JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President (11 page)

“The time may come when we’re going to have to do something about this war.” Referring to the possibility of a coup, Kennedy added, “I don’t know who we would sort of support. . . . They [Diem and the Nhus] ought to go but there’s the question of how skillfully that’s done and if we get the right fellow. . . . I just want to be sure that it would be someone better.” Wearying of the conversation, he concluded, “I think [we] have to leave it almost completely in your hands.”

Realizing he had just given a carte blanche to a proud man who had been famously resistant to following orders at the UN, he pulled back slightly, saying, “I don’t know whether we’d be better off with the alternative maybe . . . we’ll have to move more in that direction, but I’ll have to take a look at it before I come to that conclusion.”

“That’s helpful, very helpful. I’ll certainly give it my best. But if they all get assassinated, then you’re really going to have to get on top of it.”

“What about Madame Nhu?” Kennedy asked. But instead of inquiring if Lodge thought she might also be assassinated, he said, “Is she a lesbian, or what? She looks awfully masculine.” (A recent
Time
cover story had called her “a fragile exciting beauty” known for her “flaming feminism.”)

Lodge could not have anticipated this line of inquiry, but he smoothly shifted gears. “I think she is,” he agreed. “I think she also was very promiscuous, sort of a nymphomaniac.” Realizing he had found a subject that interested the president, he described her campaign to curb vice by shutting down Saigon’s dance halls.

Kennedy declared that promiscuity and Puritanism were “a dangerous combination,” prompting this descendent of Massachusetts Puritans to exclaim, “Very well put!”

The sex lives of heads of state, congressmen, Hollywood stars, and, for that matter, almost anyone crossing his path fascinated Kennedy. Nancy Dickerson recalled a foreign ambassador being shocked when he leaned close to him in a receiving line and asked, “
Are you getting any lately
?” A young female reporter told Dickerson that while she was interviewing him he had suddenly asked, “
How’s your romance going
?” After learning that Laura Bergquist had interviewed Fidel Castro in 1961, he asked her, “
Who does he sleep with
? . . . I’ve heard he doesn’t even take his boots off.” Bergquist said she had no idea, but he persisted. “He runs around making these long speeches,” he said, “but where are the dames?” Bergquist went to Hyannis Port a year later, hoping to persuade him to let
Look
run some candid photographs of Caroline. While flipping through the pictures of his daughter he asked her about Che Guevara. She had just met him in Havana and had described him as “
cool, brainy, blunt
, witty, and sensible”—a pragmatic man who could inspire the young, in fact a man not unlike Kennedy. After peppering her with more questions he gave her an appraising look and said, “Something gives me the feeling you’ve got the hots for the ‘Che.’” She spluttered that it was an “odd remark” and reminded him that a photograph of her and Guevara showed they had been two wary antagonists. “Yeah, but you know what psychiatrists say . . . that kind of hostility often leads to an opposite emotion.” She left convinced that he was “
a very swinging sexual animal
and saw others in his own light.”

He ended his meeting with Lodge soon after discussing Madame Nhu’s sex life. A week later, the proud and imperious Lodge arrived in Saigon believing that the president had left things “almost completely” in his hands.

CAPE COD

A
s Kennedy’s helicopter landed on the lawn of his family compound, his nieces and nephews came running. They surrounded him, and Caroline shouted, “
It’s my daddy’s turn
! It’s my daddy’s turn!”—meaning it was his turn to treat at the candy store. They clambered aboard his golf cart, sitting on his lap and clinging to the front and rear bumpers as he sped across the lawn and into the village.

“What’s the limit? What’s the limit?” he demanded as they trooped into the store.

“Everyone gets five cents’ worth,” Caroline explained.

“Anybody got a buck?” he asked his Secret Service agents.

“Daddy, did you take us to the store with no money?”

“Oh, Caroline,” he said, “I’ve goofed again.”

