the writer provided “Observations on Vietnam and Cuba.” Since the Soviets seemed to feel trapped in Cuba and the United States in Vietnam, might it not make sense to invite de Gaulle to propose a swap with the Soviets of neutralization for both countries? Whether Kennedy ever saw this memo or what reaction he might have had to it is unknown. Nonetheless, it is clear that by late November 1963, Kennedy welcomed suggestions for easing difficulties with Cuba and Vietnam as alternatives to the policies that, to date, had had such limited success. On November 21, the day he was leaving for Texas, Kennedy told Mike Forrestal that at the start of 1964 he wanted him “to organize an in-depth study of every possible option we’ve got in Vietnam, including how to get out of there. We have to review this whole thing from the bottom to the top,” Kennedy said.
THE PROBLEMS WITH VIETNAM, as with Cuba and domestic affairs, did not seem to undermine Kennedy’s reelection chances in 1964. Most soundings on national politics encouraged optimism about the president’s prospects in the next campaign. At the end of 1962, Americans listed Kennedy as the world public figure they most admired, ahead of Eisenhower, Winston Churchill, Albert Schweitzer, Douglas MacArthur, Harry Truman, and the Reverend Billy Graham. No other officeholder or active politician, including Nixon, made the top ten. Although Kennedy’s approval ratings fell between January and November 1963 from 76 percent to 59 percent and his disapproval numbers went up from 13 percent to 28 percent, he took comfort in the consistently high public affirmation of his presidential performance. In March 1963, 74 percent of Americans thought that he would be reelected. Moreover, when Gallup ran trial heats pitting him against Goldwater, Rockefeller, Michigan governor George Romney, or Nixon, Kennedy consistently had double-digit leads over all of them.
In-depth state surveys of North Dakota and Pennsylvania added to the optimism. North Dakota had been a reliable Republican state, with Kennedy winning less than 45 percent of the popular vote in 1960. But the election of a Democrat to a U.S. Senate seat in 1960 and the reelection of the senior senator, another Democrat, in 1962—albeit by the narrowest of margins in both contests—encouraged some hope that the president might win the state in 1964. In an April 1963 survey of North Dakota voters, Kennedy had an astonishing 77 percent approval rating. In statewide straw polls against four potential Republican nominees, Kennedy beat all of them except for Romney, who had only a slight 51 percent to 49 percent lead. Pollsters concluded that “from the loss of the State with a bare 44.5% of the total vote, the President has soared to a situation in which he might beat any Republican presidential candidate.”
The news from Pennsylvania was even better. In 1960, Kennedy had won the state by 117,000 votes, or 51.2 percent, to Nixon’s 48.8 percent. By the spring of 1963, his popularity had “increased significantly.” Rockefeller was Kennedy’s strongest opponent in straw polls, but he was “not running anywhere near as strong as Nixon did against Kennedy” in 1960, while other potential Republican nominees “might have difficulty defeating Kennedy among Republicans, let alone Democrats.”
Journalists echoed the polling results. Charlie Bartlett quoted a current jingle: “Never wait for an uptown car on the downtown side of the street.” Top administration officials “feel strongly now that they are waiting on the right side of the street for events that are moving in a favorable direction.” In May, a Chattanooga Times reporter predicted a Kennedy victory in Tennessee, where Negroes, who “hold the balance,” would back him “110% …. About the worst thing that could happen to Kennedy,” the reporter said, “ … would be the death of John XXIII and the election of an austere, reactionary Pope. John is very popular with many Protestants and this, combined with Kennedy’s own careful handling of the religious problem, has done much to water down the church issue in the South.” A Rochester, New York, newsman saw Kennedy “holding fast” to 1960 voters and winning over about one in ten Nixon supporters. “ ‘I voted for Nixon, but Kennedy seems to be doing a good job’ ” was the standard comment of these crossover voters. Kennedy’s Catholicism and “inexperience” had largely disappeared as issues, and a feeling that he was going to win anyway was creating a bandwagon effect.
