JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President (2 page)

August 7–14, 1963

PROLOGUE TO THE LAST HUNDRED DAYS

Even though people may be well known, they still hold in their hearts the emotions of a simple person for the moments that are the most important of those we know on earth—birth, marriage, and death.

—Jacqueline Kennedy

WASHINGTON, CAPE COD, AND BOSTON

J
ohn F. Kennedy’s second son was born twenty years to the day after the Navy rescued Kennedy from the group of Pacific islands where he had been marooned for five days after a Japanese destroyer rammed his torpedo boat,
PT 109,
slamming him against the cockpit wall and killing two crewmen. The medal that he won for “courage, endurance, and excellent leadership” and “extremely heroic conduct” during these five days, and John Hersey’s account of his heroics in
The
New Yorker,
became the early engines of his political career. He answered questions about his exploits with a self-deprecating “
It was involuntary
, they sank my boat,” but he arranged things so that seldom a moment passed without his eyes resting on some reminder of
PT 109
. When he looked across the Oval Office he saw a scale model of the boat on a shelf, and
when he looked up from his papers
he saw on his desk the coconut shell onto which he had carved his SOS: “Nauro Isl Commander—Native knows Pos’it—He can pilot 11 alive—Need small boat—Kennedy.” When he emerged from his helicopter at the family compound in Hyannis Port he heard his nieces and nephews chanting, “
In ’forty-three, they went to sea
! / Thirteen men and Kennedy! / To seek the blazing enemy!” and saw on the beach the dinghy he had christened
PT 109½
. Twice a day he swam the breaststroke in the White House pool, the same stroke he had used while towing a badly burned crewman through shark-infested waters for five hours, gripping the strap of his life preserver in his teeth. Every morning he fastened his tie with a metal clasp shaped like a torpedo boat with “PT 109” stamped on its bow, and because he had given copies of this clasp to his friends and aides, he saw it whenever they walked into his office.
All of which may explain why
Kennedy’s friend and fellow World War II naval veteran Ben Bradlee is certain that when Evelyn Lincoln hurried into the Oval Office at 11:43 a.m. on August 7, 1963, to report that Jackie had gone into premature labor on Cape Cod, there was “no way on God’s earth” that he did not think,
My child is being born twenty years to the day after I was rescued,
a coincidence providing an additional emotional dimension to a day that would be among his most traumatic.

Jackie had been scheduled for a cesarean section at Washington’s Walter Reed Army Hospital in September, but because John Kennedy, Jr., had arrived prematurely almost three years earlier, the Air Force had prepared a suite for her at the Otis Air Force Base Hospital. Kennedy had asked her obstetrician, John Walsh, and her White House physician, Janet Travell, to vacation on the Cape that summer.
He called Travell before flying
to Otis, and she reported that Walsh had taken Jackie to the hospital and was preparing to perform an emergency cesarean. Jackie would be fine, she said, but a baby born six weeks prematurely had only a fifty/fifty chance of surviving.

If there was ever a time when Kennedy could imagine beating these odds, it was the summer of 1963, a splendid season that his brother Bobby recalled being “
the happiest time of his administration
.” On June 28 he had given his
Ich bin ein Berliner
oration, a stirring summation of the difference between democratic and totalitarian states (and probably the finest speech delivered by an American president on foreign soil), to a quarter of a million Germans filling the future John F. Kennedy Platz. After Air Force One took off for Dublin he told Ted Sorensen, “
We’ll never have another day
like this one as long as we live,” but he was soon describing his visit to his ancestral villages in Ireland as
the three happiest days
of his life. The day after returning from Europe he went to Hyannis Port for a Fourth of July he called “
the greatest weekend
of my life.” After disembarking from his helicopter he had embraced Jackie, surprising reporters who had never seen them hug or walk arm in arm. The weather had been superb, three sparkling summer days. He felt healthier than he had in years, “
bursting with vigor
,” according to Dr. Travell. He took long swims, flew kites with John off the back of the
Honey Fitz,
the presidential cabin cruiser, and because his chronic back pain had largely vanished, played golf for the first time since 1961. He screened a film of his Irish trip on three straight evenings, and when he could not persuade anyone but his brother Ted to sit through it again they watched it alone, prompting his former Navy buddy Paul (“Red”) Fay to complain, “
All we are getting here still
is his Irish visit. . . . Jack brings the conversation back round to it and invariably shows the film which I have now seen for the sixth time.”

