An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (56 page)

Kennedy gained additional standing with civil rights advocates by opposing the slated expiration in the fall of the Civil Rights Commission, a six-member agency mandated to keep watch on the state of civil rights around the country. As a signal that he would not let the commission die, Kennedy asked sitting commissioners John Hannah and Father Theodore Hesburgh to continue to serve. Although willing, they doubted that Kennedy would take bold initiatives. When Hesburgh emphasized the urgency of action by citing statistics about the absence of blacks in southern state universities and in the Alabama National Guard, Kennedy replied, “Look, Father, I may have to send the Alabama National Guard to Berlin tomorrow and I don’t want to do it in the middle of a revolution at home.” It was a clear signal of Kennedy’s priorities.

Understanding the constraints on Kennedy, Hannah and Hesburgh wanted the commission to exert counterpressure by having special access to the White House through a liaison. Kennedy said that Harris Wofford, whom he had made a full-time special assistant on civil rights, was already on the job, which was false. But Hannah and Hesburgh responded that Wofford was taking an office at the administration’s new Peace Corps. Kennedy replied, “That’s only temporary.” As soon as they had left, a Kennedy aide called Wofford to come to the White House at once. There, “a solemn-looking man in a dark suit, carrying a book,” approached Wofford. The man said that the president had ordered him to swear Wofford in, although neither he nor Wofford knew to what position. Wofford swore to uphold the Constitution and then was ushered into the Oval Office. Kennedy made it clear that Wofford would become a special assistant to the president on civil rights and would devote himself to making sure that civil rights advocates were “not too unhappy, and beyond that [Kennedy] wanted to make substantial headway against what he considered the nonsense of racial discrimination.” The strategy for 1961, he told Wofford, was “minimum civil rights legislation, maximum executive action.” In March, when two conservative Civil Rights Commission members resigned, Kennedy appointed antisegregationists, who won Senate approval over the objections of southerners. At the same time, however, Kennedy hesitated to make a direct request to Congress to extend the life of the commission. Reluctant to risk losing ground on civil rights by a possible negative vote in Congress, he kept the agency alive by executive action.

In the first hundred days, the economy was Kennedy’s biggest domestic worry. The 1960 recession that had helped elect him continued into 1961. In his State of the Union Message on January 30, he made economic expansion his primary domestic goal. “We take office,” he declared, “in the wake of seven months of recession, three and one half years of slack, seven years of diminished economic growth, and nine years of falling farm income.” With five and a half million unemployed—nearly 7 percent of the workforce—and business bankruptcies at their highest level since the Great Depression, Kennedy justifiably described the economy as “in trouble. The most resourceful industrialized country on earth ranks among the last in the rate of economic growth,” he said.

But, as with civil rights, Kennedy felt he had limited capacity to force immediate change. He had already ruled out a tax cut as politically unacceptable when he was asking people to sacrifice for the good of the country. Nor did he believe that he could force a big economic program through Congress that included spending a lot of money on public works programs. When one liberal economist proposed a 60 percent increase in the federal deficit in order to help with unemployment, Kennedy told him: “With the seven percent unemployment we have now, ninety-three percent of the people in the country are employed. That other seven percent isn’t going to get enough political support to do it. I don’t believe that, right or wrong, there’s any possibility of doing the kind of all-out economic operation that you want.” Nor was he inclined to talk conservative Federal Reserve chairman William McChesney Martin into reducing interest rates, another means liberals saw for stimulating a recovery. He thought a rate reduction would antagonize bankers, as would replacing Martin, and would worsen the country’s balance of payments by discouraging foreign investments in U.S. Treasury bonds.

So once again, he relied on executive action. A special message to Congress on February 2 cautioned against expecting “to make good in a day or even a year the accumulated deficiencies of several years.” It was better to be “realistic” about what they could achieve in 1961: reverse the downward trend, narrow the gap of unused potential, “abate the waste and misery of unemployment,” and maintain reasonable price stability. Then, in 1962-63, they could hope to expand “American productive capacity at a rate that shows the world the vigor and vitality of a free economy.” Kennedy announced more rapid federal spending on building highways and post offices; speedier payment of tax refunds, veteran benefits, and farm subsidies; and stepped-up efforts to implement urban renewal programs. Wherever possible, federal purchasing would be channeled into areas of high unemployment. State and local governments were also urged to spend federal allocations for public programs as fast as possible. Recognizing that these proposals might not promptly “restore momentum to the American economy,” Kennedy promised that “if these measures prove to be inadequate to the task, I shall submit further proposals to the Congress within the next 75 days.”

