After Joe Kennedy was blackballed from joining the country club in Cohasset, a WASP summer resort, he bought a rambling house with a broad lawn running down to the water in Hyannis Port. It was comfortable but simply furnished, and after years of use by his large and rambunctious family, many of the sofas and chairs could have used a trip to Jordan Marsh. He did not give his children bicycles until their friends had them, and enforced the same rule about cars. After Ted acquired a loud horn that blasted the sound of a mooing cow as he drove around Harvard, he wrote him, “It’s all right to struggle to get ahead of the masses by good works, by good reputation and hard work, but it certainly isn’t by doing things that [could lead people to say] ‘Who the hell does he think he is?’”
Kennedy inherited his parents’ dislike of ostentation. When he and Lem Billings (who was on a tight budget) traveled across Europe, they picnicked and ate in cheap cafes, and either camped or slept in hostels and flophouses. After visiting the Duke of Devonshire, whose late son had been married to his sister Kathleen, Kennedy noted approvingly in his diary that the duke “does have great integrity and lives simply with simple pleasures.” When he came to Washington as a young congressman, he rented a small house in Georgetown, seldom entertained, wore old chinos and sneakers to the office, and threw on a food-stained tie before appearing on the House floor. His legal residence in Boston was a small apartment on Bowdoin Street with wobbly tables, broken chairs, and an ancient Victrola. Visitors were shocked that someone of his wealth and background would live in such a dump. But since Rose had moved the Kennedy children around like hotel guests, never giving them their own permanent rooms, Bowdoin Street, in a way, really was his home, where he kept his yearbooks and Navy sword.
After Jackie taught him to appreciate fine clothes and furniture, he began offering fashion tips to friends, warning them away from button-down collars and brown shoes with dark suits. The day after his inauguration, he toured the White House with the economist John Kenneth Galbraith and delivered a caustic commentary on the low quality of the furnishings, telling him, “I hope to make this house the repository of the best.” When Galbraith related this to Kay Halle, a friend of the Kennedy family, she imagined the president marching upstairs and saying to Jackie, “You’ve got great taste. I know the job for you.” He later gave his friend Joe Alsop, a newspaper columnist, a similar tour, taking him into Ike’s former bedroom and pointing out that the only decent piece was a huge highboy that, he added with a wicked grin, blocked the door to Mamie’s bedroom.
Despite his newfound connoisseurship, he never lost his aversion to displaying his wealth. He bought monogrammed handkerchiefs but folded them so the initials were hidden, and he banned photographers from taking pictures of his private cabin on Air Force One because he thought it looked too much “like a rich man’s plane.” Jackie’s lavish spending was a constant irritant, as was the weekend house she had bullied him into building in Virginia hunt country. While it was under construction they gave Paul Fay a tour. Fay thought they had skimped too much and encouraged Jackie to increase the size of the living room windows. Kennedy pulled him aside and said, “Are you out of your mind? Can you imagine what’s going to happen if I come in with a house that costs over sixty thousand? . . . You were down in West Virginia [where he had run in the 1960 Democratic primary]. You know what the conditions were like down there. Can you see what those people in West Virginia are going to think when here I am building myself a house? I’ve got a White House already. I’ve got the one on the Cape—my family’s house—and we’ve been down in Florida, and now I’m building this one out in Middleburg, Virginia.” He had agreed to build a modest ranch house costing under $60,000, but as the costs mounted during construction, he hired an accountant to shadow the contractor and make sure he bought the cheapest materials.
Many politicians affect a bogus egalitarianism, but Kennedy’s was genuine. It predated his political career and was evident in his choice of friends. In the Navy, he had preferred the enlisted men and junior officers to the brass, and unlike many PT boat commanders, he worked alongside his crew, scraping and painting. Sam Elfand, a poor farm boy from Tennessee who was under his command during the war and remained a lifelong friend, remembered him as being “not a stuck-up individual” who was “receptive to everybody.” One of Kennedy’s complaints about Eisenhower was that he had ditched his old friends when he became famous. “He is a terribly cold man,” he told his White House aide Arthur Schlesinger. “All his golfing pals are rich men he has met since 1945.” He also criticized Eisenhower for attacking his proposal for providing medical care to the aged as socialized medicine, “and then getting into his government limousine and heading out to Walter Reed [the army hospital],” and was horrified when, speaking about the Cuban refugees in the United States, Eisenhower told him, “Of course, they’d be so great if you could just ship a lot of them in trucks from Miami and use ’em as servants for twenty dollars a month.”
