Thursday, November 14–Friday, November 15
WASHINGTON, THE MASON-DIXON LINE, MANHATTAN, AND PALM BEACH
Kennedy’s sixty-fourth press conference was a grim affair. He was mad at Congress for cutting his foreign aid budget, and at the Soviets for arresting the Yale professor Frederick Barghoorn in Moscow on trumped-up espionage charges. These subjects and Vietnam dominated the conference. He sounded cool and reasonable in the transcript, but on television appeared nervous and tense. He cracked fewer jokes, he smiled less, and his voice trailed off. Asked about the purpose of the conference on Vietnam that his advisers were attending in Honolulu the next week, he offered a laundry list of goals, including “assess the situation,” decide “what our aid policy should be,” and determine “how we can bring Americans out of there.”
“Now that is our objective,” he stressed. “To bring Americans home, permit the South Vietnamese to maintain themselves as a free and independent country.” After asking, “Are we going to give up in South Vietnam?” he answered, “The most important program, of course, is our national security, but I don’t want the United States to have to put troops there.”
If there was ever a year when he owed Jackie a lavish Christmas gift, it was this one, when she had lost a child and agreed to campaign in Texas. He decided on a fur coverlet and collected samples in the Oval Office. None struck him as good enough, and before leaving Thursday for New York he called a family friend and gave her carte blanche to select a fur, provided it arrived before Christmas.
At 4:00 p.m. his helicopter landed at the point on the Mason-Dixon Line where the Delaware and Maryland border intersected a newly completed stretch of Interstate 95 that would make it possible to drive from Boston to Washington without encountering a traffic light. After the public works titan Robert Moses introduced him generously, and erroneously, as “the chief architect of our present highway system,” he predicted that the Boston-to-Washington corridor would become “one gigantic urban center,” and cut a blue-and-gray ribbon to open a road soon to become the John F. Kennedy Memorial Highway.
The previous week he had driven into Manhattan in a motorcade of limousines, police cruisers, and motorcycles. Sirens screamed, lights flashed, intersections were blocked, stoplights ignored, and traffic tied in knots. This week he stopped for lights and signs, arriving in the city “like an ordinary motorist,” according to Salinger. Even so, his limousine was part of a procession of thirteen cars, many filled with police and Secret Service agents. A section of the East River Drive was under repair, and construction barrels blocked one of its lanes. As the traffic merged, a passenger car threatened to separate his limousine from the Secret Service follow-up car. When the driver ignored shouts from agents to let them pass, one had to point a rifle out the window. After pulling off the drive, Kennedy’s car hit every crosstown red light. A city bus blocked his limousine from turning onto Madison Avenue, enabling a woman to dash into the street and take a flash photograph of him. A policeman told a reporter, “She might well have been an assassin.”
A police official criticized him for taking “unnecessary risks.” Salinger explained that he had not wanted to disrupt traffic. Cynics said that he had not wanted to subject potential voters to delays, and Time remarked caustically that he had been “zeroing in on the ‘safe-motorists’ vote.” But winning a few more votes in a state already securely in his column had to be a minor concern. He had probably dispensed with the motorcade because, like the renovations to Jackie’s hospital room, it offended his egalitarian sensibilities, and he believed that these fast-moving, police-escorted motorcades only widened the distance between himself and the public.
Once he arrived at the Carlyle Hotel, he was safe, or at least safer. An Otis elevator engineer had been stationed in a shed on the roof to repair any malfunction that might trap him between floors, and a Secret Service detail had inspected and sealed his penthouse suite. But when he left to attend a party at the apartment of his sister and brother-in-law Jean and Stephen Smith, he slipped out a side door with his Secret Service detail, leaving a large police detail waiting in the lobby.
Stevenson was at the party, and face to face with the president he decided to warn him about Dallas. Oleg Cassini, who overheard their conversation, took Kennedy aside and asked, “Why do you go? Your own people are saying you should not.” He stared back wordlessly and shrugged.
