JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President (31 page)

ORONO, BOSTON, AND CAPE COD

K
ennedy’s Western tour had demonstrated that Americans could become as weary of a cold war as a hot one. The test ban treaty ratification battle had demonstrated the importance of convincing Congress that an agreement with the Soviet Union need not compromise national security.
He combined these lessons in a speech
that he delivered at the University of Maine’s Alumni Stadium in Orono on Saturday morning. After speaking of “new rays of hope on the horizon,” he cautioned that “we still live in the shadows of war,” and promised to maintain “our readiness for war” but pursue “every avenue for peace.” After recounting how one German statesman had asked another shortly after the start of the First World War, “How did it all happen?” only to have the other reply, “Ah, if only one knew,” he said, “If this planet is ever ravaged by nuclear war, if three hundred million Americans, Russians, and Europeans are wiped out by a sixty-minute nuclear exchange, if the pitiable survivors of that devastation can then endure the ensuing fire, poison, chaos, and catastrophe, I do not want one of those survivors to ask another, ‘How did it all happen?’ and to receive the incredible reply, ‘Ah, if only one knew.’” He received a standing ovation for what would be called a major foreign policy speech and the opening salvo of his campaign—a warning to those opposing détente that they were making more likely a nuclear conflagration that could kill millions of Americans.

Two hours later he walked into
Harvard’s Soldiers Field stadium during the early minutes of the Columbia game. Spectators jumped up, pointing and cheering, and the Harvard band played “Hail to the Chief.”
His own Harvard football career
had been a fiasco. He had reported weighing 150 pounds and was demoted during the season first to the “B” and then to the “C” freshman team. But his enthusiasm for the game had remained undiminished, and he smoked a cigar, waved to a friend’s son as he came off the field, and applauded enthusiastically when a Harvard field goal tied the score. He had decided to attend at the last minute, leaving the Secret Service no time to screen his neighbors in the stadium. He sat between Larry O’Brien and Dave Powers, high on the fifty-yard line and surrounded by Harvard students.

Near the end of the first half he turned to O’Donnell and said, “
I want to go to Patrick’s grave
, and I want to go there alone, with nobody from the newspapers following me.” He stayed for the halftime show, laughing when the Columbia band performed a spoof about a presidential candidate named “J. Barry Silverwater.” Police blocked the exits from the parking lot to prevent anyone following him to the cemetery. The trip was less spontaneous than it appeared.
He had designed Patrick’s headstone
, giving Lincoln a sketch and instructing her to have it installed before October 19.
He had also brought
along a bouquet of yellow chrysanthemums. After standing silently for several minutes at the grave, he said, “
Patrick seems so alone here
,” and wondered if he would be buried alongside him.

He had several hours before he was due at the All New England Salute Dinner, a fund-raising event at the Commonwealth Armory. While heading back to his hotel he asked his driver to stop at one of his favorite haunts, the Boylston Street Schrafft’s.
A waitress cried, “Oh, my God
, it’s the President!” and dropped a glass. A teenage soda jerk kept saying, “Look who’s here. . . . Look who’s here.”

He signed menus and napkins, ate a butterscotch sundae, ordered a chocolate frappe to go, and chatted about old times with Thomas Pellegriti, who had driven him during his congressional campaigns and now managed the restaurant. As he began walking down Boylston Street there were shouts of “That’s the President!” accompanied by the
bang
of fender-benders as drivers took their eyes off the road.

His impromptu walk was another security headache
for the Secret Service and Boston police during a day that had already demonstrated how difficult it was to protect a president who was determined to move about freely and spontaneously. At Logan Airport he had walked straight through the honor guard and around the Secret Service to shake hands with mechanics. While being driven to his hotel he had insisted on stopping to greet a group of nuns standing outside their convent. He had slipped out a side entrance of the hotel with a small contingent of Secret Service agents, leaving police and reporters to make a mad dash to the Harvard Stadium, and while riding to the armory that evening he stood in the back of an open car in a dinner jacket, waving at crowds three deep and insisting on traveling so slowly that he arrived twenty minutes late.

