An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963

by Robert Dallek

  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 conv
entions 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”—1721/2 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 bett
er 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.”