do something positive

{Excerpt: Grace And Power}
--- The first major reverberation from the Bay of Pigs was in Southeast Asia. Macmillan worried that "the failure of the covert action in Cuba might lead to the Americans insisting upon overt action in Laos." In fact, the opposite reaction occurred. "I was ready to go into Laos," Kennedy told Hugh Sidey. "Yes, we were going to do it. Then because of Cuba I thought we'd better take another look at the military planning for Laos." Kennedy still believed, as he told Lem Billings, that if the communists prevailed in Laos, "Vietnam would be next. Then Thailand, et cetera." Yet when "we began to talk about maybe going into Laos," Kennedy recalled, "all the generals and other people disagreed about this, and you don't know whom to believe and whom to disbelieve."

Kennedy was asking those generals tougher questions than he had before Cuba, and the unsatisfactory answers steered him away from intervention -- mainly because he realized the United States lacked enough conventional troops to win. "I just don't think we ought to get involved in Laos," Kennedy told Richard Nixon, citing the possibility of fighting "millions" of troops "in the jungles." Moreover, said Kennedy, "I don't see how we can make any move in Laos, which is 5000 miles away, if we don't make a move in Cuba, which is only 90 miles away."

JFK's skepticism was reinforced by Bobby, as well as Sorensen, who favored a peaceful resolution. For public consumption, Kenedy continued to make warlike noises, keeping 10,000 marines in readiness on Okinawa. But he also pushed a face-saving political alternative -- a cease-fire followed by the creation of a coalition government including the Pathet Lao, with the country's neutrality guaranteed by an international conference.

By early May the Pathet Lao comfortably controlled half of Laos. The Soviets helped organize a cease-fire, and a conference convened in Geneva to work out the terms of a newly configured neutralist Laos. The solution was expedient and flawed, placing communists in numerous government positions and failing to prevent the Pathet Lao from continuing to quietly secure more territory. It seemed unlikely that Laos would achieve independence, but at least the United States couldn't be accused of abandoning the country to outright communist rule.

Chapter Sixteen.
Two weeks before the Bay of Pigs defeat, William Shannon wrote in the liberal New York Post that Kennedy was like "a lithe young diver on the high board bouncing conspicuously but never quite taking the plunge." With his foreign adventure ending in a belly flop, Kennedy sought new ways to make a more graceful impression. On May 25, JFK effectively started his presidency all over again, giving what he called his "second State of the Union address," speaking for forty-seven minutes to a joint session of Congress and a national television audience. As before, he presented a laundry list of domestic and foreign initiatives.

This time [the president] grabbed attention with a bold proposal to spend nearly $700 million ($4.2 billion today) as the first step in a $9 billion ($54 billion today) effort to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. Space exploration, he declared, could "hold the key to our future on earth." Previously, Kennedy had viewed the space program as an unnecessary expense, although Lyndon Johnson, whom Kennedy had designated his point man on space issues, had long been a forceful advocate.

The president changed his mind in April after Russia successfully sent a manned spacecraft into orbit around the earth for ninety minutes. Three weeks later the United States conducted its own space launch, televised live for maximum effect by the president's order. Astronaut Alan Shepard Jr. soared 115 miles into the upper atmosphere, then emerged safely after his capsule landed 302 miles out in the Atlantic. It was a risky enterprise -- scientists had estimated a 75 percent chance of success -- but it paid off handsomely for the new administration. "With Shepard rode the hopes of the U.S. and the whole free world in a period of darkness," Time observed. The Soviets still held the technological lead, so the moon exploration plan was a guaranteed crowd pleaser.
...

A more promising effort to jump-start the Kennedy presidency was his first official trip overseas. In early April he announced a visit to Paris to confer with French president Charles de Gaulle; in mid-May he added Vienna to the itinerary for a meeting with Nikita Khrushchev. These consultations, and the pomp surrounding them, would be a major part of Kennedy's aggressive image-making.

The prospect of a Paris visit caught the public imagination instantly. Press accounts speculated that Jackie would serve as her husband's translator. Kennedy had a middling knowledge of French, telling Nicole Alphand, wife of the French ambassador, that he understood "about one out of every five words but always the words 'de Gaulle.'" The White House hastened to clarify Jackie's role, saying that instead of translating, she would be "tied up in other official good will duties." But Jackie's special French expertise -- her linguistic fluency, Bouvier heritage, sojourns in Paris, knowledge and affinity for the history and culture -- offered unmatched opportunities to burnish the image of the United States.

...
De Gaulle had been a source of special fascination for Jackie since World War II, when she had named her poodle Gaullie because her dog, like the French general, was "straight and proud with a prominent nose..." her stepbrother Yusha recalled. Later she read de Gaulle's Mémoires in French; during a primary campaign swing in Wisconsin, she had appeared with volume two at her side. ...

To prepare for her return to the City of Light, Jackie brushed up her language skills with a tutor from the French Embassy, read briefing papers prepared by the State Department, and organized a wardrobe of continental sophistication. She hewed to the now celebrated -- and widely imitated -- "Jackie look" of classic, simple tailoring, with an emphasis on what Oleg Cassini described as "sumptuous fabric, unusual color and distinctive details" to please the Parisian cognoscenti. ...

To President Kennedy, de Gaulle was a "great and gloomy figure" -- the hero of the French resistance during World War II, and as president since 1958 the apotheosis of French national pride. Kennedy knew, according to Sorensen, that the seventy-year-old de Gaulle could be "irritating, intransigent, insufferably vain, inconsistent and impossible to please."

After France had been driven out of Southeast Asia, de Gaulle opposed American military intervention there -- a "bottomless military and political quagmire"...
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{author: Sally Bedell Smith. Copyright, 2004.
Random House. New York.}

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