Kennedy: The Classic Biography (61 page)

I do not believe it is possible to “overexpose” a President like Kennedy. Nevertheless he could not, with any effectiveness, go on the air to denounce Big Steel, or announce a Cuban quarantine, or deliver some momentous message, every month of the year. Selectivity was the key—selecting the right time and the right issues. As a commander saves his biggest guns for the biggest battles, so Kennedy limited his direct national appeals to situations of sufficient importance to demand it and sufficiently fluid to be helped by it. “I made a speech,” he reminded a press conference pressing him for a “fireside chat” on the Birmingham race conflict, “the night of [the] Mississippi [crisis] at Oxford, to the citizens of Mississippi and others, that did not seem to do much good. But this doesn’t mean we should not keep on trying…. If I thought it would [be helpful], I would give one.”

At a time when the international scene and the narrow Congressional margins required all the national unity possible, John Kennedy saw no sense in dividing the country, or alienating the Congress, or squandering his limited political capital, or feeding the fires of extremism, or wearing out his welcome and credibility, by making major appeals for public support on too many hopeless or meaningless causes. “I will,” he said early in his term, “at such time as I think it most useful and most effective…use the moral authority or position of influence of the Presidency…. [But] I want to make sure that whatever I do or say does have some beneficial effect.”

The most frequent complaint concerned Kennedy’s refusal to employ more “fireside chats” on behalf of legislation.
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He employed them where he thought they would help vital measures, such as the Test Ban Treaty, tax cut and civil rights bill and in his constant televised plugs for foreign aid, and he was also willing to fight for his program in press conference statements and speeches around the country. But he had to consider the legislative and political consequences of opening a “cold war” with a Congress that was in fact passing, even though it was very slowly passing, most of the important Kennedy items and that was nominally a Democratic Congress. If the public response, in the form of letters to the Congress, turned out to be light—as it usually is—he would have laid his full prestige on the line for little gain and possibly a loss.

The fact is that a large proportion of the public will not listen to a Presidential speech on legislation. Many of those who do listen will resent being deprived of their regular TV entertainment. Very few of the rest feel sufficiently affected to write their Congressmen, and very few Congressmen feel sufficiently flexible to change their votes on the basis of such letters. Most members of Kennedy’s bipartisan opposition in Congress were either irrevocably committed by the time a speech was in order or permitted by their seniority and safe districts to disregard both the President and any petitions he might stir up. No speech could have sprung the Department of Urban Affairs free from the House Rules Committee, for example. No speech could have obtained passage of an education bill which lacked a hundred or more votes, or made the Senate Finance Committee move faster, or forced Louisiana’s Otto Passman to like foreign aid.

Whether on TV or the public platform, John Kennedy’s major speeches were an important tool of his Presidency. He often used them to define administration decisions in specific terms and to convey those decisions throughout the government as well as the rest of the world. We had more experts from whom to seek ideas, facts and first drafts than we had in pre-Presidential years. Next-to-final drafts were usually submitted to the agencies concerned for their views, and this process was so slow on foreign policy speeches that McGeorge Bundy would gather all concerned around a table in his office to go over the draft in one sitting. We also had more pressures for completing authorized texts well ahead of time for advance distribution and foreign-language translation.

But in other respects the texts of most major speeches, messages and other documents, including many of his letters to Khrushchev, were still produced basically in accordance with the rules described in
Chapter II
. The basic pattern of our collaboration remained the same. Major speeches and other policy statements reflected decisions taken in meetings in which I participated, enabling me to spell out the reasons and sometimes the very words he had used in those meetings. Groups of advisers could suggest outlines and alterations, and they could review drafts, but group authorship could not produce the continuity and precision of style he desired, or the unity of thought and argument he needed. “The big difference,” he said to me one day, “is all the different audiences that hear every word. In the Senate and campaign we didn’t have to worry so much about how Khrushchev and Adenauer and Nehru and Dirksen would react.”

