sexual partners, in and out of the White House.
His marriage was inevitably placed under extreme
strain, and his liaisons with beautiful women even
brought him into contact with the underworld.
After his death, many women claimed to have been
his mistress but, as one of his genuine lovers deli-
cately put it, if all who said that Jack Kennedy had
made love to them had been telling the truth, he
would not have had the strength to lift a cup of tea.
In his domestic policies Kennedy was hardly auda-
cious. He appointed Keynesians as his economic
aides, but also invited a conservative financier,
Douglas Dillon, to be secretary of the treasury.
Kennedy was aware that his majority in the coun-
try was small and that Congress was in no mood to
pass extensive measures involving large public
expenditure. Federal aid was provided in selected
depressed regions where unemployment was espe-
cially high. Increased government expenditure on
defence and a liberalisation of social security bene-
fits provided a stimulus to the economy, but it was
anyway on a cyclical upswing in the summer of
- In 1962 there followed a Trade Expansion
Act to reduce tariffs, but Congress – with which he
had an unhappy relationship – severely cut
Kennedy’s proposed public works programme.
Nor were his relations with big business helped
when he put pressure on the United States Steel
Corporation to rescind a price increase. This
provoked a severe collapse of share prices on the
Stock Exchange. In 1962 Kennedy pressed for-
ward with more resolution on issues of social
reform. He wanted ‘Medicare’ to be granted to
retired workers over sixty-five, funded by social
security, but the powerful medical lobby, objecting
to ‘socialised medicine’, and a Congress worried
about the likely cost, defeated the measure.
In 1963 with unemployment remaining high
(5.5 per cent) by the standards of that period of
full employment, Kennedy boldly proposed a sub-
stantial cut in income tax, only for Congress to
hold the measure up. Before the tragically pre-
mature end of his presidency, Kennedy had
achieved little in the way of giving assistance to
the more deprived sections of American society,
but his focus on housing aid, education and
medical provision pointed to a future when all
these programmes would be enacted. The one
glaring omission was civil rights legislation. But
on this explosive question Kennedy could not
postpone decisive action by instituting modest
and well-intentioned changes by presidential
executive orders. The battle for black equality was
reaching a pitch so intense that all America
became involved.
Kennedy felt more drawn to global issues, the
great questions of war and peace and America’s
relations with the rest of the world. In the strug-
gle with communism, the free world seemed to be
entering a new and dangerous phase. Berlin, Cuba
and Indo-China lay at the heart of the ‘unfinished
business’ left over from the Eisenhower adminis-
tration, and all three issues came to the boil within
the first six months of 1961. A speech by
Khrushchev on 6 January 1961, declaring that the
Soviet Union would support what he called
‘national liberation movements’ in the underde-
veloped countries, turned Kennedy’s attention to
Third World issues. The ideological subtleties of
Khrushchev’s phrase, which aroused bitter debate
among communists about what exactly he meant,
were not fully grasped in Washington, though the
growing rift between the USSR and China was no
secret.
In the White House, Khrushchev’s statement
was interpreted as a challenge: that the commu-
nist world would back insurgency in countries
that so far had resisted communist takeovers. It
was a paradox that, though the West appreciated
the significance of nationalism and those other
elements that determined international and
domestic conflicts, communism was still viewed as
a monolithic and undifferentiated threat to the
free world.
Kennedy surrounded himself at the White
House with some of the best brains in the
country, charged with helping him to formulate
an effective counter to the threat of a continuing
advance by communism, especially in the Third
World. He decided that the US did not have to
balance its budget slavishly, as Eisenhower had
tried to do, and that a boost to public expendi-
ture in the spirit of Keynesian orthodoxy would
help to get the sluggish economy moving, cut
1
AMERICA’S MISSION IN THE WORLD 561
