The press conferences were the central forum of presidential contact. Kennedy averaged twenty-one a year, far fewer than Roosevelt and somewhat fewer than Eisenhower. Though at times oddly resistant when the time came for another press conference, he was the most skilled presidential practitioner in this medium since Roosevelt. Moreover, while Roosevelt’s press conferences were intimate off-the-record sessions around the presidential desk in the oval office, Kennedy’s were mass public affairs, often on live television; he achieved his success under far more exacting conditions.
Success was the product of study as well as of art. Salinger organized a meticulous briefing process, drawing in predicted questions and recommended responses from information officers across the government. The President would then convene a press conference breakfast, ordinarily attended by Salinger, Sorensen, Bundy, Heller and Robert Manning, the State Department’s Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs. Here the President would try out his answers, often tossing off replies which convulsed the breakfast table but which, alas, could not be diplomatically made on the occasion. Later in the day he would go over to the auditorium of the State Department, and the fun would begin: the forest of hands waving from the floor; the questioner recognized by a brisk jab of the presidential forefinger; then the answer—statistics rolling off the presidential tongue, or a sudden glint in the eye signaling the imminence of a throwaway joke, or, very occasionally, an abrupt frostiness of countenance; then the next questioner recognized almost before the answer to the first was completed—it was a superb show, always gay, often exciting, relished by the reporters and by the television audience.
One felt at times that the President missed chances to make points to the nation for fear of boring the men and women in the room by telling them things he supposed they already knew. F.D.R. had never hesitated to cast elementary statement or homely metaphor—lend-lease and the neighbor’s firehose—before the sophisticates of the Washington press corps, knowing that the key phrases would filter through to the people who needed them. In Kennedy’s case, the uninitiated, instead of learning something about a public issue, often only witnessed abstract and cryptic exchanges between reporter and President. Nonetheless, the conferences offered a showcase for a number of his most characteristic qualities—the intellectual speed and vivacity, the remarkable mastery of the data of government, the terse, self-mocking wit, the exhilarating personal command. Afterward he liked to relax, watch himself in action on the evening news and chat about the curious habits of the press. Once I asked him why he kept calling on the Texas newspaperwoman who had so offended him by asking about security risks in the State Department. He replied, “I always say to myself I won’t call on her. But she gets up every time and waves her hand so frantically that toward the end I look down and she’s the only one I seem to see.”
His relations with the press, like those of all Presidents, had its ups and downs. Calvin Coolidge is the only President on record who did not seem to care what was written about him. When someone asked him about a savage attack by Frank Kent in the American Mercury, he replied philosophically, “You mean that magazine with the green cover? It was against me, so I didn’t read it.” No other President was this philosophical; and Kennedy was certainly not. He read more newspapers than anyone except perhaps Roosevelt,* and very often with appreciation; but like Presidents Hoover, Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower—indeed, like most politicians—he retained an evidently inexhaustible capacity to become vastly, if briefly, annoyed by hostile articles or by stories based on leaks. When this happened there would be complaints to the staff, calls to reporters, searches for the sources of stories and even the cancellation for a time of the New York Herald Tribune. (This uncharacteristic act resulted from his irritation over the paper’s insistence in playing the congressional investigation of Billie Sol Estes on its front page while, he believed, studiously ignoring a concurrent investigation into stockpiling scandals in the Eisenhower administration.) Nor were relations improved when the information officer of the Defense Department talked imprudently about news as “part of the arsenal of weaponry” and affirmed “the inherent right of the government to lie . . . to save itself when faced with nuclear disaster.”
Washington reporters, with their acute sense of contemporaneity, always believe that each new administration is plotting an assault on the freedom of the press with a determination and malignity never before seen in the republic; the iniquities of past Presidents fade quickly in retrospect. So for a time in 1962 they proclaimed a deep sense of grievance over the ‘hypersensitivity’ of the President and the administration. For its part the administration used to wonder about the hypersensitivity of reporters, who seemed to feel that, if a government official dared disagree with a story, it was an attempt to ‘manage’ the news. When Look came out with a piece detailing the indignities which newspapermen were suffering under the reign of terror, Kennedy laughed and remarked, “This is the best example of paranoia I have seen from those fellows yet.”
This guerrilla warfare between press and government was, of course, inherent in the situation; it was also a great bulwark of national freedom. Gilbert Harrison, the editor of the New Republic, summed the problem up accurately:
From the past 10 years in Washington, I have decided that irrespective of party or person, race, creed or color, every public official, elected or not, has the same attitude toward journalists, and it is this: “If you knew what we knew, you would not say what you do.” Likewise, the attitude of the journalists is constant, and it is this: “If you knew what we knew, you would not do as you do,” which is sometimes revised to read: “If you would tell us what you are doing and what you mean to do, perhaps we would not say what we say.”
Each attitude is proper to the vocation of the one who holds it. Each is unyielding. If a President has never been known to telephone a critical journalist and tell him how wrong he, the President, has been, no journalist I know confesses his mistakes.
