JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President (32 page)

WASHINGTON

K
ennedy told Evelyn Lincoln that Tuesday had been so awful that he felt like “
packing his bags and leaving
.”
During dinner with Jackie and the Bradlees
he complained about it being “miserable” from start to finish. The Birmingham Police Department continued refusing to hire a Negro officer, and liberals on the Judiciary Committee continued pushing a civil rights bill that could not pass the House. His invitation to the Bradlees had been the usual last-minute summons, tendered at the end of the day when he wanted to relax, celebrate, bitch, or do all three. His agenda that evening included Jackie’s cruise and the Bobby Baker scandal. Before the Senate Rules Committee began taking testimony, he hoped to persuade Bradlee (and
Newsweek
) that rumors of sexual misbehavior by anyone in the White House were unfounded. He told Bradlee that he had always viewed Baker “primarily as a rogue, not a crook,” adding, “He was always telling me where he could get the cutest little girls, but he never did.” Bradlee noted that Kennedy had appeared “reluctant to take reports of Baker’s sexual adventures too seriously, or the trouble he [Baker] might get into as a result of them,” and had been “briefed to the teeth.”

Kennedy said he was certain Johnson had not been “on the take” while he was vice president, but before that, he was “not so sure.” This comment prompted a discussion of what Bradlee called Washington’s “new, sophisticated immorality,” the practice of currying favor with congressmen by paying their law firms exorbitant fees for make-work projects, and steering contracts to firms in which an elected official had a financial interest.

Kennedy said he had just learned that J. Paul Getty, one of the richest men in the world, had paid only $22,000 in taxes the previous year. Bradlee replied that if he wanted to get a tax-reform bill through Congress, he should give this kind of information to
Newsweek
. “Maybe after 1964,” he said, a phrase Bradlee had noticed him using more often these days. Most presidents enjoy their greatest successes during their first term, but because Kennedy’s victory had been so narrow,
Schlesinger believed that he was
“looking forward increasingly to his second term as his big season of accomplishment.”
When Kermit Gordon described
what he called an “especially noxious subsidy situation”—a case in which the beneficiaries of the subsidy were those who were already the richest in the business—Kennedy said, “I am looking forward to the second term, when I can really take this government to pieces and stop this sort of thing.”

During dinner Jackie called Onassis “an alive and vital person,” and praised her husband for being “really nice and understanding.” Sensing that she was remorseful about the bad publicity surrounding her cruise, Kennedy joked that this might be a good time to capitalize on her guilt. “Maybe now you’ll come with us to Texas next month,” he said.

“
Sure I will, Jack
,” she said, flipping open a red leather appointment book and writing “TEXAS” across three days in November.

•   •   •

D
URING
THE
WEEK
K
ENNEDY
grilled his staff about their encounters with the Bishops.
Evelyn Lincoln passed along a tidbit
that she knew would delight him. Bishop had recounted that while he was researching “A Day in the Life of President Eisenhower,” the president’s secretary Ann Whitman had told him that Ike often sat at his desk for hours on end with nothing to do, becoming so bored that he would plaintively ask for something to keep him busy. “I told Mr. Bishop,” she said firmly, “that was
not
the case with President Kennedy.”

He was unhappy that George Thomas had told Bishop that he owned twenty-five pairs of shoes. “
Don’t you see how most of the people
who own only one pair of shoes might resent my having twenty-five?” he asked him. “Even if it were true?”
Thomas had also revealed
that he sometimes went through five shirts a day, changed his entire wardrobe between meetings, and to facilitate this, Thomas would hang a new set of clothes in the small bathroom off the Oval Office so he could dart in and replace a blue suit with a brown one, complete with matching tie, shoes, and shirt. Bishop, incurious to a fault, had failed to ascertain whether vanity, a fetish for clean clothes, or a desire to match his wardrobe to a visitor’s position or personality lay behind all this frantic wardrobe-changing.

Bishop interviewed Jackie
during a chaotic Wednesday morning. As they spoke, John dashed from the bathroom naked and one family dog bit another. He found it odd that she answered his questions while staring at Kelly as if he were invisible. He asked her for a “word portrait” of an average evening at home with the president. With a fixed smile, she described him bringing his “homework” upstairs to the family quarters and reading it—a response in keeping with her rule of “minimum information with maximum politeness.”

