America's Greatest 20th Century Presidents (24 page)

After the debate, Kennedy spent the remaining month of the campaign patching together a viable Election Day coalition.  African-Americans were an important piece of the Democratic coalition, but Kennedy's past hesitance on civil rights issues put that voting bloc\in jeopardy.  He decided to risk losing Southern white segregationists, and opted to come out more loudly in support of civil rights.  This eventually won him the endorsement of Martin Luther King Jr. 

By November, the gap between the two candidates was paper thin.  Kennedy remained strong among “white ethnics,” labor and African-Americans, while Nixon appealed to rural Protestants, the West Coast, and parts of the South.  On Election Day, the popular vote was as close as polls suggested: Kennedy won by a hair, with 49.7% to Nixon's 49.5%.  The Electoral College vote, however, was a different story, with Kennedy winning with 303 votes to Nixon's 219. The vote was so close that many still accuse Kennedy and his surrogates of fixing the election, with charges of fraud clouding matters in Texas and Illinois. Nixon would later be praised for refusing to contest the election, but in the following decades it was made clear how much his surrogates had tried to overturn the election.

Regardless, Kennedy had just become the youngest man ever elected President, and the first Roman Catholic.  He was sworn in as the 35
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President of the United States on January 20, 1961.  In his inaugural address, he famously asked Americans to “ask not what your country can do for you, but ask what you can do for your country.” 

The Kennedy family’s dream of a President Kennedy had finally come true.

Chapter 4: Presidency, 1960-1963

In many ways, John F. Kennedy and his young family were the perfect embodiment of the ‘60s. The decade began with a sense of idealism, personified by the attractive Kennedy, his beautiful and fashionable wife Jackie, and his young children. Months into his presidency, Kennedy exhorted the country to reach for the stars, calling upon the nation to send a man to the Moon and back by the end of the decade. In 1961, Kennedy made it seem like anything was possible, and Americans were eager to believe him. The Kennedy years were fondly and famously labeled “Camelot,” by Jackie herself, suggesting an almost mythical quality about the young President and his family.

Cuba and the Bay of Pigs

Within just a month of becoming President, the issue of communist Cuba became central to the Kennedy Presidency.  On February 3
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, 1961, President Kennedy called for a plan to support Cuban refugees in the U.S.  A month later, Kennedy created the Peace Corps, a program that trained young American volunteers to help with economic and community development in poor countries.  Both programs were integral pieces of the Cold War: each was an attempt to align disadvantaged groups abroad with the United State and the West, against the Soviet Union and its Communist satellites.

Cuba and the Cold War boiled over in April, when the Kennedy Administration moved beyond soft measures to direct action.  From April 17-20, 1,400 CIA-trained Cuban exiles landed on the beaches of Western Cuba in an attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro.  This plan, which Kennedy called the “Bay of Pigs,” had been originally drafted by the Eisenhower Administration.  The exiles landed in Cuba and were expected to be greeted by anti-Castro forces within the country.  After this, the US was to provide air reinforcement to the rebels, and the Castro regime would slowly be overthrown. 

By April 19
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, however, it became increasingly clear to Kennedy that the invasion would not work.  The exiles were not, as expected, greeted by anti-Castro forces.  Instead, the Cuban government captured or killed all of the invaders.  No U.S. air reinforcement was ever provided, flummoxing both the exiles and American military commanders. The Bay of Pigs had been an unmitigated disaster. 

On April 21
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, in a White House press conference, President Kennedy accepted full responsibility for the failure, which had irreparably damaged Cuban-American relations.  From then on, Fidel Castro remained wary of a U.S. invasion, which would have serious implications when the USSR began planning to move missiles into Cuba, precipitating another crisis a year and a half later.  Between April and the following year, the U.S. and Cuba negotiated the release of the imprisoned exiles, who were finally released in December of 1962, in exchange for $55.5 million dollars worth of food and medicine.

Just months into his Presidency, Kennedy was severely embarrassed.  Hailed as a foreign policy expert with heroic military experience during the campaign, Kennedy's ability to conduct American foreign policy was now firmly in question, and it was eagerly put to the test by the Soviet Prime Minister, Nikita Kruschev. When the two leaders negotiated in June 1961 at Vienna, Kennedy later told his brother Robert that it was "like dealing with Dad. All give and no take."

Khruschev and Kennedy meet at Vienna

The Space Race Begins

In 1957, at a time when people were concerned about communism and nuclear war, many Americans were dismayed by news that the Soviet Union was successfully launching satellites into orbit. Among these concerned Americans was President Eisenhower, whose space program was clearly lagging a few years behind the Soviets’ space program. In 1957, the Soviets successfully launched Laika the dog into orbit, while NASA just seemed to be dogging it. Americans who could view Soviet rockets in the sky were justifiably worried that Soviet satellites in orbit could soon be spying on them, or, even worse, dropping nuclear bombs on them.  

