Kennedy

by Ted Sorensen

  Many of those with whom he was most friendly asked unfriendly questions, to which he never objected. He preferred hard, controversial questions to soft, generalized queries. The sharper the question, the more sharply he felt he could answer. He listened patiently to long statements concealed as questions and engaged in no direct debate with reporters. Often he was champing to give his answer before the question was completed.

  At no time did he lose his dignity, his temper or his control of the situation. He made a few misstatements of fact but no major blunders. His answers were almost always brief. Some of the best were no more than a sentence or even a word. Would he comment on the possibilities of a neutron bomb? “No.” Was he certain the Soviets really put two men in orbit? “Yes.”

  Questions asked by female correspondents invariably provided an element of entertainment, if not information. He knew that May Craig’s questions were more likely to be puzzling than weighty, but he always shared the television viewers’ curiosity about what her question would be, and he always called on her. One lady reporter provoked a rare show of anger by using a question to brand two State Department employees as “well-known security risks.” The President responded immediately that he was familiar with both men, their records and their assignments, which he believed they could carry out “without detriment to the interests of the United States, and I hope without detriment to their characters by your question.” But he continued to call on this reporter at every conference. “I’d like to pass her by,” he once confided, “but something always draws me to recognize her.”

  1 When, as President, he became a member of the National Press Club, its bulletin board solemnly pronounced: “John F. Kennedy, a former newspaperman now in politics, was approved for membership.” The President at a news conference summed it up more casually: “A lot of journalists have bad luck.”

  2 His general experience, particularly with the State Department and Pentagon, was that those who knew didn’t tell and those who told didn’t know.

  3 He regarded the author of that particular article as particularly biased and hostile, and upon learning that he had secured a sensitive Pentagon post for his temporary active duty in the Air Force, the President wasted no time in changing his orders—“preferably out in some desert,” he told the White House Air Force aide.

  4 A comparative survey by Professor Elmer Cornwell has shown that the Kennedy press conferences generated far more newspaper stories, not only in the number of articles but in total space, than those of any of his predecessors. In a single year, Kennedy in his conferences produced more news than Roosevelt had meeting the press three or four times as often.

  CHAPTER XIII

  THE PUBLIC

  BUT THE PRESIDENT would not rely on the press conferences alone to inform the American people. Every working day Kennedy filled the news with statements, releases, proclamations, memoranda, public letters, messages and reports to the Congress and remarks to small groups in the White House. Every time he signed a bill, presented a medal, toasted a prime minister, swore in an official, lamented a death or approved a commemorative stamp, he spoke with a larger audience in mind. The press received twice as many White House news releases each year as had ever been true before.

  Salinger held two press briefings every day. Comprehensive background briefings were inaugurated to explain every Presidential message to the Congress. A few special news sessions were held by the President at Cape Cod and Palm Beach. He was the author of several magazine articles, on subjects ranging from the arts to physical fitness, and the subject of cover stories in every kind of magazine.

  Kennedy also initiated a series of White House luncheons with editors and publishers, mostly on a state-by-state basis (although one friendly get-together was limited to prominent newspapers which had opposed him in 1960). Well briefed in advance on their names, views and state’s problems, he talked informally, confidentially and extremely frankly about their interests and his. Wary news executives suspicious of being taken in by his charm went away impressed by his competence. “You ought to talk to the people this way,” said one publisher. To which the President replied, “What do you think I’m doing right now?”

  During his Christmas holiday in Palm Beach, both in 1961 and 1962, he invited the two dozen or so regular White House correspondents accompanying him to a free-wheeling three-to-four-hour “backgrounder” in his home on the year behind and the year ahead, dividing each session into domestic and foreign affairs discussions. Year-end “think pieces” (which would have been written anyway, he reasoned) were in this way better informed of views attributable to “the highest authority” or “sources close to the administration.” Although these phrases deceived no one in the know, it made for a freer and fuller exchange than would have been true of a regular press conference or a larger background group in Washington. The State Department also sponsored regular background briefings for editors at which the President spoke off the record. He also made frequent public addresses, usually followed by question-and-answer sessions, to various organizations of editors, publishers, business publications, inter-American press executives and cartoonists.

  TELEVISION

  But his greatest weapon, he said more than once, was television. In addition to his televised press conferences and major speeches, the President frequently issued short statements on television from the White House and frequently granted special television interviews. The most successful of these was the unprecedented interview conducted by the three White House correspondents for the major networks, carried by all three to a vast audience in December, 1962. The President did not influence the choice of either questioners or questions. Relaxed in his White House rocker, with no crowd of reporters and with the cameras concealed, he spoke with astonishing candor—almost as if he thought it was a private interview—about his views of the office, his problems and prospects. Receiving a tremendously favorable response, he planned to make such an appearance an annual affair, and scheduled a repeat performance for December 17, 1963, the anniversary of the first.

