1

The Ultimate Source of Action

“Is this tape in? Is this plugged in?” he asked his personal secre-
tary, Evelyn Lincoln. As John F. Kennedy sat alone in his office with
his Dictaphone recorder sometime in 1959 or 1960—before he was
elected president but after he had decided to run—he wanted to lay
out a history of his political career and explain why he found elected
office so important and personally rewarding, to explain why it had
become a calling and not just a career. Mrs. Lincoln confirmed that
the recorder was in fact working and switched on. The junior senator
from Massachusetts began to speak. He spoke for about twenty-six
minutes.
Dictating memos, letters, and speech drafts with a microphone and
recorder was a habit Kennedy had recently gotten into, as had many
executives of the era, to free himself from always having to summon
a secretary into his office to take shorthand notes to be typed up later
in long form. That had been the standard procedure in offices around
the world for over a century and had provided employment for gen-
erations of secretaries and typists.
But innovations in affordable consumer recording devices offered a
more efficient, more flexible option, bypassing the need for shorthand
notes. And it could be done after hours without asking secretaries to

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 20 The Fourteenth Day

work late. It could even be done away from the office. With a Dicta-
phone recorder, Kennedy was free to do this most time-consuming
yet essential of workday chores virtually when and where he liked.
The tapes, or belts, in the case of a Dictaphone, could then be passed
to a pool of typists to be typed up. It was, of course, only a small
step toward the revolution in office communications that came in the
­following decades, but it marked an important initial breakthrough.
On this occasion, Kennedy was not dictating a letter or memoran-
dum. It is not known precisely when he made this particular record-
ing or why. It is possible—even probable—that he was making notes
for what would one day be the first draft of his memoir. He was, after
all, already an accomplished and Pulitzer Prize–winning author,
well versed in a historian’s way of thinking. He made other, similar
recordings later, while in the Oval Office, that were almost certainly
early notes for such a book, something for him to work on after leav-
ing office. After all, even if he had been reelected in 1964 and lived to
serve out a second term, he would not yet have been fifty-one years
old when he became an ex-president.
Whatever his reasons, the recording he created during that ses-
sion provides a remarkable view of his thinking about politics, policy,
and public service. Speaking in a matter-of-fact tone, he laid out why
he thought politics mattered and the good that politicians could do
despite their negative public image. The effects of coming of age polit-
ically in the era of Franklin D. Roosevelt and having been raised in
the Democratic stronghold of Boston came through strongly. And in
his own words and voice, he explained why he aspired to be president.
He had been a congressman and a senator. But the presidency, he said,
was “the ultimate source of action.”
That John F. Kennedy chose politics as his career was by no means
inevitable. His father, the family patriarch, Joseph P. Kennedy, who
was never accused of lacking for ambition, audacity, or, for much of
his adult life, money, had made it abundantly clear that he expected
political greatness from his male offspring. Those hopes and dreams
had been sharply focused on John’s older brother, Joe Junior. When

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 The Ultimate Source of Action 21

Joe Junior was killed in action in World War II in Europe, the man-
tle of expectations was not automatically handed to the next-oldest
brother, John. As a sickly child and young man—he had been given
the last rites twice—John had not grown up expecting to be a leader
or to run for office. Before John Kennedy embarked on a political
career, a shift in his thinking was therefore required.1
In his pre-presidential recording, he cast himself as a reluctant
convert to a political career. Glossing over some of the earliest dis-
cussions of the possibility, Kennedy noted that about a year after
his brother’s death he decided that he would try his hand at politics.
There was never an epiphany, he said; there “never was a moment of
truth for me when I saw my whole political career unfold.”
It was certainly not about money. He already had plenty of family
money from the fortune his father had amassed. His personal trust,
managed by his father’s accountants in New York, provided a gener-
ous income, so much so that since first entering Congress in 1947
and continuing through his time in the Senate and the Oval Office,
Kennedy routinely donated his salary to charity. As president, that
amounted to $100,000 a year, a significant sum, about double the cur-
rent presidential salary when adjusted for inflation.
Nor did Kennedy lack opportunities for pursuing other career
paths. He could have been a wealthy lawyer or perhaps an important
figure in the world of newspapers. A career in that direction had got-
ten an early boost. Family connections helped land him some plum
assignments that took him to the sites of several great global events:
the United Nations founding conference in San Francisco; the Pots-
dam Conference, where Winston Churchill, Harry Truman, and
Joseph Stalin decided the fate of the postwar world; and the British
elections in 1945, where the party of the wartime hero Churchill suf-
fered a stunning defeat at the polls by Clement Attlee’s Labour Party.
But reporting lacked something for the restless young Kennedy. As
he explained it, “A reporter is reporting what happens; he’s not mak-
ing it happen. Even the good reporters, the ones who are really fas-
cinated by what happens and who find real stimulus in putting their

