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

flummoxed by Kennedy’s call for liberating Cuba, since the vice president was plotting to do just that, along with the CIA and a band of Cuban émigrés. Because he was obligated not to reveal the top-secret plan, Nixon was tongue-tied during the fourth and final presidential debate when Kennedy called for Cuba’s liberation. “I had no choice but to take a completely opposite stand and attack Kennedy’s advocacy of open intervention in Cuba,” Nixon wrote in his 1978 memoirs. “I shocked and disappointed many of my own supporters…. In that debate, Kennedy conveyed the image—to 60 million people—that he was tougher on Castro and communism than I was.” Nixon, a master of the black arts of electoral politics, had finally met his match.
    Kennedy edged out Nixon by a whisper of a margin on Election Day, but liberal JFK supporters like John Kenneth Galbraith, the economist who had been Kennedy’s tutor at Harvard and esteemed advisor in the campaign, worried about the costs of victory, especially JFK’s promise to help free Cuba. Journalists and historians have made much of the Kennedy family’s alleged deal with Chicago mobsters to deliver votes in their key city. But no pact would prove more decisive, or more costly to Kennedy, than the one he made with Vulcan, god of fire and metal. By invoking the gods of weapons and war, Kennedy succeeded in banishing the Democrats’ image of Stevensonian weakness and replacing it with a vigorous new muscularity. But the champions of aggressive foreign policy who thrilled to Kennedy’s militaristic rhetoric now expected the new president to deliver. As Kennedy prepared to take office, they eagerly awaited a massive U.S. arms buildup and a bold effort to roll back communism in Cuba.
    If the new president was committed to expanding America’s nuclear arsenal, he was even more determined never to use it. This seemingly contradictory position was vividly displayed in Kennedy’s ringing inaugural address. The speech revealed a man with “one foot in the Cold War, and one foot in a new world he saw coming,” as Kennedy advisor Harris Wofford described the new president. With its double-edged message of bellicose vigilance and pacific idealism, the speech appealed to a broad political spectrum. While Kennedy vowed the nation would “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty,” he also dispensed with the usual Soviet-bashing rhetoric and invited our enemy to join us in a new “quest for peace, before the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science engulf all humanity in planned or accidental self-destruction.” Likewise, he offered a post-colonial vision to the Third World, and Latin America in particular, where the United States would help “in casting off the chains of poverty” in an “alliance for progress”—but immediately followed this with a veiled warning to those revolutionary groups in the region who sought to follow Castro’s path, vowing to “oppose aggression or subversion anywhere in the Americas.”
    The inaugural was an inspired work of oratory, whose soaring rhetoric succeeded in making its aggressive interventionism as well as its ambitious humanitarianism seem of a whole. Calling on powers both dark and light in our nature, it was cheered by everyone from Norman Thomas on the left to Barry Goldwater on the right. Only a speech this deftly written could have thrilled both the pacifist poet Robert Lowell, who had served prison time during World War II as a conscientious objector, and one of that war’s most ferocious lions, Admiral Arleigh Burke. After Kennedy’s speech, Lowell was moved to declare his joy “that at long last the Goths have left the White House.” Old “31-Knot” Burke—President Eisenhower’s crusty, saber-rattling chief of naval operations and certainly a man Lowell would have considered one of those “Goths”—was no less