At the Wednesday meeting on Vietnam, Kennedy was even more pessimistic, musing aloud about calling off the generals. “I don’t think we ought to take the view that this has gone beyond our control,” he said, “’cause I think that would be the worst reason to do it.” When Bundy responded that both Lodge and Harkins favored the operation as currently planned, he said, “Well, I don’t see any reason to go ahead unless we think we have a good chance of success.”
The former ambassador to South Vietnam Richard Nolting was at the Wednesday meeting and argued that only Diem had “a reasonably good prospect of holding this fragmented, divided country together.” Harriman interjected, “Needless to say I don’t agree with this.” When Nolting attacked Cable 243 as improvident, Harriman yelled, “Shut up!”
At one point during the meeting Kennedy said, “This shit has got to stop!” and he told Bobby afterward, “My God! My government’s coming apart.”
Before attending Thursday’s Vietnam meeting, he received a cable from Lodge that began, “We are launched on a course from which there is no respectable turning back: The overthrow of the Diem government.” There was no turning back, he said, “because U.S. prestige is already publicly committed to this end . . . and will become more so as facts leak out,” and because “there is no possibility . . . that the war can be won under a Diem administration.” After reminding Kennedy that this was the policy Cable 243 had instructed him to carry out, he recommended making an “all-out effort to get Generals to move promptly.” He explained that he had decided to ignore the instructions in an earlier cable directing him to ask Diem to rid himself of the Nhus before giving the generals his final approval, because the generals were already concerned about American indecision and delay.
Lodge’s vaguely insubordinate cable prompted Kennedy to shoot back a top-secret cable. Soon after arriving at Squaw Island on Thursday evening, he called McGeorge Bundy and dictated a cable flagged “Personal for the Ambassador from the President” and “No Department or other distribution whatever.” He told Lodge, “We will do all that we can to help you conclude the operation successfully. Nevertheless, there is one point on my own constitutional responsibilities as President and Commander in Chief which I wish to state to you in this entirely private message, which is not being circulated here beyond the Secretary of State.” With the Bay of Pigs obviously in mind, he continued, “Until the very moment of the go signal for the operation by the Generals, I must reserve a contingent right to change course and reverse previous instructions. While fully aware of your assessment of the consequences of such a reversal, I know from experience that failure is more destructive than an appearance of indecision. I would, of course, accept full responsibility for any such change as I must bear also full responsibility for this operation and its consequences.” He added, “When we go, we must go to win, but it will be better to change our minds than fail. And if our national interest should require a change of mind, we must not be afraid of it.”
Had the nationally syndicated columnist George Dixon known about any of this he might not have written in his weekend column, one Kennedy must have read because it appeared in the Washington Post, “I wouldn’t be surprised if John Fitzgerald Kennedy looks back upon the week of Aug 25 to 31, 1963 as the most gratifying week of his life.” During these seven days, Dixon said, “a nuclear test ban treaty grew almost certain of passage, not a single incident marred the civil rights march,” and the president was “more popular than the day he took office.” He concluded, “No matter what reversals may be in store for him in the years ahead, the President can assuage his woes by looking back upon last week.”
• • •
KENNEDY RETURNED FROM a cruise on the Honey Fitz on Friday afternoon to find that Lincoln had left a message on his bed reporting that a federal judge had just sentenced James Landis to thirty days in jail for tax fraud, a reminder that his own deal with Dirksen had spared Sherman Adams from a similar fate.
He was having second thoughts about Jackie’s cruise, perhaps because he had been aboard the Christina and could imagine how the press would play up the First Lady’s presence on a ship boasting a liveried crew, gold-plated faucets, El Greco paintings, and bar stools upholstered with the skin of whale testicles—the kind of vulgar wealth-flaunting he had been raised to disdain. On Labor Day she proposed bringing Undersecretary of Commerce Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., and his wife as chaperones. He gave in, calling Roosevelt at his farm in upstate New York and telling him, “Lee wants Jackie to be her beard [to disguise her affair with Onassis]. You are the only one she has agreed to have come along.” The Roosevelts understood their role. “I don’t think Jack wanted Jackie to go,” Susan Roosevelt said later. “I think he was appalled by it, so he arranged for us to make it look less like the jet set.”
