JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President

by Thurston Clarke

  Dobrynin pressed him to promise that there would be more agreements and “no slowing down the pace.” He countered that they would have to find “the right time” to sign a civil aviation agreement. Dobrynin pushed back, suggesting they sign it immediately and have it take effect later.

  After bemoaning the cost of the space program, Kennedy suggested that the United States and Soviet Union consider coordinating their activities in outer space. Since neither was exploring space for military purposes, it was largely a matter of “scientific prestige,” he said, and even then, the prestige turned out to be fleeting “three-day wonders.” He proposed that they “come to some understanding as to what our space schedules might be.” That way, they might each save “a good deal of money.” He added, “If we’re both going to the moon, we ought to both go to the moon on some arrangement where we don’t use so many resources for something that is, in the final analysis, not that important.”

  This was not the first time that Kennedy had proposed that the two nations cooperate in space, even to the point of mounting a joint moon expedition. During the campaign, he had told the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that “certain aspects of the exploration of space might be handled by joint efforts, for the cost of space efforts will mount radically as we move ambitiously outward.” He had proclaimed in his inaugural address, “Let both sides seek to invoke the wonders of science instead of its terrors. Together let us explore the stars,” and had expanded on this in his 1961 State of the Union address, saying that although the United States was ahead in “the science and technology of space,” the Soviet Union led in the capacity to place large vehicles in orbit, and that both should consider “removing these endeavors from the bitter and wasteful competition of the Cold War.”

  He had abandoned these noble sentiments after the Soviet Union launched the first human into orbit on April 12, 1961. The flight by Yuri Gagarin was a Sputnik-like shock to American self-esteem, and within weeks Secretary of Defense McNamara and NASA’s administrator James Webb had given him a report recommending a program aimed at landing a man on the moon before the Soviet Union. They argued, “Dramatic achievements in space . . . symbolize the technological power and organizing capacity of a nation.” Such achievements might be “economically unjustified,” but America should nevertheless decide to “pursue space projects aimed at enhancing national prestige,” not least because the competition in space was “part of the battle along the fluid front of the Cold War.” Putting a man on the moon first would represent a decisive victory on this battlefront. With the memory of Gagarin’s triumph fresh, they told Kennedy, “The orbiting of machines is not the same as the orbiting or landing of a man. . . . It is a man, not merely machines, that captures the imagination of the world.”

  After accepting the nomination Kennedy had promised Americans a “New Frontier,” of “unknown opportunities and perils” beyond which lay “the uncharted areas of science and space.” In his nationally televised address to a joint session of Congress on May 25, 1961, he compared the space race to the exploits of explorers like Lewis and Clark, and declared, “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind. . . . None will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.”

  For a competitor like Kennedy, a race to the moon was the ultimate competition. For a man who loved the sea, space was “the new ocean,” and in September 1962 he told students at Rice University, “We set sail on this new sea because there is knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won and used for the progress for all people.” But he still harbored doubts about the cost and value of a lunar mission. Soon after announcing the program, he suggested a joint expedition to Khrushchev during their summit in Vienna. After initially dismissing the idea, Khrushchev returned to it later, saying, “All right—why not?” But when Kennedy raised it again, he insisted it could only follow a general disarmament.

  He remained conflicted about a moon landing throughout 1961 and 1962. The romantic and visionary Kennedy liked its daring and challenge; the practical Kennedy fretted about its expense and wondered if it was simply a cold war stunt. At an August 1962 news conference he said that the United States remained behind the Soviet Union in long-range booster rockets but would soon surpass it. Achieving this, however, was requiring expenditure that he called “a very heavy burden upon us all.”

  During a November 1962 meeting he and Webb argued about the relative importance of winning the race to the moon compared with NASA’s other projects. Webb believed that the lunar program was part of the goal of making America preeminent in space, calling it “one of the top-priority programs.”

  “Jim, I think it is the top priority,” he said. “I think we ought to have that very clear. Some of these programs can slip six months, or nine months, and nothing strategic is going to happen. . . . But this is important for political reasons, international political reasons. This is, whether we like it or not, in a sense a race. If we get second to the moon, it’s nice, but it’s like being second any time.” When Webb suggested linking the lunar program to a broader one of making the United States preeminent in space, Kennedy became exasperated, and said, “I’m not that interested in space. I think it’s good, I think we ought to know about it, we’re ready to spend reasonable amounts of money. But we’re talking about these fantastic expenditures that wreck our budget and all these other domestic programs, and the only justification for it . . . is because we hope to beat them [the Soviets] and demonstrate that starting behind, as we did by a couple of years, by God, we passed them.”

  At his July 20, 1963, press conference a reporter asked about rumors that the Russians were abandoning the race to the moon, and wanted to know whether, if this proved to be correct, the United States would still continue its lunar program, or perhaps consider a joint moon mission. Kennedy replied that the United States should push on with its own program in light of “any evidence that they [the Soviets] are carrying out a major campaign,” and called a moon flight important not only for its own sake, but because it would demonstrate “the capacity to dominate space.” He was skeptical about the possibility of a joint flight, saying it would require “a breaking down of a good many barriers of suspicion and hostility.”

