“To make clear our good faith and solemn convictions on the matter, I now declare that the United States does not propose to conduct nuclear tests in the atmosphere so long as other states do not do so. We will not be the first to resume. Such a declaration is no substitute for a formal binding treaty, but I hope it will help us achieve one. Nor would such a treaty be a substitute for disarmament, but I hope it will help us achieve it.”
Finally came the radical commitment: “Our primary long-range interest in Geneva, however, is general and complete disarmament—designed to take place by stages, permitting parallel political developments to build the new institutions of peace which would take the place of arms.”
What Kennedy had said would quickly become known to the men and women of the Soviet Union—but only because Nikita Khrushchev had dictated that it be so. According to a New York Times piece three days later, headlined “Russians Stirred by Kennedy Talk About Cold War,” the Communist daily Izvestia had published the speech in full. Reported the Times, “The decision to make the speech available to the Soviet people through the government newspaper was interpreted here as an indication that the speech had made a favorable impression in the Kremlin.”
The story then quoted a Soviet intellectual: “The speech and its publication in Izvestia show that there can be mutual understanding.” While a young woman worker was “overheard to ask a friend: ‘Have you read the Kennedy speech? It is all about peace.’ ”
• • •
The previous month, however, most Americans had witnessed something they wanted no one in the world to see. It had been in their newspapers and on their television sets. The incident had occurred in Birmingham, Alabama, in early May, when Eugene “Bull” Connor—the unrepentantly racist commissioner of public safety, just elected for his sixth term—had unleashed dogs and ordered fire hoses turned on peaceful African-American civil rights demonstrators.
Now, on June 11, the day after Kennedy’s American University speech, two black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood, had attempted to enroll at the University of Alabama. Their way was blocked by order of Governor George C. Wallace, who’d campaigned on a promise to do just that. Watching the eleven o’clock news two weeks earlier with Jackie and the Bradlees, the president had grown solemn at clips of Wallace promising—in the face of a federal court order—personally to “bar the door” against any attempts at desegregation. “He’s just challenging us to use the marshals . . . that’s going to be something.”
He’d once met Wallace—whose recent campaign slogan had been “Segregation now—Segregation tomorrow—Segregation forever”—and was disgusted by the man. “Make him look ridiculous. That’s what the president wants you to do,” Attorney General Robert Kennedy instructed his deputy, Nicholas Katzenbach.
There in Tuscaloosa, flanked by an enormous contingent of National Guardsmen—his earlier experience at Ole Miss had taught him about strength in numbers—Katzenbach instructed Wallace to allow the two students to be admitted. When the governor remained immovable in the door of Foster Auditorium, the commander of the Alabama Guard, General Henry Graham, told him to “stand aside,” which Wallace then did.
Thanks to a documentary shot at the time by Robert Drew, we can see much of what happened next. Titled Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment, it shows Kennedy standing in the Oval Office and asking his top aides—Ken O’Donnell, Larry O’Brien, Ted Sorensen, Pierre Salinger, and his brother Bobby—to join him around a small coffee table. Kennedy assumed the captain’s seat, in this case a rocking chair. He did so with a subtle, two-thumbs-up gesture as if he were still a young skipper calling his crew to quarters. General Graham’s success, acting on his behalf, obviously had energized Kennedy. At that moment he made the call to deliver a major speech that night, giving Sorensen only three hours to prepare it.
In his State of the Union that January, President Kennedy had affirmed that the “most precious and powerful right in the world, the right to vote . . . not be denied to any citizen on grounds of his race or color. In this centennial year of Emancipation, all those who are willing to vote should always be permitted.” He’d followed it by endorsing a push for voting rights, backing an end to all discrimination in hiring and supporting full access to public accommodations. Now, with his own deepening conviction heightened by the confrontation in Alabama he’d just seen on television, he was ready to further speak his thoughts.
Calling civil rights “a moral issue . . . as old as the Scriptures and . . . as clear as the American Constitution,” he framed it in the context of the Cold War. “Today we are committed to a worldwide struggle to promote and protect the rights of all who wish to be free. And when Americans are sent to Vietnam or West Berlin, we do not ask for whites only. We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it.”
The commonsense truths he spoke that night were framed in the idiom of everyday American conversation.
“It ought to be possible, therefore, for American students of any color to attend any public institution they select without having to be backed up by troops.
“It ought to be possible for American consumers of any color to receive equal service in places of public accommodation, such as hotels and restaurants and theaters and retail stores, without being forced to resort to demonstrations in the street, and it ought to be possible for American citizens of any color to register to vote in a free election without interference or fear of reprisal.
“It ought to be possible, in short, for every American to enjoy the privileges of being American without regard to his race or his color. In short, every American ought to have the right to be treated as he would wish to be treated, as one would wish his children to be treated. But this is not the case.
“If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public; if he cannot send his children to the best public school available; if he cannot vote for the public officials who represent him; if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place? Who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay?”
