JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President (20 page)

“What was the pitch about wanting to go to Poland?” Fay asked after Johnson left.

“The poor guy’s got the worst job in the government, and just wants to make a significant contribution. Unfortunately the timing isn’t right,” Kennedy said, adding condescendingly, “Otherwise I’d love to see him go and have a little fun.”

The Scandinavian trip
would be the most calamitous of Johnson’s vice presidency. He was boorish and cranky, plagued by kidney stones, and unable to connect with the middle-class audiences. In Finland, he walked across the graves of the honored dead in a cemetery commemorating a famous massacre. In Norway, he interrupted the food service at a state dinner by having a long conversation with an aide, standing in the aisle and blocking the waitresses. He infuriated the Danes by ordering all the furniture designed by a famous craftsman removed from his hotel room. There is no telling what this miserable and impulsive man might have done in Poland.

WASHINGTON

T
he official diary of Kennedy’s engagements
kept by Ken O’Donnell shows the short week following Labor Day as among the least eventful of his presidency. He did not return from Cape Cod until Tuesday morning, and spent most of Thursday and Friday entertaining King Zaher of Afghanistan. On Tuesday afternoon, during a discussion of French atomic tests and the peaceful uses of nuclear power,
he filled two pages with doodles
, scribbling “test,” “biological,” “megaton,” “peaceful uses,” and, evidence that his mind was wandering, “Panama” (five times), “1964,” “discrimination,” and “Cuba.” He covered the bottom of the second sheet with an eighteenth-century man-of-war in full sail.

Many of his doodles
were composed of words taken from meetings and conversations, written several times, underlined, crossed out, and placed in boxes piled into towers or connected in chains. On rare occasions he would doodle his thoughts, once writing during a briefing, “
I don’t understand all this
.” When he drew something, it was usually a boat, perhaps because he would rather have been on it. In one of his more inventive doodles, he turned a U.S. flag into a treble clef, in another he drew the pillar of a canopy bed. He doodled when he was bored or wanted to release tension and frustration. “Vietnam” appeared frequently in his doodles that summer and fall, written down a page, put in boxes, crossed out, and underlined again and again.

The political situation there remained stalemated. The generals had suspended their plotting, and Diem was refusing to dismiss his brother. The Pentagon insisted the war was being won and recommended supporting Diem; the State Department and U.S. press corps in Saigon believed it would be lost if he remained in power. The pro-Diem English-language
Times of Vietnam
condemned Kennedy’s statements to Cronkite and accused the CIA of plotting to overthrow Diem. The State Department dismissed the charge as “
something out of Ian Fleming
.”

Roger Hilsman attended a meeting
of the Far East Subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday. He reported to Lodge, and presumably to Kennedy as well, that its members had “far-reaching doubts regarding not only Diem-Nhu leadership but also advisability of continued US participation in Viet-Nam war” and were considering introducing a resolution stating, “It is the sense of the Senate that the American people are no longer willing to support a regime in South Viet-Nam that oppresses the people and religious sects. Continued support of such a regime is inconsistent with the basic precepts of American democracy.”

Kennedy missed most of Friday’s
National Security Council meeting because he was entertaining King Zaher. In his absence, Bobby asked “whether we could win the war with Diem and Nhu.” When Rusk said we could not if the Nhus remained in power, Bobby replied, “If we have concluded that we are going to lose with Diem, why do we not grasp the nettle now?” Rusk called pulling out “very serious,” saying we would be in “real trouble” if the Vietcong took over. Bundy thought we had not yet reached “a moment of decision.” General Taylor pointed out that three weeks ago the administration had believed we could win with Diem, and that the Joint Chiefs still shared that view. Bobby wanted to know what they should do if it became apparent that Diem could not win. McNamara said that the Pentagon had insufficient information to answer that question. To remedy that, Bobby proposed sending a mission to solicit the opinions of the U.S. servicemen who were advising and training South Vietnamese military units.

