JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President (7 page)

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Authors: Thurston Clarke

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Presidents & Heads of State, #History, #United States, #20th Century

BOOK: JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President
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Just as Kennedy’s womanizing made it risky for him to fire J. Edgar Hoover, the perilous state of his health made it too dangerous to dismiss Travell. Unlike Hoover, she kept her title but not her power. Burkley became Kennedy’s White House physician in all but name, Kraus assumed sole responsibility for his back, and Travell was relegated to treating Jackie and the children.

Kennedy’s back improved
throughout the winter of 1962, and he told Kraus, “
I wish I could have known you
ten years ago.” By April, Kraus had reduced his visits to several times a month and their relationship had ripened into a friendship. Kennedy admired mental and physical courage, and Kraus had demonstrated both, becoming the first climber to pioneer difficult climbing routes in the Shawangunks and Dolomites. (Kennedy was probably also impressed that
James Joyce had taught Kraus English
in Vienna, a fact Kraus was not shy about sharing.) Kraus was impressed that during the Cuban missile crisis Kennedy had come to the White House dispensary, where he was waiting for his scheduled exercise session, and had taken his hand and said, “
I know, Doctor, you’ve come a long way
to take care of me, but please forgive me. Tonight, I simply have no time.” He was floored that on the most important day of his presidency, he had taken the time to apologize to him personally. “You know I really liked Kennedy before that incident,” he said. “But after that, I liked him even more.”

Kraus returned to his office
from a weekend in 1962 to find his cabinets open and his files scattered across the floor. Because he had labeled Kennedy’s file “K” and kept it in a separate drawer, the burglars had left empty-handed. Many in the White House suspected the FBI, the Soviets, or the GOP, in order of probability. Kennedy had scrambler phones installed in Kraus’s office, apartment, and country home, and whenever Kraus needed to consult Cohen and Burkley about the president’s condition he left his office and used a pay phone.

By the summer of 1963,
Kraus considered Kennedy cured
. He was playing golf, had not experienced any back pain during his strenuous European tour, and could toss his son in the air. Kraus remained on call for emergencies and saw Kennedy sporadically, but had he been a regular patient he would have discontinued their appointments. Kennedy had once told Jackie plaintively, “
I wish I had more good times
,” meaning more healthy times. By that standard, the summer of 1963 was a very good time. The gap between his robust physical appearance and the actual state of his health had narrowed to the point that he felt almost as well as he looked. Desensitization shots had reduced his allergies to animals and dust, making him less susceptible to sinusitis and other respiratory infections, his Addison’s was being managed with cortisone, and he boasted of feeling better than at any time in his adult life. All that remained was to discard his back brace, a device that made him sit bolt upright in chairs and in the backseats of limousines.

Wednesday, August 14

CAPE COD

W
hen Kennedy arrived
in Jackie’s room at Otis to bring her home to Squaw Island, he found her upset that she could not persuade her private nurse, Luella Hennessey, to spend the rest of the year with her at the White House.
Hennessey was a cheerful
and confident fifty-seven-year-old spinster who had been caring for Kennedys since 1937, when she nursed thirteen-year-old Patricia following an emergency appendectomy. After Bobby was admitted to the same hospital several days later with pneumonia, Joe and Rose asked her to come to Cape Cod and see both Patricia and Bobby through their convalescence. She soon became a family fixture, summoned when anyone became ill and often serving as a surrogate mother while Rose was away on her frequent shopping trips abroad. Once the Kennedy children began having their own children, she called every year to see who was expecting so she could plan her vacations around their delivery dates. Since the birth of Robert Kennedy’s daughter Kathleen in 1951 she had been present at the births of eighteen Kennedy children, including Caroline and John. She did not deliver or nurse the babies but looked after their mothers, sitting in their hospital rooms, reassuring them, and attending to their needs.

During all her years of nursing Kennedys only Jack had imagined that Hennessey might have greater ambitions and talents, and
he was paying her tuition
for a course at Boston College that would prepare her to open a school for mentally challenged children. She had arrived at Otis hours after Patrick was born and had been at Jackie’s side ever since. She had refused her invitation to come to the White House only because it would have meant postponing her studies at Boston College. Forced to choose between Hennessey’s education and his wife’s recovery, Kennedy chose his wife. “
There are ninety-six thousand
R.N.s [registered nurses] in this country,” he told Hennessey. “And I think ninety-five thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine would jump at the chance to go to the White House for the winter!”

“But you see, Jack, that’s the difference between the other nurses and me, and that’s why you want me,” she said. She proposed staying with Jackie through August. If Jackie still felt she needed her after that (it turned out that she did not), she would postpone her studies. “But I’m sure after having my company for a whole month she will be so fine I won’t be needed.”

Jackie presented the hospital staff
with framed and signed lithographs of the White House and said gamely, “
You’ve been so wonderful to me
that I’m coming back here next year to have another baby. So you better be ready for me.”

