JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President

by Thurston Clarke

  Kennedy asked Judge Francis Morrissey, a close family friend, to arrange the service. Morrissey chose a white gown for Patrick and a small white casket. He ordered it closed because he recalled Kennedy telling him, “Frank, I want you to make sure they close the coffin when I die.”

  Cushing celebrated the Mass in the chapel of his Boston residence on the morning of August 10. There were thirteen mourners, all members of the Kennedy and Auchincloss families except for Morrissey, Cushing, and Cardinal Spellman of New York. According to Catholic doctrine, baptized children who die before the age of reason go directly to heaven (Patrick had been baptized at the hospital), and the Mass of Angels is designed to be a comforting ceremony emphasizing their purity and eternal life. Kennedy wept throughout. When it ended, he took the money clip fashioned from a gold St. Christopher medal that Jackie had given him at their wedding and slipped it into Patrick’s coffin. Then he threw his arms around the coffin, as if planning to carry it away. “Come on, dear Jack, Let’s go . . . Let’s go,” Cushing murmured. “God is good. Nothing more can be done. Death is not the end of it all, but the beginning.”

  Joseph Kennedy had recently purchased a family plot at Holyhood Cemetery, and Patrick would be the first Kennedy interred there. As Cushing spoke at the grave, John Kennedy’s shoulders began heaving. Putting a hand on the coffin, the president said, “Good-bye,” then touched the ground and whispered, “It’s awfully lonely here.” Seeing him bent over the grave, alone and vulnerable, a Secret Service agent asked Cushing, “How do you protect this man?”

  Back at Otis, he wept in Jackie’s arms while describing the funeral. After recovering his composure he said, “You know, Jackie, we must not create an atmosphere of sadness in the White House, because this would not be good for anyone—not for the country and not for the work we have to do.” His reference to “the work we have to do” stressed their partnership in a way that Jackie had to find gratifying, and promising. According to her mother, it made a “profound impression” on her.

  Monday, August 12

  CAPE COD AND WASHINGTON

  Monday was the nineteenth anniversary of the day that Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., had been killed in action while participating in Operation Aphrodite, a harebrained and ultimately unsuccessful scheme that involved Navy pilots flying B-17 bombers packed with explosives toward German missile sites and U-boat pens on the French coast before bailing out at the last minute into the English Channel. On Monday morning all of the Kennedy siblings except Rosemary, who had been institutionalized in 1944 after a botched lobotomy, and Jack attended a requiem Mass for Joe at St. Francis Xavier Church in Hyannis Port. The White House announced that the president was missing the service because he was visiting Jackie, but it took only twelve minutes to fly by helicopter from Otis to Hyannis Port, so he could have easily done both, and he later found time to take an excursion on the family speedboat.

  He did not skip Joe’s Mass because he had been any less devastated by his older brother’s death than his siblings. Joe had been more athletic and popular in school, and sometimes teased and bullied him, but they had been competitors, not enemies, and he had mourned him deeply, telling Lem Billings that Joe’s death had left him “shadowboxing in a match the shadow is always going to win.” The headmaster of Choate, the boarding school both had attended, wrote his mother that he would now have to live Joe’s life as well as his own. He ended up living Joe’s life instead of his own, having the brilliant political career that his father had always imagined for Joe.

  It was difficult for a Kennedy to be in Hyannis Port and not be reminded of Joe or his sister Kathleen, who had died in a 1948 plane crash. Ted Kennedy called his family’s rambling clapboard house “an oasis of stability and family love,” and it was the only real home the Kennedy children had known while shuttling between their parents’ winter residences in Palm Beach and suburban New York. JFK had lived in dormitories at two boarding schools and three colleges, then in houses and apartments in Washington, but every summer he returned to Hyannis Port. It had been the backdrop for the iconic 1953 photograph on the cover of Life showing him and Jackie on a sailboat, barefoot, tanned, and flashing radiant smiles, and the 1962 photograph on the cover of Look in which he was driving a golf cart packed with his nieces and nephews, hair flying and mouths open, screaming in delight. It was where he had devised his strategy for the 1960 election and learned that he had won it when Caroline jumped on his bed and said, “Good morning, Mr. President”; and where he and Bobby had acquired houses adjoining their parents’ home, so they could play flashlight tag and touch football on the same lawn, swim off the same beach, and sail in the same waters as they had in their youth, glimpsing the ghosts of their younger selves, and those of Kathleen and Joe.

  Hyannis Port was also where the family had donated an altar to St. Francis Xavier Church commemorating Joe. To the left of the crucifix a painted image of St. George represented England, from which Joe had taken off on his final mission; to its right was St. Joan of Arc, representing France, his destination. Above them floated the badge of a naval aviator, a pair of wings against a blue background. It was impossible for a Kennedy to attend Mass here and not be reminded of Joe’s suicidal mission, one for which he had volunteered, hoping to match his younger brother’s PT 109 heroics. Kennedy never mentioned Joe by name in his speeches, perhaps because he feared he might break down, so it is possible that he skipped the Mass on the nineteenth anniversary of Joe’s death because he was afraid he would look at this altar and begin weeping, and after Patrick’s death he could not bear any more tears.

