American Experience (1988) s26e03 Episode Script

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NARRATOR:
The biggest day of John
Kennedy's life to date,
Inauguration Day, 1961,
dawned gray and frigid.
700 trucks were already
out on the streets,
clearing eight inches
of new-fallen snow
from the east front
of the Capitol.
As the skies began to clear,
20,000 spectators crowded in
to await Kennedy's arrival,
and the news professionals
hauled a bouquet of cameras
onto a temporary structure
rising high above
the other onlookers.
EARL WARREN:
You, John Fitzgerald Kennedy,
do solemnly swear.
I, John Fitzgerald Kennedy,
do solemnly swear.
That you will faithfully execute
the office of president
of the United States.
That I will faithfully execute
the office of president
of the United States.
It was bitterly cold,
and Kennedy made sure,
even though nobody knew he was
wearing thermal underwear,
he made sure that he would
take off his topcoat.
He could show somebody
who was vital and young.
So help you God.
So help me God.
(crowd applauds)
ROBERT DALLEK:
When Eisenhower left,
at that juncture
he was the oldest man
in the country's history
to have served
in the White House.
Kennedy coming in
was the youngest man
to ever have been elected.
And so Kennedy wants
to underscore that.
He wants to emphasize
the new, the innovative.
Let the word go forth
from this time and place,
to friend and foe alike,
that the torch has been passed
to a new generation
of Americans,
born in this century.
RICHARD REEVES:
Kennedy understood something
that is not so obvious,
and that is that words
are more important than deeds.
You can't govern
300 million people,
or 180 million when Kennedy
was president, by doing things.
You can only do it by rhetoric.
NARRATOR:
President Kennedy was talking
to Americans that day,
and to the world.
He meant to reassure
historic allies
and to exalt the virtues
of democracy
for new governments emerging in
Africa, Asia and the Americas.
He also had a direct
and pointed message
for Soviet leader
Nikita Khrushchev.
(crowd applauds)
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 the success of liberty.
JULIAN BOND:
There was enormous optimism.
He was young, personable,
attractive.
He appeared to be friendly and
disposed toward people of color.
And so there's great hopes
that new things would happen.
KATHLEEN KENNEDY TOWNSEND:
His inaugural speech was
how we as a nation
are going to be great.
The New Frontier.
He was willing
to challenge people.
And I think each one of us
wants to be challenged.
We want to think that
our life has a mission.
And he understood that
and reached out to it.
And so, my fellow Americans,
ask not what your country
can do for you,
ask what you can do
for your country.
(crowd applauds)
(lively big band music playing)
NARRATOR:
The new first couple
glided through
a half-dozen ceremonials,
including a gala produced
by the president's friend
Frank Sinatra
showcasing the brilliant sparkle
of American celebrity.
Jacqueline Kennedy wore white
gowns to almost every event:
her choice.
A cottage small
is all I'm after ♪
Not one that's spacious
and wide ♪
NARRATOR:
Inside the gala and the balls,
among the colorful
and garish gowns,
Mrs. Kennedy stood apart.
Some like the high road,
I like the low road ♪
BEDELL SMITH:
Jackie once said that she would
like to envision herself
as a sort of art director
of the 20th century,
suspended in a chair
over everything else
and orchestrating
how everything would look.
Everything was a scene
to be staged.
REEVES:
People suddenly see
this glamorous young couple
from the upper class,
who are almost impeccable
in everything they do in public,
and we want to be like them.
This is the new America.
When the saints
come marching in! ♪
(applause)
NARRATOR:
If his youth gave him pause,
John Kennedy didn't show it.
He appeared to be fearless.
He ignored anyone who said
it was too dangerous
for a president to speak
off the cuff
and held the first
live televised press conferences
in the White House.
He would keep them up
throughout his presidency.
REPORTER:
Congressman Alger
of Texas today
criticized Mr. Salinger
as a, quote,
"Young and inexperienced White
House publicity man," end quote.
(crowd laughing)
And he questioned
the advisability
of having him visit
the Soviet Union.
I wonder if you have
any comments.
I know there are always
some people
who feel that Americans are
always young and inexperienced
and foreigners are always able
and tough and great negotiators.
Now he also, as I saw the press,
said that Mr. Salinger's
main job
was to increase my standing
in the Gallup polls.
Having done that,
he's now moving on
(crowd laughing)
to improve our communication.
BEDELL SMITH:
Jack Kennedy did have
what he called the "great man"
theory of governing.
And he felt that a leader
with the requisite intelligence
and persuasive powers,
which included charm, I suppose,
could have an impact.
And he tried to model himself
along the lines of leaders
that he admired
who had had that kind of impact.
NARRATOR:
John Fitzgerald Kennedy
demonstrated that this was
his presidency from the start.
He appointed Republicans
to head the Department of State,
Treasury, Defense and the CIA,
and when progressive Democrats
complained, he waved them off.
He also waved off critics
who said that his 35-year-old
brother, Bobby,
was too inexperienced
and named him attorney general.
He peopled his White House staff
with brainy and confident
young men,
and he wasn't shy
about taking charge.
EVAN THOMAS:
The Kennedys were part
of that faith, that belief,
born of the New Deal,
of winning World War II,
this sense that
America's time had come.
We had the best,
the brightest, the smartest,
and if you just get enough
of those guys in one room,
everything will be clear
and all problems will be solved.
There was sort of a gleeful
amateurism to them,
this faith that if you're smart
and vigorous and aggressive
and ambitious, well,
things will follow.
This was a dangerous formula,
I should say,
but it was attractive
at the time.
The system he worked out
was kind of a spoke and wheel
so that he was in the center,
he was the hub,
and out to the spokes
were the State Department,
the national security adviser,
whatever.
And to get to each other,
they had to go through him.
BEDELL SMITH:
In a way, it was quite
improvisational.
And he encouraged
a lot of clashing ideas.
He would sometimes give the same
assignment to different people
and see what they came up with.
TIMOTHY NAFTALI:
He wasn't bringing people
together in a room
to hammer out a consensus.
He was bringing people in a room
to give him the best information
so that he could make
the decision.
The problem with this system
was it depended on the president
asking the right questions.
If the president was
distracted or tired,
the system wasn't going
to work well.
KENNEDY (on tape):
Why does a politician
continually raise his sights,
and leave a job
that represented complete
satisfaction at one time
for a higher position?
Question. Paragraph.
Part of the reason lies
in the normal desire
to move ahead, comma,
perhaps a more important part
lies in the recognition
that, uh, that
a greater opportunity
to determine the direction
in which the nation will go
lies in higher office.
I've come to understand
that the presidency
is the ultimate source
of action.
(Dictaphone clicks off)
NARRATOR:
There was a lot
on the young president's plate
when he stepped into office:
a weak economy, a trade deficit,
ominous stirrings
in the civil rights movement.
Kennedy wasn't pushing hard
on his domestic agenda.
He wanted federal investment
in education,
a minimum wage bill,
maybe guaranteed health care
for the elderly.
Memorandum to David Bell,
Bureau of the Budget
NARRATOR:
What truly engaged John Kennedy
at the beginning of 1961
was the increasing
Soviet menace.
Like most Americans,
the president was worried
engagement with the Russians
might spark a hot war
or nuclear catastrophe.
But Kennedy did not want
to appear afraid
to face down Nikita Khrushchev.
The soviet premier
was making noises
about annexing
democratic West Berlin
and actively aiding
anti-colonial movements
in the Congo, Laos and Vietnam.
Khrushchev was even making
a play in America's backyard.
He had been an ardent supporter
of Fidel Castro
in the two years since
the revolutionary
had taken power in Cuba,
just 90 miles
from the U.S. mainland.
THOMAS HUGHES:
Khrushchev,
as a kind of inauguration
present for Kennedy,
had given his big speech about
national wars of liberation
being the future extension
of Communist influence.
Kennedy made everybody
read this.
It was required reading
in the first weeks
of the administration.
Kennedy definitely bought this
idea of Communism on the march,
that we were in this
twilight struggle,
that we had to face off against
the Communists everywhere,
that it was this almost
sacred duty to face up
against the Communist menace.
Eisenhower's formula had always
been all or nothing:
face off against the Communists
and say,
"We're going to go
to nuclear war or nothing."
Kennedy thought
the smarter thing to do
was to be willing
to fight small wars.
It was called
"flexible response."
The idea was you can't just
threaten nuclear war every time.
Kennedy bought into this idea
that you could fight small wars,
win them,
check Communism that way.
NARRATOR:
In early April 1961,
just a few months
into Kennedy's presidency,
Nikita Khrushchev announced
the latest Soviet triumph:
the first manned flight
into space.
Kennedy watched as the Soviets
heralded their stunning
achievement to the world,
just as he was deciding
whether or not to execute
the most aggressive anti-
Communist plot available to him:
the takedown of Khrushchev's
only real ally
in the Western Hemisphere.
The plan for an armed overthrow
of Fidel Castro in Cuba
was a holdover from the
Eisenhower administration.
More than 1,000 U.S.-sponsored
Cuban exiles
were already in Guatemala
training for the invasion
when Kennedy took office.
