Kennedy (60 page)

His unwillingess to make still more public TV appeals for legislation was hardly a matter of “hoarding” his personal and political popularity, as often charged. “No President in the past eighty years incurred greater political regional liabilities,” as the
Saturday Review
observed, and only Roosevelt in the past eighty years was the subject of so much hostile comment in parts of the business community. He was a President willing, if necessary, to risk defeat for his principles, but he preferred preserving both his principles and his power to effect them.

Consequently politics was an ever-present influence in the Kennedy White House, not as the sole subject of many meetings in his office, but as a criterion for trips, visitors, appointees and speeches, as an unspoken force counterbalancing the unrealistic, checking the unreasonable, occasionally deterring the desirable and always testing the acceptable. It was automatically assumed by the staff that part of our role was to weigh the effect of every move and statement, large and small, on various voter groups, on Congress, on national unity and on the 1962 and 1964 elections. Kennedy retained in the White House his unusually acute political antennae, with which he sensed the public mood both quickly and accurately. He understood what moved people, what touched their hearts and what touched only their pocketbooks. He was good at distinguishing their momentary whims from their enduring convictions.

There was no single source of this sensitivity. He read every fiftieth letter of the thirty thousand coming weekly to the White House, as well as a statistical summary of the entire batch, but he knew that these were often as organized and unrepresentative as the pickets on Pennsylvania Avenue. (Pickets and their placards never interested him—although he made friends one stormy day by arranging for a group of youthful peace marchers to be served coffee.) “Mail, unfortunately,” he told a 1962 press conference, “is not true as an indicator of the feelings
of the people…. I got last week 28 letters on Laos…[and] 440 letters on the cancellation of a tax exemption for a ‘mercy’ foundation.”

He also remained an avid consumer of public opinion polls. He did not commission any polls directly, as rumored, but Lou Harris and others reported findings of many polls taken for their political clients, and the published polls of Gallup and his colleagues were studied with care. Nevertheless the President remained a skeptic. He told Orville Freeman that a survey of farmers showing Kennedy’s job performance rating higher than his Secretary of Agriculture’s merely proved that the latter was doing a good job—but that the whole poll was dubious, since it also claimed that Bostonian Kennedy ranked higher than Kansan Eisenhower. He told a press conference that a Gallup Poll showing 72 percent against a tax cut which produced deeper debts might have had a different result had it asked opinions on a tax cut necessary to prevent a recession, unemployment and consequently greater debts. At the peak of the 1963 civil rights furor, he privately speculated to a visitor that his poll ratings could drop below 50 percent for the first time—and then was amused by the rash of rumors which promptly spread throughout Washington and even appeared in the press citing an about-to-be-published poll revealing such a slide. (The next Gallup Poll showed him still above 60 percent.)

He relied on more than mail, public petitions and polls. He talked with hundreds of people every week in the White House. He read newspapers and magazines from all over the country. He judged the reactions of his crowds when he traveled (although not necessarily their size, which was partisan and planned). He observed the pressures reflected in Congress and heard reports from his Cabinet on their trips. But somehow his political intuition was an amalgamation of all these that was greater than the sum of its parts.

His political instincts had always been good. As a young reporter in London after the war, he had sensed that Churchill and the Tories would lose the 1945 elections. His editors, noting that no senior correspondent agreed, severely took him to task. As a result, by election time he had gradually crawled off that limb to report a Churchill rally and certain victory. Churchill lost.

Since that day he had been engaged in his own campaigns and calling them correctly. John Kennedy liked politics. He liked talking about it, participating in it, speculating on it. He looked upon it as the noblest profession. He never tired of encouraging young men and women to enter politics and public service, and by his own example, I believe, he worked a profound change in this nation’s respect for that calling.

The most oft reported charge made by President Kennedy’s liberal and intellectual critics was that he made no crusading commitments of the heart, that he neither possessed nor inspired any warmth. They wanted him to go in more for lost causes, bigger deficits, grand designs and “fireside chats.” They wanted him to pay more attention to Bowles and less to Acheson, to denounce the Republicans and do everything at once. They thought it proof of their complaints that his popularity exceeded Eisenhower’s.

At the sophisticated Georgetown cocktail parties, in the scholarly and leftist journals, in the political columns and in letters-to-the-editor, they imitated, with little consistency, each other’s charges: that Kennedy relied too much or not enough on his advisers, that he sent too much or too little to the Congress, that he engaged in too much “arm-twisting” or too little “leadership.” They resented his wealth, his “style,” his youth. Some liberals talked nostalgically about the good old days of Harry Truman, just as in Truman’s day they had yearned for Roosevelt. “Every generation,” said the President understandingly, “remembers its youth.”

At times he would muse aloud over the academic isolation of many of his intellectual critics and their previous record of misjudgments. Though they assumed to speak for the voters, most of them talked mostly to each other—in Washington, on a campus or on an editorial staff. Their criticisms, he noted, generally lacked accurate information or feasible alternatives. They would, he hoped, judge him on the basis of his entire term in office, not merely individual episodes. “It is,” he said, reflecting on his own candidacy as well as his critics, “much easier to make speeches than it is finally to make the judgment.” He also frequently quoted Melbourne, under fire from the historian Macaulay, saying he “would like to be as sure of anything as Macaulay seemed to be of everything.” Many of the noted analysts of public opinion and foreign policy, he commented, rarely left Washington. However, said Kennedy of his liberal critics in typical understatement, “I guess criticism is their special business.”

