Kennedy: The Classic Biography (62 page)

While the left called Kennedy too timid, the right assailed him as power-hungry. Because he was uniquely a man for his time, because he recognized the revolutionary changes sweeping our globe and nation, and wanted our attitudes and institutions changed accordingly, he was assailed for being ahead of his time by those opposed to change.

John Kennedy never hated, and he worked hard to cast out hate in human and national affairs. But he was hated. The White supremacists hated “the Kennedys” more than they hated Truman or Eleanor Roosevelt. Bitter-end businessmen, ignoring all he had done for their prosperity, condemned him as a traitor to his class as they had once condemned Franklin Roosevelt. The far-right fringe of professional cold warriors and anti-Communists denounced him with poisonous passion, just as in the heyday of Joseph McCarthy they had denounced the fourteen Kennedy appointees mentioned in Chapter X, and Harry Truman, Henry Wallace, Robert Oppenheimer, Philip Jessup, James Conant, Francis Sayre, Arthur Miller and Walter Reuther, all of whom Kennedy honored by one means or another.

The publisher of the Dallas
News
embarrassed his fellow Texans at a White House luncheon by demanding “a man on horseback to lead this nation—many people in Texas and the Southwest think you are riding Caroline’s bicycle.” But the President was not embarrassed. He knew that he “didn’t get elected President by arriving at soft judgments,” and that he and only he had to weigh the multiple burdens, balance the conflicting responsibilities and produce the concrete solutions which would assure the survival and the success of 180 million Americans.

He deplored “the discordant voices of extremism” which peddled their frighteningly simple solutions to citizens frustrated and baffled by our nation’s burdens. We had never heard of the John Birch Society until campaigning in Wichita in 1960, but in the years that followed, this and similar fringe groups increasingly recovered the noisy voices that had been stilled since McCarthy’s demise. In his speech prepared for Dallas on November 22, 1963, the President lashed out at those who “confuse rhetoric with reality” and assume “that vituperation is as good as victory.” And earlier he had said of these fanatics:

They look suspiciously at their neighbors and their leaders. They call for a “man on horseback” because they do not trust the people. They find treason in our churches, in our highest court, in our treatment of water…. Unwilling to face up to the danger from without [they] are convinced that the real danger is from within.

But hate groups are not softened by reason or charm. Indeed, John Kennedy’s obvious charms and cool reasoning only seemed to make them angrier. A man who loves, as Kennedy loved his fellow man, regrets hate, but Kennedy nevertheless expected it. When a pre-Presidential profile complained because no one hated him, the then Senator had written me:

It is only after you wield the powers of the Presidency that you get hated. Morse, Hoffa, Al Hayes, etc., all hate me now merely because of one bill. Presidents are bound to be hated unless they are as bland as Ike.

John Kennedy was not going to be bland. He was bound to arouse either enthusiasm or anger with everything he did, and he was not a man to do nothing. “Public sentiment” on most controversial matters, he said to a fellow politician, “says don’t act. But that’s not enough. Somebody ought to see over the hill, even if he risks defeat. If that isn’t the President’s function, we should never have quarreled with Eisenhower.”

He was always defying the most powerful interests in Washington—the AMA, the Truckers, the billboard users, the private-power, drug-manufacturer and junk-mail lobbies, even the leaders of his own church. He fully shared Theodore Roosevelt’s concept of the White House as a “bully pulpit,” calling for new standards of excellence in every endeavor, large and small, from staying in school to staying physically fit, from historical publications to cultural appreciation. “The American people are rather evenly divided on a great many issues,” he coolly said. “As I make my views clearer on these issues, of course some people increasingly are not going to approve of me.”

