Jack used his committee membership to encourage public discussion of wiser overseas actions and to build his reputation as a foreign policy expert. He had no illusion that anything he said would necessarily alter America’s response to the world or reach great numbers of voters. But he believed it useful to speak out anyway: A national debate on foreign policy was essential in the midst of the Cold War, and his contribution to such a discussion could encourage intellectuals and party leaders to take his presidential candidacy more seriously.
An Algerian crisis—the struggle of a French North African colony to gain independence—became an opportunity for Kennedy to restate anticolonial ideas voiced in 1954 over Vietnam. “The most powerful single force in the world today,” he declared in a Senate speech in July 1957, “is neither communism nor capitalism, neither the H-bomb nor the guided missile—it is man’s eternal desire to be free and independent.” And “the single most important test of American foreign policy today is how we meet the challenge of imperialism. . . . On this test more than any other, this Nation shall be critically judged by the uncommitted millions in Asia and Africa.” Neither foreign aid nor a greater military arsenal nor “new pacts or doctrines or high-level conferences” could substitute for an effective response to anticolonialism. More specifically, he urged U.S. backing for Algerian self-determination through a mediated settlement. If, however, the French refused to negotiate, he favored outright U.S. support of independence.
Kennedy’s bold proposal did not sit well with either the French government or the Eisenhower administration, which disputed the wisdom of his recommendations. And though he responded to his critics by restating his firm belief in his proposal, he told his father that perhaps he had made a mistake. Joe assured him otherwise: “You lucky mush,” Joe said. “You don’t know it and neither does anyone else, but within a few months everyone is going to know just how right you were on Algeria.”
Taking heart from his father’s prediction, Jack restated the need to rethink American foreign policy in an article in the October 1957 issue of Foreign Affairs. “A Democrat Looks at Foreign Policy” left no doubt that he was offering a partisan alternative to Republican thinking about world politics. Nevertheless, the article was more an exercise in analysis than a polemical attack. Kennedy began by urging that America not see the world strictly through “the prisms of our own historic experience.” The country needed to understand that we lived not simply in a bipolar world of Soviet-American rivalry but a global environment in which smaller powers were charting an independent course. America needed not only to oppose communism but also to help emerging nations regardless of their attitude toward the Cold War.
Kennedy described “two central weaknesses in our current foreign policy: first, a failure to appreciate how the forces of nationalism are rewriting the geopolitical map of the world . . . and second, a lack of decision and conviction in our leadership . . . which seeks too often to substitute slogans for solutions.” Jack’s proposals for change, however, suffered from some of the same limitations as Eisenhower’s. He urged policy makers to replace “apocalyptic solutions” with something he called “a new realism,” which was to substitute economic aid for military exports and to work against “the prolongation of Western colonialism.” But how? The “new realism” was as much a political slogan as a genuine departure from current thinking about overseas affairs
In private, Jack was also critical of his Democratic colleagues. Early in 1958, he told economist John Kenneth Galbraith that “the Democratic party has tended to magnify the military challenge to the point where equally legitimate economic and political programs have been obscured. . . . It is clear also that, however tempting a target, the attacks on Mr. Dulles [for brinksmanship and insensitivity to the Third World] have been taken too often as a sum total of an alternative foreign policy—a new kind of devil theory of failure.” To counter this, he stated his intention “to give special attention this year to developing some new policy toward the underdeveloped areas.”
Yet at the same time as he was discussing alternative Cold War actions, Kennedy could not ignore the military competition with Moscow. Fears that the Soviet Union was surpassing the United States in missile technology and would soon be able to deliver a devastating attack on North America made defense policy a centerpiece of all discussions on foreign affairs. In October 1957, the Soviets successfully launched Sputnik I, a space satellite that orbited the earth. The accomplishment shocked Americans and produced an outcry for a vast expansion of U.S. defense spending. A government-sponsored committee headed by H. Rowan Gaither, chairman of the board of the Ford Foundation, advised Eisenhower that American defenses against Moscow were inadequate, that there was a missile gap favoring the Soviets, and that unless the United States began an immediate buildup, it would face defeat in a nuclear war. Three members of Gaither’s committee urged a preventive war before it was too late.
