by Conrad Black
The effort to de-escalate the Cold War and produce a test-ban treaty fizzled, and there was only snarling, rather than any useful dialogue, between Moscow and Washington for the rest of Eisenhower’s term. He had planned to visit Russia and then Japan after the Paris summit; when the Russia visit was canceled, he decided to go to the Philippines, Korea, Formosa, and then Japan. But Japanese communists staged such demonstrations against the mutual-defense treaty that was about to be ratified that the feeble Japanese government asked that Eisenhower’s visit be postponed, instead of putting down the riots and asking the people for the reception their distinguished visitor deserved. The combination of the Sputnik debacle, the U-2 shambles, and the fizzle of the Tokyo trip made the latter Eisenhower presidency seem tired and bumbling, though the president retained his great popularity, in America and the world.
But his time was passing, and his chief associates, Herter and CIA director Allen Dulles, were also old and irresolute. The balance of his presidency was an anticlimax. Eisenhower was insensitive to requests from Nixon, who was trying to succeed him as president, and from others, for increased attention to space exploration, which the president considered a waste of money. And he effectively tolerated the continuation of the nonsense about a missile gap, based on Sputnik and Khrushchev’s bravura; it was a complete fraud, and Eisenhower, given his great military prestige, could have debunked it easily, but he was somewhat enervated by the abrupt end of his detente-seeking summitry.
There were alarms about Castro, agitation for drastic action from Nixon and others, which Eisenhower sensibly resisted, and about the Congo, which Belgium granted its independence but which immediately fragmented, with a pro-Belgian faction continuing to control the mining-rich Katanga region. Eisenhower had the intelligence to avoid support of colonialism, and while the U.S. had a hand in a coup against the new government led by Patrice Lumumba, it had nothing to do with his assassination.
John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson were the Democratic nominees in 1960, and Richard Nixon was easily chosen, despite his chief’s shilly-shallying, and he took Henry Cabot Lodge for the vice presidential slot. Kennedy was assured of the votes of the country’s Roman Catholics, about a quarter of the population, and deftly managed to campaign against religious prejudice, although the Republicans never tried to fan any, and Kennedy convinced just enough Protestants that they had to vote for him to prove to themselves that they were not bigots. It was a stylish political maneuver. The official result was a Kennedy victory of 34.22 million votes to 34.11 million for Nixon and 303 electoral votes to 219, and 15 for Virginia’s Senator Harry F. Byrd. If the votes are distributed exactly in Alabama, rather than giving Byrd’s nearly 300,000 unpledged Democratic votes to Kennedy as a fellow Democrat, Nixon almost certainly won the popular vote. Nixon was also almost certainly cheated of Illinois, where Kennedy won by 9,000 votes out of 4.8 million votes cast and some ballot boxes in Chicago were never found. The Democrats won nine states and the Republicans four by 1 percent or less. The election was effectively a draw and no one will ever know who really won, but Kennedy was the ostensible victor and Nixon rejected even Eisenhower’s urging to have a judicial recount. Nixon has not received the credit he deserved for sparing the country such an ordeal of uncertainty.
Kennedy and his young family and entourage were immensely convivial and full of what they called “vigor”; and it was certainly time for a new generation. At 43, Kennedy was the youngest man ever elected president of the United States (he was 27 years younger than Eisenhower, 19 years younger than Eisenhower at his first election, though a year older than Theodore Roosevelt when he succeeded McKinley), and his administration was full of strenuous young people. The sober and well-tried Dean Rusk, wartime colonel, holder of a variety of secondary foreign policy positions under Truman, and president of the Rockefeller Foundation, became secretary of state.
The end of the Eisenhower administration was a sad, dwindling twilight, but it should not have been. In the 100 years and 20 presidencies between Rutherford Hayes and Ronald Reagan (counting Cleveland twice, as is the custom, because his terms were not consecutive), Eisenhower, Theodore Roosevelt, and Calvin Coolidge were the only presidents who retired in good health and good standing with the voters, and of those, Eisenhower was the only one who became president by being elected to the office. His were years of peace and prosperity. He got out of and stayed out of wars, made the first start toward de-escalation of the Cold War with Open Skies, and made immense contributions to knitting the country together and renovating infrastructure with the interstate highway program and the St. Lawrence Seaway.