At a meeting the day
before his inauguration,
Kennedy had spent little time
asking the outgoing president
about Cuba
and walked away with the idea
that prospects for success
were good,
that national security
required action.
THOMAS:
They were a little bit
ships passing in the night
when they met at the White House
in December
and then in January 1960, '61.
And it's too bad.
They needed to have a better
conversation than they did.
Eisenhower should have said
to Kennedy,
"Hey, take it easy on this.
"Make sure you really talk
to the generals
before you invade Cuba."
But he didn't.
This really was a CIA operation.
And there was a man named
Richard Bissell
who ran Covert Operations
at the CIA.
Very ambitious, very aggressive,
wanted to be head of the CIA,
was basically banking on success
in Cuba carrying him there.
And what Bissell was selling
was the invasion of Cuba,
that they were going
to get rid of Castro,
but also a whole world
of covert action:
that by subterfuge,
the United States
could get its way in the world.
And the Kennedys fell
for Dick Bissell.
The only National Security
Council meeting that I attended
was the meeting at which
the president discussed
the Bay of Pigs.
And I remember Allen Dulles,
the director of the CIA,
said that once
the invasion began,
there would be
a national uprising.
There was absolutely
no doubt in his mind,
nor, I think,
as we left that day,
in the president's mind,
that once the invasion
was underway,
that there would be a popular
uprising among the Cuban people.
REEVES:
Kennedy had a real respect
for the people
in the intelligence agency
and made the obvious assumption
they knew what they were doing.
NARRATOR:
The president wanted to believe
he could have it both ways.
He hoped to overthrow Castro
without leaving behind
American fingerprints
and without poking a finger
in Khrushchev's eye.
THOMAS:
Kennedy does have some qualms
about the invasion plan.
It's a little bit too loud
and noisy, as they say,
and he wants to tone it down.
So like a politician,
he looks for a compromise.
"I want something quieter.
"I want you to go on a beach,
"in an area which is far away
from an urban center,
"so that this is not picked up.
"Set up a camp on Cuban soil
"and then establish
a government there,
"and make the government there
responsible for air attacks
"so that it's viewed
as the Cubans
"Okay, we're helping the Cubans,
"but it is ultimately the Cubans
fighting for the Cubans.
Can you do that?"
"Yes, Mr. President."
THOMAS:
The fact that the military's
signing off on it just means
what they're really saying is,
"This is a CIA operation.
It's their problem if it fails."
Kennedy is not
sophisticated enough,
not experienced enough
to understand that.
ANNOUNCER:
The assault has begun on the
dictatorship of Fidel Castro.
Cuban Army pilots opened the
first phase of organized revolt
with bombing raids
on three military bases
NARRATOR:
The invasion unraveled
from the start.
The initial air campaign
on April 15, 1961,
was a disaster,
and a very public one.
ANNOUNCER:
In Havana, acting
foreign minister Olivares
shows diplomats rockets fired
from the Cuban raiders
which he claims
have U.S. markings.
NARRATOR:
Kennedy sent
his ambassador to the U.N.
to make a hasty and formal
denial of U.S. involvement
in the initial air strikes.
ADLAI STEVENSON:
The United States has committed
no aggression against Cuba
and no offensive
has been launched from Florida
or from any other part
of the United States.
NARRATOR:
By the time the American-trained
and equipped invasion force
began its cruise toward
the tiny Caribbean island
the following day,
the coup in Cuba was
a poorly kept secret.
MICHAEL DOBBS:
The exiles landed in small boats
at the Bay of Pigs,
which is a very remote part of
Cuba, not near any town at all.
The Cuban authorities
had heard about the invasion,
and they were able to surround
this exile force very quickly,
isolate them
and begin to massacre them,
kill them, capture them.
And that put the president
in a very difficult position.
Either he had to commit
U.S. forces
to rescue this abortive
invasion force
or he had to deny
all connection with it.
NARRATOR:
While the remaining Cuban
exile force dug in,
the CIA and the military begged
Kennedy to commit more troops,
or at least okay
powerful air strikes
in support of the invaders
on that beachhead.
The president demurred.
NAFTALI:
The facts on the ground
got worse and worse and worse
for the exiles who had invaded
with U.S. support.
It was a total disaster.
NARRATOR:
There was no popular
uprising in Cuba.
Castro bragged about
his stunning defiance
of the United States.
His popularity in Cuba soared.
Nikita Khrushchev
wagged his finger
at the new American president,
who had been defeated
and caught
in an embarrassing lie.
Of the 1,400 Cuban exiles
who made the attack,
1,200 were killed or captured.
Many of the survivors were
headed for firing squads.
NASAW:
The Bay of Pigs is the low point
not only of the Kennedy
presidency
but maybe of any presidency.
As Jackie says,
she had never seen her husband
as distraught, as defeated.
She caught him a couple of times
just weeping.
This is a decision-making
that depended on the guy
in the middle
asking the right questions
and getting the right answers,
and it failed.
And he knew who was at fault.
He was pretty depressed,
sitting in his office, saying,
"How could I be so stupid?
Why did I listen
to those people?"
NASAW:
And as the days went on,
he didn't feel better.
He couldn't get himself
out of this depression,
he couldn't rouse himself.
At one point, Bobby came
to Jack in the Oval Office
and said, "Let's call Dad.
He'll make us feel better."
THOMAS:
Right after the Bay of Pigs,
Kennedy calls
President Eisenhower
and asks to meet him
at Camp David.
And Kennedy says,
"What went wrong?"
And President Eisenhower
starts quizzing him.
He said, "Now, when you met
about this,
"did you meet in a big group
and have a true back-and-forth,
"or did you meet with people
alone, one on one,
and not really have
a full debate?"
And it comes out in this meeting
that Kennedy never really talked
to the generals
about what they really thought.
And Eisenhower kind of shakes
his head and says, "You know,
next time, you're going to have
to do better, Mr. President."
DALLEK:
It humbled him,
but most important,
it made him deeply skeptical
of taking advice at face value
from people who were supposed
to be experts
in the military,
in the intelligence community,
in the CIA.
And he realized he had to make
critical evaluations
of what people were telling him,
and he had to be skeptical.
He decided to set in motion
really a revival
of his administration,
and it leads him to decide
to do the sort of unprecedented:
to have a second
State of the Union speech.
Kennedy's trying to revive
his presidency
after the Bay of Pigs.
HUGHES:
Kennedy was always being
confronted at the wrong time
with the wrong problem.
And he regards all these things
as terrible,
competitive distractions.
REEVES:
He learned about
the Freedom Riders
when he got his New York Times
that particular morning,
and there was a picture
of the bus burning
in Anniston, Alabama.
And his response was,
"What the hell is this?"
NARRATOR:
In mid-May 1961,
a group of Americans
trying to focus attention
on the illegal segregation
of interstate bus lines
in the South
ran into more resistance
than they'd expected.
White supremacists in Alabama
had firebombed one passenger bus
the protesters were on
and beaten them bloody.
John Kennedy was ten days away
from a major address
to Congress;
he was also busy preparing
for his historic summit
with Nikita Khrushchev,
which was just three weeks away.
He didn't want
America's race problems
to be splashed
all over the press of the world,
and therefore, out of the blue,
learning about it,
I answer his call on the phone
when he suddenly discovers
the Freedom Riders
are riding into danger.
And he said, "Get your friends
off those buses.
Find a way to stop it."
JULIAN BOND:
There's a feeling that
the Kennedy administration
wants to treat the civil rights
movement generally,
the Freedom Riders particularly,
as an irritant.
"These are people getting
in our way.
"These are people upsetting
our plans.
"These are people
who are taking attention away
from what we want to do."
REEVES:
At that time,
a Democratic president
was totally at the mercy
of Southern Democrats.
They ran the Congress.
And they were segregationists.
And he did not want to lose
control of Congress
over, you know,
a few black kids.
NAFTALI:
That was the battle in 1961
he didn't want to fight.
And the president
and Robert Kennedy
reacted to this by saying,
"Not now."
It's politically understandable,
but historically,
it's inexcusable.
NARRATOR:
Kennedy was wary of sending
federal troops
to protect the Freedom Riders;
he knew it would inflame
white Southern Democrats.
Justice Department officials
called the protest leaders
and warned them that
the United States government
could not assure their safety
if they continued
and asked them to stand down.
BOND:
The optimism that had enveloped
the Kennedys, I think,
from Election Day forward
began to diminish,
and it kept going down and down
and down and down and down.
NARRATOR:
The Freedom Riders refused
to suspend their campaign,
though they held out little hope
of federal protection.
"This goddamn civil rights
mess," Kennedy complained.
He tried to satisfy both sides.
He sent his attorney general
brother out to make statements
chastising both the Freedom
Riders and their attackers.
He dispatched
a Justice Department aide,
a Southerner
named John Seigenthaler,
to try to keep a lid
on the situation
and to explain
to local authorities
that it was their duty
to protect the protesters
from the white mobs.
This assignment landed
Seigenthaler in a parking lot
of the Montgomery bus station,
where the local police
refused to stand
between the Freedom Riders
and a group of armed
and angry segregationists.
SEIGENTHALER:
There were people there that day
who would have killed those kids
just because they were black.
