Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House

by Robert Dallek

  Do you want a man for president,

  Who is seasoned through and through?

  But not so doggone seasoned,

  That he won’t try something new.

  A man who’s old enough to know,

  And young enough to do.

  Many in the Democratic Party thought Kennedy would make an excellent choice for vice president and that he should wait his turn to run for president behind the sixty-year-old Adlai Stevenson, the party’s two-time nominee, the fifty-nine-year-old Missouri senator Stuart Symington, an expert on national security in a dangerous world, and the fifty-two-year-old Lyndon Johnson, the Senate majority leader from Texas, whose prominence in the party and qualities as a force of nature seemed to make him a more deserving candidate than Jack. Stevenson, who hoped for a third nomination, privately dismissed Kennedy’s ambition as a little foolish, telling a friend, “I don’t think he’d be a good president. I do not feel that he’s the right man for the job; I think he’s too young; I don’t think he fully understands the dimensions of the foreign affairs dilemmas that are coming up.”

  But Kennedy saw delay as a prescription for defeat. During the Wisconsin primary, when an elderly woman opposed to his candidacy told him, “You’re too soon, my boy, too soon,” Jack replied, “No this is my time. My time is now.” It wasn’t the eight years that he might have to wait should a Democrat win in 1960 that persuaded him to run at age forty-three, but the thought that at fifty-one, health problems might deprive him of the energy and stamina for a presidential campaign. Moreover, he was convinced that in eight years fresher faces would push him into the background or make him old news, with little ability to generate public excitement.

  In running for the highest office, Kennedy saw himself as uniquely positioned to serve the country’s well-being. He believed that the Republicans and most of his Democratic rivals for the nomination were locked into conventional thinking that would perpetuate the Cold War and endanger the peace. “The key thing for the country is a new foreign policy that will break out of the confines of the Cold War,” he told a potential supporter. “Then we can build a decent relationship with developing nations and begin to respond to their needs. We can stop the vicious circle of the arms race and promote diversity and peaceful change within the Soviet bloc. We can get this country moving again on its domestic problems.” Other Democratic aspirants for the highest office not only echoed Republican foreign policy ideas but also made the mistake of putting traditional welfare state assumptions—economic security and social programs—ahead of overseas challenges that could overshadow domestic concerns. Kennedy believed that his strongest claim on the presidency was an understanding that domestic issues had to take a backseat to national security dangers and that the next chief executive needed, above all, to assure long-term peace, because advances in destructive weapons made another all-out war impermissible.

  The nomination and general election campaigns, however, offered limited opportunity for Kennedy to make a detailed case for how the country’s direction in foreign affairs would change under his stewardship. Persuading party leaders and voters that he could lead them to victory in November and convincing a wider electorate that he would be a better national leader than his Republican rival moved him to focus on other matters than the substance of governing. Besides, he had no clear agenda for how he would achieve his larger designs, and since offering details of how he would proceed in office seemed likely to stimulate more opposition than support, he believed it just as well to let a program for governing remain unstated. As much to the point, he knew that the country’s most effective presidents had never planned too far ahead. Circumstances were always changing, and any course of action was best designed in response to current events. As a student of history and the presidency in particular, he knew that the most influential recent presidents, from Theodore Roosevelt to Harry Truman, had shunned choosing a cabinet or White House staff or announcing precise policy choices in advance of their administrations. He took counsel from Abraham Lincoln’s famous observation, “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.”

  His fight for the nomination took him far afield from the substance of foreign policy making. During the West Virginia primary, for example, he felt compelled to address the state’s struggle with economic problems. He described an agenda—increased unemployment benefits, expanded Social Security, food distribution for the needy, federal spending to stimulate coal production (the state’s biggest industry), and more defense investment—that echoed FDR’s New Deal, which, like Roosevelt himself, was highly popular in the state. But all this was muted alongside efforts to convince the state’s Protestants, who made up 96 percent of its residents, that his Catholic religion would be of no consequence in shaping a Kennedy presidency. “The Catholic question” was a matter of vital concern to millions of American voters in 1960—many, especially across the South, where anti-Catholic sentiment was most pronounced, believed that a Catholic president would be more loyal to the pope than to the United States. In confronting the issue directly and effectively, Kennedy assured himself of an essential electoral victory crucial to his nomination.

  The question shadowed his campaign nonetheless, and in mid-September, less than two weeks after the traditional Labor Day start of the national contest, Kennedy felt compelled to defend his religious affiliation before a meeting of Protestant, mainly Baptist, ministers in Houston, Texas. Although some of his advisers urged against speaking to what they described as a hostile, pro-Republican group, Kennedy believed it essential to address the innuendoes and outright distortions about the likely impact of his religion on his capacity to serve as president. “I’m getting tired of these people who think I want to replace the gold in Fort Knox with a supply of holy water,” he told two of his aides.

