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

by Thurston Clarke

  His terrifying ambition to be judged a great man was an obsession that, with the possible exception of sex, trumped all else. He ran for Congress and the presidency at a young age, and fussed about his health so much because he feared dying before he could leave his mark on history. When he discovered that Bradlee had been keeping a diary, he made him promise not to publish anything without his permission until five years after the end of his administration, to prevent him scooping his own memoirs. He made Arthur Schlesinger a special assistant because he had written acclaimed books about Andrew Jackson and FDR, and he hoped he would write a more sympathetic account of his presidency if he co-opted him.* He kept a watchful eye on Schlesinger, and after he appeared to be claiming in a newspaper article that he was responsible for giving him crucial advice during the Cuban missile crisis, he swore and told Fay, “Look at that damn interview. Schlesinger sounding off that it was his advice that got the President to change his position he previously held and accept Artie’s advice. I’ll tell you what Artie can advise on. He can devote all his mental capacity to advising Jackie on the historical significance of the furniture she puts in the White House.” It was another idle threat.

  His ambition explained why he had read a compendium of presidential wisdom, Sayings of Great Presidents, the day after he won the election; kept the current issue of History Today on his night table; and pressed historians to explain what made a president great. When he heard that the Princeton historian and Abraham Lincoln expert David Herbert Donald was scheduled to speak at Bobby’s house, he moved the event to the White House and asked Donald: Where would he rank various presidents? What separated a great president from a mediocre one? How did a president acquire greatness? And what about Lincoln? Would he have been regarded as a great president if he hadn’t been assassinated? He argued that Lincoln’s assassination had saved him from the problem of Reconstruction, and Donald agreed that Lincoln may have been lucky in his reputation to die when he did. Donald left a private meeting with him unimpressed by his understanding of American history but fascinated by his determination to become a great man, writing a friend, “This is a man determined to go down in our history books as a great President, and he wants to know the secret.”

  Every month brought another hundred-year anniversary of a crucial Civil War battle or Lincoln milestone, making it impossible for him not to keep a competitive eye on Lincoln. He asked Sorensen to study the Gettysburg Address and determine its “secret” before writing a first draft of his inaugural address. He invited the poet and Lincoln scholar Carl Sandburg to the White House for a private tutorial, and must have been pleased when Sandberg said, “There has never been a more formidable set of historical conditions for a president to face since Lincoln.”

  He made Churchill his template, borrowing or emulating his phrases and constructions. He titled his first book Why England Slept, an homage to Churchill’s While England Slept. Churchill had opened his 1922 study of world leaders, Great Contemporaries, “Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities.” He opened Profiles in Courage, “This is a book about the most admirable of human virtues—courage.” Kay Halle never forgot visiting him in a hospital room when he was twelve to see him hidden behind stacks of books, immersed in Churchill’s The World Crisis. When he was a young congressman, his legislative aide Mark Dalton found him sitting up in bed in Hyannis Port, reading one of Churchill’s early books. “Just listen to this,” he said in an excited voice. “This is one of the most interesting things I have ever read.” Referring to a leader in the Middle Ages who had to make a fateful decision, Churchill had written, “At that moment, all history stood still.” After repeating the passage out loud, he asked Dalton, “Did you ever read anything like that in your life?”

  While he was in Florida in 1955, recovering from a risky operation that had not only failed to alleviate his chronic back condition but had almost killed him, he had spent hours rereading Churchill’s books, copying and memorizing passages. He was channeling Churchill when he told an audience at the National Press Club that America needed a president “who is willing and able to summon his national constituency to its finest hour.” The call in his inaugural address for the United States and Soviet Union to renew the search for peace “before the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science engulf us all in ruin” was a wordier version of Churchill’s warning about a world “made darker by the dark lights of perverted science.” His summons to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend” replicated the cadences of “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields.” His warning to the newly independent nations of Asia and Africa that “in the past, those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside” was an homage to Churchill’s remark that “dictators ride to and fro upon tigers which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.”

  He opened a 1961 speech to a gathering of historians in Washington by quoting Churchill’s statement that history would judge his role in World War II favorably because he intended to write it. Behind his decision to tape certain White House meetings lay his determination to write the definitive account of his administration. He was selective about what he recorded, choosing meetings and conversations that promised to be historically significant. The tapes would give him a huge advantage over Schlesinger and other historians, and because he was the only one in the room who knew a meeting was being recorded, he could also engage in some historical stage-managing.*

  Because he viewed history as a competitive enterprise, Kennedy approached the task of becoming a great president with the same spirit that he and his siblings had brought to swimming contests, sailboat races, and touch football. When Bradlee and Cannon asked during their 1960 interview if he had a lot of “super competitive” spirit, he replied, “I think I do have a lot of it. I don’t know if it is out of my family or what it is,” and praised ambition as “what moves the world.” He was concerned about being compared with FDR, once telling Schlesinger, who had praised FDR effusively in his New Deal trilogy, “That’s the trouble, Arthur, with all you historians! That’s what you did to Roosevelt and his crowd. You made all those New Dealers seven feet tall. They weren’t that good. They were just a bunch of guys like us.”

