JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President (37 page)

“I wouldn’t do that, Mr. President,” Scammon interjected. “You can’t get a single vote more by doing anything for poor people. Those who vote are already for you. I was thinking of photographs with policemen in the cities. Then you should go to the new shopping centers on the highways. The votes you need, your people, men with lunch pails, are moving out to the suburbs.”

Scammon’s analysis fascinated him, and he asked how these new demographics might play out in 1964. Scammon spoke of Catholics buying suburban houses and suddenly becoming concerned about their property taxes.

He immediately got it: preventing these new suburban Democrats from turning into Republicans would be key to winning a landslide in 1964. He asked Scammon how many Democrats retained their party affiliation after moving to the suburbs, and at what rung on the social and economic ladder a Democratic family became Republican.

“It might be less than ten thousand dollars a year. I’ll try to find out,” Scammon promised.

“It’s going to be a new kind of politics,” he said.

“It’s a new kind of country.”

WASHINGTON

K
ennedy stopped at Lincoln’s desk to chat
as she was reading the memorandums from the previous day’s campaign meeting. She told him that staging a convention as electrifying as the one in 1960 would be difficult and that the next would not be as exciting because everyone knew what would happen.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “There might be a change in the ticket.”

The White House electrician and dog handler Traphes
Bryant had noticed an increase
in the barbed comments about Johnson that fall. He overheard a staffer saying that because FDR had dumped Wallace for Truman and still won reelection, voters would not hold it against Kennedy if he did the same to Johnson. Another asked, “How would you like to work for
him
?”
Another said, “We’ve got to get that Texas cornpone out of here before he uses the vice presidency as a springboard into the White House in ’68,” and another claimed that even Jackie wanted the president to drop him, adding, “Jack won’t pay any attention to her, of course, but for once she’s right.”

Kennedy had dismissed the rumors
about Johnson being replaced at his October 31 press conference, and
when Bartlett raised the possibility
with him he angrily denied it. But if he
was
considering replacing Johnson, he would certainly not have announced it at a press conference a year before the election, or tipped his hand to Bartlett, Bradlee, Joe Alsop, or any of his other journalist friends. But
Lincoln was in a different category
, and he had such faith in her discretion and loyalty that she not only knew about his lovers but had acted as an intermediary, receiving their billets-doux at her home address.

After examining Kennedy on Wednesday
, Dr. Burkley noted that he weighed 170½ pounds, had complained about “a slight ache in his right groin after resistive exercises,” but insisted that he felt fine after taking a swim and using an anesthetic spray. He concluded that “his energy is excellent . . . and [he] now reports that he has resumed his full number 1 exercise program with 12½ pounds of weights.”

Kennedy chaired an afternoon meeting
to finalize his new program to alleviate poverty in eastern Kentucky that was attended by the state’s governor and U.S. senators, the secretaries of agriculture and labor, and Undersecretary of Commerce Roosevelt. They agreed on an enhanced school lunch program, more public health services and surplus food, and initiatives to provide jobs and housing grants. The only proposal requiring congressional approval was an accelerated public works program. A week later, Roosevelt sent Kennedy a memorandum from his new office in Kentucky, reporting that the first emergency medical teams would be in the state by the end of the week, a survey of school lunches and a county-by-county survey of surplus food supplies would be on Kennedy’s desk by December 5, food was being rushed to needy areas and distributed by surplus vehicles supplied by the federal General Services Administration, and the Kentucky Highway Commission and U.S. Forest Service would be hiring eight hundred men by the end of the month. It was testimony to how quickly a president can use his executive powers to ease suffering.

Later that afternoon,
he and Jackie appeared together
at a White House function for the first time since Patrick’s death, watching a performance on the South Lawn by the Royal Highland Black Watch for an audience of underprivileged children. The commander of the Black Watch presented him with a ceremonial dagger and said that their motto was “Nobody wounds us with impunity.” He replied, “I think that is a very good motto for some of the rest of us.”

The family watched the piping and marching from the second-floor Truman Balcony. Caroline and John wore matching powder-blue overcoats with black velvet collars, the same ones they would wear when the Black Watch pipers returned to Washington twelve days later. Caroline threw her arm around her father’s neck, and John crawled in and out of his lap. Afterward, Nanny Shaw brought them into the Oval Office in their pajamas to say good night. Kennedy lay on the rug so they could swarm all over him. Lincoln walked in and asked, “
What would the people think
if they saw the President down on the floor?” Looking up from the floor, he said, “After all, Mrs. Lincoln, I am also a father.”

Lincoln and Shaw took the children into the Rose Garden
. While John chased one of the family dogs, Caroline stared into the night sky and recited, “Star light, star bright . . .” but could not remember the rest of the ditty. He appeared silently behind her as she went on: “Star bright, star light . . .”

