JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President (18 page)

September 1–30, 1963

DAYS 83–54

CAPE COD AND MARTHA’S VINEYARD

K
ennedy had met the author William Styron at a 1962 White House dinner honoring Nobel Prize winners. Styron’s first novel,
Lie Down in Darkness,
had won critical acclaim and prestigious awards, making him the kind of intellectual celebrity Kennedy liked to cultivate, and so on Sunday he and Jackie
cruised to Martha’s Vineyard to collect Styron
and his wife, Rose, and give them lunch aboard the
Honey Fitz
. Styron was anticipating an afternoon with a man he considered “the glamorous and gorgeous avatar of American power at the magic moment of its absolute twentieth-century ascendancy.”
*
He was not disappointed and would describe Kennedy as “lethally glamorous,” and possessing a “beguiling and self-effacing modesty.” The food on the
Honey Fitz
was another matter: stone-cold hot dogs in soggy buns, frozen beer, and runny or rock-hard
oeufs gelés
,
with a pitcher of stiff Bloody Marys the only saving grace.

They discussed Massachusetts politics, race, and whether Alger Hiss was guilty (Kennedy thought he was). He asked Styron if he had read “The President and Other Intellectuals,”
an essay by the New York literary critic and all-purpose intellectual Alfred Kazin that had appeared in the October 1961 issue of
The American Scholar
. Kazin had conceded that Kennedy possessed “
the sex appeal of a movie hero
” and “as much savvy as a Harvard professor,” but then dismissed him as a poseur and “would-be intellectual.” He peppered his essay with snide comments about his “restless ambition” and “determination to succeed,” and criticized
Profiles in Courage
as devoid of “any significant ideas” and resembling “those little anecdotes from the lives of great men that are found in
Reader’s Digest
.” He concluded that his most essential quality was “that of the man who is always making and remaking himself,” belittling him as “the final product of a fanatical job of self-remodeling.”

Schlesinger heard prepublication rumors about the article and persuaded Kazin to come to the White House for lunch, hoping that meeting Kennedy might change his mind. Afterward, Kazin added a few grace notes and praised Kennedy’s “freshness of curiosity.” He kept the most wounding passages, however, and told Schlesinger that most New York intellectuals agreed with him that the president was “
slick, cool, and empty
, devoid of vision.” Kennedy tried making light of it, telling Schlesinger, “
We wined him and dined him
, and talked about Hemingway and Dreiser with him. . . . Then he went away and wrote that piece.” Kazin was unrepentant, and in his 1978 autobiography he spoke of Kennedy’s “
wistful need for more confident learning
than he possessed” and his “need to charm,” and called him “a personality under construction,” as if that were a crippling flaw.

Carefully keeping his voice neutral, Styron admitted to having read Kazin’s article.

“Well, what did you think?” Kennedy demanded.

Styron felt as if he had been passed a conversational hot coal. He had found the article tough and caustic, but thought Kazin had made a case that Kennedy lacked the intellectual voltage usually ascribed to him. As he was struggling to formulate a diplomatic response, Kennedy posed a question that showed how deeply the article had wounded him, asking, “What qualifies a critic [i.e., Kazin] to make an assessment of a work if he himself has never created one?” Styron thought, “Boy, Alfred’s really got Kennedy’s goat,” and told him that the critical and creative faculties were different talents, and not necessarily interdependent.

Styron had stumbled upon something more complicated than a New York intellectual getting the goat of a thin-skinned president, although Kennedy was certainly that.
In 1961, he had become so exercised
over the
New York
Herald Tribune
’s
biased reporting that he had canceled the White House subscriptions.
After some one-sided articles
appeared in
Time,
he had ordered an aide to compare how the magazine had covered his first year in office with how it had treated Eisenhower’s first year.
*
He and Ben Bradlee had been friends
for almost a decade, but after an August 1962 article in
Look
quoted Bradlee as saying, “It’s almost impossible to write a story they [the Kennedys] like. Even if a story is quite favorable to their side, they’ll find one paragraph to quibble with,” he refused to speak to him for several months. Making his reaction to negative press articles so puzzling was the fact that in other respects he was a tough-skinned political warrior capable of shrugging off brutal ad hominem attacks. Presidents Johnson and Nixon would also be sensitive about criticism, but they were concerned about its short-term political consequences. Kennedy had his eye on history, and he understood that articles in newspapers like the
Herald Tribune
were its rough draft and that future historians might weigh the opinions of critics like Kazin.

