ZENITH
I felt I was walking with destiny and all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.
—Winston Churchill, May 10, 1940
Jack Kennedy’s victories had taught him essential lessons. He recognized the edge a candidate receives when he’s made the earliest start and kept at it. He realized the importance of the vital energy gained by building a trusted team. He discovered the power derived when a politician grasps the nature of the times and wields that understanding.
But failures also offer education. The Bay of Pigs taught him something more critical: When the stakes are the highest and most desperate, there must be both clarity and completion. Know the enemy and your goal, and hold fast to what you’re attempting. Should any oppose your course, fight them with all your resolve.
Throughout the summer of 1961, Jack Kennedy had managed to sustain his hopes for a ban on nuclear arms testing to which the Soviets would agree. At the very heart of his presidency was his mission to keep his country from nuclear war. It would be, he knew, a battle from which no winners could emerge. In 1946, the young journalist John Hersey had published in the New Yorker his account of the survivors of the attack on Hiroshima; no one who’d read it would ever forget it.
We’d agreed, as had the Soviets, to halt nuclear testing in 1958. Yet, in July, a Gallup poll had indicated that public support for the resumption of U.S. nuclear testing stood at two to one. The other side, exhibiting its greater aggression, suddenly showed its hand. August brought Moscow’s shocking announcement of its unilateral decision to resume nuclear testing in the atmosphere. Kennedy’s reaction—“fucked again!”—was deep and personal. Even before this horrifying news hit the headlines, Americans had gotten reports that the milk drunk by Russian children across the country contained detectable traces of radioactivity. Had the Russians treacherously been testing underground all along, even if they’d sworn not to? And was this a clue? And, if so, what were we going to do about it?
Over the next three months the Soviet Union would go on to conduct thirty-one such tests, including the exploding of the largest bomb in history—58 megatons, four thousand times more powerful than the one dropped over Hiroshima in 1945. Despite partisan pressure to respond by resuming U.S. testing, Kennedy resisted. He persisted in believing in the possibility of a comprehensive ban on all forms of nuclear arms testing, atmospheric and underground as well. “Mankind must put an end to war—or war will put an end to mankind.” Yet as the leader of the Free World, he couldn’t allow the Soviets to proceed without a U.S. response. With this in mind, the president instructed Defense Secretary McNamara to begin testing underground.
The United States had tested its first nuclear weapon at the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico in July 1945, a month before the U.S. fighters flew off to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those attacks, of course, brought about the Japanese surrender and ended World War II. Seven years later, the United States tested the first hydrogen bomb in the isolated Marshall Islands in the western Pacific in early November 1952. It was one of the last acts of the Truman administration before the election on November 4 ushered in the Eisenhower era.
Truman himself had presided over the dawn of the nuclear era by signing off on the Hiroshima and Nagasaki missions. Other peacetime nuclear explosions—military tests of new, far deadlier weapons—followed on his watch. Then, under President Eisenhower, the number doubled or even tripled. For a dozen years, from 1946 to 1958, the Marshall Islands, a U.S. Trust Territory until 1986, bore the brunt of America’s experimentation. For the Soviets, the testing of their nuclear weapons secretly in their vast territory had begun in 1949. They had selected sites in remote Kazakhstan and later in Novaya Zemlya, a chain of islands in the Arctic Ocean at Russia’s northern edge.
The history of the Cold War is written in the long lists of these many tests. During this period, our allies France and Great Britain were intent on developing their own nuclear arsenals. But distinctions such as “atomic” and “hydrogen,” “nuclear” and “thermonuclear” mean little to the average citizen. Americans accepted the basic contradiction. The United States could keep the Soviets from aggression in Europe by the threat of nuclear retaliation. At the same time, neither side would dare use nuclear weapons, knowing the other would as well.
