The Kennedy Imprisonment

by Garry Wills

  If, in 1944, John Hersey had tried to find out how a PT boat could be run down by a destroyer, military censorship would have blocked his effort. Inflation of heroic deeds was encouraged by the whole war atmosphere. It is typical of the “gentleman songsters” aspect of the PT command that Kennedy first told Hersey of his exploit after dining at the Stork Club and going to the theater. Hersey had married an old girl friend of Kennedy’s, and the two met at social affairs before and during the war. This was one more confirmation of the Ambassador’s belief that knowing the right people would pay off, down the road, in unforeseen ways. “Doing the town” while on leave, Kennedy ran across just the right celebrator of his legend.

  If the Navy encouraged exaggeration of its heroes’ exploits, it nonetheless downgraded the medal Kennedy was recommended for, and rewrote the citation, and delayed the bestowal for nine months—which suggests to the Blairs that there were some misgivings about the accident 109 was engaged in. Kennedy did not get his medal until his father’s friend, James Forrestal, became Secretary of the Navy. From the time of the Inga Arvad affair, Joseph Kennedy had been closely engaged in the Navy’s treatment of his sons. Through his lobbying, the U.S.S. Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. was commissioned and cadet Robert Kennedy was assigned to serve on it. The promoter who had opposed entry into the war, and who lost a son to it, was nevertheless determined to get some mileage out of it for his other sons’ careers.

  So the legend was born. On his desk in the Oval Office, Kennedy kept the cocoanut shell he carved as a message to potential rescuers. In the legend, this did the trick. In fact, an Australian spotter had already arranged for the rescue before the cocoanut was received. From his first race for Congress through his entry into the White House, Kennedy used his shipmates as campaign speakers. The PT 109 tie clip became a status symbol on the New Frontier. Edward Kennedy created a sensation by giving them away in Africa. Not since Theodore Roosevelt charged up San Juan Hill with two journalists at his side had a military episode been so expertly merchandized for its political value. In the White House, Kennedy oversaw all aspects of the movie made about his adventure, approving the script and director, choosing the star, Cliff Robertson. (His first choice, Warren Beatty, turned the President down.)

  In time, John Kennedy surpassed his father in skill at creating the right image for himself. Though a lackluster student at Harvard, Kennedy left school with material for a book that made him seem a promising young intellectual. He managed his congressional career the same way. While not distinguishing himself for legislation or leadership among his peers, he gave a key speech (on Algeria) and published a key book (on courage) that attracted public notice. Profiles in Courage was a “twofer,” not only a prize-winning performance in itself, but a reminder to readers and reviewers that the war veteran knew something about courage, about the Hemingway quality of “grace under pressure” mentioned in the book’s first sentence.

  John Kennedy is rightly called the author of Profiles in Courage, as he is the author of his own inaugural address. He authorized each—was the only one who could deliver it; directed the writing; delivered nothing he did not accept; had final right to delete anything or add anything. His authority could not be overruled. It was all done in his name. But Theodore Sorensen, not the author in any of the senses used above, wrote the inaugural address. And Sorensen, along with Jules Davids and others, wrote Profiles in Courage.

  The book was put together much like a major speech. Scholars and politicians were canvassed for suggestions. Subjects were chosen to give political balance to the book—three Senators from the South, three from the Midwest, and two Republicans were included lest the Democratic Senator from Massachusetts be accused of making courage a New England or a party monopoly. Yet the Senator from Massachusetts meant to connect himself with a noble tradition—so two Senators from Massachusetts were included in this study of eight Senate heroes. The network of honorary Kennedys was pressed into service. Dean Landis wrote a memorandum that remarkably defines the book’s theme. Professors Schlesinger and Commager were asked for suggestions and read drafts. Alan Nevins wrote the introduction. Jacqueline Kennedy brought her history teacher at Georgetown—Jules Davids—into the process. Arthur Krock made suggestions to Sorensen, who was this book’s Arthur Krock.

