Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House (17 page)

Occasionally, however, curiosity about current events got the better of her, and she asked “about something painful. . . . I asked him something and it was at the end of the day. And he said, ‘Oh, my God, kid . . . I’ve had that, you know, on me all day and I just. . . . Don’t remind me of that all over again.’ And I just felt so criminal. But he could make this conscious effort to turn from worry to relative insouciance.” On another occasion when she inquired about a foreign crisis, he said, “‘Don’t ask me about those things.’ . . . So I decided it was better to live—you get enough by osmosis and reading the papers, and not ask. . . . And I decided that was the best thing to do. Everyone should be trying to help Jack in whatever way they could and that was the way I could do it the best—you know, by being not a distraction—by making it always a climate of affection and comfort and détente when he came home.”

She had no desire to imitate Eleanor Roosevelt, who had set the standard for first ladies with high public visibility as an advocate for causes essential to neediest Americans regardless of race, ethnicity, or religion. Mrs. Roosevelt had become a spokesperson for human rights everywhere and after Franklin’s death served the world community as America’s first ambassador to the United Nations. But while Jacqueline had no intention of reaching for that exalted status, she also did not want to be like Bess Truman or Mamie Eisenhower, her two immediate predecessors, who had stayed in the background as conventional wives attending to household duties. By contrast, Jacqueline became a symbol of good taste and high culture—a first lady who encouraged Americans to see their White House as a monument to the nation’s architectural and artistic history. She established the White House Historical Association and oversaw the publication of a historic guide to the White House describing the building’s history and treasures. In 1962, she conducted a televised tour of the House that reached into millions of American homes. The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, which brought to fruition plans since 1958 for a National Cultural Center, became a permanent legacy of her commitment to American cultural life.

As he launched his administration on January 20, 1961, Kennedy believed that his appointments to cabinet and subcabinet posts had created a “Ministry of Talent.” McNamara, Bundy, Rostow, Dillon, Sorensen, Schlesinger, and all the other academics, lawyers, financiers, industrialists, and public servants taking up residence in the White House and executive offices surrounding it were, in the journalist David Halberstam’s later use of the term, the “best and the brightest.”

Kennedy was innately skeptical about social engineering and human agency to greatly alter either international relations or domestic affairs. But he also believed that an American affinity for grand designs and bold actions meant that the country wanted leaders who would reach for the ideal rather than settle for the ordinary. “I’m an idealist without illusions,” he told Schlesinger. His Inaugural Address made clear his ambition for an extraordinary administration of great accomplishments. But he also cautioned, “All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days, nor in the life of this Administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet.”

But with the array of exceptional men he had attracted to Washington, he had high hopes for something more—something better—than what most past presidents had achieved.

C
HAPTER
4

“Never Rely on the Experts”

F
reezing weather on inauguration day could not dampen Kennedy’s evident satisfaction at becoming the youngest and first Catholic president. Despite the twenty-degree temperature and heavy snow the night before, which had threatened to cancel the outdoor ceremony, Kennedy spoke to the thousands before him wearing neither hat nor overcoat, symbolizing his campaign theme of national strength and renewal. During the evening, he made the rounds of the many inaugural balls, dancing and chatting with friends and supporters until 2
A.M.
, when he slipped away to a private party at columnist Joseph Alsop’s Georgetown home. He did not return to the White House until 3:40 in the morning. After less than four hours sleep, he began his day, arriving at the Oval Office at eight minutes before nine.

Kennedy faced the day and the coming challenges of his presidency with confidence. “Did you have any strange dreams the first night you slept in” Lincoln’s bedroom, his friend Charlie Bartlett asked him. “No,” an amused Kennedy replied, “I just jumped in and hung on.”

He believed that the combined power and prestige of the office, joined to his political skills, boded well for a successful administration. Remembering that Woodrow Wilson had launched his administration by breaking long-standing custom and appearing in person before a joint congressional session to urge passage of tariff reform, Kennedy broke new ground five days after his inspiring inaugural speech by holding the first live televised presidential press conference. Couldn’t “an inadvertent statement . . . possibly cause some grave consequences?” a reporter asked. Kennedy confidently dismissed the concern, saying the country would have “the advantage of direct communication.” Pressed to explain the unusual neglect of domestic affairs in his speech, he answered that the American people are familiar with his national goals, but because his government was new on the world scene, he needed to describe our intentions and hopes to a divided world.

During swearing-in ceremonies for his cabinet and other presidential appointees, he declared himself confident that their service would advance the well-being of peoples everywhere. The Peace Corps and the Alliance for Progress, for example, two executive initiatives launched in the first weeks of his term, confirmed his conviction that he could rely on advisers to help him find the means to compete with communist appeals to the hearts and minds of Third World peoples and make him a successful foreign policy leader.