His prediction was correct. One morning we had talked about criticism at his pre-press conference breakfast—about the wide range of attacks that week, from Alabama’s Governor Wallace to Vietnam’s Madame Nhu, from right-wing author Victor Lasky to Communist Chinese boss Mao Tse-tung. No one, it turned out, had read the Lasky diatribe except its target. And the target was bearing up very well. He was not insensitive yet—or ever—but as each day passed he became more committed to his own self-examination and his own sense of responsibility. He took great delight in reciting a poem by bullfighter Domingo Ortega, as translated by Robert Graves:

Bullfight critics ranked in rows

Crowd the enormous Plaza full;

But only one is there who knows—

And he’s the man who fights the bull.

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Actually Roosevelt had rarely used his “fireside chats” to put pressure on the Congress, and often delivered them when Congress was out of session.

PART FOUR
President Kennedy and the Nation

CHAPTER XIV
THE CONGRESS

F
OR A MAN WITH NO INTEREST
in mathematics, John Kennedy spent a large proportion of the years I knew him counting. Prior to July, 1960, he was counting convention delegates; and he came up with a bare majority. From July to November, 1960, he was counting electoral votes; and he again gained a slender majority. After November, 1960, he was counting Congressional votes; and this time he could not make the sums come out right.

His experience with the Eighty-sixth Congress, particularly that miserable postconvention session in August, 1960, made it clear that larger Democratic majorities were needed in both houses to pass the bills blocked (often in the House Rules Committee and sometimes with the use or threat of a veto) in 1960—including bills on housing, education, minimum wages, depressed areas, civil rights and medical care. But in the 1960 election those larger majorities were not forthcoming. For the first time in this century a party taking over the Presidency failed to gain in the Congress. The Democrats lost only one seat in the Senate. But in the House the Republicans lost seven incumbents while displacing twenty-nine Democrats, every one of them a Kennedy progressive. Twenty of those twenty-nine districts had gone Democratic in the 1958 mid-term landslide by less than 2.5 percent of the vote, and most of them were predominantly Protestant areas carried by Nixon in the closest Presidential race of the century.

The Democratic Party still had large paper majorities in both houses—262-174 in the House and 65-35 in the Senate—and Northern and Western Democrats in agreement with Kennedy’s program still held a majority of their party’s seats. In both houses they had a minority of the total vote, however, particularly in the House of Representatives. In the balky Eighty-sixth Congress they had substantially outnumbered House Republicans. But in the Eighty-seventh, the most conservative Congress since Eisenhower’s Republican Eighty-third, the opposite was true. The balance of power appeared to have swung decisively in the direction of the conservative coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats who had since 1937 effectively blocked much of the progressive legislation of four Presidents.

Reviewing these dismal figures with Lyndon Johnson and the Democratic Congressional leaders in Palm Beach, the President-elect decided nevertheless to confront the conservative coalition with an immediate showdown of strength—over control of the House Rules Committee. That committee, dominated since 1937 by the conservative coalition and in more recent years by its wily chairman, Howard Smith of Virginia, had been the chief bottleneck on the Kennedy-Johnson bills the previous August. No bill reported by a House committee could be considered in the regular manner on the House floor, and no bill passed by both houses in differing forms could proceed to a Senate-House conference committee, unless Smith’s committee granted a “rule.” Many “rules” were not granted at all, and others were granted only after long delays and the attachment of conditions or amendments. Although the committee was 8-4 Democratic, neither Smith nor ranking Democrat William Colmer from Mississippi had ever supported Kennedy’s campaign, much less his program, and their two votes, joined by the four conservative Republican members against six loyal Democrats, produced a 6-6 tie on most major issues, guaranteeing, in the President’s words, that “nothing controversial would come to the floor of the Congress. Our whole program would be emasculated.”

