JFK’s regimen of strong medications required strict oversight and constant calibration, especially the corticosteroids for his Addison’s. To treat his chronic back pain, Travell gave him daily injections of the local anesthetic procaine. Kennedy also routinely took cytomel (for thyroid deficiency); Lomotil, Metamucil, paregoric, phenobarbital, and Trasentine (to control the diarrhea from his colitis); testosterone (to increase energy and boost weight following bouts of colitis); penicillin (for urinary tract flare-ups); Fluorinef (to increase his ability to absorb salt, which Addison’s depleted); Tuinal (for insomnia, a side effect of the cortisone); antihistamines (for an array of allergies); vitamin C; and calcium supplements (to substitute for milk products, which exacerbated his colitis). As a precaution against triggering an Addisonian crisis, JFK’s doctors boosted his cortisone when he faced stressful situations such as speeches and press conferences.
Kennedy’s day began at seven or seven-thirty—often before Jackie had awakened. After tackling his first batch of newspapers (the Washington Post, New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, Baltimore Sun, and Wall Street Journal) in roughly fifteen minutes, he would slip into his frayed tan bathrobe and take “a short soak in a long tub.” He ate a hearty breakfast of orange juice, lean bacon, toast and marmalade, two four-minute-eggs, and coffee with cream and sugar. One morning when Ken Galbraith joined him, Kennedy finished what was left on the economist’s plate after polishing off his own serving. Following a round of phone calls and a quick visit with Dr. Travell, Kennedy reached the office by 9 or 9:30 a.m. “He was a slow starter,” said Walt Rostow. “He would gather speed in the morning.”
For the sake of his health, Kennedy typically left the Oval Office from one until four, first swimming in the warm indoor pool for a half hour—a ritual he would repeat after work in the early evening. “It was part of his therapy,” said Dave Powers, who did the breast stroke alongside JFK, the better to keep up his entertaining patter. The swimming would “help the pain in his back, and . . . help him relax and think better.” Most of the time, Kennedy dispensed with swimming trunks—a perfectly natural choice for someone shaped by all-male boarding school, college, military service, and clubs.
After Kennedy’s lunch on a tray in the private quarters, his black fifty-three-year-old valet George Thomas closed the bedroom curtains. Since Kennedy entered Congress in 1947, Thomas had been looking after him. Cherubic and amiable, Thomas now lived in a room on the third floor, usually slept less than six hours a night, and had acquired “the stumpy walk of a man who has spent a lot of time on his feet.”
After changing into a nightshirt, Kennedy climbed under the covers—usually with a hot pad to soothe his back—and read until he dozed off. He stayed in bed at least forty-five minutes even if he could not sleep. Taking a nap after lunch “changed Jack’s whole life,” Jackie told Lyndon Johnson. “He was always sick, and when we got to the White House he did it every day.”
To support his unstable spine, JFK wore a stiff corset and needed a firm mattress specially made from cattle-tail hair, because he was extremely sensitive to horsehair and horse dander. (He could be near horses only in the open air; once when Jackie took him to an indoor horse show, he had to leave early when he developed an allergic reaction.) A bed on Air Force One was fitted with a similar mattress, and JFK brought along still another for use in the accommodations where he stayed on his travels. Heads of state had to concern themselves with ensuring that a double-sized frame would be available for Kennedy’s use.
Kennedy’s famous rocking chair was also intended to help manage his back pain. “Such a chair,” Dr. Travell told the press, “provides gentle constant exercise and helps prevent muscular fatigue.” Sometimes JFK instructed aides to bring it along when he went out to dinner. He seemed to need the rocker to discharge tension—or so it appeared to a number of his visitors. Teddy White’s wife, Nancy, speculated that Kennedy’s constant rocking indicated a “most restless man who’s able probably to work it off in simple ways.” Whether it was a side effect from medication or a symptom of one of his illnesses, Kennedy’s agitation couldn’t be missed—what William Manchester described as a right hand that “seems to have a life of its own”: tapping, scratching, tugging, snapping, and seldom still.
