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

by Thurston Clarke

  “Now tell me why it is you can’t get a Negro policeman around there,” Kennedy snapped. “Seems to me, if you’ve got forty percent of the community that’s Negro . . . I would think you’d be much better with Negro policemen.”

  They blamed civil service regulations, an absence of qualified Negro applicants, and the possibility that a third of the Birmingham police force would resign if they hired a Negro. Frank Newton, a telephone company executive who chaired the moribund biracial committee, blamed outside agitators for his city’s troubles. Five days after a Birmingham policeman had shot a Negro youth in the back, and four months after the photograph of a white policeman turning a German shepherd loose on a Negro teenager had sickened Kennedy, Newton insisted that charges of police brutality were unwarranted, because “in reality, we have a well-trained police force, and they have acted with admirable restraint.”

  “Why isn’t it possible to do something?” Kennedy asked. “It seems to me that there are two or three things that aren’t very difficult to do.” He pointed out that the Washington police force was integrated. Why could Birmingham not do the same? His voice hardening, he added, “It isn’t any use . . . to say to me to get the agitators out . . . because I didn’t put them in—”

  Newton interrupted to say, “If I may give you a straightforward answer, but a respectful answer. There’s people, though, that think you have given these people encouragement—”

  “Let me make it clear that I regard getting on the police force as legitimate, and I regard people working as clerks as legitimate.”

  Newton argued that the public accommodation section of his civil rights bill was certainly not a limited measure.

  Kennedy had had enough. The conference had already run too long. The black delegation from Birmingham had withdrawn its demand for troops and praised him at a press conference. The whites were not only refusing to hire a single black policeman, they were scolding him for encouraging the demonstrations. He seldom spoke at length at meetings like this but now delivered a testy ten-minute monologue about integration. “Oh, public accommodation is nothing. When I think what Harry Truman did in integrating the armed forces—to give you an honest answer and a respectful one—that was really tough,” he said, throwing Newton’s “respectful answer” comment back in his face. “Imagine . . . taking kids out of Mississippi and all the rest, putting them together in a barracks, putting them under a Negro sergeant? They did that fifteen years ago.” Compared with that, permitting Negroes to rent a hotel room was easy, and so was integrating the workplace and universities. The “tough one” was integrating elementary and secondary schools. “I understand Mississippi, where it’s forty-five to fifty percent Negro, where half of them, three quarters, haven’t gone beyond the sixth grade, what it means to try to integrate those schools,” he said, and he could understand “the gut feeling about that,” but not the gut feeling about the police force, clerks, and public accommodation or about whether a student goes to a state university. “Now that’s my feeling about it,” he concluded in a firm voice.

  For another thirty minutes, he pleaded with them to do something that could “give everybody outside of Birmingham and all of us up here and other places, a chance to say, well, now they’re trying.” He begged them to hire a Negro policeman—to do something, even if it was “window dressing.” They refused to budge. At a press conference following the meeting, Hamilton declared that most of Birmingham’s residents, including its Negroes, were “firmly, deeply dedicated to the principle of segregation.”

  • • •

  ONCE KENNEDY HAD APPROVED Attwood’s request to meet with Lechuga, Attwood moved fast. He asked the ABC correspondent Lisa Howard to throw a cocktail party on Monday evening and invite the Cuban diplomat. As Kennedy was briefing Blaik and Royall before their departure for Birmingham, Attwood was huddled with Lechuga at Howard’s Park Avenue apartment, discussing a possible meeting with Castro.

