Two hours later he walked into Harvard’s Soldiers Field stadium during the early minutes of the Columbia game. Spectators jumped up, pointing and cheering, and the Harvard band played “Hail to the Chief.” His own Harvard football career had been a fiasco. He had reported weighing 150 pounds and was demoted during the season first to the “B” and then to the “C” freshman team. But his enthusiasm for the game had remained undiminished, and he smoked a cigar, waved to a friend’s son as he came off the field, and applauded enthusiastically when a Harvard field goal tied the score. He had decided to attend at the last minute, leaving the Secret Service no time to screen his neighbors in the stadium. He sat between Larry O’Brien and Dave Powers, high on the fifty-yard line and surrounded by Harvard students.
Near the end of the first half he turned to O’Donnell and said, “I want to go to Patrick’s grave, and I want to go there alone, with nobody from the newspapers following me.” He stayed for the halftime show, laughing when the Columbia band performed a spoof about a presidential candidate named “J. Barry Silverwater.” Police blocked the exits from the parking lot to prevent anyone following him to the cemetery. The trip was less spontaneous than it appeared. He had designed Patrick’s headstone, giving Lincoln a sketch and instructing her to have it installed before October 19. He had also brought along a bouquet of yellow chrysanthemums. After standing silently for several minutes at the grave, he said, “Patrick seems so alone here,” and wondered if he would be buried alongside him.
He had several hours before he was due at the All New England Salute Dinner, a fund-raising event at the Commonwealth Armory. While heading back to his hotel he asked his driver to stop at one of his favorite haunts, the Boylston Street Schrafft’s. A waitress cried, “Oh, my God, it’s the President!” and dropped a glass. A teenage soda jerk kept saying, “Look who’s here. . . . Look who’s here.”
He signed menus and napkins, ate a butterscotch sundae, ordered a chocolate frappe to go, and chatted about old times with Thomas Pellegriti, who had driven him during his congressional campaigns and now managed the restaurant. As he began walking down Boylston Street there were shouts of “That’s the President!” accompanied by the bang of fender-benders as drivers took their eyes off the road.
His impromptu walk was another security headache for the Secret Service and Boston police during a day that had already demonstrated how difficult it was to protect a president who was determined to move about freely and spontaneously. At Logan Airport he had walked straight through the honor guard and around the Secret Service to shake hands with mechanics. While being driven to his hotel he had insisted on stopping to greet a group of nuns standing outside their convent. He had slipped out a side entrance of the hotel with a small contingent of Secret Service agents, leaving police and reporters to make a mad dash to the Harvard Stadium, and while riding to the armory that evening he stood in the back of an open car in a dinner jacket, waving at crowds three deep and insisting on traveling so slowly that he arrived twenty minutes late.
He flew to Hyannis Port by helicopter on Sunday morning, landing on the lawn of his parents’ home. He took his father for a gentle excursion on their power boat, and they later watched a football game on television. He asked the family chauffeur if he was getting “the best care,” adding simply, “I miss him.” During the afternoon he crossed the street to visit Larry Newman and his daughter Leighlan (“Lee-Lee”), who had nicknamed him “Mr. Kissable.” She rushed up and grabbed his legs, then climbed into his lap as he and her father discussed Vietnam. He told Newman that MacArthur and de Gaulle had used identical words to warn him against committing U.S. forces to a land war in Asia. “The first thing I do when I’m reelected, I’m going to get the Americans out of Vietnam,” he said. “Exactly how I’m going to do it, right now, I don’t know, but that is my number one priority—get out of Southeast Asia. . . . We are not going to have men ground up in this fashion, this far away from home. I’m going to get those guys out because we’re not going to find ourselves in a war it’s impossible to win.” As he left he smiled and said, “I’d like to be around when Lee-Lee’s ten or fifteen years older.”