The president joined the meeting at this point and approved his brother’s suggestion. McNamara said he would ask General Harkins, who headed the U.S. military mission in Vietnam, to begin canvassing the advisers. Taylor proposed sending Major General Victor Krulak to Vietnam to solicit the views of South Vietnamese officers. It was agreed that Joseph Mendenhall, a State Department official with extensive experience in the country, would join him and that they would leave immediately and spend two days there assessing the situation. The notion that they could fly twenty-four thousand miles in four days, spend forty-eight hours in Vietnam, and return with any worthwhile insights indicated the confused state of the administration’s policy. The public affairs officer at the Saigon embassy who briefed them called their assignment “
a symptom of the state the U.S. government was in
.”

Kennedy’s appointments usually filled several pages of his official diary. On Wednesday they took up only half a page. Between 10:30 a.m. and 12:52 p.m., he reportedly participated in an “OFF THE RECORD MEETING. (No list and no subject supplied),” an unusual notation since O’Donnell usually included these details. He had in fact spent these hours planning his reelection campaign, studying reports and polls, and conferring by telephone with his brother-in-law Steve Smith, who had agreed to manage his 1964 campaign, and with Bobby, who had managed his last one.

Lincoln affixed a memorandum
to the notes that he made that morning, explaining that they had been written as he “was going over some suggestions on campaign strategy for 1964.” On one page he had written, “Must win the South” and “We would at this point.” This was probably a reference to
a recent memorandum from the pollster Louis Harris
titled “The South in 1964” that suggested he could win the region by appealing to its more enlightened governors over the heads of its congressional delegation. The most important recent development in the South, Harris wrote, had been an “industrial explosion” accompanied by an “educational awakening” that had been “hidden mostly from view over the surface manifestations of segregation and the pratings about states’ rights.” He recommended targeting dynamic Southern cities like Atlanta, Houston, and Charlotte. “You can also stick it to the Republicans and the renegade Democrats by saying that . . . the main stream of the new South is not states’ rights, not bitter end segregationist, not ultra-conservative,” he advised, “and that you are willing to take your chances with this new South.”

On the second page of his notes, Kennedy had written, “
dismiss him as a second rate figure
,” a reference to Senator Barry Goldwater, his likely Republican opponent. He was already making moves to counter Goldwater, and Salinger had announced that at the end of September he would be making a five-day conservation trip to ten Midwestern and Western states, visiting national parks, wilderness areas, dams, and power projects. Salinger called the trip nonpolitical, but reporters immediately put quotation marks around the word. His itinerary included states where Goldwater was expected to be strong because of his Western roots, eight states where Democratic senators were running for reelection, and six that had voted for Nixon in 1960 and that Kennedy hoped to win to offset expected losses in the South.

It was probably on Monday that he decided to appoint Wisconsin’s commissioner of taxation, John Gronouski, to the vacant position of postmaster general, making him the first Polish American to hold a cabinet position. Although Kennedy needed to solidify his support among Polish Americans, who voted heavily in major Eastern and Midwestern cities, he also had strong personal reasons for making the Gronouski appointment.

His strained flexor muscle continued bothering him, and on Thursday
Lincoln noted that he was experiencing “discomfort
” and had not been following Kraus’s exercise regimen. Despite having flown Kraus back from Italy, Kennedy had disregarded his advice and now wanted a fourth opinion. Unwilling to tolerate the pain of a minor muscle strain any longer, he called Carroll Rosenbloom, a family friend who owned the Baltimore Colts, and asked him to arrange a consultation with the team’s orthopedic surgeon. Lincoln reported that on Friday, “
Dr. McDonald came
& he reassured the President that his leg would snap out of it. He told him to continue the therapy he was getting from Dr. Kraus. The President felt much better from this reassurance.”

