JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President (24 page)

Heller, like many in the administration, had fallen in love with Kennedy. It was a platonic affair, but romantic nonetheless, and his complaints sounded like someone bitching about a callous lover. The White House aide Walt Rostow spoke of an “
unspoken but very powerful affection
—going both ways” between Kennedy and his staff, and the CIA director, John McCone, a Republican, claimed, “
Never in my time in public life
have I known a man who drew so much affection from those with whom he closely dealt.” Schlesinger was also in love. In the summer of 1960, he had condemned Kennedy’s choice of Johnson as a running mate as “
evidence of the impressively cool
and tough way Jack is going about his affairs,” calling him “a devious and, if necessary, ruthless man,” and saying, “My affection for him and personal confidence in him have declined.” Kennedy invited Schlesinger to Hyannis Port three weeks later and seduced him all over again. After a four-hour cruise complete with Bloody Marys, swimming, and target shooting, Schlesinger was
describing him as “warm, funny, quick
, intelligent and spontaneous.”

•   •   •

A
T
THE
TIME
OF
THE
B
IRMINGHAM
BOMBING
, the civil rights bill had been stalled in the House Judiciary Committee, where liberals led by the chairman, Emmanuel Celler, were threatening to add amendments that would make it unpalatable to moderate Republicans. During a mass meeting in Birmingham on Monday, civil rights leaders had urged the government to send the Army into the city to protect the black community. King had endorsed their request, calling the city “
in a state of civil disorder
” and accusing Wallace of fomenting “an atmosphere of violence.”

If Kennedy refused to send troops to Birmingham, he would embolden the House liberals insisting on a tougher civil rights bill, but occupying it with federal troops would smack of a second Reconstruction, leaving its white population still more embittered and hostile. He believed that the only realistic solution was to facilitate communication and accommodation between leaders of the black community and moderate white businessmen and politicians, presuming they existed. To promote this, he decided to send a two-man committee to the city to mediate between the communities.
Bobby’s first choice
for the assignment had been Earl Blaik, a sixty-six-year-old retired West Point football coach whom he had recruited the previous year to resolve a feud between the NCAA and AAU that was threatening the U.S. Olympic effort. Blaik had persuaded General Douglas MacArthur to join him and they had quickly settled the dispute. Bobby hoped they could perform the same magic in Birmingham, but this time Blaik refused to involve MacArthur on the grounds that the assignment was too taxing for an eighty-year-old man. He suggested General Kenneth Royall, who had supposedly integrated the troops while serving as Truman’s secretary of the Army. Bobby called Royall, who agreed to serve if Blaik joined him. Bobby pressed for an immediate commitment, explaining that the White House wanted to make an announcement within the hour, before the president met with a delegation of black leaders. Had he and his brother been in less of a hurry, they might have discovered that instead of presiding over the integration of the Army, Royall had fought it, telling a congressional committee that he did not believe the armed forces should be turned into “
an instrument for social evolution
.”
The black journalist Simeon Booker
, who would soon expose Royall, would also reveal that in Blaik’s eighteen years as head coach at West Point he had never had a single black player on his team. As with Kennedy’s other mistakes, his impatience and his preoccupation with public relations lay behind this one.

Dr. King opened the White House meeting
by declaring that the Negro community in Birmingham was reaching “a breaking point.” He warned that without “a new sense of hope and a sense of protection” there could be “the worst race rioting we’ve ever seen in this country.” Kennedy asked if there was any hope. King said there were “many white people of goodwill,” and agreed that troops could not solve the problem. He suggested that the attorney general visit the city and attempt to open lines of communication.

Kennedy announced that he had asked Mayor Albert Boutwell to send a delegation to the White House on Monday, and had appointed Royall and Blaik, “two very good men,” as his personal emissaries. If the situation continued to deteriorate despite these measures, he would consider troops. He urged the leaders to consider the larger historical picture. “If you look . . . at any of these struggles over a period across the world, it is a very dangerous effort,” he said. “So everyone just has to keep their nerve.” If they responded with violence, they risked losing the support of whites of goodwill, and once that happened, “we’re pretty much down to a racial struggle.”

