JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President (12 page)

Jack and Jackie had a running argument about whether French or British history was more interesting. Her gift may have been meant as another salvo in that good-natured quarrel, chosen because of his interest in heroism and great men. But because so much of it dwelled on the count’s extraordinary sexual exploits, it would have been difficult for him to ignore that she might have also intended it as a cautionary tale, a warning that this could happen to him: a biography exposing
his
scandalous philandering.

WASHINGTON

D
uring Kennedy’s weekly Tuesday breakfast with Democratic congressional leaders,
Senator Mansfield handed him a three-page memorandum
titled “Observations on Viet Nam” that suggested the change in American ambassadors presented him with an opportunity to reexamine “the fundamental premise” behind U.S. involvement in the war: the conviction that its outcome was as important to the United States as it was to the South Vietnamese. If it was, Mansfield wrote, “We are stuck with it and must stay with it whatever it may take in the end in the way of American lives and money and time to hold South Vietnam.” He argued that it was not, although Americans had talked themselves into believing that it was by describing Vietnam as vital to U.S. security and giving it “a highly inflated importance.” The crucial question, he said, was “Have we, as in Laos, first over-extended ourselves in words and in agency programs and then, in search of a rationalization for the erroneous over-extension, moved what may be essentially a peripheral situation to the core of our policy considerations?”

He contended that South Vietnam was peripheral to U.S. interests because it offered no great economic or commercial advantages, and any policy requiring the commitment of hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops to the Asian mainland, where U.S. naval and air superiority was less effective, was clearly irrational. Given this, he urged Kennedy to consider “the point at which the cost in men and money to the United States of essentially unilateral action to achieve the objective outweighs any possible advantage which it might provide to the security and welfare of this nation,” and to declare that although the United States was concerned with the freedom of Vietnam, “in the absence of responsive indigenous leadership or adequate international cooperation . . . the essential interests of the United States do not compel this nation to become unilaterally engaged in any nation in Southeast Asia.” He also recommended toning down the rhetoric, stressing the relatively limited importance of the area in terms of specific U.S. interests, referring the problem to the United Nations, and considering “withdrawing abruptly and in a matter-of-fact fashion a percentage—say, 10 percent—of the military advisors which we have in Vietnam, as a symbolic gesture.”

Hours after Kennedy read Mansfield’s memorandum, South Vietnamese police and Special Forces units trained by U.S. advisers invaded Buddhist pagodas across South Vietnam. They vandalized shrines, and arrested and beat more than a thousand priests and nuns, killing an unspecified number. Diem declared martial law, imposed a curfew, and cut phone lines to the U.S. embassy. The crackdown violated his promise to Ambassador Nolting not to take any further repressive measures against the Buddhists, and was a calculated insult to the United States, timed to occur between Nolting’s departure and Lodge’s arrival.

At 4:00 p.m., before knowing the full extent of what was happening, Kennedy took the stage at the State Department auditorium for his sixtieth live televised press conference. The conferences played to his strengths. He looked younger in black and white, had a quick wit, a good memory for facts and statistics, and was a superb extemporaneous speaker. Like his debates with Richard Nixon, they were unequal contests in which he came off as more intelligent, charming, confident, better-looking, better-dressed, and more amusing and thoughtful than his opponents—in this instance, the White House press corps. He held one about every sixteen days, calling them when Salinger warned that reporters were getting restless, or when he wanted to pressure Congress into passing a piece of legislation. The main purpose of his
August 20 press conference
was to scold House members for making draconian cuts to his foreign aid bill. It was a typical Kennedy performance: fluent responses that read as well as they sounded, and an impressive marshaling of facts and logic leavened by humor. When asked if he was “seeking a man with a business background or a political background” to serve as his next postmaster general, he drew laughs by replying, “There are other fields that are still to be considered, including even a postal background.” There was more laughter when he answered a question about Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, his probable opponent in 1964, becoming a captive of the radical right by saying, “I don’t know who has captured who.”

Sometimes his cool-cat façade fell away and he turned testy, reflective, or passionate, offering a glimpse of his deeply forested interior. This happened on August 20—after calling his foreign aid bill “essential to the continued strength of the free world,” and insisting that with unemployment at 5.6 percent “the state of the economy is good,” and replying to a question on whether black Americans deserved “special dispensation” for having suffered years of second-class citizenship by saying we should “make sure we are giving everyone a fair chance, but not [through] hard and fast quotas”—when, after delivering these replies in a calm and reasoned manner, he was asked to comment on Dr. Edwin Teller’s testimony on the test ban treaty before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Teller had called the treaty a “
tragic mistake
” that would weaken American defenses and invite a Soviet attack. When Fulbright reported to Kennedy that Teller had impressed some members of the committee, the president had replied, “
There’s no doubt that any man
with complete conviction, particularly who’s an expert, is bound to shake anybody who’s got an open mind. That’s the advantage of having a closed mind.”

