LIKE all American Presidents before and since, directly he took the oath of office on January 20, 1961 John F. Kennedy discovered his domestic agenda was to be subordinated to international considerations.Kennedy was narrowly elected to office in 1960 by, in part, promising to end the "decade of inertia" he claimed characterised the 1952-1960 Eisenhower Administration's homefront policies during the early years of the Cold War.

But just months after taking office, JFK complained to former Vice-President and political rival Richard Nixon that managing US involvement on the world stage entirely eclipsed what he had hoped would be an ambitious and vigorous programme of domestic reforms.

"Foreign affairs is the only important issue for a President to handle, isn't it?" he asked rhetorically during an Oval Office meeting with Nixon, who, despite their party and ideological differences, occasionally met to discuss international issues. "I mean, who gives a shit if the minimum wage is $1.15 or $1.25, compared to something like Cuba?"

By December, when the Bermuda Big Two summit meeting was scheduled to take place, Kennedy had been contending with Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschev's nuclear sabre rattling for months.

The Soviet leader had first adopted his stridently belicose stance when the Central Intelligence Agency backed the anti-Castro Cuban rebel landings at the Bay of Pigs in April; the US had severed diplomatic relations with Fidel Castro's revolutionary government earlier in the year and Cuba had gone on to confirm the increasingly obvious — that the island nation was now a socialist regime and a de facto Soviet client state.

Khrushchev's language continued to grow increasingly shrill — and his actions increasingly provocative — through the failed Vienna summit meeting with the US President, the July/August Berlin Wall crisis and the resumption of unprecedentedly powerful atmospheric Soviet thermo-nuclear tests.

But the constant warlike Soviet refrain had only reached its harsh crescendo a few weeks prior to the scheduled Bermuda talks. At the end of October US and Soviet tanks faced off with one another for 16 hours in a manufactured dispute over border-transit rights in that divided city, a Khrushchev-choreographed exercise in brinkmanship that might have led to war. And on December 4 — the day the Bermuda summit was announced — American and Soviet bloc combat troops were once again facing off with one another in Berlin just 15 yards apart, weapons at the ready, as East German work crews strengthened the wall running through the city.

Then there was also a seemingly neverending succession of far-flung Cold War side-shows for the President to factor into his foreign policy pronouncements.

Fighting had continued all year in the breakaway Congo province of Katanga - Patrice Lumumba, the messianic architect of Congolese Independence from Belgium, had been murdered in January by political rivals and United Nations Secretary Dag Hammarskj|0xf6|ld died in a mysterious aircraft accident in September near Ndola , Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) while he was trying to broker a ceasefire between Katangan rebels and UN peacekeepers.

On December 12 Indian troops had occupied the Portuguese colony of Goa, ending 450 years of Lisbon's rule in just 26 hours.

Holland, reluctant to accelerate its decolonisation programme, was waging a low-intensity rear-guard action against Indonesia over the future of its New Guinea territories.

And in partitioned Vietnam, JFK had just authorised the deployment of 16,000 US military "advisors" to help the Western-oriented South Vietnamese counter cross-border incursions by Viet Cong guerillas backed by the Communist North Vietnamese Army.

The global<\p>Cold War battlefieldwas obviously going to dominate the agenda at the fourth round of 1961 Kennedy/Macmillan talks. After a telephone conversation between JFK<\p>and Macmillan on the afternoon of December 4 confirming Bermuda as the venue for two days of intensive pre-Christmas discussions, a statement was released jointly in London and Washington announcing the pending Big Two summit."President Kennedy and Prime Minister Macmillan have for some time past felt that, as part of a series of meetings which are now taking place between heads of some of the Western governments, it would be useful if they could meet for a few days to continue discussions about the international situation which they held in Washington last spring and again in London in summer," read the statement.

"It has now been agreed the President and Prime Minister will meet in Bermuda on December 21 and 22."

President Kennedy had suggested Bermuda as the site for the talks — continuing a tradition of major power summits convened here that began with the 1953 "Big Three" talks between UK Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill, US President Dwight Eisenhower and French Premier Joseph Laniel and the March, 1957 talks between Macmillan and Eisenhower.

Officially, news of the Kennedy/Macmillan summit took Bermuda completely unawares.

"This was a complete surprise to the Bermuda Government," Colonial Secretary (precursor to the current Deputy Governor) J.W. Sykes told The Royal Gazette when the joint US/UK statement was issued. "This came right out of the blue this afternoon." Unofficially, however, it appears Governor Major General Sir Julian Gascoigne had been notified by the British Foreign Office as early as September that the President and Prime Minister might be meeting in the island before the end of the year. Certainly, the island's officials seemed exceptionally well prepared to facilitate top-level talks that had come "right out of the blue" — by December 5 accomodation for 200-plus delegates and newsmen expected on the island for the talks had been arranged with the Bermudiana Hotel (while Kennedy and Macmillan would stay at Government House, their Cabinet officials and advisors were billeted at the Hamilton hotel along with the journalists who would be covering the event). And within 24 hours of the announcement, the Foreign Office's Ashley Williams was in Bermuda taking overall charge of local arrangements for the talks, coordinating with Colonial Secretary Sykes, Trade Development Board executive director (and later Cabinet Secretary) Jimmy Williams and Bermuda News Bureau manager Colin Selley>British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan - accompanied by Foreign Secretary Alec Douglas Home, British Ambassador to Washington and JFK confidante David Ormsby Gore (later Lord Harlach) and other Cabinet Ministers and advisors - arrived in Bermuda via Halifax, Nova Scotia early on the morning of December 20. Kennedy was scheduled to arrive the following morning.After disembarking from his British Overseas Airways Corporation Comet, Macmillan posed for photographers with Sir Julian on the airport tarmac and then was escorted to the Governor's limousine. Cars were also arranged for other members of Macmillan's party — including the 12 Royal Marines who would act as his personal bodyguard at Government House. Eight police motorcycle outriders led the motorcade along North Shore, with the limousine carrying Macmillan going directly to Government House while the other cars travelled on to the Bermudiana Hotel.

