Surrounded by Enemies (15 page)
Read Surrounded by Enemies Online
Authors: Bryce Zabel
The election that year was an odd one. Pundits had openly speculated about what might have happened had John Kennedy died in Dallas. LBJ would have become President Johnson. He could probably have passed a civil rights bill based on Kennedy’s martyrdom, a bill that was still stalled in Congress in the real world. Johnson might have crushed Goldwater under the right conditions.
By surviving, John Kennedy remained fair game. He got the tough race he always expected, albeit made so much more unpredictable by the events in Texas.
What happened on the electoral map surprised everyone. Kennedy had benefitted by the rejection of Barry Goldwater in the final days of the campaign as a serious candidate. In the end, the more than seventy million popular votes were split 53 percent to 44 percent in Kennedy’s favor, with 3 percent going to other candidates. Voters gave the South solidly to Goldwater, who had only sporadic success elsewhere. LBJ managed to lose his home state of Texas, but the Democrats picked up California, a state they had lost to Nixon in 1960. It was an Electoral College rout, 366-172.
At the same time, though, the country was disturbed and wanted to throw some bums out. Tickets were split so badly that Kennedy’s success was marked by his party’s overall loss, leaving Democrats with a Republican-controlled House and a paper-thin majority in the Senate.
The Kennedy families came together for Thanksgiving once again in 1964. Given the horrible dark cloud that had hung over the last year’s gathering, this one seemed to be about rebirth. Edward Kennedy had just been reelected senator from Massachusetts, despite being confined to a hospital bed while recovering from his near-fatal plane crash. Against his doctors’ wishes, he was transported by ambulance and allowed to recuperate in the Hyannis Port compound in a special hospital bed that had been moved there for him. On Thanksgiving Day, John Kennedy helped his youngest brother put on a back brace and walk to the dinner table, where they posed for a picture together. They shared a special bond with their back injuries and the fact they had each cheated death in the last year. Until this day, it had always been Jack and Bobby. For the first time, friends and family members saw them as Jack and Teddy, their own duo with its own potential.
John Kennedy was alive and had just retained the presidency. His family was unified. They could begin to pick up the pieces and move forward again, after a year of difficulties.
During the holidays, President Kennedy spent a great deal of time reading and consulting over the two big events of the next month — the State of the Union, followed by his second presidential inauguration. Pierre Salinger told the
New York Times
that the President had read Winston Churchill’s
A History of the English-Speaking Peoples
. While that may have been true, it was later learned he had also re-read one of his favorite books,
Melbourne
by David Cecil. This biography of Lord Melbourne, Queen Victoria’s prime minister and political adviser, includes many anecdotes of the young aristocracy in England, which held honor above all else but often spent weekends at country estates, where parties and extramarital sexual relations were the order of the day (and night). When it was time to get back to business, however, no one talked about these events, and divorce was considered disgrace.
Clearly by his choice of reading material, John Kennedy was considering both his public and his private life during these weeks.
Kenny O’Donnell, wearing the hat of political strategist, argued during the entire month of December that the January 3 State of the Union and the January 20 inauguration speech had to be considered a double shot to address the American people and the world about where America stood. The opportunity could not be wasted.
The New Frontier had taken the world to the brink of nuclear holocaust, featured man’s inhumanity to man in the deep South, and shattered the domestic tranquility on the streets of Dallas, Texas. The one area of agreement for everyone in the administration was that this second chance could not be wasted.
Proxy Wars
_______________
N
ineteen sixty-five was shaping up to be an ugly, tumultuous year. More than thirteen months had passed since the dismal winter of 1964, and the reality about what happened in Dallas, and why had yet to be made clear. If anything, the truth seemed to be slipping away. The nation’s shock had slowly turned to anger.
Indeed, two separate investigations had foundered during this recent past: the Oswald trial, because of the suspect’s death; and the Warren Commission, because of the Oswald trial. The reasons and excuses were what they were, but the public was unhappy with the lack of results. A majority of people felt that the truth about Oswald had been covered up and that the Warren Commission was a sham.
