JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President (5 page)

Kennedy told Dirksen that he was unaware of any case against Adams. They returned to the Oval Office and he called Bobby, who confirmed that an indictment was imminent. “Cancel it, and do it now,” he said. “Don’t sign the indictment. Place it in the deep freeze.” Bobby argued that showing favoritism to a tax cheat could “destroy us politically.” As Dirksen listened, their conversation became increasingly heated until he reminded Bobby who was president and said that if he could not comply “your resignation will be accepted.”

He did not mention Eisenhower’s
“blank check” to Bobby, and anyone overhearing (or taping) their conversation would have concluded that he was extending a professional courtesy to a former president, sparing him the embarrassment of having a close associate indicted. Viewed that way, it was not unlike President Ford’s decision to pardon Richard Nixon. But it was one thing to pardon Nixon to end the Watergate nightmare; it would have been another had Nixon or his agents offered Ford something in return. Similarly, once Kennedy cashed Eisenhower’s and Dirksen’s blank checks he would be transforming an act of presidential discretion and mercy into an unethical bargain, one in which he had obstructed justice to reap a future reward.

Dirksen wrote Eisenhower a carefully worded letter
afterward. Referring to “one of your former staff members,” he said, “I believe everything is in proper order.” Eisenhower’s reply was equally opaque: “I am particularly indebted to you for following through the matter mentioned in your second paragraph.”

Many politicians would have viewed cashing Eisenhower’s blank check as business as usual. For Kennedy, it was a departure from the ethical standards that had guided him throughout his career. He had expounded on the importance of public integrity in his January 1961 farewell speech to Massachusetts legislators, telling them history would not judge them “merely on the basis of color or creed or even party affiliation,” nor would their “competence and loyalty and stature . . . suffice at times such as these.” Instead, “the high court of history” would measure them by the answers to four questions: were they “men of courage,” “men of judgment,” “men of dedication,” and “men of integrity.” A man of integrity, he added, would permit neither “financial gain nor political ambition” to divert him from fulfilling the public’s “sacred trust.”

Kennedy was in many respects a hard-nosed politician, fond of saying, “
Forgive your enemies
but never forget their names,” and able to drive down a street in his former congressional district and recall which stores had displayed his campaign posters fifteen years earlier. The journalist Fletcher Knebel (who was married to Laura Bergquist) considered him “
a very real, a very earthy
, a very . . . cynical politician,” and noticed that whenever he mentioned someone who had crossed him, “his voice would get sharp, rough, his eyes would narrow and you could tell that the big time grudge was still on,” and at moments like these, Knebel said, his blond eyebrows gave him “the eyes of a snake.”

Although he demanded loyalty and held grudges against those who withheld it, he often failed to reward it with favors and patronage, an omission leading one Boston politician to complain, “
Kennedy doesn’t pay
for anybody’s funeral and seldom goes to wakes and he never seems to get anyone a job. Now what kind of a politician is that?” He was so averse to the patronage politics of his maternal grandfather, John (“Honey Fitz”) Fitzgerald, the baby-kissing, saloon-visiting, favor-swapping former mayor of Boston, that
he slighted his own family
. While he was serving in the U.S. Senate, his maternal uncle Thomas Fitzgerald had continued working as a uniformed toll taker on the Mystic River Bridge, and an unemployed cousin was so certain that Kennedy would refuse to help him get a government job that he approached Governor Foster Furcolo.
He had resisted his father’s demand
that he make Bobby attorney general, giving his personal attorney, Clark Clifford, the bizarre assignment of persuading his own father that it was a bad idea. His other major appointments had been remarkable for their lack of political calculation. National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, Secretary of the Treasury Douglas Dillon, and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara were all Republicans, and he had not met McNamara and Rusk before asking them to join his cabinet. The greatest challenge to his “Ministry of Talent” philosophy came when his father pushed him to appoint Francis Morrissey to a vacant seat on the federal district court in Massachusetts. Morrissey was unqualified for the position, and after much agonizing Kennedy left the seat vacant rather than give it to him.

