Between 500,000 and 1 million people had lined the streets to welcome the world’s most famous couple that morning, depending on who was counting the crowd (the French police being more conservative than the White House press office). Considering de Gaulle’s frosty relationship with Kennedy’s predecessors Eisenhower and Roosevelt, his warm reception for Kennedy was a departure. De Gaulle suspected that all U.S. leaders wanted to undermine French leadership of Europe and supplant it with their own. That said, he was happy to bask in the celebrity of the First Couple, whose images adorned the covers of all the major French magazines. The difference in age also helped, allowing de Gaulle to play his preferred role of the wise, legendary man of history taking this young, promising American under his wing.
At Orly Airport at ten that morning, de Gaulle had welcomed Kennedy on a giant scarlet carpet, flanked by fifty black Citroëns and a mounted honor guard of Republican Guards. All six feet, four inches of Le Général rose from his car in his double-breasted business suit as the band played “The Marseillaise.”
“Side by side,” reported the New York Times, “the two men moved all day through Paris—age beside youth, grandeur beside informality, mysticism beside pragmatism, serenity beside eagerness.”
The cheers grew so loud as the two men drove along Boulevard Saint-Michel on the Left Bank of the Seine that de Gaulle persuaded the U.S. president to rise in the rear seat of their open-top limo, eliciting an even greater roar. Despite a chill wind, Kennedy rode bareheaded and with only a light topcoat. He dressed no more warmly that afternoon as rain drenched the two men in their sweep up the Champs-Élysées, an indignity de Gaulle bore without complaint.
Behind all that misleading theater was a U.S. president who was entering the most important week of his presidency as a weary, wounded commander in chief who was inadequately prepared and insufficiently fit for what would face him in Vienna. Khrushchev would be scanning for Kennedy’s vulnerabilities after the Bay of Pigs, and there were plenty for the picking.
At home, Kennedy was facing violent racial confrontations that had broken out in the American South as African Americans grew more determined to end two centuries of oppression. The immediate problem revolved around the “Freedom Riders,” whose efforts to desegregate interstate transportation had won only tepid support from the Kennedy administration and were opposed by nearly two-thirds of Americans.
Abroad, Kennedy’s failure in Cuba, unresolved conflict in Laos, and tensions building around Berlin made his Paris–Vienna trip all the more fraught with risk. Kennedy was making the mental connection to Berlin even while wrestling with racial affairs at home. When Father Theodore Hesburgh, a member of his Civil Rights Commission, questioned the president’s reluctance to take bolder steps to desegregate the United States, Kennedy said, “Look, Father, I may have to send the Alabama National Guard to Berlin tomorrow, and I don’t want to do it in the middle of a revolution at home.”
It seemed just another of his presidency’s early misfortunes that Kennedy had seriously reinjured his back muscles while planting a ceremonial tree in Ottawa, and the pain had grown worse on the long flight to Europe. It had been the first time since his spinal fusion surgery in 1954 that he was hobbling around on crutches. To protect his image, he refused to use the props in public, but that only aroused more pain when he was in France, by putting even greater pressure on his back.
Kennedy’s personal physician, Janet Travell, who accompanied him to Paris, was concerned about his heightened suffering and the impact his treatments might have on everything from mood to endurance during the trip. The president had already been taking five baths or hot showers a day to ease his pain. Though Americans didn’t know it, the real purpose of his famous Oval Office rocking chair was that it helped relieve the throbbing of his lower back, into which doctors had been shooting procaine, a potent cousin of novocaine, for nearly a decade. Travell was also treating him for chronic adrenal ailments, high fevers, elevated cholesterol levels, sleeplessness, and stomach, colon, and prostate problems.
Years later, Travell would recall that Paris was the beginning of “a very hard period.” Travell would give Kennedy two to three shots a day in Paris. White House doctor Admiral George Burkley was worried because the procaine soothed the president through only a temporary numbness that was followed by even greater soreness, requiring ever larger doses and ever stronger narcotics. Burkley had prescribed more exercise and physical therapy, but Kennedy preferred the quicker fix of the drugs.