After only six weeks, however, with evidence that the economy was getting weaker rather than stronger, CEA chairman Walter Heller had prepared a “second-stage recovery program.” As Kennedy joked at the press’s annual Gridiron dinner in early March, “The Secretary of Treasury reported that the worst of the recession was not yet spent—but everything else was.”

Heller may have had “profiles in courage” in mind as he urged Kennedy to do the right thing for the economy—a tax cut, lower interest rates, and deficit spending—without regard for political constraints. But liberal economists Paul Samuelson and Leon Keyserling had little confidence that Kennedy would respond positively to such an appeal. Keyserling, who was particularly cynical about Kennedy, said, “Kennedy never thought of anything except in terms of how it will affect [him] in reelection four years from now.” Keyserling was being far too critical. The political consequences of a failed economic initiative with Congress and the Federal Reserve were unquestionable constraints on Kennedy, but he nevertheless asked the CEA to develop “bold” proposals for implementation should the economy continue a slow recovery from its latest decline.

Happily for Kennedy, an upturn that became evident in early April freed him from having to make immediate hard choices about the economy. “The financial program of the Administration is now beginning to show impressive results,” the CEA told him. At the end of May, Heller reported a likely $9 billion rise in GNP from the first to the second quarter, with an additional $50 billion expansion forecast over the next fifteen months. Although Heller did not expect this economic growth to reduce unemployment much below 6 percent, it further eased Kennedy’s need to invest political capital in bold economic measures to get the country moving again.

As it was, he could take comfort from the fact that administration proposals being enacted by Congress—an Area Redevelopment Act aimed at depressed regions, a twenty-five-cent rise in the minimum wage to $1.25, expanded Social Security benefits, and a nearly $5 billion low-and-middle-income-housing bill—were promising to provide enough economic stimulation to make Americans more hopeful about the future. In early March, 35 percent of Americans had expressed the belief that more people in their community would be out of work in the next six months, but by late April, only 18 percent said this. In the same two polls, the number of optimists about the economy increased from 34 to 58 percent.

Judging from a series of other opinion surveys from March and April, the public was warmly disposed toward Kennedy’s presidency. On March 13,
Newsweek
reported that the “new, young, and untried President . . . now had the great part of the American people behind him.” Lou Harris told JFK that his approval rating was at 92 percent, and Gallup put it at a still-impressive 72 percent. Kennedy understood that more than economic steps and hopes were generating public goodwill. Even before his inauguration, columnist Joe Alsop thought Kennedy had changed the public mood. “I don’t think you’ve put a foot wrong since election day,” Alsop told him. “It’s been an astonishing performance. . . . I can all but see my friends, including a most surprising number of Republican friends, breathing in new hope, and . . . getting ready to move forward in the rough times that lie ahead.” One Kennedy aide ascribed the shift to “the simple fact that an active, do-something administration has now replaced a passive, do-nothing administration.”

Kennedy himself believed that weekly press conferences, which were broadcast live on television and radio for the first time in American history, were making a difference. Apprehensions that live appearances with occasional inadvertent statements might have “grave consequences” did not deter him. Columnist James Reston, warning that the format could lead to a catastrophe, characterized it as “the goofiest idea since the hula hoop.” But convinced that such fears were overdrawn and that direct communication with the public made the small risk of misstatements worth taking, Kennedy dismissed the concerns as unwarranted.

He also knew that news conferences allowed him to put his intelligence and wit on display. Schlesinger remembered the conferences as “a superb show, always gay, often exciting, relished by the reporters and by the television audience. . . . The conferences,” he added, “offered a showcase for a number of [Kennedy’s] most characteristic qualities—the intellectual speed and vivacity, the remarkable mastery of the data of government, the terse self-mocking wit, the exhilarating personal command.” Some of his funniest responses, which he gave at breakfast prep sessions, were too barbed for public consumption. Still, he thought of these conferences as “The 6 O’Clock Comedy Hour.”

