Alan Brinkley, Lizabeth Cohen (moderator), Randall Kennedy, Michael Kazin, Arthur Schlesinger
JOHN SHATTUCK: Forty years after the end of the Kennedy administration, President Kennedy’s values, inspirations, intentions, belief in public service, his commitment to internationalism for a better and more secure world all stay with us. For those of you who have visited our museum, which I hope those of who haven’t will do so this afternoon, I’m sure you will be struck, as I am, by the power of the words of John F. Kennedy.
Let’s listen:
PRESIDENT KENNEDY: What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enable men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children -- not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women -- not merely peace in our time, but peace in all time.
First: Let us examine our attitude toward peace itself. Too many of us think it is impossible. Too many think it unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable -- that mankind is doomed -- that we are gripped by forces we cannot control.
We need not accept that view. Our problems are manmade -- therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man's reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable -- and we believe they can do it again.
PRESIDENT KENNEDY (new clip): We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.
The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated. If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public school available, if he cannot vote for the public officials who represent him, if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place? Who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay?
One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet free from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this Nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.
We face, therefore, a moral crisis as a country and a people. It cannot be met by repressive police action. It cannot be left to increased demonstrations in the streets. It cannot be quieted by token moves or talk. It is a time to act in the Congress, in your State and local legislative body and, above all, in all of our daily lives.
PRESIDENT KENNEDY (new clip): Frank O'Connor, the Irish writer, tells in one of his books how, as a boy, he and his friends would make their way across the countryside, and when they came to an orchard wall that seemed too high and too doubtful to try and to difficult to permit their voyage to continue, they took off their hats and tossed them over the wall -- and then they had no choice but to follow them.
This Nation has tossed its cap over the wall of space, and we have no choice but to follow it. Whatever the difficulties, they will be overcome. Whatever the hazards, they must be guarded against. With the vital help of this Aerospace Medical Center, with the help of all those who labor in the space endeavor, with the help and support of all Americans, we will climb this wall with safety and with speed -- and we shall then explore the wonders on the other side.
SHATTUCK: Those words were delivered the day before President Kennedy was assassinated. What is the legacy that he left? To examine the Kennedy presidency, we are very honored to have with us a number of our nation's leading scholars and historians. It's wonderful first to welcome back Alan Brinkley, who was also here for our forums on President Roosevelt and Truman. Professor Brinkley is provost of Columbia University, where he has taught as the Alan Nevins Professor of History since 1991. His book, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin and the Great Depression won the National Book Award. He is presently writing a biography of Henry Luce, and you're likely to have read his essays in The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, Newsweek and many, many other publications. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Humanities Center and the Woodrow Wilson Center, and he will be delivering opening remarks here this afternoon.
Joining Professor Brinkley is the renowned and beloved American historian and great friend of this library, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Professor Schlesinger worked for John F. Kennedy's campaign in 1960 and became a special assistant to President Kennedy in the White House. His history of the Kennedy administration, A Thousand Days, won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, awards he had also received earlier for another book, The Age of Jackson.
Michael Kazin is a professor of history at Georgetown University. His book, America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s, was named one of the best books of 2000 by The Washington Post. Professor Kazin wrote the chapter on John F.
Kennedy in The Reader's Companion to the American Presidency, which Professor Brinkley edited. He has won numerous fellowships and is widely published in such journals as The American Prospect, The New York Review of Books and The American Historical Review.
Randall Kennedy is a professor at Harvard Law School and the author of Race, Crime and the Law, which won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Prize. After graduating from Yale Law School, Professor Kennedy clerked for Judge J. Skelly Wright and then US Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. He is on the editorial broad of The Nation, Dissen, and The American Prospect.
And finally, moderating today's discussion is the distinguished Harvard historian, Lizabeth Cohen. Professor Cohen is the Howard Mumford Jones Professor of American Studies in Harvard's History department and the American civilization program. Her first book, Making a New Deal, won the Bancroft Prize for American history and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Earlier this year, Professor Cohen published her most recent book, A Consumer's Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America.
So Professor Brinkley, if I could offer the podium to you for opening remarks and then have the rest of your colleagues come up on stage afterwards. Thank you very much. Welcome to all of you.
ALAN BRINKLEY: Thank you. It's always a pleasure to be at this beautiful library. And it's a particular, and particularly daunting, pleasure to be here to talk about the man whose spirit this library is committed to. And I want to say just a few words, just to start this panel before my colleagues join me up here, about some of the difficulties that we as historians have, and I think also that we as Americans have, in thinking about John Kennedy even now, 40 years after his death.
Theodore White, the journalist and historian whose famous interview with Jacqueline Kennedy shortly after her husband's assassination introduced the idea of Camelot to the image of the Kennedy presidency, wrote in his memoirs a few years before he -- before Teddy White -- died of his personal memories of John Kennedy. And he suggested something of the dilemma facing historians and others who try to understand the significance of the Kennedy presidency. He wrote, "I still have difficulty seeing John F. Kennedy clear. The image of him that comes back to me, as to most who knew him, is so clean and graceful, almost as if I can still see him skip up the steps of his airplane in that half-lope, and then turn, flinging out his arm in farewell to the crowd before disappearing inside. It was a ballet movement. The remembered pleasures of travel with him clutter the outline of history."
Now, we can read that statement simply as an expression of great affection and admiration for John Kennedy, which I think in part it was. But it's also a statement, I think, even if not intended as such, of frustration, of the way in which the image of John Kennedy, the image of grace and culture and charisma, has often tended to overwhelm the substance of John Kennedy's life and the substance of his presidency. And so seeing John Kennedy clear, as Teddy White put it, is not, I think, something that very many people have easily managed to do. Because the layers of myth surrounding his name and his memory are so exceptionally thick as to be at times almost impenetrable.
On the morning of November 22, 1963, John Kennedy woke up as a man, as a president, as a political figure with admirers and detractors, a man with a record, some of it good, some of it not. By the evening of that day, he had become a legend, enshrouded in a fog of grief and posthumous adulation from which he has never fully emerged. To many Americans, even to many who were born after his death, John Kennedy remains still a shining symbol of energy, idealism, hope and purpose, a reminder of all that we often feel we have lost in our public life, in our national self-image. His youth, his attractiveness, his wealthy and appealing family, his eloquence, his slight touch of shyness and reserve, his image as an intellectual and a writer, his wit, his undoubted charisma, these and other qualities have combined to create one powerful myth of John Kennedy, a leader different from, greater than, other men.
Several years ago, I visited the extraordinary museum on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas, and I spent some time at the end reading the comments that visitors had written in the guest book. And those comments divided into two categories. One was comments on various assassination conspiracy theories. And the other was extraordinary tributes to John Kennedy. "Our greatest president." "How we need him today." "A true friend of the people." "The greatest man since Jesus Christ."
