Kennedy

Hugh Brogan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317874782
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Vietnam War
• Index: History

This invaluable account provides an excellent introduction to the Presidency of John F. Kennedy. To understand Kennedy's aims and achievements in the White House, it looks at Kennedy the man and outlines his background and early career and the influences upon him. Hugh Brogan shows Kennedy as a credible statesman, a man of solid achievement. His record as President was, broadly, impressive and would have been more so had he lived.

Chapter 1
The Kennedy Problem

‘Profiles in Power.’ Irresistibly (for all I know, intentionally) the title of this series calls to mind Profiles in Courage, the book for which John Fitzgerald Kennedy was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1957. The echo suggests his unquestionable entitlement to a place in a catalogue which also includes Elizabeth I, Cardinal Richelieu and David Lloyd George; but in fact it is far from self-evident. As President of the United States Kennedy undoubtedly wielded great power, as much as the modern world can give to anybody, perhaps as much as anybody has exercised in all history; but it was his so briefly! Only two years and ten months separated his inauguration as President of the United States from his murder; as Theodore Sorensen said bitterly on hearing the dreadful news, ‘they wouldn’t even give him three years.’¹ Of the forty presidents, only six have served shorter terms than Kennedy’s; only two in the twentieth century have done so (Harding and Ford: not names with which Kennedy would care to be associated). At his inauguration he said, ‘Let us begin’; his successor, on inheriting his office, said, ‘Let us continue’; but while it is clear that Kennedy finished little, it is not obvious that he started much. The great affairs of his time, it might be urged, were well advanced before he came to power. He passed his years in the presidency learning his job and mastering the issues, but was cut down before he could prove what he had learned or put it to use. I do not accept this view, but I have tried to face it.

A profile can only be a sketch. Short though Kennedy’s life was, it was crammed with incident and great events, many of which I have had to leave out entirely. Readers wanting a full account will have to look elsewhere. But it has been my purpose to provide enough information to justify the contention that Kennedy’s was indeed a highly significant presidency, in which decisions were taken and choices made that, for good and ill, changed the course of history and still make themselves felt; that it was a lens through which the United States and the US presidency can effectively be studied; and that, because of the Kennedy personality and the fantastic circumstances of his death and its aftermath it was, so to say, a magical episode, the investigation of which carries the normally pedestrian politicai historian very far indeed from corridors of power and air-conditioned archives. Kennedy, in short, was important. (It does not need to be argued that he was interesting: the ever-growing library of books about him makes the point for me.)

In making my case I have been assisted by the mere lapse of time. In the last analysis, hindsight is the historian’s only privilege, and where recent events are concerned it is, self-evidently, not available. Very little of the material in the Kennedy literature can be categorised as truly historical. This was not necessarily the writers’ fault: the time was simply not ripe. Now it is ripening. More than thirty years have passed since Kennedy was president; thirty years is the conventional definition of a generation, though given modern rates of longevity forty might be a more realistic figure. At any rate, thirty years seems to be the period after which current affairs begin to become history: the presidency of Kennedy’s immediate predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, has already become the property of academic historians, and is debated by them with the right scholarly mixture of detachment and curiosity. Kennedy’s turn (I thought and think) has surely come. There is no longer any justification (if there ever was) for adding to the high pile of tendentious pamphlets even if the author’s experience is that of one who, when young, saw Shelley plain, greatly admired him, and was like all the world appalled by his assassination. True impartiality may be unattainable, but that need not impede the work of depicting Kennedy’s performance as president, of defining the problems and choices that confronted him, and of trying, through examination of his record, better to understand his office, his country and his times. There has been enough outpouring of grief, anger, prejudice, eulogy and abuse. The time has come to try for the beginnings of a permanent judgement, that forever unattainable prize which historians are obliged forever to seek.

Time has already begun to change the most fundamental categories of interpretation. For instance, Kennedy was most evidently a Cold War president, and the Cold War is over. One of the minor consequences of this tremendous fact has been to make most studies of Kennedy’s foreign policy obsolete: some are still valuable for the raw information which they contain, and for their authors’ mental powers; but they are obsolete, past appeal, for their interpretation, and the historian, who, having lived through the Cold War, has most probably been bent to a view of the world which must now be discarded, has the additional burden of fighting free of other scholars’ theories and assumptions, theories and assumptions which, only yesterday, seemed beyond question. It does not matter which school they belong to: left, right or centre, they must all be consigned to the dustbin. The same may be said, if perhaps less emphatically, of studies of Kennedy’s domestic record: the Reagan years have come and gone and nothing behind them looks the same. Kennedy is no longer part of our present; he belongs to a defìnable historical period, and the task is to define it.

