As commander of PT-109, Kennedy was engaged in an escort mission at night when a Japanese destroyer rammed through the ship. The young commander apparently had posted no lookouts and had only one of three engines in gear, making escape impossible. Surviving crew members drifted throughout the night, then made it to a nearby atoll, whereupon Kennedy again swam back into the adjacent waters to try to flag down a U.S. ship. Eventually a British coastal naval watcher facilitated the rescue. When search parties arrived, they had reporters with them—alerted by Joe Kennedy—and when the group finally reached safety, the British naval watcher was conveniently forgotten in place of the ambassador’s heroic son. Jack certainly exemplified courage, endurance, and physical prowess in getting his crew to the island. A story on PT-109, turned into a Reader’s Digest article that made JFK a war hero, led him to comment, “My story about the collision is getting better all the time.”7 Not long after, Joseph junior died in a risky flight, making John next in line for political office in the eyes of his father.
Upon his discharge, Jack entered politics, winning a House seat, then taking the 1952 Massachusetts Senate seat. JFK suffered from severe back problems, which required surgery that fused some of his vertebrae. While recuperating, he managed to write another book, Profiles in Courage. Or so went the story. In fact, most of the actual research and writing came from a veritable Who’s Who of academics, including historians Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Allan Nevins, government professor James Burns, and reliable speechwriter Ted Sorensen (who would later be JFK’s press secretary). Despite writing only a tiny fraction of the manuscript, Kennedy acted as though it were fully his, accepting the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for biography for it.8
There is no question Kennedy inherited several foreign policy messes from his predecessor, chief among them the recent overthrow of Cuban dictator Fulgen-cio Batista by communist rebel Fidel Castro in 1959. Advisers to both Ike and JFK argued that the Maximum Leader, as Castro called himself, was merely an ardent nationalist and opportunist, much the way Ho Chi Minh of North Vietnam was later depicted. Castro encouraged such mischaracterizations, even though he claimed to have been a Marxist-Leninist when he started his guerrilla activities.9 Unfortunately, Eisenhower had offered diplomatic recognition to Castro’s government. Within a few months, the administration realized it had blundered and that a new Iron Curtain had dropped over Cuba, behind which stood a communist dictatorship easily as oppressive as any in Europe. Eisenhower also approved a CIA plan in March 1960 to organize an army of Cuban exiles, recruited mostly in Miami and based in Guatemala. At the same time, the CIA plotted Castro’s assassination, a project at which the agency proved so inept that it recruited Mafia dons John Roselli, Santos Trafficante, and Sam Giancana to provide hit men to take out Castro. Although some of these more radical operations originated in the Eisenhower administration (unapproved by the president), Kennedy was fully briefed on all of them and through surrogates issued his complete consent. He supposedly told a reporter that he was “under terrific pressure” from his advisers to have Castro assassinated. His brother, Robert F. “Bobby” Kennedy was deeply involved in the intrigue: He knew about his brother’s close ties to the mob through a sex partner named Judy Exner, whom Kennedy shared with Sam Giancana.10
The first flashpoint, however, involved not the assassination of Castro but an invasion by the exiles at the Bay of Pigs, which occurred three months after the inauguration. Again, JFK reviewed and approved the operation.11 Castro had anticipated an invasion, having told Radio Havana that the State of the Union address had indicated “a new attack on Cuba by the United States.”12 Success for any invasion depended entirely on getting Castro out of the way first. As John Davis noted, the dictator’s assassination was “the very lynchpin” of the plan—“an integral part,” as Arthur Schlesinger had termed it.13 Kennedy even met with the Cuban national hired by the Mafia to eliminate Castro, indicating he knew exactly whom to contact.14
On April 17, 1961, a small army of 1,400 Cuban exiles landed at the Bay of Pigs, where, they were assured, the U.S. fleet and CIA-operated warplanes would support the invasion. When things went badly, however, Kennedy suddenly withheld the promised support, dooming the invasion and sentencing the invaders to prison or death at Castro’s hands. Anti-Castro elements never forgot that JFK had betrayed them. American public opinion “was outraged by the Bay of Pigs failure and would have supported direct intervention.”15 Chester Bowles, a senior member of the Kennedy administration, said that “at least 90 percent of the people” would have supported a decision to send troops into Cuba or otherwise overthrow Castro.16 Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev viewed Kennedy’s vacillation as weakness and decided to probe further.