Kennedy’s inspiration for the Peace Corps was partly a response to Nixon’s accusation in their last debate, on October 13, that the Democrats were the “war party” that had trapped the United States in Korea. But the idea had been germinating for months. At a rally on the night of the thirteenth at the University of Michigan, Kennedy issued a call for international service by young Americans that, in Henry James’s memorable phrase, could be “the moral equivalent of war.” While Kennedy needed no one to tell him that mobilizing American ideals could be an effective response to communist cynicism about the United States as an exploitive imperial power, he looked to the country’s history and current ideas for ways to translate this insight into significant programs.

The Peace Corps was grounded in the idealism of missionaries dating from the nineteenth century, who had been acting on convictions that they were God’s instruments of enlightenment to non-Christians in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. In the twentieth century, as U.S. influence expanded around the globe, academics and legislators had been discussing an organization of young volunteers committed to overseas service well before Kennedy asked his brother-in-law Sargent Shriver to tell him how this could be done. Against this backdrop, the Peace Corps, Ted Sorensen said, had “a hundred fathers.” And in his response to the president, Shriver pointed to a host of organizations and people, including Democratic congressmen and senators, who had crafted plans for making a corps of volunteers a reality.

Kennedy believed that no one was better suited to head the Peace Corps than his brother-in-law. The forty-five-year-old Shriver was the offspring of a notable Maryland Catholic family dating back to the American Revolution. A graduate of Yale and its law school, Shriver was an idealist who worked with Charles Lindbergh’s isolationist group, America First, against involvement in World War II. Shortly before Pearl Harbor, however, he joined the Navy as a lieutenant and won a Purple Heart for wounds suffered during combat at Guadalcanal. After five years in the service, he became an executive at Joe Kennedy’s Merchandise Mart in Chicago, where he met Eunice Kennedy, Joe’s daughter. They married in 1953 and Sarge, as he was called, became a member of Jack’s political team.

As Kennedy understood, Shriver’s forte was as a public servant helping the less advantaged at home and abroad. In time, he would become known for his commitment to a war on poverty, Head Start, Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), the Job Corps, Community Action, Legal Services for the Poor, and, in collaboration with Eunice, the Special Olympics, competitions for handicapped athletes. For the moment, however, it was the directorship of Kennedy’s Peace Corps that captured his passion for good deeds. His motto: To do well, do good.

When Kennedy signed an executive order on March 1 setting up the Peace Corps, he viewed the action as coming from a shared conviction with Shriver that it would make a difference not only in helping the less advantaged but also in advancing the national interest. Kennedy hoped the Peace Corps could become a model for how his administration would perform: a collaborative effort of the best minds and most well intentioned to create an innovative program serving both the world and the nation. By 1963, within two years of its founding, the Corps had enrolled 7,300 volunteers serving in forty-four countries.

The Alliance for Progress was a more focused expression of the Peace Corps ideal. With Castro’s rise to power in Cuba, Kennedy was eager to counter and, if possible, abort his growing charismatic appeal in the Caribbean and across the Americas. During the presidential campaign, Kennedy had emphasized Eisenhower’s failure to address hemispheric dangers from the poverty and misery that gave rise to Castro and made several of the southern republics vulnerable to communism.

Kennedy’s inaugural speech partly focused on the region’s problems and his eagerness to address them. He announced, “To our sister republics south of our border, we offer a special pledge: to convert our good words into good deeds, in a new alliance for progress, to assist free men and free governments in casting off the chains of poverty. But this peaceful revolution of hope cannot become the prey of hostile powers. Let all our neighbors know that we shall join with them to oppose aggression or subversion anywhere in the Americas. And let every other power know that this hemisphere intends to remain the master of its own house.”

The name Alliance for Progress and the promise of a new initiative in dealing with Latin America rested on the suggestions of several advisers, but especially that of Richard Goodwin. As Bobby Kennedy said later, the president credited Goodwin with the felicitous phrase that gave the Alliance its name.

Goodwin was a brilliant twenty-nine-year-old graduate of Harvard Law School. In 1959, after clerking for the storied Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, he became an aide in Kennedy’s Senate office. During the campaign, he made himself indispensable to Kennedy as a speechwriter and expert on Latin America. Goodwin was charged with describing Kennedy’s vision of how his administration would improve relations with hemisphere countries. After consulting the
Washington
Post
’s expert on the region, who asked a Cuban émigré friend at the Pan American Union to suggest a compelling name for a program of reform, they came up with “Alliance for Progress.” Kennedy seized upon it as a worthy successor to FDR’s Good Neighbor policy.

When Kennedy announced his commitment to the program in a White House speech before Latin American representatives and congressional leaders on March 13, 1961, he had no illusion that his words would dispel doubts about U.S. motives. He knew that many in the hemisphere dismissed the Alliance as nothing more than anticommunist rhetoric, calling it the “Fidel Castro Plan.” But Kennedy hoped that in time it would produce results that could disarm some of the antagonism to the United States. Convinced that Goodwin had impressed himself on Latin American governments as a friend of the region, Kennedy made him deputy assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs. As important, Kennedy took satisfaction from the belief that his administration had a core of wise advisers who, as with the Peace Corps, were helping him launch productive experiments in developing countries, where communists were aggressively competing for influence.