The leaders praised the Blaik-Royall mission at a press conference, with King calling Kennedy’s pledge not to allow the property and rights of Negro citizens to be trampled, “
the kind of federal concern needed
.”

Kennedy flew to New York that evening. While he was dining at a friend’s apartment,
two men in a station wagon
hurled a paint bomb at his parked limousine, spattering it and hitting a Secret Service agent. It was not known if they had been targeting the president. He did not leave the Carlyle for the United Nations until late the following morning, allowing time for him to cross Madison Avenue and spend several minutes in the basement of Klejman’s gallery, staring at the floodlit statue of the handsome Greek athlete.

He told the UN General Assembly
, “Today the clouds have lifted a little so that new rays of hope can break through,” and that although “the long shadows of conflict and crisis envelop us still, we meet today in an atmosphere of rising hope, and at a moment of relative calm.” Speaking of “a pause in the cold war,” he said, “If we can stretch this pause into a new period of cooperation . . . then surely this first small step [the test ban treaty] can be the start of a long and fruitful journey.” He proposed “agreements on measures which prevent war by accident or miscalculation,” “further measures to curb nuclear arms,” and a treaty “to keep weapons of mass destruction out of space.”

He waited until the end to spring his surprise. “Finally, in a field where the United States and the Soviet Union have a special capacity—in the field of space—there is room for new cooperation, for further joint efforts in the regulation and exploration of space,” he said. “I include among these possibilities a joint expedition to the moon.” After asking, “Why . . . should man’s first flight to the moon be a matter of national competition? Why should the United States and the Soviet Union . . . become involved in immense duplications of research, construction, expenditure?” he proposed sending to the moon “not the representatives of a single nation, but the representatives of all our countries.”

He concluded on a note of grandiloquent optimism that reprised his American University speech: “I believe the problems of human destiny are not beyond the reach of human beings.” The test ban treaty might not end war, resolve every conflict, or bring freedom to every nation, he admitted, but it could be a lever, “and Archimedes, in explaining the principles of the lever, was said to have declared to his friends, ‘Give me a place where I can stand—and I shall move the world.’ My fellow inhabitants of this planet . . . let us see if we, in our own time, can move the world to a just and lasting peace.”

The usually dour Soviet foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, was smiling broadly as he stood in the receiving line. When he reached Kennedy he held up the line for several minutes to deliver a personal message from Khrushchev. When a reporter asked if this new spirit of détente would last, he replied, “
It must last
.”

Kennedy’s proposal had caught everyone, including most in his own administration, by surprise. A boldface, front-page headline in the
New York Times
proclaimed, “Kennedy Asks Joint Moon Flight by U.S. and Soviet as Peace Step.” The
Washington Post
banner headlines said, “Kennedy Urges Joint Moon Trip” and “Air of Optimism About Cold War Marks U.N. Talk.” His proposal was described as “a sudden reversal of the Administration’s position on the ‘space race’” and “the first step toward pulling out of the costly ‘moon race.’” Like his civil rights speech and his American University “Peace Speech,” his UN address had been a closely held secret until he delivered it.

Before Kennedy left
the United Nations, Adlai Stevenson briefed him on
a memorandum he had received
from William Attwood, a member of his staff who had recently completed a tour as U.S. ambassador to Guinea. Earlier that week the Guinean ambassador to Cuba had informed Attwood that Castro resented being pushed around by the Russians and might be prepared to reach an accommodation with the United States. After hearing similar comments from other African diplomats, Attwood, who during his career as a journalist had held a groundbreaking interview with Castro, wrote Stevenson a memorandum asking for authorization to contact Cuba’s UN delegate, Carlos Lechuga, with a view to determining whether Castro was willing to participate in a secret dialogue.

