An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963

by Robert Dallek

  Seizing upon their success in facing down Wallace, Kennedy decided to give a televised evening speech announcing his decision to ask Congress for a civil rights law. Except for Bobby, Kennedy’s advisers opposed the idea; he might, they worried, be investing too much of his personal standing in a measure likely to fail. But Kennedy believed that larger national needs required it. With only six hours to prepare, it was uncertain whether Sorensen would be able to deliver a polished speech in time. The president and Bobby talked about what he should say in an extemporaneous talk should no text be ready. Five minutes before Kennedy went on television, Sorensen gave him a final draft, which Kennedy spent about three minutes reviewing.

  Though Kennedy delivered part of the talk extemporaneously, it was one of his best speeches—a heartfelt appeal in behalf of a moral cause. It included several memorable lines calling upon the country to honor its finest traditions: “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue,” he said. “It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution. The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities. . . . One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this Nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free. . . . Now the time has come for this Nation to fulfill its promise. . . . The fires of frustration and discord are burning in every city, North and South, where legal remedies are not at hand. . . . A great change is at hand, and our task, our obligation, is to make that revolution, that change, peaceful and constructive for all. . . . Next week I shall ask the Congress of the United States to act, to make a commitment it has not fully made in this century to the proposition that race has no place in American life or law.”

  The following week, on June 19, Kennedy asked for the enactment of the most far-reaching civil rights bill in the country’s history.He presented it against the backdrop of the murder of Medgar Evers, a leading black activist in Mississippi and veteran of the D-Day invasion, assassinated a day after the president’s speech by a rifle shot in the back at the door to his house in front of his wife and children.

  The proposed law would ensure any citizen with a sixth-grade education the right to vote, and would eliminate discrimination in all places of public accommodation—hotels, restaurants, amusement facilities, and retail establishments. Kennedy described the basis for such legislation as clearly consistent with the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause, the Fifteenth Amendment’s right of citizens to vote regardless of race or color, and federal control of interstate commerce. He also asked for expanded powers for the attorney general to enforce court-ordered school desegregation; bring an end to job discrimination and expand funds for job training, which could help African Americans better compete for good jobs; and create a federal community relations service, which could work to improve race relations.

  Because bipartisan support was essential to overcome southern Democratic opposition, Kennedy met with Republican House and Senate leaders and Eisenhower to enlist their backing. He asked every member of Congress to put aside sectional and political ties for the sake of the national well-being.

  In asking Congress to put civil rights at the center of its deliberations, Kennedy believed that he was also putting his presidency at risk. “He always felt that maybe this was going to be his political swan song,” Bobby said. “He would ask me every four days, ‘Do you think we did the right thing by sending the legislation up? Look at the trouble it got us in.’” The “trouble” Kennedy saw came from southern Democrats. After he sent up the civil rights bill, Kennedy said in a telephone conversation with Congressman Carl Albert of Oklahoma, “I suppose that civil rights thing has just got ’em all excited.” In explaining why a public works bill had failed, Albert replied, “We lost some of the southern boys that we would otherwise have had.” Albert thought that civil rights was “overwhelming the whole, the whole program.” He saw it “affecting mass transit and killing Kennedy’s farm bills.” “Civil rights did it,” Kennedy concluded.

  Regardless of the legislative consequences, Kennedy felt that he had to act. As Everett Dirksen, quoting Victor Hugo, said in the following year, “Stronger than all the armies is an idea whose time has come. The time has come for equality . . . in education and in employment. It will not be stayed or denied. It is here.” Remembering Profiles in Courage, Kennedy told Luther Hodges, his southern commerce secretary, “There comes a time when a man has to take a stand and history will record that he has to meet these tough situations and ultimately make a decision.”

  But more than moral considerations were at work in Kennedy’s decision. Bobby and the president understood that unless they now acted boldly, African Americans would lose hope that the government would ever fully support their claims to equality and would increasingly engage in violent protest. The alternative to civil rights legislation was civil strife, which would injure the national well-being, embarrass the country before the world, and jeopardize the Kennedy presidency. And since the South seemed likely to vote Republican in the next election, a show of political courage made good political sense and would probably gain him more than he would lose. “Kennedy will lose the segregationist vote,” a reporter for the Chattanooga Times said in May. “But he’ll get 110% of the Negro vote no matter how much Martin Luther King and others criticize him for doing less than the maximum for civil rights. In a close election in Tennessee, the Negroes hold the balance.” The journalist had it right, except for the part about King, who himself led a chorus of praise for Kennedy’s bill. King called Kennedy’s civil rights proposals “the most sweeping and forthright ever presented by an American president,” and predicted that they would “take the Nation a long, long way toward the realization of the ideals of freedom and justice for all people.” Yet the fight had only begun. If the White House were going to defeat a southern filibuster, Kennedy would have to go beyond earlier rhetorical appeals and fully assert his political influence before the end of the 1963 congressional session.