Kennedy gave an impromptu speech thanking the nurses and airmen gathered in her suite. Given the ruckus that he had raised the previous month about the renovations to these rooms, he should have felt sheepish when he saw Jackie’s standard-issue hospital bed, wooden nightstand, and gooseneck lamps.
The improvements had been as modest
as the furniture. Walls had been washed instead of repainted, a portable dishwasher rolled into a small kitchen, a room converted into a nursery, some carpeting replaced, and a couch and chairs sent to be refurbished at Jordan Marsh, the venerable Boston department store. The Secret Service had demanded the most expensive changes, insisting that an open corridor be glassed in, bulletproof steel mesh installed over the windows, and air conditioners rented, since the windows would have to remain shut whenever the president visited.

He had hit the roof when
he read about the renovations in the
Washington Post
.
He telephoned
General Godfrey McHugh, his Air Force attaché, called them a “fuck-up,” and thundered, “Are they crazy up there? I want to find out what we paid for that furniture and I want it to go back to Jordan Marsh!” He was particularly incensed by a photograph of the Otis public information officer standing next to Jackie’s bed. He was a “silly bastard,” he said, adding, “I wouldn’t have him running a cat house.”

His tantrums usually exploded suddenly and disappeared just as quickly. This time he stayed mad. Later that morning
he called
Assistant Secretary of Defense Arthur Sylvester and raged, “I’d like to send that goddamned furniture . . . right back to Jordan Marsh on an Air Force truck this afternoon with that captain on it. What about transferring his ass out of here. . . . And that silly fellow who had his picture taken next to the bed, I’d have him go up to Alaska, too.” He said he was afraid that Congress would seize on the renovations as an excuse for cutting his defense budget, but that was unlikely, and insufficient to explain his fury.

A month earlier he had become furious while visiting his second cousin Mary Ryan in Ireland. After discovering that Ambassador Matthew McCloskey had used embassy funds to pave her yard, he told Fay, “
To think that big blockhead
[McCloskey] could insult this wonderful woman by thinking that her yard wasn’t good enough to receive me.” He threatened a punishment similar to making the Air Force officer ride on the truck returning the furniture, saying, “I’ll tell you what, McCloskey will pay for that concrete going in and he’ll pay for that concrete coming out, out of his own pocket.” This never happened, but like the furniture, Mary Ryan’s yard had struck a nerve.

The Kennedys were probably the richest Irish American family in the country. Although their money was new, earned by Joe Kennedy on Wall Street and in Hollywood, he and Rose had raised their children in the style of old-money Boston Brahmins. He knew that those whom Rose called “
the nice people of Boston
” might never accept him, but they might accept his children if he instilled the proper old-money values in them, raising them on the Yankee principle that living simply was evidence of a virtuous life. Rose reinforced the message, telling them, “
Money is never to be squandered
or spent ostentatiously. Some of the greatest people in history have lived lives of the greatest simplicity,” and repeating St. Luke’s admonition “Of those to whom much has been given, much will be required.”

After Joe Kennedy was blackballed from joining the country club in Cohasset, a WASP summer resort, he bought a rambling house with a broad lawn running down to the water in Hyannis Port. It was comfortable but simply furnished, and after years of use by his large and rambunctious family, many of the sofas and chairs could have used a trip to Jordan Marsh.
He did not give his children bicycles
until their friends had them, and enforced the same rule about cars. After Ted acquired a loud horn that blasted the sound of a mooing cow as he drove around Harvard, he wrote him, “
It’s all right to struggle
to get ahead of the masses by good works, by good reputation and hard work, but it certainly isn’t by doing things that [could lead people to say] ‘Who the hell does he think he is?’”

Kennedy inherited his parents’ dislike of ostentation. When he and Lem Billings (who was on a tight budget) traveled across Europe, they picnicked and ate in cheap cafes, and either camped or slept in hostels and flophouses. After visiting the Duke of Devonshire, whose late son had been married to his sister Kathleen, Kennedy noted approvingly in his diary that
the duke “does have great integrity
and lives simply with simple pleasures.” When he came to Washington as a young congressman, he rented a small house in Georgetown, seldom entertained, wore old chinos and sneakers to the office, and threw on a food-stained tie before appearing on the House floor.
His legal residence in Boston
was a small apartment on Bowdoin Street with wobbly tables, broken chairs, and an ancient Victrola. Visitors were shocked that someone of his wealth and background would live in such a dump. But since Rose had moved the Kennedy children around like hotel guests, never giving them their own permanent rooms, Bowdoin Street, in a way, really
was
his home, where he kept his yearbooks and Navy sword.

After Jackie taught him to appreciate fine clothes and furniture, he began
offering fashion tips to friends
, warning them away from button-down collars and brown shoes with dark suits. The day after his inauguration, he toured the White House with the economist John Kenneth Galbraith and delivered a caustic commentary on the low quality of the furnishings, telling him, “
I hope to make this house
the repository of the best.” When Galbraith related this to Kay Halle, a friend of the Kennedy family, she imagined the president marching upstairs and saying to Jackie, “
You’ve got great taste
. I know the job for you.”
He later gave his friend Joe Alsop
, a newspaper columnist, a similar tour, taking him into Ike’s former bedroom and pointing out that the only decent piece was a huge highboy that, he added with a wicked grin, blocked the door to Mamie’s bedroom.