Kennedy fussed over the trappings of his presidency
almost as much as he did over his health. He had designed the sterling-silver calendars that he presented to members of the ExComm (Executive Committee) who had met throughout the Cuban missile crisis, and he had chosen the new colors and interior decoration of Air Force One, ordering that “United States of America” be painted in large letters on its fuselage and U.S. flags added to its tail fin. He was so pleased with the blue-and-white color scheme that he asked Postmaster General Day to hire the same designer to improve the appearance of the nation’s mailboxes and the hats worn by its mailmen, and commissioned a New York firm to make recommendations for improving the look of the brochures, logos, and visual footprints of other government agencies. While walking down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Capitol with Jackie one evening, he was so shocked by its dilapidated shops that he established a commission to improve the thoroughfare’s architecture and ambience, and closely monitored its progress. He sampled the wines before White House dinners and
pored over the guest lists
, demanding an explanation for anyone he failed to recognize. He supervised the renovation of the White House Rose Garden, a place it was said he loved so fiercely that
no one dared leave a heel print
in it.
He oversaw the placement
of the television cameras broadcasting a ceremony bestowing honorary citizenship on Winston Churchill, directing that a fine-looking contingent of marines in dress uniform be framed in the middle of the picture, and a black marine stand in the center. He had a fondness for well-executed rituals and ceremonies (his Catholic upbringing), and understood that the design of his jet, the furniture and paintings in the White House, and a well-executed state dinner contributed to the nation’s prestige, and that in the cold war, prestige was a weapon.

Much of what King Zaher
and Queen Homaira of Afghanistan experienced during their state visit reflected changes instituted by the president and the First Lady. State visits had formerly been cumbersome three-day affairs, but Kennedy had cut the schedule in half so he could host more foreign leaders. Because he had decided that traveling out to Andrews Air Force Base to greet a visiting head of state was a waste of time and that the Ellipse and the White House South Lawn were more impressive backdrops for an arrival ceremony, King Zaher and his party landed in a helicopter on the Ellipse and drove to the White House by motorcade. Because Kennedy had been impressed by the soldiers in breastplates and plumed helmets lining his route to the Élysée Palace during his state visit to Paris, he decided to replicate the spectacle at the White House, so that when Zaher arrived that evening for his state dinner, marines in dress uniform lined the White House driveway. His first honor guard had represented all four services, but after noticing that the marines looked healthier, had better posture, and wore more elegant uniforms, he eliminated the other services. Guests at state dinners had customarily sat side by side at long tables, unable to converse with anyone except their immediate neighbors. He and Jackie had introduced round tables to facilitate conversation among larger numbers of guests. During Thursday’s state dinner he undoubtedly asked Zaher to sign his place card. No other president had entertained as many foreign heads of state in such a short space of time as he had, and he would have added Zaher’s card to about sixty others in a collection that Bradlee recalled him boasting about, “
as pleased as a small child
talking about his bug collection.”

The guests trooped outside after dinner to watch a drill team of marines illuminated by crisscrossing searchlights perform on the South Lawn, and to hear the Air Force Drum and Bugle Corps bagpipers play Irish melodies.
Kennedy had recently noticed
that the Jefferson Memorial was sited directly opposite the South Lawn and had asked General Clifton to find some old searchlights and illuminate it as an experiment. He drove over to inspect the memorial, liked what he saw, and ordered trees on the South Lawn trimmed so that guests would have an unobstructed view. Tonight was the first time it had been lit for a state dinner, and it provided a stunning backdrop to the festivities, “brilliantly lit, like a rounded jewel,” one guest reported. Afterward, he ordered it illuminated every evening.

Jackie had read that fireworks were the customary welcome for honored guests in Afghanistan, so the evening concluded with the first display in White House history. Because Kennedy feared that a twenty-minute display might be too long, boring his guests (and himself), he cut it to ten minutes. The organizers shot off twenty minutes’ worth of fireworks in ten, and the display was so brilliant and loud that calls from people convinced that the city was under attack jammed police switchboards. The evening concluded with a lone bugler standing in a spotlight, sounding taps.