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 22 The Fourteenth Day

noses into the center of action, even they, in a sense, are in a secondary
profession. It’s reporting what happened, but it isn’t participating.” So
Kennedy decided against that profession, although for the rest of his
life he maintained a good understanding of and fascination with the
media business and, unlike some of his political rivals, mingled com-
fortably in press circles, counting several reporters among his closest
friends.
By his own explanation, Kennedy felt called to participate rather
than watch from the sidelines. When combined with its corollaries of
action, vigor, and decision—all virtues that he would adopt to style
his political career—participation became Kennedy’s self-defined
approach to politics and governing. It underpinned the carefully
crafted public persona that became known simply as JFK.
An opportunity arose in 1946 for the young Kennedy to test the
political waters: a vacancy in the Eleventh Congressional District of
Massachusetts, a seat his grandfather had held half a century before.
“Suddenly, the time, the occasion, and I all met,” Kennedy said. As he
himself described it, a steep learning curve was accompanied by build-
ing momentum and growing enthusiasm for the possibilities: “I moved
into the Bellevue Hotel with my grandfather and I began to run. I have
been running ever since. Fascination began to grip me and I realized
how satisfactory a profession a political career could be. I saw how ide-
ally politics filled the Greek definition of happiness: ‘A full use of your
powers along lines of excellence in a life affording scope.’”
Kennedy won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in the
1946 election. Although there were times when his work interested
him, he soon became frustrated at the difficulty in distinguishing
himself from 434 other members of Congress, most of whom also had
a strong interest in burnishing or building their public profiles. After
six years in the House, he was again restless. “I prepared to move on,”
he said simply. Kennedy ran for the Senate. He was successful, beat-
ing a formidable opponent with a long family lineage of Massachu-
setts politics: Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.
Unlike his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, widely celebrated as a

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 The Ultimate Source of Action 23

master practitioner of Senate rules, traditions, and power, Kennedy

was unimpressed with that chamber. “There is,” he said, “much less
than meets the eye in the Senate, frequently.” And the key to suc-
cess in the Senate was changing as governing the nation became infi-
nitely more complicated. A generational shift was also under way, as a
post–World War II, twentieth-century mind-set edged out that of the
nineteenth century. As Kennedy saw it, approvingly, politics was also
becoming more of a profession, in which the “hail-fellow, well-met”
extroverts were being replaced by quiet and thoughtful men.
He soon found the strict seniority system stifling. Decades-long
Senate service was not unusual; by the time Kennedy was sworn in,
one member, Walter George of Georgia, was beginning his fourth
decade in the Senate. Even for the most senior members, years of
work could be undone by a brief vote or an even briefer presidential
speech. A junior member, such as Kennedy, could count on much less.
That led Kennedy to a realization: “All of the things that you become
interested in doing, the President can do and the Senate cannot, par-
ticularly in the area of foreign policy.” In national security, defense,
and foreign policy—many of the areas Kennedy was most interested
in—the reality was that the legislative branch was secondary to the
executive branch. Senator Kennedy lamented that “it’s the President
who controls and who can affect results.” And as he explained it, that
motivated him to seek the presidency.
Kennedy had five successful political campaigns under his belt
before deciding to run for the presidency. He had also been in the mix
of contenders for his party’s nomination to be Adlai Stevenson’s run-
ning mate in 1956, thanks to the publicity generated by his voice-over
work for a film shown at the Democratic National Convention. That,
and a best-selling and Pulitzer Prize–winning book, Profiles in Cour-
age, gave Kennedy a national profile.
Kennedy took from these successful campaign experiences several
lessons. Having money, which he had access to in abundance, could
help, but it could also hurt. It was not essential to political success,
he believed, and rarely decisive. A widely recognized and respected

