JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President (33 page)

He rose, signaling that the conversation was over. Before leaving, Daniel posed two questions, both obvious negotiating points that Castro would want answered.

Could the United States tolerate “economic collectivism”? he asked. In other words, did Castro have to renounce communism as well as subversion?

“What about Sekou Toure [the Marxist leader of Guinea]? And Tito? I received Marshal Tito three days ago and our discussions were most positive.”

Daniel inquired about the American economic blockade. Kennedy said it would continue as long as Castro was attempting to subvert other Latin American nations. The deal he was proposing was clear: if Castro stopped trying to export communism to other nations and became the Tito of the Caribbean, then like Tito he could receive U.S. recognition and aid. As they parted, Kennedy said he wanted a report when Daniel returned from Havana, adding, “Castro’s reactions interest me.”

•   •   •

O
N
T
HURSDAY
, B
ISHOP
ANNOUNCED
that he had collected enough anecdotes and observations for a small book. He and Kelly would fly to Aruba and while closeted in a hotel finish the article and book in a couple of weeks. He would send Kennedy a carbon copy so he could correct factual errors and identify any observations that he found “hurtful and unfair.” If Bishop agreed, he would remove or change them.

“If it gets here before Jackie and I leave for Texas, I’ll take it with me,” Kennedy said. Bishop was perplexed by his urgency, writing later, “For a reason beyond my divination, he was eager for the little book.” But Kennedy’s motives were not hard to divine. Bishop had written a laudatory article about Eisenhower and he wanted no less for himself. Anticipating correctly that the book would be flattering, he wanted it published as soon as possible as an antidote to Lasky’s venomous tome. Before Bishop left, he questioned him closely about his best-selling book,
The Day Lincoln Was Shot
. “
My feelings about assassination are identical
with Mr. Lincoln’s,” he said. “Anyone who wants to exchange his life for mine can take it. They just can’t protect [me] that much.”
Bishop thought he “seemed fascinated
, in a melancholy way, with the succession of events of that day which had led to the assassination.”

Kennedy woke Friday to front-page articles
reporting that Dallas had been flooded with handbills carrying his photograph and captioned “Wanted for Treason,” and that protestors had heckled and attacked Adlai Stevenson when he delivered a speech at an event in the Dallas Municipal Auditorium celebrating United Nations Day—not that surprising a reaction in a state whose legislature had passed
a law that made flying the United Nations flag a criminal offense
.

Stevenson had celebrated the new spirit
of détente in his speech, saying, “We may be moving into a new era,” and calling the atmosphere in the United Nations the best since its founding. There were loud catcalls and boos, and fistfights between hecklers and supporters. “They fear to hope,” he said of his opponents. “And if anything, this eighteenth anniversary of the United Nations is an occasion that offers hope.”
An angry crowd surrounded him
as he was leaving. Two men spat in his face and the wife of an insurance executive smacked him over the head with a sign proclaiming “If You Seek Peace, Ask Jesus.” “
We are patriots,” she explained
. “I just can’t understand all these liberals and their ideas.”
She later blamed
“a group of Negroes” for pushing her toward Stevenson.

Kennedy asked Schlesinger to call Stevenson
and congratulate him for keeping his cool. Schlesinger was close to Stevenson, but the fact that Kennedy did not make the call himself was more evidence of their complicated relationship. Stevenson tried making light of the confrontation but finally said, “
You know, there was something very ugly
and frightening about the atmosphere. Later, I talked with some of the leading people out there. They wondered whether the President should go to Dallas, and so do I.” Knowing Kennedy would dismiss any warning about physical danger, particularly one emanating from Stevenson, Schlesinger decided against relaying it.