U. E. Baughman, who headed the Secret Service when Kennedy took office, thought that his egalitarian spirit surpassed even President Truman’s, a surprising observation to make about a man who had a million-dollar trust fund, had been dressed by a valet for much of his adult life, and had rarely if ever cooked his own breakfast, cleaned his own house, or washed his own clothes. But like Truman, he had maintained close friendships with people of modest means, such as Dave Powers and his driver Muggsy O’Leary. Deirdre Henderson, who served as his informal liaison with the New England academic community, was struck by how people like Muggsy—the real people, the cops, the staff in the kitchen—instinctively felt that he liked them, and returned his affection. After spending a summer weekend in 1959 at the Newport estate of Jackie’s mother and stepfather while she was traveling in Italy, he wrote to Jackie, “I was taken into the kitchen and introduced to all the help, who were just over from Ireland, and found them much more attractive than the guests.” During his first congressional campaign, he looked down at an audience of stevedores and truckers and said to himself softly, “These are the kind of people I want to represent,” which may explain why Larry O’Brien, Ken O’Donnell, and Dave Powers, the triumvirate of Irishmen who had worked on so many of his campaigns and knew him so well, were certain he would have wanted what O’Brien called “a plain, inexpensive casket . . . one any average American might have.”
Photographs of him and Jackie walking arm-in-arm or holding hands are rare. When she kissed him during a campaign appearance in New York, he maneuvered her so that photographers missed it, ignoring their shouts of “Kiss her again, Senator,” and “Hug him, Jackie.” But when they descended the steps of the Otis base hospital on August 14, he was gripping her hand, and a photographer remarked that they walked to their car hand-in-hand, “like a couple of kids.” An old friend who saw the resulting photograph was stunned, realizing that in all the years she had known them she had never seen them hold hands, even in private.
After helping her climb inside the convertible, he rushed around to the other side and reached across the seat to grab her hand again. Jackie’s Secret Service agent Clint Hill called it “a small gesture but quite significant to those of us who were around them all the time,” adding that after Patrick’s death, he and other agents “noticed a distinctly closer relationship, openly expressed, between the President and Mrs. Kennedy.” Their hand-holding was not the only sign that their relationship had changed. Between August 14 and September 24, when she returned to Washington, he spent twenty-three nights with her at Cape Cod and Newport, sometimes flying up midweek, something he had never done before. Arthur Schlesinger sensed their reluctance to reveal their feelings falling away as they became, he said, “extremely close and affectionate.”
PART TWO
August 15–31, 1963
DAYS 100–84
Thursday, August 15
WASHINGTON
Eisenhower began honoring his part of the Sherman Adams bargain while Kennedy was fly
ing back to Washington. After the United States docked in New York, he announced at a press conference that although he would not reach a final conclusion about the test ban treaty before studying its full text, “Unless there is . . . some rather hard evidence that the Soviets are way ahead of us in something, or that the security of the United States would be endangered, then I would certainly be on the favorable side.” A frontpage headline in the New York Times the next day declared, “Eisenhower Hints He Backs Treaty,” and it was later reported that he had sent Senator Fulbright a letter formally announcing his support for the treaty.
Minutes after arriving at the White House, Kennedy met with Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., the former political rival he had appointed ambassador to South Vietnam. Lodge’s decision to accept the post struck many as just as inexplicable as Kennedy’s decision to offer it to him. It was not a first-rank embassy, certainly not for a distinguished sixty-one-year-old former U.S. senator, ambassador to the United Nations, and vice presidential candidate. Soon after the inauguration, Lodge had told Secretary of State Rusk that he had “one more tour of public duty in his system” and would accept a “challenging” position in the administration. Two years later, Kennedy ran into Lodge at a dinner and afterward instructed his military attaché, Major General Chester Clifton, to ask him if he was interested in an embassy. Lodge told Clifton that although he was not looking for a job, he would consider something “challenging and difficult.” Clifton relayed this to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who recommended Saigon.