Partly in response to the power of this idealized image of John Kennedy, a counter-myth has also arisen, one that exaggerates his undoubted flaws at least as much as the Superman myth exaggerates his undoubted virtues. And just as the idealized image of Kennedy began during his lifetime, so also did this counterimage. On the day John Kennedy died in 1963, the best-selling book in the United States was Victor Lasky's JFK: The Man and the Myth, a withering portrait of a man whose golden public image, Lasky argued, obscured a corrupt and squalid reality. Much worse, of course, was to come, books reveling in exposure of Kennedy's squalid sexual behavior, books that alleged corruption and fraud in his family and in his campaigns, books accusing him of plotting assassinations and coups, books arguing that he was unfit, both by intellect and temperament, for leadership, and in effect hoodwinked the public by using his family's influence and his father's money.
And, of course, there are also the myriad conspiracy theories surrounding Kennedy's death, some of them at least vaguely plausible, many of them patently absurd, but almost all of them embraced with passionate and even fanatical devotion by their constituencies, who continue, 40 years later, to see Kennedy's death as such a momentous event in history that it's impossible to accept that it can be explained by the actions of a single embittered man.
Well, what an extraordinary historical phenomenon John Kennedy has become. Nothing about his life, or his death, ever seems to fit into a normal human scale. Everything about him is exceptional: his virtues; his flaws, the ideas and energies he unleashed, the imagined forces that mobilized to destroy him. A man whose image swings between extremes, that of an almost godlike superman who embodied the nation's highest hopes, and that of a reckless libertine who behaved with dangerous arrogance and immaturity. The real John Kennedy was none of those things. Although he helped unleash great ideals, he was himself an intensely unromantic and highly pragmatic man. Although he was a more knowledgeable and thoughtful man than his detractors argue, he was a less cultured and intellectual man than his admirers at the time claimed. Although he exuded youth and vigor, he was in fact a frail man, suffering from serious, potentially fatal illnesses. He was a man with great virtues and great flaws, neither the Promethean leader that so many Americans choose to remember, nor the reckless fraud that his detractors sometimes portrayed. He was both less and more than the many myths surrounding him suggest.
To understand John Kennedy historically, and not romantically, to see him clear, as Theodore White put it, requires, I think, among other things, a somewhat reduced emphasis on Kennedy's own compelling personality, of which we've just seen an evocative glimpse, and a somewhat greater effort to place him in the context of a very particular historical moment. And there are several characteristics of that period, the late 1950s and early 1960s, that seem to me worth considering as part of our explanation of John Kennedy's significance in his time and ours.
One of those characteristics was the growing national impatience in the late 1950s with what Kennedy and many others came to call drift. For 15 years after the end of World War II, a sort of ideological momentum had been building slowly in the United States, fueled by anxieties about the rivalry with the Soviet Union, fueled by optimism about the extraordinary performance of the American economy, a momentum behind the idea of the active pursuit of some great national purpose, some American mission. The desire for change in 1960 was still cautious and tentative, as the extraordinarily thin margin by which Kennedy defeated Nixon that year suggests. But the desire was there and growing.
Henry Luce, the editor of Time and Life magazines in the late 50s, began a national conversation about what he called "the national purpose," and recruited a number of leading American writers and intellectuals to produce essays on what the national purpose should be. It was published as a little book. I read it in high school. And it evokes, I think, that moment, a moment that it's hard to imagine many other nations actually experiencing -- I mean, imagine the British talking about the British purpose -- a moment in which many Americans began to feel that the nation really required a great mission in the world, to give the nation an identity, to give the nation the values that it needed, and to give the nation the power that it wanted to exercise in the world.
An official in the Defense Department in the early Kennedy years wrote a policy paper at one point expressing also this curious sense of urgent purpose. He said, "The United States needs a grand objective. We behave now as if our real objective is to sit by our pools, contemplating the spare tires around our middles. The key consideration is not that the grand objective be exactly right. It is that we have one, and we start moving towards it." And John Kennedy, of course, was the man who based his claim to leadership on a promise of energy and activism and purpose. He was, as he liked to put it, the man who would get the country moving again at a time when much of the country was ready to move. During his 1960 campaign, he complained frequently about the stagnation over which the Republicans had presided, he claimed, for the previous eight years. In his acceptance speech in Los Angeles in 1960, he said, "I have premised my campaign for the presidency on the single assumption that the American people are uneasy at the present drift in our national course, and that they have the will and the strength to start the United States moving again."
Richard Straut, The New Republic columnist who wrote under the pseudonym TRB, wrote at the time of Kennedy as "a young man offering positive leadership and presidential power to the utmost." And that suggests a second and closely related characteristic of this time. Along with a growing sense of urgency about drift and commitment and purpose was a set of changing expectations of the American presidency itself. It was visible in part in the increasing impatience among liberals and among many others with Dwight D. Eisenhower, a cautious, centrist president who prized stability above all and who deeply mistrusted bold new ventures. By the late 1950s, Eisenhower was increasingly under attack from liberals and others for permitting the nation to drift, for offering no positive leadership. Those complaints coincided with a new, popular, and scholarly conception of the presidency, an idea of the president as more than simply the leader of the government, but as something approaching the embodiment of American nationhood, a figure of almost cultish interest and importance.
For those Americans who were coming to believe that the nation needed to make more vigorous efforts to confront new challenges, the presidency was coming to seem the one institution capable of defining a coherent purpose for the nation, the one institution that could marshal the country's resources and lead a forceful assault on its domestic and international problems. We can see evidence of this new view in, among other places, some of the books about presidential power that were beginning to appear in the late 50s and early 60s, almost all of them emphasizing the desirability of, the need for, presidential activism, books in which Eisenhower almost invariably appeared as an example of what a president should not be like. Clinton Rossiter, a political scientist at Cornell, published a book called The American Presidency in 1956 and argued in it that the president of the United States was the most important leader in the world, a man whose power was nearly unlimited and was curbed only by his ultimate, and rather distant, accountability to the people. "The president," Rossiter wrote, "is not a Gulliver, immobilized by 10,000 tiny cords. He is, rather, a kind of magnificent lion who can roam freely and do great deeds, so long as he does not try to break loose from his broad reservation. There is virtually no limit to what the president can do if he does it for democratic ends and through democratic means."
Four years later, Richard Neustadt published Presidential Power. It was a less rapturous book than Rossiter's, more aware of the limits of a president’s ability to act. He quoted, for example, Harry Truman commenting on Dwight Eisenhower as he was about to enter the presidency. And Truman said of Eisenhower, "He'll sit here, and he'll say, 'Do this, Do that,' and nothing will happen." But Neustadt saw those difficulties as no excuse for inaction. In fact, they were all the more reason for the president to seek out ways to exert power that would work. The president must act, Neustadt and others believed. And if there were obstacles to action, the president must find ways to circumvent those obstacles. Because if American government was going to perform, if it was going to accomplish the great things that it should, it would have to rely on leadership from the one area of government that could provide it, the efficient, modern, effective element of government, not the clumsy and inefficient Congress, not the conservative and corrupt state and local governments, but the presidency, the only seat of true action.
