21. THE EARLY 1960s

KENNEDY AND THE COLD WAR

America knew that it was not a perfect country, but certainly understood what perfection should look and feel like, and indeed sought growth toward that ideal. The Cold War raging in the 1950s and early 1960s made this imperative.  To win the hearts of an emerging Third World, to keep the Third World nations of Asia, Africa and Latin America from falling under the Communist program emanating from the Russian Kremlin, America needed to present to the world as positive a face as possible in order to win these newly emerging nations over to the "Free World" community of nations led by America.

Coming into the 1960 presidential election, it looked fairly clear that Vice President Richard Nixon would receive the Republican nomination.  Only New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller seemed to be a possible challenger, except that he let it be known early on that he had no intentions of running for the position.  Thus Nixon was easily nominated as the Republican candidate at the Chicago Convention. America’s U.N. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., was selected to be Nixon’s vice-presidential running mate.

On the Democratic Party side, the situation was much more fluid.  Adlai Stevenson tried again for the nomination, but could not get much traction on this third attempt. Texas Senator Lyndon Johnson, the powerful Senate majority leader, sought the nomination, and brought solid-South or "Dixiecrat" support with him to the Los Angeles Convention.  But the front runner virtually from the start was the charismatic John F. Kennedy, Massachusetts senator and leading member of the rich and ambitious Kennedy clan, run by John’s father, Joseph Kennedy, Roosevelt’s one-time American ambassador to Great Britain (appointed by Roosevelt to get him out of the country and out of Roosevelt’s way!).  Helping advance John’s political career was his brother, Robert, who had been serving as legal counsel to a number of congressional committees, but who had also served as John’s campaign manager as far back as John’s initial run for the U.S. Senate in 1952. The brothers were close, and would remain close.

As it turned out, Johnson was unable to get any significant amount of support outside of the South, and Kennedy went on to gain the Democratic Party nomination. But Kennedy then asked Johnson to be his running mate – and Johnson accepted.  Kennedy needed the Southern vote to edge out Nixon, who had strong support across much of the rest of the country, except among a number of old guard urban bosses and state governors, who lined themselves and their political organizations behind Kennedy.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy was second of nine children born to the very prosperous and politically active Irish-Catholic family of the Kennedys of Boston. John’s grandfather on his mother’s side, "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, was a Democratic congressman and two-term mayor of Boston, and his grandfather on his father’s side, Patrick Joseph (PJ), was a businessman active in Massachusetts Democratic Party politics, a political opponent of John’s other grandfather! John’s father, Joseph, continued the family’s activity in Massachusetts Democratic Party politics, as well as make a huge fortune in the 1920s in stock market and real estate investments and in Hollywood movie production, surviving the stock market crash by getting out of his investments ahead of time, and then in the 1930s, with Prohibition ended, moving into the whiskey import business.  Joseph Kennedy was a major financial supporter of Franklin Roosevelt in his march to the White House in 1932, and Roosevelt rewarded this support in 1933 by appointing Joseph Kennedy as head of the new Security and Exchange Commission (SEC), assigned the task of cleaning up illegal stock market activity.  Two years later, Joseph would change jobs, heading up the Maritime Commission.  And three years after that, he would be appointed by Roosevelt as U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain.

Thus young John Kennedy would grow up in a world of privilege and power. But he worked hard to meet the family’s expectations of high performance in all walks of life. He was educated at a number of Catholic private schools before entering the prestigious but Protestant (largely Episcopalian) Choate boarding school for his high-school education.  Then like his father, John would attend and graduate from Harvard (1936-1940).  During this time, he traveled abroad extensively (not merely West Europe but also the Middle East and Soviet Russia) and developed a very strong interest in international affairs, writing a Harvard senior thesis critical of English diplomacy in its dealing with Hitler, which was published in 1940 as a best-seller, Why England Slept.

But, unknown to the public, John Kennedy suffered from a wide variety of deeply serious health problems, the most critical and lasting being constant back problems.  This would keep him from being accepted into the army’s Officer Candidate School in 1940.  But after some considerable exercising (and some inside help from his father) he was able to get into the U.S. Naval Reserve, soon an ensign and a member of the Office of Naval Intelligence staff in D.C., just shortly before the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in late 1941.

