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 nav
y 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.
The clash with Burke, followed by a McNamara revelation in February that there was no missile gap, encouraged public faith in Kennedy’s foreign policy leadership. Initially, the missile gap revelation threatened to embarrass the president by suggesting that he had used national defense for cynical purposes during the campaign. And indeed, when McNamara told reporters in a background briefing that the United States had more operational missiles than the Soviets, it provoked a furor in the press. Kennedy refused to confirm McNamara’s assertion, saying at a news conference that a study was under way to determine the facts and that it was “premature to reach a judgment as to whether there is a gap or not a gap.”
But to Kennedy’s surprise, the issue did not resonate with the public. On the contrary, it seemed to care much less about who had said what about the missile gap than about America’s advantage over Moscow. It was as if Kennedy’s presence in the White House had magically granted the United States military superiority over the Soviet Union. In April 1960, 50 percent of the country had believed it a good idea to raise taxes to help eliminate the missile gap. A few days after the press reported McNamara’s comment, 49 percent of Americans accepted that the United States was stronger than Russia, while only 30 percent continued to think that it was the reverse. By June, despite little additional press discussion of the issue, 54 percent of Americans believed that the United States led Moscow in long-range missiles and rockets, with only 20 percent seeing the Soviets as ahead. The public was more concerned that the Soviets seemed to be eclipsing the United States in a global contest for hearts and minds. Sixty-six percent wanted to equal Moscow’s public relations budget to tell “our side of the story to Europe and the world.”
Kennedy partly satisfied the national yearning to outdo Moscow in the promotion of national values by setting up the Peace Corps. The proposal had originated with Hubert Humphrey. Kennedy had been considering the idea for a number of months, having discussed it during a late-night campaign stop at the University of Michigan. On March 1, he issued an Executive Order authorizing the dispatch of American men and women “to help foreign countries meet their urgent needs for skilled manpower.” The corps was not to be “an instrument of diplomacy or propaganda or ideological conflict.” Instead, it would allow “our people to exercise more fully their responsibilities in the great common cause of world development.” And life in the corps would “not be easy.” Volunteers would receive “no salary and allowances will be at a level sufficient only to maintain health and meet basic needs. Men and women will be expected to work and live alongside the nationals of the country in which they are stationed—doing the same work, eating the same food, talking the same language.” Kennedy hoped that service in the corps would be “a source of satisfaction to Americans and a contribution to world peace.”
The response in the United States to the proposal was all Kennedy hoped it would be. Seventy-one percent of Americans declared themselves in favor of such a program, and thousands of young Americans volunteered to share in the adventure of helping less-advantaged peoples around the world. Over the next two years, the program maintained a high profile among Americans and overseas, with 74 percent of the American public well-disposed toward the work of the corps.
One measure of the program’s success was the antagonism it generated in Moscow and among some Third World citizens. They complained that the Peace Corps was nothing more than a propaganda trick that would also allow the CIA to plant agents in African, Asian, and Latin American countries. Critics dubbed the corps “Kennedy’s Kiddie Korps,” “a lot of kids bouncing around the world in Bermuda shorts.” But Kennedy understood that the corps would help combat Soviet depictions of the United States as a typical capitalist country, entirely self-interested and only too willing to take advantage of weaker, dependent nations. He knew that American self-interest and idealism were not mutually exclusive; indeed, one was as much a part of the national tradition as the other. And he believed that Peace Corps workers would make a genuine contribution not only to the well-being of the peoples they served but also to U.S. national security by encouraging emerging nations to take the United States rather than Soviet Russia as their model.
To underscore the Peace Corps’ commitment to idealistic aims, Kennedy appointed Sargent Shriver as director. Shriver later joked that JFK chose him because no one thought it could succeed, “and it would be easier to fire a relative than a political friend.” But, in fact, Kennedy picked him because he was a recognized idealist who believed that “if you do good, you’ll do well” and wished to do his “best for folks who couldn’t do theirs.” Shriver was known for the motivating mottoes on his office walls. “There is no place in this club for good losers,” one said. “Bring me only bad news; good news weakens me,” another declared. He was also a man of unquestioned integrity and boundless energy. He directed that no member of the corps was to engage in any diplomatic activities or intelligence gathering. “Their only job was to help people help themselves,” he told them. He was indefatigable, working sometimes until three or four o’clock in the morning. He wanted only devoted evangelists around him, telling the chairman of AT&T that he wished there were a telephone system that “had us all plugged in like an umbilical cord so we could never get away.”
The Peace Corps proved to be one of the enduring legacies of Kennedy’s presidency. As with some American domestic institutions like Social Security and Medicare, the Peace Corps became a fixture that Democratic and Republican administrations alike would continue to finance for over forty years. It made far more friends than enemies and, as Kennedy had hoped, convinced millions of people abroad that the United States was eager to help developing nations raise standards of living.
In no region of the world was Kennedy more determined to encourage a positive image of the United States than in Latin America. Fidel Castro’s summons to peoples of the Western Hemisphere to throw off the yoke of U.S. domination challenged Kennedy to offer a competing message of hope that countered convictions about Yankee imperialism. Khrushchev deepened Kennedy’s concern in January 1961, when he publicly declared Moscow on the side of “wars of national liberation.” Kennedy believed that Khrushchev’s speech “made clear the pattern of military and paramilitary infiltration and subversion which could be expected under the guise of ‘wars of liberation.’” Kennedy told his ambassador to Peru that “Latin America required our best efforts and attention.” This was not simply rhetoric on Kennedy’s part: His presidency generated more documents and files on Cuba than on the USSR and Vietnam combined.
Part of Kennedy’s response to the communist challenge in Latin America was the Alliance for Progress. He believed it essential for the United States to put itself on the side of social change in the hemisphere. He understood, said Schlesinger, whose White House work included Alliance projects, “that, with all its pretensions to realism, the militant anti-revolutionary line represented the policy most likely to strengthen the communists and lose the hemisphere. He believed that, to maintain contact with a continent seized by the course of revolutionary change, a policy of social idealism wa
s the only true realism for the United States.” Though Kennedy would not be able to resist pressures for old-fashioned interventionism, and though he worried that the problems of the southern republics might prove more intractable than he imagined, he nevertheless enthusiastically proposed an alliance between the United States and Latin America to advance economic development, democratic institutions, and social justice. He believed that the contest with communism and old-fashioned American idealism dictated nothing less.
On March 13, in a speech before congressional leaders and hemisphere ambassadors in the East Room of the White House, Kennedy spoke passionately about the opportunity to realize the dream articulated by Simón Bolívar 139 years before of making the Americas into the greatest region in the world. “Never in the long history of our hemisphere has this dream been nearer to fulfillment, and never has it been in greater danger,” Kennedy said. Science had provided the tools “to strike off the remaining bonds of poverty and ignorance. Yet at this very moment of maximum opportunity, we confront the same forces which have imperiled America throughout its history—the alien forces which once again seek to impose the despotisms of the Old World on the people of the New. . . . Let me be the first to admit,” Kennedy disarmingly acknowledged, “that we North Americans have not always grasped the significance of this common mission, just as it is also true that many in your own countries have not fully understood the urgency of the need to lift people from poverty and ignorance and despair.” He then called on “all people of the hemisphere to join in a new Alliance for Progress—Alianza para Progreso—a vast cooperative effort, unparalleled in magnitude and nobility of purpose, to satisfy the basic needs of the American people for homes, work and land, health and schools—techo, trabajo y tierra, salud y escuela.”