  • • •

  HE ARRIVED AT THE WHITE HOUSE at 4:00 p.m. on Monday and immediately resumed what he had been doing before his hurried departure on August 7, trying to find sixty-seven senators willing to ratify his test ban treaty.

  An hour before Jackie went into labor, he had been chairing a meeting in the Cabinet Room, called to organize the Citizens Committee for a Nuclear Test Ban. Attending were senior aides; cabinet members; James Wadsworth, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations; and Norman Cousins, whose conversations with Khrushchev had led to the treaty. Kennedy had been pessimistic about its ratification, complaining that most senators had yet to announce their support, and mail to Congress and the White House had been overwhelmingly negative. Persuading two thirds of the senators to support anything would be difficult enough, he said; persuading them to ratify a treaty this controversial would be a miracle. Fifteen would vote against anything he supported, and if the vote were held that day he thought the treaty would fail, a catastrophe he compared to America’s failure to ratify the League of Nations following World War I.

  Cousins provided a list of forty-eight prominent individuals who had agreed to serve on a pro-treaty Citizens Committee. Wadsworth warned that retired military officers and Dr. Edwin Teller, the developer of the hydrogen bomb and a lifelong conservative who was an implacable foe of limiting nuclear testing, would argue that fallout was not dangerous and the Soviets were likely to violate the treaty. Kennedy admitted that he was unsure he could even hold his own administration in line, and assumed some in the military and on the Atomic Energy Commission would work behind the scenes to persuade Congress and the press that the treaty threatened national security. The generals opposing it, he said, believed the best solution to a crisis was “to start dropping the big bombs.”

  While flying to Otis after this meeting he had scribbled “Fullbright” [sic] and “Senate Preparedness Subcommittee” on a slip of paper. Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas, a Democrat, chaired the Foreign Relations Committee, which would hold open hearings on the treaty beginning August 12. The Senate Preparedness Subcommittee was dominated by cold war hawks like Barry Goldwater, Henry Jackson, and Strom Thurmond, and chaired by Senator John Stennis of Mississippi, a treaty opponent who was insisting on closed hearings. After checking into the Ritz that evening, he had written “Joint Chiefs” on another scrap of paper
. He believed the treaty could be ratified only if the Joint Chiefs of Staff supported it, and if enough Senate Republicans voted for it to compensate for the defection of Southern Democrats. He had lobbied the chiefs individually at the end of July, and they had agreed to support it in their testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in exchange for his endorsement of what became known as the “four safeguards”: a robust program of underground testing, the maintenance of modern nuclear laboratories and programs, the capability to resume atmospheric testing promptly if the Soviets withdrew from the treaty or cheated, and an improved capacity to detect violations.

  Senator Stennis had summoned the chiefs to closed hearings, and Kennedy feared that if they testified there first, they might voice reservations about the treaty that would be leaked to the press before they could support it openly before Fulbright’s committee. To prevent this happening, he telephoned Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield when he returned to the White House on Monday to stress the importance of having the chiefs testify before his committee first. He was making “such a big thing” about it, he said, “because, in my opinion, the chiefs are the key and what they will say in public would be more pro-treaty than what they will say under interrogation by Scoop Jackson.”

  He addressed the second threat to the treaty’s ratification, the opposition of Senate Republicans, during an hour-long off-the-record meeting with Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen that began at six that evening. His appointment book does not indicate where they met, but since the weather was fine and the matter under discussion so sensitive that Dirksen had insisted on going into the Rose Garden when they first spoke about it during the winter of 1961, they probably went outside, where there was less risk of having their conversation overheard or intercepted by whatever bugs the CIA, FBI, or other government agencies might have installed in the White House without Kennedy’s knowledge, a possibility he did not consider all that far-fetched. Secretary of State Dean Rusk had made a point of telling J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, in front of Kennedy, that if he discovered a hidden microphone or phone taps in his office he would resign and expose him. Bobby Kennedy often looked up at a chandelier in his office and shouted, “You bugging, Hoover? Well, listen to this, you old son of a bitch. . . .” And having bugged the Oval Office himself and kept it a secret from almost everyone in his family and staff, Kennedy had to entertain the possibility that someone might be doing the same thing to him.

  In the summer of 1962, he had ordered the Secret Service agent Robert Bouck to install microphones in the Oval Office, the Cabinet Room, and his upstairs study. Bouck had hidden two microphones in the wall sconces of the Cabinet Room. In the Oval Office, he had placed one underneath the coffee table and another in Kennedy’s desk. Wires connected them to tape recorders in a locked basement room. Unlike President Nixon’s taping system, which ran continuously and recorded everything, Kennedy’s was engineered so he could record only the conversations that he wanted to preserve. In the Cabinet Room, he could press a button disguised as a buzzer to activate the system; in the Oval Office, he pressed one on the coffee table or another concealed in the kneehole of his desk. At first, only Bouck, his assistant Chester Miller, and Lincoln knew about the microphones. Bobby Kennedy and Ken O’Donnell learned about the system later, and Dave Powers figured it out after Kennedy cautioned him to watch his language, saying, “I don’t want to hear your bad words coming back at me.” None of his other senior advisers and members of his cabinet—not even his press secretary, Pierre Salinger; his aides Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Ted Sorensen; Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara; or Secretary of State Dean Rusk—knew that he was recording them. His principal motive for taping selected conversations and meetings was probably to provide accurate and irrefutable material for his presidential memoirs. He had been disturbed that soon after the Bay of Pigs fiasco some of his advisers who had endorsed the operation began claiming that they had actually opposed it. His recordings would prevent a recurrence of this type of revisionism.