“First star I’ve seen tonight,” Lincoln prompted.

“Up above the world so high,” Kennedy said. “Why don’t you go over and say that to Mommy?”

•   •   •

P
RINCESS
G
ALITZINE
HAD
MET
the reclusive screen star Greta Garbo on a previous Onassis cruise and had renewed their friendship when Garbo attended a showing of her fashions in New York. Garbo had declined several invitations to dine at the White House, but after learning that Galitzine was coming on Wednesday she accepted on condition that the event would be small and discreet. Jackie invited her sister, Lee, and the Washington socialite Florence Mahoney. Kennedy asked Lem Billings, who had met Garbo in 1962 and claimed to have become her great chum while accompanying her on a driving tour of the Riviera the summer before. Ever since then, he had been regaling and perhaps irritating Kennedy with paeans to her beauty and humor.

One of Kennedy’s least-appealing attributes was a fondness for practical jokes and a tendency to let them continue too long.
A prime example was his treatment of Stevenson
in Newport the previous year. The sky had been threatening, the seas rough, and the winds strong, but he summoned Adlai from Washington anyway. Oleg Cassini, who was his guest that weekend, had protested that it was a terrible day for flying. “Good. He’ll be airsick,” Kennedy said. Stevenson was green and mopping his brow as he disembarked from a helicopter. Kennedy proposed they talk while taking a cruise, a suggestion that Stevenson received with what Cassini called “horror in his eyes.” The seas pitched and rolled, lightning flashed, and Kennedy sat with him in the stern, braving the weather without a jacket and forcing him to follow suit. When they docked, he said, “Well, Adlai, there’s your helicopter waiting.” As it strained to gain altitude, Cassini said, “Mr. President, that is truly cruel and unusual punishment.”

“He could use it,” Kennedy replied. “It’s good for his health.”

The previous weekend at Wexford
he had persuaded Bradlee to participate
in a prank on Torby Macdonald. At his urging, Bradlee had called Macdonald and, as Kennedy listened on an extension, warned him that
Newsweek
was preparing to run a Bobby Baker story that would link Macdonald to a minor lobbyist named Micky Weiner. As Macdonald became increasingly frantic, protesting that he barely knew Weiner, Kennedy put his hand over the mouthpiece and said, “Torb’s hurting. Tuck it to him some more.” Bradlee continued tormenting Macdonald, and Kennedy collapsed on the sofa, helpless with laughter.

Kennedy had invited Garbo
to come early so he could brief her on the prank that he planned to spring on his best friend. When Billings arrived, he bounded over to Garbo and exclaimed, “Greta!” She turned to Kennedy with a puzzled look on her face and said, “I have never seen this man before.” Billings was too mortified to eat. He listed everywhere they had been together, but she insisted she had never met this “Mr. Billings.” As he became increasingly upset and disoriented, Kennedy was solicitous, suggesting that he might have met someone resembling Garbo. When he finally put his friend out of his misery, everyone laughed uproariously. Billings grinned, trying to be a good sport, but later called the prank “one of the worst things I ever went through in my life.”

Garbo became inebriated
and shouted, “I must go!” But she stayed and stayed. Jackie gave her a tour of the White House, and she took off her shoes and sat on Lincoln’s bed. She refused an invitation to stay overnight because she feared it might have entailed what she called “a visit from the President.” Kennedy usually retreated to his study after dinner. Tonight he remained at the party, pointedly telling Garbo that he never stayed with guests this long. Before she left he gave her one of his prized pieces of scrimshaw, prompting Jackie to remark, “
He never gave
me
a whale’s tooth.”

WASHINGTON, THE MASON-DIXON LINE, MANHATTAN, AND PALM BEACH

K
ennedy’s sixty-fourth press conference
was a grim affair. He was mad at Congress for cutting his foreign aid budget, and at the Soviets for arresting the Yale professor Frederick Barghoorn in Moscow on trumped-up espionage charges. These subjects and Vietnam dominated the conference. He sounded cool and reasonable in the transcript, but on television appeared nervous and tense. He cracked fewer jokes, he smiled less, and his voice trailed off. Asked about the purpose of the conference on Vietnam that his advisers were attending in Honolulu the next week, he offered a laundry list of goals, including “assess the situation,” decide “what our aid policy should be,” and determine “how we can bring Americans out of there.”

“Now that is our objective,” he stressed. “To bring Americans home, permit the South Vietnamese to maintain themselves as a free and independent country.” After asking, “Are we going to give up in South Vietnam?” he answered, “The most important program, of course, is our national security, but I don’t want the United States to have to put troops there.”