He had meant his warning to Massachusetts state legislators that “
at some future date
, the high court of history sits on judgment on each of us,” and he imagined himself surrounded by current and future historians constantly taking his measure, telling Bradlee, “
Those bastards, they’re always there
with their pencils out.” In
Profiles in Courage
,
he had been the one delivering the verdict, praising eight senators for possessing “
the breath-taking talents
of the orator, the brilliance of the scholar, the breadth of the man above party and section, and, above all, a deep-seated belief in themselves, their integrity and the rightness of their cause”—all qualities that he was cultivating in himself. By calling his scholarly brilliance a sham, Kazin was threatening what he cared about most: a favorable judgment from history’s high court.

All presidents govern with an eye on history, but not all care equally. If historians ranked presidents by ambition instead of achievement, Kennedy would be near the top of most lists. He was swinging for the fences from his first day in office, determined to be ranked alongside or above Lincoln and FDR. Even joining the pantheon of great presidents was not enough; he wanted to be celebrated as a great man who had shaped his times. For this he looked for inspiration to de Gaulle and Churchill, men who had worked at becoming heroic figures (“making and remaking themselves”) and had proved that greatness can be fashioned from a convergence of willpower and historical circumstance. When the French statesman Jean Monnet told Schlesinger that one of de Gaulle’s most remarkable features was “
his precise and persistent concern with the figure
he will cut in history,” and that whenever he considered a decision “he wonders how it will look in the history books thirty years from now,” he could have been describing Kennedy.

Jackie knew how much he valued history’s judgment, and
her famous post-Dallas “Camelot interview
” with the journalist Theodore White was an attempt to preempt the historians. Referring to a journalist who had written some unflattering lines about her husband, she told White, “Men are such a combination of bad and good . . . and what is history going to see in this except what Merriman Smith wrote, that bitter man.” White decided that she had agreed to the interview because she did not want her husband “left to the historians.” After recounting the events in Dallas, she likened his presidency to King Arthur’s mythical Camelot. Most of Kennedy’s knights would dismiss the comparison as the kind of sentimental claptrap he would have hated, but they overlooked the rest of her interview, during which she delivered a passionate exegesis of his love of history. In a stream-of-consciousness monologue, she told White, “But Jack loved history so. But history to me was about Jack. But history made him what he was . . . this lonely sick boy . . . he sat and read history . . . scarlet fever . . . this little boy in bed for so much of the time . . . all the time he was in bed this little boy was reading Marlborough, he devours the Knights of the Round Table . . . history made Jack that way, made him see heroes.” Returning to her memories of Dallas, she punctuated them with “history,” the one-word refrain that explained him: “
History
 . . . everybody kept saying to me to put a cold towel around my head . . . my whole face splattered with blood and hair . . . I wiped it off with Kleenex.
History
.”

Kennedy was not shy about his ambitions. He told Billings that
his goal was “greatness
.” He advised Sidey to “
go for the top
. If you aim for second you will end up there,” leading Sidey to conclude that he was gripped by “
the romantic conviction that he was astride
history.” The diplomat Charles (“Chip”) Bohlen, who had known many of the century’s great leaders, was impressed by Kennedy’s fierce determination to be numbered among them and
sensed an “unknown quality
” that “gave you infinite hope that somehow or other he was going to change the course of history.”