He took pains to have a hand in every major Presidential paper—not only speeches but letters, messages and proclamations—and he still chose his words and their arrangement with great care. His Inaugural, State of the Union, American University, United Nations, Berlin, Irish Parliament and other addresses, including those televised from the White House on Cuba and civil rights, earned him the title of one of the most articulate and eloquent Presidents since Lincoln.

Eloquence depends not only on the words but on the man, the subject and the situation. Kennedy was still no orator. Others could be more forceful in voice, gestures, emphases and pauses. But as Lord Rosebery said of the impassioned oratory of Pitt, it was “the character which breathes through the sentences” that was impressive. Kennedy’s character could be felt in every word, and the dramatics his style may have lacked were supplied by the subject and situation.

While we were more acutely aware of weighing each word in a speech, we still joked over what he insisted was my outrage at his changes and my determination to find some future use for every paragraph he cut. Some texts, such as the speech on peace at American University, represented primarily Presidential initiative with very little departmental contribution. Some, on necessary topics of little interest to him, such as reclamation, were basically unchanged from the products he received from collaboration between the departments and my office. And some, as in the past, were virtually ignored when he rose to speak. He became, however, so skillful at moving back and forth between his text and his interpolations that the press, unable to follow him on their copies, often assumed that an entire speech was extemporaneous when it was not.

On speeches televised from the White House he stayed close to his carefully cleared texts. On political stump speeches, particularly outdoors, he often ignored them. One near mishap occurred during his noted outdoor speech before the West Berlin City Hall, which had all the air of a political rally. Departing from his text, fired by the enthusiasm of his audience, he delivered an inspiring series of challenges to all naive advocates of the Communist system, each one closing with the words: “Let them come to Berlin!” He included in this series: “And there are some who say in Europe and elsewhere we can work with the Communists. Let them come to Berlin!” Inasmuch as he had said only two weeks earlier at American University that we should try to find ways of working with the Communists, and inasmuch as he was looking forward to nuclear test-ban negotiations the following month in Moscow, this ad lib caused some consternation. Between City Hall and the Free University of Berlin it was discussed, and at the university he inserted this passage of Kennedy interpreting Kennedy:

As I said this morning, I am not impressed by the opportunities open to popular fronts throughout the world. I do not believe any democrat can successfully ride that tiger. But I do believe in the necessity of the great powers working together to preserve the human race.

POLITICS

His unwillingess to make still more public TV appeals for legislation was hardly a matter of “hoarding” his personal and political popularity, as often charged. “No President in the past eighty years incurred greater political regional liabilities,” as the
Saturday Review
observed, and only Roosevelt in the past eighty years was the subject of so much hostile comment in parts of the business community. He was a President willing, if necessary, to risk defeat for his principles, but he preferred preserving both his principles and his power to effect them.

Consequently politics was an ever-present influence in the Kennedy White House, not as the sole subject of many meetings in his office, but as a criterion for trips, visitors, appointees and speeches, as an unspoken force counterbalancing the unrealistic, checking the unreasonable, occasionally deterring the desirable and always testing the acceptable. It was automatically assumed by the staff that part of our role was to weigh the effect of every move and statement, large and small, on various voter groups, on Congress, on national unity and on the 1962 and 1964 elections. Kennedy retained in the White House his unusually acute political antennae, with which he sensed the public mood both quickly and accurately. He understood what moved people, what touched their hearts and what touched only their pocketbooks. He was good at distinguishing their momentary whims from their enduring convictions.

There was no single source of this sensitivity. He read every fiftieth letter of the thirty thousand coming weekly to the White House, as well as a statistical summary of the entire batch, but he knew that these were often as organized and unrepresentative as the pickets on Pennsylvania Avenue. (Pickets and their placards never interested him—although he made friends one stormy day by arranging for a group of youthful peace marchers to be served coffee.) “Mail, unfortunately,” he told a 1962 press conference, “is not true as an indicator of the feelings of the people…. I got last week 28 letters on Laos…[and] 440 letters on the cancellation of a tax exemption for a ‘mercy’ foundation.”