He had been a detached father when John and Caroline were infants, telling Fay, “
I don’t understand how you can get such a big kick
out of your children. . . . Certainly nothing they are going to say is going to stimulate you.” But once Caroline began talking, they forged a closer relationship, and by the summer of 1963 John had become a rambunctious and personable little boy. When Kennedy arrived at Hyannis Port he would shout, “
It’s time for Father and Son
to get to know each other.” John would dash into his arms and they would fall onto the lawn so he could hold the boy in the air, tickling him and saying, “
John, aren’t you lucky
to have a dad who plays with you like this?” His newfound rapport with his children had increased his excitement for his next one, and as he passed Lincoln’s desk he often told her, “
Soon you’ll have three
coming over to get candy from your candy dish.”

There had been rocky periods in his marriage, but Jackie’s pregnancy had brought them closer. Fay and his wife, Anita, had been their houseguests the weekend before Jackie went into labor.
When Kennedy failed to appear for an excursion
, Fay went upstairs and found them lying in bed, arms wrapped around each other, more intimate than he had ever seen them. Later that weekend Kennedy told Fay, “
I’d known a lot of attractive women
in my lifetime before I got married, but of all of them there was only one I could have married—and I married her.”

After returning to Washington
from these summer weekends, he told his friend Dave Powers how much he was enjoying his children and how great everything was. Powers was a puckish, middle-aged Irish American who had been with him since his first campaign. His principal duties involved ushering distinguished visitors into the Oval Office (he had once famously told the Shah of Iran, “You’re my kind of shah”), entertaining the president with jokes, reminiscing about earlier campaigns, swimming alongside him in the White House pool, and keeping him company when his family was away, because he was a man, Powers said, who “
could not bear to be alone
, ever.”
During the summer of 1963 they often sat together
on the Truman Balcony, eating dinner off trays and listening to songs from Kennedy’s youth, such as “Stormy Weather” and “The Very Thought of You.” The spotlights came on, illuminating the White House fountain and the Washington Monument, and Kennedy invariably said, “It gets better every night” or “This is the best White House I’ve ever lived in.” When he became sleepy, Powers went upstairs with him, sitting by his bed and talking until he mumbled, “Good night, pal,” the signal that Powers could extinguish his light and return to his own family.

The summer of 1963 was also a high point in Kennedy’s presidency, “
a remarkably intensive but productive period
,” according to Sorensen. The
Wall Street Journal
reported in its front-page “Washington Wire” on August 9 that “White House optimism grows, little restrained by Washington’s summer doldrums. The Kennedy team feels the tide of events runs his way, at home and abroad. The President sees a chance for new accords to ease the cold war. The nation’s civil rights crisis seems to come under control. . . . Republican squabbling on issues and candidates pleases him as an omen for 1964.”

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Maxwell Taylor, had known what he called “
many President Kennedys
.” They included the masterful leader of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, the “supremely confident” man who emerged during the summer of 1963, and the president shaken by the “Bay of Pigs,” shorthand for the bungled attempt of CIA-trained Cuban exiles to overthrow the Communist regime of President Fidel Castro in April 1961. The Eisenhower administration had planned the operation, Kennedy’s civilian and military advisers had endorsed it, and he had approved what amounted to an amphibious landing on a hostile shore attempted by amateur Cuban soldiers overseen by American amateurs. He shouldered the blame but was furious with the Pentagon and CIA for a fiasco that he feared had mortally wounded his presidency.

As he and a friend drove out of the White House a few weeks after the catastrophe, he smiled and waved at a group of cheering supporters while muttering, “
If they think they’re going to get me
to run for this job again, they’re out of their minds.”
He told his best friend
and former prep school roommate Lem Billings that the presidency was “the most unpleasant job in existence,” and that he doubted anyone would want to build a library for what was promising to be “a rather tragic administration.” He remained pessimistic well into the fall. When the NBC correspondent Elie Abel asked him to cooperate on a book about his first term, he said, “
Why would anyone write a book
about an administration that has nothing to show for itself but a string of disasters?” But by the summer of 1963, following his successful resolution of the Cuban missile crisis, a strong showing by Democrats in the 1962 elections, and healthy economic growth, he had become almost as happy and confident as President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Like Roosevelt, who had faced the Depression and the Second World War, he was contending with two grave threats to the nation’s survival, a nuclear war and a racial conflict. On two successive days in June 1963 he delivered speeches addressing each one that represented a sharp departure from the caution marking his first two years in office.