  On September 12, before an audience of three hundred in the ballroom of Houston’s Rice Hotel, he respectfully dismissed concerns about his religion as a diversion from more essential considerations in the campaign. He emphasized his unqualified commitment to the separation of church and state: “I am not the Catholic candidate for President,” he famously declared. “I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for President, who happens also to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my church on public matters—and the church does not speak for me.” He cautioned that 40 million Americans should not lose their chance of being president on the day they were baptized. If this were the case, he predicted, “the whole nation will be the loser in the eyes of Catholics and non-Catholics around the world, in the eyes of history, and in the eyes of our people.” Although the religious issue by no means disappeared during the rest of the campaign, or stopped thousands of voters, especially across the South and in rural counties around the country, from casting anti-Catholic ballots, Kennedy’s speech muted suspicions and disarmed some of the anti-Catholic hostility toward him.

  It did not, however, make his campaign a model of constructive civic pronouncements on the substance of his future presidency. True, Kennedy felt compelled to offer generalizations about how he would get the country moving again, characterizing his future administration as leading the country on to “a New Frontier—the frontier of the 1960s—a frontier of unknown opportunity and perils—a frontier of unfulfilled hopes and threats.” The Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith told him that the speech was an impressive rhetorical exercise, which it “had to be,” safely negotiating “the delicate line that divides poetry from banality.” But what did it mean? No one, including Kennedy himself, could say.

  Kennedy and his advisers correctly believed that elections were generally won by voters coming to your side less out of convictions about how you would overcome current problems than from negative views of your opponent’s character and record of flawed leadership. Kennedy remembered Franklin Roosevelt’s campaign in 1932 against the hapless Herbert Hoover, whose failure to end the Depression spoke for itself, and Harry Truman’s successful upset victory in
1948 against New York’s Governor Thomas Dewey, whom Democrats characterized as the only man who could strut sitting down, and whom Truman tied to the “Do Nothing,” “Good-for-Nothing” Republican-controlled Eightieth Congress. During the 1960 West Virginia primary, the Kennedy campaign promoted discussion of Hubert Humphrey’s lack of World War II military service, implying that he had been a draft dodger, despite their understanding that medical problems had kept Humphrey out of the service.

  In 1960, Vice President Richard M. Nixon perfectly fit the role of an opponent with a controversial political history that could be turned against him. Nixon had a reputation as a political assassin who had won U.S. House and Senate seats in California by falsely tarring opponents as communist fellow travelers. In 1952, he had attacked Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic nominee, as holding a Ph.D. from Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s “cowardly college of Communist containment.” Nixon’s underhanded political tactics had also aligned him with Joseph McCarthy, who had been discredited by 1960. Liberals understandably despised Nixon. But his tactics had undermined him with voters more generally by making him appear sinister, untrustworthy, and not deserving of election to the presidency.

  Nonetheless, Nixon also had his share of devoted supporters, who saw him as a leader who could effectively combat ruthless communists. Eight years as vice president under the still popular Dwight Eisenhower gave him impressive credentials as a seasoned foreign policy leader who had famously stood up to Soviet first secretary Nikita Khrushchev in what came to be known as the 1959 Moscow “kitchen debate.” But his identification with the Eisenhower administration also carried liabilities: a so-called missile gap that Kennedy made much of during the campaign. In 1957, Moscow’s launching of Sputnik, the first man-made satellite to orbit the earth, suggested that the Soviets had eclipsed the United States in capacity to deliver intercontinental ballistic missiles and had put the United States behind in the nuclear arms race. In addition, a series of economic downturns, including the continuing effects of a 1958 recession, gave Kennedy an advantage in emphasizing that he and the Democrats, who enjoyed higher standing as economic managers, would be better able to restore national prosperity.

  The importance of negative images and impressions in defeating Nixon was most apparent in the results of a nationally televised debate, unprecedented in a presidential election, with Kennedy in September 1960. The debate attracted the largest audience ever to have watched two candidates battle each other. As a practiced debater confident of his ability to best any opponent, Nixon was receptive to the prospect of squaring off against his younger, less experienced opponent. Likewise, Kennedy was enthusiastic about the chance to demonstrate that he was as competent as Nixon in discussing the challenges facing the United States. Besides, Kennedy and his aides were confident that his more attractive personal attributes would create an appeals gap with the dour, humorless Nixon.

  In their respective opening and closing statements, Kennedy ignored Nixon and spoke directly to the large viewing audience. Nixon, by contrast, tried to score points against Kennedy, reinforcing impressions of himself as a street fighter trying to win an election rather than demonstrate his qualities as a statesman. Moreover, Nixon, who had spent two weeks in a hospital for treatment of a knee infection suffered in an accident, was thin and pale and appeared scrawny and listless—almost cadaver-like. “My God,” Chicago mayor Richard Daley said, “they’ve embalmed him before he even died.” By contrast, Kennedy, the one with far greater physical problems than the vice president, came across as the picture of robust good health. The minority of the audience who heard the debate on the radio thought Nixon had won. But the great majority who watched it on television gave Kennedy the nod.

  John Kenneth Galbraith, the liberal Harvard economist and campaign adviser, thought Kennedy was “simply superb.” When he asked “the proprietor” of “a Negro shoe shine parlor” in San Diego, where he was at a conference on unemployment and Social Security, how he liked Kennedy’s performance, the man replied: “So help me God, ah’m digging up two from the graveyard for that boy.”

