The Rest Is History - 393. JFK: Cuba, Camelot and the Cold War (Part 2)

Episode Date: November 28, 2023

By the late 1950s, John F. Kennedy was a rich and handsome Democratic senator with a beautiful wife and young family, heading for the White House despite his Catholicism, his affairs and his secret illnesses. In January 1961 he became the youngest ever President of the United States, during a period of heightened political and social tensions at home and abroad, with the Cold War raging, communism on the rise and the Civil Rights Movement dominating the headlines. What role, then, did Kennedy’s domestic and foreign policies play in these monumental moments of world history? And does the backlash against him offer us the crucial clues to the motives behind his assassination, and the identity of his killer?  Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss Kennedy’s early political career, the successes and failings of his presidency, and world-shaking events such as the Bay of Pigs disaster, the Cuban missile crisis, the Space Race and the Vietnam War. All the while, Kennedy’s days are numbered as that fateful day in Dallas comes ever closer… *Dominic’s book The Fall of the Aztecs is available now from bookshops across the UK - the perfect Christmas present!* Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. 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

tempered by war disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage, and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today, at home, and around the world. 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.

That, Dominic, was John F. Kennedy's inaugural address on the 20th of january 1961 did you enjoy that i do i thought it was pretty extraordinary so you said before you recorded that what were your expression i wasn't going to bother with precision it was about the vibe precision is for journey. Yes. Well, it's kind of like Picasso painting a bull or something. You get the sense of the bull, but you don't get the kind of absolute sense that it has four legs. You just have a sense of bullness. You do. Explain the pauses, the long Pinterest pauses. Well, if you watch it, he has incredibly long pauses. Ah, okay.

Very, very long pauses. So I went through and I listened to it and I was struck incredibly long pauses okay very very long pauses so i went through and i listened to it and i was struck by those pauses because this is what we impressionists do right pick up on you know the little kind of hints of personality yeah things that make it distinctive that other people might not pick up on and i went through and i put a dash through that passage did you every time there was a pause well that is what sets the really top performers apart, isn't it? I like to think so. The attention to nuance and detail. I like to think so. But it's tremendous rhetoric, isn't it? It's great rhetoric written by Theodore Sorenson, Ted Sorenson, his speechwriter, who had been working for him since the late 50s.

Kennedy is a great phrase maker and he has a slightly sort of, I don't think he's the best speaker in the world, but he has this kind of declamatory style, slightly friends, Romans, countrymen style that I think works very well. It is. It's traditional oratory. Yeah. As opposed, say, to Reagan's more folksy. Exactly. Oh, kind of. Yeah, because JFK never really does folksy. He would probably regard that as too populist. He sees himself as the leader of the new

Rome. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So Tom, we are doing this series about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. And this week we're talking about the victim to try and sort of shed some light on why he might've been assassinated. Before we get into his presidency and how he becomes president, we should just recap a bit to reflect on the man and the politician so as a man i'm surprised how much i like kennedy having read up on him for these episodes because there's part of me that had always you know he's so boring because he's so ubiquitous you know it's like people who don't like the beatles because they're over familiar with the beatles yeah but actually the kennedy that i think emerges from the first let's say 40 years of his life, is actually a pretty likable guy. Charming, funny.

Brave. Yeah, brave. Anglophile. I mean, what's not to like? Right. A big fan of Winston Churchill in North Melbourne. And somebody who had, as we know, most importantly, defended Stanley Baldwin in his book, While England Slept. Ticking all the boxes. He is ticking all the boxes. The one box that I think some listeners may be wondering about is the fact that he is so promiscuous and that he's not a faithful husband. I suppose the one thing I would say in defense of him, as it were, not that I think it's historians' jobs to attack

or defend, he's not predatory. He doesn't have non-consensual relationships. He, without exception, has relationships with people who are very keen to have them with him. But also, we were discussing this in the previous episode. I mean, it's tied up with his daddy issues. It is. Because his father, Joe Kennedy, has basically taught his sons- That it's fine. That this is what you do. I mean, his father's a terrible father. Yeah.

He lobotomises his oldest daughter, Rosemary. Yeah, exactly. In 1940, was it, or something? An absolutely tragic story. So Rosemary had what we would now call severe learning difficulties, and the family decides, or Joe decides, we don't really know how much his wife was involved with the decision. He's persuaded by people he talks to, surgeons on Cape Cod or whatever, that the thing to do is to have her sent for a lobotomy and that destroys her life effectively that's a terrible mistake to have made it's not necessarily his fault he's following the advice well yeah it's a ghastly story tom it's an

absolutely ghastly story but anyway he's he's not a good father no he's not and maybe you could say about jfk that what's incredible is he turns out as well-adjusted as he does. I think that's actually a reasonable thing to say. We reflected on the man, just reflect on the politician for a second, because I think understanding the politician is really important when we get into the theories about why he was murdered. At the point that we ended last time, the late 1950s, he is an extremely conventional politician. He is not on the left of the Democratic Party. He is kind of squarely in the middle. So he's from Massachusetts. That means he's almost automatically more liberal

than many because Massachusetts is a very liberal state, an urban state, big unions, all that kind of thing. So he's not going to be a big defender of segregation. It'd be unthinkable for a senator from Massachusetts to be a defender of segregation, for example. And he's not going to be a big defender of segregation it'd be unthinkable for a senator from massachusetts to be a defender of segregation for example and he's not an isolationist or anything like that but there's nothing about jfk at this point that would alarm people you know unless you're the kind of person who thinks all democrats and marxists and there are people like that yeah but business leaders other politicians you know even sort of southern democrats or republicans in congress they've seen plenty of people like him before you know he's not as left other politicians, even sort of Southern Democrats or Republicans in Congress. They've seen plenty of people like him before. He's not as left-wing as FDR was, for example.