Before his inauguration
Look
had published
an article by Fletcher Knebel titled “
What You Don’t Know About Kennedy
.” It portrayed him as appealingly human and forbiddingly smart, as well as a notorious moocher who seldom carried cash. Knebel’s opening sentence set the tone: “John Kennedy can quote from the classics, poke fun at himself, be as aloof as Charles de Gaulle or as convivial as an Irish baritone, eat gallons of fish chowder, fume like dry ice, drive a car like a fugitive from justice, go weeks without wearing a hat, read esoteric French philosophy, take three showers a day, face physical hazards without a ripple of nerves, lead others with assurance, be casually gracious.” Readers learned that he seldom exploded in anger, was repelled by anything “corny,” demanded privacy, possessed “not a sliver of snobbishness,” could be “thin-skinned,” used profanity “with the unconcern of a sailor,” was “an avid reader,” and was widely regarded as “the most intellectually curious and self-possessed man to win the Presidency in our era.”

“A friend describes the life of the President-elect and his wife as rather like an iceberg,” Knebel wrote, “one part fully exposed to public view and most of it quietly submerged.” He did not reveal that the “friend” was Jackie, or that she had referred to two icebergs in her letter to him, writing, “
I would describe Jack as rather like me
in that his life is an iceberg. The public life is above the water—& the private life—is submerged.” It was an arresting and disturbing metaphor. There are few things colder and more forbidding than an iceberg, and Knebel had tinkered with her words to make them more compatible with the article’s lighthearted tone. His most telling change was to turn her twin icebergs into a shared one. Two icebergs implied that their submerged lives remained separate and mysterious, even to each other, which was probably what Jackie had meant by her comment “
I’d say Jack didn’t want to reveal
himself at all.”

She struck others as equally unfathomable. Her secretary Mary Gallagher described Jackie’s life in the White House as “
strangely remote
,” and claimed she had no really close female friends. Norman Mailer detected “
something quite remote
in her . . . distant, detached as the psychologists say, moody and abstracted the novelists used to say.”
Newsweek
described “
the subtle smile
of a self-restrained pixie,” but the author Marya Mannes had a more perceptive take, calling it “
a smile that had nothing public
about it, that spoke of things withheld and guarded,” and possessed a quality of “serene removal” found in Greek statuary. Ethel Kennedy thought her brother-in-law would “
have a hard time getting to the bottom
of
that
barrel, which is great for Jack, who’s so inquisitive.” When Jackie sat silently during one of the countless Kennedy family celebrations in Hyannis Port, he had said, “
A penny for your thoughts
,” only to have her reply, “If I told them to you, they wouldn’t be mine, would they, Jack?”

Her intelligence and ambitions lay in the submerged regions of her iceberg. When she graduated from boarding school at eighteen, she wrote in her class yearbook under Ambition in Life, “Not to be a housewife.” The editor of the
Washington Star,
where she worked in the early fifties, recalled “
a bright young woman
” who could “see around corners,” and her professor of advanced composition at George Washington University had
praised her “brilliant imagination
” and ability to “write like a million.” Her greatest literary accomplishment had been beating twelve hundred other applicants to win
Vogue
’s
Prix de Paris in 1951. In her winning essay she speculated on what she would do if she became what she called “a sort of overall art director of the twentieth century.”

Her breathless voice masked
an iron will
, and a mean streak. She loathed Frank Sinatra, and when he made small talk while escorting her into the Washington armory for the pre-inauguration gala, she elbowed him in the ribs and said with a frozen smile, “
Look, Frank. Just smile
. That’s all you have to do, okay?” Schlesinger believed that a “
tremendous awareness
, an all-seeing eye and a ruthless judgment,” lay “underneath a veil of lovely inconsequence.” She sometimes turned this judgment on her husband. When he sent Major General Clifton to her table during a state dinner to request that the marine band play some livelier tunes, she told Clifton, “I chose the music myself. But if he insists, have them play ‘Hail to the Chief’ over and over. That should amuse him.” When Kennedy chided her for not caring what people thought about her, she said, “
The trouble with you, Jack
, is that you care too much what people think of you.” A reporter overheard her saying, “
Where is this great Irish wit
you’re supposed to have, this celebrated wit? You don’t show much of it when you’re home.” During the 1956 convention he had asked one of his staff, within her hearing, “
Jackie is superb in her personal life
, but do you think she’ll ever amount to anything in her political life?” She turned the question on him, asking the staffer, “Jack is superb in his political life, but do you think he’ll ever amount to anything in his personal life?” Yet she still slipped notes to the newsmen preparing to grill him on
Face the Nation
that said, “
Don’t ask Jack mean questions
.”