  CHAPTER 18

  New Departures: Foreign Affairs

  While maintaining our readiness for war, let us exhaust every avenue for peace.

  — John F. Kennedy, October 1963

  KENNEDY UNDERSTOOD that advances at home alone were insufficient to ensure America’s overseas success. Managing the Cold War remained as great a challenge as ever. And Kennedy left no doubt that this was still his highest priority. In a December 17, 1962, TV and radio interview with William Lawrence of ABC and George Herman of CBS, he spent most of the hour-long discussion on foreign affairs. Kennedy described the missile crisis as a turning point that had opened a new era in history. “Cuba was the first time,” he said, “that the Soviet Union and the United States directly faced each other with the prospect of the use of military forces . . . which could possibly have escalated into a nuclear struggle.” Its successful resolution now allowed him to set a more rational agenda on nuclear weapons and to encourage possibilities of Soviet-American détente, which would in turn free him to give more attention to other world problems threatening America’s long-term national interest.

  Kennedy believed it essential to rein in the nuclear arms race. “There is just a limit to how much we need,” he told the newsmen. “[We have] submarines in the ocean, we have Minutemen on the ground, we have B-52 planes, we still have some B-47’s, we have the tactical forces in Europe. I would say when we start to talk about the megatonnage we could bring into a nuclear war, we are talking about annihilation. How many times do you have to hit a target with nuclear weapons?” He found it inconceivable that anyone could speak casually about a nuclear war, which some of the military and far-right politicians did. A massive nuclear exchange would bring 150 million fatalities in the first eighteen hours in Western Europe, the Sov
iet Union, and the United States. And displaying a greater confidence than ever to take on the U.S. military and the defense industry, Kennedy described the B-70 bomber as “a weapon that isn’t worth the money we would have to put into it,” and stated that, congressional pressure notwithstanding, spending $10 to $15 billion on an airplane that added nothing to U.S. security made no sense. Nor did he think it currently worth billions of dollars to build a Nike Zeus antimissile system until tests proved that it worked. And Polaris submarine and Minuteman ground-to-ground missiles made a Skybolt air-to-surface missile project obsolete, so building it would waste $2.5 billion.

  Kennedy did not discount the continuing importance of East Germany to the Soviets in sustaining their hold on Eastern Europe, but he was hopeful that Khrushchev realized “the care with which he must proceed now, as do we.” (Khrushchev did. Within days after the missile crisis, Yuri Zhukov, Pravda’s foreign editor, told Salinger that Khrushchev would not renew difficulties over Berlin.) Although Berlin would remain a source of tension in Soviet-American relations, it did not seem likely to become a major point of contention again anytime soon—and indeed, for the rest of the Cold War it would remain a back-burner issue. Khrushchev believed that “the socialist countries have gained more in Berlin from the wall than they would have gained by a peace treaty, which would have provided that no wall could be built.”

  Kennedy hoped that the Soviet-American thaw might encourage more sophisticated thinking in the United States about world affairs. “I do think we have a tendency to think of the world as Communist and free,” Kennedy mused at the end of 1962, “as if it were two units. The fact of the matter is our world is so divided, so poverty stricken, so desperate in many conditions, that we have a full-time job just strengthening the section of the world which is not Communist, all of Africa, newly independent and poverty stricken.” Latin America, where people lived on $100 a year, was another tempting ground for communist subversion. If the United States could raise standards of living in these Third World areas, he said, “then I think we can be successful.”

  Attention to problems with European allies, however, had to precede détente with the Soviets and greater attention to the Third World. In the winter of 1962-63, difficulties with Britain, Germany, and France crowded out bold initiatives elsewhere. Seeing unity with Europe as essential to other advances overseas, and remembering that the history of any alliance is the history of mutual recrimination, Kennedy worked to ease tensions.

  Kennedy’s decision to drop Skybolt had greatly upset the British, who had had the wherewithal to build nuclear warheads but not the missiles to which they were attached. Macmillan had staked British prestige on having an independent nuclear deterrent, which the air-to-ground missile—Eisenhower had promised to supply—was supposed to give them. Kennedy’s policy reversal threatened to topple Macmillan’s government and leave his successor skeptical of any future U.S. commitment. Some in Britain now echoed Chamberlain’s observation in the thirties that it was best not to rely on the Americans for anything.

  Kennedy felt compelled to bail Macmillan out. Leaving him without some fallback would have not only betrayed his closest European ally but added to feelings in France and Germany that Washington was insensitive to the political and security needs of its friends. When he met Macmillan at a conference in Bermuda on December 18 and 19, Kennedy offered to continue Skybolt’s development if the British agreed to share the building costs. But Macmillan no longer saw the missile as being of any use. Not only had the political damage been done, but in the interim the Skybolt had failed during routine testing. (“The Lady had been violated in public,” Macmillan said with reference to reports of failed Skybolt tests and Kennedy’s public comments.) With Macmillan now predicting a rift with the United States unless some new agreement were reached at once, Kennedy found a formula that satisfied British amour propre: The United States would scrap Skybolt and instead with Britain jointly build nuclear submarines armed with Polaris missiles. The weapons would technically be part of a multilateral NATO force, but an agreement to let London use them unilaterally in time of “supreme peril” would preserve the fiction of an independent British nuclear deterrent.

