Kennedy: The Classic Biography

K E N N E D Y

TED SORENSEN

NEW YORK • LONDON • TORONTO • SYDNEY • NEW DELHI • AUCKLAND

For my father
C. A. SORENSEN (1890–1959)
who showed me the way

PREFACE TO THE 2009 EDITION

Despite some speculation that “the Kennedy legacy isn’t what it used to be,” my recent calendar reflects a warm and welcome resurgence of interest in President John F. Kennedy. There are more books, articles, documentaries, academic conferences, and speeches about President Kennedy all over the world than ever before, declaring his leadership and spirit relevant to both our current hopes and our new president. In addition, the gratifying response to my 2008 memoirs
Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History
—both in literary reviews and reader mail—has been extraordinary, showing interest among those too young to remember Kennedy and nostalgia among those who do. On college campuses, I find there’s a yearning and delight to learn that not long ago we had a president globally respected, who was true to his progressive ideals and dedicated not simply to party and self but to a better country and world, a champion of peace who never resorted to war.

As a candidate, Obama frequently invoked Kennedy’s name, speeches and goals, and he successfully utilized endorsements from JFK’s daughter Caroline and brother Edward.

Not long after JFK’s death, I predicted that his accomplishments would impress future generations only if intervening generations built on his foundation. Instead a series of failed and flawed presidencies made Kennedy’s stand out all the more: Lyndon Johnson, whose reversal of Kennedy’s policy
not
to send combat troop divisions into Vietnam required him to withdraw from the 1968 election; Richard Nixon, whose sponsorship of the multiple high crimes and misdemeanors collectively known as Watergate required him to resign his presidency soon after reelection; Gerald Ford, whose inability to match Kennedy’s stabilization of the economy caused him to serve less than one full term; Jimmy Carter, whose setbacks both at home and abroad limited him to one term; Ronald Reagan, whose stumble into the Iran-Contra scandals clouded his final term; George H.W. Bush, whose economic mismanagement limited him to one term; Bill Clinton, whose notoriety as the first elected president to be impeached by the House of Representatives tarnished a man of talent; and George W. Bush, whose incompetence and ideological rigidity led to needless wars and economic collapse, causing him to be ranked by historians below Buchanan, Harding, and Hoover.

Barack Obama paradoxically is much like John F. Kennedy:

Kennedy, like Obama, began testing the presidential waters while still a young Harvard graduate relatively new to Washington. Neither had executive experience but both had lived abroad, gaining perspective on America’s world role.

Kennedy, like Obama, was told that he was too young and should wait four or eight years by accepting second place.

Kennedy, like Obama, was told that his successful and soaring speeches were “just words, mere rhetoric.”

Candidate Kennedy, like candidate Obama, was a United States Senator in a country consistently looking to former governors, vice presidents, generals, and cabinet members for presidents.

Kennedy, like Obama, faced an apparently insuperable demographic obstacle to victory, in Kennedy’s case his religion. This 1965 book is a sad reminder of the unreasoning fears of a Catholic presidency in 1960. That fear largely disappeared, not merely because he won but because his service as president proved there was no basis for bigotry—and that helped pave the way for Obama forty-eight years later.

Kennedy, like Obama, was a leader who knew the meaning of loyalty, both upward and downward. JFK always defended his aides whenever we were attacked, and earned a devoted team loyalty, diminishing unauthorized leaks during his lifetime and the usual sniping in his team’s published recollections after his death.

Kennedy, like Obama, had a sense of history, helping him distinguish major from minor crises and useful allies from cheerleaders. He also appreciated world history, preserving Egyptian relics that would have been flooded by the Aswan Dam.

As president, Kennedy—like Obama in his first year—won international respect and domestic confidence, including the confidence of consumers and investors.

Kennedy, like Obama, believed in diplomacy and negotiations, even with adversaries, and entrusted our ambassadors with those negotiations.

Kennedy, like Obama, was a strong leader, leading by exhortation, example, extraordinary compassion, competence, and innovation, never by asserting extra-legal powers.

Kennedy, like Obama, was cautious in adopting ideological labels, but ultimately accepted “pragmatic liberal,” despite his party’s nervous avoidance of that last word.

