JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President (36 page)

An article by Attwood
appearing in the November 5 issue of
Look
titled “We Face a New Kind of World” claimed, “On balance, the state of the world, as seen from Washington, looks considerably more hopeful than it did three years ago.” Attwood argued that the end of the European colonial empires had brought about “one of the most revolutionary periods in human history.” During this period, he wrote, “the supremacy of the world’s white, Christian minority” was vanishing and Americans should accept that “being the strongest power on earth doesn’t mean that we can impose our system or our way of life on other countries.”
Kennedy liked the article so much
that he asked the Democratic National Committee chairman, John Bailey, to send a copy to every member of the Senate and House, although one wonders how he squared Attwood’s warning about imposing our system on other nations with promoting bogus student demonstrations in the Dominican Republic, and supporting the sabotage campaign of Cuban exile groups. Like many great men in the making, he wanted to be inspirational
and
successful—high-minded in public and pragmatic in private.

Hours after asking Bailey to distribute Attwood’s lofty article, he flew to New York to accept the Protestant Council’s first annual “Family of Man” citation, bestowed for his support of human rights. He had been battling Congress over cuts to his foreign aid budget and used his speech to the council to defend foreign assistance on practical and humanitarian grounds, painting it as an effective cold war weapon
and
a moral imperative.
He criticized congressmen who found it
“politically convenient to denounce both foreign aid and the Communist menace,” and enumerated its economic benefits—a half million jobs created at home and the promotion of U.S. exports. But moments later he was insisting that “the rich must help the poor. The industrialized nations must help the developing nations.” Referring to the Marshall Plan and the robust foreign aid program of the Eisenhower years, he said, “Surely the Americans of the 1960s can do half as well as the Americans of the 1950s. . . . I do not want it said of us what T. S. Eliot said of others some years ago: ‘These were a decent people. Their only monument: the asphalt road and a thousand lost golf balls.”

At a black-tie party afterward,
William Styron was surprised to see him
“quite alone and looking abandoned.” He greeted Styron and his wife, Rose, with “a grand smile,” Styron remembered, as if they were “long-lost loved ones,” and asked, “How did they get
you
to come here? They had a hard enough time getting me.” He was in an amiable mood, but Styron detected “an undercurrent of seriousness, almost an agitation” when he spoke about civil rights. He asked Styron if he was acquainted with any Negro historians and if he knew the black authors James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, and if he thought they might accept an invitation to the White House. Recalling their Labor Day conversation about the Nat Turner rebellion, he said, “What a great idea for a novel. I hope it’s done soon.” Styron felt himself being swept away by his charm, “overtaken by a grand effervescence” that he compared to “being bathed in sparkling water.” Kennedy was distracted, turned away, and Styron never saw him again.

•   •   •

B
Y
THE
TIME
K
ENNEDY
spent his third straight weekend at Wexford, he had either changed his mind about the house or decided to embrace it for Jackie’s sake.
Salinger informed reporters
that the family liked it so much that they had decided to enlarge the stables and add a wing with more guest rooms and servants’ quarters.

He arrived at Wexford early
on Saturday afternoon with the Bradlees and the photographer Cecil Stoughton. Jackie had organized an informal horse show to entertain them, but the hill leading to the house was so steep and the road so rutted from days of rain that none of her friends’ horse vans could make it, leaving her and Caroline as the only performers. It was a gorgeous day, sunny and cool. He and the Bradlees sat on the stone wall of the patio, drinking Bloody Marys and watching Jackie jump hurdles in the meadow below. Later they sat against the wall of the house, sheltered from the wind, their faces tipped toward the weak November sun. Jackie led John’s pony, Leprechaun, up from the meadow and handed her husband some sugar cubes to feed him. When the pony nudged him onto his side, looking for more sugar, he threw an arm over his head. As Jackie and the Bradlees collapsed in hysterics, he shouted at Stoughton, “Are you getting this, Captain? You’re about to see a president trampled by a horse.”

Stoughton also filmed
him teaching Caroline how to swing a golf club, and John marching across the lawn, wearing an oversized helmet and carrying a toy rifle on his shoulder. He stopped to salute his mother with his left hand.
She knelt down
in her riding boots and jodhpurs to show him how to do it correctly, using his right. Tomorrow Daddy would be taking him to a ceremony (Veterans Day) where he would see real soldiers, she explained. They would be saluting Daddy, so perhaps he would want to salute him, too. Kennedy was concerned about John’s fascination with guns and the military but reluctantly indulged it, buying him toy guns, letting him attend military ceremonies, and telling General Clifton, “
I guess we all go through that
. He just sees more of the real thing.”

