Free Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) by David Talbot

was the Cold War, with its constant threat of instant annihilation, that confirmed the ultimate absurdity of war. Kennedy came to recognize that war in the nuclear age was unthinkable. “I think that the principal reason Kennedy ran for the presidency was he thought the Eisenhower-Dulles policy of massive retaliation and all of that was heading the country toward nuclear war,” said Theodore Sorensen, contemplating his days with JFK years later in the offices of his Manhattan law firm. “He felt the policy of massive retaliation—in which we supposedly kept the peace by saying if you step one foot over the line in West Berlin or somewhere else, we will respond by annihilating you with nuclear weapons—he felt that was mad. He also felt it was a policy that had no credibility and would not prevent Soviet pressures or incursions in one place or another.”
    But John Kennedy did not run for the White House in 1960 against the scowling anticommunist Richard Nixon as a peace candidate. He was too politically shrewd for that. Kennedy had seen the owlish, high-minded Adlai Stevenson, darling of the Democratic Party’s liberal establishment, soundly defeated twice by Republican war hero Dwight Eisenhower. From the McCarthy era on, flag-waving Republican candidates had beaten their Democratic opponents by portraying them as soft and effete defeatists, no match for our brutal and implacable enemies. (It was a winning political formula that Republicans would use throughout the Cold War and then successfully retool, at least for a time, with the “war on terror.”) John Kennedy, however, was no Adlai Stevenson. The party’s liberal wing—regally presided over by the sainted widow of the Democrats’ gloried past, Eleanor Roosevelt—hated him for it, scorning Kennedy as slick and vague—“a gutless wonder,” in Harry Truman’s bitter formulation. Mrs. Roosevelt wondered, with reason, how the author of Profiles in Courage , a book extolling political leaders who put principle ahead of expediency, could have avoided taking a stand against McCarthyism, the greatest threat to American democracy of the day. If only the glamorous young senator “had a little less profile and a little more courage,” she tartly remarked.
    But the Kennedy family had no interest in being beautiful losers like Stevenson, whose inevitable defeats were embraced by liberals as confirmation of their own natural superiority. Winning was always the goal with the Kennedys, and they knew how to do it. The Kennedy brothers might have been raised in Brahmin comfort and been educated at the most elite New England schools, but when it came to the brawling world of politics, they were not that far removed from the Irish saloons of their forefathers.
    In his 1960 presidential race, John Kennedy faced the most cunning and dirty politician on postwar America’s national stage, Richard Nixon. JFK beat him by playing every bit as dirty—and more important, by grabbing the war club that Republicans like Nixon used to beat Democratic contenders, and using it against “Tricky Dick” instead. Kennedy stunned Nixon by thumping his chest louder than his opponent on the nuclear arms race and on Cuba, where Fidel Castro’s revolutionary government was dramatically breaking away from U.S. dominion. Prodded by his Georgetown friend Joseph Alsop, a syndicated newspaper columnist with close ties to the CIA, JFK sold voters on the alarming idea that we were falling dangerously behind the Soviets in the nuclear arms race. The “missile gap” turned out to be a myth, the creation of Air Force intelligence analysts and credulous newsmen, as Kennedy would be informed by a Pentagon arms expert soon after moving into the White House. But during the campaign, the missile gap hue and cry succeeded in putting Nixon on the defensive, as did Kennedy’s clarion call to support Cuban “freedom fighters” in their crusade to take back the island from Castro.
    Nixon felt especially