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

by Thurston Clarke

  In “The Arts in America,” an article Kennedy wrote for Look in 1962, he called the arts “very close to the center of a nation’s purpose,” “a test of the quality of a nation’s civilization,” and the incarnation of “the creativity of a free society.” He recounted how the distinguished artist George Biddle had attended a meeting at the White House during which FDR told the British ambassador that he was looking forward to the day when contemporary paintings hung on the walls of every American classroom, and quoted Biddle as saying that “Roosevelt had little discrimination in his taste in painting and sculpture. . . . [But] he had a more clear understanding of what art could mean in the life of a community—for the soul of a nation—than any man I have known.” It was a comment that also applied to Kennedy, who had promoted the arts despite his own middlebrow tastes and a restlessness that sometimes became apparent when he attended the very cultural events he was sponsoring. (August Hecksher, who advised him on artistic matters, said later, “I don’t think he liked music. Sitting on those little White House chairs in the East Room was really physically painful.”) Kennedy would also echo Roosevelt’s comment about hanging great works of art in every classroom when he told the French author Romain Gary, “Your children live on streets like the Rue Anatole, Boulevard Victor Hugo, Avenue Valery. . . . Our streets all have numbers. We have enough great names to replace them: Hemingway Square, Melville Boulevard . . . I would like to see a twelve-year-old boy come home and tell his mother, when she scolded him for being late, ‘I was playing baseball on William Faulkner Avenue.’”

  His second reason for wanting to deliver a brilliant speech at Amherst was that he had treated Robert Frost shabbily in the final weeks of the poet’s life, and attending the groundbreaking for his library was a kind of posthumous apology. Frost had visited the Soviet Union during the summer of 1962, met with Khrushchev, and upon his return recklessly told reporters at an airport press conference that Khrushchev thought Americans “were too liberal to fight,” and would “sit on one hand and then the other.” A resulting Washington Post headline declared, “Frost Says Khrushchev Sees US as ‘Too Liberal to Defend Itself.’” Kennedy was so furious that he refused to speak to Frost again, even when he was on his deathbed, even after numerous entreaties from his family and friends, including Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, who had introduced them.

  Udall considered his pettiness “cold and unfeeling” and was still upset about it when he flew with him to Amherst. During the flight he reminded him of his cruelty to Frost, albeit in a lighthearted way by remarking that the poet’s elderly daughter did not hold either of them “in high regard,” adding, “Well, Mr. President, if you see me wrestling on the ground with someone, you’ll know that I’m wrestling with Leslie Frost.”

  “Well, Stewart,” he said, “we’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.”

  Fog forced Air Force One to circle for an hour, giving him time to tinker with his speech and complain to Schlesinger that Eisenhower’s memoirs had been excessively self-righteous. “Apparently he never did anything wrong,” he said. “When we come to writing the memoirs of this administration, we’ll do it differently.” When Schlesinger noted this in his diary, he did not explain who Kennedy had meant by “we.” Both of them collaborating on a memoir, or writing competing accounts of the administration? Or was it the royal “we”?

  After Schlesinger left his compartment, he told Assistant Treasury Secretary Jim Reed, who had joined the party because he was an Amherst alumnus, “I really don’t think too much of this speech.” He added a preamble about education and poverty, and revised it some more. He eliminated Schlesinger’s “Too often we do not honor our artists until they are dead and can disturb us no longer,” perhaps because it was uncomfortably close to how he had treated Frost in his final months. He cut laborious passages such as “He carved his poetry in materials as subtle as the colors of this New England Indian Summer, and as enduring as the granite of his New Hampshire hills.” He replaced Schlesinger’s “unchallengeable figures of our time,” with “granite figures of our time,” his “the loveliness of our national environment” with “the beauty of our natural environment.” In places, he turned Schlesinger’s ham-fisted prose into poetry, replacing “when power intoxicates, poetry restores sobriety” with “when power corrupts, poetry cleanses.”