She informed Bishop that she planned to accompany her husband to Texas the next month. He wondered if that meant parades and all. “Parades and chicken banquets,” she insisted.

•   •   •

O
N
W
EDNESDAY
IT
SEEMED
POSSIBLE
that the Baker scandal and a coup in South Vietnam might reach a climax simultaneously.

Following a two-hour executive session, the chairman of the House Rules Committee told reporters, “
We’ll start with Baker
. Where it spreads from there we don’t know,” and the
Washington Post
pointed out that the Senate resolution mandated “
an investigation of any possible conflicts
of interest or other improprieties.”

According to a cable from the CIA station chief in Saigon, “
Highly reliable source reports
coup imminent led by Lt. Col. Pham Ngoc Thao.” The source, however, feared the “coup may fall apart en route.” Kennedy received a cable from Lodge the same day warning that, “
in the contest with Viet Cong
, we are at present not doing much more than holding our own,” and reporting that because of recent restrictions on U.S. aid to the regime, “experienced observers believe that our actions are creating favorable conditions for a coup. . . . Although I as yet see no one who looks as though he means business in this regard.”

Kennedy decided to send his Harvard roommate
Torbert (“Torby”) Macdonald to Saigon to warn Diem that a coup was imminent and his life might be in danger. Following Kennedy’s script, Macdonald told Diem, “They’re going to kill you. You’ve got to get out of there temporarily to seek refuge in the American embassy and you must get rid of your sister-in-law [Madame Nhu] and your brother [Nhu].” After he returned, Macdonald told Kennedy, “He just won’t do it. He’s too stubborn.”

•   •   •

D
URING
A
TWO
-
HOUR
CONFERENCE
with House leaders
and ranking members of the Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, Kennedy tried to hammer out a compromise civil rights bill satisfactory to moderate Republicans and liberals. The House minority leader, Charles Halleck of Indiana, was the key to any deal, and Kennedy had convened the meeting to discover what he would accept. Halleck complained to Kennedy that liberals on the Judiciary Committee, Republicans and Democrats alike, had loaded the bill with provisions “
way beyond anything you asked
, and way beyond anything we ought to do,” with the result that moderate Republicans such as himself risked being targeted as “goats” for emasculating the bill.

“
We’re
the goats
,” Kennedy said, reminding him that liberals and civil rights leaders had criticized his original bill for being too cautious.

Halleck said he had been courageous to introduce the bill. He flattered Halleck in return, and within two hours they had sketched out a compromise. After the others left, Halleck told Kennedy, “
The colored vote in my district
doesn’t amount to a bottle of cold piss.” He wanted to pass a civil rights bill anyway because whenever he went to Warm Springs, the Georgia resort made famous by FDR, none of the restaurants would serve his Negro driver. “Once in a while, a guy does something because it’s right,” he explained.

On Wednesday evening Kennedy invited the Bradlees
to their second dinner in a row. By the time he joined them, Jackie had put on a dress from King Hassan and was imitating the bumps and grinds of a Moroccan dancer. She complained that Bishop was “prying awfully deep,” even trying to get her maid to reveal what she wore to bed and who slept where. “Never mind,” he said. Bishop was writing a lead story, “and the way things are going for us right now, we can use anything we can get. Anyway, we have the right of clearance. . . . That’s a great thing—that right of clearance.”

He mentioned that the
Washington Post
had run a photograph of Bobby Baker’s house, and Bradlee said he understood that when the photographer rang the bell, two women in evening dresses had opened the door.

“Did they get their pictures?” he asked.

While walking to the White House theater to watch the new James Bond movie,
From Russia with Love,
they discussed who he wanted to succeed him in 1968. After everyone had vetoed Johnson, Jackie asked, “Well, who then?”

“It was going to be Franklin [Roosevelt],” he said mischievously, “until you and Onassis fixed that.”