He was studiously ambiguous, as a deliberate tactic to feel his way through foreign and domestic problems, did nothing to dismantle the New Deal, but cavorted with the Republican country club reactionaries as if he were one of them. He did little to reduce wartime tax rates, reform the welfare system, or grasp the soaring possibilities in embracing the space program. He failed to silence a lot of impudent mythmaking about a missile gap when he had in fact been a wise steward of the nation’s defenses, keeping them strong, avoiding the reckless bellicosity of the service chiefs, resisting the temptation to overspend, and finally, in his farewell message, cautioning against the relations between the senior officers and the defense production industries. (This was later misrepresented by the left as cautioning against a virtual coup by the service chiefs and munitions and armaments makers, when he was really concerned about undue extravagance in the acquisition of unneeded and hideously expensive weapons systems.)
He had an inadequate notion of civil rights but enforced the law decisively and led the Western Alliance with consideration and diplomatic skill, despite his botch of Suez, an insane enterprise by the British and the French, yet one that should not have led to those countries being durably sandbagged as Great Powers. Until the U-2 fiasco, he dealt better with the Soviets than any president except Nixon and Reagan, and despite his cool reception to most of his ideas, worked better with de Gaulle than any of the other five U.S. presidents who dealt with him, except Nixon.
It was a personal failing that he was much less helpful in making Nixon president than Nixon had been in making him president, and he was not particularly loyal to his supporters, unlike most of the presidents who came shortly before or soon after him. But he maintained his popularity better than any modern president except Roosevelt and perhaps Reagan. Despite his lack of imagination and his ambivalence, he was a sage and capable and in all respects reliable holder of his great office in very tense times, where a less steady and experienced leader could have got the country into real problems, as some of his successors shortly did. The whole world benefitted from his refusal to be stampeded or hoodwinked by the armed services chiefs.
Beneath his amiable and avuncular exterior, Eisenhower was always a cunning operator, as different in method from Roosevelt’s sphinx-like, aristocratic charm masking immense ambitions and devious acts as from Truman’s blunt and courageous decisiveness, which could quickly become pugnacity. All were effective and between them provided seven consecutive terms of very successful high-level strategic direction. The condition of the world and of the place of the United States within it from 1933 to 1961, due essentially to the capability of these three presidents, would have been unbelievable at the start of the period. Probably the closest parallel to it in duration of good government and influence on the whole (known) world is provided by the five consecutive benign Roman emperors, Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius (96–180 A.D.; Roman emperors didn’t have term limits). The next 20 years would be very tumultuous.
4. PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY AND THE NEW FRONTIER
The Kennedy era came in with panache and a refreshing emphasis on renewal, reexamination of previously accepted truths, and an apparent infusion of energy into the top ranks of government. The president’s eight-year-younger brother, Robert, a former aide to Senator McCarthy, would be attorney general. He was not qualified for t
he position on the basis of his legal career, as Eisenhower’s Brownell and Rogers or Roosevelt’s Cummings, Murphy, Jackson, and Biddle had been. But he was unprecedentedly close to the president and very committed to several important policy goals, including civil rights and a crackdown on organized crime.
There had been extensive concerns about the phenomenon of the Kennedys. The new president’s father had been a harum-scarum financier, flamboyantly putting motion picture companies together and capitalizing on the speculative susceptibilities of the stock market in the era before strict rules about the accuracy of prospectuses or the retention of escrowed stock. He was an effective chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and an adequate chairman of the Maritime Commission. He was a poor choice as ambassador to Great Britain, as he supported the appeasement movement ostentatiously and became a semi-public defeatist about the ability of the British to survive the war. He had been effectively blackballed by Roosevelt and Truman and Eisenhower. John E Kennedy was parachuted easily into the congressional district held by the famous Boston politician and four-time mayor James Michael Curley in 1946. In 1952, Ambassador Kennedy laid out a large campaign fund to take advantage of incumbent Henry Cabot Lodge’s preoccupation with the Eisenhower campaign effort and paid Senator McCarthy, a family friend, not to intervene in the state. Kennedy won and was overwhelmingly reelected in 1958.
