Two minutes into his dictation, John came into the room and began shouting. Relieved to be distracted from accepting responsibility for his most ineptly managed crisis since the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy said, “Wanna say something? Wanna say something? Hello . . .”
“Hello,” John obliged.
He quizzed his son about the seasons, asking him, “Why do the leaves fall?” “Why do the leaves turn green?”
After John left, he said, “I was shocked by the death of Diem and Nhu,” praised Diem as “an extraordinary character” who had “held his country together,” and called his death “particularly abhorrent.” Because he could not bear to do anything for very long, his dictation lasted for only five minutes and twenty-one seconds.
He may have been atoning for his complicity in Nhu’s and Diem’s murders when he sent Secretary of the Interior Luther Hodges an uncharacteristically tough memorandum on Monday complaining about what he called an “inexcusable” outbreak of polio in America’s Trust Territories in Micronesia. He demanded to know why, when the polio vaccine was widely available in the United States, “no action was undertaken between 1958 and 1963 when the spread of the disease became acute,” and if “there is a difference in treatment for United States citizens in this country and the people for whom the United States is responsible in the Trust Territory.” It was a scandal, but the fact he chose to address it today, and in such strong terms, and to demand that Hodges “expedite a complete investigation into the reason why the United States Government did not meet its responsibility in this area,” suggests good works atoning for sin.
Also on Monday, Byron Skelton, the Democratic National Committeeman for Texas, sent Bobby a newspaper clipping headlined “5 Flags Upside-Down.” The flags were outside the Dallas home of General Edwin Walker, who had been forced out of the Army in 1961 for disseminating right-wing propaganda to troops under his command in Germany. He was flying them to protest U.S. membership in the United Nations and the decision by Dallas officials to apologize to Stevenson. In a covering letter, Skelton wrote, “Frankly I am worried about President Kennedy’s proposed visit to Dallas. You will note that General Walker says that ‘Kennedy is a liability to the free world.’ A man who would make this kind of statement is capable of doing harm to the President. I would feel better if the President’s itinerary did not include Dallas. Please give this your earnest consideration.”
While reviewing foreign policy issues with Bundy on Monday, Kennedy said he favored “pushing toward an opening toward Cuba” that would take Castro “out of the Soviet fold.” That same day, Attwood called Bundy’s deputy, Gordon Chase, to report that he had held further conversations with the Cubans about what he called “the accommodation approach to Castro” but did not want to discuss them on the phone. He did say, “The general tone seemed to be that Castro is interested, that other people in the [Cuban] hierarchy are opposed, and that the problem is sticky one.”
On Tuesday, Attwood briefed Bundy and Chase in person about developments since his September meeting with Lechuga. He reported that following further conversations and telephone calls between himself, Lechuga, Lisa Howard of ABC, and Castro’s confidant Dr. Rene Vallejo, the Cubans had decided against sending a senior official from Havana to participate in secret talks at the United Nations. Vallejo had called Howard to reaffirm that Castro was interested in the talks but could not leave Cuba to participate in them personally. On October 31, Vallejo had told Howard that Castro wanted to send a plane to Mexico City to collect a U.S. official (presumably Attwood) and fly him to a private airport in Cuba. Bundy and Chase asked Attwood to write a memorandum for the president summarizing all this. Bundy added that the president was more interested than the State Department in exploring the Cuban overture, but wanted a preliminary meeting at the UN between him and a Cuban official to agree on an agenda. At a Tuesday White House meeting on Cuba that the president did not attend, the CIA’s deputy director for plans, Richard Helms, proposed that they slow down the pace of the Attwood initiative, “war game” the peace scenario, and “look at it from all possible angles” before making contact with Castro.
• • •
KENNEDY WAS IN AN EXPANSIVE MOOD when Ben and Tony Bradlee arrived on Tuesday evening for another last-minute dinner party. Although he had kept the Baker investigation from metastasizing into another Profumo scandal, it remained on his mind, and he invited everyone to guess who the “hidden Profumo” in his administration might be, knowing full well it was himself. Salinger and Gilpatric were among the names tossed out.