  Kennedy won the election, but it was a close victory: a 118,574 popular vote margin, yielding 49.72 percent of the 68,837,000 total cast; it translated into an electoral count of 303 to 219. When Kennedy went to bed at 3:30 A.M. on election night, however, the contest still hung in the balance, with six states—California, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, and Pennsylvania—too close to call. It wasn’t until the next morning at a little after nine that he learned he had won, though Nixon’s press secretary did not concede the result until after noon.

  Kennedy puzzled over how to respond to the narrow margin. He could look back to Woodrow Wilson’s 42 percent plurality in 1912 and take comfort from knowing that Wilson won a second term and became one of the most significant presidents of the century. But it did little to salve Kennedy’s wounded pride and self-confidence, especially since everyone in his inner circle had been predicting a victory of between 53 and 57 percent: “How did I manage to beat a guy like this by only a hundred thousand votes?” he asked one of his aides. More important, it left him less room to maneuver; he would have to build an administration with greater regard for Republican sensitivities. His promise to adopt a fresh outlook on the Cold War, for example, gave immediate ground to decisions on choosing directors of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Liberals urged him to appoint new national security and law enforcement officials who could signal a change. Instead, two days after the election, Kennedy announced that Allen Dulles and J. Edgar Hoover would remain as heads of the two agencies.

  The same week, Kennedy arranged a meeting with Nixon as a show of national unity. He privately acknowledged that he had nothing to say to his recent rival, but he thought it was important to give the impression that he would construct a bipartisan administration, though he would not offer him a job. After the meeting, in which Nixon did most of the talking, Kennedy privately remarked, “It was just as well for all of us that he didn’t quite make it.”

  Two meetings with Eisenhower were more consequential. Kennedy wished to avoid any demonstration of antagonism, which had marked the transition from Truman to Eisenhower in 1952–53. Although Kennedy did not think well of Ike, seeing him as an “old fuddy-duddy” and calling him an “old asshole” who had lost control of his administration and become a “non-president,” he understood that Eisenhower still enjoyed high public standing.

  The first meeting at the White House in December 1960 focused on foreign policy problems. Eisenhower dominated the conversation; afterward he praised Kennedy as “a serious earnest seeker for information.” He believed that Kennedy “will give full consideration to the facts and suggestions we presented,” implying that despite party and campaign differences, Eisenhower foresaw continuity between their administrations. Kennedy kept his counsel largely because he didn’t wish to reveal the limits of what he knew about the topics Ike had put before him or what he intended to do as president: “NATO nuclear sharing, Laos, the Congo, Algeria, Disarmament [and] Nuclear test suspension negotiations, Cuba and Latin America, U.S. balance of payments and the gold outflow.”

  In January, as Kennedy approached his inauguration, he asked for a second meeting. He was particularly worried about a civil war in Laos and the possibility that his first crisis would compel a decision on using military force to prevent a communist victory, which Eisenhower’s advisers believed would pose a threat to all of Southeast Asia. Kennedy told an aide, “Whatever’s going to happen in Laos, an American invasion, a Communist victory or whatever, I wish it would happen before we take over and get blamed for it.” He feared a military action that went badly, diverted attention from other issues, and produced unfavorable contrasts with Ike. Comparison between him, a junior naval officer, and Eisenhower, the storied five-star World War II general, would clearly be disadvantageous at the start of Kennedy’s term.

  When he sat down with Eisenhower,
Kennedy wanted to discuss administrative questions. In particular, he was keen to talk about “the present national security set up, organization within the White House . . . [and the] Pentagon.” But Eisenhower put him off with the recommendation that he delay “any reorganization before he himself could become well acquainted with the problem.” Ike’s advice did not sit well with Kennedy, who believed that Eisenhower’s affinity for a military command system had produced an overly cautious administration reluctant to act boldly and move in new directions. Kennedy gave Eisenhower the impression that he intended to set up a government that relied on having the right man in the right place. Eisenhower, who believed that successful administration depended more on smooth-running bureaucracies than on ambitious men pressing their personal agendas, considered Kennedy naïve in thinking that he could find miracle workers who would help him solve national and international problems.

  Kennedy, however, had no precise plan for how he would organize his administration. He believed that it required considerable forethought and preparation. Consequently, after winning the nomination, he had invited Clark Clifford, Harry Truman’s White House counsel and architect of his 1948 election victory, to discuss campaign politics. At the end of a breakfast meeting, Kennedy made “a request that had no precedent in American politics, one that was to set a pattern for future transfers of presidential power,” Clifford recalled. Kennedy said, “Clark, I’ve been thinking about one matter where you could be of special help to me. If I win, I don’t want to wake up on the morning of November 9 and say to myself, ‘What do I do now?’ I want to have a plan. I want someone to be planning for this between now and November 8.” He asked Clifford to prepare a memorandum “outlining the main tasks of the new Administration.” A week later, Kennedy told Clifford that a Brookings Institution group was studying past transitions and discussing ways to improve on them. He persuaded Clifford to be his representative on the committee.