JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President (29 page)

He and Gromyko rejoined the others and held an unproductive discussion about arms control and a nonaggression pact, but agreed on a direct New York–Moscow air route and the establishment of consulates in Leningrad and Chicago—secondary issues but ones keeping the atmosphere of détente alive. “
I don’t want you to get discouraged
,” Kennedy said after they finished. “You may not be conscious of much progress where you sit, but we’ve been pulling and hauling around the United States for the last three months. . . . And we think, for us, we’ve made some progress in our relations with the Soviet Union. We may not get the German question disposed of and may not have solved all the matters, but considering some of the difficulties that both of our countries face—and internally and externally—it seems to me we’ve done pretty well. So I’m rather encouraged, not discouraged. I don’t want you to be discouraged.”

“Well, there is improvement in some things,” Gromyko conceded.

Referring to Khrushchev’s desire for more agreements, Kennedy said, “There is only a certain tempo which you can move in these matters.” After mentioning the test ban and the wheat deal, he added, “Do you realize that in the summer of 1961, the Congress unanimously passed resolutions against trade with the Soviets and now we’re going ahead, we hope, with this very large trade agreement that represents what’s changed in American policy. . . . That’s progress. We’re talking about next week with going ahead with this matter on space, we’re talking about getting the civil air agreement settled, we’ve got good communications. . . . I agree we haven’t settled Berlin but considering that we’ve got a lot of problems, we’ve—you’ve taken some of your troops out of Cuba so it’s less of a problem for us here—that’s some progress.”

“You are right, Mr. President. There is a change in the atmosphere.”

As they were talking, one of Kennedy’s children
shouted “Daddy!” He told Gromyko to open the door so they could come in.

“Want to say hello to the minister?” he asked.

“They are very popular in our country,” Gromyko said.

“His chief is the one who sent you Pushinka,” he reminded them. “You know that? You have the puppies.”

A reporter meeting the usually dour Gromyko
afterward described him being in a relatively jovial and loquacious mood. He even cracked a joke about flying to the moon instead of returning to Moscow. The
Washington Post
took his high spirits as a sign that the Soviet Union was “
eager to maintain a show
of forward momentum in improving relations.”

The same day that Kennedy met Gromyko, he received a letter from Khrushchev that was published in
Pravda
and U.S. newspapers. Khrushchev wrote that it was important “
to develop further the success
we have achieved, to seek solutions of other ripe international questions,” and expressed hope that the test ban treaty “should become the beginning of a sharp turn toward broad relaxation of international tension.” Ten days later, the State Department drafted a reply from Kennedy that read, “
I am convinced then
that the possibilities for an improvement in the international situation are real.” The opportunities might be “fragile ones,” he said, but the two powers should “move forward, lest our hopes of progress be jeopardized.” Kennedy signed off on the letter, and McGeorge Bundy scrawled on its bottom, “Approved. Let’s get it out.”
The State Department never sent it
, an inexplicable error not coming to light until December. A “clerical misunderstanding” was blamed, an explanation that strains credulity.

Earl Blaik and Kenneth Royall followed Gromyko
into the Oval Office to report on their mission to Birmingham. Mayor Boutwell had brought an all-white delegation to the airport to meet them, and after some perfunctory handshakes had declared that blame for his city’s racial strife lay with “professional outsiders who thrive on the fruits of tension and unrest.” Boutwell had also called their mission “advisory”—meaning he would not be bound by their recommendations—and accompanied them to an exclusive whites-only club for lunch.

During the next several days they had met five hundred prominent whites and blacks, but never in an integrated group. (They may have also informed Kennedy that while they were in the city two bombs exploded in a middle-class black neighborhood, a Klan wizard posted bail for two white men charged with possessing dynamite, and Alabama state troopers flew Confederate battle flags while patrolling black neighborhoods.) In an effort to lighten their dispiriting report, Blaik asked Kennedy, “How is your sense of humor?” and went on to describe a sign he had seen proclaiming “Kennedy for King—Goldwater for President.” There was a long pause until Kennedy got the “joke”—the sign had meant he was “for” the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.

