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

by Thurston Clarke

  Sorensen believed that “no single accomplishment in the White House” gave Kennedy “greater satisfaction” than the ratification of the test ban treaty. According to O’Donnell, the ceremony provided him with “the deepest satisfaction of his three years at the White House” because he believed that the treaty made it less likely that millions of innocent children would perish in a nuclear war. As he and Bobby spoke in his bedroom during the Berlin crisis, when the two powers appeared close to a nuclear exchange, his eyes had teared up and he had said, “It doesn’t matter about you and me and the adults so much, Bobby. We’ve lived some good years. What is so horrible is to think of the children who have never had a chance who would be killed in such a war.” On October 20, 1962, just before announcing a naval blockade of Cuba that might provoke the Soviets into mounting a surprise nuclear attack, he had summoned Jackie and the children back from the Virginia countryside so they could spend what might be their final days together, and be close to the White House shelter in case they had only a few minutes’ warning. While swimming with Dave Powers that evening he said, “Dave, if we were only thinking of ourselves, it would be easy, but I keep thinking about the children whose lives would be wiped out.” On Saturday, October 27, the most perilous day of the crisis, he told his mistress Mimi Beardsley, “I’d rather my children be red than dead.” Making the fate of his children weigh on him even more heavily was his suspicion that the Soviets had sent the parts for a nuclear bomb in diplomatic pouches and assembled them on the top floor of their Washington embassy. When he sensed that the reporter Hugh Sidey was skeptical, he said in a stern voice, “That’s what they tell me. Do you know something that I don’t?”

  The signing ceremony was also satisfying because he considered the test ban treaty a first step toward his goal of settling the cold war during his second term. Others shared his optimism. After conferring with him in early October, the British foreign secretary, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, had told reporters, “We have begun the process of reaching a détente with the Soviet Union,” and suggested in an address to the General Assembly that the world was witnessing “the beginning of the end of the cold war.” Since 1947, the editors of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists had displayed a doomsday clock on their cover, showing how near the world was to the midnight of a nuclear war. They started their clock at seven minutes to midnight and reset it three times between 1947 and 1963. It fell to a low of two minutes to midnight in 1953 when the United States and the Soviet Union tested atomic weapons within a nine-month period. After Congress ratified the test ban treaty, the editors pushed the minute hand back to 11:48 p.m., the furthest it had yet been from midnight.

  Kennedy had written to a friend in 1954, “I firmly believe that as much as I was shaped by anything, so was I shaped by the hand of fate moving in World War II. . . . The war made us. It was and is our greatest single moment. The memory of the war is a key to our characters.” It was also the key to understanding why the test ban treaty meant so much to him.

  Following his rescue after the sinking of PT 109, he had been given command of PT 95, a torpedo boat converted into an unwieldy gunboat. Despite its slow speed he drove it close to shore to attack Japanese positions and barges, coming under heavy fire while rescuing a detachment of marines who had made a diversionary raid on Choiseul Island. He witnessed the deaths of several wounded men, one of whom died in his bunk, and would later cite Choiseul as an example of how “men tend to like the idea of war until they have tasted it.” Before the marines landed they had been raring to go, he said, but after they had been behind enemy lines, their appetite for combat had “somewhat diminished.”

  His letters from the Pacific reflected a growing cynicism with the top brass, armchair patriots, and war in general. His remark in one letter that “all war is stupid” appeared in different guises in others. He told a Navy friend, “War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today,” and told his lover Ingrid Arvad, “This war here is a dirty business. It’s very easy to talk about the war and beating the Japs if it takes years and millions of men, but anyone who talks like that should consider well his words.” After complaining about those who made “thousands of casualties sound like drops in the bucket,” he added, “But if those thousands want to live as much as the ten [surviving crewmen of PT 109] that I saw, the people deciding the whys and wherefores had better make mighty sure that all this effort is headed for some definite goal, and that when we reach that goal we may say it was worth it.” In a letter to his family, he displayed a suspicion and distrust of senior officers that would later influence his interactions with the Joint Chiefs. Describing the inspection of his unit by Admiral Halsey, he wrote, “He said we were a ‘fine looking crowd,’ which was obviously a lie—and said it was ‘a privilege for us to be where we are’—which made me edge away from him in case God hit him with lightning.”

