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Chapter 4 Stonewalling the House W hen the Eighty-Eighth Congress convened on January 3, 1963, its Republican members were livid about the 1962 election . Precedent had all but guaranteed that the Democrats, as the party in power during a midterm election, would lose around five Senate seats and nearly forty in the House. Instead, it was the GOP that lost Senate seats (four), while gaining only two seats in the lower chamber. The election results shored up President Kennedy’s political standing, which had been somewhat precarious because of his razor-thin margin of victory in 1960. The Republicans had “lost rather than gained momentum in the incipient race to win back the White House in 1964,” as one prominent White House correspondent put it.1 Politicians and news commentators unanimously agreed that one issue was responsible for the turnabout in Democratic fortunes. “You remember my prediction a month ago?” House minority leader Charles Halleck reportedly told an aide on October 22, the day the congressional leadership was briefed on the missile deployment. “I said he’ll pull the rug out from under the Republicans on the Cuba issue. Well, that’s what he’s done.” A less conspiratorial -sounding explanation came from the president’s sometime ally in the Senate, Stuart Symington (D-MO), who wrote Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson: “Cuba helped.”2 Indeed, the Kennedy administration had all but rewritten the conventional wisdom on its management of US foreign policy. As recently as October 1962, questions about its basic competence in this arena had promised to be a sure-fire issue for Republicans; now it appeared that foreign policy could be one of Kennedy’s strongest cards leading into the November 1964 election. Predictably, Republicans began to attack the administration over Cuba as soon as the new Congress was seated. Losing that issue appeared tantamount to conceding foreign policy as a whole. Encouraged by a few members of the 55 Stonewalling the House press, they began probing every facet of the missile crisis in an effort to dim the glow of the president’s October victory.3 During the first half of 1963, Republicans would variously claim that not all the Soviet missiles were being withdrawn from Cuba, that there were secret codicils to the terms of the Soviet withdrawal, and that the administration had been lax in its surveillance of Cuba prior to the discovery of the missiles. A few members would attempt to focus attention on the fact that Castro remained ensconced in power and would call for a belated congressional investigation into the Bay of Pigs.4 A desperate minority within the GOP would even argue that the administration had timed the missile crisis solely for political advantage. Most of these criticisms were baseless. Only two were genuinely problematic for the administration—primarily because they were true. The more sensitive of the two, in terms of the Western alliance and the Cold War, was the charge of a secret codicil: Kennedy’s private assurance to Khrushchev that he would withdraw the Jupiter missiles from Turkey. Still, in some ways this was not a hard secret to keep. Only eight of the president’s advisers had been privy to the pact, and the Soviets had been told that any public reference by Moscow to Kennedy’s pledge would instantly render it “null and void.”5 The allegation about lax photo surveillance—the photo gap—was another matter.6 Congress Enters the Fray The administration’s efforts to manage the news about the missile crisis had peaked with the December publication of the Alsop-Bartlett account in the Saturday Evening Post. One detail from the adoring article had stood out so vividly that the administration’s preferred narrative had become virtually fixed in the public mind. “We’re eyeball to eyeball,” Rusk was quoted as observing at the climactic moment, “and I think the other fellow just blinked.”7 Against such a backdrop, questions from Capitol Hill were apt to appear political—as potshots from the opposition. By early January, the White House was guardedly optimistic about getting Cuba off the front pages, and perhaps even turning it into a nonissue. Dogged surveillance of the Soviet withdrawal had demonstrated to the administration’s satisfaction that Moscow had removed the offensive missiles.8 Domestically President Kennedy’s prestige was at an all-time high, reflecting a combination of relief that a nuclear war had been avoided and the belief that Moscow had capitulated.9 The administration...

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