John F. Kennedy
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T he PRESIDENTIAL RECORDINGS JOHN F. KENNEDY !! T H E GREA T CRISES, VOLUM E ON E "" JULY 30–AUGUST 1962 Timothy Naftali Editor, Volume One George Eliades Francis Gavin Erin Mahan Jonathan Rosenberg David Shreve Associate Editors, Volume One Patricia Dunn Assistant Editor Philip Zelikow and Ernest May General Editors B W. W. NORTON & COMPANY • NEW YORK • LONDON Copyright © 2001 by The Miller Center of Public Affairs Portions of this three-volume set were previously published by Harvard University Press in The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis by Philip D. Zelikow and Ernest R. May. Copyright © 1997 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First Edition For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110 The text of this book is composed in Bell, with the display set in Bell and Bell Semi-Bold Composition by Tom Ernst Manufacturing by The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group Book design by Dana Sloan Production manager: Andrew Marasia Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data John F. Kennedy : the great crises. p. cm. (The presidential recordings) Includes bibliographical references and indexes. Contents: v. 1. July 30–August 1962 / Timothy Naftali, editor—v. 2. September 4–October 20, 1962 / Timothy Naftali and Philip Zelikow, editors—v. 3. October 22–28, 1962 / Philip Zelikow and Ernest May, editors. ISBN 0-393-04954-X 1. United States—Politics and government—1961–1963—Sources. 2. United States— Foreign relations—1961–1963—Sources. 3. Crisis management—United States—History— 20th century—Sources. 4. Kennedy, John F. (John Fitzgerald), 1917–1963—Archives. I. Naftali, Timothy J. II. Zelikow, Philip, 1954– III. May, Ernest R. IV. Series. E841.J58 2001 973.922—dc21 2001030053 W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110 www.wwnorton.com W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT 1234567890 4 MONDAY, JULY 30, 1962 Monday, July 30, 1962 The President awoke this morning at the Kennedy home in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. Boarding Air Force One at a little after 9:00 A.M., he flew to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, where Marine One, the presidential helicopter, was waiting to ferry him to the White House. President Kennedy entered the White House from the South Lawn at 10:25 A.M. He went straight to work. Turning left in the hall that bisects the ground floor, President Kennedy walked through a short lobby to the Colonnade connecting, along the fabled Rose Garden, the Executive Mansion to the President’s working office, the West Wing. On the right of the Colonnade, he passed the swimming pool, the french doors of the Cabinet Room, and then those belonging to the office of Evelyn Lincoln, his secretary. Walking through Lincoln’s office, or perhaps opening his own Rose Garden door, he entered the Oval Office. The taping system had been installed over the weekend. The President had had a switch placed under his desk in the Oval Office and another under the portion of the long conference table nearest his chair in the Cabinet Room. Kenneth O’Donnell, the President’s appointments secretary, had not scheduled any meetings for the first 90 minutes of this otherwise busy day. The President had time to acquaint himself with the new taping system before catching up on his mail and telephone calls. M ee t ing on B ra z i l 5 11:52 A.M.–12:20 P.M. [W]e may very well want them [the Brazilian military] to take over at the end of the year, if they can. Meeting on Brazil1 President Kennedy used his taping system for the first time to capture his conversation with the U.S. ambassador to Brazil, Lincoln Gordon.2 Gordon was in Washington to discuss the most recent political crisis in Brazil.3 The largest country in South America, Brazil was considered by U.S. officials as a major test of the Alliance for Progress, the centerpiece of the Kennedy’s administration’s efforts to encourage economic devel- opment and political stability in Latin America. In Brazil the Alliance for Progress took the form of a $274 million joint U.S.-Brazilian development project, for which the United States pledged $131 million in grants and loans to develop the drought- stricken and impoverished northeast region.4 Kennedy had taken a per- sonal interest in Brazil, especially the activities of João “Jango” Goulart, Brazil’s charismatic president. Goulart was a puzzle to Washington. Since coming to power in August 1961, Goulart had adopted a self- described “independent foreign policy” that involved maintaining good relations with Fidel Castro. At the January OAS foreign ministers’ meet- ing at Punta del Este, the Brazilian foreign minister Francisco San Taigo 1. With President Kennedy, McGeorge Bundy, Richard Goodwin, and Lincoln Gordon. Tape 1, John F. Kennedy Library, President’s Office Files, Presidential Recordings Collection. 