The American Story

by David M. Rubenstein

  Youthful, charismatic, and adept at dealing with the press, Kennedy represented a generational shift in American politics.

  DR: Now, there had never been presidential debates before the election of 1960. The famous Lincoln–Douglas debates of 1858 were actually Senate debates. Why did Nixon agree to have debates in 1960, and how did John Kennedy prepare for those debates?

  RR: He had a group of very smart people throwing questions at him, as did Nixon.

  As for why Nixon agreed, there are a couple of things we know. One is that the incumbent is always in trouble in a debate.

  As Jerry Brown once said to me—I asked him what was the difference between his governorship and his father’s, and he said, “Everyone’s the same size on television. Some housewife in Ventura is just as big as I am on television.” They didn’t know that then.

  Nixon thought he could destroy Kennedy in debate, and he thought he could end the campaign right there.

  DR: What about the famous makeup issue? Kennedy was asked if he wanted makeup. He said no, and Nixon then said no. But Kennedy already had a tan and had makeup on.

  RR: He had pancake makeup. Going back to another point, I want to say one thing about the two of them.

  Most of us, if we’re old enough, probably remember the picture of Lieutenant John F. Kennedy, bare-chested, a fatigue cap on, sunglasses, sitting in the cockpit of his PT-109 boat. That was his official picture at that time.

  Richard Nixon, who was also a lieutenant in the navy—a supply officer and a senior-grade lieutenant—his campaign picture was standing at attention in dress blues on a beach. And you didn’t have to be Marshall McLuhan to figure out who’s going to win that contest.

  DR: The election was held and Kennedy won, with the help of a few friends in certain states, you might say. Who wrote his enormously successful inaugural address, which is only fourteen minutes long? Why was it so special?

  RR: It was so special because the country was ready to fall in love. Kennedy had succeeded a much older man, and there was a generational change coming across. He wrote it. Sorensen did drafts.

  In the text that Kennedy approved, there was not a single mention of domestic policy. Harris Wofford, a white man who was his civil rights advisor, said, “There are things going on in this country. You’ve got to put something in this speech.” And Kennedy said okay. He added that people are crying for freedom, both abroad—and then the three words “and at home.” Meaning African Americans.

  DR: But that was the only reference to domestic policy in the entire speech.

  RR: That’s the only reference. We were a Cold War nation, and we thought we were at war. He was a Cold Warrior.

  DR: At the beginning of his administration, President Kennedy authorized the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba. [The 1961 invasion involved a group of Cuban exiles who planned to overthrow Fidel Castro’s government, with U.S. backing. The invasion, which took place on April 17, 1961, was a military and diplomatic disaster.] Why did he make such a big mistake?

  RR: He was stupid and inexperienced. He believed that Eisenhower had okayed the operation. He later found out that was not true.

  The CIA, which did plan the operation, lied to him, and thought that no American president would ever let an American invasion fail. They just assumed the president would call in the marines—that if things went bad on the beaches with these Cuban rich kids, he’d call in the marines.

  Well, Kennedy refused to do that. Finally he agreed with the CIA and the air force that he would allow three old B-26 bombers to fly over the beaches of Cuba, so they could evacuate these kids, these invaders, but first the planes were painted over gray. There were no American insignia visible on them.

  There also were no Cubans, because the people who planned the raid did not take into account that Cuba is in the Central time zone. The CIA made the whole plan based on Eastern Standard Time, and the planes flew over and nothing happened.

  DR: President Kennedy did something that other people like to do today, which is to take responsibility for what happened. When he took responsibility, his poll numbers went up. When he said, “I take responsibility,” did he expect to be more popular?

  RR: No. He thought he was finished. He literally said, “Can you believe this? The worse you do, the better they like you.” His approval rate went up into the eighties after the Bay of Pigs.

  He was no fool. I actually am not old enough to remember this, but he had this whole series of patriotic meetings, beginning with Eisenhower and Nixon, saying, “We’re with him all the way”—although in private Eisenhower told him he thought he was a goddamn fool. He said, “Did you have anybody in your office who was arguing against this?” Kennedy said no, and Eisenhower said, “Well, you better try next time.”

  But there was this great feeling of national redemption with every Republican coming to say, “The president is fine.”

  DR: Part of the problem in Cuba was that the Soviet Union was supportive of the Castro regime, so Kennedy really wanted to meet with Khrushchev. He had never met him before. They scheduled a meeting in Vienna in June 1961. What happened at that meeting?

  RR: What happened in that meeting tells you more than you want to know about John Kennedy. One, Dr. Jacobson was there, injecting him with amphetamines—speedballs—when he went in.

  Second—there are a couple of other politicians who have done this over time—Kennedy’s résumé was faked. It said that he had studied under Harold Laski at the London School of Economics and therefore was an expert on Marxism. [Laski was a famous political theorist, socialist, and Labour Party leader.]

  The truth was he enrolled there but never went to England, never met Harold Laski. But all the people around him, who bought into the résumé, thought their president, their boss, was an expert on the Marxist dialectic. He walked into the meeting with Khrushchev, who was an expert in it, and Khrushchev walked all over him.