Before leaving the next morning for the Americana Hotel to address the yearly AFL-CIO convention, he met with Henry Luce, who also had a suite at the Carlyle. Luce had founded Time and Life, the nation’s most influential magazines. Although the flattering photographs in Life had advanced Kennedy’s career more than scores of complimentary and serious-minded articles, he believed that Time was biased against his administration. He complained to Luce that his magazine was making nit-picking criticisms. “What about the state of the world, Mr. Luce?” he asked, challenging him to fault his handling of the important issues. After thinking for a few moments, Luce conceded, “I think we are doing pretty good.” During lunch afterward with his White House correspondent, Hugh Sidey, he admitted that the president had been right: his magazine had been nit-picking.
In his speech to the AFL-CIO, Kennedy enumerated his successes and challenged the nit-pickers to dismiss them. He had doubled the nuclear weapons in the U.S. strategic forces, he said, and “with that strength we work for peace.” He had presided over the peaceful desegregation of thousands of schools, restaurants, and lunch counters. The average factory worker was taking home ten dollars more a week than when he was inaugurated. The stock market had hit record highs, “although we only get credit when it goes down.” A robust economy was not enough, he said, unless it contributed “to the fullest extent possible” to ways “to improve our schools, to rebuild our cities, to counsel our young, to assure our health, and to care for our aged and infirm.” He conceded that as long as the unemployment rate remained at 5.5 percent, “this issue of economic security, of jobs, is the basic issue facing the United States in 1963.” He declared that his tax cut would be the surest remedy for unemployment, and the best guarantee that the nation would continue “sailing . . . on the winds of the longest and strongest peacetime expansion in the history of the United States.” He called equal rights important, adding, “But no one gains from a full-employment program if there is no employment to be had; no one gains by being admitted to a lunch counter if he has no money to spend; no one gains from attending a better school if he doesn’t have a job after graduation.”
He described those opposing his programs to ameliorate youth unemployment, provide jobs training, give aid to depressed areas, and meet other public needs as “powerful and articulate,” and criticized them for “campaigning on a platform of so-called individual initiative,” adding, “They talk loudly of deficits and socialism, but they do not have a single job-creating program of their own, and they oppose the efforts we are making.” After calling his job-creating programs too urgent to be postponed, he recounted a story about Marshal Hubert Lyautey, the first French resident-general of Morocco, who had asked his gardener to plant a tree only to have the man respond, “Why plant it? It won’t flower for a hundred years.” Lyautey had replied, “Plant it this afternoon!”
When he finished, a young Irish nanny vaulted over a press table at the front of the ballroom, wriggled free of policemen and Secret Service agents, and dashed toward him. He called everyone off and shook her hand. “Last night, I dreamed he took my hand,” she said. “I just had to make that dream come true.”
He was driven a few blocks to the Hilton, where he told delegates to the Catholic Youth Organization’s national convention, “I come here today . . . because we expect something of you.” He reminded them that they had an obligation to repay the nation for “all of the talents which society helped develop in you,” and echoed the “ask not” passage of his inaugural address, saying, “So we ask the best of you. . . . I congratulate
you on what you have done, and most of all I congratulate you on what you are going to do.”
Ignoring the protests of his Secret Service detail and police detachment, he again dispensed with a motorcycle escort. When his limousine stopped near the Hilton for a red light, delegates to the youth conference encircled it, forcing the police to raise their clubs and wade into the crowd to free a path. At another red light, a nurse dashed in front of his car to catch a patient who had left something behind, prompting a police inspector to say, “As far as I’m concerned, he can walk into the city the next time he visits.”
