JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President (28 page)

WASHINGTON AND CAMP DAVID

K
ennedy brought John along to his pre-press-conference breakfast briefing on Wednesday morning. The boy went around the table shaking hands before climbing onto a chair being left vacant for George Ball and refused to leave. When his father opened with his customary “
What have we got today
?” question, he piped up, “I’ve got a glass of ice water.”

The previous year,
the
Look
photographer Stanley Tretick
had proposed a photographic essay titled “The President and His Son.” Kennedy responded through intermediaries that he liked the idea, but he kept postponing it. Laura Bergquist, who would write the text, thought he was reluctant because John had not yet begun talking, and Jackie considered her and Tretick “
journalistic thieves
,” intent on sneaking photographs of her children. When Tretick heard about the Onassis cruise he called Lincoln to ask if he could shoot the story while Jackie was away. After Lincoln suggested calling back later, he asked if she meant after October 1. “
Well, I didn’t say that
,” she replied. “But it might be a good idea.”

Salinger called Tretick on Tuesday to say he could begin photographing John and the president the next day. When he walked into the Oval Office on Wednesday morning, Kennedy told him, “
We’d better get this out of the way
pretty quick. Things get kind of sticky when Jackie’s around.” Bergquist was in New York meeting a deadline, but Kennedy insisted she had to witness the shoot to get “
the mood of the boy
,” forcing Tretick to spend the day sitting outside the Oval Office, waiting for her to arrive.

Kennedy was in high spirits when he met with Heller to prepare for his press conference. He had already thought up some amusing ripostes and promised “
the six o’clock comedy hour
.” He had called the conference to announce his decision to approve the sale of surplus U.S. wheat to the Soviet Union. Republicans had denounced the deal, with Nixon calling it “
a major foreign policy mistake
 . . . even more serious than fouling up the Bay of Pigs.” The deal made economic sense, but some of his advisers considered it a grievous political error that would antagonize Poles and other blue-collar ethnics. Johnson told O’Donnell that it was “
the worst political mistake
” the president had ever made.

Kennedy opened the press conference
by rebutting the most common objections to the wheat deal, pointing out that the grain would be transported in American ships, the nation had a huge wheat surplus, the Soviets would pay cash, the deal would help the U.S. balance of payments, and the nation’s allies were already selling U.S. grain to the Russians anyway. A more revealing argument lay buried in a letter that he sent to Congress in which he called the deal “one more hopeful sign that a peaceful world is both possible and beneficial to us all,” and said that prohibiting it would cause Soviet leaders to conclude that the United States was “either too hostile or too timid to take any further steps toward peace . . . and that the logical course for them to follow is a
renewal
[emphasis added] of the Cold War.”

A reporter asked him about Eisenhower’s recent statement that he was unclear about Goldwater’s stand on various issues. “I don’t think Senator Goldwater has been particularly deceptive,” he said. “I think he has made very clear what he’s opposed to. . . . I have gotten the idea. I think President Eisenhower will as time goes by.”

He danced around the question of whether Goldwater had sewn up the Republican nomination, but made his preference for running against him so obvious that a
New York Times
headline the next day would read, “
President Nudges
Goldwater’s Hat—Says He Thinks Senator Can Be G.O.P. Nominee.” His hope that Goldwater would win the nomination was an open secret. “
Give me good old Barry
,” he had told Fay, adding that then he could campaign without leaving the Oval Office. (He feared Governor Romney of Michigan the most. “
No vice whatsoever
, no smoking, no drinking,” he said to Fay. “Imagine someone we know going off for twenty-four to forty-eight hours to fast and meditate, awaiting a message from the Lord on whether to run or not to run. Does that sound like one of the old gang?”) He also preferred Goldwater because they had become friends while serving together in the Senate (Goldwater had praised his inaugural address, albeit condescendingly, saying, “
God, I’d like to be able to do
what that boy did there”), and he anticipated a clean campaign focused on their ideological differences. In fact, he felt so comfortable around Goldwater that when he arrived at the Oval Office for a meeting and found him sitting in his favorite rocking chair, he told him, “
Keep your seat, Barry
. And you can have this fucking job, too. If you want it.”