HYANNIS PORT

K
en O’Donnell and Pam Turnure, Jackie’s press secretary, both urged Kennedy to persuade the First Lady to decline the Onassis invitation, arguing that Americans would view taking a vacation so soon after Patrick’s death to be unseemly. He told them, “
I think it would be good for Jackie
, and that’s what counts.” He was more honest with Charlie and Martha Bartlett, who had introduced him to Jackie. The Bartletts were their guests that weekend, and
he made a humorous show
of falling to one knee in front of them and begging Jackie not to go. She refused to budge. “When she wanted to do something,” Martha Bartlett observed, “
she did it
.”

It was gray and rainy all weekend, but he and Jackie, the Bartletts, and Lem Billings went out on the
Honey Fitz
anyway. The cabin cruiser was ninety-two feet long and had a spacious cabin and open deck, so Jackie may not have overheard him asking Bartlett, “
How do you think Lyndon would be
if I got killed?”
Bartlett knew that
an assassination was often on his mind, and had been with him when a speeding car had overtaken them and their Secret Service escort on a country road in Virginia and Kennedy had joked, “
He could have shot you, Charlie
.”

His closest call had come a month after his election, when a retired postal worker, Richard Pavlick, packed his car with dynamite and began tailing him, renting a room in Hyannis Port, cruising past his town house in Georgetown, and following him to Florida. On December 11, Pavlick had parked outside the Kennedy home in Palm Beach, waiting for him to leave for church so he could ram his limousine and ignite the explosives. Pavlick changed his mind when Jackie and Caroline appeared at the front door. He wanted to kill the president-elect, not his family. The Secret Service apprehended him, and soon afterward Kennedy said to Larry Newman, “
Brother, they could have gotten me
in Palm Beach. There is no way to keep anyone from killing me.” He had been researching presidential assassinations, and told Newman that President Coolidge had once said that any well-dressed man willing to sacrifice his own life could kill a president. He also shared his research with Dr. Travell while they were sitting on the patio at Palm Beach—one suddenly less shady after the Secret Service had lopped off the fronds of surrounding palms to deny cover to an assassin.

He asked Travell, “
What do you think of the rule
that for the last hundred years every president of the United States elected in a year divisible by twenty [Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Harding, and FDR] died in office?”

“You don’t
really
believe such a coincidence can continue?” she said. “The odds against it are too great, and anyway, you aren’t superstitious.”

He raised the subject with her again a few weeks later, saying it was a relief knowing that if anything happened, “
My wife will have a pension
and my children will be well cared for.”

Soon after the inauguration he and Fay had been walking back from the Army and Navy Club to the White House across Lafayette Square when a Secret Service agent jumped between him and a suspicious-looking man. Kennedy admitted to Fay that an assassination was never far from mind, adding, “
I guess that is one of the least desirable
aspects of the job.”

After a radio correspondent burst into his box on the opening day of the baseball season, shoving a microphone into his face and rattling off questions, he asked Powers, “
What would you have done
if that fellow had a grenade in his hand instead of a mike?”

During a game of charades in Palm Beach
he acted out his assassination, collapsing to the floor and going through his death throes as a teammate doused him in ketchup.

While attending Mass in Hyannis Port, he turned to reporters sitting in the pew behind him and said, “
Did you ever stop and think
, if anyone tried to take a shot at me, they’d get one of you guys first?”

After disembarking at a small airport, he scanned a crowd waiting behind a fence and exclaimed, “
Boy! Aren’t we targets
?”

But he still plunged into crowds and ordered his drivers to slow down so he could reach out and shake hands. A man in Rome kissed him and yanked him over a wooden barricade. When he arrived at the gates of the American ambassador’s residence in Dublin a cheering mob surrounded his limousine and forced him to walk. “
Crowds don’t threaten me
,” he told the ambassador. “It’s that fellow standing on the roof with a gun that I worry about.”

But he worried about more than that. While he was being driven through heavy traffic in Virginia, the lead Secret Service car passed a slow-moving sedan going in the same direction and oncoming traffic kept his own car from following it. When a boy in the backseat pointed a motion-picture camera against the rear window, he tensed, took a deep breath, and murmured, “
I will not live in fear
. What will be, must be.”