He flew to Palm Beach that afternoon with O’Donnell, Powers, Smathers, and Macdonald. When Smathers remarked offhandedly, “Everybody on the Hill says Bobby is trying to knock Johnson off the ticket,” Kennedy’s denial was so vehement that the comment had obviously struck a nerve. “George, I presume you have some intelligence,” he said sarcastically. “I love this job, I love every second of it.” Why then, he asked, would he risk it by picking a fight with Johnson that might guarantee him losing all of the Southern states? And if he dropped Johnson now, when his protégé Bobby Baker was in the headlines, it would appear that he had some kind of involvement in the Baker scandal that he wanted to conceal. And if that happened, he predicted, “Life magazine would put twenty-seven pictures of these lovely-looking, buxom ladies running around with no clothes on, twenty-seven pictures of Bobby Baker and hoodlums and vending machines, and then the last picture would be of me. And it would say ‘Mess in Washington under Kennedy Regime,’” and then 99 percent of Americans would conclude that he was running around with the girls. (He had forgotten or decided to overlook that Smathers had been a regular at Baker’s Quorum Club, and had known many of these “buxom ladies.”)
Lyndon Johnson, a likely source for the rumors that Bobby was scheming to replace him, dined that evening at Chandler’s, a midtown Manhattan restaurant featuring a screen between its bar and dining room composed of glass squares holding portraits of every U.S. president. When he wandered over to examine them, Chandler’s owner pointed to an empty square next to Kennedy’s portrait and asked, “When will I put your picture on there?” Johnson’s face darkened with rage and he said, “Never! You’ll never see it.”
While Kennedy was out of town, Bobby, speaking in confidence and with his approval, told Ambassador Dobrynin that he believed relations between their countries depended to a large extent on a good personal relationship and understanding between the president and Chairman Khrushchev, and that another summit meeting could provide an opportunity for the two leaders to “calmly sit and talk everything over.”
Jackie spent the weekend at Wexford. On Friday, she entertained her friend Robin Douglas-Home, a jazz pianist and socialite whom she had met during her 1962 Italian holiday. He had not seen her for several months and was struck by how relaxed and composed she seemed. She said she had been encouraged by how much Jack had come to value Caroline and John, and that losing Patrick had strengthened their self-sufficiency as a family. She was determined to accompany him to Texas even though, she admitted, “I’ll hate every minute of it.” But if he wanted her along, that was what mattered. Douglas-Home believed that he had never seen her happier.
Jackie was more upbeat about Texas during a telephone conversation with Letitia Baldrige, a close friend from boarding school who had recently served as White House social secretary. “You won’t believe it, but I’m going campaigning to Texas with Jack next week, and I’m going because I want to,” she said. “I’m anxious to hit the campaign trail again. Did you ever expect to hear me say that, Tish?” Baldrige detected a “note of genuine happiness” in her voice, one contrasting sharply with how she had sounded after Patrick’s death. “Now she was so exuberant,” Baldrige recalled. “I suddenly knew that her marriage was going well.”
Saturday, November 16
CAPE CANAVERAL AND PALM BEACH
The Miami Herald reporter Nixon Smiley wrote of Kennedy’s visit to the Cape Canaveral Space Center, “You had the feeling the air was electrified from the time of the President’s arrival until a moment after his departure.” Smiley described his hair as being “back lighted by filtered sunshine” and “distinctly reddish,” adding, “He wore a deeper tan than most of the men around him. He was a picture of health.” Dr. Wernher von Braun, who had come to brief Kennedy on the rocket that would launch U.S. astronauts toward the moon, also found his tan impressive and called him “in the very best of health.”
While standing outside the Saturn Control Center, the astronauts Gus Grissom and Gordon Cooper briefed Kennedy and von Braun on the long-duration flights they were taking to prepare themselves for a moon voyage. Inside the windowless blockhouse, where technicians manned the panels that would monitor and control the missile launches, Kennedy sat on a folding chair, surrounded by NASA officials and listening impatiently as Dr. George Mueller, the associate administrator for manned space flight, delivered a fifteen-minute lecture summarizing developments in the lunar program. Briefings that required him to sit passively as someone reeled off facts and figures drove Kennedy crazy. As Mueller droned on, running his pointer over charts and explaining NASA’s organization, Kennedy began interrupting him with questions. The moment Mueller stopped, he jumped up, grabbed one of the scale-model missiles arranged on a table in front of him, and asked if it was a Redstone, the one that had launched Alan Shepard and Grissom on their suborbital flights. After being told it was, he held it against a model of the Saturn V, von Braun’s lunar-mission rocket, and asked if they were built to the same scale. The Redstone model was a foot high, the Saturn seven times that. When Mueller confirmed that they were, he exclaimed, “Amazing!” “Fantastic!” and “Gee, looks like we’ve come a long way.” Robert Seamans, who headed NASA, believed this was the moment that Kennedy finally grasped the dimensions of the project he had launched. Von Braun found his boyish enthusiasm “deeply sincere and very charming.”
