Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series)

by Talbot, David

  But most important, Kennedy realized, it was time for the president of the United States to personally speak out. He needed to take to the road and explain to the American public why his pragmatic policies to extricate the country and the world from the Cold War’s death grip made more sense than the simplistic, militaristic approach of the right. Kennedy turned once again to Sorensen, whose eloquence he always called upon when he needed a passionate rejoinder to his critics and a stirring appeal to the American people’s better instincts. JFK would travel widely that fall, delivering several key speeches on how America should navigate its way through the “long twilight struggle” of the Cold War. His travels would take him from Chapel Hill, North Carolina—on the doorstep of his senatorial nemesis, South Carolina’s Thurmond—to Los Angeles, then a bastion of right-wing ferment and home to a quarter of the John Birch Society’s membership. In directly confronting his critics, Kennedy would be forced to clarify what he stood for and what America’s role should be in a fast-changing world where “heroes are removed from their tombs, history rewritten, the names of cities changed overnight.”

  After being battered by Cold Warriors for nearly a year, Kennedy finally stepped into the ring that fall and began to fight for what he believed, to define his administration. The battle was, at last, joined.

  IT WAS SATURDAY EVENING, November 18, 1961. On stage at the Hollywood Palladium, the cavernous dining and dancing hall where Lawrence Welk and his Champagne Music Makers normally presided on weekends, the president of the United States was giving his right-wing critics hell. To raucous applause from the 2,500 assembled Democrats, Kennedy, chopping the air for emphasis, scorched the “crusades of suspicion” and “discordant voices of extremism” that were echoing throughout the land. For months, the president had been forced to listen to their incessant din—the cries of “treason in high places” from the John Birch Society, whose paranoia hadx found fertile ground in regions with large fundamentalist populations like the Los Angeles Basin; the loud complaints from generals and admirals about Kennedy’s “no-win” policy; the charges of weakness and cowardice from Texas blowhards like publisher Dealey; the calls from vigilante groups like the Minutemen for Americans to arm themselves in preparation for the imminent day when Washington would fall to Communist hands. Now Kennedy—standing on the gold foil-lined stage, in front of a giant reproduction of the presidential seal—was slashing back at all this madness in a speech that targeted his fanatic enemies with icy precision.

  In periods of high tension like the Cold War, Kennedy told his audience, “there have always been those on the fringes of our society who have fought to escape their own responsibility by finding a simple solution, an appealing slogan, or a convenient scapegoat.” In the current “period of heightened peril,” with the world held hostage by the constant threat of nuclear war, this paranoid strain in American politics was flourishing, Kennedy observed. “Men who are unwilling to face up to the danger from without are convinced that the real danger is from within. They look suspiciously at their neighbors and their leaders. They call for a ‘man on horseback’ because they do not trust the people. They find treason in our churches, in our highest court, and even in the treatment of our water.” This last twist of the presidential knife was directed at the colorful theory, popular in far-right circles at the time, that the fluoridation of water was a Communist plot.

  “They equate the Democratic Party with the welfare state, the welfare state with socialism, and socialism with communism. They object, quite rightly, to politics intruding on the military, but they are very anxious for the military to engage in politics.”

  But, Kennedy concluded, he was confident that Americans—“whose basic good sense…has always prevailed”—would reject these “counsels of fear and suspicion.”

  Kennedy’s hard-hitting speech—which the Los Angeles Times would the next day call “a scornful 21-gun presidential blast”—was loudly cheered by the Democratic Party faithful who filled the Palladium that night, including Hollywood celebrities like Frank Sinatra, Nat “King” Cole, and Ralph Bellamy, who helped provide the evening’s entertainment. But outside the Palladium, where the paranoid legions Kennedy had lashed out at were noisily gathered, it was a different story. An estimated three thousand right-wing protesters—more than the number of Kennedy supporters gathered inside—paraded up and down on both sides of the street, spilling off the sidewalks and snarling traffic. Wearing red, white, and blue paper hats, they shouted anti-Kennedy slogans, sang “God Bless America,” and waved signs reading “Unmuzzle the Military,” “Disarmament Is Suicide,” “Get the Reds Out of the State Department,” and “Stamp Out Communism.”

