At the end of 1958, just as Kennedy was winning reelection in Massachusetts in a landslide that surprised many, a book was published by a moderately well-known MIT professor who had a more than casual relationship with him. The title, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, sounded like a textbook, but it was really a long essay. Instead of offering untested revolutionary theory, it dealt with how developing countries become developed and how developed societies try to maintain their vigor. The author, Walt Whitman Rostow, had been kibitzing on issues with Kennedy for a year. He was a source for an unusual blend of economic as well as foreign policy material, reflecting his interests as well as his expertise. He influenced Kennedy’s thinking about subjects as wide-ranging as developing countries like India and advanced nations such as the slow-growing United States of the late 1950s. With government experience during World War II and consultant duties afterward—including time with the Eisenhower administration—Rostow was an excellent example of the kind of activist intellectual that Kennedy attracted.
Rostow discussed his book often with Kennedy while he was writing it. He tackled the process of development—a hot academic as well as political topic in the 1950s as new countries emerged from crumbling empires in Asia and Africa. The birth of these states raised cold war tensions. The book had special relevance to ideas in Kennedy’s nascent campaign in its discussion of more advanced societies, from the United States to the Soviet Union.
Of the United States Rostow wrote in professorial patois, “The automobile–durable consumers’ goods–suburbia sectoral complex had lost in the 1950s the capacity to drive forward American growth.” This description related to an economic statistic much discussed at that time: the decline to roughly 2.5 percent annually in the rate of growth of the economy’s output of goods and services (the gross domestic product) from rates nearly double that in the period following World War II.
In a subsequent edition of the book Rostow posed his fundamental question about advanced societies: “Will man fall into secular, spiritual stagnation, finding no worthy outlet for the expression of his energies, talents and instinct to reach for immortality?”
In comments destined to be associated with Kennedy, Rostow emphasized the importance of his questions to countries like the United States “as they turned to explore new frontiers.” He went on to describe a “great struggle to find new, peaceful frontiers for the human experience.” And he used another phrase that became equally well-known, though it would prove to be more appropriate to the campaign trail than academic discourse. He summed up the purpose of the activism he advocated by saying that he wanted to “get this country moving again.” As the primaries approached, Kennedy began invoking the words on the stump. (But he resisted Rostow’s entreaty to make it the opening sentence of his acceptance speech after winning the nomination at the Democratic convention.)
Kennedy’s intellectual exercise with Rostow represented his maturation as a full-blown public figure.
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As a presidential candidate Kennedy advocated activism over agenda. He had often expressed his desire to be in Theodore Roosevelt’s “arena,” where the stakes were high and power politics mattered more than ideology. He would produce his share of “ten-point plans,” all of them left of center. But he preferred his policy statements to be “new” rather than simply “liberal,” and he clearly enjoyed the challenge of addressing specific issues in depth. The bulk of his rhetoric and eloquence was focused on ideas to tackle major problems with zest, because he believed the nation was gripped by intellectual stagnation. His quarrel was more with the America of the 1950s—a sleepy decade—than with the policies of the Eisenhower administration, and he knew that taking on the popular war-hero president was a campaign no-no from the beginning. As a Democratic candidate Kennedy wanted to present himself as an impatient agent for change rather than a programmatic partisan.
Kennedy was introduced to Rostow by foreign policy coordinator Fred Holborn in 1957, when Kennedy was looking for help in developing an aid package for neutral India. Rostow had consulted on the same issue for Eisenhower, who appreciated his ideas but never became personally close to him. The Walt Rostow of the 1950s was a good fit for Kennedy; he had wide-ranging interests and expertise on foreign as well as domestic challenges, and he had an ability to write clearly.I He was genuinely attracted to what he called Kennedy’s “remarkable computer of a mind,” which made room for Rostow’s own long menu of ideas.
Walt and Eugene Rostow represented one of two formidable brother acts that made strong contributions to Kennedy’s quest for intellectual answers. Eugene V. Debs Rostow was dean of the Yale Law School at the time. The Rostows were often paired with McGeorge Bundy, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, and his brother, William Bundy, who had worked as an analyst for the CIA. The four were more or less contemporaries of Kennedy and highly regarded on matters of intelligence and foreign policy.
In an interview shortly after his close call for a place on the ticket at the 1956 convention—before the rest of the political world knew he was actually running for president—Kennedy was asked to describe himself. “I like to think of myself as a practical liberal,” he replied. The description was not accurate. In national affairs Kennedy took risks, and many of them were calculated. He began to develop a new image for himself in a country that had known him in the mid-1950s as a celebrity.