  After coming home on medical leave, he and Chuck Spalding went to a restaurant in Palm Beach where the roof could be retracted on balmy nights so patrons could dine under the stars. For an entire hour he sat in silence, an anguished expression on his face. Spalding imagined him pondering “the terrific discrepancy between people at home dressed in white jackets and bow ties, looking like asses and . . . thinking of the nonsense of people being killed, somebody having his leg blown off.”

  He told a friend that his brother’s death had “savaged” his family and “sucked all the oxygen out of our comfortable and smug assumptions.” As a result, he said, “We sons and daughters no longer have that easy, witless, untested, and meaningless confidence on which we’d been weaned before the war,” and finally understood “that there is nothing inevitable about us. And that’s a healthy thing to know.”

  In the spring of 1945, he reported for the Hearst newspapers on the United Nations conference in San Francisco, writing in one dispatch, “The world organization that will come out of San Francisco will be the product of the same passion and selfishness that produced the Treaty of Versailles.” The only possible “ray of shining light,” he said, was “the realization, felt by all the delegates, that humanity cannot afford another war.” He urged veterans and servicemen to take an interest in the conference, because “any man who has risked his life for his country and seen his friends killed around him must invariably wonder why this has happened to him and most important what good it will do. . . . It is not surprising that they should question the worth of the sacrifice and feel somewhat betrayed.”

  Fifteen years later, he told Sidey that if he became president, war with all its “modern horror” would be his biggest concern if he got to the White House. When his postwar diary was published in 1995, Sidey wrote in an introduction, “If I had to single out one element in Kennedy’s life that more than anything influenced his later leadership it would be a horror of war, and the even worse prospects in the nuclear age. . . . It ran even deeper than his considerable public rhetoric on the issue.”

  Kennedy was not a pacifist. But his experiences in the Pacific, his fear of a nuclear war, and his sensitivity to the suffering that modern warfare inflicted on noncombatants, particularly children, all pushed him in that direction. His closest advisers suspected this, particularly those who clashed with him over using military force in Laos, Vietnam, Berlin, and Cuba. McGeorge Bundy was not entirely joking when he told his assistant Marcus Raskin, “You know, there are only two pacifists here in the White House, you and Kennedy.”

  • • •

  FIVE HOURS AFTER a ceremony marking Kennedy’s greatest foreign policy triumph since the Cuban missile crisis, an event occurred that threatened to end his presidency in impeachment and disgrace. After a four double-martini lunch at his Quorum Club, Bobby Baker stumbled into Senator Mansfield’s office and resigned as secretary to the Senate majority leader, hoping to halt a threatened Senate investigation into his murky business affairs. In fact, Baker had trad
ed so many favors and involved himself in the public and personal lives of so many legislators it was only surprising that he had not been forced to explain himself sooner. His current problems stemmed from a lawsuit filed in federal court in early September by the Central Vending Corporation that accused him of accepting a $5,600 fee to place its machines into the plants of a major defense contractor, then double-crossing the company by pushing the machines of a rival company in which he had a financial interest. The lawsuit made a Senate investigation inevitable and prompted Mansfield to summon him to a meeting in Everett Dirksen’s office at 3:00 p.m. on Monday. Also attending would be Senator John Williams, the Delaware Republican instrumental in bringing down President Eisenhower’s chief of staff Sherman Adams for an influence-peddling scheme similar to Capital Vending.

  Baker had raged against his fate during his boozy lunch, telling his companions, “My boss has abandoned me. The goddamn press is having a field day at my expense. There are so many people involved that if this thing keeps going it’ll drag them down. . . . I’m gonna resign. Fuck Senator Williams.”

