JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President (27 page)

•   •   •

T
HE
A
RKANSAS
CROWDS
WERE
large and friendly, but Fulbright was alarmed by how freely the president mingled with people at Heber Springs, where, he noted, “
any one of a thousand
or two thousand could easily have done him harm . . . because the poor Secret Service were lost in the crowd.” There were no boos, only a few hostile placards, and he received loud applause when he mentioned the test ban treaty. An editorial in the friendly
Arkansas Gazette
predicted that he was “destined to join the silent company of great Presidents.”

The next day he met in the White House with Governor John Connally of Texas, who was even less enthusiastic than Fulbright about his trip to Texas, although for different reasons. The Kennedy-Connally relationship had been one of dramatic fluctuations. At the 1956 convention, Connally had persuaded the Texas delegation to back Kennedy for the vice presidency, but four years later, while serving as Johnson’s de facto campaign manager, he had initiated a whispering campaign about his health. He redeemed himself by working hard for the ticket, and Kennedy made him secretary of the Navy, a post he held for only a year before resigning to run for governor. Once Connally moved into the governor’s mansion, Kennedy began badgering him to arrange a presidential trip to the state. Connally faced reelection in two years and was afraid that being seen as close to the president would be a liability. He stalled before finally proposing a low-key, nonpolitical trip that skipped Dallas, where he feared embarrassing signs and noisy pickets. Kennedy agreed to the plan but insisted on including Dallas.

Connally stopped in Dallas on his way to Washington to confer with its civic leaders and apologize for inflicting the president on them. He compared himself to a ship’s captain faced with an admiral demanding to come aboard, and
promised not to become “Kennedy’s errand boy
.” Like him, they feared an incident similar to the infamous attack on Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson during the 1960 campaign that had besmirched their city’s reputation.
Connally went to the Capitol
before coming to the White House and told the Texas congressional delegation that he thought the president’s visit was a mistake. He was coming to Texas to raise money, he said, yet his strength lay among people without any money, “Negroes and brass collar [working-class] Democrats.”

“
How about those fund-raising affairs in Texas, John
?” Kennedy asked as soon as Connally sat down in the Oval Office.

Holding four would be a mistake, he said, and would not raise any more money than a single properly managed dinner. Because the president had not made a “real visit” to Texas since taking office, if he held multiple events during his first trip he might be seen as “trying to financially rape the state.”

Kennedy was taken aback by the strong language and protested that he was coming more to win over the business community than to raise money. Connally argued that the place to do that was a nonpolitical event, not a fund-raiser that his enemies were sure to boycott. Texans were a courteous and hospitable people, he said, and more likely to honor him as their president instead of as a politician hunting for donations. He proposed nonpartisan speeches in Houston and San Antonio, then a luncheon in Dallas followed by a political fund-raiser in Austin. Kennedy capitulated, and Connally magnanimously said that
he
believed he would win Texas, although it might be close.

“We
shouldn’t
have a hard race in Texas,” Kennedy complained, irked by the notion of struggling to win his vice president’s native state.

Connally implored him to bring the First Lady. “The women want to see her. They want to see what her hairdo looks like and what her clothes look like. It’s important to them.”

“I would hope that she would come,” he said wistfully.

•   •   •

K
ENNEDY
MET
with his Vietnam advisers again on Saturday
morning for a further discussion of the McNamara-Taylor report. The report had presented him with three options: apply selective pressures such as withholding U.S. subsidies for commodity imports and suspending aid to the South Vietnamese Special Forces, reconcile with Diem, or encourage a coup. McNamara and Taylor dismissed reconciliation as an ineffective strategy, saying it would indicate to Diem that the United States “would sit still for just about anything he did.” They rated the prospects for a successful coup as low because Diem and Nhu had established a “praetorian guard” to protect themselves, while the generals appeared to have little stomach for a coup.

Kennedy approved “selective pressures.” He understood that the generals would view the pressures as endorsing a coup, and Bundy sent Lodge a cable instructing him to pursue an “
urgent covert effort
 . . . to identify and build contacts with alternative leadership.”

