An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (115 page)

At a press conference on November 14, two days after the State Department announced a Honolulu conference of U.S. officials on Vietnam, Kennedy offered an “appraisal of the situation in South Viet-Nam” and the goals of the Hawaii meeting scheduled for November 20. The Honolulu conference would be an “attempt to assess the situation: what American policy should be, and what our aid policy should be, how we can intensify the struggle, how we can bring Americans out of there. Now, that is our objective,” he emphasized, “to bring Americans home, permit the South Vietnamese to maintain themselves as a free and independent country, and permit democratic forces within the country to operate.”

Bundy returned from Honolulu with the impression that “the course the US country team will chart in Vietnam is by no means decided upon. . . . Briefings of McNamara tend[ed] to be sessions where people [tried] to fool him, and he tried to convince them they cannot.” As for the new regime, Bundy said, “it was too early to see what course it might follow, but it was clear that the coalition of generals might not last.” Were it not for the fact that influential defense, state, national security, and military officials remained determined to continue the fight, newspaper editorials advocating negotiations with North Vietnam aimed at neutralization might have convinced Kennedy. But the likely internal and congressional hullabaloo over such a strategy, the hope that the new government might fight the war more effectively, and the indifference of most Americans to our involvement made such a policy difficult to embrace just yet.

Nevertheless, somebody in the administration took seriously Kennedy’s apparent interest in eliminating U.S. military commitments in South Vietnam. In an undated, unsigned memo in the president’s office files from the late summer or fall of 1963, possibly even after November 1, the writer provided “Observations on Vietnam and Cuba.” Since the Soviets seemed to feel trapped in Cuba and the United States in Vietnam, might it not make sense to invite de Gaulle to propose a swap with the Soviets of neutralization for both countries? Whether Kennedy ever saw this memo or what reaction he might have had to it is unknown. Nonetheless, it is clear that by late November 1963, Kennedy welcomed suggestions for easing difficulties with Cuba and Vietnam as alternatives to the policies that, to date, had had such limited success. On November 21, the day he was leaving for Texas, Kennedy told Mike Forrestal that at the start of 1964 he wanted him “to organize an in-depth study of every possible option we’ve got in Vietnam, including how to get out of there. We have to review this whole thing from the bottom to the top,” Kennedy said.

THE PROBLEMS WITH VIETNAM,
as with Cuba and domestic affairs, did not seem to undermine Kennedy’s reelection chances in 1964. Most soundings on national politics encouraged optimism about the president’s prospects in the next campaign. At the end of 1962, Americans listed Kennedy as the world public figure they most admired, ahead of Eisenhower, Winston Churchill, Albert Schweitzer, Douglas MacArthur, Harry Truman, and the Reverend Billy Graham. No other officeholder or active politician, including Nixon, made the top ten. Although Kennedy’s approval ratings fell between January and November 1963 from 76 percent to 59 percent and his disapproval numbers went up from 13 percent to 28 percent, he took comfort in the consistently high public affirmation of his presidential performance. In March 1963, 74 percent of Americans thought that he would be reelected. Moreover, when Gallup ran trial heats pitting him against Goldwater, Rockefeller, Michigan governor George Romney, or Nixon, Kennedy consistently had double-digit leads over all of them.

In-depth state surveys of North Dakota and Pennsylvania added to the optimism. North Dakota had been a reliable Republican state, with Kennedy winning less than 45 percent of the popular vote in 1960. But the election of a Democrat to a U.S. Senate seat in 1960 and the reelection of the senior senator, another Democrat, in 1962—albeit by the narrowest of margins in both contests—encouraged some hope that the president might win the state in 1964. In an April 1963 survey of North Dakota voters, Kennedy had an astonishing 77 percent approval rating. In statewide straw polls against four potential Republican nominees, Kennedy beat all of them except for Romney, who had only a slight 51 percent to 49 percent lead. Pollsters concluded that “from the loss of the State with a bare 44.5% of the total vote, the President has soared to a situation in which he might beat any Republican presidential candidate.”