When Kennedy was asked at his press conference to rebut Teller’s charges, his voice hardened and he said, “I understand Dr. Teller is opposed to it. Every day he is opposed to it. I recognize he is going to continue being opposed to it.” He reminded reporters that the United States had needed only a single test to develop the first atom bomb, and now its bombs were “many, many, many times stronger than the weapon that flattened Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” Pounding on the podium, he asked, “How many weapons do you need and how many megatons do you need to destroy? . . . What we now have on hand, without any further testing, will kill three hundred million people in one hour,” adding sarcastically, “I suppose they could even improve on that if it’s necessary.”

WASHINGTON AND CAPE COD

W
hile Kennedy was upstairs in the family quarters,
he received an early morning call
from Undersecretary of State George Ball, reporting that Diem’s government had ended the raids but imprisoned thousands of Buddhists, closed airports, and occupied telegraph offices. Nhu’s shock troops, trained by U.S. advisers to fight the Viet Cong, had acted with appalling brutality. Ball thought that Lodge, who was in Japan and planning to arrive in South Vietnam several days later, should wait before flying to Saigon, since if he arrived now he could not present his credentials.

Kennedy disagreed. “I think this is going to be a big thing. Cabot can’t be sitting on his butt. . . . He may be helpless, but he oughta be out there. I think it’s going to make us look bad if he’s not.”

Ball said that several journalists, including David Halberstam of the
New York Times,
were claiming to have proof that the U.S. embassy had engineered the crackdown, and suggested preempting their stories by issuing a statement denying U.S. involvement. He read Kennedy a draft statement that condemned the repression as a direct violation of the South Vietnamese government’s assurances that it would seek reconciliation with the Buddhists, and concluded, “The United States deplores repressive actions of this nature. We shall continue to assist Vietnam to resist Communist aggression and maintain its independence.”

“I don’t know about that last sentence,” Kennedy said. “Why don’t you leave the last sentence out?”

Ball admitted that it had been “an afterthought.”

Kennedy criticized it as “sort of almost [a] non sequitur.” It was also precisely the kind of rhetorical flourish that Mansfield’s memorandum had cautioned him against using.

Several hours later, Lodge boarded a special military flight for Saigon and was probably airborne about the same time as Kennedy, who was flying to the Cape for another midweek visit with Jackie. And while they were both in the air, or slightly later, an Air Force transport left Andrews Air Force Base for West Germany carrying Ellen Rometsch, a statuesque twenty-seven-year-old former East German refugee who had become one of the president’s sexual partners. Also aboard was La Verne Duffy, a former investigative aide to Robert Kennedy who had fallen in love with Rometsch and had been given the assignment of escorting her out of the country.

Bobby Baker, the secretary to the Senate majority leader, had often introduced women like Rometsch—whom he described as “
eager young ladies
who’d let it be known they were out for a good time”—to congressmen, Capitol Hill staffers, lobbyists, and government officials. She had come to the attention of the FBI after boasting to a former Bureau informant about her activities at the Quorum Club, a warren of rooms that Baker had leased at a Capitol Hill hotel, and her frequent visits to the White House.
Her FBI file described her
having a “rough complexion” and being fond of heavy makeup; photographs showed a voluptuous woman with a towering beehive hairdo. On July 3, 1963, J. Edgar Hoover sent Special Agent Courtney Evans to inform Robert Kennedy that Rometsch was claiming to have had “
illicit relations with highly
placed government officials,” including the president. Evans also told Bobby that she had been raised in East Germany, where she had belonged to several Communist youth groups before fleeing to the West in 1955 at the age of nineteen.
According to Evans’s memorandum
of their meeting, the attorney general “was appreciative of the Director’s sending this information to him on a confidential basis,” and “made particular note of Rometsch’s name.” When they parted, he “again expressed his appreciation for the discreet manner in which this information was handled.”

