Jack Kennedy

by Chris Matthews

  John:

  Hello.

  Kennedy:

  Why do leaves fall?

  John:

  Because it’s winter.

  Kennedy:

  No, autumn.

  John:

  Autumn.

  Kennedy:

  And why does the snow come on the ground?

  John:

  Because it’s winter.

  Kennedy:

  Why do the leaves turn green?

  John:

  Because it’s winter.

  Kennedy:

  Spring. Spring.

  John:

  Spring.

  Kennedy:

  And why do we go to the Cape? Hyannis Port?

  John:

  Because it’s winter.

  Kennedy:

  It’s summer!

  John:

  It’s summer.

  Kennedy:

  Say your horses . . .

  Caroline:

  Your horses.

  “I was shocked by the death of Diem and Nhu,” Kennedy continued his dictation.

  “I’d met Diem with Justice Douglas many years ago. He was an extraordinary character. While he became increasingly difficult in the last months, nevertheless over a ten-year period he’d held his country together, maintained its independence under very adverse conditions. The way he was killed makes it particularly abhorrent. The question now is whether the generals can stay together and build a stable government, or whether . . . the intellectuals, students, et cetera, will turn on the government as repressive and undemocratic in the not too distant future.”

  The following day he gave Maxwell Taylor, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, a clear signal of his intentions in Vietnam, offering what he viewed as the limits of American commitment in-country. “He is instinctively against introduction of U.S. forces,” Taylor would report. Jack made a similar comment to Arthur Schlesinger. “They want a force of American troops. They say it’s necessary in order to restore confidence and maintain morale. But it will be just like Berlin. The troops will march in, the bands will play, the crowds will cheer, and in four days everyone will have forgotten. Then we will be told we have to send in more troops. It’s like taking a drink. The effect wears off, and you have to take another.”

  Yet his exact thoughts about Vietnam remain a mystery. What we do know is his early understanding of the fighting. Motivated by nationalism, the Viet Minh had fought the French, and he’d grasped what was at stake. Why would he make a different assessment of the Viet Cong war against the pro-American Diem? Ken O’Donnell said Kennedy told him he was determined to get out once the election-year politics were behind him. But it’s not that simple. Ted Sorensen believed his boss could never have the cynicism about war and human lives that the conflict in Vietnam would turn out to mandate. “I do not believe he knew in his last weeks what he was going to do.”

  At about this same time, Kennedy called members of the House Rules Committee to the White House. He was interested in getting their insider knowledge about why his legislation, which included the Civil Rights bill, was stalled. Tip O’Neill remembered being asked to come for a drink afterward when Jack spotted him stranded without a ride. The two of them chatted about the old days. Jack was curious about how some of his old boys were doing, the ones who’d been with him in the beginning. He asked about Billy Sutton, Mark Dalton, Joe Healey, John Galvin, and the others. He asked Tip to make sure Billy had a job up in Massachusetts.

  The Kennedys spent the Veterans Day weekend with the Bradlees down at their friends’ new getaway in Virginia. Jack told Ben he didn’t like what he’d heard about Dallas, where he was soon headed, about the way Adlai Stevenson had been spat on, heckled, and jeered when giving a United Nations Day speech there. He felt, he told his friend, that the “mood of the city was ugly.” In a front-page editorial, the Dallas Times Herald had pronounced the city “disgraced. There is no other way to view the storm-trooper actions of last night’s frightening attack on Adlai Stevenson.” Governor John Connally called the affair “an affront to common courtesy and decency.” And Mayor Earle Cabell pointed out that the demonstrators were “not our kind of folks.” Jack allowed White House photographers to take pictures of the family that weekend. One film shows Jackie rehearsing with John Jr. a salute he was practicing, perhaps for when he joined his father that Monday at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

  The following Thursday, Jack had invited the film legend Greta Garbo to the White House. Lem Billings had met her on a recent European trip and was thrilled at the prospect of introducing her to his pal. Jack, meanwhile, ever the practical joker, had hatched a plan. The evening was arranged so that Garbo would arrive before Lem, giving Jack a chance to chat with her and lay the groundwork for his scheme.

  Kennedy’s idea was to convince her to act as if she’d never before set eyes on Billings. The pair of them carried it off for a quite some time before finally taking Lem out of his misery. It is a perfect example of Jack’s taking the time, as he often did with his closest friends, to give them a little trouble. Though mildly sadistic—Lem devoted himself to trying to get Garbo to remember the various outings they’d had together, only to have her stare at him blankly—the prank also showed, in an odd way, that Jack cared. And cared enough—he, a president of the United States—to concoct a scheme that was at once so silly and yet so intimate. He’d done such things all his life.

  It was a dinner to remember: Jackie, Jack, and Lem—and Garbo. But it would always be a sad memory for Lem. It had taken place on November 13, 1963.

  That month, Kennedy hosted his first major campaign meeting for 1964. Included were Bobby, Ted Sorensen, Ken O’Donnell, and Larry O’Brien. It was the same team that had met in Palm Beach and later in Hyannis Port in 1959. Once again, his brother-in-law Steve Smith was to take charge, overall. The effort would be run from the White House, and the theme would be “peace and prosperity.”