If there was ever a year when he owed Jackie
a lavish Christmas gift, it was this one, when she had lost a child and agreed to campaign in Texas. He decided on a fur coverlet and collected samples in the Oval Office. None struck him as good enough, and before leaving Thursday for New York he called a family friend and gave her carte blanche to select a fur, provided it arrived before Christmas.

At 4:00 p.m. his helicopter landed
at the point on the Mason-Dixon Line where the Delaware and Maryland border intersected a newly completed stretch of Interstate 95 that would make it possible to drive from Boston to Washington without encountering a traffic light. After the public works titan Robert Moses introduced him generously, and erroneously, as “the chief architect of our present highway system,” he predicted that the Boston-to-Washington corridor would become “one gigantic urban center,” and cut a blue-and-gray ribbon to open a road soon to become the John F. Kennedy Memorial Highway.

The previous week he had driven
into Manhattan in a motorcade of limousines, police cruisers, and motorcycles. Sirens screamed, lights flashed, intersections were blocked, stoplights ignored, and traffic tied in knots. This week he stopped for lights and signs, arriving in the city “like an ordinary motorist,” according to Salinger. Even so, his limousine was part of a procession of thirteen cars, many filled with police and Secret Service agents. A section of the East River Drive was under repair, and construction barrels blocked one of its lanes. As the traffic merged, a passenger car threatened to separate his limousine from the Secret Service follow-up car. When the driver ignored shouts from agents to let them pass, one had to point a rifle out the window. After pulling off the drive, Kennedy’s car hit every crosstown red light. A city bus blocked his limousine from turning onto Madison Avenue, enabling a woman to dash into the street and take a flash photograph of him.
A policeman told a reporter
, “She might well have been an assassin.”

A police official criticized him
for taking “unnecessary risks.”
Salinger explained
that he had not wanted to disrupt traffic. Cynics said that he had not wanted to subject potential voters to delays, and
Time
remarked caustically that he had been “
zeroing in on the ‘safe-motorists’ vote
.” But winning a few more votes in a state already securely in his column had to be a minor concern. He had probably dispensed with the motorcade because, like the renovations to Jackie’s hospital room, it offended his egalitarian sensibilities, and he believed that these fast-moving, police-escorted motorcades only widened the distance between himself and the public.

Once he arrived at the Carlyle Hotel
, he was safe, or at least safer. An Otis elevator engineer had been stationed in a shed on the roof to repair any malfunction that might trap him between floors, and a Secret Service detail had inspected and sealed his penthouse suite. But when he left to attend a party at the apartment of his sister and brother-in-law Jean and Stephen Smith, he slipped out a side door with his Secret Service detail, leaving a large police detail waiting in the lobby.

Stevenson was at the party
, and face to face with the president he decided to warn him about Dallas.
Oleg Cassini, who overheard
their conversation, took Kennedy aside and asked, “Why do you go? Your own people are saying you should not.” He stared back wordlessly and shrugged.

Before leaving the next morning for the Americana Hotel to address the yearly AFL-CIO convention,
he met with Henry Luce
, who also had a suite at the Carlyle. Luce had founded
Time
and
Life,
the nation’s most influential magazines. Although the flattering photographs in
Life
had advanced Kennedy’s career more than scores of complimentary and serious-minded articles, he believed that
Time
was biased against his administration. He complained to Luce that his magazine was making nit-picking criticisms. “What about the state of the world, Mr. Luce?” he asked, challenging him to fault his handling of the important issues. After thinking for a few moments, Luce conceded, “I think we are doing pretty good.” During lunch afterward with his White House correspondent, Hugh Sidey, he admitted that the president had been right: his magazine
had
been nit-picking.

In his speech to the AFL-CIO
, Kennedy enumerated his successes and challenged the nit-pickers to dismiss them. He had doubled the nuclear weapons in the U.S. strategic forces, he said, and “with that strength we work for peace.” He had presided over the peaceful desegregation of thousands of schools, restaurants, and lunch counters. The average factory worker was taking home ten dollars more a week than when he was inaugurated. The stock market had hit record highs, “although we only get credit when it goes down.” A robust economy was not enough, he said, unless it contributed “to the fullest extent possible” to ways “to improve our schools, to rebuild our cities, to counsel our young, to assure our health, and to care for our aged and infirm.” He conceded that as long as the unemployment rate remained at 5.5 percent, “this issue of economic security, of jobs, is the basic issue facing the United States in 1963.” He declared that his tax cut would be the surest remedy for unemployment, and the best guarantee that the nation would continue “sailing . . . on the winds of the longest and strongest peacetime expansion in the history of the United States.” He called equal rights important, adding, “But no one gains from a full-employment program if there is no employment to be had; no one gains by being admitted to a lunch counter if he has no money to spend; no one gains from attending a better school if he doesn’t have a job after graduation.”

