Dallek on Kennedy
With Robert Dallek, Moderated by William Leuchtenburg
John F. Kennedy Library and Foundation
Tuesday, May 20, 2003
DEBORAH LEFF: Good evening and welcome. I’m Deborah Leff, Director of the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum, and on behalf of the Library and John Shattuck, CEO of the Kennedy Library Foundation, I’d like to welcome you to this evening’s forum looking at the extraordinary life of President John F. Kennedy as viewed through the new biography by historian Robert Dallek.
I’d like to thank our Forum co-sponsors, Fleet, the Lowell Institute, and Boston Capital along with our media co-sponsors WBUR, The Boston Globe, and Boston.com. The archives of the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum include 36 million pages of documents from the collections of 340 individuals, organizations, and government agencies, oral history interviews with 1,300 people and over 30,000 books. Our audio-visual archives hold 200,000 still photographs, seven million 550 thousand feet of motion picture film, 1,200 hours of video recordings, over 7,000 hours of audio recordings and 500 original editorial cartoons.
It appears that Boston University Professor of History Robert Dallek has reviewed every one of the items in piecing together his comprehensive new biography about President Kennedy, An Unfinished Life. Professor Dallek was the co-winner of the 1980 Bancroft prize for his book Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1923 through 1945 and is also well known for his two-volume set on President Johnson, Lone Star Rising and Flawed Giant.
His distinguished career includes appointments at Oxford University and UCLA and he has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as a senior fellowship for the National Endowment for the Humanities. Joining Professor Dallek on the podium, we are delighted to have as moderator the Dean of American Political History, William Leuchtenburg. I have to tell you I had the pleasure of first meeting Professor Leuchtenburg some years ago when I was working at ABC News for Nightline and we were doing a piece on term limits and actually turned to the country’s leading FDR scholar to get his perspective.
And when I went to get it, Professor Leuchtenburg proudly pulled out his collection of FDR campaign buttons from 1940, including the memorable "No Man is Good Three Times." William Leuchtenburg is Keenan Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and winner of both the Bancroft and Parkman Prize. He is past president of the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians. He is perhaps best known for his book, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal.
We will begin tonight with comments by Professor Dallek and then a discussion between Professor Dallek and Professor Leuchtenburg and then we’ll turn to audience questions. After that, I encourage you to come back and visit our museum to learn more about the life of President Kennedy and, after the forum, Professor Dallek has graciously agreed to sign copies of his books, which are on sale in our bookstore.
Through that book, the first major biography of President Kennedy in years, we learn so much about the remarkable life that was and the life that could have been even more remarkable were it not an unfinished life. Professor Dallek.
ROBERT DALLEK: Deborah. Thank you so much for that wonderful introduction. Whenever I get a nice introduction like that, it takes me back to a time in the Soviet Union a number of years ago when I was lecturing there. And my host on that occasion, who I liked to think had an imperfect command of English, introduced my by saying, "Professor Dallek is the author of several distinguished works. They’re the kinds of books that once you put them down, you can’t pick them up again." Not music to the author’s ears.
I’ll try and talk about some of what I’ve done in this book for just some 20 minutes so that Bill will have a chance and I, too, to have a conversation. What fascinated me when I began this project was the fact that the American public sees John F. Kennedy as one of the greatest presidents in American history. Last week USA Today, the newspaper, did a poll, asking a cross-section of Americans to name the greatest presidents. Abraham Lincoln came in first, John F. Kennedy was second.
In 1990, Americans were asked to rate presidents -- give approval ratings. Kennedy came in number one with an 84% approval rating. Now historians are puzzled over this because, after all, to suggest that John Kennedy, who served but a thousand days -- his was the sixth shortest presidency in American history -- and look at the company, in a sense, he kept: William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, James Garfield, Warren Harding, Gerald Ford, no one would suggest that any of them came close to being great or even near great president.
Historians, also looking at the Kennedy record, point to his domestic initiatives. Not a single one of his major domestic initiatives passed during his thousand days in the White House. The Medicare legislation, federal aid to education, elementary, secondary education, the tax cut. None of these came forward. He wanted to have a war on poverty. He spoke about this in his closing days. Of course, it didn’t come to pass in his administration. He spoke about setting up departments of transportation, housing and urban development. It came later. Civil rights didn’t pass during his presidency.
