JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President (41 page)

Jackie admitted disliking Connally. “
I just can’t bear him sitting there saying
all these great things about himself,” she said. “And he seems to be needling
you
all day.”

“For heaven’s sakes, don’t get a thing on him,” he said. He pointed out that if everyone on the trip ended up hating one another, “nobody will ride with anybody.”

He doodled on a sheet of hotel stationery
, drawing a sailboat heeling slightly in the wind. He put a diamond-shaped figure above it, perhaps one of the kites he and John had flown off the back of the
Honey Fitz
the previous summer. The doodle was unusual because there was not a single word on the page. Most of his scribblings communicated impatience and boredom. This one was evocative and serene.

He and Jackie dined in their suite
with the publisher of the
Houston Chronicle
. A poll commissioned by the paper showed Kennedy losing Texas to Goldwater by about 100,000 votes if the election were held that day. He told Kennedy that as a courtesy he would not be publishing it until he left town. Kennedy was impressed that the poll showed Connally running ahead of him, and Yarborough winning by the largest margin of all.

The atmosphere was more cordial
when Lyndon and Lady Bird came into their suite after supper. When Lady Bird asked what he would like to do at their ranch on Saturday he told her that he wanted to ride, a request that must have surprised Jackie since he was allergic to horses and never rode in Virginia. But he was serious enough to order riding breeches sent overnight from the White House. Perhaps he was rewarding her for coming to Texas by doing something that he knew would please her.

David Broder would write in the next day’s
Evening Star,
“
Mrs. Kennedy, on her first official
excursion outside Washington since her husband’s election, unleashed her dazzling smile, her demure charm and her dashing wardrobe on the obviously impressed citizenry of San Antonio, Houston, and Fort Worth.” Jackie also counted the day as a success. As her private secretary Mary Gallagher was brushing her hair, she said, “
Gosh, Mary, you’ve been such a great help
. You’ll just have to plan to do a lot of campaigning next year.”

Before driving to the Houston Coliseum for the testimonial dinner honoring Congressman Albert Thomas, the Kennedys stopped in the hotel ballroom to address a meeting of the League of United Latin American Citizens. He introduced her by saying, “In order that my words will be even clearer, I am going to ask my wife to say a few words to you also.” She delivered some well-practiced sentences in Spanish, beginning, “I am very happy to be with you and part of the noble Spanish tradition which has contributed so much to Texas.” There were cheers and shouts of “
Olé!
” Lady Bird thought the president looked “beguiled,” and Powers noticed them exchanging another loving look.

Jack Valenti, one of Johnson’s aides, had helped organize the testimonial dinner and was crouched below the stage when Kennedy delivered his speech.
From this vantage point he could see
his hands shaking as he spoke. It was not a minor tremor but a violent shaking, and Valenti was amazed that someone who appeared so relaxed when he spoke extemporaneously could find it so daunting to deliver a prepared speech.
Nerves may have caused him to flub
a line and say that the United States was about to fire “the largest payroll” into space. He quickly corrected himself, saying “payload into space.” Then, demonstrating how quickly his mind worked, he quipped, “It will be the largest payroll too. And who should know better than Houston. We put a little of it right in here.”

He and Jackie arrived in Fort Worth shortly after eleven that night and checked into a small three-room suite at the Texas Hotel that the Secret Service had chosen because it had only one entrance. Mary Gallagher should have preceded them so she could unpack Jackie’s suitcase and lay out her nightclothes, but she had taken the wrong motorcade car and arrived late.
Kennedy chewed her out for a slip-up
that, like the erroneous weather report, he considered a threat to Jackie’s happiness and her willingness to campaign the next year.

They could not sleep in the same bed
because the special hard mattress that he brought on trips covered only half of the king-sized box spring and the hotel had neglected to provide a single mattress for Jackie. She was so exhausted that instead of calling housekeeping, she decided to sleep alone in the small bedroom. They embraced and he said, “
You were great today
.” She went next door and laid out the pink suit and pillbox hat she would wear the following day.