He flew to Hyannis Port by helicopter on Sunday morning, landing on the lawn of his parents’ home. He took his father for a gentle excursion on their power boat, and they later watched a football game on television.
He asked the family chauffeur
if he was getting “the best care,” adding simply, “I miss him.”
During the afternoon he crossed the street to visit Larry Newman
and his daughter Leighlan (“Lee-Lee”), who had nicknamed him “Mr. Kissable.” She rushed up and grabbed his legs, then climbed into his lap as he and her father discussed Vietnam. He told Newman that MacArthur and de Gaulle had used identical words to warn him against committing U.S. forces to a land war in Asia. “The first thing I do when I’m reelected, I’m going to get the Americans out of Vietnam,” he said. “Exactly how I’m going to do it, right now, I don’t know, but that is my number one priority—get out of Southeast Asia. . . . We are not going to have men ground up in this fashion, this far away from home. I’m going to get those guys out because we’re not going to find ourselves in a war it’s impossible to win.” As he left he smiled and said, “I’d like to be around when Lee-Lee’s ten or fifteen years older.”

The weather was too cool
for his father to sit on his porch Monday morning, so he climbed to his second-floor room to kiss him good-bye. After he left the room, Nurse Dallas wheeled Joe Kennedy’s bed to the doors opening onto the balcony so he could watch his son’s helicopter lift off. Moments later she heard the elevator door open and looked over her shoulder to see the president pressing a finger to his lips. He touched his father lightly on the shoulder and said, “
Look who’s here, Dad
.” He kissed him again and whispered, “
Mrs. Dallas, take good care of Dad
before I come back.”

Tears filled his eyes as his helicopter rose above the house. “
He’s the one who made all this possible
,” he told Powers, “and look at him now.”

WASHINGTON

A
front-page article
in the Sunday, October 20,
New York Times
by the noted journalist Homer Bigart that described the desperate poverty in eastern Kentucky had left Kennedy so dismayed that it was almost all he wanted to talk about with Walter Heller on Monday. Bigart reported that unemployed coal miners and subsistence farmers faced “another winter of idleness and grinding poverty,” and wrote of “the pinched faces of hungry children,” “listless defeated men,” a tar-paper-shack school “unfit for cattle” where “daylight shone through gaping holes between rotting planks,” and “pot-bellied and anemic” children hauling water from a creek “fouled with garbage and discarded mattresses,” so hungry they ate the dirt from chimneys.

Kennedy had witnessed poverty like this
while campaigning in the 1960 West Virginia primary. Although he had seen wretched people in postwar Berlin, Asia, and Latin America, West Virginia was the first time he had faced abject poverty in his own country, and
he often referred to the “blight” of poverty
in the state during the general election, speaking about children sharing their school lunches with their parents, and families receiving “surplus food packages and no hope for the future.” He delivered an inaugural address with more references to poverty, hunger, and suffering than those given by FDR, Eisenhower, Truman, or any president to follow. After declaring that “man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life,” he had pledged to “assist free men and free governments in casting off the chains of poverty.” His first official act as president had been to sign an executive order doubling the food rations supplied to four million poor Americans. Hunger and poverty continued to concern him, and in his 1963 State of the Union address he had said, “
Tax reduction alone is not enough
 . . . to improve the lives of thirty-two million Americans who live on the outskirts of poverty,” “The quality of American life must keep pace with the quality of American goods,” and “This country cannot afford to be materially rich and spiritually poor.”

In the spring of 1963,
Heller had sent him a memorandum
titled “Progress and Poverty,” warning that America was experiencing a “drastic slowdown in the rate at which the economy is taking people out of poverty.” Throughout the spring and summer he and Heller discussed how to remedy this.
Heller admitted that although the tax cut
might create several million jobs it would not help the poorest of the poor—“those caught in a web of illiteracy, lack of skills, poor health, and squalor.”
He gave Kennedy an economic
and statistical analysis of this group and suggested an “attack on poverty.” At a cabinet meeting that fall, Kennedy announced that “disadvantaged groups other than Negroes now deserve our attention,” and after reading the testimony Heller was proposing to give to the Senate Finance Committee in support of the tax cut, he said, “
Walter, first we’re going to get your tax cut
, and then we’re going to get my expenditure program [his attack on poverty].”

