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

by Thurston Clarke

  He and Bundy had received a cable from Lodge on Tuesday stating, “It would appear that a coup attempt by the Generals’ group is imminent; that whether this coup fails or succeeds, the USG must be prepared to accept the fact that we will be blamed, however unjustly; and finally, that no positive action by the US can prevent a coup attempt short of informing Diem and Nhu with all the opprobrium that such an action would entail. Note too Don’s statement we will have only four hours notice. This rules out my checking with you between time I learn of coup and time that it starts. It means U.S. will not be able significantly to influence course of events.”

  In a reply from Bundy that Kennedy helped draft and was sent after the October 29 meetings, they told Lodge, “Believe our attitude to coup group can still have decisive effect on its decisions. We believe that what we say to coup group can produce delay of coup and that betrayal of coup plans to Diem is not our only way of stopping coup.” They closed by saying, “We reiterate burden of proof must be on coup group to show a substantial possibility of quick success; otherwise we should discourage them from proceeding.”

  In his reply, Lodge called out Kennedy for his timidity and ethics. After conceding that it was important to “get best possible estimate of chance of coup’s success,” he contended that this was irrelevant since he did not think that “we have power to delay or discourage a coup.” It would be, he cabled, “theoretically possible for us to turn over the information which has been given to us in confidence to Diem and this would undoubtedly stop the coup,” but that “would make traitors of us.” The bottom line, he argued, was that “we have very little influence on what is essentially a Vietnamese affair.” Referring to Kennedy’s demand that the plotters provide proof they could succeed, he said, “I do not know what more proof can be offered than the fact these men are obviously prepared to risk their lives and that they want nothing for themselves. If I am any judge of human nature, Don’s face expressed sincerity and determination on the morning that I spoke to him.” He concluded, “If we were convinced coup was going to fail, we would, of course, do everything we could to stop it.”

  This was not good enough for Bundy and Kennedy. In a sharply worded reply, they said they could not accept “that we have no power to delay or discourage a coup.” Reminding him of his statement that he would do everything to stop a coup that they believed doomed to fail, they said, “We believe that on this same basis you should take action to persuade coup leaders to stop or delay any operation which, in your best judgment, does not clearly give high prospect of success.” Feeling it necessary to defend their honor, they added, “We have never considered any betrayal of Generals to Diem.”

  • • •

  ON OCTOBER 30, 1960, Kennedy had driven from Philadelphia to suburban Levittown for a campaign rally. The day was overcast and chilly and he was two hours late, but forty thousand people showed up and hundreds of thousands more lined his motorcade route. When he stopped to receive bouquets, women hurled themselves at his car and one even ended up in his lap. The next day, crowds in South Philadelphia’s Italian and black neighborhoods hung out tenement windows, jammed sidewalks, and showered him with confetti and flowers. Three years later to the day that he had received that exhilarating reception, he drove through the same South Philadelphia neighborhoods while traveling from the airport to a downtown hotel where he would speak at a fund-raising dinner for Mayor James Tate. His motorcade had been well advertised, the weather was fine, and he was traveling at rush hour through wards that had given him large pluralities in 1960. This time the crowds in the Italian neighborhoods were so small and unresponsive that one reporter called the reception among the poorest of his presidency. It was one thing for Kennedy to read about white backlash, but another to see it with his own eyes, and while he was sitting next to Congressman William Green, who had also been in the car with him in 1960 when that woman had vaulted into his lap. The turnout in black neighborhoods was even more disappointing, probably the result of local black leaders criticizing his civil rights bill as too timid.

  His motorcade skirted Delmar Village, a middle-class housing development not unlike Levittown, where he had been hailed in 1960. In August, a mob of jeering and rock-throwing whites had attempted to prevent Horace and Sara Baker, the first blacks to purchase a home in Delmar, from moving in. The Bakers’ new house was vandalized, and a hundred state policemen were mobilized to protect them. One thousand heads of families in Delmar issued a statement that deplored the violence but added, “We do not welcome the Baker family into our community.” The family heads complained of “being forced to socially accept this family by law,” and called for “boycotts of any business which serves or deals with them.” The Baker incident had made the front pages of East Coast newspapers, where it had undoubtedly come to Kennedy’s attention, perhaps contributing to his statement to the Birmingham whites that integrating public accommodations was “easy” compared with education and housing.

  After such a disappointing welcome many politicians would have soft-pedaled their commitment to civil rights. When Kennedy spoke in Convention Hall that evening he called his bill “strong, just, effective, and reasonable,” and a way “to secure for all Americans the rights and opportunities that they deserve.” Referring to the speech that he had delivered in the same hall on October 31, 1960, he said that he still believed in an America where rights “are enjoyed by all regardless of their race.” Progress had been made, he said, but the issue would “continue to be us with until all Americans of every race can regard one another with the quality for which this city is noted—brotherly love.”

  He flew back to Washington that evening with Governor David Lawrence of Pennsylvania. While eating snacks and drinking beer, he told a joke that Lawrence would call “one of the best stories” he had heard on the subject of integration.

  After ascertaining that Lawrence remembered how to play knock-knock, he said, “Knock-knock.”