I mean, they were intent
on maiming
and crippling and killing.
I think the violence visited
on the Freedom Riders
that day in that Greyhound
parking lot in Montgomery
shattered those hopes
that the administration
could somehow navigate
through the troubled waters
of race in the South.
Certainly they understood that
there were going to be problems.
But this was one that required
federal intervention;
this was one that required
sending in 400 marshals
one afternoon.
And once that was done,
the idea that you were
going to be able
to navigate
those troubled waters,
you realized that was probably
a false hope.
(applause)
NARRATOR:
Once the federal marshals
were in place in Alabama,
Kennedy changed the subject
from civil rights.
When he addressed a rare
joint session of Congress
four days later,
the president mentioned
civil rights only glancingly.
He would not say a single word
about the Freedom Riders.
"These are extraordinary times,"
Kennedy explained,
"and we need to keep our eye
on the most important issue:
the global struggle
for freedom."
KENNEDY:
The great battleground
for the defense and expansion
of freedom today
is the whole southern half
of the globe:
Asia, Latin America, Africa
and the Middle East,
the lands of the rising people.
Their revolution is the greatest
in human history.
NARRATOR:
To promote the cause
of democracy around the world,
he asked young Americans to join
the newly formed Peace Corps,
and he asked Congress for money
to aid emerging nations.
He also called for a bold
new move into the heavens.
KENNEDY:
Finally, if we are
to win the battle
that is now going on
around the world
between freedom and tyranny,
the dramatic achievements
in space
which occurred in recent weeks
should have made clear
to us all,
as did the Sputnik in 1957,
the impact of this adventure
on the minds of men everywhere
who are attempting to make
a determination
of which road they should take.
I believe that this nation
should commit itself
to achieving the goal,
before this decade is out,
of landing a man on the Moon
and returning him safely
to the earth.
NARRATOR:
The moon-shot had less to do
with science and discovery
than it did with projecting
to the Soviets American resolve.
Kennedy was scheduled to take
his first overseas trip
within a week of that address
to Paris, Vienna and London.
The most important leg
was Vienna,
where the president
would be meeting face-to-face
with Nikita Khrushchev.
Kennedy was very confident
of his own charm and whatnot,
and he expected
he could seduce Khrushchev.
SALINGER:
The President
and Chairman Khrushchev
understand that this meeting
is not for the purpose
of negotiating
or reaching agreement
on the major international
problems
NARRATOR:
Kennedy had a big agenda
in Vienna.
He wanted to persuade Khrushchev
to back off in West Berlin,
to join him in decelerating
weapons programs,
and to suspend nuclear testing.
SALINGER
and a general exchange
of views on the major issues
which affect the relationships
between the two countries.
NARRATOR:
The nuclear stand-down was the
president's highest priority.
DALLEK:
Kennedy had a meeting with his
chiefs early in his presidency
in which they describe to him
the plans for a nuclear war
in which they would kill
175 million people,
devastate every major city
in the Soviet Union and China.
And as he walks out of the room,
he turns to Dean Rusk
and he says,
"And we call ourselves
the human race."
If there was anything
that horrified him
in that presidency,
it was the thought of having
to pull that nuclear trigger.
ANNOUNCER:
Paris, the city of light,
outdoes itself in the warmth
and splendor of its welcome
to President and Mrs. Kennedy,
here en route to the fateful
Vienna meeting
with Soviet Premier Khrushchev.
French president de Gaulle,
remarkably relaxed and cordial,
greets the visiting Americans
BEDELL SMITH:
There was a great deal
of interest in that first trip.
Jackie understood this.
She studied very hard.
She studied State Department
documents.
She hired a tutor
to brush up her French.
And when they arrived in Paris,
people went wild.
(applause)
I do not, uh, think it
altogether inappropriate
to introduce myself
to this audience.
I am the man who accompanied
Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris,
and I've enjoyed it.
(laughter and applause)
NARRATOR:
The success of the sit-down
with Khrushchev in Vienna
was up to the president himself.
There were two long days
of meetings on the schedule,
and Kennedy's serious health
problems had flared again.
Kennedy had wrenched his back
on a trip to Canada
several weeks
before they went to Paris
and was in a lot of pain,
more pain than usual.
He had enlisted the services
of a controversial doctor.
REEVES:
Max Jacobson, Dr. Feelgood,
who was unofficially his doctor,
was flown over with his wife,
the only two passengers
on a chartered plane.
And then they were kept
in the hotel
where the Secret Service was
so that the more
mainstream doctors
wouldn't know that Kennedy
was being pumped up.
DALLEK:
Bobby Kennedy
cautioned his brother
against letting this guy,
who some said was a quack,
letting him shoot him up
with these kinds of painkillers,
and uh, "Do you know
what's in these injections?"
And Jack said, "I don't care
if it's dog piss.
It makes me feel better."
BEDELL SMITH:
A half-hour before he was due
to meet with Khrushchev,
Kennedy summoned him to his room
and asked him to give him
a big injection,
because he knew he was going
to be faced
with a long meeting
with Khrushchev
and he wanted to be able
to withstand that length of time
without suffering
the kind of back pain
that he had been enduring.
NARRATOR:
Dr. Feelgood's cocktails
were a potent mix of painkillers
and amphetamines.
Nobody but Jackie and Bobby knew
about the injections,
and nobody on the staff
suspected.
HUGHES:
Despite all the briefings
about what a crude,
emotional peasant
Khrushchev was,
Kennedy couldn't
have been prepared
for what he was up against.
Khrushchev thought of him
as young, weak, ineffective,
and probably a pushover.
And Kennedy
defended himself limply.
NAFTALI:
Khrushchev wanted Vienna
to be humiliating
for the American president.
That was the goal.
There was nothing that Kennedy
could say or do at Vienna
that would have derailed
Khrushchev's strategy.
Kennedy walked into an ambush.
What he hopes to do is work out
some kind of accommodation
with Khrushchev over Berlin.
The Soviets are chagrined
by the fact that Berlin
is a corridor of escape
for people from the Eastern
European satellite countries;
that they're running
out of there,
fleeing Eastern Europe,
where Communism is in control,
to go to the West.
And Khrushchev
is embarrassed by this.
NARRATION
The Soviet premier
was matter-of-fact
in his presentation
to Kennedy about Berlin.
He was ready to unify the city
under the control of his ally
East Germany
and to erase any U.S.
and NATO presence in the city.
DALLEK:
By the end of the meeting,
Khrushchev says,
"We're going forward.
You press us,
that's your problem."
And Kennedy said, "It's going
to be a very cold winter."
DOBBS:
Khrushchev talked
about nuclear weapons
in a very informal way
that worried Kennedy.
Kennedy, when he came out
of that meeting with Khrushchev,
was really shaken.
I will tell you now that it was
a very sober two days.
There was no discourtesy,
no loss of tempers,
no threats or ultimatums
by either side,
no advantage or concession
was either gained or given,
no major decision was either
planned or taken.
No spectacular progress was
either achieved or pretended.
NAFTALI:
He assumed certain things
about Khrushchev
that proved to be wrong.
"If this guy doesn't share
my concern about nuclear danger,
how am I going to deal with him
over Europe?"
There was no ground that
he could see for compromise,
and that left Kennedy
in a very dangerous situation.
It left the country
in a dangerous situation.
NARRATOR:
The president found it
increasingly difficult
to read Nikita Khrushchev
in the months after Vienna.
The Soviet leader
kept Kennedy off balance.
He backed off on his Berlin
threat, building a wall
around the Soviet-controlled
sector of the city
to stem the flood of defectors,
but leaving in place
the post-war agreements
between East and West.
Then, in spite of Kennedy's
direct warnings,
he restarted
Soviet nuclear testing.
(explosion)
NAFTALI:
Khrushchev's decision to resume
testing in summer of 1961
Not just any kind of testing;
he decided to detonate
the largest bomb
ever detonated before
Put Kennedy
in a difficult position.
He has many advisers
who are arguing,
"You've got to resume testing,"
and he doesn't want to do it.
And he keeps putting it off,
hoping that something
will happen
in the negotiations
with the Soviets.
"The nuclear scientists are
arguing that you need to do it.
"We're going to make bombs
better and more effective,
more efficient."
It's the time when they start
thinking about a neutron bomb.
And Kennedy is much less
interested in all of that
than he is in trying
to keep the world away
from the brink of nuclear war.
NARRATOR:
Kennedy believed
he had to show strength,
and asking Congress
to fund an increasing buildup
of military capability and
weapons systems wasn't enough.
He decided to make a stand
in a country in Southeast Asia
few Americans
had ever heard of: Vietnam.
The Communist-backed Viet Cong
appeared to be winning there.
DALLEK:
There were people urging Kennedy
to understand
that if the Viet Cong guerrillas
succeed in South Vietnam,
it's going to be seen as a model
for guerrilla warfare
in other developing nations.
And so beating back
this insurgency
not only saves Vietnam
from Communism,
but it's going to discourage
the guerrilla campaigns
in other Third World countries.