Kennedy read and admired Neustadt's book and expressed admiration in his own writing, in Profiles in Courage, among other places, for leaders who broke free of their political constraints in pursuit of great purposes. And his governing style reflected his acceptance of this new and more expansive vision of presidential power. Kennedy was determined not to be bound up by the bureaucratic order of his office or the government. He wanted the freedom to act, even if that meant circumventing established procedures and methods. He was the last president not to appoint a chief of staff, and he structured the White House to allow himself maximum direct access to everyone in it. Nor did he observe normal protocols in dealing with other parts of his administration. Rather than dealing with agencies through their directors and secretaries, he often talked directly with lower level officials to ensure that what he wanted done would not get lost in the chain of command.
Theodore Sorenson wrote, "He ignored Eisenhower's farewell recommendation to create a First Secretary of the government to oversee all foreign affairs agencies. He abandoned the practice of the cabinets and the national security councils making group decisions like corporate boards of directors. He abolished the practice of White House staff meetings and weekly cabinet meetings. He paid little attention to organization charts and chains of command, which diluted and distributed his authority. He was not interested in unanimous committee recommendations, which stifled alternatives to find the lowest common denominator of compromise." For a time, he tried to deal with Congress in the same way, circumventing leaders, attempting to win allies on his own. His first great effort there was to change the ability of the House Rules committee to bottle up legislation, and he succeeded in diluting the power of the committee's chairman, Howard Smith, an imperious conservative from Virginia. But he made little progress after that in reforming Congress or, on the whole, in persuading it to support his legislative programs.
Kennedy believed, like many other Cold War liberals, that the Eisenhower administration had not been flexible or proactive enough in dealing with the global struggle. The famous Dulles strategy of massive retaliation, he believed, was more often than not an excuse for inaction in the face of local problems than an effective deterrent against Soviet ambitions. Kennedy wanted a more versatile approach to the world, and he set out to create a new military and political strategy that came to be known as flexible response: less reliance on the threat of nuclear action, greater investment in conventional weapons that would allow the United States to act quickly and effectively in many parts of the world. Even before Vietnam became a focus of attention, he was eager to increase the military's capacity to engage in guerilla wars, and he invested heavily in the Green Berets. He was, for a time at least, unusually enamored of the CIA and convinced that this agency, at least, could act quickly and effectively in times of crisis without worrying too much about political and bureaucratic restraints. He did get over that illusion quickly, however.
The British journalist Henry Fairleigh once described Kennedy's style of leadership, unkindly, as "guerilla government," using unorthodox methods to make war on the established bureaucracy. Kennedy's many admirers described the same characteristics more positively. Hugh Sidey wrote enthusiastically early in the new presidency, "John Kennedy, it is clear, recaptured all the power and more which Dwight Eisenhower ladled out to his Cabinet officers. In fact, Kennedy has put the Cabinet on the shelf, as far as being a force in policy matters, and he is rarely bothered to dust it off." And Theodore Sorenson said, "One of John Kennedy's most important contributions to the human spirit was his concept of the office of the presidency. His philosophy of government was keyed to power: the primacy of the White House within the executive branch and of the executive branch within the federal government, the leadership of the federal government within the United States, and of the United States within the community of nations."
Kennedy's effort to liberate himself from the bureaucracy, to exercise power independent of traditional political and even, at times, legal restraints, was responsible for some of the great achievements of his presidency. A more constrained president would have had great difficulty persuading his government and his military to accept a test ban treaty and to propose a limited rapprochement with Russia. A more procedurally embedded executive might not have had the strength or the will to resist the almost unanimous calls of his military leadership to bomb Russian bases in Cuba in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis and might also have found it difficult to make the path-breaking conciliatory speech that he gave at American University in 1963, of which we've just seen a short piece. A leader more bound up in the traditional rules of politics would likely not have been able to deliver the historic speech that John Kennedy gave, and that we also just saw, in June 1963, throwing the support of the presidency and the federal government behind the still fragile civil rights movement.
Few liberals, at least, questioned the wisdom of this approach to leadership in the early 1960s. Many believed that it was precisely what the nation needed in a time of great crisis and change. The traditional checks and balances were all very well, but they should not be allowed to interfere too much with the great tasks facing the nation. Norman Mailer once wrote, "Eisenhower embodied half the needs of the nation: the needs of the timid, the petrified, the sanctimonious and the sluggish. America's need in those years was to take an existential turn, to walk into the nightmare, to face into that terrible logic of history which demanded that the country and its people must become more extraordinary and more adventurous or else perish." But Kennedy, Mailer believed, had broken the paralyzing grip of bureaucratic government and had replaced it with the much bolder possibilities of personalized, charismatic government.
In subsequent periods of our history, this style of leadership has sometimes seemed less appealing. During the era of the Vietnam War, which many Americans came to believe was a result of this very repudiation of traditional legislative and legal constraints, the Kennedy style, although rarely Kennedy himself, came under increasing attack. In the 1980s, many Americans became deeply alarmed about the freewheeling foreign policy ventures of the Reagan administration as they attempted to circumvent Congress and the law to accomplish what they considered great and necessary missions. And in our own time, too, we see a government that has discomforted many Americans with its claims that the great challenges it faces require an abandonment of traditional checks on executive and government authority, that clinging to traditional rules and restrictions is small-minded and weak-willed and incompatible with the bold leadership needed to face great challenges.
But we should not, I think, judge John Kennedy on the basis of how others have used the leadership style that he embraced. We should judge him on what he himself did. And that judgment is, of course, forever clouded by the knowledge that his presidency was cut short after only, as Arthur Schlesinger famously recorded, 1,000 days. In the course of those 1,000 days, Kennedy compiled no significant legislative record and never developed an effective working relationship with Congress on domestic issues. He presided over one foreign policy disaster at the Bay of Pigs and contributed significantly to the making of another one in Vietnam. He was at least indirectly responsible for a reckless course of covert operations by the CIA and for a disastrous and murderous coup in Saigon. For a time, at least, he resisted the claims of the civil rights movement and, on occasion, insisted that it was a threat to America's claims to international leadership.
But in those same 1,000 days, John Kennedy helped pull the world back from the brink of nuclear war, successfully negotiated a nuclear test ban treaty and began the first nuclear nonproliferation treaty, laid the groundwork for a new and more cooperative relationship with the Soviet Union, began planning for an ambitious assault on poverty and a new system of medical insurance for the elderly, and became the first American president since Lincoln to speak openly and clearly about the moral blight of segregation and racial discrimination. Had he lived, he may or may not have succeeded in enacting into law an ambitious domestic program, as Lyndon Johnson did, and he may or may not have succeeded in extracting the United States from the war in Vietnam before it destroyed him, as Lyndon Johnson did not. He may or may not have been able to prevent the violence and social turbulence that so disrupted American life in the 1960s and so transformed the political character of our nation.
But those are not questions for historians to answer. Our job is to understand the reasons for and the power of the extraordinary mythologies that have grown up around the memory of John Kennedy, and to try, as well, despite those mythologies, to see a real man -- a talented, attractive, accomplished man, but a man, too, with many flaws -- beneath the clouds of legend that surround him. Thank you very much.
