JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President (22 page)

NEWPORT

A
fter Air Force One landed at Quonset Naval Air Station in Newport, Kennedy warned Ben Bradlee and his wife, Tony, that he needed to spend a few minutes doing what he called “
a little toe dance
” with Rhode Island’s new Republican governor, John Chaffee. He was livid when he rejoined them in the helicopter taking them to Hammersmith Farm, the waterfront estate of Jackie’s stepfather, Hugh Auchincloss. Chaffee had given him a cheap silver-plated vase as an anniversary gift, an obvious all-purpose present accompanied by a printed card announcing, “The Governor of Rhode Island.” Kennedy, who was scrupulous about writing notes and observing the social graces, was appalled that Chaffee had not bothered to sign the card. Even worse, the official cameraman had failed to capture the welcoming ceremony and Chaffee had grabbed back the vase and insisted on running through everything again, speeches and all. “
Boy, he learns fast
,” Kennedy said. “I didn’t have that much brass until I’d been in Congress five years . . . pushing a president around like that.” He mentioned the vase all weekend, each time suggesting a new way to get even with Chaffee and “put him in his place”—threats as hollow as posting the Otis officer to Alaska or making Ambassador McCloskey restore Mary Ryan’s yard.

He landed at twilight on the lawn in front of Hammersmith Farm.
As he disembarked
, Jackie came running and greeted him with an embrace that the Bradlees thought was the most affectionate they had ever seen them exchange.
As he entered the house
, he handed his mother-in-law Chaffee’s vase, calling it “a token of my undying affection.” Missing his sarcasm, she thanked him profusely but eyed it with dismay, probably wondering for how long she would have to display it. He finally admitted that it had been a present from the people of Rhode Island, and asked, “Don’t you think it was a funny thing for the governor to hand it to me this way?”

Twelve hundred guests
had attended the Kennedys’ wedding reception at Hammersmith Farm in 1953, dining and dancing under a vast white marquee. The
New York Times
reported the event on its front page, describing the guests as “the cream of society and important government officials,” and saying that no marriage had elicited such intense public interest since the famous Astor-French nuptials of 1934. Twelve people had gathered to celebrate the Kennedys’ tenth anniversary. They included a former bridesmaid, Jackie’s mother, stepfather, half brother and sister, the Bradlees, and Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island and his wife. Over cocktails, Jackie gave Kennedy three scrapbooks titled “The White House Before and After,” “The President’s Park,” and “The Making of a Garden.” One chronicled the transformation of the Rose Garden and contained well-chosen quotations about gardening written in her hand, accompanied by photographs showing how the garden had looked on a particular day and his schedule for that day. The White House head usher, J. B. West, who had watched her laboring over these scrapbooks for months,
compared them to “fine art books
.”

He reciprocated by reading out loud a letter from Klejman listing the antiquities he had brought from Washington. They included a Greek statue, an ancient Egyptian head, and some bracelets. Nothing cost less than a thousand dollars, and some items cost much more. He omitted the prices and told her to choose what she wanted, but repeatedly said, “
Now, you can only keep one
; you have to choose.” The expression of faint alarm crossing his face as he proceeded down the list made it apparent that he was reading it, and the accompanying prices, for the first time. As he came to the most expensive items he whispered to Bradlee, “
Got to steer her away
from that one.” She chose a gold bracelet resembling a coiled serpent because, she said, “
It was the simplest thing
of all and I could see how he loved it.”

Her gift to him had required months of thought and labor. His had been organized at the last minute with a single phone call and was almost as hurried and impersonal as Chaffee’s vase. He redeemed himself when they exchanged their more personal gifts. When he had knelt at her bedside weeping after Patrick’s death, she had begged him for something that would remind her of their son.
Now he gave her
the gold ring with green emerald chips symbolizing that their son had fought like an Irishman to live.
She reciprocated with
a gold-plated St. Christopher medal fashioned into a money clip that she had ordered from Tiffany’s to replace the one he had slipped into Patrick’s coffin. After the anniversary
she would write Charlie Bartlett
an effusive letter, telling him that Jack had helped “re-attach” her to life following Patrick’s death, and made her appreciate “all the lucky things” they shared. She believed that he could have lived a “worthwhile life” without being happily married, but without him, hers would have been “a wasteland.”

