A Thousand Days

by Arthur M. Schlesinger

  4. KENNEDY AND THE RADICAL RIGHT

  There was no question of a family quarrel with the radical right—and the fury of the right-wing response to Kennedy was a measure of his impact on the nation. If the intellectuals did not always recognize a friend, the reactionaries lost no time in recognizing an enemy.

  The burst of right-wing activity in the early sixties was a predictable historical phenomenon. In conservative periods, like the fifties, the radical right was characteristically disorganized and dormant. Its members were soothed by the eternal hope that a conservative administration might do something they would like. The existence of friends—or at least of nodding acquaintances—in Washington restrained them from major organizational efforts on their own. Thus McCarthy faded away quickly after the end of the Korean War; and the publication of Robert Welch’s The Politician in 1958, with its concise characterization of President Eisenhower as “a dedicated, conscious agent of the communist conspiracy,” and the formation the same year of his John Birch Society passed unnoticed.

  But the election of a progressive administration generally has a galvanizing effect on the radical right. It grows desperate, convinced that the nation is in mortal danger, that it is five minutes before midnight, that it must rally and resist before it is too late. This happened in the early thirties under Roosevelt. It happened again under Kennedy in the sixties.

  I first heard of the John Birch Society in an early-warning letter in December 1960 from that fine old progressive Republican Alfred M. Landon. One heard a great deal more of it and similar groups in the months following. The radical right appealed especially to the incoherent resentment of the frightened rich and the anxious middle class. It flourished particularly in states like California and Texas, overflowing with raw new money; in states like Arizona and Florida, where older people had retired on their pensions; and in small towns in the mountain states, where shopkeepers felt themselves harassed by big business, big labor and big government. The mood was one of longing for a dreamworld of no communism, no overseas entanglements, no United Nations, no federal government, no labor unions, no Negroes or foreigners—a world in which Chief Justice Warren would be impeached, Cuba invaded, the graduated income tax repealed, the fluoridation of drinking water stopped and the import of Polish hams forbidden.

  In domestic policy the philosophy of the radical right was well stated by Senator Strom Thurmond in a speech vindicating the right of the military to conservative political utterance: “If the military teaches the true nature of communism, it must necessarily teach that communism is fundamentally socialism. When socialism, in turn, is understood, one cannot help but realize that many of the domestic programs advocated in the United States, and many of those adopted, fall clearly within the category of socialism.” The social changes of the last generation were thus—‘objectively,’ as the communists themselves would have put it—a communist plot. In foreign policy the radical right, like the radical left, derived much of its early impetus from the Bay of Pigs, though it drew the opposite conclusion. It now rallied behind Senator Barry Goldwater, echoing his opposition to a “no-win” policy and his call for “total victory.”

  As Senator Thurmond’s declaration suggested, an early issue was the existence of right-wing views in the military establishment. This aroused attention in the spring of 1961 when Major General Edwin A. Walker was relieved of his division command in West Germany after having propagandized his troops with ultra-conservative political materials and suggested that Mrs. Roosevelt, Edward R. Murrow and others were under left-wing influence. Though reprimanded, Walker was not discharged; instead he was about to be reassigned to Hawaii as assistant chief of staff for training and operations when he resigned from the Army. Subsequently Senator J. W. Fulbright prepared a memorandum reporting the formation of an alliance between Army officers and right-wing groups under the imprimatur of a National Security Council policy statement of 1958 instructing military personnel to arouse the public to the menace of the cold war. This led to prolonged hearings by the Senate Armed Services Committee in which Fulbright was denounced for trying to ‘muzzle the military.’ In the meantime, Secretary McNamara quietly reorganized the military education program and terminated the relations between the program and private groups.

  President Kennedy felt deep concern at the spread of extremism, right and left. This concern was related, I feel sure, to his sense of the latent streak of violence under the surface of American life: the sun o’ercast with blood, the nation torn asunder and dismembered. “We are a frontier country,” James V. Bennett, the federal director of prisons, told the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, “and we have certain elements in our background and culture that incline us to the use of weapons more than some other countries in the world.” The tension and anonymity of urban life had further sharpened the impulse to violence. Every day the television industry instructed the children of the nation how easily problems could be solved by revolver shots. Fortifying the Gun-smoke ethic was a mood of national self-righteousness—the happy conviction of American uniqueness, which smoothed out and washed away the cruelties and sins of the past and which now licensed for Americans acts which, if performed by Russians or Chinese, would have seemed instinct with evil.

  It all culminated in an image of free-talking, free-shooting national virility. E. M. Dealey, chairman of the board of the Dallas Morning News, said furiously to the President that he was a weak sister; “we need a man on horseback to lead this nation, and many people in Texas and the southwest think that you are riding Caroline’s bicycle.” (When the editor of the evening paper in Dallas, the Times Herald, sent the President a note saying that Dealey did not speak for Texas, Kennedy scrawled a postscript on his acknowledgment: “I’m sure the people of Dallas are glad when afternoon comes.”) Early in November 1961 the President chatted in his office about the points he planned to make on a trip to the West Coast. An age of insoluble problems, he observed, breeds extremism, hysteria, a weakness for simple and passionate solutions. “There are two groups of these frustrated citizens,” he soon said at the University of Washington in Seattle, one group urging the pathway of surrender, the other the pathway of war.

