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

by Thurston Clarke

  Sir Laurence Olivier interrupted a performance at the Old Vic and asked the audience to stand while the orchestra played “The Star-Spangled Banner.” An Englishman told an American friend, “There has never been anything like it here since Trafalgar, and the news of Nelson’s death reached London, and men cried in the streets.” Big Ben tolled every minute for an hour, lights dimmed in Piccadilly Circus, and Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home reported that distraught British teenagers were “openly crying in the street.” Danes carried bouquets to the American embassy and left behind a six-foot-high wall of flowers. Sixty thousand West Berliners held an impromptu torchlight procession and gathered in the square where Kennedy had said “Ich bein ein Berliner.” Workmen in Nice laid down their tools and wept, and at the dedication of the Avenue du President Kennedy, the president of the Paris city council said, “Never, perhaps, has the death of a foreign chief of state so profoundly moved every Frenchman and every Parisian.” President Charles de Gaulle told a friend, “I am stunned. They are crying all over France. It is as if he were a Frenchman, a member of their own family.” As the French statesman Jean Monnet walked to Arlington in Kennedy’s funeral procession, he told Walt Rostow that the French had reacted so emotionally because “he [Kennedy] reestablished the credibility of American strength and vitality after the Eisenhower years—and then showed in 1963 [that] he would use that power compassionately, and for peace.” This, Monnet said, had “touched the life of every family in France.”

  A postman in a Connecticut suburb reported housewives on his route speaking about Kennedy’s death “as if they had lost a son or daughter.” A Detroit housewife said, “I feel as if a member of my family had died, I really do.” Future president Jimmy Carter cried for the first time since his father had died, and McGeorge Bundy admitted that he had mourned Kennedy more than his own father, who had died in October. Roswell Gilpatric believed he was so shattered because “I felt about him as I’ve never felt about another man in my life.” The columnist Joe Alsop said, “I had never known I loved the president,” and believed that nothing had ever moved him more, “not even the death of my own father.” In a condolence letter stained by tears, David Ormsby-Gore wrote Jackie, “I mourn him as though he were my own brother.”

  When Elaine de Kooning heard the news, she was working on her favorite portrait. It showed him wearing a sweatshirt, sailing pants, and sneakers, and squinting in the sunlight, looking just as he had that first day in Palm Beach. “The assassin dropped my brush,” she said. “I was traumatized. I had identified painting with painting Kennedy. For a full year, I couldn’t paint at all.” Later, she explained, “I felt that I had lost a brother or a lover. . . . I can’t believe the gunshots obliterated that brain, that personality. I was crushed. It was a personal loss.”

  A poll conducted within a week of his assassination by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago reported that 53 percent of Americans, ninety million people, had shed tears during the four days between his death and funeral. Blacks and Northerners were most likely to have wept, but even one in three Southern whites admitted crying. A majority of Americans said his assassination had been a “unique event” in their lives, more traumatic than Pearl Harbor or President Franklin Roosevelt’s sudden death. Seventy-nine percent reported mourning him like “someone very close and dear.”

  Because Americans felt they knew him almost as well as someone sitting across the breakfast table, they wanted more than a distant grave. Once their tears had dried, or before, they began naming roads and bridges, tunnels, highways, and buildings for him, creating a grief-stricken empire of asphalt, mortar, brick, and bronze so extensive that if you extinguished every light on earth except those illuminating something named for him, astronauts launched from the Kennedy Space Center would have seen a web of lights stretching across Europe and North America, and others scattered through Africa and Asia—and if proposals to stamp “Land of Kennedy” on every Massachusetts license plate, or to rename West Virginia “Kennedyiana” had been approved, they would have seen even more.

  George Orwell believed it was impossible to “prove” that William Shakespeare had been a great author, writing, “There is no test of literary merit except survival, which is in itself an index of majority opinion.” By that standard, Kennedy was a great president.

