Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [101]
Bradlee soon saw clearly the obstacles ahead for his new pal, what he called “the mines” he’d have to navigate: “His age—at forty-three, he’d be the youngest man ever elected president, and the first one born in the twentieth century. His religion—too much of America believed that a Catholic president would have to take orders from the pope in Rome. His health—he’d been given the last rites several times. His father—Joseph P. Kennedy’s reputation was secure as a womanizing robber baron, who’d been anti-war and seen as pro-German while he was ambassador to Britain during World War II, and pro-McCarthy during the fifties.”
When Bradlee asked Jack if it didn’t seem “strange” to him to be running for president, Kennedy offered even his friend a stock reply: “Yes, until I stop and look around at the other people who are running for the job. And then I think I’m just as qualified as they are.” When he asked if he thought he could pull it off, Kennedy’s answer was even more studied: “Yes. If I don’t make a single mistake, and if I don’t get maneuvered into a position where there’s no way out.”
It was, in fact, a troubled time, as the 1950s were coming to a close. The country that had proudly, gloriously led the forces that vanquished the Axis dictators now had a growing set of worries when it looked beyond its borders in almost any direction. From the earliest moments of his run for the presidency, the country that Jack Kennedy was hoping to convince he could lead was beset by an unsettling feeling. Americans sensed they were losing pace in the Cold War, and weren’t sure how this had happened. The Soviets were moving worldwide; we were fading as a global power, not dramatically, but undeniably.
In October 1957, the country even became wary, suddenly, about the grandfatherly leadership of Dwight Eisenhower. The launching of the Soviet space satellite Sputnik sent an ugly shiver down the spines of complacent citizens long convinced of their country’s enduring edge against the “Soviet menace.” We’d been told by Wernher von Braun and Walt Disney—in 1955 more than 40 million of us had watched on TV the gung-ho film Man in Space, which they’d made together—that the United States would be the first to launch a satellite into orbit. Now the Russians had done it. Our leaders had committed the worst sin a politician can—as Churchill once noted: to promise success and then fail.
The second tangible sign of losing pace came on New Year’s Eve 1958. That evening the Cuban president, Fulgencia Batista, a dictator who’d been up until that moment agreeably rotten, sneaked out of Havana at midnight and headed into exile. His departure allowed the bearded leader Fidel Castro, a young lawyer-turned-guerrilla clad in fatigues, to come down out of the Sierra Maestra and assume power. When Castro, who’d sold himself as a democratic reformer, announced his allegiance to Marxist-Leninism, the Soviet Union had an ally ninety miles from our coast.
There was also intangible evidence of America’s failure to keep pace against the encroaching Soviet menace. As we fought the battle of the global game board, there came a creeping sense ours was not the winning side.
Kennedy had run on the spirit of the returning vet in ’46, then, in 1952, had catapulted himself past the Yankee order in Massachusetts, thanks both to the creative way he again worked his own tribe and also to its own rising self-estimation.
Now, with Ike aging and the decade slowing, the candidate saw how his fellow Americans were reacting against the dullness, feeling a restless urge to do something. Even in their prosperity, they knew the times weren’t living up to their aspirations, felt the pang of their unchallenged spirits. Jack Kennedy, having been out there in a way no one else was, sensed the mood of the country in a way uniquely his own, and now staked his claim on the task of getting us moving