The White House had announced on Wednesday that Taylor and McNamara had proposed a withdrawal schedule, and that the president had approved making their recommendation public. Kennedy formally approved their recommendations on Saturday, but according to a National Security Action memorandum, “
directed that no formal announcement be made
of the implementation of plans to withdraw 1000 U.S. military personnel by the end of 1963.”

He concluded the Saturday meeting by saying, “
Our decision to remove a thousand U.S. advisors
by December of this year should not be raised formally with Diem. Instead the action should be carried out routinely as part of our general posture of withdrawing people when they are no longer needed.” In other words, the withdrawal would occur whether or not Diem made any reforms.

Before flying to Camp David to spend the weekend with Caroline and John, he tried on a selection of hats from the desperate hatters of Danbury, Connecticut. His refusal to hide his thick chestnut hair under a hat had been a catastrophe for this important Connecticut industry. (Dave Powers had once joked that “
if you put a hat on a Kennedy
, you lose three quarters of the head, all of the charisma.”) To placate Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Ribicoff, a former Connecticut governor, he had agreed to wear a hat from time to time. He lined up the candidates from Danbury and asked his aides to choose their favorites. After each picked out a different one, he told them, “
You remind me of my Vietnam advisors
.”

WASHINGTON

K
ennedy signed the instruments
of ratification for the Limited Test Ban Treaty in the White House Treaty Room, a small and once neglected space in the second-floor family quarters that Jackie had redecorated in high Victorian style with deep green walls, floor-to-ceiling burgundy drapes, furniture from the Grant administration, and a painting of the signing of the Peace Protocols ending the Spanish-American War. He orchestrated the signing as if arranging its participants for another historic portrait, placing himself in the center of the room, sitting behind a handsome antique table he had ordered brought in for the occasion. Resting on it were four leather-bound copies of the instruments of ratification and a holder with pens standing upright like arrows in a quiver. Sixteen government officials and congressional leaders who had been instrumental in negotiating the treaty and shepherding it through the Senate stood in a semicircle behind him, hands clasped in front of sober suits, their expressions grave.

He used sixteen pens to sign four copies. He handed the first pen to Senator Fulbright, the next to Mansfield, the third to Dirksen. After passing out the rest to Harriman, Rusk, Johnson, and others, he realized that he had neglected to keep one for himself. He reopened one of the folders and added a flourish to his signature. As he slipped the pen into his breast pocket he smiled and said, “This one is mine.” He gave it to Jackie.

Sorensen believed that “
no single accomplishment in the White House
” gave Kennedy “greater satisfaction” than the ratification of the test ban treaty. According to O’Donnell, the ceremony provided him with “
the deepest satisfaction of his three years
at the White House” because he believed that the treaty made it less likely that millions of innocent children would perish in a nuclear war. As he and Bobby spoke in his bedroom during the Berlin crisis, when the two powers appeared close to a nuclear exchange, his eyes had teared up and he had said, “
It doesn’t matter about you and me
and the adults so much, Bobby. We’ve lived some good years. What is so horrible is to think of the children who have never had a chance who would be killed in such a war.” On October 20, 1962, just before announcing a naval blockade of Cuba that might provoke the Soviets into mounting a surprise nuclear attack, he had summoned Jackie and the children back from the Virginia countryside so they could spend what might be their final days together, and be close to the White House shelter in case they had only a few minutes’ warning. While swimming with Dave Powers that evening he said, “
Dave, if we were only thinking of ourselves
, it would be easy, but I keep thinking about the children whose lives would be wiped out.” On Saturday, October 27, the most perilous day of the crisis, he told his mistress Mimi Beardsley, “
I’d rather my children
be red than dead.” Making the fate of his children weigh on him even more heavily was his suspicion that the Soviets had sent the parts for a nuclear bomb in diplomatic pouches and assembled them on the top floor of their Washington embassy. When he sensed that the reporter Hugh Sidey was skeptical, he said in a stern voice, “
That’s what they tell me
. Do you know something that I don’t?”