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 24 The Fourteenth Day

name could be a great advantage. It was something he counted himself

fortunate to have. He also learned that starting with disadvantages
did not necessarily doom a campaign. When he first ran for the Con-
gress, Kennedy had spent little time in the district and did not have
deep ties there. Worse, his blue-collar credentials were weak—he lived
in a fancy hotel, had spent much of the previous decade in New York,
“and on top of that . . . had gone to Harvard, not a particularly popu-
lar institution at that time in the Eleventh Congressional District.”
But all of that could be overcome, particularly if one adhered to
what he believed was the most important factor in his political success:
starting a campaign early. Through his House and Senate campaigns,
he had seen what a difference it could make in helping establish a
beachhead in the public consciousness. Because most people had more
important things to worry about than politics and politicians most of
the time, only focusing on them at election time, it was essential to
get an early start on building an enduring political presence, rather
than expecting one to materialize as if by magic a few months before
election day. Starting a campaign early was, Kennedy said, “in my
opinion the most important key to political success.” At the time, it
was an innovation. It became a defining feature in Kennedy’s political
style. During 1963, he was starting to look far ahead to the next elec-
tion, in 1964, just as he had for his previous campaigns.
As he wrapped up his private recording session, Kennedy turned
reflective. “I would say that I have never regretted my choice of pro-
fessions, even though I cannot know what the future will bring,” the
young senator said. He switched off the recorder and put the Dicta-
phone belt in the care of his trusted personal secretary, Evelyn Lincoln.
The recording would remain locked away in the files for thirty years.

On 8 November 1960, Kennedy won the presidency, but just barely.

His victory over Vice President Richard Nixon was by the narrow-
est of margins—just under 120,000 votes out of a record 68.8 million
votes cast, a plurality of less than two-tenths of a percent. And as so

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 The Ultimate Source of Action 25

often happens in modern presidential elections where tens of millions

of votes are cast in thousands of polling centers, questions lingered
about local ballot irregularities. The unconvincing manner of Ken-
nedy’s victory would have important practical ramifications. With a
weak mandate, not much executive experience, and a Congress that
owed little loyalty to the new, young president, Kennedy transitioned
from candidate on the campaign trail to occupant of the Oval Office.
He assembled a bipartisan and centrist cabinet filled with impres-
sive résumés. He persuaded Robert McNamara to give up his new job
leading the Ford Motor Company to head the sprawling bureaucracy
of the Pentagon. At the urging of Democratic elder statesmen whose
counsel he trusted, especially former secretary of state Dean Ache-
son and former secretary of defense Robert Lovett, he brought Dean
Rusk in from the Rockefeller Foundation as secretary of state. From
Wall Street, he secured C. Douglas Dillon to be his treasury secre-
tary. And he recruited McGeorge Bundy, the youngest-ever dean at
Harvard, to lead the White House’s national security team.
On the morning of his inauguration, the air was crisp and a layer
of freshly fallen snow covered the ground in Washington. For his sup-
porters, it was a fitting symbol of a fresh new start after eight years
of a Republican White House. Adlai Stevenson, with impeccable lib-
eral credentials, had twice failed to best Dwight Eisenhower. Now a
young president, full of promise and promises, radiating health and
youth (having confessed to past injuries but not to his serious illness)
and of a generation born in the twentieth century, laid out his vision.
Kennedy’s inauguration speech, crafted in collaboration with his
longtime wordsmith Ted Sorensen, was a masterpiece of prose deliv-
ered artfully. It promised an era of progress and renewal, a legisla-
tive program that would right injustices and restore basic fairness at
home, and a foreign policy of resolve and modernization. They would
look forward, Kennedy said, not back. The economist Walt Rostow
provided the bold new agenda with a name that stuck. It would be the
New Frontier.
Almost immediately, the aspirations of bringing new, modern

