AB: In West Virginia. And I remember seeing his face as he got the news. He was absolutely stunned.… This seemed to be the first realization he had that he really might make it. It was that night. And it came upon him that he might be the next President of the United States.… Jackie rushed out into the kitchen and got a bottle of champagne.
B: Our champagne.
AB: Was it our champagne?
B: Yeah, we brought it.
So much baggage has been loaded onto Ben’s relationship with John F. Kennedy over the years. All anybody ever wants to ask Ben is whether he knew how much Jack was screwing around, and when Ben gives his standard answer nobody believes him anyway. And if it isn’t the philandering, it’s the relationship itself. Journalists love to take shots at Ben for having been too close to Kennedy while he was covering him for Newsweek. The Nixon people had a field day with it, for obvious reasons, but they’re not alone. The uniform perception is that most editors today would never allow a friend to cover a friend the way Ben covered Kennedy.
There are some uncomfortable moments, to be sure, places where Ben and Kennedy each crossed a line that Ben would never have crossed later in life. In a few key spots the relationship would veer more toward transaction than friendship. “Did he use me? Of course he used me,” Ben said in an interview in 1975. “Did I use him? Of course I used him. Are those the ground rules down here in Washington? Hell, yes.” They both knew that ambition had been baked into the cake from the start.
But most of those complexities wouldn’t emerge until later. There is something simple and satisfying about Ben tucking that bottle under his arm and walking with Tony over to the Kennedys’ for dinner on the night in the spring of 1960 that JFK realized that he might be president. Just the four of them, having dinner, taking in a movie, sharing a celebratory bottle of champagne. What a moment in life, in anyone’s life, to watch the key turn in the lock and the door swing open, to see history in such personal terms. Within a couple of hours, Ben and Tony would be on the “Caroline,” the Kennedy campaign plane, for an impromptu victory trip to West Virginia. Ben was still just a correspondent at Newsweek, and Newsweek ran a distant second to Time, but when he walked off Kennedy’s plane in Charleston behind the now likely Democratic nominee Ben saw a welcome flicker of fear in the eyes of Time’s White House correspondent.
One of Ben’s favorite expressions is to say that something put somebody “on the map.” When I came across a copy of an expulsion order from the French government in March of 1956, kicking Ben out of France for having made illicit contact with French double agents posing as Algerian rebels, I noticed that he had put a yellow Post-it on it: “This incident put me on the map as a foreign correspondent.”1 Later, at the Post, hiring David Broder away from The New York Times “put me on the map as a personnel person.” Woodward and Bernstein “put me on the map in ways that no one could have predicted.” And, of course, “Nixon put me on the map.”
In 1957, newly returned from Paris and low correspondent in the Washington bureau of Newsweek, Ben was starting over. Instead of choosing his own assignments in exotic locations, he now had to make do with other reporters’ crumbs. He could report the hell out of the annual conference of the Organization of the American States, but he didn’t care and neither did anybody else. That was never going to get him where he wanted to go.
He needed to get back on the map, and in 1958 he found his chance when he and Tony ran into the young Senator Kennedy and his wife, Jackie, near their house on N Street.2 Ben and Kennedy had met before, but now they were neighbors, and so they spent much of the afternoon in the back garden of the Kennedy house at 3307, making small talk with the wives. That night, in the luck-meets-fate way of Ben’s life, the two couples found themselves not only at the same formal dinner but assigned to seats at the same table, with Jack next to Tony and Ben next to Jackie. Tony—beautiful, inquisitive, charmed, unafraid—asked Kennedy whether he thought it strange that he should all of a sudden decide to be a presidential candidate. “Yes,” he told her, “until I stop and look around at the other people that are running for the candidacy. I think I’m just as qualified as they are.” The couples rode home together from dinner, a new friendship under way.
That Ben and Kennedy would and should get along seems a foregone conclusion. They had both been born to privilege in Boston and gone to Harvard; each had had what men of that generation euphemistically call “a good war” in the Pacific with the Navy. They were both cool—handsome, charming, ambitious, ironic, self-deprecating in the slightly underhanded way that the people with the best cards can afford to be. They both loved gossip, and not surprisingly they both loved the news business. As Ben says, Kennedy was “one of the great news junkies that ever lived.” And though they apparently never discussed it with each other, each had been through severe trials with his own health, Ben with polio and Kennedy with his back, colitis, jaundice, Addison’s disease, you name it.