Khrushchev began testing Kennedy in Berlin, where the western half of the divided city offered an escape from communism. West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer had encouraged the refugees coming across the borders, at a rate of a thousand a day by July 1961. To stanch this hemorrhage, the East Germans, with Soviet permission, erected the massive Berlin Wall separating the two sections of the city. It was left to America to act. A Polk or a Teddy Roosevelt would have destroyed the wall immediately. Kennedy called up reservists and began a small-scale mobilization, but otherwise did nothing about the wall itself, which became a physical symbol of the cold war. Its barbed wire, minefields, and tank traps—all facing inward—clearly illustrated that the chief task of communism was to keep people from leaving, not to keep invaders from entering.
Kennedy’s weakness in Berlin convinced Khrushchev that the United States would not resist communist expansion elsewhere. At Castro’s urging, the Soviet Union had begun to place intermediate range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) in Cuba. Subsequent letters have surfaced that reveal a wild, almost fanatical Castro hoping to goad the United States into a nuclear war. The IRBMs placed in Cuba posed a huge threat: these weapons had a fifteen-minute flight time to major United States cities, and their launch would provide only a few minutes for actual confirmation and warning, unlike Soviet land-based ICBMs that would have a thirty-minute flight time. Khrushchev lied about the missiles to Kennedy, claiming they were antiaircraft missiles. U-2 spy planes soon revealed the truth. A flight in mid-October 1962 provided photographic confirmation, not only of the IRBMs, but also of the surface-to-air (SAM) missiles protecting the nuclear missile sites.
Kennedy’s cabinet divided almost evenly. Some wanted to strike immediately with a full air attack and even an invasion, whereas others advocated going to the United Nations and invoking sanctions. Robert Kennedy came up with a third alternative, a quarantine, or blockade, of Cuba to keep incomplete weapons from being finished. It provided time to allow the Russians to back down gracefully. Kennedy announced the quarantine on October twenty-second, with a deadline on October twenty-fourth, cabling Khrushchev to return to the “earlier situation” before the missiles. Negotiating through an ABC newsman, John Scali, the Kennedy administration and the Russians floated several mutual solutions. On October twenty-sixth, Khrushchev in a secret letter offered to withdraw the missiles in return for a pledge by the United States not to invade Cuba.17 Shortly after the letter was tendered, the hard-liners inside the Kremlin demanded that Khrushchev gain deeper concessions, which he submitted in a second letter insisting on the removal of the U.S. missiles deployed in Turkey. Kennedy brilliantly pretended not to have received the second letter, then publicly acknowledged the first, offering the Soviet leader a way out, which he accepted.18 Castro reportedly responded by flying into a rage. His communist sidekick, Che Guevara, watched as Castro swore, smashed a mirror, and kicked a hole in a wall.
Meanwhile, the Soviets had been embarrassed by allowing the Cuban dictator to egg them on, then were humiliated a second time when their postoperation intelligence showed that the U.S. Navy could have utterly destroyed the Soviet Atlantic fleet in a matter of minutes had hostilities broken out. From that point on, the USSR set a policy of building a world-class navy capable of blue-water operations under Admir
al Sergei Gorshkov.
But reality matched neither the euphoria of Kennedy’s “victory” nor the “embarrassment” of the USSR. The United States had now failed—twice—to evict communists from Cuba. Millions of Cubans voted with their feet and relocated to the United States. Most of them moved to Florida, where they thrived in a capitalist economy, whereas Cuba continued to languish in utter poverty. Castro, over the next thirty years, would prove the single most irritating communist leader on the planet, launching military operations in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and even Angola, destabilizing much of Central America and fomenting revolution in Africa. No other great power had permitted an enemy outpost to exist in such proximity when it had the military might to eliminate it. Nevertheless, JFK emerged with a public relations victory, heralded as the tough young president who had forced the Russians to back down. In fact, he was on the run on other fronts, such as space.
