JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President (40 page)

He had also mentioned a major Vietnam policy review to Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, an early critic of U.S. involvement in the conflict, when Morse came to the White House in November to confer about the administration’s education bill. “
Wayne, I want you to know
you’re absolutely right in your criticism of my Vietnam policy,” he had said. “Keep this in mind, I’m in the midst of an intensive study which substantiates your position on Vietnam. When I’m finished, I want you to give me half a day and analyze it point by point.”

Heller came into the Oval Office late Tuesday afternoon to brief him on the antipoverty program. Federal agencies were embracing the program, he said, but wanted reassurance that the president was firmly behind it. Kennedy’s reply showed that he had taken Scammon’s analysis of the rising importance of middle-class suburban voters to heart. “
I’m still very much in favor
of doing something on the poverty theme if we can get a good program,” he said, “but I also think it’s important to make clear that we’re doing something for the middle-income man in the suburbs, et cetera. But the two are not at all inconsistent with one another. So go right ahead with your work on it.”

Lewis Weinstein, a distinguished
Boston attorney who had supported Kennedy since his first campaign in 1946, stopped in the Oval Office for a brief conversation after attending a meeting of the President’s Committee on Equal Opportunity in Housing. He reported that he was about to take office as chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, and asked if Kennedy would sponsor a conference with Jewish leaders to discuss the oppression of Jews in the Soviet Union. After he pointed out that no president since Theodore Roosevelt had championed Russian Jews, Kennedy said, “Well, here’s one President who’s ready to do something,” and promised to hold the conference after his return from Texas.
He called Weinstein the next day
to apologize for not giving him more time and to promise to send him a new photograph. It “shows my battle scars and wrinkles,” he said, adding, “I’m not the skinny kid you once knew. In the picture I’m looking upward, watching eternity.”

When Salinger came to say good-bye before leaving for Honolulu, Kennedy looked up from a stack of papers, removed his glasses, and said with an air of fatigue, “
I wish I weren’t going
to Texas.” That morning Salinger had received a letter from a woman in Dallas saying, “
Don’t let the President come
down here. I’m worried about him. I think something terrible will happen to him.” He decided not to mention the letter, because he knew Kennedy would dismiss it, just as he had the other warnings.
But Lincoln had no qualms
about relaying her husband’s premonitions to him. Before going home that evening she told him that for days Abe had been telling her that he had a bad feeling about the trip, and wished the president were not going.

“
If they are going to get me
,” he said, “they will get me even in church.”

WASHINGTON

D
uring their weekly White House breakfast meeting
with Kennedy, the Democratic congressional leaders expressed reservations about his decision to visit Dallas, given what had happened to Stevenson. When House Majority Whip Hale Boggs cautioned that he was going into “quite a hornet’s nest,” he replied, “Well, that always creates interesting crowds.”
His mind was wandering, and he drew doodles
of sailboats, writing above them “20th anniversary,” and “August,” perhaps references to August 1963, the twentieth anniversary of the sinking of
PT 109,
or to August 1964, the twentieth anniversary of his brother’s death.

He would be away for most of the next twelve days, first in Texas, then in Hyannis Port for Thanksgiving. He spent some of Wednesday attending to personal business.
He complained to Dr. Burkley
about a case of jock itch,
signed a lease
to rent Brambletyde next July,
asked Lincoln to check on the forecast
for Texas so Jackie would pack the right clothes, and
told Turnure to make sure
that Jackie had a hairstyle that could withstand the wind while she was riding in an open limousine. Turnure suggested a shorter motorcade, or putting the bubble top over the car. “Take a forty-five-minute drive around Washington with Dave Powers,” he said. “See what you look like when you come back.”

He read a carbon copy of Jim Bishop’s
A Day in the Life of President Kennedy
as soon as it arrived. Bishop never revised, so this was his first and only draft, written in less than three weeks and padded with dull descriptions of the White House furniture and biographies of Kennedy’s staff and cabinet. Among his revelations were that the president liked a grilled cheese sandwich and consommé for lunch, kept the pool heated to ninety degrees and did the breaststroke so he could swim and talk (Bishop had not wondered why he had turned the customarily solitary activity of swimming into a group event), and treated time “as though he has been told he has a week to live.”