  It is a curious fact that each of these two extreme opposites resembles the other. Each believes that we have only two choices: appeasement or war, suicide or surrender, humiliation or holocaust, to be either Red or dead.

  Against the left he urged the indispensability of strength; against the right, the indispensability of negotiation. But the challenge to the right was the main burden of the speech. “At a time when a single clash could escalate over night into a holocaust of mushroom clouds, a great power does not prove its firmness by leaving the task of exploring the other’s intentions to sentries.”

  Two days later in Los Angeles he returned to the theme. “In the most critical period of our Nation’s history,” he said, “there have always been those on the fringes of our society who have sought to escape their own responsibility by finding a simple solution, an appealing slogan or a convenient scapegoat.” Today such people

  look suspiciously at their neighbors and their leader. They call for “a man on horseback” because they do not trust the people. They find treason in our churches, in our highest court, in our treatment of water. They equate the Democratic Party with the welfare state, the welfare state with socialism, socialism with communism.

  Kennedy delivered his reply. “Let our patriotism be reflected in the creation of confidence in one another, rather than in crusades of suspicion. . . . Above all, let us remember, however serious the outlook, however harsh the task, the one great irreversible trend in the history of the world is on the side of liberty.”

  4. THE POLITICS OF RESENTMENT

  A few days later 1800 delegates attended a meeting of the National Indignation Convention at the Memorial Auditorium in Dallas, Texas. One speaker, to the delight of the crowd, complained that the chairman of the meeting had turned moderate: “All he wants-
to do is impeach Warren—I’m for hanging him.”* General Walker himself had now retired to Dallas to advocate the cause of the John Birch Society. Other right-wing organizations were trundling their wares across the country, like the Christian AntiCommunism Crusade of Dr. Fred Schwarz and the Christian Crusade of the Reverend Billy James Hargis. Even further to the right the Minutemen were drilling their members in guerrilla tactics to deal with Soviet invasion or other unspecified contingencies. In the outskirts of Washington itself, George Lincoln Rockwell was recruiting pimply youths for an American Nazi party.

  The spectrum of the right ran all the way from the amiability of Barry Goldwater to the lunacy of the outer fringe. The press reported much of this with surprising solemnity. In the summer of 1962 New York right-wingers, convinced that Nelson Rockefeller and Jacob Javits were beyond redemption, organized the Conservative Party; like Hughes in Massachusetts, though on the opposite side, they hoped to prepare the way for a national movement. When Life ran a skeptical story about Fred Schwarz, the outcry from Schwarz’s backers, some of whom were national advertisers, induced Life’s publisher, C. D. Jackson, to fly to a Schwarz rally in the Hollywood Bowl and offer a public apology. “I believe we were wrong,” Jackson said, “and I am profoundly sorry. It’s a great privilege to be here tonight and align Life magazine with Senator Dodd, Representative Judd, Dr. Schwarz and the rest of these implacable fighters against communism.”

  Aided by such reverent treatment, the right wing grew, if not more popular, at least richer. Careful analysis by Group Research, Inc., indicated that the expenditures of the thirty basic groups rose from $5 million in 1958 to $12.2 million in 1962 and $14.3 million in 1963; nor did this estimate include groups for which no figures were available, such as the very active youth organization Young Americans for Freedom. (The annual national office budget of Americans for Democratic Action in 1962 and 1963 was about $150,000.) A large amount of the right-wing finances, Group Research added, had “some sort of privileged status under the tax laws,” and the contributors included a number of leading industrial families and their family foundations.

  The more frenetic right-wing agitation focused more and more directly on the President and his family. Every President, of course, provokes his quota of more or less good-natured jokes, and so did Kennedy. In Texas businessmen passed out cards saying “I MISS IKE” and then, in lower case, “Hell, I even miss Harry.” The Kennedy cocktail? Stocks on the rocks. “Caroline Kennedy is certainly a nice kid. But that’s the last time we should let her plan a Cuban invasion.” The Kennedy rocking chair as the symbol of the New Frontier: you get the feeling of moving but you don’t go anywhere. If Jack, Bobby and Teddy were on a sinking boat, who would be saved? The country. “Truman showed that anyone can be President, Ike that no one could be President, Kennedy that it can be dangerous to have a President.”

  But in the domain of the radical right it all became much sicker and nastier. Not since the high point of the hate-Roosevelt enthusiasm of the mid-thirties had any President been the target of such systematic and foul vilification. Everything about Kennedy fed resentment: his appearance, his religion, his wealth, his intelligence, his university, his section of the country, his wife, his brothers, his advisers, his support of the Negroes, his determination to de-emotionalize the cold war, his refusal to drop the bomb. A widely mimeographed letter called for contributions to erect a Kennedy statue in Washington. “It was thought unwise to place it beside that of George Washington, who never told a lie, nor beside that of F. D. Roosevelt, who never told the truth, since John cannot tell the difference.” It went on:

  Five thousand years ago, Moses said to the children of Israel: “Pick up thy shovels, mount thy asses and camels, and I will lead you to the Promised Land.” Nearly five thousand years later, Roosevelt said: “Lay down your shovels, sit on your asses, and light up a Camel; this is the Promised Land.” Now Kennedy is stealing your shovels, kicking your asses, raising the price of Camels, and taking over the Promised Land.