FORT WORTH AND DALLAS

K
ennedy woke to hear
George Thomas knocking gently on his bedroom door. He said, “Okay,” his signal that Jackie had slept in a different room and Thomas could come in, pull the curtains, draw his bath, and drop off the morning papers.

He shaved, bathed, and put on his back brace—pulling straps, fastening buckles, and wrapping a long Ace bandage in a figure-eight pattern around the brace and his thighs that left him sitting up ramrod straight on his bed.
Then he slipped on the white shirt
with narrow stripes that he had ordered from Pierre Cardin in Paris after admiring it on Ambassador Alphand.

His bedroom did not face the parking lot where he would be speaking at 8:00 a.m., so he tiptoed into Jackie’s room and looked down. Several thousand people had already gathered in the half-light in raincoats and under umbrellas. “
Gosh, just look at the crowds
down there!” he exclaimed. “Isn’t that terrific?” When Larry O’Brien arrived to discuss how to persuade Yarborough to ride with Johnson in today’s motorcades, he led him to the window and said, “
Just look at the platform
. With all those buildings around it the Secret Service couldn’t stop someone who really wanted to get you.”

He showed O’Brien the front page
of the
Dallas Morning News.
A banner headline proclaimed “Storm of Political Controversy Swirls Around Kennedy on Visit.” A headline farther down the page said “Yarborough Snubs LBJ.” “
Christ, I come all the way down here
to make a few speeches—and this is what appears on the front page,” he said, adding in a harsh voice, “
I don’t care if you have to throw
Yarborough into the car with Lyndon. Get him in there.”

He flipped through the newspapers and found a more encouraging article in the
Chicago Sun-Times.
It reported, “
Some Texans, in taking account
of the tangled Texas political situation, have begun to think that Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy may turn the balance and win her husband the state’s electoral votes.”

He asked Dave Powers if he had seen the crowd downstairs. “
And weren’t the crowds great
in San Antonio and Houston,” he added. “And you were right, they loved Jackie.”

He had been told to expect 2,500 people
at the early morning rally. Twice that number cheered as he mounted the flatbed truck serving as a platform. He disliked overcoats as much as hats and shook off the Secret Service agent offering him a raincoat. He shouted, “There are no faint hearts in Fort Worth!” and the crowd roared. The rally had been scheduled early because many in the audience would be union members who had to punch time clocks. He looked down to see clerks and housewives, men in work clothes, and nurses and waitresses in uniforms—a crowd like the one in Boston that had prompted him to say, “
These are my kind of people
.”

He made a joke of Jackie’s absence, saying, “Mrs. Kennedy is organizing herself. It takes longer, but, of course, she looks better than we do when she does it.”

He praised the defense industries that employed many of them and promised his commitment to “a defense system second to none.” He spoke about space, another field where he would not accept second place, announcing that “next month the United States will fire the largest booster in the history of the world, putting us ahead of the Soviet Union in that area for the first time in our history.” Achievements like these, he said, depended “upon the willingness of the citizens of the United States to assume burdens of citizenship.” He concluded, “Here in this rain, in Fort Worth . . . we are going forward!”

The audiences in Billings and Salt Lake City had proved that he had anticipated their weariness with the cold war. The cheers and applause in Fort Worth confirmed that he understood that working-class Americans hungered for a noble cause. As he left for the Chamber of Commerce breakfast in the Hotel Texas ballroom, he told Henry Brandon of the London
Times,
“
Things are going much better
than I had expected.”

As Jackie walked into the ballroom, the businessmen and their wives leaped to their feet. Some stood on chairs, cheering and filling the room with deafening whistles. Kennedy said, “Two years ago, I introduced myself in Paris by saying that I was the man who had accompanied Mrs. Kennedy to Paris. I am getting somewhat that sensation as I travel around Texas.” The head of the Chamber of Commerce gave Jackie a pair of boots, and presented him with a ten-gallon hat. “We couldn’t let you leave without providing you some protection against the rain,” he said. Someone shouted, “Put it on!” He smiled, waved it in the air, and said, “I’ll put it on in the White House on Monday. If you come up, you’ll have a chance to see it there.”