Much has been made of Ben’s verve, his appetite for life, and of Jack’s similar spirit. At one point the two men were riding alone in a car together, with Ben’s son Dino jumping around in the backseat. Kennedy watched Dino admiringly and then turned to Ben and said, “Really, if you could only have one thing it would be energy, wouldn’t it?” Each man had been given what amounted to a second chance in life, a third if you counted surviving the war. “The war was such an unusual experience and dislocation,” Kennedy once told Ben privately. “Everybody turns suddenly in a different direction.” Each intended to make the most of what he had and was comfortable with that kind of intensity and desire in other people.
All that said, the two men built a lasting personal relationship largely because their wives liked each other. Ben himself told an interviewer in the late seventies that “a lot of the friendship was forged by the wives getting on very well. Jackie was very lonely in those days, I mean she did not like most Washington women, and she said to Tony at one point, ‘Will you be my best friend?’ And that’s what did a lot of the connection.” They spent most of their time together as a foursome.
Ben admits that he had heard rumors about Kennedy being a “fearful girler,” but he insists that he and Kennedy never talked about it and that he never had any understanding of the extent. As Ben always puts it, imagine that you’re at a table having dinner with Jackie and Tony and the president. “You’re not going to talk about screwing other women,” he says.
B: … The times I was alone with him, a couple of times when we went sailing together, couple of times we played golf together, couple of times we went riding together. It’s not a situation that breeds the kind of intimacy that must exist before that subject is going to be brought up.…
I’m trying to think if I ever had a conversation with any man about a conquest of his. They just don’t do it. Anyway, that’s the way it was. Whether people believe it or not, I don’t give a shit now.
He does acknowledge, in Conversations with Kennedy, that at one White House party stocked with particularly attractive females, Kennedy had turned to him and said, “If you and I could only run wild, Benjy.” He also describes being invited by Kennedy to a party in a hotel room in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, while accompanying the president on a trip out west, and then being hastily uninvited by one of the president’s aides.
“That second call has interested me more than the first one did,” Ben would write later. “I wondered why, but without the obvious thought that occurs to me now. I didn’t think of investigating to see who might have been a special guest of the president. I figured someone had pointed out to him that he might risk alienating some reporter, if only one reporter was present. Is that so naïve?”
Ben’s deepening association with the candidate Kennedy was a boon to his status in the Newsweek bureau. As Kennedy’s star rose and his decision to run for president appeared more certain, Ben became the go-to guy for quotes from the candidate. He also spent a good deal of time out on the campaign trail.
“The Wiscon
sin weather was the worst of the season,” Ben opened one dispatch for Newsweek in November of 1959. “Blowing snow, glare ice, and ear-tingling cold…. But Jack Kennedy, at a springy 42, was equal to the elements.” This is typical of Ben’s prose style at the time, and of the style of newsmagazine writing in general. Jauntiness was clearly a goal. Ben’s coverage of Kennedy in Newsweek was favorable, but that was somewhat unavoidable; Kennedy did win, after all. To note that crowds enjoyed Kennedy’s youthfulness, humor, and vigor is likely an honest accounting of what most people would have seen had they been there.
Behind the scenes, things were a little less clear-cut. In May of 1959, before Kennedy had officially announced his candidacy, Ben covered a speech of Lyndon Johnson’s in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for Newsweek. At the time, Johnson was widely perceived to be one of Kennedy’s potential rivals for the Democratic nomination. Ben filed for Newsweek, but he also wrote a private, critical assessment of the speech in a “Memorandum for Sen. John F. Kennedy” that definitely crosses the line between what a reporter should and shouldn’t do for a friend. (He never mentions having written this memo in any of his books or interviews; I found it at the Kennedy Library.) After calling the speech “a masterpiece of corn,” Ben deconstructs Johnson’s entire presentation:
My own response to Johnson is that, almost all other considerations aside, he could never make it. The image is poor. The accent hurts.… [He] really does not have the requisite dignity. I watched closely. His personal mannerisms are destructive of the dignified image. He’s somebody’s gabby Texas cousin from Fort Worth.