As Kennedy was reading about these events in Dallas,
a bomb threat delayed Tito’s departure
for Europe on the
Rotterdam.
Tito had previously complained to the chief of protocol, Angier Biddle Duke, about the placards carried by pickets outside the Waldorf-Astoria calling him a “Murderer” and “Red Pig.”
As he and Duke were driving to the pier
, Duke spread out the
Herald Tribune,
pointed to a photograph of Stevenson being assaulted in Dallas, and said it proved there had been nothing special in Tito’s treatment, adding, “This is how we treat our own distinguished national leaders.”

Later on Friday, Kennedy received a cable from Lodge responding to his concerns that the coup might fail.
Lodge reported that the generals
were “seriously attempting to effect a change in the government,” and argued against thwarting them because it was “at least an even bet that the next government would not bungle and stumble as the present one has.”

Sending a Republican to Saigon, particularly one this headstrong and self-assured, must have again seemed less clever than it had last summer. In a cable signed by Bundy, Kennedy told Lodge, “
We are particularly concerned
about hazard that an unsuccessful coup . . . will be laid at our door by public opinion almost everywhere. Therefore . . . we would like to have option of judging and warning on any plan with poor prospects of success. We recognize that this is a tall order, but President wants you to know of our concern.”

During a morning meeting with his foreign policy advisers,
Kennedy doodled
“Lodge,” “Coup,” and “Degree of Correctness” three times down the page. After attending a White House luncheon for Radio Free Europe, he spent the afternoon upstairs, writing and circling “coup,” “press problems,” and “coup plans.”

Jackie’s dressmaker Oleg Cassini had told Prime Minister Harold Macmillan that he believed the Kennedys had acquired something the British had lost, “
a casual sort of grandeur
about the evenings, always at the end of the day’s business, the promise of parties, the pretty women and music and beautiful clothes and champagne.” Being invited to one of their casual White House dinners was a coveted honor, and the fact that Britain’s ambassador, David Ormsby-Gore, was such a frequent guest grated on the French ambassador, Hervé Alphand.
Jackie finally invited him
and his wife to dinner on Friday evening because she thought he was about to explode.

Her fondness for French history, culture, and cuisine did not, surprisingly, encompass the French people.
She considered them “really not very nice
” and could not think of a single French person she liked, except for a few “very simple” ones. Aside from the nonsimple Alphands, she also invited the Roosevelts and Princess Galitzine. Kennedy arrived for the evening in high spirits because William McCulloch, the ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, had just announced that he would send the compromise civil rights bill to the House floor. He liked to tease when he was in a good mood.
He told Alphand he was wearing the same shirt
he had just seen on Ambassador Ormsby-Gore, and kidded Roosevelt about their recent weight-loss competition.
After dinner, he offered Alphand the same analysis
of Franco-American relations he had given Daniel, telling him that de Gaulle needed to provoke “an atmosphere of tension” to pursue his policy of independence. “Certainly not, Mr. President!” Alphand exclaimed indignantly. Surely a “free and responsible ally” was preferable to “an obedient servant.”

Jackie told Alphand
that the French author André Malraux had sent her a fine piece of jewelry to honor the birth of her third child, and although she had been happy to receive it, she hoped he would agree to take it back. Alphand noticed that mentioning Patrick had almost brought her to tears.
He wrote in his diary
that she remained gripped by “
une profonde et grande emotion.
” He also noted that he had heard rumors of Kennedy’s womanizing. “The President’s desires were difficult to satisfy,” he wrote, and raised fears of scandal, which might happen “because he does not take sufficient precautions in this Puritan country.”

The Roosevelts mentioned the attack
on Stevenson in Dallas and urged Jackie to be careful. She said she wished she could take a “pass” on the trip but Jack wanted her there.
The next day, she told the Secret Service agent
Clint Hill that the Roosevelts had tried to talk her out of going to Dallas, and asked his opinion. He thought she was fishing for an excuse to back out of the trip and joked that she wanted to avoid going to the Johnsons’ ranch. “Well, that is rather frightening in and of itself,” she admitted before turning serious and asking, “Do you think the climate in Dallas is so hostile . . . so hostile to the President that the people could mistreat us like they did Adlai?” Hill said there had been no more threats against her husband in Dallas than anywhere else in the South, a remark that was less reassuring then he meant it to be.