Kennedy approved the manuscript without asking for a single revision. Jackie was more sensitive, or read it more closely, and requested sixty minor changes. Bishop agreed to all but one, refusing to cut Dave Powers’s remark that his family called him the president’s “other wife.” Bishop included some observations in his memoirs that had escaped inclusion in
A Day in the Life.
“
A bit of old-fashioned Boston
peeked through his habits,” he wrote. “He sat on the same cushion of the same settee every night. He lit a big cigar and poured a cold beer. Then . . . [he] would ask Mrs. Kennedy to play the same music: a recording of
Camelot.
He was in a pleasant rut: same cigar, same beer, same music, same cushion.”

Kennedy’s last meeting was a late-afternoon conference with Roger Hilsman and Undersecretary of State U. Alexis Johnson, prompted by a communication from Cambodia’s Prince Sihanouk requesting that the United States cut off aid to his nation. They showed him a draft of a proposed reply that he considered too harsh.
He added some words of friendship
and reconciliation, leading Johnson to reflect, “He was always seeking to conciliate; he was always seeking to understand other people and what their motives were. He could never quite accept the fact that other people would not always return his good will.”

Before greeting the seven hundred guests attending the annual White House Judicial Reception, he hosted a reception upstairs for the Supreme Court justices and their wives. He remained seated, rocking in his chair, a hand under his chin as he scrutinized the justices. Sixty-five-year-old Associate Justice William O. Douglas had just married twenty-three-year-old law student Joan Carol Martin, and this was her first visit to the White House. Like de Kooning, who had been surprised to find Kennedy “incandescent, golden, and bigger than life,”
Joan Douglas noticed
that “he was not black and white, as he had seemed to be in pictures,” but was “vibrant and glowing. . . . [and] an outdoorsman, like my husband.” De Kooning had been captivated by the notion of this “gallant, intelligent, handsome man leading the country and the world.” Joan Douglas thought he had taken “all the formaldehyde out of [the] government,” becoming “a noble figure moving through the pages of history.”

He and Jackie descended a red-carpeted stairway to the reception. There was no receiving line, so his cabinet, members of the federal judiciary, and Justice Department employees surrounded them as they moved between rooms while the Marine band played tunes from
My Fair Lady
and
Camelot
. Treasury Secretary Dillon tracked him down in the East Room to say good-bye before leaving for the Far East with Rusk and Salinger. “
You’re going off to Japan
,” Kennedy said. “I’ve got to go to Texas. I wish we could trade places.”
Dillon thought he was “in wonderful form
” and “looked great.”
The Supreme Court justices also remarked
on his high spirits to Chief Justice Earl Warren. But
Ethel Kennedy thought he seemed withdrawn and preoccupied
. Either she had detected something the others had missed, or he was in high spirits
and
worried about Vietnam, Bobby Baker, and the feuding Texas Democrats, and she and the Supreme Court justices were noticing the same “extraordinary variety of expressions” that had mesmerized de Kooning.

Bobby Kennedy spent almost forty-five minutes
at the reception talking to Jackie about Texas and asking if she was certain she had recovered sufficiently from Patrick’s death to endure the strain of campaigning. November 20 was his thirty-eighth birthday, and Ethel threw a party for him at Hickory Hill after the Judicial Reception.
Bobby told one of his guests
that he had misgivings about Texas, saying flatly, “I don’t want him to go.”
He asked O’Donnell if he had seen
the letter from Byron Skelton urging the president to skip Dallas.
O’Donnell said he had decided
not to show it to him since if he suggested removing an important city like that from the itinerary because Skelton was nervous, he would have thought he had lost his mind.

Sometime that evening
Jean Daniel delivered Kennedy’s message
to Fidel Castro. After making Daniel repeat Kennedy’s criticism of the Batista regime three times, Castro said, “I believe Kennedy is sincere. I also believe that today the expression of this sincerity could have political significance.” After condemning the Bay of Pigs and the U.S. blockade, he continued, “But I feel he inherited a difficult situation. . . . I also think he is a realist: he is now registering that it is impossible to simply wave a wand and cause us, and the explosive situation throughout Latin America, to disappear.” Showing that he understood the thrust of Kennedy’s message, he said, “All the same, at a time when the United States is selling wheat to the Russians, Canada is trading with China . . . why should it be impossible to make the Americans understand that socialism leads, not to hostility toward them, but to coexistence? Why am I not Tito or Sekou Toure?”

Kennedy skipped his brother’s party because he wanted Jackie to be rested for Texas. They dined alone at the White House, and
she read him a letter from her mother
urging her to “have a wonderful time in Texas!” In return,
he showed her a tongue-in-cheek letter
he had received from her sister. Lee had written that whenever Jackie went on trips she always received beautiful presents, mentioning that while Onassis had given Jackie an expensive gift after the cruise, she had received only “3 dinky bracelets that Caroline wouldn’t wear to her own birthday party.”