  He told Mansfield that quitting was preferable to meeting with Williams and dismissed his suggestion that he take a leave of absence because, as he explained later, “Somehow I got it into my head that should I resign, the entire Bobby Baker episode would magically disappear from the front pages and come to a grinding halt.”

  Three days later, Williams declared that the integrity of the U.S. Senate was at stake and introduced a resolution calling for an investigation. He said he would not repeat the “multitude of rumors” circulating about Baker’s activities, but promised that they would be “fully checked,” a statement guaranteed to unsettle Kennedy as well as Johnson, whose relationship with Baker had been so close that Baker was known as “Little Lyndon.” The president and vice president were among the “many people involved” whom the scandal might drag down, and among the rumors that Williams intended to check were those surrounding the involvement of congressmen and White House officials with Quorum Club party girls such as Ellen Rometsch, and the allegation that Johnson had bought a large life insurance policy from a Maryland agent named Don Reynolds, who had then been required to purchase advertising on a Texas television station controlled by the Johnsons as a kickback.

  After Williams announced his investigation, Baker received solicitous calls from Lady Bird Johnson and Bobby Kennedy, both obviously speaking as surrogates. Lady Bird said, “Bobby, Lyndon and I just want you to know we love you. You are like a member of the family and we are so grateful for all you’ve done for us. Our prayers are with you.” Baker pictured Johnson at her side, “petrified that he’d be dragged down.” Bobby Kennedy told Baker, “Bobby, my brother is fond of you and remembers your many kindnesses. I want you to know that we [the Justice Department] have nothing of any consequence about you in our files. . . . My brother and I extend our sympathies to you. I know you’ll come through this.”

  Tuesday, October 8–Sunday, October 13

  WASHINGTON AND CAMP DAVID

  Kennedy brought John along to his pre-press-conference breakfast briefing on Wednesday morning. The boy went around the table shaking hands before climbing onto a chair being left vacant for George Ball and refused to leave. When his father opened with his customary “What have we got today?” question, he piped up, “I’ve got a glass of ice water.”

  The previous year, the Look photographer Stanley Tretick had proposed a photographic essay titled “The President and His Son.” Kennedy responded through intermediaries that he liked the idea, but he kept postponing it. Laura Bergquist, who would write the text, thought he was reluctant because John had not yet begun talking, and Jackie considered her and Tretick “journalistic thieves,” intent on sneaking photographs of her children. When Tretick heard about the Onassis cruise he called Lincoln to ask if he could shoot the story while Jackie was away. After Lincoln suggested calling back later, he asked if she meant after October 1. “Well, I didn’t say that,” she replied. “But it might be a good idea.”

  Salinger called Tretick on Tuesday to say he could begin photographing John and the president the next day. When he walked into the Oval Office on Wednesday morning, Kennedy told him, “We’d better get this out of the way pretty quick. Things get kind of sticky when Jackie’s around.” Bergquist was in New York meeting a deadline, but Kennedy insisted she had to witness the shoot to get “the mood of the boy,” forcing Tretick to spend the day sitting outside the Oval Office, waiting for her to arrive.

  Kennedy was in high spirits when he met with Heller to prepare for his press conference. He had already thought up some amusing ripostes and promised “the six o’clock comedy hour.” He had called the conference to announce his decision to approve the sale of surplus U.S. wheat to the Soviet Union. Republicans had denounced the deal, with Nixon calling it “a major foreign policy mistake . . . even more serious than fouling up the Bay of Pigs.” The deal made economic sense, but some of his advisers considered it a grievous political error that would antagonize Poles and other blue-collar ethnics. Johnson told O’Donnell that it was “the worst political mistake” the president had ever made.

  Kennedy opened the press conference by rebutting the most common objections to the wheat deal, pointing out that the grain would be transported in American ships, the nation had a huge wheat surplus, the Soviets would pay cash, the deal would help the U.S. balance of payments, and the nation’s allies were already selling U.S. grain to the Russians anyway. A more revealing argument lay buried in a letter that he sent to Congress in which he called the deal “one more hopeful sign that a peaceful world is both possible and beneficial to us all,” and said that prohibiting it would cause Soviet leaders to conclude that the United States was “either too hostile or too timid to take any further steps toward peace . . . and that the logical course for them to follow is a renewal [emphasis added] of the Cold War.”