His iceberg was a Greenland-sized mass of secrets and subterfuge that included his frantic philandering, the White House taping system, and his perilous health. His attorney Clark Clifford saw a man who was adept at “
never allowing intimacies
to go beyond a certain point,” and kept “a very tight rein on his personal emotions.” Jackie had the best grasp of the contours of his iceberg’s submerged terrain. Before their wedding she had asked the wife of a known womanizer how to manage an unfaithful husband, only to be told, “
You have to believe that he loves
only you. But I didn’t think I was marrying an unfaithful husband going into my marriage.”

“Well, I think I am,” she replied.

Their icebergs also concealed various physical imperfections and vanities. She wore custom-made glasses to accommodate her widely spaced eyes, white gloves to hide her nicotine-stained fingers and huge hands, and extra-wide shoes to accommodate her enormous feet. He wore a back brace, sometimes hobbled around on crutches, used a sun lamp, and disliked carrying cash because he thought that a wallet marred the drape of his suits. He was so sensitive about his “
Fitzgerald breasts
” that he avoided swimming in public, so concerned with his weight that he traveled with a bathroom scale, and so vain about his thick chestnut hair that he kept a brush in his desk drawer. When he traveled by convertible he waited for an underpass or tunnel before whipping out his comb.

During a campaign trip to Oregon
in 1960, Jacques Lowe took a photograph that captured their iceberg-like isolation. It resembled
Nighthawks,
Edward Hopper’s painting of a man and a woman sitting in a nearly empty urban diner, eyes averted, silent, bored, and alone. In Lowe’s photograph they are sitting side by side in the corner booth of a diner. She is holding a mug of coffee to her mouth and looking down at a magazine. He is resting his elbows on the table, has clasped his hands together in front of his mouth, and is staring across the table at his brother-in-law Stephen Smith, whose back is to the camera. Sunlight streams through some venetian blinds, throwing stripes of sun and shadow across his face. The perfect caption would have been the observation of his friend Chuck Spalding that Jack and Jackie were “
the two most isolated
, most
alone
people I ever met.”

Chuck and Betty Spalding were their guests at Brambletyde, their Squaw Island house, the first weekend after Patrick’s death. Both sensed that the loss had drawn them closer. Pointing to Jackie, Jack told Chuck, “
See that smile on her face
? I put it there.” Jackie told Betty she had been stunned when he wept in her arms. She had never seen anything like it before, and it had left her thinking, “
Maybe now I’m getting through to him
,” and hoping they might have a different kind of marriage.

There are no photographs of the August 17–18 weekend, but when Jackie returned from Otis on August 14, the White House photographer Cecil Stoughton took some color pictures that are the antithesis of Lowe’s “two icebergs at the diner” shot. Stoughton’s photographs show them sitting in blue lounge chairs on Brambletyde’s flagstone terrace. She is wearing a bright pink shift; he is in a blue polo shirt and long trousers. Everyone in the family except John is barefoot and they are surrounded by their dogs: Charlie the Welsh terrier; Shannon the cocker spaniel; Clipper the German shepherd; an Irish wolfhound named Pushinka, a Russian space dog that had been a gift from Premier Khrushchev; and Pushinka’s two mongrel puppies. Many of the dogs had already been on the Cape, but Kennedy had brought the others up from Washington to distract the family from its grief. In some photographs Caroline rests her head on Charlie, John hugs Shannon, and Jackie holds the puppies in her lap. In others, the president is talking on a white telephone or leaning back and smiling, a proud father admiring his family.