  Secret Service agents swept through the Oval Office several times a week, looking for bugs in his telephones and unscrewing their mouthpieces to search for transistors that could pick up conversations before the scramblers made them unintelligible. Because assassins had attempted to poison foreign political figures with radioactive material hidden in their watches and rings, they swept the room with a Geiger counter and passed a wand over Kennedy’s wristwatch. But even these precautions had not persuaded him that his office was safe. Minutes before civil rights leaders gathered in the Oval Office on June 22, 1963, he had taken Martin Luther King, Jr., into the Rose Garden and prefaced his remarks by saying, “I assume you know you’re under very close surveillance.” King concluded that he was referring to the FBI, and wondered if he was insisting on speaking outdoors because he feared its surveillance might extend into the White House, and that the Oval Office might be bugged. As they walked, he warned King that the government had evidence that two of his close associates were Communist agents, said their presence in his inner circle might imperil passage of the civil rights bill, and urged him to break off contact with them. By warning him of this surveillance he was in effect thwarting an FBI operation and obstructing justice, reason enough to be sure he was not overheard.

  Dirksen had seemed concerned about listening devices when he arrived in the winter of 1961 for a hurriedly arranged meeting. “I would like for you to surrender your title for a few minutes and join me for a stroll in the Rose Garden to discuss a very personal and private matter,” he had said. “It simply must be two friends—Jack and Ev—talking on a personal basis.”

  Once they were outside, Dirksen told him that President Eisenhower wanted Kennedy to persuade his brother Attorney General Robert Kennedy to cancel an impending indictment of the former New Hampshire governor Sherman Adams for tax fraud. Adams was a close friend of Eisenhower and had served as his chief of staff before resigning following allegations that he had received an expensive Oriental rug and fur coat from Bernard Goldfine, a Boston businessman under investigation for violating federal trade regulations. Goldfine had now supplied federal agents with documentary evidence indicating that he had also given Adams more than $150,000 in cash during a five-year period. The Justice Department had presented the case to a grand jury and was preparing to indict Adams for failing to pay taxes on the bribes. Adams’s wife had told Mamie Eisenhower that she was afraid he would commit suicide if he was indicted, and Eisenhower had told Dirksen, “I was president for eight years, and I think I have the respect of the American people and I want to retain it. I believe the day will come when President Kennedy will need the public assistance of a former president whose name has prestige and who’s beyond partisan arrows. I’d like you to ask President Kennedy, as a personal favor to me, to put the Adams indictment in the deep freeze. You have the authority to advise him he’ll have a blank check in my bank if he will grant me this favor.”

  Dirksen sweetened Ike’s offer by also promising a blank check on his bank. It was a tempting deal. Eisenhower remained popular, and his support for a bill could influence public opinion and Republican congressmen. (During a 1962 interview with the television networks’ White House correspondents, Kennedy had said that Eisenhower had “great influence today in the Republican party, and therefore in the country.”) Dirksen’s check was even more valuable. Although Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, Southern Democrats opposed much of Kennedy’s domestic agenda, making it difficult for him to pass legislation without Republican support.

  Kennedy told Dirksen that he was unaware of any case against Adams. They returned to the Oval Office and he called Bobby, who confirmed that an indictment was imminent. “Cancel it, and do it now,” he said. “Don’t sign the indictment. Place it in the deep freeze.” Bobby argued that showing favoritism to a tax cheat could “destroy us politically.” As Dirksen listened, their conversation became increasingly heated until he reminded B
obby who was president and said that if he could not comply “your resignation will be accepted.”

  He did not mention Eisenhower’s “blank check” to Bobby, and anyone overhearing (or taping) their conversation would have concluded that he was extending a professional courtesy to a former president, sparing him the embarrassment of having a close associate indicted. Viewed that way, it was not unlike President Ford’s decision to pardon Richard Nixon. But it was one thing to pardon Nixon to end the Watergate nightmare; it would have been another had Nixon or his agents offered Ford something in return. Similarly, once Kennedy cashed Eisenhower’s and Dirksen’s blank checks he would be transforming an act of presidential discretion and mercy into an unethical bargain, one in which he had obstructed justice to reap a future reward.

  Dirksen wrote Eisenhower a carefully worded letter afterward. Referring to “one of your former staff members,” he said, “I believe everything is in proper order.” Eisenhower’s reply was equally opaque: “I am particularly indebted to you for following through the matter mentioned in your second paragraph.”