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 26 The Fourteenth Day

ideas to the governance of the country and its foreign policy ran
into problems. Although Democrats controlled both houses of
Congress, southern Democrats often sided with Republicans on
social legislation that formed key components of the New Frontier.
Civil rights legislation he had promised during the campaign was
stonewalled in Congress, and by the fall of 1962, civil rights leaders
were growing increasingly disillusioned with Kennedy’s reluctance
to push the issue.
Some problems were of the administration’s own making. When
the steel industry tried to defy the White House and raise prices, Ken-
nedy forced it to back down. It was ostensibly a victory, but one that
came with a price. The White House had spent considerable political
capital in the battle, and its tactics were seen as heavy-handed and
antibusiness. It would take some time for those early impressions to
erode. An early effort siding with the legendary Speaker Sam Ray-
burn to remove an uncooperative Mississippi Democrat who was
creating a bottleneck in the Rules Committee that was holding up
legislation ended with Rayburn and the White House winning, but
unconvincingly.
Before the fall of 1962, two episodes on the world stage led many
voters to question Kennedy’s effectiveness as president. In April of
the preceding year, the administration botched what was supposed to
be covert assistance for an invasion and uprising in Cuba to oust the
communist leader Fidel Castro. The invasion, known for its landing
site at the Bahía de Cochinos, or Bay of Pigs, failed dismally, with
tragic consequences for many involved. CIA-trained Cuban émigrés
storming their homeland were quickly rounded up and captured, and
Castro remained in power, more determined than ever to defy the
United States. Making it worse, the White House initially mishandled
its public response by denying involvement and then being forced to
backtrack. The Bay of Pigs misadventure amounted to a self-inflicted
wound, and a serious one at that.
Less than two months later, in June 1961, Kennedy met with Nikita
Khrushchev, the Soviet premier, in Vienna. The summit did not go

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 The Ultimate Source of Action 27

well. Rather than leading to the kind of mutual understanding that

might reduce cold war tensions, as Kennedy had hoped when agree-
ing to the meeting, the closely watched summit instead led to the kind
of mutual misunderstanding that made the cold war more dangerous.
Khrushchev renewed his threat to West Berlin, and the exchanges
created the widely held public impression that the seasoned, mer-
curial communist leader had browbeaten the inexperienced, young
president. Such reports probably exaggerated the effectiveness of
Khrushchev’s tactics—it was certainly not the first time Khrushchev
had resorted to blunt language, after all—but the image they created
less than two months after the botched Bay of Pigs invasion was of a
president unsure of his footing.
Kennedy had assumed office believing that the presidency was the
ultimate source of action, but by the fall of 1962 many of his initia-
tives seemed to lead only to new lessons on the limits of presidential
power.
One does not need the benefit of hindsight to recognize that the
crisis over Cuba in the fall of 1962 was no ordinary foreign policy
challenge. Nikita Khrushchev’s plan, to put Soviet nuclear missiles
just ninety miles off the continental United States, was audacious in
the extreme. That it was to be done in secret, presenting the Ameri-
cans with a fait accompli, was incendiary, especially in an election
season. The stakes in the ensuing showdown were extraordinarily
high: nothing less than survival or global thermonuclear annihilation.
That set it apart from the dozens of decision moments and crises, big
and small, that came through the Oval Office doorway on any given
day. Kennedy—along with his Soviet counterpart, Khrushchev, and
indeed the rest of the world—knew all too well that a misstep could
be fatal to millions. It could even destroy the very nation Kennedy
was sworn to protect.
What had Khrushchev been up to? Why had he risked so much,
taken “one hell of a gamble,” in Kennedy’s words? For Kennedy,
trying to untangle Khrushchev’s intentions and motivations was
key. The answers he arrived at helped shape his own responses and