  By the time his helicopter set down on Amherst’s Memorial Field, the fog had lifted and it had become a gorgeous Indian summer day. He spoke first in the Amherst College cage, a sprawling athletic structure with dirt floors and hanging nets. Delivering a prepared speech always made him more nervous than speaking extemporaneously, and his hands never stopped moving. He fiddled with his pages or stabbed the air with a forefinger, as much to release tension as punctuate his words.

  He based his opening remarks on the notes that Reed had just seen him write and memorize. They expressed his newfound interest in the connection between poverty and education, and the barriers that kept poor children from attending institutions like Amherst. After telling the students and alumni that Woodrow Wilson had once said, “What good is a political party unless it is serving a great national purpose?” he asked, “And what good is a private college or university unless it is serving a great national purpose?” He declared that “privilege is here, and with privilege goes responsibility.” After reminding them that “private colleges taken as a whole draw fifty percent of their students from the wealthiest ten percent of the nation,” he cited the statistics he had used during his conservation tour to draw connections between poverty, lack of education, and unemployment. He decried America’s shocking disparity in income, pointing out, “In 1958, the lowest fifth of the families in the United States had four and a half percent of the total personal income, the highest fifth, forty-four and a half percent,” and adding, “There is inherited wealth in this country and also inherited poverty. And unless the graduates of this college and other colleges like it who are given a running start in life—unless they are willing to put back into our society these talents . . . to put those qualities back into the service of the Great Republic, then obviously the presuppositions upon which our democracy is based are bound to be fallible.”

  Speaking of Frost, he said, “The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the nation’s greatness, but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable . . . for they determine whether we use power or power uses us. It is hardly an accident that Robert Frost coupled poetry and power, for he saw poetry as the means of saving power from itself. When power leads men towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truth which must serve as the touchstone of our judgment.”

  His homage to Frost completed, he offered a vision of what poetry tempered by power might accomplish that amounted to a litany of what he intended to accomplish during his second term. He said:

  I look forward to a great future for America, a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral restraint, its wealth with our wisdom, its power with our purpose. I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty, which will protect the beauty of our natural environment, which will preserve the great old American houses and squares and parks of our national past, and which will build handsome and balanced cities for our future.

  I look forward to an America which will reward achievement in the arts as we reward achievement in business or statecraft. . . . And I look forward to an America which commands respect throughout the world not only for its strength but for its civilization as well. And I look forward to a world which will be safe not only for democracy and diversity but also for personal distinction.

  The New York Post, then a left-wing publication, praised his words in an editorial as “a thousand light yea
rs away from the usual banalities uttered by politicians on such occasions,” adding, “rarely has a man wielding enormous power saluted the poet in phrases so cadenced or celebrated his role in terms so perceptive and profound.”

  He went from the field house to the site of the future Robert Frost Library, where ten thousand people, three times the number predicted, sat above him on the sunny slopes of College Hill. He recounted Frost’s post-inauguration admonition to him, saying, “He once said to me not to let the Harvard in me get to be too important. So we have followed that advice.” Before leaving, he told Kay Morrison, Frost’s long-serving secretary, “We just didn’t know he was so ill.” It was not true. Frost had lingered in the hospital for weeks, and Kennedy had been informed of his condition.*

  Jim Reed had been with him until he returned to Washington that afternoon, and transferred to a helicopter flying him to his new weekend house in Atoka. During all that time Reed remembered him being “in high good humor and high fettle,” a surprising observation since minutes before leaving the White House for Amherst, he had learned that his worst fears about the Bobby Baker investigation were being realized. In an exclusive story appearing on the front page of the Des Moines Register, headlined “U.S. Expels Girl Linked to Officials—Is Sent to Germany After FBI Probe,” the investigative reporter Clark Mollenhoff wrote, “A Senate Committee will hear next week about the friendship of several congressional figures with an exotic 27-year-old German girl who was expelled from the country last August.” An “outline” of her activities would be provided to the Senate Rules Committee, Mollenhoff said. “However, the evidence also is likely to include identification of several high executive branch officials as friends and associates of the part-time model and party girl.” He added that she was the wife of a West German army sergeant and had been deported on August 21 at the request of the State Department. An investigation had established “that the beautiful brunette . . . was associating with congressional leaders and some prominent New Frontiersmen from the executive branch of government.” An “incomplete list of her government friends” had been supplied to Senator Williams (who was obviously Mollenhoff’s source), and he planned to share it with the Senate Rules Committee on Tuesday.

