JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (48 page)

In a new foreword to John Kennedy’s
Profiles in Courage
, Robert Kennedy wrote shortly after his brother’s death, “Courage is the virtue that President Kennedy most admired. He sought out those people who had demonstrated in some way, whether it was on a battlefield or a baseball diamond, in a speech or fighting for a cause, that they had courage, that they would stand up, that they could be counted on.”
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The issue on which his brother most valued courage, Robert said, was in preventing nuclear war and “the specter of the death of the children of this country and around the world.”
[4]

JFK had been inspired to write
Profiles in Courage
during another one of his bouts with death, in the course of a long hospitalization and convalescence from a spinal operation in 1954. The book’s theme was “political courage in the face of constituent pressures.”
[5]
Although Kennedy’s stories of political courage were drawn mainly from the Senate, he gave one revealing example of a president who followed his conscience against “the pressures of constituent and special interests”:

“
President George Washington
stood by the Jay Treaty with Great Britain to save our young nation from a war it could not survive, despite his knowledge that it would be immensely unpopular among a people ready to fight. Tom Paine told the President that he was ‘treacherous in private friendship and a hypocrite in public . . . The world will be puzzled to decide whether you are an apostate or imposter; whether you have abandoned good principles, or whether you ever had any.’ With bitter exasperation, Washington exclaimed: “I would rather be in my grave than in the Presidency’; and to Jefferson he wrote:

‘I am accused of being the enemy of America, and subject to the influence of a foreign country . . . and every act of my administration is tortured, in such exaggerated and indecent terms as could scarcely be applied to Nero, to a notorious defaulter, or even to a common pickpocket.’”

Kennedy commented on Washington, “But he stood firm.”
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Washington had resisted the pressures for a war his newly born country could not have survived. Kennedy in his presidency had to keep on resisting the pressures for a war neither his country nor the world could have survived.

The pressures on President Kennedy came less from constituents than from the weapons-making corporations that thrived on the Cold War, and from the Pentagon and the CIA that were dedicated to “winning” that war, whatever that might mean. For JFK, who stood virtually alone in the Oval Office against these forces, the question of political courage became more intense than it was in any of the conflicts he described in
Profiles in
Courage
.

The political context of Kennedy’s assassination was described best by the president who preceded him.

On January 17, 1961, three days before JFK was inaugurated as president, Dwight D. Eisenhower in his farewell address warned of a new threat to freedom from within the United States. In response to a threat from without, Eisenhower said, “We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

“We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted.”
[7]

Eisenhower himself never used the power of his presidency to challenge this new threat to democracy. He simply identified it in a memorable way when he was about to leave office. He thereby passed on the possibility of resisting it to his successor.

In Kennedy’s short presidency, the military-industrial complex actually increased its profits and power. JFK’s initial call to develop a military response to the Soviet Union and its allies that would be “more flexible” than the Eisenhower policy of mutual assured destruction expanded the Pentagon’s contracts with U.S. corporations. Yet in the summer of 1963, the leaders of the military-industrial complex could see storm clouds on their horizon. After JFK’s American University address and his quick signing of the Test Ban Treaty with Khrushchev, corporate power holders saw the distinct prospect in the not distant future of a settlement in the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. Both Kennedy and Khrushchev were prepared to shift their war of conflicting ideologies to more peaceful fronts. Kennedy wanted a complete ban on the testing of nuclear weapons, then mutual steps in nuclear disarmament. He saw a willing partner in Khrushchev, who wanted to ease the huge burden of arms expenditures on the Soviet economy. In that direction of U.S.-Soviet disarmament lay the diminished power of a corporate military system that for years had controlled the United States government. In his turn toward peace, Kennedy was beginning to undermine the dominant power structure that Eisenhower had finally identified and warned against so strongly as he left the White House.

In 1962 Kennedy had already profoundly alienated key elements of the military-industrial complex in the steel crisis. The conflict arose from JFK’s preoccupation with steel prices, whose rise he believed “quickly drove up the price of everything else.”
[8]
The president therefore brokered a contract, signed on April 6, 1962, in which the United Steelworkers union accepted a modest settlement from the United States Steel Company, with the understanding that the company would help keep inflation down by not raising steel prices. Kennedy phoned identical statements of appreciation to union headquarters and the company managers, congratulating each for having reached an agreement that was “obviously non-inflationary.”
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When he finished the calls, he told adviser Ted Sorensen that the union members “cheered and applauded their own sacrifice,” whereas the company representatives were “ice-cold” to him.
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It was a foretaste of the future.