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 28 The Fourteenth Day

policies, and helped him anticipate how his own actions might be
interpreted in Moscow. Again and again during the crisis, he would
ask his Soviet experts their views and try to think through the prob-
lem himself. 2
The foundation for the crisis had been laid back in the summer,
when Khrushchev decided to add nuclear weapons to the mix of mili-
tary hardware that the Soviets would send by ship to their small, fee-
ble ally in the Caribbean. What the Cuban communists led by Fidel
Castro lacked in real means they made up for with revolutionary zeal.
For the Soviets, struggling with communist China for the leadership
role in world communism, Cuba offered more than just a beachhead
very near America. It represented an opportunity for Moscow to bur-
nish its revolutionary credentials.
Precisely why the plan to send nuclear missiles to Cuba
appealed to Khrushchev is largely a matter of informed specula-
tion. Khrushchev himself gave several reasons, none of which, on
its own, entirely satisfies. In one telling, it was an effort to defend
Cuba against an American invasion. In another, it was to retaliate
for American-made NATO missiles deployed close to the borders
of the Soviet Union.
Historians Timothy Naftali and Aleksandr Fursenko, based on
their careful reading of Soviet documents, make a convincing case that
Khrushchev’s thinking was initially vague, that he sensed benefits that
had not yet taken full form, but that when he contemplated what the
new situation would look like, he saw opportunity.3 Khrushchev could
often be mercurial and stubborn, sometimes charming and persuasive.
But he was always a devoted opportunist. The State Department had
warned Kennedy about that on his way to his first meeting with the
Soviet premier at Vienna in June of the preceding year:

Although it is true to a degree of almost all leaders, it is especially

true of Khrushchev that he attempts to relate the various pieces
of policy that he envisages to each other. Periodically he seems
to take inventory of his most important problems and his most

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 The Ultimate Source of Action 29

important opportunities, put them in a blender, and come up with

a synthetic solution which is meant to deal with them all.4

For Khrushchev, one of the greatest opportunities was to force a

final resolution of the Berlin problem, something that had more than
once over the preceding decade and a half caused a confrontation that
could have all too easily led to nuclear war. An awkward arrangement
in the closing stages of World War II had left West Berlin, protected
by the United States, France, and Great Britain, as an enclave buried
deep in communist East Germany. Repeated attempts by the Soviets
to force the Western powers from the city had failed but had made the
city one of the cold war’s most dangerous flash points. Now Khrush-
chev apparently believed he could resolve the issue in his favor once
and for all.5
Whatever Khrushchev’s real intentions, they were thwarted by
miscalculation and by the responses crafted by Kennedy and his
advisers. Through an intense series of meetings and feverish depart-
mental and agency activity, they had devised a plan of action that
persuaded Khrushchev to suffer the humiliation of defeat, with all
the consequences that it would have for undermining the Soviet pre-
mier’s leadership.
Kennedy had first been informed of the photographic reconnais-
sance early on the morning of 16 October. For the following thirteen
days he and his advisers wrestled with the cold war’s most dangerous
crisis. But tension over Cuba had been building since the summer.
On 4 September, responding to an intensifying public and political
debate about growing Soviet military aid to Cuba, Kennedy, through
his press secretary, Pierre Salinger, had issued a clear warning: that
if the military buildup crossed a threshold from defensive forces to
ones that posed an offensive threat to American territory, “the gravest
issues would arise.”6
Surveillance photographs from U-2s, cutting-edge spy planes
that flew at very high altitude, provided irrefutable evidence that the
threshold had been crossed. Kennedy gathered his advisers to devise

