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

by Thurston Clarke

  When Kennedy was asked at his press conference to rebut Teller’s charges, his voice hardened and he said, “I understand Dr. Teller is opposed to it. Every day he is opposed to it. I recognize he is going to continue being opposed to it.” He reminded reporters that the United States had needed only a single test to develop the first atom bomb, and now its bombs were “many, many, many times stronger than the weapon that flattened Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” Pounding on the podium, he asked, “How many weapons do you need and how many megatons do you need to destroy? . . . What we now have on hand, without any further testing, will kill three hundred million people in one hour,” adding sarcastically, “I suppose they could even improve on that if it’s necessary.”

  Wednesday, August 21–Friday, August 23

  WASHINGTON AND CAPE COD

  While Kennedy was upstairs in the family quarters, he received an early morning call from Undersecretary of State George Ball, reporting that Diem’s government had ended the raids but imprisoned thousands of Buddhists, closed airports, and occupied telegraph offices. Nhu’s shock troops, trained by U.S. advisers to fight the Viet Cong, had acted with appalling brutality. Ball thought that Lodge, who was in Japan and planning to arrive in South Vietnam several days later, should wait before flying to Saigon, since if he arrived now he could not present his credentials.

  Kennedy disagreed. “I think this is going to be a big thing. Cabot can’t be sitting on his butt. . . . He may be helpless, but he oughta be out there. I think it’s going to make us look bad if he’s not.”

  Ball said that several journalists, including David Halberstam of the New York Times, were claiming to have proof that the U.S. embassy had engineered the crackdown, and suggested preempting their stories by issuing a statement denying U.S. involvement. He read Kennedy a draft statement that condemned the repression as a direct violation of the South Vietnamese government’s assurances that it would seek reconciliation with the Buddhists, and concluded, “The United States deplores repressive actions of this nature. We shall continue to assist Vietnam to resist Communist aggression and maintain its independence.”

  “I don’t know about that last sentence,” Kennedy said. “Why don’t you leave the last sentence out?”

  Ball admitted that it had been “an afterthought.”

  Kennedy criticized it as “sort of almost [a] non sequitur.” It was also precisely the kind of rhetorical flourish that Mansfield’s memorandum had cautioned him against using.

  Several hours later, Lodge boarded a special military flight for Saigon and was probably airborne about the same time as Kennedy, who was flying to the Cape for another midweek visit with Jackie. And while they were both in the air, or slightly later, an Air Force transport left Andrews Air Force Base for West Germany carrying Ellen Rometsch, a statuesque twenty-seven-year-old former East German refugee who had become one of the president’s sexual partners. Also aboard was La Verne Duffy, a former investigative aide to Robert Kennedy who had fallen in love with Rometsch and had been given the assignment of escorting her out of the country.

  Bobby Baker, the secretary to the Senate majority leader, had often introduced women like Rometsch—whom he described as “eager young ladies who’d let it be known they were out for a good time”—to congressmen, Capitol Hill staffers, lobbyists, and government officials. She had come to the attention of the FBI after boasting to a former Bureau informant about her activities at the Quorum Club, a warren of rooms that Baker had leased at a Capitol Hill hotel, and her frequent visits to the White House. Her FBI file described her having a “rough complexion” and being fond of heavy makeup; photographs showed a voluptuous woman with a towering beehive hairdo. On July 3, 1963, J. Edgar Hoover sent Special Agent Courtney Evans to inform Robert Kennedy that Rometsch was claiming to have had “illicit relations with highly placed government officials,” including the president. Evans also told Bobby that she had been raised in East Germany, where she had belonged to several Communist youth groups before fleeing to the West in 1955 at the age of nineteen. According to Evans’s memorandum of their meeting, the attorney general “was appreciative of the Director’s sending this information to him on a confidential basis,” and “made particular note of Rometsch’s name.” When they parted, he “again expressed his appreciation for the discreet manner in which this information was handled.”