In his most visible role in domestic policymaking, Kennedy in 1957 ventured where many of his colleagues—including some aspiring presidential candidates—did not dare to go. At a time when organized labor represented one of the strongest forces in the Democratic Party, Kennedy ended nearly a decade of political silence on an issue that affected virtually every American: health care. Sticking his neck out on an issue where the opposition—the insurance industry and the conservative world of physicians—had been brutally effective since the 1930s, he embellished on an idea initially advanced by Aime Forand, a relatively obscure, labor-oriented congressman from Rhode Island. Forand had proposed universal hospital insurance coverage financed through the Social Security system’s payroll tax, but it was Kennedy who brought it to center stage, targeted initially on the elderly.
He did the same with public schools, another pressing issue. Education in America suddenly became a focal point following the Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of Sputnik, the first satellite to orbit the planet. Kennedy decided to challenge a multitude of determined opponents who felt the schools should be the exclusive concern of local governments. He defied convention by proposing that the federal government send money directly to local school districts to help fund operating costs. By doing so he resolved a debate that had taken place in his own mind since the 1940s; he concluded that federal dollars should not go directly to parochial schools—a position that put him in conflict with the Catholic Church.
When he started his covert run for president in 1956, Kennedy was essentially a blank slate on the principal questions of the day. He was the spokesman for no issue and had no legislative achievement. He might have had bright promise, but he had only the barest bones of a record. Simple political calculation required that the blank slate be filled. There was little time as Kennedy began traveling and subtly campaigning in 1957, but he plunged into a couple of politically perilous areas—labor unions and social programs—during his four-year effort to establish a stronger record in Congress. The work was methodical. At first his most significant moves to attract attention were in foreign affairs. His rhetoric on domestic issues was boilerplate and partisan; gradually, however, that began to change in the sensitive world of labor unions, where substance and politics were joined at the hip.
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“The base of support for President Kennedy was labor,” recalled Meyer “Mike” Feldman, an experienced policy specialist and lawyer who joined the staff during 1958 to work with Sorensen, researching major issues and helping develop ideas and proposals. “In order to have solid labor support, he had to have the liberal community support him. I think there were a great many liberal pressures on him. Up until 1958 his coloration was a pretty conservative coloration; beginning around the time I came to work he became more and more liberal.”
In part this was pure politics. Early on, Kennedy understood that Johnson was his most formidable potential opponent. Kennedy was still trying to woo southern Democrats, but always with the recognition that he might not succeed because he favored civil rights. But it was also a given around Kennedy that Johnson, as the Democrat closest to the southern establishment in Congress, would face enormous obstacles winning support in northern states. “Now if he couldn’t get the south, which was the center of conservatism, he had to get the north in order to get the votes to be nominated,” Feldman explained. “So taking one step at a time in the effort to get the nomination he had to have a liberal image.”
On paper Kennedy could never be Humphrey. There was not a cause involving civil rights or labor that the Minnesota senator and likely presidential candidate had not supported, usually with full-throated eloquence. All of the leading unions and civil rights organizations anticipated supporting him in 1960, and even Kennedy himself acknowledged Humphrey’s influence on his own views, especially civil rights.
Some Democrats suspected the influence went even further. James Rowe, who was close to both Johnson and Humphrey, liked to joke that on many major issues Humphrey usually controlled three votes: his own, Kennedy’s, and that of the famously cautious Stuart Symington.
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As events unfolded, a leadership route opened for Kennedy, and he jumped at the opportunity. In the beginning of 1957 he and his brother Robert took assignments on the Rackets Committee—over the strenuous objections of their father—that put them squarely in the midst of a national discussion about organized labor. Unions were nearing the zenith of their membership numbers and had the ability to influence any legislative threats to their existence.
As nationally televised hearings by the committee increasingly regaled—and repelled—much of the country with lurid tales of gangsters, rigged union elections, and personal profiteering, Kennedy became the principal Democrat overseeing the legislative response to the outrages.
As 1957 wore on, Kennedy’s decision to get involved in the investigation appeared almost prescient. The principal target of the hearing was the large and swaggering Teamsters Union, led by the shadowy Dave Beck and his Mussolini-like leader-in-waiting Jimmy Hoffa, who had already made a Faustian bargain with organized crime. Television audiences loved the show almost as much as they had been fascinated by Kefauver’s hearings six years earlier, which introduced the country to the Mafia’s national tentacles.