  Kennedy looked forward to running against Senator Barry Goldwater. He was convinced that the conservative Arizonan was just too candid for a presidential candidate and would quickly self-destruct. His bigger worry was Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York. Told that “Rocky” liked him, Kennedy said it didn’t matter. Politics would change that. “He’ll end up hating me. That’s natural,” he said, remembering, perhaps, his own change of heart over Nixon.

  President Kennedy was confident. But he also knew that he needed Texas and, perhaps, Georgia—not easy states to get in his corner, given the growing rage of white Southerners against him for his strong stand on civil rights. The polling showed that two thirds of them were deeply hostile, not an easy situation for a man looking to nail down Southern support. It was going to be a tough election. He needed to begin raising money and rousing those yellow-dog Democrats who’d been raised with the party and might still be won over.

  Jack spent the next weekend in Palm Beach with Torby Macdonald, now in his fifth term as a Massachusetts congressman. It was a bachelor party fueled by enough bonhomie to induce JFK to croon “The September Song” with extra feeling. That Monday, November 18, he traveled with George Smathers to Miami and Tampa to deliver speeches denouncing Castro and his regime.

  “A small band of conspirators has stripped the Cuban people of their freedom and handed over the independence and sovereignty of the Cuban nation to forces beyond the hemisphere. This, and this alone, divides us. As long as it is true, nothing is possible. Once this barrier is removed, everything is possible.”

  With the trip to Texas ahead of him, Kennedy worried about the South. “I wish I had this fucking thing over with,” he complained to Smathers. He also told him, “You’ve got to live each day like it’s your last day on earth.”

  On November 22, having spent the night in Fort Worth, he agreed to meet outside, before breakfast, with a good crowd of union people. Despite the early morning drizzle, the crowd was warm and enthusiastic. Inside, as the business leaders sipped their coffee, he gave a tough spe
ech on Vietnam. “Without the United States, South Vietnam would collapse overnight.”

  Whatever concerns he had in the long run, whatever hesitation kept him from committing combat troops, he had those eighteen thousand “advisors” there on the ground. He was also thinking about an exit strategy. The day before, he’d asked his national security aide Michael Forrestal to “organize an in-depth study of every possible option we’ve got in Vietnam, including how to get out of there.”

  On the way from Fort Worth to the airport later that morning, Jack grilled Congressman Jim Wright and Governor John Connally about the strange difference in politics between the city he’d just left and the one he was about to enter. Why is Fort Worth so Democratic and Dallas so angrily right-wing? It was his usual curiosity abetted here by fresh reason to wonder. After all, he’d just been given a hero’s welcome by the people of one city but remembered only too well Richard Nixon carrying Dallas with 65 percent in 1960. Now, there was the pall cast by the recent ugly treatment of Adlai Stevenson.

  While Wright laid some of the blame on the conservative press, especially the Dallas Morning News, Connally offered a more sophisticated assessment of the difference between the two Texas cities. He said it could be traced to their different economies. Fort Worth was still a cowboy town. Dallas, on the other hand, was a white-collar town where people worked in high-rise office buildings. They identified with the folks on the floor above them, not the guy or woman working next to them in the stockyard or factory. They voted like their managers because they wanted to join them. This explained the shift of the city to the Republicans, a change that Connally understood and that was a precursor of his own ambitions.

  Jack was just trying to figure it all out. He was out there in the American landscape, doing what he’d come very much to love, perhaps even more than the public service it allowed. He was on the road, doing the work of an American politician. He had goals, and he needed to be president to reach them.

  39

  Bobby, Jack, Joe Sr., Teddy, and Joe Jr.

  40

  41

  At the London embassy

  42

  43

  44

  Sister Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy

  45

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  LEGACY

  He was acutely responsive to the romance of history in

  the making, to the drama of great events; and to national

  sentiment.

  —David Cecil, Young Melbourne

  On a cold Friday night in late November 1963, Teddy White of Life magazine traveled through a driving rainstorm from New York to Cape Cod. When he arrived at Hyannis Port, he was received at the main house, Joseph P. Kennedy’s. He found the president’s widow fully composed despite the horror of the week before. Chuck Spalding was there, Dave Powers and a few others, but they quickly left the guest alone with the woman who had so earnestly invited him.

  White would remember her appearance vividly. She wore trim slacks and a beige pullover sweater. Yet it was her eyes he most recalled. “They were wider than pools.” She was, of course, beautiful. Her voice, as she spoke to him, was low, and what she said seemed to offer almost total recall.

  Jacqueline talked and talked for nearly four hours. Her companion was mesmerized and could barely write fast enough. The story that ran in Life was a careful selection from what she told him. He’d been summoned in a situation of the utmost distress as a respected journalist. But he was also a friend, and his instinct was to protect this woman whom he cared about when he dictated on deadline during those first hours of Saturday morning. She was listening to his every word as he called it in, he would confess years later, and she’d pushed hard for the idea of Jack Kennedy’s presidency being like Camelot.

