Kennedy: The Classic Biography (137 page)

He had no morbid fascination with the subject of death. When his wife and daughter stopped by his White House desk with a dead bird Caroline wanted to bury, he preferred not to look at it. (Dead animals, in fact, appalled him. He did not like, to hunt, was upset about the deer he had shot at the LBJ ranch, and often dangerously swerved his car to avoid running over a rabbit or dog, alive or dead, in the middle of the road.)

During the Berlin and Cuban missile crises, he expressed concern not over the possibilities of his death but over the terrible tragedy that might befall his children and all the children of the world. Even then he was not moody or melancholy about the subject; although his own letters to the next-of-kin of those killed in Vietnam, he admitted, constituted one of his most difficult tasks. Perhaps he came closest to revealing his inner thoughts when the Irish Ambassador presented a Wexford cup in honor of little John’s christening with a poem:

…
When the storms break for him

May the trees shake for him

Their blossoms down;

And in the night that he is troubled

May a friend wake for him

So that his time be doubled;

And at the end of all loving and love

May the Man above

Give him a crown.

The President, moving toward the microphone for his remarks of acceptance, whispered to the Ambassador: “I wish that was for me.”

Another poem—one of his favorites, which he often asked Jacqueline to recite—was Alan Seeger’s “I Have a Rendezvous with Death.” He was moved by the fact that Seeger had been cut down in the brilliance of his youth. “It is,” he once said at a war memorial, “against the law of nature for parents to bury their children…a son with all of his life before him.” “The poignancy of men dying young always moved my husband,” said Jacqueline, “possibly because of his brother Joe.” And possibly he lived each day of his own life to the utmost because he did not know when his own rendezvous with death might come.

Simply accepting death as an inevitable fact of life, and simply recognizing assassination as an unavoidable hazard of the Presidency, he refused to worry about his personal safety—not with any bravado or braggadocio but with an almost fatalistic unconcern for danger. He had preferred the risks of a dangerous back operation to the frustrations of life on crutches. He had preferred the risks of flying in poor planes and poor weather to the frustrations of holding back his campaign. And he preferred the risks of less protection in the Presidency to the frustrations of cutting off public contact.

He mentioned more than once—but almost in passing—that no absolute protection was possible, that a determined assassin could always find a way, and that a sniper from a high window or rooftop seemed to him the least preventable. Occasionally he would read one of the dozens of written threats on his life that he received almost every week in the White House. But he regarded assassination as the Secret Service’s worry, not his. “Jim Rowley,” he quipped, “is most efficient. He has never lost a President.”

He paid little attention to warnings from racist and rightist groups that his safety could not be guaranteed in their areas. He went to Caracas where Nixon had been endangered by rioters, he stood overlooking the Berlin Wall within Communist gunshot, he traveled more than 200,000 miles in a dozen foreign countries where anti-American fanatics or publicity-seeking terrorists could always be found, he waded into uncontrolled crowds of handshakers at home and abroad, he advocated policies he knew would provoke venom and violence from their opponents, and he traveled in an open car in Dallas, Texas, where the Lyndon Johnsons and Adlai Stevenson had been manhandled by extremists—not to prove his courage or to show defiance but because it was his job. “A man does what he must,” he had written in
Profiles in Courage
, “in spite of personal consequences, in spite of…dangers—and that is the basis of all human morality.” Life for him had always been dangerous and uncertain, but he was too interested in its opportunities and obligations to be intimidated by its risks.

His trip to Texas, like his mission in life, was a journey of reconciliation—to harmonize the warring factions of Texas Democrats, to dispel the myths of the right wing in one of its strongest citadels, and to broaden the base for his own re-election in 1964. Just before he boarded his helicopter on the South Lawn—November 21, 1963, 10:45 A.M.—I ran out with some suggestions he had requested for “Texas humor.” I never saw him again.

I must ask to be excused from repeating the details of that tragedy. How and why it happened are of little consequence compared to what it stopped. No amount of argument or investigation can alter the fact that Jack Kennedy was assassinated. His assassin was assassinated. His assassin’s assassin, as of this writing, has been condemned to be executed. Some blame leftists, some blame rightists, some blame Dallas or the security forces, some blame us all. John Kennedy would have said it is too late to be blaming anyone—and he would have had compassion for his assassin and compassion for us all.

He would not have condemned the entire city of Dallas. Certainly the warmth of its welcome that day was genuine and impressive. Yet we can never be certain whether the fumes of hate and malice which too often polluted the atmosphere of that city might not have further distorted the already twisted perspective of one of its inhabitants.

He would not have condemned the Dallas police, the FBI and the Secret Service. Certainly there were limitations on their ability to guard an active, strong-willed President in a free society, and certainly to this President his agents were deeply devoted. Yet we can never be certain what prevented a more alert coordination of all the known facts on the Kennedy route and the potential Kennedy assassin.

He would not, finally, have doubted the conclusions of guilt pronounced by the Warren Commission. Certainly the members and staff of that Commission deserve the highest praise for their painstaking investigation and report. Yet, in the Commission’s own words, “because of the difficulty of proving negatives to a certainty, the possibility of others being involved…cannot be established categorically”; and thus we can never be absolutely certain whether some other hand might not have coached, coaxed or coerced the hand of President Kennedy’s killer.

Personally I accept the conclusion that no plot or political motive was involved, despite the fact that this makes the deed all the more difficult to accept. For a man as controversial yet beloved as John Kennedy to be killed for no real reason or cause denies us even the slight satisfaction of drawing some meaning or moral from his death. We can say only that he died as he would have wanted to die—at the center of action, being applauded by his friends and assaulted by his foes, carrying his message of reason and progress to the enemy and fulfilling his duty as party leader.