This was substantially the President’s view. When asked what he thought of the press in the spring of 1962, he said, “Well, I am reading it more and enjoying it less—[laughter]—and so on, but I have not complained, nor do I plan to make any general complaints. I read and talk to myself about it, but I don’t plan to issue any general statement on the press. I think that they are doing their task, as a critical branch, the fourth estate. And I am attempting to do mine. And we are going to live together for a period, and then go our separate ways.” [Laughter] The reporters understood this; and, despite the animated exchanges of 1962 and occasional moments of mutual exasperation thereafter, the press corps regarded Kennedy with marked fondness and admiration.
2. PROBLEMS OF THE CONVENTIONAL THEORY
Kennedy thus used the conventional instruments of public education with freedom and skill. But he felt that press conferences and public addresses could not work for him as they had worked for the Roosevelts and Wilson—that hortatory and explicit public education was simply not suited to the mood of the 1960s. For, as a student of history, he understood that public education did not take place in a vacuum. To move a nation, a President had first to have the nation’s ear; and there was no quicker way to dissipate presidential influence than to natter away when no one was listening.
Thus a decade of reformers and muckrakers, working in the cities and states, had given the nation’s ear to Theodore Roosevelt and Wilson, and a depression touching nearly every family in the country had given the nation’s ear to Franklin Roosevelt. The early thirties in particular had been a time when visible and tangible crisis had generated a hunger for national action. With people hanging on every presidential word, public education offered no great problem to a President who had something to say. But no President, not even one of the Roosevelts or Wilson, could create by fiat the kind of public opinion he wanted. Effectiveness in public education required leverage in the nation to begin with.
Kennedy had very little leverage. No muckraking agitation had prepared
the way for his Presidency; no national economic collapse was making his constituents clamor for action. His was an invisible and intangible crisis, in some ways more profound than the one which confronted Franklin Roosevelt but bearing infinitely less heavily on the daily lives of Americans. The economy was moving forward, 95 per cent of the labor force had jobs, American troops were not fighting in foreign lands, the country was bathed in physical contentment; and, except for racial minorities, spiritual disquietude floated about without commitment to issues. This acquiescent nation had elected him President by the slimmest of margins; no one could possibly claim his victory as a mandate for radical change. “President Kennedy today,” as Richard Rovere perceptively stated his problem, “is attempting to meet a challenge whose existence he and his associates are almost alone in perceiving.” The President liked to recall Owen Glendower’s boast in Henry IV, Part I—“I can call spirits from the vasty deep”—and Hotspur’s reply:
Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?
The possibility that they might not come had even troubled Presidents like the Roosevelts and Wilson. Thus by the spring of 1935 a feeling had arisen that F.D.R. was falling down on the job of public education. My father was one of those urging him then to carry his case to the people as he had done in 1933. Roosevelt replied, “My difficulty is a strange and weird sense known as ‘public psychology.’” To others he explained, “People tire of seeing the same name day after day in the important headlines of the papers, and the same voice night after night over the radio. . . . Individual psychology cannot, because of human weakness, be attuned for long periods of time to constant repetition of the highest note in the scale.” One had to assume that Presidents had a better sense of “public psychology” than most of their critics; that was one reason why they were Presidents and their critics were critics. Moreover, once in the White House, they were in the exact center of pressure and therefore more likely to have an accurate sense of the balance of conflicting forces. If they wanted to act, as Kennedy clearly did, it was idle to suppose that only a misreading of the political situation or mere indolence was holding them back. The presidential secret was timing. The clamor for action was part of the equation, and activist Presidents were wrong to resent such pressure (though of course they all, including Kennedy, occasionally did, because it was so often voiced by friends from whom they expected sympathy rather than complaint). And sometimes when they succumbed to the pleadings the results were hardly those one might have predicted. Throughout 1961 the New York Times demanded that Kennedy carry his program to the people. Then in May 1962 at a great outdoor rally the President called for the enactment of the Medicare bill, which the Times itself favored editorially. The speech went to thirty-two other rallies and to millions of homes throughout the country. It seemed a splendid exercise in public education and in mobilizing support for the administration program—exactly the sort of thing the Times had been advocating. But the Times immediately responded by condemning Kennedy for employing “hippodrome tactics.”
Timing remained the key. In the absence of visible crisis Presidents had to wait for some event to pierce the apathy and command the nation’s ear; experience was a more potent teacher than exhortation. At moments one felt that it was nearly impossible to change people or policies in advance of disaster, because only disaster could sufficiently intimidate and overcome those with vested interests in existing people and policies. So we read every day in the newspapers about the decay of the Diem regime in Vietnam. But, so long as the Secretaries of State and Defense endorsed the policy of unconditional support of Diem, it was hard for the President to act until some dreadful blow-up made the failure of the policy manifest—and by that time it might be too late. So too in Negro rights: if the President committed his prestige to congressional action before the nation was ready to listen to his arguments, he might squander the hope of later influence. In a sense, things had to get worse before there was a possibility of putting them better. Thus Estes Kefauver’s bill for the control of the marketing of drugs lingered in committee to immense public indifference until the thalidomide scandal provoked national anger and congressional action. Francis Keppel, the Commissioner of Education, used to express the hope that Congress would pass federal aid to education before some catastrophe—150 schoolchildren, for example, burned to death in a firetrap—came along to stir overdue national concern. In the fall of 1961 President Eisenhower went on television to deliver a political blast against the administration. A few days later over dinner at the White House Kennedy noted that the Eisenhower telecast had received a rating of only 7 as against 20 each for the programs—cowboys and crime—on competing channels. “People forget this,” he said, “when they expect me to go on the air all the time educating the nation. The nation will listen only if it is a moment of great urgency. They will listen after a Vienna. But they won’t listen to things which bore them. That is the great trouble.”