So this presumably makes him an ideal person to run for the presidency. Absolutely. I mean, he's the kind of figure that the Democrats at the moment are signally lacking. Yes. Because the Kennedy that's floating around now believes all kinds of mad stuff, doesn't he? Yes, Robert Kennedy's son. Ali now believes all kinds of mad stuff, doesn't he? Yes, Robert Kennedy's son. Aliens and all kinds of stuff. Exactly.

But JFK is straight down the road, bang on the nail, centrist, exactly what you want if you want to win an election. Especially in an age, Tom, when the two big parties are uneasy coalitions. They're regional coalitions rather than ideological. But they always are, aren't they? They are. But in this period, to win, the Democrats must win urban, northeastern kind of cities and things. So the Chicago's, the Boston's, New York's and so on. Ideally, they'd like to win California

and they would also need to win the white segregationist South where a lot of black people can't vote. So in other words, if you nominate somebody who is a fervent champion of black people can't vote. So in other words, if you nominate somebody who is a fervent champion of black civil rights, you will alarm white Southern voters and you will forfeit the support of the kind of white Southern power brokers. But conversely, presumably, if you are

very associated with the segregationist traditions, then you're not going to win liberals in the Northeast. Correct. Exactly. Exactly so. Yes, I see. Yes. It's a coalition and it's a tough ask. And if you've got a young war hero with a very beautiful wife, a young family, loads of money, lots of glamour, then you're laughing. And so when Kennedy announced that he's standing, which is in January 1960, he's obviously going to be very hard to beat. There are two downsides. One, senators don't normally win.

So it's very rare for a senator to get the nomination because senators are kind of seen as legislators. They're not executives. And secondly, he's a Catholic. And America's never had a Catholic president. There has been a Catholic candidate for president, Al Smith, in 1928. But he was hammered by Herbert Hoover. So that kind of hangs over Kennedy. Can he beat the wasps? Can he beat the wasps? And he has to prove himself by doing something that a lot of

candidates don't bother doing. He enters the presidential primaries. So we now think of presidential primaries as the norm, but they were quite exceptional in those days. Lots of people didn't enter and thought they could kind of set up the nomination at the convention. So he enters the primaries and he wins in two quite Protestant states. So Wisconsin and West Virginia, they're the two big tests. He beats the local favourite, who's Hubert Humphrey from Minnesota. And in doing so, he shows that Catholics can win elections outside their own kind of heartland.

And how much kind of anti-Catholic sentiment is there floating around his candidacy? Is he going to be ruled from Rome and all that kind of thing? There's a fair bit of talk of this. I think most Americans actually don't think this way at all. There are always a few who do, because there's still a fair bit of kind of sectarianism, but most Americans don't. I mean, Kennedy puts that to bed quite successfully. But I think because it had never happened, he's always being asked about it. I mean, it seems mad now, looking back, that in 1960, the candidates for the Democratic Party was having to go around making speeches about his belief in the separation of church and state. Someone to go out of his way to say he believed in the separation of church and state and that he would not be dictated to by Rome.

That all dates back to Gregory VII, the famous Pope of the 11th century. So a historical irony there. Well, this is a lovely teaser, Tom, for your forthcoming episodes, which you would be doing in 2029, did we agree? To be discussed. On Gregory VII. Anyway, he goes to the convention. He wins on the first ballot. There are lots of other candidates. So Lyndon Baines Johnson, the Senate majority leader, Democrat, kind of Texan, is one of the other candidates. And Kennedy actually ends up picking him as his vice presidential nominee.

And that's to balance his Northeast kind of liberal Harvard, Massachusetts vibe with a hard drinking, hard pissing Southerner. Right. Yes, a Texan. So not somebody from the real heartland, the segregationist heartlands of Mississippi, South Carolina or somewhere, but a Texan. So on the kind of fringes of the South, but somebody who knows how to work the system in Congress. Somebody who's been around a lot. I mean, they're a very odd couple. They have nothing in common, but it's a sensible choice. And Kennedy makes this grand speech at the convention about the new frontier. You know, we stand on the frontier of the 1960s.

He appeals to youth. He says, my call is to the young at heart, regardless of age. The Cold War is crucial for him. So he says, you know, we're in a struggle for mastery, a race for mastery of the sky and the rain, the oceans and the tides, the far side of space and the inside of men's minds. This is the kind of soaring rhetoric that I think if somebody did now in the 21st century, people would slightly laugh. But in 1960, people would love it. I mean, they did love it. I don't know. I think someone should try it. Can you see Rishi Sunak coming out with this, Tom?

No, not Rishi. Someone in America. Yeah, maybe. So he goes into the general election and he's up against Nixon, the vice president. With his five o'clock shadow. With his five o'clock shadow. That's been massively overstated, you know. So this is a reference to the TV debate. Nixon wore a pale suit and kind of looked very haggard. Sweaty.