Like Eisenhower, who refused to give in to the country’s overreaction and launch an arms race, Kennedy urged a balance among military strength, economic aid, and considered diplomacy. In a New York Times interview in December 1957, he warned against neglecting economic aid programs and disarmament talks in a rush to outdo the Soviet arms buildup. In June 1958, he spoke on the Senate floor against shifting control over foreign economic assistance from the State Department to the Defense Department. He feared weakening the power of the secretary of state and a greater militarization of the Cold War.
Yet the opportunity to take political advantage of what seemed like a major failing on the part of the Eisenhower administration was irresistible. In August 1958, Jack spoke in the Senate about a fast-approaching “dangerous period” when we would suffer a “gap” or a “missile-lag period”—a time “in which our own offensive and defensive missile capabilities will lag so far behind those of the Soviets as to place us in a position of grave peril.” The gap was the result of a “complacency” that put “fiscal security ahead of national security.”
By criticizing White House defense policy, Jack hoped both to serve the nation’s security and score political points. But although his speech enhanced his party standing as a serious analyst of foreign and defense issues, it added little to his hold on the public and did nothing to convince the administration that it needed to substantially alter defense planning. Only a small minority of Americans shared his fears of a missile gap: in October 1957, just 13 percent of a Gallup poll thought that defense preparedness or Sputnik “missiles” was the most important problem facing the country. People were instead far more concerned about racial segregation and finding ways to reach accommodations with Russia that could reduce the likelihood of a nuclear war.
But Jack’s growing public appeal—and it was clearly growing—rested on more than his policy pronouncements. During 1957-58 he became emblematic of a new breed of celebrity politician, as notable for his good looks, infectious smile, charm, and wit as for his thoughtful pronouncements on weighty public questions. “Seldom in the annals of this political capital,” one journalist noted in May 1957, “has anyone risen as rapidly as Senator John F. Kennedy.” Popular and news magazines—Look,Time,Life, the Saturday Evening Post, McCall’s, Redbook, U.S. News & World Report, Parade, the American Mercury, and the Catholic Digest—regularly published feature stories about Jack and his extraordinary family. (“Senator Kennedy, do you have an ‘in’ with Life,” a high school newspaper editor asked him. “No,” he replied, “I just have a beautiful wife.”) One critical journalist wrote: “This man seeks the highest elective office in the world not primarily as a politician, but as a celebrity. He’s the only politician a woman would read about while sitting under the hair dryer, the subject of more human-interest articles than all his rivals combined.” But in the words of another, he had become the “perfect politician” with a beautiful wife and, in November 1957, a daughter, Caroline Bouvier Kennedy.
By the fall of 1959, Joe Kennedy was able to tell reporters that “Jack is the greates
t attraction in the country today. I’ll tell you how to sell more copies of a book. Put his picture on the cover. Why is it that when his picture is on the cover of Life or Redbook that they sell a record number of copies? You advertise that he will be at a dinner and you will break all records for attendance. He can draw more people to a fund-raising dinner than Cary Grant or Jimmy Stewart. Why is that? He has more universal appeal.”
Jack’s 1958 Senate reelection campaign had borne out his extraordinary political attractiveness. With no Republican of any stature willing to run against him, Jack was able to coast to a record-breaking victory. Despite a campaign designed by Larry O’Brien and Kenny O’Donnell to keep Jack’s “direct and personal participation to an absolute minimum,” he won 874,608 votes out of 1.32 million cast, 73.6 percent, the largest popular margin ever received by a candidate in Massachusetts and the second-largest margin tallied by any U.S. Senate candidate that year. The numbers seemed to support the predictions of Kennedy admirers that the country was witnessing “the flowering of another great political family, such as the Adamses, the Lodges, and the La Follettes.” “They confidently look forward to the day,” a friendly journalist wrote months before Kennedy’s 1958 victory, “when Jack will be in the White House, Bobby will serve in the Cabinet as Attorney General, and Teddy will be the Senator from Massachusetts.”