LBJ never trusted Ben. He always thought that Ben was a Northeast elitist Kennedy partisan who couldn’t accept somebody like him as president. To a certain extent, LBJ was right.
Playing to his audience, Ben proceeds with more strategic advice:
For safety’s sake, I think your present assumption, that he is a candidate, has to be the one.…
The danger is, of course, not that he makes it or that he can hand his strength intact to anybody else. What is to be feared is that he will come to Los Angeles with a block of 300 or more delegates and hold them off the market for three or four ballots.… Not only do you have to advance steadily, but you have to do it in pretty big leaps.…
This is the peril of Johnson. Every piece written that touts him as a candidate should, it seems to me, be read in this light rather than on its apparent face value.… He’s to be feared not as a potential winner but as a game-player who might try to maneuver you right out of the contest in Los Angeles.
Somebody in Kennedy’s office, perhaps Kennedy himself, underlined that last sentence.
For the most part, Ben stuck to being a reporter.3 Kennedy never gave Ben big scoops, particularly during the campaign, but he handed out tidbits. Ben flew out early to the Democratic convention in Los Angeles in July of 1960 to prepare for Newsweek’s cover story on Lyndon Johnson. Tony followed a few days later, in a seat on a commercial jet next to the presumptive nominee himself. She was carrying a page of questions spelled out by Ben for her to ask, playing reporter as she had the first night she and Jack met. “Will you pick LBJ?” she asked. JFK, battling a sore throat and wanting to save his voice, had taken to writing out his responses. “He won’t take it,” Kennedy wrote. (In Los Angeles, Phil Graham, in one of his episodes of manic brilliance, would help engineer the deal that put Johnson on the ticket.)
Ben was in the room for nearly every important moment, from the night of the West Virginia primary to the famous televised debate between Nixon and Kennedy in September of 1960, where he was in the studio for the taping as one of the pool reporters. (According to Ben, Nixon looked like a “cadaver.”) He and Tony also flew up to Hyannis on the night of the presidential election. The election was so tight that it wasn’t clear Kennedy had won until the next morning, Wednesday, November 9. That evening, the Kennedys invited Ben and Tony and Bill Walton, Kennedy’s advisor and confidant, for a private dinner in their home on the compound.
The famous line to emerge from that dinner, which at the time was officially off the record, was Kennedy’s quotation of his telephone conversation with Chicago mayor Richard Daley the night before. “Mr. President,” Daley had said, “with a little bit of luck and the help of a few close friends, you’re going to carry Illinois.” When Ben published Daley’s prediction in Conversations with Kennedy in 1975, people went crazy. Since then it has become part of the lore of that election and fodder for the notion that Daley had “stolen” it for Kennedy.
But more simply, Kennedy’s invitation to Ben and Tony that night says a good deal about their friendship. On the day that he found out that he had been elected president, Kennedy wanted to have dinner with them. From the interview with Schlesinger:
B: When he came down the stairs we were there. It was very emotional. The terrible problem was what do you call him? You know, whereas Tony could just say “Oh Jack, how wonderful!” and kiss him, I couldn’t do that. And then was when he said, “You can call me Prez.” That’s what Bobby and Teddy had decided on that afternoon. And then we went to the movies, didn’t we, again? In the early moments of John Kennedy’s great historical life, he went to the movies. When in doubt go to the movies.
Edward Bennett Williams used to joke that the way to get something in the newspaper was to tell Ben, “Don’t say anything.” “He’s pretty ruthless, even with me,” Kay Graham once told an interviewer. “I’d tell him something and ask him not to say anything and he’d use it.” “I asked him what people criticized him for,” Vaillant observed in his Grant Study report in 1969, “and he said, ‘being a barracuda with regard to the news,’ that people said of him that they should say nothing to him or he’d put it in the paper.” Asked once when this ruthlessness began, Ben said, “I learned that covering Kennedy. I was a newspaper person first and foremost because if I’d been less of a newspaperman, I would have been more of a friend.”