Kennedy was not the star of the show; his relentless brother was, compiling an encyclopedic record of wrongdoing by the Teamsters. Robert also bored into the vulnerable witnesses, especially Beck and Hoffa, with withering questions. While he destroyed the Teamsters’ credibility, he compiled material for a best-selling book about the mess, The Enemy Within, which was released near the eve of the 1960 campaign. But while Robert controlled the drama, Jack was a prominent presence in the hearings, despite his constant travels on the campaign trail. He always seemed to enter the set at critical moments to deliver penetrating observations. The well-known liberal lawyer Joseph Rauh said Kennedy’s timing was so fortuitous that he assumed Robert tipped him off about what was on the agenda.
Slowly the hearings began to produce material for Kennedy’s speeches as his campaign gathered momentum. He made the argument that no Democrat could tolerate corruption in a movement whose fundamental purpose was to represent workers’ rights and their economic health. But he also deftly used his position on the committee to push back against business and conservative interests that sought to attack labor’s organizing and collective bargaining role, which included the use of strikes.
During the hearings Kennedy’s three major opponents on the committee were very conservative Republicans: Barry Goldwater of Arizona, Karl Mundt of South Dakota, and Carl Curtis of Nebraska. In 1957 the trio focused on a long, bitter strike led by the United Auto Workers against Wisconsin’s Kohler Company, the bathroom fixtures giant. From the company and its political allies came angry charges of coercive activity, and Robert Kennedy accommodated them by sending investigators. Jack meanwhile arranged the UAW’s response to the accusations. No evidence of illegal conduct was found in Wisconsin, and the strike was actually settled while the committee hearings were still going on.
Over the course of Kennedy’s work on the committee, union leadership took notice and slowly began to change its view of Joe Kennedy’s son, a man they had viewed with suspicion ever since his arrival in Congress a decade earlier. Rauh, the UAW’s counsel during the investigation, said later, “Whenever the UAW needed John Kennedy, he was there. . . . He was very warm and sympathetic about our problem and very derogatory about Goldwater, Mundt and Curtis. He just felt they were beneath contempt, the three of them. He was very interested in being helpful and he was very helpful.”
Thanks to the hearings and his membership on the Senate Labor Committee, Kennedy became the key Democrat involved in drafting legislative solutions to labor corruption. The effort—shunned by more senior colleagues—would occupy the bulk of his time in Washington over the next two years. Substantively the risk was that the rights workers had won over the preceding generation would be eroded even more than they had been in the Taft-Hartley Act of the late 1940s; politically for Kennedy there was the danger of provoking angry opposition from unions wanting no legislation at all.
Kennedy saw it as an opportunity to demonstrate to his colleagues and other political insiders that he was capable of major legislative achievement on a high-profile issue. It was also a chance to show nearly 20 million labor union members that he could be an effective friend. Most important, the voting public would learn that he was a serious national player and no lightweight.
But the cost was steep: months of laborious work crafting a bill in the Senate, dealing with an antagonistic House of Representatives, searching for a way to reconcile the two branches’ differing approaches, watching the clock run out on Congress at the end of 1958, and then having to slog through the entire process all over again in 1959 before legislation could be agreed upon.
As the Senate lawmaking process began after the dramatic hearings wound down, Kennedy imported Archibald Cox, one of the country’s top labor law experts and a Harvard Law School professor, to advise him every step of the way. Cox quickly convened his own group of experts to help Kennedy pull together a legislative proposal that was ready by the end of the year.II
Watching him up close for the next two years Cox observed a mix of politician and independent intellectual, eventually sharing Walt Rostow’s view of his policymaking mind. “Unlike so many public figures,” Cox later recalled, “especially in the legislative branch, he had tremendous interest in the substance, the merits of these problems, even down to rather small details, and he really did seem to be interested in getting to the bottom of it. . . . I suppose I might say that it was an intellectual interest.”
After working at close quarters with important staff members, especially Sorensen and Ralph Dungan, the Kennedy aide who most often dealt with the unions, Cox was certain Kennedy appreciated the gamble as he oversaw the legislative process. “There had been the feeling that this pretty nearly would make or break him. To get the nomination and get the election he had to get a bill through. On the other hand it was a tightrope. If the bill that went through was too restrictive that would be death.”