The signing ceremony was also satisfying because he considered the test ban treaty a first step toward his goal of settling the cold war during his second term. Others shared his optimism. After conferring with him in early October, the British foreign secretary, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, had told reporters, “
We have begun the process
of reaching a détente with the Soviet Union,” and suggested in an address to the General Assembly that the world was witnessing “
the beginning of the end
of the cold war.” Since 1947, the editors of the
Bulletin of Atomic Scientists
had displayed a doomsday clock on their cover, showing how near the world was to the midnight of a nuclear war. They started their clock at seven minutes to midnight and reset it three times between 1947 and 1963. It fell to a low of two minutes to midnight in 1953 when the United States and the Soviet Union tested atomic weapons within a nine-month period. After Congress ratified the test ban treaty, the editors pushed the minute hand back to 11:48 p.m., the furthest it had yet been from midnight.

Kennedy had written to a friend in 1954, “
I firmly believe that as much as I was shaped
by anything, so was I shaped by the hand of fate moving in World War II. . . . The war made us. It was and is our greatest single moment. The memory of the war is a key to our characters.” It was also the key to understanding why the test ban treaty meant so much to him.

Following his rescue after the sinking of
PT 109,
he had been given command of
PT 95,
a torpedo boat converted into an unwieldy gunboat. Despite its slow speed he drove it close to shore to attack Japanese positions and barges, coming under heavy fire while rescuing a detachment of marines who had made a diversionary raid on Choiseul Island. He witnessed the deaths of several wounded men, one of whom died in his bunk, and would later cite Choiseul as an example of how “
men tend to like the idea of war
until they have tasted it.” Before the marines landed they had been raring to go, he said, but after they had been behind enemy lines, their appetite for combat had “somewhat diminished.”

His letters from the Pacific reflected a growing cynicism with the top brass, armchair patriots, and war in general. His remark in one letter that “
all war is stupid
” appeared in different guises in others. He told a Navy friend, “
War will exist until that distant day
when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today,” and told his lover Ingrid Arvad, “
This war here is a dirty business
. It’s very easy to talk about the war and beating the Japs if it takes years and millions of men, but anyone who talks like that should consider well his words.” After complaining about those who made “thousands of casualties sound like drops in the bucket,” he added, “But if those thousands want to live as much as the ten [surviving crewmen of
PT 109
] that I saw, the people deciding the whys and wherefores had better make mighty sure that all this effort is headed for some definite goal, and that when we reach that goal we may say it was worth it.” In a letter to his family, he displayed a suspicion and distrust of senior officers that would later influence his interactions with the Joint Chiefs. Describing the inspection of his unit by Admiral Halsey, he wrote, “
He said we were a ‘fine looking crowd
,’ which was obviously a lie—and said it was ‘a privilege for us to be where we are’—which made me edge away from him in case God hit him with lightning.”

After coming home on medical leave, he and Chuck Spalding went to a restaurant in Palm Beach where the roof could be retracted on balmy nights so patrons could dine under the stars. For an entire hour he sat in silence, an anguished expression on his face. Spalding imagined him pondering “
the terrific discrepancy between people at home
dressed in white jackets and bow ties, looking like asses and . . . thinking of the nonsense of people being killed, somebody having his leg blown off.”

He told a friend that his brother’s death
had “savaged” his family and “sucked all the oxygen out of our comfortable and smug assumptions.” As a result, he said, “We sons and daughters no longer have that easy, witless, untested, and meaningless confidence on which we’d been weaned before the war,” and finally understood “that there is nothing inevitable about us. And that’s a healthy thing to know.”

In the spring of 1945, he reported for the Hearst newspapers on the United Nations conference in San Francisco, writing in one dispatch, “
The world organization that will come out
of San Francisco will be the product of the same passion and selfishness that produced the Treaty of Versailles.” The only possible “ray of shining light,” he said, was “the realization, felt by all the delegates, that humanity cannot afford another war.” He urged veterans and servicemen to take an interest in the conference, because “
any man who has risked his life
for his country and seen his friends killed around him must invariably wonder why this has happened to him and most important what good it will do. . . . It is not surprising that they should question the worth of the sacrifice and feel somewhat betrayed.”

