V: You were going to give that to your kids as a legacy … if you were going to give away the store, what made you decide?
B: I had had it with Nixon. Nixon had dominated my life for three years, ’72, ’73, ’74, and when he quit, when it became obvious that it was going to end, I wanted to do something totally different. Totally, totally different … It seemed to me that [writing a book about Kennedy] would be entirely different and immeasurably better.
That’s the only reason Ben ever gave me, too—that after Nixon resigned, he wanted to do something different. He hadn’t looked at his notes about his various interactions with Kennedy—some 125 separate encounters in all—since before the assassination. With a paid three-month leave in hand, Ben had time to tackle something new.
It’s curious that Ben would decide to deliver a book about his closeness to JFK on the heels of three years of opprobrium from the Nixon people casting him as a “Kennedy coatholder” and Democratic partisan. The reaction of Ben’s letter-writing admirer (“you miserable cock-sucker”), while extreme, wasn’t unique in its savagery. The first sentence of Taylor Branch’s review of the book in Harper’s magazine in October of 1975 reads, “Ben Bradlee, executive editor of the Washington Post, recently delivered himself of one of the most pathetic memoirs yet written by an American journalist about his President.” Others were similarly uncharitable. Ben’s old friend Jim Fallows wrote in Esquire in 1976:
It was not the coziness with Kennedy which offended but the shallowness of the portrayal and Bradlee’s seeming obliviousness to how poor a light it cast on him. Bob Woodward, who admired Bradlee as much as anyone in the newsroom, did not read the book because he had heard bad things about it and was afraid they were true.
I asked Bob about that, because it had cropped up in a couple of places.
“I read it, but I read it very late, many years later,” he said. He didn’t want to go too far. “I certainly didn’t read it at the time, and I guess I didn’t want to.” While Ben was working on Conversations with Kennedy, Bob and Carl had already finished All the President’s Men and were hard at work on The Final Days, the follow-up, and also on the movie. Bob had been busy.
“As I recall the book when I did read it,” he went on, “is, it’s empirical. Here are my notes. He went to the White House this night, Jackie said this, Tony said this … it was like raw data.” That was the problem that most reviewers had with it, too: it was just data, without much hint of awareness or purpose. “I know he did it real quick … and quite frankly, I think, you know, he was the editor during Watergate, he wasn’t the reporter. And he’s basically a reporter, you realize that.” Bob paused, wanting to be sure I understood him. “And so this was kind of his statement, ‘Hey, look, I was there, I’m a reporter, too.’ ”
That made more sense as a motivation than Ben’s insistence that he just wanted to do something different. The movie hadn’t come out yet; Ben had no idea that Robards would immortalize him. Writing the book, giving the inside dope on Kennedy—that was a way to keep himself out there, to capitalize on Watergate in a personal way.
“What I remember,” Bob went on, “is that it showed Jack Kennedy was just a first-class gossip. He really wanted to know about so-and-so, who’s doing this, who’s shtupping who.”
“And Ben is very, they’re very similar.”
“And that’s Ben,” Bob said.
Ben doesn’t understand the criticism of Conversations with Kennedy, for the most part. His rote response is that what went into the book is exactly what he put into his notes—true, but also the source of many of the book’s problems. It’s hard to separate the critical reaction to Conversations with Kennedy from what must surely have been widespread jealousy of Ben after the successes of Watergate. But whether there were axes to grind or not, critics identified real flaws. Taylor Branch, again:
Bradlee seems resolutely oblivious to the possibility that, to eyes less bedazzled than his own, his portrait might be a betrayal—a betrayal above all of the limited capacity of charm to redeem character. Kennedy is seen as graceful and witty, but he is shown as petty and vindictive. Kennedy is seen as gay and sophisticated, but shown to be grim and resentful.…
It is as if [Bradlee] were stricken by some sort of emotional dyslexia, in which he tells stories of dirt and discomfort but sees only race and wit. His book is either a failed tribute or an unwitting catharsis of Bradlee’s illusions, and these twisted meanings come hard upon painful journeys to the drawing rooms and living quarters of the New Frontier. The book is, of course, a best-seller.