Travell kept an ongoing “Medicine Administration Record” to track the cocktail of pills and shots she provided the president: penicillin for urinary infections and abscesses, Tuinal to help him sleep, Transentine to control diarrhea and weight loss, and assorted other remedies, including testosterone and phenobarbital. What she couldn’t log were the more unconventional administrations of a more unconventional medic who had traveled more secretly to Paris and Vienna.
Known as “Dr. Feelgood” to his celebrity patients, who included Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote, Dr. Max Jacobson provided injections that contained hormones, animal organ cells, steroids, vitamins, enzymes, and—most important—amphetamines to combat fatigue and depression.
Kennedy was so pleased with Jacobson’s remedies that he had recommended them as well for Jackie after the difficult November delivery of their son John-John—and again to boost her stamina before the Paris trip. On the night of their grand state dinner with de Gaulle at Versailles, Dr. Feelgood administered Kennedy his customary shot. The diminutive, red-cheeked, dark-haired doctor then wandered through the First Couple’s suite of rooms to Jackie’s bedroom, where she was choosing an elegant French gown designed by Givenchy over a dress designed by the American Oleg Cassini, to drive home her connection to the host country.
She cleared the room when Dr. Jacobson arrived, and he put a needle in her behind and injected a fluid that would help her glow incandescently through a six-course dinner in the Hall of Mirrors. Truman Capote would later praise Jacobson’s treatments: “You feel like Superman. You’re flying. Ideas come at the speed of light. You go 722 hours straight without so much as a coffee break.”
However, the potential national security consequences of these concoctions for the commander in chief were considerable coming just before his crucial meeting with the Soviet leader. Besides the addictive nature of what Kennedy was consuming, the potential side effects included hyperactivity, hypertension, impaired judgment, and nervousness. Between doses, his mood could swing wildly from overconfidence to bouts of depression.*
At Bobby’s urging, the president would later provide Jacobson’s concoctions to the Food and Drug Administration for analysis. Kennedy was untroubled when the FDA said Dr. Feelgood was shooting him up with steroids and amphetamines. “I don’t care if it’s horse piss,” Kennedy said. “It works.”
In strategizing for Paris, Kennedy had three primary purposes, and they all had to do with Vienna and its impact on Berlin. First, he wanted de Gaulle’s advice about how best to manage Khrushchev in Vienna. Second, he wanted to know how the French leader would recommend that the Allies wrestle with the next Berlin crisis, which he was beginning to believe was likely. Finally, Kennedy wanted to use the Paris trip to burnish his public image and thus strengthen his hand for Vienna.
When Kennedy briefed de Gaulle on Khrushchev’s threats regarding Berlin as delivered to Thompson at the Ice Capades, de Gaulle dismissed them with a wave of the hand. “Mr. Khrushchev,” he declared dismissively, “has been saying and repeating that his prestige is engaged in the Berlin question and that he must have a solution within six months, and then again in six months and then still again in another six months.” The Frenchman shrugged. “If he had wanted a war over Berlin, he would have acted already.”
De Gaulle told Kennedy that he considered Berlin primarily a psychological question: “It is annoying to both sides that Berlin should be located where it is; however, it is there,” he said.
The K
ennedy–de Gaulle meeting was already off to a better start than previous U.S. presidential sessions with the French leader. Eisenhower had warned Kennedy that de Gaulle endangered the entire Atlantic alliance with his nationalist disdain for the U.S. and NATO. Franklin Roosevelt had compared de Gaulle’s vicious temper to that of Joan of Arc. “The older I get,” Eisenhower told Kennedy, “the more disgusted I am with them—not the French people but their governments.”
In contrast to his predecessors, Kennedy had two advantages in dealing with the French leader: his willingness to play the role of de Gaulle’s junior and the impact of his wife’s Sorbonne education and her French-language fluency on the vain general. After she chatted amicably with de Gaulle over lunch about the Bourbons and Louis XVI, de Gaulle turned to Kennedy and enthused, “Your wife knows more French history than most French women.”