The next year he received extensive torpedo-boat training, becoming at the end of the year a trainer himself, before receiving in April (1943) the overseas assignment in the Pacific Solomon Islands of commanding a number of PT boats in active war service.  In August of that year his PT boat was rammed and sunk by a Japanese destroyer. But Kennedy and his surviving crew were able to swim (three miles) to shore, Kennedy bravely towing a badly wounded crew member – at the same time that his own back was badly injured. He returned to service in September, and helped rescue a number of marines stranded on a Japanese-controlled island.  But in November he was sent to the hospital to begin treatment for his back injury.

This was a very tough time for Kennedy, his older brother Joseph, Jr. being killed in Europe the following year, and he himself having to spend much of the rest of the war hospitalized for back treatment.  He was finally discharged from the Navy Reserve as a naval lieutenant (March 1945).  But he was able to carry himself admirably with a substantial number of military decorations.

Being a talented writer, he (with his father’s help) gained a position with the Hearst papers as a special correspondent, even getting to cover the famous Potsdam Conference in the summer of 1945.

But with his older brother’s death, Kennedy’s father had other plans for his second son, John.  The Kennedy family plans had originally been for Joe, Jr., to enter American politics, and reach even as high as the U.S. presidency itself.  Now the family turned to John to take up that responsibility.  John’s father was ready to invest considerable sums of money in support of John’s entry into national politics.

That opportunity came with the 1946 Congressional elections in which the incumbent Congressman stepped aside to become Boston mayor, allowing John to run for, and ultimately win (quite substantially), the election for the 11th Congressional District of Massachusetts.  Thus John Kennedy’s long march to the White House got underway.

As a freshman Congressman, he was appropriately supportive of the fellow Democrat U.S. President Truman, taking a special interest in the growing Cold War.

But even well before the beginning of his third term as Congressman, he began laying the groundwork for a senatorial run in 1952. In this he would be seeking to upset the incumbent "Boston Brahmin" (member of Boston’s long-standing ruling class) Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., whose political ancestry reached back even before the beginning of the 20th century (Lodge’s grandfather of the same name had become a U.S. senator back in 1893 and head of the Senate in the early 1920s). Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., had been a U.S. senator since 1937. It would be a tough race.

But Kennedy worked hard, and actually succeeded that November in defeating Lodge with a relatively high majority of the votes (the extensive Roman Catholic population of Massachusetts helping him considerably).

During his 1952 campaign, Kennedy met the sophisticated Jacqueline Bouvier, like himself a skilled journalist, and very good-looking in a Hollywood sort of way. She also was well-traveled abroad – as well as quite fluent in French (considered at the time to mark someone as a true aristocrat) and sophisticated in more a French than Middle-American manner.  They dated, and following his successful run for the U.S. Senate he proposed marriage.  She however did not give him an answer for some time – until she returned from her coverage of the coronation of the very young British Queen Elizabeth (June 1953).  They would be married that September at Saint Mary’s Church in Newport, Rhode Island, with Roman Catholic Cardinal Cushing presiding.  It was a major story, appearing on the society pages of America’s newspapers.

Unfortunately, tragedy that seemed to accompany Kennedy success hit the young family hard, Kennedy being forced to undergo (and nearly dying from) spinal surgery in late 1954, and Jacqueline suffering a miscarriage (1955) and a stillbirth (1956) before she was finally able to give birth to a healthy daughter, Caroline, in 1957.

Nonetheless, Kennedy was a rising star. And at the Democratic National Convention of 1956, after delivering an excellent nominating speech for presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson, he came in second in the vote for Stevenson’s vice-presidential running mate.  Even at that, Kennedy now had national political recognition, helping advance his career considerably.

This helped him gain a very easy re-election in 1958 to a second term as Senator. At this point he began to lay out a strategy for a run for the U.S. Presidency in 1960.