  Kennedy, who was ushered quickly into the Palladium hours before he spoke, did not see the armies of the night who were massing against him. But the next day he would be forced to confront their passions in a surprising place. Kennedy, who loved to bask in the sun and celebrity atmosphere of Southern California, woke the next morning in his presidential suite at the Beverly Hilton, looking forward to a relaxing Sunday. In the afternoon, the president would ride leisurely down Wilshire Boulevard in an open convertible, waving at openmouthed pedestrians. His motorcade—which consisted of only two police cars (one in front of the president’s convertible and one in back) and a car filled with reporters—glided through Santa Monica to its destination, the Spanish-style oceanfront home of Kennedy’s sister Pat and her husband, Peter Lawford. There, the president would enjoy himself, swimming in the pool and dining with Hollywood friends Angie Dickinson and Mrs. Billy Wilder on a lunch of cold vichyssoise, stuffed brandied squab with wild rice, a vegetable dish of peas and onions, and mixed green salad with Italian dressing, all finished off by chocolate tarts and coffee.

  But Kennedy’s Sunday did not begin so smoothly. That morning, he and his old political crony Dave Powers were driven from the Beverly Hilton to the nearby Church of the Good Shepherd on Santa Monica Boulevard. After settling into a pew ten rows from the front, Kennedy soon found himself and the other worshippers being lectured about the necessity of vigilance in a dangerous world in a sermon delivered by Father Alfred Kilp. It was immediately clear what kind of message Father Kilp was sending the presidential captive in his audience. Catholics took pride in the first member of their faith to win the White House. But Kennedy’s church, with its strong anti-communist legacy, had also become a beachhead for the John Birch Society. Robert Welch, founder of the group, claimed that 40 percent of its membership was Catholic and he proudly displayed a letter from none other than Cardinal Cushing, the Kennedy family’s favorite prelate, praising Welch as a “dedicated anticommunist.”

  In his sermon Father Kilp invoked the terrible vision of an America under communist rule—one where Catholic schools would be closed and churches turned into “such profane uses as theaters or even garages.”

  “Be alert, pray and meditate,” the priest counseled his flock, “because if you do not, you may wake up and find yourself a second-rate citizen of a satellite nation or a dispossessed Catholic.”

  The day after Kennedy was lectured in his own church about the need for anticommunist vigilance, he came under strong return fire from the John Birch Society itself, whose leaders were stung by the president’s frontal assault on them as a band of paranoid fanatics. Kennedy’s fiery speech at the Hollywood Palladium was “another example of talk tough and carry a big pillow,” declared John Rousselot, a Bircher congressman from San Gabriel. “The only thing we can be assured of is that the organized, powder-puff left wing will herald this speech as a great blow for sound diplomacy and ‘peace in our time.’”

  Kennedy’s anti-right campaign also drew an angry response from Senator Barry Goldwater, around whom the growing conservative movement was gathering as the standard-bearer to face Kennedy in 1964. The real “radicals” in American politics, sniped Goldwater at an Atlanta press conference, were “in the White House.” The Arizonan called Kennedy a “wagon master” who is “riding on the left
wheel all the time.”

  The explosions on the political right as Kennedy took off from Los Angeles International Airport on Sunday night to return to Washington demonstrated that he had hit his targets. Kennedy’s eloquent offensive in fall 1961 was a turning point in his administration. His muscular response to the zealotry of the far right gave the American people a clear view of the path along which he wanted to lead them out of the gloomy Cold War thicket.

  JFK’s coast-to-coast counterattack on his right-wing opponents had begun with an October 12 speech at the University of North Carolina’s Kenan Stadium, where he disparaged those thundering patriots who believed America’s challenges in the world could be resolved by swaggering and sloganeering. “We shall be neither Red nor dead, but alive and free,” declared Kennedy in the final line of his speech, alluding to the morbid right-wing slogan of the day, “I’d rather be dead than Red.”