JACK’S SIX YEARS in the Senate had schooled him in the major domestic, defense, and foreign policy issues. His education was essential preparation for a presidential campaign and, more important, service in the White House. To be sure, his Senate career had produced no major legislation that contributed substantially to the national well-being. But it had strengthened his resolve to reach for executive powers that promised greater freedom to implement ideas that could improve the state of the world. In a 1960 tape recording, explaining why he was running for president, he stated that the life of a legislator was much less satisfying than that of a chief executive. Senators and congressmen could work on something for two years and have it turned aside by a president in one day and one stroke of the pen. Jack believed that effective leadership came largely from the top. Being president provided opportunities to make a difference no senator could ever hope to achieve. The time had come.
PART THREE
Can a Catholic Become President?
I am not the Catholic candidate for President. I am the Democratic party’s candidate for President, who happens also to be a Catholic.
— John F. Kennedy, September 12, 1960
CHAPTER 7
Nomination
No, sir, th’ dimmycratic party ain’t on speakin’ terms with itsilf. Whin ye see two men with white neckties go into a sthreet car an’ set in opposite corners while wan mutthers “Traiter” an’ th’ other hisses “Miscreent” ye can bet they’re two dimmycratic leaders thryin’ to reunite th’ gran’ ol’ party.
— Finley Peter Dunne, Mr. Dooley’s Opinions, 1901
JACK KENNEDY’S REELECTION VICTORY in Massachusetts and his growing national visibility since the 1956 Democratic convention put him on everyone’s list of possible candidates for the presidency in 1960. He was an appealing alternative to Eisenhower. Ike was much admired, even loved, by millions of Americans, but alongside Kennedy, the sixty-nine-year-old president, who was in declining health and had become the oldest man ever to serve in the office, seemed stodgy. Kennedy’s vigor (“vigah,” Jack pronounced it, in the New England way) was seen as a potential asset in dealing with Soviet challenges, a sluggish economy, racial divisions, and what the literary critic Dwight Macdonald described as the “terrible shapelessness of American life.”
In 1957, more than 2,500 speaking invitations from all over the country testified to Kennedy’s appeal. Seizing upon the opportunity to reach influential audiences, he agreed to give 144 talks, nearly one every other day, in 47 states. By early 1958, he was receiving a hundred requests a week to speak. Some Massachusetts newspapers, eager to boost a native son, already pegged him as the Democratic nominee. Numerous party leaders agreed. A majority of the party’s forty-eight state chairmen described him as the likely choice, and 409 of the 1,220 delegates to the 1956 Democratic convention declared their preference for Kennedy in 1960. Although Democratic governors did not foresee a first-ballot victory, they thought that Jack would certainly lead in the early balloting.
Kennedy backers took additional satisfaction from polls in 1959 depicting him in the most flattering terms. Even Republicans conceded that he was “very smart . . . nice-looking . . . likeable . . . [and] knowledgeable about politics.” Although some in the GOP set him down as a “smart-alec . . . millionaire . . . headline hunter,” others wished that he were a member of their party. Democrats had only nice things to say about Jack, describing him with words and phrases like “truthful,” “not afraid to express himself,” “family man,” “nice-looking,” “vigorous,” “personable,” “intelligent,” and “level-headed.” Some independents thought he was “too outspoken,” but the great majority described him in extremely favorable terms. Sixty-four percent of all potential voters with an opinion about Kennedy believed that he had “the background and experience to be President.”