•   •   •

W
INSTON
C
HURCHILL
’
S
SON
, R
ANDOLPH
, was staying in Washington with Kay Halle. He called Kennedy on Tuesday to report that Prime Minister Macmillan had been rushed to a London hospital for an emergency prostate operation and would be resigning within twenty-four hours. Kennedy invited him to come to the White House with Halle after the press conference, and they arrived just as John was poking his head out of a secret door in the kneehole of the desk as his father said, “
I’m a great big wolf
and I’m going to eat you up in one bite!”
Caroline walked into the room
, her shoulders hunched like a miniature version of her father’s, and he told Halle, “
You know, I’ve been taking care of
the children because Jackie is away, and I’m having the most marvelous time.”

He invited Tretick and Bergquist to join them. They came in as John was careening merrily around the room in his pajamas. Bergquist called it “
a sight to gladden the eye
and camera.”

“
What do you think of him
?” Kennedy demanded. Before anyone answered, he asked, “Isn’t he a charge?”

He struck Tretick
as more interested in what they thought of John than in the photographs. Bergquist did not usually warm to small children, but she thought the boy was “an instant beguiler” and “not gorgeous” but “friendly, uninhibited, and unspoiled.” Kennedy grabbed him, pulled up his pajama shirt, and began caressing the bare skin above his fanny, and she sensed a “
joyous, funny, mutually fascinated
, male-to-male, even sensuous” relationship.

John wiggled free and disappeared beneath the desk. He threw open the little door, poked his head out, and Tretick, almost faint with joy, took what he predicted would be “
a hell of a picture
.”

Churchill was already four sheets
to the wind. He asked a steward for a bottle of scotch that Kennedy eyed nervously, fearful it might appear in one of the photographs. To distract Churchill from the bottle, he asked John to tell Churchill a secret. The boy whispered some unintelligible words into Churchill’s ear. Churchill slapped his head and exclaimed, “
Oh no! No! No! No
! Not
that
!” Bergquist and Tretick hung around on Thursday and Friday.
They were there when John stood outside
the Oval Office gaily chanting “G’myko! G’myko!” as the Soviet foreign minister conferred with his father, when he tried on Maxwell Taylor’s gold-braided hat and imitated a chimpanzee, and when he went racing through the West Wing after someone had said he was cute, shouting, “
I’m cute! I’m cute
!”

Bergquist claimed she was not
a “gung-ho idolater” but still considered Kennedy “a fascinating human animal,” and “one of the smartest, quickest, funniest human beings” she knew. Because he was easily bored,
she always saved her best jokes for him
and came expecting lots of lighthearted banter. The Tretick photo shoot was different. She had not seen him in a year and sensed an unusual sadness and “
a somber, sobering quality
,” telling a friend that there had been
something “remote and tragic
” about him. (Nine months later she shared her impressions with Jackie, who said, “
Oh, you caught that
, because that was very true about him.”) The day after Tretick finished the shoot, Ted Sorensen told an interviewer that the president was “
subject to moods
” and sometimes discouraged by his inability to get things done as he would like. “He’s exuberant at times. He’s discouraged at times,” he explained. “There are events which interest him and those that bore him. There are those which make him sad. And nothing is done by anyone else to dispel them, I suppose.”

He had been riding an emotional roller coaster since the beginning of the summer. He had delivered his landmark American University and civil rights speeches, traveled to Germany and Ireland, and enjoyed the best weekends of his life on the Cape. Then had come the test ban treaty, the death of his son, the infighting among his advisers over Vietnam, his triumphant Western tour, and Jackie’s perilous cruise. By the time Bergquist saw him, it appeared unlikely that Congress would pass his tax-cut and civil rights bills before the end of the year, Khrushchev had yet to respond to his proposal for a joint lunar mission, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, the only foreign leader he counted as a genuine friend, was ill, and hearings into the Bobby Baker affair threatened to embroil him in the kind of scandal that had doomed Macmillan.