Bobby had long been concerned about his brother’s failure to ascertain even the most rudimentary information about some of his sexual partners, once warning him, “
You’ve got to be careful
about these girls. A couple of them might be spies.” Britain’s recent Profumo scandal had made Kennedy’s behavior seem even more reckless. The British press had revealed in March that the secretary of state for war, John Profumo, had been patronizing the prostitute Christine Keeler at the same time that she was seeing a Soviet military attaché. Keeler was English and had not passed any government secrets to the Soviet attaché, but Profumo had resigned and the scandal was threatening to topple the Macmillan government.

The FBI agents who interviewed and investigated Rometsch could not substantiate the allegations that she had enjoyed “
high-level sex contacts
” or that she was a Communist agent. Because she was married to a West German airman stationed at the embassy, the FBI report recommended informing the State Department of the investigation, while cautioning, “
Of course, no mention will be made
of the President and the AG [attorney general].” The report did not quiet Bobby’s fears. The Bureau had found no evidence that Rometsch was a spy, but it had confirmed that she had belonged to Communist youth groups, had known the East German leader Walter Ulbricht, still had relatives living in the East, and had enjoyed a liaison with a Soviet embassy official while living in Washington. If her relationship with the president became public, there would be a congressional investigation that would inevitably call into question all of the administration’s dealings with the Soviet Union, including the test ban treaty. It was also possible that a more thorough investigation might reveal contacts between Rometsch and Soviet bloc intelligence agencies.
*

•   •   •

K
ENNEDY
HAD
BEEN
IGNORANT
of Rometsch’s background, but his inordinate interest in the Profumo case indicated that he appreciated the danger of becoming ensnared in a similar scandal. He had badgered the London embassy for updates on Profumo, and knowing of his interest in the case, his friends offered him frequent reports. After returning from Britain, Schlesinger told him, “
It is hard to overstate
the atmosphere of political squalor in London today,” and said the scandal had served “to reinforce the impression that the Government is frivolous and decadent.” Profumo remained on Kennedy’s mind all summer.
While editing a draft
of his July 26 speech on the test ban treaty, he objected to using the word “proliferation,” telling Ball that he feared some people might think it had something to do with Christine Keeler.
If someone disparaged Profumo
, he leaped to his defense, saying how easy it would be for a fellow to make that kind of a mistake, and that such extreme criticism was unjustified. During a small White House dinner the year before, honoring the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin, he had become testy when Berlin mentioned that a historian had recently published an article about a sexual affair between Lenin and a woman that predated the Russian Revolution. “
He thought this was not at all the way
to treat a great man,” Berlin said later. “I had the feeling that he felt one mustn’t talk about the private affairs of great heads of state in quite that tone of voice. I felt put in my place.”

Bobby decided it was too dangerous
for Rometsch to stay in Washington, where she might talk to someone who would tip off the press, and could be subpoenaed to appear before Congress or a grand jury. He ordered her deported, instructed the State Department to deny her a visa if she attempted to return, and asked Duffy to chaperone her on the flight back to West Germany. But if he and the president had imagined that this would end the threat, they would be proved wrong two months later, when they would open the
New York Times
to see her photograph underneath a headline reading, “Baker Inquiry Is Asked If German Woman’s Ouster by U.S. Involved Security.”

Kennedy’s affair with Rometsch was
one of the most egregious instances of a womanizing
so compulsive and careless that even those who believed they knew him well would struggle for decades to fathom it, falling back on words such as “inexplicable” and “incomprehensible.” His defense of Lenin and Profumo showed that he appreciated the risks to his presidency and his place in history. Then why did he do it? How could a man who cared so much about the judgment of history engage in behavior that as a student of history he must have known would surely come to light? How could a man who had shown such integrity in his public life show so little in private, risking his reputation for hurried and, according to several of his partners, unsatisfying couplings with call girls, strippers, interns, and secretaries?

One of his mistresses suggested that
his need for a secret life
was a greater motivation than the sex. His friends have speculated that his wartime brush with death had left him addicted to risk, and that aside from driving like a madman, this was the riskiest thing he could do. It has been said he did it because he could not tolerate being bored and illicit sex was a pleasant antidote to boredom, because the steroids he took to control his Addison’s had supercharged his libido (although he had been sexually promiscuous before taking the medicine), and because he believed he would die young, and sex was at the top of his bucket list. He told Senator Smathers, who sometimes supplied him with women, “
You’ve got to live every day
like it’s your last on earth,” and said to Joe Alsop, “
I’ve got this slow-motion cancer
[he was referring to his Addison’s], which they say gets you when you’re forty.” It is also possible that abstinence really did give him, as he claimed, insomnia and migraines.
He confided in Clare Boothe Luce
that he “went all to pieces” unless he had sex every day, and told Harold Macmillan that if he went without sex for a day
he suffered punishing headaches
. According to the more questionable theories, he was promiscuous because
being circumcised at the age of twenty-one
for tight foreskin problems had left him desperate to prove his manhood, or because he had been traumatized as a boy by
finding his father in flagrante
with the film star Gloria Swanson, although there are doubts whether this occurred. The most widely accepted theory blames his father, a notorious philanderer who, according to Kennedy, encouraged him and his brothers “to get laid as often as possible.”

