A Thousand Days Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Foreword to the 2002 Edition

  Foreword

  Prologue: January 1961

  The Road to the Nomination

  Triumph in Los Angeles

  Campaign for the Presidency

  Kennedy on the Eve

  Gathering of the Forces

  Prelude to the New Frontier

  Latin American Journey

  The Alliance for Progress

  The Hour of Euphoria

  The Bay of Pigs

  Ordeal by Fire

  New Departures

  Legacy in Southeast Asia

  Encounter in Europe

  Trial in Berlin

  The Reconstruction of Diplomacy

  Peril in the Skies

  No Truce to Terror

  New Directions in the Third World

  Tangle in Southeast Asia

  Africa: The New Adventure

  The World of Diversity

  The Country Moving Again

  The National Agenda

  In the White House

  Down Pennsylvania Avenue

  The Bully Pulpit

  The Politics of Modernity

  Battle for the Hemisphere

  Again Cuba

  The Great Turning

  The Not So Grand Design

  Two Europes: De Gaulle and Kennedy

  The Pursuit of Peace

  The Travail of Equal Rights

  The Negro Revolution

  Autumn 1963

  Index

  About the Author

  Footnotes

  First Mariner Books edition 2002

  Copyright © 1965, 2002 by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

  Copyright © renewed 1993 by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 0-618-21927-7

  eISBN 978-0-547-52450-4

  v3.0414

  In memory of

  John Fitzgerald Kennedy

  If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially.

  —HEMINGWAY

  Foreword to the 2002 Edition

  THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN in the grim months after John F. Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963. A Thousand Days has the advantages and disadvantages of a book composed so soon after the fact Immediacy gives it vividness. It also gives a kind of knowledge denied those who were not around when history happened. As Alexis de Tocqueville once observed, participants understand better than posterity “the movements of opinion, the popular inclinations of their times, the vibrations of which they can still sense in their minds and hearts.” Posterity of course has its compensating advantages—a cooler perspective, knowledge of consequences, access to declassified documents and private papers, the diverse illuminations of hindsight. Also, as Mr. Dooley pointed out, “Ye are not subjict to interruptions be people who were there.”

  History is a permanent debate—“an argument without end,” as Pieter Geyl, the eminent Dutch historian, put it. Historians, like everyone else, are prisoners of their own experience. Their priorities are shaped by the pressures of their time. Each new generation of historians has its distinctive preoccupations in the present, and, consequently, its distinctive demands on the past. The result is chronic fluctuation in historical verdicts. Reputations rise and fall like stocks on Wall Street, determined by the supply and demand equations of a later age. The reputation of American presidents is particularly dependent on the climate in which historians hand down their judgments.

  In the conservative 1950s, I published The Crisis of the Old Order, the first volume of The Age of Roosevelt. The bitter politics of the 1930s had not yet abated, and many Americans still loathed “that man in the White House.” Conscious of the continuing hatred, I noted in the foreword that this was, I supposed, “a bad time” to be writing about FDR. “The reputation of a commanding figure is often at its lowest in the period ten to twenty years after his death. We are always in a zone of imperfect visibility so far as the history just over our shoulder is concerned. It is as if we wrote in the hollow of the historical wave; not until we reach the crest of the next one can we look back and estimate properly what went on before.” Today, of course, recollected in tranquility, FDR is routinely rated, by conservatives as well as by liberals, as one of the three greatest American presidents.

  Some years after the publication of A Thousand Days in November 1965, President Kennedy was in the hollow of the historical wave. His reputation was further buffeted by external events. The Vietnam War persuaded some scholars that U.S. foreign policy was inherently imperialistic. Watergate disillusioned them about presidential power. Kennedy revisionism gathered force. Critics dismissed him as charming but superficial, a triumph of style over substance, concerned with image rather than achievement, a man who talked big but accomplished little. In the darker version, Kennedy became an incorrigible philanderer, a reckless risk-taker in both private and public life, a bellicose fellow who ordered the assassination of foreign leaders, almost provoked a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, plunged the nation into the Vietnam morass and, between needless international crises, turned the White House into a virtual bordello.

  When American Heritage magazine asked scholars in 1988 to name the single most overrated figure in American history, JFK received more votes than anyone else. One historian summed up the revisionist case: “His public relations approach to the presidency was an almost total disaster for the nation. . . . The revelations of his private life have added more tarnish to the once golden image.”

  Revisionism, it should be said, did not affect popular admiration of Kennedy. Ordinary Americans remembered a strong and stirring president who saved the peace in the most dangerous moment of the Cold War, assumed leadership in the struggle for racial justice, initiated the exploration of space, laid the foundation for federal aid to the arts and humanities, tapped the republic’s latent idealism and infused a generation with a passion for public service. They cherished the idea of Camelot and its brief shining hours.