His distaste for patronage was part of a moral architecture buttressed by
Profiles in Courage,
since after celebrating the bravery and ethics of eight exemplary U.S. senators he could hardly hold himself to a lower standard. Before winning the presidency, he had written in a notebook that if a politician wanted to be “
a positive force for public good
,” he needed to possess “a solid moral code covering his public actions.” The phrase “public actions” implied that a politician’s moral code as it pertained to his
private
actions was irrelevant—a distinction not lost on Jackie, who once told a guest at a Georgetown dinner party who had praised her husband for being a fine politician, “
He may be a fine politician
, but do we know if he’s a fine person?”

Until now he had allowed Eisenhower’s and Dirksen’s checks to remain blank. Either he was reluctant to transform his favor to Ike into a quid pro quo or he was waiting for an issue important enough to warrant filling them in. He did not cash them when Republican senators, led by Dirksen, defeated or delayed many of his major domestic initiatives. Nor did he cash them after Dirksen criticized his policies for increasing deficit spending and the size of the federal bureaucracy and called his New Frontier “
nothing more than a bright ribbon
wrapped around the oldest and most discredited political package on earth—the centralization of power,” a centralization that was “the essence of socialism.”

He and Dirksen were political adversaries but personal friends. They were an unlikely pair. Dirksen’s flamboyant mannerisms, ornate vocabulary, and mellifluous voice had led to nicknames such as “Wizard of Ooze” and “Liberace of the Senate,” while Kennedy refused to throw his arms into the air and his speeches were templates of restraint. Dirksen had crossed the aisle to support his foreign policy initiatives, incurring the wrath of other Republicans. Kennedy repaid him by offering tepid support to his Democratic opponent in the 1962 midterm election. This had not prevented Dirksen from raising objections to the test ban treaty and civil rights bill. Like the treaty, which required sixty-seven votes for ratification, the civil rights bill needed sixty-seven senators willing to vote for cloture and end a filibuster. In both instances, Kennedy needed the support of liberal and moderate Republicans, who looked to Dirksen for leadership.

Dirksen, who by the standards of the time could be considered a moderate Republican, was prepared to support all of the provisions of Kennedy’s civil rights bill except its most symbolic and important one, the article outlawing discrimination in public facilities and accommodations. Without it, the bill was no longer a historic measure—the twentieth century’s Emancipation Proclamation.

While the test ban treaty was being negotiated in Moscow,
Dirksen had issued a statement
warning that it might amount to the “virtual surrender” of the United States to the Soviet Union. After it was initialed, he had recommended “extreme caution and a little bit of suspicion,” and refused an invitation to travel to Moscow with the U.S. delegation to witness its signing.
Eisenhower had also been critical
. Before boarding the
Queen Elizabeth
for a nostalgic return to England and Normandy he had told reporters that the Soviet Union’s decision to resume atmospheric testing in 1961, breaking an informal moratorium that had lasted since 1958, was reason enough to view the treaty with suspicion.

Although many in the administration and Congress believed the treaty would be ratified,
Kennedy remained pessimistic
. Several influential Democratic senators were threatening to propose reservations to its text that would make it unacceptable to the Soviet Union. J. Edgar Hoover was secretly lobbying against it, Edward Teller was condemning it as a Soviet victory, and the dean of Notre Dame Law School had declared that any treaty with “
militant activated atheism
” was inherently evil. Bobby Baker, the secretary to the Democratic majority leader and a legendary Capitol Hill fixer and prognosticator about whom the
Washington Post
had said “
His nose counts
were regarded by press gallery admirers as close to infallible,” told Kennedy that his count showed a majority of senators voting for it, but not necessarily two thirds. When Baker said the treaty might be a lost cause,
Kennedy replied, “Maybe not
.”

Kennedy faced two decisions on August 12: whether to fill in his blank checks with Ike and Dirksen, and if he did, whether to ask them to support the civil rights bill or test ban treaty. History might judge him harshly for calling in his markers from the Sherman Adams deal, but it might judge his first term a failure if neither measure passed Congress. He had concluded his inaugural address by saying, “With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love.” But what if a favorable judgment from history conflicted with the sure reward of a good conscience?