The need for wise counsel in dealings with Latin America and Cuba in particular had become apparent to him well before his inauguration. When told on January 3 that Eisenhower was breaking relations with Havana, which was aligning itself with the Soviet Union, Kennedy refused to comment privately or publicly on the decision. Nor was he willing to respond to a
New York Times
story on January 10 that the United States was training an anti-Castro force of exiles at a Guatemalan base. Eager to focus on a constructive program for Latin America and uncertain about how to meet Fidel Castro’s challenge before hearing from national security advisers, Kennedy preserved his options by saying nothing.

At a pre-inauguration meeting on January 19, Eisenhower pressed Kennedy to adopt an aggressive policy toward Castro. He explained that he had authorized help to the “utmost” of anti-Castro Cubans and recommended an acceleration of support, declaring it essential to oust Castro before he could spread communism across the Caribbean.

Because promises of a new day in U.S. relations with Latin America implied a renewed commitment to self-determination for the southern republics, Kennedy was reluctant to adopt Eisenhower’s prescription of forcing Cuba to conform to U.S. designs. But the pressure to do something was intense. CIA director Allen Dulles, who had helped shape Eisenhower’s response to Castro, told Kennedy that Castro planned to export communism to other hemisphere countries, including Venezuela and Colombia, where they already had considerable power among the people.

Dulles’s knee-jerk anticommunism gave Kennedy second thoughts about keeping him as CIA director rather than choosing someone who might have been less doctrinaire about Castro and his threat to the United States. But national security considerations and domestic politics ruled out any reconsideration of Dulles’s tenure. Moreover, Dulles’s family and personal history, including a grandfather and older brother who were secretaries of state, and his experience in the State Department, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the CIA, and in the CIA itself, where he had served as director for seven years, made him an authoritative figure whose views seemed perilous to ignore. A Dulles resignation with leaks about White House opposition to his judgments on Cuba would have created a political maelstrom. Although he masked his doubts about the new young president, Dulles wondered whether Kennedy had the commitment and courage to meet the Soviet challenge. Self-confident that he knew what Kennedy needed to do to meet Moscow’s and Havana’s threat, Dulles hoped that Kennedy would follow his lead.

In 1961, no one responsible for U.S. national security could imagine dismissing the Soviet menace to the Western Hemisphere. However strained the comparisons to communist success in winning control of Eastern Europe and China, and however much Joe McCarthy’s assault on perfectly innocent people in and out of government had been discredited, Soviet subversion and fear of being labeled soft on Reds constantly shadowed Kennedy and his new White House advisers.

Dean Rusk, the administration’s leading subordinate on foreign affairs, also held Dulles in high regard, and spoke about national security against a backdrop in which anticommunist hawks had brought down State Department professionals as having appeased Stalin at Yalta in 1945 and betrayed Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese Nationalists. Rusk advised that ousting Castro represented a sensible defense of U.S. interests in the hemisphere, but he warned that an open use of U.S. power might trigger serious uprisings all over Latin America, which would undermine the credibility of Washington’s commitment to an Alliance for Progress. When the military chiefs weighed in with warnings about Castro’s strengthening hold on power in Havana and apparent determination to export communism to other Latin American countries, Kennedy accepted the need to act against him. But he doubted the wisdom of an overt U.S. sponsored invasion of the island by Cuban exiles. He saw no alternative leader who commanded Castro’s charismatic appeal in Cuba and across Latin America and could set up a representative government.

The great question then for Kennedy was not whether to strike against Castro, but how to mount an assault that brought him down without provoking accusations that the new government in Washington was no more than a traditional defender of selfish U.S. interests at the expense of Latin autonomy. A better question, which none of his advisers posed, was whether Castro represented a genuine threat to national security, and if not, was the administration principally responding to conservative political pressures that could throw Kennedy on the defensive and undermine his freedom to lead? The fact that no such questions were being asked spoke volumes about the mind-set that discouraged discussions of possibly more constructive actions. For all the rhetoric about a fresh approach to old problems, Kennedy and his team were as locked into conventional thinking as their predecessors.

The CIA and military chiefs saw Castro as the advance wave of Soviet control in the hemisphere. In response, they convinced themselves that the exiles could successfully invade Cuba and touch off a civil war that could be seen as an effort to replace Castro’s repressive regime with a democratic government more beholden to the Cuban people than to Washington’s dictates. But even if they were wrong about the effectiveness of an exile attack, they were convinced that Kennedy would be compelled to take military action if an invasion faltered and his new administration faced an embarrassing and perilous defeat. In short, the CIA and military believed it more important to bring down Castro with direct action, if necessary, whatever the cost to the new administration’s image, than to jeopardize U.S. control in the hemisphere.