Yet like any savvy American politician, Kennedy knew better than to take voters for granted. So much could happen in 1964 that might weaken his hold on the electorate and force him into a close election. “I suppose … we’re going to get a very tough fight,” he told a British visitor in October 1963. The chairman of the Westchester County, New York, Democratic Committee predicted in November that “if civil rights and tax cut legislation [are] on the books and off television by January, we will do better than ’60. If not, we will just have to work harder.” Kennedy saw little reason to think that either bill would gain passage by then and assumed that they would indeed have to “work harder.” Whenever he spoke to O’Donnell and Powers about ’64, he “[made] a point of saying it is going to be another tough campaign.” He would remind people that the Democrats had won only 52.8 percent of the congressional vote in 1962, and that since 1884, except for FDR, the Democrats had never won a majority of the popular vote for president. When he assessed recent voting patterns of “swing groups” likely to tip the election one way or another, the numbers confirmed his expectations of a very close contest. His gains in the East and the West and among women were “soft,” while Republicans had a “slight gain among men” and a “solid gain” in the South, where Kennedy did not think enough blacks would switch to him and the Democrats in 1964 to make a significant difference.
By November 1963, the campaign had already begun. During the last week in September, Kennedy made a trip through several western states that was billed as a “conservation tour” but was more an attempt to improve his political image in a region where he had done poorly in 1960. The Republicans had also launched their campaign, with attacks on the administration’s economic policies. In response, Kennedy was “hell-bent to talk about our faster growth rates than the European rates” in 1962–63. When Walter Heller told him that this was more a case of “expansion”—an upsurge from a recession—than “growth,” Kennedy responded that “in light of what the opposition was saying, one had to sometimes bypass these fine distinctions.” Heller agreed, “so long as we don’t fool ourselves,” and underestimate the importance of the tax cut and economic growth.
Kennedy was also worried about the negative impact of his civil rights proposals on voters. In New Jersey, where he had won by only twenty-two thousand votes in 1960, “the weakening of the Democratic political machine, plus the frightening backlash flowing from the whole civil rights issue” convinced the White House that they would have to do a great deal of work to win the state again. “To put it another way,” a New Jersey member of the Interior Department told O’Donnell, “we have to win in Arizona, Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico to offset a loss in New Jersey.”
Kennedy’s greatest worry was losing the South. He had acknowledged to Walter Cronkite during a September 2, 1963, interview the importance of civil rights as an issue working against him in the region. He granted that he would again lose some southern states, but he refused to concede the Old Confederacy to the Republicans. Lou Harris had urged him to ignore the accepted wisdom about the area. The common assumptions that “the main stream of southern politics today is segregationist, states rights, and right wing conservatism,” Harris advised, were “superficial shibboleths of the noisiest, not most representative elements in the region …. The outstanding developments in the South today do not directly concern the race question. Foremost is the industrial explosion that is taking place … accompanied by a comparable educational awakening.” A New South was in the making by moderate governors and businessmen, who were boosters of southern development councils. “You can well go into the South throughout 1964,” Harris told him, “not to lay down the gauntlet on civil rights, but rather to describe and encourage the new industrial and educational explosion in the region.” The votes Kennedy will lose in the South on civil rights, former FDR political adviser Jim Farley predicted, would be offset by gains on other issues.
Kennedy also saw the hard right as a threat to his reelection. In August 1963, he asked White House counsel Myer Feldman to assess the influence of right-wing organizations. Feldman’s survey distinguished between conservatives and the radical right, which he described as a formidable force in American political life. Well funded by “70 foundations, 113 business firms and corporations, 25 electric light, gas and power companies, and 250 identifiable individuals,” these organizations and men saw “the Nation as imperiled on every front by a pro-Communist conspiracy,” which was softening the country up for an imminent takeover. Most troubling, they had been politically more successful than realized: They had managed to elect 74 percent of their over 150 congressional candidates. Broadcasting a fifteen-minute radio program on three hundred radio stations 343 times a day and mailing eighty thousand copies a week of their newspaper, Human Events, “the radical right-wing,” Feldman told Kennedy, “constitutes a formidable force in American life today.”
Yet Kennedy saw the ultraright more as a political gift than a danger. He did not discount their ability to heighten the public’s fears of communist subversion or to put pressure on him to be more militant toward communist threats abroad. But he also understood that middle America and more traditional conservatives regarded these extremists as a threat to popular government programs like Social Security and unemployment insurance and as too rash in foreign affairs, where they could not be trusted with nuclear weapons.
