An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (38 page)

Although another Kennedy labor bill would win Senate approval in 1959, the Senate decision to instead agree on the House’s more restrictive Landrum-Griffin Act deprived Kennedy of any significant political gain in the labor wars. More disappointing, Bobby and Jack found “appalling public apathy” generating “the merest lip-service” to reform. Yet Jack’s image as an honest crusader had been promoted. But even if the public agreed with the Kennedys, when it came to promoting actual legislation, the eyes of the voters glazed over. They paid more attention in 1960, however, when Bobby published
The Enemy Within,
describing the Kennedy crusade to overcome union corruption and break up the Mafia or Italian crime families Bobby had also investigated in 1958-59.

OF COURSE, JACK
had never seen intervention in domestic issues as the primary means of advancing his presidential ambitions. On the contrary, they were a political minefield in which a presidential aspirant could alienate more voters than he might attract. Although promises of prosperity had been an essential ingredient of every successful twentieth-century presidential campaign, national security often ran a close second, and in 1952 and 1956 it commanded more voter attention than the economy.

Standing up for the nation, rather than self-serving factions, and arguing in favor of overseas actions that could affect the lives of all Americans and millions of others abroad appealed to Jack’s idealism. He was not dogmatic and understood that no one had a monopoly of wisdom on the best means for dealing with external events. But he had a degree of self-confidence about foreign affairs that he rarely displayed in addressing domestic ones. Back in 1953, he had asked Ted Sorensen which cabinet posts would interest him most if he ever had a choice. “Justice, Labor and Health-Education-Welfare,” Sorensen replied. “I wouldn’t have any interest in any of those,” Kennedy said emphatically, “only Secretary of State or Defense.”

A focus on foreign policy also helped Jack refute assertions that his interest in the presidency was largely inspired by his father. During a 1953 meeting of Joe and Jack with some Hearst editors, Joe dominated the conversation with pronouncements on how to meet Cold War challenges. Jack abruptly left the room. “Jesus, Jack, what’s happening?” his friend Paul Fay, who followed him into another room, asked. “Why did you do that?” Jack responded, “Listen, I’ve only got three choices. I can sit there and keep my mouth shut, which will be taken as a sign that I agree with him. I can have a fight with him in front of the press. Or I can get up and leave.” In 1960, he told a journalist, “My father is conservative. We disagree on many things. He’s an isolationist and I’m an internationalist. . . . I’ve given up arguing with him. But I make up my own mind and my own decisions.”

Jack’s appointment to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in January 1957 helped his standing as a party spokesman on foreign affairs. To join the committee, Kennedy needed Johnson’s support. Jack’s rival for the assignment was Kefauver, whose four-year seniority to Jack gave him a stronger claim. But “I have never had the particular feeling that when I called up my first team and the chips were down that Kefauver felt he ought to be . . . on that team,” LBJ bluntly told Kefauver in January 1955. In contrast, Jack had been cooperative with Lyndon during his four years in the Senate and had been rewarded with Johnson’s support for the VP nomination. And appointing Jack to Foreign Relations meant that if Jack’s presidential campaign faltered, Lyndon could count on Joe and Jack for their support. According to LBJ, Joe “bombarded me with phone calls, presents and little notes telling me what a great guy I was. . . . One day he came right out and pleaded with me to put Jack on the Foreign Relations Committee, telling me that if I did, he’d never forget the favor for the rest of his life. Now, I knew Kefauver wanted the seat bad and I knew he had four years’ seniority on Kennedy. . . . But I kept picturing old Joe Kennedy sitting there with all that power and wealth feeling indebted to me for the rest of his life, and I sure liked that picture.”

Jack used his committee membership to encourage public discussion of wiser overseas actions and to build his reputation as a foreign policy expert. He had no illusion that anything he said would necessarily alter America’s response to the world or reach great numbers of voters. But he believed it useful to speak out anyway: A national debate on foreign policy was essential in the midst of the Cold War, and his contribution to such a discussion could encourage intellectuals and party leaders to take his presidential candidacy more seriously.

