Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House Read Online Free PDF Page A

ability to generate public excitement.
    In running for the highest office, Kennedy saw himself as uniquely positioned to serve the country’s well-being. He believed that the Republicans and most of his Democratic rivals for the nomination were locked into conventional thinking that would perpetuate the Cold War and endanger the peace. “The key thing for the country is a new foreign policy that will break out of the confines of the Cold War,” he told a potential supporter. “Then we can build a decent relationship with developing nations and begin to respond to their needs. We can stop the vicious circle of the arms race and promote diversity and peaceful change within the Soviet bloc. We can get this country moving again on its domestic problems.” Other Democratic aspirants for the highest office not only echoed Republican foreign policy ideas but also made the mistake of putting traditional welfare state assumptions—economic security and social programs—ahead of overseas challenges that could overshadow domestic concerns. Kennedy believed that his strongest claim on the presidency was an understanding that domestic issues had to take a backseat to national security dangers and that the next chief executive needed, above all, to assure long-term peace, because advances in destructive weapons made another all-out war impermissible.
    The nomination and general election campaigns, however, offered limited opportunity for Kennedy to make a detailed case for how the country’s direction in foreign affairs would change under his stewardship. Persuading party leaders and voters that he could lead them to victory in November and convincing a wider electorate that he would be a better national leader than his Republican rival moved him to focus on other matters than the substance of governing. Besides, he had no clear agenda for how he would achieve his larger designs, and since offering details of how he would proceed in office seemed likely to stimulate more opposition than support, he believed it just as well to let a program for governing remain unstated. As much to the point, he knew that the country’s most effective presidents had never planned too far ahead. Circumstances were always changing, and any course of action was best designed in response to current events. As a student of history and the presidency in particular, he knew that the most influential recent presidents, from Theodore Roosevelt to Harry Truman, had shunned choosing a cabinet or White House staff or announcing precise policy choices in advance of their administrations. He took counsel from Abraham Lincoln’s famous observation, “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.”
    His fight for the nomination took him far afield from the substance of foreign policy making. During the West Virginia primary, for example, he felt compelled to address the state’s struggle with economic problems. He described an agenda—increased unemployment benefits, expanded Social Security, food distribution for the needy, federal spending to stimulate coal production (the state’s biggest industry), and more defense investment—that echoed FDR’s New Deal, which, like Roosevelt himself, was highly popular in the state. But all this was muted alongside efforts to convince the state’s Protestants, who made up 96 percent of its residents, that his Catholic religion would be of no consequence in shaping a Kennedy presidency. “The Catholic question” was a matter of vital concern to millions of American voters in 1960—many, especially across the South, where anti-Catholic sentiment was most pronounced, believed that a Catholic president would be more loyal to the pope than to the United States. In confronting the issue directly and effectively, Kennedy assured himself of an essential electoral victory crucial to his nomination.
    The question shadowed his campaign nonetheless, and in mid-September, less than