AMHERST AND ATOKA

K
ennedy criticized the speech
that Sorensen had written for him to deliver at the groundbreaking ceremonies for the Robert Frost Library at Amherst as “thin and stale,” and asked Schlesinger to revise it
with an eye to including the “poetry and power
” theme of Frost’s Inauguration Day poem.
He liked Schlesinger’s version better
—despite complaining that some of it “sounded too much like Adlai”—and invited him to fly to Amherst so they could revise it on the plane

He probably cared more about the Amherst speech than any other he delivered that fall. Its theme was the importance of the arts in the life of a great nation, a concept he had championed not only because of Jackie’s interest in the arts but because he believed that like sports, military power, economic strength, and scientific achievement, the arts were a barometer of national excellence, and flourished under a great leader. To promote them he had made a big production of choosing new volumes for the White House library; woven poetry and excerpts from literature into his speeches; invited artists, writers, and classical musicians to the White House; proposed a national cultural center in Washington (the future John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts); and established the Presidential Medal of Freedom for “especially meritorious contribution to . . . cultural or other significant public or private endeavors,” designing the award himself and nominating its first twenty-two recipients. There was a resulting boom in museum attendance and interest in the arts, leading the historian and critic Lewis Mumford to praise him as “
the first American president to give art
, literature, and music a place of dignity and honor in American life.”

In “
The Arts in America
,” an article Kennedy wrote for
Look
in 1962, he called the arts “very close to the center of a nation’s purpose,” “a test of the quality of a nation’s civilization,” and the incarnation of “the creativity of a free society.” He recounted how the distinguished artist George Biddle had attended a meeting at the White House during which FDR told the British ambassador that he was looking forward to the day when contemporary paintings hung on the walls of every American classroom, and quoted Biddle as saying that “Roosevelt had little discrimination in his taste in painting and sculpture. . . . [But] he had a more clear understanding of what art could mean in the life of a community—for the soul of a nation—than any man I have known.” It was a comment that also applied to Kennedy, who had promoted the arts despite his own middlebrow tastes and a restlessness that sometimes became apparent when he attended the very cultural events he was sponsoring. (August Hecksher, who advised him on artistic matters, said later, “
I don’t think he liked music
. Sitting on those little White House chairs in the East Room was really physically painful.”) Kennedy would also echo Roosevelt’s comment about hanging great works of art in every classroom when he told the French author Romain Gary, “
Your children live on streets
like the Rue Anatole, Boulevard Victor Hugo, Avenue Valery. . . . Our streets all have numbers. We have enough great names to replace them: Hemingway Square, Melville Boulevard . . . I would like to see a twelve-year-old boy come home and tell his mother, when she scolded him for being late, ‘I was playing baseball on William Faulkner Avenue.’”

His second reason for wanting to deliver a brilliant speech at Amherst was that he had treated Robert Frost shabbily in the final weeks of the poet’s life, and attending the groundbreaking for his library was a kind of posthumous apology. Frost had visited the Soviet Union during the summer of 1962, met with Khrushchev, and upon his return recklessly told reporters at an airport press conference that Khrushchev thought
Americans “were too liberal to fight
,” and would “sit on one hand and then the other.” A resulting
Washington Post
headline declared, “Frost Says Khrushchev Sees US as ‘Too Liberal to Defend Itself.’”
Kennedy was so furious
that he refused to speak to Frost again, even when he was on his deathbed, even after numerous entreaties from his family and friends, including Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, who had introduced them.

Udall considered his pettiness “cold and unfeeling” and was still upset about it when he flew with him to Amherst.
During the flight he reminded him
of his cruelty to Frost, albeit in a lighthearted way by remarking that the poet’s elderly daughter did not hold either of them “in high regard,” adding, “Well, Mr. President, if you see me wrestling on the ground with someone, you’ll know that I’m wrestling with Leslie Frost.”