  He understood that presidents are always compared closely with their predecessors and was fascinated by how historians were already judging Eisenhower. In the summer of 1962, the Sunday New York Times Magazine carried a long article by Schlesinger’s father reporting on how seventy-five distinguished historians had ranked the presidents. The article included a photograph of Kennedy, hunched over a table with his back to the camera, captioned, “President Kennedy in his White House office—How will he be rated by historians.” The article was encouraging. The historians had picked Lincoln, Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Wilson, and Jefferson as the five greats, in that order. Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., summarized the eight crucial qualities of a great president this way: (1) “Each held stage at a critical moment in American history and by timely action attained timeless results.” (2) “Each took the side of liberalism and the general welfare against the status quo.” (3) “[Each] acted masterfully and farsightedly in foreign affairs. All cared profoundly about keeping the country out of war.” (4) They were “not only constructive statesmen but realistic politicians.” (5) [Each] “left the Executive Branch stronger and more influential than he found it.” (6) They “offended vested economic interests and long-standing popular prejudices.” (7) They “were more deeply loved than they were hated. The rank and file of Americans re-elected every one of them to a second term.” (8) They “possessed a profound sense of history. . . . Essential as it was to win approval at the polls, they looked as well to the regard of posterity.”

  Kennedy possessed all eight qualities. He prided himself on being a realistic politician, and had offended “vested economic interests” during his hand
ling of the 1962 steel crisis. He had a “profound sense of history,” was “loved more than he was hated,” and was governing during a “critical moment” in the cold war and struggle for civil rights. He had kept the country out of war during the missile crisis, taken the side of liberalism as opposed to the status quo of the Eisenhower years, and made the Executive Branch more influential and powerful. Judged by these criteria, he needed only to win reelection and attain “timeless results” by ending the cold war and passing his civil rights bill.

  He told Schlesinger that he was surprised his father had ranked Woodrow Wilson so high, ahead of Truman and Polk, but delighted that Eisenhower was twenty-second out of thirty-four.* “At first I thought it was too bad that Ike was in Europe and would miss the article,” he said, “but then I decided that some conscientious friend in the United States would probably send him a copy.” After Eisenhower criticized him for his handling of the Cuban missile crisis he speculated that the historians’ poll was behind his attacks. “For years Eisenhower has gone along, basking in the glow of the applause which he has always had,” he told Schlesinger. “Then he saw that poll and realized how he stood before the cold eye of history—way below Truman; even below Hoover. That is what is eating him now. He hates me because I am his successor; but his real quarrel is [with] what he now fears may be the judgment of history. That is why he is going around the country trying to defend his administration and to blacken us.”

  During a 1960 campaign stop in Philadelphia he had proclaimed that when historians assessed the next decade he wanted them to cry out, “These were the great years of the American life, the nineteen sixties. Give me those years!” He had taken office at a time when America was prosperous, the civil rights movement in its infancy, and his biggest campaign issue, a supposed “missile gap” between the United States and the Soviet Union, was a fallacy, leaving him a prospective great man in search of great challenges. The Cuban missile crisis finally provided his Churchillian moment—“when all history stood still”—and convinced him that in the atomic age, great men avoided war rather than leading their nations into it. The Birmingham demonstrations gave him his great domestic cause, and by Labor Day his “romantic conviction” that he was astride history and that historians might someday cry, “These were the great years of the American Republic!” seemed within grasp.

  After lunch, he handed Styron an expensive Havana cigar encased in a silver tube. (Before ordering a ban on Cuban imports he had told Pierre Salinger to cruise through Washington and buy up every top-grade Cuban cigar.) As he put it in his pocket, Styron thought of Castro and decided, “Of all the world’s leaders, the Harvard man and the Marxist from Havana were temperamentally and intellectually most alike.”

  Styron had heard that Kennedy hated being bored, so he offered only the briefest summary of his work-in-progress, a novel about the Nat Turner slave revolt in Virginia. But Kennedy was fascinated and pressed him for details, mounting what Styron called a “bright and persistent interrogation.”

  As they steamed into harbor at Martha’s Vineyard, Kennedy noticed that they were heading straight for the Edgartown Yacht Club. He quickly ordered his captain to reverse engines and steer away from that WASP bastion to the public pier, “My God! They’d have my hide if they learned I’d just barged in there without permission,” he said. Running a hand through his hair, he added, “I’ll bet there’s not a Democrat within five miles of here.”