The challenge was to focus as much of the legislative product as possible on the union abuses the hearings had dramatized, with new regulations promoting reforms to ban election chicanery and tighten financial rules to combat corruption. At the same time Kennedy worked to block moves by influential members of the business community and some Republicans who sought to limit the ability of unions to organize membership drives, call strikes, and stage consumer boycotts. In the Senate he succeeded with the assistance of Republicans like Irving Ives of New York, his cosponsor, and John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky, his colleague on the Labor Committee. The Senate votes in 1958 were nearly unanimous.
There was, however, a close call, which Cox admitted “caught us entirely off balance.” An effort to expand on the restrictions in Taft-Hartley was packaged under the tempting title of a “labor bill of rights” and pushed as an amendment by the Labor Committee chairman, Democrat John McClellan, who had also chaired the investigative committee hearings. McClellan was content to lurk in the background and leave the job of crafting the legislation to Kennedy. When the tough version favored by McClellan narrowly passed the Senate, Majority Leader Johnson helped Kennedy and his allies plot a parliamentary maneuver that made reconsideration possible. A second, less onerous proposal prevailed that nearly all the unions said they could live with.
Slowly Kennedy and Cox, with diplomatic assistance from Arthur Goldberg, another highly regarded labor lawyer, had nudged the labor movement from almost violent opposition to any legislation to acceptance of Kennedy’s argument that something had to be enacted. Kennedy wanted labor to help shape it.III At the beginning of 1958, when Kennedy opened hearings on his proposal by observing that many “friends” of the movement had helped assemble it, AFL-CIO chief George Meany grumbled into his microphone, “God save us from our friends.” By the end of the year Meany and other major union leaders were working daily with Kennedy and Cox.
The real problem was the House of Representatives. It was an election year, and the Democrats were poised to capitalize on soft economic conditions to win more seats, but the House remained in the firm grip of a coalition of southern Democrats and conservative Republicans. It produced what Kennedy supporter and prominent Williams College professor James MacGregor Burns would describe in his best-seller as “the deadlock of democracy.” In the judgment of Speaker Rayburn, the choice was between a measure most Democrats and unions would see as hideous and impossible to reconcile with the Senate bill, and no action at all. To complicate the situation, the Eisenhower administration, guided by Labor Secretary James Mitchell, began to weigh in on the side of the conservatives. With grumbling all around, the legislation died with the close of the session.
But Kennedy did it all over again in 1959. With far more Democratic members after the off-year elections, the House was able to pass a bill, albeit with more restrictions than either Kennedy or the labor movement could tolerate. That meant Kennedy would have to shoulder responsibility for hammering out a final version between the two branches. He and Cox now went to work on House Democrats, none more important than a young congressman from Arizona, Stewart Udall, like Kennedy an activist by nature but not a knee-jerk partisan.
“When we came back in ’59,” Udall recalled, “many of us felt that this issue was absolutely crucial to the future of the Democratic Party and the politics of the 1960 campaign because we controlled the Congress, and if we couldn’t write some kind of labor legislation, the Republicans would quite rightly make a major point to the American people that we were too close to the labor organizations, that we were, in effect, too tightly controlled by them.”
During House consideration and the ensuing negotiations with the Senate, Cox and Kennedy helped Udall run what he called his “school” for interested members, mostly young first- and second-termers who frequently held the balance of power on important votes. “We fought violently in committee, page by page on various amendments,” said Udall. “We’d fight over amendments and fight over amendments to amendments.”
But Kennedy’s allies largely prevailed in the House and in the conference committee with the Senate that Kennedy oversaw. The final legislation confronted the abuses publicized in the Rackets Committee hearings, but its regulations promoting more fair play in union elections and more transparency in union finances were soft enough to win the acquiescence of the major unions, with the exception of the ever-angry Machinists.
The bill ultimately bore the names of the bipartisan sponsors of the House version, Democrat Phil Landrum of Georgia and Republican Robert Griffin of Michigan. According to Cox, Kennedy had no objection to the absence of his name from the legislative marquee. He preferred the fact that he had won respect in vital circles for his long months of work.
When Kennedy’s presidential campaign began in earnest, volunteers at virtually every union-dominated event in the primary states of Wisconsin and West Virginia distributed flyers listing fifteen examples of his work on the bill that protected unions.