An Algerian crisis—the struggle of a French North African colony to gain independence—became an opportunity for Kennedy to restate anticolonial ideas voiced in 1954 over Vietnam. “The most powerful single force in the world today,” he declared in a Senate speech in July 1957, “is neither communism nor capitalism, neither the H-bomb nor the guided missile—it is man’s eternal desire to be free and independent.” And “the single most important test of American foreign policy today is how we meet the challenge of imperialism. . . . On this test more than any other, this Nation shall be critically judged by the uncommitted millions in Asia and Africa.” Neither foreign aid nor a greater military arsenal nor “new pacts or doctrines or high-level conferences” could substitute for an effective response to anticolonialism. More specifically, he urged U.S. backing for Algerian self-determination through a mediated settlement. If, however, the French refused to negotiate, he favored outright U.S. support of independence.

Kennedy’s bold proposal did not sit well with either the French government or the Eisenhower administration, which disputed the wisdom of his recommendations. And though he responded to his critics by restating his firm belief in his proposal, he told his father that perhaps he had made a mistake. Joe assured him otherwise: “You lucky mush,” Joe said. “You don’t know it and neither does anyone else, but within a few months everyone is going to know just how right you were on Algeria.”

Taking heart from his father’s prediction, Jack restated the need to rethink American foreign policy in an article in the October 1957 issue of
Foreign Affairs
. “A Democrat Looks at Foreign Policy” left no doubt that he was offering a partisan alternative to Republican thinking about world politics. Nevertheless, the article was more an exercise in analysis than a polemical attack. Kennedy began by urging that America not see the world strictly through “the prisms of our own historic experience.” The country needed to understand that we lived not simply in a bipolar world of Soviet-American rivalry but a global environment in which smaller powers were charting an independent course. America needed not only to oppose communism but also to help emerging nations regardless of their attitude toward the Cold War.

Kennedy described “two central weaknesses in our current foreign policy: first, a failure to appreciate how the forces of nationalism are rewriting the geopolitical map of the world . . . and second, a lack of decision and conviction in our leadership . . . which seeks too often to substitute slogans for solutions.” Jack’s proposals for change, however, suffered from some of the same limitations as Eisenhower’s. He urged policy makers to replace “apocalyptic solutions” with something he called “a new realism,” which was to substitute economic aid for military exports and to work against “the prolongation of Western colonialism.” But how? The “new realism” was as much a political slogan as a genuine departure from current thinking about overseas affairs

In private, Jack was also critical of his Democratic colleagues. Early in 1958, he told economist John Kenneth Galbraith that “the Democratic party has tended to magnify the military challenge to the point where equally legitimate economic and political programs have been obscured. . . . It is clear also that, however tempting a target, the attacks on Mr. Dulles [for brinksmanship and insensitivity to the Third World] have been taken too often as a sum total of an alternative foreign policy—a new kind of devil theory of failure.” To counter this, he stated his intention “to give special attention this year to developing some new policy toward the underdeveloped areas.”

Yet at the same time as he was discussing alternative Cold War actions, Kennedy could not ignore the military competition with Moscow. Fears that the Soviet Union was surpassing the United States in missile technology and would soon be able to deliver a devastating attack on North America made defense policy a centerpiece of all discussions on foreign affairs. In October 1957, the Soviets successfully launched
Sputnik I,
a space satellite that orbited the earth. The accomplishment shocked Americans and produced an outcry for a vast expansion of U.S. defense spending. A government-sponsored committee headed by H. Rowan Gaither, chairman of the board of the Ford Foundation, advised Eisenhower that American defenses against Moscow were inadequate, that there was a missile gap favoring the Soviets, and that unless the United States began an immediate buildup, it would face defeat in a nuclear war. Three members of Gaither’s committee urged a preventive war before it was too late.

Like Eisenhower, who refused to give in to the country’s overreaction and launch an arms race, Kennedy urged a balance among military strength, economic aid, and considered diplomacy. In a
New York Times
interview in December 1957, he warned against neglecting economic aid programs and disarmament talks in a rush to outdo the Soviet arms buildup. In June 1958, he spoke on the Senate floor against shifting control over foreign economic assistance from the State Department to the Defense Department. He feared weakening the power of the secretary of state and a greater militarization of the Cold War.