  And recent years have seen a perceptible recovery of Kennedy’s reputation among scholars. This is partly due to the passage of time; we are now on the crest of the next wave. And it is especially due to the documentation of Kennedy’s leadership in the Cuban missile crisis in The Kennedy Tapes (1997), edited by Ernest May and Philip Zelikow. Their three-volume set, The Presidential Recordings: John F. Kennedy, The Great Crises (2001), further enhances Kennedy’s standing as a calm, thoughtful, resolute and, above all, substantive president.

  He glittered when he lived, and the whole world grieved when he was killed. Grief nourishes myth. The slain hero, robbed of fulfillment by tragic fate, is the stuff of legend. Myth breeds countermyth. With the perspective of forty years we can perhaps disentangle myth and reality.

  Let us first dispose of Camelot. JFK had gone to Choate and Harvard with Alan Jay Lerner. He liked Lerner, and he liked the songs Lerner wrote with Frederick Loewe for the popular 1960 musical. But during his lifetime no one spoke of Kennedy’s Washington as Camelot. Had anyone done so, no one would have been more derisive than J
FK. Nor did those of us around him see ourselves for a moment as knights of the Round Table. You will note the absence of Arthurian allusions in the text that follows.

  Camelot was Jacqueline Kennedy’s grieving thought to the journalist Theodore H. White a week after her husband was killed. She thereby launched a myth that time turned into a cliché. Later she told John Kenneth Galbraith that she feared she had overdone Camelot. For that matter, King Arthur’s Camelot was hardly noted for marital constancy and concluded in betrayal and death.

  Then a word about the 1960 election. A recurrent myth is that the Kennedys stole the election in Illinois and that Richard Nixon’s finest hour was his patriotic refusal to upset the nation by contesting the result. In fact, Illinois was not crucial to Kennedy’s victory. Had he lost Illinois, Kennedy still would have won the electoral college—and the presidency—by 270 to 246. And if Mayor Richard Daley’s men stole votes in Cook County, Republicans stole votes downstate. The state electoral board, 4 to 1 Republican, voted unanimously to certify the Kennedy electors.

  An associated myth is that Joseph P. Kennedy made a deal in the winter of 1959–60 with a Chicago gangster named Sam Giancana to use trade unions under mob control to turn out the Chicago vote for his son. In fact, the only big union under mob influence was the Teamsters Union—and the Teamsters, led by Robert Kennedy’s enemy Jimmy Hoffa, were for Nixon.

  Giancana was known to the Kennedy family but hardly in a way that would have made him an ally. Robert Kennedy, as counsel to the Senate Rackets Committee in 1958, succinctly described Giancana as “chief gunman for the group that succeeded the Capone mob.” Called before the Rackets Committee, Giancana declined to answer questions on the grounds that his answers might tend to incriminate him—and giggled as he declined. Robert Kennedy said bitingly, “I thought only little girls giggled, Mr. Giancana.” In his book The Enemy Within, published in February 1960, Robert Kennedy portrayed Giancana in the most contemptuous terms. The idea is preposterous that a shrewd and experienced man like Joe Kennedy would make a deal with Sam Giancana and would regard the gangster and not Dick Daley as the key to Chicago politics.

  Fifteen months after Giancana giggled before the Rackets Committee, the Central Intelligence Agency in its wisdom signed him up in a plot to murder Fidel Castro. The Mafia had flourished in Havana under the indulgent Batista dictatorship, but Castro, after he came to power in 1959, closed the casinos and whorehouses and drove the mobsters from Cuba. This gave the Mafiosi, as the CIA saw it, both the motives and the contacts to do the dirty deed without implicating the United States government.

  It was the Eisenhower administration that made the decision to bring in the mob, not, as the myth goes, the Kennedy administration. In September 1960, months before Kennedy became president, the CIA recruited Giancana. In October the CIA installed him in a Miami hotel. My guess is that the CIA was doing all this on its own, confident that it knew the requirements of national security better than transient elected officials and invoking the excuse of “plausible deniability” to justify the concealment of their plans from higher authority. No one has discovered that Eisenhower—or Kennedy after him—authorized the assassination projects.

  There is more to the Giancana story. In the course of the 1960 campaign, Frank Sinatra, a pal of Giancana’s, introduced John Kennedy to an attractive young woman named Judith Campbell. Though her later claims were contradictory and her story escalated with every telling, it seems that their affair extended into his presidency. She also had an affair with Giancana. How much did she tell Giancana about Kennedy? Did the Mafia have blackmail power over the president?

  If they did, they neglected to use it. Giancana was a major target in the war against organized crime waged by Robert Kennedy’s Department of Justice. Had Giancana ever had anything on the president, he would certainly have exploited it to save his hide when the feds were hot on his trail. Instead, his future was round-the-clock FBI surveillance, federal indictments and a year in prison.