He asked Jackie what she was packing. Referring to the November 22 luncheon at the Dallas Trade Mart, he said, “
There are going to be all these rich
Republican women at that lunch, wearing mink coats and diamond bracelets, and you’ve got to look as marvelous as any of them. Be simple—show these Texans what good taste really is.”
She held up some dresses and outfits
, and they chose a pink suit with a navy-blue collar and a matching pink pillbox hat for Dallas.

After dinner he received a call from George Ball
, who had just returned from Paris and wanted to brief him on U.S. and Common Market relations. He told Ball that he planned to return from Texas on Saturday evening so he could have lunch the next day with Ambassador Lodge, and suggested that he come to Wexford on Sunday evening. They could prepare for his meeting with Chancellor Erhard of West Germany the next Monday, and it would give him an opportunity to show Ball around his new house.

WASHINGTON, SAN ANTONIO, HOUSTON, FORT WORTH

K
ennedy was edgy
on Thursday morning, probably worried that the feuding Texas Democrats would wreck the trip and Jackie would be so miserable that she would refuse to campaign next year.
As soon as he arrived at the Oval Office
he asked Lincoln to check the forecast for San Antonio and Houston. The day before, the Navy had promised cool weather, and Jackie had packed woolen suits. Lincoln reported that today the Air Force was predicting that Texas would be warmer than normal. He swore and called the naval office responsible for the forecast and bawled out the hapless sailor who answered. He fumed some more after learning that Jackie’s bags had already gone to the plane. “Hot.
Hot
,” he complained to Lincoln. “Jackie’s clothes are all packed and they’re the
wrong
clothes.”

He met briefly
with Charles Darlington and Thomas Estes, his ambassadors to Gabon and Upper Volta. As they left, Darlington noticed him putting a hand on his back before straightening up, a gesture he recognized because he also suffered from back pain. But sometime that morning Kennedy would also tell O’Donnell, “
I feel great. My back feels better
than it has in years.”

Because of the cool and drizzly weather,
Nanny Maud Shaw was opposed
to letting John ride the helicopter to Andrews with his parents. Kennedy overruled her and dressed the boy in a peaked yellow sou’wester that made him resemble a tiny fisherman. Caroline put on her favorite clothes to say good-bye, and
she and Shaw waved from the roof
.

As Kennedy and his son were walking to the Marine Corps helicopter, an aide handed him a letter from McGeorge Bundy requesting a two-week vacation in January.
He grinned and scrawled
across the bottom, “Fine. I think it’s time I left myself.”
Hale Boggs
, who had called Dallas a “hornet’s nest,” was passing the White House as the helicopter lifted off. He jumped out of his car and waved, even though he knew no one could see him. Kennedy
spent the short flight teasing his son
and kicking his foot until he shouted, “Don’t, Daddy!”
When John learned
that he was returning to the White House he burst into tears.

Kennedy tucked a file card
into the bathroom mirror of his compartment on Air Force One containing the statistics he had asked Powers to collect. They showed that whereas he had won Texas by only 46,223 votes in 1960, Lyndon Johnson, who had been running for senator as well as vice president, had beaten his Republican opponent by 138,693 votes, and the Democratic governor of Texas, Price Daniel, had won by a margin of 1,124,972 votes. He planned to cite these numbers to remind Texas Democrats that too many party members had voted Republican for the top of the ticket and to shame them into a greater effort on his behalf in 1964.

The enmity between Senator Yarborough and the more conservative party establishment led by Governor Connally and supported by Vice President Johnson was real, but the notion that Kennedy could resolve it by visiting Texas for a few days was preposterous. Johnson and Yarborough lived in Washington, and if that had been Kennedy’s only goal he could have easily invited them to the Oval Office for peace talks. His principal reasons for going remained the same as when he had proposed the trip the previous year: to raise money; energize the party; demonstrate that he could appeal to the oil men, executives, and rednecks composing its conservative wing; and improve his chances of winning Texas by the kind of margins Johnson and Governor Daniels had enjoyed in 1960. To reach out to conservative Democrats, he was speaking that evening at a dinner in Houston honoring Congressman Albert Thomas that would be attended by the city’s business community. The next day, there would be a Chamber of Commerce breakfast in Fort Worth, a luncheon at the Dallas Trade Mart, and a fund-raising dinner in Austin at which
Johnson planned to introduce him by saying
, “And thank God, Mr. President, that you came out of Dallas alive!”

