An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (97 page)

During the summer and fall, Kennedy crisscrossed the country in support of a Democratic Congress. He said that the nation’s well-being—its future prosperity and social advance—depended on electing more House and Senate Democrats who would vote for his programs. Since 1938, the Congress had been more or less deadlocked in its consideration of new progressive measures. He described himself as fighting the same battles Wilson, FDR, and Truman had faced “to provide progress for our people.” “I believe we should have the opportunity and not have the kind of balance in the Congress which will mean two . . . more years of inertia and inaction. That’s why this is an important election. Five, ten seats one way or the other can vitally affect the balance of power in the Congress and vitally affect our future. . . . So this is not an off-year, it is an important year.” Kennedy catalogued his legislative victories and defeats, pointing out, “We have won fights by 3 or 4 votes in the House of Representatives, and we have lost fights by 3 or 4 votes.” Ignoring the opposition to his proposals of conservative southern Democrats, he blamed Republicans for his problems: 75 percent of them had voted against his higher education bill; 84 percent of Republican senators had opposed extended unemployment benefits; 81 percent and 95 percent of House Republicans had voted against his area redevelopment and public housing bills, respectively; and 80 percent of House Republicans had resisted increasing the minimum wage to $1.25. “On a bill to provide medical care for our older citizens . . . seven-eighths of the Republican Members of the Senate voted ‘no,’ just as their fathers before them had voted 90 percent against the social security [bill] in the 1930’s.” As he came closer to the election, Kennedy acknowledged that conservative Democrats were also a problem. If liberal Democrats failed to vote, he told an audience in Pittsburgh on October 12, every proposal that we bring before the Eighty-eighth Congress in January 1963, “will be in the control of a dominant Republican-Conservative Democratic coalition that will defeat progress on every single one of these measures.”

Despite not risking his presidential standing by investing excessively in any single congressional race, Kennedy’s general endorsement of Democrats sympathetic to his legislative agenda tested his personal influence. He approached the campaign confident that his presidential performance had given him a stronger hold on the electorate than he had had in 1960. He understood that, whatever the appeal of his message, the public liked him. His good looks, intelligence, wit, and charm, which were so regularly and exuberantly on display at press conferences, now drew large audiences to hear him on the campaign trail. Some inside the administration could see Kennedy’s obvious imperfections—the insatiable sexual appetite contradicting the picture of the ideal family man married to a perfect wife; the manipulation of image to hide missteps; the fierce competitiveness to win, which made him and Bobby all too willing to exploit friends; and the private physical suffering, which occasionally made him glum and cranky. Yet no one could doubt that Kennedy’s two years in the White House had created an imperishable view of him as a significant American president worthy of the office.

Still, the reality was that Kennedy had no real hope of breaking the congressional deadlock. Though preelection polls showed 56 percent of voters favoring Democrats over Republicans, a significant part of this support was for southern members of the party, who were unsympathetic to progressive measures. So, despite a satisfying gain of four Democratic seats in the Senate and the loss of only four seats in the House, which made this, except for FDR’s, the best midterm showing for any incumbent president in the twentieth century, Kennedy acknowledged that “we’ll probably be in a position somewhat comparable to what we were in for the last two years.” If they could maintain the unity of congressional Democrats and win some support from moderate Republicans, he foresaw legislative gains. But he believed it more likely that they would struggle, as they had during his first two years, with narrow margins of victory and defeat. He was gratified that brother Ted had won his Senate race in Massachusetts, which he had helped, or at least hoped would help, by appointing Cleveland mayor Anthony Celebrezze as HEW secretary, a choice that appealed to Italian American voters in Massachusetts. But beyond Ted’s victory, Kennedy saw little to cheer about.

There was other bad news. Despite a 12-point jump in his approval rating to 74 percent and what was being hailed as “your excellent showing in congressional races and your net pick-up in the Senate,” urban areas in “pivotal industrial states” had, according to Lou Harris, shown some “big Democratic slippage over 1960” among Catholic and Jewish voters. To some extent, Kennedy’s abnormally high Catholic vote in 1960 made a decline among this bloc predictable. More troubling was the fact that Irish Catholics were becoming more conservative, or Republican, in their voting, while Polish and Italian Catholics, unhappy with recent Democratic failures to provide greater economic benefits, were simply voting in smaller numbers for the party. Moreover, Kennedy’s perceived sympathy for disadvantaged blacks, who were in growing competition with big-city ethnics for jobs and housing, antagonized blue-collar Catholics. In reaction to civil rights pressures, the traditional Democratic South was becoming more Republican.