  Monday, September 2

  CAPE COD

  The fifteen-minute television news broadcasts were Radio Age relics. By 1963, network executives had decided that a medium that broadcast both images and words needed more time and therefore expanded the evening news to thirty minutes. To inaugurate the longer format, CBS sent its anchorman Walter Cronkite to Cape Cod to interview the president on Labor Day. He was checking into a motel the night before when another journalist alerted him to an AP story predicting that Kennedy was planning to make “a major statement on Vietnam” during their interview. Cronkite was furious that the president was intending, as he put it, “to plant a statement to suit his purposes”—an odd complaint considering that CBS was using him to launch its new program. He lit into Pierre Salinger in the motel bar, threatening not to pose a single question about Vietnam. Salinger spent the rest of the evening and their ride to Squaw Island the next morning trying to change his mind, arguing that if he failed to raise the subject, the president would make his statement to another journalist and Cronkite would look stupid for missing the scoop.

  Cronkite was still smarting from two acrimonious encounters with Kennedy during the campaign. On the eve of the Wisconsin primary he had angered Kennedy by raising the issue of his religion. Kennedy complained to CBS’s president, Frank Stanton, pointedly reminding him that as president, he would be naming members of the Federal Communications Commission. After the conventions, Cronkite had conducted a half-hour interview with each candidate. He did Nixon first, then Kennedy at his home in Georgetown. He asked both the same concluding question: “What single quality do you think will be the most important that you take into the White House?” Nixon gave a smooth reply. Kennedy responded with an incoherent statement (much like the one his brother Ted would give to the CBS correspondent Roger Mudd in 1980), saying, “Well, I think it’s . . . well, I think you would find probably . . . well, I think you’d probably find my sense of history. It’s my sense of history. I have a sense of history.” Realizing he had blown it, he asked to do a second interview. Cronkite refused on the grounds that Nixon had not been offered a similar deal. When he persisted, Cronkite threatened to announce on air that he had redone his interview. He claimed not to care, and Cronkite capitulated. As Cronkite was walking to the door he told Kennedy, “I think this is the lousiest bit of sportsmanship I’ve ever seen in my life.” Shamed by this accusation, Kennedy shouted, “Wait a minute! Wait a minute! Go ahead and use it.”

  Cronkite held the Labor Day interview on the lawn outside Brambletyde. Once he had settled into a wicker chair facing the president, he changed his mind, reasoning that since the interview would be edited for time he might as well let Kennedy make his statement. He began by asking about the economy. Kennedy acknowledged that the current unemployment rate of 5.5 percent was too high, but said it would drop if Congress passed his tax cut. Asked if he would probably lose most of the South, he replied, “I am not sure that I am the most popular political figure in the country today in the South.”

  When Cronkite finally mentioned Vietnam, he delivered a response calculated to increase the pressure on Diem and prepare Americans for the possibility that the war might be unwinnable. “I don’t think that unless a greater effort is made by the government to win popular support that the war can be won out there,” he said. “In the final analysis, it is their war. They are the ones who have to win or lose it. We can help them, we can give them equipment, we can send our men out there as advisors, but they have to win it. . . . We are prepared to continue to assist them, but I don’t think the war can be won unless the people support the effort and, in my opinion, in the last two months, the government has gotten out of touch with the people.”

  He called Diem’s repression of the Buddhists “very unwise,” and when Cronkite asked if he thought Diem’s government could regain the support of the people, he said, “With changes in policy and perhaps in personnel [i.e., Nhu], I think it can. If it doesn’t make those changes, I would think that the chances of winning it [the war] would not be very good.”

  “Hasn’t every indication from Saigon been that Diem has no intention of changing his pattern?” Cronkite asked.

  “Our best judgment is that he can’t be successful on this basis. We hope that he comes to see that, but in the final analysis it is the people and the government itself who have to win and lose this struggle. All we can do is help, and we are making it very clear, but I don’t agree with those who say we should withdraw. That would be a great mistake.”
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  It is inconceivable that Kennedy’s major statement on Vietnam was that the United States would not withdraw. Instead, the news dominating front pages the next day would be his warning that Diem would lose the war if he continued repressing the Buddhist majority and keeping his brother in the government. His pledge not to withdraw was hard to square with the rest of the interview. James Reston pointed out the contradiction in the New York Times, writing, “He both threatened and reassured Diem. He said: Change or we’ll string along with you anyway.” The two statements made no logical sense because his remark about not withdrawing was a smokescreen meant to conceal his real agenda and to avoid being “damned everywhere as a Communist appeaser.” It contradicted what he had told Mansfield, Hilsman, Harriman, O’Donnell, and others, and what he would soon announce: the withdrawal of a thousand U.S. advisers. Like his statement that he did not suffer from Addison’s disease, it was simply not true.

  He closed the interview by vehemently denying Cronkite’s assertion that he had sent Lodge to Saigon to keep the conflict from becoming a partisan issue in 1964. Speaking of Lodge, he said, “If he were as careful as some politicians are, of course, he would not have wanted to go there. He would have maybe liked to have some safe job, but he is energetic and has strong feelings about the United States and, surprising as it seems, he put this ahead of his political career. Sometimes politicians do those things, Walter.”