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Because of the tedious and grubby ritual of legislating and power-brokering, there simply wasn’t time in the late 1950s for Kennedy to develop any more major examples of his capabilities as a senator. So to be taken seriously as a candidate, he turned to the advocacy of innovative big ideas to fill out his political portrait.
One issue that steadily percolated in the 1950s involved America’s elderly citizens. As one of his Massachusetts allies, Congressman Thomas P. O’Neill Jr., was fond of saying, there was no elderly middle class back then; you were either very comfortable or barely surviving. The poorer group, getting by with puny Social Security benefits, had no access to any kind of health care outside of charity hospitals. In 1958, at Kennedy’s request, Sorensen and Mike Feldman recruited a University of Michigan professor with both past government experience in Washington and political connections from his support of Stevenson earlier in the decade. Wilbur Cohen was another liberal academic who gravitated toward Kennedy as the decade drew to a close. His first job was to develop what Kennedy would call a bill of rights for the elderly, with adequate health care among its tenets.IV
In the process Kennedy knowingly walked into a political minefield that ambitious men had avoided for a decade. The idea for some form of a national insurance program to help finance health care had been around ever since Theodore Roosevelt borrowed it from Europe to be part of his Bull Moose platform in 1912. During the Depression Franklin Roosevelt had seriously considered adding it to his proposal for what became Social Security but decided health care would be a political bridge too far.
Harry Truman labored mightily to get traction for a proposal in the late 1940s, but by then powerful opposition had been organized among doctors through their American Medical Association and the insurance lobby. They pushed the politically successful argument that this would constitute “socialized medicine.” In the cold war socialized was a buzzword. Truman’s idea went nowhere. But by the time Kennedy was running for president the concept was being revived on the fringes of the political world.
Kennedy developed his own approach to the subject. His vehicle had its origin in academic circles in the 1930s, where it was argued that using a small premium on the fledgling Social Security system’s payroll tax as a funding source could generate enough dollars to make a national hospital insurance program feasible. In the 1950s the idea was grabbed by Aime Forand, a solid labor Democrat from New England, who put together legislation focusing initially on the elderly; if that could be accomplished, wider coverage would come incrementally. By the end of the decade the Forand proposal had revived the policy argument and awakened all the well-organized opponents. Their ranks included a movie actor and former Democrat who was shilling for big business on the radio, Ronald Reagan.
The debate was loud enough to generate a conservative counterproposal, which was enacted and named after its conservative Democratic cosponsors, the mighty Senator Bob Kerr of Oklahoma and the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Wilbur Mills of Arkansas. It brought some relief to the poorest of the elderly but was limited in its reach. The program was widely derided for its requirement that prospective beneficiaries sign a statement declaring themselves destitute. Kennedy condemned the humiliating, bureaucratic demand, calling it a “pauper’s oath.”
Kennedy seized on the Forand proposal. Less than three weeks after officially declaring his candidacy he was ready with speeches, background material, and advocates to promote the idea throughout the campaign. His effort attracted fervent opposition on the familiar grounds of Big Government, “socialized medicine,” and other right-wing cold war themes. But on balance the initiative gave Kennedy national standing as a legitimate player in an important debate over a domestic issue.
That was equally true for another debate he became engaged in, a heated national argument over the future and financing of public schools. The topic had grown increasingly prominent in public affairs after World War II as a swelling population spilled out of cities and rural areas into new communities called suburbs. Many jurisdictions—the old cities as well as the new suburbs—struggled to finance their schools on inadequate property tax bases. The inequity produced wide disparities between a few superrich, world-class districts and communities that lacked enough classrooms and textbooks. The shock delivered by the Soviet Union’s leap into space heightened the serious nature of the national conversation. It was complicated by a powerful tradition that local schools should be managed locally, free of “outside” control, a belief made even more intense by the growing national argument over segregated public schools.
This was one of the few issues Kennedy had taken on at the beginning of his political career. His first proposal was made as a second-term congressman, and he updated it regularly in legislation and speeches as his career advanced. He called for direct federal assistance to local districts to help pay for operating expenses. In 1949 he joined a small group of congressional supporters seeking $300 million in annual aid; the figure was periodically raised over the years to account for inflation and a growing population of Baby Boomers.
Once again Kennedy faced the counterargument against Big Government, made more intense by racial strife. Federal aid to education also forced him, for the first time in his political career, to confront his religion. As the national debate intensified, the hierarchy of the Catholic Church clamored to get some of the proposed aid for its parochial schools, arguing that they often served needy communities and took fiscal pressure off the public schools. But Kennedy pushed back—on solid constitutional grounds. In the dispute he invited considerable criticism from his Church. Instead of sending him into retreat, however, the clash gave him an early opportunity to demonstrate his independence.