Yet the opportunity to take political advantage of what seemed like a major failing on the part of the Eisenhower administration was irresistible. In August 1958, Jack spoke in the Senate about a fast-approaching “dangerous period” when we would suffer a “gap” or a “missile-lag period”—a time “in which our own offensive and defensive missile capabilities will lag so far behind those of the Soviets as to place us in a position of grave peril.” The gap was the result of a “complacency” that put “fiscal security ahead of national security.”

By criticizing White House defense policy, Jack hoped both to serve the nation’s security and score political points. But although his speech enhanced his party standing as a serious analyst of foreign and defense issues, it added little to his hold on the public and did nothing to convince the administration that it needed to substantially alter defense planning. Only a small minority of Americans shared his fears of a missile gap: in October 1957, just 13 percent of a Gallup poll thought that defense preparedness or Sputnik “missiles” was the most important problem facing the country. People were instead far more concerned about racial segregation and finding ways to reach accommodations with Russia that could reduce the likelihood of a nuclear war.

But Jack’s growing public appeal—and it was clearly growing—rested on more than his policy pronouncements. During 1957-58 he became emblematic of a new breed of celebrity politician, as notable for his good looks, infectious smile, charm, and wit as for his thoughtful pronouncements on weighty public questions. “Seldom in the annals of this political capital,” one journalist noted in May 1957, “has anyone risen as rapidly as Senator John F. Kennedy.” Popular and news magazines—
Look,
Time,
Life,
the
Saturday Evening Post, McCall’s, Redbook, U.S. News & World Report, Parade,
the
American Mercury,
and the
Catholic Digest
—regularly published feature stories about Jack and his extraordinary family. (“Senator Kennedy, do you have an ‘in’ with
Life,
” a high school newspaper editor asked him. “No,” he replied, “I just have a beautiful wife.”) One critical journalist wrote: “This man seeks the highest elective office in the world not primarily as a politician, but as a celebrity. He’s the only politician a woman would read about while sitting under the hair dryer, the subject of more human-interest articles than all his rivals combined.” But in the words of another, he had become the “perfect politician” with a beautiful wife and, in November 1957, a daughter, Caroline Bouvier Kennedy.

By the fall of 1959, Joe Kennedy was able to tell reporters that “Jack is the greatest attraction in the country today. I’ll tell you how to sell more copies of a book. Put his picture on the cover. Why is it that when his picture is on the cover of
Life
or
Redbook
that they sell a record number of copies? You advertise that he will be at a dinner and you will break all records for attendance. He can draw more people to a fund-raising dinner than Cary Grant or Jimmy Stewart. Why is that? He has more universal appeal.”

Jack’s 1958 Senate reelection campaign had borne out his extraordinary political attractiveness. With no Republican of any stature willing to run against him, Jack was able to coast to a record-breaking victory. Despite a campaign designed by Larry O’Brien and Kenny O’Donnell to keep Jack’s “direct and personal participation to an absolute minimum,” he won 874,608 votes out of 1.32 million cast, 73.6 percent, the largest popular margin ever received by a candidate in Massachusetts and the second-largest margin tallied by any U.S. Senate candidate that year. The numbers seemed to support the predictions of Kennedy admirers that the country was witnessing “the flowering of another great political family, such as the Adamses, the Lodges, and the La Follettes.” “They confidently look forward to the day,” a friendly journalist wrote months before Kennedy’s 1958 victory, “when Jack will be in the White House, Bobby will serve in the Cabinet as Attorney General, and Teddy will be the Senator from Massachusetts.”

JACK’S SIX YEARS
in the Senate had schooled him in the major domestic, defense, and foreign policy issues. His education was essential preparation for a presidential campaign and, more important, service in the White House. To be sure, his Senate career had produced no major legislation that contributed substantially to the national well-being. But it had strengthened his resolve to reach for executive powers that promised greater freedom to implement ideas that could improve the state of the world. In a 1960 tape recording, explaining why he was running for president, he stated that the life of a legislator was much less satisfying than that of a chief executive. Senators and congressmen could work on something for two years and have it turned aside by a president in one day and one stroke of the pen. Jack believed that effective leadership came largely from the top. Being president provided opportunities to make a difference no senator could ever hope to achieve. The time had come.