LIZABETH COHEN: Welcome. What we're going to do, just so you know where we're headed here, is we've asked each of the other three panelists to talk for five minutes or so about their own thoughts about Kennedy's administration and his legacy. Then we'll have discussion among ourselves up here and then at about 3:10 or 3:15, we'll open the floor to your questions. Arthur, would you like to begin?
ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER, JR.: I think we are all grateful for Alan Brinkley's thoughtful and reasoned speech and remarks. John F. Kennedy, eminently a man of reason, as his brother Robert Kennedy was a man of passion, would have appreciated the tone of Alan's analysis.
Looking back on the Kennedy presidency, one is struck by the vicissitudes of presidential reputation. For example, the decline in reputation after a strong leader has passed from the scene is marked by me, I discover, in reading the foreword for the book that I wrote about the age of Roosevelt in the 1950s, a rather defensive foreword, because FDR's reputation had sunk. Now, he is universally regarded, even by Newt Gingrich, as the greatest president of the 20th century and universally regarded as among the three greatest presidents in American history.
Kennedy suffered the same decline in reputation in the 1980s. The American Heritage had a poll among historians of the most overrated people in American history, and Kennedy won that dubious contest. I think now that as FDR's reputation … When I was in college in the 1930s, both Theodore Roosevelt, who was regarded as a boisterous, meddling Boy Scout, Wilson as a rigid, Presbyterian fanatic -- Both of those people suffered from that same curve of downward evaluation by historians. Now, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson are counted as among the most considerable presidents of the century.
I think, beyond the natural curve of downward revision followed by upward revision, the publication of the Kennedy tapes about the missile crisis and the publication of the Kennedy/Johnson tapes about the civil rights struggle both document the view that Kennedy was a considerable president, not only in his style, but in his substance. The Cuban Missile Crisis was not only the most dangerous moment in the Cold War, it was also the most dangerous moment in all human history. Never before had two contending powers possessed between them the technical capacity to blow up the world. We now know that had the Joint Chiefs of Staff succeeded in persuading the president to launch a surprise attack to take the missiles out, followed by an air strike, followed by an invasion, we now know that the Red Army, which had 43,000 people, soldiers, in Cuba -- the CIA told us that perhaps they had 10,000 -- had the delegated authority to repel an American invasion by the use of tactical nuclear weapons.
It never occurred to us that tactical nuclear weapons had been issued, that tactical nuclear warheads existed in Cuba. I was with Bob McNamara, the Secretary of Defense, when General Ribcoff in a meeting at Havana told us that there were tactical nuclear weapons and delegated authority to use them to repel an American invasion. Bob McNamara practically fell out of his chair at this point, because he said that if the Soviet Union was using nuclear weapons against us, killing our troops, he would be under great pressure to reply in the same vein. And God knows where this might escalate. The Cuban Missile Crisis -- Kennedy was determined first to get the missiles out of Cuba, and, second, to get them out peacefully. And both Kennedys rejected the Joint Chiefs of Staff operation’s recommendation. And one of the reasons for their rejection was the educational experience brought about by the Bay of Pigs. After the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy had no hesitation in rejecting the counsel of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or of the CIA. And that was an expensive education, but it produced happy results in the Cuban Missile Crisis.
As Kennedy addressed successfully the most pressing and possibly catastrophic international issue, so he addressed the most corrosive domestic issue facing this country, that is, the question of racial justice. In the speech he gave in June 1963, of which excerpts were played in the introductory tapes, again, Kennedy had underestimated the moral intensity, the moral urgency of the black movement for equal rights. But he also was faced, confronted by very unpromising political circumstances in the Congress. No reform president since FDR in 1938 had a working progressive majority in the Congress for domestic issues. And Kennedy lacked that, as shown in his effort to try to have the Department of Housing in 1962. It was evident that he proposed to appoint Dr. Robert Weaver, Bob Weaver, a black economist, who was Commissioner of Housing. There had never been a black man in the Cabinet, and the Southerners resented that and refused to create, Southern Democrats refused to create a new department. In fact, it was later created under Lyndon Johnson, and Bob Weaver was made the first black Cabinet member.
But what happened was that Bull Connor, the police commissioner of Birmingham, Alabama, attacked with fire hoses and barking dogs a nonviolent march in March of 1963. The television images were shown all over the country and produced a gasp of horror. And those, as Kennedy said later to a group of black leaders, including Martin Luther King, Roy Wilkins and others, Whitney Young, he said, after hearing critical remarks about Bull Connor, he said, "You shouldn't be too tough on Bull Connor, because he was a great help in producing civil rights." And there was an intake of horror around the room until they discovered that Kennedy was ironical, as usual, and that the whole change in the atmosphere, the change that prompted Kennedy to give the speech and to launch a new civil rights bill was due to the political atmosphere produced by the atrocious behavior of Bull Connor.
He made himself, belatedly perhaps, the head of the civil rights movement, the movement for racial justice. And, as I say, I think the two critical problems that confronted his administration were: on foreign policy the possibility of nuclear war over nuclear missiles in Cuba, and on the domestic policy the question of racial justice. And on both of them he showed manifest and superb leadership.
Thank you.
LIZABETH COHEN: Randy Kennedy.
RANDALL KENNEDY: It's a daunting thing to attempt a fully rounded assessment of a president. A president's responsibilities are so far-reaching. They go in so many different directions. I'm going to limit my remarks to one particular aspect of President Kennedy's record, and what I'm going to focus on really follows directly from Professor Schlesinger's remarks. I'm going to focus on the civil rights era, because my view of President Kennedy has been very substantially influenced by the view of two of my elders. I remember with great fondness my grandmother. We all called her "Big Mama." Black woman, lived all of her life in South Carolina, where I was born, Columbia, South Carolina. I remember quite distinctly that there were three people whose pictures were in my grandmother's bedroom: Jesus, a portrait of Jesus, a portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr., and a portrait of John F. Kennedy.
And the reason why there was a portrait of John F. Kennedy, there were two reasons. One was because of the halo of martyrdom. That was part of it. My grandmother never expressed that directly, but I feel confident in stating that that's part of the reason why that portrait was there. But the portrait was also there because of her deep-seated belief that whatever his limitations, he was a friend of the Negro. He was a friend of Black people. And there was reason for her to believe that. He, in his speeches, in his demeanor, ultimately in certain actions that he took, gave cause for believing that he stood four square in favor of racial decency in the United States.
Another person whose view has influenced my view in a big way is my father, blessed memory, who is also from the deep South. And in my household, when John F. Kennedy's name would be mentioned, my father would bridle. He anticipated harsh revisionist views of John F. Kennedy. And the reason that he did, number one, the thing that he always mentioned first was this: he said John F. Kennedy, when he ran for office, said that it would only take one swipe of the presidential pen to remove racial segregation, racial discrimination, with respect to housing that was within the jurisdiction of the federal government. And that's something that he said over and over again while he was seeking votes to become president. My father said Black people helped put John F. Kennedy over the top, and then they waited for that stroke of the pen, and they waited in vain. And my father always held that against Kennedy, and frankly, he held it against him with a real bitterness.