Consequently, Kennedy wanted to run against Goldwater, the favorite candidate of the country’s most conservative elements; the Arizona senator’s denunciations of New Deal social programs and glib talk about “lobbing one into the men’s room of the Kremlin” made him appear to be an easy mark. When Salinger showed Kennedy a poll indicating that the Republicans would make the wild westerner their nominee, Kennedy said, “Dave Powers could beat Goldwater,” and quipped that a race against Goldwater would allow “all of us … [to] get to bed much earlier on election night than we did in 1960.” At a press conference on October 31, when a reporter asked him to comment on Goldwater’s charge that the administration was falsifying the news to keep him in office, Kennedy gleefully replied, “I think it would be unwise at this time to answer … Senator Goldwater. I am confident that he will be making many charges even more serious than this one in the coming months. And, in addition, he himself has had a busy week selling TVA and giving permission to or suggesting that military commanders overseas be permitted to use nuclear weapons, and attacking the President of Bolivia while he was here in the United States, and involving himself in the Greek election. So I thought it really would not be fair for me this week to reply to him.”
More worrisome as a candidate until the middle of 1963 was New York governor Nelson Rockefeller. Kennedy thought that Rockefeller would have beaten him in 1960, but he was confident that as president he would have the advantage over him in 1964. Nevertheless, he took nothing for granted and made a systematic effort to learn everything he could about Rockefeller. Kennedy made Ros Gilpatric, who had worked with Rockefeller, a sort of go-between. Whenever Rockefeller was in Washington, Kennedy wanted to see him. “I never saw more concentrated attention given to any political subject, from the time I got to know the President well,” Gilpatric recalls. But in the summer of 1963 Rockefeller married a divorcée with four children; his poll numbers plunged and Goldwater emerged as the new front-runner for the nomination.
Rockefeller’s fading candidacy was a relief to Kennedy, though he worried that Romney, a moderate like Rockefeller, might fill the vacuum and take the nomination away from Goldwater. At a November 13 staff meeting with Bobby, Sorensen, O’Donnell, O’Brien, brother-in-law Steve Smith, John Bailey and Dick Maguire from the DNC, and Richard Scammon, the director of the Census Bureau and a demographer, Kennedy discussed campaign plans for three hours. A successful businessman and devout Mormon who neither smoked nor drank and was awaiting a message from God on whether to run, Romney impressed Bobby as someone who could win both moderate and conservative votes. “People buy that God and country stuff,” Kennedy observed. “Give me Barry,” he pleaded half jokingly. “I won’t even have to leave the Oval Office.”
“As usual, the campaign will be run right from here,” Kennedy told the group. And the first step in that direction would be to give Steve Smith control at the DNC. Bailey, who was seen as “rather weak,” would become a figurehead, though no one, of course, said so at the meeting. Kennedy, borrowing from Wilson in 1916, described his campaign theme as “peace and prosperity.” He planned to underscore the administration’s commitment to economic uplift for all Americans by promising a war on poverty in eastern Kentucky, “the most severely distressed area in the country.” It was also a way to encourage the impression that he was compassionate and to make people feel more “personally involved with him.” Scammon, however, cautioned against investing too much in appeals to the poor. “You can’t get a single vote more by doing anything for poor people,” Scammon advised. “Those who vote are already for you.”
Instead, Scammon wanted the campaign to focus on the new suburbanites—the upwardly mobile families who might be lost to the Republicans. His analysis fascinated Kennedy, who wanted to know at what point in their upward economic and social climb Democrats became Republicans. Scammon promised to see if he could find out. Kennedy, mindful of the growing importance of television, which would broadcast the conventions in 1964, wanted to make the Democratic meeting more entertaining for the mass audience, which might tune in, at least for a while. “For once in my life, I’d like to hear a good keynote speech,” Kennedy said.
AS PART OF THE EMERGING CAMPAIGN, Kennedy planned trips to Florida and Texas in November. Convinced that his stand on civil rights would make it difficult to win most southern states, he intended to make special efforts to hold on to Florida and Texas. On November 18, he visited Tampa and Miami, where he spoke to politicians, labor leaders, and the Inter-American Press Association about the domestic economy and foreign affairs, particularly relations with Latin America.