Even after Kennedy issued the directive for underground nuclear tests, he continued to be pressured by his own experts. They wanted more. In November, the National Security Council delivered a blunt assessment: “If we test only underground and the Soviets tested in the atmosphere, they would surely pass us in nuclear technology.” Still, Kennedy persisted in trying to negotiate. Following a further failure to bring the Soviets around to the American position, he let it be known that the United States was now prepared to begin atmospheric testing again. Though he did nothing beyond indicate American willingness to resume, it was a necessary step in getting to the negotiating table. With it came a new pressure: Prime Minister Harold Macmillan of Britain, considered by JFK a personal as well as an official friend, urged the United States to put off any such activity for six more months.
As 1962 began, Kennedy hadn’t given up on his hope of bringing the Russians around to his idea of a peaceful rivalry, not a nuclear one. What he cared about, above all, was making sure the nuclear genie got put back in the bottle; for him, arriving at a mutual test ban would be the first step. “A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step,” he liked to quote.
Nothing mattered more to him.
In February he and Prime Minister Macmillan jointly wrote a letter to Khrushchev, calling for a “supreme effort” to stop the arms race and avert a nuclear apocalypse. Kennedy, in a phone call with Ben Bradlee not long after sending it, shared his frustration with what he called this “hard-boiled” conflict over nuclear weapons testing between the United States and the USSR, but also the “soft-boiled” one with the British.
Kennedy’s national security team now voted unanimously to resume atmospheric testing. But with the next round of international peace talks scheduled for March in Geneva, he wanted to delay the announcement. It would get in the way, he felt, of offering Khrushchev another chance.
It didn’t matter. Once again, his approaches were refused, his aims thwarted—and, as a result, he saw himself gradually pushed toward brinkmanship. At this point, with the Russians intransigent and any attempts at persuasive diplomacy a failure, Jack felt it was time to present his case to the country. On March 2, speaking on television and radio for forty-five minutes, he made the case for deterrence, explaining the strategic necessity.
He wanted to explain to millions of worried Americans why he’d agreed to resume atmospheric testing. “For all the awesome responsibilities entrusted to this office, none is more somber to contemplate than the special statutory authority to employ nuclear weapons in the defense of our people and freedom.” He needed to test, he said, in order to maintain the country’s deterrent strength. “It is our hope and prayer that these . . . deadly weapons will never be fired.” Red Fay, at the White House for dinner that night, recalled how deeply delivering the speech had affected his friend. “It was about 9:30 when the President finally arrived. Jackie had placed me so that when he came in, I’d be sitting on his left. He was flushed . . . really worn from the whole experience. Everybody sensed that he was very tense. His hands shook. . . . Everybody else, because of his tension, all started to talk among themselves. He directed his conversation to me and said, ‘God, I hope you’ve been enjoying yourself over here, because I’ve been over there in that office, not knowing whether the decision I made . . . ’ ” His voice trailed off, and Fay was left to imagine the agonizing weight of the responsibility that he felt.
Kennedy had dark forebodings. “Ever since the longbow,” he would tell a trusted visitor to the oval office, “when man has developed new weapons and stockpiled them, somebody has come along and used them. I don’t know how we can escape it wi
th nuclear weapons.”
Still Kennedy clung to the fading notion he might be able to shift the two-power rivalry between the United States and the Soviets to peaceful pursuits. He understood that the real contest between the USA and the USSR was over authority in the “Third World.” The rising peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America were looking to see who was winning, which system—democracy or Communism—best suited their needs and their hopes.
The ability to conquer space mattered greatly in this quintessential Cold War struggle to be top gun. The way to win was by looking like a winner. Unfortunately, through 1961 the Soviets had held the competitive edge. The launch of Sputnik four years earlier in 1957 had thrown America off stride, and the flight of Yuri Gagarin in April 1961 had done the same again, making the Russians seem invincible by virtue of their superior technology.
But on February 20, 1962, the balance of power, when it came to achievement in space, was restored. On that day, John Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth, circling the globe three times in Friendship 7. A marine among the original seven American astronauts picked by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in 1959, Glenn met with President Kennedy at the White House both before and after the flight. Even space—especially space—isn’t free of politics, John Glenn well understood. Kennedy knew “we were actually superior to the Soviets and that that’s what we were out to prove.”
