Read an Excerpt
I
The Torch
The Kennedys leave their Georgetown apartment on the morning of JFK's inauguration, January 20, 1961.
Jacques Lowe, Jacques Lowe Photographic Archive, Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin
Transition
The snow came fast and thick. On the morning of Thursday, January 19, 1961, storm clouds blew up from North Carolina and Virginia in icy gusts, paralyzing the mid-Atlantic states, which saw as much as twenty-nine inches of precipitation as the mercury dived into the low twenties, and then the teens. By day's end, eight inches of snow would blanket Washington, D.C., as the city prepared for the peaceful transfer of power.
Two hours before the snow began to fall, John Kennedy met in the Oval Office with President Dwight Eisenhower, the seventy-year-old incumbent, who would pass on the burden of the office to Kennedy the following day at noon. Even beyond their twenty-seven-year age difference-the greatest America has seen between an incoming and outgoing president-the contrast between them was stark: Kennedy was the tousle-haired picture of young-man-in-a-hurry vitality and ambition, bronzed from a recent stay at his father's Palm Beach estate; Eisenhower was the Kansas farm boy turned stalwart hero of D-Day-pallid, bald, and aged-who wore the mantle of power with reflexive ease. Before repairing to the West Wing, the two men had greeted each other warmly before a gaggle of eager press photographers at the White House's North Portico, flashing the famous smiles that had lit up thousands of campaign posters through the years. All was cordial as they met, belying an undercurrent of tension between them. Among their respective aides, Eisenhower derided Kennedy as "Little Boy Blue," while Kennedy called Eisenhower "that old asshole," a military term reserved by junior officers for the top brass, and, later, "a cold bastard."
This was their second transition meeting. The first, in early December, a discussion on national security matters lasting the better part of an hour, hadn't amounted to much. Remarkably, Kennedy and Eisenhower had crossed paths only once before the transition, a brief encounter in Potsdam, Germany, during World War II when Kennedy was covering the war for Hearst newspapers that Eisenhower couldn't recall. This despite the fact that throughout the entirety of Ike's presidency Kennedy had sat in the U.S. Senate representing his home state of Massachusetts, speaking to the infertility of Kennedy's tenure in Congress's upper chamber.
Regardless, JFK had used his political résumé-six years in the House of Representatives, eight years in the Senate-to launch a successful candidacy for the nation's highest office. On Election Day, he had eked out the sparest of wins against his Republican challenger, Eisenhower's vice president, Richard Nixon, carrying 49.72 percent of the vote to Nixon's 49.55 percent-a margin of just 118,574 votes. The slimmest victory of the twentieth century, it was hardly the mandate Kennedy had hoped for, limiting his ability to deviate markedly from the policies of Eisenhower and nipping at his abundant confidence. "How did I manage to beat a guy like [Nixon] by only a hundred thousand votes?" he asked his aide Kenny O'Donnell incredulously. Still, it had been enough. As Kennedy himself said after the votes had been counted and his win confirmed the following day, "The margin is thin, but the responsibility is clear."
He had gotten there by pledging to "get America moving again," implicating a supposedly complacent Eisenhower as he hammered away at the "missile gap," a contrivance designed to foster anxiety that the Soviet Union had slowly built up its arsenal disproportionally as the cold war simmered and the president sat idly by. Eisenhower was stung by Kennedy's attacks on his record, and by Nixon's failure to defend him. The old general viewed Kennedy's win as a repudiation of his administration, considering it one of his "greatest disappointments." "All I've done for the last eight years has gone down the drain," he lamented to his son John.
He was wrong. The electorate had simply cast its lot with Kennedy, capriciously tilting the cycle of history in another direction as a means of exercising their own lever in the balance of power inherent in a democracy. With an outgoing approval rating of 60 percent, Ike was nearly as popular with Americans as when he took the presidency in a landslide eight years earlier. At a time when tensions between the U.S. and the Soviet Union were rising, the steady-handed president had kept the cold war from becoming hot, successfully employing a strategy of containment to rein in the ambitions of his Soviet counterpart, Nikita Khrushchev. The hostility between the two superpowers stood in contrast to the halcyon façade that marked the 1950s and the early '60s; an underlying fear of Russian aggression and the spread of communism pervaded the nation and defined the Eisenhower era. But in a dangerous world, Eisenhower, the former supreme allied commander in the greatest of America's foreign wars, had kept the communist wolf from the door.