Kennedy stoically declined to discuss his persistent pain, but it was evident in “his gingerly walking and sitting,” said Sorensen, “in not carrying anything, and when his jaw would tighten and he would become more quiet and less animated.” Hervé Alphand, the French ambassador, was shocked when Kennedy couldn’t “bend to pick up a match” on one occasion, and another time “asked me to pick up a cup of tea for him” on a low coffee table. Even Tony Bradlee was taken aback when Kennedy asked her to crack some crabs for him at dinner. Friends became accustomed to seeing him periodically on crutches or using a cane—aids that he hid from the public.
While watching movies, he assumed “strange sitting positions,” shifted around, and usually had to walk out because of discomfort. Since Kennedy loved movies, this was a source of terrible frustration; finally he instructed that a bed be moved into the White House theater so that he could watch comfortably, propped up by four pillows. He was similarly incapable of completing a round of golf, a game he enjoyed thoroughly. Most of the time, he barely made it through nine holes.
Kennedy had modest personal habits, and was fastidious about his custom-tailored clothes, changing his shirt three or four times a day as he moved through his routines of work, exercise, and rest. In the evenings JFK would unwind by sipping a bottle of beer, a scotch and water (no ice), or a daiquiri. His major indulgence was a slender Upmann cigar. He would smoke one or two after dinner, and he liked to have one lit during ocean cruises. “He could chain smoke cigars when the spirit moved him,” recalled Ben Bradlee. Kennedy enjoyed small-stakes gambling on backgammon and golf with friends like Billings and Earl Smith—purely to sharpen the competition—but they rarely collected the wagers.
Although JFK was determined to keep his social and work lives separate, he never fully relaxed. When the Kennedys had dinner parties, he customarily stood up at ten or eleven, suddenly announcing, “I’ve got some reading to do.” But he rarely fell asleep until well after midnight, frequently reaching for the phone to call his father and Bobby. “All our family are light sleepers,” Joe Kennedy explained to William Manchester. “Of course he is preoccupied. It would be a miracle if he weren’t.”
ELEVEN
To a degree not seen before or since in the presidency, Jack Kennedy had an extraordinarily close relationship with the press and co-opted most of the reporters who covered him. He considered himself a journalist manqué. Before turning to politics, Kennedy had flirted briefly with a newspaper career, covering the United Nations Conference and British elections in 1945 for the Hearst chain, and he had briefly owned a newspaper with Jim Reed. When he was a senator, his byline had appeared on articles in the Atlantic Monthly, New Republic, and New York Times Magazine, although the writing had been done primarily by Sorensen. “Kennedy takes printer’s ink for breakfast,” said James Reston of the New York Times.
JFK read so many publications—delving into the Washington, New York, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, and St. Louis papers each day plus Time, Newsweek, the New Republic, New Yorker, Sports Illustrated, and even Britain’s Times, New Statesman, Spectator, Economist, and Manchester Guardian Weekly “as though they were his household papers,” said aide Fred Holborn—that he frequently astonished reporters and columnists by citing information from deep within their stories. After Laura Bergquist had written a piece for Look on Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo Molina, dictator of the Dominican Republic, Kennedy slyly asked, “What happened to Snowball?”—a reference to one of the dictator’s torture experts, “a notorious Negro dwarf” who specialized in “biting off men’s genitals.”
Kennedy also liked to “play editor,” suggesting topics for stories, as well as lines of inquiry. He constantly prodded Ben Bradlee to p
ursue leads about political adversaries (“You ought to cut Rocky’s ass open a little this week”) and gave him tidbits for profiles on members of the administration and the Kennedy family. JFK could “read leaks,” scanning the front page of the New York Times to “spot special prejudices” and “unerringly identify the sources,” said Time’s Hugh Sidey. More often than not, JFK himself was the disguised source. “The American ship of state is the only ship that leaks at the top” was the common joke.
Journalists and authors also frequently submitted material to Jack and Bobby Kennedy for corrections and comments before publication. “That’s a great thing, that right of clearance,” JFK told Bradlee. While he was writing The Making of the President 1960 early in 1961, Teddy White asked Bobby to review the “thumbnail sketch of the present Attorney General of whom I am so fond and whom I do not want to hurt.”