  DR: Kennedy recognized he had been beaten up during the two-day meeting. Khrushchev then felt, “This man I can really take advantage of.” Is that what led to his putting Soviet missiles in Cuba?

  RR: It certainly was part of it, although their relationship was a little different by then. Khrushchev’s motivation—Kennedy later said if he were Khrushchev, he would have done exactly the same thing—was that the Soviets did not have any long-range missiles capable of hitting a target in the United States, while we had picket fences of missiles surrounding the Soviet Union and had submarines that could fire missiles that could reach Russia within minutes.

  DR: Kennedy had said during the campaign that there was a missile gap. There was no gap, right?

  RR: It was a lie. There was a missile gap of a hundred to one in our favor. The Soviets only had sixteen. We had thousands.

  Khrushchev had medium-range ballistic missiles. We had long-range, medium-range, and short-range missiles. But if the Soviet leader could get launching sites in Cuba, those medium-range missiles could reach as far north as Washington. It was a gamble. We caught it. I want to repeat that Kennedy said, “If I were Khrushchev, I would do the same thing.”

  DR: How did we catch it? Were we surprised that they were getting ready to have the nuclear missiles so close to here?

  RR: The Republicans weren’t surprised. Kenneth Keating was not surprised. [Keating, a Republican who served as a senator for New York from 1959 to 1965, suspected the Soviets had nuclear intentions in Cuba.] Keating and other Republicans and the defense intellectuals were saying, “This is really trouble.” And the White House was denying it.

  To bring another figure into it, one of the clues that led to Kennedy realizing it was true was that he had a young sometime foreign affairs advisor named Henry Kissinger. Our spying was nowhere near as comprehensive as it is today, and Cuba, during this two-month-long period, was mostly clouded over.

  We used the U-2 spy plane to get photographs when the clouds broke, and Kissinger noted that there were new soccer fields in Cuba. The Cubans played baseball. The
y didn’t play soccer. They do now. They didn’t then. Kissinger, who was a soccer fanatic, said, “There must be Russians there. Russians play soccer.”

  DR: Kissinger was then a thirty-seven-year-old consultant to McGeorge Bundy, who was Kennedy’s national security advisor. So they discovered these missile sites. What did they decide to do? The military wanted to go in and invade and bomb? Why did they decide to use a quarantine strategy—a naval blockade—instead?

  RR: The military, particularly Curtis LeMay, the U.S. Air Force chief of staff, wanted to destroy the island. And the rest of the world too, if it took that.

  It was an interesting thing about Kennedy and the military. He hated LeMay. After one session, in which LeMay talked about eliminating the Soviet Union, he said, “Never let that man near me again.” But six months later, he appointed him chief of staff. His brother said, “How could you do that?” He said, “Look, the man is like Babe Ruth. He’s a bum, but the people love him.”

  DR: He also didn’t want him out there saying bad things.

  RR: Right.

  DR: After they discovered that missiles were in Cuba, they ultimately decided to go for the quarantine approach. Why did Khrushchev send the Soviet ships back and agree to take the missiles out?

  RR: Because, from the experience in Vienna—the summit at which he was humiliated—John Kennedy came to understand, as many of his people, say, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, did not understand, that Khrushchev was just another politician in a different system. Kennedy didn’t want to start World War III, and he knew Khrushchev didn’t either.

  Then there was a back-and-forth of ghostwritten military memos. It was Bobby actually who suggested, “Ignore this one, answer this one,” and when he answered this one, what came back from Khrushchev was: “We can work this out.” There was a secret codicil, of course, which was that Kennedy—no one knew this at the time—promised we would never invade Cuba.

  DR: We also agreed to take our missiles out of Turkey, more or less in a secret deal.

  RR: Yeah. But those missiles were worthless anyway.

  DR: Let’s talk about civil rights for a moment. When he was running for president, Kennedy famously called Coretta Scott King when her husband, Martin Luther King Jr., was arrested. Why did he make that call, and why was Bobby Kennedy upset about it?

  RR: They thought it was a disaster. They didn’t want Kennedy to be seen as the candidate of black people. It was his brother-in-law Sargent Shriver, a true liberal, who convinced Kennedy to make that call.

  Bobby didn’t know about it. Bobby was furious when he found out about it, because the last thing in the world the Kennedys wanted was to be heroes of the civil rights movement. It was only when George Wallace barred the door at the University of Alabama and it was on national television that Kennedy decided he had to make a stand. [In June 1963, Wallace, then the governor of Alabama, physically stood in the way of African American students attempting to enroll at the segregated state university.]

  He asked Wofford, “Why are these black people”—he wasn’t a racist or anything—“why are they doing this? Who are they listening to?” And Wofford said, “They listened to you. You were talking about individual action and freedom.”

  It was Wofford and Lyndon Johnson and Johnson’s press secretary, George Reedy, who had been a Communist as a young man, who told him, “You’ve gotten this far in politics by being a northerner. The southerners controlling Congress think you’re only doing this for politics. They think you’re secretly like your father—that you’re secretly on their side.” And the young black activists believed JFK was on their side. Events forced Kennedy to choose.