Yet not all the controversies in which he was involved are now dead. The Cold War is over, but argument continues about the United States’ place in the modern world, and what new international order can and should be worked for. Thirty years have amply vindicated the wisdom of the policy on civil rights which Kennedy was driven to adopt and which Lyndon Johnson carried to fruition in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but the American dilemma remains as acute as ever. The economic and fiscal problems which preoccupied Kennedy are even more pressing than they were in his time. The office of the presidency, of which he had so articulate a view, is still the centre of American politics and of all debate about American power and purposes. There have been no political assassinations in the United States recently, but America still leads the world in death by private gunshot, and every year almost as many people die in this way as US servicemen died in the whole of the Vietnam War. And the memory of that war, in which Kennedy for a time played so crucial a part, still bedevils the formation and execution of American foreign policy. So if it is ever reasonable to study the past in order to master the present, it is reasonable in this instance. It may not any longer make much sense to take sides about Kennedy’s perceptions and decisions, but it is well worth asking why he acted as he did, in order to understand not just America in the 1960s, but also America today.

The scholarly obligation to weigh the extent to which time has changed our concerns with the Kennedy presidency has led me to say as little as possible about the Kennedy myth. It could not be excluded entirely, but it is such a large and potent subject that to do it justice would have required a quite different book, in which the questions of policy and action would have vanished. Jack Kennedy was only intermittently deceived by his own legend (though he was always ready to encourage it when it seemed politically profitable); he would have been appalled by the extent to which it has blotted out concern with the real issues with which he grappled, and his real achievements. It is doubtful if time will ever wholly rescue his reputation: after all, the one thing which everyone knows about Henry VIII, after four hundred years, is that he had six wives. Yet for forty years after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, conspiracy theorists supplied an alarmed and bewildered public with fanciful explanations of the event, but at length the market dried up and no more was heard of them. Byron’s sex life eclipsed his poetry in interest for more than a century after his death, but that can largely be explained by the brilliance of the letters in which he chronicled his love affairs, and by the sensational nature of his exploits - everything from incest to homosexuality (Kennedy’s sexual adventures seem insipid in comparison). Nowadays, at last, his verse once more commands its proper attention. The history of the Kennedy family, that mixture of saga, tragedy and soap-opera, has served far more often as a distraction from the effort to understand history than as a serious theme. It is like those studies of Napoleon which chiefly concern themselves with Josephine and Marie Walewska. True, the Kennedy legend is an invaluable means for investigating the American consciousness, with particular emphasis on its sentimentality, gullibility and prurience; but the writer of a mere profile can ask to be excused for omitting trivia, even though the market for tittle-tattle and fantasy is unexhausted.

A profile need not be based on fresh archival research, and anyway new information, however much I had uncovered, would be unlikely to make any fundamental difference to understanding Kennedy and his times. We already have more data than we can easily digest. It is the brevity and incompleteness of Kennedy’s career which make it baffling, and nothing will alter that. A profile should, however, have a clear theme, and in this instance ‘power’ is not, I think, the correct term. Rather, this is a profile in leadership. Kennedy was fascinated from his earliest manhood until his death by the problem of leadership in a democracy. He read about it, wrote about it, studied it at first hand, analysed it and practised it until he acquired a deep expertise. Like all politicians, he tended to be impatient and resentful of criticism; he thought himself a better judge than anyone else of what was required of the president, in large matters and small. He played a long game, and by 1963 was confident that it was going to be a winning one: in his last press conference he indicated that he expected all his major legislative proposals - tax reform, civil rights, medical care for the aged - to be enacted in 1964 or, at latest, 1965: Ί am looking forward to the record of this Congress, but… this is going to be an 18־month delivery!’² His appraisal of his performance in foreign policy was even more buoyant. The final purpose of this book, then, must be to investigate the sources of his self-confidence, to see how his ideas survived the test of practice, and to decide, however tentatively, to what extent his claim to leadership was justified.

Notes

1. William Manchester, The Death of a President (New York: Harper & Row 1967) p. 249.

2. The president’s news conference of 14 November 1963; Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy (Washington, DC 1962–64) (PP) iii p. 849.

Chapter 2
A Candidate for Office

Winning the presidency of the United States was John Kennedy’s single most difficult achievement, involving three years of labour, calculation and luck. After he had brought it off it was easy to think that his victory had been inevitable, but few thought so before the Democratic party’s nominating convention of 1960, and no realist could think so after the narrow electoral win in the autumn. Among the realists was Kennedy himself. When Benjamin Bradlee reminded him that one of his campaign organisers had been described as ‘coruscatingly brilliant’, the president laughed and said, ‘Sometimes these guys forget that fifty thousand votes the other way and they’d all be coruscatingly stupid.’¹ His tiny margin over the Republican candidate, Richard Nixon - 118,574 popular votes, or 0.17 per cent of all those cast - is still the clearest indication of the magnitude of the task that he had set himself.

