• • •
Looking back at it, it is nothing short of astounding to realize how many people most hostile to John Kennedy were in possession of damning facts about him—and how limited they were in their willingness or capacity to use that information.
There were Secret Service agents who were dismayed by Kennedy’s behavior, and who felt their own mission compromised by it. Who were those women coming into the presidential suites on campaign trips, cleared into the White House by Kenny O’Donnell or David Powers or Evelyn Lincoln when Mrs. Kennedy was away? What if the President had a health crisis during those pool parties with young press-office girls while the agents were outside? For all they knew, however, they were bound by a strict code of silence.
J. Edgar Hoover knew all the secrets: the affair with a mobster’s mistress; the White House visits by a German embassy employee who moonlighted as a prostitute; the encounters with Hollywood stars. Much as he reviled Kennedy for his conduct, Hoover’s goal was not exposure but the retention of power. There were also longstanding hints that the Kennedys had information about the director that would prove fatal to his own career. It was Dallas, however, where Bobby Kennedy found his ace in the hole: a statement from the Dallas bureau chief that Hoover had personally ordered him to destroy a threatening letter he’d received from Oswald before the shooting. Bobby had made it clear to Hoover that this information would remain secret just as long as Hoover continued to absolve the President of any improper behavior.
Some of the most powerful press barons were deeply conservative, passionately anti-Communist: Henry Luce’s Time-Life empire, the Reader’s Digest of the Wallaces, Ben Hibbs’s Saturday Evening Post, among others. They were also among the least likely to publish accounts of a public figure’s sexual exploits, at least not openly. (Time had an innuendo code: A man’s mistress was “his great and good friend.” A gay man was “a confirmed bachelor.”) Luce himself had his own reasons for discretion: he’d had a string of lovers, and his wife, Clare Boothe Luce, had had a long-term affair with the President’s father. As for the Post and the Digest, they were firmly anchored in a bucolic, bygone pastoral; no hint of extramarital sex ever stained their pages.
In a later era, none of this would have kept these secrets out of the public eye; but in the mid-1960s, the idea of an interconnected population able to distribute and receive information in an instant, able to send audio and video from their homes out into the wider world, was something out of a science fiction fantasy. Communication was a one-way street. If the Katers wanted America to hear what was on the tapes they’d made of John Kennedy and his press aide in her bedroom, they would have to find a radio or TV station to broadcast them, or a record company to put out a recording, or a newspaper to print the transcripts. If a British prostitute claimed to have slept with Kennedy, she’d have to find a publication willing to print that allegation; and (as the New York Journal-American reporters had learned) even a veiled reference could provoke the wrath of the extended First Family. Moreover, there were gatekeepers in the mid-1960s: newspapers, magazines, and television stations that had a sharply defined and limited sense of what was news, especially if there was no clear proof of misbehavior. If they chose to exclude a public official’s private life, that pretty much confined such stories to rumors and whispers that stayed underground. Sure, there was an appetite for scandal. Confidential magazine had proved that in the fifties, when its diet of outing adulterers and homosexuals made it one of the largest-selling magazines in America. Its target was Hollywood celebrities, though, not politicians, and by 1960 a string of lawsuits had effectively neutered it.
For the men who wished to strike a fatal blow at Kennedy’s stature, then, two things were necessary: first, a story so damaging that it would break through the private-life/public-life barrier; second, a willingness on the part of some respectable journalistic force to publish it.
On the first count, they had no doubt at all . . .
• • •
“So,” Clark Mollenhoff said to his dinner companion over brandy and cigars, “let me understand how I’m going to justify a fifty-dollar dinner expense to my editor.” They’d spent the last two hours at La Niçoise, one of the more fashionable Georgetown restaurants.
“Well, let me tell you a story,” the man across the table said. “You have a woman from a prominent family—blond, beautiful, brilliant—marries and divorces a high official in the Central Intelligence Agency. She’s related by marriage to a Washington player, and she’s a regular at White House dinners, on the presidential yacht . . . and maybe those weren’t the only times she was seeing the President.”