He did look sweaty because he said he was going to visit every single state to show his dynamism. So he'd visited every single state and he was absolutely exhausted. And he'd also hurt his knee and then been hospitalized. And he drags himself from his hospital bed to do this debate. And actually, I mean, there's sort of one clip of him looking a little bit sweaty. He's not even looking that sweaty. He's looking a tiny bit sweaty. And that's now become a staple of documentaries. But actually, if you watch the whole debate, it's actually very

boring. They're both really good by modern standards. I mean, you watch it in disbelief at how far the standards have plummeted since then. They're both very articulate, really well informed, very thoughtful. They don't really disagree on very much. The big issue is Kennedy says, under the Eisenhower administration, we've fallen behind the Soviet Union. They don't really disagree on very much. The big issue is Kennedy says, under the Eisenhower administration, we've fallen behind the Soviet Union. They sent up a Sputnik satellite in 1957. Fidel Castro has come to power in Cuba in the Cuban revolution. And also Kennedy says there's this massive missile gap. He goes on about this all the time. He says the Russians have so many more missiles than we do. So in a way, he's attacking Nixon from the right.

Yeah. If you want to see it that way, I mean, I wouldn't describe it in left-right terms, but absolutely. He says they're stagnant, conservative, and they've done nothing. And they've fallen behind in the Cold War. And I will prosecute the Cold War with great dynamism and vigour. And we'll have shiny rockets. And we'll go to space. And we'll do all of these exciting things. When does he give his pledge to get a man on the moon? So that's 1961 later. But it's kind of incubating there. Oh, absolutely. So when Gagarin is the first man into orbit, Kennedy, his response to that is to

say, we will get somebody on the moon by the end of the decade. So this is all part of his kind of new frontier thing. You can understand why he's saying this, because America has had... It's not perfect, of course. It's had McCarthyism and the civil rights issue. But America is by far the richest, most affluent, most technologically advanced country on Earth. Tremendous optimism around, we can do what we want. We can put a man on the moon. We can solve poverty. We can win the Cold War. Kennedy is the embodiment of that early 60 60s kind of shiny space age, atomic age optimism. But also Camelot, famously, is the word that's applied to his White House. Though only afterwards, Tom.

Oh, not at the time. So it's actually Jackie giving an interview to Life magazine, I think months after his assassination, says, oh, it was like Camelot. We love Camelot because they loved the musical. Yes. They're very much a musical. So when people go on about the glamour of the Kennedy White House. What is it? What do the common people do?

I think they sing. That's it. Yes. Yeah. I can't remember how it goes, but they're very much people who like listening to Broadway musicals and sipping martinis. That's their kind of mad men. Yes. Yeah. And that's the sort of Camelot mystique.

Now, actually, the interesting thing is we've listed all candidates' great advantages and assets. This is the closest election in modern American history. Both candidates win just over 49.5% of the vote and actually goes to two states, Illinois and Texas. And in both of those states, there were allegations that it had been fixed and there'd been fraud and that people had stuffed boxes. Right, because the allegation that Joe Kennedy bought the presidency for his son, it's a kind of Trump-esque complaint, isn't it, that rumbles throughout his presidency. And it plays a part in the theories after Kennedy's death, because some people

listening to this may well say, they fixed the election, Joe Kennedy bought the election, but he didn't deliver, and then the mafia killed him. Okay, so let's bear that in mind. Well, the truth of the matter, just on that election, he didn't buy the election. They did spend a lot of money, but was there a sense in 1960 that it had been fraudulently bought? Not really. And also, it's possible that there'd been a little bit of ballot box stuffing in Illinois. The margin there was 9,000 votes. But in Texas, the margin is 46,000 votes. That's a hell of a lot of votes.

So most academics, in fact, almost all academics, I think, who have looked into this say that was not a stolen election. You know, actually, there's always a little bit of grey area in some of these things because local election officials, yeah, they make mistakes, they are appointed by the party, they maybe, you know, lean one way or the other, but this isn't a case of major fraud by any means. So Dick Nixon slinks off to lick his wounds

and Kennedy, meanwhile, is preparing to deliver his long pause- strewn inaugural address he is indeed now on his administration Tom this is again important when we come to the murder a common belief among conspiracy theorists is that Kennedy was ultimately much more left-wing than people realized that he's a radical who is going to alter American foreign policy or domestic policy in some alarming way. And for that reason, he had to be eliminated. When you look at the people in his administration, the key players, they're all very much the old kind of Washington insiders. So his Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, had been a State Department official in the 1950s, and then he had run the

Rockefeller Foundation. His treasury secretary, Douglas Dillon, was an Eisenhower Republican, had been an Eisenhower official. And his defense secretary, Robert McNamara, had worked for the Air Force, and then he had been head of the Ford Motor Company. So these are not firebrand radicals by any stretch of the imagination. they are very establishment figures very military industrial complex so dominic they are very military industrial complex but is kennedy himself not somebody who would be military industrial complex adjacent to tom people who've watched oliver stone's film jfk will remember that it opens with eisenhower

in his last broadcast warning against the military industrial complex, doesn't he? So I just throw that out. Which he absolutely did. But I think Eisenhower's warning there is partly a warning actually about let's not overspend. Let's not throw loads of money at expensive military white elephants just to please big business and their friends in the military who want to build air bases and stuff everywhere and waste everybody's money. I think this sort of the idea that Eisenhower is actually secretly, Dwight Eisenhower hated the United States and

its mission in the world. I mean, that's obviously nonsense. Eisenhower is incredibly patriotic and has already toppled a government in Guatemala, Tom, in 1954. All right, Poirot. Carry on with your account of the murderese administration, stacking up the clues or not so it's possible i suppose that somebody might want to murder kennedy because they regarded him as too left-wing domestically it's possible but is it likely so if you look at his economic policy that's the thing that most people usually care most about not the most eye-catching but if you ask ordinary people it's bread and butter stuff.

