Where Were You?: America Remembers the JFK Assassination (30 page)

The other part of it is the longer courage. Imagine you’re born and have every illness there is. You have scarlet fever; you have your appendix
taken out. Then you have something that you can’t quite figure out. It’s a knot in your stomach—and we’ve all had nervous knots—but a knot that’s inside your stomach; it never goes away, you can’t figure it out, and you have to eat light foods and soups. You can’t eat anything heavy or anything fried; it keeps getting worse and worse, and then you find out you have leukemia, which means you’re going to die young. You’re having your blood count [taken] all the time. Your mother calls but never visits you. The mother, Rose, was kind of remote.

He’s away at Choate, constantly thinking,
I’m going to die
.
All they can do is keep my red blood cell count [up] and everything
. That’s going on, and finally it turns out that he has colitis, which is bad enough. To have all these sicknesses and the bad back, which he had congenitally. . . . One of his legs was three quarters of an inch shorter than the other. He was wearing corrective shoes later in life. The bad back of course should have kept him out of the Navy. It did keep him out of the Army. He basically went through an intensive campaign of learning how to work his back and get through.

He managed to get into the Navy with some political help. His dad said, “This guy’s going to be on one of these bucking broncos”—the PT boats, which we all know from fast boats, are pounding you all the time. He had to sleep every night on a board. He could never sleep on a bed his whole life. It was always on a board because of his bad back, and then they butchered him after he came out of the war. He spent a year in a hospital. They never fixed it.

Then in 1953 he [was diagnosed with] Addison’s disease, which gets so bad. The first episode is in 1947. He’s over with Pamela Harriman—Pamela Churchill at the time. She takes him to her doctor, who says, “This friend of yours isn’t going to last a year.” Then he gets another episode in the South Pacific with Bobby, who saves his life and gets him to the Okinawa Air Force Hospital, and that’s sort of when their bond begins. The third time he has the last rites of the Church, in 1954 when he goes in for his back operation, which goes bad with complications. He barely survives. Even Nixon, who was in the [Harvard] class with him in ’46, was crying in the car. I talked to a Secret Service agent.

This guy was so close to the edge of life all the time, and I think that explains his carpe diem behavior with women, his “hell’s a-poppin’, let’s
have some fun” attitude about everything in life. “Let’s get through the day, that’s all we’re going to have.”

They lied—Ted Sorensen, all the rest of them, and India Edwards, remember she came from Johnson’s campaign. They were putting out the fact he had Addison’s disease. If we had known that and it had the full [coverage] like Page Three today in the papers, if it had been all over the place, he wouldn’t have gotten through. The irony of the 1960 campaign is that Jack Kennedy was probably the only Democrat who could beat Nixon; Nixon probably would have blown away a Humphrey or a Stevenson. It must’ve driven Nixon completely crazy that this guy he thought was a playboy could beat him and nobody else could beat him. But that was a fact.

Jack Kennedy used the pictures to cover up who he was. He loved the glamour shots. He loved being handsome. He loved Jackie being beautiful. He loved all that photography. He loved the kids. He loved Macaroni the pony. I think he liked that idea because it created a certain thing he could manipulate and use. The inner Jack Kennedy was far less romantic and far tougher. Think of Jack as Bobby; think of Bobby as Jack. Bobby had to be the henchman. Bobby had to go into the room with Governor Mike DiSalle of Ohio and beat him up, and he had to go to Governor Tawes of Maryland and basically beat him up. It was Mob behavior. This was a Mob scene—not a mob scene with a crowd; it was a mobster type of event, where they really scared these guys. Jack would say to Bobby, “Make sure he’s publicly for me, and don’t bring my name up,” and then Bobby would do it because he loved his brother completely.

Jack was the guy giving the orders. In fact, when you talk to all the old Irish Mafia, they say they came to love Bobby. Like Richard Hardwood, all those guys came to love him, the guys who covered him. Jack scared you, he was so tough, so brutal. He knew what he had to do, so he made these decisions to put Johnson on the ticket, to pretend he’d never met Richard Nixon. They’d been friends for twelve years, but he acted like he never met him when he debated him. It’s cold, ice—he cut him. What
he did with cutting the deal with Khrushchev: “Okay, I’ll give you the missiles in Turkey. I won’t tell anybody about it.” That takes a real level of toughness, even ruthlessness if you want to call it that. Bobby was accused of it, but Jack was guilty of it. That’s the big difference.

The hard thing about studying Jack Kennedy is to understand his brutality toward Jackie. Why didn’t he feel some sympathy toward her, in the way that he not only cheated on the marriage but he didn’t seem to care that she knew about it? [When Jackie had a miscarriage at eight months and JFK remained on his sailing trip] was the first time he showed real coldness. He didn’t even come back. In fact, George Smathers, his friend from the Senate, said, “I told him to go back or forget his political career” because he would lose the marriage and everything, and he’d never be able to explain that kind of cold behavior.