A further trouble was that a good deal of the public education doctrine was linked to the idea of bringing pressure on Capitol Hill by appealing ‘over the heads’ of Congress to the people. Critics recalled Wilson’s remark that the President had “no means of compelling Congress except through public opinion.” In the broad sense this was indisputable. Kennedy himself used to point out that every member of the House “subjected himself, every two years, to the possibility that his career will . . . come to an end. He doesn’t live a charmed life. You have to remember that the hot breath is on him also, and it is on the Senate, and it.is on the President, and it is on everyone who deals with great matters.”
But the notion that this was the way activist Presidents had managed Congress also sprang from garbled memories of Wilson and the Roosevelts. These Presidents passed their programs much more by party leadership within Congress than by popular pressure against it. Very few of F.D.R.’s early fireside chats, for example, were appeals for the enactment of pending legislation; and, when the coalition of southern Democrats and Republicans was joined together, no amount of his incomparable radio persuasion could thrust it asunder. In any case, the hot breath was not particularly relevant to the arithmetic of Kennedy’s Congress. No quantity of fireside chats was likely to change the vote of Representative Howard Smith, of Senator Harry Byrd, or, indeed, of most of the other strategically placed opponents of Kennedy’s program. “There’s nothing that can be done about a man from a safe district,” Kennedy used to say. “He’ll vote the way he wants to.” Such men did not need the President, the Democratic party or organized labor to keep their seats. For the 10 per cent of swing votes in Congress, quieter forms of suasion seemed more likely to produce the desired results.
Public education in the explicit manner of the Roosevelts and Wilson was thus not, in Kennedy’s judgment, particularly well adapted either to the times or to his special congressional dilemma—or to himself. This last is a subtler matter; for a period of visible domestic crisis like 1933 would doubtless have called forth different aspects of his own personality. But a politician lives in continuous interaction with his age; and the chemistry of the sixties confirmed Kennedy in temperamental traits already well marked—an aversion to what he called “highly charged” political positions, a scorn for histrionics, a recoil from cominess, a determination not to become a national scold or bore. These traits were rooted partly, as Richard Neustadt has suggested, in a rationalist’s “mistrust of mass emotion as a tool in politics.” Kennedy feared overexciting people about public issues, as he came to believe that his call for an airraid shelter program had done during the Berlin crisis of 1961; and he was embarrassed on the rare occasions when he succumbed to public emotion himself, as he did when the Cuban Brigade, freed from Castro’s prisons, presented its flag to him at Miami in December 1962. They were rooted too in that qualified historical fatalism which led him to doubt whether words, however winged, would by themselves change the world.
One other factor entered in
, and this I find hardest of all to assess. Contrary to a widespread impression, Kennedy did not perceive himself as a partisan President, nor did he wish the country so to perceive him. He perceived himself rather as a man who, unlike the Trumans and Robert Tafts of American politics, generally saw reason on both sides of complex issues. But he knew that the impression of a highly partisan young Democratic politician ruthlessly on the make had been one reason for the narrowness of his victory in 1960. The strategy of reassurance initiated so promptly after the election represented both Kennedy’s natural impulse and the only sensible response to the character of the vote. By taking a nonpartisan stance, he aimed at erasing the picture of the power-hungry young careerist and winning the national confidence he felt he lacked. As President, he replenished that strategy whenever he feared that any actions might revive the picture or weaken the confidence: thus his propitiatory course in the aftermath of the steel controversy.
At the time it seemed that Kennedy suffered from the illusion so common to new Presidents (even Roosevelt had it till 1935) that he, unlike any of his predecessors, could really be President of all the people and achieve his purposes without pain or trauma. Some of us, however, thought national argument the best way to break national apathy and communicate the reality of problems. We believed that the educational value of fights in drawing the line between the administration and its opponents would guarantee that, even if we did not have a law, we would have an issue. So we thought him mistaken in 1962 in making the entirely respectable, safe and overrated trade expansion bill his top legislative priority instead of staging a knockdown-drag-out fight over federal aid to education or Medicare. To the President I would cite the Roosevelts, Wilson, Jackson and so on in arguing the inevitability and superiority of the politics of combat as against the politics of consensus. But, while he did not dispute the historical points, he plainly saw no reason for rushing prematurely into battle.
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