[This is highly relevant today…]

The ‘steel crisis’ of 1962 was a very public showdown between President John F. Kennedy, U.S. Steel and seven other major steel manufacturers over their blatant violation of an agreement which he had personally negotiated between U.S. Steel and the United Steel Workers’ Union.

JFK was concerned about rising inflation. His administration had set an informal but well-publicized goal of wage increases and price hikes to match productivity increases. In the meantime, the Steelworker’s contract negotiations with the nation’s major steel companies were getting nowhere.

Kennedy took it upon himself to complete the negotiations and so he personally intervened. Labor Secretary Arthur Goldberg, a longtime union counsel, mediated the talks.

The pact, with ten of the nation’s 11 steel companies, called for an increase in fringe benefits worth 10 cents an hour in 1962, but no wage hikes that year. Kennedy praised the contract as “obviously non-inflationary” and said both the union and the steel firms showed “industrial statesmanship of the highest order.” The agreement implicitly stated that the companies would not raise prices.

But on April 10, Roger Blough, CEO of U.S. Steel – the largest of the firms – met with JFK in the Oval Office and told him outright that the company was going to immediately raise prices by $6 a ton – in violation of the agreement – and that other steel companies would immediately follow suit. Six did. The 3.5% hike enraged the president.

In a head-to-head confrontation with the ruling elite of US manufacturing, JFK took decisive action and ordered the Defense Department to shift several huge military contracts away from the major steel companies to the smaller, more loyal contractors who had not defied him.

JFK was so furious at being double-crossed by the steel companies that he told his staff, in words Wall Street would not soon forget: “My father always told me that all businessmen were sons of bitches, but I never believed it until now.”

In his address to the nation, Kennedy famously said,

“Some time ago I asked each American to consider what he would do for his country; and I asked the steel companies. In the last 24 hours we had their answer…at a time when restraint and sacrifice are being asked of every citizen, the American people will find it hard, as I do, to accept a situation in which a tiny handful of steel executives whose pursuit of private power and profit exceeds their sense of public responsibility can show such utter contempt for the interests of 185 million Americans…”

Following such an outrageous public shaming, Big Steel ultimately had to give in and accept Kennedy’s demands.

After they were forced to back down from their price fixing, JFK and his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, were bitterly denounced as symbols of “ruthless power” by corporate heads, leading industrialists and the Wall Street power brokers at the very heart of the Military Industrial Complex (MIC).

In an editorial entitled, “Steel: The Ides of April” (the month in which Kennedy faced down the steel executives), Henry Luce’s Fortune magazine called to readers’ minds the soothsayer’s warning to Roman Emperor Julius Caesar of his impending assassination in Shakespeare’s famous play. The Fortune Op Ed was a not-so-subtle way of warning Kennedy that his actions had confirmed the worst fears of corporate America about his administration. Wall Street was officially warning JFK that his actions would have dire consequences.

As interpreted by our nation’s rulers, the steel crisis showdown was the logical prelude to Dallas.

And so it came to pass.