The fact that Kennedy’s sexuality remained so unchanged
over the years suggests that it was fixed during his adolescence and youth, and that his father was responsible. One member of his staff called him “
an adolescent in terms
of his sexual relationships,” adding, “All this stuff was casual—as if he were in high school—hijinks.” Lem Billings, who was a closeted homosexual, believed that he had “
an immature relationship with girls
—that is, while he was terribly interested in going out and having fun with them at night, I don’t think he was really terribly excited about girls as friends.” Bobby Baker observed that he “
seemed to relish sharing the details
of his conquests” and “came off as something of the boyish braggart”; the White House intern Mimi Beardsley thought that “
part of him still seemed to be
an adolescent teenager at Choate”; and the stripper Tempest Storm described him as “
a little boy who wouldn’t
grow up,” although in other respects, she found him “one of the most mature men” she had ever known.

His affair with Tempest Storm showed how widely he cast his sexual net. His partners included Jackie’s press secretary Pamela Turnure, the White House secretaries Priscilla Wear and Jill Cowan—two spunky twenty-somethings nicknamed “Fiddle” and “Faddle”—and Ben Bradlee’s sister-in-law Mary Meyer. Prior to Rometsch, his most risky relationship had been with Judith Campbell, a two-year affair beginning in 1960 when Frank Sinatra introduced them in Las Vegas, and ended with him sharing Campbell with the Mafia boss Sam Giancana.

Whatever demons lay behind his voracious womanizing, he seemed incapable of taming them. Betty Spalding described it as “
a real compulsion
 . . . something so deep in that man.”
Charlie Bartlett, who had introduced
him to Jackie, believed he never should have married, because “he had this thing about him, which was not under control.” During a Washington dinner party in the late fifties, he told Priscilla McMillan, who had formerly worked in his Senate office, that he had married Jackie “
because I was thirty-seven years old
, and people would think I was queer if I wasn’t married.” Encouraged by his candor, she asked, “Jack, when you’re straining every gasket to be president, why do you endanger yourself by going out with women?” After a long pause he shrugged and a sad expression crossed his face that reminded McMillan of a little boy preparing to cry. “I guess it’s because I just can’t help it,” he said.

Jackie’s sister, Lee Radziwill, believed that Kennedy had “
absolutely no guilty conscience
,” but if that was true, why would he say “I just can’t help it,” or tell Charlie Bartlett that he intended “
to keep the White House white
,” or look for precedents to justify his philandering,
showing a keen interest in polygamy
during a discussion of the Kama Sutra and the sexual morals of the ancient world with Jackie’s couturier Oleg Cassini. He sometimes justified his womanizing as the mark of a great man. When his friend Marie Ridder asked during the 1960 campaign if he planned to continue having affairs while living in the White House, he replied breezily, “Oh, it’ll be much easier, because the Secret Service will protect me. Anyway all great men have this failing. Wilson stopped the conference at Versailles to have his ‘nooner,’ and Alexander the Great had so many sexual appetites he never knew next what gender would appeal to him.” He went on at great length, listing other great leaders who had been unfaithful and viewing his sexual morals, as he did so many things, in the context of the sweep of history and great men.

The most perceptive take on his sexual pathology can be found in the
letters, diary, and testimony of Margaret Coit
, a Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer who was perhaps the smartest and most sensitive woman whom he ever attempted to seduce. After she won a Pulitzer in 1951 at the age of thirty-one for her biography of Senator John C. Calhoun, the eminent financier and presidential adviser Bernard Baruch asked her to write his biography. Before traveling to Washington in the spring of 1953 to conduct research at the Library of Congress and speak with senators who had known Baruch, she manufactured a pretext to interview Kennedy, writing him that since her book encompassed Baruch’s times, she hoped he could provide her with some background about his prewar years in London. “I had designs on John F. Kennedy,” she admitted. “He was the golden boy, the most eligible bachelor in New England.”