Eisenhower wanted to go out with a bang in 1960. He was concerned about the arms race and the possible use of nuclear weapons. He called for a major arms control meeting between the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and France. Eisenhower wanted to push the Soviet leader Khrushchev into accepting a ban on nuclear testing.
Before the countries were to meet for the conference, a U.S. spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union, and its pilot, Gary Powers, was captured by the Soviets. Khrushchev wanted Eisenhower to apologize for the incident. When Eisenhower refused to apologize, the arms control meeting was cancelled.
Staying active in retirement
Eisenhower wasn’t able to run for a third term — the Republican party passed the 22nd Amendment in 1951, restricting presidents to serving only two terms. In 1961, Eisenhower retired to his farm in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania to write his memoirs.
In 1960 and 1964, Eisenhower hit the campaign trail for Republican candidates Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater. He was disappointed when John Kennedy won the presidency in 1960. Eisenhower believed that Kennedy was too young and inexperienced to be a successful president.
When asked to comment on his presidency, Eisenhower responded, “The United States never lost a soldier or a foot of ground in my administration. We kept the peace. People asked how it happened — by God, it didn’t just happen, I’ll tell you that.”
Between 1965 and 1969, Eisenhower suffered three more heart attacks. The third attack, in 1969, killed him. Eisenhower died at the age of 78. He is still one of the most beloved presidents in U.S. history. Eisenhower’s last words were “I want to go; God take me.”
Chapter 19
Fulfilling Family Expectations: John Fitzgerald Kennedy
In This Chapter
Entering politics
Becoming the first Catholic president
Dying too young
J ohn F. Kennedy is one of the most admired and revered presidents in U.S. history. He brought about dramatic changes in U.S. foreign policy — changes that ultimately failed, forcing him to return to the policies of Truman and Eisenhower.
On the domestic front, Kennedy set the foundation for the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. For this achievement he deserves much credit. He could have been a great president. But with his foreign policy being fairly unsuccessful, he barely makes it into the top 15 in many presidential ranking surveys.
Kennedy’s Early Political Career
Kennedy started his political career in 1946. He went after the Democratic nomination for the 11th Congressional district in Massachusetts. The district included parts of Boston, where his grandfather had been mayor. During his campaign, Kennedy emphasized his heroic war record. He easily won the Democratic primary. The general election against the Republican candidate was even easier. John F. Kennedy entered the U.S. House of Representatives at the age of 29.
In Congress, Kennedy showed an independent streak. He criticized his own president, Truman, for losing China to communist control, but he supported most of the Fair Deal legislation (see Chapter 17 for more on China and the Fair Deal). Most of the legislation he sponsored benefited his constituents, helping him get reelected in 1948 and 1950.
Poor little rich boy
John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born in 1917 in Brookline, Massachusetts. Politics ran in his family’s blood. Kennedy’s father, Joseph Kennedy, served in Franklin Roosevelt’s cabinet and was the U.S. ambassador to Great Britain, and his grandfather was the mayor of Boston.
Joseph Kennedy was one of the wealthiest men in the United States. Young John Kennedy enjoyed the good life, though he was a sickly child. He survived whooping cough, tonsillitis, jaundice, measles, chicken pox, scarlet fever, and appendicitis.
Kennedy went to the best private schools and studied at Princeton and Harvard. In 1940, Kennedy graduated from Harvard. When the United States entered World War II a year later, he volunteered for the army. The army rejected him because of a back problem, but the navy accepted him.
In 1943, Kennedy was given command of his own gunboat in the Pacific. A few months later, a Japanese destroyer rammed Kennedy’s gunboat. The future president swam 3 miles in shark-infested waters to the nearest island, pulling a wounded sailor behind him. On the island, he carved a message into a coconut and gave it to the friendly natives to take to U.S. soldiers. Kennedy was rescued and sent home to recover from the malaria he’d contracted.
Kennedy couldn’t wait to return to active duty. However, his back problem resurfaced and he was given an honorable discharge. Then his brother Joseph, who was planning to enter politics, died fighting in Europe. So Kennedy went into politics to honor his brother.
In 1953, while serving in the Senate, Kennedy married Jacqueline Lee Bouvier, a socialite 12 years his junior. Jackie Kennedy became one of the most popular first ladies in U.S. history. John and Jackie Kennedy had three children: Caroline, a lawyer, John Kennedy Jr., who died in a plane crash in 1999, and Patrick who died at birth just weeks before his father was assassinated.
Serving in the Senate
In 1952, Kennedy ran for the Senate. It was a long-shot campaign against one of the most prominent Republicans in the Senate, Henry Cabot Lodge. Kennedy traveled the state, campaigning for a full two years. In the end, his efforts paid off — he narrowly beat Lodge.
