Original subtitles

Tonight...

WOMAN: He loved being president.

MAN: Kennedy set so much in motion in such a short time.

MAN: Everybody went to bed

wondering what was going to happen the next day.

MAN: We're talking about nuclear war.

WOMAN: Jackie had never accompanied Jack on a domestic trip.

This was her first one.

Part two of "JFK," on American Experience.

Exclusive corporate funding for American Experience

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And by contributions to your PBS station from:

Previously on JFK...

KENNEDY (on tape): Like many decisions in life,

a combination of factors pressed on me,

which directed me into my present profession.

EVAN THOMAS: There stirred in him a little quiet,

and maybe even more than quiet, rebellion.

ROBERT CARO: There was something in Jack Kennedy,

sick as he was, in pain as he was,

that made men want to follow him into battle.

ROBERT DALLEK: He's seen as a kind of carpetbagger.

He didn't live in Boston.

His opponents attack him for being a rich boy.

You can never defeat the Communist movement in Indochina

until you get the support of the natives.

TIMOTHY NAFTALI: He sent the signals of the kind of person

who suspected that his time on earth was limited.

If elected to the United States Senate...

THOMAS HUGHES: Lyndon Johnson looked at Jack as a person who picked and chose

what he would like to do in the Senate.

Kennedy was the troubadour who came to play before the banquet

and left before the dishwashing began.

SALLY BEDELL-SMITH: They were so beautiful and they were so young.

She wrote in her diary that she had an intimation

that Jack would have a profound

and possibly disturbing effect on her life.

She was going to be marrying a man

who was known for his womanizing,

and that it was unlikely that he would stop.

I am introducing a resolution...

NAFTALI: He was willing to take a risk.

"Are we going to be on the right side

or the wrong side of history?"

HUGHES: His independence meant a lot to him.

Kennedy would keep people guessing.

CARO: Jack Kennedy could learn on the run.

He's learning that politics is changing.

DALLEK: He's only 43 years old and a woman says to him,

"Young man, it's too soon,"

and he says, "No, ma'am, this is my time."

I am today announcing my candidacy

for the presidency of the United States.

DAVID NASAW: He was the representative of the new, young, vibrant generation,

and Jack ran on that theme and ran hard.

The United States looks tired!

NEWS ANCHOR: There he is, the next president of the United States.

Now my wife and I prepare for a new administration

and for a new baby.

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, ta 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 ench.

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

toBut on the 12th dayine and enteof the crisis,Havana.

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.

NAATOR: 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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