He had reinjured his back by stepping into a hole on the Hyannis Golf Course at the beginning of August and aggravated it by playing more golf two weeks later. X-rays were taken, diagrams drawn, hot packs prescribed, bandages wound around his back and groin, and a misleading story concocted for the press to explain why he appeared to be limping. “I don’t want to read anything in the papers about my groin,” he told Salinger. “We can attribute it all to the back. . . . I don’t want the American public thinking that their president is falling apart: ‘Now he’s got a bad back, now his groin is going.’”
Dr. Kraus was on a climbing holiday in Italy so his associate, Dr. Willibrand Nagler, examined Kennedy on August 22 and 27. He diagnosed a muscle sprain, recommended continuing with the hot packs and bandages, and told him to avoid walking or climbing stairs. When the pain persisted, Kennedy insisted on seeing Kraus in person. Kraus and the famed mountaineer Gino Solda had just climbed Cima Kennedy, a mountain in the Dolomites that Solda had arranged to have named for Kennedy despite the custom of naming alpine peaks posthumously. Burkley called Kraus in the middle of the night and said that an Air Force jet was being sent to fly him to Cape Cod.
Kraus arrived on August 31, examined Kennedy, and confirmed Nagler’s diagnosis, a strain of the hip flexor muscle, and not a very serious one. He advised him to continue the hot packs and bandages for two or three days, and then resume exercising. Kennedy pretended not to know that Kraus had cut his holiday short, although it is unlikely that Nagler and Burkley would not have told him that Kraus was abroad. The next day he telegrammed Kraus, “I have just learned that you cut your vacation to come up here. I am extremely sorry that this was permitted although I am grateful to you for your kindness in coming.” It was a gracious gesture, but it might have been more gracious to have borne the pain a few days longer.
Sometime that weekend, most likely on Saturday, Clifton handed Kennedy a sealed envelope from Bundy containing Lodge’s reply to his eyes-only cable as well as a copy of the initial cable. Bundy had instructed Clifton in an accompanying memorandum that “the enclosed envelope should be opened by the President only, and when he has read the messages it contains you should destroy them. The reason for this extraordinary procedure is that these messages are not in the normal series and their existence is not known except to the President and to the Secretary of State, so I do not want them in a message file that may be seen by others who believe themselves privy to most classified material.”
Lodge’s reply was curt and to the point: “1. I fully understand that you have the right and responsibility to change course at any time. Of course I will always respect that right. 2. To be successful, this operation must essentially be a Vietnamese affair with a momentum of its own. Should this happen you may not be able to control it, i.e. the ‘go signal’ may be given by the Generals.” In other words, it was too late to for the president to countermand Cable 243. He could order Lodge around, but he could control neither the Vietnamese officers nor the timing or success of their coup. It was the reply he deserved. He had appointed Lodge for frivolous and political reasons, cavalierly told him that he would leave the planning of a coup
in his hands, and approved Cable 243, ignoring the lessons of the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban missile crisis. The only good news was that leaks to the press and mixed signals from the embassy in Saigon had so unsettled the generals that they had suspended their plotting.
PART THREE
September 1–30, 1963
DAYS 83–54
Sunday, September 1
CAPE COD AND MARTHA’S VINEYARD
Kennedy had met the author William Styron at a 1962 White House dinner honoring Nobel Prize winners. Styron’s first novel, Lie Down in Darkness, had won critical acclaim and prestigious awards, making him the kind of intellectual celebrity Kennedy liked to cultivate, and so on Sunday he and Jackie cruised to Martha’s Vineyard to collect Styron and his wife, Rose, and give them lunch aboard the Honey Fitz. Styron was anticipating an afternoon with a man he considered “the glamorous and gorgeous avatar of American power at the magic moment of its absolute twentieth-century ascendancy.”* He was not disappointed and would describe Kennedy as “lethally glamorous,” and possessing a “beguiling and self-effacing modesty.” The food on the Honey Fitz was another matter: stone-cold hot dogs in soggy buns, frozen beer, and runny or rock-hard oeufs gelés, with a pitcher of stiff Bloody Marys the only saving grace.