And historians also say, well, listen, in foreign policy, was the man that great? After all, think of the Bay of Pigs operation, Mongoose. This is also the fellow who escalated the war in Vietnam, expanded American involvement from 650 advisors to 16,700. And then historians cannot help but look at the fact that there’s been a huge de-bunking campaign over the last 30 plus years. Dare I say it? They talk about the womanizing. I plead guilty that there’s been so much discussion of the man’s private transgressions.
And also, historians, journalists, and biographers, had suspicions about his medical problems, which have, of course, come much more fully to light since I had access to the medical records in the last year and a half or so. So, in general, historians, when asked, would not rank him anywhere near the top of American presidents. So the question we have to ask, I ask myself, "Why does he have such high standing? What accounts for this? Why should one think of him or should the public think of him as such a compelling presidential figure?"
I think there are a number of things that account for it. First of all, the assassination. He was martyred. But we should not forget that William McKinley was assassinated in 1901, and 40 years later hardly anybody remembers him. I think television has been enormously important in keeping his memory alive. He’s fixed in our minds at the age of 46. Nobody can imagine, I think, that at the end of this month he would have been 86 years of age. He’s simply fixed there at the age of 46.
And, also, what television conveys to us is his charm, his wit, and his intelligence. The press conferences he held, so compelling. He was such an attractive man. I guess that much over-used word, charisma. Somebody who reviewed the book in The Wall Street Journal said, "Clearly Kennedy’s charm can still work its magic, even on as levelheaded a historian as Robert Dallek."
There’s also the face. I think most importantly, maybe, that he provided a kind of hope, promise, a sense of a better future to the country. There was something more to the New Frontier than a slogan. It was a feeling, I think, that America would be a better place. The world would be more peaceful. That if he had lived out his two terms, there would have been a degree of success that would have changed American history. I think ethnic groups are still so held fast by Kennedy as president, by Kennedy the man, because I think he gave ethnics -- as the first Catholic president -- a sense of acceptance into American life.
Roosevelt brought the ethnics into his administration. But Kennedy, being president, a Harvard graduate, a war hero, a senator, then President, he made not just Catholics … because I looked at the voting records and what I found was that when he ran against Lodge for the Senate seat in 1952, it wasn’t just Irish Catholics. It was Italians. It was Jews. It was Poles. It was French Canadians. The ethnics flocked to his banner. And I think to this day there is kind of a compelling role that he has on ethnics in America.
Womanizing: it hasn’t dented his standing one bit. I think here it is a great deal like Bill Clinton. The public did not want to impeach Bill Clinton. They certainly did not want to see him driven from office. They weren’t wildly happy about it, but they made the distinction between the personal and the public, between the private and the presidential action.
As far as the medical goes, what I think the public sees is a man of extraordinary courage, that what he shouldered were these terrible medical difficulties and he soldiered through them. He had a kind of iron will. Maybe he was able to compartmentalize. I, in looking at the medical records, set them down along side of the great crises he faced as president and, in particular, the Cuban missile crisis. And what I found was that he was as lucid, as cogent, as anyone would have wished a president to be in the midst of that terrible crisis.
How he did it is quite impressive. If I had his problems, I would have been cowering in some corner with a cover over my head. But he chose to be president and he was really highly effective as far as I’m concerned. Is his high standing deserved? In many respects I think it is. Consider the domestic side. Everyone of the major pieces of legislation that Johnson put across in ’64 and ’65 -- not every one but almost all of them -- the Medicare, Civil Rights Bill, Federal Aid to Education, the tax cut, the Departments of Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, the War on Poverty, they were all Kennedy initiatives.
And I think a hundred years from now, historians will look back on the 1960s and they will see this as the Kennedy-Johnson Administration. Not simply Johnson’s Great Society, but I think they will give Kennedy credit for the fact that these bills were on his desk. If he had lived and run again in 1964, he would have won a landslide. Running against Barry Goldwater, I think he would have one a big a landslide as Lyndon Johnson did. And he would have carried the House and Senate with him by large majorities and he would have put across all those measures.
Foreign policy -- here is where he really made, I think, an exceptional record. His handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis was brilliant, nothing less than brilliant. He preserved the world from a nuclear war. The Test Ban Treaty, he fought to put this across. He told Avril Harriman not to send cables from Moscow that would reach the Pentagon. He only wanted them to come back to the White House and a very select group in the State Department. He was very worried that a select group in the White House would undercut this test ban treaty and he sort of axed them out of the procedure in order to assure that he would get this treaty passed.
