An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963

by Robert Dallek

  But businessmen and conservative publications were unforgiving. They complained of price-fixing by the White House and the administration’s police state tactics. They compared Kennedy to Mussolini, called his actions “quasi-Fascist” and better suited to the Soviet Union than a free enterprise America. Conservative Arizona senator Barry Goldwater described the president as trying to “socialize the business of the country.” Businessmen proudly wore buttons identifying them as members of the “S.O.B. Club.” Bumper stickers announced: “Help Kennedy Stamp Out Free Enterprise,” and “I Miss Ike—Hell, I Even Miss Harry.” On May 28, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell almost 6.5 percent, the greatest one-day decline since the market collapse on October 28, 1929, investors blamed it on the administration’s “anti-business” views and the steel rollback in particular. Wall Street joked that the drop caused Joe to speak for the first time since his stroke: “To think I voted for that son-of-a-bitch.”

  When the White House rashly canceled its subscription to the New York Herald Tribune in anger over stories that Kennedy saw as “patently false articles”—including an accusation that his steel actions would win Khrushchev’s approval—he gracefully acknowledged his mistake to the press. “Well, I am reading more and enjoying it less,” he told a May news conference. The press was “doing their task, as a critical branch, the fourth estate. And I am attempting to do mine. And we are going to live together for a period, and then go our separate ways,” he said to the amusement of the reporters. Kennedy also had to defend the FBI’s “nocturnal activities” or postmidnight interviews with reporters about their sources for stories on price-fixing.

  Whatever Kennedy’s overreach in pressuring steel into a stand-down, it would have all but crippled his presidency to have passively accepted a price increase that could have deepened the country’s economic problems. And regardless of what it did to the economy, accepting the increase would have made him look weak, and, in the eyes of many abroad, like a cipher who took his marching orders from business moguls. Worse, it would have added to the feeling in Moscow that he could be had—that, as Theodore Roosevelt said of McKinley, he had the backbone of a chocolate éclair. Meeting the challenge from the steel executives head-on was possibly even more essential for the success of Kennedy’s foreign policy than for the management of his many problems at home, a classic example of a challenge in one sphere whose ultimate effects are felt in another.

  AT THE END OF 1961, Richard Neustadt gave the White House a one-year assessment of Kennedy’s presidential leadership. The president had established himself as an impressive leader, Neustadt asserted. His high Gallup approval ratings were “no accident,” but the product of smart politics, which was “an enormous asset for the President and for our government.” Part of Kennedy’s success resulted from his sensible efforts “to scale down public expectations of the future, to promote realism about our situation in the world, our power and our prospects. For the first time since World War II,” Neustadt wrote, “we’ve been offered no ‘light at the end of the tunnel,’ no assurance that this next effort . . . will turn the tide or do the trick. Instead, the theme has been cool, relatively unimpassioned: if we persevere we may end neither red nor dead. . . . From what I can observe of his sense of timing, Cuba aside, Kennedy strikes me more than ever as the ablest politician who has emerged in our age-group, very conceivably the ablest since FDR.”

  Neustadt’s analysis gratified Kennedy, but at the start of 1962, he understood that he was a long way from significant presidential achievements. And before he could lay claim to noteworthy gains, he would have to hold the Congress for his party, and—more important but less likely—help elect additional cooperative congressmen and senators. History made it seem like a nearly impossible task: Only once in the last hundred years—1934—had a president managed to strengthen his hold on Congress in midterm elections. To have any chance, Kennedy believed that he would have to shift ground from his first year and give higher priority to domestic issues than to foreign affairs and convince Americans that effective reforms depended on their giving him a more supportive Congress.

  Kennedy’s State of the Union Message on January 11 reflected his eagerness for domestic advance. “Our overriding obligation in the months ahead,” he declared, “is to fulfill the world’s hopes by fulfilling our own faith.” Unless we could achieve our national ideals, others around the globe would see no reason to follow our lead. During the past year, the economy had left “the valley of recession” for “the high road of recovery and growth.” America’s economy, which Khrushchev had called a “stumbling horse,” was “racing to new records in consumer spending, labor income, and industrial production.” Yet unemployment remained at over 6 percent, and legislation to train people for a changed job market coupled with an 8 percent investment tax credit to spur greater productivity were essential to additional economic expansion. And to bar against another recession, Kennedy asked for standby authority to reduce taxes and speed up federally aided capital-improvement programs, and for permanent higher unemployment benefits. Kennedy also asked for help in achieving a balanced budget, urban renewal, and a new comprehensive farm program to sustain production and conservation. These measures would show the world that “a free economy need not be an unstable economy,” but the most productive and “most stable form of organization yet fashioned by man.”