Fifteen years later, he told Sidey
that if he became president, war with all its “modern horror” would be his biggest concern if he got to the White House. When his postwar diary was published in 1995, Sidey wrote in an introduction, “
If I had to single out one element
in Kennedy’s life that more than anything influenced his later leadership it would be a horror of war, and the even worse prospects in the nuclear age. . . . It ran even deeper than his considerable public rhetoric on the issue.”

Kennedy was not a pacifist. But his experiences in the Pacific, his fear of a nuclear war, and his sensitivity to the suffering that modern warfare inflicted on noncombatants, particularly children, all pushed him in that direction. His closest advisers suspected this, particularly those who clashed with him over using military force in Laos, Vietnam, Berlin, and Cuba. McGeorge Bundy was not entirely joking when he told his assistant Marcus Raskin, “
You know, there are only two pacifists
here in the White House, you and Kennedy.”

•   •   •

F
IVE
HOURS
AFTER
a ceremony marking Kennedy’s greatest foreign policy triumph since the Cuban missile crisis, an event occurred that threatened to end his presidency in impeachment and disgrace. After a four double-martini lunch at his Quorum Club, Bobby Baker stumbled into Senator Mansfield’s office and resigned as secretary to the Senate majority leader, hoping to halt a threatened Senate investigation into his murky business affairs. In fact, Baker had traded so many favors and involved himself in the public and personal lives of so many legislators it was only surprising that he had not been forced to explain himself sooner. His current problems stemmed from a lawsuit filed in federal court in early September by the Central Vending Corporation that accused him of accepting a $5,600 fee to place its machines into the plants of a major defense contractor, then double-crossing the company by pushing the machines of a rival company in which he had a financial interest. The lawsuit made a Senate investigation inevitable and prompted Mansfield to summon him to a meeting in Everett Dirksen’s office at 3:00 p.m. on Monday. Also attending would be Senator John Williams, the Delaware Republican instrumental in bringing down President Eisenhower’s chief of staff Sherman Adams for an influence-peddling scheme similar to Capital Vending.

Baker had raged against his fate during his boozy lunch, telling his companions, “
My boss has abandoned me
. The goddamn press is having a field day at my expense. There are so many people involved that if this thing keeps going it’ll drag them down. . . . I’m gonna resign. Fuck Senator Williams.”

He told Mansfield that quitting was preferable to meeting with Williams and dismissed his suggestion that he take a leave of absence because, as he explained later, “
Somehow I got it into my head
that should I resign, the entire Bobby Baker episode would magically disappear from the front pages and come to a grinding halt.”

Three days later, Williams declared
that the integrity of the U.S. Senate was at stake and introduced a resolution calling for an investigation. He said he would not repeat the “multitude of rumors” circulating about Baker’s activities, but promised that they would be “fully checked,” a statement guaranteed to unsettle Kennedy as well as Johnson, whose relationship with Baker had been so close that Baker was known as “Little Lyndon.” The president and vice president were among the “many people involved” whom the scandal might drag down, and among the rumors that Williams intended to check were those surrounding the involvement of congressmen and White House officials with Quorum Club party girls such as Ellen Rometsch, and the allegation that Johnson had bought a large life insurance policy from a Maryland agent named Don Reynolds, who had then been required to purchase advertising on a Texas television station controlled by the Johnsons as a kickback.

After Williams announced his investigation, Baker received solicitous calls from Lady Bird Johnson and Bobby Kennedy, both obviously speaking as surrogates. Lady Bird said, “
Bobby, Lyndon and I just want you to know
we love you. You are like a member of the family and we are so grateful for all you’ve done for us. Our prayers are with you.” Baker pictured Johnson at her side, “
petrified that he’d be dragged down
.” Bobby Kennedy told Baker, “
Bobby, my brother is fond of you
and remembers your many kindnesses. I want you to know that we [the Justice Department] have nothing of any consequence about you in our files. . . . My brother and I extend our sympathies to you. I know you’ll come through this.”