Martin Luther King, Jr., declared that the speech he’d heard represented “the most sweeping and forthright ever presented by an American president.”
But it was one thing to speak eloquently in one’s own language, and another to confront an audience on foreign land. Driving through the streets of West Berlin later that month, on June 26, Ben Bradlee watched Kennedy struggling to rehearse the German sentences he intended to use in a speech. Bradlee knew his friend was no linguist. In fact, Jack was secretly taking French lessons, having resented Bradlee’s own fluency, which he’d gained years before as a press attaché with the American embassy in Paris. “Two thousand years ago the proudest boast was ‘civis Romanus sum.’ Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’ ”
Twenty-two months earlier, the East Germans had stepped back from the edge of conflict and constructed the Berlin Wall, taking the city—and the watching world—by surprise. Overnight, the twelve-foot concrete-and-barbed-wire symbol of totalitarianism had taken shape as a scar on the landscape of European history. More than a hundred miles long, one section of the Wall divided East and West Berlin, while a much larger one encircled the American, British, and French sectors, cutting them off from the rest of East Germany. Where once there had been reasonably free passage between the halves of the politically bifurcated city, now there were checkpoints and guards with guns.
Kennedy tackled the problem of addressing the beleaguered West Berliners straightforwardly. He and his country stood for democracy, and everything else derived from that simple reality. “There are many people in the world who really don’t understand, or say they don’t, what is the great issue between the Free World and the Communist world. Let them come to Berlin. There are some who say that Communism is the wave of the future. Let them come to Berli
n. And there are even a few who say that it is true that Communism is an evil system, but it permits us to make economic progress. Lass’ sie nach Berlin kommen! Let them come to Berlin. Freedom has many difficulties, and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in to prevent them from leaving us. 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.’ ”
A million Germans lined the parade route, with 300,000 jamming into the square fronting West Berlin. Two thirds of the population had come out to greet JFK. His speech that day was—for both his listeners and for all those who lived in that time—the greatest of the Cold War. Seeing the Wall itself affected the president physically, shocking him probably even more than he’d expected. He looked “like a man who has just glimpsed Hell,” Hugh Sidey observed.
Jack called the time he spent in Berlin and then in Ireland, where he flew next, the happiest days of his life. There, in the country of his ancestors, the first Irish-Catholic American president was welcomed with near ecstatic enthusiasm. Accompanied by his sisters Eunice Shriver and Jean Smith, he made a stop in Dunganstown in County Wexford, site of his Kennedy roots, and then, in Galway, was honored with the Freedom of the City. At the port town of New Ross, he told the crowd gathered to hear him, “When my great-grandfather left here to become a cooper in East Boston, he carried nothing with him except two things—a strong religious faith and a strong desire for liberty. I am glad to say that all of his grandchildren have valued that inheritance.”
In England, before going to Birch Grove, Harold Macmillan’s residence, to meet with the prime minister, he traveled to Derbyshire to visit the grave of his sister Kathleen. The current Duchess of Devonshire remembers how the presidential helicopter affected one resident of the small rural village: “The wind from that machine blew my chickens away, and I haven’t seen them since,” the woman complained. At St. Peter’s Church there, Jack went to the gravesite and, carrying some flowers for his sister, carefully and painfully went down on his knees to pray.
The fact that Jack Kennedy achieved this historic hat trick—the “peace speech” on nuclear arms, the epic address on civil rights, and the “Ich bin ein Berliner” moment—while enduring chronic back pain enhances the nobility of it all. You can see in the documentary footage of the Oval Office scene during the Birmingham crisis a tinge of the torture in the careful way Kennedy carries himself, the deliberate way he rocks his chair. There’s nothing easy in his manner.
• • •
For ten days in July, Averell Harriman, who’d been the U.S. ambassador in Moscow in the 1940s, negotiated with Nikita Khrushchev a treaty to ban the testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere. During those negotiations, recalled Ted Sorensen, “Khrushchev told Harriman that more than anything else, Kennedy’s ‘Peace Speech’—which the chairman allowed to be rebroadcast throughout Russia and to be published in full in the Moscow press—had paved the way for the treaty.”
The treaty outlawed nuclear testing by the USA, USSR, and Great Britain in the atmosphere, outer space, and underwater. On July 25, 1963, envoys from the three powers signed the document, making it official. John Kennedy considered this his greatest achievement.
David Ormsby-Gore, the British ambassador in Washington, traced Kennedy’s determination to secure the treaty and his courage in pursuing it to his good friend’s own biography. “With all human beings, one of the things that gives confidence is to have been in extreme peril and come well out of it, perhaps on some occasions to have been near death and come back from the brink. I have always noticed that people who have had that kind of experience have a sort of calm; not quite a detachment from life, but a calm attitude to anything that life can throw at them, which is rather significant. Of course, he had had the experience on more than one occasion of being faced by death.”