Safely back in his golden tub, Kennedy told his friends, “De Gaulle and I are hitting it off all right, probably because I have such a charming wife.”
KIEVSKY STATION, MOSCOW
SATURDAY, MAY 27, 1961
While Kennedy endured the Paris whirlwind, Khrushchev was making the 1,200-mile trip from Moscow to Vienna in a more leisurely fashion aboard a specially equipped six-car train. He would make barnstorming stops in Kiev, Prague, and Bratislava—and would be cheered at rural stations all along the train’s path.
Communist Party cells had gathered a crowd of thousands to see him off at Moscow’s Kievsky Station, where Khrushchev took Ambassador Thompson aside for a last exchange before departure. In a cable that would report on their brief chat, Thompson hit a strained note of optimism. “I believe Khrushchev will wish the meeting with the president to be a pleasant one,” he wrote, “and that he will desire if possible to make some proposal or take some position on some problems which have the effect of improving the atmosphere and relations. I find it extremely difficult, however, to imagine what this could be.”
As Khrushchev boarded the train, a young girl rushed forward to present him a huge bouquet of red roses. Ever impulsive, Khrushchev summoned the U.S. ambassador’s wife, Jane, and, with the crowd cheering, presented her the flowers.
Without confidence, Thompson told the press gathered there, “I hope everything will go well.” Privately, Thompson had begun to worry that Kennedy was heading for an ambush on Berlin issues. The latest clue was a stridently worded editorial in the official government newspaper Izvestia that had declared on the day of Khrushchev’s departure that the Soviet Union could not wait any longer for Western agreement before acting on Berlin.
Khrushchev swelled with pride as he waved to enthusiastic crowds gathered alongside the tracks of the countless stations the train passed, many of them decorated with welcoming flags, posters, and streamers. Khrushchev was particularly taken by a crimson banner that covered the entire front of the provincial station at Mukachevo in the Ukrainian region near his birthplace. It had been inscribed in Ukrainian: MAY YOU LIVE WELL, DEAR NIKITA SERGEYEVICH!
In Kiev, thousands cheered him as he toured the city and laid a wreath on the grave of its beloved poet Taras Shevchenko. At ierna, the first stop inside Czechoslovakia, the country’s party leader Antonín Novotný had seen to it that his giant portrait hung beside that of Khrushchev at every turn. A band played both national anthems to the crash of cymbals and blare of trumpets. Uniformed Young Pioneers, the party’s youth organization, filled Khrushchev’s arms with flowers while pretty girls with embroidered blouses offered the traditional welcome gift of bread and salt.
His hosts in Bratislava carefully choreographed his final stop before Vienna. Public buildings were draped in banners: GLORY TO KHRUSHCHEV—UNSHAKABLE CHAMPION OF PEACE. He and Novotný spoke to the crowds about finding a “final solution” to the Berlin problem, oblivious to whatever parallels there might be to Hitler’s “final solution” for the Jews. Locals celebrated the eve of the Vienna meetings with a fireworks display over the medieval castle in the ancient town of Trenín, where Soviet troops in April 1945 had captured the Gestapo headquarters.
In a final, precautionary touch, Khrushchev delayed his train’s departure to Vienna from Bratislava until two p.m., four hours later than had been planned. Having received reports of the throngs that celebrated Kennedy in Paris, Khrushchev’s people concluded they could only ensure a respectable reception in Vienna if communist worker unions could assemble their workers near the end of the workday.
PARIS
WEDNESDAY, MAY 31, 1961
Acting as a self-appointed tutor, de Gaulle recounted for Kennedy how he managed Khrushchev during his most irascible moments. He warned Kennedy that it was inevitable Khrushchev would threaten war at some point in their Vienna talks.
De Gaulle recalled how he had told the Soviet leader: You pretend that you seek détente. If such is the case, proceed with détente. If you want peace, start with general disarmament negotiations. Under the circumstances, the entire world situation may change little by little and then we will solve the question of Berlin and the entire Germany question. However, if you insist on raising the question of Berlin within the context of the Cold War, then no solution is possible. What do you want? Do you want war?