  A grieving nation installed plaques marking where he had slept, lived, campaigned, ate, and prayed, creating an instant biography in bronze. There were markers at the Hitching Post Inn in Cheyenne and at the Carpenter Hotel in Manchester, where he had slept, and at the U.S. Post Office on State Line Avenue in Texarkana, where he had delivered a campaign speech with one foot planted in Texas and the other in Arkansas. A plaque showed where he stood while giving a 1962 address in Independence Hall, and others marked the building at the University of Michigan where he proposed the Peace Corps, and the booth at the Union Oyster House in Boston where he sat on Sunday mornings, reading newspapers and eating chowder.

  Fifty years later, millions of people a day still cross Kennedy bridges in Niamey, Vienna, Liège, Mumbai, Bonn, Minnesota, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Kentucky, and drive down Kennedy boulevards, avenues, drives, expressways, causeways, and highways in Chicago, Maryland, Antibes, Tampa, Jersey City, San Francisco, Montreal, Key West, Waterville, Luxembourg, Humboldt, Curaçao, Casablanca, and Corpus Christi, to name a few. They play in Kennedy memorial playgrounds and parks; swim in Kennedy pools; stroll through Kennedy squares, plazas, and platzes in Providence, Utica, Bonn, Berlin, Iowa City, Atlantic City, Antwerp, Detroit, Seattle, and Syracuse; and pass Kennedy sculptures, fountains, busts, and memorial flagpoles. Students attend more than a hundred John F. Kennedy elementary, middle, and high schools in the United States. Their parents attend meetings in Kennedy Democratic clubs and union halls; belong to a Kennedy American Legion or Kennedy Knights of Columbus post; send letters from Kennedy post offices; conduct business in Kennedy civic centers; arrive or depart from Kennedy airports in New York and Ashland; attend concerts in Kennedy auditoriums; sail on Kennedy ferries, tugboats, and lifeboats; and play at golf courses, exercise in recreation centers, live in nursing homes or public housing developments, or are patients at hospitals carrying his name.

  There are forty Kennedy schools in Argentina, and his name is on a boys’ club in Uganda; a recreational center in Copenhagen; the largest sport center in Italy; a memorial park in Miraflores, Peru; an island in an ornamental lake in Melbourne; a youth center in the Ivory Coast; and three high schools, a college dining room, and a secondary school in Kenya. You can shop in the Kennedy Mall in Dubuque, and study at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. Every Saturday before Thanksgiving, thousands of competitors run between Boonsboro and Williamsport, Maryland, in the JFK Fifty Mile Marathon. Teams from around the world enter the JFK Field Hockey Tournament in Virginia Beach, sailors compete in the John F. Kennedy Memorial Regatta at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, and long-distance swimmers race in the PT109 Memorial Swim, held in the Solomon Islands on the anniversary of the day that he swam to tiny Plum Pudding Island, since renamed “Kennedy Island.”

  You can wander through the John F. Kennedy Peace Forest in Jerusalem, navigate the Kennedy Passage in Alaska, hike through the Mojave to the JFK Mountain profile, admire the Kennedy Rose in Stirling Forest Gardens, watch birds in the Kennedy Wildlife Sanctuary in Oyster Bay, climb Mount Kennedy in the Yukon or Kennedy Peak in the Dolomites, worship at a church in Parma whose cornerstone contains an urn filled with the earth from his grave, and study in the John F. Kennedy Library in Addis Ababa, and then drive an hour and drink beer with prostitutes at the J. F. Kennedy bar in Wolkite—or at least you could have a few years ago. You can visit the Kennedy Memorial at Runnymede, an acre of English ground that Parliament transferred to the United States, and look up from underneath the American scarlet oak, planted here because every November it weeps its red leaves onto the seven-ton black Portland
stone commemorating him, and see planes leaving Heathrow for John F. Kennedy International Airport.