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 30 The Fourteenth Day

a response. And he recorded many of their discussions, creating a rich

historical record of high-stakes diplomatic decision making.7
Meeting in intense secrecy for a week, from 16 through 22 Octo-
ber, the group digested the available intelligence information and
debated how to respond. Members of a generation for which words
like “Munich” and “appeasement” instantly brought to mind images
of the death and destruction of World War II, those in the group
never seriously questioned that something had to be done. They ini-
tially inclined toward some kind of military strike. Shortcomings of
such a course became increasingly apparent. Military commanders
could not guarantee that their forces could destroy all the missile sites
before the Soviets might fire some of their missiles; the CIA was not
even sure it had found all the missile sites (it had not). And launch-
ing surprise attacks too distastefully echoed the Pearl Harbor attacks
that had drawn the United States into World War II.
By 21 October, Kennedy had settled on a middle course: the United
States would institute a naval blockade of Cuba, dubbed a “quaran-
tine” to make it more palatable to world opinion, preventing further
arms shipments from arriving on the island. That would allow time
for the Soviets to reach a decision to back down. If they did not do so,
the American military would stand ready to launch military strikes.
At 7 p.m. on 22 October, Kennedy gave a special televised speech
announcing that U.S. surveillance had gathered hard evidence of
nuclear missiles in Cuba and accusing Soviet leaders of “deliberate
deception.”8 It ushered in the public phase of the crisis.
On 23 October, Kennedy signed a proclamation listing the mili-
tary equipment that would be targeted by the U.S naval quarantine
as prohibited items. It specified surface-to-surface missiles, bomber
aircraft, bombs, air-to-surface rockets and guided missiles, warheads
for any of these weapons, along with the support equipment needed
to operate the weapons.9
Tense days followed as the U.S. Navy carried out the quarantine
of Cuba. It was not clear how the Soviets would respond. Some Soviet
ships bound for Cuba turned back. Others stopped.

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 The Ultimate Source of Action 31

The massive American military, the most advanced in the world,

went on high alert. Its nuclear forces, capable of destroying the
world many times over, went to DEFCON 2, the highest alert level
before missiles were fired in anger. Children as far away as Australia
rehearsed their civil defense drills, ducking and covering under their
school desks. And the front pages of newspapers around the world
dissected every morsel of information, every White House utterance
that became available.
But then, with dramatic suddenness, Khrushchev capitulated. A
flurry of secret letters between Kennedy and Khrushchev, known as
the pen-pal series, had led to an agreement. That formal channel was
complemented by a secret channel from the White House flowing
through the president’s brother Robert Kennedy and key officials at
the Soviet embassy in Washington, to Moscow. Khrushchev agreed
to remove the missiles that had sparked the crisis and facilitate the
means of assurance that they would not be reintroduced. Kennedy
agreed to provide assurances that the United States would not invade
Cuba. Secretly, he also agreed to remove medium-range ballistic mis-
siles under NATO command from Turkey. And like that, the crisis
was over.10
Or rather, one phase was over, the most dangerous and best-
remembered phase. But the crisis that has gone down in history as
a thirteen-day crisis cast a long shadow. For all the palpable sense of
relief felt on 28 October 1962, when Khrushchev’s message that he
would order the removal of the missiles was transmitted around the
world, many issues that had contributed to the crisis in the first place
remained unresolved. Many of those unresolved issues would drag
on for months in public and in behind-the-scenes negotiations. Some
would fundamentally change the cold war, ushering in a new period
less threatened by nuclear crises and opening new opportunities for
East–West détente. Some would never be solved, producing echoes
years later for future administrations to confront.
During the crisis, the White House had put many other pressing
issues on hold. China and India were coming to blows along their

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 32 The Fourteenth Day

border. At home, an election loomed. The presidential election was

still two years away, but nine days after the end of the crisis, Amer-
ican voters would go to the polls for midterm elections. Although
only House, gubernatorial, and some Senate seats were being decided,
it was widely viewed as the voters’ first opportunity to pass judg-
ment on Kennedy’s presidency. History and a deepening voter apathy
pointed to Democratic losses.
But before Kennedy and his advisers could turn their attention
to the bulging portfolio of other urgent issues—let alone devote time
to shaping the future—there was important work to be done in the
present. They still had important challenges to confront in regard to
Cuba, remaining vigilant against a well-armed and creative adversary.
Guarding against the possibility of Soviet duplicity was their first
order of business.

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