That statement is hard to evaluate and may not be true—not only because Ben wasn’t technically a newspaperman when he was covering Kennedy. After Kennedy reached the White House, Ben realized that he had rare access to a president and resolved to make the most out of it. A couple of months into JFK’s presidency, Ben started writing up detailed summaries of their social visits—dinner, which he and Tony had with the Kennedys at the White House every week or two, or the occasional weekend trip to Hyannis or Newport or Camp David. He didn’t tell Kennedy he was doing it, and Tony didn’t like that. “I felt one shouldn’t have dinner with one’s friends and then write about it,” she told Vanity Fair in a rare public comment in 1991. She and Ben argued about it. Ben eventually came clean with Kennedy, but not until March of 1963, nearly two years after he had started.
Kennedy might not have known that Ben was taking notes on their interactions, but he did know that Ben would push it if given the chance. The most romantic passage in Ben’s memoir describes an evening in February of 1962 when Kennedy gave him a scoop at one of the big dances that the Kennedys held at the White House, back when presidents did that kind of thing. At 12:30 in the morning, as Ben was standing and chatting with Kay Graham in the Green Room, Kennedy pulled him aside and gave him an exclusive: the U.S. was going to trade a high-ranking Soviet spy, Rudolf Abel, for Francis Gary Powers, the CIA U-2 pilot who had been shot down near Sverdlovsk. The trade was set to be announced in a few hours, and Kennedy wanted to know if it was too late for Newsweek to change its cover.
It was, but Ben wasn’t about to let the opportunity pass him by. Without asking Kennedy’s permission, he found Phil Graham and told him what was going on. Within a few minutes, Ben was on a White House telephone line, dictating a story to the night managing editor at the Post. When the paper led with the story the next morning, Kennedy was so unsuspecting of Ben that he considered starting a leak investigation.
By the time Ben and Tony arrived at the White House for dinner the following week, Kennedy had figured it out. “By the way,” he said to Ben during
cocktails, “who do you work for, anyway?”
“Are you making any charges?” Ben asked, playing it cool.
“No,” the president said. “Do you have any statement you want to make?”
“Not at this time,” Ben said.
Ben also got burned sometimes. Kennedy tolerated the Powers scoop in the Post, but he didn’t take it very well when Ben spoke to a reporter for Look magazine a couple of months later and complained about how tough Kennedy and Bobby were to please. “It’s almost impossible to write a story they like,” Ben had told the Look reporter (believing, he claims, that it was off the record). “Even if a story is quite favorable to their side, they’ll find one paragraph to quibble with.” Seems minor, but it set Kennedy off and he put Ben in the freezer for three months. No dinners, no phone calls, nothing.
The only contact Ben had with Kennedy during the freeze was one of the sketchier episodes in their relationship. Rumors had been circulating for a while that Kennedy had been married once, before Jackie, and that he had gotten a quickie divorce. Untrue, evidently, but lingering—probably because of some of the widespread extracurricular skinny-dipping that Kennedy was engaged in. Pierre Salinger, Kennedy’s press secretary, negotiated to have Ben come up to Newport, Rhode Island (where Jackie’s family had an enormous waterfront estate, Hammersmith Farm), to review FBI files that would prove that the organizations spreading the rumors about Kennedy were shady themselves. This would discredit the opposition and advance a story line that the administration wanted to advance. On top of that, the president demanded approval over anything that ran in Newsweek.
“This is a right all presidents covet,” Ben wrote later, “but which they should normally not be given. This one time, the book seemed worth the candle, however, and we decided to strike the deal.” The phrase “this one time” does not normally qualify acts of which one approves, either in prospect or in retrospect. Ben and Newsweek were being used, in an explicit way. The next morning, Kennedy signed off on the story and then almost immediately made sure that Ben knew he was still in the doghouse. The British ambassador entered Kennedy’s office as Ben was on his way out and asked if Ben would be joining them for the America’s Cup races that afternoon. Kennedy pointedly said no. Shortly thereafter, Ben was out the door and on his way back to Washington.
Yours in Truth Page 8