  Either he was being less than candid or he had changed his mind by the time he and Dobrynin met a month later. When he announced the lunar program in 1961, it had seemed a necessary response to a series of Soviet space triumphs, but if the test ban treaty led to more agreements and a reduction of cold war tensions, then beating the Soviets to the moon suddenly seemed less important, and a joint moon program could both symbolize and further the emerging détente between the two nations. His willingness to dismiss the program as “not that important” also suggests that he trusted Dobrynin and Khrushchev to keep his comments confidential, and that he never intended the recordings of meetings like this one to become public, at least during his lifetime.

  After the meeting ended, Kennedy asked Thompson for his impressions. Thompson said that Dobrynin, and by extension Khrushchev, “appeared to be looking for an agreement on almost anything.” Two days later, the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times reported that “Soviet propaganda has shown unusual restraint toward the United States for the last two and a half months.” Articles about the U.S. racial situation had also suddenly disappeared from the Soviet press, and the Soviets had stopped jamming the Russian-language broadcasts of the Voice of America.

  Minutes after reading Khrushchev’s letter and discussing initiatives to further his spirit of détente with the Soviet Union, Kennedy joined McNamara, Rusk, Harriman, Ball, Hilsman, Forrestal, Taylor, and others in the Cabinet Room to discuss whether a coup in Vietnam might harm or further U.S. interests. The meeting was among the most contentious of his presidency and involved him in a detailed discuss
ion of the loyalties of individual South Vietnamese generals. It quickly became obvious that his advisers had only the vaguest notion of who these generals were. When McNamara asked who belonged to this “general officers group,” Hilsman replied that U.S. officials in Saigon had contacted only three, and that they had declined to name their colleagues.

  Kennedy asked what forces they commanded, only to be told that they included staff officers who did not command any combat units and generals who were stationed in the countryside. The preponderance of military forces in Saigon would probably remain loyal to Diem.

  Cable 243 had committed the United States to offering the generals “direct support.” McNamara wondered what this meant. Hilsman said it meant assistance that would not be channeled through Saigon. Marine Corps General Victor Krulak, the Joint Chiefs’ expert on counterinsurgency warfare, thought this might prove “extremely difficult.”

  Kennedy asked Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Taylor to estimate the chances that the generals could mount a successful coup, taking into consideration his own experience at the Pentagon. Taylor replied tartly that in Washington they did not turn over the problem of changing a head of state to the military.

  During this and four subsequent meetings held over the next three days, Kennedy persistently posed two questions: Was a coup likely to succeed? And could he call it off if he changed his mind?

  When the Bay of Pigs invasion had been under consideration, the military and the CIA had argued that because the Eisenhower administration had signed off on the operation and the rebels had been trained, canceling it would be difficult and risky. Now he was being told the same thing about a possible coup in South Vietnam. His military and civilian advisers had unanimously approved the Bay of Pigs, but on August 26 they were sharply divided over the wisdom of encouraging a coup. McNamara, Taylor, and the CIA had serious reservations and believed that Lodge, Hilsman, Forrestal, and Harriman had stampeded him into approving the cable. Taylor would call it “an egregious ‘end run,’” writing, “The anti-Diem group centered in State had taken advantage of the absence of the principal officials to get out instructions which would never have been approved as written under normal circumstances.”

  There were two factions at these meetings: a State Department one consisting of Harriman, Hilsman, and Ball, joined by Forrestal of the National Security Council, who viewed Vietnam as a crucial cold war conflict that the United States could win only if Diem was deposed; and a Pentagon faction of McNamara, Taylor, and Krulak, who also viewed it as a critical conflict, but one that Diem was more likely to win than were the generals plotting against him. There was also a third, less obvious faction in the Cabinet Room that week, which doubted that Vietnam really was a crucial cold war battleground. It consisted of one person, the president. Forrestal had an inkling of this. He later observed that “we began to lose our Presidential support in the summer of 1963,” and that after the Buddhist crisis, the president was “beginning to resist his staffs’ insistence, and the State Department’s insistence, and the Defense Department’s insistence on increasing the effort,” and “beginning to dig in his heels.”

  Wednesday, August 28

  WASHINGTON

  Hours before Kennedy delivered his June 11 civil rights speech, a spokesman for Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) announced that the organization would sponsor a “massive, militant, and monumental sit-in demonstration” in Washington coinciding with nationwide acts of civil disobedience. Eleven days later, Kennedy implored a delegation of civil rights leaders that included King, Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, and A. Philip Randolph, the president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, to cancel their march, telling them, “We want success in Congress, not just a big show at the Capitol. Some of these people are looking for an excuse to oppose us. I don’t want to give them the chance to say, ‘Yes, I’m for the bill—but not at the point of a gun.’”