“You don’t need to brief me on Mary Pinchot Meyer,” Mollenhoff said. “Cord’s ex-wife, Ben Bradlee’s sister-in-law . . . She was murdered a year or two back. Is that what you’ve got on your mind?”
“No,” the man said. “Looks like the cops got the right guy and the jury got it wrong; probably a botched robbery or rape. It’s about who else she was seeing besides the President.”
“I think you may be confused with the National Enquirer stringer.”
“No, Clark, not ‘seeing’ that way. Look, when Mary divorced Cord, she went bohemian—took up painting, along with a painter or two. She also got it into her head that she and some of her women friends could change the world if they could change the mind-sets of the men who held the levers of power. And the way to that change, she thought, was . . . drugs.”
“I’m starting to think I’m going to be on the hook for this bill,” Mollenhoff said.
“Hold on, Clark. Mary Meyer spent a lot of time up at Harvard . . . and the professor she was seeing was Timothy Leary.”
“Huh,” Mollenhoff said, and leaned a little closer to his dinner guest. Leary had spent years at Harvard experimenting with LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs before being fired in 1963. His enthusiasm for the drugs had made him a national figure; public figures like poet Allen Ginsberg and author Aldous Huxley had used it and celebrated the experience. “So what are you pitching here?” the reporter asked. “You telling me that Meyer turned on the President of the United States?”
There was a lengthy silence.
“I was skeptical too,” said the man, “until I heard the tapes.”
“Have another brandy,” Mollenhoff said. “Have two. I don’t think the expense account is going to be a problem.”
• • •
For James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s chief counterintelligence officer, conspiracies were everywhere. Every Soviet defector, he believed, was a double agent sent to throw U.S. intelligence off the scent; moles were at work at every level of the agency. In his office, he worked in semidarkness with blinds drawn, to insulate himself from his enemies. For Angleton, whose wife had been a close friend of Mary Meyer, the knowledge that the ex-wife of a high CIA official was a lover and confidant of the President, and an enthusiastic participant in the emerging drug culture, was more than enough for him to take defensive measures . . . by tapping her telephones and putting listening devices into Meyer’s town house. And when Kennedy began veering sharply away from the cold war consensus—when he began moving toward a kind of reconciliation with the Communist world—Angleton drew what was for him the obvious, unmistakable conclusion: Kennedy had listened to Mary Meyer, shared his closest thoughts with her. And now, Meyer was succeeding in the goal she had talked about with her closest friends: through the use of sex and drugs, she had turned the President of the United States. This was beyond the reckless, notorious sexual behavior, beyond the dangers of a president using amphetamines to ease his chronic pain. This was a threat to everything Angleton and the intelligence community was sworn to protect, and it was a story that had to be told. In the America of the mid-1960s, the idea of a president surviving a public revelation of adultery was highly unlikely. (“What’s Kennedy going to do?” an Angleton colleague asked sarcastically. “Go on TV and ask for forgiv
eness?”) The idea of a president surviving a story of drug use—a tiny fraction of Americans had tried marijuana in 1965, and nine out of ten thought it should be treated as a crime—was out of the question.
In Clark Mollenhoff, Angleton and his colleagues knew they had reached out to the most determined, most fearless reporter in Washington. They knew he had been at odds with the Kennedys for years—triggered by some petty bullying by Bobby at a Hickory Hill party—and they knew he had come close to breaking the Ellen Rometsch story just before the President was shot in Dallas. He was apparently immune to persuasion or intimidation. So it was no surprise that, two weeks after that dinner at La Niçoise, word began circulating through Washington that “Clark is onto something big.” It was still below the radar: whispers at dinner parties, a casual question or two to press secretary Salinger, more pointed comments to the Kennedy brothers by loyalist friends in the press like Charlie Bartlett. For that handful of men, there was a powerful sense of anticipation: it was only a matter of time before the story went public, and John Kennedy would be finished.
Except . . . John and Robert Kennedy lived by one philosophy: when it came to their political fortunes, the ends justified the means . . . any means.