  The President, along with his office, his family and the White House, also became the focal point of numerous television (and illustrated magazine and newspaper) presentations which took the public behind the scenes. Reporters and cameramen stayed with the President in the course of his duties to record “a typical day at the White House,” “the actual conduct of Presidential business” or “how a decision is made.” These were not simulated conferences of the types staged in the previous administration. The reporters or cameramen were simply there when one of us walked into the President’s office for a wholly unrehearsed meeting.

  At times some of his associates were less comfortable than he with a camera crew observing their deliberations, and at times we found it necessary to make somewhat oblique references to sensitive subjects. Some critics worried that the presence of cameramen or reporters might interfere with the natural flow of business. But the President never permitted their presence when it might do so.

  Kennedy wearied of hearing how much more often Roosevelt had used the “fireside chat,” and he discovered with much satisfaction that the faulty memory of its advocates had greatly exaggerated its frequency. The largest number of “fireside chats” FDR ever made in one year was a total of four in his first year, at the depth of the depression and the height of his influence. He made only four more during the rest of his entire first term, and throughout his whole tenure averaged fewer speeches from his office than Kennedy.

  The danger which limited both men was not too much “exposure,” as commonly assumed, but too little selectivity. “The public psychology,” wrote Roosevelt, expressing sentiments which Kennedy shared, “cannot…be attuned for long periods of time to a constant repetition of the highest note in the scale.”

  I do not believe it is possible to “overexpose” a President like Kennedy. Nevertheless he could not, with any effectiveness, go on the air to denounce Big Steel, or announce a Cuban quarantine
, or deliver some momentous message, every month of the year. Selectivity was the key—selecting the right time and the right issues. As a commander saves his biggest guns for the biggest battles, so Kennedy limited his direct national appeals to situations of sufficient importance to demand it and sufficiently fluid to be helped by it. “I made a speech,” he reminded a press conference pressing him for a “fireside chat” on the Birmingham race conflict, “the night of [the] Mississippi [crisis] at Oxford, to the citizens of Mississippi and others, that did not seem to do much good. But this doesn’t mean we should not keep on trying…. If I thought it would [be helpful], I would give one.”

  At a time when the international scene and the narrow Congressional margins required all the national unity possible, John Kennedy saw no sense in dividing the country, or alienating the Congress, or squandering his limited political capital, or feeding the fires of extremism, or wearing out his welcome and credibility, by making major appeals for public support on too many hopeless or meaningless causes. “I will,” he said early in his term, “at such time as I think it most useful and most effective…use the moral authority or position of influence of the Presidency…. [But] I want to make sure that whatever I do or say does have some beneficial effect.”

  The most frequent complaint concerned Kennedy’s refusal to employ more “fireside chats” on behalf of legislation.1 He employed them where he thought they would help vital measures, such as the Test Ban Treaty, tax cut and civil rights bill and in his constant televised plugs for foreign aid, and he was also willing to fight for his program in press conference statements and speeches around the country. But he had to consider the legislative and political consequences of opening a “cold war” with a Congress that was in fact passing, even though it was very slowly passing, most of the important Kennedy items and that was nominally a Democratic Congress. If the public response, in the form of letters to the Congress, turned out to be light—as it usually is—he would have laid his full prestige on the line for little gain and possibly a loss.

  The fact is that a large proportion of the public will not listen to a Presidential speech on legislation. Many of those who do listen will resent being deprived of their regular TV entertainment. Very few of the rest feel sufficiently affected to write their Congressmen, and very few Congressmen feel sufficiently flexible to change their votes on the basis of such letters. Most members of Kennedy’s bipartisan opposition in Congress were either irrevocably committed by the time a speech was in order or permitted by their seniority and safe districts to disregard both the President and any petitions he might stir up. No speech could have sprung the Department of Urban Affairs free from the House Rules Committee, for example. No speech could have obtained passage of an education bill which lacked a hundred or more votes, or made the Senate Finance Committee move faster, or forced Louisiana’s Otto Passman to like foreign aid.

  Whether on TV or the public platform, John Kennedy’s major speeches were an important tool of his Presidency. He often used them to define administration decisions in specific terms and to convey those decisions throughout the government as well as the rest of the world. We had more experts from whom to seek ideas, facts and first drafts than we had in pre-Presidential years. Next-to-final drafts were usually submitted to the agencies concerned for their views, and this process was so slow on foreign policy speeches that McGeorge Bundy would gather all concerned around a table in his office to go over the draft in one sitting. We also had more pressures for completing authorized texts well ahead of time for advance distribution and foreign-language translation.