  After Chapel Hill, Kennedy came west, launching another barrage against the right in Seattle on November 16 before heading south to John Birch country in Los Angeles for the most spectacular showdown in his anti-right speaking tour. In his speech at the University of Washington, the president reiterated his theme that there was nothing “soft” about averting nuclear war and that America showed its true strength by refraining from using its military might until all other avenues were exhausted. And he made a startling declaration that seemed to retreat from the aggressive posture struck in his inaugural speech. Despite its overwhelming power, he said, the United States could not play the role of global sentinel. “We must face the fact that the United States is neither omnipotent or omniscient, that we are only 6 percent of the world’s population, that we cannot impose our will upon the other 94 percent, that we cannot fight every wrong or reverse each adversity, and that therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem.” To those on the right who believed in America’s divine and unlimited powers, this was nothing less than sacrilege.

  “You must read the University of Washington speech,” said its co-author Ted Sorensen years later, sitting in his law office at Paul, Weiss, a bronze bust of the man he served on his desk. “It’s one of Kennedy’s great speeches on foreign policy, a direct refutation of the hard-liners. Had Kennedy lived, there is no doubt in my mind, we would have laid the groundwork for détente. The Cold War would have ended much sooner than it did.”

  “I think my brother had a very healthy sense about the power of this country,” Ted Kennedy recently remarked. “He had a sense of its military power, but also of its moral power. And how both could be used, with a sense of proportion, which is very rare for a young leader. You don’t see that kind of judgment even in older people.”

  DURING HIS WESTERN SPEAKING tour, JFK invited his White House predecessor to ride with him in his helicopter during a swing through Texas to attend the funeral of legendary Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn. Kennedy and Eisenhower were later spotted standing next to the whirlybird on the tarmac at Perrin Air Force Base, locked in animated conversation. “Mr. Kennedy gestured repeatedly with his left hand and appeared to be explaining something to General Eisenhower,” the Associated Press later reported. “General Eisenhower listened intently and shook his head affirmatively several times.” The two men then shook hands and parted.

  Five days later, on November 18, the old general added his influential voice to Kennedy’s campaign against “the rise of extremists” in the country and the politicization of the military. Speaking out during an interview with Walter Cronkite of CBS News, the World War II hero said it was “bad practice—very bad” for an officer, even when testifying on Capitol Hill, to express opinions “that are contrary to the president’s.”

  “I don’t think the United States needs super-patriots,” Eisenhower declared. “We need patriotism, honestly practiced by all of us, and we don’t need these people that are more patriotic than you or anybody else.”

  But the superpatriots in Washington soon demonstrated their power again. One week after Kennedy returned to the capital from Los Angeles, in an administration shuffle that would become known in Beltway circles as “the Thanksgiving Day massacre,” the president served the head of his most prominent liberal foreign policymaker—Chester Bowles—to his baying critics on the right. Bowles, it was announced on November 26, was being removed as under secretary of state and being given a vague Flying Dutchman role in the administration as a roving ambassador. The man who had seen himself as a counterweight to the forces of militarism within Kennedy’s government would now, to his opponents’ glee, be dispatched far from the center of power—winding up literally halfway around the world by summer 1963, when he was posted as ambassador to India. The self-described foreign policy “radical” who had urged the president to abolish the CIA after the Bay of Pigs would cause his enemies no more trouble for the rest of Kennedy’s tenure.

  In the State Department the old guard, who had recoiled from Bowles’s efforts to align the United States with the revolutionary ferment sweeping through the Third World, raised glasses to toast Bowles’s downfall. The trouble with Bowles, sneered one veteran diplomat, was that when he “saw a band of black baboons beating tom-toms, [he] saw George Washingtons.”

  During an emotional meeting in Bowles’s office, Sorensen told his fellow Unitarian liberal that he was a victim of Washington’s powerful Cold War lobby. But the number two man at the State Department was not helped by his sour relationship with Bobby Kennedy, who had never forgiven Bowles for refusing to campaign for his brother in the 1960 Wisconsin primary, out of allegiance to fellow liberal Hubert Humphrey, and for what Bobby believed was a cowardly attempt to run for cover after the Bay of Pigs fiasco.