  A reporter asked him about Eisenhower’s recent statement that he was unclear about Goldwater’s stand on various issues. “I don’t think Senator Goldwater has been particularly deceptive,” he said. “I think he has made very clear what he’s opposed to. . . . I have gotten the idea. I think President Eisenhower will as time goes by.”

  He danced around the question of whether Goldwater had sewn up the Republican nomination, but made his preference for running against him so obvious that a New York Times headline the next day would read, “President Nudges Goldwater’s Hat—Says He Thinks Senator Can Be G.O.P. Nominee.” His hope that Goldwater would win the nomination was an open secret. “Give me good old Barry,” he had told Fay, adding that then he could campaign without leaving the Oval Office. (He feared Governor Romney of Michigan the most. “No vice whatsoever, no smoking, no drinking,” he said to Fay. “Imagine someone we know going off for twenty-four to forty-eight hours to fast and meditate, awaiting a message from the Lord on whether to run or not to run. Does that sound like one of the old gang?”) He also preferred Goldwater because they had become friends while serving together in the Senate (Goldwater had praised his inaugural address, albeit condescendingly, saying, “God, I’d like to be able to do what that boy did there”), and he anticipated a clean campaign focused on their ideological differences. In fact, he felt so comfortable around Goldwater that when he arrived at the Oval Office for a meeting and found him sitting in his favorite rocking chair, he told him, “Keep your seat, Barry. And you can have this fucking job, too. If you want it.”

  • • •

  WINSTON CHURCHILL’S SON, RANDOLPH, was staying in Washington with Kay Halle. He called Kennedy on Tuesday to report that Prime Minister Macmillan had been rushed to a London hospital for an emergency prostate operation and would be resigning within twenty-four hours. Kennedy invited him to come to the White House with Halle after the press conference, and they arrived just as John was poking his head out of a secret door in the kneehole of the desk as his father said, “I’m a great big
wolf and I’m going to eat you up in one bite!” Caroline walked into the room, her shoulders hunched like a miniature version of her father’s, and he told Halle, “You know, I’ve been taking care of the children because Jackie is away, and I’m having the most marvelous time.”

  He invited Tretick and Bergquist to join them. They came in as John was careening merrily around the room in his pajamas. Bergquist called it “a sight to gladden the eye and camera.”

  “What do you think of him?” Kennedy demanded. Before anyone answered, he asked, “Isn’t he a charge?”

  He struck Tretick as more interested in what they thought of John than in the photographs. Bergquist did not usually warm to small children, but she thought the boy was “an instant beguiler” and “not gorgeous” but “friendly, uninhibited, and unspoiled.” Kennedy grabbed him, pulled up his pajama shirt, and began caressing the bare skin above his fanny, and she sensed a “joyous, funny, mutually fascinated, male-to-male, even sensuous” relationship.

  John wiggled free and disappeared beneath the desk. He threw open the little door, poked his head out, and Tretick, almost faint with joy, took what he predicted would be “a hell of a picture.”

  Churchill was already four sheets to the wind. He asked a steward for a bottle of scotch that Kennedy eyed nervously, fearful it might appear in one of the photographs. To distract Churchill from the bottle, he asked John to tell Churchill a secret. The boy whispered some unintelligible words into Churchill’s ear. Churchill slapped his head and exclaimed, “Oh no! No! No! No! Not that!” Bergquist and Tretick hung around on Thursday and Friday. They were there when John stood outside the Oval Office gaily chanting “G’myko! G’myko!” as the Soviet foreign minister conferred with his father, when he tried on Maxwell Taylor’s gold-braided hat and imitated a chimpanzee, and when he went racing through the West Wing after someone had said he was cute, shouting, “I’m cute! I’m cute!”