Having suffered setbacks and not
ousting Castro from Cuba,
having sort of lost the debate,
so to speak,
in Vienna with Khrushchev,
being under the gun
in relation to Berlin,
he feels he can't
step aside on Vietnam,
however marginal it may be
in his own mind
and in the minds of some others
telling him that
this piece of territory
is not all that important
to America's strategic security.
NARRATOR:
Kennedy was wary of being drawn
into another debacle
like Bay of Pigs.
He asked the secretary
of defense, Robert McNamara,
and his only trusted military
adviser, General Maxwell Taylor,
to give him a reasonable plan.
He wanted them to assess
the U.S.'s chosen ally there,
President Ngo Dinh Diem,
to determine the popularity of
his South Vietnamese government
and the strength
of his military.
He asked brother Bobby
to stay in the loop, too.
NAFTALI:
Maxwell Taylor
and Robert McNamara
lay out for Kennedy in late 1961
a set of proposals
to manage the problem
in South Vietnam,
and that involves
sending troops.
The understanding is that
those troops
will not engage in combat.
Kennedy wanted it to be
South Vietnam
fighting South Vietnam's war,
with American help.
THOMAS:
And the idea is
that guerrilla fighters
are going to win the hearts
and minds of the populace
against the Communists,
that they're going
to fight fire with fire,
they're going to fight dirty
if they have to,
but they're also going to build
schools and hospitals.
And the Green Berets get started
in the military.
The regular military doesn't
really like this very much,
but Bobby Kennedy likes it and
the Kennedys generally like it,
and they go to demonstrations
of Green Berets
swinging from the branches
and jumping from trees.
And it becomes a kind of fad,
but really informs
our early Vietnam policy.
We would go in there
to fight a guerrilla war.
His preference is to use
covert action and the CIA
to build up allies in a state
and let them fight
the overt military conflict.
Kennedy was on the forefront
of believing that
these paramilitary activities
were a better use of force
and American special forces
officers could help as advisers.
HUGHES:
The more Kennedy talked
about counterinsurgency
in his press conferences,
and the more the line was set
that the Russian challenge was
going to be informal warfare,
the more everybody sort of
climbed on board that boat.
Bobby had a green beret on his
desk in the Justice Department
to symbolize where our hearts
and minds were.
NARRATOR:
The pressures of the presidency
were taking a heavy toll
on Kennedy's health.
He required as many
as seven injections of Novocaine
in his back in a single day
and was still often unable
to bend over
to put on his own socks.
He was on codeine, demerol
and methadone for pain,
corticosteroids to control
his Addison's disease,
paregoric for his bad digestion.
He sometimes needed Nembutal
to help him sleep.
His nights were often long
and uncomfortable.
When the 44-year-old president
was feeling down
or awake and pacing
in the middle of the night,
he would pick up the phone
and call New York or Palm Beach
or Hyannisport
and hear the friendly voice
of Joe Sr.
BEDELL SMITH:
He didn't intrude
on specific policies,
but the fact that he was there,
that he could share
his experience
and his point of view
was very important to Jack.
And in December of 1961,
he had a debilitating stroke
and never regained
his power of speech.
Kennedy would continue
to call him on the phone
and would sort of fill him in
on events and people
and things that were happening,
but all that he heard
at the other end of the line
were sort of guttural grunts
in reply.
When somebody proposed
writing a book
about the first Kennedy year,
he said,
"Why would anybody want to write
a book about disasters?
"I've lost Bay of Pigs.
"I had a terrible confrontation
with Khrushchev in Vienna.
The Berlin Wall went up."
He sees his first year as
a pretty miserable experience,
and there's no significant gain
that he can point to
either on the domestic
or the foreign scene.
And so he's badly frustrated.
NARRATOR:
She didn't talk much
or give speeches.
Politics unnerved her.
She was shy to begin with
and unsure how to find
common ground
with most of her fellow
Americans.
But once Jacqueline Kennedy
settled in as first lady,
she came to appreciate
the singular advantage
of life in the White House:
she could be walled away
from the general run of voters
and still satisfy
their hunger for her.
Jackie was a great student
of 18th and 19th century Europe,
and she really set out to create
a kind of court
in the White House.
Her dress designer,
Oleg Cassini, even said
that she wanted to create
a Versailles in Washington,
and part of that was not only
to project elegance,
but it was also
to kind of raise the game
and put a premium on celebrating
beauty, first of all,
and a level of intellectual
engagement,
and celebrating artists
and writers and performers
in ways that hadn't been done
certainly in the Eisenhower
administration.
NARRATOR:
John Kennedy's taste
ran more to political biography
and spy novels,
Sinatra and show tunes.
So Jackie learned
to strike hard bargains,
like the time the president
sent his press secretary,
Pierre Salinger, to ask her
to attend a publicity event
he couldn't make.
Salinger failed.
Jack Kennedy said, "I'll try."
He went up.
He was upstairs for 20 minutes,
and he came back down and said
she was going to do it.
And Salinger said,
"What did you have to give her?
A new dress?"
And he said, "Worse than that.
Two symphonies."
NARRATOR:
Jackie Kennedy spent
much of her time and energy
in the first year
restoring the White House.
She raised more than a million
dollars for the project,
hired an expert on American
antiquities and decorative arts
along with her favorite
interior designer from Paris,
and remade the stodgy old pile.
Her passion for the project
was evident,
which Dr. Martin Luther King
learned when a Kennedy aide,
Harris Wofford, sneaked him
into the private residence
for a meeting
with the president.
WOFFORD:
Kennedy had to tell King
that there would be no effort
to get a civil rights bill
through the first Congress,
and it was a great concern
as to how King would take this.
And we got in the elevator
to go up,
and it went down instead,
and Jacqueline Kennedy got on,
in jeans and soot on her face.
And I introduced her
to Dr. King, and she said,
"Oh, Dr. King,
"I just wish you had been in the
basement with me this morning
"looking at Andrew Jackson
furniture.
You would have been thrilled
down there."
And we got off, and she said,
"But you have other things
to talk to Jack about, I know."
And I thought to myself,
"She sounded a little wacky.
A little bit charming,
but wacky."
King was completely
mellowed by it.
He said, "My, wasn't that
something?"
NARRATOR:
The first lady was so pleased
with the results
that she agreed to unveil
her handiwork
to the American people
in an hour-long
television special:
"A Tour of the White House
with Mrs. John F. Kennedy."
Mrs. Kennedy,
I want to thank you
for letting us visit
your official home.
This is obviously the room
from which much of your work
on it is directed.
Yes, it's attic and cellar
all in one.
BEDELL SMITH:
She prepared assiduously
for the day of shooting.
The shooting took seven hours.
There were eight cameras.
The producer, Perry Wolff,
was amused that between takes,
she smoked almost nonstop.
And he saw that
every time she smoked,
she took her cigarette
and she dumped the ash
on the beautiful tapestry bench
that she was sitting on.
But she performed impeccably.
CHARLES COLLINGWOOD:
Mrs. Kennedy,
do you spend a great deal
of time in the Lincoln Room?
We did in the beginning.
It was where we lived
when we first came here,
when our rooms at the other end
of the hall were being painted.
I loved living in this room.
It's on the sunny side
of the house,
and one of Andrew Jackson's
magnolia trees
is right outside the window.
BEDELL SMITH:
That night, Perry Wolff
stayed around
and showed them some
of the early rushes.
And when the lights came up,
Perry Wolff told me that
he looked over at Jack
and he saw a look of pure
adoration and admiration.
NARRATOR:
Wolff would later recall
sitting behind the couple
in the darkness,
watching Jacqueline
in an unguarded moment
rest her head
on her husband's shoulder
as they watched her performance.
"There was an exchange
of affection," Wolff noted,
"that belied many of the stories
I had heard."
DALLEK:
The fact of the matter is
that even though he loves her,
it doesn't deter him
from having affairs.
THOMAS:
John F. Kennedy, for all
his many, many qualities,
was reckless
about his womanizing.
It's a long list
of all different kinds:
society matrons, 19-year-olds
I mean, it just went on and on.
BEDELL SMITH:
He was abetted
by two of his closest aides,
Ken O'Donnell and Dave Powers.
And also, most of the people
who covered the White House
in the press were well aware
that Kennedy was engaging
in private sexual escapades
in the White House,
in Palm Springs,
in Malibu, in New York,
and even during one
of his summit meetings
with Prime Minister
Harold Macmillan in Nassau.
NARRATOR:
Kennedy could be frank and
self-aware about his behavior.
Once, when a friend asked why he
took the risk, he said simply,
"I guess it's because
I just can't help it."
You didn't raise the question
of the Kennedy women
anywhere around, I mean,
although everybody knew
what was going on.
The press was totally
compliant with this,
and Kennedy felt he could
depend upon them all.
NAFTALI:
There was a code
among the political press
not to speak of it,
partly because it was
mutual assured destruction.
Everybody had a secret.
It wasn't that everyone had
decided that this didn't matter.
It was simply that everybody
had dirt on everybody else.
And Kennedy was very comfortable
in that environment,
and that environment
had protected him.
BEDELL SMITH:
Jackie did understand that
this was an aspect of him
that there was nothing
she could do about.
And she made her peace with it.
It sort of gave her a pass
to go out and spend
a lot of time in the country.
