Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) (14 page)

The two aides took their fears to Senator Fulbright, who cornered McNamara at a party and urged him to take action. Soon after receiving a memo on the dangers of rising militarism that was prepared by Fulbright’s aides, the defense secretary issued a directive that limited military officers’ ability to promote right-wing causes at public events. McNamara and Fulbright were immediately denounced by South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, a major general in the Army Reserve, and other congressional mouthpieces for the military-industrial complex. Thurmond charged that McNamara’s directive was a “dastardly attempt to intimidate the commanders of the U.S. Armed Forces” and “constitutes a serious blow to the security of the United States.”

Fulbright decided to stand up on the Senate floor to answer Thurmond and take his message about the menace of militarism before the American people. The man who had grown up on an Arkansas hog farm to become a Rhodes scholar, university president, and chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee had been considered a potential secretary of state by Kennedy. Indeed, the brilliant, independent-minded statesman—one of the few who warned the new president against the Bay of Pigs invasion—could have been featured in a sequel to Kennedy’s
Profiles in Courage
if it had not been for the residue of segregationism he carried with him from his home state and which cost him the top post in the State Department. Fulbright was the only member of the Senate to vote against funds for Joe McCarthy’s witch-hunt expedition during the fevered height of his inquisition.

On August 2, the tall, lanky Fulbright rose to his feet and in his soft Ozarks drawl offered the nation a civics lesson in the vital importance of keeping the military out of political affairs in a democracy. Fulbright’s speech echoed the passage in Eisenhower’s farewell address that warned against “the acquisition of unwarranted influence…by the military-industrial complex.” If the country allowed such “a disastrous rise of misplaced power,” Ike had counseled, it would “endanger our liberties or democratic processes.” But Eisenhower himself had helped create the Frankenstein of a politicized military with his 1958 directive on the indoctrination of troops. Now Fulbright was telling his fellow citizens it was time for the military to return to its barracks and leave the political arena to elected officials.

Fulbright declared that military officers at the highest levels, including the National War College, were being steeped in propaganda produced by far-right groups, with the approval of the Joint Chiefs. They were being indoctrinated with the message that “sellouts” in Washington were undercutting the military’s effort to defeat communism. They were being taught that President Kennedy’s domestic legislative program—“including continuation of the graduated income tax, expansion of Social Security (particularly medical care under Social Security) and federal aid to education”—was another front in the communist assault on America.

“If the military is infected with the virus of right-wing radicalism, the danger is worthy of attention,” Fulbright told his Senate colleagues and the public. “If, by the process of the military educating the public, the fevers of both groups are raised, the danger is great indeed.”

As he reached his conclusion, Fulbright dramatically raised the specter of a military coup, invoking “the revolt of the French generals as an example of the ultimate danger.” The Washington echo chamber quickly picked up Fulbright’s dire warning, with columnist Marquis Childs writing that “in one country after another in recent years, the intervention of the military in politics has had disastrous consequences…[Military officers] do not have the right to impose their political opinions on the troops whom they command. Nor is theirs the right to try to share policy by public speeches that directly oppose what the Government is undertaking.” Syndicated columnist Drew Pearson also rang the alarm bell, writing that “certain Pentagon brass hats were lining up with industrial right-wingers to foment a sort of neo-fascism despite the fact they were wearing Uncle Sam’s uniform.”

In reaction, Strom Thurmond pushed the Senate Armed Services Committee to open hearings on the “muzzling of the military.” In September, McNamara was hauled before the committee, where Thurmond and his colleagues hammered him for six hours one day on his censorship of military officers. “The military establishment is an instrument—not a shaper—of national policy,” the slick-haired, bespectacled defense secretary reminded his Senate interrogators in his supremely rational, Mr. Spock fashion.

McNamara was testifying in the marble-walled Caucus Room of the Old Senate Office Building—the same hearing room that was the scene of McCarthy’s downfall seven years earlier during the Army-McCarthy hearings. But the extremist fervor that filled the Caucus Room that day made it clear that the spirit of McCarthy was still alive in Washington. Throughout his testimony, McNamara was loudly booed by the 250 spectators in the room while Thurmond was cheered. As a weary McNamara finished his testimony that day, he was swarmed by dozens of suburban housewives wearing “Stop Communism” tags, who had trooped to Capitol Hill to support Thurmond’s crusade.
Newsweek
later reported that “an attractive mother of four in a blue frock, trapped McNamara as he stuffed his briefcase” and demanded whether he had read General Walker’s Strangelovian “Pro-Blue” propaganda literature. When he politely murmured that he had not, the woman exploded: “You haven’t! Why, it’s the best statement against Communism. I believe our armed forces should get this material.”

The same month, as the Armed Services Committee forced McNamara to defend his injunction against political activism in the military, the Army brazenly signaled its defiance of the order by staging another anticommunist spectacle. In late September, the Fourth U.S. Army sponsored a two-day propaganda show that drew thousands of people to San Antonio’s municipal auditorium, where reactionary speakers like General A. C. Wedemeyer denounced the Kennedy administration for “appeasing” the Soviet Union and the Episcopal Church for supporting the civil rights activism of the Freedom Riders.

The following month, in response to the San Antonio rebellion and other anti-Kennedy seminars organized by the military, McNamara felt compelled to issue another ban against political agitation in the ranks. And once again the Armed Services Committee announced it would subject the McNamara crackdown to congressional scrutiny.

The Cold War lobby was on the offensive, with retired military leaders and other far-right activists loudly calling for the impeachment of the president and other prominent liberals like Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren. One retired Marine colonel went further and called for Warren’s hanging, while a retired Marine general suggested a coup was in order if the “traitors” could not be voted out.

Kennedy finally grew exasperated. In October, while hosting an off-the-record luncheon with a group of Texas newspaper publishers in the White House, Kennedy was crudely confronted by the reactionary publisher of the
Dallas Morning News
, E. M. (Ted) Dealey. As the president idly chatted with the newspaper businessmen, the Texan stunned the gathering by haranguing Kennedy directly to his face, reading from a five-hundred-word statement that he suddenly whipped from his pocket in which he berated the commander-in-chief as if he were an errant copy boy. “We can annihilate Russia and should make that clear to the Soviet government,” Dealey lectured Kennedy. But unfortunately, he continued, “The general opinion of the grassroots thinking in this country is that you and your administration are weak sisters. We need a man on horseback to lead this nation, and many people in Texas and the Southwest think that you are riding Caroline’s tricycle.”

Kennedy flushed visibly and fixed Dealey with a hard look. “The difference between you and me, Mr. Dealey,” Kennedy shot back, “is that I was elected president of this country and you were not. I have the responsibility for the lives of 180 million Americans, which you have not…. Wars are easier to talk about than they are to fight. I’m just as tough are you are—and I didn’t get elected president by arriving at soft judgments.”

Kennedy had been slow to react to the threat from the extreme right. That August, when the subject of the John Birch Society had come up in conversation with Gore Vidal over canapés and vin rose at Hyannis Port, JFK seemed to airily dismiss the danger. The president took the “frenzy of the far right a lot less seriously than I,” Vidal observed. But by the fall, Kennedy’s attitude was no longer complacent. He dispatched Bobby to meet with the Reuther brothers—they discussed over breakfast how the liberal leaders of the United Auto Workers union could help mount an effective media campaign to counter the thunder from the right. The president also asked his staff to begin giving him monthly reports on far-right activities and ordered the director of the IRS to investigate organizations receiving tax exemptions.

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.”