During that summer, as Jack had been traveling, Jackie Kennedy had remained at home pregnant, expecting to deliver her third child in September. Their second, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Jr., born right after the 1960 election, was now twenty months old. Caroline was almost six. On August 7, Jackie gave birth, five weeks early, to a boy whom they named Patrick. Never strong to begin with, two days later he began to fail. The father held his tiny fingers for two hours as the infant tried to breathe. He was holding them when Patrick died. “He put up quite a fight.” Then, “He was a beautiful baby.”
Afterward, the president went to his room, having asked to be given time alone. Through the door, Dave Powers could hear him sobbing. Later he would kneel beside Jackie’s bed and tell her about the son he’d loved that they now, together, had lost.
• • •
There was never a good time to try to come to grips with the situation in Vietnam, and Kennedy had been delaying it. Within days of taking office, he’d signed a national security directive stating that it was our country’s policy to “defeat Communist insurgency” in South Vietnam. By 1963 there were twelve thousand U.S. “military advisors” there. However, JFK had resisted calls from South Vietnam’s president, Ngo Dinh Diem, to send in combat troops, seeing no merit to that idea. Fully aware that there were gung ho American officers hoping he’d upgrade our status there from “advising” to actually fighting, he had no intention of letting that happen.
“I can remember one particular case,” Red Fay recalled. “We were out, I believe it was off of Newport. I think the Blue Angels had just flown over. The president was sitting in his swivel chair in the back of the Honey Fitz, and the phone rang next to him. There were some marines that wanted to lead their unit into combat. The situation, they thought, was ideal for an attack, and so, therefore, they wanted to lead it. And, evidently, the standing orders of the president at that time were that our advisors over there were not there to lead Vietnam troops into battle. Fay heard his old navy buddy make it crystal clear that he wanted that order enforced to the letter.
But he couldn’t abandon Saigon to the Communists and expect to win a second term. He couldn’t afford to be the president who “lost” South Vietnam, just as he’d accused Harry Truman of doing with China. The problem was President Diem. A Roman Catholic, Diem had enjoyed strong support from American Catholics, including Kennedy, since taking command when Vietnam was divided at the Geneva Convention in 1954. Diem was now conducting a campaign of repression against the country’s Buddhist majority. In June a seventy-three-year-old Buddhist monk had lit himself on fire in a main Saigon thoroughfare, having moments earlier handed a statement to reporters. “Before closing my eyes to Buddha, I have the honor of presenting my word to President Diem, asking him to be kind and tolerant toward his people and to enforce a policy of religious equality.”
President Kennedy realized he could no longer support a regime that was fighting the Communist guerrillas and Buddhist monks. Besides this, the Diem government was viewed as hopelessly corrupt, totally under the control of Diem’s brother and sister-in-law, the notorious “Dragon Lady,” Madame Nhu. Feeling stymied, he had the idea to name his onetime political rival Henry Cabot Lodge as U.S. ambassador. There were clear advantages to this. Lodge lacked any sentimental feelings toward Diem. He was arrogant enough to act decisively. Most important, he wanted a victory, personally as well as nationally. He had the added advantage, for Kennedy, of making the hellish situation in South Vietnam bipartisan.
Something had to be done. Diem and his brother Nhu were leading the country’s special forces in raids on Buddhist pagodas in Saigon and other cities, arresting monks and nuns alike. Lodge now represented a group within the Kennedy administration who wanted to back a military coup to topple Diem. The leader of that faction was Averell Harriman, who’d proven himself to Kennedy by winning Khrushchev’s agreement in July to the limited nuclear testing ban.
On August 24, Kennedy approved a cable to Saigon authorizing American support for a military coup against President Diem. It was a cold decision, certainly a stark shift in l
oyalty. Kennedy had been a backer of Diem from the earliest days of the country’s division, and had been a supporter of the American Friends of Vietnam, a lobbying group. Now he was approving his former ally’s overthrow. Inside his administration, his decision was never truly cleared by either McNamara or Rusk, and it met with disfavor from Lyndon Johnson.
The cable said: “U.S. Government cannot tolerate situation in which power lies in Nhu’s hands. Diem must be given chance to rid himself of Nhu and his coterie and replace them with the best military and political personalities available. If, in spite of your efforts, Diem remains obdurate and refuses, then we must face the possibility that Diem himself cannot be preserved. You will understand that we cannot from Washington give you detailed instructions as to how this operation should proceed, but you will also know we will back you to the hilt on action to achieve our objectives.” It was precisely what Lodge wanted: a death warrant.
August was also the month of the extraordinary, epoch-making March on Washington, with its unforgettable “I have a dream” speech delivered with Moses-like fervor by Martin Luther King, Jr., to the crowd of 250,000. The president had done what he could to stave off the possibility of conflict at the event. His efforts had helped swell the numbers of marchers, especially whites, because he’d encouraged Walter Reuther to bring his UAW members. He’d taken steps to accommodate the crowd, reducing the chances of discord by making sure there was both food and bathroom access. And, sensibly, he drew the route from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial—not to the gates of the White House.
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 76