She took off
on extended vacations.
She went to Italy
for a long time.
She basically every summer would
spend her time in Hyannis
a good distance
from the Kennedy compound
and enjoy her solitude there.
NARRATOR:
Jack was happy to join his wife,
his daughter Caroline,
and his son John Jr.
In Hyannisport when he could.
But politics kept him
on the road much of that summer
and into the fall,
with midterm elections
coming up.
BILL LAWRENCE:
Mr. Kennedy figures that by the
end of this campaign alone,
he will have traveled
almost as far
as all the presidents
in this century combined
in midterm elections.
President Kennedy
has deliberately,
directly placed his personal
prestige squarely on the line.
He has taken this dangerous
political gamble
because the fate
of his legislative program
for the next two years
hangs in the balance.
By the summer of 1962,
the Kennedy administration
had achieved very little.
The four major initiatives,
they were blocked
by Southern conservatives,
and so he's not able to get
anything significant passed.
NARRATOR:
Midterm elections
were always nerve-wracking
for a sitting president.
And Kennedy had
a personal stake in 1962:
his 30-year-old brother, Ted,
was running for his old
Senate seat in Massachusetts.
The Republicans spent
that campaign summer
taking pages
from the old Kennedy playbook,
attacking the president
for being weak on Communism.
Kennedy was trying
to project strength.
The president let the press know
about the newly operational
nuclear-armed missiles
in Turkey,
which were pointed
at the Kremlin.
He maintained absolute silence
on the historic and crucial
back-channel exchange
of personal letters he'd opened
with Nikita Khrushchev.
Only Bobby and a few of his
closest aides knew about that.
The president had also
entrusted his brother
with the continuing problem
of Fidel Castro and Cuba.
You would think that the Bay
of Pigs was purely chastening,
that it would cause them to see
a yellow light and slow down,
but actually,
the Kennedys hit the gas.
They go faster.
They start Operation Mongoose
to try to get rid of Castro.
Bobby Kennedy essentially
takes over
overseeing Covert Operations.
HUGHES:
Bobby was an unremitting
enthusiast
about covert activities
and kept pressing everybody.
I think they had
weekly meetings.
Tuesday, I think, was the chosen
day for Mongoose meetings,
and there would be
representatives
from the Pentagon, from the CIA,
from the State Department
who'd go to these meetings,
and they'd all be hectored
by Bobby to do more.
And he would use his crudest
expressions to tell them
they weren't doing enough
and they should get on the ball.
Bobby would say
there is no higher interest
in the entire United States
government
than getting rid of Castro.
THOMAS:
Now, there were already
assassination plots underway
that started in the Eisenhower
administration,
but they pick up a little bit
of momentum under Bobby,
all sorts of crazy stuff
of using organized crime
to kill Castro,
to cause what the CIA called
"boom and bang"
on the island of Cuba
to try to disrupt Castro.
None of this stuff works.
It's a complete failure.
DOBBS:
It was the most disastrous
foreign policy combination
you could imagine,
because it wasn't
effective enough
to actually overthrow Castro
and it demonstrated
to the Russians
that they had to do something
very dramatic
if they were going to save
their Cuban ally.
NARRATOR:
Kennedy had insisted,
on the record,
that his administration
would never stand
for Soviet nuclear weapons
in Cuba.
And Khrushchev had privately
and secretly assured Kennedy
the Soviets had no such plans.
But American
reconnaissance flights
had returned from Cuban airspace
with photographic evidence:
the Soviet missiles
were already in country,
waiting to be mated
to nuclear warheads.
NAFTALI:
It's very bad.
It's bad on several levels.
This whole back-channel
operation is going to collapse
if he can't even believe
what the Soviets are telling him
on something
as important as this.
He made it clear to the Soviets
that this would not be
acceptable,
and yet they did it anyway.
DOBBS:
The president is furious.
He realizes that he's been
lied to by Khrushchev.
Kennedy called his closest
advisers together
and they met in the Cabinet Room
of the White House.
There were two questions: one,
were the missiles ready to fire?
And the second question was
how they were going to react.
The initial advice is,
"Attack! Bomb! Go in!
"This is intolerable.
We've got to bomb Cuba
or invade it."
It's very aggressive.
And his brother Robert,
the attorney general,
wants to stage a provocation.
He says, "Let's sink the Maine
or something"
as an excuse to invade.
NARRATOR:
In the first meetings of the
President's Executive Committee,
the Ex-Comm,
the analysts
all believed the Soviets
were still a number of days away
from having operable
nuclear weapons in Cuba.
They couldn't even be certain
the warheads were there yet.
Kennedy set the Air Force,
the Navy and the Marines
to contingency preparation,
but he refused to green-light a
military strike that first day,
and the president
let it be known
that he wanted this kept quiet.
He didn't want the Soviets
backed into a corner
or the American people
in a panic
while he decided
on the next move.
It's hard to realize
how frightened they were.
They really thought
that war was near.
Jack stayed cool.
He was grim about it,
but he was not panicked.
NARRATOR:
Kennedy kept his announced
schedule,
including a meeting
with the Soviet ambassador,
at which he revealed nothing.
He went out to dinner.
He traveled to Connecticut and
Illinois for campaign events.
The right decision
is Democratic.
Thank you.
NARRATOR:
Five days into the crisis,
with more Soviet ships
steaming toward Cuba
and the joint chiefs
pushing the president
to begin bombing
the island nation,
Kennedy was still insisting
on restraint.
The president settled on an idea
Secretary of Defense Robert
McNamara had suggested
in an early meeting.
Kennedy instructed the Navy
to set up what he called
a "quarantine" around Cuba
and to turn back
all Soviet vessels.
In a private letter
on October 22, 1962,
Kennedy told Khrushchev
that he would protect the U.S.
and its allies by doing
"whatever must be done."
Later that evening,
the president went public
in a nationally televised speech
to alert the country
to the danger at hand
and to demand
the immediate removal
of all Soviet missiles in Cuba.
It shall be the policy
of this nation
to regard any nuclear missile
launched from Cuba
against any nation
in the Western Hemisphere
as an attack by the Soviet Union
on the United States
requiring a full retaliatory
response upon the Soviet Union.
DOBBS:
Part of Kennedy's motivations
during the missile crisis
was also shoring up
his domestic political position
and showing that he could be
tough with Khrushchev
without plunging the whole world
into a nuclear war.
That was the fine line
that he was trying to tread
during the missile crisis.
I'd hate like heck
to see us go to war,
but if it's necessary to prevent
a nuclear war,
I think the action
has to be taken.
Well, I think it's high time
we stopped Russia
from having things
their own way.
NARRATOR:
President Kennedy was not
certain how to proceed.
He lacked good low-level
aerial photos
of the Soviet missile site,
so he kept dispatching
U-2 reconnaissance planes
on dangerous missions
within range
of anti-aircraft guns in Cuba.
And even if the missions
were successful,
there would still be
more questions than answers.
DOBBS:
The CIA told him
that there were 8,000 Soviet
technicians in Cuba.
In fact, there were 43,000
heavily armed Soviet soldiers
on Cuba at that point.
The Soviets possessed,
in addition to these
longer-range missiles
that could hit the United
States, they also possessed
shorter-range tactical
nuclear weapons
that could have been used
to wipe out the U.S. naval base
at Guantánamo
or a U.S. invading force.
Kennedy didn't know any of that.
HUGHES:
He gets bad advice
from everybody
All of his appointees,
his chosen advisers
And they're all over the place,
and they change
their own views frequently.
But in each case,
Kennedy was delaying.
DOBBS:
His experience in the military
made him even more skeptical
and more cautious than he might
otherwise have been.
MAN:
Two one zero!
DOBBS:
Kennedy's nightmare scenario
during the missile crisis
was that war would start
without either him
or Nikita Khrushchev
really wanting it.
Somebody would make a mistake,
and there would be
a spiraling chain of events
that would quickly get
out of control.
NARRATOR:
On October 24,
two days after Kennedy's
public warning to Khrushchev,
new U.S. reconnaissance
photographs revealed
that work at the missile sites
in Cuba was accelerating.
Kennedy understood he had
to allow the joint chiefs
to put the military
on a hair trigger.
The Air Force's Strategic Air
Command went on high alert.
The president also understood
the chance of unintended action
sparking a war grew by the hour.
There was no hotline between
the White House and the Kremlin,
no opportunity
for real-time dialogue
between himself and Khrushchev.
Both men were talking tough,
but they were both sending
other, less-martial signals,
hoping those signals
would get through the noise.
Khrushchev ordered early on
his missile-carrying ships
to turn back from Cuba
because he wanted to avoid
an immediate confrontation
with the president.
And at a certain point,
he decided to offer a trade-off.
He said that, "I'm willing to
withdraw my missiles from Cuba
if you withdraw your missiles
from Turkey."
And at one point,
all of Kennedy's advisers
are against accepting that deal.
The only man in the room
who thinks this is a way
out of the crisis
is the president himself.
NARRATOR:
In the private residence,
Jackie Kennedy remembered,
"There was no waking
or sleeping."
And her husband had upped
his daily dose of steroids
to keep his Addison's
under control.
