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

by Thurston Clarke

  • • •

  AT THE TIME OF THE BIRMINGHAM BOMBING, the civil rights bill had been stalled in the House Judiciary Committee, where liberals led by the chairman, Emmanuel Celler, were threatening to add amendments that would make it unpalatable to moderate Republicans. During a mass meeting in Birmingham on Monday, civil rights leaders had urged the government to send the Army into the city to protect the black community. King had endorsed their request, calling the city “in a state of civil disorder” and accusing Wallace of fomenting “an atmosphere of violence.”

  If Kennedy refused to send troops to Birmingham, he would embolden the House liberals insisting on a tougher civil rights bill, but occupying it with federal troops would smack of a second Reconstruction, leaving its white population still more embittered and hostile. He believed that the only realistic solution was to facilitate communication and accommodation between leaders of the black community and moderate white businessmen and politicians, presuming they existed. To promote this, he decided to send a two-man committee to the city to mediate between the communities. Bobby’s first choice for the assignment had been Earl Blaik, a sixty-six-year-old retired West Point football coach whom he had recruited the previous year to resolve a feud between the NCAA and AAU that was threatening the U.S. Olympic effort. Blaik had persuaded General Douglas MacArthur to join him and they had quickly settled the dispute. Bobby hoped they could perform the same magic in Birmingham, but this time Blaik refused to involve MacArthur on the grounds that the assignment was too taxing for an eighty-year-old man. He suggested General Kenneth Royall, who had supposedly integrated the troops while serving as Truman’s secretary of the Army. Bobby called Royall, who agreed to serve if Blaik joined him. Bobby pressed for an immediate commitment, explaining that the White House wanted to make an announcement within the hour, before the president met with a delegation of black leaders. Had he and his brother been in less of a hurry, they might have discovered that instead of presiding over the integration of the Army, Royall had fought it, telling a congressional committee that he did not believe the armed forces should be turned into “an instrument for social evolution.” The black journalist Simeon Booker, who would soon expose Royall, would also reveal that in Blaik’s eighteen years as head coach at West Point he had never had a single black player on his team. As with Kennedy’s other mistakes, his impatience and his preoccupation with public relations lay behind this one.

  Dr. King opened the White House meeting by declaring that the Negro community in Birmingham was reaching “a breaking point.” He warned that without “a new sense of hope and a sense of protection” there could be “the worst race rioting we’ve ever seen in this country.” Kennedy asked if there was any hope. King said there were “many white people of goodwill,” and agreed that troops could not solve the problem. He suggested that the attorney general visit the city and attempt to open lines of communication.

  Kennedy announced that he had asked Mayor Albert Boutwell to send a delegation to the White House on Monday, and had appointed Royall and Blaik, “two very good men,” as his personal emissaries. If the situation continued to deteriorate despite these measures, he would consider troops. He urged the leaders to consider the larger historical picture. “If you look . . . at any of these struggles over a period across the world, it is a very dangerous effort,” he said. “So everyone just has to keep their nerve.” If they responded with violence, they risked losing the support of whites of goodwill, and once that happened, “we’re pretty much down to a racial struggle.”

  The leaders praised the Blaik-Royall mission at a press conference, with King calling Kennedy’s pledge not to allow the property and rights of Negro citizens to be trampled, “the kind of federal concern needed.”

  Kennedy flew to New York that evening. While he was dining at a friend’s apartment, two men in a station wagon hurled a paint bomb at his parked limousine, spattering it and hitting a Secret Service agent. It was not known if they had been targeting the president. He did not leave the Carlyle for the United Nations until late the following morning, allowing time for him to cross Madison Avenue and spend several minutes in the basement of Klejman’s gallery, staring at the floodlit statue of the handsome Greek athlete.

