American History
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The New Frontier
Kennedy versus Nixon
CORE OBJECTIVE
1. Assess President John F. Kennedy’s efforts to contain communism abroad and
pursue civil rights and other social programs at home.
In his 1960 speech accepting the Democratic presidential nomination, John F. Kennedy showcased the muscular language that would stamp the rest of his campaign and his presidency: “We stand today on the edge of a New Frontier—the frontier of unknown opportunities and perils—a frontier of unfulfilled hopes and threats.” Kennedy and his staff fastened upon the frontier metaphor as the label for their proposed domestic program because they believed that Americans had always been adventurers, eager to conquer and exploit new frontiers. Kennedy promised that he would get the country “moving again” and be a more aggressive cold warrior than Eisenhower.
In 1960, the presidential election pitted against each other two candidates—Vice President Richard M. Nixon and Massachusetts senator John F. Kennedy (JFK)—of similar ages and life experiences. Both were elected to Congress in 1946, both were navy veterans, and both preferred foreign affairs over domestic issues. In fact, however, they were more different than alike.
As the popular Eisenhower’s partner over successive terms, Nixon was assured the Republican nomination for president in 1960. A native of California, the ambitious son of a shopkeeper, he had fought tenaciously to be a success, first as an attorney, then as a congressman. He had come to Washington eager to reverse the tide of New Deal liberalism. His visibility among Republicans benefited from his leadership of the anti-Communist hearings in Congress during the McCarthy hysteria.
All his life, Nixon had had to claw and struggle to the top. Now he had the presidency within his grasp. But Nixon, graceless, awkward, and stiff, proved to be one of the most complicated and most interesting political figures in American history.
By 1960, Vice President Nixon had developed the reputation for being a cunning deceiver, the “Tricky Dick” who concealed his real ideas and bigoted attitudes. Kennedy told an aide that “Nixon doesn’t know who he is . . . so every time he makes a speech he has to decide which Nixon he is, and that will be very exhausting.”
The forty-three-year-old Kennedy had not distinguished himself in the House or the Senate, but he was tall and youthful, handsome and charming, and he had the energy and wit to match his grace and ambition. He also had a bright, agile mind; a quick wit; a Harvard education; a record of heroism in the Second World War; a rich and powerful Roman Catholic family; and a beautiful, accomplished, and young wife, only thirty-two years old.
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In the words of a southern senator, Kennedy fused “the best qualities of Elvis Presley and Franklin D. Roosevelt”—a combination that played well in the first-ever televised presidential debate. Some 70 million people tuned in and saw an obviously uncomfortable Nixon, still weak from a recent illness, perspiring heavily and looking pale, haggard, and even sinister before the camera. Kennedy, on the other hand, appeared tanned and calm, projected a cool poise, and offered crisp answers that made him seem Nixon’s equal, if not superior, in his fitness for the nation’s highest office.
John Kennedy’s political rise owed much to the effective public relations campaign engineered by his father, Joseph Kennedy, a self-made tycoon with a genius for promotion. “Can’t you get it into your head,” the elder Kennedy told John, “that it’s not important what you really are? The only important thing is what people think you are.” To ensure that people thought well of his son, the elder Kennedy hired writers to produce his son’s two books, paid a publisher to print them, purchased thousands of copies to make them “best sellers,” and helped engineer his son’s elections to the Congress and Senate.
The momentum that Kennedy gained from the first debate with Nixon was not enough to ensure his victory. The Democratic candidate became a relentless campaigner—traveling 65,000 miles, visiting twenty-five states, and making over 350 speeches—including an address to Protestant ministers in Texas in which he neutralized concerns about his being a Roman Catholic by stressing that the pope in Rome would never “tell the President—should he be a Catholic—how to act.”
THE KENNEDY-NIXON DEBATES Nixon’s decision to debate his less prominent opponent on television backfired.
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THE ELECTION OF 1960
■ How did the election of 1960 represent a sea change in American presidential politics? ■ What three events shaped the campaign? ■ How did John F. Kennedy win the election in spite of winning fewer states than Richard M.
Nixon?