Everybody went to bed night
after night that last week
wondering what was going
to happen the next day,
and the joint chiefs were busy
planning to strike
the Soviet Union and Cuba
on a moment's notice.
General LeMay, sure enough,
was true to form
all the way through
the Cuban missile crisis.
I mean, let's unleash
the nuclear weapons
that he had his SAC command
roaring around,
ready to go,
any day, any minute.
DOBBS:
Kennedy came under a lot of
criticism both from the military
and also congressmen
who were briefed on the crisis
who felt that he should be
taking tougher action
against Khrushchev.
And his reaction
essentially was,
"Well, they're not the ones
making the decision."
ROBERT CARO:
What you see in the Cuban
missile crisis is Jack Kennedy
pulling the nation back
from the edge of war.
We're talking here
about nuclear war.
NARRATOR:
Kennedy made one overriding
calculation:
that Nikita Khrushchev
was as horrified
at the prospect of nuclear
Armageddon as he was.
The president let that
calculation his alone
Be his guide,
and he gambled on it.
HUGHES:
He gave Khrushchev space.
He gave him space
when other people were unwilling
to give him any space at all.
NARRATOR:
Kennedy had already pulled back
the quarantine line
to delay confrontation.
And on October 25,
against the advice
of the Ex-Comm,
he instructed the Navy
to allow a Soviet oil tanker
to breach the quarantine
and enter the port in Havana.
But on the 12th day
of the crisis,
Saturday, October 27,
things started to go awry.
Black Saturday
was probably the day
the world came closer
than ever before or since
to a nuclear war.
Many things started happening
on Black Saturday,
including a U-2 spy plane
stumbling over the Soviet Union,
which Kennedy reacted
to that by saying,
"There's always some
son of a bitch
that doesn't get the word."
Both leaders,
Khrushchev and Kennedy,
were beginning to lose control
over their own forces.
NARRATOR:
The Soviets seemed intent
on testing the quarantine line
that Saturday.
A U.S. ship dropped
depth charges
on a Soviet submarine
in the Caribbean,
and, most harrowing,
an American spy plane
on a mission over Cuba
fell off the radar.
CARO:
You hear the moment on the tape.
A messenger comes into the room.
You hear Jack Kennedy,
for a moment, he's flustered.
We have said that
if Russia shoots down
one of our U-2
reconnaissance planes,
we will immediately retaliate.
We'll immediately bomb
that missile site
that took out the plane,
and then we will prepare
for an all-out invasion.
And you hear in the background
this chorus of voices,
"We said we'll retaliate.
We have to do it right now."
CARO:
You know what Kennedy says?
He says, "Well, let's take
a break, gentlemen."
Time and again,
when the hawks in that room,
when the joint chiefs of staff
are insisting on invading,
Kennedy pulls them back.
He says, "Let's go to dinner now
"and talk about
the Jupiter missiles.
Let's talk about a trade."
NARRATOR:
Kennedy could see the chance
for a peaceful solution
was slipping away,
so he chose the person
he most trusted, brother Bobby,
to take an urgent message to the
Soviet ambassador in Washington.
He was proposing a way out,
which involved the U.S.
giving up a set
of redundant weapons:
the newly installed
Jupiter missiles in Turkey.
Kennedy repeats his demand
for Khrushchev to pull out,
says that time
is of the essence.
If Khrushchev pulls his missiles
out of Cuba,
the U.S. will
over the next few weeks
pull its missiles out of Turkey.
The president was willing
to back down,
pull out the American missiles
from Turkey,
but only if that
was kept secret.
CARO:
The Strategic Air Command
bombers
are circling over the Arctic,
waiting for the "go" signals.
Other bombers
in the United States,
they're being handed
their target packets
to bomb Russia the next day.
In Florida, the Fifth Marine
Expeditionary Force
is readying for the invasion
An invasion, war.
If Russia's drawn into it
And it will be,
these are Russians on Cuba
Nuclear war.
RADIO ANNOUNCER:
This is Radio Moscow.
Premier Khrushchev
has sent a message
to President Kennedy today.
The Soviet government
has ordered the dismantling
of weapons in Cuba
as well as their crating
and return to the Soviet Union.
CARO:
Khrushchev accepts.
And he signs his telegram,
"With respect, Khrushchev."
KENNEDY:
Progress is now being made
towards the restoration of peace
in the Caribbean.
And it is our firm hope
and purpose
that this progress
shall go forward.
We will continue to keep
the American people informed
on this vital matter.
Thank you.
DOBBS:
The outcome of the missile
crisis was more than dumb luck.
I think had somebody else
been in the White House
at that point as president,
the outcome could have been
very different.
I don't want to praise
the president too much.
I think he made many blunders.
But he managed to get the Soviet
missiles removed from Cuba,
and he did so without triggering
a nuclear war.
It was not self-evident
that that would happen.
NAFTALI:
Did he do a victory dance
in public
after Khrushchev
withdrew the missiles?
No.
And he was very explicit
about why not,
and he said it to his team.
"Don't embarrass him.
"Don't humiliate him.
"We won.
It's good enough."
NARRATOR:
Kennedy was not so bashful
about using the outcome
of the missile crisis
to maximum domestic
political effect.
The president invited a few
of his closest reporter friends
to the White House for private
briefings on the events in Cuba.
Then he demanded a chance
to amend and improve their
stories about the crisis.
The administration
never did disclose
the secret trade-off
of U.S. missiles in Turkey.
Instead, under the president's
direction,
they embroidered
the already-fanciful tale
of the U.S. Navy
turning back Soviet ships:
what Kennedy's secretary
of state called
the "eyeball-to-eyeball"
confrontation
between the president
and Khrushchev.
DOBBS:
That never happened.
Khrushchev had already decided
to turn his ships around
and turned them around
the previous day.
But it helped them
build up this myth
of the president
as the determined leader
facing down his opposite number
in the Soviet Union.
That was politically useful
to the Kennedys for some time.
NAFTALI:
The Cuban missile crisis
establishes Kennedy's
credibility at home.
He can now talk to the American
people in different terms.
He's now earned his spurs
as a cold warrior.
He has actually crossed
the threshold of credibility
on national security affairs.
The Cuban missile crisis
was a game changer
for his presidency.
NARRATOR:
He entered the second half
of his term
with a new kind of confidence.
Kennedy's Democrats had held on
to all but four House seats
in the midterms
and maintained a healthy
majority.
His youngest brother, Teddy,
had won election to the Senate,
where Democrats
had gained a few seats.
Three in four Americans
approved of the way President
Kennedy was handling his job.
He was popular enough
to bridge the yawning gap
between politics and celebrity.
(audience laughing)
VAUGHN MEADER (as KENNEDY):
Next, uh, next question.
NAOMI BROSSART (as JACKIE):
Yes, I should like to ask
a question about
MEADER (as KENNEDY):
Would you identify yourself,
please?
BROSSART (as JACKIE):
I'm your wife.
NARRATOR:
A comedy album by a little-known
impersonator named Vaughn Meader
was the hit
of holiday season 1962.
BROSSART (as JACKIE):
Yes, I should like to ask
the following question:
(speaking French)
MEADER (as KENNEDY):
No, speak English, Jackie.
NARRATOR:
The First Family
sold a record-breaking
seven-and-a-half million copies
in just six months.
REPORTER:
Mr. President,
it's been a long time
since a president and his family
have been subject
to such a heavy barrage
of teasing
and fun-poking and satire,
and now a smash hit record.
Can you tell us whether you read
and listen to these things
and whether they produce
annoyment or enjoyment?
(laughing)
Annoyment.
No, they produce
Yes, I have read them
and listened to them.
Actually, I listened
to Mr. Meader's record
but I thought it sounded more
like Teddy than it did me.
(crowd laughs)
NARRATOR:
The president understood
political gold dust
when he saw it,
and Caroline and John
were impossible to miss.
He occasionally snuck
his favorite photographers
into the White House
for photo ops
when the first lady wasn't
around to run interference.
JOHN JR.:
Hello!
KENNEDY:
Why do the leaves fall?
Why does the snow come
on the ground?
JOHN JR.:
Because it's winter.
KENNEDY:
Why do the leaves turn green?
JOHN JR.:
Because it's spring.
KENNEDY:
And where do we go on the Cape,
Hyannisport?
(John answering softly)
KENNEDY:
In summer.
(John Jr. laughing,
answers softly)
NARRATOR:
John Kennedy had come
to fatherhood relatively late,
but he clearly enjoyed the role
as he enjoyed being an uncle
and, with Joe Sr. debilitated,
the Kennedy family patriarch.
KATHLEEN KENNEDY TOWNSEND:
He wanted us to come over
to the White House.
He's my brother Joe's godfather,
and I was always looking
at the first edition of books
and the scrimshaws
and the prints
that my brother Joe would get.
So I thought he was a really,
really thoughtful godparent
and took it seriously.
SANDER VANOCUR:
Have you found that
there's any way
to break through
to Mr. Khrushchev,
to make him really aware
that you are quite sincere
and determined
about what you say, sir?
Well, it's difficult.
