Kennedy

by Ted Sorensen

The United States was still not first, said the President. He was not lulled by a variety of seemingly indifferent statements from Chairman Khrushchev, including the suggestion at Vienna that the U.S. could better afford to go to the moon first and then the Soviet Union would follow. Nor was he deterred by a swelling chorus of dissenters at home. After each striking Soviet success, he noted, there were demands that we do more on a crash “Manhattan Project” basis. After each American astronaut’s flight, there were demands that the world recognize our pre-eminence. But during the long intervals between flights, there were demands—sometimes from the same political and editorial sources—that our space budget be cut back and our timetable slowed down. Taxpayers complained about the cost. Scientists complained that more important activities were being slighted. Republicans began dipping into such phrases as “boondoggle” and “science fiction stunt.”

  But the President, once started, was not backing out. To those who said the money could better be spent relieving ignorance or poverty on this planet, he pointed out that this nation had the resources to do both but that those members of Congress making this point seemed unwilling to vote for more welfare funds, regardless of the size of the space program. To those who criticized concentration on the moon shot, he pointed out that this was a focal point for a broad-based scientific effort, and that some sixty other unrelated projects comprised nearly one-quarter of the space budget. To those who argued that instruments alone could do the job, he replied that man was “the most extraordinary computer of them all…[whose] judgment, nerve and…[ability to] learn from experience still make him unique” among the instruments. To those who feared that the publicity given our launchings would cost us heavily in the event of failure, he replied that this risk not only demonstrated our devotion to freedom but enhanced the prestige of successes which might otherwise be written off as second-best.

  He was concerned, to be sure, about risks to the astronauts’ lives; and he made clear at the outset that, “Even if we should come in second…I will be satisfied if, when we finally put a man in space, his chances of survival are as high as I think they must be.” He was also concerned about the program’s effect on our nation’s supply of scientists and engineers, and voiced new urgency for his higher education and other personnel development programs. He was concerned, finally, about waste and duplication in the space effort, and kept his Budget Director, Science Adviser and Space Council riding herd on the rapidly growing NASA complex (although not, he admitted, very successfully).

  But he never relinquished that goal, “not simply to be first on the moon,” as he put it, “any more than Charles Lindbergh’s real aim was to be the first to Paris,” but to strengthen our national leadership in a new and adventuresome age. In September of 1962, at Rice University in Houston, his most notable address on the subject summed up all the reasons why this nation must “set sail on this new sea.” The exploration of space will go ahead whether we join it or not, he said; and just as the United States was founded by energy and vision, and achieved world leadership by riding the first waves of each new age—the industrial revolution, modern invention and nuclear power—so this generation of Americans intends to be “the world’s leading space-faring nation.” His remarks revealed much of his general outlook on life as well as on space:

  But why, some say, the moon?…And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, thirty-five years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? [A traditional, but almost inevitably more powerful, football rival.]…

  We choose to go to the moon in this decade, and do the other things, not because they are easy but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills….

  Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it, and he said, “Because it is there.”

  Well, space is there, and…the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there.

  Kennedy’s accelerated space program also served as a useful aid to American foreign policy. Other nations cooperated in tracking our space vehicles and benefited from our weather, navigation and communications satellites. Many instituted space research programs in conjunction with our own. But it was not until after the orbital flight of John Glenn in 1962 that the Soviet Union for the first time showed any interest in space cooperation.

  The Glenn flight was a turning point in many ways. Ten times it had been postponed. Frequently during the five-hour, three-orbit trip unforeseen dangers threatened to burn Glenn alive. The President, who enjoyed talking with each astronaut immediately upon the latter’s safe return, personally liked Glenn immensely. Indeed, he found all the astronauts to be a remarkably competent and personable group. He did not approve of the rights granted them by his predecessor to make large profits through the exploitation of their names and stories while still in military service; nor did he want the period or frequency of their parades and speech-making to reach a level interfering with their work. But he recognized that their courage and achievement merited special honors. “The impact of Colonel Glenn’s magnificent achievement,” he said, after Glenn was safely down, having watched his flight most of the day on TV, “goes far beyond our own time and our own country. We have a long way to go. We started late. But this is the new ocean, and I believe the United States must sail on it.”

  At Vienna Khrushchev—dismissing the importance of scientific coordination on launchings which he asserted were undertaken primarily for prestige—had said cooperation was impossible anyway because he did not want his rockets observed. In a later interview he had compared space progress with the evolution of insects, with his nation in the flying stage and the Americans merely jumping. But among the many cables from heads of state pouring in after the Glenn flight was a Khrushchev message extending not only congratulations but new interest in cooperation. There had been no such response, noted Kennedy, to similar proposals in his Inaugural, State of the Union and United Nations addresses. “But we…now have more chips on the table…so perhaps the prospects are improving.”