Kennedy also worked to increase the registration of African American voters across the nation, and he won the hearts of many black voters by helping to get Martin Luther King Jr. out of a Georgia jail after being arrested for “trespassing” in an all-white restaurant. “I’ve got a suitcase of votes,” explained King’s appreciative father, “and I’m going to take them to Mr. Kennedy and dump them in his lap.” On the Sunday before Election Day, a million leaflets about Kennedy’s enabling King’s release from prison were distributed in African American churches across the nation.
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A Vigorous New Administration
When the votes were counted, Kennedy and his running mate, the powerful Texas senator Lyndon B. Johnson, had won the closest presidential election since 1888. The winning margin was only 118,574 votes out of more than 68 million cast. Nixon had carried more states than Kennedy, sweeping most of the West and holding four of the six southern states that Eisenhower had carried in 1956. But Kennedy won 70 percent of the black vote, which proved decisive in at least three key states. Nixon convinced himself that the Democrats had stolen the election through chicanery in Illinois and Texas. Nursing an inflated sense of grievance, he resolved never again to be outdone by a rival’s dirty politics.
Kennedy’s New Frontier
John F. Kennedy was the first Roman Catholic elected president and the youngest man ever elected. His inauguration ceremony on a cold, clear, blustery January day set the tone of youthful elegance, charm, and energy that would signify the Kennedy style. In his inaugural speech, the president quite intentionally spoke as the leader of “a new generation of Americans,” implying that Eisenhower had come to represent older Americans. Kennedy dazzled listeners with uplifting words: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and success of liberty. And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.”
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JACK AND JACKIE Young, refined, and fabulous, the Kennedys were instant celebrities. Women teased their hair into the First Lady’s famous hairdo, while men craved JFK’s effortless cool.
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Kennedy and Civil Rights
Such inspiring language heralded a presidency of fresh promise and new beginnings, an activist administration committed to bringing together the “best and the brightest” minds in the nation to fashion a dazzling new era in political achievement. Yet much of the glamour surrounding Kennedy was cosmetic. Despite his athletic interests and robust appearance, he suffered from serious medical problems: Addison’s disease (a withering of the adrenal glands), venereal disease, chronic back pain resulting from a birth defect, and fierce fevers. He took powerful prescription medicines or injections daily, sometimes hourly, to manage a degenerative bone disease, to deal with anxiety, to help him sleep, and to control his allergies.
Kennedy and his associates hid his physical ailments—as well as his sexual dalliances in the White House with a galaxy of women, including actress Marilyn Monroe and Judith Campbell Exner, the girlfriend of a Chicago mob boss. The handsome president was a compulsive womanizer. When Kennedy met British prime minister Harold Macmillan, he left him speechless by asking, “I don’t know about you, Harold, but if I don’t have a woman every three days, I get terrible headaches. How about you?”
Kennedy had a difficult time launching his New Frontier domestic program. Conservative southern Democrats joined with Republicans to block his efforts to increase federal aid to education, provide medical insurance for the aged, and create a cabinet-level department of urban affairs and housing to address poverty in the inner cities. Legislators did approve the Peace Corps, created in 1961 to recruit idealistic young volunteers who would provide educational and technical service abroad. The Kennedy administration also persuaded Congress to increase the minimum wage and pass a Housing Act that earmarked nearly $5 billion for new public-housing projects in poverty- stricken inner-city areas. And Kennedy won support for an accelerated space program with the audacious goal of landing astronauts on the moon before the end of the decade.
M VIDEO: JFK and Civil Rights
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Catastrophe in Cuba
The most important development in domestic life during the sixties occurred in civil rights. Throughout the South, racial segregation remained firmly in place. Signs outside public restrooms distinguished between “whites” and “colored”; signs in restaurants declared “Colored Not Allowed,” or “Colored Served Only in Rear.” Stores prohibited African Americans from trying on clothes before buying them. Witnesses in courtrooms were sworn in with their hands placed on different Bibles, depending on their race. Despite the Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954, many public schools across the South remained segregated and unequal in quality.
Like Franklin D. Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy celebrated racial equality but did little to promote it until events forced him to do so. He was reluctant to challenge conservative southern Democrats on the explosive issue of segregation. His caution reflected his narrow election margin in 1960. He and his brother Robert (“Bobby”), the attorney general as well as the president’s closest adviser, had to be forced into actively supporting the civil rights movement.