By August 12, it would have been impossible for him
not
to recognize that he had thwarted justice in the Adams case in the expectation of reaping a future reward. The month before, he had refused to intervene in a far less serious case of tax fraud in which the potential defendant had been James Landis, a former dean of Harvard Law School and a close friend of the Kennedy family for more than thirty years. Due to a combination of negligence and psychological problems, Landis had failed to file returns between 1956 and 1960. He submitted delinquent returns in 1961 and 1962, paying back taxes and fines. Had he not been so close to the Kennedys, the IRS might have closed the case, but to avoid any appearance of favoritism it referred him to the Justice Department for possible prosecution. Bobby Kennedy recused himself, leaving the decision to Assistant Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach.

During a telephone call on July 25
, Kennedy told Katzenbach that he had consulted his attorney Clark Clifford, who had concluded that Landis would have to be indicted. “I guess we have to proceed,” he said, his reluctance evident in his voice. “Is that your judgment?”

“More damage not to go ahead,” Katzenbach replied.

“Five years [of not filing returns] is so serious that if anyone ever gets the idea that the President’s friends can get away with it, Christ, I think it would be an awful moral cracker to the Internal revenue, to taxpayers. The next time anybody got arrested, they’d say, ‘What the hell about Landis?’”

Landis pled guilty on August 2, and it could not have escaped Kennedy’s notice that he had helped Eisenhower’s friend Sherman Adams escape jail but had not saved his own friend from indictment for a less venal offense.

While walking in the Rose Garden with Dirksen on Monday,
he finally filled in his blank checks
. Faced with choosing between his ethics and history, he chose history; with choosing between a historic bill that began redressing centuries of wrongs and a treaty reducing the threat of a nuclear war, he chose the treaty.

He had told Sorensen that he would “gladly forfeit his reelection, if necessary for the sake of the test ban treaty,” and his ambassador to France, Charles (“Chip”) Bohlen, believed that he was “
emotionally more wrapped up
in the test ban than almost any other effort.”
Glenn Seaborg, who headed the Atomic Energy Commission
and met with him often that summer, thought he felt more passionately about it than any other measure sponsored by his administration, and called his determination to halt atmospheric testing and the spread of nuclear weapons “like a religion” to him. The treaty was neither perfect nor comprehensive, but it was a start.
On July 31, he had told Seaborg
and other senior government scientists that he believed the treaty would give the United States as much as eighteen months “to explore the possibility of détente with the Soviet Union—which may not come to anything but which quite possibly could come to something.” Because the United States and Soviet Union were unable to agree on protocols for policing a ban on underground testing, its official title was “The Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty,” but it was still more important to him than the civil rights bill.
His decision proved
that he had meant it when he said, “Domestic policy can only defeat us; foreign policy can kill us.”

He told Dirksen, “
Ike said I had coin in his bank
, and you say I have coin in yours. Ev, I must write a check on you and Ike.”

Dirksen agreed that they “owed him one.”

“Ev, I want you to reverse yourself and come out for the treaty. I also want Ike’s public endorsement of the treaty before the Senate votes. We’ll call it square on that other matter.”

“Mr. President, you’re a hell of a horse trader,” Dirksen said. “But I’ll honor my commitment, and I’m sure that General Eisenhower will.”

Both men kept their word. For Dirksen it was probably just another deal. But it left such a sour taste in Eisenhower’s mouth that during his first conversation with President Johnson on November 23 he complained, somewhat boorishly under the circumstances,
about the “tactics” of the IRS
and Kennedy’s Justice Department.

After Dirksen left, Kennedy swam in the White House pool and went upstairs to the family quarters. Sometime that evening, before or after drinking four Bloody Marys,
he called an attractive Hungarian émigrée
whom he had met at a dinner party. He had included her in White House events, but she knew about his womanizing and had resisted his attempts to seduce her. When he persuaded her to come to the White House in June, on the pretext of helping him pronounce some German phrases he wanted to use in Berlin, they had met alone in the family quarters and he had behaved impeccably, saying as she left, “See, I’ve been good.” Perhaps he simply wanted companionship again. He sounded depressed when he called, and after she refused his invitation to the White House they had a lengthy conversation during which he asked why God would let a child die.