The weather was too cool for his father to sit on his porch Monday morning, so he climbed to his second-floor room to kiss him good-bye. After he left the room, Nurse Dallas wheeled Joe Kennedy’s bed to the doors opening onto the balcony so he could watch his son’s helicopter lift off. Moments later she heard the elevator door open and looked over her shoulder to see the president pressing a finger to his lips. He touched his father lightly on the shoulder and said, “Look who’s here, Dad.” He kissed him again and whispered, “Mrs. Dallas, take good care of Dad before I come back.”
Tears filled his eyes as his helicopter rose above the house. “He’s the one who made all this possible,” he told Powers, “and look at him now.”
Monday, October 21
WASHINGTON
Afront-page article in the Sunday, October 20, New York Times by the noted journalist Homer Bigart that described the desperate poverty in eastern Kentucky had left Kennedy so dismayed that it was almost all he wanted to talk about with Walter Heller on Monday. Bigart reported that unemployed coal miners and subsistence farmers faced “another winter of idleness and grinding poverty,” and wrote of “the pinched faces of hungry children,” “listless defeated men,” a tar-paper-shack school “unfit for cattle” where “daylight shone through gaping holes between rotting planks,” and “pot-bellied and anemic” children hauling water from a creek “fouled with garbage and discarded mattresses,” so hungry they ate the dirt from chimneys.
Kennedy had witnessed poverty like this while campaigning in the 1960 West Virginia primary. Although he had seen wretched people in postwar Berlin, Asia, and Latin America, West Virginia was the first time he had faced abject poverty in his own country, and he often referred to the “blight” of poverty in the state during the general election, speaking about children sharing their school lunches with their parents, and families receiving “surplus food packages and no hope for the future.” He delivered an inaugural address with more references to poverty, hunger, and suffering than those given by FDR, Eisenhower, Truman, or any president to follow. After declaring that “man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life,” he had pledged to “assist free men and free governments in casting off the chains of poverty.” His first official act as president had been to sign an executive order doubling the food rations supplied to four million poor Americans. Hunger and poverty continued to concern him, and in his 1963 State of the Union address he had said, “Tax reduction alone is not enough . . . to improve the lives of thirty-two million Americans who live on the outskirts of poverty,” “The quality of American life must keep pace with the quality of American goods,” and “This country cannot afford to be materially rich and spiritually poor.”
In the spring of 1963, Heller had sent him a memorandum titled “Progress and Poverty,” warning that America was experiencing a “drastic slowdown in the rate at which the economy is taking people out of poverty.” Throughout the spring and summer he and Heller discussed how to remedy this. Heller admitted that although the tax cut might create several million jobs it would not help the poorest of the poor—“those caught in a web of illiteracy, lack of skills, poor health, and squalor.” He gave Kennedy an economic and statistical analysis of this group and suggested an “attack on poverty.” At a cabinet meeting that fall, Kennedy announced that “disadvantaged groups other than Negroes now deserve our attention,” and after reading the testimony Heller was proposing to give to the Senate Finance Committee in support of the tax cut, he said, “Walter, first we’re going to get your tax cut, and then we’re going to get my expenditure program [his attack on poverty].”
He told Heller during their meeting on October 21 that in light of the Bigart article he had decided that attacking poverty would be a major theme of
his reelection campaign, and he planned on traveling to poverty-stricken areas to “arouse the American conscience.” Heller wrote in a memorandum, “It’s perfectly clear that he is aroused by this, and if we could really produce a program to fill the bill, he would be inclined to run with it.”
• • •
GOOD HOUSEKEEPING MAGAZINE had commissioned the best-selling author and columnist Jim Bishop to write “A Day in the Life of President Kennedy.” Bishop arrived at the White House on Monday with his wife, Kelly, puzzled that the president had agreed to let them snoop around and interview his staff and family for an article appearing in a magazine that even he dismissed as “a publication for women, replete with recipes, patterns, deodorants, and articles about what to do with your cheating husband.” Bishop probably didn’t want to admit that Kennedy was cooperating because he anticipated an article as uncritical and flattering as his “A Day in the Life of President Eisenhower.”