He regarded Dallas’ reputation for extremism as a good reason to include it on his schedule, not a good reason to avoid it. For, with all his deep commitments, Kennedy was fanatical on only one subject: his opposition to fanatics, foreign as well as domestic, Negro as well as white, on the Left as well as the Right. He was against violence in foreign relations and in human relations. He asked his countrymen to live peacefully with each other and with the world. Mental illness and crime, racial and religious hatred, economic discontent and class warfare, ignorance and fear of this world’s complex burdens, malice and madness in the individual and society—these are the causes contributing to the atmosphere of violence in which a President may be assassinated—and these are the very evils which John Kennedy strove most often to root out.

On the morning of November
11
, as he glanced at a full-page, black-bordered advertisement in the Dallas News accusing him of a series of pro-Communist attitudes and actions, he said to his wife, shaking his head: “We’re really in ‘nut country’ now.” He spoke contemptuously of oil millionaires who paid little taxes, sounding as angry, she thought, as he had been one night in Newport when a wealthy Republican had complained about the minimum wage. But John Kennedy never stayed angry long. He had traveled to Dallas to tell its citizens that “ignorance…can handicap this country’s security,” and that “the righteousness of our cause must always underlie our strength. For as was written long ago: ‘Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.’” On November 22, 1963, in the city of Dallas, Texas, the watchman woke but in vain.

I must also ask to be excused from repeating here in detail the reaction of his staff, his countrymen and the world during those dark days in November—November, a favorite Kennedy month, the month of his election victories and his children’s birthdays and the Thanksgiving reunions at the Cape. “The only two dates that most people remember where they were,” the President once said, “are Pearl Harbor and the death of Franklin Roosevelt.” None of us will forget where we were when we first learned, disbelieved and learned again of the death of John Kennedy. No one will forget how his widow, eyewitness to the lowest level of human brutality, maintained the highest level of human nobility. No one will forget how low the flags seemed at half-mast on that crisp New England kind of day when they buried him at Arlington Cemetery.

The intellectual who had written in 1960 that Kennedy, like his election opponent, was not “a man at whose funeral strangers would cry” was proven wrong. The name of a familiar Irish ballad, which I saw on a hand-lettered sign as we departed the previous summer from Shannon, summed up the feelings of many: “Johnny, I hardly knew ye.” An era had suddenly ended, the world had suddenly changed and the brightest light of our time had suddenly been snuffed out by mindless, senseless evil.

“There is a time to be born and a time to die,” according to the passage he liked to quote from Ecclesiastes; but this was not John Kennedy’s time to die. He had so much more to do and to give that no religion or philosophy can rationalize his premature death as though it served some purpose; and no biographer can assess his truncated life as though it had been completed.

He had written that his brother Joe’s life, though denied its future promise, nevertheless had a “completeness…the completeness of perfection.” He cited the words of Solomon: “Having fulfilled his course in a short time, he fulfilled long years.” All this could be said of Jack Kennedy, too. But that is not enough. Joe’s death, he observed, “seems to have cut into the natural order of things.” So did Jack’s. Upon his inauguration, he had vowed only to begin—but he had only begun. He was given so little time.

If one extraordinary quality stood out among the many, it was the quality of continuing growth. In November, 1963, he had learned more about the uses and limitations of power, about the men on whom he could depend, about the adversaries and evils he faced, and about the tools and techniques of policy. He had undertaken large tasks still to be completed and foreseen future plans still to be initiated. He had, in the words of his favorite Frost poem, “promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep.” With all his accomplishments in the past, he seemed destined to accomplish still more in the future.

“What made it so unfortunate…about Kathleen and Joe,” he once said, was that “everything was moving in their direction. [For] somebody…who is miserable anyway, whose health is bad…that’s one thing. But for someone who is living at their peak, then to get cut off—that’s the shock.” That was the shock of November, 1963. Jack Kennedy was living at his peak. Almost everything seemed to be moving in his direction—abroad after the Cuban missile crisis and Test Ban Treaty, at home with the tax and civil rights bills, in office with a more complete mastery of the Executive Branch. He was healthier and happier than he had ever been, neither wearied nor disillusioned by his burdens, more respected and beloved than before, still growing, still striving, confidently looking forward to five more years of progress in the Presidency—and then suddenly to get “cut off.” The world’s loss is the loss of what might have been.

On the night of November 21, lavishing praise on Texas Congressman Albert Thomas, he had quoted the Scriptures once again: “Your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions…[and] where there is no vision, the people perish.” Jack Kennedy was old enough to dream dreams, and still young enough to see visions. Of what could he have been dreaming as he smiled and waved to the people of Dallas on November 22?

On this most successful trip, he might well have been thinking of future trips, including an early one planned for the impoverished areas of eastern Kentucky for which he had initiated a crash assistance effort. He was planning for early 1964 a tour of Asia—including Japan, India, Pakistan, the Philippines and Indonesia. He looked foward to an official “state visit” to Italy with his wife. He had assured his happily harassed cousin in County Wexford, Ireland, that “we promise to come only every ten years,” but he had later pledged at Limerick to “come back to Erin in the springtime.” Most intriguing of all was the prospect of touring the Soviet Union at the invitation of Nikita Khrushchev, an invitation often repeated in the Chairman’s letters and other messages. The test ban and other signs of accommodation had now made that trip possible; and a Berlin solution, or even a continuation of relaxed tensions, would have made that trip definite.