  Howard was a former soap opera actress who had become a correspondent for the Mutual Radio Network and had scored an interview with Nikita Khrushchev during his 1960 visit to the United States. In April 1963, she had held the first television interview with Fidel Castro in four years. Upon her return, she informed the CIA that during their eight hours of private talks Castro had stressed that he wanted negotiations with the United States and was ready to discuss the Soviet military presence in Cuba, compensation for expropriated American investments, and the question of Communist subversion in the hemisphere. She urged that a U.S. official be sent on a quiet mission to Havana to hear him out. Deputy Director Richard Helms wrote in a memorandum based on their conversation, “It appears that Fidel Castro is looking for a way to reach a rapprochement with the United States government, probably because he is aware that Cuba is in a state of economic chaos.” He added that Howard believed that “Castro’s inner circle was split on the idea of a rapprochement with the U.S. with hardliners like Che Guevara and Raoul Castro opposing it.” Helms thought it was encouraging that Castro had asked Howard for an appraisal of Khrushchev. She had told Castro he was a shrewd politician who would dispose of him when he was no longer needed. Upon hearing this, Castro had nodded his head “as if in skeptical agreement.”

  The New York attorney James Donovan had also developed a relationship with Castro while negotiating to secure the release of Cuban exiles captured at the Bay of Pigs. In January 1963, he returned to Cuba to arrange the release of several imprisoned U.S. citizens. During what he called a “most cordial and intimate conversation” with Castro and his trusted aide and interpreter, the Boston-trained physician Dr. Rene Vallejo, Castro had invited him to return to Cuba with his wife for another visit, and had given Donovan the impression that he wanted to discuss “the future of Cuba and international relations in general.” While accompanying Donovan to the airport, Vallejo raised the subject of reestablishing diplomatic relations.

  When Kennedy heard about Donovan’s experiences, he told Gordon Chase, the National Security Council aide responsible for Latin America, that they should “start thinking along more flexible lines,” and not insist that Castro make a clean break with Moscow as a precondition for talks. He recommended that Donovan postpone what he called “his week-long walk along the beach with Castro” until they could debrief him. After that, he said, he might want to give Donovan “some flies to dangle in front of Castro.” Chase concluded his memorandum of their conversation: “The above must be kept close to the vest. The President, himself, is very interested in this one.”

  Donovan returned in April and had two long conversations with Castro. Vallejo claimed that although Castro wanted to develop a relationship with the United States, other officials in his government were opposed and Castro feared they might rebel. But Castro still believed he and Donovan could negotiate a “reasonable relationship” between their nations. After being briefed about these conversations, Kennedy expressed more interest in pursuing a demarche with Cuba, discussing it with the CIA director, John McCone, five days later. McCone suggested two courses of action: engaging Castro in negotiations “with the objective of disenchanting him with his Soviet relations, causing him to break relations with Khrushchev,” or continuing their current policy of supporting hit-and-run sabotage raids by Cuban exiles—of exerting “constant pressure of every possible nature on Khrushchev to force his withdrawal from Cuba, and then to bring about the downfall of Castro by means which could be developed after the removal of the Soviet troops.” Kennedy decided to keep the Donovan channel open and pursue both strategies at once.

  This remained his policy when Attwood met with Lechuga at Lisa Howard’s cocktail party on September 23. After Attwood described his 1959 conversations with Castro, Lechuga suggested that Castro might be ready to talk again, particularly with someone he knew and trusted, and said there was a good chance that Castro would invite him to Havana. Attwood explained that since he was a diplomat instead of a journalist he would need offi
cial authorization, and promised to contact him when he had an answer. The next day, Bobby told Attwood he was concerned that he might be identified if he visited Cuba. He proposed holding the meeting in Mexico or at the United Nations instead and encouraged him to continue the conversation. Three days later, Attwood ran into Lechuga at the UN, relayed Bobby’s comments, and said that if Castro or his personal emissary had something to tell the president, they could meet somewhere outside Cuba.

  Tuesday, September 24–Monday, September 30

  THE WESTERN TOUR

  Despite his New Frontier rhetoric, Kennedy preferred oceans to mountains, golf courses to prairies, sailing to hunting, and swimming to fishing. He was the most widely traveled man to become president but had probably crossed the Atlantic more than the Continental Divide, and was more comfortable in Europe than in the American West. The West was also tricky for him because local dignitaries invariably presented him with cowboy hats or Indian war bonnets, and he disliked wearing anything on his head, particularly something making him appear ridiculous. When a delegation of Indian chiefs in Idaho gave him a feathered war bonnet during a campaign stop, he had finessed the situation by joking, “The next time I watch television, I’m going to root for our side,” but he was certain to face more headdresses and cowboy hats on his Western conservation tour.