Kennedy, with his ever-present gentle sense of civility and humor, disarmed his critics and defused the usual partisan bitterness. Fortunately, the memory of his successful leadership has survived thousands of false reports, which according to polls, failed to diminish his standing among most thoughtful American citizens and historians.

No one alive on that terrible day, November 22, 1963, can forget when he or she heard the awful news. There is still a sense of in-completion about Kennedy’s life and presidency, a sense of promise cut off.

Rereading the epilogue of this first book reminds me, as did writing the chapter on JFK’s death in
Counselor
, of all that our world lost with his murder.

None of the dozens of conspiracy theories about his assassination provided any solid evidence to change the sad conclusion that we simply do not know. Even sadder is the ability of America’s gun lobby, long after the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and MLK, to block any serious limitation on the flood of murder weapons freely sold in this country.

Some authors have speculated that Kennedy’s assassination was the work of powerful financial, military and intelligence community interests who feared that Kennedy might reverse not only racial discrimination but also anti-Communist belligerence. If history ever proves that horrific thesis correct, and those conspirators hoped by killing Kennedy to block the civil rights and peace movements in this country, one thing is clear—they failed. The United States is now trading and negotiating with Russia, under an African American president.

This is the first time that I have reread every page and word of this book since completing it in 1965. I am happy to say I find it’s “not bad”—which readers of my new book,
Counselor
, know is my highest form of praise. Today I would not change a word of this book, including its evaluations of JFK and his presidency. True,
Counselor
is better in sorting out his policy priorities with more perspective, contains more about Kennedy’s personal life and mine, more about the Cuban Missile Crisis, the presidential campaign and transition, and more about my strained relations with a few White House colleagues. However, I find no outright contradictions between the two books, almost no duplication and few if any words or claims that I would recant.

This book is more factual about Kennedy’s health than I remembered. Any subsequent critic who claimed “cover up” apparently failed to catch this book’s multiple hints about his medical problems. There’s also more here than in my new one about Kennedy’s role as a United States Senator, including his failure to vote on the Joe McCarthy censure, and his landmark speeches on Algeria and Indochina, warning America and the West against futile military involvement in Asian countries—applicable to Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan today—who are determined never to permit again the military and political domination they suffered under colonialism.

Appendix A of this book reminded me how much JFK as president accomplished in Congress, despite a Dixiecrat-Republican majority. He laid the groundwork for the first important break since Abraham Lincoln in the discrimination and segregation faced by our black citizens. He was the first to address the needs of the developmentally disabled (spurred by the efforts of his sister Eunice and the history of their sister Rosemary), the last national attention to this issue until the Republicans in 2008 nominated Sarah Palin of Alaska for vice president.

People forget how Kennedy’s innovative words and ways inspired many of the progressive movements stirring this country during these last forty-six years, including minority rights, gay rights, women’s rights (see the report of his commission on the status of women), the environmental movement, and consumers’ rights. If his insistence on wages keeping pace with productivity had been continued, then the widening gulf between the very rich and the very poor could have been prevented.

In foreign policy, because his early warning against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction was neglected, we now face the possibility of nuclear, biological, chemical, and other weapons falling into the hands of the dangerously irresponsible.

Under Kennedy, Congress authorized the Peace Corps, showing a very different face of America to the Third World; authorized America’s major leadership in space exploration, with a lunar landing that prevented a hostile military occupation of outer space; authorized the Alliance for Progress, building democratic political and economic institutions in Latin America; ratified the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the first serious step toward arms control in the nuclear age (no comparable second step has been taken); and gave at least grudging support to JFK’s position as the last president who believed in the United Nations (“our last best hope”).

On November 22, 2009, it will be forty-six years since the death of John F. Kennedy, who was then forty-six years old. In the epilogue of this book, I noted that he had accomplished more in forty-six years than most men can in eighty. I am now over eighty, proud of what I have been able to do in my life, including these last forty-six years during which my life has dramatically changed. My eyesight is limited, and until I reread this book I had forgotten that John F. Kennedy also required extra large type in his speech reading copies. I have difficulty reading even large type, but I continue to speak out in an effort to carry on the ideals that JFK launched during my eleven years with him, especially the ideals of a more peaceful world and a more just America.

Ted Sorensen
New York, NY
April 2009

CONTENTS

                      
PREFACE TO THE 2009 EDITION

                      
PROLOGUE

PART ONE.    The Emerging Kennedy