  Once he realized that he could not stop them, he tried to control them. “They’re going to come down here and shit all over the [Washington] Monument,” he told a Justice Department official. “I’ve got a civil rights bill to get through. We’ll run it.” Following consultations with the Justice Department, the leaders agreed to cancel acts of civil disobedience planned for the Capitol, stage a shorter march between the Washington and Lincoln Memorials, hold the event on a Wednesday to discourage participants from remaining in the city over the weekend, limit speeches to seven minutes, and advance the schedule so that most participants would leave by nightfall. Kennedy gave the demonstration his blessing at a press conference, saying, “They [the marchers] are going to express their strong views. I think it is in the great tradition [of our democracy].” Having decided to support the march, he now feared that a low turnout would enable opponents of his civil rights bill to argue that he had exaggerated the demand for it, and so he added, “I look forward to being there.”

  He later changed his mind about attending, probably because he feared his presence might inflame the South and connect him to any violence occurring during the demonstration. So instead of joining the 150 members of Congress at the Lincoln Memorial rally and witnessing the largest mass protest in American history, he asked one of the black White House employees, a doorman, Preston Bruce, to accompany him to the third-floor solarium, where they stood at an open window, too far away to see the crowd of a quarter million over the treetops, but close enough to hear the strains of the civil rights anthem, “We Shall Overcome.” Gripping the windowsill so hard that his knuckles turned white, Kennedy said in a choked voice, “Oh, Bruce, I wish I were out there with them!”

  He returned downstairs in time to see Dr. King deliver the only speech that a panel of distinguished historians would rank above his inaugural address when asked to choose the finest orations of the twentieth century. He watched King on the First Family’s only television set, a thirteen-inch black-and-white portable with rabbit ears. Blair Clark, a CBS executive who had roomed with Kennedy at Harvard, thought he had a natural “instinct” for the medium, and “never forgot that he was an actor in a public drama.” He was so telegenic that his appearance more than his words had accounted for his victory in his debates with Nixon. After seeing a replay of them, he had remarked, “We wouldn’t have had a prayer without that gadget,” a comment perfectly expressing his conflicted emotions toward television: a respect for its power, and a disdain for a “gadget” that bored him so much that except for watching football games, he seldom tuned it on. One of its black marks was that Eisenhower had loved it so much that he and Mamie had installed sets throughout the White House, including two in their sitting room so they could watch different programs while eating dinner off trays. Kennedy had ordered the White House electrician to remove all of Ike’s sets, but after Caroline protested that she would miss Lassie, he left the small portable in the West Hall so that it could be moved out of sight when guests arrived.

  Today was the first time he had heard King deliver an entire speech. After listening to his “I Have a Dream” litany, Kennedy turned to his aide Lee White and said, “Jesus Christ, that’s a terrific speech. He’s damn good, isn’t he?” An hour later he welcomed the organizers of the march to the White House, telling King as he shook his hand, “I have a dream.” King had dreamed of Mississippi “transformed into the oasis of freedom and justice,” and America becoming a “beautiful symphony of brotherhood” where children were judged “by the content of their character.” Kennedy was dreaming of sixty-seven U.S. senators prepared to override a filibuster of his civil rights bill, and would support whatever furthered that dream, and oppose whatever threatened it.

  By the time the leaders arrived at the White House, it was evident that their march had been an epic success. They had promised to bring 100,000 demonstrators to Washington, and more than twice that number had come. Although Kennedy had ordered the largest peacetime mobilization of armed forces in U.S. history, there had been no violence,
the troops had stayed in their barracks, and Americans had witnessed an inspiring television spectacle that had advanced his bill more than weeks of backroom arm-twisting.

  Roy Wilkins saw “relief written all over his face” as he praised the leaders for doing “a superb job of making your case,” overlooking that his civil rights bill had made it his case as well.

  Wilkins and King had the best understanding of the journey that Kennedy had traveled since his inauguration, and why a man whose cautious approach to equal rights had once left them so frustrated had at last become, in their opinion, a greater champion of black Americans than any president in U.S. history, Lincoln included. Wilkins called his transformation “the education of JFK on the race question,” and credited his willingness to learn and be moved by events for finally awakening him “to the poison and venom that had been the daily lot of the Negro.” King had a similar take on his evolution. When they first met in 1960 he had sensed that Kennedy had an intellectual commitment to civil rights but not an emotional one, and blamed the fact that like most white men of his age and class, he had simply not known many black people. There had been no black students at Choate and only a few at Harvard in the 1930s, and the Navy remained segregated throughout the war. During his six years in the House there had been just two black representatives, and during his eight in the Senate, not a single black senator. In the 1940s and 1950s, Washington had been a segregated city, the first Jim Crow metropolis south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Black passengers moved into the Colored Only coaches at Union Station before continuing south, classified advertisements specified race, and black employees at the Capitol were prohibited from swimming in its pool or eating in its restaurants, so it is hardly surprising that Kennedy had never attended a black wedding, funeral, or church service, and had no way of understanding what Wilkins called the “joys and hardships” of being black in America.