He was able to win some key Democratic Party primaries going into the national convention.  But it was still a time in which party bosses controlled most of the votes at the convention and Senator Lyndon Johnson was a well-known behind-the-scenes operator.  Going into the convention Kennedy had the largest number of first-round votes, but knew that if he did not get the nomination on that first round, Johnson would probably be able to swing the convention his way after that.  But as it turned out, Kennedy was able to gain the majority he needed to receive the party’s presidential nomination on that first ballot.  Then, to the surprise of many (and the irritation of his brother Bobby, John's campaign manager), Kennedy asked Johnson to become his running mate.  It would be a very close race against Republican Vice President Nixon and Kennedy would need the swing vote of the South where Johnson was from, and where Johnson commanded a lot of support.

The presidential campaign that year would be the first time that presidential debates would be presented via television, and it would work greatly to Kennedy’s benefit.  During the all-important first debate (of four), Nixon did not present himself visually in the cool format that Kennedy was able to project, and such imagery would become increasingly important in the way Americans would henceforth evaluate candidates.¹  The debate turned on Nixon’s citing his own eight years of executive experience as Vice President, plus the promise to continue down the same prosperous path that the country had experienced during the Eisenhower years.  Kennedy countered by pointing out that America had been allowed to fall behind the Soviet Russians in the vital technology race, and by promising that as President he would push hard to get America back into the lead in the space race.

As he campaigned, having his attractive wife Jacqueline often at his side during the campaign merely added all the more to the sense of sophistication that accompanied the Kennedy presence.

His Catholicism was of some concern to largely Protestant America.  But he was quick to point out that he was not campaigning on behalf of the Church, and that his Catholicism had not been an issue to anyone back when he served his country in the South Pacific!  Actually, Kennedy’s religious loyalties remained largely unknown to Americans (even while president).  He was indeed a loyal member of the Irish-Catholic world, although this seemed to be more a matter of social identity than any particular personal theological conviction.  He followed fairly closely the ritual requirements of the Catholic Church (principally, regular in his attendance at mass) but not so much its moral disciplines.  Also unknown to Americans at the time, and even long after, Kennedy was a compulsive womanizer with an insatiable appetite for mistresses, usually of the higher reaches of society, including Hollywood (even the famous Marilyn Monroe).

Kennedy would bring God into his public pronouncements in a way Americans at the time expected their presidents to do so.  But where he actually stood personally with God was not really known to anyone other than Kennedy himself. His close associates, including for instance his personal advisor Ted Sorenson, remained unaware of Kennedy’s exact position on such matters as heaven and hell and life after death.  Certainly Kennedy lived a life of prayer, personal pain as well as political pain being a big part of his life.  But that seemed to have no impact on his extensive womanizing (which at the time was considered by the Washington press and Congressional membership to be nobody’s business other than the president himself).

Kennedy was thus a very private Catholic.  And Americans truly had no cause to believe that he would, as a good Catholic, bring America under Rome’s papal authority.  Anyway, with the grand religious council held in Rome known as Vatican II (1962-1965), the political requirements of "good Catholics" to come under Rome’s political jurisdiction was put aside in support of a wider acceptance of the legitimate place of other members of the Christian world (meaning, among other things, that non-Catholics were no longer destined at death to go to hell!).

In any case, the November (1960) presidential vote was close² – very close indeed, with Kennedy gaining 49.7 percent of the vote and Nixon 49.5 percent. The crucial electoral college majority, however, would register as a bigger difference, with Kennedy’s 303 votes to Nixon’s 219.  Kennedy was thus elected as the country’s thirty-fifth president.

¹Just prior to that first broadcast, Nixon had rushed in from a campaign meeting and had not put on makeup (Kennedy had) needed to keep him from looking washed out under the glaring T.V. lights. Nixon would not repeat that mistake. But first impressions really stayed with people who thought Nixon looked uncertain and even anemic. Radio listeners however thought Nixon had sounded the more solid of the two debaters – although at this point the TV audience (some 70 million Americans) vastly outnumbered the radio audience.

²There were serious questions about how Mayor Daily brought in the Illinois vote for Kennedy. But Illinois going to Nixon instead of Kennedy would not have changed the ultimate outcome.