  During the flight back from Amherst, Kennedy could contain himself no longer. He mentioned the Baker scandal to Schlesinger, and after pretending to be ignorant about the identities and activities of Baker’s party girls, casually remarked that the scandal “might be the Profumo affair of this administration.” Schlesinger had not read Mollenhoff’s story and said he understood that the scandal involved money, not sex. Kennedy replied that when a newsman rang the door at Baker’s town house, one allegedly occupied by his secretary, a girl in a negligee had answered the door.

  After he landed on the meadow below his new home, his official schedule noted “no further activity recorded this date.” In fact, he was on the telephone almost constantly throughout the afternoon and evening. Evelyn Lincoln’s phone logs show that between 4:16 and 8:45 p.m. he spoke with O’Donnell six times, Bobby six times, once with J. Edgar Hoover, and twice with Edwin Guthman, who handled press relations for the Justice Department.

  According to the FBI file on Ellen Rometsch, O’Donnell called the Bureau at 5:00 p.m., “and asked to be briefed on the information developed by the FBI in our investigation last summer concerning Ellen Rometsch, and whether there was any information to the effect that she had been involved with anyone at the White House.” Fifteen minutes later Bobby called the FBI agent Alex Rosen, and, referring to the Des Moines Register article, said he was contacting Clark Mollenhoff to tell him there was “no substance” to allegations about the involvement of any White House personnel with Rometsch, and that he had requested that the FBI conduct a further investigation to substantiate this. The president himself called Hoover, prompting Rosen to note, “Pursuant to the Attorney General’s request and the Director’s subsequent conversation with the President, we instituted investigation to locate and re-interview subject Ellen Rometsch.” At 9:00 p.m., O’Donnell supplied Rosen with Rometsch’s address in West Germany.

  Assistant Director Cartha DeLoach reported that his agents had received “a considerable number of telephone calls over the weekend” regarding the Mollenhoff story and Ellen Rometsch, including five from the press secretary Ed Guthman. During his first call, Guthman had asked DeLoach to persuade the New York Daily News not to carry the Mollenhoff story. DeLoach refused, and in subsequent calls Guthman asked him to prevent the AP from picking up the article. DeLoach explained that he did not have the personal contacts at the AP to accomplish this, adding that “it was not within the province of the FBI to kill the story.” During their final conversation Guthman told him, “The President was personally interested in having this story killed.” DeLoach replied that the FBI had interviewed Rometsch in July and furnished the results to the attorney general. He advised Guthman to make his own statements to the press “without dragging the FBI into this matter.”

  • • •

  JACKIE HAD PROPOSED BUILDING a home in Atoka after they had been unable to extend the lease on their rented house in the Virginia hunt country. He resisted at first, but capitulated after she went into a sulk. (She knew he could not tolerate a sulker, a weakness Billings called his Achilles heel.) He insisted on a modest house. She agreed to keep it under $40,000, but the cost rose to $60,000, then to almost $100,000 by the time it was completed. When he brought Bartlett to see the foundations he was already in despair. The hills were claustrophobic, the grass brown, the trees bare. “Can you imagine me ending up in a place like this?” he asked.