• • •
The President was as furious as anyone had ever seen him.
“We’ve been fucked,” he said. “They’ve kicked us in the balls.”
It was April 10, 1962, and the chairman of U.S. Steel, Roger Blough, had just left the Oval Office after informing Kennedy that the company was going to raise its prices in the face of an apparent labor industry agreement to hold down wages and prices. To the President, the price hike was more than an inflationary danger; it was a personal betrayal, one that would make him look weak, ineffectual. He was determined to force U.S. Steel and its competitors to roll back the price hike. In the days that followed, every weapon of the federal government was pressed into service, no matter how questionable its use.
The Defense Department began moving contracts away from the major steel companies to smaller competitors who had held the price line. The Justice Department began preparing antitrust suits; it seemed highly suspicious that the companies matched the price rise to the penny. Reporters were called and visited by the FBI in the middle of the night, to be grilled about conversations they might have had with steel executives. Attorney General Robert Kennedy made the stakes clear to his Justice Department aides.
“We’re going for broke,” he said. “Their expense accounts and where they’d been and what they were doing . . . I told the FBI to interview them all—march into their offices . . . subpoenaed for their personal records . . . subpoenaed for their company records. We can’t lose this . . .”
No one was immune from the Kennedys’ fury. When the President saw a report on NBC’s Nightly News, he was incensed by what he perceived as anchorman Chet Huntley’s kindness to the steel industry. He called Newton Minow, chair of the Federal Communications Commission, and snapped: “Did you see that goddamn thing on Huntley-Brinkley? I thought they were supposed to be our friends. I want you to do something about that—you do something about that.”
The President himself explained the deployment of another potential weapon—one of Washington’s best-placed lawyers.
“If any one person deserves the credit,” he said to his old friend Red Fay, after the steel companies backed down, “it’s that damned Clark Clifford [who represented some of the companies] . . . Can’t you just see Clifford outlining the possible courses of action the government could take . . . ? Do you know what you’re doing when you start bucking the power of the President of the United States? I don’t think U.S. Steel or any of the other major steel companies wants to have Internal Revenue agents checking the expense accounts of the top executives. Do you want the government to go back to hotel bills that time you were in Schenectady, to find out who was with you? Too many hotel bills and nightclub expenses would be hard to get by the weekly wives’ bridge group out at the country club.”
The Kennedys took some heat from the press for their abuse of power, but at a family dinner the President seemed unconcerned, joking about his conversation with a steel company president: “He asked me, ‘Why are all the income tax returns of all the steel executives in all the country being scrutinized?’ And I told him the Attorney General would never do any such thing, and of course he was right!”
“They were mean to my brother!” Bobby interjected. “They can’t do that to my brother.”
The President left out of his jocular remarks another fact: Bobby Kennedy had ordered the FBI and the CIA to bug the phones and offices of steel executives as well.
And if that’s what the Kennedys did to win a policy dispute . . . what might they do if the presidency itself was at stake?
• • •
“John, we’ve got a problem—actually, we’ve got a lot of problems.”
From his office in downtown Minneapolis, John Cowles heard his Washington attorney with a sense of disbelief.
“Where?” he asked.
“Everywhere, it seems. Three days ago, we got a notice of inquiry from the FCC about our TV stations in Memphis and Daytona. Apparently something to do with record keeping. Yesterday, the IRS decided to order up an audit on Look. Then an hour ago we got another inquiry about our Des Moines station from the Justice Department’s antitrust division; they say they’re looking at ‘cross-ownership.’ Christ, we’ve had that station for a decade! I’m not a great believer in coincidences, so . . . what have you folks been doing that’s got the government so wound up?”
“I haven’t got a clue,” Cowles said. “Let me do some checking.”
The Cowles Media Company was hardly an enemy of the Kennedy administration. The family was Republican, but its ties were to the Progressive Republicans of Teddy Roosevelt. Yes, the Des Moines Register had backed Nixon in ’60, but they’d swung to Kennedy over Goldwater in ’64. So had the Star Tribune in Minneapolis. And Look magazine had run so many flattering photo spreads of the Kennedy family that some Republicans were suggesting it change its name to Look at JFK.