  Not surprisingly, what was left out of White’s story was far more fascinating than the narrative she’d designed. Her monologue had been simultaneously art and accident, and White was an expert assembler of information. But when you see his actual notes, the raw material, what you find is telling.

  The piece quotes her as saying to White that “men are a combination of good and bad.” Yet it isn’t, in fact, how she’d phrased it. “Comb. of bad and good” is what sits there in White’s scribbled notes. Why would he transpose it for the magazine? Why did he transcribe it correctly later on? “His mother never really loved him,” she said, and that, too, is in the typescript of the handwritten interview, but again, not in the article. “She likes to go around talking about being the daughter of the mayor of Boston, of how she’s the ambassador’s wife. She didn’t love him,” Jackie had repeated.

  She wanted to explain Jack Kennedy, not as a president, not as a husband, but as a man. It may not have been what she thought she intended, but it was what gripped her. “History made him what he was. He sat and read history.” She mentioned his scarlet fever. “This little boy in bed, so much of the time. All the time he was in bed, this little boy was reading history, was reading Marlborough. He devoured the Knights of the Round Table. And he just loved that last song.”

  She was talking about Camelot now, the musical that was a hit on Broadway. The final song was the reprise of “Camelot,” and in it was the image that soon came to haunt a nation: “Don’t let it be forgot that once there was a spot / for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.”

  Here are more of White’s raw notes, jotted quickly as he tried to keep up with her: “History is what made Jack. He was such a simple man. He was complex, too. He had that hero, idealistic side, but then he had that other side, the pragmatic side. His friends were all his old friends. He loved his Irish mafia.” She knew his compartmentalized way of living better than anyone.

  She also said this: “And then I thought, I mustn’t think that bad way. If history made Jack that way, made him see heroes, then other little boys will see.” In the shock of tragedy, she was telling her husband’s story, as she put it, both the “bad and good.”

  Aided and abetted by Jackie Kennedy, White produced a thrilling evocation of the fallen president, bringing home the immense loss. Around the world, everyone old enough to this day remembers exactly where they were when they heard the news of the assassination. When the story ran, the readers of Life, and then millions more, accepted his widow’s vision; they took to their hearts the notion of Camelot—that vanished, shining place presided over by a noble, merry hero.

  It was her gift to him. She’d wanted only two monuments to her husband. First, there would be an eternal flame to mark his grave at Arlington National Cemetery. She told White about how, driving across Memorial Bridge to Virginia at night, you can see the Lee Mansion lit up on the side of the hill from “miles and miles away.” When Caroline was little, she said, that immense white building had been one of the first things she recognized. Now, below it, there would be the small twinkling light for her father.

  The other commemoration she requested was quite different. She’d clearly given it careful thought. NASA’s Apollo 5 mission was set for takeoff in January 1964. The president had mentioned the launch in recent speeches. She asked that her husband’s initials be placed on a tiny corner of the great Saturn rocket where no one would even see them.

  To White, she also talked about Jack’s last look at life, that instant when the end came, out of nowhere during that Dallas motorcade. “You know when he was shot, he had such a wonderful expression on his face,” she told him. “You know that wonderful expression he had when they’d ask him a question about one of the ten million gadgets they have on a rocket, just before he answered? He looked puzzled.”

  I think we know that expression. It was a look he gave when he’d conjured up a witty answer at a press conference. It was the startled but pleased expression of a guy who’s just figured something out. His friends as far back as Choate knew it well and remembered it.

  Jacqueline Kennedy had come a long way that week. A short piece of film recently unearthed shows us a slender, dark-haired young woman—seemin
gly no more than a girl—racing to catch up to a gurney. She is a woman chasing after her love.

  Within hours she’d assumed the reins of command, designing and staging a magnificent funeral. It was Lincolnesque with its horseless rider, the boots of the lost hero turned backward. There were the drums, relentless, insistent, hammering their bleak reality. Soldiers die to the sound of drums.

  “Jackie was extraordinary,” Ben Bradlee would write after watching her from close up that weekend. “Sometimes she seemed completely detached, as if she were someone else watching the ceremony of that other person’s grief.” Still at the age Jack had been when he married her, she was observing the whole scene as if, really, she weren’t a part of it.

  Jack had, as Arthur Schlesinger described it, “to an exceptional degree, the gift of friendship.” As Jim Reed, his navy friend, put it: “each of us had a certain role we were cast into, whether we knew it or not.” The night they lost their leader, Ken O’Donnell, Dave Powers, and Larry O’Brien had headed up Wisconsin Avenue to Gawler’s Funeral Home to pick out a coffin. The Irish mafia, the men Jack loved, were doing what their people do. The Irish are good with death. That Saturday night—the day after the horror—Dave delighted Jackie with stories of her husband before she knew him, of his endless climbs up the stairs of those wooden “three-deckers” in the old 11th Congressional District. Dave said he’d hoped that Jack would have one day come to his wake up in Charlestown.

  Ken O’Donnell would be haunted by what he saw as his role in the tragedy. Before Jack had given anyone else a job, he’d handed him his: to protect him. It was impossible to forget that he, Ken O’Donnell, had been in charge of the Secret Service covering his friend, and he’d been the one urging Jack to make the trip to Texas.