  He had agreed to build the house before he or Jackie had visited Camp David, the presidential retreat in the wooded hills of northwestern Maryland. They had assumed that because the Eisenhowers had loved Camp David so much, they would naturally hate it. They were pleasantly surprised when they finally went and returned often, leading him to ask Jackie, “Why are we building Atoka when we have this wonderful place for free?” She had a similar reaction, telling Chief White House Usher West, “If only I’d realized how nice Camp David really is, I’d never have rented Glen Ora or built Wexford,” the name she had given their new house, hoping it would persuade her husband to like it.

  Wexford had been completed that summer, but instead of immediately moving in, they had rented it to strangers, an arrangement a reporter likened to a woman allowing someone else to wear her new mink coat first. While driving with West to the warehouse where they stored their furniture in order to choose some items for Wexford, she asked him if a president had ever sold a house while he was in office. West was not sure. “Well, do you have any idea what the repercussions would be if I were to sell Wexford?” she asked. He guessed that she would realize twice what they had paid for it.

  She could have gone to Wexford while he was in Boston. Instead, she had taken the children to Camp David because she wanted them to experience their new house for the first time as a family. She was so concerned that he might find an excuse to avoid coming that weekend that she persuaded Princess Galitzine to join them, telling her, “John detests the country and loves the ocean and doesn’t want to come. But if you come it may persuade him to come.” She may have also wanted Galitzine as a counterweight to Lem Billings, who had accompanied Kennedy to Amherst and would be coming with him to Wexford. For thirty years he had been a constant Kennedy family houseguest at Palm Beach, Hyannis Port, or wherever Jack and Jackie happened to be living. He had arrived at the White House a week after the inauguration, moved some clothes into a third-floor room, and came and went at will, often tagging along to Virginia and the Cape, prompting her to whisper to West in mock despair, “Oh, Mr. West, he’s been a houseguest every weekend since I’ve been married.” She tolerated his constant presence—she had no choice—but if there was ever a weekend when she might have wished he might stay away, it could have been this one.

  It would have been s
urprising had she not been jealous of her husband’s relationship with Billings. They had roomed at Choate, traveled across Europe as students, lost their virginity to the same prostitute, and exchanged hundreds of candid letters (during their courtship, Jack had sent her one postcard). Their love affair was platonic for Kennedy, but more complicated for Billings, who was a closeted homosexual. He had made a pass when they were teenagers that Kennedy had rebuffed, but it had not damaged their relationship, and for Kennedy to continue their close friendship throughout his political career, at a time of great homophobia, was both reckless and courageous. His fondness for Billings puzzled outsiders. Eunice called it “more than a friendship,” adding, “it was a complete liberation of the spirit. . . . [Jack] was a completely liberated man when he was with Lem.” Kennedy knew that Billings had not only loved him longer than anyone outside of his own family, he loved him for himself. Billings claimed to know more about Kennedy’s personal life than anyone else, including members of Kennedy’s family, once saying, “He never had any secrets from me.” There is no evidence that Billings knew about Ellen Rometsch. But if Kennedy did confide in anyone that weekend, it would have been him.

  The weekend could not have been more ill-timed. Aside from worrying about a potential scandal that might lead to his impeachment, Kennedy was monitoring an imminent coup in Vietnam that might become his next Bay of Pigs. He had too much on his mind to pretend he liked a home that he had never wanted to build and that had not turned out very well. But despite his reservations, Billings sensed that he was still excited by the prospect of seeing it for the first time, “because it was brand new and his own possession.” If so, his excitement was short-lived. There was nothing grand or distinctive about the fifteen-room yellow stucco ranch house stretching like a barracks across a small rise grandiloquently known as “Rattlesnake Mountain.” His own parsimoniousness, not Jackie’s design, was largely to blame. The house had a fine view of the Blue Mountains, a stable for Jackie’s horses and the children’s ponies, and a handsome flagstone terrace, but its interior was disappointing. There were not enough closets or spare bedrooms for his liking, and he considered the collection of suggestive Mogul miniatures that Jackie had hung in the dining room in questionable taste. Nor did Wexford impress Princess Galitzine, who was surprised to find a “modest house without a butler, gardener, or even a garden.”