He also remained an avid consumer of public opinion polls. He did not commission any polls directly, as rumored, but Lou Harris and others reported findings of many polls taken for their political clients, and the published polls of Gallup and his colleagues were studied with care. Nevertheless the President remained a skeptic. He told Orville Freeman that a survey of farmers showing Kennedy’s job performance rating higher than his Secretary of Agriculture’s merely proved that the latter was doing a good job—but that the whole poll was dubious, since it also claimed that Bostonian Kennedy ranked higher than Kansan Eisenhower. He told a press conference that a Gallup Poll showing 72 percent against a tax cut which produced deeper debts might have had a different result had it asked opinions on a tax cut necessary to prevent a recession, unemployment and consequently greater debts. At the peak of the 1963 civil rights furor, he privately speculated to a visitor that his poll ratings could drop below 50 percent for the first time—and then was amused by the rash of rumors which promptly spread throughout Washington and even appeared in the press citing an about-to-be-published poll revealing such a slide. (The next Gallup Poll showed him still above 60 percent.)

He relied on more than mail, public petitions and polls. He talked with hundreds of people every week in the White House. He read newspapers and magazines from all over the country. He judged the reactions of his crowds when he traveled (although not necessarily their size, which was partisan and planned). He observed the pressures reflected in Congress and heard reports from his Cabinet on their trips. But somehow his political intuition was an amalgamation of all these that was greater than the sum of its parts.

His political instincts had always been good. As a young reporter in London after the war, he had sensed that Churchill and the Tories would lose the 1945 elections. His editors, noting that no senior correspondent agreed, severely took him to task. As a result, by election time he had gradually crawled off that limb to report a Churchill rally and certain victory. Churchill lost.

Since that day he had been engaged in his own campaigns and calling them correctly. John Kennedy liked politics. He liked talking about it, participating in it, speculating on it. He looked upon it as the noblest profession. He never tired of encouraging young men and women to enter politics and public service, and by his own example, I believe, he worked a profound change in this nation’s respect for that calling.

HIS CRITICS

The most oft reported charge made by President Kennedy’s liberal and intellectual critics was that he made no crusading commitments of the heart, that he neither possessed nor inspired any warmth. They wanted him to go in more for lost causes, bigger deficits, grand designs and “fireside chats.” They wanted him to pay more attention to Bowles and less to Acheson, to denounce the Republicans and do everything at once. They thought it proof of their complaints that his popularity exceeded Eisenhower’s.

At the sophisticated Georgetown cocktail parties, in the scholarly and leftist journals, in the political columns and in letters-to-the-editor, they imitated, with little consistency, each other’s charges: that Kennedy relied too much or not enough on his advisers, that he sent too much or too little to the Congress, that he engaged in too much “arm-twisting” or too little “leadership.” They resented his wealth, his “style,” his youth. Some liberals talked nostalgically about the good old days of Harry Truman, just as in Truman’s day they had yearned for Roosevelt. “Every generation,” said the President understandingly, “remembers its youth.”

At times he would muse aloud over the academic isolation of many of his intellectual critics and their previous record of misjudgments. Though they assumed to speak for the voters, most of them talked mostly to each other—in Washington, on a campus or on an editorial staff. Their criticisms, he noted, generally lacked accurate information or feasible alternatives. They would, he hoped, judge him on the basis of his entire term in office, not merely individual episodes. “It is,” he said, reflecting on his own candidacy as well as his critics, “much easier to make speeches than it is finally to make the judgment.” He also frequently quoted Melbourne, under fire from the historian Macaulay, saying he “would like to be as sure of anything as Macaulay seemed to be of everything.” Many of the noted analysts of public opinion and foreign policy, he commented, rarely left Washington. However, said Kennedy of his liberal critics in typical understatement, “I guess criticism is their special business.”