There were other things that one could say about John F. Kennedy's civil rights record that would give some basis for my father's very strong critique of it. Some of the worst, most stubborn, most vicious segregationist judges in the Southern United States were appointed to their lifetime positions by John F. Kennedy as president of the United States. At the same time, President Kennedy had the opportunity to elevate to the United States Supreme Court what could have been the nation's first Black Justice. He considered it. The person he considered was a very distinguished Black jurist, sat on the United States Court of Appeals, Judge Hasty (?), but he didn't. President Kennedy spoke very eloquently in favor of civil rights, and near the end of his time as president, of course, he did send to the Congress what became the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But I think it can be said with justice that he was belated in taking action. And I think, ultimately, the lesson that I take from the Kennedy presidency with respect to civil rights is that there always is the problem of time. We never know how much time is allotted to us, and, therefore, delaying things that need to be done is a tremendous risk. In any event, I look forward to reactions to those comments, and I look forward to hearing the views of my other panelists. Thank you very much.
MICHAEL KAZIN: I'm going to take off a little bit from Professor Kennedy's comments, in the sense of starting with a personal anecdote. I teach at a Catholic university, and I teach a course on the 1960s, my most popular course for reasons that are probably obvious to anyone who lived through the 60s, the aura of that, and part of it is because people want to learn about John Kennedy. And when I give a lecture on John Kennedy which is -- how should I say it? -- somewhat more critical of him than Alan's talk, though along the same general lines, students come up and tell me that they liked the lectures. Usually it's one of my most popular lectures in the course. And then I say, "Well, I'm curious what your parents think of it." And they say, "Oh, I couldn't tell my parents about this lecture. It's much too critical." I say, "Oh, your parents are great admirers of Kennedy? They're liberals?" “Well, they're great admirers of Kennedy, but they all vote Republican.”
What's interesting about that, I think, is that Kennedy's idealism, his aura of idealism, the image you saw, beautifully portrayed, depicted in the film clips, which Alan discussed and Arthur discussed as well in different ways, I think is a problem for understanding his place in history. When I teach the 60s course, I also teach about the young new left and the young new right, both of which really got going in the early 1960s during Kennedy's administration. Both the leader of the organization of the young white new left and the leader of the organization of the young Black new left, Students for a Democratic Society on one hand, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee on the other hand, and also the leading group, Young Americans for Freedom, of the young new right, all were quite critical of John Kennedy's idealism. All saw, on one hand, his promise to fight any enemy, go to any length to defeat the foes of freedom as, on one hand, dangerous, on the other hand, hypocritical, because the new right didn't believe that John Kennedy really was going to roll back Communism as it seemed his rhetoric promised. Many people in the young new left believed, as Randy Kennedy was saying, that he was rhetorically on their side, but was not willing to take the steps, until very late in his administration, after the Birmingham demonstrations, to really get behind a civil rights bill.
So in many ways, I think, the problem, or one of the problems, of John Kennedy in history is the kind of expectations he raised both for people who agreed with those ideals and those who were cynical of those ideas … made problems, not just for John Kennedy during his administration, but for liberals afterwards: for Lyndon Johnson, for George McGovern, for Bill Clinton, in a lot of ways, too, the sense that it was possible to end poverty, it was possible to bring about racial equality in one generation, it was possible to both defeat Communism in the third world, and to contain it in Europe at the same time as one could forge a more peaceful world. This is part of Kennedy's aura, I think, too, this failure and this promise. It's a sense in which hubris is both incredibly attractive and also limiting.
The crisis of liberalism and the decline of liberalism broke out very soon, really, after Kennedy's death. There was a very small window of opportunity, of course, that Lyndon Johnson exploited from November ’63 until the spring of 1965, in which most of the Great Society programs were passed, of course, with the, in a sense, posthumous help of John Kennedy. But Johnson, I think, was very much trying to do what Kennedy would have done, and to do it better than Kennedy would have done it. And that was an impossible agenda to fulfill, and it proved, I think, in many ways, to be the undoing of liberalism. Because as people on the right understood, and most people like me at the time who were on the left did not understand, this was a very conservative country in the 1960s. And the Democratic coalition that John Kennedy tried to lead into power and to build a new era of Democratic dominance was always quite brittle and always had many fault lines, and those fault lines broke out with tremendous fury, I think, by the mid 1960s.
As Alan said quite eloquently, one cannot blame John Kennedy for shortcomings of that kind. On the other hand, I think that the problem with liberal idealists -- and this was true for Woodrow Wilson, it was true for Abraham Lincoln, and it was true for Franklin Roosevelt in many ways as well -- is that one has to be responsible for the political consequences of idealism. And in many of those cases, those presidents -- Roosevelt, Wilson, Lincoln, and Kennedy -- did not live to see the downfall of their ideals. So we continue to praise them and love them, admire them, posthumously, for those ideals. At the same time, I think we have to make a very sort of hardheaded historical analysis of perhaps how the vaulting idealism was also related to the kind of cynicism, skepticism, and decline of some of the views for which they stood and for which they died.
LIZABETH COHEN: I'd like to start by just probing a little bit more on this issue of why Kennedy's agenda was so difficult to accomplish, particularly the domestic agenda. Alan Brinkley and Arthur Schlesinger have suggested that he had obstacles that were just very hard to overcome: difficulties with Congress, the need for support in the South, a conservatism of America, as Mike just mentioned. But I wonder whether we might talk a little bit more about what kind of limitations there might have been in Kennedy himself. It's often said that he was more knowledgeable, more interested, and more skilled in foreign policy than in domestic issues. And I wonder to what extent you think that may explain some of the difficulties. Granted, there were obstacles, but can we lay any of this at the feet of the Kennedy administration?
ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER: In the fall of 1963, JFK used to complain about the fact that a succession of foreign crises had diverted him from the issues of domestic reform. As Alan reminded us, the setting for LBJ's War on Poverty was created in the last month of the Kennedy administration. He took a certain consolation from the life of Theodore Roosevelt, because he felt that Theodore Roosevelt had a much more impressive domestic record in his second term than in his first term. But he was a New Dealer at heart. He believed in affirmative government. He felt that the primary experience of going to West Virginia … For example, he couldn't believe the people in the United States, the richest country in history of the world, lived in such misery and anguish as the miners of West Virginia. And one of the first things he tried to do was to get a development program for Appalachia. And I do not think that his concern for the domestic progress of the country, for the poor people, should be underestimated.
ALAN BRINKLEY: Well, I think it's a very good question, as to whether John Kennedy himself or circumstances over which he had no control thwarted his domestic agenda. I think Arthur's right that part of it is his preoccupation with foreign policy -- which one could argue was a preference, but one could certainly argue was a necessity given the crises that he faced -- I think one could also argue that the political calculus within which these domestic agendas were being considered simply wasn't one that made possible the kind of progress that Lyndon Johnson made. I don't think we can underestimate the importance of Kennedy's death itself in changing the political character of the United States in 1963, '64, and part of '65.