He often speculated about the best way to die, weighing the relative merits of hanging, strangling, and drowning. His sister Kathleen and brother Joe had died in planes, so he was sensitive to the risks of flying. As his valet George Thomas was packing Kennedy’s bags for a short trip to Ohio, the president turned to Ted Sorensen and said, “
If this plane goes down
, Old Lyin’ Down [Vice President Lyndon Johnson] will have this place cleared out from stem to stern in twenty-four hours—and you and George will be the first to go!”

He discussed an interparty feud with Governor William Lawrence of Pennsylvania as they rode to a political event at Washington’s Shoreham Hotel. After Lawrence remarked that one of the warring politicians would not be up for reelection until 1968, he said, “
Well, probably neither you nor I
will be here then.” Lawrence said, “Wait a minute, wait a minute, that may apply to me at my age, but not to you.”

Minutes before delivering a speech to Congress proposing that the United States land astronauts on the moon, Kennedy told relatives and aides gathered in the Oval Office, “
I firmly expect this commitment to be kept
. And if I die before it is, all you here now just remember when it happens I will be sitting up there in heaven in a rocking chair just like this one, and I’ll have a better view of it than anybody.”

After his successful handling of the Cuban missile crisis he told Jackie, “
Well, if anyone’s going to shoot me
, this would be the day they should do it.”

Many of the jokes he shared with Powers concerned death and wakes, but when death was real and close, it was no laughing matter. When Caroline brought her dead parakeet into the Oval Office he recoiled in horror and said, “
Get it away from here
!” A friend who witnessed this said, “He didn’t want to see it and he didn’t want to know necessarily about the funeral arrangement. He just wanted it out of the way.”

His sensitivity to the narrow margins
separating life and death, success and failure was understandable. Had the Japanese destroyer hit
PT 109
a few feet nearer to where he was standing, he would have been killed. Had he not encountered the two Solomon Islands natives, he and his men would have died of exposure or been captured. Had cortisone not been discovered as a treatment for Addison’s disease, he might have died before turning thirty-five. Paper-thin margins had also marked his political career. He had won the presidency by the smallest popular vote margin in almost a century, and had barely avoided nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis—narrow escapes that may explain why he could be so full of good humor and optimism one moment, and so morbid the next.

•   •   •

O
N
S
ATURDAY
EVENING
he and five of his six surviving siblings celebrated their father’s seventy-fifth birthday in the same way they had before he suffered a massive stroke in December 1961, leaving him paralyzed on one side and confined to a wheelchair, capable of hearing and understanding everything but capable only of grunting and saying “No!” They tied blue and yellow Mickey Mouse balloons to his wheelchair and pushed him into the living room, where they showered him with gifts and entertained him with poems, songs, toasts, and limericks. His daughter Jean Kennedy Smith and son-in-law Sargent Shriver unfurled a flag resembling the presidential one, except that it had a wide-eyed cartoon animal instead of an eagle above the words of a long-standing family joke, “He’s Always in the Bushes!”

Stoughton’s photographs show Joe Kennedy’s children standing in his low-ceilinged living room, singing and applauding. The rugs are worn, the coffee table flimsy, and the upholstered furniture mismatched, with a low dark red couch next to a pale green easy chair, near a chair covered with the same busy and flowery pattern as the curtains. At dinner almost everyone except for Jack and Jackie is wearing a paper birthday hat. The grandchildren have not joined them, but the table is decorated for eight-year-olds, with balloons, a “Happy Birthday” tablecloth, and noisemakers, as if they were still his little boys and girls. No one in the photographs—even the candid ones—looks grumpy or bored. Everyone is laughing and smiling, thin and fit, blessed with brilliant white teeth, dark tans, and glossy hair.