She took Ben and Tony Bradlee aside later that evening and with tears glistening in her eyes said, “
You two really are our best friends
.” It struck Ben Bradlee as a forlorn remark, the kind that “a lost and lonely child desperately in need of any kind of friend” might make. He doubted they were really their best friends, but the comment touched him and he wrote in his diary that because the Kennedys were so remote and independent, those rare occasions when they revealed their emotions were especially moving. The year before, Jackie had made a similarly impetuous declaration to her personal secretary, Mary Gallagher, suddenly embracing her and saying through tears, “
You know, you’re my only friend
in this impersonal White House.” Gallagher was taken aback, since they had recently been embroiled in an acrimonious dispute over her salary and civil service rank.

•   •   •

D
URING
THEIR
LONG
WEEKEND
in Newport the Bradlees and Kennedys followed the same schedule: swimming at Bailey’s Beach Club in the morning, lunch and a cruise on the
Honey Fitz,
then golf at the Newport Country Club.
Jackie was not a keen golfer
but tagged along, riding in the cart with her husband and even playing thirteen holes on Saturday.
A home movie
taken during one of their
Honey Fitz
outings shows him fingering a cigar, twiddling his sunglasses, and stroking John or Caroline, anything to keep his hands in motion. He gave John a swimming lesson in the pool and sat with him in a beached dinghy, teaching him how to row.
He sent a cable to Lyndon Johnson
, who had suffered excruciating pain from kidney stones throughout his Scandinavian trip, urging him to “pay more attention to the doctors than you usually do.” Johnson’s gaffe-filled trip had produced more ill will than good, but Kennedy generously praised him as “the best of our ambassadors.”

He decided to split the next summer
between rented houses in Hyannis Port and Newport, and asked Senator Pell to persuade the owner of Annandale Farm, the fifteen-acre waterfront estate bordering Hammersmith Farm, to rent it to them for August and September but not to tell Jackie. He knew it would make her happy and wanted to surprise her. She had grown up in Newport during the summers, had friends there, and preferred it to Hyannis Port. He was more conflicted, once complaining to a friend, “
All around me I see ponies
and horses running around the backyard. What the hell is there for
me
to do?”
Still, it had great waters
for sailing, and he liked Hammersmith Farm enough that while Jackie was in Italy he had invited himself for the weekend and had asked her mother if he could return again, sleeping next time in Jackie’s childhood room, the same one they had shared as newlyweds.

He and Jackie attended Sunday Mass at the same church where they had been married. As they were driving to Bailey’s Beach Club he stopped to talk with some nuns standing in a crowd along the road. “
Jackie here always wanted to be a nun
,” he told them mischievously. “She went to a convent school and really planned to take the orders.”

It was at about this moment that a box of dynamite hidden near the basement steps of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham exploded, killing four young black girls on their way to Sunday school. The bombing had been perpetrated by four members of an offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan and was one of the landmark atrocities of the civil rights struggle, but it appears to have had surprisingly little impact on Kennedy, which is doubly curious since anything threatening the lives or happiness of innocent children usually engaged his emotions. Bradlee devoted several pages of his book
Conversations with Kennedy
to recounting their anniversary weekend but made no mention of his reaction to the deaths of the four girls.

After leaving Bailey’s Beach Club, Kennedy took his usual luncheon cruise and played golf.
His phone logs
show that after coming off the links he called Bobby, probably to discuss the bombing and send Assistant Attorney General Burke Marshall to Birmingham. He also decided to return to Washington that evening instead of the following morning,
but the notes he made
on the plane showed that his mind was not on the bombing, and included reminders such as “speeches for Western trip.”