Jackie was so delighted by her reception that she told O’Brien, “I’m going to be making a lot of these trips next year.”
Back in their suite she said
, “Oh, Jack, campaigning is so easy when you’re president. I’ll go anywhere with you this year.”

“How about California in the next two weeks?”

“I’ll be there.”

“Did you hear
that
?” he asked O’Donnell, who had just walked into the room.

He opened the
Dallas Morning News
and saw a full-page advertisement placed by a right-wing group calling itself the “American Fact-Finding Committee.” It was bordered in black like an obituary, headlined “Welcome Mr. Kennedy to Dallas,” and listed twelve charges against him framed as questions, among them: “Why have you scrapped the Monroe Doctrine in favor of the ‘Spirit of Moscow’?” “Why did you host, salute and entertain Tito . . . ?” and “Why has Gus Hall, head of the U.S. Communist Party, praised almost every one of your policies . . . ?”

In 1961, the publisher of the
Morning News,
Ted Dealey, had come to the White House
for a conference and accused Kennedy and his appointees of being “weak sisters,” telling him to his face, “We need a man on horseback to lead this country, and many people in the Southwest think that you are riding Caroline’s tricycle.”
Kennedy fired back
that the difference between them was that “I was elected president of this country and you were not and I have the responsibility for the lives of 180 million Americans, which you have not,” adding, “I’m just as tough as you are . . . and I didn’t get elected president by lying down.”
He answered Dealey again
in a speech he gave several weeks later. Knowing that Dealey had not fought in World War II, he said that he had observed that men tend to like the idea of war until they have tasted it, and speaking of people on the fringes of society (like Dealey) who looked for scapegoats and simple solutions, he said, “They call for a ‘man on horseback’ because they do not trust the people. . . . They equate the Democratic part with the welfare state, the welfare state with socialism, socialism with communism.” The solution, he said, was to “let our patriotism be reflected in the creation of confidence in one another, rather than in crusades of suspicion.”

He handed the
Dallas Morning News
to Jackie, open to the nasty advertisement. “
Oh, you know, we’re heading
into nut country today,” he said. “But, Jackie, if somebody wanted to shoot me from a window with a rifle, nobody can stop it, so why worry about it?”

Some residents of “nut country” had woken
this morning to find a flyer on their doorstep with two photographs of Kennedy, straight on and in profile. They resembled police mug shots and announced that he was “Wanted for Treason.” He was accused of “betraying the Constitution,” “turning the sovereignty of the U.S. over to the Communist controlled United Nations,” giving “support and encouragement to the Communist inspired racial riots,” and appointing “anti-Christians to Federal office.”

Pacing around the room as he spoke, he said, “
You know, last night
would have been a hell of a night to assassinate a president. I mean it. There was the rain and the night, and we were all getting jostled. Suppose a man had a pistol in a briefcase.” (At this, he pantomimed someone pulling out a gun and pointed his index finger at the wall, jerking his thumb to simulate a trigger.) He continued, “Then he could have dropped the gun and the briefcase and melted away in the crowd.” The performance was more Walter Mitty than Hitchcock, probably an attempt to put Jackie at ease by making fun of the advertisement.

He and Jackie had been in the suite
for almost twelve hours but only now did they notice that they had been surrounded by original works of art, including paintings by Monet, Picasso, Dufy, and Van Gogh. They had also overlooked a catalog on the coffee table titled “An Art Exhibition for the President and Mrs. John F. Kennedy.” It listed the titles and provenance of the artworks and explained that they were on loan from local collectors and museums. The Kennedys had arrived late and exhausted and had been busy that morning, but it was still odd that a president who had made the arts a signature issue and a First Lady who had studied art history had failed to recognize that, for example, Dufy’s whimsical
Bassin de Deauville,
with its gaily colored sailboats zipping across a harbor, was an original and not a print. “
Isn’t this sweet, Jack
,” she said. “They’ve just stripped their whole museum of all their treasures to brighten up this dingy hotel suite.” The wife of a Fort Worth publishing executive had organized the show, and he could have easily written her a note after returning to Washington.
Instead, he grabbed a telephone book
, looked up her number, and called. After they spoke, he handed the phone to Jackie, who said, “They’re going to have a dreadful time getting me out of here with all these wonderful works of art.”

