Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) (27 page)

After their taut confrontation in the Oval Office, the general finally agreed to submit his resignation. In return the president agreed not to make public the military conspiracy and to allow its masterminds to quietly retire to civilian life. It was a compromise that underlined the Democratic president’s sense of moderation and restraint, but perhaps his political weakness too.

At the White House press conference where he later announced the general’s resignation, the president denied reports of an attempted coup. The beleaguered leader did not want to further undermine confidence in his government. The American military is deeply indoctrinated in the principles of the Constitution, the president lectured the assembled reporters, so such treason is foreign to our officer corps. “I am sure the American people do not believe that any such thought ever entered the mind of any general officer in our services since the day the country began,” the president said, as he concluded the conference. “Let us pray that it never will.” For those who knew how close to the brink the country had really come, the president’s reassurances must have seemed bleakly hollow.

These were not real-life scenes from the Kennedy presidency, but fictional scenes inspired by the increasingly ominous mood in the capital. They take place at the end of
Seven Days in May
, the bestselling novel about a military coup that comes chillingly close to success. Written by Washington journalists Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey, the political potboiler lacked literary flair, suffering from cardboard characters and corny dialogue. But its spooky scenario struck a chord with the public when it was published in September 1962, after nearly two years of well-publicized tensions between civilian and military officials in the Kennedy administration. Knebel, a White House correspondent for
Look
magazine, said he got the idea for
Seven Days in May
after interviewing the country’s always disturbing Air Force chief, Curtis LeMay, who at one point shocked the journalist by going off the record to fume against President Kennedy’s “cowardice” at the Bay of Pigs.

Knebel and his co-author were not just expressing their own anxieties—and those of the public—about the stability of the Kennedy presidency. They were channeling the fears of the Kennedy brothers themselves. Both men were haunted by the premonition that their administration would end violently. They raised the subject of a coup or assassination with eerie frequency during their brief hold on power. Surely no American presidency, with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln’s, has been so filled with intimations of its own mortality. Yet, oddly, this chronic concern of the Kennedys has received scant attention in histories of the administration.

JFK made a habit of shocking his friends with the morbid specter of his own bloody demise. One day, JFK was sailing off Palm Beach with Grant Stockdale, an old friend and fund-raiser whom he appointed ambassador to Ireland. JFK began shooting off rounds from a .22 rifle over the empty ocean expanse and he urged his friend to join him. Stockdale said, “Not on your life, not with all the Secret Service around and me with a gun in my hands.” JFK then turned thoughtful and said, “Stock, do you think I’ll be assassinated?” His friend rushed to reassure him: “Chief, don’t even think about such a thing. Of course you won’t.”

Kennedy brought up the subject on several occasions with Charlie Bartlett, even discussing at length with him what kind of president Lyndon Johnson would make after his own violent departure. One day, the two men were taking a relaxing drive on a backcountry road in Virginia. Suddenly a car shot past the Secret Service car that was trailing the president and then roared past JFK and his friend. “He was shaken a little bit by this car going by,” Bartlett recalled. “And he said, ‘Those fellows should have stopped them…. The Secret Service should have stopped that car.’ And then he disliked the fact that he was showing concern, and he said, ‘Charlie, that man might have shot you.’ But the thing was obviously on his mind.”

John Kennedy had highly sensitive political nerve endings. He was acutely attuned to the dark rumblings in Washington. And so were journalists like Knebel, who enjoyed good access at the White House. Knebel had known Kennedy since his days in Congress, when he recognized the dazzling young politician from Boston as a comer. “He was just good copy, that’s all—with the money and the flashiness and the beautiful wife and the whole thing, you know?” Knebel later said. “Also, I felt strongly that he was going someplace, so I just began hanging around his office.”

Like his wife, fellow
Look
staff writer Laura Fletcher Knebel, he developed a genial, sparring relationship with JFK. Once, after showing Kennedy a 15,000-word profile of him that he had written for an upcoming book about the 1960 presidential race, Knebel was sharply challenged by the candidate on one of his facts. Knebel had written about a well-documented loan that Joe Kennedy had made to the publisher of the
Boston Post
during JFK’s 1952 Senate race. Soon after, the
Post
’s editorial page switched allegiance from Republican candidate Henry Cabot Lodge to JFK.

“The way you write this, about that ’52 election, any reader would think that we had bought that paper for the editorial support,” Kennedy objected.

“Frankly, that’s the implication I want to leave because I think that’s what happened,” Knebel shot back.

The two men continued squabbling at some length over Knebel’s characterization of the deal until Kennedy finally got him to agree to insert a strong denial from family finance man Stephen Smith. Their dispute resolved, JFK then walked Knebel to his door. Years later, the journalist laughed at the memory of what Kennedy did next. “This was a trait about Kennedy that reporters just loved, it just killed them.” Opening the door for Knebel, Kennedy said, “You know, we had to buy that fucking paper or I would have lost the election.”

“How shrewd that guy was, you know?” the journalist later marveled. “That strange, whimsical, almost magical quality that that guy had about him; he did have it. It wasn’t something that was painted on by the press or that was manufactured. It was real.”

Knebel made sure that Kennedy got an early copy of
Seven Days in May
before it was published. JFK quickly devoured the book, as did his brother and others in their circle. Then Kennedy contacted Hollywood director John Frankenheimer, maker of the soon-to-be-released film
The Manchurian Candidate
—another Cold War thriller JFK admired—and encouraged him to turn
Seven Days in May
into a movie. So began a remarkable, little-known footnote of the Kennedy years, when the president appealed to his Hollywood friends to help him awake the nation to the threat of far-right treason.