He recounted his luncheon with Hoover and spoke about seeing the photograph of Rometsch as if it had been the first time he had laid eyes on her. “Boy, the dirt he [Hoover] has on those senators,” he said, shaking his head. “You wouldn’t believe it.”
Calls bringing good news kept interrupting the dinner. Another brief Berlin autobahn standoff had ended with the Soviets backing down, and early results in the off-year elections showed Democrats winning important contests in Kentucky and Philadelphia, although with narrower margins than Kennedy would have liked. “The way things have been going,” he said, “to win in Philadelphia, Kentucky, and the autobahn adds up to a pretty good day.”
He needled the Bradlees about their failure to enroll their daughter in a snobby dancing school, claiming that his father would have told him to leave town rather than accept such a snub. While puffing on one of the three cigars he chain-smoked that evening, he raised the surgeon general’s long-awaited report on the link between cancer and smoking, saying he was concerned that it would reduce federal tax receipts and harm the economies of tobacco-growing states. He complained about a news photograph showing U.S. servicemen dancing with bar girls in Saigon. “If I was running things in Saigon,” he said, “I’d have those G.I.s in the front lines tomorrow.” A leftist government had recently assumed power in the Dominican Republic, and he was torn about whether to order the CIA to orchestrate an antigovernment student demonstration there. Bradlee asked how he would feel if the Soviets did the same thing here. He had no answer to this.
He invited Ambassador David Ormsby-Gore to dinner the following evening. After the test ban treaty had been initialed in Moscow, Ormsby-Gore had spent a weekend in Hyannis Port with him and Bobby, discussing further steps to improve U.S.-Soviet relations. Bobby had said that his brother should visit the Soviet Union, and over dinner on Tuesday, Kennedy reminded Ormsby-Gore of that conversation. “You know, I have made up my mind that one of the things I really must do is go to the Soviet Union,” he said. “I believe that this would be in everybody’s interest—whether I can do it before the presidential elections next year may be a bit doubtful . . . but sometime I am determined to go.”
An article by Attwood appearing in the November 5 issue of Look titled “We Face a New Kind of World” claimed, “On balance, the state of the world, as seen from Washington, looks considerably more hopeful than it did three years ago.” Attwood argued that the end of the European colonial empires had brought about “one of the most revolutionary periods in human history.” During this period, he wrote, “the supremacy of the world’s white, Christian minority” was vanishing and Americans should accept that “being the strongest power on earth doesn’t mean that we can impose our system or our way of life on other countries.” Kennedy liked the article so much that he asked the Democratic National Committee chairman, John Bailey, to send a copy to every member of the Senate and House, although one wonders how he squared Attwood’s warning about imposing our system on other nations with promoting bogus student demonstrations in the Dominican Republic, and supporting the sabotage campaign of Cuban exile groups. Like many great men in the making, he wanted to be inspirational and successful—high-minded in public and pragmatic in private.
Hours after asking Bailey to distribute Attwood’s lofty article, he flew to New York to accept the Protestant Council’s first annual “Family of Man” citation, bestowed for
his support of human rights. He had been battling Congress over cuts to his foreign aid budget and used his speech to the council to defend foreign assistance on practical and humanitarian grounds, painting it as an effective cold war weapon and a moral imperative. He criticized congressmen who found it “politically convenient to denounce both foreign aid and the Communist menace,” and enumerated its economic benefits—a half million jobs created at home and the promotion of U.S. exports. But moments later he was insisting that “the rich must help the poor. The industrialized nations must help the developing nations.” Referring to the Marshall Plan and the robust foreign aid program of the Eisenhower years, he said, “Surely the Americans of the 1960s can do half as well as the Americans of the 1950s. . . . I do not want it said of us what T. S. Eliot said of others some years ago: ‘These were a decent people. Their only monument: the asphalt road and a thousand lost golf balls.”