As a senator, Kennedy continued his efforts to bring as much money as possible home to Massachusetts. Then his old back problems resurfaced. Kennedy spent most of 1954 and 1955 in the hospital. While in the hospital, he wrote a book entitled Profiles in Courage, in which he discussed U.S. politicians who risked their political careers to support unpopular issues. The book won the Pulitzer Prize and transformed Kennedy into a national phenomenon.
Kennedy transformed himself before returning to the Senate. He became more liberal, supporting integration and the 1957 civil rights legislation. One area of controversy for Kennedy was his refusal to criticize fellow senator and family friend Joseph McCarthy, who was still going after suspected communists in the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. Many liberals believed that Kennedy should condemn him openly, but Kennedy remained quiet on the issue.
In 1957, Kennedy became a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where he developed many of his ideas on foreign policy. He supported economic aid to the Third World, and independence for Algeria from France. He supported building nuclear missiles in 1957 — a stance he used against Nixon in the 1960 presidential campaign. Kennedy easily won reelection to the Senate in 1958.
Campaigning for the presidency
As soon as Kennedy won reelection to the Senate in 1958, he started campaigning for the presidency. He knew that it would take time to convince the Democratic Party leadership that someone like him could win. He faced three major obstacles:
He was too young. He was only 41 when he started campaigning for the presidency. The United States had never elected such a young president.
He was Catholic. Many voters, especially in the South, were reluctant to vote for a Catholic president, because they believed that a Catholic would be loyal to the pope and not the Constitution. The United States had never had a Catholic president.
He was considered too conservative. Kennedy’s opposition to some of Truman’s policies didn’t sit too well with the Democratic Party leadership.
Kennedy’s strategy to overcome the Democratic Party’s objection was simple: Win in all the states that held primaries to select delegates to the Democratic nominating convention. He poured all of his resources into these primaries and focused especially on West Virginia. West Virginia was a predominantly Protestant state, bordering the South. If he could win in West Virginia, he could win anywhere. Kennedy won the state, and the party leadership recognized that he was a viable candidate who could win the presidency.
At the Democratic convention in 1960, Kennedy won the nomination on the first ballot. He named the Senate majority leader from Texas, Lyndon Johnson, as his ru
nning mate to help shore up southern support.
Debating with Nixon
Before the 2000 election, the 1960 election was the closest of the 20th century. Kennedy faced Republican Vice President Richard Nixon. Kennedy campaigned on a platform he called the New Frontier. It consisted of economic and social reforms, with an emphasis on civil rights, which ensured him the liberal and black votes.
The four nationally televised debates made the difference in 1960. Kennedy looked vigorous, knowledgeable, and not too young. Nixon didn’t fare as well, especially in the first debate, as he had just been released from the hospital after treatment for a knee infection. The hot studio lights made him sweat noticeably, and he had a heavy beard that gave him a five o’clock shadow. People who listened on the radio gave the debates to Nixon. The people who watched the debates on television picked Kennedy as the winner. Image decided the 1960 election.
Kennedy won the election with 49.7 percent of the vote to Nixon’s 49.6 percent. Kennedy assumed office in January 1961.
Benefiting from voter fraud
The election of 1960 produced allegations of massive vote fraud in Illinois and Texas — two states Kennedy narrowly won. In both states, the graveyard vote, or votes cast using the identities of dead people, made the difference. In Illinois, Chicago mayor Richard Daley’s political machine was well known for stuffing ballot boxes. Vice-presidential candidate Lyndon Johnson put his home state network into play in Texas.
Many Republicans wanted Nixon to contest the election, but he refused. The country was involved in the Cold War, the ongoing ideological conflict with the Soviet Union, and Nixon didn’t want to undermine public confidence in a new government by going to court.
President John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1961–1963)
John F. Kennedy, shown in Figure 19-1, was the first president born in the 20th century. He was also the youngest president, at 43 years of age, to be elected to office. (Theodore Roosevelt assumed the office at age 42, after the assassination of President William McKinley, but he wasn’t elected to it until he was 46.) Kennedy was also the youngest president to die in office. He was only 46 when he was assassinated.
Figure 19-1: John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35th president of the United States.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress
On January 20, 1961, President Kennedy presented one of the most unforgettable inaugural addresses in U.S. history. He outlined his “New Frontier” proposals and proclaimed that a new generation of U.S. citizens had taken over the country. In his conclusion, he called upon the U.S. citizenry to “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for you country.”
President Kennedy committed a first by appointing his brother Robert attorney general. For the first time, a president had a brother in his cabinet. Kennedy’s other surviving brother, Teddy, was elected to the Senate in 1962 and still represents Massachusetts in the Senate today.
Changing Foreign Policy
John F. Kennedy was prepared to make major changes to U.S. foreign policy. He wanted to abandon the policy of containing communism and instead work with the Soviet Union to create a better, less violent world. Soviet aggression in Berlin and Cuba changed his mind.
Another major change in U.S. foreign policy came in the area of Third World relations. Kennedy believed in helping third-world countries. He backed up his beliefs by providing the Third World with monetary aid and U.S. volunteers in the form of the Peace Corps.