The family attended Sunday Mass at St. Stephen the Martyr Church in Middleburg and heard Father Albert Pereira preach a homily about Christian death and the high cost of elaborate funerals. In a nod to the president, he said, “
The Saints today are the peacemakers
.” The church had opened in April and was purpose-built for the First Family, with a soundproof and bulletproof usher’s room where the president could take calls. Pereira was one of the few clergymen with whom Kennedy felt comfortable discussing Catholic dogma and his faith (another was Cardinal Cushing), perhaps because
he was an outspoken civil rights advocate
who had proved his courage by playing a key role in integrating Middleburg’s lunch counters. Before St. Stephen’s opened, Kennedy had attended Pereira’s services at the Middleburg Community Center, often arriving early for a private theological conversation.
On November 10, Pereira gave him a Bible
that he would carry to Texas, and that Johnson would use to take the oath of office.

Marie Ridder often went riding with Jackie and had known her and Jack for years. When she stopped at Wexford during one of these fall weekends (most likely the last one), Kennedy complimented the house within Jackie’s hearing, and she thought they seemed “very cozy” together.
Bill Walton confirmed her impression
that Jack and Jackie’s relationship had improved when they dined together a few days later, telling her that Jackie had taken him aside to say, “I think we’re going to make it. I think we’re going to be a couple. I’ve won.”

ATOKA, ARLINGTON, AND WASHINGTON

M
onday was “Daddies Day” at the White House school, when fathers attended classes with their children. Kennedy missed Caroline’s first class, but before going to Arlington for Veterans Day ceremonies he joined the students at recess and praised their French teacher, Jacqueline Hirsh, for the “
many miracles
” she had worked with the children.

It was an ideal day for a military pageant, with bright sunshine and a brisk wind snapping the flags. He left John outside the amphitheater but soon changed his mind, telling a Secret Service agent, “
I think he’ll be lonely
out there,” and asking him to bring the boy inside. An agent who had seen the First Lady teaching John how to salute at Wexford leaned down as the color guard saluted the president and whispered, “
Okay. Time to salute Daddy
.” This time, John used his right hand.

Kennedy found the ceremony so moving that he remained throughout the speeches instead of returning to the White House. While strolling down the rows of white gravestones with Representative Hale Boggs afterward, he said, “
This is one of the really beautiful places
on earth. I could stay here forever.” Arlington remained on his mind all day, and he told Charlie Bartlett, “
I suppose I’ll have to go back to Boston
because that’s where my library is going to be.” Then his face darkened and he added, “But of course I’m not going to have a library if I only have one term. Nobody will give a damn.”

He returned to the White House as Hirsh was leaving. Knowing that Caroline was disappointed that he had missed her French class,
he persuaded Hirsh to repeat it
. As she held up pictures of objects, the children shouted their names in French. He felt sheepish that his command of the language was so poor that he had not known that a watermelon was
la pasteque.

Hirsh took Caroline on an excursion
every Monday afternoon and taught her a new French sentence. Jackie had promoted it as a way for her daughter to do something any ordinary child might do, such as shop at a store and travel by bus. Today Hirsh took Caroline and her ten-year-old son, Mike, to the National Zoo and taught her to say “We went to the zoo.” Caroline and Mike returned to the Oval Office with balloons for her father and brother. Mike had broken his tooth playing football and the dentist had given him a temporary silver cap. When Kennedy noticed it he exclaimed, “My God, Mikey, you look like a Russian with that tooth!” Realizing that he had hurt the boy’s feelings, he bent down, opened his mouth wide, and said, “Mike, you look into my mouth and you let me know which one of my teeth are capped. I had an accident too.”

Caroline repeated her new French phrase, and he asked if it was the name of a bird. She informed him that it meant “We went to the zoo.”

“
Well, I think it’s time
I learned French.” Turning to Hirsh, he asked, “If you gave me a French lesson how would you do it?”

She suggested he could start by reading the French edition of
Profiles in Courage.
He was already familiar with its contents, so they could concentrate on conversation and grammar. During each lesson he could summarize what he had read in French. He told her he wanted to be fluent by June, when he would be going to Normandy for the twentieth anniversary of D-Day. (He also wanted to surprise Jackie,
whose facility with languages had left him somewhat jealous
.)