Kennedy knew that his brother Joe had died while on a mission to obliterate bunkers on the French coastline that were being prepared as launching sites for the unmanned rockets that the Germans planned to fire at British cities, and he knew that von Braun, who had belonged to the Nazi Party, had engineered those rockets. He had mentioned this when they met in 1953 at a New York television studio while waiting to appear on a program announcing the nominations for Time’s Man of the Year. When von Braun later recounted their conversation, he spoke of Joe being killed “in an airplane accident that was closely related to the fledgling missile technology,” a delicate way of framing his connection to the Kennedy family.
After emerging from the Saturn Control Center into the blinding sunshine, von Braun and Kennedy were driven to a launch pad where the skyscraper-high Saturn I rocket stood pointed at the heavens. Von Braun explained that when it was launched the next month, it would be more powerful and would carry a heavier payload than anything the Soviet Union had shot into space.
After staring at it for several moments, Kennedy said, “Now, this will be the largest payload that man has ever put in orbit. Is that right?” After von Braun again assured him that it was, he said, “That is very, very significant.”
While briefing Kennedy at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville the previous year, von Braun had noticed that he was a man who liked to evaluate things on the basis of what he could see and touch, so he was not surprised when Kennedy suddenly strode toward the Saturn I rocket, not stopping until he stood directly underneath it. He looked up and, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet, said in a soft voice, “When this goes up we’ll be ahead of the Russians. . . . When this goes up we’ll be ahead of the Russians.”
Sidey, who overheard this, had also been with him at a campaign stop in Oklahoma City in 1960 when he had told an audience, “I will take my television black and white. I want to be ahead of them [the Russians] in rocket thrust.” And when he had been at the White House on April 14, 1961, two
days after the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had become the first human to orbit the earth, Kennedy had invited him into the Cabinet Room so that he could listen to his advisers debate the wisdom of racing the Soviet Union to the moon. “What can we do now?” Kennedy had demanded. “Is there any place we can catch them?” The science adviser Jerome Wiesner and NASA’s director, James Webb, argued that a manned lunar landing would not be as scientifically important as several less costly and dramatic ventures. NASA’s chief scientist, Hugh Dryden, thought it might require an investment similar to the Manhattan Project, the government program that had developed the atomic bomb. Budget Director David Bell wondered if the nation could support such a huge expenditure. Sorensen was concerned that it would divert resources from social programs. But Kennedy cared more about beating the Russians to the moon. “If someone can just tell me how to catch up,” he said. “Let’s find somebody—anybody. I don’t care if it’s the janitor if he knows how.” After the meeting ended inconclusively, Sidey stopped him at the door and asked what he had decided. “Wait here,” he said, gesturing for Sorensen to follow him into the Oval Office. Several minutes later Sorensen emerged and said, “We are going to the moon.”
Kennedy traveled by helicopter from the launch pad to a Navy vessel from which he would watch a submarine launch a Polaris missile. On the way he passed over Merritt Island, where construction was proceeding for the 87,000-acre Moonport. He looked down to see a thrilling incarnation of American power in the middle of the American Century, an undertaking as ambitious and historic as the Panama Canal and the Manhattan Project. Seamans pointed out the future launch pad and Vertical Assembly Building, where the Saturn missiles would be assembled and stored. Once completed, it would be the fourth-largest structure on earth, bigger than the Pentagon and taller than anything south of the Washington Monument.
JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President Page 37