Bergquist was also shocked to find herself facing “
a very serious preoccupied
man who was obviously beginning to look middle-aged.” Kennedy monitored his appearance so carefully that he must have been aware of this, and it may have contributed to his moodiness.
He weighed himself
after every swim, and Powers sensed a correlation between his mood and his weight.
He had recently complained to Fay
that his face was showing his weight and he was getting what he called “full jowls.” (
He should have been more concerned
about his cholesterol, since an October 12 laboratory report showed it at 353, a dangerously high level.)
Jackie’s secretary Mary Gallagher
had detected some reddish highlights in his hair at his birthday party in May. Photographs taken later that summer show his hair flecked with gray, but by October she was noticing more highlights. Like all the Kennedys, he was a fanatical sun-worshipper. The phrase “a healthy tan” was common in the sixties, and a deep one helped refute the rumors that he was sickly. His tan had to be dark in order to be visible on black-and-white television, and
during the campaign he had ordered Lincoln
to schedule a day off every week, preferably at a beach. When he was a young man a friend had chided him for spending so much time in the sun at Palm Beach so he could “
look so handsome at these parties
you go to.” He had replied, “It’s not only that I want to look that way, but it makes me feel that way. It gives me confidence, it makes me feel healthy.”

He could keep up his tan during the winter at Palm Beach and during the summer on Cape Cod, but if being tanned really
did
make him happy, it made sense that he might feel lower in the autumn, when it was hurricane season in Florida and the sun in Hyannis Port was too weak to darken his skin.

•   •   •

A
S
SOON
AS
Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko arrived for a meeting on October 10, Kennedy said, “
Why don’t we go out on to the terrace
and talk one-to-one without interpreters?”

Gromyko spoke excellent English, so if Kennedy had merely wanted to hold a confidential conversation without interpreters, he could have sent them out of the room for a few minutes. He took Gromyko outside because what he wanted to say was so sensitive that he did not want to be overheard by Ambassador Dobrynin, Dean Rusk, or Llewellyn Thompson, who were also attending the meeting, or by any listening devices, including the microphone he had just activated. Rusk had displayed a similar caution when meeting with Gromyko at the United Nations the previous month. After reporting that the president wanted to build on the success of the test ban treaty, he had asked him, “
Could we go for a ride
out of town and carry on our conversation?” While walking along a suburban road without interpreters, Rusk told Gromyko that the president wanted to reduce the size of U.S. forces in Europe, news that would have dismayed America’s NATO allies. Gromyko later wrote that the issue of U.S. troop levels in Europe had been present “visibly or invisibly at almost every U.S.-Soviet meeting since the war,” and the fact that Kennedy was suddenly ready to discuss reducing U.S. forces had “seized our attention.”

Kennedy and Gromyko had met several times during his presidency, most recently during the Cuban missile crisis, when he had impressed Gromyko with his candor by admitting that the Bay of Pigs had been a mistake, telling him, “
I don’t deny
that the Cuban problem is a serious one, but I am restraining those who are in favor of actions which could lead to war.”

Standing with Gromyko on the terrace outside the Oval Office, he again spoke candidly. “
The fact is, there are two groups
of the American population which are not always pleased when relations between our two countries are eased,” he said. “One group consists of people who are always opposed to improvement for ideological reasons. . . . The other group are people of ‘a particular nationality’ [Gromyko assumed he was speaking of the ‘Jewish lobby’] who think that, always and under all circumstances, the Kremlin will support the Arabs and be the enemy of Israel. . . . That is the reality. But I think it is still possible to improve relations, and I want Moscow to know that.”

Gromyko said the Kremlin understood his situation, and that the positive reaction of the American public to the resolution of the Cuban crisis had shown that these two groups were a minority.

“I just wanted you to know some of the difficulties the President of the United States has to face when dealing with the questions of Soviet-U.S. relations.” He also wanted Khrushchev to understand why, having signed the test ban treaty, installed the hotline, approved the wheat deal, proposed a joint moon mission, and entered into talks to ban nuclear weapons from space, he felt it necessary to slow down the pace for a while.
His caution was a good example
of what Walt Rostow considered one of his greatest strengths: a sense of history consisting “of a sense of the scale and timing of the problems he confronted, versus the capacities . . . of the United States.”