Cuba -- what we see in the last three, four, five months of his presidency were back channel discussions, initiatives. He knew that his Cuban policy had been going nowhere. And he was intent now on a possible rapprochement with Castro. And Castro was interested in this, too, because the day after the Cuban Missile Crisis ended, he announced to the world that he was ready for possible talks with the United States. We don’t know. Nobody can say, definitively, but if he had lived I think there is some chance that we never would have had this kind of 40 additional years of tension with Castro’s Cuba.
Vietnam -- here I think was a vital, vital change that occurred when Kennedy was killed. He was so suspicious, so distrustful of the American military. In World War II, he wrote letters back to friends and family in which he spoke negatively about a number of the naval officers he saw in the Southwest Pacific. And then he was so burned by the Bay of Pigs operation. He felt that the CIA and the military had, so to speak, taken him into camp. He walked around afterwards saying, "How could I have been so stupid?"
And then this was further deepening his feeling of doubt by the Cuban Missile Crisis when the military are pushing him to bomb Cuba, to invade Cuba and he chose instead to, of course, rely on quarantine and diplomacy. And, of course, his initiative succeeded and helped the world avoid a nuclear holocaust.
Seven days after the Cuban missile crises, on November 5, 1962, he sent Robert McNamara a memo. There was still an invasion plan for Cuba on the table. And they were worried that Khrushchev might not follow through on his commitment to remove the missiles from Cuba. Kennedy said to McNamara, "Bob, the invasion plan is very thin. Think of the technical capacity they have. Think of the nationalistic fervor we could meet. And let’s not forget what happened with the British in the Boar War, what happened to the Russians in Finland in 1940, and what happened to us in North Korea."
He said, "We could get bogged down." Now, this is Cuba. What did he think about Vietnam? In 1962 he asked Bob McNamara to begin laying a plan to withdraw the American advisors. He was worried about Vietnam. He did not want to see it fall to Communism. And he expanded the number of advisors from 650 to 16,700. But this does not mean that he was eager to or ready to Americanize the war. I find no better evidence of this than the way in which he was dealing with the American press corps in Saigon. Lyndon Johnson came to hate the press corps because they were demoralizing the war effort, he felt.
Kennedy, by contrast, saw the press corps as quite aggressive about urging a wider, more substantial and more effective role of the United States in preserving the Diem government in Saigon. They were writing stories highly critical of American policy, of the failure to assure the South Vietnam was not going to turn into a Communist country. Kennedy was worried that they could push the Vietnam issue on to the front pages of the newspapers. He asked that David Halberstam be removed from Saigon. The New York Times, of course, would not do it, justifiably, understandably.
But he was worried that Halberstam and The New York Times was going to make such an issue of this that he would feel under tremendous pressure to expand the war. What he knew, of course, was that if you look at the Gallup polls in 1961, ’62, ’63 there was not a single Gallup poll that I could find on Vietnam. The first Gallup poll I found was in April of 1964 after the Rolling Thunder campaign. The bombing of Vietnam had been started by Johnson. And the public was asked, "Do you know anything about Vietnam?" Only 37% said they were paying attention to Vietnam.
A year later in the spring of 1965, after Johnson -- it was in ’65 that he began the bombing -- after he had begun the bombing, spring of ’65, people were asked, "What do you think will be the outcome in Vietnam in five years?" Only 22% said they thought there would be a pro-American government. Forty-five percent said they thought it would be a neutralist set-up government or a pro-Communist government. This is the spring of ’65. In the summer of ’65, the majority of Americans were not intent on a victory in Vietnam. They thought that the outcome would, at best, be something like Korea, a kind of stalemate.
What I am saying to you is that, if Kennedy had lived, not only would he have put across, I think, those domestic measures that were on his agenda, but I think he would have had the opportunity to reduce American involvement in Vietnam and maybe even to end it. Please understand me. I’m not saying that John Kennedy, having his second term, living out his presidency for eight years would have brought utopia to America. There would have been problems, other problems. There always are problems. But we wouldn’t have had Johnson. We wouldn’t have had the credibility gap. We wouldn’t have had, I think, the extent to which we became involved in the Vietnam War. We wouldn’t have had Richard Nixon. We wouldn’t have had Watergate. And I think it would have been a much less cynical, in some ways politically alienated America than the country we now have.
So does a man make a difference? I think so. Does a president count? Yes, in very important ways. And the tragedy of Kennedy’s loss is that I think we lost a better future when he was gunned down in Dallas. So let me stop here and have Bill ask some questions, I guess.
carmelo pugliatti