JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President (45 page)

JFK confers in the Oval Office on August 15 with his newly appointed ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge. Kennedy taped the meeting without Lodge’s knowledge, and one of the wires running from the table to the floor probably led to a tape recorder in the basement.

(Photograph by Robert Knudsen, White House/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)

A guest remembered the Squaw Island house as being “full of sadness” during the weekend of August 24 and 25. Caroline was particularly distressed by her brother’s death, and her father was the only one who could cheer her up.

(Photograph by Cecil Stoughton, White House/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)

By the summer of 1963, John F. Kennedy, Jr., had become a rambunctious and personable little boy—“friendly, uninhibited, and unspoiled,” according to journalist Laura Bergquist, who sensed a “joyous, funny . . . even sensuous” relationship between father and son.

(Photograph by Cecil Stoughton, White House/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)

JFK meets in the Oval Office with the leaders of the March on Washington on August 28. Earlier that afternoon he had stood at an open window, gripping the sill so hard that his knuckles turned white as he listened to the strains of “We Shall Overcome” wafting over from the Lincoln Memorial and telling a black White House usher, “Oh, Bruce, I wish I were out there with them!”

(Photograph by Cecil Stoughton, White House/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)

JFK cruises on the
Honey Fitz
during the Labor Day weekend. His health that summer was the best of his presidency. One physician recalled him as “bursting with vigor.”

(Photograph by Cecil Stoughton, White House/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)

During a Labor Day interview with CBS newsman Walter Cronkite, Kennedy leveled his harshest criticism yet at South Vietnam’s president Ngo Dinh Diem. Cronkite believed that his comments “effectively pulled the rug out from under Diem and changed the course of events in South Vietnam.”

(Photograph by Cecil Stoughton, White House/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)

Kennedy meets at the White House on September 6 with Arizona Republican senator Barry Goldwater, his likely opponent in the 1964 presidential election. Although the two had become friends while serving in the Senate, JFK relished the thought of running against Goldwater, telling a friend that he could beat “good old Barry” without leaving the Oval Office.

(Photograph by Cecil Stoughton, White House/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)

The Kennedy children and their families gathered at Hyannis Port on September 7 to celebrate their father’s birthday. There were funny hats, noisemakers, and a “Happy Birthday” tablecloth, as if they were still Joe Kennedy’s little boys and girls.

(Photograph by Cecil Stoughton, White House/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)

Presidential friend and adviser Dave Powers welcomes the actress and singer Marlene Dietrich to the White House on September 10. The year before, Kennedy had received Dietrich in the upstairs family quarters and they had slept together. This time he scheduled only a brief afternoon meeting in the Oval Office, even though Jackie was away in Newport. It was perhaps an example of his attempts to curb his womanizing following the death of his son.

(Photograph by Robert Knudsen, White House/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)

JFK and Jackie invited Ben and Tony Bradlee to Newport for the Kennedys’ tenth wedding anniversary. Jackie was not a keen golfer but gamely tagged along.

(Photograph by Robert Knudsen, White House/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)

On his way west for a tour stressing conservation, JFK stopped in Milford, Pennsylvania, on September 24 to speak at a ceremony honoring the descendants of Gifford Pinchot, Jr., the first head of the U.S. Forest Service. The family had donated its chateau-style mansion to the Forest Service for use as a training center. However, Kennedy probably added the ceremony to his itinerary because Pinchot had been the uncle of his lover Mary Meyer and her sister, Tony, Ben Bradlee’s wife, and he was curious to see where the Meyer girls had spent their childhood summers. He is standing between Mary Meyer and her mother.

(Photograph by Cecil Stoughton, White House/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)