Between Kennedy and Khrushchev

During the 1960 election, the “Merry-Go-Round” ’s revelation of a suspicious loan from billionaire Howard Hughes helped to defeat Richard Nixon. Nevertheless, Drew Pearson remained an outsider in John Kennedy’s New Frontier, having accused Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book, Profiles in Courage, of having been ghost-written, and painted Joseph P. Kennedy as being sympathetic to Nazi Germany before World War II. Being a generation older than Kennedy, Pearson found himself more comfortable with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and scored a rare interview with him. Khrushchev insisted that he sought peace, which Pearson communicated to Kennedy and to his readers. Consequently, anti-communist groups assailed the column and picketed Pearson. At the same time, Pearson grew more appreciative of the civil rights movement. The column attacked the Ku Klux Klan and encouraged Kennedy to speak out more forcefully against racial segregation and inequality.

Kennedy and the Democratic political considerations of compromise

The politics surrounding freedom of information changed with the 1960 election of President Kennedy. Partisan power shifted to unified Democratic government, and the power tensions between the White House and Congress over executive privilege faced new challenges. Congressional Democrats were loath to attack their new president in the same manner that Moss went after Eisenhower, so leadership directed the Moss Subcommittee to back off. While partisan politics dictated that congressional Democrats go easy on Kennedy, congressional Republicans increased attacks on the administration over issues of executive privilege and freedom of information, following the same playbook Moss had used on Eisenhower. Within the CLDC, Moss learned to take another approach to handling the politics of unified Democratic government and in dealing with Kennedy, who was acting on the precedent set by Eisenhower to continue similar policies in denying information. The result would be a deal worked out between Kennedy and Moss to ensure that, going forward, executive privilege would only be invoked with the full authority of the president and by no one else.

Midterm Election in Kerala in 1960 and the American Government

After toppling the first Communist ministry in Kerala the main attention of the US agencies—Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the US Embassy in India—was to install a non-communist stable government in Kerala to meet the dangers of communism in Asia. The US agencies adopted two ways to realise these objectives. First of all, they extended all out support to the triple alliance composed of the Congress Party, Praja Socialist Party (PSP) and the Muslim League against the Communist Party in 1960 election. The election campaign of the triple alliance was much funded by the CIA. However the triple alliance won the election, the Communist Party got more votes than in 1957 and it intensified the US agencies to beef up its anti-Communist operations in Kerala and outside. It led to the adoption of second method of anti-Communist activities that the US agencies began to give wide publicity in India and outside that the first Communist ministry in Kerala could not make any economic advancement in Kerala during their tenure nor could they redress the chronic problems of unemployment and food scarcity and if Communists were voted to power in other parts of Asia, they would follow the same trend and fall.