At a black-tie party afterward, William Styron was surprised to see him “quite alone and looking abandoned.” He greeted Styron and his wife, Rose, with “a grand smile,” Styron remembered, as if they were “long-lost loved ones,” and asked, “How did they get you to come here? They had a hard enough time getting me.” He was in an amiable mood, but Styron detected “an undercurrent of seriousness, almost an agitation” when he spoke about civil rights. He asked Styron if he was acquainted with any Negro historians and if he knew the black authors James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, and if he thought they might accept an invitation to the White House. Recalling their Labor Day conversation about the Nat Turner rebellion, he said, “What a great idea for a novel. I hope it’s done soon.” Styron felt himself being swept away by his charm, “overtaken by a grand effervescence” that he compared to “being bathed in sparkling water.” Kennedy was distracted, turned away, and Styron never saw him again.
• • •
BY THE TIME KENNEDY spent his third straight weekend at Wexford, he had either changed his mind about the house or decided to embrace it for Jackie’s sake. Salinger informed reporters that the family liked it so much that they had decided to enlarge the stables and add a wing with more guest rooms and servants’ quarters.
He arrived at Wexford early on Saturday afternoon with the Bradlees and the photographer Cecil Stoughton. Jackie had organized an informal horse show to entertain them, but the hill leading to the house was so steep and the road so rutted from days of rain that none of her friends’ horse vans could make it, leaving her and Caroline as the only performers. It was a gorgeous day, sunny and cool. He and the Bradlees sat on the stone wall of the patio, drinking Bloody Marys and watching Jackie jump hurdles in the meadow below. Later they sat against the wall of the house, sheltered from the wind, their faces tipped toward the weak November sun. Jackie led John’s pony, Leprechaun, up from the meadow and handed her husband some sugar cubes to feed him. When the pony nudged him onto his side, looking for more sugar, he threw an arm over his head. As Jackie and the Bradlees collapsed in hysterics, he shouted at Stoughton, “Are you getting this, Captain? You’re about to see a president trampled by a horse.”
Stoughton also filmed him teaching Caroline how to swing a golf club, and John marching across the lawn, wearing an oversized helmet and carrying a toy rifle on his shoulder. He stopped to salute his mother with his left hand. She knelt down in her riding boots and jodhpurs to show him how to do it correctly, using his right. Tomorrow Daddy would be taking him to a ceremony (Veterans Day) where he would see real soldiers, she explained. They would be saluting Daddy, so perhaps he would want to salute him, too. Kennedy was concerned about John’s fascination with guns and the military but reluctantly indulged it, buying him toy guns, letting him attend military ceremonies, and telling General Clifton, “I guess we all go through that. He just sees more of the real thing.”
The family attended Sunday Mass at St. Stephen the Martyr Church in Middleburg and heard Father Albert Pereira preach a homily about Christian death and the high cost of elaborate funerals. In a nod to the president, he said, “The Saints today are the peacemakers.” The church had opened in April and was purpose-built for the First Family, with a soundproof and bulletproof usher’s room where the president could take calls. Pereira was one of the few clergymen with whom Kennedy felt comfortable discussing Catholic dogma and his faith (another was Cardinal Cushing), perhaps because he was an outspoken civil rights advocate who had proved his courage by playing a key role in integrating Middleburg’s lunch counters. Before St. Stephen’s opened, Kennedy had attended Pereira’s services at the Middleburg Community Center, often arriving early for a private theological conversation. On November 10, Pereira gave him a Bible that he would carry to Texas, and that Johnson would use to take the oath of office.
Marie Ridder often went riding with Jackie and had known her and Jack for years. When she stopped at Wexford during one of these fall weekends (most likely the last one), Kennedy complimented the house within Jackie’s hearing, and she thought they seemed “very cozy” together. Bill Walton confirmed her impression that Jack and Jackie’s relationship had improved when they dined together a few days later, telling her that Jackie had taken him aside to say, “I think we’re going to make it. I think we’re going to be a couple. I’ve won.”
Monday, November 11–Tuesday, November 12
ATOKA, ARLINGTON, AND WASHINGTON
Monday was “Daddies Day” at the White House school, when fathers attended classes with their children. Kennedy missed Caroline’s first class, but before going to Arlington for Veterans Day ceremonies he joined the students at recess and praised their French teacher, Jacqueline Hirsh, for the “many miracles” she had worked with the children.