Jackie sat next to her father-in-law at dinner, and during the skits and present-giving she took a seat at the end of the red couch, closer to him than anyone except her husband. One photograph shows her kneeling next to him while the others stand in a semicircle behind his chair. She insisted that she loved him “
more than any other man except my husband
and my father.” But why she would choose to idolize a man who had been such a spectacular womanizer, and whose behavior had probably steered her husband in the same direction, remains a mystery.

Another photograph reveals that the Bartletts and Lem Billings have been relegated to a small table at the side of the dining room reminiscent of the “children’s table” at Thanksgiving. Although they are among Jack and Jackie’s oldest friends, they remain outsiders. Rita Dallas, the registered nurse who was caring for Joe Kennedy, believed that the Kennedy children were “
loyal to the extreme
” and saw them as a monolithic unit. In fact, their relationships had altered as they married, had children, changed jobs, and moved. The Palm Beach and Cape Cod houses were a powerful formaldehyde, but Joe’s and Kathleen’s deaths, Jack’s political career, and Joe Sr.’s stroke had shuffled things. Jack had been closest to the high-spirited Kathleen, whose magnetism and charm most closely resembled his own. After she died in 1948, he turned to Eunice, the next-youngest and most driven of the surviving girls, teasing and competing with her as if she were Joe. He often sat with her in the library at Hyannis Port, briefing her on his speeches and seeking her advice. She would tell her father afterward, “
He’s pretty good, Daddy
, but I could do it better.”

The eight-year difference between him and Bobby had kept them apart when they were younger, but they became close after traveling to Asia together in 1951. He spoke with Bobby more than anyone in his cabinet, and trusted him and valued his advice more than anyone on his staff, but their relationship was less intimate than many imagined. He did not include him in the last-minute White House dinners, and seldom attended social events at his home in Virginia. Bobby’s large and rambunctious family was one barrier; another was a subterranean competition that he was more willing than Bobby to acknowledge. Billings recalled times when Bobby would call and Jack would hold the telephone away from his mouth and say to whoever happened to be in the Oval Office, “
I think it is the Second Most Important Man
in the capital calling.”

No one in the family had influenced Kennedy more or contributed more to his success than his father. Joe Kennedy had raised a family of ferocious competitors, weaning them on maxims such as “
We don’t want any losers
around here. In this family we want winners” and “Don’t come in second or third—that doesn’t count—but win.” When Schlesinger invited Kennedy to speculate as to why his father’s children had turned out so much better than FDR’s, he said, “
It was all due to my father
,” explaining that although he had not been around as much as some fathers, when he was, “he made his children feel that they were the most important things in the world to him,” and “seemed terribly interested in everything we were doing.” By 1960, however, Kennedy had stopped paying attention to his advice. After his father criticized him for courting union members in Michigan, he told a friend, “
I’m not going to listen
to Dad anymore in this campaign because he doesn’t understand what a Democrat has to do to get elected. In this country, a Democrat can only win if he excites an awful lot of people to believe their lives are going to be better if he gets into the White House.” He tipped his top hat to him during his inaugural parade but seldom invited him to the White House, and he found his advice and criticisms oppressive. But he was gentle and loving after Joe’s stroke. During Joe’s first post-stroke visit to the Oval Office Kennedy patiently explained the significance of the mementoes on his desk, and as tears of pride streamed down his father’s face he wheeled him to another part of the room and said, “
This is my rocker
, Dad. It looks as though we both need special chairs, doesn’t it?”

Joe Kennedy’s birthday party continued
in the living room after dinner. Teddy’s wife, Joan, played “Happy Birthday” on the piano, and as if this birthday was like the others, Teddy sang “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” so loudly that the veins on his neck bulged. At Joe’s seventieth birthday, everyone had sung, to the tune of “Yankee Doodle,”
“He’s the famous bear of Wall Street / Just a grizzly in his house . . . And he’s our Happy Birthday boy,” and they probably reprised it this night. The evening concluded with Jack singing, from the melancholy “September Song,”
“O, the days dwindle down to a precious few. . . .”