April 1961 was certainly a bad month for President Kennedy's Cold War bona fides.  Even before the Bay of Pigs, America’s Cold War prospects seemed even bleaker when the Soviet Union launched Yuri Gagarin into space, making him the first human to travel outside of earth.  It was an enormous scientific and technologic feat, and it showcased the industriousness of the USSR. The Cold War was not merely a contest over economic and military power; it was also a battle for prestige.  On this final point, the Soviet Union's entry into space gave it an enormous lead.

In response, President Kennedy spoke to a joint session of Congress in May, in which he proposed one-upping the Soviets by not only sending a man to space, but by sending a man to the moon.  On May 25, 1961, President Kennedy asked the nation to “commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” While Kennedy is still hailed today for his push to land a man on the moon within a decade, Eisenhower’s administration had already been designing plans for the Apollo space program by 1960, a year before Gagarin orbited the Earth and two years before John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth. 

President Kennedy's commitment to space initiatives prior to Yuri Gagarin's mission was mixed, however.  As a Senator, he had opposed the Eisenhower Administration's research funding to space exploration.  As President, he changed his position in response to the Soviet Union's advances.

Though Kennedy was not alive to witness the U.S. achieve this mission, his efforts laid the groundwork for Apollo 11's July 20
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, 1969, landing on the moon. 

Vietnam

At the end of Kennedy's first year in office, the U.S. sent its first direct military support to South Vietnam, with two Army Helicopters arriving to the country on December 11
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, 1961.  This move was part of a long-standing commitment, begun by the Eisenhower Administration, to prevent the spread of communism into Southeast Asia. Furthermore, South Vietnam was one of the Southeast Asian countries that the United States vowed to help defend during negotiations over the armistice that ended the Korean War.  Kennedy was initially reluctant to devote a full-scale military presence to the country, but his position was continually evolving throughout his Presidency.

Kennedy also felt that the South Vietnamese themselves did not want an American presence in their country.  By 1963, this was increasingly apparent to the president, but, on the other hand, he felt the Southeast Asian territory was critical to preventing the spread of communism.  This concept was fueled largely by the “Domino Theory” that had dominated Cold War foreign policy thinking.  Kennedy also worried that giving up on Vietnam would further weaken his foreign policy credentials and chances at reelection in 1964.

Throughout 1962 and 1963, Kennedy's primary interest in Vietnam was to better understand how much the South Vietnamese wanted or did not want an American presence. He sent numerous ambassadors, among them his former opponent Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., to the country to investigate.  Kennedy, however, was frustrated when multiple investigations returned widely different accounts.  The issue remained unresolved until Kennedy's death in November of 1963, at which point President Johnson took over the policy and dramatically increased the American military presence.

Cuban Missile Crisis

The issue of communist Cuba came to a head in a big way in October of 1962.  With the help of spy planes, U.S. intelligence discovered the Soviets were building nuclear missile sites in Cuba.  Kennedy officially learned of this on October 16
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. 

It went without saying that nuclear missile sites located just miles off the coast of the American mainland posed a grave threat to the country, especially because missiles launched from Cuba would reach their targets in mere minutes. That would throw off important military balances in nuclear arms and locations that had previously (and subsequently) ensured the Cold War stayed cold. Almost all senior American political figures agreed that the sites were offensive and needed to be removed, but how?  Members of the U.S. Air Force wanted to take out the sites with bombing missions and launch a full-scale invasion of Cuba, but Kennedy, however, was afraid that such an action could ignite a full-scale escalation leading to nuclear war.

Instead, President Kennedy thought a naval blockade of all Soviet ships to be the better option. On October 22, 1962, Kennedy addressed the nation to inform them of the crisis. He told Americans that the “purpose of these bases can be none other than to provide a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere.” Speaking of the threat to the nuclear weapon balance maintained in previous years, Kennedy stated, “For many years, both the Soviet Union and the United States, recognizing this fact, have deployed strategic nuclear weapons with great care, never upsetting the precarious status quo which insured that these weapons would not be used in the absence of some vital challenge.” Thus, Kennedy announced a blockade, warning, “To halt this offensive buildup a strict quarantine on all offensive military equipment under shipment to Cuba is being initiated. All ships of any kind bound for Cuba from whatever nation or port will, if found to contain cargoes of offensive weapons, be turned back.”  

Beginning on October 24
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, the US began inspecting all Soviet ships traveling in the Caribbean.  Any ships carrying missile parts would not be allowed to enter Cuba.  Additionally, President Kennedy demanded that the Soviets remove all nuclear missile sites from Cuba. In response, Soviet premier Khruschev called the blockade "an act of aggression propelling humankind into the abyss of a world nuclear-missile war".