Despite this widespread esteem, knowledgeable political observers, including many in the Kennedy camp, saw formidable obstacles to Kennedy’s nomination and election. His positive image, however useful, allowed critics to describe him as more the product of a public relations campaign funded by his family’s fortune than the result of political accomplishments. William Shannon, a well-known columnist for the New York Post, wrote: “Month after month, from the glossy pages of Life to the multicolored cover of Redbook, Jack and Jackie smile out at millions of readers; he with his tousled hair and winning smile, she with her dark eyes and beautiful face. We hear of her pregnancy, of his wartime heroism, of their fondness for sailing. But what has all this to do with statesmanship?” New York Times columnist James Reston complained that “[Kennedy’s] clothes and hair-do are a masterpiece of contrived casualness.” Reston worried that there had been too much emphasis “on how to win the presidency rather than on how to run it.” Chicago Daily News reporter Peter Lisagor and other journalists met with Jack in 1958: They “looked at him walking out of the room, thin, slender, almost boyish really,” and one of them said, “‘Can you imagine that young fellow thinking he could be President of the United States any time soon?’ I must say the thought occurred to me, too,” Lisagor recalled.
Polls assessing Kennedy’s candidacy in a national campaign echoed Lisagor’s doubts. They foresaw a close contest with Vice President Richard M. Nixon, whose eight years under Eisenhower gave him a commanding lead for the Republican nomination. Moreover, a vigorous campaign for Nixon by Ike, whose approval ratings in the next-to-last year of his presidency ranged between 57 percent and 66 percent, seemed to promise a third consecutive Republican term. But no sitting vice president had gained the White House since Martin Van Buren in 1836, and several straw polls matching Adlai Stevenson and Kennedy against Nixon and New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, or Kennedy directly against Nixon, gave the Democrats a slight edge. Nothing in the surveys, however, suggested that Kennedy and the Democrats could take anything for granted.
The criticism and doubts bothered Jack, but he blunted them with humor. At the 1958 Gridiron dinner, an annual Washington ritual in which the press and politicians engaged in humorous exchanges, Jack poked fun at his father’s free spending in support of his political ambitions. He had “just received the following wire from my generous daddy,” JFK said. “‘Dear Jack—Don’t buy a single vote more than is necessary—I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for a landslide.’” To answer predictions that a Catholic president would have divided loyalties, Jack promised to make Methodist bishop G. Bromley Oxnam, an outspoken opponent of electing a Catholic, his personal envoy to the Vatican. To counter Oxnam’s complaint that a Catholic in the White House would be in constant touch with the pope, Jack declared his intention to h
ave Oxnam “open negotiations for that Trans-Atlantic Tunnel immediately.” The Republicans did not escape his barbs: A 1958 recession had moved President Eisenhower to declare that, in Jack’s version, “we’re now at the end of the beginning of the upturn of the downturn.” He added, “Every bright spot the White House finds in the economy is like the policeman bending over the body in the alley who says cheerfully, ‘Two of his wounds are fatal—but the other one’s not so bad.’”
Jack’s wit scored points with journalists but had limited impact on Democratic voters and party officials, who would have the initial say about his candidacy. In 1959, Democrats were evenly divided between Kennedy and Stevenson. Each of them was the choice of between 25 percent and 30 percent of party members. Less encouraging, congressional Democrats put Kennedy fourth behind Lyndon Johnson, Stevenson, and Missouri senator Stuart Symington for the nomination. They thought that the forty-two-year-old Kennedy was too young to be president and preferred to see him run as vice president.
But Jack had no patience with being second. “We’ve always been competitive in our family,” he explained. “My father has been competitive all his life, that’s how he got where he is.” When Newton Minow, a Stevenson law partner, told Kennedy in 1957 that he could probably have the vice presidential nomination in 1960, Jack said: “‘I’m not interested in running for vice president. I’m interested in running for president.’ ‘You’re out of your mind,’” Minow replied. “‘You’re only thirty-nine years old, you haven’t got a chance to run for President.’ ‘No, Newt,’” Jack answered, “‘if I’m ever going to make it I’m going to make it in 1960.’” Sensible political calculations were shaping his decision. “If I don’t make it this time, and a Democrat makes it,” he told a reporter, “then it may [be] for eight years and there will be fresher faces coming along and I’ll get shoved in the background.” Besides, the vice presidency was “a dead job.” Nor did he think he could work with Stevenson, who “is a fussbudget about a lot of things and we might not get along.” Settling for second place was tantamount to defeat.