
exquisite Jacqueline, and with a Harvard brain trust of “the best and the brightest.” The
Thousand Days of what would be called Gamelot seemed to integrate the worlds o
Washington, Hollywood, Broadway
and Cambridge: Frank
Sinatra,
Robert
Frost
and
the Bundys.
Kennedy’s foreign policy was driven by a critique of Eisenhower’s strategy o
“massive retaliation,” a budget-tight reliance on nuclear deterrence, air power and
CIA
machinations. Kennedy offered “flexible response,” a more ambitious call for the ability
to contain the Soviets along the East-West axis, but also to rise to the challenge o
national wars of liberation with “counter-insurgency” As such, Kennedy inspired liberal
idealists to take seriously the emergence of the Third World through both the Green
Berets and the
Peace Corps
.
Domestically Kennedy discovered that the
civil rights
revolution—the
sit-ins
and the
freedom
rides
of 1960 and 1961—forced his administration to respond to the call for
racial justice. Partly in response to the ways in which
segregation
harmed US interests
among people of color in the Third World, partly reacting to the pressures generated by
events in the
South,
Kennedy reluctantly moved by 1963 to embrace legislative
proposals to eliminate segregation.
On other domestic issues, the Kennedy administration had difficulties in achieving
legislative victories in seeking modestly to expand
welfare
state programs; he is credited
with stimulating the economy with a tax cut and upholding the public interest in forcing
US Steel to rescind price increases. For the most part, he was a corporate liberal,
committed to technocratic solutions within a pro-business, welfare state format.
Kennedy faced his most crucial tests abroad, initially during the Berlin Crisis, which
led to the construction of the Berlin Wall and following the abortive
Bay of Pigs
invasion
of Castro’s Cuba. Kennedy’s ad hoc style of leadership, which paid insufficient attention
to issues of Castro’s strengths, matters of terrain and the role of air support, contributed
to the debacle.
Following this defeat, Kennedy continued to seek the subversion of the Castro
Revolution through the CIA’s Operation Mongoose. When intelligence discovered Soviet
missile silos being constructed in Cuba, Kennedy responded with a dramatic, televised
challenge of a naval blockade to Khrushchev, which brought the world closer to nuclear
war than at any previous moment—or any since. Khrushchev adhered to the blockade,
allowing time for compromises to be made—Soviet missiles removed, a US pledge not to
invade Cuba and a secret agreement by the US to remove its Jupiter missiles from
Turkey.
Kennedy increased US military personnel in South Vietnam from 600 to over 17,000
in response to the military successes of the National Liberation Front. Domestic
opposition finally deposed Ngo Dinh Diem in a military coup and assassination in
November 1963. Historians grapple with the “what if” regarding Kennedy and Vietnam.
The weight of evidence suggests that Kennedy was likely to increase the Americanization
of the war in the face of an impending communist victory At the same time, there were
signs of some moderation of Kennedy’s
Cold War
militancy (for example the Test-
an
Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 624