‘Availability’ (a term of art in traditional American politics) was the test applied to all public men in 1957, when Kennedy began seriously to plan his candidacy, and by that test he was apparently a hopeless case.² By the definitions of Democratic availability (those of the Republican party were somewhat different) he came from the wrong state: Massachusetts cast only fourteen electoral votes and was strongly Democratic anyway. An available Democrat was one who came from a large marginal state - New York, perhaps, or Illinois - which his status as a ‘favourite son’ would help to carry on election day. Kennedy was too young: 29 May 1957 was only his fortieth birthday (Lyndon Johnson, the formidable leader of the Democrats in the Senate, usually referred to him as ‘the boy’). He was a US senator, and neither a distinguished nor a diligent one. By tradition, governors of states were preferred for presidential nominations to members of either House of Congress, both because they usually controlled their state delegations at the conventions, and because their experience as executives was thought to be better training for the presidency than that of a mere legislator, and because senators, by voting on national issues as they had to, made enemies in a way that governors did not. Then, Kennedy was objectionable to the liberal wing of the party because of his equivocal record on the late Senator Joe McCarthy, the Demon King of anti-communism, and because he was the son of a buccaneering billionaire, Joseph P. Kennedy, notorious for his dubious business career and for his illiberal views on both domestic and foreign policy. Finally, to most people, Jack Kennedy’s last, worst disqualification was that he was a Catholic (though that good Baptist, former President Harry S. Truman, remarked that it wasn’t the candidate’s heavenly father but his earthly father that he worried about). Since 1928, when the great Al Smith was overwhelmingly defeated by Herbert Hoover, Democratic leaders had been resolved never again to nominate a Catholic for president.³

But times were changing, and Kennedy was smart enough (perhaps because he was young enough) to know it. His father’s money, shrewdness and influence were no handicaps, and his own youth might be a precious asset. America was very comfortable under President Eisenhower, but even among those who had twice voted for him, and would have done so again had he not been debarred by the Twenty-Second Amendment to the Constitution from running for a third term, there was a feeling that the country had somehow lost its way under this elderly, prudent rule; was perhaps too comfortable, too somnolent; had lost its sense of purpose and was letting the dreaded Soviet communists overtake it; to meet this anxiety Eisenhower had set up a committee to suggest ‘Goals For Americans’. Eisenhower’s economic policy might reasonably be judged too timidly conservative: three recessions in eight years were surely too many in an age brimming with Keynesian skills and insights. And even Eisenhower himself felt that in a sense America had passed its peak: the devastation in Europe and Asia caused by the Second World War was now largely a thing of the past, and the unique position of the United States, as the only country to have done well out of that war, was at an end. There was a growing number of effective economic competitors, and the piles of gold stored in Fort Knox were beginning to dwindle. It was time for a change; youthful energy might bring it about. So much was this the general mood that not only Kennedy but also Richard Nixon (aged 48) made it his theme in the 1960 election; and perhaps Nixon’s inability to sound as convincing as Kennedy on the point (as Ike’s vice-president he had to defend the Eisenhower record) was what denied him victory.

Nor was it really a drawback that Kennedy was a senator; indeed, it was an advantage - so much so that of the five main competitors for the 1960 Democratic nomination four were senators (Kennedy, Johnson, Humphrey, Symington) and the fifth, Adlai Stevenson, got no advantage from having once been Governor of Illinois. The growth of the federal government had given senators new importance in domestic matters, and in the Cold War years foreign policy was invariably the most important campaign issue. It was a matter, literally, of life and death, and no governor could hope to compete with a senator’s expertise in that field, unless, like Stevenson and Nelson Rockefeller of New York (a Republican), he had gone to the state house from the State Department. Of the twenty-two major party presidential and vice-presidential candidates nominated between 1960 and 1988, seventeen were, or had been, members of either the Senate or the House of Representatives; three (including Kennedy) had served in both; and five had had significant experience as members of the federal executive. It was the era of Washington insiders, and its waning, when it came, was slow - signalled by the emergence of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, both former governors, and both out-spoken rebels against what they believed to be the corrupt and inefficient government ‘inside the Beltway’ - the Beltway being the highway built in the 1960s to girdle the District of Columbia and that Greater Washington which had been called into being by the relentless expasion of the federal government and the multiplication of persons wishing to do business with it. The road was a fitting symbol of the age, both at ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• CHAPTER 1 The Kennedy Problem
• CHAPTER 2 A Candidate for Office
• CHAPTER 3 Alarms and Excursions
• CHAPTER 4 The View from the White House
• CHAPTER 5 The Missiles of October
• CHAPTER 6 Revolution
• CHAPTER 7 Vietnam
• CHAPTER 8 Death and a Presidency
• Chronology
• Bibliographical essay
• Index