We also, I think, have to look at the difference between John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, who had very different sets of talents. And one of Lyndon Johnson's truly extraordinary talents was the ability to manipulate Congress. And John Kennedy simply did not have that kind of skill set available to him. Almost nobody in our history has had it in the way that Lyndon Johnson did. So this extraordinary moment of legislative triumph that occurred in the first year and a half of the Johnson presidency was made possible, I think, by the plans that Kennedy made, the impact of Kennedy's death on the way Americans thought about the world, and the remarkable skills that Lyndon Johnson brought to the task and, maybe most of all, the huge Democratic landslide in 1964, which transformed the character of Congress in ways that would have benefited John Kennedy, as well as Lyndon Johnson, had he lived.
ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER: I think that last factor is very important. We gained 40 new seats in the House of Representatives because of the Republican benevolence in nominating Barry Goldwater and most of them were liberal Democratic seats, so that LBJ was the first Democratic president to have a working majority in the House of Representatives for social legislation since Roosevelt in 1938. And the 40 new seats … If Kennedy had survived, he would have probably gotten 50 or 60 new seats, because he was a much more popular figure, a much more comprehensible figure on a national basis than LBJ, who was a powerful figure in Washington but not a great national figure. So I think that as much as LBJ certainly had relationships and resources in dealing with Congress which were not available for Kennedy, I think it's not so much Johnson's Congressional sorcery as it is the arithmetic which was produced by the election of 1964 that enabled the Great Society program to go ahead.
MICHAEL KAZIN: I also think it's true, though, that the inaugural speech, the great inaugural speech in '61, as is often mentioned, doesn't mention domestic policy at all, not at all. And Johnson was always deeply involved in domestic policy from his days as a Congressman, and saw that as, of course, the root of his power. He was fighting for various bills when he was in Congress and when he was Senate majority leader. So I think that it has to be said that Johnson, to jump on one thing that Alan said, that Johnson was not just more skilled at getting legislation passed. I think he did care more deeply about those pieces of legislation that he wanted to get passed than John Kennedy did until the last few months of Kennedy's administration.
I mean, obviously, one of the elements of the Kennedy mystique, if you will, is that he, in the last year of his life, and in the last six months of his life, seemed so much more committed to a great idealistic agenda than he seemed to have been earlier. Most of the biographies, I think, argue that as well. And that, of course, is part of his legacy.
RANDALL KENNEDY: One of the most poignant things about President Kennedy, from my point of view, is the learning curve that you just alluded to. I think that you're right that you can't simply take a look at the limitations and say that they were all externally imposed. I think one limitation was just his own knowledge about the country, the problems besetting the country. And to go back to my subject, civil rights, when John F. Kennedy was elected in 1960, there was reason for Richard Nixon to be angry in thinking that … frankly, to be angry at Black people, with Black people really going to Kennedy, because between their records in the 1950s, Nixon had the better civil rights record. Kennedy, simply with respect to civil rights, he was decently inclined, but he was not knowledgeable, and he certainly didn't have a good feel for what the segregation regime meant. I think that changed over three years, and it's really -- I mean, it's sad enough, but it only adds to the sadness to think that he was cut down right at the point at which his emotional learning curve, with respect to the civil rights issue, was really going upwards.
LIZABETH COHEN: Thank you. I'd like to raise another issue that picks up on some of the things that you've all said. Most of you touched on the power of the myth of Kennedy and the difficulty that presents to historians and the general public in assessing his presidency. We live now in an era where we're very aware of the power of media in politics. And it's often said that it was the KennedyNixon debate that brought us into this era, the televised debates. If you remember, Eisenhower had actually done some commercials on television, but it really took off in the 1960s. I wonder to what extent, though, this was not just the impact of the assassination and that sort of aura that has followed Kennedy, but rather real intentionality on the part of the Kennedy team to use the media in their own interest and to create this image and this mythology that now we struggle with as historians.
ALAN BRINKLEY: I think that's true. I think you can see the Kennedy myth already beginning to build before Kennedy died. One famous little example of this is the polls that were taken in 1963 asking people how they had voted in 1960. And something like 60% of the public said they'd voted for Kennedy, when, in fact, only about 48% of them had. And then there was a huge posthumous landslide, of course, that took it up to about 80%. But I don't mean to be facetious.
Kennedy, partly on the basis of achievement, partly on the basis of his performance in the Cuban Missile Crisis and other foreign policy things, and partly on the basis of his really extraordinary media skills -- I mean, he was truly the first television president. Not the first president to be on television, but the first president to be good on television. And it's easy to dismiss that as a kind of superficial quality that really distracts us from reality, and often, of course, it does. But it's also, you know, it is now a real necessity for effective governance and Kennedy helped make that. Media skill without commitment to real and important goals can be a terrible thing in a president, but media skill combined with that commitment can be a very valuable thing. Kennedy, I think, at the end of his life, as Randy just suggested, was sort of just learning how to use the media to forge a consensus around domestic issues or to try to do that. And I think he had the potential to be extremely good at it.
MICHAEL KAZIN: I think it also should be mentioned that intellectuals were in love with Kennedy and that is more than just people like us liking Kennedy. It had an important impact on how he was seen by the rest of the country. Norman Mailer, to help Kennedy get elected, wrote a famous essay for Esquire magazine during the campaign in 1960 called "Superman Comes to the Supermarket."
ALAN BRINKLEY: That's where the quote I read came from.
MICHAEL KAZIN: Yeah. And it's a fascinating essay, because it is both an analysis and a love poem at the same time. And that, of course, was the kind of combination of elements that was going to appeal to intellectuals who saw themselves as tough-minded and not really falling in love with politicians, especially one who hadn't showed that they could accomplish anything quite yet. But at the same time, Kennedy seemed on the cutting edge of a lot of things. And as my six-year-old daughter said when she first saw him on television, "He's a beautiful man." And we haven't had a beautiful man as president, except perhaps for Ronald Reagan, since then. And Ronald Reagan is … Perhaps when the Kennedy Library gets around to the Ronald Reagan symposium, I think it would be interesting to make a comparison between Reagan's image and Kennedy's image. Because for people on the right, Ronald Reagan is their Kennedy.
LIZABETH COHEN: Either one of you want to add anything to that? Well, why don't we -- it's your turn -- why don't we open this up now to questions from the audience. I would ask you to come up to the microphones if you have a question and to also introduce yourself before asking it.
Q: My name is Harry Crushpane (?). I'm a professor of history at Dean College in Franklin, Massachusetts. And it's been alluded here, everyone talked or mentioned the assassination, and how the academic community was influenced by John Kennedy. And yet, over these past 40 years, the academic community has been totally silent regarding the assassination and all the books, theories, movies that have come out. I'd like, Professor Cohen, if you could present the question to the panel, do they buy conspiracy in John F. Kennedy's death? Or why hasn’t the academic community really come out strong against all those in the country who are proposing that President Kennedy was not killed by a lone assassin, but in fact a conspiracy that changed American government and history from 1963 on?