They discussed Massachusetts politics, race, and whether Alger Hiss was guilty (Kennedy thought he was). He asked Styron if he had read “The President and Other Intellectuals,” an essay by the New York literary critic and all-purpose intellectual Alfred Kazin that had appeared in the October 1961 issue of The American Scholar. Kazin had conceded that Kennedy possessed “the sex appeal of a movie hero” and “as much savvy as a Harvard professor,” but then dismissed him as a poseur and “would-be intellectual.” He peppered his essay with snide comments about his “restless ambition” and “determination to succeed,” and criticized Profiles in Courage as devoid of “any significant ideas” and resembling “those little anecdotes from the lives of great men that are found in Reader’s Digest.” He concluded that his most essential quality was “that of the man who is always making and remaking himself,” belittling him as “the final product of a fanatical job of self-remodeling.”
Schlesinger heard prepublication rumors about the article and persuaded Kazin to come to the White House for lunch, hoping that meeting Kennedy might change his mind. Afterward, Kazin added a few grace notes and praised Kennedy’s “freshness of curiosity.” He kept the most wounding passages, however, and told Schlesinger that most New York intellectuals agreed with him that the president was “slick, cool, and empty, devoid of vision.” Kennedy tried making light of it, telling Schlesinger, “We wined him and dined him, and talked about Hemingway and Dreiser with him. . . . Then he went away and wrote that piece.” Kazin was unrepentant, and in his 1978 autobiography he spoke of Kennedy’s “wistful need for more confident learning than he possessed” and his “need to charm,” and called him “a personality under construction,” as if that were a crippling flaw.
Carefully keeping his voice neutral, Styron admitted to having read Kazin’s article.
“Well, what did you think?” Kennedy demanded.
Styron felt as if he had been passed a conversational hot coal. He had found the article tough and caustic, but thought Kazin had made a case that Kennedy lacked the intellectual voltage usually ascribed to him. As he was struggling to formulate a diplomatic response, Kennedy posed a question that showed how deeply the article had wounded him, asking, “What qualifies a critic [i.e., Kazin] to make an assessment of a work if he himself has never created one?” Styron thought, “Boy, Alfred’s really got Kennedy’s goat,” and told him that the critical and creative faculties were different talents, and not necessarily interdependent.
Styron had stumbled upon something more complicated than a New York intellectual getting the goat of a thin-skinned president, although Kennedy was certainly that. In 1961, he had become so exercised over the New York Herald Tribune’s biased reporting that he had canceled the White House subscriptions. After some one-sided articles appeared in Time, he had ordered an aide to compare how the magazine had covered his first year in office with how it had treated Eisenhower’s first year.* He and Ben Bradlee had been friends for almost a decade, but after an August 1962 article in Look quoted Bradlee as saying, “It’s almost impossible to write a story they [the Kennedys] like. Even if a story is quite favorable to their side, they’ll find one paragraph to quibble with,” he refused to speak to him for several months. Making his reaction to negative press articles so puzzling was the fact that in other respects he was a tough-skinned political warrior capable of shrugging off brutal ad hominem attacks. Presidents Johnson and Nixon would also be sensitive about criticism, but they were concerned about its short-term political consequences. Kennedy had his eye on history, and he understood that articles in newspapers like the Herald Tribune were its rough draft and that future historians might weigh the opinions of critics like Kazin.