It was an ideal day for a military pageant, with bright sunshine and a brisk wind snapping the flags. He left John outside the amphitheater but soon changed his mind, telling a Secret Service agent, “I think he’ll be lonely out there,” and asking him to bring the boy inside. An agent who had seen the First Lady teaching John how to salute at Wexford leaned down as the color guard saluted the president and whispered, “Okay. Time to salute Daddy.” This time, John used his right hand.
Kennedy found the ceremony so moving that he remained throughout the speeches instead of returning to the White House. While strolling down the rows of white gravestones with Representative Hale Boggs afterward, he said, “This is one of the really beautiful places on earth. I could stay here forever.” Arlington remained on his mind all day, and he told Charlie Bartlett, “I suppose I’ll have to go back to Boston because that’s where my library is going to be.” Then his face darkened and he added, “But of course I’m not going to have a library if I only have one term. Nobody will give a damn.”
He returned to the White House as Hirsh was leaving. Knowing that Caroline was disappointed that he had missed her French class, he persuaded Hirsh to repeat it. As she held up pictures of objects, the children shouted their names in French. He felt sheepish that his command of the language was so poor that he had not known that a watermelon was la pasteque.
Hirsh took Caroline on an excursion every Monday afternoon and taught her a new French sentence. Jackie had promoted it as a way for her daughter to do something any ordinary child might do, such as shop at a store and travel by bus. Today Hirsh took Caroline and her ten-year-old son, Mike, to the National Zoo and taught her to say “We went to the zoo.” Caroline and Mike returned to the Oval Office with balloons for her father and brother. Mike had broken his tooth playing football and the dentist had given him a temporary silver cap. When Kennedy noticed it he exclaimed, “My God, Mikey, you look like a Russian with that tooth!” Realizing that he had hurt the boy’s feelings, he bent down, opened his mouth wide, and said, “Mike, you look into my mouth and you let me know which one of my teeth are capped. I had an accident too.”
Caroline repeated her new French phrase, and he asked if it was the name of a bird. She informed him that it meant “We went to the zoo.”
She suggested he could start by reading the French edition of Profiles in Courage. He was already familiar with its contents, so they could concentrate on conversation and grammar. During each lesson he could summarize what he had read in French. He told her he wanted to be fluent by June, when he would be going to Normandy for the twentieth anniversary of D-Day. (He also wanted to surprise Jackie, whose facility with languages had left him somewhat jealous.)
He was serious enough to squeeze four lessons into the next ten days. He was a difficult student, self-conscious and restless, getting up and down, impatient to learn. “I can’t wait to surprise the world,” he told Hirsh. “It’s always good to improve [at] anything.” He ruminated a long time before producing a sentence that was grammatically correct but atrociously pronounced, and he interrupted so often that she warned that if he wanted to be fluent by June he would have to concentrate more. She praised his grammar and was honest about his accent. His goal, he said, was to sound like a French person and “to be able to do it [speak French] just perfectly.” She estimated that might take at least a year. “I bet I do it in six months,” he boasted.
• • •
THE DECEMBER 1962 CEREMONY at Miami’s Orange Bowl honoring the Cuban exiles who had been captured during the Bay of Pigs operation and freed in exchange for a ransom of medicine and baby food had been emotional for Kennedy because he felt responsible for their captivity. After the brigade presented him with its flag he impulsively declared, “I can assure you that this flag will be returned to this brigade in a free Havana,” but it soon became apparent that he and the exiles differed on what constituted a free Havana. For them, it was a city without Castro or communism, one liberated by a coup, counterrevolution, or invasion. As much as this scenario would have pleased him, he could imagine a resolution of the Cuban problem leaving Castro in power. Because he considered both outcomes acceptable, and prized success over ideology, since the spring of 1963 he had been following a two-track strategy of continuing clandestine attempts to destabilize and overthrow Castro while encouraging efforts to establish a dialogue.
JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President Page 35