LIZABETH COHEN: Anybody want to talk about the way we've viewed the …
ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER: I think the question of the assassination is probably historically insoluble. There's still argument about the Lincoln assassination. I am an agnostic myself on the question of whether a lone individual or a conspiracy was responsible for the murder of Kennedy. I do think that the Warren Commission investigation was inadequate, because both the FBI and the CIA withheld vital information from the Warren Commission. But they withheld it, I think, not because of some Oliver Stone conspiracy, but because they were bureaucratically inclined to cover up their own incompetence. But I think the question is insoluble.
Q: Hi. My name is Sheldon Stern. I used to work here as a historian. I'm just interested in … I did pick up, obviously, from several of you a view on the Cuban Missile Crisis, which I've spent many years studying. And I'm just curious about your sense about the options that Kennedy had, if you could get into it a little bit more, and more importantly, the leadership that he showed at those meetings, those secret meetings, which I think I've just described well in my own book. But anyway, go ahead.
ALAN BRINKLEY: One option that we all know about, of course, was to do what the Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted him to do, which was to bomb the sites in Cuba, and I think most of us would agree that that was a very bad option that he was quite wise to avoid. Another option that some critics of Kennedy's performance in the Cuban Missile Crisis have raised is not to have challenged the missiles at all, that in fact we created a crisis by challenging something that the Soviets were doing that was in fact quite reasonable, which was putting missiles as close to our shores as we had missiles close to theirs, in Turkey. And one could argue that, I suppose, as a matter of right and justice or wisdom or something. Politically -- and you know it's very hard to make a political argument when you're talking about a matter of life and death for the world -- but politically that was an absolutely impossible option, I believe, for an American president, particularly given the commitments that American presidents had already made in the four years since Castro had invaded Cuba. The idea that Cuba would not just be a Communist nation 90 miles from our shore, but would be a Soviet missile base 90 miles from our shore was something that no American president could possibly accept.
So I have some sympathy for the argument that this was a crisis that we helped to create, because we had missiles on the borders of the Soviet Union, too. But given that, which was a situation that long pre-existed Kennedy's presidency, I don't think he had any choice but to respond in some way to the crisis, and I think that the option that he chose, among those available, was probably the best one.
MICHAEL KAZIN: The obvious point is that Kennedy was very lucky, too, that Khrushchev backed down. And as you know, Khrushchev backed down in large part because he realized that the balance of forces was so much against him. And I think that, I mean, one can praise Kennedy for the strength that he showed in the ExComm meetings, and so forth, but at the same time, one also has to praise Khrushchev a bit for realizing that if you back down the world would be saved and otherwise the Soviet Union would be destroyed. And a large part of the United States would be destroyed, but it wouldn't suffer the same kind of damage the Soviet Union would. That's a terrible counterfactual to roll out, but I think that would have been what would have happened.
LIZABETH COHEN: I'd like to just take the opportunity, though, as we raised foreign policy and how it may help us to assess Kennedy's leadership skills, we haven't touched on Vietnam here very much, and I would like to just introduce that into the conversation. We know that -- certainly Alan Brinkley said it and others - Kennedy was certainly a very staunch Cold Warrior, and he did see the world framed by Communism and anti-Communism. And yet, some recent interpretations, most recently, I think, David Kaiser's book on Vietnam, have suggested that actually he wasn't as committed to our Vietnam policy as we have looked back on and assumed, and that had he lived another counterfactual, he might actually have pulled back and not brought us into the same kind of American intervention as we ultimately became involved with. I wondered whether you have any thoughts on what we can learn from Kennedy's leadership abilities, looking at Vietnam.
ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER: Kennedy had a great capacity to refuse escalation. He refused escalation during the Bay of Pigs. He refused it during the Berlin crisis of '61. He refused it during the missile crisis of '62. I do not believe he would have Americanized the war in Vietnam. Indeed, he called upon, as David Kaiser points out and Frederick Lodoval (?), also a scholar, he called upon McNamara to produce a plan for the withdrawal of American forces from Vietnam in 1965, and he rejected every recommendation from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to send combat units to Vietnam. Both McNamara and McGeorge Bundy, his National Security advisor, feel that he would not have Americanized the war, he would not have sent combat units into South Vietnam or bombers into North Vietnam. He would have found some way to extricate ourselves from this predicament. Both McNamara and Bundy indeed advised Johnson to do precisely what, on reflection, they think Kennedy would never have done.
MICHAEL KAZIN: Arthur, I wonder, though, politically, could he have survived a public which would have seen this as a loss to the Communists? I mean, clearly one of the reasons, the main reason why Johnson did escalate the war is he thought if American troops didn't take over the fighting, that the National Liberation Front, the North Vietnamese, would win. And indeed, they probably would have in ’64 or early '65. So I wonder whether, politically, it would have been possible to leave 17,000 advisors in place and watch Saigon be captured by the enemy.
ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER: There would have been difficulties about it, but I think Kennedy would have worked it out some way.
ALAN BRINKLEY: David Kaiser's argument is that there were other options, that there was the Laos option, for example, which would at least have delayed the victory of the Communists in South Vietnam, that there was a kind of neutralization option. I just don't know whether that's true, and I don't know what I think about what Kennedy might have done had he lived. One big difference between Kennedy and Johnson in 1965 -- because in many ways, Johnson had all the same foreign policy advisors that Kennedy had had at that point -- but one big difference would have been that Kennedy would not have faced another election and would have -- you can't go too far with that, because presidents are never unconcerned about what the public thinks of them -- but it would have made it easier for Kennedy, I think, to reconsider Vietnam. And when one reads the increasing number of internal documents about the meetings that went on in the Johnson administration on the war, one discovers, as Arthur suggested, that all of those people had really grave doubts about the wisdom of this venture and about the possibility of success, and that those doubts were always trumped by their sense that the disaster that would have befallen them, both politically at home and in terms of America's influence and reputation in the world, by repudiating this commitment just overwhelmed the other disastrous possibilities that they were concerned about.
Leslie Gelb wrote an article years ago called "Vietnam: The System Worked," a sort of rational choice argument about this, and simply said that every American administration, starting with Truman and all the way through Nixon, did the least that was necessary to keep Vietnam from falling, because they always believed that the cost of allowing Vietnam to fall was simply too large to pay, and that what Kennedy and then ultimately Johnson faced was the point where the least was in fact a great deal, and that only when the public and the world turned against the war, which didn't really happen decisively until at least 1968, only then was it politically possible to withdraw from it. So I don't know the answer.
LIZABETH COHEN: Back to you.
Q: Thank you. Actually, that's a good prequel to my question. What I'd like to ask …
LIZABETH COHEN: Could you introduce yourself?