  James MacGregor Burns called the memorials and grief “something that goes beyond rational calculation.” Burns had been the only author to write an authorized Kennedy biography. Kennedy had expected a book like his acclaimed Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox, and gave him access to his Senate files and submitted to hours of interviews. His 1960 biography was admiring but suggested that Kennedy lacked moral passion, listening too much to his intellect and too little to his heart.* Faced with explaining why a man he had criticized for lacking passion had excited such passionate grief, Burns said, “Was it a fabrication? Was it that he was handsome, and his wife and kids—one statesmen who had cute kids? You don’t find that many.” He concluded that it had to be “something that transcends all this.”

  The transcendent reason was that Kennedy was being mourned for his promise as well as for his accomplishments, a promise that had become increasingly evident during his last hundred days. This is why Albert Schweitzer praised him as a man “who could have been the savior of the world,” William Attwood believed the next five years of his presidency would have “ushered in a kind of American renaissance at home and abroad,” Ted Sorensen called his death “an incalculable loss of the future,” the diplomat Chip Bohlen thought that when he was killed and Johnson sworn in, it represented “the future giving way to the present or the past,” and the Israeli statesman Abba Eban, after defining tragedy as “the difference between what is and what might have been,” called his assassination “one of the most authentically tragic events in the history of nations.”

  “What might have been” is speculation, but what Kennedy intended to do is not.

  David Ormsby-Gore wrote in his condolence letter to Jackie, “He had great things to do and would have done them.” Anyone wishing to wager against him doing these great things, and becoming a great president, should consider what he had already done.

  He had been determined to see combat and demonstrate his courage during the war despite his poor health. After failing his military physicals, he had followed a strict regimen of physical conditioning and been accepted by the Navy, then pulled strings to be transferred from Intelligence to PT boats, and through willpower, courage, physical stamina, and luck had survived the sinking of PT 109 and been decorated for heroism. He had run for Congress at the age of twenty-nine, and despite being gravely ill he had beaten more seasoned opponents. He had challenged Lodge for the Senate in 1952, and confounded the professionals by beating him decisively in a year when Republicans handily won the White House and Eisenhower carried Massachusetts. He had been determined to win a Pulitzer Prize, and he had. He had told Margaret Coit that he would become president, and seven years later, despite his youth and religion, he had done that, too. He had wanted to deliver the greatest speech by a president since the Gettysburg Address, and his inaugural address had been just that.

  He had told Henry Brandon that to win the presidency he had to be a cold warrior, but to win a second term he had to be seen as searching for a peaceful end to the cold war. Days before leaving for Dallas he told Averell Harriman that he planned to make improved relations with the Soviet Union and a comprehensive test ban treaty, one including underground testing, the “principal thrust” of his second term. He also intended to travel to Moscow for a summit meeting with Khrushchev; launch a secret dialogue with Castro; explore the possibility of establishing a relationship with China; withdraw a thousand advisers from Vietnam by the end of 1963 and remove more during 1964; settle the cold war; end the threat of a nuclear war; launch an attack on poverty; pass his tax cut, civil rights, and immigration bills; preside over the most robust, full-employment economy in American history; and continue marrying poetry to power and inspiring the young.

  What he intended to do is easier to discern than why he intended to do it. His remark during his dispute with the American Legion that “more often than not, the right thing to do is the right thing politically” shows that he realized that morality and political success were not exclusive, but raises the question of how much he wanted to accomplish these things because he considered them moral imperatives, or because they had engaged his emotions, or because he saw them as hurdles he needed to jump if he was to be judged a great man. Emotions, morals, and ambition were so tightly woven in him that unbraiding them would have been difficult enough had he served two terms, written his own memoirs, and been the subject of books by advisers like Schlesinger and Sorensen that were not composed under the shadow of Dallas. What is clear is that just as ambition and realpolitik had characterized his congressional career and early White House years, morality and emotion tempered his ambitions during his last hundred days.

  Nor is it speculation to contrast what he intended to do with what happened.