  A question remains about John Kennedy and women. His sexual waywardness does not constitute JFK’s finest hour. But exaggeration is possible. Some think today that there was an unending procession of bimbos through Kennedy’s White House and that the Washington press corps knew about it but covered up for him because newspapermen liked him and because, under the civilized rules of the day, a politician’s private life was considered his own business.

  Vague rumors about JFK and women did waft about Washington from time to time, but, as one who worked in the White House, I never saw anything untoward. Kennedy was a hardworking president, concentrating intently on the matters at hand. At no point in my experience did any preoccupation with women interfere with his conduct of the public business (apart from Caroline crawling under the presidential desk).

  Lest this ignorance be attributed to the invincible innocence of a professor, let me call another witness, that hard-bitten reporter Ben Bradlee, then head of the Newsweek bureau in Washington, later the brilliant editor of the Washington Post. Bradlee was not only at the center of Washington newsgathering; he was also Kennedy’s closest friend in the press. “It is now accepted history,” Bradlee wrote in his 1995 memoir, A Good Life, “that Kennedy jumped casually from bed to bed with a wide variety of women. It was not accepted history then . . . [I was] unaware of this proclivity during his lifetime.”

  Who can really know about anyone else’s sex life? Unless one of the partners talks, or compromising letters turn up, or a third person is in the bedroom (an unlikely circumstance), no one can be certain what may have gone on between consenting adults. All this does not prevent sensation-mongers writing with awesome certitude about the sex lives of famous people.

  Nor can outsiders pronounce on the inwardness of a marriage. My impression, shared by others from the Kennedy White House, is that JFK, for all his adventures, always regarded Jacqueline with genuine affection and pride. Their marriage never seemed more solid than in the later months of 1963.

  One sometimes hears the argument that recklessness in private life leads to recklessness in public life. But history shows no connection between private morals and public behavior. Martin Luther King, Jr., for example, had wayward sexual habits but was all the same a tremendous moral force for his people and for his nation. On the other hand, Pol Pot of Cambodia was apparently devoutly religious and a faithful family man. All he did was to murder hundreds of thousands of his countrymen. The adultery test has limitations as a predictor of official conduct.

  In Kennedy’s case, the argument that private recklessness leads to public recklessness is invoked to explain the Bay of Pigs and the CIA assassination plots against Castro. But these were initiatives of the Eisenhower administration, and no one has accused Ike of a reckless private life, at least since the Second World War.

  In feet, Kennedy was a cautious president, notable for his capacity to refuse escalation. When the Bay of Pigs invasion appeared to be failing, though under pressure from the military and the CIA to send in American forces, Kennedy declined to do so—as he later declined escalation in the Berlin crisis of 1961 and the missile crisis of 1962.

  The missile crisis was not only the most dangerous moment in the Cold War. It was the most dangerous moment in all human history. Never before in the annals of life on this planet have two contending powers possessed between them the technical capacity to blow up the world. The tapes of the debate within the American government—not available when I wrote A Thousand Days, their existence not even suspected—show Kennedy’s cool determination to expel the missiles without going to war.

  We know now that the Soviet forces in Cuba had tactical missiles equipped with nuclear warheads and the authority to use them in case of an American attack. Had Kennedy yielded to the pressure applied by the Joint Chiefs of Staff for an invasion, the result would probably have been nuclear war. Fortunately, after the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy had little regard for the JCS and their recommendations. Instead he steadily pursued—and successfully achie
ved—a diplomatic solution. “It quickly became clear,” Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs, “he understood better than Eisenhower that an improvement in relations was the only rational course.”

  Then came Vietnam. Though Kennedy increased the number of American military advisers attached to the South Vietnamese army, he rejected every proposal to send in American combat units. “The last thing he wanted,” said General Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, “was to put in ground forces.” Both Robert McNamara, his secretary of defense, and McGeorge Bundy, his national security adviser, said later that in their judgment Kennedy would never have Americanized the war—though they advised President Johnson to do exactly that and he, with deep misgivings, followed that advice, thinking that that was what Kennedy would have done.

  Kennedy believed that in the end American influence in the world depended less on American arms than on American ideals. Undertakings like the Peace Corps and the Alliance for Progress were closest to his heart. And he believed too that Americans must live up to their own ideals. He regretted that he had to spend so much time on foreign policy; “each day,” he said, “was a new crisis.” He looked forward to a second term in which he could concentrate on domestic problems, especially in combating poverty, enlarging economic opportunity and promoting racial justice. Actually Kennedy in his thousand days compiled a pretty good record in domestic policy, as Professor Irving Bernstein showed in his book Promises Kept: John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier (1991).

  Kennedy came slowly to appreciate the intensity of black America’s demand for full citizenship, and by 1963 he made himself, at distinct political cost, the leader of the movement for new civil rights legislation. “We are confronted,” he said, “primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the Scriptures and as clear as the American Constitution.”