A Thousand Days Read online

  He made his share of mistakes. There was an excessive New Frontier faith in activism, a conviction that if there was a problem, there must be a solution, and let’s do it now. But he never lost the capacity to learn from his mistakes. Each year he became a better president.

  Most important was the impact Kennedy had on a new generation of Americans. His irreverence toward conventional ideas and institutions provoked a discharge of critical energy throughout American society. At Kennedy’s behest, bright, idealistic and capable young men and women, asking not what their country could do for them but what they could for their country, entered politics and public service. JFK liked to quote John Buchan: “Politics is still the greatest and the most honorable adventure.” He offered young people the faith that individuals can make a difference to history. The Kennedy generation brought new ideas, hopes, vision, generosity and vitality to the national life.

  John Fitzgerald Kennedy in his thousand days gave the country back to its own best self. And he taught the world that the process of rediscovering America was not over.

  ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER, JR.

  Foreword

  THIS WORK IS NOT a comprehensive history of the Kennedy Presidency. It is a personal memoir by one who served in the White House during the Kennedy years.

  A personal memoir, at best, can offer only a partial view. The Presidency is such a complex institution that only the President himself can fully know his problems and his purposes. John Fitzgerald Kennedy had intended to write the history of his own administration. No one else will ever be able to achieve the central, the presidential, perspective on these years. Even the public official closest to Kennedy, then the Attorney General of the United States, looking at the White House Papers after his brother’s, death, was astonished at the variety of presidential issues he had not known about before.

  A presidential associate, moreover, inevitably tends to overrate the significance of the things he does know about. Grace Tully, who was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s personal secretary, acutely observed of the books written by the men around F.D.R., “None of them could know that for each minute they spent with the President he spent a hundred minutes by himself and a thousand more with scores of other people—to reject, improvise, weigh and match this against that until a decision was reached.”* This book, for example, deals largely with foreign affairs and only occasionally records President Kennedy’s intense feeling about his own country and his deep desire to improve the quality of life and, opportunity in the United States. This was an animating purpose of his Presidency, but, as one only irregularly involved in these matters, I have less to say about them. Similarly others will have to describe in greater detail President Kennedy’s relations with Congress and with party politics.

  The presidential perspective on this administration is now tragically and irretrievably lost. But sometime in the future an historian, today perhaps a very young man, will read the volumes of reminiscence and analysis, immerse himself in the flood of papers in the Kennedy Library and attempt by the imaginative thrust of his craft to recover that perspective. He will not attain it; but he will do the best he can on the basis of the evidence and his own insight to reproduce the form and color and motion of the years as they unrolled before the occupant of the Oval Room. I hope that this and similar books published in the time between may advance his task.

  A number of my colleagues in the Kennedy administration helped check and supplement my own recollections as I worked on this book, and I am deeply grateful for their assistance. But the reconstruction of past events is exceedingly difficult, if not impossible; and, when I have been confronted by diverging judgments and memories, I have had no choice but to consider the evidence as best I could and draw conclusions on my own responsibility. Therefore I am, as author, totally and exclusively accountable for the shape that incidents and people assume in this narrative. I do wish, however, to express special thanks to Nancy Riley Newhouse for valuable assistance on research and to Gretchen Stewart for devoted and unstinting help in every aspect of this undertaking.

  This work is based on papers as well as on interviews and recollections. Every statement, I believe, has its warrant; but in order to protect confidential communications it has seemed better not to give a systematic indication of sources at this time. A fully footnoted manuscript will be deposited under seal in the Kennedy Library along with my own White House papers. After an appropriate interval these will be open to scholars.

  Many of the quotations come from a journal I kept through these years. At the start of his administration President Kennedy said that he did not want his staff recording the daily discussions of the White House. Remarks tossed off gaily or irritably in conversation, he knew, looked very different in print. He mentioned Henry Morgenthau’s solemn chronicling in his diaries of Franklin Roosevelt’s jocosities during the gold-buying episode of 1933; and he wished no restraint on his own freedom of expression. Accordingly my White House notes for the first weeks were fragmentary. Then after the Bay of Pigs he said, “I hope you kept a full account of that.” I said that I had understood he did not want us to keep full accounts of anything. He said, “No, go ahead. You can be damn sure that the CIA has its record and the Joint Chiefs theirs. We’d better make sure we have a record over here. So you go ahead.” I did.

  None of this, I fear, can come close to recapturing the exceptional qualities of John F. Kennedy as a man and as a President. But I hope it will suggest something of the way in which he quickened the heart and mind of the nation, inspired the young, met great crises, led our society to new possibilities of justice and our world to new possibilities of peace and left behind so glowing and imperishable a memory.

  ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER, JR.

  Washington, D. C.

  February 4, 1965

  Prologue: January 1961

  IT ALL BEGAN in the cold.