M VIDEO: JFK and Communism
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Kennedy’s record in foreign relations, as in domestic affairs, was mixed but more spectacularly so. Although he had told a reporter that he wanted to “break out of the confines of the Cold War,” he quickly found himself reinforcing its restrictive assumptions. While still a senator, Kennedy had blasted Eisenhower for not being tough enough with the Soviets and for allowing Fidel Castro and his Communist followers to take over Cuba in 1959.
Soon after his inauguration, Kennedy learned that a secret CIA operation, approved by Eisenhower, was training 1,500 anti-Castro Cubans for an invasion of their homeland. U.S. military leaders assured Kennedy that the invasion plan (“Operation Trinidad”) was feasible; CIA analysts naively predicted that news of the invasion would inspire anti-Castro Cubans to rebel against their Communist dictator. In reality, the covert operation had little chance of succeeding. Indeed, it became one of the rarest of historical events: a total failure.
When the ragtag force, transported on American ships, landed before dawn at the Bay of Pigs on Cuba’s south shore on April 17, 1961, Castro’s forces were waiting for them. Kennedy panicked when he realized the operation was failing and refused desperate pleas from the rebels for “promised” support from U.S. warplanes. General Lyman Lemnitzer, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that
WALK OF SHAME Captured anti-Castro Cubans at the Bay of Pigs. Why was Kennedy’s involvement at the Bay of Pigs so disastrous?
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The Vienna Summit
Kennedy’s “pulling out the rug [on the Cuban invaders] was . . . absolutely reprehensible, almost criminal.” Some 1,200 rebels were captured; the rest were killed. (Kennedy later authorized the payment of $53 million to ransom the rebels).
The clumsy effort to overthrow the Cuban government was a catastrophe. It humiliated Kennedy and elevated Castro in the eyes of the world. A New York Times columnist reported that the Americans involved in the botched invasion “looked like fools to our friends, rascals to our enemies, and incompetents to the rest.” In Moscow, Nikita Khrushchev asked if Kennedy could “really be that indecisive?” To his credit, Kennedy admitted that the Bay of Pigs invasion was a “colossal mistake” and “the worst experience of my life.” While pacing back and forth, he kept muttering to himself, “How could I have been so stupid?” Kennedy never again trusted his trigger-happy military and intelligence advisers.
Berlin Wall
Just six weeks after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy, heavily medicated because of chronic back pain, met Khrushchev at a summit conference in Vienna, Austria. Khrushchev bullied the young president and threatened to limit American access to Berlin, the divided city inside Communist East Germany. Kennedy confided to a journalist that the summit “was awful. Worst thing of my life. He rolled right over me—he thinks I’m a fool—he thinks I’m weak. . . . He treated me like a little boy.” When asked what he planned to do next, Kennedy replied: “I have to confront them [the Soviets] someplace to show that we’re tough.” Desperate to show his mettle, Kennedy responded by calling up Army Reserve and National Guard units to protect West Berlin. When military advisers told him that he would have to use nuclear weapons to protect Berlin, Kennedy lost his temper: “God damn it . . . use your head. What we are talking about is seventy million dead Americans.”
Then, on August 13, 1961, the Soviets stopped all traffic between East and West Berlin and erected the twenty-seven-mile-long Berlin Wall, made of concrete and topped with barbed wire. For the United States, the wall became a powerful propaganda weapon. As Kennedy said, “Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put up a wall to keep our people in.”
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The Cuban Missile Crisis
Green Berets
The Berlin Wall demonstrated the Soviets’ willingness to challenge American resolve in Europe. Kennedy and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara responded by
embarking upon the most intensive arms race in history, increasing the number of nuclear missiles fivefold, adding 300,000 men to the armed forces, and creating the U.S. Special Forces (Green Berets), an elite group of commandos specializing in guerrilla warfare who could provide a “more flexible response” than nuclear weapons to “hotspots” around the world and enable the United States to wage small wars in faraway lands. In contrast to the Eisenhower-Dulles emphasis on “massive retaliation,” Kennedy sought more flexibility: “We intend to have a wider choice than humiliation or all-out war.”