  Lincoln noted in her diary on November 23 that “Bobby asked me to take all of the tapes (telephone and recordings of cabinet room meetings) home for safe keeping”—presumably to prevent them from falling into Johnson’s hands. Bobby kept their existence secret from Sorensen and Schlesinger, who were both writing accounts of the administration, and gave them to the Kennedy Library. Kennedy never had the chance to write his memoirs and plead his case before the high court of history, but it is inconceivable that someone who admired history and the written word as much as he did, had dictated the most moving and memorable passages in his inaugural address, and had won a Pulitzer Prize would not have written one of the most literate, honest, and engrossing presidential memoirs of all time.

  Johnson asked Kennedy’s aides to stay on but forbade them to wear their PT 109 tie clasps in the White House. Many of those who had been closest to Kennedy resigned in 1964, including O’Donnell, Powers, Schlesinger, Salinger, Sorensen, and Bobby. Most of his foreign policy team, including Rusk, McNamara, and Bundy, stayed on. Johnson kept Hoover at the FBI beyond retirement age and urged him and Richard Katzenbach, who had replaced Robert Kennedy as attorney general, to reopen the sex angle of the Bobby Baker scandal, perhaps hoping it might blacken his predecessor’s reputation. The Evening Star reported in March 1965 that Rometsch had asked the State Department for permission to return to the United States so she could marry “a staff member of an important congressional committee” (presumably La Verne Duffy), and had admitted belonging to two Communist youth organizations before moving to West Germany. The paper also reported that Republicans on the Senate Rules Committee wanted to explore the party-girl aspects of the Baker case, and that one of Baker’s girls was claiming that her clients had included “some members of the executive branch.”

  Congress passed Kennedy’s immigration bill, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. It made immigration easier for residents of the Far East and Asian Subcontinent, and with the exception of the Civil Rights Act has probably done more to transform American society than any legislation in the last half century.

  The “Great Society,” Johnson’s domestic legislative program, was largely a compendium of Kennedy’s bills and initiatives. Medicare had been gaining traction before Dallas, and according to a New York Times editorial published on November 22, “The most forgotten of all the great forgotten issues of 1963, medical care for the aged, is finally getting a modicum of attention on Capitol Hill” and “the chances for sound action have been improved by the recommendations of a 12-member private advisory group.” Johnson pushed Kennedy’s tax-cut bill through Congress, but Kennedy had been on track to achieve this. The House had approved his bill in September, and when Bradlee needled him about not getting it passed before the end of the year, he had said, “God, what does it matter, Ben? We’re going to get the tax bill. It’s going to come in February. O.K., it’s not this year but it’s two months later.” On November 23, Walter Heller asked Johnson if he wanted him to continue pursuing the antipoverty program that Kennedy had planned to launch in 1964. Johnson said yes, but suggested calling it “The War on Poverty.”
After Johnson escalated U.S. participation in the Vietnam War in 1965 without raising taxes, Heller resigned in protest from the Council of Economic Advisers.

  Kennedy had persuaded Halleck and Dirksen to support his civil rights bill, and the House Judiciary Committee had reported out a strengthened bill including a provision prohibiting racial discrimination in employment. Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act in July 1964. Kennedy would have succeeded in getting a civil rights bill through Congress, but perhaps not until after the election. On the one-year anniversary of Dallas, Look magazine published an article by the reporter Richard Wilson titled, “What Happened to the Kennedy Program.” Wilson interviewed Democratic and Republican congressional leaders and found them unanimous in concluding, that the Kennedy program “would have been adopted had he lived, just as it was adopted when he was dead.” Senate Majority Leader Mansfield said, “The assassination made no real difference. Adoption of the tax bill and civil rights bill might have taken a little longer, but they would have been adopted.” Senate Minority Leader Dirksen said, “The program was on its way before November 22, 1963. Its time had come.” According to House Majority Leader Carl Albert, “The pressure behind this program had become so great that it would have been adopted in essentially the same form whether Kennedy lived or died,” and House Minority Leader Halleck said, “The assassination made no difference. The program was already made.” They had to have known that their opinions would upset the notoriously touchy Johnson, but they made them anyway. There was no political gain in voicing them and considerable risk, since all four men would have to work with Johnson during the next four years, making their statements all the more impressive and credible.