Kennedy: The Classic Biography (86 page)

We cannot do much about most of the emotional and political criticism, which focuses on personalities and clichés. Nor can we discharge every appointee that comes under attack, withdraw our legislative program, relax our enforcement of the law or join the Republican Party….

Nevertheless it is both possible and desirable for each member of the Cabinet… to take certain steps designed to show both business in particular and the public in general that this administration is not engaged in an unfair, unreasonable harassment of American businessmen.

The steps suggested, which were then listed in a memorandum sent to each Cabinet member, included informal luncheons and dinners with the business clientele of each department, formal business advisory groups (such as the Defense Industry Advisory Council), more speeches to business organizations, temporary avoidance of controversial remarks not cleared at the White House (such as Hodges’ speeches on business ethics and an Archibald Cox speech on wage-price machinery), better liaison with the business press, and a reasonable, nonhostile attitude on the part of those employees engaged in law enforcement. Top aides were dispatched to all meetings of the Business Council, and other business organizations similarly received high-level speakers from the administration, all stressing the need for cooperation—as they had in fact since 1961.

Also planned were a series of off-the-record seminars in cities throughout the country, bringing together leading administration spokesmen and leading businessmen to exchange views and increase understanding. The first of these was a success in Denver. But the political campaign and the Cuban missile crisis postponed a followthrough, and by the start of 1963, with the market climbing, the economy expanding and a tax cut in the offing, much of the meanness in business attitudes had ebbed.

When smaller and more selective price increases were initiated by the Wheeling Steel Company in April of 1963, on the anniversary of the previous fight—a date the President doubted was coincidental—there was a brief revival of tension. New memoranda were prepared in the White House on the industry’s economic position. New secret meetings were suggested by self-appointed intermediaries. New calls were placed to other companies by administration officials. And new crisis meetings were held in the Cabinet Room. The President, reported in the press only as watching the situation “with great interest,” made a point of postponing by one day his departure for an Easter vacation while the steel companies waited and watched.

But unlike the previous year, no affront to his office and no abuse of his good faith were involved, and the President confined himself, after a long and heated debate within the administration, to releasing a low-key statement which strongly opposed a general across-the-board price increase of the kind attempted the previous year but recognized that

selective price adjustments, up or down, as prompted by changes in supply and demand, as opposed to across-the-board increases, are not incompatible with a framework of general stability and steel price stability and are characteristic of any healthy economy.
⁵

But both the reasonableness and the warning reflected in this statement helped U.S. Steel and Bethlehem announce smaller and more selective increases, and Wheeling and all other producers adjusted back to their level, resulting in an average increase of little more than 1 percent. Only a third of all steel products were involved, and selected price reductions several months earlier largely offset the over-all effect. Actions on both sides, in short, prevented another massive confrontation, and both reflected and continued the improvement in government-business relations which had taken place during the previous twelve months.

This whole “take a businessman to lunch” campaign, stressed particularly in the last six months of 1962, appears in retrospect an unusual effort to woo a single segment of the electorate, but it was comprised largely of better communication, not substantive concessions, and in a sense it only matched the attention already received by other segments of the electorate from a Democratic administration. Nor was it a hypocritical act to beguile business. For the major burden of this effort, as always, rested with the President, and he neither started nor stopped it in the summer and fall of 1962 when the hostility was at its peak. Both for political and economic reasons, he had preferred from the start of his administration to neutralize the hostility of those business executives he could not win over, rather than merely denounce them as other Democrats had done.

Over and over since his inauguration he had sounded the theme of harmony and cooperation: “Far from being natural enemies, government and business are necessary allies.”

In addition to addressing the major business organizations and holding a special press conference with business writers, the President was effective in meetings, luncheons and receptions at the White House with smaller groups of business leaders, showing a genuine interest in their problems and giving them a better grasp of his. A public exchange of letters with banker David Rockefeller on balance of payments problems and his December, 1962, address to the Economic Club on his new tax and budget program were also well regarded in the business community. But in all these appeals and appearances the President was explaining rather than altering his policies.

Particularly in the summer of 1962, many of his efforts were poorly received. He did not refrain, at a peacemaking White House Economic Conference in May, from chastising American bankers who had endangered our gold supply by telling their European counterparts that Kennedy’s deficits were sure to bring inflation. Some businessmen thought the repeated mention of profits in his Chamber of Commerce address (some twenty times in a five-page speech) was designed to make them look greedy. Still others resented his Yale Commencement address labeling as myths most of their cherished concepts. His request that the administration-business dialogue move on “to a…difficult…confrontation with reality” fell largely on deaf ears in the business community. General Eisenhower, among others, said that the President was saying, “Business, get friendly—or else!” Nothing could have been further from the truth.

But it was true that John Kennedy, merely to placate unreasoning opponents, had no intention of displacing their favorite targets in the administration with business appointees lacking breadth (unlike McNamara, McCone, McCloy, Hodges, Day, Dillon and other businessmen whom he appointed and admired), or relaxing his enforcement of the antitrust laws (most indictments, he pointed out, stem from complaints by other businessmen), or preventing all further budget deficits (which would have weakened the economy and depressed the stock market). Above all, he intended to find out whether it was possible to pursue a rational national economic policy in the public interest instead of one based on the myths and pressures of private interests—business, labor or otherwise.