WASHINGTON

T
uesday was the first day of school in Alabama. To thwart the court-ordered desegregation of schools in Birmingham, Tuskegee, and Mobile, Governor Wallace had called out the Alabama National Guard and ordered it to prevent black students from entering the buildings. Kennedy thwarted him by federalizing the Guard and sending the troops back to their armories. Black students attended the previously all-white public schools without incident, demonstrating that even in the Deep South, integration could occur without the intervention of U.S. marshals and troops.

At a National Security Council meeting
on Tuesday morning, Victor Krulak and Joseph Mendenhall reported on their four-day mission to South Vietnam. Krulak had interviewed members of the U.S. advisory mission and the South Vietnamese military. He told Kennedy that the Buddhist crisis had not harmed the war effort or damaged relations between the American and South Vietnamese military and that the war was being won “irrespective of the grave defects of the ruling regime.” Mendenhall had met with Vietnamese nationals in Saigon, Hue, and several provincial towns. He said there had been a breakdown of civil government in Saigon, spoke of “a pervasive atmosphere of fear and hate arising from the police reign of terror,” and concluded, “We will lose the war with the Diem government.”

After asking if they had visited the same country, Kennedy said bleakly, “This is not a new thing, this is what we’ve been dealing with for three weeks. On the one hand you get the military saying that the war is going better, and on the other hand you get the political [opinion]. . . . What is the reason for the difference—I’d like to have an explanation what the reason is for the difference.”

Krulak said he was reporting on “national” attitudes to the war while Mendenhall had been concerned with sentiment in the urban areas, a lame explanation that left Kennedy unsatisfied. He decided to reconcile their conflicting reports by saying, “It seems to me after listening to General Krulak and those fellows from State [Mendenhall et al.] that they’re probably both right. There hasn’t been a real deterioration yet but it could set in. I think maybe two months from now. . . . So my judgment would be that we’re probably going to be worse off in two to four months.”

McNamara disagreed. It was impossible to forecast so far ahead, he said, and he disputed claims that the Buddhist crisis had weakened the military effort. He supported Rusk’s recommendation that they rein in Lodge, whose latest cable had “recommended that we decide today to get rid of Diem and Nhu.”

After receiving Krulak and Mendenhall’s dispiriting report,
Kennedy attended a luncheon meeting of the Business Committee for Tax Reduction
in 1963. He told the businessmen that his tax cut bill was “the most important domestic economic measure to come before the Congress in the past fifteen years.” Current tax rates hobbled the economy, he said, and his bill would “give a major responsibility and opportunity to American business to meet those needs [for jobs] through private means,” provide “recession insurance,” and expand “consumption and investment.” The result would be “a reduction in our budgetary deficits.” He received a standing ovation.

Lincoln noted in her diary
, “At 3:45 today Marlene Dietrich came to see the President. She looks mighty good—leggy for 62.” He was meeting the famed actress and singer in the Oval Office because he had a 4:15 appointment with the U.S. ambassador to Egypt, making it unlikely that their encounter would be as intimate as it had been the previous September, when she had visited him in the family quarters on a Saturday evening while Jackie was in Virginia.
On that occasion he had poured
her a glass of her favorite German wine, led her onto the balcony, and launched into a discussion of Abraham Lincoln. After noticing that she seemed impatient, he stopped and said, “I hope you aren’t in a hurry.” She explained that in half an hour she was due at the Statler Hotel, where Jewish war veterans were holding a dinner to honor her for aiding Jewish refugees. He stared deeply into her eyes and said, “That doesn’t give us much time, does it?” Staring straight back, she replied, “No, Jack, I guess it doesn’t.”

In her recounting of the story to the theater critic Ken Tynan, Kennedy took her glass and led her to a bedroom. In Tynan’s hands, their coupling became a scene from an X-rated screwball comedy. As Kennedy unwound the bandages holding his back brace in place, she thought, “I’d like to sleep with the President, sure, but I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to be on top!” But he took the superior position and she reported it being over “sweetly and very soon.” He fell asleep; she threw on her clothes, shook him awake, and shouted, “Jack—wake up! Two thousand Jews are waiting! For Christ’s sake get me out of here!” He wrapped a towel around his waist and led her down the corridor to the elevator. Then, as she told it, “standing right there in his towel, without any embarrassment, as if it were an everyday event—which in his life it probably was,” he told the elevator operator to have a car take her to the Statler. Before the door closed he said, “There’s just one thing I’d like to know. Did you ever make it with my father?” She insisted she had not and he said, “Well, that’s one place I’m in first.”