The trip would end with a weekend at Johnson’s ranch that he was dreading. During the flight he told Powers and O’Donnell, “
You two guys aren’t running out
on me and leaving me stranded with poor Jackie at Lyndon’s ranch. If I’ve got to hang around all day Saturday, wearing one of those big cowboy hats, you’ve got to be there, too.” They both declined, saying that they had promised their families to be home by Saturday.

He poked his head into Jackie’s compartment
as she was brushing her hair and said, “Oh, Jackie, just thought I’d check to see if you were all right.” She was beginning to find his constant concern with her happiness tiresome. “Yes, Jack, I’m fine,” she said, the irritation in her voice apparent. “Now will you just go away.”

He strolled down the aisle to where the reporters were sitting. He was smoking a small cigar and had to parry questions about whether or not it was Cuban. (It was.) A reporter asked him about Goldwater and he joked, “
I don’t think Barry is going to have time
for a presidential campaign, though. He’s too busy dismantling the federal government.”

To reduce the risk of Jackie’s becoming tired, he had insisted that their schedule should be relatively light and had refused a request from Congressman Henry Gonzalez, one of his strongest allies in the state, to visit a San Antonio high school that Gonzalez had arranged to have renamed in his honor.
Gonzalez now took him aside on Air Force One
to complain that he was spending only two hours in San Antonio, even though he was more popular there than in the other cities on his itinerary. After Gonzalez pressed him to change his mind and stop at the new John F. Kennedy school, he promised to return sometime that winter to dedicate it.

For months Gonzalez had been complaining to him about the dangers faced by U.S. advisers posted to South Vietnam. His godson, Miguel Jr., was a helicopter cargo master and despite being an “adviser” had flown more than three hundred combat missions. After coming under hostile fire and being forced to grab a rifle from a South Vietnamese soldier to shoot back, he had begged Gonzalez to send him a pistol. Gonzalez had related the story to Kennedy and asked how he could deny soldiers like his godson the means of defending themselves. Kennedy probably had Miguel Jr. in mind when he had shouted to McNamara, as he was preparing to announce the withdrawal of a thousand advisers by the end of the year, “and tell them that means the helicopter pilots, too.” Before returning to his compartment, Kennedy turned to Gonzalez and said, “
Oh, and by the way, Henry
, I’ve already ordered . . . all the helicopters to be out of Vietnam by the end of the year.”

Teenagers filling the observation deck
of the San Antonio airport screamed “Jackie!” She waved as the president strode to a chain-link fence and shook hundreds of outstretched hands to the consternation of his Secret Service agents, who were finding it impossible to enforce the rule that the hands of anyone approaching him should be visible and empty.
Gonzalez had been standing
in a San Antonio crowd like this one when a man shoved a .38 into his stomach and pulled the trigger. The gun had misfired, but he still suffered flashbacks. He had one as Kennedy was shaking hands, telling a companion that it would be easy for someone in the crowd to kill him, and recalling a recent conversation with Congressman Wilbur Mills of Arkansas, during which Mills had snarled, “That damn princeling, silver spoon in his mouth, what the hell does he know about Texas?”

When Kennedy campaigned in
San Antonio in 1960
, sixty thousand spectators had lined the route of his motorcade. Today, more than twice that number had turned out. He heard shouts of “Viva Kennedy,” saw hundreds of schoolchildren cheering and waving flags, and brushed showers of confetti off his hair and shoulders. Spectators broke through police barricades when he stopped to shake hands with some secretaries standing outside an office building, prompting a reporter for the
San Antonio Express
to observe that “
despite the conglomeration of Secret Service agents
on hand, it’s appalling to note how simple it would be to approach a president.”

He kept a close eye on Jackie
. When she began appearing apprehensive, he tried to distract her by suggesting that they make a game of counting the “jumpers” and “leapers” in the crowd, but there were so many they soon abandoned it. The wind was strong and the motorcade sped through some of its twenty-six-mile route, messing up her hair.
Seeking shelter from the wind
, she asked Governor Connally, who was sitting next to his wife, Nellie, on the jump seats, if they could trade places. Kennedy immediately made them switch back. The back bench was higher than the jump seats, and anyone sitting there was more visible.

There were some sour notes
. Demonstrators from the NAACP held signs proclaiming, “Rights Not Favors” and “Mr. President, You Are in a Segregated City.” A man jumped from the sidewalk and gave him an energetic thumbs-down. An American Legion post had hired a skywriting plane to spell out “Cuba?”—a reminder that he had still not dislodged Castro from power.
A constable on traffic duty overheard
a man in a stopped car telling another that the president would not “make it out of the city alive,” but drove off before he could stop them.
The Secret Service failed to keep a mental patient
dressed as a priest and carrying a black bag from taking a front-row seat for the ceremony at the Brooks Aerospace Medical Center, where the president was dedicating a medical library and laboratories.