  He told the UN General Assembly, “Today the clouds have lifted a little so that new rays of hope can break through,” and that although “the long shadows of conflict and crisis envelop us still, we meet today in an atmosphere of rising hope, and at a moment of relative calm.” Speaking of “a pause in the cold war,” he said, “If we can stretch this pause into a new period of cooperation . . . then surely this first small step [the test ban treaty] can be the start of a long and fruitful journey.” He proposed “agreements on measures which prevent war by accident or miscalculation,” “further measures to curb nuclear arms,” and a treaty “to keep weapons of mass destruction out of space.”

  He waited until the end to spring his surprise. “Finally, in a field where the United States and the Soviet Union have a special capacity—in the field of space—there is room for new cooperation, for further joint efforts in the regulation and exploration of space,” he said. “I include among these possibilities a joint expedition to the moon.” After asking, “Why . . . should man’s first flight to the moon be a matter of national competition? Why should the United States and the Soviet Union . . . become involved in immense duplications of research, construction, expenditure?” he proposed sending to the moon “not the representatives of a single nation, but the representatives of all our countries.”

  He concluded on a note of grandiloquent optimism that reprised his American University speech: “I believe the problems of human destiny are not beyond the reach of human beings.” The test ban treaty might not end war, resolve every conflict, or bring freedom to every nation, he admitted, but it could be a lever, “and Archimedes, in explaining the principles of the lever, was said to have declared to his friends, ‘Give me a place where I can stand—and I shall move the world.’ My fellow inhabitants of this planet . . . let us see if we, in our own time, can move the world to a just and lasting peace.”

  The usually dour Soviet foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, was smiling broadly as he stood in the receiving line. When he reached Kennedy he held up the line for several minutes to deliver a personal message from Khrushchev. When a reporter asked if this new spirit of détente would last, he replied, “It must last.”

  Kennedy’s proposal had caught everyone, including most in his own administration, by surprise. A boldface, front-page headline in the New York Times proclaimed, “Kennedy Asks Joint Moon Flight by U.S. and Soviet as Peace Step.” The Washington Post banner headlines said, “Kennedy Urges Joint Moon Trip” and “Air of Optimism About Cold War Marks U.N. Talk.” His proposal was described as “a sudden reversal of the Administration’s position on the ‘space race’” and “the first step toward pulling out of the costly ‘moon race.’” Like his civil rights speech and his American University “Peace Speech,” his UN address had been a closely held secret until he delivered it.

  Before Kennedy left the United Nations, Adlai Stevenson briefed him on a memorandum he had received from William Attwood, a member of his staff who had recently completed a tour as U.S. ambassador to Guinea. Earlier that week the Guinean ambassador to Cuba had informed Attwood that Castro resented being pushed around by the Russians and might be prepared to reach an accommodation with the United States. After hearing similar comments from other African diplomats, Attwood, who during his career as a journalist had held a groundbreaking interview with Castro, wrote Stevenson a memorandum asking for authorization to contact Cuba’s UN delegate, Carlos Lechuga, with a view to determining whether Castro was willing to participate in a secret dialogue.

  Attwood had been two years behind Kennedy at Choate and knew him well enough to craft a memorandum that would catch his attention. He opened by saying that he was proposing “a course of action which, if
successful, could remove the Cuban issue from the 1964 campaign.” Instead of offering Castro a “deal,” he recommended “a discrete inquiry into the possibility of neutralizing Cuba on our terms,” and argued that the present policy of isolating Cuba was leaving America “in the unattractive posture of a big country trying to bully a small country,” and aggravating Castro’s anti-Americanism. Given this, he said, “We have something to gain and nothing to lose by determining whether in fact Castro does want to talk and what concessions he would be prepared to make.” He offered to solicit an invitation from Lechuga and travel to Cuba as a private citizen. His diplomatic rank was high enough to guarantee that his conversations with Castro would be serious, yet he was not so well known that reporters would notice his absence. Their meeting would be “purely exploratory” and the president could decide afterward whether to pursue more formal negotiations. “At the moment,” Attwood wrote, “all I would like is the authority to make contact with Lechuga. We’ll see what happens then.”