Politically, voters had shown their discontent in the November election by splitting tickets in absolutely unprecedented numbers and sending divided government to Washington. The appeal made by the GOP establishment to focus voters on Congress and not the presidential race had worked. When the smoke cleared, the Democrats lost six Senate seats and a whopping thirty-eight House seats. Although this left the President’s party still in control of the Senate by a reduced but comfortable 59-41 margin, the Republicans had taken control of the much larger House by the slimmest possible margin, 218-217.
That single seat set the stage for an epic struggle to control Congress and, by extension, to decide the fate of the newly reelected President and his agenda. As an example, Democratic Congressman Albert Watson of South Carolina’s Second District supported Barry Goldwater. Ordinarily the Democrats would have thrown him out of the party, forcing a vacancy that would have called for a special election. Now they needed him, no matter what his politics were. There were many senators and representatives like Watson, all from the southern states, who were now questioning their allegiance to the Democratic party. They could not be trusted to vote with their party on individual issues, particularly those concerning social justice. With a virtually tied House of Representatives, they would have to be dealt with.
For now, though, the Republicans had the House, and that meant they had the Speaker. The position went to Congressman Gerald R. Ford of Michigan, a man known to his colleagues as a congressman’s congressman. It was the accomplishment of Ford’s personal agenda to be the Speaker of the House, a position he had dreamed of since the 1950s, when he declined offers to run for both the Senate and the Michigan governorship. He had become Minority Leader in 1964 in a closely contested race, replacing Indiana’s Charles Halleck. The fact that Ford had also served on the now-imploded Warren Commission made Democrats nervous.
Ford’s stated position was that by splitting tickets in 1964, voters had shown John Kennedy their sympathy for what happened at Dallas but were reminding him not to interpret his victory as a mandate for a liberal agenda. This would be much easier to enforce now that Republicans, by virtue of their paper-thin majority in the House, got to chair all the committees. The new numbers meant nothing was going to be easy for the Democrats going forward.
John Kennedy’s “luck of the Irish” in surviving both the assassination attempt in Dallas and a spirited GOP reelection challenge also had the White House in a more combative mood. With those boxes checked off, JFK’s inner circle now felt the time had come to strike back somehow and hold accountable those who had been a part of this crime. They had to seize the momentum. Whatever people thought about the lone-nut-versus-conspiracy debate, John Fitzgerald Kennedy still needed to make it clear that he was in charge.
A more activist approach brought with it grave danger: the exposure of the President’s extramarital private life and drug use; the real depth of dissatisfaction the nation’s military and intelligence agencies felt toward him; and the possibility that the conspirators would try again, with force, and this time succeed. Still, the Kennedy White House knew that the election, then the State of the Union address, and even the second inauguration could not forestall the inevitable.
The one-two punch of the two looming speeches needed to launch a new theme. It was time to turn a page in the history of the 1960s, and if any man had the rhetorical skills and personal charisma to do that, it was John Kennedy.
In his January 3, 1965 State of the Union address delivered to both houses of the Eighty-Ninth Congress, President Kennedy looked out across the faces in the room and joked that it was good to see so many old friends and be given the opportunity by the nation’s voters to make so many new ones. It was one of the few lines that got a positive reaction from both sides of the aisle. Any applause line the President offered was guaranteed to be accompanied by TV images showing half of the new Congress sitting on their hands.
Three weeks earlier, while planning for the address, John Kennedy had, in a moment of keen political clarity, realized exactly that TV dynamic and planned accordingly.
He knew that Americans would see those sour images and be disgusted. He would use television and speak past the congressmen and senators, engaging the camera as directly as possible, and speak to the people at home who had just reelected him. And he would direct their attention to the humorless Republicans who sat motionless, without response.
The Kennedy White House added a dramatic touch, to justify a feeling of greater importance and potential for bipartisanship. They borrowed from the great Franklin D. Roosevelt and scheduled the speech for delivery at night, the first time this had been done since FDR’s State of the Union message in 1936. By doing so, Kennedy thus assured himself a nationwide television audience of more than thirty-one million of his fellow citizens.
