An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963

by Robert Dallek

  Kennedy agreed, which is not to suggest that he saw education as principally a political tool. He strongly believed in the need for federal aid to education at all levels as essential to progress at home and abroad. But taking a bold stand on education, despite its poor legislative prospects, seemed a good way to counter liberal complaints about his timidity on civil rights and win Democratic backing in 1962.

  It was much the same with medical insurance for the elderly. In February 1962, Kennedy reintroduced his bill to provide health coverage for the aged under Social Security. He encouraged public rallies to pressure Congress, publicly thanked a group of physicians favoring his program, spoke passionately in support of his bill before twenty thousand people at Madison Square Garden, and took on the American Medical Association for opposing Social Security and calling his proposal “a cruel hoax.” But Kennedy’s passion (and that of organized labor and senior citizens) was insufficient to identify a formula that would disarm conservative opponents and satisfy a majority of liberal advocates. In July, the administration’s medical insurance bill failed in the Senate, where it fell short by 52 to 48. One newspaper summarized the defeat as “Kennedy’s Blackest Week with Congress.” Kennedy himself called the vote “a most serious defeat for every American family.” Once again, the only good news here was the political advantage it seemed to give Kennedy in pressing his party’s case for more congressional seats. (When asked if the fact that twenty-one Senate Democrats voted against him on the insurance plan would tend “to inhibit [him] in setting this forth as an issue,” Kennedy replied that it would not: “The fact of the matter is this administration is for Medicare and two-thirds of the Democrats are for Medicare and seven-eighths of the Republicans are against it. And that seems to me to be the issue.”)

  Other domestic problems dogged him during the first half of 1962. In April, he sent Congress a special message on the nation’s transportation system, which he described as vital to domestic growth and productivity and the ability to compete abroad. “A chaotic patchwork of inconsistent and often obsolete legislation and regulation” burdened the country’s movement by air, ground, rail, and water. “Fundamental and far-reaching” changes in federal policies were essential to ensure the national well-being. And while he went on to describe in detail the many difficulties besetting everything from interstate highways to international aviation and inner-city traffic, he acknowledged that he had no clear answers and that Congress would need to “devote considerable time and effort” to identifying means to fend off “permanent loss of essential services,” which would then compel “even more difficult and costly solutions in the not-too-distant future.”

  POLITICS WAS ANOTHER CHALLENGE. After Kennedy’s election as president, the family had decided to run brother Edward—Ted, as he was called—for Jack’s vacant Senate seat. But Ted could not hold the office until 1962, when he would turn thirty, the minimum age required by the Constitution. In December 1961, Jack tested the waters with a rumor published in the Boston Globe about Ted’s candidacy. When House majority leader John W. McCormack called the president to propose his own nephew, Massachusetts attorney general Edward McCormack, as an interim appointment, Kennedy had replied, “I’m putting someone in. I want to save that seat for my brother.”

  Though the governor of Massachusetts technically held the appointment power, the selection was Kennedy’s call. The interim appointee was Benjamin A. Smith, Kennedy’s college friend, who was to stand aside for Ted in two years. Assumptions that Bobby was in line for the seat and that a likely political backlash against Kennedy nepotism would derail the plan both proved false. With regard to the former, Bobby’s collaboration with his brother inside the administration made him too valuable to send to the Senate. Besides, Ted was eager to run, and Joe insisted on it. Bobby remembered Joe as the moving force behind the decision. “He just felt that Teddy had worked all this time during the campaign and sacrificed himself for his older brother,” Bobby said, “that we had our positions, and so he should have the right to run.”

  But Kennedy himself had doubts. Teddy was twenty-nine in 1961, with no credentials to speak of other than having worked on his brother’s 1958 and 1960 campaigns. He told Ted to test the waters in Massachusetts by speaking around the state. “I’ll hear whether you are really making a mark up there,” Kennedy told him. “I will tell you whether this is something that you ought to seriously consider.” But Joe saw no need for an apprenticeship or any test. “He felt that it was a mistake to run for any position lower than [U.S. senator],” Bobby remembered. “Certainly, he was as qualified as Eddie McCormack to run for the Senate or anybody else who was being mentioned in Massachusetts, [people] who were perhaps older but weren’t particularly outstanding figures.”