The economy grew every year in Kennedy's administration. And the one big thing he did was to cut everybody's taxes. So the economy had stuttered a bit at the end of Eisenhower's time. There'd been a brief recession in the late 50s. And Kennedy's keen to get it started again. Now, he could do this through Roosevelt-type big government public works, or he could cut taxes and give people more money to spend. The Liz Truss option. The Liz Truss option. That's not a comparison you often hear, is it? The Kennedy-Truss comparison. But it works for JFK. It does work for JFK, and he lasts longer than Liz Truss.

So he cut most tax bans. There are about a thousand different tax bans in America in the early 60s. The average cut was about 20%. So if you were the top rate taxpayer, so the people who might be in a shadowy meeting, Tom. Yes. Smoking cigars. Yeah. Deciding to rub him out. You have JFK to thank for slashing your rate of tax from 90% to 70%. So whether such people are genuinely suffused with rage against JFK's socialistic policies, I will leave the listener to decide for themselves. And in fact, some liberals, it's often a thing among liberal historians, they will say, JFK is just an establishment

centrist dad. He's not actually doing all the things that he should be doing. So there's that. Okay. On the centrist daddery, of course, the great domestic talking point, the thing that's roiling America is the civil rights movement. So we did an episode, didn't we, on Martin Luther King's great speech in 1962. And you talked there about how Kennedy was kind of a bit ambivalent about civil rights, was he? Is that unfair? To a degree. If Kennedy unusually had decided to spend late nights at the White House, not with some imported secretary that his aides had brought in for the occasion, but with you,

Tom, he would say to you, I do care about civil rights. I think it's a disgrace that people are treated so badly in the South. Of course, it's a long, deep problem that's been going on for generations. I would hate it if I lived there. But he would see it in quite academic terms. He'd see it as a policy issue. How do we solve this? And is that firstly, because he's looking at it as someone who wants to win re-election? Of course. And doesn't want to alienate white democratic voters in the South? And secondly, is it because he doesn't have much personal experience of what it means for segregated black people in the South

to be denied the vote and attacked with dogs and denied basic rights. Absolutely, absolutely right on both counts. So on the one hand, he's grown up in gilded splendor in Massachusetts and been going around to London and going on trips to Europe and hobnobbing with actresses and all that stuff. He spent far more time in Europe than he has ever spent in the American South. I mean, he spent probably more time in one city, London, than most of the American South put together. To him, he doesn't have black friends. There weren't black people at Choate, or would there have been people at Harvard?

Not that he would have associated with. It's just never been an issue for him. So there's no emotional investment. One of the things I remember from the episode that we did on the Martin Luther King speech is that Kennedy had never heard Martin Luther King speak before. No, exactly. That's his first time he hears him. Yeah. And then there's the issue of the coalition, that to get anything through Congress, he'll probably need to depend on Southern Democratic votes.

Obviously, they will never vote for him on civil rights. So if he wants to get that through, he'll have to rely on Republican votes. He appoints his attorney general, so he's in charge of law and order, his younger brother, Robert. Robert at this stage, he's a fascinating character actually, Tom. Ends up being a great aficionado of Greek tragedy, would you believe? I'm not surprised. But Robert at this stage is a very hard man. Robert is the fixer who does the dirty work for his older brother. And he basically says to Robert, just keep me out of civil rights. Keep it quiet.

We can deal with that in the second term. I don't need any grief about civil rights. And actually what happens, of course, is that civil rights becomes this colossal issue. And a couple of occasions, he has to federalize the National Guard, send in the National Guard over the heads of state governors to enforce the desegregation of universities, send in the National Guard over the heads of state governors to enforce the desegregation of universities, first in Mississippi in 1962 and then in Alabama in 1963. So circumstances are pushing him to take a more and more interventionist line on civil rights. And then in June 1963, he finally realizes he has to bite the bullet. He gives a landmark TV speech, actually a really

powerful speech, in which he says, this is a moral issue as old as the scriptures and as clear as the American constitution. He says, we preach freedom around the world, but how can we do that when we say we are the land of the free except for the Negroes? We have no second-class citizens except for Negroes. We have no class or caste system, no ghettos, no master race except with respect to Negroes. And he also says, who among us, if we were black, would be content with the councils of patience and delay? So he says, okay, enough. Let's fix it. And he says, I'm going to send to Congress a bill to outlaw discrimination in schools and public accommodations and employment to end the age of discrimination. The issue he has is, is he going to be able to get this through Congress? And at that point in

the summer of 1963, it looks very unlikely. It looks like the Southern Democrats will block it. So he's been pushed into taking this position. And lots of black civil rights leaders say he's been very slow. He's dragged his feet. But at last, he's given us the speech we dreamed of from a president. But whether he can turn that into legislative accomplishment, that's a very different question. So presumably that is something that he would, now having made this speech, he has to look to sell it to people in the South and to cities like Dallas in Texas. So that's Kennedy's domestic policies. But let's take a break now. When we come back, let's look at the dimension of foreign policy, Cuba, missile crises, and the Cold War. So we'll be back in a few minutes. Add free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets. Head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com.

Hello, welcome back to The Rest Is History. And we are looking at the presidency of JFK. And Dominic, in the first half, we, well, you, to be honest, gave us a survey of his domestic record. But as we said, his real focus, the events that he's really remembered for, are all pretty much in the dimension of foreign policy, aren't they? They are, because that's what had fascinated him since he was a teenager. In the first episode, we talked about him reading Winston Churchill's book, The World Crisis. He read a biography of Duke of Marlborough. He had written his thesis about British politics in the 1930s.