Attwood had been two years behind Kennedy at Choate and knew him well enough to craft a memorandum that would catch his attention. He opened by saying that he was proposing “a course of action which, if successful, could remove the Cuban issue from the 1964 campaign.” Instead of offering Castro a “deal,” he recommended “a discrete inquiry into the possibility of neutralizing Cuba on our terms,” and argued that the present policy of isolating Cuba was leaving America “in the unattractive posture of a big country trying to bully a small country,” and aggravating Castro’s anti-Americanism. Given this, he said, “We have something to gain and nothing to lose by determining whether in fact Castro does want to talk and what concessions he would be prepared to make.” He offered to solicit an invitation from Lechuga and travel to Cuba as a private citizen. His diplomatic rank was high enough to guarantee that his conversations with Castro would be serious, yet he was not so well known that reporters would notice his absence. Their meeting would be “purely exploratory” and the president could decide afterward whether to pursue more formal negotiations. “At the moment,” Attwood wrote, “all I would like is the authority to make contact with Lechuga. We’ll see what happens then.”

He handed his memorandum to Stevenson on Thursday. Stevenson liked the idea but said, “
Unfortunately, the CIA is still in charge
of Cuba.” He nevertheless promised to raise it with Kennedy. Averell Harriman, who happened to be at the UN mission at the time,
said he was “adventuresome enough
” to favor the scheme and suggested running it past Bobby Kennedy because of its political implications.
Stevenson briefed the president
on it while he was at the UN, and Kennedy approved Attwood’s request to arrange a chance social meeting between himself and Lechuga.

After a week that had seen Kennedy proposing to end the space race, sending a high-level delegation to South Vietnam, lobbying a skeptical public to support his tax cut, persuading Dr. King not to demand troops in Birmingham, and authorizing secret negotiations with Cuba, he arrived in Newport in a slap-happy mood.

To mark National Library Week, the White House had just released a list of
his twelve favorite books
. Ten were nonfiction, and nine of those were biographies, including Margaret Coit’s
John C. Calhoun.
(Jackie believed he liked biographies because he was “looking for lessons . . . from history.”) The only novels were Stendhal’s
The Red and the Black,
an early-nineteenth-century work about the ambitious son of a carpenter whose attempt to crash Parisian society resembled Joe Kennedy’s struggle to win the acceptance of Boston, and Ian Fleming’s
From Russia with Love,
the best of the James Bond novels. Kennedy liked Fleming’s books so much that
he was attempting to write his own Bond-style thriller
involving a coup d’état masterminded by Vice President Johnson. There are no notes for the book among his personal papers, so he was probably keeping the plot in his head. He called Chuck Spalding periodically to bring him up to date, recounting that in one chapter, “Lyndon has tied up Mrs. Lincoln and Kenny O’Donnell in the White House closet and he’s got a plane to take them away.”

While cruising on the
Honey Fitz
on Saturday afternoon he persuaded Paul and Anita Fay to act in a Bond homage that would be filmed by Chief Petty Officer Robert Knudsen. He assigned everyone parts before docking at the private pier in front of Hammersmith Farm, not realizing that the reporters Frank Cormier and Merriman Smith were shadowing the
Honey Fitz
in a speedboat and watching some of his amateur dramatics through binoculars. Their article reported that Fay had “
stretched prone on the long pier
 . . . clowning with Mr. Kennedy for the benefit of a government photographer.” The president then walked down the pier and “laughingly put his foot on Mr. Fay’s stomach.”

Jackie persuaded the Secret Service agents to play supporting roles. “We’re making a film about the President’s murder,” she told them, “and we’d like you and the other agents to drive up to the front of the house, then jump out and run toward the door.” The agents agreed and followed in their car as the president and his friends drove up from the pier. When they arrived, she said, “
Look desperate, like you heard shots
and are concerned that the President might be hurt and you need to respond fast.”

Luckily for Kennedy, Cormier and Merriman witnessed only his film’s tamer scenes. Knudsen recalled that at one point in the filming Kennedy clutched his chest and fell flat onto the pier.
While he was down, Knudsen said
, Jackie and her friend Countess Vivian Stokes Crespi had “simply stepped over the President’s body—as if he were not there.” They were followed by Fay, who stumbled and fell on top of the president. At that moment, Kennedy spewed out some red liquid (probably tomato juice) that he had been holding in his mouth. Knudsen shot the scene several times, with Fay taking a turn at playing the corpse, and later wondered if the president had experienced
some kind of “premonition
.” More likely, the skit reflected his high spirits after a successful week, his love of the Bond thrillers, and a rich but carefully concealed fantasy life, a Walter Mitty streak he revealed only to his closest friends.