Where Can We Catch Them?
Eisenhower’s concern over Sputnik had led to the massive, if ill-directed, flood of federal money into universities. Another blow to American prestige occurred in April 1961, when the USSR put the first human in orbit, sending Yuri Gagarin up some four weeks ahead of an American astronaut. Two days later Kennedy held a meeting in which he desperately questioned his advisers: “Is there any place where we can catch them [the Soviets]? What can we do? Can we go around the Moon before them? Can we put a man on the Moon before them?”19 What Kennedy did not know was that between Sputnik and Gagarin’s flight, at least three Soviet test pilots had died, having been fired into the outer atmosphere only to drop back down like flaming meteors. Another had burned up in a test chamber in 1961. Even with Gagarin’s flight, the Soviet government was so unsure he would survive that it generated a news release for the cosmonaut’s death in advance, to be read by the official TASS news agency if Gagarin did not return alive. The Soviet citizenry was, as usual, not informed of any of these events.20
In May 1961, after a frenzied study session with NASA administrators, Kennedy committed the United States to putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade, resulting in an expenditure of $5 billion per year on space until 1969. The Soviets had recognized the propaganda aspects of space, and they now hustled to add a wooden seat for a third cosmonaut to a two-man capsule in order to again beat the U.S. Apollo three-man spacecraft into orbit.21 It was characteristic of Soviet mentality when it came to science and technology to ignore human safety or environmental concerns in favor of a public relations coup.
Kennedy hardly held a more idealistic position. Newly released tapes from the Kennedy library of a key 1962 discussion with NASA administrator James Webb revealed that Webb repeatedly resisted Kennedy’s efforts to turn the U.S. space program into a narrowly focused lunar expedition. Another legend soon exploded—that of Kennedy’s great vision in putting a man on the moon. JFK wanted a propaganda victory, pure and simple: “Everything we do [in space] ought to be tied into getting to the moon ahead of the Russians.”22 He then laid it on the table for the NASA administrator, saying that beating the Russians to the moon “is the top priority of the [space] agency and…except for defense, the top priority of the United States government. Otherwise, we shouldn’t be spending this kind of money, because I’m not that interested in space [emphasis ours].”23
Once committed, however, the sheer technological prowess and economic might of the United States closed the gap. When Apollo 11 landed Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Edwin Aldrin on the moon on July 20, 1969, the Russians knew they had met their match. More important, the Soviets had concluded that the advantages of space-based weaponry—especially given their relative technological backwardness compared to the West—were minimal and that military money could best be used in nuclear missiles and submarines. Apollo 11 thus marked a victory of sorts in the cold war, with the Soviets slowly and quietly scaling down their space efforts.
In broader terms, the space program presented troubling confirmation of government centralization in America, having turned space into a public domain wherein private access was retarded through subsidization of orbital launches by taxpayer dollars.24 National security concerns engendered layers of bureaucracy, bringing parts of NASA’s supposedly civilian operations under the oversight of the Pentagon. Space launch was never debated on its own merits, and it was never placed against other policy options or even other uses of its massive resources. Kennedy’s “vision” of putting a man on the moon reaped the headlines, whereas the practical utility of space access had yet to be attained despite extraordinary financial and social costs.
