The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  Lem disliked Red Fay, the new undersecretary of the navy, as much as Red disdained Lem. Red did his own routine of buffoonery, attempting to shove Lem to stage rear with a little reminiscing here, some posturing for the camera there. His wit, like Lem’s, had been honed so as never to risk pricking Kennedy’s skin.

  “Frank!” the president exclaimed enthusiastically. “How about a glass of milk!” Allergies be damned. “And don’t mind Lem; he thinks he’s still in prep school.”

  “Yeah, well, who’s asking for milk,” Lem quipped.

  Jack took off his clothes and walked out into the kitchen in his shorts. “It’s good to be home, Frank,” the president said as he stood there chugging down the milk and rubbing his bad back. Frank did not want to stare, but he was startled when he saw Kennedy’s surgery scars.

  The next day the president was supposed to go on a cruise on the Marlin and enjoy some fine New England lobsters, but the day was so blustery that he spent much of the time reading, sitting on the front lawn wrapped in a Notre Dame blanket. His back was still bothering him, and Dr. Travell hovered nearby; her patient was hobbling around much of the time on crutches.

  As the president prepared for the summit with Khrushchev, he was inundated with memos, briefing books, letters, and advice from all quarters. Unlike much of the intelligence he had been given on Cuba, this material was sophisticated and realistic, stripped of ideological cliché, flattery, and bombast. Washington’s five-year “National Intelligence Estimate” of the Soviet Union did not present an image of an irrational, expansive, chance-taking Russia, but described a country acting with “opportunism, but also by what they consider to be a due measure of caution.” Khrushchev seemingly could afford to wait. In January, the Soviet leader had given an address to the meeting of world Communist leaders in which he said, “To win time in the economic contest with capitalism is now the main thing.” The Soviet economy was growing at an extraordinary 8.6 percent a year. The Soviets were investing one-third of their gross national product back into the economy, as opposed to only 20 percent in the United States. Although the Soviet economy was less than half that of America, it was growing twice as fast. The experts believed that the Soviet military was already roughly on a par with the West. Politically, throughout the developing world, many of the most intelligent and idealistic young leaders looked toward socialism as their model and linked the United States with the other colonial powers of the West.

  “From the particular vantage point of Belgrade, it is evident that [the] noncommitted world now stands at [a] very crucial parting of the ways,” wrote Ambassador George Kennan. “If some relaxation of over-all world tensions is not achieved, it seems to me very likely that there will be a serious split between that group of unaligned nations which is violently anti-Western and anti-American and that which would like to preserve decent relations with the West.”

  The president was coming off the disaster of the Bay of Pigs. If he had not been the one to propose this summit originally, he would probably have postponed the event. The stakes for Kennedy were even higher: unlike most summit meetings, where some agreements have been worked out beforehand, the two leaders were arriving with nothing but a vague agenda, and it was possible that Kennedy would walk away with nothing but the echoes of rhetoric. He clearly could have used something more than generalizations about what to expect, but as the State Department rightly told him: “In an exchange of this type, particularly with so outspoken a leader as Khrushchev, it is not practicable to expect that the course of the talks can be charted in advance.”

  Such analyses, as realistic and thoughtful as they were, were not constructed to fill the young president with immense confidence. Of course, Kennedy’s advisers were not supposed to be trainers, massaging him and whispering encouragement to him. Yet many of the documents prepared for Kennedy were marked by a startling defensiveness and a fear of the future. These experts seemed not to understand that the Soviet Union had much more to fear in the future than did the Western democracies.

  In February the president had met with his top advisers on the Soviet Union. He asked Llewellyn Thompson, the astute ambassador to the Soviet Union, what had to be done to win the war against Soviet communism. The ambassador had not replied with an arcane discussion of weapon systems, covert actions, and propaganda campaigns. He had talked about the human spirit. “First, and most important, we must make our own system work,” Thompson said. “Second, we must maintain the unity of the West. Third, we must find ways of placing ourselves in new and effective relations to the great forces of nationalism and anti-colonialism. Fourth, we must, in these ways and others, change our image before the world so that it becomes plain that we and not the Soviet Union stand for the future.”

  An immense question was just what approach the young president would take with the Soviet Union. There was fear in some quarters that he might overreact to the Soviet challenge, a fear expressed most articulately and passionately by the most unexpected of spokesmen. In his farewell address President Eisenhower had said, “We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” Critics would attempt to turn Eisenhower into a critic of this military-industrial alliance, but he was warning against only what he considered its potential excesses. “We recognize the imperative need for this development,” he said. “Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications.” Eisenhower had overseen an immense military buildup, yet he saw that the cold war was an endurance contest in which economic strength was as creditable a weapon as mass deterrence. He believed Kennedy’s campaign rhetoric and feared that the new president would listen to the blandishments of the defense contractors encouraging him to build military systems of unprecedented expense and complexity while attempting to cut taxes. Eisenhower had warned in a campaign speech that “when the push of a button may mean obliteration of countless humans, the president of the United States must be forever on guard against any inclination on his part to impetuosity; to arrogance; to headlong action; to expediency; to facile maneuvers; even to the popularity of an action as opposed to the rightness of an action.”