Bishop arrived at the White House a skeptic who believed the problem with Kennedy was that “one never knew how much of the warmth was real.” He had expected a perfunctory meeting lasting a few minutes. Instead, Kennedy stuck out his hand and said “Jim,” as if they were old friends, and “Kelly” before he could introduce his wife. He suggested that since Bishop’s ancestors had also come from County Wexford he might like to see his photographs of his recent trip there. As they leafed through his scrapbook he smiled at Kelly and said, “He ought to get a book out of this, don’t you think?”
Bishop protested that he was writing only an article.
“Stretch it a little and you’ll have a book.” Turning to Kelly, he said, “You speak to him.”
Jackie would have resented Bishop’s intrusion at the best of times. His presence this week was particularly unwelcome. She had returned from her trip feeling guilty and eager to build on the new intimacy she sensed between herself and her husband. A number of observers had noticed their relationship changing for the better. The reporter Helen Thomas thought they had “grown closer” after Patrick’s death and “appeared genuinely affectionate toward each other.” Roswell Gilpatric would later say, “You could see now that he liked being with her. . . . I think their marriage was really beginning to work out.” Jackie agreed, telling Father McSorley, “It took us a very long time for us to work everything out, but we did, and we were about to have a real life together.” Because these statements were made after Dallas, they cannot escape the suspicion that they were motivated by a desire to paint the couple’s final days together as happy ones. There may have been some wishful thinking and exaggeration, but there is enough contemporaneous evidence to confirm their essential truth.
On Monday, with her privacy already under assault from Jim and Kelly Bishop, Jackie called J. B. West into her bedroom and said in her trademark whisper, “Oh, Mr. West, I’ve gotten myself into something. Can you help me get out of it?” She explained that although she had invited Princess Galitzine to stay at the White House, “now we’ve changed our minds,” and she wanted to rescind the invitation so she and the president could spend the next several nights alone. “Could you help us cook up something so we can get out of having her as a houseguest?” she asked. Before he could answer, she continued, “Would you fix up the Queen’s Room and the Lincoln Room so that it looks like we’re still decorating them, and I’ll show her our guest rooms are not available?”
West had the furniture covered with drop cloths, the rugs rolled up, and buckets of white paint and dirty brushes set out. As a finishing touch, he scattered around ashtrays filled with butts left by the imaginary workmen. When Princess Galitzine came to dinner, Kennedy walked her down the East Hall, stopping to point out the renovations in the Queen’s Room and say, “And you see, this is where you would have spent the night if Jackie hadn’t been redecorating again.”
Tuesday, October 22–Friday, October 25
WASHINGTON
Kennedy told Evelyn Lincoln that Tuesday had been so awful that he felt like “packing his bags and leaving.” During dinner with Jackie and the Bradlees he complained about it being “miserable” from start to finish. The Birmingham Police Department continued refusing to hire a Negro officer, and liberals on the Judiciary Committee continued pushing a civil rights bill that could not pass the House. His invitation to the Bradlees had been the usual last-minute summons, tendered at the end of the day when he wanted to relax, celebrate, bitch, or do all three. His agenda that evening included Jackie’s cruise and the Bobby Baker scandal. Before the Senate Rules Committee began taking testimony, he hoped to persuade Bradlee (and Newsweek) that rumors of sexual misbehavior by anyone in the White House were unfounded. He told Bradlee that he had always viewed Baker “primarily as a rogue, not a crook,” adding, “He was always telling me where he could get the cutest little girls, but he never did.” Bradlee noted that Kennedy had appeared “reluctant to take reports of Baker’s sexual adventures too seriously, or the trouble he [Baker] might get into as a result of them,” and had been “briefed to the teeth.”
Kennedy said he was certain Johnson had not been “on the take” while he was vice president, but before that, he was “not so sure.” This comment prompted a discussion of what Bradlee called Washington’s “new, sophisticated immorality,” the practice of currying favor with congressmen by paying their law firms exorbitant fees for make-work projects, and steering contracts to firms in which an elected official had a financial interest.