Macmillan spent four hours at Government House getting refreshed and fine-tuning summit plans with senior members of his party. Then he visited two Royal Naval vessels HMS Vidal and HMI>Troubridge, moored in Hamilton harbour. And that evening the Prime Minister and members of his delegation attended a reception hosted by Sir Julian at Government House for local dignitaries.

But in between these activities, the British leader was required to hold a series of long-distance telephone talks with JFK that could have scuppered the Bermuda summit.

On December 19, family patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy, former appeasement-minded US Ambassador to Great Britain during World War Two, Wall Street speculator, Hollywood financier, unashamed champion of McCarthyism and Prohibition-era bootlegger, had been felled by a major stroke at his Florida home.

President Kennedy's relationship with his father comprised equal measures of respect and fear. A droll anecdote captures their complex bond. The senior Kennedy had substantially bankrolled his son's 1960 election campaign - and is widely believed to have made under-the-table payments to officials in toss-up states to ensure their electoral votes fell into the Kennedy column. John F. Kennedy, when asked about his controversial father's involvement in the razor-thin Presidential victory, would joke that on the eve of the election Joseph Kennedy had asked him the exact number of votes he would need to win - there was no way he was paying "for a landslide". The fact the President always resorted to gallows humor when discussing his father's political scheming escaped no one's notice.

JFK learned of 73-year-old Joseph Kennedy's illness just after returning to the White House from a trumphant tour of South America. He had walked into Press Secretary Pierre Salinger's White House office when the "hot line" — a telephone used to contact the President and available only to Cabinet officers and other high officials — flashed an amber light. It was JFK's brother, Attorney General Bobby Kennedy. After a brief conversation, President Kennedy replaced the phone on its cradle.According to witnesses the President grew ashen. "Dad's gotten sick," he told Salinger. Although his Bermuda conference with Macmillan was less than 48 hours away, the President decided to fly to his ailing father's bedside in Palm Beach."I'm going," Kennedy told Salinger. "Get things ready." While preparations were being made for the Florida flight, the President presided over a 45-minute National Security Council meeting. Then he left the White House, walked through the cold rain and fog to a limousine where Attorney General Robert Kennedy and his sister Jean Kennedy Smith were waiting. They all flew to Florida aboard Air Force One.

Between visits to the hospital, President Kennedy conferred with his aides and maintained his official schedule. From Bermuda, Macmillan called more than once offering to fly to Palm Beach or to call off the conference altogether. But when the doctors reported that Joseph Kennedy might remain semi-comatose for weeks, the President decided to go ahead with his Bermuda plans.

In fact, Joseph Kennedy rallied and although he never made a full recovery from the stroke, he lived until 1969.

JFK arrived on the island aboard Air Force One as scheduled at 12. 55 p.m. on December 21 after a two-hour flight from Florida.

He was met at the airport by Macmillan, Bermuda Governor Sir Julian Gascoigne, local dignitaries as well as US Consul General George Renchard and officers from Kindley Air Force Base.

As the President disembarked from Air Force One, one of four Navy helicopters from the aircraft carrier ULake Champlain, moored off-shore for the summit, hovered overhead, serving as an airborne security outpost.

On the airport tarmac the President then inspected dress-uniformed honour guards comprised of soldiers from the Bermuda Militia Artillery and the Bermuda Rifles (this was before their amalgamation into the Bermuda Regiment).

He then made a few brief remarks to his hosts and the huge crowd that had gathered at the airport, comments carried live both locally and internationally over a radio hook-up.

"Your Excellency, Prime Minister," said a windswept President Kennedy,

"I want to express my great pleasure at having an opportunity to talk to you again, and to visit you on your territory which has been the scene on other occasions of most important meetings beneficial to both our countries.

"We have had, since I assumed the responsibility of the Presidency, meetings in Washington and in Florida and in London, and I think it most appropriate at this particular time in the affairs of the world that the United States and Great Britain should once again meet, and that we should have a chance to exchange our views and coordinate our policies.

"So I am delighted to be here, Prime Minister, and I am most grateful to the Governor for his warm welcome."

Macmillan responded as follows: "Mr. President, it is a very great pleasure to welcome you here on British soil where, as you say, other meetings have taken place between Presidents and Prime Ministers engaged in the task which occupies us - the strengthening of our friendship to preserve the peace of the world.

"That is what we are for - that is what we are trying to do.

"We are particularly grateful to you, Mr. President, for coming at a time of great personal anxiety and sorrow to you. We appreciate that.

"You have all our good wishes, and on speaking today I know that I speak not only for all those here assembled in this lovely island of Bermuda, but for all British people all over the world, wherever they may be." Continued next week