Having done what some considered impossible, NASA proceeded to flounder during the Nixon and Carter years as it struggled to achieve routine space launch through a questionable commitment to the expensive and generally inefficient space shuttle.25 To contrast the promise and the reality of the space program, one has only to look at such films as Stanley Kubrick’s fantasy, 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which spacecraft docked with a wheel-shaped space station to the tune of the “Blue Danube Waltz” as it prepared for deep-space missions. In fact, by the end of 2001, the United States did not have anything resembling a fully operational space-based launch platform in orbit, although the Russian Mir space station had already worn out and was positioning itself to crash into an ocean. Worse, the United States had no routine way to get to a space station even in emergencies.26
Tax Cuts and Growth
Whether it involved the space or antipoverty efforts, already a mind-set had taken root in Washington that money, education, and research could solve any problem. This marked the final evolution of the Progressive-era embrace of education as the answer to all challenges, invoking an unquestioning trust of the New Deal assumptions that the federal government could overcome any obstacle. Well before Kennedy took office, Ike’s Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) had spent $46 million on research unrelated to health. Then that number exploded: by 1966, Johnson had kicked it up to $154 million; then, in a single year, the budget jumped to $313 million. Much of this “research” became circular: defending, reporting, or “explaining” what federal programs were doing by internal and anonymous literature circulated in obscure journals or by photocopy. For whoever read it, the results could not have been inspiring. One Oakland job-training program designed to raise wages by teaching new skills to the poor was at first a Kennedy showpiece. Years later, when the first internal studies became public, it was revealed that male trainees gained all of $150 to $500 per year in income—for a per capita expenditure of thousands.27
One reason government-oriented elites thought that they could solve problems with money was that the wealth existed, and the government’s take had increased after the JFK tax cuts of 1961–62. West German Chancellor Ludwig Erhard had impressed the idea on Kennedy during his visit to Germany in 1961, instructing JFK to avoid the British model of high taxes, which had all but killed economic growth in England. Obviously frustrating liberals in his own party, Kennedy delivered a speech to the Economic Club of New York in which he rebuked the critics: “Our true choice is not between tax reduction…and the avoidance of large federal deficits…. It is increasingly clear that…an economy hampered by restrictive tax rates will never produce enough revenue to balance the budget—just as it will never produce enough jobs or enough profits.”28
JFK favored tax cuts, but not to jump-start the economy, which was not in recession, but to generate wealth that would produce more tax revenues. Put simply, Kennedy realized that government could grow with tax cuts if there were no corresponding spending cuts. He therefore proposed a two-year across-the-board reduction from 91 percent to 70 percent on the top rates and from 20 percent to 14 percent on the bottom rates. He added depreciation incentives for new plant and equipment purchases, framed in Keynesian defenses. Yet it was pure Mellonism: giving those at the top a large cut so that they could invest, start new firms, and add production facilities, employing still others who themselves would pay taxes. Critics typicall
y called it trickle-down economics, but it was common sense—and it worked. Over the next six years, personal savings rose from a 2 percent annual growth rate to 9 percent; business investment rose from an annual rate of 2 percent to 8 percent; GNP rose by 40 percent in two years; job growth doubled; and unemployment fell by one third.29
Federal revenues rose, and Walter Heller, a Keynesian economist who had tried to talk Kennedy out of the tax cut, admitted in testimony to the Joint Economic Committee in 1977 that the tax cut paid “for itself in increased revenues…[because] it did seem to have a tremendously stimulative effect.”30 But if Kennedy achieved his objective of spurring economic growth with lower tax rates, his other policies had tragically unintended consequences, most notably the increasingly dangerous situation in Southeast Asia.
Origins of the Vietnam Quagmire
Just as the space race had its roots in concerns over Soviet ability to strike the United States with atomic weapons, so too did the disaster in Southeast Asia known as the Vietnam War. As he does for Soviet space supremacy, Eisenhower bears much of the blame for failing to address the problems in Vietnam. He failed to lead decisively in the 1954 accords that ended the French presence in Vietnam (by which time America already was paying 80 percent of the French effort there).31 The communist boss from the North, Ho Chi Minh, or “He Who Shines,” had received extensive support from the U.S. wartime spy agency, the OSS (forerunner to the Central Intelligence Agency).32 By 1954, most analysts agree, open and fair elections throughout the whole of Vietnam would have placed Ho in power—an unacceptable outcome to most cold war State Department officials. It is also true, however, that when the partition did take place, some nine hundred thousand residents of the North decided to escape the blessings of “enlightenment” offered by the new communist regime and headed south.
A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror Page 111