The rhetoric of the election was toned down and, in its place, was a President Kennedy simply acknowledging Dallas and its aftermath, lamenting the “political stagnation” of the previous year. His word choice and his demeanor addressed his comments to the viewer at home.
We are weary of this crime and wonder why more than a year later this Congress is just now beginning its own investigation, the so-called Joint Committee on the Attempted Assassination of the President. This committee will have the cooperation of the President’s office, but it should do its work expeditiously. Those of you without jobs, farmers who need help, auto workers in Detroit, and the others, you all want answers and an end. And you want Congress to turn its attention to the great issues that still challenge our society. Congress will be tested this year and it must not fail.
With that, JFK did his best to put Congress in a box, knowing that in most minds, their new committee should have been up and operating a full year ago. New staff members had been sifting through the voluminous amount of material that had been collected by the Warren Commission. Most of it was gathered and distributed to committee members on the very day that the President was making his address.
In order to give Congress reasons not to turn all of its attention to Dallas, the State of the Union needed to put serious policy matters before the legislative branch and challenge them to show the same enthusiasm for bill-passing as crime investigation. With that in mind, President Kennedy unveiled a laundry list of activity.
The national budget was now close to $100 billion and could not be increased without a fight. So frugality in government had to be stressed over bold, new programs. Kennedy called for the full development of all national resources, human and natural — but not for more spending — to improve the quality of life in the U.S.
The President also asked for fresh congressional action on several bills that got by the Senate but failed to pass the House in 1964: Medicare under Social Security, aid to Appalachia, and liberalization of the immigration laws. As a stimulus to the economy and a follow-up to last year’s $11.6 billion tax cut, he asked for heavy cuts in excise taxes. He also promoted a bigger war on waste, a new regional redevelopment program, and more money for housing and urban renewal.
The President prodded legislators to pony up money for the sea water desalinization projects he had proposed in his first State of the Union. Kennedy managed to sound like the first green president when he declared that the phrase, “America, the beautiful” is itself in danger. “The water we drink, the food we eat, the very air we breathe, are threatened with pollution,” argued President Kennedy. “Our parks are overcrowded, and our seashore overburdened. Green fields and dense forests are disappearing.”
He said he did not regard the administration’s agenda for a second term as pushing for “a final objective, finished work,” but rather as a “challenge constantly renewed.”
JCAAP met formally for the first time, just three days after the State of the Union. That first call-to-order was pro forma and businesslike, actually avoiding the sense of partisan fighting that most people were expecting. Instead, the committee focused on which witnesses to call back and whether to do so publicly. It also decided which witnesses to add to the lists that had been forwarded.
Everyone, from the President to the committee members to the conspirators themselves, knew this was the calm before the storm.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy took his second oath of office on January 20, 1965 when it was administered by Chief Justice Earl Warren, the man who had run from the commission named after him and hung the President of the United States out to dry. An estimated 1.2 million people attended this inauguration, a record for any such event held at the National Mall until the Obama inauguration of 2009. It was also the last time an inauguration was covered by newsreels.
All in all, it took little more than an hour to transact the business of the occasion — to swear John Kennedy in again for a second full term as the thirty-fifth U.S. President and Lyndon Johnson once more as the thirty-seventh Vice President. While the pundits did not consider it as dramatic as the 1961 inauguration, in which the torch was passed from the World War II generation’s Eisenhower to a new generation led by Kennedy, it had its own sense of history. Covering it for CBS, Walter Cronkite noted that “no one who is watching can help thinking how close the nation came to having another man standing there with his hand on the Bible.” As he delivered that line, the camera lingered on Vice President Lyndon Johnson who seemed downcast and somber.