  Bobby had long been concerned about his brother’s failure to ascertain even the most rudimentary information about some of his sexual partners, once warning him, “You’ve got to be careful about these girls. A couple of them might be spies.” Britain’s recent Profumo scandal had made Kennedy’s behavior seem even more reckless. The British press had revealed in March that the secretary of state for war, John Profumo, had been patronizing the prostitute Christine Keeler at the same time that she was seeing a Soviet military attaché. Keeler was English and had not passed any government secrets to the Soviet attaché, but Profumo had resigned and the scandal was threatening to topple the Macmillan government.

  The FBI agents who interviewed and investigated Rometsch could not substantiate the allegations that she had enjoyed “high-level sex contacts” or that she was a Communist agent. Because she was married to a West German airman stationed at the embassy, the FBI report recommended informing the State Department of the investigation, while cautioning, “Of course, no mention will be made of the President and the AG [attorney general].” The report did not quiet Bobby’s fears. The Bureau had found no evidence that Rometsch was a spy, but it had confirmed that she had belonged to Communist youth groups, had known the East German leader Walter Ulbricht, still had relatives living in the East, and had enjoyed a liaison with a Soviet embassy official while living in Washington. If her relationship with the president became public, there would be a congressional investigation that would inevitably call into question all of the administration’s dealings with the Soviet Union, including the test ban treaty. It was also possible that a more thorough investigation might reveal contacts between Rometsch and Soviet bloc intelligence agencies.*

  • • •

  KENNEDY HAD BEEN IGNORANT of Rometsch’s background, but his inordinate interest in the Profumo case indicated that he appreciated the danger of becoming ensnared in a similar scandal. He had badgered the London embassy for updates on Profumo, and knowing of his interest in the case, his friends offered him frequent reports. After returning from Britain, Schlesinger told him, “It is hard to overstate the atmosphere of political squalor in London today,” and said the scandal had served “to reinforce the impression that the Government is frivolous and decadent.” Profumo remained on Kennedy’s mind all summer. While editing a draft of his July 26 speech on the test ban treaty, he objected to using the word “proliferation,” telling Ball that he feared some people might think it had something to do with Christine Keeler. If someone disparaged Profumo, he leaped to his defense, saying how easy it would be for a fellow to make that kind of a mistake, and that such extreme criticism was unjustified. During a small White House dinner the year before, honoring the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin, he had become testy when Berlin mentioned that a historian had recently published an article about a sexual affair between Lenin and a woman that predated the Russian Revolution. “He thought this was not at all the way to treat a great man,” Berlin said later. “I had the feeling that he felt one mustn’t talk about the private affairs of great heads of state in quite that tone of voice. I felt put in my place.”

  Bobby decided it was too dangerous for Rometsch to stay in Washington, where she might talk to someone who would tip off the press, and could be subpoenaed to appear before Congress or a grand jury. He ordered her deported, instructed the State Department to deny her a visa if she attempted to return, and asked Duffy to chaperone her on the flight back to West Germany. But if he and the president had imagined that this would end the threat, they would be proved wrong two months later, when they would open the New York T
imes to see her photograph underneath a headline reading, “Baker Inquiry Is Asked If German Woman’s Ouster by U.S. Involved Security.”

  Kennedy’s affair with Rometsch was one of the most egregious instances of a womanizing so compulsive and careless that even those who believed they knew him well would struggle for decades to fathom it, falling back on words such as “inexplicable” and “incomprehensible.” His defense of Lenin and Profumo showed that he appreciated the risks to his presidency and his place in history. Then why did he do it? How could a man who cared so much about the judgment of history engage in behavior that as a student of history he must have known would surely come to light? How could a man who had shown such integrity in his public life show so little in private, risking his reputation for hurried and, according to several of his partners, unsatisfying couplings with call girls, strippers, interns, and secretaries?