I think you see the Soviet Union
and the United States
so far separated
in their beliefs,
we believing in a world
of independent, sovereign,
different, diverse nations,
they believing in a monolithic
Communist world,
and you put the nuclear equation
into that, uh, that struggle,
that's what makes this,
as I said before,
such a dangerous time,
and we must proceed
with firmness
and also with the best
information we can get
and also with care.
NARRATOR:
In the first months of 1963,
the president was determined
to use his increased standing
with the American public
to take a chance:
to attempt to remake
the frayed relationship
with the Soviet Union.
But other events crowded him.
Despite rosy reports
from his closest advisers,
things were not going well
in Vietnam.
The man whose government Kennedy
was backing, Ngo Dinh Diem,
had dwindling
popular support there.
Diem's army in the field
appeared incapable
of holding off the undertrained
and barely weaponized
North Vietnamese Communists,
and this despite the fact
that Kennedy had quadrupled
the number of American troops
in Vietnam
in little more than a year
to nearly 12,000.
Many of these "advisers" were
doing actual fighting and dying.
Kennedy was not happy
that this was making news.
The issue of segregation,
in Alabama in particular,
was a loaded powder keg.
And the new governor there,
George Wallace,
was waving a match.
I draw the line in the dust
and toss the gauntlet
before the feet of tyranny
and I say segregation now,
segregation tomorrow,
and segregation forever.
(crowd cheering)
NARRATOR:
Wallace had won the governorship
by running against what
he called "federal intrusion"
by the "integratin',
scalawaggin',
carpet-baggin' liars."
Once in office, he kept his
white supremacist supporters
stirred to a foaming rage.
But the integrationists
in Alabama
were no longer in a mood
to back down.
We informed the White House
that we would be starting
a movement there.
And for us, the issue was
that there had been
60 unsolved bombings
that were black people's homes,
who were bombed for nothing.
Almost any night, somebody might
drive through that neighborhood
and throw a stick of dynamite
on a front porch,
or a Molotov cocktail.
NARRATOR:
That April, the movement
launched a series of boycotts,
sit-ins and marches
protesting segregation
and "the blatant misuse of local
police power" to support it.
"This is," the activists
proclaimed,
"Birmingham's moment of truth."
The growing protests
drew reporters and photographers
from around the country.
Kennedy would not take a public
stand against segregation there,
not even when Police
Commissioner Bull Connor
began filling the city jails
with marchers.
On May 2 alone, Connor arrested
nearly 1,000 children
who had joined the protest.
The next day, almost 3,000
high school students
marched into the streets
of downtown Birmingham.
YOUNG:
We were in the process
of dispersing the crowd,
because we did not want
any violence.
And so my back was turned
to Bull Connor and the dogs,
because we were trying to get
the young people
to move out of the park
and go back to the church.
And then all of a sudden,
the fire hose starts
and the dogs come charging.
(dogs barking angrily)
Jack Kennedy was very conscious
of images.
When the television cameras
and Life magazine
arrived down South,
that's the moment
when the federal government
cannot sit back.
NARRATOR:
Kennedy still shied away
from taking a side.
The president deputized
a Justice Department official
to go to Alabama and help get
a deal to end "the spectacle,"
as he called it.
But he refused to push Congress
to solve this problem
once and for all
by passing federal
civil rights legislation
that applied everywhere
in America.
The solution, he insisted,
would have to be worked out
by Birmingham itself.
The protesters did agree to take
a break as negotiations began,
but as soon as a tentative deal
was reached,
the segregationists started
a new firebombing campaign.
Kennedy sent 3,000
federal troops to the city
to keep the peace.
He was worried, he said,
that "the Negroes will be
uncontrollable."
This government will do whatever
must be done to preserve order,
to protect the lives
of its citizens,
and to uphold
the law of the land.
NARRATOR:
The president was vague
on just what that "law" was.
He still didn't ask Congress
to consider a civil rights bill.
Kennedy appeared,
like the white moderates
Martin Luther King despaired of,
"more devoted to order
than to justice."
Kennedy was anxious to pivot
back to his preferred agenda:
the relationship
between the United States
and the Soviet Union.
On June 10, 1963,
Kennedy stepped to the podium
at American University
to make what he hoped would be
the signature speech
of the first term
of his presidency.
Today, the expenditure
of billions of dollars
every year on weapons acquired
for the purpose of making sure
we never need them
is essential
to the keeping of peace.
But surely the acquisition
of such idle stockpiles,
which can only destroy
and never create,
is not the only,
much less the most efficient,
means of assuring peace.
He calls on the Americans
and the Soviets
to recognize that they need
to think in terms of a new day
in this cold war conflict;
that the world
is too much hostage
to these nuclear weapons;
that it is so impermissible
to think of having this
kind of all-out conflict.
REEVES:
Kennedy gave,
certainly intellectually,
one of the best speeches ever
given by an American president,
and that was that maybe
we got off on the wrong track,
and maybe the cold war
is not necessary.
I mean, it raised
the most basic questions
about, "Why are we doing this?"
KENNEDY:
History teaches us
that enmities between nations,
as between individuals,
do not last forever.
No government or social system
is so evil
that its people must be
considered as lacking in virtue.
Among the many traits
the peoples of our two countries
have in common,
none is stronger than
our mutual abhorrence of war.
This was the first time
an American president
said the Soviets are like us.
It was the first time
he asked the American people
to think beyond stereotypes
and the cold war
and think about the fact
that this was a matter of
the future of the human race.
NARRATOR:
The American University speech
got big play
behind the Iron Curtain the next
day, but in the United States,
more dramatic events were
leading the national newscasts.
As governor and chief magistrate
of the state of Alabama,
I deem it to be my solemn
obligation and duty
to stand before you,
representing the rights
and sovereignty of this
NARRATOR:
Alabama, in the person of its
"Segregation Forever" governor,
was back in the news.
George Wallace was making a show
of blocking black students
from attending
the state university there.
WALLACE:
The illegal and unwarranted
actions
of the central government
on this day,
contrary to the laws, customs,
and traditions of this state,
is calculated
to disturb the peace.
NARRATOR:
Kennedy had been ignoring
Vice President Johnson's advice
to look Southerners "in the eye"
and tell them that integration
was a "moral"
and "Christian" issue.
Watching Wallace's posturing,
Kennedy decided,
for the first time
in his career,
to risk his political standing
in the South
by taking the side
of integration.
There was an argument
in the White House
between Sorensen, Bobby
and the president.
And the president said,
"I want to go on television
tonight and talk about this."
They didn't want him to.
President Kennedy decides to go
on national television
that night and give a speech
calling for a civil rights act
to end discrimination
in the South.
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.
NARRATOR:
John F. Kennedy
finally called for federal
legislation ending segregation.
KENNEDY:
Next week I shall ask
the Congress
of the United States to act,
to make a commitment it has not
fully made in this century
to the proposition
that race has no place
in American life or law.
It's done in such
a hurry-up fashion
that when the TV lights go on
and Kennedy begins to read
his speech, it's not finished.
One of the most important
speeches of his presidency,
he's winging it
for the last third.
We have a right to expect
that the Negro community
will be responsible,
will uphold the law.
But they have a right to expect
the law will be fair,
that the Constitution
will be colorblind,
as Justice Harlan said
at the turn of the century.
This is what
we're talking about,
and this is a matter
which concerns this country
and what it stands for,
and in meeting it, I ask the
support of all of our citizens.
Thank you very much.
NAFTALI:
May and June of 1963 are a pivot
in the Kennedy presidency
because it's the first moment
that he's willing to use
the presidency as a bully pulpit
to shape public opinion,
to lead public opinion,
and that's when presidents
are at their greatest.
NARRATOR:
The president flew across
the Atlantic that summer
with the wind at his back and
the eyes of the world upon him.
One of the first stops
was the city he'd protected
from Soviet domination:
West Berlin.
DALLEK:
He goes in June of 1963
on something of a victory lap.
It's quite triumphant.
KENNEDY:
All free men,
wherever they may live,
are citizens of Berlin,
and therefore, as a free man,
I take pride in the words,
"Ich bin ein Berliner."
(crowd cheering)
HUGHES:
The Berlin speech
and the million Germans
that came out to hear him
had a profound effect.
This was Kennedy the statesman
and the politician combined.
And he says to Sorensen,
"We'll never have
a day like this
in our whole political lives."
DALLEK:
And then of course
he goes to Ireland,
where he is feted
as the prodigal son
who has returned home,
who comes back to his roots.
KENNEDY:
George Bernard Shaw,
speaking as an Irishman,
summed up an approach to life.
Other people, he said,
"see things and say, 'Why?'
"But I dream things that never
were, and I say, 'Why not?""
The problems of the world
cannot possibly be solved
by skeptics or cynics
whose horizons are limited
by the obvious realities.
We need men who can dream
of things that never were
and ask, "Why not?"
(applause)
We came home after that,
at the Cape,
this "big house," we call it,
which is where my parents lived.
And we went to the big house
for movies on the weekends.
So we called Jack out
when he came back from Ireland,
and we said, "What's the movie
for the weekend?"
He said, "Well, you come over
and see.
I thought you'd all want to see
the trip to Ireland."
