An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (50 page)

By contrast, CBS commentator Charles Kuralt said, “the change in Kennedy has been the reverse of the change in Nixon. It is hard to recognize in the relaxed, smiling, and confident Kennedy . . . the serious man who . . . in July . . . seemed all cold efficiency, all business.” Eleanor Roosevelt believed, as she told Arthur Schlesinger Jr., that no one “in our politics since Franklin has had the same vital relationship with crowds.” It was as if running against someone as humorless and possibly ruthless as Nixon strengthened Kennedy’s faith in himself—in the conviction not only that he would be a better president but that the energy to get the job done could come not just from within, and not just from family dynamics, but from the sea of American faces that smiled when he stepped toward them.

Yet for all this, Kennedy himself might have thought that Roosevelt’s view was a little too romantic. He had no illusion that his positive impact on voters was as strong as she believed. On election night, as he watched the returns at the family’s Hyannis Port compound, the results illustrated his marginal hold on the electorate. When he went to bed at 3:30 in the morning, the election still hung in the balance. He was reasonably sure he had won, but with Pennsylvania, Missouri, Illinois, Minnesota, Michigan, and California too close to call definitively, he refused to assume a victory. Despite the uncertainty, he was so exhausted he slept for almost six hours. When he awoke at about nine, Ted Sorensen gave him the news in his upstairs bedroom: He had carried all six states. In fact, California was still a toss-up and ultimately went for Nixon, but it didn’t matter; the other five states were enough to ensure Kennedy’s election. But even then, it was not until noon, when final returns came in, that they knew with any certainty that he had won. Only when Nixon’s press secretary issued a concession statement a little after that did Kennedy agree to appear before the press in the Hyannis Port armory as the president-elect. There, Joe Kennedy, more elated than Jack or Bobby at winning a prize he had long hoped for, appeared in public with Jack for the first time since the start of the campaign.

Although Jack ended up with 303 electoral votes to Nixon’s 219, his popular margin was a scant 118,574 out of 68,837,000 votes cast. True, he and Nixon had generated enough interest to bring 64.5 percent of the electorate to the polls, one of the highest turnouts in recent history. But he had won the presidency with only 49.72 percent of the popular vote. (Senator Harry F. Byrd of Virginia, running as a segregationist, siphoned off 500,000 votes.) Although Kennedy joined a long line of minority presidents, including Woodrow Wilson, who had gained the White House in the three-way 1912 election with barely 42 percent popular backing, it was small comfort. Kennedy’s margin was the smallest since Grover Cleveland’s 23,000-vote advantage over James G. Blaine in 1884, and Benjamin Harrison had turned back Cleveland’s bid for a second term with 65 more electoral votes but 100,456 fewer popular votes.

Any number of things explain Kennedy’s victory: the faltering economy in an election year; anxiety about the nation’s apparently diminished capacity to meet the Soviet threat; Kennedy’s decidedly greater personal charm alongside Nixon’s abrasiveness before the TV cameras and on the stump; Lyndon Johnson’s help in winning seven southern states (Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas); an effective get-out-the-vote campaign among Democrats, who, despite Eisenhower’s two elections, remained the majority party; the black vote for Kennedy; and the backing of ethnic voters, including but much broader than just Catholics, in big cities like New York, Buffalo, Chicago, Newark, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh. Kennedy’s margins in Detroit, Minneapolis-Saint Paul, and Kansas City helped give him 50.9, 50.6, and 50.3 percent majorities in Michigan, Minnesota, and Missouri, respectively. Contributing to Kennedy’s win was an unwise Nixon promise to visit all fifty states, which had diverted him from concentrating on crucial swing areas toward the end of the campaign. Ike’s blunder in dismissing Nixon’s claims of executive leadership and his failure, because of health concerns, to take a larger role in his vice president’s campaign may also have been decisive factors in holding down Nixon’s late surge.