2. Lincoln Gordon was ambassador to Brazil, August 1961 to January 1966. An economist at Harvard and Oxford before and after World War II, Gordon helped develop the Marshall Plan, advised NATO in the 1950s, and soon after the 1960 election was appointed a member of a Latin American Task Force organized by president-elect Kennedy. After playing a promi- nent role in the organization of the administration’s Alliance for Progress, announced to the world in a White House speech by President Kennedy to the Latin American diplomatic corps on 13 March 1961, Gordon was appointed ambassador to Brazil. From January 1966 to January 1967, Gordon served as assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, resign- ing that post to become president of John Hopkins University. 3. Gordon was in Washington from 26 July through 1 August. William H. Brubeck, Memorandum for Mr. McGeorge Bundy, 25 July 1962, “Brazil” folder, National Security Files, Box 13, John F. Kennedy Library. 4. “Northeast Agreement,” Cable to Brazilian Government, 9 April 1962, “Brazil” folder, National Security Files, Box 12A, John F. Kennedy Library. 6 MONDAY, JULY 30, 1962 Dantas had led the opposition to sanctions against Cuba. Besides the confrontation over foreign policy, relations with Goulart were strained because of a series of high-profile expropriations of U.S.-owned Brazilian subsidiaries. Yet when Goulart visited the United States in April 1962 he had made a good impression on President Kennedy. The Brazilian presi- dent had two private sessions with Kennedy, gave a speech to a joint ses- sion of Congress, and visited New York, Chicago, and the North American Air Defense Command in Colorado. A high point of the tour was Goulart’s offer to buy out foreign-owned public utility companies on negotiated terms, a reference to the dispute with U.S. giant IT&T, whose telephone company had been taken over by the state of Rio Grande do Sul. Both leaders appeared pleased with the visit and President Kennedy promised to go to Brazil in July or August. Kennedy never made that visit. By the summer of 1962, Brazil was in the grip of a constitutional crisis born of the strange circumstances surrounding Goulart’s rise to the presidency. In 1960, Goulart, a Labor Party leader, had been elected to the vice presidency. Under the Brazilian constitution of 1946, separate elections were held for presi- dents and vice presidents. The elected president, Jânio Quadros, stunned the nation a year later by resigning in what appears in retrospect to have been a monumentally unsuccessful play for more power. Assum- ing that the military would never support Goulart, who would suc- ceed to the presidency if Quadros’s resignation were accepted, the president expected the Brazilian Congress to agree to a broad delega- tion of powers as a way of persuading him to revoke his resignation. Instead the resignation was accepted at face value with Goulart the beneficiary. As Quadros had predicted, the leadership of the Brazilian military was not happy, and a civil war was averted only by a congressional compromise that limited presidential powers even further. The Brazilian constitution was amended to transform the government into more of a parliamentary regime, modeled after the West German constitution. A disciple of the leg- endary Brazilian leader Getúlio Vargas, Goulart dreamed of revoking this parliamentary democracy to return to the strong presidential state of the 1930s and 1940s. Vowing to recapture those powers, Goulart once quipped to Gordon, “I do not intend to be the Queen of England.”5 By the terms of the new constitution, a plebiscite on restoring presidential powers was to 5. Timothy Naftali Interview with Ambassador Lincoln Gordon, 3 August 2000. M ee t ing on B ra z i l 7 be held in 1965 just before the next presidential election. Goulart did not wish to wait that long. The U.S. government watched warily in June 1962 as Goulart launched what the U.S. diplomats thought was an attack on the Brazilian parliamentary system in June 1962. Congressional elections were sched- uled for October, and the constitution provided that anyone in public executive office who wanted to run for congress had to resign his office four months before election day. Goulart used the fact that the Brazilian cabinet had to resign to maneuver the congress into advancing the date of the referendum on presidential powers. He also forced out a center- right prime minister in favor of a little-known left-leaning candidate, Francisco Brochado da Rocha. Brochado da Rocha was no stranger to the U.S.