  But in other respects the texts of most major speeches, messages and other documents, including many of his letters to Khrushchev, were still produced basically in accordance with the rules described in Chapter II. The basic pattern of our collaboration remained the same. Major speeches and other policy statements reflected decisions taken in meetings in which I participated, enabling me to spell out the reasons and sometimes the very words he had used in those meetings. Groups of advisers could suggest outlines and alterations, and they could review drafts, but group authorship could not produce the continuity and precision of style he desired, or the unity of thought and argument he needed. “The big difference,” he said to me one day, “is all the different audiences that hear every word. In the Senate and campaign we didn’t have to worry so much about how Khrushchev and Adenauer and Nehru and Dirksen would react.”

  He took pains to have a hand in every major Presidential paper—not only speeches but letters, messages and proclamations—and he still chose his words and their arrangement with great care. His Inaugural, State of the Union, American University, United Nations, Berlin, Irish Parliament and other addresses, including those televised from the White House on Cuba and civil rights, earned him the title of one of the most articulate and eloquent Presidents since Lincoln.

  Eloquence depends not only on the words but on the man, the subject and the situation. Kennedy was still no orator. Others could be more forceful in voice, gestures, emphases and pauses. But as Lord Rosebery said of the impassioned oratory of Pitt, it was “the character which breathes through the sentences” that was impressive. Kennedy’s character could be felt in every word, and the dramatics his style may have lacked were supplied by the subject and situation.

  While we were more acutely aware of weighing each word in a speech, we still joked over what he insisted was my outrage at his changes and my determination to find some future use for every paragraph he cut. Some texts, such as the speech on peace at American University, represented primarily Presidential initiative with very little departmental contribution. Some, on necessary topics of little interest to him, such as reclamation, were basically unchanged from the products he received from collaboration between the departments and my office. And some, as in the past, were virtually ignored when he rose to speak. He became, however, so skillful at moving back and forth between his text and his interpolations that the press, unable to follow him on their copies, often assumed that an entire speech was extemporaneous when it was not.

  On speeches televised from the White House he stayed close to his carefully cleared texts. On political stump speeches, particularly outdoors, he often ignored them. One near mishap occurred during his noted outdoor speech before the West Berlin City Hall, which had all the air of a political rally. Departing from his text, fired by the enthusiasm of his audience, he delivered an inspiring series of challenges to all naive advocates of the Communist system, each one closing with the words: “Let them come to Berlin!” He included in this series: “And there are some who say in Europe and elsewhere we can work with the Communists. Let them come to Berlin!” Inasmuch as he had said only two weeks earlier at American University that we should try to find ways of working with the Communists, and inasmuch as he was looking forward to nuclear test-ban negotiations the following month in Moscow, this ad lib caused some consternation. Between City Hall and the Free University of Berlin it was discussed, and at the university he inserted this passage of Kennedy interpreting Kennedy:

  As I said this morning, I am not impressed by the opportunities open to popular fronts throughout the world. I do not believe any democrat can successfully ride that tiger. But I do believe in the necessity of the great powers working together to preserve the human race.

  POLITICS

  His unwillingess to make still more public TV appeals for legislation was hardly a matter of “hoarding” his personal and political popularity, as often charged. “No President in the past eighty years incurred greater political regional liabilities,” as the Saturday Review observed, and only Roosevelt in the past eighty years was the subject of so much hostile comment in parts of the business community. He was a President willing, if necessary, to risk defeat for his principles, but he preferred preserving both his principles and his power to effect them.

  Consequently politics was an ever-present influence in the Kennedy White House, not as the sole subject of many m
eetings in his office, but as a criterion for trips, visitors, appointees and speeches, as an unspoken force counterbalancing the unrealistic, checking the unreasonable, occasionally deterring the desirable and always testing the acceptable. It was automatically assumed by the staff that part of our role was to weigh the effect of every move and statement, large and small, on various voter groups, on Congress, on national unity and on the 1962 and 1964 elections. Kennedy retained in the White House his unusually acute political antennae, with which he sensed the public mood both quickly and accurately. He understood what moved people, what touched their hearts and what touched only their pocketbooks. He was good at distinguishing their momentary whims from their enduring convictions.

  There was no single source of this sensitivity. He read every fiftieth letter of the thirty thousand coming weekly to the White House, as well as a statistical summary of the entire batch, but he knew that these were often as organized and unrepresentative as the pickets on Pennsylvania Avenue. (Pickets and their placards never interested him—although he made friends one stormy day by arranging for a group of youthful peace marchers to be served coffee.) “Mail, unfortunately,” he told a 1962 press conference, “is not true as an indicator of the feelings of the people…. I got last week 28 letters on Laos…[and] 440 letters on the cancellation of a tax exemption for a ‘mercy’ foundation.”