The showdown had been building up for years, as Speaker Sam Rayburn found it increasingly difficult to deal with Smith, Colmer and the Republican members. Asking the new President to stay out of the fight, the Speaker took over its command from the House liberals. By threatening to “purge” Colmer from the committee for his support of anti-Kennedy electors in Mississippi, Rayburn impressed upon the Southerners—to whom the seniority system was a sacrosanct source of strength—that he was serious enough to act. Moderate Southern leaders asked Rayburn to compromise. He had not purged Negro Adam Clayton Powell for endorsing Eisenhower. He had not purged other members convicted of crimes. By singling out Colmer, he would so anger the South that no Kennedy bill could be passed. Rayburn, aware all along of these facts, offered a compromise: the temporary addition to the Rules Committee of two Democrats and one Republican, making possible an 8-7 majority on most bills. The moderates were agreeable, but a floor vote was required, and Republican Leader Charles Halleck announced that his party was officially opposed.

The fight was on. Rayburn employed every asset at his command. Kennedy could hardly remain aloof. Rayburn obtained an endorsement of his move in the House Democratic caucus. Kennedy declared at his first press conference that, although the Constitution made it a matter for the House,

it is no secret that I would strongly believe that the members of the House should have an opportunity to vote…on the programs which we will present—not merely the members of the Rules Committee…. But the responsibility rests with the members….I merely give my view as an interested citizen.

The Vice President, the Attorney General, the Secretaries of Commerce and the Interior as well as other Cabinet members, and particularly White House aide Larry O’Brien, used all the influence a new administration could muster—patronage, sentiment, campaign commitments and Federal actions of all kinds. Rayburn and his lieutenants canvassed every vote, staking the deeply respected Speaker’s personal prestige on the outcome. Lobbyists for the Chamber of Commerce, National Association of Manufacturers, American Medical Association and American Farm Bureau launched a mail assault against the change, and labor, liberal and civil rights lobbyists were pressed into action on its behalf.

The infighting became vicious. The vote was put off until the day after the President’s First State of the Union Message, in hopes that his eloquence and restraint would win fence-sitters. Moderate Southerners and Republicans were begged not to undermine the President before he was barely under way, not to humiliate the Speaker in one of his last great fights and not to handicap the country at a critical time. The President made several last-minute phone calls. The Vice President urged Texans to stand by their colleague. The Speaker made one of his rare impassioned speeches before the vote. The proposal carried 217-212.

“With all of that going for us,” the President repeated many times in the months that followed, “with Rayburn’s own reputation at stake, with all of the pressures and appeals a new President could make, we won by five votes. That shows you what we’re up against.” Sixty-four Democrats had voted against their President. Only 22 Republicans had voted with him, 17 from states he had carried. Without the votes of more than one-third of the Southern Democrats and one-eighth of the Republicans he would not have won at all.

The meaning was clear. No bill could pass the House of Representatives without somehow picking up the votes of 40 to 60 Southerners or Republicans, or a combination of the two, out of the 70 or so Southerners and Republicans who were not intransigent on every issue.

The situation was better in the Senate, although progressive Democrats there, too, had substantially less than 50 percent of the votes. The President and his Senate leadership decided against intervening in a fight to curb filibusters. The filibuster’s chief damage was limited to civil rights bills, which appeared unlikely of passage anyway; and incoming Majority Leader Mike Mansfield opposed making the fight at that time, certain that it could not be won and that Westerners as well as Southerners would be antagonized by the President’s intervention.

In his continuing confrontation with the conservative coalition in both houses, the President could not afford any additional antagonists. He could not bring the same pressures to bear on every fight that he had brought on the Rules Committee roll call. Just as the experts were predicting that only his housing bill stood a chance, the House approved his emergency farm bill by seven last-minute votes and turned down his minimum wage bill by one vote (a defeat he later reversed).

The Republicans taunted Kennedy for his inability to cash in on his Democratic majorities, but the President made no bones about the fact that Southern Democratic defections made every vote a cliff-hanger. “You can water bills down and get them by,” he said, “or you can have bills which have no particular controversy to them…. But…we have a very difficult time, on a controversial piece of legislation, securing a working majority.” Yet, as Theodore White has pointed out, “More…new legislation was actually approved and passed into law…than at any other time since the 1930’s.”
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