  No one on his staff or in the press corps believed he was motivated by a love for the region or an interest in ecology; everyone understood that this “nonpolitical” trip was entirely political, his first campaign foray of the 1964 election. Before leaving, he had armed himself against a skeptical press corps that was mocking him as “Johnny Appleseed” and “Paul Bunyan” with a repertoire of self-deprecating jokes such as “Mr. Chairman, my fellow nonpartisans,” and “It is obvious that this is a nonpartisan trip—I’m not going to a single state I carried.” But he was serious about drawing large and enthusiastic crowds, and told Jerry Bruno, who was advancing the trip, “I want the crowds—I want those crowds to be there!”

  The day before he left for the West, the Senate ratified the Limited Test Ban Treaty by a vote of eighty to nineteen, a larger margin than had been anticipated and one making it easier for him to pursue more agreements with Moscow. When he embarked on the tour, the NBC correspondent Sander Vanocur thought he seemed happier than he had in months, and the test ban victory was undoubtedly a factor.

  He stopped in Milford, Pennsylvania, to speak at a ceremony honoring the descendants of Gifford Pinchot, Jr., the first head of the United States Forest Service. They had donated Grey Towers, their family’s chateau-style mansion, to the Forest Service as a training center, and he had added the ceremony to his schedule because it fit with the conservation theme and Pinchot had been the uncle of his lover Mary Meyer and her sister, Tony, Ben Bradlee’s wife, and he was curious to see where they had spent their childhood summers. Both women joined him on the flight to Milford. It was the first time he had seen Mary since Patrick’s death, and Tony admitted to feeling a “little rivalry” with her sister.

  He delivered a plodding speech to ten thousand spectators filling a hillside facing Grey Towers. While speaking of his administration’s creation of three National Seashores, he said, “I don’t know why it should be that six or seven percent only of the whole Atlantic Coast should be in the public sphere and the rest owned by private citizens and denied to many millions of our public citizens.” The fact that much of the remaining 93 percent of coastline was in the hands of old-money families like the Pinchots, and new-money ones like the Kennedys, somewhat undermined the nobility of his statement. After finishing, he turned to Mary and Tony’s mother, Ruth Pinchot, and asked to see her house, a summer bungalow near the estate. Forest Service officials had spent weeks preparing to bore him with a lengthy tour of Grey Towers and were crestfallen when he raced through the mansion to leave time for visiting Ruth’s modest cottage. The New Deal had made Pinchot a fierce right-winger, but he turned on the charm and she showed him what he had come to see, photographs of her attractive daughters as little girls. She told friends that she had atoned for welcoming the devil into her house by doubling her contributions to conservative causes.

  He flew on to Ashland, Wisconsin, where he made a lame joke about Calvin Coolidge, and then to the University of Minnesota Field House in Duluth, where he gave a speech that Vanocur called “dreadful” and “one of the worst reporters could remember.” Even Bradlee’s magazine was critical, with Newsweek reporting, “The message that he brought to the people made heavy listening and the President’s obvious unfamiliarity with the subject was uncomfortable.” A large crowd turned out the next morning at the Grand Forks airport, pushing down an airport fence to get at him. But at the University of North Dakota Field House he droned on about conservation, a funereal atmosphere descended on the audience, and reporters ranked his speech the worst of his presidency. Jerry Bruno had turned out the crowds, but even he was disappointed by their lack of enthusiasm, calling them “unresponsive and restless.” The president would try different themes, he said, “but the sense of emotional attachment just wasn’t there.”