  Kennedy remained uncertain nevertheless. In January 1962, a reporter asked the president, “Your brother, Teddy, in Massachusetts, seems to be running for something but none of us are very certain just what it is. Could you tell us if you have had an opportunity to discuss this with him and whether you can tell us the secret?” Kennedy replied, “Well, I think he’s the man . . . who’s running and he’s the man to discuss it with.” In March, when Ted announced his candidacy, he stated his opposition to his brother’s involvement in his campaign. It was a strategy for reducing the president’s political liability. “Well, in part, I am aware of the campaign,” Kennedy told the press, “but my brother is carrying this campaign on his own and will conduct it in that way.” In May, when a reporter asked the president about reports of “administration aid and comfort to [Ted’s] senatorial campaign,” Kennedy reiterated his distance from the primary contest. “What about your associates, sir?” a reporter probed further. “No member of the White House staff is planning to go to the [state] convention, nor will be, to the best of my knowledge, in Massachusetts between now and the convention.”

  But of course, JFK, Bobby, and the White House were deeply involved. For starters, they schooled Ted to talk of a Kennedy dynasty with good-natured humor. When Kennedy biographer James MacGregor Burns told JFK of his interest in the seat and declared, “I’m sure I’m about number 99 on your list,” Jack graciously, but evasively, replied, “Oh, no, Jim, you’re number two or three.” When a reporter complained of “too many Kennedys,” Ted joked, “You should have taken that up with my mother and father.” Reluctant to step on Ted’s line, Kennedy responded to the same complaint with the deadpan observation, as “my brother pointed out, there are nine members of my family. It is a big family. They are all interested in public life.” And the great issues were, after all, centered in the nation’s capital.

  According to Adam Clymer, Ted’s biographer, Kennedy “made it clear that a defeat would be not just Ted’s loss, but his own, too, and would not be tolerated.” In March, as Ted prepared to go on Meet the Press, Kennedy brought him into the Oval Office, sat him down behind his desk, and questioned him like a prosecuting attorney. (Kennedy ultimately was too nervous to watch his brother’s performance, which was more than adequate.) At a secret White House meeting of Massachusetts politicians in April, some of whom flew in from Boston under assumed names, the president pressured everyone to advance Ted’s candidacy. He “suggested discreetly using patronage.” And though few jobs were apparently delivered, “the hope of them was certainly dangled before a lot of ambitious politicians.” Ted Sorensen provided quotes for speeches and one administration aide took a leave of absence to work directly on Teddy’s campaign.

  Kennedy himself dealt with the most potentially explosive issue jeopardizing Ted’s candidacy. In 1951, during Ted’s freshman year at Harvard, the university expelled him for having a classmate take his final exam in Spanish. After a year in the army, he returned to Harvard, in September 1953. He graduated in 1956 and went on to the University of Virginia Law School. Fearful that the cheating scandal would become a prominent story in the Boston Globe, the Kennedys decided to keep control of the issue by revealing it themselves. The president invited a Globe repo
rter to the White House, where he offered to provide Ted’s Harvard file if the reporter would mute the incident by including it in a biographical profile. Though the Globe insisted on making the profile a front-page story, it buried the details of the scandal in the fifth paragraph of an account innocuously headlined “Ted Kennedy Tells About Harvard Examination Incident.” Other papers featured the story the next day, but they were no more than echoes of the Globe’s report. And with the Globe, now the state’s leading newspaper, downplaying the incident, Ted’s vulnerability was greatly reduced. It was an emphatic demonstration of shrewd politics and the press’s friendly attitude toward a president they liked and were reluctant to undermine.