  In Georgia, it was said, a movie house showing the film of Robert Donovan’s PT-109 inscribed on its marquee: “See how the Japs almost got Kennedy.” Southerners repeated with smacking relish a story about Kennedy’s seeking out a medium in order to interview the spirit of Abraham Lincoln. “I need your help on this question of civil rights,” Kennedy was represented as saying. “What is your advice?” “The only thing I can tell you,” Lincoln replied, “is to go to Ford’s Theater.” Other stories, often of an unbounded obscenity, must be left to specialists in political pornography. All this crystallized and disseminated the pose of national virility, the Gun-smoke stance; it encouraged the unthinking and the vicious to cherish their threats and hatreds. In the two years after November 1961 the Secret Service investigated thirty-four threats against the President’s life from the state of Texas alone.

  Kennedy, who disliked the very thought of an ‘age of hate,’ mobilized the weapons of reason to fight the spreading hatreds of his own land, beginning his education of the public before his first year was over. But he knew that reason by itself could not be enough. Once again, he fell back on his most powerful weapon—himself; on his own willingness to attest by example his faith in American rationality and decency, on his own determination, as Norman Mailer said in a flash of insight, to define “the nature of our reality for us by his actions.” Kennedy was in this sense the existential hero, though the term would have amused or depressed him. So in November of 1961 he chose to carry his attack on extremism into the city of Los Angeles where four weeks before the publisher of Life had publicly apologized to Fred Schwarz. So in the future he never hesitated to define America by his presence and courage in the heart of the enemy’s country.

  5. THE TRIAL OF 1962

  In this swirling mood of emotion Kennedy prepared to confront his first national electoral test—the congressional elections of 1962. The radical right, despite the Conservative Party of New York, constituted, of course, a tiny minority of the electorate and the radical left, despite Stuart Hughes, a tinier still. The great majority of the voters remained in the orbit of conventional politics. But the probabilities were always against the party in power in a mid-term election. In 1954 Eisenhower, for all his popularity, had lost control of both houses of Congress. Indeed, in the entire century only Theodore Roosevelt in 1902 and Franklin Roosevelt in 1934 had been able to prevent opposition gains in off years. The average loss of House seats by the party in power in mid-term elections, leaving out 1934, had been forty-four; the average in the Senate since the First World War, again excepting 1934, had been seven or eight.

  These statistics were gloomy. “History is so much against us,” Kennedy mused at a press conference. “[Yet] if we can hold our own, if we can win five seats or ten seats, it would change the whole opinion in the House and in the Senate.” No one thought this likely. In August the Gallup poll reported that twenty-four of the thirty-five marginal Democratic seats were in danger. Meanwhile Kennedy pondered his own role in the campaign. A letter from Thomas Storke, the venerable Santa Barbara editor, saying that Wilson had intervened disastrously in the 1914 campaign and hoping that Kennedy would not follow this example in 1962, prompted the President to ask me to check the record on presidential intervention in mid-term elections. Storke’s memory was inaccurate about 1914, a contest in which Wilson had taken no part; but the historical inquiry seemed to sustain his general point. I reported back that, while presidential intervention had steadily increased in the course of the century, there was no evidence that it had ever played a significant role. Roosevelt, for example, had made only ‘non-political’ speeches during the great Democratic triumph of 1934; while Eisenhower’s campaigns of 1954 and 1958—the most extensive ever undertaken by a President in mid-term elections—had not succeeded in staving off Democratic victories. My memorandum suggested that “the most fruitful form of presidential participation” was the non-political tour, quoting Theodore Roosevelt: “‘The most effective political sp
eeches are often those that are nominally not political speeches at all.’ History,” the memorandum concluded, “suggests that it would be a mistake . . . to turn the 1962 mid-term election into a test of personal confidence by actively intervening in the form of personal endorsement or advocacy of (or opposition to) individual candidates.”

  Kennedy wisely ignored both the memorandum and history. He already planned a non-political tour to dedicate dams in mid-August, and he undertook another in early September. But he plainly felt under wraps. Given his sense of the politics of modernity, he may subconsciously have perceived that he himself was the best argument for his issues and that the best hope was to turn the mid-term election precisely into a test of personal confidence. Campaigning, moreover, was a refreshing experience; he always returned cheerful and rejuvenated. I can remember his coming back enormously invigorated from New Jersey after his last-minute entry into the gubernatorial campaign in 1961, saying that the crowds lining the streets reminded him where his support really lay—and that most of them couldn’t care less whether the budget was balanced or not. He acknowledged that in the past “fate usually didn’t seem to be affected” by what Presidents had done; but “I’ve never believed that precedents really mean anything in politics. From my own personal experience as well as for other reasons, just because it happened this way in the past doesn’t mean anything. The question really is, can we interest enough people to understand how important the congressional election of 1962 is? And that is my function.”