  One of his mistresses suggested that his need for a secret life was a greater motivation than the sex. His friends have speculated that his wartime brush with death had left him addicted to risk, and that aside from driving like a madman, this was the riskiest thing he could do. It has been said he did it because he could not tolerate being bored and illicit sex was a pleasant antidote to boredom, because the steroids he took to control his Addison’s had supercharged his libido (although he had been sexually promiscuous before taking the medicine), and because he believed he would die young, and sex was at the top of his bucket list. He told Senator Smathers, who sometimes supplied him with women, “You’ve got to live every day like it’s your last on earth,” and said to Joe Alsop, “I’ve got this slow-motion cancer [he was referring to his Addison’s], which they say gets you when you’re forty.” It is also possible that abstinence really did give him, as he claimed, insomnia and migraines. He confided in Clare Boothe Luce that he “went all to pieces” unless he had sex every day, and told Harold Macmillan that if he went without sex for a day he suffered punishing headaches. According to the more questionable theories, he was promiscuous because being circumcised at the age of twenty-one for tight foreskin problems had left him desperate to prove his manhood, or because he had been traumatized as a boy by finding his father in flagrante with the film star Gloria Swanson, although there are doubts whether this occurred. The most widely accepted theory blames his father, a notorious philanderer who, according to Kennedy, encouraged him and his brothers “to get laid as often as possible.”

  The fact that Kennedy’s sexuality remained so unchanged over the years suggests that it was fixed during his adolescence and youth, and that his father was responsible. One member of his staff called him “an adolescent in terms of his sexual relationships,” adding, “All this stuff was casual—as if he were in high school—hijinks.” Lem Billings, who was a closeted homosexual, believed that he had “an immature relationship with girls—that is, while he was terribly interested in going out and having fun with them at night, I don’t think he was really terribly excited about girls as friends.” Bobby Baker observed that he “seemed to relish sharing the details of his conquests” and “came off as something of the boyish braggart”; the White House intern Mimi Beardsley thought that “part of him still seemed to be an adolescent teenager at Choate”; and the stripper Tempest Storm described him as “a little boy who wouldn’t grow up,” although in other respects, she found him “one of the most mature men” she had ever known.

  His affair with Tempest Storm showed how widely he cast his sexual net. His partners included Jackie’s press secretary Pamela Turnure, the White House secretaries Priscilla Wear and Jill Cowan—two spunky twenty-somethings nicknamed “Fiddle” and “Faddle”—and Ben Bradlee’s sister-in-law Mary Meyer. Prior to Rometsch, his most risky relationship had been with Judith Campbell, a two-year affair beginning in 1960 when Frank Sinatra introduced them in Las Vegas, and ended with him sharing Campbell with the Mafia boss Sam Giancana.

  Whatever demons lay behind his voracious womanizing, he seemed incapable of taming them. Betty Spalding described it as “a real compulsion . . . something so deep in that man.” Charlie Bartlett, who had introduced him to Jackie, believed he never should have married, because “he had this thing about him, which was not under control.” During a Washington dinner party in the late fifties, he told Priscilla McMillan, who had formerly worked in his Senate office, that he had married Jackie “because I was thirty-seven years old, and people would think I was queer if I wasn’t married.” Encouraged by his candor, she asked, “Jack, when you’re straining every gasket to be president, why do you endanger yourself by going out with women?” After a long pause he shrugged and a sad expression crossed his face that reminded McMillan of a little boy preparing to cry. “I guess it’s because I just can’t help it,” he said.