“Well, Stewart,” he said, “we’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.”

Fog forced Air Force One to circle for an hour, giving him time to tinker with his speech and complain to Schlesinger that Eisenhower’s memoirs had been excessively self-righteous. “
Apparently he never did anything wrong
,” he said. “When we come to writing the memoirs of this administration, we’ll do it differently.” When Schlesinger noted this in his diary, he did not explain who Kennedy had meant by “we.” Both of them collaborating on a memoir, or writing competing accounts of the administration? Or was it the royal “we”?

After Schlesinger left his compartment, he told Assistant Treasury Secretary Jim Reed, who had joined the party because he was an Amherst alumnus, “
I really don’t think too much
of this speech.”
He added a preamble
about education and poverty, and revised it some more. He eliminated Schlesinger’s “Too often we do not honor our artists until they are dead and can disturb us no longer,” perhaps because it was uncomfortably close to how
he
had treated Frost in his final months. He cut laborious passages such as “He carved his poetry in materials as subtle as the colors of this New England Indian Summer, and as enduring as the granite of his New Hampshire hills.” He replaced Schlesinger’s “unchallengeable figures of our time,” with “granite figures of our time,” his “the loveliness of our national environment” with “the beauty of our natural environment.” In places, he turned Schlesinger’s ham-fisted prose into poetry, replacing “when power intoxicates, poetry restores sobriety” with “when power corrupts, poetry cleanses.”

By the time his helicopter set down on Amherst’s Memorial Field, the fog had lifted and it had become a gorgeous Indian summer day.
He spoke first in the Amherst College cage
, a sprawling athletic structure with dirt floors and hanging nets. Delivering a prepared speech always made him more nervous than speaking extemporaneously, and his hands never stopped moving. He fiddled with his pages or stabbed the air with a forefinger, as much to release tension as punctuate his words.

He based his opening remarks on the notes that Reed had just seen him write and memorize. They expressed his newfound interest in the connection between poverty and education, and the barriers that kept poor children from attending institutions like Amherst. After telling the students and alumni that Woodrow Wilson had once said, “What good is a political party unless it is serving a great national purpose?” he asked, “And what good is a private college or university unless it is serving a great national purpose?” He declared that “privilege is here, and with privilege goes responsibility.” After reminding them that “private colleges taken as a whole draw fifty percent of their students from the wealthiest ten percent of the nation,” he cited the statistics he had used during his conservation tour to draw connections between poverty, lack of education, and unemployment. He decried America’s shocking disparity in income, pointing out, “In 1958, the lowest fifth of the families in the United States had four and a half percent of the total personal income, the highest fifth, forty-four and a half percent,” and adding, “There is inherited wealth in this country and also inherited poverty. And unless the graduates of this college and other colleges like it who are given a running start in life—unless they are willing to put back into our society these talents . . . to put those qualities back into the service of the Great Republic, then obviously the presuppositions upon which our democracy is based are bound to be fallible.”

Speaking of Frost, he said, “The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the nation’s greatness, but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable . . . for they determine whether we use power or power uses us. It is hardly an accident that Robert Frost coupled poetry and power, for he saw poetry as the means of saving power from itself. When power leads men towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truth which must serve as the touchstone of our judgment.”

His homage to Frost completed, he offered a vision of what poetry tempered by power might accomplish that amounted to a litany of what he intended to accomplish during his second term. He said:

I look forward to a great future for America, a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral restraint, its wealth with our wisdom, its power with our purpose. I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty, which will protect the beauty of our natural environment, which will preserve the great old American houses and squares and parks of our national past, and which will build handsome and balanced cities for our future.

I look forward to an America which will reward achievement in the arts as we reward achievement in business or statecraft. . . . And I look forward to an America which commands respect throughout the world not only for its strength but for its civilization as well. And I look forward to a world which will be safe not only for democracy and diversity but also for personal distinction.