He was serious enough to squeeze four lessons into the next ten days. He was a difficult student, self-conscious and restless, getting up and down, impatient to learn. “I can’t wait to surprise the world,” he told Hirsh. “It’s always good to improve [at] anything.” He ruminated a long time before producing a sentence that was grammatically correct but atrociously pronounced, and he interrupted so often that she warned that if he wanted to be fluent by June he would have to concentrate more. She praised his grammar and was honest about his accent. His goal, he said, was to sound like a French person and “to be able to do it [speak French] just perfectly.” She estimated that might take at least a year. “I bet I do it in six months,” he boasted.

•   •   •

T
HE
D
ECEMBER
1962
CEREMONY
at Miami’s Orange Bowl honoring the Cuban exiles who had been captured during the Bay of Pigs operation and freed in exchange for a ransom of medicine and baby food had been emotional for Kennedy because he felt responsible for their captivity. After the brigade presented him with its flag he impulsively declared, “
I can assure you that this flag
will be returned to this brigade in a free Havana,” but it soon became apparent that he and the exiles differed on what constituted a free Havana. For them, it was a city without Castro or communism, one liberated by a coup, counterrevolution, or invasion. As much as this scenario would have pleased him, he could imagine a resolution of the Cuban problem leaving Castro in power. Because he considered both outcomes acceptable, and prized success over ideology, since the spring of 1963 he had been following a two-track strategy of continuing clandestine attempts to destabilize and overthrow Castro while encouraging efforts to establish a dialogue.

These strategies converged on November 12
, when he chaired a meeting of senior administration officials overseeing the CIA’s anti-Castro campaign. Director McCone presented a dispiriting summary of the current state of play, admitting that Cuba’s military remained loyal to Castro and its internal security forces well organized. Desmond Fitzgerald, who headed the CIA’s Cuban task force, gave a discouraging update on the Agency’s efforts to topple Castro. Casualties among CIA operatives in Cuba had increased, with twenty-five captured or killed, while the willingness of Canada, Spain, and the UK to continue trading with Cuba had diluted the impact of U.S. economic sanctions. He reported that the Agency continued to support autonomous anti-Castro groups mounting sabotage operations from bases outside U.S. territory, and listed four recent sabotage operations, but offered vague statements about their effect, justifying them as ways of “keeping up the pressure,” raising “the morale of the people,” and adding to Cuba’s “growing economic problems.”

Kennedy asked point-blank if the CIA’s sabotage program was worthwhile. Rusk criticized it as counterproductive, and argued that it might weaken support for the exile groups within Cuba and result in the Soviets increasing troop levels on the island and staging more incidents on the Berlin autobahn. Despite these objections, the consensus at the meeting was that the CIA program should continue because it was low-cost, denied Castro essential commodities, and improved the morale of the anti-Castro Cubans.

Kennedy signed off on several sabotage operations scheduled for the weekend, but hours later he was pursuing the second track of his Cuban policy.
Bundy called Attwood to deliver a message from the president
that was so sensitive he said he could only communicate it orally. He told him that Kennedy wanted him to contact Castro’s confidant, Dr. Rene Vallejo, and say that while it did not seem practical at this stage to send an American official to Cuba, the administration would like to begin the conversation by having Vallejo visit the United States and deliver any messages from Castro directly to Attwood. Bundy added, “In particular, we would be interested in knowing whether there was any prospect of important modification in those parts of Castro’s policy which are flatly unacceptable to us: namely . . . (1) submission to external Communist influence, and (2) a determined campaign of subversion directed at the rest of the hemisphere. Reversals of these policies may or may not be sufficient to produce a change in the policy of the United States, but they are certainly necessary, and without [them] . . . it is hard for us to see what could be accomplished by a visit to Cuba.” Kennedy was reiterating the conditions that he had asked Jean Daniel to communicate to Castro: cease the subversion and move out of Moscow’s orbit.
Attwood told Bundy he would ask
Lisa Howard to call Vallejo before getting on the line himself and directing the conversation according to these guidelines. If Vallejo agreed to travel to New York, Attwood would come to Washington to receive instructions on how to handle the negotiations.

•   •   •

K
ENNEDY
CONVENED
THE
FIRST
formal meeting of his reelection team in the Cabinet Room on Tuesday afternoon. Attending it were his brother Bobby; his brother-in-law Stephen Smith, who would be managing the campaign; his political advisers Lawrence O’Brien and Ken O’Donnell; Ted Sorensen; John Bailey, who chaired the Democratic National Committee (DNC); DNC treasurer Richard Maguire; and Richard Scammon, the director of the Census Bureau. Vice President Johnson had not been invited.

