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

by Thurston Clarke

  “We’ve been making eyes at one another three times now,” he said, lunging again. She asked if he would want his sisters to give in on the first date. “I don’t care what they do,” he said.

  She struggled up from the sofa and he grabbed her shoulders and exclaimed, “I’m sad; I’m gay; I’m melancholy; I’m gloomy—I’m all mixed up, and I don’t know how I am!”

  As they began grappling again, she said, “Don’t be so grabby. This is only our first date. We’ve got plenty of time.”

  He stared deeply into her eyes and said, “But I can’t wait, you see. I’m going to grab everything I want. You see, I haven’t any time.”

  She finally kissed him. After he murmured, “Darling,” she said, “That’s the first gentle word you have ever said to me.”

  “How would you like a husband who was harsh to you first and gentle to you afterwards?” he asked. “How would you like a husband who beat you every morning?”

  After she accused him of being “a spoiled Irish Mick on the make,” and he called her “a spoiled Irish bastard,” they both broke down laughing and he promised not to bother her anymore. She agreed to ride back with him to his house in Georgetown on condition that he send her home in a taxi.

  As they were driving she asked if he was disappointed. “Of course I’m disappointed,” he admitted. He had wanted to sleep with her and learn how Bernard Baruch made his money. “I want to make millions,” he said. “I am going to outdo my father.” A few minutes later he told her, “I would rather win a Pulitzer Prize than be president of the United States,” and asked, “Why don’t you write a book about me? What I am interested in is me.” As they passed the White House he announced in a hard voice, “I am going to go there.”

  She asked if he had the drive to be president. He conceded that he was unsure, adding, “I often wonder—do I have the brains to be president?”

  He put her in a cab and promised to call her.

  “You won’t see me again,” she promised. He was the most driven person she had ever met, and he frightened her. What scared her most was the effortless, machine-like way that he had shifted between the intellectual and the carnal. “We had been talking about books and ideas and . . . he had seen me as one kind of person. He had seen me as a mind; and now he saw me as just something female,” she recalled. “He couldn’t fit the two together, and it was if he were two parts. He was like a fourteen-year-old high school football player on the make; and he was like an elder statesman of sixty in his intellectual process.”

  Before they parted he urged her to read The Young Melbourne, a biography of Queen Victoria’s first prime minister, as a way of understanding him. Like the Kennedy family, Lord Melbourne’s had been new-money arrivistes, and like him, Melbourne had been a second-oldest son and a political realist with what his biographer called “a mocking wit,” who had assumed family leadership after the death of his older brother. After finishing the book she sent him a long and thoughtful letter. “As for you, I believe you do have the drive to be President—and the dignity, on occasion—and the brains and these will provide the momentum,” she wrote, “but who knows where the wild horse will run. . . . There is more in luck and fate than we think, and we can do no more than turn it loose.” She wrote again to congratulate him when he won his own Pulitzer Prize. He scrawled at the bottom of his reply, “When are we going to meet again?”

  On August 21, he was still shifting gears. On the same day that he had told Ball not to pledge that America would continue resisting Communist aggression in Vietnam, and had returned to Cape Cod to comfort Jackie, the plane carrying Ellen Rometsch could have flown over Squaw Island, perhaps while he was writing a reminder on White House stationery to investigate a new cure for cancer or sketching an emblem for a new naval medal, an eagle holding two branches, as Caroline sat on his lap, happily adding her own scribbles to his.

  The day after Ellen Rometsch returned to Germany, a column by the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Richard Wilson titled “Personal Conduct in High Office—President Lauded for Highest Standard in Both Public and Family Life” appeared in the Washington Evening Star. Wilson wrote, “One need not agree with all, or any, of his [Kennedy’s] policies to recognize that in his behavior, attitude, and demeanor he provides the needed example that the troubled or misguided may turn to with respect and admiration.”