Soviet missiles in Cuba
In the fall of 1962, Nikita Khrushchev and the Soviets posed another challenge to Kennedy, this time only ninety miles off the Florida coast. To protect Communist Cuba
from another American-backed invasion, Khrushchev approved the secret installation of Soviet missiles on the island nation. The Soviets felt they were justified in doing so because the United States had earlier installed missiles with nuclear warheads in Turkey, along the Soviet border.
SEVERED TIES Two West Berliners climb the newly constructed Berlin Wall to communicate with a family member at an open window.
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On October 16, 1962, photos taken by U.S. spy planes revealed the Soviet missile sites in Cuba. Although the Soviet actions violated no law or treaty, Kennedy decided that the forty or so missiles had to be removed. But how? As the air force chief of staff told Kennedy, “You’re in a pretty bad fix, Mr. President.”
Over the next thirteen days, perhaps the most dangerous two weeks in history, Kennedy and the National Security Council (NSC) discussed several possible responses, ranging from doing nothing to invading Cuba. The commander of the marines at one point reminded the group that the missiles in Cuba were not a true threat. The Soviet Union “has a hell of a lot better way to attack us than to attack us from Cuba.” Yet the group insisted that the missiles be removed for symbolic reasons.
At that point, the world came closer to a war involving the exchange of nuclear weapons than it ever has before or since. Kennedy and the NSC discussed in some detail the unthinkable possibility of a nuclear war, even estimating the damage that atomic bombs might inflict on major cities. Eventually, however, the group narrowed the options to a choice between a “surgical” air strike on the missiles and a naval blockade of Cuba. Although the military advisers urged bombing the missile sites followed by an invasion of the island, Kennedy chose the naval blockade, which was carefully disguised by calling it a quarantine, since a blockade is technically an act of war.
Naval quarantine of Cuba
On Monday night, October 22, President Kennedy delivered a solemn speech to the world, announcing that the U.S. Navy was establishing a naval quarantine of Cuba to prevent Soviet ships from delivering the goods and weapons that the island nation depended upon. He urged the Soviets to “move the world back from the abyss of destruction.”
Soviets remove missiles under
nuclear threat
Tensions grew as Khrushchev replied that Soviet ships would ignore the quarantine. He accused Kennedy of “an act of aggression propelling humankind into the abyss of a world nuclear-missile war.” Despite such rhetoric, however, on Wednesday, October 24, five Soviet ships, presumably with more missiles aboard, stopped well short of the quarantine line. Two days later, Khrushchev, knowing that the U.S. still enjoyed a 5 to 1 advantage in nuclear weapons, offered a deal. Neither he nor Kennedy wanted to be the first president to launch nuclear missiles. The Soviets would remove the missiles in return for a public pledge by the United States not to invade Cuba—and a secret agreement to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey. Kennedy agreed. Secretary of State Dean Rusk stressed to a newscaster, “Remember, when you report this, [say] that eyeball to eyeball, they [the Soviets] blinked first.”
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Controlling Atomic Weapons
In the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis, tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union subsided, in part because of several symbolic steps: an agreement to sell the Soviet Union surplus American wheat, the installation of a “hotline” telephone between Washington and Moscow to provide instant contact between the heads of government, and the removal of aging U.S. missiles from Turkey, Italy, and Britain.
Test Ban Treaty: Bans testing of
nuclear weapons in the atmosphere
Going to the edge of nuclear war over Soviet missiles in Cuba led Kennedy and others in the administration to soften their cold war rhetoric and pursue other ways to reduce the threat of atomic warfare. As Kennedy told his
advisers at a White House meeting, “It is insane that two men, sitting on opposite sides of the world, should be able to decide to bring an end to civilization.” In June 1963, the president began discussions with the Soviets to reduce the risk of nuclear war. “If we cannot end our differences,” he said, “at least we can help make the world a safe place for diversity.” After two months of difficult negotiations, those discussions resulted in the Test Ban Treaty with the Soviet Union and Great Britain, ratified in September 1963, which banned the testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere. It was an important move toward improved relations with the Soviet Union. As Kennedy put it, using an ancient Chinese proverb, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.”
THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS Photographs taken from a U.S. surveillance plane on October 14, 1962, revealed both missile launchers and missile shelters near San Cristóbal, Cuba. What were the implications of this discovery on America’s international relations?
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Kennedy and Vietnam
M VIDEO: The Vietnam War
Military advisers in Vietnam
As tensions with the Soviet Union eased, a new crisis was growing in Southeast Asia, where events were moving toward what would eventually become the greatest
American foreign-policy calamity of the century. The situation in South Vietnam had worsened under the corrupt leadership of Premier Ngo Dinh Diem and his family. He had backed away from promised social and economic reforms, and his repressive tactics, directed not only against Communists but also against the Buddhist majority and other critics, played into the hands of his enemies.
Kennedy continued to dispatch military “advisers” to South Vietnam in the hope of stabilizing the situation (they were called advisers to avoid the impression that U.S. troops were doing the fighting). When he took office, the United States had 900 troops in Vietnam; by the end of 1963, there were 16,000, all of whom were officially classified as advisers rather than combatants. “If I tried to pull out,” Kennedy explained, “we would have another Joe McCarthy red scare on our hands,” with cold war hawks accusing him of “losing” Vietnam to communism. “We must be patient, we must persist.”
By 1963, Kennedy was receiving sharply conflicting reports from South Vietnam. U.S. military analysts expressed confidence in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. Journalists, however, predicted civil turmoil as long as Diem remained in power. By midyear, frequent Buddhist demonstrations against Diem ignited widespread discontent. The spectacle of Buddhist monks setting themselves on fire in public squares to protest government tyranny stunned Americans.
United States backs coup in South
Vietnam
By the fall of 1963, the Kennedy administration had decided that the autocratic Diem was “out of touch with his people” and had to go. On November 1, U.S.-backed
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Kennedy’s Assassination
army generals seized the South Vietnamese government but then took a step that Kennedy had neither intended nor expected: they murdered Diem and his brother.
The rebel generals, however, provided no more political stability than had Diem, and successive coups set the fragile country spinning from one military leader to another. Thereafter, unstable South Vietnam essentially became an American colony. The United States put the generals in power, gave the orders, and provided massive financial support, much of which was diverted into the hands of corrupt politicians. During that tumultuous fall of 1963, Kennedy seemed to have developed doubts about the ability of the United States to prop up the South Vietnamese government. When asked about the South Vietnamese effort to hold off Communist insurgents, he replied: “In the final analysis it’s their war. They’re the ones who have to win it or lose it. We can help them as advisers but they have to win it.”
By the fall of 1963, John F. Kennedy had matured a great deal as president. Not only had he come to understand the urgency and momentum of the civil rights movement, he also had come to see the cold war as a more complex issue than he had believed during his first year in office. In October 1963, he announced his intention to withdraw U.S. forces from South Vietnam by the end of 1965.
What Kennedy would have done thereafter in Vietnam has remained a matter of endless discussion, because on November 22, 1963, while riding at noon in an open car through Dallas, Texas, he was shot and killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, a twenty-four-year-old ex-marine turned Communist who worked in the Texas School Book Depository, from which he fired at Kennedy with a rifle. Kennedy seemed to have had a premonition of his death. “We’re heading into nut country today,” he warned his wife Jackie that morning. “But Jackie, if somebody wants to shoot me from a window with a rifle, nobody can stop it, so why worry about it?”
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Debate still swirls about whether Oswald, who had lived in the Soviet Union for a time, acted alone or was part of a conspiracy to assassinate the president, in part because Oswald did not live long enough to tell his story. As Oswald was being transported to a court hearing, Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner distraught over Kennedy’s death, shot and killed a handcuffed Oswald as a nationwide television audience watched.
Kennedy’s shocking assassination and his heartrending funeral enshrined the young president in the public imagination as a martyred leader cut down in the prime of his life. His short-lived but drama-filled presidency had flamed up and out like a comet hitting the earth’s atmosphere. Americans wept in the streets, and the world was on edge as the wounded nation welcomed a new and very different president.
PRESIDENT SHOT DEAD Commuters read the news of President Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963.