He told Heller during their meeting
on October 21 that in light of the Bigart article he had decided that attacking poverty would be a major theme of his reelection campaign, and he planned on traveling to poverty-stricken areas to “arouse the American conscience.” Heller wrote in a memorandum, “It’s perfectly clear that he is aroused by this, and if we could really produce a program to fill the bill, he would be inclined to run with it.”

•   •   •

G
OOD
H
OUSEKEEPING
MAGAZINE
had commissioned the best-selling author and columnist Jim Bishop to write “A Day in the Life of President Kennedy.”
Bishop arrived at the White House
on Monday with his wife, Kelly, puzzled that the president had agreed to let them snoop around and interview his staff and family for an article appearing in a magazine that even he dismissed as “a publication for women, replete with recipes, patterns, deodorants, and articles about what to do with your cheating husband.” Bishop probably didn’t want to admit that Kennedy was cooperating because he anticipated an article as uncritical and flattering as his “A Day in the Life of President Eisenhower.”

Bishop arrived at the White House a skeptic who believed the problem with Kennedy was that “
one never knew how much of the warmth
was real.” He had expected a perfunctory meeting lasting a few minutes.
Instead, Kennedy stuck out his hand and said
“Jim,” as if they were old friends, and “Kelly” before he could introduce his wife. He suggested that since Bishop’s ancestors had also come from County Wexford he might like to see his photographs of his recent trip there. As they leafed through his scrapbook he smiled at Kelly and said, “He ought to get a book out of this, don’t you think?”

Bishop protested that he was writing only an article.

“Stretch it a little and you’ll have a book.” Turning to Kelly, he said, “You speak to him.”

Jackie would have resented Bishop’s intrusion at the best of times. His presence this week was particularly unwelcome. She had returned from her trip feeling guilty and eager to build on the new intimacy she sensed between herself and her husband. A number of observers had noticed their relationship changing for the better. The reporter Helen Thomas thought they had “
grown closer
” after Patrick’s death and “appeared genuinely affectionate toward each other.” Roswell Gilpatric would later say, “
You could see now that he liked
being with her. . . . I think their marriage was really beginning to work out.” Jackie agreed, telling Father McSorley, “
It took us a very long time
for us to work everything out, but we did, and we were about to have a real life together.” Because these statements were made after Dallas, they cannot escape the suspicion that they were motivated by a desire to paint the couple’s final days together as happy ones. There may have been some wishful thinking and exaggeration, but there is enough contemporaneous evidence to confirm their essential truth.

On Monday, with her privacy already under assault from Jim and Kelly Bishop, Jackie called J. B. West into her bedroom and said in her trademark whisper, “
Oh, Mr. West, I’ve gotten myself into something
. Can you help me get out of it?” She explained that although she had invited Princess Galitzine to stay at the White House, “now
we’ve
changed our minds,” and she wanted to rescind the invitation so she and the president could spend the next several nights alone. “Could you help us cook up something so we can get out of having her as a houseguest?” she asked. Before he could answer, she continued, “Would you fix up the Queen’s Room and the Lincoln Room so that it looks like we’re still decorating them, and I’ll show her our guest rooms are not available?”

West had the furniture covered with drop cloths, the rugs rolled up, and buckets of white paint and dirty brushes set out. As a finishing touch, he scattered around ashtrays filled with butts left by the imaginary workmen. When Princess Galitzine came to dinner, Kennedy walked her down the East Hall, stopping to point out the renovations in the Queen’s Room and say, “
And you see, this is where
you would have spent the night if Jackie hadn’t been redecorating again.”