  Civil rights, health and welfare, and education reforms were necessary complements to economic advance. Full and equal rights—to vote, to travel without hindrance across state lines, and to have access to free public education—required fresh actions by the executive, the courts, and the Congress. The acts of every branch of government, Kennedy said, should make the hundredth anniversary in January 1963 of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation a demonstration that “righteousness does exalt a nation.” Help to the indigent, stressing “services instead of support, rehabilitation instead of relief, and training for useful work instead of prolonged dependency,” would mark America out as a compassionate nation. So would improvements in the country’s health care system, including the creation of National Institutes of Health to expand research, a mass immunization program to stamp out polio, diphtheria, whooping cough, and tetanus among children, improved food and drug regulation, and, most of all, health insurance for the aged. Education was no less important. Kennedy declared his intention to press the case for a program to overcome illiteracy of eight million Americans and to renew his call for federal aid to elementary, secondary, and higher education. “Civilization,” Kennedy said, quoting H. G. Wells, “is a race between education and catastrophe. It is up to you in this Congress to determine the winner of that race.”

  In the following week, Kennedy held two White House meetings with congressional Democrats to arm them for the 1962 elections and encourage their cooperation with his agenda in the coming congressional session. He pointed to favorable Gallup polls: a 77 percent approval rating; 56 percent who believed that they had an improved standard of living; and millions of Americans who supported welfare reforms, health insurance for the elderly, and federal aid to education. An opinion survey that indicated a 60 to 40 percent split favoring Democratic control of Congress gave Kennedy additional ammunition to press for greater cooperation than in the previous year.

  In a document (stamped “Propaganda”) describing the challenge in the House and the Senate to win majority votes and the first session’s major accomplishments, Kennedy emphasized the difficulties of overcoming a southern Democratic-Republican coalition, and the administration’s considerable success in passing thirty-three major bills, compared with eleven during FDR’s 1933 session and twelve in Ike’s 1953 session. Journalists made privy to the administration’s argument responded skeptically, pointing out that Kennedy had lost his aid to education and Medicare fights and that many of the Kennedy laws were not New Frontier measures but extensions of earlier programs. Nevertheless, Kennedy put a briefing paper before the legislators making the case for h
is successes: No one could attack his government for communist subversion, corruption, inflation, or appeasement; he expected to balance the budget in fiscal 1963; he had avoided a Korea-type war; defense appropriations were up 15 percent; the religion and youth arguments against him had all but disappeared; prosperity was increasing; and farmers were less discontented.

  For all Kennedy’s efforts to talk up his legislative accomplishments, a defensive tone revealed his own doubts and his limited interest in domestic affairs. And despite leading his State of the Union Message with a discussion of domestic issues, he focused nearly 60 percent of the address on international affairs: national security, the U.N., Latin America, new and developing nations, the Atlantic community, the balance of payments, and trade.

  The discrepancy was further reflected in Kennedy’s limited domestic accomplishments during the first half of 1962. His strong remarks about civil rights in his State of the Union speech did not translate into significant gains between January and July. Limited public support for aggressive actions made the White House reluctant to ask for a civil rights bill or to step up the use of Executive Orders. In April, when Gallup asked, “What do you think is the most important problem facing the country?” only 6 percent said racial problems or segregation, compared with 63 percent who answered, “War, peace, international tension.” In May, 67 percent of an opinion survey thought that the administration was pushing integration either enough or too fast; only 11 percent believed it was not fast enough. Kennedy was too much of a politician to challenge such numbers, however sad was the nation’s seeming indifference to the moral imperative of ending segregation.

  The Kennedys remained sensitive to black complaints about ongoing racial bias, but they continued to hope that executive action would be sufficient. Although Johnson and the CEEO had managed to get a majority of the government’s largest contractors to sign up for the Plans for Progress program, by the fall of 1961, the New York Times reported that solid gains in black employment were not evident. One CEEO staff member described company commitments to more jobs for blacks as not “worth the paper they were written on, they were just absolutely meaningless documents.” Kennedy himself worried that Plans would “turn out to be a fraud or a delusion or an illusion, that there were a lot of plans signed and then no Negroes would be hired.” A staff shake-up in the program and a shift from voluntary to compulsory compliance made for some advances in black hiring but hardly enough to make a dent in the double-digit unemployment of African Americans, twice that of whites.

  Although the bad news overshadowed the modest gains in the program, it was the first time any White House had made a serious effort to compel integration by companies on government contracts. Moreover, Plans for Progress heightened public consciousness of racial bias, which excluded blacks from jobs or kept them in the lowest ranks of company employees. The administration also prided itself on other substantive and symbolic civil rights initiatives: an advisory committee on integration in the armed forces; Justice Department suits in behalf of school integration in seven southern states; investigations and suits in seventy-five southern counties over excluding blacks from the polls; and a successful appeal to use the 1957 Civil Rights Act against arbitrary state prosecutions of blacks. At the same time, the Kennedys resigned their memberships in the Metropolitan and Cosmos clubs in Washington, D.C., in protest against a whites-only policy and pressured restaurant owners along Highway 40 in Maryland north of Baltimore, the most traveled route by African diplomats between Washington and the United Nations, to serve customers without regard for race.