  This kind of political production is normal, not only for an officeholder’s speeches but for his books. The two categories tend, in fact, to merge when a politician is “writing.” Books just collect or expand on his speeches, written by various aides. There is no deception in this, because there is no pretense that the man signing his name did all or even most of the writing. But things were complicated in Kennedy’s case by the fact that Arthur Krock was lobbying to win the book a writer’s prize, the Pulitzer.

  If the Ambassador was right, if it helps to have written a well-received book, it helps immeasurably more to have received a Pulitzer Prize for having written a book. John Kennedy wanted that award, and was willing to make claims of authorship that went well beyond the political authorization involved in delivering a speech. Indeed, he made claims, and insisted on them repeatedly, that are not sustainable. When it was suggested that Kennedy had not written his own book, he showed anger and threatened suits; his father asked the FBI to investigate his accusers. The Senator displayed notes in his own hand, and dictabelt tapes of his own voice.

  But those notes and tapes are now in the Kennedy Library, and Herbert Parmet’s investigation of them destroys Kennedy’s claim to have written the book. The notes pertain mainly to one subject—John Quincy Adams, the Massachusetts favorite among Kennedy’s chosen heroes; and even these are not drafts of a continuous text. The tapes are a jumble of quotes from secondary sources (many of them passages read straight from Margaret Coit’s life of John Calhoun). There is no draft, at any stage, for the book, or for any substantial part of it. The notes show he was keeping up with the progress of the work; but Kennedy was ill, traveling, or campaigning most of the time when the book is supposed to have been composed, and Sorensen was working on it full time—sometimes for twelve hours a day—over a period of six months. Parmet leaves no doubt who did most of the work, and especially who supplied “the drama and flow that made for readability.” From his first work on his senior paper at Harvard, Kennedy was never able to sustain a long passage of prose—he assembled that paper in a mad flurry of work with a team of hired secretaries to whom he dictated, pointing out passages for copying, working more as compiler than prose artist.

  Sorensen follows the code of the political speechwriter in maintaining that his principal was the author of whatever he signed. Within the constraints of his craft, speaking its code as it were, Sorensen told the truth. But Jules Davids, who wrote lengthy first sketches of four chapters, told Parmet that he and Sorensen did most of the research and drafting of the book. Kennedy loyalists supported the Senator’s specific claim to having written the book, though James MacGregor Burns admitted in his oral history report at the Kennedy Library: “I think Sorensen, or whoever was helping him, gave him more help on the book than you or I could get if we were doing one.” The rules for Kennedys are different, that’s all.

  One of the books Profiles shoved aside for the 1957 Pulitzer was Burns’s own Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox, which was the second choice of the biography panel (consisting of Julian Boyd and Bernard Mayo). The first choice of the judges was Alpheus Mason’s Harlan Fiske Stone: Pillar of the Law. Three other books were also recommended: Irving Brant’s James Madison: The President, 1809–1812, Samuel Flagg Bemis’s John Quincy Adams and the Union, and William N. Chambers’s Old Bullion Benton. It would have been ridiculous to place Kennedy’s work in the company of these biographies, and the two historians did not. But the Pulitzer Advisory Board has the power—and the bad habit—of overruling its own judges’ recommendations, and that happened in 1957, when Arthur Krock “worked like hell” (in his own words) to get the prize for Kennedy.

  The board, naturally, denied improper influe
nce—which reduced it to the puerile explanation that the Milwaukee Journal’s president, J. D. Ferguson, swayed twelve grown men with the news that his twelve-year-old grandson enjoyed Profiles in Courage. Herbert Parmet, the best student of this whole episode, is skeptical of the board’s rather humiliating explanation of its own act:

  Keeping his hands off would have been out of character for the Ambassador. Allowing the Pulitzer prize to be decided by chance would have been especially unique for a man who placed so much importance on having his son gain literary respectability en route to power, and Hohenberg [historian of the Pulitzer nominations] has admitted to Krock’s visibility in the situation. Furthermore, the Times correspondent had been “instrumental” in deciding “several” other Pulitzer prizes. His credentials as a lobbyist within that journalism fraternity were first-rate.