So we all sat and watched
his trip to Ireland.
It was fantastic.
We loved it, we clapped,
and everything was wonderful.
And then the next night he said,
"I thought maybe you missed
a little bit of the trip
to Ireland."
Then we said,
"No, no, that's fine."
We went back, saw it again.
And the third night,
Sunday night, he said,
"Just to cover it completely,
we'll just have one more look,
my trip to Ireland."
I mean, he was so happy.
He loved being president.
Yes, he did.
He loved being president.
Yesterday, a shaft of light
cut into the darkness.
Negotiations were concluded
in Moscow
on a treaty to ban
all nuclear tests
in the atmosphere
NARRATOR:
Kennedy and Khrushchev
negotiated an agreement
on a nuclear test ban
in July of 1963,
just six weeks after
the American University message.
It was a limited agreement
and still had to be ratified
by the Senate,
but it was an agreement.
REEVES:
No one ever thought that
you could get any kind of treaty
involving nuclear missiles,
and Kennedy and Khrushchev
did it.
There'd never been a treaty
like it before.
NAFTALI:
The nuclear test ban
proved two things:
One, that you could actually
have an agreement
with the Soviets;
and two, that you could convince
the Soviets to take a step
Granted, not a huge step
Towards a more peaceful world
where there was less danger
of nuclear war.
DALLEK:
He had used the power
of his office
to face down the Soviets
in the missile crisis.
He had stood up to them.
He had recouped the setbacks
he had suffered
over the Bay of Pigs
and over the Vienna summit,
and he was on his way
to a second term
that could lead maybe
to some kind of détente
with the Soviet Union.
NARRATOR:
His closest friends
said Jack Kennedy
seemed more settled than
they'd seen him in years.
Jackie Kennedy would say
it was the most time
the family ever shared.
BEDELL SMITH:
Jackie was pregnant
with their third child
that they were
very excited about.
And that summer
up in Hyannisport,
they spent a lot of time
together,
and their friends commented
on how close they seemed.
And then Jackie went into labor
prematurely in August
and had Patrick,
who was suffering
from hyaline membrane disease,
which at that point
was extremely serious.
They took him to Boston
and Jack sat there in a chair
outside this hyperbaric chamber
and waited.
SALINGER:
Patrick Kennedy died
at 4:04 a.m.
The strain of the baby's
attempts to breathe,
with the problems
with his lungs,
caused his heart to expire.
The president, his brother
the attorney general,
and the president's friend
Dave Powers
were with the baby when he died.
BEDELL SMITH:
They celebrated their
10th anniversary in September,
and she wrote to a friend
who had introduced them.
It was a kind of
bittersweet letter
because she said that she felt
that Jack could have had
a full and vital life
without being married to her,
but to her, being married to him
and loving him was everything.
So it was clear that she was
very much in love with him,
and in many ways,
they did draw closer together.
REPORTER:
Mr. President, Dr. Teller,
in urging the Senate to reject
the nuclear test ban today,
said that it weakens
American defenses
and thus invites attack.
Now, to anyone who works
in the laboratories today,
a 30-megaton weapon
is perhaps not as sophisticated
as a 60- or 70-
or 80-megaton weapon,
but it's still many, many, many
times, dozens of times stronger,
than the weapon that flattened
Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
How many weapons do you need
and how many megatons
do you need to destroy?
I said in my speech
what we now have on hand
without any further testing
will kill 300 million people
in one hour,
and I suppose they can
even improve on that
if it's necessary.
NARRATOR:
The president understood
he still had plenty
of rough water ahead.
Ratification of the test ban
treaty was not assured.
Civil rights legislation
was jammed up in committee;
a simple vote on the House
or Senate floor seemed unlikely.
Vietnam was a mess.
Diem's government had squandered
what little popular support
it had.
Its military was still unable
to stand up to the Communist-led
North Vietnamese.
American casualties
were on the rise,
and American reporters
on the ground
were starting to tell that story
to their readers back home.
(automatic gunfire)
NAFTALI:
Kennedy's got this problem.
He doesn't want the Viet Cong,
which are the Communists there,
to win.
But what do you do if the
government you're supporting,
and the government whose army
you are supplying, is corrupt?
THOMAS:
Different parts of Kennedy's
own government
are telling him
different things.
Some people are saying
we should get rid of Diem,
have a coup d'état;
other people are saying
that's a terrible idea.
Kennedy has basically
lost control
of the Vietnam policy-making
part of his government,
and he knows it.
KENNEDY (on tape):
Monday, November 4, 1963:
Over the weekend the coup
in Saigon took place,
culminated three months
of conversation about a coup,
comma, a conversation
which divided the government
here and in Saigon.
NARRATOR:
The president had set in motion
the overthrow of Diem
without really thinking
through the consequences.
Three days after the event,
in which Diem and his brother
were assassinated,
Kennedy was still trying
to make sense of it.
KENNEDY:
I feel that we must bear a good
deal of responsibility for it.
The way he was killed
made it particularly abhorrent.
The question now is whether
the generals can stay together
and build a stable government.
NARRATOR:
Kennedy was finally beginning
to understand
how risky was his investment
in Southeast Asia.
The president's instinct
was still to exert control
without calling attention to it.
He told his ambassador
in Saigon, Henry Cabot Lodge,
that the U.S. was going
to "intensify our efforts"
to help the new
government there.
His military leaders called
for more American ground troops,
sanctioned to fight
against the Communist North.
Kennedy wanted to weigh
all the options,
from a troop increase
to a troop withdrawal.
(marching band drumming)
NARRATOR:
John Kennedy's prospects
for a second term looked good
in the fall of 1963,
despite the problems in Vietnam.
But there was work to be done,
particularly in Texas,
the state that had been crucial
to his victory in 1960.
The 1964 election
His reelection
Was just a year away, and it
wasn't going to be easy
to campaign openly
for civil rights legislation
and still win majorities
in the South.
The state party in Texas was
already beginning to fracture,
so the president decided
to mend some political fences
and fundraise with conservative
governor John Connally.
NAFTALI:
He needs Texas.
He's got to win Texas again,
and he's got to raise money
for the campaign.
Jacqueline doesn't really
want to go,
but he's asked her
to come with him.
BEDELL SMITH:
Jackie had never accompanied
Jack on a domestic trip.
This was her very first one.
They decided to take little
three-year-old John with them
on the helicopter
to Andrews Air Force Base,
and he cried when they left,
and Kennedy gave him a big hug.
CARO:
As Air Force One
is heading toward Dallas,
the weather clears.
And one of Kennedy's aides,
Larry O'Brien, says,
"Kennedy weather."
It's a glittering,
bright Texas sun,
so everything's shining,
everything's gleaming:
Air Force One,
the great silver plane.
The door opens, and it seems
like the Kennedys are gleaming.
ANNOUNCER:
There's Mrs. Kennedy,
and the crowd yells,
and the president
of the United States.
And I can see his suntan
all the way from here.
CARO:
The plan was for them
to get right into the car,
but the crowd is so excited
along the fence,
they're all reaching out
to try to touch
this beautiful couple.
And they walk along.
How could they resist?
They get into the car
and the motorcade
pulls out for Dallas.
The Kennedys are
in the first car;
in the jump seats
are John Connally
and Nellie Connally, his wife.
Down the sidewalks,
from the curb to the buildings,
are crammed solid with people.
From every window,
people are reaching out
and yelling and screaming.
Every time Jackie waves,
the crowd presses forward,
and every time Jack waves,
they press forward
so that the motorcade
has to go slower,
from 20 miles to 15 miles
to ten miles to five miles.
Nellie Connally turns
to the president and says,
"Mr. President,
you certainly can't say
that Dallas doesn't love you."
And she says Jack Kennedy
looked at her
and gave her this big smile.
ANNOUNCER:
This is Edwin Newman
in the NBC newsroom in New York,
this information from Dallas.
Two priests who were
with President Kennedy
say he is dead of bullet wounds.
This is the latest information
we have from Dallas.
REPORTER:
What is your feeling
right now?
I really couldn't say, really.
Right now, I just don't know
what to do.
Was there much emotion
among the congregation?
There was.
It really was amazing
to see the number of men
who came into the cathedral
sobbing,
almost convulsed
with sorrow, anguish.
But all we can do now
is pray for him,
and that's about all we can do.
An entire loss to the world,
it's hardly believable.
♪♪
♪♪
(drums playing funeral cadence)
(drumming fades away)
(silence)
(soft music playing)
THOMAS:
Jack Kennedy was
the most glamorous,
attractive president of the
United States we've ever had
and that we'll ever have.
That alone holds
your fascination.
And he had enormous promise.
Now, it was unfulfilled.
It was not realized.
He probably wasn't as great
as he appeared to be.
But he sure felt that way.
BEDELL SMITH:
He is, as is always the case
with people who die
at a young age,
he's fixed in everybody's mind
in the way he looked,
in his "viguh,"
in his sense of humor,
in his informal style.
NAFTALI:
Kennedy set so much in motion
in such a short period of time
that the outcome of each
narrative was unclear.
WOFFORD:
We will never know
whether he would have been
a great president.
I'd bet on him,
but we didn't have that chance.
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