Tough stuff, but Branch properly identifies the problem at the heart of the book: the book isn’t what Ben thinks it is. In it, he’s not doing what he thinks he’s doing. What he thinks he’s doing is presenting an unvarnished version of his interactions with President Kennedy, thereby shedding new light on the casual, fun side of a man he loved. As he wrote of it in his memoir, “The critics would find the book interesting, but too admiring of Kennedy, not critical enough. I had no intention of writing a critical biography. I had wanted simply to tell what the president and his wife were like when they were relaxed and among friends. Someone I admired had once wished aloud for such a book by some friend of Lincoln’s.”
From the outset Ben can’t seem to resolve a fundamental question, one that he poses at the top but then resolutely fails to answer: “What, in fact, was I? A friend, or a journalist?” The honest engagement of that question would have made for an interesting book, but Ben doesn’t take it on. Instead he simply lays out the sum total of his interactions with Kennedy, the raw data, and leaves it to the reader to make the inferences for himself.
Of a trip to Hyannisport: “Apparently the cook was under instructions to have an endless supply [of chowder] on hand in case His Nibs wanted a snack. We watched in fascination as he gulped down four large bowls, one after the other. In anyone else it would have been gluttonous.” Harmless enough, and certainly a way for Ben to show, early on in the book, that he wasn’t too taken in by the Kennedy mystique. But seeing it, I was reminded of something Ben had said to Arthur Schlesinger some years before during his joint interview with Tony:
B: Jack used to really—first he started showing up about 9:30 or after, and then he used to start showing up earlier, calling up earlier and wondering if lunch or dinner was going to be available. That was the first collision with his eating habits, which were just appalling …
AB: We used to feed him in the kitchen. We did at least twice.
Q: How do you mean, appalling?
B: Because he wanted steak and baked potatoes and corn and cake.… No variation of this was allowed for very long.…
He was terribly vain in the Esquire kind of way. And I remember him coming over here, with his own cocktail shaker full of … God, that sounds funny for the President, doesn’t it? With his own cocktail shaker full of daiquiris, and very breezily sort of walking through, out into our garden, shaking with one hand, sort of right out of the pages of Town and Country, and whoops!—the whole bottom of the cocktail shaker went out onto his pants. And he immediately refused the offer that we could make him a daiquiri here, but went right back to his house to change his pants …
AB: It wasn’t vanity.
Aggression-tinged moments like that abound in Conversations with Kennedy. Ben rarely refuses a chance to stick it to his old friend, on matters great and small. When Kennedy finds fault with Newsweek’s coverage of Jackie’s trip to India—“That wasn’t one of your better efforts,” he tells Ben—Ben can’t help but note that Kennedy’s reaction had been “critical, this time, not just thin-skinned.” Poke.
Vanity: “I remarked that he had put on a little weight. Few things interest him more than a discussion of his own weight.”
On a picture of himself that Kennedy doesn’t like: “ ‘It shows the Fitzgerald breasts,’ he said … and in fact it did show the future president with some extra mammary protuberance.”
On Kennedy’s view of T
he Washington Star’s imbalanced coverage of two separate issues of the day: “A little simplistic, I thought; the problem is more complicated than that, but it was an interesting point.”
On LBJ: “This seemed a little petty of Kennedy.… There are times—like tonight—when LBJ’s simple presence seems to bug him. It’s not very noble to watch, and yet there it is.”
His characterization of the Kennedy children is particularly passive-aggressive. There isn’t a mention of John-John in particular that isn’t tinged, somehow, with a kind of genteel horror:
If you throw your head back in mock surprise, John-John roars with laughter until he drools. Kennedy keeps urging me to pick John-John up and throw him in the air, because he loves it so, and because Kennedy himself can’t do it because of his back. “He doesn’t know it yet,” the president said, “but he’s going to carry me before I carry him.” Caroline came into the room with her wretched little dog. (page 159)
At one point John-John careened into the small table on which the ambassador’s drink was sitting, and dumped it smack into his lap. Tony and I were the only ones embarrassed. (page 169)
Asked by an interviewer in 1975 why he had written the book, Ben gave a different answer from his standard “wanted to do something different” routine, an answer that comes closer to the spirit of the book than what he has said about it since:
If there was a philosophical point to it, it was to debunk the idea of Camelot. I mean, if you want to be pompous and serious, I think America is ill-served by its love for heroes. I think sometimes we’re too comfortable with the heroic explanations of men and the things they do. That’s not the way things are.