  When Kennedy read the column the next day, as he surely did, he found himself praised as “a man of intellectual attainment and with wide and varied interests . . . ranging into areas of mind and spirit which define the ultimate values of life” and “a cultivated modern man of vigorous spirit and wit and pleasing habits, manners, and appearance” who “publicly and privately” was “setting a national tone of responsibility.” Wilson contrasted his “sense of responsibility [for] . . . how he behaves in his exalted office publicly and privately” with Profumo and politicians like Nelson Rockefeller, who had just divorced his wife of thirty years. He concluded, “High officials must surely recognize, as President Kennedy recognizes, that the probity of their lives should at least match the level of their responsibility.”

  Saturday, August 24–Sunday, August 25

  CAPE COD

  Jackie loved their rented house on Squaw Island so much that she had ordered its sixteen rooms measured and photographed so she could build a replica on an adjoining lot. Everything she liked about Brambletyde—the isolation, privacy, and spectacular position on a promontory facing the sea—made it gloomy on stormy days like this one, when you heard only the wind, crashing surf, and a lanyard clanging against a giant flagpole. The White House press office announced that the president would spend the day reading reports on the deteriorating situation in South Vietnam, and released a letter from Dr. Albert Schweitzer, the renowned humanitarian physician. Writing in longhand from his clinic in equatorial Africa, Schweitzer had congratulated Kennedy for “having had the foresight and the courage to inaugurate a world policy toward peace,” and called the test ban treaty “one of the greatest events, perhaps the greatest, in the history of the world,” praise that did not seem so excessive ten months after several hundred million human beings had narrowly escaped being incinerated during the Cuban missile crisis.

  The press office narrative of a busy president using the inclement weather to catch up on his work did not match the mood inside Brambletyde. Bill Walton, the only guest that weekend, spoke of the house being “full of sadness.” Caroline remained upset by Patrick’s death, and only her father could calm her. When she was not in his lap, he read and reread the condolence letters, passing them to Walton with comments such as “Look at what the Pope said.” He was keeping score and had already complained to Schlesinger that Adlai Stevenson had neglected to write Jackie. “I wish you would tell him to send her a letter,” he said. “Don’t mention that it came from me, but I have spent most of my life in the midst of people getting hurt because someone doesn’t write a letter or attend a funeral, and I want to avoid that thing as much as possible.”*

  Walton, who was equally close to both of them, remembered the weekend as the most intimate he had ever spent with them, saying later, “She hung on to him and he held her in his arms.” Each took him aside during the weekend: Jack to unburden himself about the pressures of dealing with Khrushchev over access to Berlin; Jackie to confide that she knew Jack had badly wanted a second boy and was the kind of man who needed a large family.

  A telegram arrived from Lee Radziwill inviting Jackie to join her on a cruise through the Greek islands in October with the shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis. The Kennedys had met Onassis while traveling through Europe in 1955, and he had asked them to dinner with Winston Churchill aboard the Christina, his opulent 325-foot yacht. Thrilled by the opportunity to meet the man whose speeches he had memorized, Kennedy had arrived overdressed in a white dinner jacket. The aging Churchill ignored him, and Jackie teased him afterward, saying, “Maybe he thought y
ou were a waiter, Jack.” He dined with Onassis again in Washington in 1959, and a few months later Onassis arranged a more satisfying meeting between him and Churchill.

  The prospect of Jackie cruising with Onassis appalled Walton, but Kennedy seemed torn. She had already canceled her official engagements until the end of the year, and the trip might head off another lengthy bout of postpartum depression like the one she had experienced following John’s birth. But he also understood the political risks. When she had traveled to Italy the previous year, she had been criticized for vacationing outside the country without her husband. And rumors of an affair between Lee and Onassis had prompted the columnist Drew Pearson to ask, even though Lee was married, “Does the ambitious Greek tycoon hope to become the brother-in-law of the President?” The troubled relationship between Onassis and the U.S. government was another concern. Onassis had paid a fine to avoid a criminal trial on charges of violating Maritime Commission regulations, leading Kennedy to refer to him in private as a pirate and crook, and to tell Clint Hill, the Secret Service agent accompanying Jackie on her visit to Greece in 1961, “Whatever you do in Greece, do not let Mrs. Kennedy cross paths with Aristotle Onassis.”