After Lodge accepted the post, he received a condescending letter from the Republican congresswoman Frances Bolton, a prominent member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, informing him that she and many Republicans were “deeply disturbed” by his decision. If South Vietnam fell to the Communists during his tenure, she wrote, the GOP would share the blame, and she believed that Kennedy was “perfectly capable of using a possible defeat in Southeast Asia to ruin the Republican Party.” Was Lodge certain he understood “the complexities of these countries,” she asked, and certain of his “capacity for patience, understanding, and really infinite wisdom?” Lodge replied, “American security must always be considered from a totally unpartisan viewpoint, without regard to party politics, important though party politics are.” South Vietnam was vital to U.S. security, the commander in chief had asked him to serve, and under these circumstances, “service is a patriotic duty as well as an honor”—a stirring defense all the more impressive for being voiced in a private communication.
Kennedy’s motives for sending Lodge to Saigon were less estimable. His first choice had been Edmund Gullion, the current ambassador to Ghana and a friend and usher at his wedding who had frequently advised him about foreign affairs. Rusk argued that the post called for someone with more experience and seniority and pushed for Lodge. Kennedy’s other advisers opposed sending a Republican of his stature to Saigon on the grounds that he might resist taking orders from a Democratic administration and prove difficult to fire. Bobby warned him that in about six months they might find him causing a lot of trouble. (In fact, he began causing trouble in less than a week.) Sorensen thought Lodge “lacked the qualities of prudence which were necessary in this kind of area,” and joked that he hoped he was being sent to North Vietnam. O’Donnell was shocked because Kennedy had often disparaged his political skills and dismissed him as lazy. Schlesinger suggested that appointing him might have appealed to the president’s “instinct for magnanimity.” But had he really wanted to be magnanimous he could have offered him a more prestigious post, and Schlesinger conceded that “involving a leading Republican in the Vietnam mess appealed to his instinct for politics.” O’Donnell and Jackie arrived at a similar conclusion, with O’Donnell saying, “The idea of getting Lodge mixed up in such a hopeless mess as the one in Vietnam was irresistible,” and Jackie remarking later that he believed sending a Republican to Saigon “might be such a brilliant thing to do because Vietnam was rather hopeless.”
Kennedy certainly had reason to be magnanimous. His victories over Lodge in the Massachusetts Senate race in 1952 and in the 1960 general election, when Lodge had run for vice president, had capped a family rivalry spanning generations. It had started when Lodge’s grandfather Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr., had introduced a bill in Congress in 1895 aimed at curbing immigration from southern and eastern Europe by requiring immigrants to be literate in their national languages. When his bill reached the House, Kennedy’s maternal grandfather, who was then a congressman, had fiercely opposed it. According to a story that Fitzgerald told for years and his grandson surely knew by heart, when he and Lodge met in the Senate chamber, Lodge had called him an “impudent young man” and asked, “Do you think the Jews or the Italians have any right in this country?” Fitzgerald had shot back, “As much right as your father or mine. It was only a difference of a few ships.” Fitzgerald ran against Lodge for the Senate in 1916 and lost. In 1952, his grandson challenged Lodge’s grandson for the same seat and won. Lodge served as Eisenhower’s ambassador to the United Nations until he resigned to run for vice president in 1960, and lost to Kennedy again. Two years later, Ted Kennedy beat Lodge’s son in an election to fill the president’s former Senate seat.
The reporter Joe McCarthy had interviewed Kennedy and his father as they cruised off Hyannis Port in 1959. As Jack listened, his father thundered that he had moved his family out of Boston because the anti-Catholic, anti-Irish prejudice of the Yankee elite made it no place to raise Irish-Catholic children. “I didn’t want them to go through what I had to go through when I was growing up there,” he told McCarthy, adding, “They wouldn’t have asked my daughters to join their deb clubs; not that the girls would have joined anyway—they never gave two cents for that society stuff. But the point is they wouldn’t have been asked in Boston.” Kennedy had enjoyed more social success than his father, attending Choate, an elite prep school, and becoming the first Irish Catholic to join Harvard’s Spee Club. But he remained convinced that the WASP elite was determined to exclude him from its private clubs. While playing golf at the Newport Country Club before his wedding, he had been reprimanded because his foursome did not include a member. “I’m afraid that they feel their worst fears are being realized,” he told his friends, “the invasion by the Irish-Catholic hordes into one of the last strongholds of America’s socially elite.”