  The President’s letter to Khrushchev on specific areas of cooperation largely repeated the proposals set forth over a year earlier in his first State of the Union: a joint weather satellite system, communications satellite coordination, an exchange of information on space medicine, cooperative tracking arrangements and other, less dramatic areas. The Soviet response was limited. Communist suspicions and secrecy were hard to dent, and negotiations proceeded slowly. Some of Kennedy’s own advisers complained that too much cooperation instead of competition would dampen Congressional interest and appropriations. But the limited arrangement finally reached—and as of this writing never implemented by the Soviets—was at least a small first step toward fulfillment of the vow he made at Rice about space:

  …that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace…not…filled with weapons of mass destruction, but with instruments of knowledge and understanding…for the progress of all people.

  4. Foreign Aid and the Peace Corps

  John Kennedy’s concept of peace meant more than an absence of war. It required a stable community of free and independent nations, free from the unrest and strife on which Communism fed. It required those nations blessed with plenty to help those weakened by want. He gave top priority upon entering the White House to America’s programs for the new and developing nations. “The great battleground for the defense and expansion of freedom today,” he said,

  is the whole southern half of the globe—Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East—the lands of the rising peoples. Their revolution is the greatest in human history. They seek an end to injustice, tyranny and exploitation. More than an end, they seek a beginning.

  He regarded a revitalized program of economic aid as the principal instrument with which we could help them begin. It was not only a matter of idealis
m or generosity. These vast undeveloped continents were, in the absence of a major war, the crucial point of conflict between East and West. The modernization and maturity of their societies would strengthen our own security. He recognized that each of the poor nations (not all of them could even be called “developing,” although that was the official term used to avoid “backward” or “undeveloped”) was in a different stage, faced with different problems; and he emphasized that no amount of American aid would be effective unless the recipient nation mobilized its own resources under a long-range economic plan. But his efforts to obtain that kind of self-help and self-reform by the recipient nations were only partially successful. So were his efforts to obtain a larger cooperative effort by the other industrialized nations. And so, finally, were his efforts to obtain a thoroughgoing reorganization and long-term financing in the American aid program.

  Each year, as previously recounted, the Congressional opposition to foreign aid increased—and each year the President’s indignation increased with it. “They try to sound so noble talking about setting an example with our own people first,” he said to me one evening. “What does medical care for the aged mean in countries with a life expectancy of forty? Who’s impressed by our education programs if most of them are illiterate and never went to school? I’m all for helping the distressed areas and the unemployed, but these people are concerned about just living.” Frequently, in press conferences and public speeches, he expressed that same indignation in terms he hoped the Congress and country would understand:

  It is hard for any nation to focus on an external or subversive threat…when its energies are drained in daily combat with the forces of poverty and despair. It makes little sense for us to assail…the horrors of Communism, to spend $50 billion a year to prevent its military advance—and then to begrudge spending…less than one-tenth of that amount to help other nations…cure the social chaos in which Communism has always thrived.

  To be sure, some important gains were achieved in this country’s program: a more streamlined Agency for International Development (AID) in place of the previous conglomeration (although he later regretted the new title as an unhelpful gimmick), a shift in emphasis from military to economic assistance and from grants to loans, new incentives for private investment, and at least a degree of long-term, country-by-country planning, with emphasis on those nations able to organize their own assets and in time stand up on their own. Although delays and deficiencies in the program’s leadership in 1961-1962 lost much of the momentum sought in his first foreign aid message to the Congress, he found in David Bell the AID program’s ablest administrator in many years. At the United Nations he helped launch an international “Decade of Development.” But the scale of the assistance effort by this and the other prospering countries (whom he tried to spur to greater heights) was not enough to prevent the gap between rich and poor nations from widening, to the despair of their citizens and to the despair of John Kennedy.

  He had more success with two specialized efforts. The “Food-for-Peace” program, initiated by a Hubert Humphrey amendment during the previous administration, had been limping along, caught in a cross fire between Agriculture and State, and regarded as an outlet for farm surpluses rather than American generosity. Kennedy set up an independent Food-for-Peace office in the White House under George Mc-Govern (and later Richard Reuter), secured legislation authorizing its expansion, and within eighteen months shipped more food abroad than Herbert Hoover and his associates had shipped in ten years of relief to the victims of World War I. Preferring to pay for transporting food otherwise stored at the taxpayers’ expense, he nearly doubled the program’s previous volume, with such new uses as school lunch programs and food-for-wages projects in more than eighty countries. Some of the food was donated in order to combat famines and floods in the Congo, Kenya, Vietnam and elsewhere, some of it was given to local schools and relief agencies, some of it was delivered under long-term credit arrangements, and some of it was paid for in local currencies. The program was a marked success.

  But Kennedy was proudest of a unique institution he had advocated in his 1960 campaign, created in his first hundred days and staffed in the field with Americans motivated only by the kind of dedication he had urged—the Peace Corps. The Peace Corps was a cadre of several hundred, later several thousand, mostly youthful volunteers carrying American energy and skills directly to the people of the poor nations. They lived with those people in their villages, spoke their languages, helped them develop their natural and human resources, and received no compensation other than the satisfaction of helping others. The Peace Corps became in time—at least in the developing nations—the most stirring symbol of John Kennedy’s hope and promise.