Kennedy had a distinguished war record as a torpedo boat captain and won a Pulitzer Prize for a book he wrote about American senators who had risked their careers to make courageous decisions of principle. But it was suspected and later came to light that the book had been largely ghostwritten for him. Kennedy and his glamorous wife did not suffer from public reservations about their Roman Catholicism, a concern that had generally eroded, and they were responded to by much of the population like movie stars, or even rock stars, and were publicly friendly with a number of prominent entertainers, including Angie Dickinson and Marilyn Monroe (with both of whom the president and the attorney general had sexual relationships) and Frank Sinatra.
There were vague suggestions, through the senior Kennedy, Sinatra, and shared romantic relations, of links to the underworld. There have also come to light a number of questions about the new president’s health. He had been a sickly youth and due to war wounds had a chronically painful back. He took a heavy cocktail of prescribed medicine, including hormones, steroids, animal organ cells, vitamins, enzymes, and amphetamines, which sometimes cause hyperactivity, nervous tension, impaired judgment, sudden mood swings, and sexual cravings verging on satyriasis. Little of this, apart from the friendliness with actors and actresses, was publicly known at the time, and it was, on balance, a refreshing change from the patrician Roosevelt, the down-to-earth Truman, and the avuncular General Eisenhower. The Kennedy era, from its ambiance and style and energy, was different from the start and has been unforgettable since.
Kennedy’s inaugural address on January 20, 1961, is surpassed only by Lincoln’s two addresses and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first inaugural (“Nothing to fear but fear itself”), as the most famous in the country’s history. He urged Americans: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country” and promised to “pay any price, bear any burden . . . oppose any foe” in the cause of freedom. This promised a sharp change from Eisenhower’s policy of trying to limit and stay clear of actual exchanges of continuing fire while threatening to use atomic weapons on a range of categories of aggression. Where Eisenhower talked a saber-rattling line, and did so successfully in gaining peace in Korea, he stayed clear of attempts to involve the U.S. in war in Vietnam and in the Formosa Strait. From the start, Kennedy appeared to be expressing a preparedness to use conventional military activity more actively and, in Eisenhower’s expression, less “prayerfully” than the former administration, but to be prepared to forgo incitement of nuclear envy by the Kremlin by not demanding continually larger throw weights and more numerous launch platforms for nuclear weapons. It has not been entirely clear how fully these views were embraced or what level of sophisticated analysis went into the development of them.
The new defense secretary, Robert McNamara, the former head of Ford Motor Company, was an ambitious architect of change from the start, seeking to standardize warplane types and advocating a new notion of allowing the USSR to achieve nuclear parity with the United States, creating a defense formula of “Mutual Assured Destruction.” The rationale for this was that it would make nuclear war practically impossible, as neither side could be under the slightest illusion that the result of conflict would not be the destruction of everyone. Critics of this view would claim that it would only incite the Soviets to an accelerated buildup to try to gain absolute nuclear superiority. And critics of McNamara’s quest for a standardized warplane claimed, with some justice as it turned out, that aircraft flown from aircraft carriers have to be lighter and that those flown from the land should have larger bomb or missile-launch capacities. These problems emerged gradually and in very awkward circumstances.