But what those things had in common was they're all really about foreign affairs and kind of international relations. And that's what fascinates him. Presumably, it's not just that he's kind of, oh, I can't be bothered with the domestic sphere. I mean, foreign policy is intruding on him, isn't it? Because he has this huge problem that there is a communist outpost in the form of Cuba right on America's doorstep. Yes. And don't forget, he's come to

office proclaiming, we will pay any price, bear any burden in the defense of liberty, all this kind of crusading rhetoric. He believes in the Cold War. Kennedy is more nuanced than just to say, he's anti-communist, of course, but he's been very conscious in the 50s because he has been to places like Indochina, he's been to Vietnam. He has seen the difficulty of what happens when a European empire withdraws and then someone's going to fill the gap and there's a competition. Is it going to be communists or anti-communists? What's the United States going to do? He's very conscious that the United States can't just be the bully and can't be the sponsor always of the most repressive conservative forces in society.

So he's kind of wrestling with that. But Cuba is a particularly incendiary problem because it's right on America's doorstep. A lot of Americans have lost money because of the Cuban Revolution. A lot of Cuban exiles have ended up in Florida and Miami and are pressing for action. And when he comes in, he is briefed within days, I think, by the CIA that they have been planning an operation to retake Cuba. They've been planning it for a year. They have a scheme of basically getting Cuban exiles, getting paramilitaries, and transporting them from Central America to Cuba, and giving them air support with bombers under CIA command, and that they think there is enough of a groundswell of anti-Castro feeling in Cuba that they will be able to topple Castro.

And I mean, if this goes ahead, it'd be a great coup for Kennedy. Literally. Yeah, it'd be a great coup for kennedy literally yeah it will be a great coup yeah very good now straight away some of kennedy's aides think this sounds kind of far-fetched like 1500 people is not many because these are the same guys who are giving castro exploding cigars and well they're not doing that at this stage. Oh, have they not? Okay. They're later on going to be the exploding cigars. Making his hair fall out. Right, the beard falling out powder and so on. These are very much the plan B.

So the plan A is the day of pigs. And at the time, some of Kennedy's aides, well, they clearly have doubts. But the general mood, and you see this again with Vietnam years later, the general mood is we should look strong. We should do things. We're the United States. Let's give it a go. What could possibly go wrong? So in April 1961, they launched the Bear Pigs operation. Now, I think the CIA always thought that basically they could blackmail Kennedy. If things went wrong, he would have no choice but to send in lots of support, authorize more airstrikes, all this kind of thing. And actually what happens is the whole thing is pretty much done and dusted in about three days. The guys land. Cuba doesn't

rise as they hoped. They basically end up either being killed or captured by Castro's troops. And JFK, when people say to him, will you send more air support? He says, no, this is obviously a disaster. Why would I bother? No. Also, he doesn't want to get sucked into this flashpoint that could cause problems with the Soviet Union, with Cuba's communist sponsor. So the Bay of Pigs is a disaster. And there's no doubt that among some Cuban exiles, they blame Kennedy. And there's a lot of bitterness. They think he let them down. You know, it was a pretty stupid operation to begin with.

Kennedy hasn't given up on the idea of getting rid of Castro. So this thing called Operation Mongoose, Tom, which is your exploding cigars, seashells planted that will explode when he picks them up, all these kinds of things. It's sometimes claimed, I think, in a lot of histories that this is Kennedy's personal obsession, that when he wakes up in the morning, he's thinking about exploding cigars. Because it's quite Churchill, isn't it? It's the kind of thing Churchill would have loved. It is. Mad schemes. Yes, it is a mad scheme. Exploding gizmos. So is he influenced by that at all or not? You see, I don't think actually Kennedy is quite as into this as everybody thinks he is. I think

it's become conventional wisdom that the Canada is thought of nothing else but murdering Fidel Castro. I think when it comes up in meetings, Kennedy says, sure, go for it. But I don't think when he's off with the latest secretary, I don't think this is what's playing on his mind. Damn you, Castro. Yeah. Yes. Is that what he's saying yeah yeah i think it's annoying that castro is still there but i don't think he's obsessed by it as we are now with it if you know what i mean because presumably his real focus is with the soviet union yes of course absolutely it is the guy who's written who wrote that essay about francois the

first of france yeah this is his field of the cloth of gold or something going off to meet khrushchev and all that he thinks of himself as a big player and castro is just an irritation Francois I of France. Yeah. This is his field of the cloth of gold or something, going off to meet Christophe and all that. He thinks of himself as a big player, and Castro is just an irritation. Yeah. How conscious is he of the shadow of the mushroom cloud? Oh, he's very conscious of it. It's there the whole time.

It's absolutely there the whole time in the early 60s. And he presumably has lots of accurate briefings on what a nuclear war would mean. Oh, yeah. He undoubtedly knows what a nuclear war would mean. I mean, he doesn't want a nuclear war. And thanks in large degree to Kennedy, there isn't a nuclear war. So funny enough, the one thing that often gets missed is there could easily have been a nuclear war about Berlin. So that would be a very obvious flashpoint. He first meets Nikita Khrushchev, who's the relatively new paramount leader of the Soviet

Union. In the summer of 1961, they go to Vienna. So this is just a couple of months after the Bay of Pigs. And he is off his face on painkillers, isn't he? Kennedy. Yeah. I remember a brilliant book by David Reynolds. Is it David Reynolds? David Reynolds, yeah. Summits. Yes, yeah.