Almost immediately, Nixon supporters complained that fraudulent voting in Illinois and Texas (where Kennedy won by 8,800 and 46,000 votes, respectively) had given Kennedy the election, but the accusations were impossible to prove. Daley’s machine probably stole Illinois from Nixon (before the final tally was in, he reported Illinois for Kennedy), but Jack would have won even without Illinois. As for Texas, 46,000 fraudulent votes would have been more than the most skilled manipulator of returns could have hidden. Although Nixon publicly took the high ground by refusing to challenge the outcome, Senator Thurston B. Morton, Republican National Committee chairman, urged state and local Republican officials in eleven states “to take legal action on the alleged vote fraud.” But no one could demonstrate significant fraud anywhere. Recounts in Illinois and New Jersey, for example, made no change in the final vote, and in other states, judges found insufficient evidence to order recounts. However close, Kennedy’s victory represented the will of the electorate.

In the final analysis, the most important question is not why Kennedy won but why his victory was so narrow. Harry Truman was amazed at the closeness of the race. “Why, even our friend Adlai would have had a landslide running against Nixon,” he told Senator William Benton of Connecticut. Given the majority status of the Democrats, the discontent over the state of the economy and international affairs, and Kennedy’s superior campaign and campaigning, he should have gained at least 52 or 53 percent of the popular vote. Everyone on his staff had predicted a victory of between 53 and 57 percent. The small margin shocked them. What they missed was the unyielding fear of having a Catholic in the White House. Although about 46 percent of Protestants voted for Kennedy, millions of them in Ohio, Wisconsin, and across the South made his religion a decisive consideration. It was the first time a candidate had won the presidency with a minority of Protestant voters.

Forty-three years after the election of 1960, it is difficult to imagine the importance of something that no longer seems significant in discussions about suitability for the White House. Whatever gains and losses John Kennedy’s presidency might have brought to the country and the world, his election in 1960 marked a great leap forward in religious tolerance that has served the nation well ever since.

PART FOUR

The President

Most of us enjoy preaching, and I’ve got such a bully pulpit!

— Theodore Roosevelt, 1905

The Presidency is not merely an administrative office. That’s the least of it. It is more than an engineering job, efficient or inefficient. It is pre-eminently a place of moral leadership. All our great Presidents were leaders of thought at times when certain historic ideas in the life of the nation had to be clarified.

— Franklin D. Roosevelt, September 11, 1932

On my desk I have a motto which says “The buck stops here.”

— Harry S Truman, December 19, 1952

CHAPTER 9

The Torch Is Passed

I am an idealist without illusions.

— attributed to John F. Kennedy by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., c. 1953

JACK KENNEDY’S ELECTION
to the presidency by the narrowest of margins frustrated and exhilarated him. He was “more perplexed than bothered by the narrowness of his victory,” Arthur Schlesinger Jr. recalled. Kennedy was clearly “jubilant” and “deeply touched” at becoming only the thirty-fourth American to become president. But after seeing him, journalist Henry Brandon thought that the result had actually somewhat “hurt his self-confidence and pride.” Kennedy himself asked Kenny O’Donnell, “How did I manage to beat a guy like this by only a hundred thousand votes?”

But Kennedy had little time to savor or question his victory; the transition from candidate to president-elect confronted him with immediate new pressures. The problems he had complained of during the campaign—an uncertain public lacking inspired leadership in the Cold War, the missile gap, a nuclear arms race, Cuba, communism’s appeal to developing nations, a stagnant economy, and racial injustices—were now his responsibility.

In the seventy-two days before he took office, he had first to overcome campaign exhaustion. The day after the election, during the press conference at the Hyannis Port Armory, his hands, although out of camera range, trembled. One reporter, responding to Kennedy’s appearance the following day, asked whether rumors about his health problems were true. Two weeks after the election, when Ted Sorensen visited him at his father’s vacation retreat in Palm Beach, he had not fully recovered. His mind was neither “keen” nor “clear,” Sorensen recalls, and he “still seemed tired then and reluctant to face up to the details of personnel and program selection.” As he and his father drove to a Palm Beach golf course, Jack complained, “Jesus Christ, this one wants that, that one wants this. Goddamn it, you can’t satisfy any of these people. I don’t know what I’m going to do about it all.” Joe responded, “Jack, if you don’t want the job, you don’t have to take it. They’re still counting votes up in Cook County.”