  Its formation, however, was not untroubled. Liberals demeaned it as a gimmick. Conservatives dismissed it as a nonsensical haven for beatniks and visionaries. Communist nations denounced it as an espionage front. Leaders in many of the neutral nations most in need of it heaped resentment and ridicule upon it. And its own backers threatened to dissipate its momentum by talking, even before it was started, of a UN peace corps and a domestic peace corps and a dozen other diversions. In 1961, in both the House and the Senate, Republican opposition on the key roll-call votes was strong.

  But the President—and his energetic, idealistic brother-in-law, Peace Corps Director Sargent Shriver—built carefully and persistently. They pledged that the Peace Corps would be nonpolitical in world as well as domestic affairs. They made clear that it would go only where specifically invited. Attempts by the CIA to use or infiltrate it were stoutly and successfully resisted. Shriver, with the persuasion that only a member of the family could muster, induced the President to reverse his decision to put the Peace Corps under the far less popular AID. Applicants were carefully screened and thoroughly trained. Misfits were promptly weeded out. Peace Corps country and regional directors were unusually well qualified. Its mission was described by the President in practical, matter-of-fact tones, leaving the zeal to Shriver.

  In time, its birth pangs and growing pains gave way to flourishing health. Each year the Peace Corps appropriation grew larger and the opposition diminished. Each country with Peace Corps volunteers asked for more. When a postcard from a volunteer in Nigeria was distorted into a major incident, the President penned a handwritten note of reassurance to the young lady involved and asked that it be hand-delivered to her upon her arrival back in this country. With surprisingly few errors and incidents, these volunteers—who became better known outside of a host country’s capital city than any American diplomat, and who worked as teachers, doctors, nurses, agricultural agents, carpenters and technicians of all kinds at all levels—served as this nation’s most effective ambassadors of idealism. They also brought back to this country an unusually well-grounded understanding of life in the backwoods of the world.

  A special bond grew up between the President and the Peace Corps volunteers. Today they are known in some areas as “Kennedy’s children”—and that term comes close to describing how he and they felt about each other. He was truly, one Peace Corpsman would later write, “the volunteer.” And the Peace Corps volunteers, said the President—who met with groups of them every chance he could get—represented the highest response to his Inaugural injunction to “ask not.”

  5. The Alliance for Progress

  His Inaugural Address had contained another phrase from the campaign—a new “alliance for progress”—Alianza para el progreso. No continent was more constantly in the President’s mind—or had a warmer appreciation of his efforts—than Latin America. Many Africans, to be sure, had a special regard for John Kennedy—because of his civil rights efforts, his Senate speech on Algeria, his lead-off appointment of the crusading Mennen Williams as Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, his initiative to achieve better treatment and housing for their diplomats in Washington, his enthusiasm for the African independence movements, and his bold support of Adoula in the Congo, the Angolans
against Portugal and the Volta Dam project in Ghana. Many Latin Americans, in contrast, were initially skeptical of Kennedy’s early promises, which sounded familiar, and dubious about his early emphasis on anti-Communism and Castro and his failure to put one man in charge of hemispheric policy. But in time they realized he meant what he said when he called their continent “the most critical area in the world.”

  Both the name and the essence of the Alliance for Progress first publicly appeared in the text of a Kennedy election campaign speech in Tampa, Florida. With time running short, he dropped the phrase and a proposed program from his actual delivery, assuring reporters later that he stood by the full text. The plight of our Latin-American neighbors was, in fact, a favorite theme throughout his campaign—this nation’s failure to relieve their poverty, the favors we bestowed upon their military dictators, the neglect of the entire continent in U.S. student exchange, Voice of America, economic development and other programs. He talked one night on the Caroline of concentrating on Latin America during his first months in office; and he requested suggestions for a policy label as meaningful for the sixties as Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor Policy” had been for the thirties. I suggested “Alianza,” assuming that it had broader meaning than “alliance” because it was the name of an insurance cooperative organized by some of our Mexican-American supporters in Arizona. A Cuban refugee and Latin-American expert in Washington, Ernesto Betancourt, suggested through Goodwin the addition of “para el progreso” (although for some time we mistakenly dropped the “el”). The candidate liked it—and the Alliance for Progress was born.

  The official birth date, however, was March 13, 1961, when the President convened, in the East Room of the White House, the ambassadors from Latin America. The ten-point program which he unveiled in that address under the Alliance for Progress label had its roots in the undelivered portion of his Tampa speech, his January State of the Union speech and his December, 1958, speech in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The Alliance was legislatively launched following the East Room speech—which was broadcast in Spanish, Portuguese, French and English throughout the hemisphere by the Voice of America—when he sent a special message to Congress requesting funds.