A British cartoon at the height of the business-administration clash showed one irate American executive saying to another: “This guy Kennedy thinks he is running the country!” That caption was correct. He did—and he was.

1
Presumably a Biblical reference to Samson never used by the President, possibly suspecting that some opponent would note that Samson used “the jawbone of an ass.”

2
To a stockholder urging the corporation not to give any grants to Harvard University, “where they study deficit spending,” Martin said, “I agree with you…. I don’t think we could get any Harvard men anyway—they’re all in the government.”

3
To whom they contributed twenty-five times as much money in the 1960 campaign as they gave to John Kennedy.

4
Coincidentally, he had also invoked his Taft-Hartley injunction powers against the West Coast maritime unions on the very day of his attack on Big Steel, and in time several other unions, as mentioned earlier, felt both his pressure and his wrath on their wage or job demands.

5
suggested, to the President’s amusement, that the statement, with its strong arguments against an increase followed by the above, was based on a line from Don
Juan:

“A
little still she strove, and much repented,

And whispering ‘I will ne’er consent’—consented.”

CHAPTER XVIII
THE FIGHT FOR EQUAL RIGHTS

I
N 1953
John Kennedy was mildly and quietly in favor of civil rights legislation as a political necessity consistent with his moral instincts.

In 1963 he was deeply and fervently committed to the cause of human rights as a moral necessity inconsistent with his political instincts.

Of all the national ills which he finally brought to the attention of the nation—not merely that of one branch of ggovernment or one wing of his party, but that of the entire nation—none had been more studiously avoided in the past than the evils of racial discrimination. Of all the efforts he made as President none was more important or more bitterly resisted than his effort not only to make such discrimination illegal but to make his white countrymen understand that it was wrong. He was revered in many Negro homes and reviled in many white Southern homes as the first President, in the words of Richard Rovere, “with the conviction that no form of segregation or discrimination is morally defensible or socially tolerable.”

In 1963 the Negro revolution in America rose more rapidly than ever before. John Kennedy did not start that revolution and nothing he could have done could have stopped it. But in 1963 he befriended and articulated its high aspirations, and helped guide its torrential currents. He was not forced into this position by circumstances beyond his control, as many have written. On the contrary, the sympathy he displayed, the appointees he assembled, the courage he demonstrated in placing himself at the head of that revolution, all encouraged a climate for reform and a reason for hope within the Southern Negro leadership. Their new efforts and pressures would probably not have been risked had there been a different attitude in the White House and in the Department of Justice.

Contrary to some reports, Kennedy was not converted to this cause by the eloquence of some persuasive preacher or motivated by his own membership in a minority group. John Kennedy’s convictions on equal rights—like his convictions on nearly all other subjects—were reached gradually, logically and coolly, ultimately involving a dedication of the heart even stronger than that of the mind. As a Senator he simply did not give much thought to this subject. He had no background of association or activity in race relations. He was against discrimination as he was against colonialism or loyalty oaths—it was an academic judgment rather than a deep-rooted personal compulsion. He voted for every civil rights bill coming before him as Congressman and Senator more as a matter of course than of deep concern. Although he joined in sponsoring several such measures, he regarded the school desegregation question as “a judicial problem, not a legislative one…and for the courts to interpret as they see fit.” His statement of support for Eisenhower’s intervention with troops in the Little Rock schools in 1957 was more impassive than impassioned. Even in addressing Negro audiences he was more likely to talk about the general problems of education, unemployment and slum housing than to focus directly on the race issue.

He was angered in one conference committee when a Southern Senator made a slurring reference in the presence of Negro Congressman Dawson, but he found the approach of many single-minded civil rights advocates uncomfortable and unreasonable also. As the first member of either house of Congress from any New England state to appoint a Negro to his staff (Mrs. Virginia Battle, a secretary in his Boston office)—as a leading speaker for the United Negro College Fund—as an advocate of curbs on filibusters—he was not being hypocritical, but neither was he being nonpolitical.

In fact, when he talked privately about Negroes at all in those days, it was usually about winning Negro votes. He talked privately that way about every group—Poles, farmers, Jews, veterans, the aged, suburbanites or any other. To him Negroes were no different from anyone else. He did not treat them differently, look at them differently or speak of them differently. They were not set aside as a Special Problem or singled out as a special group—he simply sought their votes along with those of everyone else.

Politics, in fact, helped to deepen his concern. He was a good politician—and in the 1960 convention and election Negroes more than most groups were his political friends and their enemies were often his enemies. As he became a national figure, his compassion for the problems of his “constituents” took in a far larger proportion of Negroes than it had in Massachusetts. Harris Wofford, who had previously worked for the Civil Rights Commission, supplied him with some statistics for the campaign which shocked and offended him. He used them in his opening debate with Nixon (just as, nearly three years later, he would use them in his February, 1963, Civil Rights Message and in his June, 1963, address to the nation):

The Negro baby born in America today, regardless of the section of the nation in which he is born, has about one-half as much chance of completing high school as a white baby born in the same place on the same day, one-third as much chance of completing college, one-third as much chance of becoming a professional man, twice as much chance of becoming unemployed, about one-seventh as much chance of earning $10,000 a year, a life expectancy which is seven years shorter, and the prospects of earning only half as much.