The conventional national security team was fairly orthodox, and welcome after the sclerosis of Herter and Allen Dulles (who unfortunately was kept on at the CIA). Dean Rusk as secretary of state was not a radical departure from the past and was an articulate, expressionless spokesman for whatever was afoot. Adlai Stevenson, who would have been secretary of state had he not responded to the incitements of Eleanor Roosevelt and sought the nomination himself for the third time, was a very pacifistic and urbane figure at the United Nations, where he replaced Henry Cabot Lodge, the late vice presidential candidate, who would soon become the envoy to the coming, and altogether predictable, hot spot of South Vietnam. The national security advisor was Colonel Henry L. Stimson’s old aide, McGeorge Bundy, a Harvard eminence, and his deputy was Walt Whitman Rostow, a tough anti-communist of a largely economic background. Kennedy transformed the White House decision-making apparatus from a layered command structure that Eisenhower had had, to one where almost all initiatives came back to the president from their originators, even if they were well down in the organization. Many relatively untried and rather academic people were directing a new government in a novel way. When Vice President Lyndon Johnson told Speaker Sam Rayburn (who had served in Congress since Wilson’s time) how impressed he was with many of these bright young people, Rayburn responded: “I’d feel a whole lot better about them if just one of them had run for sheriff once.”189
In emphasizing a less confrontational and more upbeat approach to the exigencies of the Cold War, Kennedy early in his administration set up the Peace Corps, which was intended to be an adjunct to foreign aid, to be helpful to those in need of it, and to stress the desire of the United States to live peacefully with all countries. He installed his brother-in-law, R. Sargent Shriver (husband of his sister Eunice), as the head of the Peace Corps, in which eventually 200,000 Americans served in 139 countries. It is not easily quantifiable, but it assumedly had a positive effect on America’s relations with the world. It amplified the upbeat nature of the Kennedys, though to cynics it also appeared to be the substitution of the politics of the Eagle Scout for the generally harsh and unsentimental realities that control international relations.
Trying to retrieve Roosevelt’s cordial atmosphere of the Good Neighbor in Latin America, he also set up the Alliance for Progress in Latin America, and put Puerto Rico’s capable governor Luis Muñoz Marin at the head of it. It was a public relations success, and received over $20 billion from the U.S. through the decade of the sixties. Its goals were to foster economic growth and investment, literacy, better health care, and democratic government in Latin America, and it set the goal of 2.5 percent annual GDP growth rates. That objective was achieved, and there were large advances in literacy, but the Alliance was not a political success under future U.S. presidents. The funds commitment was not adequate to be vital to a whole hemisphere, and critics remarked that American business extracted far more in dividends from Latin America than t
he U.S. government was reinvesting in it.
On May 25, 1961, a month after the Soviet Union put aloft successfully the first man in space, President Kennedy enunciated the goal of putting a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth before the end of the decade. As he put it a few months later: “We choose to go to the moon.” It did fairly quickly eliminate concerns about who was leading the space race, put a stop to the drivel about the missile gap, and certainly uplifted the imaginations of a great many people. And it would prove a very thoroughly developed and administered program that continued under three presidents and achieved all its objectives.
5. THE BAY OF PIGS, THE VIENNA SUMMIT, AND THE BERLIN WALL
The Kennedy foreign policy quickly became embroiled in relations with the Soviet Union, especially in regard to Cuba and Berlin. Cuba had been a lively subject of conversation in the latter days of the Eisenhower administration. As Nixon and Kennedy debated in the two months before the 1960 election, Kennedy accused Eisenhower and Nixon of tolerating a festering communist sore right under America’s nose, “eight minutes by jet” from Florida. Nixon was privately imploring Eisenhower to do something to appear more protective of American interests and get him out from under Kennedy’s charges of a feeble and appeasing policy. Eisenhower replied that some covert activities could be engaged in, but that Castro was not violating the OAS Charter and was popular in Latin America, and that if the United States just moved on him militarily, it would be illegal, would cause tremendous problems in Latin America, and could lead to the assertion of extreme pressures by Khrushchev on the West, especially in Berlin. Nixon, in a policy straitjacket, managed a superb series of replies to Kennedy, accusing the Democratic nominee of being a trigger-happy amateur. Nixon called Castro a “pipsqueak demagogue” but said that a direct military attack was unjustified and would be a disaster. Nixon didn’t believe a word of what he was saying to Kennedy, but delivered it very effectively. Eisenhower had asked for the recruitment of a charismatic leader-in-exile from the émigré community around Miami, but they were mainly aggrieved professionals and well-to-do people who were full of rage but not very representative.