DESPITE THE TRENDS,
and possibly because of them, Kennedy could not ignore black claims on equal treatment under the law; African American voters remained the Democratic party’s most reliable supporters. For both political and moral reasons, then, on November 20, Kennedy finally announced his decision to sign an Executive Order integrating federally supported public housing.

While he waited for any backlash that might accompany his signing of the Executive Order, Kennedy worried about increasing negative revelations about his personal life and how they might jeopardize his presidency. He remained confident that the mainstream press would not publicize his womanizing. But when rumors of a Marilyn Monroe-JFK affair began appearing in gossip columns, Kennedy made a concerted effort to squelch them. He asked former journalist and inspector general of the Peace Corps William Haddad to “see the editors. Tell them you are speaking for me and that it’s just not true,” Kennedy said. Haddad later told Richard Reeves, “He lied to me. He used my credibility with people I knew.” Haddad obviously came to believe the many stories circulated about JFK and Marilyn. Almost as much ink has been spilled over their alleged relationship and one between Bobby and Marilyn as over the Cuban missile crisis. Peter Lawford, the actor and Kennedy brother-in-law, dismissed these speculations as “garbage.” But numerous phone calls listed in White House logs from Monroe to Kennedy suggest something more than a casual acquaintance. Whatever the truth, Kennedy obviously understood that no good could come to his presidency from gossip about an affair with someone as famously promiscuous and troubled as Monroe.

Kennedy’s worries about his public image extended to medical matters. Because he believed that revelations about his health problems were more likely (and more likely to be damaging) than about his sexual escapades, he became more cautious about publicizing his interactions with his many physicians. According to George Burkley, Kennedy was so concerned about not giving the impression that he was “physically impaired . . . and required the constant supervision of a physician” that he shunned having “a medical man in near proximity to him at all times.”

Kennedy especially felt compelled to quell private concerns about the injections Travell and Jacobson were giving him. Hans Kraus told him in December 1962 “that if I ever heard he took another shot, I’d make sure it was known. No President with his finger on the red button has any business taking stuff like that.” In addition, Kraus told Evelyn Lincoln “that if Dr. Travell was going to continue making suggestions and innuendos concerning the President’s health he was going to get out of the picture. He said it had to be ‘Yes’ or ‘No’—that he was not interested in half way tactics.” Eugene Cohen also warned Kennedy that Travell was a “potential threat to your well-being.” Kennedy agreed to take control of his back treatments away from Travell and turn it entirely over to Burkley and Kraus. To ensure against alienating Travell, however, and risking leaks from her to the press about his condition, Kennedy kept her on as White House physician and continued to identify her as the principal doctor in charge of his health care. In fact, however, beginning in June 1963, she could not order medical services at Walter Reed Army Medical Center for anyone at the White House without Burkley’s approval.

Nevertheless, though Jacobson and Travell played diminished roles in Kennedy’s treatment, neither of them was without some continuing part in his care. Through much of 1962, Jacobson made occasional professional visits to the White House. It is well known that in June Bobby instructed an FBI laboratory to analyze the substance Jacobson was injecting into his brother’s back. Bobby was concerned that the president might become addicted to the amphetamines Jacobson was using. Inconclusive lab tests, however, allowed Jacobson to continue treating Kennedy through at least the fall of 1962.

Similarly, for all the limitations Burkley, Cohen, and Kraus imposed on Travell, she remained more than a presence at the White House, though in a diminished capacity, something she complained about to Jackie. Her records indicate that she kept close track of the president’s condition and use of medicines and may have had an ongoing part in medicating him. But according to Dr. James M. Young, a thirty-three-year-old marine captain who became Burkley’s principal assistant in June 1963, Travell was without a say in managing Kennedy’s health care during the five months after he came to the White House; she was never at twice-a-month medical evaluation meetings Young attended with Kennedy. But Young acknowledged that her records suggest that she may have had a behind-the-scenes role.