  “Who’s there?” Lawrence dutifully replied.

  “Iza.”

  “Iza who?”

  “I’s ya next door neighbah!”

  Lawrence laughed while recounting the moment. “I’s ya next door neighbor. I can hear him say it.”

  According to Larry Newman, Kennedy “wouldn’t listen to a dirty joke, especially if it was an ethnic joke. And especially if there was a mimicked accent involved. He would simply say, ‘I don’t want to hear it,’ and walk away.” Given this, his “Iza” joke becomes even more inexplicable. Was he smarting from the poor turnout for his motorcade? Upset that he appeared to be losing the support of blacks and backlash whites? Did it prove that his civil rights education remained incomplete, or could never be completed? That he would have been among the whites telling pollsters that they wanted blacks to have equal rights, but did not want them next door? Perhaps he considered jokes like this one simply, as he had told George Taylor about the practice of segregating his campaign workers at lunch in 1946, “one of the things of the time.”

  The next day brought the most humiliating meal of his presidency, a private luncheon with J. Edgar Hoover that was partial payment for his role in persuading Mansfield and Dirksen to put Rometsch and the other party girls off limits during the forthcoming Senate hearings. The final bill for Hoover’s services would presumably include keeping him in office past the mandatory government retirement age of seventy.

  The conventional wisdom is that Kennedy had reappointed Hoover in 1960 because he feared that Hoover might leak damaging information about his personal life, including his dalliance during World War II with a Danish woman who had once allegedly traveled in Nazi circles. But he had also retained Hoover because he was a close friend of his father’s and it would have been difficult for any president, particularly one who had won such a narrow victory, to cashier an icon like Hoover. The Washington attorney Clark Clifford, his principal adviser during the transition, had served in the Truman administration and b
y his own admission “despised and distrusted” Hoover. Yet even he had recommended reappointing him to avoid a partisan backlash during Kennedy’s first months in office. Still, Kennedy fantasized about ridding himself of the man, once telling Fay, “I really am not in a position to do the things I’d like to do. I did not get a plebiscite from the people, and I have to really kind of balance things. . . . But come ’64, I’m going to win big and do all the things that I’ve been unable to do—like getting rid of J. Edgar Hoover.” He told Hilsman, “What we’re going to do is this, we’ll have the Army band walk down the side of the Mall playing ‘The Star Spangled Banner,’ and the Navy band on the other side. The Air Force band will parachute in, playing the national anthem as they descend. From a platform in the middle of the Mall, I will present Hoover with the Medal of Freedom and every other medal we can possibly think of. Then I will whisper in his ear, ‘You’re fired.’” In fact, he would not have needed to fire Hoover, just waited until his seventieth birthday on January 1, 1965, and staged an elaborate retirement ceremony.

  Kennedy had ordered a microphone installed in the upstairs living quarters, but there is no evidence of his ever employing it, and his luncheon with Hoover was hardly an event he would have wanted to preserve for posterity. His predecessors had made these lunches with Hoover frequent affairs, and Hoover had reciprocated with gossip about other politicians and public figures that left them wondering what he had on them. Although he had probably collected more salacious information on Kennedy than any of his predecessors, Kennedy had lunched with him only five times since taking office, and just once in 1963.

  The following week, Kennedy gave Bradlee an account of their luncheon designed to convince him that he had known nothing about Baker’s girls until hearing about them from Hoover. He claimed that he had invited Hoover (this “awful bore”) to lunch because he had learned that FDR had regularly entertained him and felt he should do the same, what with “rumors flying and every indication of a dirty campaign coming up.” He recounted how Hoover had given him a full briefing on the hijinks between various U.S. senators and Baker’s girls. Shaking his head in apparent amazement, he said, “Boy, the dirt he has on those senators. You wouldn’t believe it.” He also related how Hoover had brought a photograph of Rometsch that showed her to be “a really beautiful woman,” and he had presumably feigned a similar innocence as Hoover passed a photograph of his former lover across the table at lunch.

  PART FIVE

  November 1–22, 1963

  DAYS 22–1

  Friday, November 1–Sunday, November 10

  WASHINGTON, NEW YORK, AND ATOKA

  Bundy woke Kennedy just after 3:00 a.m. to report that the South Vietnamese generals had launched their coup. Three hours later, a CIA cable described “heavy fighting including armor, small arms, and possible some light artillery vicinity Palace as of 1530 hours [Saigon time].” At an early morning White House staff meeting, Forrestal called the putsch “much better than anyone would have thought possible.” Bundy said the action was an “acceptable type of military coup.”

  Kennedy convened his advisers in the Cabinet Room, and after hearing more optimistic reports he said, “I think we have to make it clear this is not an American coup.” Among the cables to Lodge that he approved that morning was one urging him to persuade the generals to bear seven points in mind. These included: “Practical evidence of determination to prosecute war with renewed vigor; Reprisals at minimum; Safe passage for family [of Diem and Nhu] to exile; Humane treatment for arrestees.”