  The British now satisfied, Kennedy rested assured that Skybolt was dead. But just three days after the Bermuda meeting, while Kennedy was vacationing in Palm Beach, he received word that there had been a successful Skybolt test. He was mystified that McNamara had approved the test after he had decided to scrap the missile. Evelyn Lincoln remembers Kennedy sitting by the pool getting a manicure and trying to get hold of McNamara, who was on his way to Aspen, Colorado. Instead, he reached Gilpatric, to whom he read “the riot act. . . . I can’t understand McNamara doing this,” Kennedy said to Lincoln. “He is generally so good on everything.” But Kennedy, despite believing otherwise, had failed to make his intent clear to his defense secretary. Kennedy felt compelled to discount the importance of the test to the press, and to emphasize U.S. commitment to the Nassau Agreement, as the Bermuda understanding was called. A highly visible misstep like this injured the administration’s recently established reputation for foreign policy mastery. Kennedy was so annoyed by the incident that in March 1963, he asked Richard Neustadt to review the episode and explain to him what had gone wrong. How could he have gotten at cross-purposes with his closest ally and its prime minister, whom he held in higher regard than any other foreign leader? Why were the British so surprised by the Skybolt decision? Hadn’t we given them ample notice? Was there a failure of communication? And if so, by whom and for what reasons? Neustadt concluded that there had indeed been a failure of communication between both sides at the highest levels of government.

  The Nassau Agreement made for additional difficulties. To appease French sensibilities, which would also have been offended by a follow-through on Skybolt, Kennedy offered de Gaulle the same deal he had made with London. But de Gaulle wanted no part of it. Unlike the British, the French still lacked the ability to make nuclear warheads, though successful nuclear detonations convinced de Gaulle that it was only a matter of time. De Gaulle still did not trust Washington to defend Europe with nuclear weapons, believing that the administration would rather let Western Europe fall under communist control than risk a Soviet nuclear attack on American cities. De Gaulle intended to build an independent nuclear arm that would be immune from any American coordination or restriction. He also wanted to keep the British, whom he saw as ciphers of the Americans, at a distance. To drive this point home, on January 14, 1963, in a well-prepared performance at a semi-annual press conference, de Gaulle announced a French veto of British membership in the European Economic Community (EEC). Less than two decades after World War II, he now saw Germany as a more reliable French ally.

  Not surprisingly, the Germans were receptive to his overtures. Adenauer, like de Gaulle, distrusted U.S. determination to stand up to the Soviets in a European crisis and correctly understood that Washington might ultimately recognize East Germany and resist German reunification. In February 1963, Bonn signed a mutual defense pact with Paris that implied diminished Franco-German reliance on NATO and American power. De Gaulle was receptive to having Germany follow him into the family of nuclear nations, and Adenauer was interested, having long resented a Kennedy public declaration to the Russians in November 1961 that “if Germany developed an atomic capability of its own, if it developed many missiles, or a strong national army that threatened war, then I would understand your concern, and I would share it.”

  Kennedy feared that Adenauer and de Gaulle were putting NATO at risk and making Europe less, rather then more, secure. “What is your judgment about the course of events?” Kennedy asked Macmillan in a January telephone conversation. “I think this man’s gone crazy,” Macmillan replied. “Absolutely crazy.” Macmillan added that de Gaulle wanted to be “the cock on a small dung hill instead of having two cocks on a larger one.” Crazy or not, de Gaulle had to be dealt with. Franco-German independence defied Kennedy’s plans for c
ontinuing American leadership of Europe’s defense, which he considered essential to deter Soviet aggression on the continent. “There is always the argument in Europe that the United States might leave Europe, which is, of course, in my opinion, fallacious, because the United States can never leave Europe,” he said at an off-the-record press conference on December 31. “We are too much bound together. If we left Europe, Europe would be more exposed to the Communists.”

  In January 1963, Kennedy decided that he would make a midyear visit to rally the allies. He told ambassador to France James M. Gavin, “Well, I am going to see the General in the next few months, and I think that we will be able to get something done together.” Kennedy shared Acheson’s conviction that it was “not possible to persuade, bribe, or coerce General de Gaulle from following a course upon which he is set. But he can and does in time recognize the inevitable and adjust his conduct to it, as in Algeria. Years ago I asked Justice Brandeis whether a certain man was intelligent,” Acheson related. “‘Yes,’ he said. ‘He has the sort of intelligence which leads a man not to stand in front of a locomotive.’” Acheson believed that de Gaulle would come to his senses when he understood that France simply could not afford the cost of developing its own nuclear deterrent.