  He handed his memorandum to Stevenson on Thursday. Stevenson liked the idea but said, “Unfortunately, the CIA is still in charge of Cuba.” He nevertheless promised to raise it with Kennedy. Averell Harriman, who happened to be at the UN mission at the time, said he was “adventuresome enough” to favor the scheme and suggested running it past Bobby Kennedy because of its political implications. Stevenson briefed the president on it while he was at the UN, and Kennedy approved Attwood’s request to arrange a chance social meeting between himself and Lechuga.

  After a week that had seen Kennedy proposing to end the space race, sending a high-level delegation to South Vietnam, lobbying a skeptical public to support his tax cut, persuading Dr. King not to demand troops in Birmingham, and authorizing secret negotiations with Cuba, he arrived in Newport in a slap-happy mood.

  To mark National Library Week, the White House had just released a list of his twelve favorite books. Ten were nonfiction, and nine of those were biographies, including Margaret Coit’s John C. Calhoun. (Jackie believed he liked biographies because he was “looking for lessons . . . from history.”) The only novels were Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, an early-nineteenth-century work about the ambitious son of a carpenter whose attempt to crash Parisian society resembled Joe Kennedy’s struggle to win the acceptance of Boston, and Ian Fleming’s From Russia with Love, the best of the James Bond novels. Kennedy liked Fleming’s books so much that he was attempting to write his own Bond-style thriller involving a coup d’état masterminded by Vice President Johnson. There are no notes for the book among his personal papers, so he was probably keeping the plot in his head. He called Chuck Spalding periodically to bring him up to date, recounting that in one chapter, “Lyndon has tied up Mrs. Lincoln and Kenny O’Donnell in the White House closet and he’s got a plane to take them away.”

  While cruising on the Honey Fitz on Saturday afternoon he persuaded Paul and Anita Fay to act in a Bond homage that would be filmed by Chief Petty Officer Robert Knudsen. He assigned everyone parts before docking at the private pier in front of Hammersmith Farm, not realizing that the reporters Frank Cormier and Merriman Smith were shadowing the Honey Fitz in a speedboat and watching some of his amateur dramatics through binoculars. Their article reported that Fay had “stretched prone on the long pier . . . clowning with Mr. Kennedy for the benefit of a government photographer.” The president then walked down the pier and “laughingly put his foot on Mr. Fay’s stomach.”

  Jackie persuaded the Secret Service agents to play supporting roles. “We’re making a film about the President’s murder,” she told them, “and we’d like you and the other agents to drive up to the front of the house, then jump out and run toward the door.” The agents agreed and followed in their car as the president and his friends drove up from the pier. When they arrived, she said, “Look desperate, like you heard shots and are concerned that the President might be hurt and you need to respond fast.”

  Luckily for Kennedy, Cormier and Merriman witnessed only his film’s tamer scenes. Knudsen recalled that at one point in the filming Kennedy clutched his chest and fell flat onto the pier. While he was down, Knudsen said, Jackie and her friend Countess Vivian Stokes Crespi had “simply stepped over the President’s body—as if he were not there.” They were followed by Fay, who stumbled and fell on top of the president. At that moment, Kennedy spewed out some red liquid (probably tomato juice) that he had been holding in his mouth. Knudsen shot the scene several times, with Fay taking a turn at playing the corpse, and later wondered if the president had experienced some kind of “premonition.” More likely, the skit reflected his high spirits after a successful week, his love of the Bond thrillers, and a rich but carefully concealed fantasy life, a Walter Mitty streak he revealed only to his closest friends.

  He was so furious with Cormier and Merriman that he stopped addressing Cormier by his first name. Two weeks later, Cormier dined with Salinger and O’Donnell at a lodge in Jackson Hole during Kennedy’s Western tour. Salinger chewed him out for being a “Peeping Tom reporter,” and said that writing about what he had seen in Newport had been “in terrible taste.” Cormier replied, “Well, if it was in terrible taste for me to write about it, it was in terrible taste for the President to do it.” O’Donnell, who seldom criticized the president, said, “I agree with you.”