  Kennedy worried nevertheless that the scandal would hurt Ted’s chances of election. “It won’t go over with the WASPs,” he told Ben Bradlee. “They take a very dim view of looking over your shoulder at someone else’s exam paper. They go in more for stealing from stockholders and bankers.” The president urged Bradlee to have Newsweek look into the record of Eddie McCormack, Ted’s likely primary opponent. “I asked him what he meant,” Bradlee recalled, “and [he] told me that McCormack had resigned his commission in the Navy on the day he graduated from Annapolis on a medical disability. ‘Half of it was nerves and half of it was a bad back,’” Kennedy explained, “‘and he’s been drawing a 60 percent disability ever since up until six months ago.’” It was a perfect example of Kennedy hardball politics. Bradlee never investigated the allegation, but it put him in mind of the maxim “Don’t get mad, get even.”

  In June, after Ted won a majority of delegates at the state convention and Edward McCormack decided to contest his nomination in a September primary, a wave of criticism threatened to make Ted’s candidacy an issue in the fall elections. Did the president think Ted was up to the job? a reporter asked, and would his candidacy have some negative fallout in November? The voters of Massachusetts would decide the matter, Kennedy answered diplomatically, but he could not resist making the case for his brother. Ted had managed his successful reelection campaign in 1958 and managed the preconvention fight for western state delegates and then the presidential contest in the same states. “I have confidence in his ability,” Kennedy declared.

  BECAUSE THE TRUMAN and Eisenhower presidencies had suffered from embarrassing scandals that had undermined their credibility, Kennedy was determined to ensure against any wrongdoing that would weaken his ability to govern or lead. Thus, a scandal involving Billy Sol Estes, a Texas businessman, and the administration’s Agriculture Department was more worrisome to the president than his brother’s Senate campaign. When information emerged in March about Estes’s payoffs to four Agriculture Department officials to obtain grain and cotton storage contracts, the White House assigned seventy-five FBI agents to the case, and the Justice Department made certain that Agriculture secretary Orville Freeman and undersecretary Charles Murphy were untainted. Kennedy assured the press that his administration had given Justice and the IRS carte blanche to ferret out improper actions and that no guilty official would go unpunished.

  Nevertheless, the political heat was intense. Eisenhower publicly suggested that because all the investigative agencies in the administration and the Congress were under Democratic control, some Republicans ought to be brought into the process. At the same time, the New York Herald Tribune began describing the case as another Teapot Dome and predicting that Secretary Freeman would have to resign. The Tribune also printed a picture of Kennedy’s Inaugural Address signed by him to Estes. Kennedy’s explanation that the DNC had distributed sixty thousand copies of the photo with machine-signed signatures without his knowledge of the recipients insulated him from charges of any direct involvement with Estes, but the death of Henry H. Marshall, an Agriculture Department official investigating the Estes case, raised additional questions. Although Marshall had bruises on his hands, arms, and face and had been shot five times with a bolt-action rifle that had to be pumped each time to eject a shell, a Texas grand jury ruled the death a suicide. Reports in the Dallas Morning News that the president had taken a personal interest in the Marshall case and that the attorney general had repeatedly called the judge presiding over the grand jury embarrassed the White House. A Newsweek report that Marshall’s death was the result of “an extra-curricular romance,” relieved Kennedy and Bobby, who told Ben Bradlee, “That explains it perfectly, and to think those bastards on the Herald Tribune must have known this and were still writing it as Billy Sol Estes.” The fact that the Tribune hadgiven less coverage to a comparable scandal involving George M. Humphrey, Eisenhower’s secretary of the treasury, particularly incensed the Kennedys, who attributed the paper’s emphasis to a Republican bias.