  “Vive Jacqui! Vive Jacqui! Vive Jacqui! Vive Jacqui!”

  As the president and first lady drove in a long motorcade through Paris, a chant echoed through the elegant boulevards and the old quarters. The worldly Parisians greeted Jackie as one of their own, celebrating her the way they had no previous first lady. Jack realized that though this was his state visit, it was his wife’s triumph.

  Jackie’s success was in part the result of calculation and planning. Many of the extraordinary series of gowns and dresses that she wore in Europe and America might have borne the label of her American designer, Oleg Cassini. In truth, many of them were primarily the result of collaboration between Jackie and Cassini’s assistant, Joseph Boccehir. As first lady, Jackie could not be seen in the French haute couture that was her preference. Instead, she perused fashion magazines, cutting out pictures and sketches of French clothes that she admired, suggesting changes, a new fabric, a bow, a cummerbund, and sending her ideas to Boccehir, who brilliantly created her vision. In Paris an exquisite pink lace gown, though officially dubbed a Cassini creation, proved to be similar to a Pierre Cardin dress in his spring collection. It was “so identical,” Women’s Wear Daily noted, “that the Paris couture couldn’t believe their eyes.”

  Kennedy had dreamed of the great ladies of history, a Catherine the Great or Marquise de Pompadour, ladies of wit, grace, and nuance who talked of art and music and politics, moving seamlessly from subject to subject. He had thought only European women were capable of that, but the thirty-one-year-old woman sitting between him and President Charles de Gaulle at the brilliant dinner at Versailles was proving herself precisely such a woman. “This evening, Madame, you are looking like a Watteau,” the French leader greeted her, but it was not only her looks that proved exquisite. The two leaders dispensed with their official interpreter, a
nd instead Jackie translated. That was no mere ceremonial honor, for Kennedy and de Gaulle discussed substantive matters during the elegant repast. “She played the game very intelligently,” the French leader reflected after she left France with a president who called himself “the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris.” De Gaulle said that “without mixing in politics, she gave her husband the prestige of a Maecenas,” referring to a Roman diplomat and counselor to the Emperor Augustus.

  In most circumstances, Kennedy would have found the grand fete at the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles a wondrous diversion, but he was momentarily so disoriented that he did not recognize his sister-in-law, Princess Radziwill, and shook her hand politely as he would that of any other guest. That faux pas appeared to startle him, and as he walked on with the imperious President de Gaulle he turned away a glass of orange juice and asked for champagne instead.

  During his three days in Paris Kennedy was suffering immensely from pain. Not only Dr. Travell and Dr. Burkley accompanied the president, but Dr. Jacobson as well. Although Kennedy called in Dr. Jacobson to deal with his back pain, he appears to have used Jacobson’s treatment primarily when he needed to be especially alert. After the long flight the doctor attended to the president on the morning of his first long, event-filled day in Paris. Dr. Travell shot him up with novocaine two or three times a day, but that was not enough to relieve his back pain, and when he was in his suite at the Quai d’Orsay, he got into the golden bathtub to see whether hot water could dull his pain.

  It was raining as Air Force One flew into Vienna, raining as the motorcade moved through the old streets full of cheering crowds, and raining as Kennedy arrived at the American embassy residence for the start of the two-day summit. At around noon, just before Kennedy’s first meeting with Khrushchev, the president called in Dr. Jacobson. “Khrushchev is supposed to be on his way over,” Jacobson recalled Kennedy saying. “The meeting may last for a long time. See to it that my back won’t give me any trouble when I have to get up or move around.”

  When Khrushchev arrived, he dispensed quickly with the inevitable politesse of diplomatic gatherings and began to lecture Kennedy like a professor trying to force some knowledge into a stubborn student. The Soviet leader led the American president on a journey that swept from the feudal past, through the French Revolution, to the Soviet present. “Once an idea is born, it cannot be chained or burned,” Khrushchev said with the conviction of his ideology. “History should be the judge in the argument between ideas.”

  However much Kennedy’s health dragged him down, at moments like this he was able to will himself into a sharp focus. He did not challenge Khrushchev’s sweep of history by suggesting that others might view communism as a journey back into history’s dungeons, not the triumphant march of the future. Such a response might have been emotionally satisfying, but this was not a debate in which he would be scored on the points he made, and he had a crucial agenda that he had come to promote.

  Instead of confronting Khrushchev, Kennedy suggested that this struggle of ideas had to be conducted “without affecting the vital security interests of the two countries.” The Russian leader took that to mean that “the United States wanted the USSR to sit like a schoolboy with his hands on his desk. The Soviet Union supports its ideas and holds them in high esteem. It cannot guarantee that these ideas will stop at its borders.”