His quick mastery of the press interviews before TV cameras and microphones persuaded Kennedy that “we couldn’t survive without TV.” It allowed him not only to charm the public, but also to reach people directly without the editorializing of the news media through interpretation or omission. Perhaps most important, whether on television or in person, Kennedy came across to the public as believable. Unlike Nixon, who never overcame a reputation for deceitfulness, Kennedy’s manner—his whole way of speaking, choice of words, inflection, and steady gaze—persuaded listeners to take him at his word. And the public loved it. By April 1962, a Gallup poll would show that nearly three out of every four adults in the country had seen or heard one or more of the president’s news conferences. Ninety-one percent of them had a favorable impression of his performance; only 4 percent were negative. In addition, by a 61 to 32 percent margin, Americans favored the spontaneous TV format.

ENCOURAGING DEVELOPMENTS
in relations with the Soviet Union from the first week of Kennedy’s presidency also contributed to his high approval ratings. Back in July 1960, a U.S. patrol plane had been lost while flying a mission over the Barents Sea north of Russia. Ten days later, Moscow had announced that the plane had invaded its air space and been shot down but that two crew members had survived and were in Soviet custody. During the next six months—the remainder of Eisenhower’s term—the two governments argued about the appropriateness of the Soviet attack. After Kennedy’s inauguration, Khrushchev had announced that “step by step, it will be possible to remove existing suspicion and distrust and cultivate seeds of friendship and practical cooperation.” Kennedy’s noncommittal response that his government stood ready “to cooperate with all who are prepared to join in genuine dedication to the assurance of a peaceful and a more fruitful life for all mankind” suggested that the new administration would measure Khrushchev’s words by future deeds.

At his first press conference, on January 25, Kennedy announced that the Soviets had released the two fliers. Khrushchev privately revealed that just before the election, Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson had told him that if he released the fliers, “he would set himself in right with Mr. Nixon.” But Nixon’s reputation as an anticommunist ideologue and Khrushchev’s falling-out with Eisenhower over the U-2 incident had made Moscow partial to a more flexible Democrat like Kennedy. The Soviet decision to release the fliers after January 20 was a gift to the new president that gave Kennedy instant credibility as a foreign policy leader. In response, Kennedy declared that Moscow had “removed a serious obstacle to harmonious relations.”

Kennedy’s responses to unauthorized public statements by U.S. military chiefs demonstrated that he intended to assert the closest possible control over the making of foreign policy, particularly toward Moscow. His critical view of some World War II navy chiefs, skepticism about investing so much in defense at the expense of foreign economic aid, and a January 17, 1961, Eisenhower farewell speech warning against “unwarranted influence . . . by the military-industrial complex” had increased Kennedy’s sensitivity to what Ike described as “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power.”

Speeches by Admiral Arleigh Burke, chief of naval operations, on the U.S.-Soviet rivalry particularly impressed Kennedy as destructive to potential initiatives for easing tensions. Arthur Sylvester, McNamara’s press officer, remembers that he “hardly had been in the damn job, didn’t even know where the men’s room was,” when the navy chief of information brought him a speech in which “this stupid Burke was going to . . . [attack] the Soviet Union from hell to breakfast not knowing all the facts.” Sylvester took the speech to the White House, where Kennedy ordered Burke to rein in his rhetoric. “You old son-of-a-bitch,” Burke told Sylvester, “I’ll write a new speech.” Burke apparently leaked the story to the
New York Times,
which brought charges of muzzling from senators on the Armed Services Committee. But seeing limits on the military as essential to gains in Soviet-American relations, Kennedy told Sylvester, “Arthur, the greatest thing that’s happened in the first three months of my administration was your stopping the Burke speech.” To prevent Burke and other military chiefs from publicly challenging Kennedy’s freedom to make conciliatory gestures toward Moscow, the administration announced in January that all officers on active duty would have to clear public statements with the White House.