In the early years of Kennedy’s consideration of the touchy issue, he opposed general-purpose aid for church-run schools but supported specific appropriations to help buy school buses and textbooks and pay for school nurses and other services. As time passed and his candidacy loomed, he took a harder line on the subject.
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Kennedy did not campaign as an issues-based candidate, throwing detailed plans and proposals at audiences. Instead he attempted to awaken voters to a domestic landscape littered with unmet needs and festering problems that demanded attention. Rather than push programs, he urged personal involvement.
Walt Rostow was not the only person influencing Kennedy’s spirited activism. In early 1959 still another onetime Stevenson supporter and speechwriter, Harvard’s Arthur Schlesinger Jr., was comfortably aboard Kennedy’s campaign. It was an easy transition for the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, who had urged Stevenson to pick Kennedy as his running mate in 1956.
While Kennedy’s brother-in-law Stephen Smith was establishing a covert campaign office at the foot of Capitol Hill, Schlesinger was circulating a twenty-three-page memorandum to Kennedy and a few top aides. The document was labeled “Confidential” in the senator’s files, and it made the case for a campaign “to get the country moving again.” In Schlesinger’s view it was the natural order of things for a country that historically moved in cycles between relative activism and relative passivity, a view for which his equally illustrious father, Arthur Schlesinger Sr., was already known.
Writing that “there is an inherent cyclical rhythm in our national affairs,” Schlesinger said he sensed “a growing desire to start moving forward as a nation again” after a decade of relative quiescence. After years marked by the Depression and world war, it made historical sense that there was “a condition of national weariness produced by two decades of unrelenting crises.” Referring specifically to President Eisenhower, Schlesinger sneered that “his particular contribution to the art of politics was to make politics boring at a time when the American people wanted any excuse to forget public policy.”
No more, Schlesinger argued. To emphasize the nation’s underlying discontent and desire for change, he appealed to Kennedy’s intellectual side by citing not opinion polls but cultural indicators: the rise of the Beat generation of popular writers like Jack Kerouac and even “sick” comics like Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce. He mentioned the popularity of a novel by the Russian Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, and noted the enthusiastic reception accorded the newly installed Cuban leader, Fidel Castro, on his recent official visit to the United States, where he drew ten thousand people in little Cambridge and forty thousand to New York’s Central Park. The interest in new and revolutionary figures represented, he said, a mixture of anxiety and yearning.
Schlesinger did not propose another New Deal; instead he saw an analogy with the Progressive Era at the turn of the century, particularly in “the concept of the public interest, the general welfare and the national interest.” Americans, he said, wanted a leader pushing for unified purpose, even sacrifice.
I In 1960 Rostow would be one of a dozen people Sorensen asked to submit language for Kennedy’s acceptance speech. Rostow’s anticommunism back then matched Kennedy’s in vigor, and he was able to provide new ideas for combating Moscow before his activist mind plunged into the quagmire of Vietnam after Kennedy’s death. The Johnson administration Americanized the war and Rostow became one of its most recognizable hawks.
II Cox, a lanky, avuncular, Central Casting version of a professor, would head a committee of academics that Kennedy formed in 1959 to churn out position papers for his campaign. It was an operation Cox himself said never produced anything of much value to Kennedy. But it was an early clue that many prominent liberal minds had moved on from Stevenson. Cox would later be tapped as the Kennedy administration’s solicitor general on his way to fame as the Watergate special prosecutor fired by President Nixon in the “Saturday Night Massacre” that helped drive Nixon from office in disgrace.
III Goldberg, who was especially close to the Steelworkers union, was the first secretary of labor in the Kennedy administration. Kennedy later named him to the Supreme Court, but Johnson persuaded him to step down to become ambassador to the United Nations upon the death of Adlai Stevenson.
IV Cohen, then only in his forties, actually went on the letterhead of “Senior Citizens for Kennedy” in 1960, but the chuckles this evoked in the campaign were more than matched by the respect Cohen commanded for his policy work. In the Kennedy administration he began as No. 2 in the old Department of Health, Education and Welfare. After Kennedy’s death Johnson made him secretary. It was he who implemented the Kennedy proposal known as Medicare after its enactment in 1965.