  Kennedy was a student of history, but the past had taught him different lessons. When he finally got Khrushchev alone, he tried to impart his own vivid sense of history to the Soviet leader. Khrushchev might believe that feudalism led to capitalism, and capitalism to communism. As Kennedy saw it, history was not made up of abstract movements but of human lives moving through time. The president pointed out that history was not won without immense costs in blood and turmoil. He talked of all the “great disturbances and upheavals throughout Europe” at the time of the French Revolution, and all the “convulsions, even interventions by other countries,” at the time of the Russian Revolution. The president admitted that he had “made a mis-judgment with regard to the Cuban situation,” and that the reason the two of them were sitting here today was “to introduce greater precision in these judgments so that our two countries could survive this period of competition without endangering their national security.” Khrushchev countered that when a subject people rose up to throw off a tyrant, that was not the hand of Moscow at work but the will of a subjugated people. The Russian leader paraded some of the more obvious examples of Western hypocrisy, including the support of the fascist Franco in Spain.

  Khrushchev did not seem interested in this “greater precision” if it meant signing new agreements in Vienna. He was full of endless Marxist platitudes and bromides, while Kennedy was an American technician, attempting to strap a few more safeguards onto the machine of death that the two leaders controlled—or perhaps more accurately, that controlled the two leaders.

  After lunch on the second and final day, Kennedy asked to talk to Khrushchev again in private. This was his last chance to achieve at least some of that “greater precision.” Berlin was arguably the most dangerous place in the world. There, where the Soviet bloc and the West touched so menacingly, was the tinder to set off World War III. Khrushchev could pretend that history was a dove that rode on the Soviet shoulder, but the people of East Germany were turning away from the Communist future by tens of thousands a year, escaping into the free city of West Berlin. The Russian leader could suggest, as he did to Kennedy, that the famous American kitchen in which he had debated Nixon was unlike any kitchen in America, but the West was a siren song and the walls around the Soviet Union and its satellites were there to keep people in more than to keep spies out. Khrushchev needed to stop the flow of so many of East Germany’s most talented people into the West, and by signing a peace treaty with East Germany he would have an excuse to do so. Soon afterward, supposedly of their own volition, the East Germans would close off the entrée points along the autobahn, and this intolerable, decadent, capitalist sore would be cauterized.

  Kennedy pushed Khrushchev hard, trying to get him to back off from signing a peace treaty with East Germany. He wanted the Soviet leader to promise that whatever happened, West Berlin’s rights of access to the West would be maintained. And every time Kennedy pushed, Khrushchev pushed back, giving nothing. “The calamities of a war will be shared equally,” Khrushchev said in a statement with which the president could scarcely disagree. “The decision to sign a peace treaty is firm and irrevocable and the Soviet Union will sign it in December if the U.S. refuses an interim agreement.”

  “It will be a cold winter,” Kennedy said, ending his dialogue with the Russian leader.

  Air Force One flew out of Vienna that afternoon, taking Kennedy for his first visit to London since becoming president. It should have been the most glorious of reunions, Kennedy returning in triumph to the city that his father had left in disgrace two decades before. The president was indeed doubly welcomed, as the leader of Great Britain’s most important ally and as a lover of the nation’s peoples and culture. But no matter how fine the champagne with which Kennedy was toasted, the taste of ashes stayed in his mouth.

  On his one full day in London, the president attended the christening of Anna Christina Radziwill, the daughter of Jackie’s sister and her husband, Prince Radziwill. For a hundred years wealthy American women had been marrying impecunious European noblemen, appropriating royal titles, and if one of the ambitious Bouvier sisters was a first lady, the other was now a princess. The splendid chamber was full of the great names of England, solemnly witnessing this occasion. It was a glorious ceremony that had all the patina of ancient rituals, commemorating blood as the most sacred of inheritances.

  Among the guests was columnist Joseph Alsop, a friend of the president and a man comfortable with the elites of Europe. While the glittering palaver went on elsewhere, Kennedy pulled Alsop off into a corner and for fifteen minutes unloaded on him in a tense, urgent voice. “I had
no idea when I was at Vienna how serious it was,” Alsop said, nor did the American public. Alsop listened, thinking that for the first time Kennedy had to “really face up to the appalling moral burden that an American president now has to carry.”

  When Kennedy arrived back in Washington, he was exhausted and went to bed a sick man. Except when he had little choice but to attend a public gathering, he barely stumbled out of bed for the next week. For the first time the White House announced that the president had hurt his back on his Canadian trip and that he was being treated with novocaine shots and swimming. He flew down to Palm Beach, where he took over the estate of Charles Wrightsman and swam laps in the heated pool.

  Kennedy tried to play the healthy man, walking briskly down the ramp and entering his limousine without aid. But the public knew that their young president was hobbling around on crutches. This elicited a myriad of advice: the owner of the Bodark Crutch Company was appalled at the “cheap undependable pair of adjustable crutches” Kennedy was using; a British astrologer offered a “Natural Cure”; a Miami physician drove up to Palm Beach hoping to physically manipulate the president’s back; a Pulaski Foundation pilgrimage prayed for his recovery at the shrine of Czestochowa; chiropractors were ready to put their hands on the offending bones; the Sleeper Lounge Company offered an electrical Sleeper Lounge Adjust-A-Bed; and a molded-shoe manufacturer wanted to send a special shoe to the president. In America, genuine solicitousness meshed perfectly with opportunism, but the larger problem was that it was unthinkable that the youthful president should be seen as limping along.