The
New York Post,
then a left-wing publication, praised his words in an editorial as “
a thousand light years away
from the usual banalities uttered by politicians on such occasions,” adding, “rarely has a man wielding enormous power saluted the poet in phrases so cadenced or celebrated his role in terms so perceptive and profound.”

He went from the field house to the site of the future Robert Frost Library, where ten thousand people, three times the number predicted, sat above him on the sunny slopes of College Hill. He recounted Frost’s post-inauguration admonition to him, saying, “
He once said to me
not to let the Harvard in me get to be too important. So we have followed that advice.”
Before leaving, he told Kay Morrison
, Frost’s long-serving secretary, “We just didn’t know he was so ill.” It was not true. Frost had lingered in the hospital for weeks, and Kennedy had been informed of his condition.
*

Jim Reed had been with him
until he returned to Washington that afternoon, and transferred to a helicopter flying him to his new weekend house in Atoka. During all that time Reed remembered him being “in high good humor and high fettle,” a surprising observation since minutes before leaving the White House for Amherst, he had learned that his worst fears about the Bobby Baker investigation were being realized.
In an exclusive story appearing
on the front page of the
Des Moines Register,
headlined “U.S. Expels Girl Linked to Officials—Is Sent to Germany After FBI Probe,” the investigative reporter Clark Mollenhoff wrote, “A Senate Committee will hear next week about the friendship of several congressional figures with an exotic 27-year-old German girl who was expelled from the country last August.” An “outline” of her activities would be provided to the Senate Rules Committee, Mollenhoff said. “However, the evidence also is likely to include identification of several high executive branch officials as friends and associates of the part-time model and party girl.” He added that she was the wife of a West German army sergeant and had been deported on August 21 at the request of the State Department. An investigation had established “that the beautiful brunette . . . was associating with congressional leaders and some prominent New Frontiersmen from the executive branch of government.” An “incomplete list of her government friends” had been supplied to Senator Williams (who was obviously Mollenhoff’s source), and he planned to share it with the Senate Rules Committee on Tuesday.

During the flight back from Amherst, Kennedy could contain himself no longer.
He mentioned the Baker scandal to Schlesinger
, and after pretending to be ignorant about the identities and activities of Baker’s party girls, casually remarked that the scandal “might be the Profumo affair of this administration.” Schlesinger had not read Mollenhoff’s story and said he understood that the scandal involved money, not sex. Kennedy replied that when a newsman rang the door at Baker’s town house, one allegedly occupied by his secretary, a girl in a negligee had answered the door.

After he landed on the meadow below his new home,
his official schedule noted
“no further activity recorded this date.” In fact, he was on the telephone almost constantly throughout the afternoon and evening.
Evelyn Lincoln’s phone logs show
that between 4:16 and 8:45 p.m. he spoke with O’Donnell six times, Bobby six times, once with J. Edgar Hoover, and twice with Edwin Guthman, who handled press relations for the Justice Department.

According to the FBI file
on Ellen Rometsch, O’Donnell called the Bureau at 5:00 p.m., “and asked to be briefed on the information developed by the FBI in our investigation last summer concerning Ellen Rometsch, and whether there was any information to the effect that she had been involved with anyone at the White House.” Fifteen minutes later Bobby called the FBI agent Alex Rosen, and, referring to the
Des Moines Register
article, said he was contacting Clark Mollenhoff to tell him there was “no substance” to allegations about the involvement of any White House personnel with Rometsch, and that he had requested that the FBI conduct a further investigation to substantiate this. The president himself called Hoover, prompting Rosen to note, “Pursuant to the Attorney General’s request and the Director’s subsequent conversation with the President, we instituted investigation to locate and re-interview subject Ellen Rometsch.” At 9:00 p.m., O’Donnell supplied Rosen with Rometsch’s address in West Germany.