The news from Pennsylvania was even better. In 1960, Kennedy had won the state by 117,000 votes, or 51.2 percent, to Nixon’s 48.8 percent. By the spring of 1963, his popularity had “increased significantly.” Rockefeller was Kennedy’s strongest opponent in straw polls, but he was “not running anywhere near as strong as Nixon did against Kennedy” in 1960, while other potential Republican nominees “might have difficulty defeating Kennedy among Republicans, let alone Democrats.”

Journalists echoed the polling results. Charlie Bartlett quoted a current jingle: “Never wait for an uptown car on the downtown side of the street.” Top administration officials “feel strongly now that they are waiting on the right side of the street for events that are moving in a favorable direction.” In May, a
Chattanooga Times
reporter predicted a Kennedy victory in Tennessee, where Negroes, who “hold the balance,” would back him “110%. . . . About the worst thing that could happen to Kennedy,” the reporter said, “. . . would be the death of John XXIII and the election of an austere, reactionary Pope. John is very popular with many Protestants and this, combined with Kennedy’s own careful handling of the religious problem, has done much to water down the church issue in the South.” A Rochester, New York, newsman saw Kennedy “holding fast” to 1960 voters and winning over about one in ten Nixon supporters. “‘I voted for Nixon, but Kennedy seems to be doing a good job’” was the standard comment of these crossover voters. Kennedy’s Catholicism and “inexperience” had largely disappeared as issues, and a feeling that he was going to win anyway was creating a bandwagon effect.

Yet like any savvy American politician, Kennedy knew better than to take voters for granted. So much could happen in 1964 that might weaken his hold on the electorate and force him into a close election. “I suppose . . . we’re going to get a very tough fight,” he told a British visitor in October 1963. The chairman of the Westchester County, New York, Democratic Committee predicted in November that “if civil rights and tax cut legislation [are] on the books and off television by January, we will do better than ’60. If not, we will just have to work harder.” Kennedy saw little reason to think that either bill would gain passage by then and assumed that they would indeed have to “work harder.” Whenever he spoke to O’Donnell and Powers about ’64, he “[made] a point of saying it is going to be another tough campaign.” He would remind people that the Democrats had won only 52.8 percent of the congressional vote in 1962, and that since 1884, except for FDR, the Democrats had never won a majority of the popular vote for president. When he assessed recent voting patterns of “swing groups” likely to tip the election one way or another, the numbers confirmed his expectations of a very close contest. His gains in the East and the West and among women were “soft,” while Republicans had a “slight gain among men” and a “solid gain” in the South, where Kennedy did not think enough blacks would switch to him and the Democrats in 1964 to make a significant difference.

By November 1963, the campaign had already begun. During the last week in September, Kennedy made a trip through several western states that was billed as a “conservation tour” but was more an attempt to improve his political image in a region where he had done poorly in 1960. The Republicans had also launched their campaign, with attacks on the administration’s economic policies. In response, Kennedy was “hell-bent to talk about our faster growth rates than the European rates” in 1962-63. When Walter Heller told him that this was more a case of “expansion”—an upsurge from a recession—than “growth,” Kennedy responded that “in light of what the opposition was saying, one had to sometimes bypass these fine distinctions.” Heller agreed, “so long as we don’t fool ourselves,” and underestimate the importance of the tax cut and economic growth.

Kennedy was also worried about the negative impact of his civil rights proposals on voters. In New Jersey, where he had won by only twenty-two thousand votes in 1960, “the weakening of the Democratic political machine, plus the frightening backlash flowing from the whole civil rights issue” convinced the White House that they would have to do a great deal of work to win the state again. “To put it another way,” a New Jersey member of the Interior Department told O’Donnell, “we have to win in Arizona, Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico to offset a loss in New Jersey.”

Kennedy’s greatest worry was losing the South. He had acknowledged to Walter Cronkite during a September 2, 1963, interview the importance of civil rights as an issue working against him in the region. He granted that he would again lose some southern states, but he refused to concede the Old Confederacy to the Republicans. Lou Harris had urged him to ignore the accepted wisdom about the area. The common assumptions that “the main stream of southern politics today is segregationist, states rights, and right wing conservatism,” Harris advised, were “superficial shibboleths of the noisiest, not most representative elements in the region. . . . The outstanding developments in the South today do not directly concern the race question. Foremost is the industrial explosion that is taking place . . . accompanied by a comparable educational awakening.” A New South was in the making by moderate governors and businessmen, who were boosters of southern development councils. “You can well go into the South throughout 1964,” Harris told him, “not to lay down the gauntlet on civil rights, but rather to describe and encourage the new industrial and educational explosion in the region.” The votes Kennedy will lose in the South on civil rights, former FDR political adviser Jim Farley predicted, would be offset by gains on other issues.