Senator Yarborough refused to ride in the motorcade with Lyndon and Lady Bird and climbed into the third car with Henry Gonzalez, a departure from protocol that would dominate the following day’s front pages. It was payback for Connally’s failure to invite him to a reception for the president at the governor’s mansion the next evening, and for not seating him at the head table at the fund-raising dinner.
Asked by a reporter to comment
on these snubs, he said, “Governor Connally is so terribly uneducated governmentally, how would you expect anything else?”

Kennedy gave no hint to the crowd at Brooks
that he had ever harbored doubts about the lunar mission. His speech demonstrated how quickly he could change his mind, and how much personal experience—in this instance, his visit to Cape Canaveral—could sway him. He told them that Americans stood “on the edge of a great new era characterized by achievement and by challenge” that called for “pathfinders and pioneers.” He recounted having seen the Saturn rocket booster that would soon launch “the largest payload that any country in the world has ever sent into space.” He reaffirmed his commitment to the space race, saying, “I think the United States should be a leader. A country as rich and powerful as this . . . should be second to none.” He said that when the Saturn rocket was launched in December, “I hope the United States will be ahead. And I am for it.” He closed with a poetic image, recounting how as boys the Irish writer Frank O’Connor and his friends would take off their hats and toss them over orchard walls that appeared too high to climb. Once their hats were on the other side, they had to follow them. “This nation has tossed its cap over the wall of space,” he said, “and we have no choice but to follow it. . . . With the help and support of all Americans, we will climb this wall with safety and speed, and we shall then explore the wonders on the other side.”

Five minutes later he stood in a laboratory
at Brooks, peering through the porthole of an oxygen chamber similar to the one at Children’s Hospital. Four airmen had been inside since November 3, living like lunar astronauts at a simulated altitude of 27,500 feet and breathing 100 percent pure oxygen. He put on a headset to speak with them, the same way he had communicated with Patrick’s doctors. After wishing them good luck, he asked the scientist in charge of the experiment if space medicine might lead to improvements in oxygen chambers for premature infants.
Before leaving Brooks, he invited
Astronaut Gordon Cooper to accompany him to Dallas, saying that he could use having a “space hero” along on that leg of the trip. Cooper declined, explaining that he had to be at Cape Canaveral the following day for some important tests. Had he gone, he would have ridden in the president’s limousine, sitting in the backseat between Jack and Jackie.

Kennedy was jubilant
during the flight to Houston, twirling in his swivel chair and asking if the reception would be as good as in San Antonio. Fearing that the crowds in Houston might be sparse, he had decided against a formal motorcade. Fewer people did turn out than in San Antonio, but they were equally enthusiastic.
He asked Powers to estimate
their number. “For you? About as many as turned out the last time you were here,” Powers said. “But a hundred thousand more today for Jackie.” Kennedy beamed. Looking at his wife, he said, “Jackie is my greatest asset.”
As they pulled into the Rice Hotel
, Powers noticed him giving her an adoring look.

The hotel had stocked their suite with caviar, champagne, and Heineken beer. Before they could enjoy it, Johnson arrived for a meeting and Jackie disappeared into the bedroom. Two weeks before,
Johnson had told his friend Horace Busby
that when he was with Kennedy in Austin on the evening of November 22, he planned to inform him that he had decided against running for vice president in 1964 and would instead return to Texas to run a newspaper. “You be the editor and I’ll be the publisher,” he had said to Busby. “You’ll let me write at least one column a week and we are going to run all the interests out of Texas.” Busby knew that he had been trying to buy a newspaper, but did not think he was serious, and that like any “star performer” he just needed to be flattered and cajoled.

His meeting with Kennedy was so acrimonious
that Jackie could hear them shouting from the next room. Kennedy was angry because he believed that Johnson could have made peace between the warring factions in Texas.
He had complained to Bobby earlier
that Johnson was “a son of a bitch” because he would not “lift a finger” to settle the Yarborough-Connally feud. Nothing had happened that day to change his opinion.
After Johnson stormed out of the suite, Kennedy told Jackie
, “That’s just Lyndon. He’s in trouble.” He did not explain if he was in trouble with
him,
or because of the Bobby Baker investigation, or because he could not control Yarborough and Connally.