During the trip to Texas, he hoped to raise campaign funds and mend political fences. Kennedy had been pressing Governor John Connally for months to arrange a dinner with rich Texas donors. But Connally, who was up for reelection in 1964, was not eager to identify himself with a president whose civil rights record had alienated many Texas voters. Nor was Johnson keen on the trip. He did not think that Kennedy could do much to heal a breach in the Texas Democratic party between Connally conservatives and liberals led by Senator Ralph Yarborough. Johnson feared that a visit would only exacerbate tensions and underscore his own ineffectiveness in controlling the state party. None of the Texas political crosscurrents, however, deterred Kennedy. He intended to tell Texas party leaders that they needed to improve on his forty-six-thousand-vote margin in 1960 if they expected him to provide the kind of federal largesse he could favor them with in a second term. “He was doing the thing he liked even better than being President,” recalled O’Donnell and Powers, “getting away from Washington to start his campaign for reelection in a dubious and important state, with twenty-five electoral votes, where he was sure he could win the people even though many of the bosses and most of the big money were against him. It was a tough political challenge that he relished with much more enjoyment than he found in his executive duties in the White House.” Bobby agreed: When the president “was in Washington, it depressed him a little bit. Not depressed him—that’s too strong a word. But you read all those columns, and none of them were very enthusiastic for him …. Everybody was, you know, sort of finding fault with him … that’s why he loved it [campaigning] so much. Every time he came back, he said, ‘It’s a different country.’ … The people in Washington really missed the depth of his popularity.”
On the morning of November 21, as Kennedy prepared to leave for Texas, Dave Powers conferred with him in the Oval Office. Powers remembered that “he looked taller than his six feet standing there on the gray-green carpet with the American eagle woven in its center …. Although he was still plagued by his aching back, he was the picture of health”—172½ pounds with “the build of a light heavyweight boxer.” His routine of calisthenics and swimming in the heated White House pool, with its backdrop of colorful seascape murals, had eased his back problems, though the pain was always with him, increasing and decreasing in response to his activities.
The day’s schedule was a typical twenty-four hours in the life of a traveling president. A three-and-one-half-hour flight from Andrews Air Force Base to San Antonio was followed by forty-five-minute flights to Houston and then Fort Worth. Greeting hundreds of people at the three airports and riding for two and a half hours in motorcades waving to crowds was exhilarating and exhausting. The dedication of an aerospace medical facility in San Antonio and remarks in Houston to the League of Latin American Citizens and at a dinner honoring Congressman Albert Thomas, a Kennedy ally who had helped win appropriations for the space program, were satisfying but unexceptional events. Jackie’s presence on the trip gave the crowds and press something to talk about. And the open hostility between Connally and Yarborough, punctuated by news accounts of Yarborough’s refusal to ride in a car with Johnson, Connally’s ally, generated additional local interest in the president’s visit.
The possibility of overt right-wing demonstrations against Kennedy had raised doubts about the wisdom of visiting Texas. After a crowd of ultraconservatives had jeered and physically threatened Adlai Stevenson during a United Nations Day visit to Dallas on October 24, some of the president’s friends wondered whether he should risk going to the city. On November 4, Texas Democratic National Committeeman Byron Skelton sent Bobby a newspaper story about retired general Edwin Walker, a supporter of the radical-right John Birch Society, who said that “ ‘Kennedy is a liability to the free world.’ A man who would make that kind of statement is capable of doing harm to the President,” Skelton advised. “I would feel better if the President’s itinerary did not include Dallas. Please give this your earnest consideration.” Bobby had passed the letter along to O’Donnell, who had concluded that “showing the letter to the President would have been a waste of his time.” Kennedy would have dismissed him as mad if he had suggested “cutting such a large and important city as Dallas from the itinerary because of Skelton’s letter.”
A John Birch Society ad in the Dallas Morning News on November 22 gave resonance to the concern. It accused Kennedy of being soft on communism, while allowing his brother to prosecute loyal Americans who criticized the administration. The ad implied that the Kennedys were pro-communist. When he showed the black-bordered ad to Jackie, the president said, “We’re heading into nut country today. But, Jackie, if somebody wants to shoot me from a window with a rifle, nobody can stop it, so why worry about it?”
Of course, there were security precautions that could be taken, but in protecting the president from potential threats during his trip to Texas, and Dallas in particular, the Secret Service and FBI worried too much about the ultraright and too little about a possible assassin from the radical left. Consequently, neither agency picked up on the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald, an unstable ne’er-do-well who had lived in Russia for almost three years, openly identified himself with Castro’s Cuba, and unsuccessfully tried to breach a State Department ban on visiting the island, might be a threat to the president. If they had been attentive to Oswald’s movements, they would have noted his presence in Dallas, where he worked in the downtown Dealey Plaza building of the Texas School Book Depository, which overlooked Kennedy’s motorcade route. If he had been an object of clear concern, they would have taken notice of the mail-order Italian rifle he purchased shortly after the president’s visit was announced.