To be sure, there had been setbacks, especially in Eisenhower's second term. In 1957, the Soviets had stunned the world by launching Sputnik, a satellite not much bigger than a beach ball, spurring alarm that the Russians had gained technological superiority and igniting a space race between the superpowers. The subsequent creation of NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration) did little to instill confidence as the U.S. struggled to catch up, stumbling in early efforts to successfully launch a rocket with American prestige and ingenuity on the line. The following year, revolutionary Fidel Castro led a band of guerrillas to drive out the U.S.-backed regime in Cuba, introducing a communist state to the Western Hemisphere less than a hundred miles off the coast of Florida.
In 1960, Eisenhower's last full year in office, the Soviets shot down American U-2 spy plane pilot Francis Gary Powers on a covert CIA mission to photograph Soviet missile installations in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg. The Eisenhower administration, assuming that neither Powers nor the aircraft had survived the crash, claimed it was a weather plane that had experienced a technical malfunction. The Soviets proved otherwise, revealing to the world that Powers, a member of the CIA's operations team who was very much alive and well, was now their prisoner, and that the downed aircraft was mostly intact, allowing them a firsthand look at American spying apparatus.
After months of interrogation by the KGB, Powers issued an apology along with a confession that he had been engaged in an espionage mission. The incident further strained superpower tensions while providing the Soviets with a public relations windfall. U.S. fears grew that same year when Khrushchev appeared at a United Nations plenary session in New York where he protested an anti-Soviet speech by removing his shoe and defiantly pounding it on the table, bellowing, "We will bury you!"
Domestically, Eisenhower had grappled cautiously with the burgeoning civil rights movement. In the decade before his presidency, promising action had been taken toward racial equality, including a 1941 Executive Order from Franklin Roosevelt to bar discrimination in defense industries and the armed forces based on "race, creed, color, or national origin," followed by Harry Truman's order to desegregate the military in 1948. Still, the postwar years saw a surge in racism, no more so than in the Deep South. A major step forward came in Eisenhower's second year in office with the unanimous ruling on the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education, rendering public school segregation unconstitutional. In 1957, Eisenhower responded to clamorous resistance to racial integration in Little Rock, Arkansas, by calling in the 101st Airborne to ensure the admission of nine Black students at the city's Central High School.
Two years earlier, in 1955, the nation had been introduced to Martin Luther King, Jr., a twenty-six-year-old minister who led a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, after the arrest of Rosa Parks, a Black secretary for the NAACP and seamstress who refused to give up her seat to a white patron. A Supreme Court ruling striking down the segregation of Montgomery's buses came a year later, leading to King's creation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), an alliance of Black ministers who led new and broader civil rights campaigns in the South.
In October 1960, King was arrested for participating in an Atlanta restaurant sit-in and, after being taken to a DeKalb County jail, was moved in shackles to a rural prison where he would be subjected to hard labor and vulnerable to violence from racist white prison guards and inmates. Only a plea to Georgia's Democratic governor Ernest Vandiver from Kennedy, then in the last days of stumping for the presidency, ensured King's release.
There was also the matter of the economy, which sputtered into recession at the end of Ike's term, with wages stalled, unemployment rising, and gross domestic product down by 5 percent in the last quarter of 1960.
All foreshadowed the trials Kennedy would contend with in Eisenhower's stead: increased hostilities with a menacing, determined Soviet adversary and the threat of the global spread of communism; a flat-footed U.S. space program; the growing demands of equal rights from the Black community against an intractable white majority violently protecting the status quo; and a sluggish economy in need of a lift.
Eisenhower was more than ready to let it all go. But he would be missed. As the editorial board of the Dallas Morning News wrote of him on the day of his second meeting with Kennedy, "No man in universal history has amassed so much influence and power without taking one more step: assumption of an imperial diadem or the trappings of dictatorship. It behooves JFK to remember, as we think he does, that neither the U.S. nor the rest of the world is through with Dwight Eisenhower." Nor, in fact, was Kennedy, who understood the value of keeping the redoubtable Ike close then, and in the course of his own presidency. It was Kennedy who had asked for the second transition meeting. As he wrote in a memo to himself later, he did so to reflect "the harmony of the transition," thereby "strengthening our hand." But in truth, he also did it because he knew he would benefit from Eisenhower's counsel.
