Kennedy Read online

  K E N N E D Y

  TED SORENSEN

  NEW YORK • LONDON • TORONTO • SYDNEY • NEW DELHI • AUCKLAND

  For my father

  C. A. SORENSEN (1890–1959)

  who showed me the way

  PREFACE TO THE 2009 EDITION

  Despite some speculation that “the Kennedy legacy isn’t what it used to be,” my recent calendar reflects a warm and welcome resurgence of interest in President John F. Kennedy. There are more books, articles, documentaries, academic conferences, and speeches about President Kennedy all over the world than ever before, declaring his leadership and spirit relevant to both our current hopes and our new president. In addition, the gratifying response to my 2008 memoirs Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History—both in literary reviews and reader mail—has been extraordinary, showing interest among those too young to remember Kennedy and nostalgia among those who do. On college campuses, I find there’s a yearning and delight to learn that not long ago we had a president globally respected, who was true to his progressive ideals and dedicated not simply to party and self but to a better country and world, a champion of peace who never resorted to war.

  As a candidate, Obama frequently invoked Kennedy’s name, speeches and goals, and he successfully utilized endorsements from JFK’s daughter Caroline and brother Edward.

  Not long after JFK’s death, I predicted that his accomplishments would impress future generations only if intervening generations built on his foundation. Instead a series of failed and flawed presidencies made Kennedy’s stand out all the more: Lyndon Johnson, whose reversal of Kennedy’s policy not to send combat troop divisions into Vietnam required him to withdraw from the 1968 election; Richard Nixon, whose sponsorship of the multiple high crimes and misdemeanors collectively known as Watergate required him to resign his presidency soon after reelection; Gerald Ford, whose inability to match Kennedy’s stabilization of the economy caused him to serve less than one full term; Jimmy Carter, whose setbacks both at home and abroad limited him to one term; Ronald Reagan, whose stumble into the Iran-Contra scandals clouded his final term; George H.W. Bush, whose economic mismanagement limited him to one term; Bill Clinton, whose notoriety as the first elected president to be impeached by the House of Representatives tarnished a man of talent; and George W. Bush, whose incompetence and ideological rigidity led to needless wars and economic collapse, causing him to be ranked by historians below Buchanan, Harding, and Hoover.

  Barack Obama paradoxically is much like John F. Kennedy:

  Kennedy, like Obama, began testing the presidential waters while still a young Harvard graduate relatively new to Washington. Neither had executive experience but both had lived abroad, gaining perspective on America’s world role.

  Kennedy, like Obama, was told that he was too young and should wait four or eight years by accepting second place.

  Kennedy, like Obama, was told that his successful and soaring speeches were “just words, mere rhetoric.”

  Candidate Kennedy, like candidate Obama, was a United States Senator in a country consistently looking to former governors, vice presidents, generals, and cabinet members for presidents.

  Kennedy, like Obama, faced an apparently insuperable demographic obstacle to victory, in Kennedy’s case his religion. This 1965 book is a sad reminder of the unreasoning fears of a Catholic presidency in 1960. That fear largely disappeared, not merely because he won but because his service as president proved there was no basis for bigotry—and that helped pave the way for Obama forty-eight years later.

  Kennedy, like Obama, was a leader who knew the meaning of loyalty, both upward and downward. JFK always defended his aides whenever we were attacked, and earned a devoted team loyalty, diminishing unauthorized leaks during his lifetime and the usual sniping in his team’s published recollections after his death.

  Kennedy, like Obama, had a sense of history, helping him distinguish major from minor crises and useful allies from cheerleaders. He also appreciated world history, preserving Egyptian relics that would have been flooded by the Aswan Dam.

  As president, Kennedy—like Obama in his first year—won international respect and domestic confidence, including the confidence of consumers and investors.

  Kennedy, like Obama, believed in diplomacy and negotiations, even with adversaries, and entrusted our ambassadors with those negotiations.

  Kennedy, like Obama, was a strong leader, leading by exhortation, example, extraordinary compassion, competence, and innovation, never by asserting extra-legal powers.

  Kennedy, like Obama, was cautious in adopting ideological labels, but ultimately accepted “pragmatic liberal,” despite his party’s nervous avoidance of that last word.

  Kennedy, with his ever-present gentle sense of civility and humor, disarmed his critics and defused the usual partisan bitterness. Fortunately, the memory of his successful leadership has survived thousands of false reports, which according to polls, failed to diminish his standing among most thoughtful American citizens and historians.

  No one alive on that terrible day, November 22, 1963, can forget when he or she heard the awful news. There is still a sense of in-completion about Kennedy’s life and presidency, a sense of promise cut off.

  Rereading the epilogue of this first book reminds me, as did writing the chapter on JFK’s death in Counselor, of all that our world lost with his murder.

  None of the dozens of conspiracy theories about his assassination provided any solid evidence to change the sad conclusion that we simply do not know. Even sadder is the ability of America’s gun lobby, long after the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and MLK, to block any serious limitation on the flood of murder weapons freely sold in this country.