Contrary to his public image as a dashing and decisive chief executive, Kennedy was, in fact, in the words of his economic adviser Paul Samuelson, “
an extremely hesitant person
who checked the ice in front of him all the time.” Winning the White House by about 113,000 votes out of the 69 million cast, the narrowest margin in almost a century, had encouraged his caution and pragmatism. There had been much ice checking during his first two years in office, leading the columnist Joseph Kraft to say that his motto could have been “
no enemies to the right
.”

At first, Kennedy had avoided challenging the hard-line cold warriors in either party and resisted engaging the Soviet Union in serious disarmament talks. He changed his mind after the Cuban missile crisis demonstrated how easily a misjudgment by either side could start a nuclear war. The crisis had started in October 1962, when Kennedy learned that the Soviet Union was installing missiles armed with nuclear warheads in Cuba capable of attacking the U.S. mainland. He ordered a naval blockade of the island to prevent the arrival of more Soviet arms, and demanded that the Soviets remove the missiles and bases. For almost a week the two nations teetered on the brink of a nuclear war. The crisis was averted by a deal in which the Soviets agreed to dismantle the missiles and close the bases in exchange for a secret undertaking by Kennedy to do the same with U.S. missiles in Turkey. Kennedy’s friend David Ormsby-Gore, who was serving as Britain’s ambassador, observed that after the crisis, “
he finally realized that the decision
for a nuclear holocaust was his. And he saw it in terms of children—his children and everybody else’s children. And then that’s where his passion came in, that’s when his emotions came in.” The risk of radioactive fallout had worried him since 1961, when the Soviet Union unilaterally decided to resume atmospheric nuclear tests, forcing him to do the same. When he asked his science adviser Jerome Wiesner how fallout returned to the earth from the upper atmosphere, Wiesner explained that it came down in the rain. Staring at the rain falling in the Rose Garden, Kennedy said, “
You mean there might be radioactive
contamination in that rain out there right now?”

He used a June 10, 1963,
commencement address at American University
to announce his own unilateral suspension of atmospheric nuclear tests and to propose negotiations in Moscow aimed at drafting a treaty banning nuclear testing in the atmosphere, underground, underneath the oceans, and in outer space. The speech was a dramatic break from eighteen years of cold war rhetoric by Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, and himself. He blamed both sides for the arms race, called on Americans to “reexamine our own attitude—as individuals and as a Nation,” acknowledged Russia’s wartime sacrifices, declared that “no government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue,” and reminded Americans that they and the Soviet people “breathe the same air,” “cherish our children’s future,” and “are all mortal,” expressing these truths so eloquently that one British newspaper called the address “
one of the greatest state papers
of American history.” Soviet newspapers reprinted its entire text and
Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev praised it
as the best speech by any American president since Roosevelt.

The next day Kennedy delivered a nationally televised address
on civil rights that James Farmer of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) lauded as the “
strongest civil rights speech made by any president
, Lincoln included.” After saying that “race has no place in American life or law,” he announced that he was sending Congress a comprehensive civil rights bill guaranteeing all citizens the right to be served in hotels, restaurants, retail stores, and other public facilities. If passed, it would represent the most dramatic advance in civil rights since the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in
Brown v. Board of Education
declared separate public schools for black and white students to be unconstitutional. As in his American University speech, he asked Americans to exercise their moral imaginations. After reminding whites that black citizens could not eat in public restaurants, send their children to the best public schools, or vote for their representatives, he asked, “Who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place?” When he finished, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., told a companion, “
Can you believe that white man
not only stepped up to the plate, he hit it over the fence!” The next day King sent him a telegram praising the speech as “
eloquent, passionate
and unequivocal . . . a hallmark in the annals of American history.” King and Farmer would have been even more impressed had they known that all of Kennedy’s senior advisers except his brother Bobby had opposed him delivering a speech framing the issue in moral terms, and submitting a civil rights bill to Congress.