For forty-five minutes, the pair met alone in the Oval Office. Their conversation began on a somber note, with Ike providing a tutorial on the use of "the Football," the black vinyl bag containing the codes to launch a nuclear attack. The "Presidential Emergency Action Documents," as it was officially known, would be a fixture of Kennedy's presidency, handed off by military aides in eight-hour shifts and always within his reach as commander in chief. Ike then segued into another security measure. "Watch this," he told Kennedy as he picked up a phone, ordering "Opal Drill Three." Within three minutes the presidential helicopter, Marine One, descended on the South Lawn, ready to whisk the president away.
"I've just shown my friend here how to get out in a hurry," Ike quipped as the two men adjourned to the Cabinet Room where they were met by the president's secretaries of state, defense, and treasury, and transition team head, along with their counterparts from Kennedy's team, Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, Douglas Dillon, and Clark Clifford respectively.
The first of the four items on the agenda, as requested by Kennedy, was "Trouble Spots." Laos was among those countries on the list. "If Laos should fall to the Communists," Eisenhower warned, "then it would be a question of time until South Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and Burma would collapse"-an allusion to the domino theory, the widespread belief that if the US allowed one nation to yield to communist aggression, others would fall in turn. Laos, he maintained, was "the cork in the bottle," adding, "This is one of the problems I'm leaving you with that I'm not happy about. We might have to fight."
Given the dire situation, Kennedy asked why Eisenhower hadn't already sent in ground troops. "I would have but I did not feel I could commit troops with a new administration coming to power," Eisenhower answered.
Kennedy inquired about whether a coalition government or military action by the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) would work in the region. Neither was a good option, Eisenhower maintained.
As they discussed which of the neighboring nations might come to the aid of the communist rebels, Kennedy asked, "What about China?" Eisenhower replied that he thought the Chinese would be reluctant to provoke a major war, adding gravely of the situation at large, "It's a high-stakes poker game; there's no easy solution." Kennedy got the impression that Eisenhower was actually enjoying the conversation. So did McNamara and Dillon, who thought the president, to Dillon's mind, got an "inner satisfaction" in laying the onerous problems of Southeast Asia "in Kennedy's lap."
The talk turned to another trouble spot, this one closer to home. On two occasions prior to the meeting, Kennedy had been briefed on a U.S. operation in Guatemala where the CIA was training a band of anti-Castro exiles to stage a coup to wrest Fidel Castro from power. "Should we support guerrilla operations in Cuba?" Kennedy asked Eisenhower.
"To the utmost," Eisenhower replied enthusiastically, recommending "the effort be continued and accelerated," and offering his firm view that the United States "cannot let the present government go on there" as Kennedy took note.
The meeting broke up after about an hour. Just before leaving the Cabinet Room, Eisenhower stole a moment to tell Kennedy that despite the rhetoric of his campaign-a reference to Kennedy's claims of a "missile gap"-the U.S. held a distinct nuclear advantage over the Soviets through its Polaris fleet: submarines with nuclear-missile-firing capabilities that surrounded coastal areas of the Soviet Union. "You have an invulnerable asset in Polaris," he reported to Kennedy, perhaps with some self-satisfaction, "invulnerable."
The interaction resulted in a thaw of sorts between Eisenhower and Kennedy. In spite of his initial reservations, Eisenhower, however grudgingly, was taken by the young man's considerable charm and acute mind. But he worried that Kennedy would be out of his depth in the position he was about to assume. Eight years earlier, when Harry Truman handed the office over to Eisenhower, Truman worried that his successor didn't grasp the enormity of the task before him. So it now was for Eisenhower, who told his diary after their first meeting that he didn't think Kennedy understood the complexities of the job. Kennedy, for his part, held a similar view of Eisenhower. Though he was duly impressed by Eisenhower's "surprising force" of personality and found him to be more up to speed on matters of state than he'd expected, he left with the impression that Eisenhower didn't fully appreciate the power of the office he held.