The president wanted to send his enemies in Washington a message. “Kennedy wanted
Seven Days in May
to be made as a warning to the generals,” Arthur Schlesinger said years later over glasses of Perrier and lemon in the book-lined drawing room of New York’s Century Club. “The president said the first thing I’m going to tell my successor is ‘Don’t trust the military men—even on military matters.’”

“President Kennedy wanted
Seven Days in May
made. Pierre Salinger conveyed this to us,” Frankenheimer recalled. “The Pentagon didn’t want it done. Kennedy said that when we wanted to shoot at the White House, he would conveniently go to Hyannis Port that weekend.”

JFK had also encouraged the production of Frankenheimer’s
Manchurian Candidate
, which starred the president’s yet-to-be excommunicated friend Frank Sinatra. Destined to become a Cold War classic, the 1962 film was a perverse dream that tapped into the political psychosis of the era. In
The Manchurian Candidate
, brainwashing Communists and scheming right-wing extremists are amoral equivalents; they join forces to assassinate a president and dispose of American democracy. Kennedy was an avid fan of the darkly lurid 1959 Richard Condon best seller on which the film was based. When United Artists suddenly got cold feet about the movie, fearing that it might exacerbate Cold War tensions, Sinatra persuaded Kennedy to intervene with the studio. The president maintained an active interest in the movie’s production. “He was really interested in the facts of the project,” Sinatra recalled. On August 29, 1962, Kennedy gave
The Manchurian Candidate
a special screening at the White House.

John Kennedy clearly grasped Hollywood’s dreamlike power to conjure the public’s deepest fears and hopes. As with Bobby’s
Enemy Within
project, JFK showed his communications savvy by turning to Hollywood on
Seven Days in May
. But there is also something poignant about his entreaty. The fact that the president of the United States was driven to enlist the support of show business friends in his struggle with the military underscores how embattled he must have felt.

Frankenheimer and an A-list of Hollywood liberals responded to the president’s call. Kirk Douglas’s production company acquired the rights to the novel even before it was published and he agreed to co-star in the film with Burt Lancaster as the mutinous General James Mattoon Scott and Frederic March as peace-loving President Jordan Lyman. The Defense Department “shunned” the
Seven Days in May
project, Knebel later reported, after Frankenheimer refused to submit the script (by future
Twilight Zone
creator Rod Serling) for “consideration,” as military censors euphemistically called the process. But with Kennedy’s support, Frankenheimer filmed scenes at the White House and staged riots outside on Pennsylvania Avenue—mock battles between opponents and supporters of “President Lyman” that echoed the real-life clashes swirling around the Kennedy administration.

Months later,
Look
magazine ran a photo essay by Knebel on the making of
Seven Days in May
, including shots of overturned government cars burning in the streets of Washington. The journalist revealed the rampant anxieties that the movie’s production had set off within the government: “At the outset of filming, the moviemakers had a call from still another arm of government. The Secret Service was alarmed at a spurious report that the movie involved a President’s assassination.” Three days after the magazine’s publication date, Kennedy was dead. A strange and melancholy air would hang over the film when it was finally released in February 1964, despite the fact that in the story, at least, the good guys won.

The day Kennedy was assassinated, Paramount Pictures, the distributor of
Seven Days in May
, planned to run an ad for the film, using a quote from one of its fictional military conspirators: “Impeach him, hell. There are better ways of getting rid of him.” The studio yanked the ad at the last minute, fearing it was too provocative, “narrowly avoiding an embarrassing coinci dence on the very day the president was shot,”
Variety
later reported. But several media commentators found the movie itself too disturbing when it was released. An opinion writer in the
Los Angeles Herald-Examiner
questioned whether movies like
Seven Days in May
should be made. “The world is on too short a fuse,” he argued, and pictures like this damaged “the American image abroad.” A
Los Angeles Times
columnist felt compelled to reassure his readers that a military coup could not really happen in America, quoting none other than retired admiral Arleigh Burke to support his case. Meanwhile congressmen, including Melvin Laird, a future secretary of defense, called for the movie to be clearly labeled fiction before it was shown overseas.

Seven Days in May
was one of several nerve-wracking political features to come out of the Kennedy years, including
The Manchurian Candidate
,
Dr. Strangelove
, and
Fail-Safe
. Together they weave a jittery picture of American democracy “as an excitingly perilous arena,” in the observation of film critic J. Hoberman. “Shot in sober black and white and populated by demagogues, dupes and traitors, such movies were delirious news bulletins that set American presidents and presidential candidates in the midst of some personal or public Armageddon.” Hollywood, in short, was trying to tell America something about the country’s precarious political situation. With most of the Washington press corps remaining cheerfully oblivious to the ominous tensions building in the nation’s capital, “the delirious news bulletins” had to come from the country’s dream factory.

Critics would later call these films masterpieces of political paranoia. But Frankenheimer rejected the description in an interview near the end of his life. “Paranoia only exists if the circumstances are totally untrue,” he pointed out. And America was fraught with dangerous circumstances in those years, he said. As for
The Manchurian Candidate
, he said, history has “vividly demonstrated that there are lots and lots of plots to assassinate presidents and high-ranking figures for political gain…. There’s a certain grotesque reality about
The Manchurian Candidate
. And as far as
Seven Days in May
is concerned, we know that there was a very definite group in the military that would have, at one point, liked to have taken over the government…. The extreme right has been very, very effective in undermining quite a few things that could’ve changed the destiny of this country.”