  The two had also clashed in early June during discussions about how to handle the rapidly deteriorating situation in the Dominican Republic, where plotters would soon assassinate the vicious dictator Rafael Trujillo, and the Kennedys were eager to see a a stable, U.S.-friendly government installed. “The tone of [a June 1 State Department] meeting was deeply disturbing,” Bowles would later write in a confidential memo. “Bob Kennedy was clearly looking for an excuse to move in on the island. At one point he suggested, apparently seriously, that we might have to blow up the [U.S.] consulate to provide the rationale…. The entire spirit of this meeting was profoundly distressing and worrisome, and I left at 8:00 p.m. with a feeling that this spirit which I had seen demonstrated on this occasion and others at the White House by those so close to the president constitutes a further danger of half-cocked action by people with almost no foreign policy experience, who are interested in action for action’s sake, and the devil take the [hindmost].” When Bowles succeeded in blocking Bobby’s intervention plans, the young Kennedy—still very much in his hotheaded phase, particularly when it came to Caribbean political intrigue—dismissed him as a gutless bastard.

  Bowles’s downfall highlighted a weak strain in the Kennedy presidency. So eager were the brothers to prove their toughness that they sometimes made examples of their liberal cohorts, rather than stand firm against their public lynching. “The McCarthy years had pounded into [the Kennedy crowd’s] heads a sense of inferiority, insecurity and a sense that they weren’t quite trusted by the members of the Establishment,” Bowles later reflected. They needed the blood of sacrificial lambs like Bowles to prove they could be equally as merciless as Republican Cold Warriors.

  It was the president’s own misfortune. “Kennedy’s inability to bring out the best and draw on the wisdom of Bowles was the president’s loss,” remarked Kennedy aide Harris Wofford. “He badly needed someone close to him who had a basic moral reference point.”

  The Thanksgiving massacre also claimed another liberal victim: Dick Goodwin. Kennedy bowed to the political pressure by transferring his freewheeling Cuba point man to the State Department, where the “young Jew,” in Goodwin’s words, would be kept under tight “WASP supervision.” Goodwin’s enemies crowed over his demotion, telling the Washington Daily News that a “major ir
ritant” in Latin American policy had now been removed.

  Kennedy would continue to phone Goodwin with questions about Latin policy, but it was not the same. Goodwin felt like “a rejected lover,” banished to a hostile wing of the president’s government, where he would not last long. He would later escape to Sargent Shriver’s more hospitable Peace Corps. And on November 22, 1963, he was to be named a special consultant on the arts—a post far removed from the inner foreign policy councils where he could cause his enemies trouble.

  ROBERT KENNEDY LATER SAID that his brother regarded 1961 as “a very mean year.” His confidence in his own national security team had been shattered by the humiliation in Cuba. He had been bullied on the one side by Khrushchev and by his own military chiefs on the other. The world had slithered closer to extinction during the Berlin Crisis. “Fucked again,” exhaled Kennedy, when just as the global situation seemed at its darkest, he learned that the Soviets were resuming nuclear weapons testing. “I want to get off,” said JFK after a particularly gloomy White House meeting held to discuss this latest destabilizing development.

  “Get off what?” Bobby asked him.

  “Get off the planet.”

  The president was in a reflective mood on the Saturday evening after Thanksgiving. He was spending the holiday weekend with family and friends up at Hyannis Port. After working all day on his forthcoming budget, he joined the festive group at his father’s house in the family compound, where everyone was gathering for cocktails and dinner. After the plates were cleared away, Kennedy suggested that his friend Red Fay—whom he had made assistant secretary of the Navy, as Admiral Burke rightly and bitterly suspected, primarily to enjoy his lively company—entertain the group with his trademark rendition of “Hooray for Hollywood.” After “Grand Old Lovable,” as Kennedy called his Republican friend, finished the song, Teddy—the best singer in the family—belted out “Heart of My Heart” and sister Eunice also took her turn in the spotlight. Then everyone insisted that the president himself entertain them. “Do you know ‘September Song’?” Kennedy asked Teddy’s wife, Joan, who was playing piano.