  On the other hand, Kennedy couldn’t get anything done without the southerners. He didn’t want to rile them up. But he then made one of the great speeches in American history—not all of it on paper, working from notes—saying, “This is not a political question. This is not a regional question. This is a moral question. It is a question of what kind of people we are.” One of the great moments in American history.

  DR: Why did Kennedy oppose the 1963 March on Washington? He opposed it, and he refused to speak at it.

  A president for the television age: Kennedy at a TV taping, July 3, 1963.

  RR: Absolutely. And his brother had someone stationed in the bowels of the Lincoln Memorial with the switches to turn off the microphones.

  DR: If the speeches weren’t appropriate?

  RR: Yeah. If they thought they had to do it. What happened next was that Kennedy, who knew a star when he saw one, watched Martin Luther King Jr. deliver the “I Have a Dream” speech on television, and called Bobby and said, “I want him to come to the White House.”

  It took King twenty minutes to get there because Kennedy had never allowed his picture to be taken with Martin Luther King Jr. or any black person. Sammy Davis Jr., the black song-and-dance man—and Kennedy friend—was thrown out of the White House because he had a white wife.

  In the twenty minutes it took them to get there, Kennedy had a meeting with the National Security Council—these were big days, dense with events—at which he signed off on overthrowing President Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam, which is what, in the end, got us involved there. [Diem was overthrown in a military coup on November 1, 1963, after the United States indicated it would not interfere. That strengthened the position of the Communist North Vietnamese government.]

  DR: Let’s get to that right now. Many people associate President Johnson and President Nixon with the Vietnam War, but when Kennedy came into office, we had a few hundred military advisors in Vietnam. When he died, we had about sixteen thousand or so there. Many people who support President Kennedy and like him say that he would have definitely, in a second term, gotten us out of Vietnam. What is your view on that?

  RR: My view is he would not have done what Lyndon Johnson did. Diem was a Catholic. That was very important to the Kennedys. It was a minority religion, hated in Vietnam. I have no doubt in my mind that Kennedy would have pursued that war for a while, but nowhere to the extent that Johnson did.

  DR: But Kennedy wanted to be reelected, obviously. He began campaigning, and took his wife, Jackie, with him. The first time she went on a political trip with him—the first time she went west of the Mississippi as first lady—was when she went to Texas in November 1963. Why did they need to go to Texas?

  Enduring glamor: John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy at their wedding reception, September 12, 1953, in Newport, Rhode Island.

  RR: She decided to go. He was going to Texas because the state’s two senators at that time were at each other’s throats. One was a liberal, one was a conservative, both were Democrats. Johnson was supposed to take care of that. There’s money in Texas, and Kennedy wanted that money and wanted the votes. That’s why he went.

  It was the first time Jackie agreed to go with him. It wasn’t him saying, “I want you to go with me.” It was her saying, “I want to come with you.” He was dazzled by the way she was received.

  12 TAYLOR BRANCH

  on Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement

  “The longer I studied him, the deeper and more profound for me was his understanding of ecumenical, spiritual, and political movements.”

  BOOKS DISCUSSED:

  The America in the King Years trilogy

  Parting the Waters, 1954–63 (Simon & Schuster, 1988)

  Pillar of Fire, 1963–65 (Simon & Schuster, 1998)

  At Canaan’s Edge, 1965–68 (Simon & Schuster, 2006)

  One of the most significant social, political, legal, and cultural occurrences in my lifetime has been the civil rights movement of the late 1960s. It spawned the 1964 Civil Rights Act, among other epic legislation, and subsequent movements for equal rights for other disenfranchised elements of American society.

  So I thought that an interview on the civil rights movement, with a focus on the most visible leader of that movement—Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.—would be an interestin
g subject for one of the Congressional Dialogues. Fortunately, the ideal person for the interview—Taylor Branch—was available. His 2,912-page trilogy on this subject, the first volume of which won the Pulitzer Prize, is the well-recognized gold standard for coverage of this subject.

  Branch has an eclectic background: journalist, editor, college lecturer, political organizer, and biographer. These activities have been recognized with the MacArthur “genius” Fellowship and the National Humanities Medal.

  Branch lives in my hometown of Baltimore, and we have many friends in common from there and in Washington. But we had not met before the interview.

  I wish we could have had more time to cover this important subject, but the interview does touch a good amount on the important highlights of the author’s epic work, which took him twenty-four years to complete.

  It is no doubt difficult to recognize the full impact of a social movement when you are living through it, especially if the movement spans two to three decades. I know I did not recognize the full impact of the civil rights movement as it was unfolding.

  With hindsight, it is now clear that the civil rights movement, transcendental in its impact in the United States, also spawned a number of other transformative social, legal, and political movements over the past several decades: the movement for equal opportunity and protection for all minority groups; the movement for equal rights for women; the social and political protest movements, ranging from the Vietnam War to LGBTQ rights; the voting registration drives among underrepresented voters; and the use of federal courts to protect rights guaranteed by the Constitution and by related laws.