Khrushchev had then replied to de Gaulle that he did not want war.
In that case, the Frenchman had told him, do nothing that can bring it about.
Kennedy doubted dealing with Khrushchev would be that easy. Kennedy told the French leader, for example, that he knew de Gaulle wanted his own nuclear weapons capability because he doubted that the U.S. ever would risk New York for Paris—let alone for Berlin—in a nuclear exchange with Moscow. If the general himself so deeply doubted American resolve, why would Khrushchev feel otherwise? Kennedy wondered.
De Gaulle would not be drawn. This was a moment for a clear American message of resolve to Khrushchev, irrespective of whether the French leader believed it himself. “It is important to show that we do not intend to let this situation change,” de Gaulle said. “Any retreat from Berlin, any change of status, any withdrawal of troops, any new obstacles to transportation and communication, would mean defeat. It would result in an almost complete loss of Germany, and in very serious losses within France, Italy and elsewhere.” Beyond that, de Gaulle told Kennedy, “If [Khrushchev] wants war, we must make clear to him he will have it.” The French leader was confident that if Kennedy refused to retreat before Soviet dictates, Khrushchev would never risk a military confrontation.
What worried de Gaulle more was the Soviet and East German approach of slowly eroding the Western position in Berlin so that “we would have lost without seeming to have lost but in a way which would be understood by the entire world. In particular, the population of Berlin is not made up exclusively of heroes. In the face of something which they would interpret as our weakness, they might begin to leave Berlin and make it into an empty shell to be picked up by the East.”
It struck Kennedy that de Gaulle was free to speak so bravely about Berlin because France did not have to shoulder America’s security burden there. De Gaulle was being so vague about possible remedies that Kennedy tried to provoke a more detailed response. Kennedy said he was a practical man who wanted de Gaulle to be specific about the point at which the French leader would go to war over Berlin.
De Gaulle said he wouldn’t go to war over either of the issues currently in question: if the Soviets unilaterally signed a peace treaty with East Germany or changed four-power procedures in the city to give East Germans greater sovereignty over East Berlin—for example, by handing them the right to stamp travel documents at border crossings. “This is in itself no reason for a military retaliation on our part,” he said.
So Kennedy pressed the great Frenchman further: “In what way, therefore, at what moment, shall we bring pressure to bear?” The president complained that the Soviets and East Germans had a multitude of ways to complicate the Berlin situation, perhaps even causing West Berlin’s ruin, but using methods that would not trigger a Western resp
onse. “How do we answer that?” he wondered.
De Gaulle said the West should only respond militarily if the Soviets or East Germans acted militarily. “If either [Khrushchev] or his lackeys use force to cut our communications with Berlin, then we must use force,” he said.
Kennedy agreed, but he did not believe as de Gaulle did that any weakening of the Western position in Berlin would be a disaster. He said it would be a blow “which would not be mortal but would be serious” to Western Germany and all of Europe.
Kennedy sought de Gaulle’s advice on how he in Vienna could best convince Khrushchev of Western firmness, given that the Soviet leader so doubted U.S. resolve following the Bay of Pigs. He wanted to know what the French leader thought of U.S. and Allied contingency plans to respond to any new Berlin blockade with a demonstration of approximate company strength, and, if that failed, then of brigade strength.
Given Soviet conventional superiority around Berlin, de Gaulle told Kennedy he could deter the Soviets only with a willingness to use nuclear weapons, which was precisely what the president wanted to avoid.
“What we must make clear is that if there is any fighting around Berlin, this means general war,” de Gaulle said.
By the time of their grand Élysée Palace banquet that evening, Jack and Jackie, as the French press called them, had taken the country by storm. They sat down that evening with three hundred other guests in the mirrored, tapestried dining hall around an immense table covered by a single tablecloth of white organza and gold embroidery, giving rise to the Kennedys’ wonder over how one could create such an object. The Republican Guard symphony orchestra played everything from Gershwin to Ravel, each number embodying some deeper U.S.–French meaning.
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