He could have scheduled a repeat performance when she returned to the White House on Wednesday. Jackie was in Newport and he had no official events scheduled that evening. Perhaps he had decided to remove temptation by seeing her in the middle of a busy afternoon, because after Patrick’s death he really
was
trying harder to “keep the White House white,” and because the next day was his tenth wedding anniversary.

He had already bought Jackie a private anniversary gift, a gold ring decorated with tiny chips of emerald symbolizing Patrick’s Irish heritage. Because he planned on giving it to her in private he also needed something she could open in front of their guests.
He had left this second gift
to the last minute, and on Thursday morning he called John Klejman, an art dealer specializing in Greek, Roman, and Byzantine antiquities who owned a New York gallery opposite the Carlyle Hotel, where the Kennedys had an apartment. He asked Klejman to throw together a collection of his best pieces, ones he thought Jackie might like, and have them flown with a price list to Andrews Air Force Base so he could take them with him to Newport that afternoon. According to Klejman,
Kennedy had “fallen in love” with one
of his most costly antiques, a life-sized fourth-century B.C. Greek bronze of a handsome athlete. It was too expensive to give Jackie, but he was hoping to persuade the National Gallery to acquire it. In the meantime, Klejman kept it for him on private display in his basement, where it sat on a pedestal surrounded by floodlights. When Kennedy was in New York he would cross Madison Avenue to the gallery and stand in the basement for several minutes, mesmerized by the statue.

He was in high spirits at his pre-press-conference briefing on Thursday morning, leading Walter Heller, his economic adviser, to describe it as “
the best humored briefing breakfast
we have had at any time.” He asked everyone what he should say about Lasky’s book, but since no one had read it they could only discuss the reviews. After learning that the columnist Roscoe Drummond had praised it, he said, “Never trust a man who serves only soft drinks,” explaining that the only time he had visited Drummond at home he had been offered orange pop. Rusk chimed in that Drummond had served him a soft drink, too, one with artificial rum flavoring. It had been “the supreme indignity.”

After saying that he anticipated being challenged on Gronouski’s qualifications, Kennedy asked, “Why shouldn’t we have a Pole or an Italian in the cabinet? Nobody thinks anything of it when his name is Day.” After a pause he added, “I hope I get a question on this.”

Heller complained that when the stock market fell it was called the “Kennedy market,” but when it rose his opponents called it something else. Recognizing a clever sound bite when he heard it, Kennedy promised to use it. He mentioned that the money American tourists spent abroad was contributing to the balance-of-payments crisis and admitted that his own family bore some responsibility. Heller facetiously suggested a “See America First” trip for the First Lady. He laughed and called it “a good project for next year.”

•   •   •

T
HE
N
ET
E
VALUATION
S
UBCOMMITTEE
(NES) was an Orwellian title for a committee of military officers and civil servants given the task of providing the president with what was called, in bureaucratese, “integrated evaluations of the net capabilities of the USSR, in the event of a general war, to inflict direct injury on the continental U.S., and to provide a continual watch for change which would significantly alter these net capabilities.” In plain language, the NES estimated how many million Americans would die in a nuclear war. Although the NES was supposed to give the president a yearly briefing, Kennedy’s last one had come during the 1961 Berlin crisis. According to
a declassified summary
of that meeting, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Lyman Lemnitzer had stated that their assumption was “a surprise attack in late 1963 preceded by a period of heightened tensions”—a scenario resulting in the deaths of more than a hundred million Americans. Kennedy asked if an assessment had ever been done of the damage that a preemptive U.S. attack would inflict on the Soviet Union. The CIA director, Allen Dulles, said such a strike would be less effective until the end of 1962, but that his agency and the Pentagon believed that between then and the end of 1963 the United States would enjoy a “window of superiority” in land-based missiles. Kennedy had turned to Rusk afterward and, with a strange look on his face, had said, “
And we call ourselves the human race
.” Rusk believed that the 1961 NES briefing had convinced him that waging a nuclear war was inconceivable, writing, “To see it all laid out vividly confirmed Khrushchev’s warning ‘In the event of a nuclear war, the living would envy the dead.’”