And the account of the summit there is amazing, that Kennedy's just shoveling painkillers. But this is true, Tom, for Kennedy throughout this period. So the reason we spent so long talking about Kennedy's back, his malaria, his urinary issues, his Addison's disease, is because in this point, if you look at photos of Kennedy as a young man, and then photos of him as president, the one thing that is so obvious is that as president, he's like somebody has puffed him up. His skin is very puffy. His eyes are narrowed. His face is kind of yellow and puffy. He's still a handsome man, but the truth is he is on a massive cocktail of drugs, often working against one another because the Addison's disease makes a mess of all the other things. And he travels

when he goes to Vienna, for example, or when he goes to Dallas later on, he would travel with a special kind of plank, like a kind of wooden plank and all this orthopedic stuff. And he has a kind of horrid kind of corset, doesn't he? A corset that he has to wear to basically keep him upright. So him being off his face, as you put it, vienna i mean that's nothing unusual but he's often in agony actually and how do you judge his performance at vienna he does really badly in vienna i mean kennedy himself says of khrushchev he beat the hell out of me that khrushchev has gone in for a fight khrushchev said later you know i would have liked

to be nice to kennedy he seemed a nice guy but but I was doing my job, which was to give him a really hard time. And he does. And they want to kind of reconcile the status of Berlin, which has obviously been divided since the Second World War. The Soviets wanted to be part of East Germany, and they basically want the West out. The West obviously don't want that at all. And Kennedy just allows himself really to be shouted at by Khrushchev. And he's really shaken

when he comes away because he hasn't done himself justice somebody who's so used to being the alpha male and actually he's used to people falling for his charm and finding him funny and great company and Khrushchev's not interested in any of that and Kennedy finds that very troubling and then just two months later Khrushchev moves in Berlin. We did the episode, Tom, about the Berlin Wall with Ian McGregor, a wonderful guest, great episode. The Berlin Wall goes up. Now, that is a moment that a different president could have overreacted to. And Kennedy protests, but he does nothing about it, really.

He sends troops to the checkpoint. The tanks squaring up. The tanks, the footage and the photos, it's extraordinary. That could be the beginning of the Third World War. But Kennedy is very conscious, you know, we won't do anything to provoke them because actually in some ways, the forced partition of Berlin with the erection of the wall, it's not a bad outcome from his point of view. I mean, aside from anything else, it's a terrible symbol of what the Cold War means. Yes, but it freezes the conflict. I mean, if there's a bloody big war there, then you can't fight each other.

So how would you gauge his performance in that, that he's kind of Goldilocks, tough, but he's reacting in a fairly sensible way. He's not escalating things. He's not overreacted to the provocation in Berlin. And that's actually the pattern that you will see in the second year with the great event of the second year, which is the Cuban Missile Crisis. So that really is, even if you're a Kennedy skeptic, even if you say he is a spoiled brat and he's entitled and they're making excuses for the womanizing and he's just a rich man's David Cameron. Even if you said all that, I think his performance in the Cuban Missile Crisis is pretty good because he gets these photos on the 16th of June, 1962. The missiles are being installed, Soviet missiles in Cuba, and that clearly can reach the American

mainland. And this is a massive deal. I mean, this puts America itself under threat. And of course, Kennedy's always a politician. So if news of this gets out, he can't just do nothing. Because if news got out that he knew about it and did nothing, he would make him look so weak, especially after what had happened in Berlin. So he doesn't do what maybe Nixon would have done nixon is a great man for brooding you know darkened rooms classical music playing staring into the fireplace and thinking about how miserable he is and how uncool he is kennedy doesn't do any of that and he doesn't sort of secrete himself away

with henry kissinger and cook up some scheme he convenes this big kind of committee it's called the x-com and with generals and advisors and they're all sworn to secrecy and his brother and his brother robert who's a really big player in this i mean somebody that as we said before is very happy to be his hard man and to argue with everybody on kennedy's behalf and you know push the generals and all this kind of thing and kennedy just sits there he's obviously always present in the discussions we know from the tapes and the transcripts that he's an active participant. But he's weighing up all the different options. Because some of those generals, I mean, the most famous one is a guy called General Curtis

LeMay. He would love to get going. Have a crack at the commies. Let's have a crack at the commies. You know, they think that if at the end of all this, there's one Russian left and two Americans, then we've won. Yeah. And that's a great result.

Yeah. And he's very conscious. He's been in war. He didn't enjoy it. He came back from war a weakened man, sickly man. He is very conscious of the costs the whole time. So we know that in all these discussions, I mean, all the people who've studied them, the historians, Max Hastings and so on, Fred Logevold, say he is judicious, he's careful, he says, let's not rush. And so the stakes are very high for himself personally, for his administration, for the United States. Is he thinking the stakes are global? This could be the end of humanity. Of course he is. Of course he is. Yeah, we absolutely know that, you know, the mood in these meetings is funereal, is really somber. We're in an impossible position

here. We have to do something. We can't not do anything, but we're very conscious that if we do this wrong, you know, the human race could be ravaged beyond imagination. Whoops, apocalypse. Exactly. Absolutely. Exactly. So they impose a blockade. They don't act immediately against the missiles. They don't do what some of the generals want,

which is to strike at Cuba straight away. He says, well, have a naval blockade around Cuba. I mean, this is a great subject for at least one Restless History podcast. But just to tell the story

very quickly, they impose the blockade. The Soviets look like they're going to ignore it and they have a ship steaming towards the islands. The world holds its breath, Tom. I know you love a BBC Two documentary cliche. I do.