  Monday, September 23

  WASHINGTON

  Monday was one of the busiest days of Kennedy’s presidency, packed with so many meetings and ceremonies that he ate lunch at three and missed his swim and nap. He began with a morning conference with Taylor and McNamara, who were preparing to depart for Vietnam, and ended with an evening meeting with Blaik and Royall, who were leaving for Birmingham. In between, he chaired the first cabinet meeting since July, conferred with the Italian foreign minister and the Laotian prime minister, met with his new Marine Corps commandant and with officers of the National Rural Electronic Cooperative Association, and held an hour-long conference with a delegation of white civic leaders from Birmingham.

  He had sent McNamara and Taylor a memorandum stating that recent events in Vietnam had “raised serious questions about the present prospects for success against the Viet Cong.” When they met, he stressed that they should not threaten Diem with cuts in aid, but let whatever cutbacks occurred “speak for themselves.” Taylor, who now understood what he wanted, proposed that they “work out a time schedule within which we expect to get this job done and to say plainly to Diem that we were not going to be able to stay beyond such and such a time with such and such forces, and that the war must be won in this time period.” Kennedy suggested that they impress upon Diem “the need for reform and change as a pragmatic necessity and not as a moral judgment.” (A week later, Harriman would tell Arthur Schlesinger over dinner, “The only thing that really counts for us in the world is our moral position. Every time we compromise our moral position, we take a loss.”*)

  A month after Kennedy had worried about his government “coming apart,” the split between the Pentagon and the State Department remained bitter and intractable. At the Pentagon, Krulak and Taylor, and to a lesser extent McNamara, believed Diem had the best chance of defeating the Communists. The State Department faction of Harriman, Ball, Hilsman, and Lodge viewed the Taylor-McNamara mission as a threat, evidence that Kennedy was siding with the Pentagon. Harriman told Forrestal that he and Hilsman believed the mission would be “a disaster,” because it entailed “sending two men opposed to our [the State Department’s] policy.” Hilsman wrote a “Top Secret; Personal and Private” letter to Lodge that he asked Forrestal, who was accompanying Taylor and McNamara, to hand deliver. Hilsman made what he called “four rather personal points.” These included “More and more of the town is coming around to our point of view and that if you in Saigon and we in the Department stick to our guns the rest will also come around”; “No pressures—even a cut-off in aid—will cause Diem and Nhu to make the changes we desire and that what we must wo
rk for is a change in government”; and “You have handled an incredibly difficult task superbly. My very heartiest and most sincere congratulations.”

  • • •

  KENNEDY MET WITH BOBBY and Burke Marshall before seeing the delegation of Birmingham’s white leaders. Marshall reported that the leaders had not delivered on their promises to hire black department store clerks and form a biracial committee, leading Kennedy to ask why there were no Negro policemen in the city.

  “They say it would be bad for morale,” Marshall replied.

  “Of the white policemen?” he asked incredulously.

  He wanted to know what he should say if the whites blamed outside agitators like Dr. King for stirring up trouble. Marshall said that King had not been in Birmingham since May, and had only returned after the bombing in an effort to calm the situation.

  “What do I want people to do?” he demanded.

  Form a biracial committee, Marshall said. Hire Negro policemen.

  William Hamilton, an aide to Mayor Albert Boutwell, opened the meeting by pleading for “a little bit of calm” and “a little bit of time.” Kennedy despised this kind of stalling tactic. “I’m just interested in . . . what you can do in Birmingham to ease the situation there,” he said.

  Hamilton said Birmingham’s white leadership had already done “a great many things.” Another man blamed “constant agitation” from people “outside the community” for preventing them from making reforms.