Saturday, August 17, was the kind of pleasant summer day that Kennedy usually liked to spend on the water and at the golf course. Instead, he stayed with his family at Brambletyde until five o’clock, when he played a quick round of golf. Sunday was overcast, and except for attending Mass in Hyannis Port he was at home until four thirty, when he played more golf before taking Jackie and the children on a cruise. His phone logs show a few telephone calls on Saturday and Sunday; otherwise he devoted the weekend to the Spaldings and his family, and to reading a book that Jackie had given him.

He and Jackie were voracious readers. For her, books had been an escape from her parents’ troubled marriage; for him, an escape during his many illnesses and hospitalizations. His reading had a determined and remorseless quality, and
he read at meals, in the bathtub
, and even propped a book up on his bureau as he dressed. He had told his friend Larry Newman, “I feel better when there are books around. That’s really where my education comes from.” Exchanging books had become a form of communication for them—a way of expressing feelings they had difficulty voicing. As a homecoming present from Otis, he had given her
Letters from Vatican City
by Xavier Ryne, the
New Yorker
correspondent who covered the Vatican, and a biography of Catherine de’ Medici, a flattering reminder of her contribution to “the work” they had to do together.
When he returned that weekend, she reciprocated
with Jon Manchip White’s
Marshal of France: The Life and Times of Maurice de Saxe.
*
During their 1961 state visit to Paris she had held a long conversation in idiomatic French with President Charles de Gaulle about eighteenth-century French history, making it unlikely that she did not know that in addition to being the foremost military genius of his time, Maurice de Saxe had also been a legendary lover and philanderer.

Kennedy was a fast reader and could have finished the biography that weekend. At the very least he would have read in White’s concise foreword that the count had been “the brilliant adornment of a brilliant age, one of the most renowned and admired men in the Europe of his day,” and “the lover of many celebrated women” who had “won the lifelong friendship of men the stature of Voltaire.” He had also been “among the wittiest and most elegant” military heroes of all time, “a dreamer and an idealist,” and “a deeply interesting person in his own right” who “loved noise, excitement, rewards, women, wine, and glory—especially glory,” and had become a great man “in spite of sickness . . . and the most bitter and ruthless opposition.”

White’s early chapters revealed more similarities. Like Rose Kennedy, who sometimes scooted through her houses in Hyannis Port and Palm Beach with reminder notes pinned to her cardigan and Scotch tape plastered across her forehead to smooth her wrinkles, the count’s mother was “growing increasingly eccentric as the years passed.” His father, Frederick Augustus I, the king of Poland and elector of Saxony, had been a notorious satyr, “an ogre of self-indulgence who regarded the debauching of his brilliant son’s character with positive complacency.” Nevertheless, White wrote, “He was unable wholly to corrupt his son, and many of the princely qualities of Maurice’s nature survive,” including “the energy, magnanimity, and gusto that made him so attractive a person.”

When Jackie lost Arabella, Kennedy had been on a yacht in the Mediterranean; when Maurice de Saxe’s wife had their first child, who would live only a few days, “the father was not at his wife’s side but was rollicking with a sledging party on the frozen Elbe.” Kennedy may have had an affair with Marilyn Monroe; while living in Paris in 1720, Maurice de Saxe “soon became notorious among the ladies of Paris, taking as a lover the glamorous young actress Adrienne Lecouvreur, who discerned in him a real-life hero with the soul of an artist.” Like Jackie, who had taught her husband to care about clothes, food, and furnishings, Lecouvreur found her lover “a promising subject for any woman who had a taste for polishing rough diamonds.” Their romance was troubled, with her complaining, “You were not made to love me in the way that I want to be loved.” After his death, the editor of his memoirs called him a man who “preferred to command love rather than merit it.”