The world holds its breath. And then Khrushchev sends two messages, the first of which seems to be quite emollient, the second of which seems to be quite belligerent. And Kennedy says, let's pretend the second one never happened. Maybe he sent that into duress or been drinking or whatever. Let's reply to the first message and let's do quietly a little deal. They will withdraw their missiles from Cuba and we will withdraw our missiles from Turkey, which is obviously on the border of the Soviet Union. So they will feel that they have got something out of it.

And that's what they do. So, Dominic. Yeah. Khrushchev blinks. When it's perceived as Khrushchev blinking, it's a tiny bit more ambiguous than that, because Khrushchev has got the removal of the American missiles from Turkey out of it. So he has got something. But in the world's press, because of this image of the Soviet ship steaming towards Cuba and then going back.

And then going back, it looks as if Khrushchev has blinked. Good optics. It's bad optics for Khrushchev, who then gets the boot in Moscow. Not just because of that, but also because he's been kind of very unreliable and eccentric. And Kennedy comes out of it looking the person who held his nerve and won the day. Young, charismatic. And Kennedy comes out of it looking the person who held his nerve and won the day. Young, charismatic. The amazing thing is that during all this, amid all the stress he was still carrying on,

having a mistress called Mimi Beardsley smuggled into the White House for trysts. Well, I suppose if you think the world's going to end. Yeah, get on with it. Yeah, crack on. Yes, exactly. Could be the last chance you have. Now, there is one other thing. So on all this, Tom, on the foreign policy, because we mustn't forget we're thinking about motives

to bump Kennedy off. You can see why anti-Castro Cuban exiles would be very, very cross with Kennedy. You can actually see why, you know, if a Cuban exile had been caught red-handed with a revolver in his hand, having shot Kennedy in the White House. You wouldn't be surprised. I mean, it's not inherently implausible. On the missile crisis, on his handling of affairs with the Soviet Union, he's definitely not weak. I mean, he's not an appeaser like his father had been. So what do the generals make of him in the wake of the missile crisis? Do they kind of express their respect or are there some who think? I mean, there'll be one or two who grumble, but I think most of them recognise that he's done a decent job. There's no General Pinochet waiting in the wings at the Pentagon or anything.

Now, the other big thing is Vietnam. So when I saw that Oliver Stone film, JFK, which we talked about in episode one, I remember really vividly how Vietnam absolutely hangs over that whole film. And the idea that Kennedy is going to withdraw from Vietnam, and that's why he was murdered. And that is, put it this way, I think it is hard to sustain that claim with any authority when you look at Kennedy's record in Vietnam.

So the United States has already committed to Vietnam before he becomes president, but not by masses of people. It's really just the military advisors level at that stage? Yeah. So there are military advisors. There's maybe something like a thousand when he comes in. He increases them quite radically in his first three years. So there's about 16,000 by late 1963. Now, don't forget there's lots of American troops and advisors in different parts of the world. So this doesn't make Vietnam a complete outlier. He is conscious that the Viet Cong, the National Liberation Front, the North Vietnamese, have been pushing and pushing since about 1961. They are trying to strengthen their grip in the countryside.

Their dream is to unify North Vietnam, which is communist, South Vietnam, which is anti-communist. But there are loads of examples of Kennedy saying to people, I'm very well aware how much we're hated. I'm well aware of how much the Vietnamese people resent outside interference. I'm very worried about this. I don't want to lose South Vietnam, but equally, I don't want to see us stuck in this terrible quagmire that we can't get out of. So he's conscious of all this. Now, one development that it kind of seems uncanny given what we know is going to happen is the president of Vietnam, South Vietnam, that he's got a reasonably close relationship with, I call President Diem. He is toppled by a coup in October 1963. It's not CIA orchestrated, but it's CIA backed. So a bit like the one in Chile that we talked about.

Yeah, it would have happened anyway, even if the Americans didn't approve of it. But the Americans do say, fine, go for it. He is toppled and he is then murdered. And when Kennedy hears that Ziem has been murdered, he's very shocked. I mean, people say he's furious. He thought he was just going to be imprisoned or sent into exile or something, but he is killed. And this is just weeks before Kennedy's own death. And Kennedy is very troubled by this. And at this point, he is clearly dithering about what to do in Vietnam. Now, there's some historians who say he would probably have got out. He would have said, this is obviously a bit of a basket case. We're not going to win. Let's go home. There are others who say he wouldn't have got out. The talk of getting out was a political tool. He was using that as a way of putting pressure on the

South Vietnamese, but actually he would have stayed. The thing is, we know from the United States' involvement in other places, let's say Iraq and Afghanistan this century, how difficult it is actually in those situations. To pull yourself out of a Korkmeyer, Dominic. A morass, I think, or a Meyer. A morass. They are the approved metaphors for Vietnam and any other is wrong. No, but Tom, he clearly hasn't made up his mind, I would say, in 1963. We will come to the argument about his assassination. But is it plausible that he is so clearly committed to withdrawing from Vietnam and that people care enough, that other people in his administration or in the American establishment care enough to have him killed because of it? I mean, whether that is plausible, again, I'll leave it for the listeners

to determine. We will discuss, won't we? But you can probably tell from the way I've framed that, that I don't regard that as overwhelmingly convincing. Okay. Okay. Just before we come to the reasons that he goes to Dallas. Yeah. Space. The final frontier. The final frontier. I mean, there's lots of paranoid theorizing about space aliens roswell i have no idea where you're going with this tom i have to i'm just wondering whether you feel there's any uh credence in ideas that uh yeah i find them very credible what do you expect me to say to that okay well i'm just i'm just putting that out there because that's all part of the mix so hold on kennedy wants to go to the moon and people say,