It took three phone calls for Cowles to locate the all-but-certain source of the problem.
“We were about to call you, John,” said the chief of the Register’s Washington bureau. “We’re working on something that’s way above my pay grade. Whether we run it is going to be your call.”
An hour later Cowles and three executives were on their way to the airport. By early evening they were in a suite at the Mayflower Hotel, meeting with Clark Mollenhoff. At 11:00 p.m., Mollenhoff stormed out of the suite, cabbed back to the bureau, and announced his immediate resignation.
“I didn’t see that we had any choice,” Cowles said later to a small group of executives. “The story looked solid, but you could just imagine the reaction. Clark said the tapes sure sounded like Kennedy but how many people can imitate that voice—hell, Vaughn Meader’s still making a living at it. Then there’s the question of how we got to hear the tape. Were we criminally liable for communicating the fruits of an illegal wiretap? We hear that heads have already started to roll at the CIA. And when you look at the potential cost to the company . . .” He shook his head.
“But I’ll tell you this,” he added. “It’ll be a cold day in hell before our papers have another good word to say about the Kennedys.”
• • •
The story didn’t disappear, not completely. It survived in that twilight region of rumors and urban legends, like the stories about John Kennedy’s first marriage and his fling with Marilyn Monroe. The Realist, an “underground” publication with a bent for dark satire, published a “celebration” of John Kennedy’s “Dionysian Appetites,” saluting his “buoyant departure from the Victorian strictures of earlier times,” under the title: “Hail to His Briefs.” A twenty-four-year-old playwright named Barbara Garson wrote a lengthy parody of the famous Lor
d Byron poem she called “Don John.”
“Ask not,” he said, “what I can do for you.”
For what he asked, no maiden could resist.
And when his trumpet summoned her again
’Twas not his trumpet she was pleased to kiss.
Among the more sophisticated news readers, the understanding grew that John Kennedy did not live by the traditional standards of morality. Given how radically those standards were under siege in the later half of the 1960s, this understanding did not prove politically fatal.
The real fallout, however, was within the journalistic community. The Kennedys’ view of the press had always been “instrumental”: there were friends, there were foes. There was money to be spent when necessary: the family had loaned the Boston Post owner $500,000 in 1952 as the price of a senatorial endorsement, and had put a muckraking New York journalist on the family payroll for $1,000 a week to buy his loyalty. There were sanctions for apostasy: Kennedy had angrily canceled White House subscriptions to the New York Herald Tribune for its critical coverage, and had exiled Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee from his inner circle for months.
Now, however, the press had seen another side of the Kennedys: a blunt use of political power directed not at some rogue corporations but at them. It would color their approach to the President for the rest of his term, arm them with the motivation to recast his record in more skeptical, critical terms. It was just what Kennedy did not need as he turned to the challenge of building his legacy.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE LAST CHAPTER
Welcome home, Mr. President.”
“Not my home for much longer, J.B.”
Chief usher J. B. West chuckled as he took the crutches from Kennedy and guided him toward the wheelchair. Over the course of his second term, the President’s steadily weakening back had all but collapsed. For his first years in the White House, a regimen of hot baths, exercise, and drugs had kept him reasonably mobile; only occasionally did the public get a glimpse of the crutches Kennedy used to maneuver, or the way he gingerly rose and sat. By the end of 1967, the years—and the corticosteroids he had taken for most of his life—had turned his lumbar region into what one physician called “a disaster area.” Now, on this early November morning in 1968, the wheelchair had become a commonplace sight in and around the White House, and Jerry Bruno’s advance team found itself spending most of its time staging events that would limit Kennedy to the shortest possible number of steps. More than once, Kennedy had found himself remembering what he’d said when he was asked why he was going for the presidency back in 1960: “I just don’t know that I’ll be healthy enough in eight years.”
If Kennedy Lived: The First and Second Terms of President John F. Kennedy: AnAlternate History Page 18