Young’s meetings with Kennedy convinced him that the president was in “robust health having no difficulty with his chronic back problems. He was well-controlled on his other medications—even so much as to say finitely controlled,” Young remembered. This is difficult to square with Travell’s records, which describe substantial ongoing problems. Was Kennedy setting Young up for a part in the 1964 campaign, when he might want a medical authority to testify to his physical capacity to remain as president? Kennedy’s attentiveness to managing his image as someone in excellent health makes such a manipulation plausible.

KENNEDY KNEW
that shielding himself from bad publicity to maintain his personal public standing would not give his administration the sort of momentum he hoped to bring to a reelection campaign. The perception of a vigorous president was important, but it was no substitute for a healthy economy and a record of social advancements.

“The Congress looks more powerful sitting here than it did when I was there in the Congress,” Kennedy told some journalists in December 1962. If a president puts forward a significant program, he told them, it will affect powerful interests and produce a fight in which “the President is never wholly successful.” With this understanding, he had to decide whether to focus exclusively on the tax cut or to supplement it with renewed requests for education and health insurance reforms and an Urban Affairs Department. Walter Heller also asked him to consider proposing new laws affecting farm programs, immigration, presidential campaign finance, the Taft-Hartley Labor Act, and consumer protections.

Economic advance had to come first. As Phil Graham told him, “The economic conditions of the Western World are not good. And a sudden shock could lead to a very serious panic. . . . The greatest force the Communists ever had working for them—greater even than the Red Army—was the terrible depression of the 1930’s. The military power of Communism is blocked today. We must not allow them to advance by reason of the chaos and despair of a major depression.”

Whether Graham, who would take his life in the coming year, accurately reflected the state of western economies or his own despair, Kennedy felt he could not ignore the warning. Any sign of a recession or economic slowdown evoked memories for millions of Americans of 1930s breadlines. In the closing weeks of 1962, Kennedy made boosting the economy his highest priority. More than ever, he believed that long-term growth required a tax cut and tax reforms. In December 1962, Kennedy took up the cause of tax reform in another public address, which he compared with his appearance before the Houston Protestant ministers’ conference during the presidential campaign: He saw a national commitment to a tax cut that increased federal deficits as comparable to convincing voters that a Catholic could be a good president.

In an attempt to exploit Cold War fears, Kennedy described the country’s national security as directly bound up with its economic performance. Addressing familiar concerns that tax cuts would lead to larger deficits and runaway inflation, Kennedy said, “The lesson of the last decade is that budget deficits are not caused by wild-eyed spenders but by slow economic growth and periodic recessions. . . . In short, it is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut rates now.” He said that “the hope of all free nations” was riding on the tax cut; America’s safety and that of the free world depended on the United States’ continuing capacity to outproduce the Soviet Union.

Nevertheless, a request to Congress for these measures in January 1963 seemed certain to arouse renewed skepticism and opposition. Wilbur Mills in the House and Albert Gore in the Senate, key Democratic figures in the looming battle over the tax legislation, remained unsympathetic to prompt action. Mills saw no need for a tax bill as long as the economy was not in a recession or slowing down and substantial federal budget deficits continued to threaten confidence in the “fiscal responsibility of the government.” He was willing to support changes in individual and corporate tax rates as a way to promote long-term economic expansion but not before January 1964 and not unless reductions in nondefense spending matched tax cuts. Gore warned the president that “a reduction in revenue will set off a howling campaign for reduction in expenditures and your administration will be put in an economic straight jacket. The ax would most likely fall heaviest on foreign aid and on programs that may be needed to stimulate the economy, such as public works.” Gore also feared that tax reform would favor the rich and shortchange the poor. “People with large incomes would have their take-home pay (income after taxes) increased 50%, 100% and, in some instances even 200%, while the average tax payer would have an increase of less than 10%, most of them only 3% to 5%. This simply cannot be justified—socially, economically or politically. And I hold these sentiments passionately! This is something that no Republican administration has dared do; it is something you must not do.”