•   •   •

I
N
D
ECEMBER
1955, six years before Kennedy established the President’s Commission on the Status of Women and gave it the task of making recommendations “for overcoming discrimination in government and private employment on the basis of sex,” he had sat by the pool in Palm Beach reading the second volume of a biography of his hero Lord Melbourne, the nineteenth-century British statesman known for his hedonism, intellect, and aristocratic style, and writing in a notebook that one reason he found European history more interesting than American was that
American women were by comparison “not glamorous
.” Instead, they were “either prostitutes or housewives,” who did not “play much of a role in [the] cultural or intellectual life of [the] country.” It was not that surprising an observation for a man who had grown up at a time when most women
were
housewives, and who had attended an all-male prep school and college, served in a military that segregated the sexes, and spent fourteen years in Congress with few female members.

The man who received the eighty-six-page report from the Status of Women Commission at an East Room ceremony on Friday, October 11, was not that different from the misogynist of 1955. The previous month he had welcomed a delegation of female delegates to the United Nations General Assembly to the White House. Their spokesman, the elderly Daw Mya Sein of Burma, answered his greeting by saying, “
Thank you very much, Mr. President
, for receiving us here today. And I hope in a few years’ time that a woman president will be standing just where you are now, welcoming the
men
delegates to the United Nations.” Without missing a beat, he replied, “
Madam, you are raising
the standard of rebellion in the royal pavilion.”

His quick comeback impressed the U.S. delegate Marietta Tree, but she was disappointed when he followed it by saying, “
I never know whether women
want to be referred to as women or as politicians.” Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Katie Louchheim muttered, “
If they are politicians, they don’t care
.” He had once made a similar observation to Tree, saying, “
I don’t know how to treat women
politicians—as women or as politicians,” so he obviously considered it a clever riposte. Tree had the same reaction as Louchheim, that women “
just thought of themselves
as people involved in politics.” It confirmed her impression that Kennedy was “
quite uneasy with women
who were involved with politics,” and that “for the most part, women were a necessary adjunct to his life, he simply enjoyed their beauty and charms without particularly [enjoying] . . . their intellectual side or their counsel.”
Nancy Dickerson had a similar take
and thought that although he had “great sex appeal” he was also “the complete male chauvinist.” He loved being around women and sometimes asked for their opinions, she said, but “thought it ridiculous to pay them the same [attention] as men.” Earlier in his term she had shared a flight with him on Air Force One to New York, where he was speaking at a convention of women in radio and television. He showed her his speech and asked for suggestions. She urged him to say, “
Let’s get women off the weather beat
and let them be newscasters.” He looked shocked, she recalled, “as if I was certifiable.”

Jackie encouraged
his prejudices, once asking him why women like Madame Nhu and Clare Boothe Luce (the former congresswoman, U.S. ambassador to Italy, and wife of the publisher Henry Luce), who were both obviously “attractive to men,” also had “this queer thing for power”—an attribute that she called “unattractive in a woman.” He told her, “It’s strange, but it’s really because they resent getting their power through men.” As a result, he thought, they ended up hating men.

While he was in New York that autumn Kennedy had asked the noted journalist Clayton Fritchey, who was serving on Adlai Stevenson’s staff, to explain why Stevenson appealed to so many women, Jackie included. “
Look, I may not be the best-looking
guy in the world,” Kennedy said, “but, for God’s sake, Adlai’s half-bald, he’s got a paunch, he wears his clothes in a dumpy kind of way. What’s he got that I haven’t got?” The difference, Fritchey explained, was that although they both loved women, Adlai also liked them, and gave them the impression that they were “intelligent and worth listening to.”

“I don’t say you’re wrong, but I’m not sure I can go to those lengths,” he admitted.

