Apr. 3, 1963 | JFK on National Budget

Apr. 3, 1963 - President Kennedy said today that budget cuts like those advocated by General Dwight D. Eisenhower were “just bound to put you into an economic decline instead of a rise.” In some of the most biting criticism of the former President he has ever made, Mr. Kennedy differed vigorously with General Eisenhower’s suggestions that the budget for fiscal year 1964 could be cut by as much as $12 billion and that the Kennedy space program was “spongy” with waste. The economic record of the Eisenhower Administration, the President said at his news conference, was “not a record we plan to duplicate if we can help it.” That record included, he said, the largest budget deficit in history, two recessions in three years, record unemployment in 1959, and a gold outflow of nearly $4 billion in the same year. General Eisenhower’s view that the space program was wasteful and too costly, the President said, was not new but had been held “from the time of Sputnik on.” That was a reference to the first Soviet space satellite launched in 1957 during the Eisenhower Administration — an event Mr. Kennedy often has cited as one of the historic turning points of the postwar era. “We are second in space today,” the President said pointedly, “because we started late.”

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