  On Saturday afternoon, Deputy National Security Adviser Michael Forrestal called to ask Kennedy to approve a cable to Ambassador Lodge that Forrestal had drafted in consultation with Averell Harriman and Roger Hilsman. Forrestal read him a draft of Cable 243, their proposed reply to an earlier cable from Lodge requesting guidance on how he should respond to a group of South Vietnamese generals wanting to know the U.S. position if they deposed Diem. The crucial passage in 243 said, “US Government cannot tolerate situation in which power lies in Nhu’s hands. Diem must be given chance to rid himself of Nhu and his coterie and replace them with best military and political personalities available. If, in spite of your efforts, Diem remains obdurate and refuses, then we must face the possibility that Diem himself cannot be preserved.” If Diem refused to remove Nhu, the cable instructed, “You may also tell appropriate military commanders we will give them direct support in any interim period of breakdown central government mechanism.” Since Diem was unlikely to cashier his brother, this represented a green light to stage a coup.

  At the end of an emotional day when he and his family were still mourning Patrick, Kennedy was being asked to approve a cable that would involve the United States even more deeply in South Vietnam’s political shenanigans, and risked complicating any future attempts to reduce American involvement in the conflict. His senior foreign policy advisers were out of Washington. Secretary of Defense McNamara was in Aspen; the CIA director, John McCone, was sailing in Puget Sound; National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy was at his house on Cape Ann; and Secretary of State Dean Rusk was in New York, preparing for the fall meeting of the United Nations General Assembly.

  Kennedy asked if he could delay making a decision until Monday, when everyone would be back in town.

  Forrestal replied that the Buddhist crisis was spiraling out of control, and Harriman and Hilsman wanted to send an immediate response.

  “Well, go and see what you can do to get it cleared,” he said.

  Hilsman and Harriman found Undersecretary Ball, the senior State Department official in Washington, on a golf course and asked him to approve the cable. Realizing its importance, Ball called Kennedy and read him the critical passages. The president struck him as favorable to sending it, despite recognizing the danger that Diem’s replacement might be no better, and asked Ball for his opinion. Ball was an old-school diplomat who leavened his realpolitik with a belief in American exceptionalism. He believed that encouraging coups “ran counter to the grain of American principles,” but he also thought that the Nhus had undermined “what little moral justification remained for our position in Vietnam.” He told Kennedy that he supported sending the cable. Kennedy replied that he would approve it as long as Rusk and Roswell Gilpatric, the senior Defense Department official in McNamara’s absence, also signed off.

  Ball called Rusk, who sounded cautious but finally agreed to approve the cable provided the president understood its implications.

  Forrestal reached Gilpatric at his Virginia farm. He viewed the cable as a matter between State and the White House, and since Rusk and Kennedy apparently wanted to send it, he considered his approval a formality.

  Forrestal reported back to Kennedy that everyone was on board. If he thought that some had signed on because they believed that Kennedy had already approved the cable, he did not voice this suspicion. And so, believing the matter was urgent and that everyone had weighed the consequences, Kennedy told Forrestal to send the cable, at a stroke violating the two most hard-won lessons of his presidency. From the Bay of Pigs he had learned not to accept the unanimous recommendations of his civilian and military advisers without subjecting them to a rigorous interrogation; from the Cuban missile crisis he had learned the value of gathering a select group of advisers in a room, listening as they debated policy options, then having the courage to make a contradictory decision.

  Sunday remained chilly and blustery, but the rain had stopped. Kennedy asked the White House photographer, Cecil Stoughton, to take an 8-millimeter film of him playing golf so he could send it to Arnold Palmer and have him critique his swing, an example of following his father’s advice always to seek the opinion of the top expert in any field. In the afternoon, he and Jackie and the children, accompanied by Walton and Stoughton, went out on the Honey Fitz. They sat on lounge chairs in the stern, wearing thick sweaters and wrapped in gray blankets. The sea was dotted with whitecaps as he watched a sailing race through binoculars. One of Stoughton’s photographs shows Caroline holding a stuffed animal and leaning her head on his shoulder as he stares into the distance. His skin is deeply lined and weathered from a lifetime of tanning in Hyannis Port and Palm Beach, his eyes are puffy, his hair frosted with gray.