He described those opposing his programs to ameliorate youth unemployment, provide jobs training, give aid to depressed areas, and meet other public needs as “powerful and articulate,” and criticized them for “campaigning on a platform of so-called individual initiative,” adding, “They talk loudly of deficits and socialism, but they do not have a single job-creating program of their own, and they oppose the efforts we are making.” After calling his job-creating programs too urgent to be postponed, he recounted a story about Marshal Hubert Lyautey, the first French resident-general of Morocco, who had asked his gardener to plant a tree only to have the man respond, “Why plant it? It won’t flower for a hundred years.” Lyautey had replied, “Plant it this afternoon!”

When he finished, a young Irish nanny
vaulted over a press table at the front of the ballroom, wriggled free of policemen and Secret Service agents, and dashed toward him. He called everyone off and shook her hand. “Last night, I dreamed he took my hand,” she said. “I just had to make that dream come true.”

He was driven a few blocks to the Hilton, where
he told delegates to the Catholic Youth Organization’s national convention
, “I come here today . . . because we expect something of you.” He reminded them that they had an obligation to repay the nation for “all of the talents which society helped develop in you,” and echoed the “ask not” passage of his inaugural address, saying, “So we ask the best of you. . . . I congratulate you on what you have done, and most of all I congratulate you on what you are going to do.”

Ignoring the protests of his Secret Service detail
and police detachment, he again dispensed with a motorcycle escort. When his limousine stopped near the Hilton for a red light, delegates to the youth conference encircled it, forcing the police to raise their clubs and wade into the crowd to free a path.
At another red light
, a nurse dashed in front of his car to catch a patient who had left something behind, prompting a police inspector to say, “As far as I’m concerned, he can walk into the city the next time he visits.”

He flew to Palm Beach that afternoon with O’Donnell, Powers, Smathers, and Macdonald.
When Smathers remarked offhandedly
, “Everybody on the Hill says Bobby is trying to knock Johnson off the ticket,” Kennedy’s denial was so vehement that the comment had obviously struck a nerve. “George, I presume you have
some
intelligence,” he said sarcastically. “I
love
this job, I love every second of it.” Why then, he asked, would he risk it by picking a fight with Johnson that might guarantee him losing all of the Southern states? And if he dropped Johnson now, when his protégé Bobby Baker was in the headlines, it would appear that
he
had some kind of involvement in the Baker scandal that he wanted to conceal. And if that happened, he predicted, “
Life
magazine would put twenty-seven pictures of these lovely-looking, buxom ladies running around with no clothes on, twenty-seven pictures of Bobby Baker and hoodlums and vending machines, and then the last picture would be of
me
. And it would say ‘Mess in Washington under Kennedy Regime,’” and then 99 percent of Americans would conclude that
he
was running around with the girls. (He had forgotten or decided to overlook that Smathers had been a regular at Baker’s Quorum Club, and had known many of these “buxom ladies.”)

Lyndon Johnson, a likely source for the rumors that Bobby was scheming to replace him, dined that evening at Chandler’s, a midtown Manhattan restaurant featuring a screen between its bar and dining room composed of glass squares holding portraits of every U.S. president. When he wandered over to examine them, Chandler’s owner pointed to an empty square next to Kennedy’s portrait and asked, “
When will I put your picture on there
?” Johnson’s face darkened with rage and he said, “Never! You’ll never see it.”

While Kennedy was out of town
, Bobby, speaking in confidence and with his approval, told Ambassador Dobrynin that he believed relations between their countries depended to a large extent on a good personal relationship and understanding between the president and Chairman Khrushchev, and that another summit meeting could provide an opportunity for the two leaders to “calmly sit and talk everything over.”

Jackie spent the weekend at Wexford.
On Friday, she entertained her friend Robin Douglas-Home
, a jazz pianist and socialite whom she had met during her 1962 Italian holiday. He had not seen her for several months and was struck by how relaxed and composed she seemed. She said she had been encouraged by how much Jack had come to value Caroline and John, and that losing Patrick had strengthened their self-sufficiency as a family. She was determined to accompany him to Texas even though, she admitted, “I’ll hate every minute of it.” But if he wanted her along, that was what mattered. Douglas-Home believed that he had never seen her happier.

Jackie was more upbeat about Texas during a telephone conversation with Letitia Baldrige, a close friend from boarding school who had recently served as White House social secretary. “
You won’t believe it
, but I’m going campaigning to Texas with Jack next week, and I’m going because I want to,” she said. “I’m anxious to hit the campaign trail again. Did you ever expect to hear me say that, Tish?” Baldrige detected a “note of genuine happiness” in her voice, one contrasting sharply with how she had sounded after Patrick’s death. “Now she was so exuberant,” Baldrige recalled. “I suddenly knew that her marriage was going well.”