During a White House dinner
on the eve of the Cuban missile crisis, Isaiah Berlin had noticed that whenever Kennedy spoke about Churchill, Stalin, Lenin, and Napoléon, “his eyes shone with a particular glitter, and it was quite clear that he thought in terms of great men and what they were able to do.” When Berlin returned a few weeks later, Kennedy admitted that he had worried that the Bay of Pigs “would always be this fearful stigma which historians would always note.” Berlin decided that he had never known anyone “who listened to every single word that was uttered more attentively,” and his “remorseless attention” reminded him of Lenin, another man who could “exhaust people simply by listening to them.” Like Lenin, Kennedy was “on the job all the time,” Berlin said, and spoke “like a man with a mission or some kind of calling . . . [and] as if there was not much time and great things had to be done.” He decided that his ambition was “terrifying but rather marvelous.”

His terrifying ambition to be judged a great man was an obsession that, with the possible exception of sex, trumped all else. He ran for Congress and the presidency at a young age, and fussed about his health so much because he feared dying before he could leave his mark on history.
When he discovered that Bradlee
had been keeping a diary, he made him promise not to publish anything without his permission until five years after the end of his administration, to prevent him scooping his own memoirs. He made Arthur Schlesinger a special assistant because he had written acclaimed books about Andrew Jackson and FDR, and he hoped he would write a more sympathetic account of his presidency if he co-opted him.
*
He kept a watchful eye on Schlesinger, and after he appeared to be claiming in a newspaper article that he was responsible for giving him crucial advice during the Cuban missile crisis, he swore and told Fay, “
Look at that damn interview
. Schlesinger sounding off that it was his advice that got the President to change his position he previously held and accept Artie’s advice. I’ll tell you what Artie can advise on. He can devote all his mental capacity to advising Jackie on the historical significance of the furniture she puts in the White House.” It was another idle threat.

His ambition explained why he had read a compendium of presidential wisdom,
Sayings of Great Presidents
,
the day after he won the election;
kept the current issue of
History Today
on his night table; and pressed historians to explain what made a president great.
When he heard that the Princeton
historian and Abraham Lincoln expert David Herbert Donald was scheduled to speak at Bobby’s house, he moved the event to the White House and asked Donald: Where would he rank various presidents? What separated a great president from a mediocre one? How did a president acquire greatness? And what about Lincoln? Would he have been regarded as a great president if he hadn’t been assassinated? He argued that Lincoln’s assassination had saved him from the problem of Reconstruction, and Donald agreed that Lincoln may have been lucky in his reputation to die when he did. Donald left a private meeting with him unimpressed by his understanding of American history but fascinated by his determination to become a great man, writing a friend, “
This is a man determined
to go down in our history books as a great President, and he wants to know the secret.”

Every month brought another hundred-year anniversary of a crucial Civil War battle or Lincoln milestone, making it impossible for him
not
to keep a competitive eye on Lincoln.
He asked Sorensen to study the Gettysburg Address
and determine its “secret” before writing a first draft of his inaugural address. He invited the poet and Lincoln scholar Carl Sandburg to the White House for a private tutorial, and must have been pleased when Sandberg said, “
There has never been a more formidable
set of historical conditions for a president to face since Lincoln.”

He made Churchill his template, borrowing or emulating his phrases and constructions. He titled his first book
Why England Slept,
an homage to Churchill’s
While England Slept.
Churchill had opened his 1922 study of world leaders,
Great Contemporaries
,
“
Courage is rightly esteemed
the first of human qualities.” He opened
Profiles in Courage,
“
This is a book about
the most admirable of human virtues—courage.”
Kay Halle never forgot
visiting him in a hospital room when he was twelve to see him hidden behind stacks of books, immersed in Churchill’s
The World Crisis.
When he was a young congressman, his legislative aide Mark Dalton found him sitting up in bed in Hyannis Port, reading one of Churchill’s early books. “
Just listen to this
,” he said in an excited voice. “This is one of the most interesting things I have ever read.” Referring to a leader in the Middle Ages who had to make a fateful decision, Churchill had written, “At that moment, all history stood still.” After repeating the passage out loud, he asked Dalton, “Did you ever read anything like that in your life?”