The point of Ben’s book, and it succeeds in this, is to show that JFK was human. Yet aside from the details that Ben delivers—Kennedy cursed all the time, was far more infirm than anybody knew, loved gossip, was petty, might have rigged the Illinois presidential election—you really don’t get any sense of what one reviewer called “the essential Kennedy.” The pointillist accumulation of detail never quite coheres into a whole, unless you switch your frame of reference. Jackie got that part right away. When Ben eventually showed her a copy of the book in advance of publication, the first words she said were, “It tells more about you than it does about him.”
You can’t put everything you know into a book. You have to decide what story you’re telling, which part of “true” you want to stick with. You hope the facts you do include can double as clues for the ones that you don’t.
There is a lot left unsaid in Ben’s book about Kennedy. The stunner is that Kennedy was screwing Ben’s sister-in-law, Mary Meyer, for the last two years of his presidency, a fact Ben never mentions in the book. He claims at the outset of Conversations with Kennedy that “I never wrote less than I knew about him,” but either he’s lying or he’s having fun with tenses. Such a statement might have been true in 1963, but it certainly wasn’t true in 1974.
His justification for not including Kennedy’s affair with Mary Meyer in the book is facile: “I didn’t have a conversation with Kennedy about it.” But it’s also, apparently, true. He and Kennedy never talked about it, and while Kennedy was alive Ben had no knowledge of the affair. In 1974, when Ben sat down to write the book, most of Kennedy’s indiscretions were still only rumors, and none of Kennedy’s close associates had made on-the-record allegations about his infidelity. “My rule used to be if private behavior didn’t interfere with public business, then it stayed private,” Ben told an interviewer in 1995. There is a kind of omerta there that a man of Ben’s generation would have had a hard time bucking just to sell books. So he left it out.
But he leaves clues:
And then suddenly: “You haven’t got it, Benjy. You’re all looking to tag me with some girl, and none of you can do it, because it just isn’t there.” Jackie just listened with a smile on her face. And that is the closest I ever came to hearing him discuss his reputation as what my father used to call “a fearful girler.” (page 49)
The conversation ended, as these conversations often ended, with his views on some of the women present—the overall appeal of the daughter of Prince Paul of Yugoslavia and Mary Meyer. “Mary would be rough to live with,” Kennedy noted, not for the first time. And I agreed, not for the first time. (page 54)
We had met the Kennedys in the upstairs hall, and Jackie had greeted my wife bluntly, saying “Oh, Tony, you look terrific. My bust is bigger than yours, but then so is my waist.” The females imported from New York for the occasion had been spectacular again, and at one point Kennedy had pulled me to one side to comment “If you and I could only run wild, Benjy.” (page 147)
It’s all there: we never talked about it, Kennedy made an oddly intimate comment about Mary, and Kennedy also kept his eye out for attractive ladies and wished he could run wild. Ben was leaving bread crumbs so that when the truth finally emerged he’d have his ass covered.
Ben didn’t take that approach purely out of loyalty to his friend. The entire Mary Meyer saga had taken a macabre turn when she was murdered in October of 1964—less than a year after the president—while walking along the towpath of the C&O Canal in Georgetown. Witnesses fingered a slight black man who was found down an embankment from the scene of the crime, shivering in the water, but he was eventually acquitted. Given Mary’s relationship with Kennedy, and the fact that her ex-husband, Cord Meyer, had been relatively high up in the CIA, people have since suspected that the CIA had something to do with it.