We all live in compartments, and it’s healthy in some ways. We go to the store, and we go to the dry cleaners. We know the fellow or the woman there, but we don’t have parties with them. We meet people in certain places at work whom we don’t hang out with. We live in different compartments. Most people live like that in a benign way. Jack Kennedy lived in compartments, almost like a
Titanic,
each compartment sealed off from the others. The Irish Mafia weren’t Kennedy’s social friends. Dave Powers was a handy man to have around, but he wasn’t a pal socially. Ted Sorensen was his intellectual blood bank but not a friend socially; he never got invited at night.

The pals Kennedy hung around with—Ben Bradlee, Charlie Bartlett, David Ormbsy-Gore, Smathers—they were his friends, and then you can separate that group: the happily married, faithful husbands and their wives, who were couple-friends of him and Jackie. Then there were the guys he screwed around with, like Smathers. Smathers is a good example of a guy he had another kind of relationship with.

Everything was subdivided, and that’s the way he lived. These various
people never met one another. The only one who could walk from compartment to compartment, from Jack to his serious girlfriends, like Mary Meyer, and to the ones that weren’t serious, and to Jackie, was Jack himself. He could do this by the hour. He would have a relationship with one person, and then he’d go right back to Jackie. How can you explain it, except that’s the fact?

Imagine these Knights of the Round Table, the Camelot image. Everyone in that world Jack lived in had his sword pointed to the center of the table, like the Knights of the Round Table. That’s why they’re round, to keep them equal, and he was in the middle. Everybody related to him. Jackie didn’t relate to Mary Meyer, but he related to Mary Meyer, and he related to Jackie and the girls, Fiddle and Faddle, at the office, and whoever else was around, like Mimi Fahnestock or someone like that.

All those relationships were all pointing to him, but they never met. The Irish Mafia never met the WASP friends. The WASP friends socially never met the intellectuals. Arthur Schlesinger and Galbraith and those guys were possibly hanging around with Ted Sorensen, but they weren’t hanging around with Dave Powers and Billy Sutton. They never got to know each other. It was Jack’s world. Maybe it was a principality, but they all seemed to like it. Red Fay’s daughter once said to me, “Nothing was as thrilling as to get the phone call” that Jack’s on the line to talk to her dad. He made that family light up, because Jack was the best buddy from the old days, and the guys who were in the Navy with him said he was great company. They liked him. The thing about Jack [that] we keep forgetting about our politics, it’s about liking the guy, and this country liked him.

I try to capsulize what the ’60s were like for me and the Kennedy experience. A friend of mine in the Peace Corps, in Swaziland, was in the village right next to mine, and we hung out a lot together. He teaches at the University of New Orleans right now. One night he took his village out onto the side of a hill, the people he’d been working with in world development. They all sat there, and he said, “I want you to see something tonight.” As they were sitting there in the dark—this is in Africa—he pointed to a little light crossing the horizon. He said, “That’s us going to
the Moon.” That was Kennedy. The wonder and romance and idealism of the Peace Corps and the magic of going to the Moon, that all happened because of him.

The Peace Corps was a great thing for me. The Peace Corps was the greatest thing in my life because what happened was: You go from being a grad student somewhere to all of a sudden you’re out in the middle of Africa, all of a sudden you’re on a motorcycle, bopping around, teaching business to a lot of African guys who are about fifty years old, who become your best friends. You’re like a son to them, and you establish all these relationships. Then you hitchhike through Africa alone, and you do things like go to Israel for a month—all different places I went. You get to have the adventure of your lifetime. I would never have imagined the Peace Corps without Kennedy. Jack Kennedy came in, and he was so much the Peace Corps. It was his idea: adventure, fun, foreign travel, doing good. Run it militarily in terms of discipline; do everything right. It was great.

I was up at Holy Cross, and everybody’s Irish or Italian, a few French Canadians—and all Catholic. We were up there in Worcester, Massachusetts, the heart of Massachusetts. I was going to check my mail, which we always did after lunch, and some guy came up to me and said, “I’ll bet you five dollars Kennedy was just shot,” and I go, “What a terrible thing to say.”

I walked over to Mr. Power’s world history class, and he said to the class, “The president’s been shot. Anybody who wants to take a cut right now, it won’t be counted against you.” I think we had three cuts a semester. I zoomed over to the Carlin Hall, a dorm, went down to the basement,
and found Cronkite on TV. I watched what everybody watched, and I believe I watched him say, “He’s dead.” I watched it right through the night and the whole weekend. I was just taken with the whole story.

I have a very simple take on the Kennedy assassination. What you don’t know, you don’t know. But what we do know is this, which I think is critical: Lee Harvey Oswald had the job at the Book Depository weeks before the motorcade route was established, so it was a crime of opportunity. He had this infatuation with Castro, having become disillusioned with the Soviet Union when he was living there. Oswald came back [to America] and became infatuated with Castro. Before the crime in Dallas, he had gone down to the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico City, perhaps trying to put together an escape route. Who knows? I’d like to see those records someday.