Unimpeded by any law enforcement agency and animated by possibly nothing more than resentment against a symbol of the authority, success, and fame he craved and could never hope to achieve, Oswald fired three shots from the sixth-floor window of the Depository building at the president riding directly below in an open car. The second bullet struck Kennedy in the back of the neck. Were it not for a back brace, which held him erect, a third and fatal shot to the back of the head would not have found its mark. At 1:00 P.M. central time, half an hour after the attack, doctors at Dallas’s Parkland Memorial Hospital told Mrs. Kennedy that the president was dead.
KENNEDY’S DEATH SHOCKED the country more than any other event since the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. The assassination produced an outpouring of grief that exceeded that felt by Americans over the killings of Lincoln, James A. Garfield, and William McKinley, or over FDR’s sudden death in April 1945. However traumatic Lincoln’s assassination, the four years of Civil War bloodletting, which took 620,000 lives, somewhat muted the horror of losing the nation’s leader. It was as if Lincoln’s demise was foreordained—the culmination of a four-year catastrophe that tested the nation’s capacity to survive. The Garfield and McKinley assassinations were assaults on presidents serving in a politically diminished office and on men who enjoyed a lesser hold on the country’s imagination than FDR or JFK did. The approaching victory in World War II made Roosevelt’s passing less traumatic than if it had come in the midst of the conflict, when the loss of his leadership would have seemed more difficult for the nation to surmount.
By contrast, Kennedy’s sudden violent death seemed to deprive the country and the world of a better future. Despite initial glaring misjudgments about civil rights, Cuba, and Soviet Russia, Kennedy’s subsequent performance had raised global expectations that he could improve the state of world affairs. His transparent eagerness for better relations between the United States and the USSR and for higher standards of living everywhere had impressed people as not simply the usual peace and prosperity rhetoric promised by all politicians but the product of thoughtful conviction. When he called for tax cuts and legislation guaranteeing the equal treatment promised in the Constitution, it seemed fresh and bold and likely to advance the national well-being. When he urged nuclear arms limitations, he seemed to be not only a defender of the national interest but also a humanist arguing the case for a rational world struggling against the age-old blights of fear, hatred, and war.
The British philosopher and historian Isaiah Berlin reflected feeling abroad when he wrote Schlesinger, “I do not wish to exaggerate: perhaps it is not at all similar to what men may have felt when Alexander the Great died; but the suddenness and the sense of something of exceptional hope for a large number of people suddenly cut off in mid-air is, I think, unique in our lifetime—it is as if Roosevelt had been murdered in 1935, with Hitler and Mussolini and everybody else still about and a lot of [Neville] Chamberlains and [Edouard] Daladiers knocking about too.”
In the United States, the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr lamented, “I never knew how his brief and brilliant leadership had touched the imagination and the hearts of the common people until this terrible deed ended his career.” Chief Justice Earl Warren undoubtedly spoke for millions of Americans when he wrote Jackie, “America now has a higher duty to undertake—completion of the unfinished work of your beloved husband. No American during my rather long life ever set his sights higher for a better America or centered his attack more accurately on the evils and shortcomings of our society than did he. It was God’s will that he should not remain with us to complete his self-prescribed task, but I have the faith to believe it was also God’s will that we who survive him should use this adversity to memorialize his farsightedness and humanitarianism. That memorial should be the consummation of his ideal for our nation. I feel confident that there are many millions of Americans, of whom I am one, who will consider this to be their solemn duty.”
IN THE FORTY YEARS since Kennedy’s assassination, family, friends and the whole country have struggled to come to terms with his senseless murder. What could possibly explain the sudden violent end to the life of someone as young, attractive, and politically powerful as John F. Kennedy? Is there some way to give constructive meaning to his death?
Jacqueline Kennedy, the most directly affected by JFK’s death, struggled to maintain her rationality. White House physician Dr. James M. Young, who saw her in Washington and Hyannis Port two or three times a day during the ten days after the assassination, remembers her as “emotionally distraught” but generally composed and self-contained. She “did not break down and cry,” and with the help of sleeping medication “she did well.” There were occasional expressions of anger at the failings of the Secret Service and at Kennedy’s doctors. She called Janet Travell a “Madame Nhu,” George Burkley, who would pass patients off to other physicians, a “communist,” and Eugene Cohen, who was at odds with Travell, a “psychopath.”