The problem that President Kennedy faced for his second inaugural address was that his first one had been declared certainly one of the best ever and possibly in the top position. He was in competition with himself. Knowing this, Kennedy had tried to be smarter. In 1961, he had stayed out until 4 a.m. partying with friends and even, rumor had it, sleeping with a woman who wasn't his wife. In 1965, he was in bed by 9 p.m. the night before, and with Jacqueline Kennedy. We now know she had told him that if he wasn’t home with her by midnight that she would come down with a serious bout of the flu and miss his speech.
Kennedy had also gone through five full drafts of his comments with Theodore Sorensen, including one done on the morning of the Inauguration. Kennedy woke his speechwriter up at 6 a.m., telling him on the phone that the version they had written had too much “treacle” in it and summoning him to the Oval Office. Together they ended up cutting it down to less than three-fourths of its original length, leaving out an entire section that dealt with the need to refocus energy on the economy, something they both agreed had been amply covered just two weeks earlier. Instead they substituted:
The United States seeks no dominion over our fellow man, but only man’s dominion over tyranny and misery. Let us now transform our unity of interest into a unity of purpose, to achieve progress without strife, change without hatred; not without difference of opinion, but without the deep and abiding divisions which scar the union for generations.
Kennedy said the New Frontier, still the destination of his administration, was “not a set of promises, but a set of challenges.” It would only be built, he said, by the combined efforts of government and the public and not by a series of laws and edicts. The journey had to be personal for everyone.
During the policy debates leading up to the speech, Sorensen had noted that even before Dallas, Vice President Johnson had been promoting the idea that the second term should be about "the Great Society.” He wondered if, just possibly, it might be the one good idea LBJ had given them during his tenure and that they might want to borrow it. Kennedy thought the phrase smacked of press-agentry, and a particularly grandiose kind at that. “Spare me from another Johnson Treatment” is how he put it, sticking in the final knife.
While the New Frontier had no room at all for a Great Society, as it turns out, it could be a place where people could get a second chance. Kennedy tackled the shadow of assassination by rhetorically sailing past it.
It is time to move beyond the blame and guilt of the past events in Dallas and begin again to address the issues of war and peace, the human rights of men and women of all nations, and the pursuit of justice. Let our work begin anew. Let Americans and the world enjoy the redemption that only a second chance can offer.
John F. Kennedy’s “Second Chance” speech was meant to get the country moving again. He used the metaphorical power of the phrase over and over as he ran through his administration’s record from the success of the early space launches, but also defending and deflecting the record on the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the civil rights protests, the Berlin Wall, and Vietnam.
President Kennedy then transitioned to the biggest headline of his speech. If the first term had a too-close brush with war, then the second term would be about the search for peace. Echoing many of the themes from his 1963 American University speech and 1963 United Nations address, he cast 1964 as a dramatic pause that must now end. He had accepted an offer from Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to visit Moscow and would do so before the year was out. Together, they would discuss ways to reduce international tensions and seek new ways to work together.
After the speech, the Kennedys and the Johnsons enjoyed what looked like a long, glittering toast offered up by the capital and the nation, even though at this time, JFK and LBJ were barely speaking to each other. First came the parade where they stood beaming in a glassed-in and bulletproof box outside the White House and saluted the paraders marching past. Then came a visit back to the Oval Office for Kennedy to do a little business and change into evening clothes, while the Vice President went to a local club for a few scotches with friends.
The long evening came with five inaugural balls where the President and First Lady danced late into the night. “My husband rarely dances with me but when he does, there is no one finer,” explained Jackie Kennedy, adding a comment that made a few observers wonder if she was discussing the ballroom or the bedroom. “Of course, all the ladies seem to want to dance with the President.”
The smiles and toasts were observed by heavily armed men who were part of security measures that were nearly double what had been in place four years earlier. At one point, Kenneth O’Donnell pointed this out to Dave Powers over a martini and asked, “If Oswald acted alone, and he’s dead, then why are so many of these guys still on the job?”
These two men, who had personally felt the hot fire of bullets coming from behind the grassy knoll along with that from the now-infamous sixth floor of the School Book Depository, knew the answer. The men who had planned Dallas were still at large.