  Jackie’s sister, Lee Radziwill, believed that Kennedy had “absolutely no guilty conscience,” but if that was true, why would he say “I just can’t help it,” or tell Charlie Bartlett that he intended “to keep the White House white,” or look for precedents to justify his philandering, showing a keen interest in polygamy during a discussion of the Kama Sutra and the sexual morals of the ancient world with Jackie’s couturier Oleg Cassini. He sometimes justified his womanizing as the mark of a great man. When his friend Marie Ridder asked during the 1960 campaign if he planned to continue having affairs while living in the White House, he replied breezily, “Oh, it’ll be much easier, because the Secret Service will protect me. Anyway all great men have this failing. Wilson stopped the conference at Versailles to have his ‘nooner,’ and Alexander the Great had so many sexual appetites he never knew next what gender would appeal to him.” He went on at great length, listing other great leaders who had been unfaithful and viewing his sexual morals, as he did so many things, in the context of the sweep of history and great men.

  The most perceptive take on his sexual pathology can be found in the letters, diary, and testimony of Margaret Coit, a Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer who was perhaps the smartest and most sensitive woman whom he ever attempted to seduce. After she won a Pulitzer in 1951 at the age of thirty-one for her biography of Senator John C. Calhoun, the eminent financier and presidential adviser Bernard Baruch asked her to write his biography. Before traveling to Washington in the spring of 1953 to conduct research at the Library of Congress and speak with senators who had known Baruch, she manufactured a pretext to interview Kennedy, writing him that since her book encompassed Baruch’s times, she hoped he could provide her with some background about his prewar years in London. “I had designs on John F. Kennedy,” she admitted. “He was the golden boy, the most eligible bachelor in New England.”

  Despite her literary fame, Coit was a country girl and a virgin who admitted knowing “very, very, very little” about the outside world. She dressed for their interview in a gray silk suit, pink lace gloves, and a gray bonnet with a pink lace veil, an outfit more suited to a date. (“He got the idea right away,” she said.) His Senate office was spartan. There was a small sofa, some straight-backed chairs, and bookcases crammed with works on history, economics, and politics. She was encouraged that none of his secretaries were “very young, chic, or pretty,” but shocked by his appearance. His eyes, hair, and lips looked gray, and under his tan even his skin had a grayish tinge. After several minutes of desultory conversation he admitted knowing little about Baruch. Then he gave her a long, searching look and said, “You’re the smartest thing to come into this office since the election,” and invited her to a party at his house.

  She was disappointed that he spent most of the evening in a corner with Senator Symington. As she was leaving he suddenly threw an arm around her waist and announced, “Isn’t she the darlingest thing to come into this house for a long time?” He tracked her down at the Library of Congress manuscript room several days later and asked her out. “I just glowed,” she told her diary. “And as I bathed and dressed for the big date, I felt—this is the biggest day of my life. Dreamed of him as the fai
ry prince . . . grey and ethereal.”

  She arrived at his office to find him in shirtsleeves, signing photographs for his constituents while chewing a wad of Juicy Fruit gum, snapping it so forcefully that his head shook. “My brother told me that you won the Pulitzer Prize,” he said, adding that he was impressed that she had not mentioned it. He noticed her examining his history books and said, “Try me on them. I’ve read them all.” She did, and was amazed that he really had read and digested them. He fired questions. Was she married? Had Bernard Baruch made a pass at her? Was there any passion left in the relationship between Baruch and Clare Boothe Luce? He took a call from Jackie and spoke to her in a cold and offhanded manner, even though he would propose to her a month later. After hanging up, he plopped down on the sofa, threw back his head, and closed his eyes, and the remaining color drained from his face.

  Coit said he seemed too exhausted to take her out and suggested postponing their date. He agreed but insisted on driving her back to her rooming house. He hobbled down the office building corridor on crutches, but the fresh air revived him and he bit a stick of Juicy Fruit in half and popped some into her mouth. Once they were seated in his battered blue sedan he leaned across her to shut the passenger-side door tightly, grinning as he pressed his arm against her breasts. Thinking he might want to rest before driving home, she invited him to her rooms. He immediately threw himself onto her couch and tried dragging her down. “Wait a minute,” she said, struggling to escape. “I made up my mind that I was not going to kiss you on the first date.”