Kennedy also saw the hard right as a threat to his reelection. In August 1963, he asked White House counsel Myer Feldman to assess the influence of right-wing organizations. Feldman’s survey distinguished between conservatives and the radical right, which he described as a formidable force in American political life. Well funded by “70 foundations, 113 business firms and corporations, 25 electric light, gas and power companies, and 250 identifiable individuals,” these organizations and men saw “the Nation as imperiled on every front by a pro-Communist conspiracy,” which was softening the country up for an imminent takeover. Most troubling, they had been politically more successful than realized: They had managed to elect 74 percent of their over 150 congressional candidates. Broadcasting a fifteen-minute radio program on three hundred radio stations 343 times a day and mailing eighty thousand copies a week of their newspaper,
Human Events,
“the radical right-wing,” Feldman told Kennedy, “constitutes a formidable force in American life today.”

Yet Kennedy saw the ultraright more as a political gift than a danger. He did not discount their ability to heighten the public’s fears of communist subversion or to put pressure on him to be more militant toward communist threats abroad. But he also understood that middle America and more traditional conservatives regarded these extremists as a threat to popular government programs like Social Security and unemployment insurance and as too rash in foreign affairs, where they could not be trusted with nuclear weapons.

Consequently, Kennedy wanted to run against Goldwater, the favorite candidate of the country’s most conservative elements; the Arizona senator’s denunciations of New Deal social programs and glib talk about “lobbing one into the men’s room of the Kremlin” made him appear to be an easy mark. When Salinger showed Kennedy a poll indicating that the Republicans would make the wild westerner their nominee, Kennedy said, “Dave Powers could beat Goldwater,” and quipped that a race against Goldwater would allow “all of us . . . [to] get to bed much earlier on election night than we did in 1960.” At a press conference on October 31, when a reporter asked him to comment on Goldwater’s charge that the administration was falsifying the news to keep him in office, Kennedy gleefully replied, “I think it would be unwise at this time to answer . . . Senator Goldwater. I am confident that he will be making many charges even more serious than this one in the coming months. And, in addition, he himself has had a busy week selling TVA and giving permission to or suggesting that military commanders overseas be permitted to use nuclear weapons, and attacking the President of Bolivia while he was here in the United States, and involving himself in the Greek election. So I thought it really would not be fair for me this week to reply to him.”

More worrisome as a candidate until the middle of 1963 was New York governor Nelson Rockefeller. Kennedy thought that Rockefeller would have beaten him in 1960, but he was confident that as president he would have the advantage over him in 1964. Nevertheless, he took nothing for granted and made a systematic effort to learn everything he could about Rockefeller. Kennedy made Ros Gilpatric, who had worked with Rockefeller, a sort of go-between. Whenever Rockefeller was in Washington, Kennedy wanted to see him. “I never saw more concentrated attention given to any political subject, from the time I got to know the President well,” Gilpatric recalls. But in the summer of 1963 Rockefeller married a divorcée with four children; his poll numbers plunged and Goldwater emerged as the new front-runner for the nomination.

Rockefeller’s fading candidacy was a relief to Kennedy, though he worried that Romney, a moderate like Rockefeller, might fill the vacuum and take the nomination away from Goldwater. At a November 13 staff meeting with Bobby, Sorensen, O’Donnell, O’Brien, brother-in-law Steve Smith, John Bailey and Dick Maguire from the DNC, and Richard Scammon, the director of the Census Bureau and a demographer, Kennedy discussed campaign plans for three hours. A successful businessman and devout Mormon who neither smoked nor drank and was awaiting a message from God on whether to run, Romney impressed Bobby as someone who could win both moderate and conservative votes. “People buy that God and country stuff,” Kennedy observed. “Give me Barry,” he pleaded half jokingly. “I won’t even have to leave the Oval Office.”