Kennedy knew he could not afford to show any signs of flagging in public. How could he get the country moving again or create the sense of hope, the belief in a better national future that had been so central to his campaign if he gave any indication of physical or psychological fatigue? Thus, in response to the reporter’s question about his health, he declared himself in “excellent” shape and dismissed rumors of Addison’s disease as false. “I have been through a long campaign and my health is very good today,” he said. An article based largely on information supplied by Bobby Kennedy echoed Jack’s assertions. Published in
Today’s Health,
an American Medical Association journal, and summarized in the
New York Times,
the article described Jack as in “superb physical condition.” Though it reported some adrenal insufficiency, which a daily oral medication neutralized, the journal assured readers that Jack would have no problem handling the demands of the presidency.

The reality was, of course, different. Kennedy’s health remained as uncertain as ever. Having gone from one medical problem to another throughout his life, he believed his ongoing conditions were no cause to think that he could not be president. But whether someone with adrenal, back, colon-stomach, and prostate difficulties could function with high effectiveness under the sort of pressures a president faced was a question that remained to be answered. True, FDR had functioned brilliantly despite his paralysis, but he was never on a combination of medicines like the one Kennedy relied on to get through the day. When he ran for and won the presidency, Kennedy was gambling that his health problems would not prevent him from handling the job. By hiding the extent of his ailments, he had denied voters the chance to decide whether they wanted to join him in this bet.

Kennedy’s hope was to return the center of decision to the Oval Office, rather than let it remain in the hands of the subordinates who were supposedly running Eisenhower’s government. But obviously he needed a cabinet, and selecting it was not simple. Appointing prominent older men could revive campaign charges that Kennedy was too young to take charge and needed experienced advisers to run his administration. At the same time, however, Kennedy did not want to create the impression that he would surround himself with pushovers and ciphers who would not threaten his authority. He wanted the most talented and accomplished people he could find, and he was confident that he could make them serve his purposes.

He also understood that his thin margin of victory gave him less a mandate for fresh actions than a need to demonstrate lines of continuity with Eisenhower’s presidency. The margin convinced him that it was essential to conciliate Republicans and indicate that as president he would put the national interest above partisan politics.

Indeed, Kennedy’s announcement of appointments two days after the election suggested not new departures but consistency with the past. At a dinner with liberal friends the day after the election, Kennedy’s mention of the CIA and the FBI had brought pleas for new directors and novel ways of thinking about Cold War dangers. To his friends’ surprise, the next morning he announced that Allen Dulles and J. Edgar Hoover would continue to head the CIA and the FBI, respectively. Kennedy hoped this would put Democrats on notice that he would not be beholden to any party faction and would make up his own mind about what would best serve the country and his administration. (He may also have been guarding against damaging leaks from Hoover about his private life. As Lyndon Johnson would later put it, better to keep Hoover inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in.)

Four days later, Kennedy flew in a helicopter to Key Biscayne to meet Nixon. When O’Donnell asked him what he would say to Nixon, he replied, “I haven’t the slightest idea. Maybe I’ll ask him how he won in Ohio.” The meeting had its intended symbolic value, showing Kennedy as a statesman above the country’s political wars. The
New York Times
reported Kennedy’s determination not to exclude the Republicans from constructive contributions to his administration, though Nixon himself would not be offered any formal role. Nevertheless, Kennedy could not ignore their political differences. O’Donnell recalled the conversation between Kennedy and Nixon as neither interesting nor amusing. Nixon did most of the talking. “It was just as well for all of us that he didn’t quite make it,” Kennedy told O’Donnell on the return ride to Palm Beach. Nixon did not reveal his Ohio strategy, Kennedy said later.