  Throughout the uproar, the president and Bobby were less worried about their involvement than Johnson’s. His reputation as a fabulous wheeler-dealer who had won a Senate seat with tainted ballots in 1948 and had accumulated a $15-million fortune in radio, television, real estate, and bank holdings with influence peddling had made him an object of press speculation. Estes was, after all, his fellow Texan, and rumors abounded about joint business ventures, lobbying at agriculture in Estes’s behalf, gifts—including an airplane used to fly to the 414-acre Johnson ranch with a sixty-three-hundred-foot landing strip—and efforts to impede the FBI’s investigation. Kennedy and Bobby kept close tabs on these allegations, especially one, that a Republican congressman was preparing impeachment proceedings against the vice president. Although Johnson and his staff dismissed the charges as baseless, Bobby insisted on a thorough FBI investigation of the stories. It turned up nothing, and though some later historians of the FBI speculated that Hoover might have suppressed information tying Johnson to Estes’s crimes or that Johnson arranged to have incriminating files destroyed, a reading of FBI materials obtained through a Freedom of Information request demonstrates that the Bureau indeed made a rigorous effort to find the truth. As Johnson said later, “The damn press always accused me of things I didn’t do. They never once found out about the things I did do.”

  Worries about Johnson extended to his management of the space program. Despite the success of Alan Shepard’s suborbital flight in May 1961, by February 1962 NASA had still not matched cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s orbital success the previous April. Bad weather and technical problems had aborted ten televised U.S. planned launchings between May and February. But on February 20, John Glenn’s spaceship orbited the earth three times in just under five hours before a pinpoint landing in the Atlantic near Bermuda, where helicopters from a nearby U.S. cruiser waited to lift Glenn and his capsule from the ocean. The White House was jubilant, especially because it knew that problems with the capsule’s heat shield had brought the mission close to disaster. Another successful flight by Scott Carpenter in May gave Kennedy—in contrast with the steel price conflict, stock market downturn, and Estes scandal—something to cheer about. (If only Glenn “were a Negro,” Johnson told Kennedy, who laughed at what became his favorite example of Lyndon’s constant preoccupation with political calculations.)

  Glenn’s successful mission allowed Kennedy to encourage common actions with Moscow in space exploration. He publicly suggested a joint weather-satellite system, “operational tracking services from each other’s territories,” cooperative efforts to map the earth’s magnetic field from space, joint communications satellites, and shared information on space medicine as preludes to wider cooperation in unmanned lunar exploration and possible manned flights to Mars or Venus. But fearing that any such commitment would reveal the limits of the Soviet Union’s military rockets and space programs and would burden already strained defense budgets, Khrushchev turned aside the president’s suggestions by insisting that a general and complete disarmament agreement had to precede cooperative space exploration.

  Public gains from the orbital missions counteracted behind-the-scenes worries that NASA contracts might open the administration to charges of sweetheart deals arranged by Johnson. With plans in tow to shift half of
NASA’s operations from Florida’s Cape Canaveral to a command center in Houston, Johnson came under attack for serving his own and his state’s special interests. In 1962, lobbyists and congressmen from outside the South began complaining about a southwestern monopoly on NASA contracts. Johnson, Bobby said later, was “awarding these contracts badly, and they were getting in the wrong hands.” Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania representatives objected to a loss of contracts, and reporters pressed the president for an explanation. He answered that they were looking to see if “the distribution of contracts is as equitable as it can be.” Nixon, who, in 1962, was running for governor of California, attacked the Kennedy administration for “injecting politics in the allocation of defense contracts.” Because defense expenditures in California were higher than they had been under Eisenhower and Nixon, Kennedy did not think “that that was a fuse sufficient to light off Mr. Nixon.” But politics was politics, and to rein in Johnson’s influence, Kennedy made congressional staffer Richard Callaghan an aide to NASA chief James Webb. Callaghan was instructed to ensure a more geographically diverse distribution of contracts and to find out whether Johnson was pulling any strings at NASA for his supporters. Callaghan told Time-Life reporter Robert Sherrod that Kenny O’Donnell, Kennedy’s liaison to Congress, “wasn’t only interested in getting the contractors [and congressmen] off his back.” He wanted to know about Johnson’s “influence on the Space Agency.” O’Donnell later told Sherrod that they had found no wrongdoing. Consequently, in May, when a reporter asked the president about rumors that Johnson would be dropped from the ticket in 1964, Kennedy emphatically denied them, describing Johnson as “invaluable” to the administration.