  Some authors have speculated that Kennedy’s assassination was the work of powerful financial, military and intelligence community interests who feared that Kennedy might reverse not only racial discrimination but also anti-Communist belligerence. If history ever proves that horrific thesis correct, and those conspirators hoped by killing Kennedy to block the civil rights and peace movements in this country, one thing is clear—they failed. The United States is now trading and negotiating with Russia, under an African American president.

  This is the first time that I have reread every page and word of this book since completing it in 1965. I am happy to say I find it’s “not bad”—which readers of my new book, Counselor, know is my highest form of praise. Today I would not change a word of this book, including its evaluations of JFK and his presidency. True, Counselor is better in sorting out his policy priorities with more perspective, contains more about Kennedy’s personal life and mine, more about the Cuban Missile Crisis, the presidential campaign and transition, and more about my strained relations with a few White House colleagues. However, I find no outright contradictions between the two books, almost no duplication and few if any words or claims that I would recant.

  This book is more factual about Kennedy’s health than I remembered. Any subsequent critic who claimed “cover up” apparently failed to catch this book’s multiple hints about his medical problems. There’s also more here than in my new one about Kennedy’s role as a United States Senator, including his failure to vote on the Joe McCarthy censure, and his landmark speeches on Algeria and Indochina, warning America and the West against futile military involvement in Asian countries—applicable to Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan today—who are determined never to permit again the military and political domination they suffered under colonialism.

  Appendix A of this book reminded me how much JFK as president accomplished in Congress, despite a Dixiecrat-Republican majority. He laid the groundwork for the first important break since Abraham Lincoln in the discrimination and segregation faced by our black citizens. He was the first to addre
ss the needs of the developmentally disabled (spurred by the efforts of his sister Eunice and the history of their sister Rosemary), the last national attention to this issue until the Republicans in 2008 nominated Sarah Palin of Alaska for vice president.

  People forget how Kennedy’s innovative words and ways inspired many of the progressive movements stirring this country during these last forty-six years, including minority rights, gay rights, women’s rights (see the report of his commission on the status of women), the environmental movement, and consumers’ rights. If his insistence on wages keeping pace with productivity had been continued, then the widening gulf between the very rich and the very poor could have been prevented.

  In foreign policy, because his early warning against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction was neglected, we now face the possibility of nuclear, biological, chemical, and other weapons falling into the hands of the dangerously irresponsible.

  Under Kennedy, Congress authorized the Peace Corps, showing a very different face of America to the Third World; authorized America’s major leadership in space exploration, with a lunar landing that prevented a hostile military occupation of outer space; authorized the Alliance for Progress, building democratic political and economic institutions in Latin America; ratified the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the first serious step toward arms control in the nuclear age (no comparable second step has been taken); and gave at least grudging support to JFK’s position as the last president who believed in the United Nations (“our last best hope”).

  On November 22, 2009, it will be forty-six years since the death of John F. Kennedy, who was then forty-six years old. In the epilogue of this book, I noted that he had accomplished more in forty-six years than most men can in eighty. I am now over eighty, proud of what I have been able to do in my life, including these last forty-six years during which my life has dramatically changed. My eyesight is limited, and until I reread this book I had forgotten that John F. Kennedy also required extra large type in his speech reading copies. I have difficulty reading even large type, but I continue to speak out in an effort to carry on the ideals that JFK launched during my eleven years with him, especially the ideals of a more peaceful world and a more just America.