He seldom sat through an entire film, but he watched this one to the end. Bradlee thought he liked the cool sex and brutality. As they were leaving, he announced that he and Jackie were going to take a holiday out West the following summer. He was thinking of Montana, where he had received such a good reception, but not Wyoming, too many “cold bastards” there.

At a meeting on Thursday with Rusk, Taylor, and Gilpatric
, he approved a schedule for redeploying U.S. forces from Europe that was in line with Rusk’s assurances to Gromyko during their secret walk. He agreed to a reduction of 30,000 troops from U.S. logistical forces in Europe, 10 percent from headquarters staff, and the return, with the minimum explanation possible, of units sent to bolster U.S. forces during the 1961 Berlin crisis. A National Security Action Memorandum summarizing his decisions stated that the “possible redeployment of U.S. forces under consideration within the government should not be discussed publically nor with our allies until a decision has been made and politico-military plan for action approved. Even then, whenever possible[,] action of low visibility should be taken without public announcement.”

He took another step toward reducing cold war tensions
during a Thursday meeting with Jean Daniel, the noted French journalist who edited the Socialist newsweekly
L’Observateur.
After Attwood learned that Daniel would be traveling to Cuba in early November and hoped to interview Fidel Castro, he had asked Bradlee to persuade Kennedy to see him before he left. They met alone in the Oval Office for thirty minutes. Kennedy did not activate the hidden microphone, but Daniel took what he called “very specific” notes.

Kennedy began by saying that he had decided that worrying about the state of Franco-American relations was a waste of time, and that General de Gaulle’s “rather incomprehensible” strategy required a certain amount of tension with the United States—tension that de Gaulle needed, he added facetiously, “to restore to Europe the desire to think for itself and renounce its torpid dependence on American dollar aid and political guidance!”

Daniel asked what he expected from de Gaulle’s visit this winter. “Absolutely nothing!” he said, smiling. But he was looking forward to it anyway because de Gaulle was a “historic figure,” and perhaps “the strangest great man of our time.”

During a break from negotiations over the Panama Canal with President Roberto Remon, Kennedy had told Deputy Special Assistant for National Security Affairs Carl Kaysen that he felt the talks were going badly: “
He says we’ve been screwing them
all these years, and I agree.” He apparently felt the same way about pre-Castro Cuba. Knowing that Daniel was certain to repeat his remarks to Castro, he now delivered an extraordinary denunciation of America’s earlier Cuban policies:

I believe there is no country in the world, including all the African regions, including any and all the countries under colonial domination, where economic colonization, humiliation and exploitation were worse than in Cuba, in part owing to my country’s policies during the Batista regime. I believe that we created, built and manufactured the Castro movement out of whole cloth and without realizing it. I believe that the accumulation of these mistakes has jeopardized all of Latin America. . . . I can assure you that I have understood the Cubans. I approved the proclamation which Fidel Castro made in the Sierra Maestra, when he justifiably called for justice and especially yearned to rid Cuba of corruption. I will go even further: to some extent it is as though Batista was the incarnation of a number of sins on the part of the United States. Now we shall have to pay for those sins. In the matter of the Batista regime, I am in agreement with the first Cuban revolutionaries. That is perfectly clear.

He paused, and after noting Daniel’s amazement continued:

But it is also clear that the problem has ceased to be a human one, and has become international—that is, it has become a Soviet problem. I am the President of the United States and not a socialist; I am the President of a free nation which has certain responsibilities in the Free World. I know that Castro betrayed the promises made in the Sierra Maestra, and that he has agreed to be a Soviet agent in Latin America. I know that through his fault—either his “will to independence,” his madness or communism—the world was on the verge of nuclear war in October 1962.

Referring to Castro’s recklessness during that crisis, he said, “I must say, I don’t even know if he realizes this or even cares about it,” adding, “You can tell me whether he does when you come back.” Speaking as much to Castro as Daniel, he warned that Latin American nations “are not going to attain justice and progress . . . by going from economic oppression to a Marxist dictatorship which Castro himself denounced a few years ago.” Then he held out the carrot, saying, “The United States now has the possibility of doing as much good in Latin America as it has done wrong in the past; I would even say that we alone [i.e., not the Soviet Union] have this power—on the essential condition that communism does not take over there.”