While the left called Kennedy too timid, the right assailed him as power-hungry. Because he was uniquely a man for his time, because he recognized the revolutionary changes sweeping our globe and nation, and wanted our attitudes and institutions changed accordingly, he was assailed for being ahead of his time by those opposed to change.

John Kennedy never hated, and he worked hard to cast out hate in human and national affairs. But he was hated. The White supremacists hated “the Kennedys” more than they hated Truman or Eleanor Roosevelt. Bitter-end businessmen, ignoring all he had done for their prosperity,
condemned him as a traitor to his class as they had once condemned Franklin Roosevelt. The far-right fringe of professional cold warriors and anti-Communists denounced him with poisonous passion, just as in the heyday of Joseph McCarthy they had denounced the fourteen Kennedy appointees mentioned in Chapter X, and Harry Truman, Henry Wallace, Robert Oppenheimer, Philip Jessup, James Conant, Francis Sayre, Arthur Miller and Walter Reuther, all of whom Kennedy honored by one means or another.

The publisher of the Dallas
News
embarrassed his fellow Texans at a White House luncheon by demanding “a man on horseback to lead this nation—many people in Texas and the Southwest think you are riding Caroline’s bicycle.” But the President was not embarrassed. He knew that he “didn’t get elected President by arriving at soft judgments,” and that he and only he had to weigh the multiple burdens, balance the conflicting responsibilities and produce the concrete solutions which would assure the survival and the success of 180 million Americans.

He deplored “the discordant voices of extremism” which peddled their frighteningly simple solutions to citizens frustrated and baffled by our nation’s burdens. We had never heard of the John Birch Society until campaigning in Wichita in 1960, but in the years that followed, this and similar fringe groups increasingly recovered the noisy voices that had been stilled since McCarthy’s demise. In his speech prepared for Dallas on November 22, 1963, the President lashed out at those who “confuse rhetoric with reality” and assume “that vituperation is as good as victory.” And earlier he had said of these fanatics:

But hate groups are not softened by reason or charm. Indeed, John Kennedy’s obvious charms and cool reasoning only seemed to make them angrier. A man who loves, as Kennedy loved his fellow man, regrets hate, but Kennedy nevertheless expected it. When a pre-Presidential profile complained because no one hated him, the then Senator had written me:

John Kennedy was not going to be bland. He was bound to arouse either enthusiasm or anger with everything he did, and he was not a man to do nothing. “Public sentiment” on most controversial matters, he said to a fellow politician, “says don’t act. But that’s not enough. Somebody ought to see over the hill, even if he risks defeat. If that isn’t the President’s function, we should never have quarreled with Eisenhower.”

He was always defying the most powerful interests in Washington—the AMA, the Truckers, the billboard users, the private-power, drug-manufacturer and junk-mail lobbies, even the leaders of his own church. He fully shared Theodore Roosevelt’s concept of the White House as a “bully pulpit,” calling for new standards of excellence in every endeavor, large and small, from staying in school to staying physically fit, from historical publications to cultural appreciation. “The American people are rather evenly divided on a great many issues,” he coolly said. “As I make my views clearer on these issues, of course some people increasingly are not going to approve of me.”

His prediction was correct. One morning we had talked about criticism at his pre-press conference breakfast—about the wide range of attacks that week, from Alabama’s Governor Wallace to Vietnam’s Madame Nhu, from right-wing author Victor Lasky to Communist Chinese boss Mao Tse-tung. No one, it turned out, had read the Lasky diatribe except its target. And the target was bearing up very well. He was not insensitive yet—or ever—but as each day passed he became more committed to his own self-examination and his own sense of responsibility. He took great delight in reciting a poem by bullfighter Domingo Ortega, as translated by Robert Graves:

F
OR A MAN WITH NO INTEREST
in mathematics, John Kennedy spent a large proportion of the years I knew him counting. Prior to July, 1960, he was counting convention delegates; and he came up with a bare majority. From July to November, 1960, he was counting electoral votes; and he again gained a slender majority. After November, 1960, he was counting Congressional votes; and this time he could not make the sums come out right.

His experience with the Eighty-sixth Congress, particularly that miserable postconvention session in August, 1960, made it clear that larger Democratic majorities were needed in both houses to pass the bills blocked (often in the House Rules Committee and sometimes with the use or threat of a veto) in 1960—including bills on housing, education, minimum wages, depressed areas, civil rights and medical care. But in the 1960 election those larger majorities were not forthcoming. For the first time in this century a party taking over the Presidency failed to gain in the Congress. The Democrats lost only one seat in the Senate. But in the House the Republicans lost seven incumbents while displacing twenty-nine Democrats, every one of them a Kennedy progressive. Twenty of those twenty-nine districts had gone Democratic in the 1958 mid-term landslide by less than 2.5 percent of the vote, and most of them were predominantly Protestant areas carried by Nixon in the closest Presidential race of the century.

The Democratic Party still had large paper majorities in both houses—262-174 in the House and 65-35 in the Senate—and Northern and Western Democrats in agreement with Kennedy’s program still held a
majority of their party’s seats. In both houses they had a minority of the total vote, however, particularly in the House of Representatives. In the balky Eighty-sixth Congress they had substantially outnumbered House Republicans. But in the Eighty-seventh, the most conservative Congress since Eisenhower’s Republican Eighty-third, the opposite was true. The balance of power appeared to have swung decisively in the direction of the conservative coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats who had since 1937 effectively blocked much of the progressive legislation of four Presidents.