  Because of his book, Kennedy was chosen to chair a special Senate committee for choosing the five outstanding Senators in America’s history. This committee announced its winners just one day before Kennedy won the Pulitzer. Of the five Senators chosen to be honored, three were included in Kennedy’s eight “profiles,” and the press treated those by referring to Kennedy’s text. The book’s appearance, his service on the committee, and winning the Pulitzer made up a kind of triple play for Kennedy in the spring of 1957, just as his presidential hopes were surfacing.

  In 1981, shortly after a reporter for the Washington Post received a Pulitzer Prize, it was discovered that her account was false. In order to advance her journalistic career, she had made up a sensational story. She had to resign in disgrace, and the paper apologized for inadvertently misleading the prize committee. The Pulitzer Prize is given for reporting and writing. The book award is given and accepted on the assumption that the writer’s skill is at issue, not the patron’s office. In taking the prize, Kennedy falsified the facts of the book’s production; and he spent all his remaining years covering up that falsification. He lied to the nation, and conscripted various honorary Kennedys in perpetuating his image as a prize-winning author and historian. This aided his career in many ways. For instance, when he wanted the Republican Robert McNamara, who had just taken over the Ford Company, to come to Washington as his Secretary of Defense, McNamara—who had read and been impressed by Profiles in Courage—asked him directly if he had really written it. Kennedy solemnly assured him that he had.

  So, a woman tried to advance her career, and is ruined. A student tries to pass Spanish, has a friend take his exam for him, and is kicked out of Harvard. But a Senator claims that he wrote what he did not, and goes blithely on to the presidency. This would pose an ethical problem for a man who did not separate his “image” so clearly from any concern for truth. Putting the best face on one’s performance is a fundamental political skill; and it was for Joseph and John Kennedy an imperative of family life. Creating the Kennedy “image” was a basic drive for both men. Sometimes this meant exaggerating what was, admittedly, a heroic episode. Sometimes it meant asserting a nonexistent role as writer. It seems unlikely that either man could distinguish between the two exercises in self-promotion.

  The woman reporter who lost her Pulitzer had given herself false credentials when applying for the Washington Post job—she claimed to be a Vassar graduate. John Kennedy gave himself false credentials in his Who’s Who entry—a nonexistent year of study at the London School of Economics. He gave biographers false credentials for his war medal. It was not enough to save one man, at the risk of his own life. He had to save three. The incremental touches of glamour were always sought. The unflattering notes were censored. The collision became an attack. The flattering New Yorker article became a Kennedy panegyric when tailored for Reader’s Digest—and that in turn became a campaign document (and, later on, a movie). Reality was all a matter of arranging appearances for the electorate.

  The senior Kennedy had forged a separate world for his children. It hovered above ordinary life. It created reality, as Hollywood renamed starlets and gave them more interesting biographies. Glamour was something other people yearned for; the Kennedys could supply it. An appetite was satisfied on both sides. War propaganda did for heroes what Hollywood promotion did for stars. The superhuman does not just happen. It must be contrived. For a time, that master contriver of images, Joseph Kennedy, would see his family outshine any star in the fan magazines, any heroic astronaut on the cover of Life, any popular professor on the Harvard campus. In this world, you were whatever you could make people think you were. In that sense, John Kennedy was the writer of Profiles in Courage.

  11

  Style

  Summoning artists to participate in the august occasions of the state

  Seems something artists ought to celebrate.

  —ROBERT FROST, 1961 Inauguration

  Washington positively fizzed in 1961. Kennedy had assembled a cabinet of all the talents. Brilliant people circulated, telling each other how brilliant they were. As Arthur Schlesinger remembers it:

  Washington seemed engaged in a collective effort to make itself brighter, gayer, more intellectual, more resolute. It was a golden interlude.… One’s life seemed almost to pass in review as one encountered Harvard classmates, wartime associates, faces seen after the war in ADA conventions, workers in Stevenson campaigns, academic colleagues, all united in a surge of hope and possibility.