Kennedy said he had just learned that J. Paul Getty, one of the richest men in the world, had paid only $22,000 in taxes the previous year. Bradlee replied that if he wanted to get a tax-reform bill through Congress, he should give this kind of information to Newsweek. “Maybe after 1964,” he said, a phrase Bradlee had noticed him using more often these days. Most presidents enjoy their greatest successes during their first term, but because Kennedy’s victory had been so narrow, Schlesinger believed that he was “looking forward increasingly to his second term as his big season of accomplishment.” When Kermit Gordon described what he called an “especially noxious subsidy situation”—a case in which the beneficiaries of the subsidy were those who were already the richest in the business—Kennedy said, “I am looking forward to the second term, when I can really take this government to pieces and stop this sort of thing.”
During dinner Jackie called Onassis “an alive and vital person,” and praised her husband for being “really nice and understanding.” Sensing that she was remorseful about the bad publicity surrounding her cruise, Kennedy joked that this might be a good time to capitalize on her guilt. “Maybe now you’ll come with us to Texas next month,” he said.
“Sure I will, Jack,” she said, flipping open a red leather appointment book and writing “TEXAS” across three days in November.
• • •
DURING THE WEEK KENNEDY grilled his staff about their encounters with the Bishops. Evelyn Lincoln passed along a tidbit that she knew would delight him. Bishop had recounted that while he was researching “A Day in the Life of President Eisenhower,” the president’s secretary Ann Whitman had told him that Ike often sat at his desk for hours on end with nothing to do, becoming so bored that he would plaintively ask for something to keep him busy. “I told Mr. Bishop,” she said firmly, “that was not the case with President Kennedy.”
He was unhappy that George Thomas had told Bishop that he owned twenty-five pairs of shoes. “Don’t you see how most of the people who own only one pair of shoes might resent my having twenty-five?” he asked him. “Even if it were true?” Thomas had also revealed that he sometimes went through five shirts a day, changed his entire wardrobe between meetings, and to facilitate this, Thomas would hang a new set of clothes in the small bathroom off the Oval Office so he could dart in and replace a blue suit with a brown one, complete with matching tie, shoes, and shirt. Bishop, incurious to a fault, had failed to ascertain whether vanity, a fetish for clean clothes, or a desire to match
his wardrobe to a visitor’s position or personality lay behind all this frantic wardrobe-changing.
Bishop interviewed Jackie during a chaotic Wednesday morning. As they spoke, John dashed from the bathroom naked and one family dog bit another. He found it odd that she answered his questions while staring at Kelly as if he were invisible. He asked her for a “word portrait” of an average evening at home with the president. With a fixed smile, she described him bringing his “homework” upstairs to the family quarters and reading it—a response in keeping with her rule of “minimum information with maximum politeness.”
She informed Bishop that she planned to accompany her husband to Texas the next month. He wondered if that meant parades and all. “Parades and chicken banquets,” she insisted.
• • •
ON WEDNESDAY IT SEEMED POSSIBLE that the Baker scandal and a coup in South Vietnam might reach a climax simultaneously.
Following a two-hour executive session, the chairman of the House Rules Committee told reporters, “We’ll start with Baker. Where it spreads from there we don’t know,” and the Washington Post pointed out that the Senate resolution mandated “an investigation of any possible conflicts of interest or other improprieties.”
According to a cable from the CIA station chief in Saigon, “Highly reliable source reports coup imminent led by Lt. Col. Pham Ngoc Thao.” The source, however, feared the “coup may fall apart en route.” Kennedy received a cable from Lodge the same day warning that, “in the contest with Viet Cong, we are at present not doing much more than holding our own,” and reporting that because of recent restrictions on U.S. aid to the regime, “experienced observers believe that our actions are creating favorable conditions for a coup. . . . Although I as yet see no one who looks as though he means business in this regard.”
JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President Page 30