  He was presiding at a meeting on Saturday morning when Forrestal handed him a telegram reporting that Diem and Nhu had committed suicide after surrendering. He jumped to his feet and rushed from the room with what Taylor called “a look of shock and dismay on his face which I have never seen before.” He was in turmoil all day. Schlesinger thought he looked “somber and shaken.” Forrestal believed that the deaths “shook him personally,” bothering him “as a moral and religious matter.” Jackie noticed that he had “that awful look that he had at the time of the Bay of Pigs,” adding, “I mean he was just—just wounded.” As shocked as he was by Diem’s death, he could not have been entirely surprised. He had, after all, sent Macdonald on a secret mission to warn Diem that his life was in danger, and would later tell Cardinal Spellman of New York that he had known that Diem might be killed but could not control the situation.

  He believed that devout Catholics like Diem and Nhu would not have committed suicide, and told McNamara, “We must bear a good deal of responsibility for it.” He ranted to Fay about Madame Nhu. “She’s responsible for the death of that kind man,” he said. “You know it’s so totally unnecessary to have that kind man die because that bitch stuck her nose in and boiled up the whole situation down there.” While Jackie was at Wexford, he invited Mary Meyer to the White House for the first time since the previous spring. She signed in around one o’clock and stayed several hours. They may have resumed their affair, but it is also possible that he simply wanted her there to comfort him. He had not taken up again with Marlene Dietrich when she visited in September nor continued his affair with Mimi Beardsley after Patrick’s death, so his encounter with Meyer may have also been innocent.

  By the time he reconvened his advisers that afternoon, it appeared that Diem and Nhu had been executed while riding in the back of an army personnel carrier. “There is some question in some of our minds as to how much we want to know about this,” Hilsman said. “It’s becoming more and more clear that this is an assassination.” McCone agreed, saying, “I would suggest that we not get into—into this story.” After learning that General Duong Van (“Big Minh”) Minh, who had led the coup, may have ordered the executions, Kennedy said in a soft voice, “Pretty stupid.” A moment later he asked, “We haven’t got any report on what public reaction [in Vietnam] was to the assassination, have we?”

  “Jubilance in the streets,” Hilsman said, adding that Lodge had been cheered publicly and might finally get a chance to be elected president . . . of South Vietnam.

  “I’m not sure about that,” Kennedy said.

  After more speculation about the popularity of the coup, he asked, “What are we gonna say about the, uh, death of Diem and Nhu? We’re not gonna say anything, right?”

  Someone remarked that reporters were being told that the government was receiving conflicting reports about their deaths.

  “We’ve already got an unfortunate event,” he said. “Nonetheless, it’d be regrettable if it were ascribed, unless the evidence is clear . . . to Big Minh and the responsible council of generals. I don’t want it wrapped around him if we can help it.”

  Hilsman speculated that more information about those responsible for the murders of Diem and Nhu would surface within the next forty-eight hours.

  “I’m sure Lodge must be aware that this is an unfortunate matter,” Kennedy said, “and I suppose next they’re going to make every effort to disassociate Big Minh and Conein [the CIA officer who had been the principal intermediary with the generals plotting the coup].” Speaking of Minh, he added, “If there was not responsibility on his part, that should be made clear.”

  “In other words, get a story and stick to it,” Hilsman said.

  Stepping back from what might be construed as an attempt to cover up Minh’s role in the assassinations, he said, “It ought to be a true story . . . if possible.”

  • • •

  HE HAD DICTATED the college honors thesis that became his first book, Why England Slept, and dictated his contributions to his second, Profiles in Courage. When he began dictating his first speech to the House of Representatives, his secretary had expected “this green young legislator” to stumble over his words. Instead, she said, he sat back in his chair and a “stream of beautiful language” just “flowed out.” Audiotapes of him dictating his Senate speeches show him seldom pausing or repeating himself, and delivering sentences shorn at birth of
adjectives and qualifiers. When he could not dictate, he scribbled notes and delivered extemporaneous speeches that resembled his dictation, with “the words rolling out of his mouth as if he had written them weeks before,” Lincoln said. He dictated his announcement that he was running for president two hours before delivering it and while a barber was cutting his hair, and dictated passages for his inaugural address while flying to Palm Beach. On November 4, he dictated some material for his memoirs. He said, “One, two, three, four,” to check that the Dictaphone was working, then added the date because he assumed this would be one of many such recordings on this subject.

  Diem’s assassination had prompted him to consider his memoirs, perhaps because he knew that history would judge him harshly and he wanted to get his version of events down while it was fresh in his mind. He began, “Over the weekend, the coup in Saigon took place. It culminated three months of conversation about a coup (comma), conversation which divided the government here and in Saigon.” He listed those opposing the coup—Taylor, Bobby, McNamara, and McCone—and those favoring it—Harriman, Ball, Hilsman, and Forrestal—and repeated his comment to McNamara that “we must bear a good deal of responsibility for it.” He blamed it on the August 26 cable, and said, “In my judgment that wire was badly drafted (comma), it should never have been sent on a Saturday. I should not have given my consent to it without a roundtable conference in which McNamara and Taylor could have presented their views.” If this was an accurate preview of his memoirs, they would have been memorably honest and unsparing.