  At the same time, however, the White House continued to be less than forthcoming in fulfilling its promise to integrate federally financed housing. In the fall of 1961, Wofford told Kennedy that his housing pledge was his most specific commitment on civil rights and “certainly the best remembered by Negroes.” A failure to issue an Executive Order “would seriously jeopardize all our gains to date.” But in January 1962, when a reporter asked Kennedy why he intended to postpone this integration order “for some time,” he answered defensively that his administration had “made more progress in the field of civil rights on a whole variety of fronts than were made in the last 8 years.” He added that he would meet his responsibilities on the housing matter when he believed it would be in the public interest. In April, he publicly welcomed a Civil Rights Commission inquiry into equal opportunity in housing in Washington, D.C., but continued to resist pressure for an Executive Order. In August, when a White House counsel prepared an Executive Order, the president asked that the document remain confidential; he continued to believe that it would undermine his 1962 legislative program and weaken Democratic chances in November by antagonizing southern congressmen and voters. Allowing politics to trump a transparently moral commitment served neither JFK’s legislative agenda nor his reputation for acting in behalf of social arrangements that did the nation’s democratic traditions proud.

  Civil rights advocates were also ambivalent about the administration’s record on judicial appointments. During the first eighteen months of his term, the president nominated Thurgood Marshall to join William H. Hastie as the only blacks ever chosen for appointment to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Moreover, in the spring of 1962, when Kennedy had the chance to make his first Supreme Court selection, he considered nominating Hastie, but Chief Justice Earl Warren and Associate Justice William O. Douglas opposed him on the grounds that Hastie was insufficiently liberal. Kennedy then turned to Deputy Attorney General Byron White, but told Schlesinger, “I figure that I will have several more appointments before I am through, and I mean to appoint [Paul] Freund [at the Harvard Law School], Arthur Goldberg and Bill Hastie.”

  Limited actions and hopes to expand the number of African Americans on the bench, however, could not balance the five southern racists Kennedy appointed to federal judgeships: Clarence Allgood and Walter Gewin of Alabama, Robert Elliott of Georgia, E. Gordon West of Louisiana, and William Harold Cox of Mississippi. During their tenure, they did all in their power to obstruct school integration and deny voting rights to blacks. West dismissed the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling as “one of the truly regrettable decisions of all time.” Cox, whose opinions were often reversed by higher courts, was an even more outspoken opponent of civil rights. His injudiciousness was stunning. In open court, he shouted at black plaintiffs that they were “a bunch of niggers . . . acting like a bunch of chimpanzees.”

  None of this should have surprised the president and attorney general. Early on, NAACP executive secretary Roy Wilkins had wired the president about Cox: On the bench, he would stand for “the mores of 1861. For 986,000 Negro Mississippians Judge Cox will be another strand in their barbed wire fence, another cross over their weary shoulders and another rock in the road up which their young people must struggle.” Furthermore, Bobby had interviewed Cox at the Justice Department. “We sat on my couch in my office, and I talked to him. And I said that the great reservation that I had was whether he’d enforce the law and live up to the Constitution. . . . He assured me that he would. He was really, I think, the only judge whom I’ve ever had that kind of conversation with. He was very gracious. He said that there wouldn’t be any problem. . . . I was convinced that he was honest with me and he wasn’t.”

  There was much more at work here than Bobby’s naïveté. The tradition of deferring to Senate prerogative and assuring cooperation on a legislative program were more compelling than anything Cox told him. Cox was a good friend of Mississippi’s Senator James Eastland, actually his college roommate, and Eastland’s power as chairman of the Judiciary Committee was enough to produce the deference Eastland expected for his choice. Though Bobby denied discussing Cox with Eastland, he later told an interviewer, “The President of the United States is attempting to obtain the passage of important legislation in many, many fields, and the appointment of a judge who is recommended by the chairman of a committee or a key figure on a committee can make th
e whole difference on his legislative program.”

  Though Wilkins told Kennedy that he had not “gained anything [in 1961] by refusing to put a civil rights bill before” Congress, Kennedy hoped that his restraint might pay off in the Eighty-seventh Congress’s second session. “He wasn’t a man to give up easily,” Wilkins admitted, though it was more than stubbornness motivating Kennedy. In fact, Kennedy had few hopes his patience would now result in less legislative friction over civil rights. Instead, he felt that his deference to the southerners on civil rights might get them to act on education or Medicare, issues that politically would be much more advantageous for him.

  But it was a hope misplaced. In October 1961, HEW secretary Abe Ribicoff had told him that “the passage of any broad-scale education legislation will be a most difficult task.” A personal survey of congressional and public sentiment had convinced Ribicoff not to expect any affirmative action. “A broad program of grants to States for public school construction and teacher’s salaries is virtually impossible to pass. There is substantial Southern opposition to any bill for elementary and secondary schools. . . . Republican opposition to any general aid bill is strong, and is overwhelming against teachers’ salaries.” Ribicoff saw three principal impediments to reform: southern determination to preserve segregated schools, opposition to eroding local control over education, and resistance to providing aid to private or religion-based schools. Although he suggested a piecemeal approach in the coming session as an alternative to the failed comprehensive one in 1961, Ribicoff also believed that another unsuccessful effort at a more comprehensive bill might turn out to be useful in the upcoming elections.