Her husband’s tragic death seemed to have dissolved her anger toward him for his womanizing. At least she said nothing to Dr. Young about the problem, but to the contrary, spoke only lovingly of Jack, remembering the scars on his back as a symbol of his fortitude in dealing with his physical pain, the hard mattress he needed, and the pleasure of being with him in bed.
She seemed to find purpose and solace in preserving JFK’s memory. Only thirty-four years old, deprived of decades of life with her husband, faced with raising her six-year-old and three-year-old children without their father—whom they would never know—Jackie kept her balance—indeed sanity—by focusing on Kennedy’s legacy. She understood that no one was going to forget him; rather, her concern was how the world would remember him.
She began with his funeral. Although some members of the family wished to bury the president in Brookline, Massachusetts, JFK’s birthplace, Jackie insisted on Arlington Cemetery. An eternal flame, like one in Paris at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier built after World War I at the base of the Arc de Triomphe, was to mark the grave. She also asked that the ceremony resemble Lincoln’s, the most revered of the country’s martyred presidents. A procession from the White House to the Roman Catholic St. Matthew’s Cathedral, eight blocks away, consisted of Jackie, Bobby, Ted, President and Mrs. Johnson, principal Kennedy associates, and representatives of ninety-two nations, including de Gaulle and Anastas Mikoyan, Khrushchev’s first deputy. The international contingent and fears that assassins associated with Oswald or incited by his example might try to kill some of the dignitaries made the ceremony a more portentous occasion than that of Franklin Roosevelt’s passing.
It may be that Jackie, as one writer said, “needed the myth of her fallen husband to secure her own brittle identity,” but a more generous analysis should admit that her effort to lionize Kennedy must have provided a therapeutic shield against immobilizing grief. A few days after his funeral, she granted an interview to Theodore White, whose book on the 1960 election had drawn a flattering portrait of her husband. Describing Kennedy’s death as marking the end of Camelot, a romanticized association with King Arthur’s court that White faithfully recorded in a Life magazine article on December 6, Jackie helped create an idyllic portrait that Schlesinger has said “would have provoked John Kennedy to profane disclaimer.”
Their son’s death staggered Joe and Rose. Still immobilized by his 1961 stroke, Joe did not attend the funeral. He was either too incapacitated or too shocked to comprehend the awful news. The family shielded him from the reports on television until the next morning, when Teddy and Eunice told him. Rose could not bear to be in the room when they did. “We have told him, but we don’t think that he understands it,” Rose said.
The news temporarily shook Rose’s faith. She “walked and walked and walked” in the yard of the Hyannis Port house and on the beach and “prayed and prayed and prayed, and wondered why it happened to Jack. He had everything to live for …. Everything—the culmination of all his efforts, abilities, dedication to good and to the future—lay boundlessly before him. Everything was gone and I wondered why.” Rose was so upset that she could not walk with the procession to the cathedral for fear that she might collapse.
But no one among the Kennedys suffered more acutely than Bobby. Though a man of unquestioning faith, he could not find any sense or meaning in his brother’s death. “Why, God?” he asked as he sobbed in the privacy of the Lincoln bedroom the night of November 22. “The innocent suffer—how can that be possible and God be just?” he asked himself in the days after the assassination. LeMoyne Billings remembered him as devastated. He had so fully devoted himself to his brother’s career that the president’s death left him bewildered. “He didn’t know where he was …. Everything was just pulled out from under him.” In the weeks and months after the tragedy, Bobby took to reading Greek classics by Aeschylus, Euripides, Herodotus, and Sophocles and works by the modern existentialists, especially Albert Camus, to help understand the agony and suffering in every life. They gave him the solace needed to sustain a public career, now more than ever in behalf of those most vulnerable to personal and social problems.
The depths of Bobby’s anguish may partly have sprung from guilt. John McCone believed that Bobby was either directly or indirectly involved in Castro assassination plots, which Bobby suspected had led Castro agents to kill his brother. Biographer Evan Thomas concluded that Bobby “gave lip service to the single-gunman explanation” in the government’s official report on the assassination, but “he never quieted his own doubts.” Bobby, according to Thomas, thought the killing might have been the work of the CIA or mobster Sam Giancana or Castro or Jimmy Hoffa or the Cuban exiles.