  Upon returning to Squaw Island he received Lodge’s response to Cable 243. Lodge had been instructed to give Diem the “chance to rid himself of Nhu and his coterie” and to approach the “appropriate military commanders” only if Diem remained “obdurate.” Although he had been in Vietnam only four days, he was already insisting on fast-tracking the coup. “Believe that chances of Diem’s meeting our demands are virtually nil,” he cabled. “At the same time, by making them we give Nhu chance to forestall or block action by military. Risk, we believe, is not worth taking. . . . Therefore, propose we go straight to Generals with our demands, without informing Diem. Would tell them we prepared to have Diem without Nhus but it is in effect up to them whether to keep him.” Here, already, was the result of leaving things “almost completely” in Lodge’s hands.

  Monday, August 26–Tuesday, August 27

  WASHINGTON

  During a meeting on Monday, the Soviet ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin, presented Kennedy with a letter from Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev representing the latest installment in the secret correspondence between them that had led to the test ban treaty and an agreement to install a “hotline” between Washington and Moscow that would begin functioning on August 30 and transmit its first operational message on November 22.

  They had started exchanging letters after the Cuban missile crisis made them the first men in history forced to make decisions that could lead to the instant death of millions of human beings. Kennedy had initiated the correspondence by writing to Khrushchev on October 28, 1962, a day after the most perilous moment in the crisis, “I think we should give priority to questions relating to the proliferation of nuclear weapons, on earth and in outer space, and to the great effort for a nuclear test ban.” When Norman Cousins, who served as an intermediary between them during the spring of 1963, met with Kennedy before leaving for Moscow in April, Kennedy predicted that Khrushchev would say that he wanted to reduce tensions but could see no reciprocal interest in Washington. “It is important that he be corrected on this score,” he said. “I’m not sure Khrush
chev knows this, but I don’t think there’s any man in American politics who’s more eager than I am to put Cold War animosities behind us and get down to the hard business of building friendly relations.”

  Cousins would make several observations about Khrushchev that also applied to Kennedy, among them his description of the Soviet leader as “a lonesome figure who gave the impression of being gregarious,” and a man who “never attempted to conceal his peasant background” yet “didn’t hesitate to wear expensive silk shirts and gold cufflinks.” Their correspondence also shows them sharing concerns about the health risks of nuclear fallout and proliferation, and understanding that the other faced similar pressures from hard-liners within his own government and military. Kennedy referred to this in his April 11, 1963, letter to Khrushchev, writing, “In closing, I want again to send my warm personal wishes to you and your family. These are difficult and dangerous times in which we live, and both you and I have grave responsibilities to our families and to all of mankind. The pressures from those who have a less patient and peaceful outlook are very great—but I assure you of my own determination to work to strengthen world peace.” Two weeks later, Kennedy told Cousins, who was briefing him on his conversations with Khrushchev, “One of the ironic things about this entire situation is that Mr. Khrushchev and I occupy approximately the same political positions inside our governments. He would like to prevent a nuclear war but is under severe pressure from his hard-line crowd, which interprets every move in that direction as appeasement. I’ve got similar problems. Meanwhile the lack of progress in reaching agreements between our two countries gives strength to the hard-line boys in both, with the result that the hard-liners in the Soviet Union and in the United States feed on one another, each using the actions of the other to justify its own position.”

  Kennedy had witnessed this when Khrushchev sent him two contradictory communications on successive days during the Cuban crisis. The first was a conciliatory letter, the second a brusque ultimatum. The former U.S. ambassador to Moscow Llewellyn Thompson advised him that Khrushchev might have sent the second message to placate hard-liners and recommended ignoring it and responding to the first message.