Lincoln had noticed Johnson’s name appearing less often
on the lists of invitees to crucial policy and planning meetings in 1963. Her record of the private conferences between him and the president showed them meeting alone for more than ten hours in 1961, but for only seventy-five minutes in 1963. It is unlikely Kennedy simply forgot to invite him to the November 12 meeting, because he frequently complained about Johnson’s sensitivity and must have known he would be hurt to be excluded from the first major planning session for the 1964 campaign. Johnson had left for his Texas ranch two days earlier but would surely have stayed in Washington to attend an important meeting like this one.
Sorensen believed he had been excluded
because he was “not part of the inner circle and did not have the warmest relations with—or full confidence of—everyone in that room,” a polite way of saying that, as Sorensen well knew, Kennedy had little confidence in his ability to perform the only vice presidential duty that really mattered, assuming the presidency.

Their relationship had reached a nadir that fall after Johnson aligned himself with the hard-line Diem supporters in the administration and criticized the wheat deal. He sat silently at White House meetings, offering a few mumbled remarks or becoming infuriatingly loquacious. Kennedy may not have wanted him around because he was afraid that a man who considered himself more politically astute than anyone else in the White House would try to dominate the meeting, and perhaps because he was undecided about keeping him on the ticket. Even so, it was a curious omission, since the meeting concerned a reelection campaign in which Johnson’s home state would play a key role.
Kennedy even raised the subject of his forthcoming
visit to Texas at the meeting, saying in an irritated voice that he would be seeking campaign funds as well as votes, and adding, “Massachusetts has given us about two and a half million, and New York has been good to us, too, but when are we actually going to get some money out of those rich people in Texas?”

Few believed that Kennedy would lose the election.
McGeorge Bundy was even thinking ahead
to a possible third term, telling Jackie that there might be such a demand for him to return to the White House that they should investigate the legality of him serving another term if it were not consecutive with the first two. The respected political commentator Stewart Alsop wrote in his November 2
Saturday Evening Post
column that although Washington journalists who wanted to hype the forthcoming contest were offering scenarios for a Goldwater victory, hardly anybody believed it. “
Goldwater doesn’t have a prayer
of beating John F. Kennedy in 1964,” he said. “Neither does anyone else.” He argued that Kennedy’s Catholicism, which had cost him so many votes in 1960, was no longer a factor, nor were his youth and inexperience now that he had become “a middle-aged fellow with thickening jowls, a tendency to lose his reading glasses, [and] the remembered fear of nuclear war written clearly on his face.”

A recent Gallup poll
had Kennedy winning 58 percent of the national vote compared with Goldwater’s 39 percent, with 6 percent undecided or voting for third-party candidates. The greatest threat to his reelection was that Goldwater would implode before taking the nomination, leaving him to face a more moderate Republican opponent such as Governor George Romney of Michigan or Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York. Goldwater had already made some gaffes, promising to sell the popular Tennessee Valley Authority, and telling an interviewer, “You know I haven’t got a really first-class brain.”

Kennedy made it clear at the November 13 meeting that he intended to micromanage the Democratic convention, just as he had state visits and the design of Air Force One. He wanted a livelier convention, and said, “For once in my life I’d like to hear a good keynote speech.” He also wanted a color film about the last four Democratic presidents. Only NBC broadcast in color, most Americans did not own color sets, and a color film would be more expensive, but he thought it would impress the delegates. “We’ll run on peace and prosperity,” he declared. “If we don’t have peace we’d better damn well win the [cold] war.” He went on to assess his chances in each state, showing a detailed knowledge of the key players and demonstrating that he really
could
have driven down that street in Boston and recalled which stores had displayed his posters in 1946.

He sounded less sure-footed when he shifted to the big picture. As if thinking out loud, he said, “But what is it that we can make them decide they want to vote for us, Democrats and Kennedy—the Democrats not strong in appeal obviously as it was twenty years ago. The younger people . . . what is it we have to sell ’em? We hope we have to sell ’em prosperity, but for the average guy that prosperity is nil. He’s not unprosperous but he’s not very prosperous. . . . And the people who are really well off hate our guts. . . . There’s a lot of Negroes, [but] we’re the ones that are shoving the Negroes down his throat. . . . We’ve got peace, you know what I mean, we say the country’s prosperous and I’m trying to think of what else.”

He passed out copies of Homer Bigart’s article about poverty in Kentucky and said that as part of his prosperity theme he wanted to mount an attack on poverty. He would remind Americans that most poor people were white and would schedule photo opportunities with white coal miners in Appalachia and poor Negroes in Northern cities.