On April 10, 1962, Roger Blough, chairman of U.S. Steel, asked to meet with Kennedy. At 5:45 p.m., seated next to JFK, Blough said, “Perhaps the easiest way I can explain the purpose of my visit . . . ,”
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and handed Kennedy four mimeographed pages. Blough knew the press release in the president’s hands was being passed out simultaneously to the media by other U.S. Steel representatives. It stated that U.S. Steel, “effective at 12:01 A.M. tomorrow, will raise the price of the company’s steel products by an average of about 3.5 percent . . .”
[12]

Kennedy read the statement, recognizing immediately that he and the steelworkers had been double-crossed by U.S. Steel. He looked up at Blough and said, “You’ve made a terrible mistake.”
[13]

After Blough departed, Kennedy shared the bad news with a group of his advisers. They had never seen him so angry. He said, “My father always told me that all businessmen were sons-of-bitches, but I never believed it until now.”
[14]
His explosive remark appeared in the
New York Times
on April 23, 1962.
[15]
The corporate world never forgot it.

He phoned steelworkers union president David McDonald and said, “Dave, you’ve been screwed and I’ve been screwed.”
[16]

The next morning U.S. Steel was joined in its price increase by Bethlehem Steel, the second largest company, and soon after by four others. In response Kennedy mustered every resource he could to force the steel companies to roll back their prices. He began at the Defense Department.

Defense contracts were critical to “Big Steel,” an industry that embodied the intertwined influence with the Pentagon that Eisenhower had warned against. Defense Secretary McNamara told the president that the combined impact in defense costs from the raise in steel prices would be a billion dollars. Kennedy ordered him to start shifting steel purchases at once to the smaller companies that had not yet joined in the raise. McNamara announced that a steel-plate order previously divided between U.S. Steel and Lukens Steel, a tiny steel company that had not raised prices, would now go entirely to Lukens.
[17]
Walter Heller, who chaired the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, “calculated that the government used so much steel that it could shift as much as 9 percent of the industry’s total business away from the six companies that had announced price rises to six that were still holding back.”
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The president even ordered the Defense Department to take its steel business overseas, if that were necessary to keep defense contracts away from U.S. Steel and its cohorts.
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Big Steel executives saw that Kennedy meant business, their business—and that substantial Cold War profits were already being drained away from them.

Attorney General Robert Kennedy moved quickly to convene a federal grand jury to investigate price fixing in Big Steel’s corporate network. He looked into the steel companies’ possible violation of anti-trust laws, an investigation his Anti-Trust Division had actually begun before the steel crisis. He now ordered the FBI to move on the steel executives with speed and thoroughness. As RFK said later in an interview, “We were going to go for broke: their expense accounts and where they’d been and what they were doing. I picked up all their records and I told the FBI to interview them all—march into their offices the next day. We weren’t going to go slowly. I said to have them done all over the country. All of them were hit with meetings the next morning by agents. All of them were subpoenaed for their personal records. All of them were subpoenaed for their company records.”
[20]

Steel executives suddenly found themselves being treated as if they were enemies of the people. The president then stated that they were precisely that. He opened his April 11 press conference by saying:

“Simultaneous and identical actions of United States Steel and other leading steel corporations increasing steel prices by some $6 a ton constitute a wholly unjustifiable and irresponsible defiance of the public interest . . . the American people will find it hard, as I do, to accept a situation in which a tiny handful of steel executives whose pursuit of private power and profit exceeds their sense of public responsibility can show such utter contempt for the interests of 185 million Americans.”
[21]

Reporters gasped at the intensity of Kennedy’s attack on Big Steel. After describing the ways in which steel executives had defied the public interest, JFK concluded with an ironic reference to his inaugural address:

“Some time ago I asked each American to consider what he would do for his country and I asked the steel companies. In the last 24 hours we had their answer.”
[22]

On April 12, Kennedy sent his lawyer, Clark Clifford, to serve as a mediator with U.S. Steel. The steel executives, feeling the heat from the White House, proposed a compromise. Clifford phoned the president to say, “Blough and his people want to know what you would say if they announce a partial rollback of the price increases, say 50 percent?”

“I wouldn’t say a damn thing,” Kennedy replied. “It’s the whole way.”
[23]

Clifford was instructed to say that “if U.S. Steel persisted, the President would use every tool available to turn the decision around.”
[24]
That included especially switching more defense contracts away from them to more affordable companies. There was to be no compromise.

Clifford reported back to the steel heads that “the President was already setting in motion to use the full power of the Presidency to divert contracts from U.S. Steel and the other companies,” adding that “he still had several actions in reserve, including tax audits, antitrust investigations, and a thorough probe of market practices.”
[25]
The president was prepared to wage a domestic war against Big Steel’s price increase.

On April 13, 1962, Big Steel’s executives surrendered. The first company to yield was Bethlehem Steel, another major defense contractor. The reason, reported back to the White House, was that “Bethlehem had gotten wind that it was to be excluded from bidding on the construction of three naval vessels the following week and decided to take quick action.”
[26]
Bethlehem was followed soon by the giant, U.S. Steel. The president’s offensive, backed by overwhelming public support, had been too much for them. All six steel companies rescinded the entire price raise that their point man, Roger Blough, had conveyed to JFK as an accomplished fact three days before.