It’s one of those conspiracy theories that never quite get off the ground. But what gives the CIA angle some credence is that, after the funeral, one of Mary’s friends called Tony and told her that Mary had instructed her to retrieve a diary of hers should anything happen to her. Mary’s friend, Anne Truitt, was in Tokyo, so she asked Tony to look for it. When Ben and Tony arrived at Mary’s house the next morning, they unlocked the door and walked in only to find that James Angleton, the CIA’s chief of counterintelligence, had already made his way inside. He was a family friend, and he, too, was looking for the diary. They all searched together, but nobody found it. Later that same day, Ben and Tony realized that they ought to search the converted garage behind their own house, which Mary had been using as a studio. When they arrived, there was James Angleton again, trying to pick the lock to the door. “I collared him,” Ben said later, “and said, ‘You get the fuck out. In the first place, you’re breaking the law.’ ”
It’s strange enough that Angleton was there. What happens next is even stranger: after finding the diary in Mary’s studio, and realizing that it contained references to a love affair with the president of the United States, Ben and Tony decided that they would follow Mary’s instructions, which called for the diary’s destruction, by giving that diary to James Jesus Angleton. Full stop. The two pages that describe this encounter in Ben’s memoir are the only two pages that still feel fishy to me. The reason Ben gives: “[H]e promised to destroy it in whatever facilities the Central Intelligence Agency had for the destruction of documents. It was naïve of us, but we figured they were state of the art.” A guy who had been snooping around, and who worked for the CIA, and whom you tell to get the fuck out, is the guy you give it to for safekeeping and destruction?2
Apparently the diary was filled with paint swatches—Meyer was a painter—and only a few written passages. Ben says there’s no “thrusting and heaving,” but Tony did once acknowledge that there were some “JFK’s” in it. In Ben’s files at the Kennedy Library I uncovered a late draft of A Good Life with some of Ben’s notations on it. Written in by hand next to Ben’s description of the diary, but omitted from the final work, was this sentence: “I remember only one phrase: ‘He says I am the only woman he kissed while making love,’ or words to that effect.”
After Conversations with Kennedy came out, Ben heard from Jim Truitt, Anne Truitt’s husband. Jim Truitt had been the first editor of the Style section and a close friend of Phil Graham’s, but he had left the Post in 1969 and
in the years since had had a nervous breakdown. He felt that Ben and Kay and others at the paper had done him wrong during his departure and its aftermath, and apparently he was still bitter.
In September of 1975, he sent Ben a threatening postcard expressing some surprise that Ben had turned away a National Enquirer reporter “who just wanted to ask about your sister in law banging JFK, the diary, etc.” In February of 1976, Truitt again turned to the National Enquirer, and this time the story of Meyer’s affair with Kennedy ran, both in the Enquirer and the next day in the Post. According to the Enquirer’s researcher, Truitt had exposed the affair to show Ben up. “Here is this great crusading Watergate editor who claimed to tell everything in his Kennedy book,” Truitt is alleged to have said, “but really told nothing.”
It’s a tangled situation, one that nobody will ever plumb fully. But the existence of Kennedy’s relationship with Mary had caused Ben to do some reevaluating of his own, as he told Barbara Feinman privately in the interviews for his memoir:
BF: Were [Tony and Mary] real close?
B: Yes. I think they had sort of overtones of being rivals.
BF: Was one prettier than the other?
B: They were both awfully pretty. I mean Tony Bradlee was a lovely woman. She was spectacular looking and in those days so full of sparkle and energy and dancing on the top of tables. Very romantic. But I think in the old days Mary used to sort of just to keep her hand in used to try to swipe boyfriends. There came a time—Tony and I took forever to get married because I was living in Europe and she was living here and it took two and a half years. And there was a time when I felt that Mary was making a play for me and just for the sheer joy of it. Not for any great love, just thought it would be fun to see if she could break it up. That was in Paris and you know rules seem to be changed … anyway, it never happened. And I think that I always thought that Tony obviously had kind of a crush on Kennedy too and that it really sort of rocked her what she had had from a distance, Mary went through the red light and grabbed.
Yours in Truth Page 30