  Both Schlesinger and Sorensen proudly count up the Rhodes Scholars riding the New Frontier.

  These “eggheads” boasted of their worldliness. Harvard professors, moving south, shed weight and wives, changed eyeglasses for contact lenses, worked hard and played hard. Schlesinger delights in the fact that Kenneth Galbraith not only wrote economic tomes but satiric essays in Esquire (Schlesinger was writing movie reviews for Show while serving in the White House). In describing Richard Goodwin as “the archetypal New Frontiersman,” Schlesinger includes among his credentials “dining with Jean Seberg.” Sorensen gives the President’s friendship with Frank Sinatra as proof of his “range.” The crush of intellectuals around Marilyn Monroe, at the President’s birthday party, became a favorite memory. Schlesinger included it in his book on Robert:

  Adlai Stevenson wrote a friend about his “perilous encounters” that evening with Marilyn, “dressed in what she calls ‘skin and beads.’ I didn’t see the beads! My encounters, however, were only after breaking through the strong defenses established by Robert Kennedy, who was dodging around her like a moth around the flame.” We were all moths around the flame that night. I wrote: “I do not think I have seen anyone so beautiful; I was enchanted by her manner and her wit, at once so masked, so ingenuous and so penetrating. But one felt a terrible unreality about her—as if talking to someone under water. Bobby and I engaged in mock competition for her; she was most agreeable to him and pleasant to me—but then she receded into her own glittering mist.”

  Other women were more accessible than Marilyn—Myra McPherson interviewed one such “Kennedy girl” for her book The Power Lovers. She remembered: “Kennedy set the example. Anyone in his following had to have his doxy.” As Graham Greene wrote of Rochester: “He had such an art in gilding his failures that it was hard not to love his faults.…”

  Harvard’s urge toward Washington was so intense that it carried the professors halfway to Hollywood. At the Kennedy Library, the symbol of White House culture is the legendary night Pablo Casals played in the East Room. But Kennedy himself showed more interest in the planning and performances of his own birthday salutes—the first in Madison Square Garden, the second in Washington’s National Guard Armory. Richard Adler, who wrote the musicals Pajama Game and Damn Yankees, was “master of revels” at these parties. For the first one, Adler brought in Marilyn Monroe to croon happy birthday for the President. And he topped himself the next year:

  I directed operations from the balcony through phones to the lighting and sound men, the conductor in the pit and the stage manager backstage. Everybody was in the Armory, waiting. And when the President made his entra
nce and began to walk to the Presidential box, I pinned him with a spot and cued six trumpets for “Ruffles and Flourishes.” You know: “Tum-ta-ta, tum-ta-ta, tum-ta-ta.” I tell you, it was terrific! A Roman emperor entering the Colosseum wouldn’t have been more dramatic! Such a roar went up from the crowd. And right away we went into “Hail to the Chief.” It was fantastic! Then we give the press boys one and a half minutes for pictures, they like it, and also it adds to the excitement. Meanwhile we are lowering the lights, and I have a drum roll going, and as each group of lights goes out and the drums get louder and louder until finally they are very loud, and then the orchestra breaks into the National Anthem, very loud, and at that point I have two flags up high above the stage, and there are fans behind them, and the flags are picked up by spots and they billow out and I had a great singer, John Reardon, to sing the National Anthem, which is usually dull in a show. Well, I want to say that the minute the National Anthem started and those flags lit up, the crowd was on its feet, applauding (did you ever see that before?), and after Reardon finished singing he took a bow, which nobody has ever done before, and they gave him a wonderful reception.… We never had a President like this.

  Mr. Adler knew how to please his patron: “This was the President’s party, not one of those culture-vulture programs.” It was a giddy time. Remembering an early White House party for the Radziwills, Schlesinger writes in A Thousand Days: “Never had girls seemed so pretty, tunes so melodious, an evening so blithe and unconstrained.”