  It had been cold all week in Washington. Then early Thursday afternoon the snow came. The winds blew in icy, stinging gusts and whipped the snow down the frigid streets. Washingtonians do not know how to drive in the snow: they slide and skid and spin their wheels and panic. By six o’clock traffic had stopped all over town. People abandoned their cars in snowdrifts and marched grimly into the gale, heads down, newspapers wrapped around necks and stuffed under coats. And still the snow fell and the winds blew.

  At eight o’clock the young President-elect and his wife went to the Inaugural Concert at Constitution Hall. An hour later they left at the intermission to go on to the Inaugural Gala at the Armory. The limousine made its careful way through the blinding snow down the Mall. Bonfires had been lit along the path in a vain effort to keep the avenue clear. Great floodlights around the Washington Monument glittered through the white storm. It was a scene of eerie beauty. As stranded motorists cheered the presidential car, the President-elect told his friend William Walton, “Turn on the lights so they can see Jackie.” With the light on inside the car, he settled back to read Jefferson’s First Inaugural, which had been printed in the concert program. When he finished, he shook his head and said wryly, “Better than mine.’’

  By midnight the city was choked with snow. Workmen labored to clear Pennsylvania Avenue for next day’s parade. Soldiers used flame throwers to melt the frozen drifts around the inaugural stand in the Capitol Plaza. At quarter to four in the morning, the President-elect returned to his house in Georgetown from a supper given him downtown by his father after the Gala. His wife, recuperating from the birth of their second child, had gone home hours earlier; but he found her awake, too excited to sleep, and they talked for a moment about the day that had passed and the day yet to come.

  Toward dawn the snow began to stop. It covered houses and clung to trees and filled the windswept streets: the white city faintly shimmered in the pale sunrise. The President-elect arose at eight, read over the text of his inaugural address, pencil in hand, and then left to attend mass at a neighboring church. The crowd began to gather in the Capitol Plaza long
before noon. At eleven the President-elect and his wife drank coffee with the retiring President and Vice-President and their wives in the Red Room of the White House. They talked formally and inconsequentially. In morning coats and top hats they entered limousines to drive along the snowy streets to the Capitol. The wife of the retiring President said, “Look at Ike in his top hat. He looks just like Paddy the Irishman.”

  The skies were now blue and cloudless, and the Plaza glistened in the sun, but the wind had not fallen and the temperature was barely twenty degrees above zero. The waiting crowd huddled and shivered. They enveloped themselves in sweaters and mufflers, blankets and sleeping bags. They stamped their feet to keep out the chill. They watched restlessly as the dignitaries slowly took their places on the platform. When the Vice President-elect entered, a man in a ten-gallon hat shouted, “All the way with L.B.J.”; the Vice President-elect acknowledged the shout with a slight inclination of his head. Noon passed, and the crowd shuffled with impatience when the ceremony failed to begin. The President-elect, starting to come from the Capitol onto the platform, was instructed to wait. Then, at twenty minutes after twelve, he appeared, and the spectators warmed themselves with applause.

  Now they listened with stoicism as the Cardinal boomed out an interminable invocation. They looked with envy as blue smoke thinly curled up from a short circuit in the electric wires underneath the lectern: where there was fire, there must be heat. The Chief of the Secret Service watched the smoke with apprehension, fearful that the whole inaugural stand might go up in flames. Three times he started to give the order to clear the stand, and three times he paused; then the smoke stopped. The Chief mused that his Service would be in for a lively era protecting the athletic and fearless new President.*

  On the platform, the breath of the old poet congealed in the freezing air; and now, when he stepped forth to speak, the glare from the sun and snow blinded him. He read three lines from a manuscript:

  Summoning artists to participate

  In the august occasions of the state

  Seems something artists ought to celebrate.

  Then he stopped and said, “I’m not having a good light here at all. I can’t see in this light.” The Vice President-elect held out his hat to shield the old man’s eyes; Robert Frost still could not see, could not conclude the poem:

  It makes the prophet in us all presage

  The glory of a next Augustan age

  Of a power leading from its strength and pride,

  Of young ambition eager to be tried,

  Firm in our free beliefs without dismay,

  In any game the nations want to play.

  A golden age of poetry and power

  Of which this noonday’s the beginning hour.

  Instead he said, “This was to have been a preface to a poem which I do not have to read,” and from memory he recited “The Gift Outright”—“The land was ours before we were the land’s”—changing the last line:

  Such as we were we gave ourselves outright

  (The deed of gift was many deeds of war)

  To the land vaguely realizing westward,

  But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,

  Such as she was, such as she will become.

  At nine minutes before one the Chief Justice came forward toadminister the oath. The President-elect, without hat or coat, the old Douay Bible of the Fitzgerald family open before him, gave his responses in firm tones. At last he began his inaugural address, his voice ringing out in the frosty air. “Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage.” And so he continued, striking notes of strength, conciliation and hope. “Let us begin anew,” he said, “—remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof. Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.” The prospect would not be easy. “All this will not be finished in the first hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first thousand days, nor in the life of this Administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.” The burden of the “long twilight struggle” lay on this people and this generation. “And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.”* (That morning, reading over his text, he had scratched out “will” and replaced it by “can.”) He concluded: “My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.”