In their 1993 article
“Did the U.S. Military Plan a Nuclear First Strike for 1963?” James K. Galbraith and Heather Purcell stated that the 1961 NES briefing had offered Kennedy a “glimpse of the opportunity that lay ahead in the winter of 1963: U.S. nuclear superiority so complete that a first strike might be successful.” It had also alerted him to the danger that American nuclear superiority might be such that “rogue elements from the military and intelligence forces, seeking to precipitate an American first strike, might not feel deterred by fear of Soviet retaliation.” They speculated that one reason Kennedy had been so determined to push the test ban treaty and nourish a détente with the Soviet Union in 1963 was to blunt pressure from military hard-liners to mount a first strike before the end of the year, when the window of superiority in land-based missiles would close.
McNamara made a similar observation in 2003
, saying that Kennedy had been concerned about right-wing hawks who believed that at some point “we were going to face a nuclear war with the Soviet Union” and that we should strike first when we had the greatest advantage. He identified this period of superiority as stretching from the Cuban missile crisis until the end of 1963. “It was the belief of many, including General LeMay. . . . [that] we had to fight the Soviets in a nuclear war,” he said, and it would be better to do it when we had a seventeen-to-one advantage in nuclear warheads.

The Net Evaluation Subcommittee report that General Taylor presented to Kennedy on the morning of Thursday, September 12, 1963, is missing from the records.
A summary that the Pentagon provided
Bundy indicates that it forecast the results of a general war at various intervals between 1963 and 1968, predicting that casualties and damage would “increase over the years.” According to the summary, “during the years 1964 through 1968 neither the US nor the USSR can emerge from a full nuclear exchange without suffering very severe damage and high casualties, no matter which side initiates the war.” The summary also warned that the U.S. window of nuclear superiority was closing, making it too late to launch a successful preemptive attack.

Seizing on this aspect of the report, Kennedy asked Air Force General Leon Johnson if it was true that “even if we attack the USSR first, the loss to the U.S. would be unacceptable to political leaders [i.e., himself].” Johnson agreed that the Soviets would have enough weapons left to produce an “unacceptable loss” in the United States. Had we, then, reached a period of nuclear stalemate? Kennedy asked. Johnson said we had. Pressed further, he conceded that “there is no way, no matter what we do, to avoid unacceptable damage to the U.S. if nuclear war breaks out.”

McNamara reported that he had received the results of a study predicting the fatalities if the United States added $80 billion to the defense budget for blast shelters and more offensive and defensive weapons systems. Even with all these improvements, if the United States struck first and the Soviets were in a low state of alert, the minimum number of U.S. fatalities would still exceed 30 million. According to the Pentagon’s summary of the meeting, “The President again said that preemption was not possible for us and that that was a valuable conclusion growing out of an excellent report.”

After concluding these grim discussions, Kennedy presided over a press conference notable for what newspapers called “more laughter . . . than most reporters could remember,” and “one of his wittiest performances of evasion and rebuttal in months.”

The
Boston Globe
headlined its story, “
JFK Press Talk
: Laughs for All,” but the article was mildly critical of his conferences for producing “more laughs than headlines.” Unnamed members of the Washington press corps had complained in a
New York Times
article published several days earlier that they had become “
more nearly an instrument of Presidential power
than a useful tool of the press” that left them “playing minor roles in a bit of show biz that might be called: ‘See Kennedy Run, or A Young President Makes Good.’” Instead of questioning him, one reporter said, they had been reduced to “merely holding him up for the world to admire.” Their gripes boiled down to this: he had become so skilled at handling these conferences that he had turned them into a clamoring mob while he stood on the stage in the cavernous State Department auditorium, cool and confident.