Glenn’s triumphant space flight proved the boost NASA needed. What it had lacked before were bragging rights. “I think one reason my flight got so much attention was that we sort of turned the corner in public opinion at that point.” In fact, conquering space offered an unprecedented thrill for the American public. Suddenly it seemed as if all things extraordinary were possible under the young president’s leadership. The dark shadows cast by the unchecked arms race were forgotten for the moment. Yet, however urgent the question of nuclear disarmament was, it was far from the only crisis facing John F. Kennedy.
• • •
In the fall of 1961, Walter Heller, who chaired the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, came to tell him that it was crucial to the economy that steel prices get brought under control. Because the industry’s high prices drove up costs across the board, they had the effect of crippling America’s ability to compete with foreign producers.
Kennedy acted. To keep American steel in the game, Kennedy went in and won an agreement from the United Steelworkers to cut back their wage demands. In March 1962, industry executives and top union officials gathered at the White House and emerged from the meeting having agreed to defer increases. While the president had no right to tell the steel companies how much to charge, the deal was clear: labor would keep down salaries, the executives would hold back on prices. Afterward, JFK called both sides to thank them for making concessions in the national interest. The union men, when he talked to them, seemed especially pleased to hear the president praising them for their sacrifice.
Then came trouble. Roger Blough, chairman of United States Steel, requested a meeting. From across the cabinet table he handed Kennedy a press release. His company was raising the price of steel 3.5 percent. “Mr. Blough,” JFK said, “what you are doing is in the best interest of your shareholders. My shareholders are every citizen of the United States. I’m going to do everything in the best interest of the shareholders, the people of this country. As the president of the United States, I have quite a bit of influence.”
Blough, Jack realized, had already released the announcement. “You have made a terrible mistake,” he said. “You have double-crossed me.”
To Ken O’Donnell, it was a shocking episode. “These guys felt they were so powerful they could stiff the president of the United States without consequences.” He also saw how livid his boss was. “He was white with anger.” Big steel had betrayed its workers and “made a fool of him.” Discussing it with Ben Bradlee, Jack explained he wasn’t about to take a “cold, deliberate fucking.”
The president’s credibility was now on the line because he’d acted as broker. Labor leaders, he knew, would never trust him again. The steel industry, meanwhile, assumed, “wrongly, he could not or would not do anything.” O’Donnell, who’d watched him at work in Massachusetts, knew what sort of surprise they were in for. “You find out about these guys in these steel companies, where they have been on vacation, who they have been with on vacation,” he instructed.
His instincts told him where the corporate chiefs were vulnerable. “I don’t think U.S. Steel or any other of the major steel companies wants to have Internal Revenue agents checking all the expense accounts of their top executives,” Kennedy told Red Fay, who, before becoming undersecretary of the navy, had himself been a Republican businessman. “Too many hotel bills and nightclub expenses would be hard to get by the weekly wives’ bridge group out at the Country Club.”
The next day, Attorney General Robert Kennedy announced that, under the antitrust laws, a grand jury investigation into the steel industry’s pricing had been ordered. Subpoenas to produce documents were served on U.S. Steel. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara instructed the Pentagon to purchase steel “where possible” from companies that had not raised prices. Later that day, in a press conference, Kennedy addressed the issue: “. . . the American people will find it hard, as I do, to accept a situation in which a tiny handful of steel executives whose pursuit of private power and profit exceeds their sense of public responsibility can show such utter contempt for the interests of 185 million Americans.” By the next night, eight steel companies that had announced price hikes canceled them.
The president’s response to the pullback was to congratulate the steel companies for honoring the public good. “Kennedy’s style of politics: you never paint a guy into a corner,” O’Donnell later observed. “You give the other fellow as much credit as you can. So, he wants a statement thanking the steel companies for realizing their commitment to the United States Government was more important than their commitment to their stockholders.”