Cabinet officials and White House aides had the same free and easy rapport with the press as their boss—unlike the Eisenhower White House, where access had been carefully monitored by Press Secretary James Hagerty. Kennedy’s men circulated through the Georgetown dinner party circuit, buffing his image, advancing his cause.
But one staff member went further than Kennedy would have wanted, acting in a subversive way that JFK, for all his skill at reading between the lines, didn’t detect. Fred Dutton served as a liaison between the Irish mafia and the eggheads in the West Wing and considered himself a hybrid of the two camps, an “intellectual politician.” But he was also more of an ideologue than most. When he became annoyed that Kennedy’s policies were too middle of the road, he secretly began writing for the liberal syndicated columnist Doris Fleeson, known as “God’s angry woman,” whose opinions were guaranteed “to make [JFK] growl.” “Fred didn’t do it on purpose at first,” recalled his wife, Nancy. “Doris was sick for a couple of weeks during the transition, and she said, ‘I can’t write my column today,’ so Fred wrote it. Then when he was in the White House and frustrated, he would write a liberal attack on the President.” While Kennedy never found out, one day he did buttonhole Dutton, who, he knew, was friendly with Fleeson. Slamming the editorial page of the Washington Star on Dutton’s desk, Kennedy exclaimed, “Can’t you control this woman?” Recalled Nancy, “It was a column Fred had written.”
Because Kennedy was in effect his own press secretary, his official press chief—“the court publicist”—assumed a secondary role. With his bushy eyebrows, plump physique, and ubiquitous cigar, thirty-five-year-old Pierre Salinger was a comic figure known more for his jocular manner than his professional expertise. He ran a chaotic West Wing office of nine people in quarters so cramped that he kept the teletype machines in his bathroom, with one of his “girls” assigned to dash in and out to clip wire service bulletins announced by insistently ringing bells. “In the tradition of TV mysteries,” David Wise of the New York Herald Tribune wrote admiringly, “he has not one but three blonde secretaries.”
Salinger confined himself mainly to routine briefings and the flow of information. “Pierre would poke his head into the Oval Office and be startled to see a reporter talking with the President,” recalled Hugh Sidey. The Irish mafia, especially O’Donnell, disliked Salinger’s flamboyance and self-promoting ways. “Kenny thought he was a foppish guy,” said John Reilly, an aide to Bobby Kennedy.
Still, JFK was amused by Salinger, who left himself open to numerous japes. “Get back into long pants,” Kennedy once exclaimed. “You haven’t got the legs for shorts.” Underneath the banter, Kennedy appreciated Salinger’s ability to divert and soothe reporters lacking special access to the top. Salinger also enjoyed a cultural cachet. Growing up in San Francisco as the son of a French Catholic mother and an American Jewish father, he had been a child prodigy pianist, an accomplishment that occasionally earned him a spot on Jack and Jackie’s guest list. But while Salinger saw Kennedy often in the course of a day, he remained outside the inner circle.
Salinger did have one great idea that helped define the Kennedy presidency: he pushed JFK to conduct his news conferences live on television. Sorensen, Bundy, Rusk, and others objected. “It’s really crazy,” Sorensen said. “Suppose he makes a mistake? It’ll get around the world.” But Kennedy liked the opportunity to present himself directly to the people, confident that he had the ability to get his message across.
For the most part, Kennedy’s formal encounters with the press were friendly and bore little resemblance to the adversarial exchanges of later presidencies. Reporters asked softball questions and laughed heartily at Kennedy’s jokes. “We were simply there as props,” said Peter Lisagor of the Chicago Daily News. “I always felt we should have joined Actors’ Equity.”
It took a few sessions for Kennedy to find his footing; he was initially judged as “elaborately serious.” But his formidable memory, rapid quips, and knowledge of arcane facts resulted in bravura performances. It didn’t much matter, as the New York Herald Tribune noted, that Kennedy “sometimes gets lost in a fog of words,” or, as ABC’s Howard K. Smith observed, “It was hard to find a verb.” JFK was telegenic and skillful at debate after years of training at his father’s dinner table.