Assistant Secretary of Labor Esther Peterson
, the highest-ranking woman in the administration and vice chair of his Commission on Women, thought his attitudes toward women compared poorly with those of Bobby, who never gave her the feeling that he was treating her differently because she was a woman. But when he walked into the East Room to accept Peterson’s report, he immediately noticed that men had taken all the front-row seats while the women sat or stood in the rear. He said, “
Gentlemen, we are here to talk about
the status of women,” and led two female legislators to seats that men had hastily evacuated. That accomplished, he offered the women a few extemporaneous banalities,
praising their report as “very useful
” and declaring, “I think we ought to look as a society at what our women are doing and the opportunities before them.” Flummoxed about what else to say, he recited his favorite all-purpose line, recounting how the Greeks had defined happiness as “the full use of your powers along lines of excellence,” and wondered if American society afforded women this opportunity, although the report that he was praising proved that it did not.

•   •   •

T
RETICK
WAS
ECSTATIC
about the photographs but still lacked a good color shot for the cover. On Friday, he persuaded Kennedy to sit on a bench in the Rose Garden with his son, but the light was harsh, the boy restless, and the session ended abruptly when Taylor and McNamara arrived for a briefing. After Kennedy brushed off Tretick’s request for another sitting,
Bergquist asked if he had seen the recent photograph of the Nixons
in Berlin. She said it showed the Nixons and their girls standing “like waxwork dummies” and gazing at the Wall with “glazed, uneasy smiles.” If he would give Tretick one more session, she’d bet his photographs could easily beat that sorry Nixon picture.

“Was it really that bad?” he asked, grinning broadly before inviting them to fly to Camp David in the morning so Tretick could try again.

Schlesinger ran into him on Friday evening, and asked after Jackie. He said she was enjoying herself and admitted having pressured Roosevelt into accompanying her. As Schlesinger was leaving, he called out wistfully, “
What are you doing tonight
?” Schlesinger noted in his diary, “I hate to repeat the cliché about the loneliness of the job, but it
is
a lonely job.”

John and Caroline had flown to Camp David the night before and met him at the landing pad. He had brought a life-sized toy parrot with a tape recorder embedded inside that he hoped would distract John long enough for Tretick to get his cover shot. He placed it on the tarmac in front of the helicopter, pushed a button, and the parrot said, in Kennedy’s flat Boston accent, “
My name is Polly Parrot
. Would you like to fly with me in my helicopter?” John answered, “Hi, Poll Parrot, would you like a stick of gum?” and dashed off before Tretick could raise his camera.

Father and son finally posed together on a wrought-iron bench. John stood with his hand on his father’s shoulder, and both flashed their toothy Kennedy smiles. It would appear on the cover of the December 3, 1963, issue, available on newsstands November 18.
Kennedy obtained copies of the photographs
several weeks earlier and showed them off around the White House, becoming “quite a bore on the subject,” according to Tretick. Kennedy had expected Jackie to be furious. Instead, she said wearily, “
No, Jack. I guess it’s your year
. You can use the children any way you want, and if you want me to pose in the bathtub for photographs, I suppose I should do that, to help out.”

Her cruise was proving as embarrassing as he had feared. She was photographed sightseeing in Istanbul, exploring ruins in Crete, and zipping around on speedboats.
A
Newsweek
article titled
“Caesar’s Wife” suggested that the trip had exhausted her immunity from criticism.
Other articles reported
that the “Millionaire Greek ship owner” had ordered forty-four pounds of lobster for a gala shipboard dinner and given her command of his “floating pleasure dome.” The chairman of the Republican National Committee denounced “
all-night parties in foreign lands
,” and a GOP congressman criticized her for accepting “
the lavish hospitality of a man
who had so defrauded the American public.”

Communication proved difficult
. The Greek switchboards dropped connections and one late-night call was routed to a Mrs. Kennedy married to a Foreign Service officer in Athens. After a paparazzo with a telephoto lens snapped her in a bikini, Kennedy called, read her some of the articles, and suggested she come home early. When she protested that it would be difficult to get ashore, he said, “
You’re a good swimmer, Jackie
.”