He had meant his warning to Massachusetts state legislators that “at some future date, the high court of history sits on judgment on each of us,” and he imagined himself surrounded by current and future historians constantly taking his measure, telling Bradlee, “Those bastards, they’re always there with their pencils out.” In Profiles in Courage, he had been the one delivering the verdict, praising eight senators for possessing “the breath-taking talents of the orator, the brilliance of the scholar, the breadth of the man above party and section, and, above all, a deep-seated belief in themselves, their integrity and the rightness of their cause”—all qualities that he was cultivating in himself. By calling his scholarly brilliance a sham, Kazin was threatening what he cared about most: a favorable judgment from history’s high court.
All presidents govern with an eye on history, but not all care equally. If historians ranked presidents by ambition instead of achievement, Kennedy would be near the top of most lists. He was swinging for the fences from his first day in office, determined to be ranked alongside or above Lincoln and FDR. Even joining the pantheon of great presidents was not enough; he wanted to be celebrated as a great man who had shaped his times. For this he looked for inspiration to de Gaulle and Churchill, men who had worked at becoming heroic figures (“making and remaking themselves”) and had proved that greatness can be fashioned from a convergence of willpower and historical circumstance. When the French statesman Jean Monnet told Schlesinger that one of de Gaulle’s most remarkable features was “his precise and persistent concern with the figure he will cut in history,” and that whenever he considered a decision “he wonders how it will look in the history books thirty years from now,” he could have been describing Kennedy.
Jackie knew how much he valued history’s judgment, and her famous post-Dallas “Camelot interview” with the journalist Theodore White was an attempt to preempt the historians. Referring to a journalist who had written some unflattering lines about her husband, she told White, “Men are such a combination of bad and good . . . and what is history going to see in this except what Merriman Smith wrote, that bitter man.” White decided that she had agreed to the interview because she did not want her husband “left to the historians.” After recounting the events in Dallas, she likened his presidency to King Arthur’s mythical Camelot. Most of Kennedy’s knights would dismiss the comparison as the kind of sentimental claptrap he would have hated, but they overlooked the rest of her interview, during which she delivered a passionate exegesis of his love of history. In a stream-of-consciousness monologue, she told White, “But Jack loved history so. But history to me was about Jack. But history made him what he was . . . this lonely sick boy . . . he sat and read history . . . scarlet fever . . . this little boy in bed for so much of the time . . . all the time he was in bed this little boy was reading Marlborough, he devours the Knights of the Round Table . . . history made Jack that way, made him see heroes.” Returning to her memories of Dallas, she punctuated them with “history,�
� the one-word refrain that explained him: “History . . . everybody kept saying to me to put a cold towel around my head . . . my whole face splattered with blood and hair . . . I wiped it off with Kleenex. History.”
Kennedy was not shy about his ambitions. He told Billings that his goal was “greatness.” He advised Sidey to “go for the top. If you aim for second you will end up there,” leading Sidey to conclude that he was gripped by “the romantic conviction that he was astride history.” The diplomat Charles (“Chip”) Bohlen, who had known many of the century’s great leaders, was impressed by Kennedy’s fierce determination to be numbered among them and sensed an “unknown quality” that “gave you infinite hope that somehow or other he was going to change the course of history.”
During a White House dinner on the eve of the Cuban missile crisis, Isaiah Berlin had noticed that whenever Kennedy spoke about Churchill, Stalin, Lenin, and Napoléon, “his eyes shone with a particular glitter, and it was quite clear that he thought in terms of great men and what they were able to do.” When Berlin returned a few weeks later, Kennedy admitted that he had worried that the Bay of Pigs “would always be this fearful stigma which historians would always note.” Berlin decided that he had never known anyone “who listened to every single word that was uttered more attentively,” and his “remorseless attention” reminded him of Lenin, another man who could “exhaust people simply by listening to them.” Like Lenin, Kennedy was “on the job all the time,” Berlin said, and spoke “like a man with a mission or some kind of calling . . . [and] as if there was not much time and great things had to be done.” He decided that his ambition was “terrifying but rather marvelous.”
JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President Page 16