  Ted Sorensen

  New York, NY

  April 2009

  CONTENTS

  PREFACE TO THE 2009 EDITION

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE. The Emerging Kennedy

  I THE MAN

  II THE SENATOR

  III THE POLITICIAN

  PART TWO. The Kennedy Candidacy

  IV THE CONTENDER

  V THE PRIMARIES

  VI THE CONVENTION

  VII THE CAMPAIGN

  VIII THE MARGIN

  PART THREE. The Kennedy Presidency

  IX THE BEGINNING

  X THE KENNEDY TEAM

  XI THE EARLY CRISES—THE BAY OF PIGS

  XII THE PRESS

  XIII THE PUBLIC

  PART FOUR. President Kennedy and the Nation

  XIV THE CONGRESS

  XV THE MAN IN THE WHITE HOUSE

  XVI THE FIGHT AGAINST RECESSION

  XVII THE FIGHT AGAINST INFLATION—THE STEEL PRICE DISPUTE

  XVIII THE FIGHT FOR EQUAL RIGHTS

  PART FIVE. President Kennedy and the World

  XIX THE OLIVE BRANCH

  XX THE WORLD LEADER

  XXI THE BERLIN CRISIS

  XXII THE ARROWS

  XXIII THE CONTINUING CRISIS

  XXIV THE CONFRONTATION IN CUBA

  XXV THE STRATEGY OF PEACE

  EPILOGUE

  APPENDIX A

  APPENDIX B

  INDEX

  About the Author

  Books by Theodore C. Sorensen

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  Across the muddy Potomac from the Lincoln Memorial a green and gentle slope rises gradually to what was once the home of Robert E. Lee. From halfway up that hill one can see on a clear autumn day most of the majesty that is Washington. The three marble monuments and memorials—to the men who forged in the Presidency an instrument of power and compassion—remind a grateful nation that it has been blessed in its gravest trials with its greatest leaders. In the distance the dome of the Capitol covers a milieu of wisdom and folly, Presidential ambitions and antagonisms, political ideals and ideologies. To the right is the stark and labyrinthian Pentagon, guiding under Presidential command the massive armed might on which hinge our security and survival. On the grassy slope itself, reminding us that “since this country was founded, each generation of Americans has been summoned to give testimony to its national loyalty,” are marked with simple stones “the graves of young Americans who answered the call to service.” And away to the left, its white sandstone hidden behind a screen of greenery, is the seat of executive power, the scene of more heroic dramas, comedies and tragedies than any stage in the world.

  It was on just such a clear autumn afternoon, on October 20, 1962, that President John Fitzgerald Kennedy stood on the second-story back porch of the White House, gazing at this same panorama, and talked—as he almost never talked—of life and death. His brother, the Attorney General, was with us, as were others from time to time. In the oval study on the other side of that porch door, the President had moments earlier concluded an historic meeting. The two great nuclear powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, were faced with their first direct military confrontation since acquiring the capacity to destroy each other. Soviet ships were to be stopped by an American naval barricade in the Caribbean. The cause was Soviet missiles on the island of Cuba, and the effect was certain to be world-wide.

  Our talk on that cool and sunlit back porch was not all somber. Only three weeks earlier we had been up all night with a civil rights battle at the University of Mississippi, a battle termed the most serious constitutional crisis of the century—and presumably with reference to this and his other burdens, the President’s first comment upon reaching the privacy of the porch was: “Well, we earned our pay this month.”

  We talked quietly about his decision, and about the meeting that had just ended. “You have to admire Adlai,” he said. “He sticks to his position even when everyone is jumping on him.” We talked about the political consequences of the crisis on the coming Congressional elections. The President was canceling the remainder of the most intensive mid-term campaign ever conducted by a Chief Executive, and he guessed (wrongly, as it turned out) that the crisis would benefit those Republicans who had been urging military action against Cuba. “Would you believe it?” he said sardonically. “Homer Capehart is the Winston Churchill of our time!”

  In more serious tones we talked calmly of the possibility of nuclear war. As was true some sixteen months earlier in the Berlin crisis, his most solemn feelings concerned the killing of children—his children and all children, children who bore no hate and no responsibility for the errors of men, but who would bear the burden of devastation and death more heavily than anyone else. Less than two years earlier, after the birth of his son John, he had mused aloud over Bacon’s words: “He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune.” Now he was talking not only about his own but all children, including those yet unborn. “If it weren’t for them,” he said, “for those who haven’t even lived yet, these decisions would be easier.”

  John Kennedy wanted no war. It was no longer “a rational alternative,” he had said a year earlier. He had devoted more time in the White House to deterring and preventing it than to all other subjects combined. Now war loomed large on the horizon. Weakness would only insure it, and strength was not certain to avoid it. A single misstep on his part could extinguish the lights of civilization, but even all the right steps could turn out wrong. Inwardly I recalled his words accepting the Presidential nomination:

  All mankind waits upon our decision. A whole world looks to see what we will do. We cannot fail their trust. We cannot fail to try
.

  Then abruptly he lightened the atmosphere once again. “I hope you realize,” he said with a grin, “that there’s not enough room for everybody in the White House bomb shelter”; and we joked back and forth about who was on the list.

  A few instructions followed: on keeping his decision open until he had one last talk with the Air Force—on keeping his decision secret until he announced it on Monday night—on redrafting his address to the nation and the world. He showed no signs of either frenzy or despair, retaining the same confident calm I had seen in him always. Despite the fatiguing pace of conferences and travels that had crowded his week, his voice exuded vitality and his commands were crisp and clear. Finally, to work on the new speech draft, I returned to my office in the West Wing of the White House, immeasurably cheered by his good humor, warmed by his deep feeling, inspired by his quiet strength.

  A few minutes later the President called me on the telephone. “Did you notice what Doug Dillon said about the Jupiters?” he asked. I had. Talk in the meeting that afternoon had turned to the vulnerability to Soviet attack of the American Jupiter missiles which the previous administration had placed in Italy and Turkey, and which the Soviets seemed likely to equate with their new emplacements in Cuba. Dillon, Kennedy’s Secretary of Treasury, had been Eisenhower’s Under Secretary of State; and he had interjected at that point the information that the Jupiters had practically been forced on Italy and Turkey by an administration unable to find any worthwhile use for them.

  “I just wanted to make sure you got that down for the book we’re going to write,” said John Kennedy. And I replied, as I had on other occasions, “You mean the book you’re going to write, Mr. President.”