At the same time, he supported his predecessor’s policies in Vietnam, actually increasing the number of U.S. military advisors in the country.
Dealing with arms and the U.S.S.R.
Unlike Truman and Eisenhower, Kennedy believed that it was possible to bargain and compromise with the Soviet Union, and that the two superpowers could coexist peacefully. Because Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet premier, had been liberalizing Soviet society and had abandoned Stalinism, Kennedy thought that he could deal with him.
Kennedy wanted to stop the arms race rather than build more weapons. He proposed meeting with Khrushchev to discuss arms control and even disarmament — the destruction of nuclear weapons.
Kennedy was disappointed. The Soviet Union saw Kennedy’s offer to negotiate as a sign of weakness. Instead of reaching out to the United States and its new leader, The Soviet Union started to behave aggressively in Europe (Berlin) and Latin America (Cuba). The Soviet Union miscalculated. Kennedy’s response was: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty.”
By 1962, Kennedy had returned to the policies of his predecessors — working to stop Soviet aggression and contain the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence.
The only tangible benefit of Kennedy’s efforts was the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty signed in 1963. It outlawed testing nuclear weapons in the atmosphere. After signing the treaty, Kennedy said, “Today the fear is a little less and the hope a little greater. For the first time we have been able to reach an agreement which can limit the dangers of this nuclear age.”
Helping the Third World: Creating the Peace Corps
Kennedy believed that it was the obligation of the United States not only to help the Third World economically but also to spread democracy to its countries.
To further that mission, Kennedy created the Peace Corps in 1961 to send U.S. volunteers to the people living in third-world countries. Thousands of U.S. citizens went abroad to help build roads and hospitals, and to help educate citizens around the world.
Stepping into the Bay of Pigs
Ironically, the first major foreign policy move of the new administration ended in disaster when Kennedy decided to proceed with the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba planned by the Eisenhower administration.
The Bay of Pigs was an attempt to aid Cuban exiles after their country fell to communism in 1959. The United States provided training, equipment, and logistical support to Cubans bent on recapturing their country. The 1961 invasion failed miserably, and, as a result, Cuba turned to the Soviet Union.
The Soviets were more than happy to provide assistance to Cuba. Khrushchev had been looking for an ally in Latin America so that he could build a base for Soviet missiles. While the U.S. had missiles in Europe targeting the Soviet Union, the Soviets had none close to the U.S. mainland. What better place than Cuba?
The Cuban Missile Crisis was the defining moment for the Kennedy administration. On October 16, 1962, U.S. intelligence found out that the Soviets were building missile sites in Cuba. The U.S. air force wanted to take out the sites, and many in the military called for an invasion of Cuba. Kennedy was afraid that an invasion would lead to a world war, so he set up a blockade of Cuba instead.
Kennedy vowed that Soviet ships headed for Cuba carrying missile parts would not be allowed through the blockade. In addition, he demanded that the Soviets remove their bases and all Soviet weaponry from Cuba.
At the last moment, the Soviets backed down and recalled their ships. The Soviet Union subsequently agreed to remove the missiles and their bases from Cuba, and the United States pledged not to invade the island. World War III had been narrowly avoided. Soviet Premier Khrushchev lost his job over the debacle.
Building a wall in Berlin
The Potsdam Conference, organized after World War II (see Chapter 17 for more on WWII and the conference), divided the German capital of Berlin into four zones — one for each victorious ally. By the 1950s, the three Western allies had created West Berlin, while the Soviet Union had set up East Berlin. During most of the 1950s, hundreds of thousands of East Germans, unhappy with their communist government, fled to the West, crossing over in Berlin because it was the easiest place to leave the country.
By the early 1960s, the number of people fleeing to West Germany had created a problem for the East German government. The country’s best educated and most skilled citizens were leaving. East
Germany faced a brain drain and a shortage of skilled laborers.
In August 1961, the Soviet Union and the communist East German government built a wall to close off East Berlin from the West and prevent the flow of people fleeing the country. Border guards had instructions to shoot to kill anyone who attempted to leave East Germany.
Initially, the Western powers didn’t react to the building of the wall — a move that shocked Germans. The Kennedy administration publicly condemned the building of the wall but did nothing more. At the time, Kennedy still believed that he could establish cordial relations with the Soviet Union and didn’t want to compromise his foreign policy over Berlin.
Kennedy’s outlook changed after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Thereafter, Kennedy adopted a policy of containment toward the Soviet Union. He traveled to West Berlin in June 1963 to show his support for the people there and to demonstrate that the United States would pursue a hard-line anti-communist foreign policy.
Kennedy was received enthusiastically by over two million Germans. He gave one of the most unforgettable speeches in history. He reassured the citizens of West Berlin of the commitment of the United States to the city and its defense. To demonstrate this point, Kennedy uttered the unforgettable sentence, “All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words: Ich Bin Ein Berliner.” (I am a citizen of Berlin.)
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