An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (57 page)

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 was 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.
”

Kennedy, who had little facility for foreign languages or much talent for pronouncing them (his struggles with high school Latin and French are well documented), had spent part of the afternoon before giving his speech practicing his Spanish. Speechwriter Richard Goodwin, who had drafted the address, tried to help him, but it was pretty useless. Amused at his own imperfect pronunciations, Kennedy asked Goodwin later, “How was my Spanish?” “Perfect,” Goodwin lied. “I thought you’d say that,” Kennedy said with a grin.

Although everyone in the room understood that Kennedy was launching a memorable program and that he sincerely wanted to achieve a dramatic change in relations with the southern republics and in their national lives, the president’s rhetoric did not dispel all doubts. One speech, however sincerely delivered, was not enough to convince the audience that traditional U.S. neglect of the region—the conviction, as Henry Kissinger later facetiously put it, that Latin America is a dagger pointing at the heart of Antarctica—was at an end. Latin American representatives to the United States also believed that American idealism was little more than a tool for combating the communist challenge. Some derisively called the Alliance for Progress the Fidel Castro Plan.

There was some justification in the Latin American dismissal of the Alliance. Kennedy and the great majority of Americans could not ignore Soviet rhetoric and actions, which demonstrated a determination to undermine U.S. power and influence by propaganda, subversion, and communist revolutions in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. True, Khrushchev ruled out a nuclear war as madness, a prescription for destroying hundreds of millions of lives and civilization. But his assertions about Soviet missile superiority and predictions that communism would win control of Third World countries made it impossible for Kennedy or any American president to set Khrushchev’s challenge aside.

In private, Kennedy was never a knee-jerk anticommunist. In a meeting with a group of Soviet experts on February 11, he displayed “a mentality extraordinarily free of preconceived prejudices, inherited or otherwise . . . almost as though he had thrown aside the normal prejudices that beset human mentality,” State Department Soviet expert Charles Bohlen said. “He saw Russia as a great and powerful country, and it seemed to him there must be some basis upon which the two countries could live without blowing each other up.”

Kennedy friend and British economist Lady Barbara Ward Jackson urged Kennedy to mount “a sustained offensive on current clichés” in a speech she proposed he give before the United Nations General Assembly. “The animosities, the festering fears of the Cold War so cloud our minds and our actions that we no longer see reality save through the distorting mirrors of malevolent ill-will.” She paraphrased W. H. Auden, “We must love each other or/ We must die.” Kennedy, who had promised to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship,” was sympathetic to Jackson’s appeal. But he saw no way to go before the U.N., or, more to the point, before the country’s many cold warriors, and quote Auden about the choice between love and death. Perhaps he might eventually “find another forum,” he told Jackson, “in which to present your thoughts, which are important.”

NUCLEAR WAR
was Kennedy’s “greatest nightmare,” Walt W. Rostow, his head of the State Department’s Policy Planning Council, said. In March 1960, Kennedy had privately written Eisenhower, “I have been greatly disturbed by the possibility that our current nuclear test ban negotiations might be jeopardized by the approach of a presidential election.” He had assured Ike that he would support and sustain any agreement he might reach, and said that he hoped his pledge would “help you to proceed—unhindered by thoughts of the coming election—with your efforts to bring about agreement on this vital matter, and thus bring us one step closer to world peace.”

Once in office, Kennedy made clear to his subordinates that he was eager to sign a test ban treaty. He saw it as “in the overall interest of the national security of the United States to make a renewed and vigorous attempt to negotiate a test ban agreement.” But the Soviets, whose nuclear inferiority to the United States made them reluctant to conclude a treaty, showed little inclination in talks at Geneva to sustain a current informal ban on testing. The Soviet “stand at Geneva,“ Kennedy told British prime minister Harold Macmillan in April, “raises the question of whether to break off the talks and under what conditions. There is a great deal of pressure here to renew tests,” Kennedy added. Deputy Defense Secretary Roswell Gilpatric remembers that “every approach toward arms control” agitated opposition among some in the White House, the State Department, and especially the military. “They felt this was as much of a foe or a threat as the Soviet Union or Red China. They had just a built-in, negative . . . knee-jerk reaction to anything like this.” If it became necessary for the United States to resume testing, JFK told West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer, it must be clear to the world that this was done “only in the light of our national responsibility.”