Lyndon Johnson shared the conviction that an undetected conspiracy was behind Kennedy’s assassination. He initially believed that the president’s death was in revenge for Diem’s killing. In time, he concluded that Castro supporters were responsible. “President Kennedy tried to get Castro, but Castro got Kennedy first,” he told Joseph Califano, his domestic affairs chief. Kennedy’s death came a year after Castro’s government foiled a CIA-assassination plot in Havana. “We had been operating a damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean,” Johnson told a journalist.
Johnson saw the country’s initial reaction to the assassination as “troubled, puzzled, and outraged.” But after Jack Ruby, an unsavory Dallas nightclub operator, killed Lee Harvey Oswald, the prime suspect in the assassination, in the garage of a Dallas police station on his way to a court hearing, the country concluded that Kennedy’s death was the work of more than just one man. Although the Warren Commission, the government’s inquiry into the assassination headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren, described Oswald in its September 1964 report as the lone killer, a majority of Americans never accepted that conclusion. To be sure, the commission’s failure to ferret out and disclose CIA assassination plots against Castro or to reveal and condemn the FBI for inattentiveness to Oswald raised questions later about the reliability of its evidence and judgment. But in December 1963, even before the commission published its findings, 52 percent of the country saw “some group or element” behind the assassination. By January 1967, the belief in a conspiracy had risen to 64 percent.
Despite an authoritative 1993 book, Case Closed, by attorney Gerald Posner refuting numerous conspiracy theories, the public, inflamed by a popular 1991 Oliver Stone film, JFK, believed otherwise. In 1992, fewer than one-third of Americans accepted the Warren Commission’s findings as persuasive. In February of that year, the New York Times Book Review listed as bestsellers one hardcover and three paperback books describing Kennedy assassination theories. To this day, a substantial majority in America assumes that an aggrieved group rather than just Oswald was behind Kennedy’s killing. The prime suspects are pro- or anti-Castro Cubans, Vietnamese retaliating for Diem’s death, “the mob” or labor bosses hurt by Kennedy, and the CIA, military chiefs, and Lyndon Johnson opposed to détente with Moscow.
The fact that none of the conspiracy theorists have been able to offer convincing evidence of their suspicions does not seem to trouble many people. The plausibility of a conspiracy is less important to them than the implausibility of someone as inconsequential as Oswald having the wherewithal to kill someone as consequential—as powerful and well guarded—as Kennedy. To accept that an act of random violence by an obscure malcontent could bring down a president of the United States is to acknowledge a chaotic, disorderly world that frightens most Americans. Believing that Oswald killed Kennedy is to concede, as New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis said, “that in this life there is often tragedy without reason.”
Despite his own suspicions of a conspiracy, Johnson was eager to reassure the country that only Oswald was involved. He feared that speculation about Cuban or Soviet responsibility might provoke a nuclear war. As he told Earl Warren when convincing him to head the commission, rumors that either Castro or Khrushchev was part of a conspiracy “might even catapult us into a nuclear war if it got a head start.” To overcome Georgia senator Richard Russell’s resistance to joining the commission, Johnson warned him that forty million Americans might lose their lives in a nuclear conflict if accusations about Castro and Khrushchev were not refuted.
Kennedy’s assassination provoked not only conspiracy theories but also an extraordinary public attachment to his memory. Forty years after his death, Americans consistently rate Kennedy as one of the five greatest presidents in U.S. history. Fifty-two percent of respondents in a 1975 Gallup poll ranking presidents put Kennedy first, ahead of Lincoln and FDR; ten years later, he remained number one, with 56 percent backing. A poll released on Presidents Day in February 1999 declared Lincoln the greatest of our presidents, with Washington, JFK, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton tied for second. In 2000, Kennedy topped the list, followed by Lincoln, FDR, and Reagan. Stories about Reagan’s ninetieth birthday in 2001 propelled him to the top spot, with Kennedy second and Lincoln third.
How can one explain Kennedy’s enduring hold on the public’s imagination? His thousand-day presidency—the sixth-briefest in the country’s history—hardly measures up to the administrations of Washington, Lincoln, and FDR, our most notable presidents. Nor are professional historians persuaded that Kennedy deserves such high standing. The want of landmark legislation, an overly cautious response to black pressure for equal treatment under the law, and a mixed record in foreign affairs, where success in the missile crisis and with the test ban treaty are balanced against unresolved Cuban problems and deeper involvement in Vietnam, have persuaded scholars that Kennedy was not a truly distinguished president.