  The applause was strong and sustained. The President left the platform. His young wife joined him in the Capitol, whispered, “Oh, Jack, what a day,” and softly touched his face. Then the inaugural parade marched through the freezing afternoon, and the thirty-fifth Presidentiad, as Walt Whitman would say, began.

  I

  The Road to the Nomination

  THE ELECTION OF Dwight D. Eisenhower to the Presidency in 1952 had signaled a change in the prevailing weather of American politics—a return, in effect, to Republican ‘normalcy’ after twenty years of Democratic activism. Yet, in losing the 1952 campaign, Adlai Stevenson had left an indelible imprint on the American mind. By giving the tradition of progressive idealism brilliant and exciting expression, he renewed, even in defeat, the vitality of American liberalism. “A whole new generation,” said Edward M. Kennedy in later years, “was drawn to take an interest in public affairs when he came on the scene. They were led by him, taught by him and inspired by him.”

  By 1956 that new generation of Democrats was preparing to claim national recognition. John Fitzgerald Kennedy had been one of its first members to enter politics. Elected to the House of Representatives from Massachusetts after the war in 1946 and then to the Senate in 1952, he was now a contender for the second place on the national ticket. The vice-presidential contest at the Democratic convention that year brought him for the first tine toward the center of the national consciousness—a brief fifty-four months before he took the presidential oath in Washington.

  1. CHICAGO: 1956

  Kennedy’s father, Joseph P. Kennedy, was dubious about his son and the Vice-Presidency. He feared that the Democrats would lose in 1956 and a Catholic running mate would be blamed for the defeat. But the young administrative assistant whom Kennedy had taken on in 1953 at the suggestion of Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois, Theodore C. Sorensen of Nebraska, was all for going ahead. Without finally committing himself, Kennedy decided to let Sorensen test the wind. Through the spring of 1956 Sorensen talked to political leaders, wrote a persuasive memorandum designed to prove from the distribution of the Catholic vote that a Catholic would strengthen the ticket and worked unceasingly to line up support.

  In the course of his missionary endeavors Sorensen got in touch with me. I had served on Stevenson’s campaign staff in 1952 and, if he were renominated, would presumably do so again. Moreover, I had come to the view that, of the various vice-presidential possibilities, Kennedy would help Stevenson most. I also felt that putting a Catholic on the lower half of the ticket would be the most expeditious way to attenuate the taboo against a Catholic President which had too long disgraced American politics. Accordingly I had told Kennedy in the spring that I wanted to assist in any way I could consistent with my role in the Stevenson campaign. Sorensen came to our place at Wellfleet on Cape Cod early in July to discuss tactics at the convention.

  Kennedy already had friends at the Stevenson headquarters in Chicago, notably two Stevenson law partners, William McCormack Blair, Jr., and Newton Minow. But he had opposition within the party, especially from professional Catholic politicians and from the older generation of party leaders. The soft-spoken and sagacious James Finnegan, Stevenson’s campaign manager, was convinced that Kennedy would antagonize voters in anti-Catholic areas, as in the rural counties of Finnegan’s own state of Pennsylvania. Jim Farley told Stevenson, “A
merica is not ready for a Catholic.” And the older party leaders disliked the idea of Kennedy not only because of his religion but because of his youth and independence. Truman dismissed the thought out of hand. Rayburn said to Stevenson, “Well, if we have to have a Catholic, I hope we don’t have to take that little —— Kennedy. How about John McCormack?” (Rayburn later changed his mind about Kennedy.) Stevenson was troubled by the reaction of experienced pros like Truman, Farley and Finnegan. On the other hand, he wanted to give the new political generation prominence, and he considered Kennedy its most attractive spokesman. As the Democrats began to assemble in Chicago for the convention, he therefore decided to ask Kennedy to put his name in nomination.

  The Stevenson staff had taken on itself to write drafts of all the nominating and seconding speeches in order to make sure that the proper points would be made. Kennedy characteristically rejected his draft, and he and Ted Sorensen set to work to produce a new one. I conducted these negotiations, and it was then that I first saw the Kennedy-Sorensen team in operation. There was no question which was the dominant partner, but there was no question either that in Sorensen Kennedy had found a remarkably intelligent, sensitive and faithful associate. Eventually the two labored together nearly till dawn on the speech.

  Kennedy nominated Stevenson the next evening, and Stevenson won on the first ballot. Afterward Stevenson met with Rayburn, Lyndon Johnson, Paul Butler, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Governor Ribicoff of Connecticut and Governor Battle of Virginia to discuss the Vice-Presidency. Wilson Wyatt and Thomas K. Finletter had already proposed to Stevenson that the nomination be thrown open to the convention. A free choice, they argued, would provide an effective contrast to the ‘dictated’ renomination of Richard M. Nixon by the Republicans. Moreover, it would obviously liberate Stevenson from the embarrassment of having to pick one of the hopefuls and thereby disappoint the others.