His last visitor, Lyndon Johnson, had brought his sister and brother-in-law to shake his hand. “
You can be sure of one thing
, Lyndon,” he said in front of these witnesses. “We’re going to carry two states next year—Massachusetts and Texas. We’re going to carry at least those two states.”

“We going to carry a lot more than those two,” Johnson promised.

His use of the word “we” had to have caught Johnson’s attention. Perhaps Kennedy had changed his mind about replacing him on the ticket after his encouraging reception in San Antonio, Houston, and Fort Worth, but it is also possible that the “we” was an uncalculated expression of his momentary exuberance.

Before leaving, he disappeared into his bedroom and changed his wardrobe, putting on a blue-striped shirt, a solid blue silk tie, and a newly pressed gray-and-blue lightweight suit. While he was gone,
Secret Service Agent Roy Kellerman told O’Donnell
that there was a chance of rain forecast for Dallas and asked if they should put the bubble top on the Lincoln Continental limousine taking the president from Love Field to the Dallas Trade Mart. Jackie liked the top because it protected her hair from the wind, but Kennedy loathed it, once telling a friend, “
They put me in a bubble top thing
and I can’t get to the people. . . . I belong to them and they belong to me.” Knowing how he felt, O’Donnell told Kellerman to leave it off unless it was raining.

Only thirty miles separated Fort Worth and Dallas. It made no practical sense for Kennedy to fly between them, but it made political sense, because newsmen could film him being greeted at Love Field. During the few minutes that he was airborne he changed into his third clean shirt of the day, told Representative Olin Teague of Texas that he would go to Cape Canaveral in December to watch the Saturn launch because
he thought the space program “needed a boost
,” wrote some last-minute ideas to include in his speech at the Trade Mart, scribbling, “
Equal choice / not any reflection
/ back—govt reform / we are going forward,” and summoned Connally and Yarborough into his cabin, where in three minutes he strong-armed Connally into inviting Yarborough to the reception in Austin and seating him at the head table. As Connally left his cabin he muttered, “
How can anyone say no
to that man?”

During the flight his Air Force aide Godfrey McHugh overheard O’Brien and O’Donnell telling members of his Secret Service detachment, “
Please, when we go to Dallas
, don’t sit like you always do in the front seat of the car [the presidential limousine] because we want to give him full exposure. He will win them by his smile. . . . We want him to be seen. It’s enough to have two Secret Service men without having a third body in front.” The agents were not happy with the request, but they complied nevertheless.

When he landed at Love Field in 1961
, no one had greeted him except the chief of police. Today he looked out the window, saw several thousand supporters and a line of dignitaries, and told O’Donnell, “
This trip is turning out
to be terrific. Here we are in Dallas, and it looks like everything in Texas is going to be fine for us.” As he and Jackie waited in the aisle for the door to open, Powers said, “
You two look like Mr. and Mrs. America
,” and reminded them that he should wave to those on the right hand side of the car while she waved to the left, because “If both of you ever looked at the same voter at the same time, it would be too much for him!”

The weather had turned on a dime: gray and drizzly when they left Fort Worth, sunny and warm when they landed in Dallas. Abandoning protocol, Jackie disembarked first. They may have lined up this way in the aisle, but it is also possible he decided that she should precede him because after yesterday he knew that she would draw the loudest cheers. Intentional or not, it symbolized a slight shift in their marital balance of power.

A reporter watching her emerge
from Air Force One compared the bright sunlight hitting her pink suit to “a blow between the eyes.”
This was the first time that most at Love Field
had seen her and the president in color outside of some magazine photographs. It was an electrifying moment, like the one in
The Wizard of Oz
when a black-and-white Kansas becomes a dazzling, Technicolor Oz.
A Dallas woman said she was amazed
at his coloring, “because I had only seen him previously on black-and-white TV. He was very fair, almost pink, and his hair was almost blond in the sunlight.” A television correspondent exclaimed, “
I can see his suntan
all the way from here!”