Moreover, revelations about Kennedy’s womanizing and health have raised questions about whether he could have made it through a second term. In his 1991 book, A Question of Character, historian Thomas C. Reeves concluded, “Had Kennedy lived to see a second term, the realities of his lechery and dealings with [mobster] Sam Giancana might have leaked out while he was still in office, gravely damaging the presidency …. Impeachment might well have followed such public disclosure.” In his 1997 book, The Dark Side of Camelot, Seymour Hersh asserted that JFK’s tawdry behavior during his presidency put him “just one news story away from cataclysmic political scandal.”
In 1982, two thousand scholars asked to categorize American presidents as great, near great, above average, average, below average, and failure, ranked Kennedy as number thirteen, in the middle of the above-average group. In 1988, seventy-five historians and journalists described JFK as “the most overrated public figure in American history.” An October 2000 survey of seventy-eight scholars in history, politics, and law, which gave considerable weight to length of presidential service, ranked Kennedy number eighteen, at the bottom of the above-average category.
But the public has other yardsticks for measuring presidential greatness. The muckraking about Kennedy’s private life has had no significant impact on public admiration for his presidential record. Most Americans set his health problems, sexual escapades, and dealings with Giancana down as unproven gossip that had no demonstrable effect on his official duties. Despite a voyeuristic interest that makes bestsellers out of books offering sensational revelations, Kennedy’s personal magnetism has had more enduring appeal than allegations of deceitfulness and immoral behavior. Substantial public interest in White House tapes and a Hollywood film demonstrating Kennedy’s effectiveness during the missile crisis, as well as long lines of people in New York, Boston, and Washington eager to view an exhibit of Jackie Kennedy’s personal wardrobe and effects as First Lady, are fresh demonstrations of the Kennedys’ continuing popularity.
The assassination and Kennedy’s martyrdom no doubt remain the most important factors in perpetuating high public regard for his leadership and importance as a president. But this alone cannot explain his popularity. In 1941, forty years after William McKinley, who had been among the small number of presidents elected twice, was assassinated, he was an all but forgotten chief. The advent of television, which captured Kennedy’s youthful appearance, good looks, charm, wit, and rhetorical idealism and hope, also contributed to his ongoing appeal. The public’s faith in Kennedy’s sincerity is an additional element in his continuing hold on the country. In an era of public cynicism about politicians as poseurs who are stage-managed and often insincere, Kennedy’s remembered forthrightness strengthens his current appeal. These attributes have encouraged a belief that had he lived, the United States would have avoided many of the problems it suffered under Johnson and Nixon during the 1960s and 1970s.
Public attachment to Kennedy also rests on the conviction that his election reduced religious and ethnic tests for the presidency. True, no other Catholic has become president since Kennedy, but Ronald Reagan, though not a practicing Catholic, had a Catholic father. Moreover, the vice presidential candidacies of Geraldine Ferraro, a Catholic, in 1984, and of Joseph Lieberman, a Jew, in 2000, demonstrate that JFK’s presidency significantly reduced religion as a barrier to the White House. It also helped make the election of a woman to the presidency conceivable. For millions of ethnic Americans, Kennedy remains more than a bright, promising young president whose life and time in office were prematurely snuffed out. He is an enduring demonstration that ethnics and minorities, who, despite rhetoric to the contrary, did not feel fully accepted in America before 1960, have come into their own as first-class citizens. Kennedy’s identification with a rich and famous family, Harvard degree, heroism in World War II, and election to the House, Senate, and White House have been enough to make him a great president in the eyes of hyphenated Americans. Then and now, they share dreams realized by the Kennedys of becoming American aristocrats.
KENNEDY’S DEATH WAS initially a triumph of the worst in human relations over the promise of better times. But, as Warren anticipated, the grief over his loss became a compelling drive for the enactment of legislative and international gains that remain living memorials to his vision of a fairer, more prosperous, and peaceful world. The “idealist without illusions,” as Kennedy described himself, would have taken satisfaction from the advances that his senseless death helped bring to life. But it was limited compensation to those who believed that another five years in the White House and a postpresidential career might have allowed Kennedy to shield the country from losses and defeats, avoiding the doubts and cynicism flowing from the assassination and the Vietnam War and bringing benefits that would have served countless millions at home and abroad.