The presidency did not knock the chip off his shoulder. The Irish ambassador to Washington, Thomas Kiernan, was surprised by his frequent references to the legendary (and perhaps imaginary) “No Irish Need Apply” signs in Boston, and he once told Paul Fay, “Do you know it is impossible for an Irish Catholic to get into the Somerset Club in Boston? If I moved back to Boston even after being President, it would make no difference.” He told the columnist Betty Beale that his family was the only Gentile one in the Palm Beach Country Club because it was the only club they could join, and Beale noticed that he seemed upset because he remained on the waiting list to join Washington’s Cosmos Club, although it customarily admitted presidents upon their election. After reading a critical letter in the New York Times signed by a man with a Protestant name and a Westchester County address, he remarked to an aide that WASPs seemed to think that “the world should be made in their image.” After it came out that Ted Kennedy had cheated on a Harvard examination, he said, “It won’t go over with the WASPs. They take a very dim view of looking over your shoulder at someone else’s exam paper. They go in more for stealing from stockholders and banks.”
How, then, could he look at Lodge and not see the kind of Brahmin who had driven his father from Boston, and would have blackballed an Irish American president from the Somerset Club? Ken O’Donnell, an expert on the dimensions of the Kennedy chip, believed that he “nursed an Irish distaste for the aloof North Shore Republican [Lodge],” and remembered that after seeing him join Nixon on the dais at the 1960 GOP convention, he had said, “That’s the last Nixon will see of Lodge. If Nixon ever tries to visit
the Lodges in Beverly, they won’t let him in the door,” a comment raising the question of how warm a welcome he would have received on the Lodge doorstep. When Bobby Kennedy was asked if his brother had held Lodge in “high regard,” he replied carefully, “I think a fair regard.”
• • •
THE OFFICIAL PHOTOGRAPH OF the August 15 meeting between Kennedy and Lodge shows Kennedy leaning back in his rocking chair while Lodge sits perched on the edge of a couch, hands clasped between his knees like a schoolboy summoned to the principal’s office. Here they were, then, inches apart, the last Yankee Brahmin to have a distinguished political career, and the first Irish Brahmin to become president. Ignore for a moment that when Kennedy was a boy his family had moved to New York to escape the snobbery of Brahmins like the Lodges, and that when Lodge was of a similar age he moved with his widowed mother to Paris, where the novelist Edith Wharton (“a most loyal and devoted friend to both my father and mother,” according to Lodge) took them under her wing. And ignore that Lodge’s father had been a poet and a favorite of President Theodore Roosevelt, who described him in a letter that Lodge quoted as “the only man I have ever met who, I feel, was a genius,” and that after an acrimonious meeting with Joe Kennedy, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had told his wife, “I never want to see that man again as long as I live.” Ignore all the differences of religion, class, and upbringing, and you have two men with more in common than either suspected or cared to acknowledge.
Lodge had lost his father when he was seven, an event leaving him absorbed with his health and, like Kennedy, a careful eater, devotee of bland soups, and afternoon napper. Both had followed mediocre prep school careers with success at Harvard. Lodge had been thirty-four when he won his Senate seat, Kennedy thirty-five, and both were criticized for being young men in a hurry. Both won medals for valor and ran on their war records—Kennedy for the House, and Lodge to regain the Senate seat he had resigned to fight in the war. Kennedy had dabbled in journalism and considered making it a career; Lodge had spent nine years at newspapers in Boston and New York. Both were appalled by baby-kissing, arms-in-the-air politics. When David Halberstam of the New York Times wrote about Lodge, “He is a total politician in the best sense. That is, he is attuned to the needs, ambitions, and motivations of others. Yet his background, coolness, and reserve mark him as essentially different from other, more genial and back-slapping politicians,” he could have been describing Kennedy. Both were also considered liberals, although Kennedy was uncomfortable with the label and Lodge the more progressive of the two. Lodge had written in the Atlantic Monthly in 1953, “In becoming a Republican, I thought I was joining something affirmative, evolutionary, and idealistic—which demanded sacrifice and generosity—not a party which said no to all proposals for change.” He had introduced a bill in the Senate requiring public funding of presidential campaigns “to the exclusion of all other methods of financing,” accused the GOP of becoming a “rich man’s club” and a “haven for reactionaries,” and blindsided Nixon during the campaign by announcing that a Nixon-Lodge administration would appoint the first Negro to a cabinet post. Despite all this, the aristocratic Lodge never connected with ordinary voters, while Kennedy, in the words of one friend, could “loft a pass, swap a joke, hoist a beer, hurt his back and hug his kids like millions of other Americans.”
JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President Page 7