  There was something petulant about his performances, as if he were a sulky child being forced to visit some distant and tiresome relations. Not only did conservation and natural resources bore him, but he had left Washington during a busy and momentous week. The House was voting on his tax cut, liberals on a House Judiciary subcommittee were adding tough provisions to his civil rights bill, a dialogue with Castro suddenly seemed possible, two important fact-finding missions were heading to Birmingham and Saigon, and a delegation of American grain traders was meeting with its Soviet counterpart in Canada to discuss a sale of American wheat, a deal that would require his approval and was certain to be controversial. He had once said that he wanted to be president because the White House was “the center of action.” This week, when the action in Washington was frenetic, he was thousands of miles away, lecturing restless audiences in states that would probably go Republican anyway. He was also missing Caroline’s first day back at school, and while he was in Grand Forks, she and her classmates rode the Goodyear blimp, an excursion that had almost been canceled after a sniper fired .22-caliber bullets into the aircraft. When the excursion ended, Jackie told a Goodyear representative that her son was “just crazy about planes” and would probably become a pilot.

  • • •

  KENNEDY ARRIVED IN BILLINGS, MONTANA, on a Big Sky day of brilliant sunshine, low humidity, and razor-sharp shadows. Seven thousand people in a city of fifty-three thousand had packed the Yellowstone County Fairgrounds grandstands. More milled around the parking lot, kicking up dust and passing a girl head over head so she could shake his hand. He thanked Senator Mansfield for introducing him by praising “his high standards of public service” and his role in ratifying the test ban treaty. Until now, he had avoided talking about the treaty on the assumption it would be unpopular in these Goldwater strongholds. But when he said that the treaty would “bring an end, we hope, for all time to the dangers of radioactive fallout,” and represented “a first step towards peace, and our hope for a more secure world,” there were loud cheers and applause, and the reporter Peter Lisagor noticed a look of total surprise on his face.

  He immediately discarded his prepared text and spoke extemporaneously about peace, the treaty, and nuclear war. Suddenly, he was campaigning again, pumping his fist up and down and stabbing the air with his forefinger as he said, “What we hope to do is lessen the chance of a military collision between these two great nuclear powers which together have the power to kill three hundred million people in the short space of a day.” When he described his treaty as “a chance to avoid being burned,” the cheers and applause grew even louder. Vanocur called the speech “an exercise in political discovery,” saying that if he had won reelection reporters would have called it the moment when he discovered a winning strategy.

  Throughout his career Kennedy had demonstrated a
talent for recognizing and profiting from revelatory moments like this one. During his 1946 congressional campaign he had slogged through a banal speech about patriotism and the sacrifices of war to an audience of Gold Star Mothers. Sensing their disappointment, he abandoned his text and said, “Well, I think I know how you ladies feel. My mother, too, lost a son in the war.” The women wept and rushed to the podium to grab his hand and hug him. Powers thought it was the moment he won the election. It was also, like his speech at Billings, a textbook example of Walt Rostow’s observation “A politician is a communicating instrument both ways. He receives and sends communications, words, images, actions. Kennedy was awfully good at it.”

  While running for president, Kennedy would read placards, study expressions, and often replace a prepared speech with an extemporaneous one that he believed would resonate with a particular audience. The students listening to him speak on the steps of the University of Michigan Student Union during the 1960 campaign were so boisterous and enthusiastic that he abandoned his speech and shouted, “How many of you who are going to be doctors are willing to spend your days in Ghana? . . . How many of you are willing to work in the Foreign Service and spend your lives traveling around the world? . . . On your willingness to contribute part of your life to this country I think will depend the answer of whether a free society can compete.” His aide Richard Goodwin, who saw the performance, believed that he had “inadvertently, intuitively . . . tapped into a still-emerging spirit of the times.” After witnessing similar moments, Eleanor Roosevelt told Schlesinger that he reminded her of her husband because both seemed to gain strength in the course of their campaigns. Great leaders drew vitality and strength from their crowds, she said, and Kennedy was the first man she had seen since FDR to have that quality.