Q: Oh, yes. My name is Jeff Koss. I'm a graduate student in American history. And my question -- particularly good to have Mr. Schlesinger here -- what I'd like to know is what the panel thinks that Kennedy brought as sort of, I don't want to say baggage, but viewpoints on Communism, on America's role in the world, in the Cold War in particular, particularly in light of the development of a vigorous anti-Communist stance in the Democratic party from the late 40s on, and what the intellectual underpinning of the anti-Communism that Kennedy brought to the office. And how important was the vital center and that approach to Communism to President Kennedy? What did he bring, as far as anti-Communism?
ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER: I think President Kennedy had a secular interpretation of the Cold War, unlike people like John Foster Dulles and Ronald Reagan, who had a theological interpretation. He regarded the Cold War as a contest of two powerful nations, both of them acting according to their sense of their own national interests. But with their technical capacity to blow up the world, it was important to preach the gospel of coexistence. And in his American University speech in June of 1963, he argued the case for competitive coexistence. He followed that up by the test ban treaty, and so on. And his effort was to stabilize the Cold War. And the notion that he wanted to roll back Communism, he felt that history would deal with that. He felt that Communism would be destroyed by its own internal contradictions, but that the important thing was to avoid war.
RANDALL KENNEDY: Could he have been both? I mean, in his inaugural speech, he sounds like a theological anti-Communist. By 1963, he sounds more like the secular anti-Communist. Could this be part of his learning curve, a theologian who became secular?
ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER: I think the inaugural speech was an overreaction to a speech Khrushchev had given a couple of weeks before in Moscow, promising Communist victory through wars of national liberation. And I think Kennedy overreacted to that, because I think the point that Khrushchev was trying to make … He also argued, Khrushchev, in that speech, for peaceful coexistence. I think the militant sections of the Khrushchev speech were addressed to the Communist world, particularly to Communist China, who felt that the coexistence was ruining the military revolutionary fervor of world Communism. And the coexistence sections of the speech were addressed to Washington. Of course, Washington read only the militant sections of the speech, and Peking read only the coexistence sections. But I think most of inaugural dealing with foreign policy was the boilerplate of the Cold War, but I think the one sentence which summed up Kennedy's own thinking is, "We must never negotiate out of fear, but we must never fear to negotiate."
Q: Good afternoon. My name is Steven Brush, and I'm a writer from Rockport, Mass, about 40 miles north of here. I don't have a question as much as I want to say a few words, not really a statement, but following up on what each of you said. I've worked on the gun issue in this country for about three and a half years, particularly gun safety. And listening to Professor Brinkley, and thinking the four of you are historians, so I'm thinking of the historical moment, the context. It's the 25th anniversary of Pope John Paul. President Kennedy was a Catholic. Today is the day Mother Theresa was beatified. So the gun issue, in my opinion, is global. But I'm just thinking of the issue in American terms.
And my concentration has been mostly for the gun problem in the schools in this country, and listening to Professor Randall and Professor Kazin speaking of sixyear-olds, I think we need to remember, after Columbine, the Black child at Flint, Michigan that was killed was six years old. And about a year and a half ago, the white child in Wellesley in the school system, the first grader that picked up a gun and brought it to the principal. This is all an American problem, and I think something that … I guess I would challenge all of you historians to think about that in the context of today and what we need to do. We're not going to have gun control in this country, at least in the foreseeable future. But we can and must have gun safety, more and more gun safety in the schools. And so, that's what I would say. And I'd ask you to just think about that in the historical context in America. Gun safety in the USA, particularly in the schools.
LIZABETH COHEN: Thank you. Anybody want to …
Q: I might add just one thing: that I did speak with Norman Mailer about this last week. I'm in touch with a lot of writers. But it's an ongoing problem. It's very, very serious. I say these words in memory of President Kennedy, in the context of the historical moment. Thank you.
LIZABETH COHEN: Thank you. Last question?
Q: Hi. My name is Zufi May (?), and I am a Fullbright visiting researcher from Russia. And I am particularly interested in Kennedy foreign policy toward Latin America. What do you think was the most successful initiative of the Kennedy administration toward Latin American countries?
LIZABETH COHEN: Kennedy administration's foreign policy towards Latin America. Anybody want to talk about the Alliance for Progress, or CIA…
ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER: The Alliance for Progress was an effort to strengthen both economic development and political democratization of Latin America. It unfortunately became, under Lyndon Johnson, a … It was much reduced in its aspirations, particularly on the Democratic side. And insofar as the Alliance for Progress was supposed to strengthen Democratic institutions, it lost that role, that responsibility under LBJ.
ALAN BRINKLEY: I think American relations with Latin America have been mostly terrible through the period in which the United States has had a role in Latin America, beginning late in the 19th century. And it's been a combination of economic exploitation of Latin America by American corporations and others, political interference in Latin American governments, usually on behalf of corporations, and then during the Cold War, a kind of heavy-handed interference in Latin America in opposition to presumed radical threats, which continued well into the 1980s, and really until the end of the Cold War.
There were a number of moments in which American governments really did make a serious effort to improve American relations with Latin America. One was the good neighbor policy during the New Deal, and the other was the Alliance for Progress under Kennedy. There were others. Jimmy Carter made some efforts.
And I think those efforts really did have an impact, at least psychologically, on the way Latin Americans viewed the United States. But those policies were never really accompanied by any real effort to change the economic role of the United States in Latin America, or at least were never accompanied effectively by any effort to do that. And so I think these were efforts of value, but not efforts that had the capacity really profoundly to change the basis of the relationship.
MICHAEL KAZIN: I think the American fear of Cuba and of Castro's influence had a lot to do with the sense of urgency about the Alliance for Progress. But as Alan mentioned, the constellation of economic power in Latin America was so unequal, and it would have been very difficult, I think, for any president to challenge that. Because some of that, of course, was very involved with American corporations. And so Cuba, I think, helped overwhelmingly skew American perception of Latin America. I think I know historians argue that in fact the Cuban revolution was not as attractive to a wide swath of people in Latin America as many Americans thought at the time. But it seemed so, and so it led both the Kennedy administration to raise expectations again about what could be possible in the Alliance for Progress, and yet, because every great power needs allies, not to do very much to really unsettle those who were opposed to the Cuban revolution. So that was the paradox.
LIZABETH COHEN: Thank you very much. I'd like to ask you to join me in thanking this panel for what I think has been a very stimulating afternoon.
JOHN SHATTUCK: Let me just add the thanks of the Kennedy Library to Lizabeth Cohen for chairing this extraordinary exploration with us here this afternoon, to Alan Brinkley, to Randy Kennedy, to Arthur Schlesinger, and to Michael Kazin. I think you have all been treated to something very special. And we at the Kennedy Library are particularly proud that we've been able to present to you a broad set of views of the presidency of John F. Kennedy, as we will do with other presidencies. And one final word. Please join us on October 22, this week, when Ted Sorenson and Robert McNamara will have a discussion with the distinguished former New York Times columnist Tony Lewis, Anthony Lewis, about their recollections of service in the Kennedy White House. Thank you very much.
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