“He was always in control,” said Robert Pierpoint of CBS. “I don’t think Kennedy ever really gave us or very seldom gave us the answers we were looking for. But he was clever in handling the non-answers.” As Kennedy told Ken Galbraith during a preparation session with a group of aides for a press conference, “When it comes to evasion, I don’t need help. I can do that myself.”
JFK had been tutored in media manipulation by his father, who was advised in 1944 by his cousin, the political sage Joe Kane, “Our presidents are selected more or less by newspapers, radio commentators and magazine writers.” While Joe Kennedy’s credo was “remember, reporters are not your friends,” he taught his sons how to coddle and flatter them—for instance, by sending notes of thanks for any “kind reference”—and to use influential contacts to place stories in national magazines. When Life was about to run a cover story on Jack, Jackie, and baby Caroline in April 1958, Joe predicted to a friend that it would be “of great political import.”
JFK had also seen the power of his father’s checkbook during the 1952 Senate race when the Ambassador made a $500,000 short-term loan to the Boston Post to reward the cash-strapped publisher for switching his endorsement from Lodge to JFK. “You know we had to buy that paper,” JFK told Fletcher Knebel of Look in 1960. Knebel instinctively protected Kennedy by omitting the damaging quote from his article.
JFK spun journalists with greater finesse than his father, primarily because he understood them and found their company intellectually stimulating. “It was studied and calculated, but still [JFK] liked reporters,” said Democratic senator George Smathers of Florida. While Kennedy’s predecessors in the Oval Office seldom saw the press in private, he went out of his way to do so. Not only did he brief influential Washington insiders such as James Reston and Walter Lippmann, he regularly scheduled lunches with out-of-town editors and publishers. Otis Chandler of the Los Angeles Times recalled that Kennedy “was fascinated that I had been Republican and that I was changing to independent.”
In parceling out his leaks, Kennedy tried to make each newsman feel he was receiving special treatment. “Protect me,” JFK once told Cy Sulzberger of the New York Times. “Don’t let Reston or any of those other fellows know you have seen me.” (Unbeknownst to Sulzberger, Kennedy had already arranged to meet Reston for a similar briefing two days later.) Sulzberger’s status as a member of the powerful family that owned the Times enhanced his access to Kennedy and members of his circle. Although he was based in Paris, Sulzberger traveled regularly to the United States and kept a detailed journal.
Kennedy inspired nearly as much awe in journalists as he did in his own staff. “I always had the feeling,” said Rowland Evans of the pro-Republican New York Herald Tribune, “when I was writing about President Kennedy that he was standing right there behind me, watching the words com
e and waiting to bore in.”
JFK granted reporters interviews that would run beyond their scheduled time, keeping cabinet officials and other aides waiting. He thought nothing of talking to reporters in his bedroom or while taking a swim in the nude. When Hugh Sidey joined him for several swims, “both of us were naked,” Sidey recalled. “Later all the Time editors wanted a reading on the President’s private parts. He wasn’t abnormal in any way.” On another occasion, Stewart Alsop recounted that “typically, when Jackie surprised [JFK] and two other men swimming bare ass in the White House pool, the other two were reporters.”
Kennedy’s most effectively ingratiating technique with the press was his “unbelievable private candor”—indiscreet revelations, outspoken opinions about individuals—that virtually bound his listener to keep the confidence. At various times, Kennedy told Ben Bradlee that the vice premier of Laos was “a total shit” and that French president Charles de Gaulle was a “bastard,” and he revealed precisely how much tycoons J. Paul Getty and H. L. Hunt paid in income taxes ($500 and $22,000, respectively), adding it was “probably illegal” for him to know, much less tell a journalist. Bradlee duly noted these explosive comments in his journal, but like his colleagues, printed none of them. Sometimes Kennedy stipulated an “off-the-record” remark; more typically he would place the onus on the reporter. “He put you on your mettle,” said Henry Brandon, Washington correspondent for the Sunday Times of London. “He left it entirely up to you . . . In the end one was more careful than one should have been.”
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