we have to stop him getting to the moon. They've got stuff on the moon they don't want people to see. It's all in the X-Files and things. I can't remember whether it's something about aliens and stuff. So just to jump ahead to next week, there's a guy called Vincent Bugliosi, who has written a book, which I've sent you the manuscript of, Tom. I know you haven't read it. And the reason I know you haven't read it is i know that book is 2500 pages long so it's implausible that you

will have read it when you're also revising other things but he has written this absolutely monstrous book looking at every conceivable assassination theory and conspiracy theory did he not mention it i think aliens are present but only very briefly and dismissively i think it's fair to say. Well, it's my favorite one. So anyway, Donny, that's brilliant. Sorry, I've let the tone down. That was a very authoritative and scholarly account.

That interruption, it wasn't an interruption. It was an intervention. It was consistent with the tone with which you began the podcast, which is nice. So you brought us back full circle. Yeah. Well, good. With your precision is for journeymen impression. So let's just end.

Obviously, what Kennedy does in Vietnam, obviously, whether his civil rights legislation passes, these things depend on the election. And it's just worth pausing for a second to talk about that. We're at the end of the autumn of 1963. Next year, he will face a Republican, probably thezona senator barry goldwater who is the great new hope of conservatives so he is the guy tom i know you love this yes i know what you're gonna say in your guts you know he's nuts that's right because the slogan was in your heart you know he's right but in your guts the democrats said you know you know, he's nuts. He's a libertarian, actually,

Goldwater. So he's not a religious conservative or anything like that. He's libertarian. But at the time, he was perceived as the most right-wing candidate the Republicans could possibly nominate. Those were the days. And could Kennedy beat him? Well, if we look at the polls and Kennedy's approval ratings, the lowest approval rating Kennedy ever had was in September 1963, and that was 56%. To put that into context, that is incredibly good. So that's very cephalogically promising. His approval rating average, Tom, so he doesn't even finish three years as president. He does two years and almost 11 months. His average approval rating in that time was 70%. That is the highest

in modern American history. That's not bad, is it? So it's not just retrospective sentimentalizing post the assassination to say Kennedy is perceived by the American public as an extremely competent, emollient, impressive political actor. He absolutely is. And I think there's no doubt that he would have won re-election had he stood. The only issue he has is, as you said, the South. And he has another problem, which is that in Texas, which had been so important to him in 1960, his vice president state, there is a big rift within the Texas Democratic Party between two of the local power brokers, a senator called Ralph Yarborough, who's more liberal, and the Texas state governor, John Connolly. And it's the rift over civil rights.

It's actually much more about personalities and patronage. It's a kind of patronage rift. So it's not over civil rights specifically at all. But the fact that they are on different wings of the party, because Connolly ends up basically becoming a Republican, that's probably in the air vaguely. But it's a kind of court politics thing. And so Kennedy thinks, I'll go down to Texas, get that done and dusted, do a little tour. His plan is to see five cities in two days, get that done, come back home, run up to christmas announce my re-election campaign in early 64 see if we can get the civil rights bill through before then but all the other things being equal he thinks it's pretty set fair he decides he's going to go with jackie now why does he take jackie with him because they have actually just lost a child patrick who lived i

think for two days or so was born very sickly and died afterwards. And Jackie had sunk into a very deep depression, obviously, completely understandably and naturally. And aides and people who knew them said, their time in the White House, they'd had lots of glamorous dinners and all that kind of thing, but there'd been a lot of arguing and bickering and normal kind of marital stuff compounded by the fact of his affairs but the loss of patrick their little boy had brought them very close together and that's you know she was going to come with him now to texas he wanted her with him that he wants to with him so on the 21st of november they visited san antonio houston and fort worth and the plan is they will tour dallas on the 22nd and then they will spend the evening in Texas at Lyndon Johnson's ranch. And so that, Tom, is the plan. And of course, I mean, I hate to call it a cliffhanger because everybody knows what is coming next. But next time, we will look at the day of the murder, and then we will look at the various theories and the possible culprits. And of course, as we said last time, the thing with the murder mysteries, you just can't stop, can you?

You're just so excited to find out what happens. Yeah. And you can actually do that with this, can't you, Dominic? Some lucky people, members of the Restless History Club. The golden ticket. Yeah. Yours for very, very reasonably priced admission. People have never heard this before, a lot of people, because I imagine there's loads of people listening to us for the first time. So for those people,

I'll say you have to go to restishistorypod.com and you get an unbelievable range of benefits and treats. We're practically giving it away, aren't we? It's like Camelot, actually. It's very like the atmosphere, the glamour. So if you go into our chat community, it's not just incredible value. It's like the dazzling repartee of Camelot in the height of the Jack and Jackie regime. Yeah. I mean, that's pretty much what we are, Tom, actually. Mad men. The Jack and Jackie of history podcasting.

Right. So if that doesn't entice people to join the Restless History Club. I don't know what will. Yeah, nothing will. And we will see you next time. For the day of the murder. And then we will be looking at all the various theories. I don't think we'll be revisiting the alien theory, Tom tom i'll tell you that now well we'll see i mean you know

okay two of us in this party dominic there are that's true it's true so we will see so coming up we've got the day of the assassination the events of that terrible day that is episode three and then all the various theories about who did it and why. Russians, CIA, mafia, aliens, whatever. We'll be looking at them all. So whether it's immediately after this episode or next week, we will hopefully see you very soon. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment.

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