But the swords were sheathed only when the mission was accomplished. America’s competitiveness was restored, but revenge had also been extracted. Robert Kennedy later confessed the rough tactics employed. “We looked over all of them as individuals . . . we were going to go for broke . . . their expense accounts and where they’d been and what they were doing. I picked up all their records . . . I told the FBI to interview them all, march into their offices the next day! We weren’t going to go slowly. . . . So, all of them were hit with meetings the next morning by agents. All of them were subpoenaed for their personal records. I agree it was a tough way to operate, but under the circumstances, we couldn’t afford to lose.”
• • •
When the action settled, Jack Kennedy didn’t like being left alone. If no one else happened to be around for the evening, he’d ask Dave Powers—now, like Ken O’Donnell, a presidential special assistant—to stay and have supper with him. They’d then spend the evening together until it was time for Dave to escort him to his bedroom. When he was finally ready to sleep, it’d be: “Good night, pal. Will you please put out the light?”
What’s curious—and fascinating—are the fixed orbits JFK assigned to this circle of friends. He always exhibited great fondness for his “Irish mafia” of O’Donnell, O’Brien, and Powers, but they were never part of his social life. With the exception of Powers, who’d join him when nothing else was going on, these men formed an indispensable support team that could be dismissed at sundown. The same went for Ted Sorensen, who’d spent those four years with him in close quarters day after day, flying around the country. They’d become so attuned that Sorensen was practically an alter ego, yet he was never invited for an evening out with his boss.
Novelty and turnover mattered in Jack’s personal world. And, naturally, there were rules. Chuck Spalding liked to say that nobody got as much as forty-eight hours with him. If you bored him, you got less. Anyone ever imagining he was an equal colleague s
oon knew better. Even social friends might step across invisible boundaries and pay the price. Ben Bradlee was “banished,” to use his word, for several months in 1962 for daring to mention to another reporter how sensitive Kennedy was to critical reporting. Proving Bradlee to be right, Jack gave him a protracted cold shoulder—a kind of grown-up’s “time out”—until eventually the Bradlees were returned to his good graces.
In the White House, he didn’t leap up at dawn like some presidents, but read the newspapers in bed over breakfast. He regularly went for a swim before lunch, took a nap afterward, and then would have another swim before dinner. Kennedy was far from the healthiest president on record, but, clearly, he wanted to come across as that. In photographs, especially, he projected a smiling vitality. When it came to his ongoing medical problems—above all, the intractable back pain—he didn’t complain. Nor did he explain.
As a married man, he’d decided not to forgo his bachelor pleasures. It seems not to have occurred to him. Lem had been right to try to warn Jackie at the wedding. But one of his affairs had an abrupt ending not of his own choosing. In March of 1962, he was visited by J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI, which had kept tabs on him during his Inga Arvad days, had now been chronicling his current relationship with a woman “of interest” to the Bureau. “Information has been developed that Judith E. Campbell, a freelance artist, has associated with prominent underworld figures Sam Giancana of Chicago and John Roselli of Los Angeles. Went on to note the phone calls back and forth between the White House and Campbell.” President Kennedy broke off the liaison with Campbell, who’d been introduced to him by Frank Sinatra, later that day.
His affair with the free-spirited Washington socialite Mary Meyer was very different. This was a relationship of equals. Divorced at the time of their relationship, she’d been married to a top CIA strategist, Cord Meyer, and was the sister of Tony Bradlee. So well did Jack segment his life, he could be good friends with her brother-in-law at the same time he was sleeping with her. He’d regularly see Meyer, who was legendarily attractive and also unpredictable, at Georgetown and White House parties. Sometimes he’d even be the one inviting her to White House functions. “She’d be difficult to live with,” he once noted to pal Ben. But, then, he didn’t have to.
Chris Matthews Complete Library E-book Box Set: Tip and the Gipper, Jack Kennedy, Hardball, Kennedy & Nixon, Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, and American Page 73