Despite his newfound connoisseurship, he never lost his aversion to displaying his wealth.
He bought monogrammed handkerchiefs
but folded them so the initials were hidden, and he banned photographers from taking pictures of his private cabin on Air Force One because he thought it looked too much “
like a rich man’s plane
.” Jackie’s lavish spending was a constant irritant, as was the weekend house she had bullied him into building in Virginia hunt country. While it was under construction they gave Paul Fay a tour. Fay thought they had skimped too much and encouraged Jackie to increase the size of the living room windows. Kennedy pulled him aside and said, “
Are you out of your mind
? Can you imagine what’s going to happen if I come in with a house that costs over sixty thousand? . . . You were down in West Virginia [where he had run in the 1960 Democratic primary]. You know what the conditions were like down there. Can you see what those people in West Virginia are going to think when here I am building myself a house? I’ve got a White House already. I’ve got the one on the Cape—my family’s house—and we’ve been down in Florida, and now I’m building this one out in Middleburg, Virginia.” He had agreed to build a modest ranch house costing under $60,000, but as the costs mounted during construction, he hired an accountant to shadow the contractor and make sure he bought the cheapest materials.

Many politicians affect a bogus egalitarianism, but Kennedy’s was genuine. It predated his political career and was evident in his choice of friends.
In the Navy, he had preferred
the enlisted men and junior officers to the brass, and unlike many PT boat commanders, he worked alongside his crew, scraping and painting. Sam Elfand, a poor farm boy from Tennessee who was under his command during the war and remained a lifelong friend, remembered him as being “not a stuck-up individual” who was “
receptive to everybody
.” One of Kennedy’s complaints about Eisenhower was that he had ditched his old friends when he became famous. “
He is a terribly cold man
,” he told his White House aide Arthur Schlesinger. “All his golfing pals are rich men he has met since 1945.” He also criticized Eisenhower for attacking his proposal for providing medical care to the aged as socialized medicine, “
and then getting into his government limousine
and heading out to Walter Reed [the army hospital],” and was horrified when, speaking about the Cuban refugees in the United States, Eisenhower told him, “
Of course, they’d be so great
if you could just ship a lot of them in trucks from Miami and use ’em as servants for twenty dollars a month.”

U. E. Baughman, who headed the Secret Service
when Kennedy took office, thought that his egalitarian spirit surpassed even President Truman’s, a surprising observation to make about a man who had a million-dollar trust fund, had been dressed by a valet for much of his adult life, and had rarely if ever cooked his own breakfast, cleaned his own house, or washed his own clothes. But like Truman, he had maintained close friendships with people of modest means, such as Dave Powers and his driver Muggsy O’Leary.
Deirdre Henderson, who served
as his informal liaison with the New England academic community, was struck by how people like Muggsy—the real people, the cops, the staff in the kitchen—instinctively felt that he liked them, and returned his affection. After spending a summer weekend in 1959 at the Newport estate of Jackie’s mother and stepfather while she was traveling in Italy, he wrote to Jackie, “
I was taken into the kitchen
and introduced to all the help, who were just over from Ireland, and found them much more attractive than the guests.” During his first congressional campaign, he looked down at an audience of stevedores and truckers and said to himself softly, “
These are the kind of people
I want to represent,” which may explain why Larry O’Brien, Ken O’Donnell, and Dave Powers, the triumvirate of Irishmen who had worked on so many of his campaigns and knew him so well, were certain he would have wanted what O’Brien called “
a plain, inexpensive casket
 . . . one any average American might have.”

Photographs of him and Jackie walking arm-in-arm or holding hands are rare. When she kissed him during a campaign appearance in New York, he maneuvered her so that photographers missed it, ignoring their shouts of “
Kiss her again
, Senator,” and “Hug him, Jackie.” But when they descended the steps of the Otis base hospital on August 14, he was gripping her hand, and a photographer remarked that they walked to their car hand-in-hand, “
like a couple of kids
.”
An old friend who saw the resulting photograph
was stunned, realizing that in all the years she had known them she had never seen them hold hands, even in private.

After helping her climb inside the convertible, he rushed around to the other side and reached across the seat to grab her hand again. Jackie’s Secret Service agent Clint Hill called it “
a small gesture
but quite significant to those of us who were around them all the time,” adding that after Patrick’s death, he and other agents “noticed a distinctly closer relationship, openly expressed, between the President and Mrs. Kennedy.” Their hand-holding was not the only sign that their relationship had changed. Between August 14 and September 24, when she returned to Washington, he spent twenty-three nights with her at Cape Cod and Newport, sometimes flying up midweek, something he had never done before. Arthur Schlesinger sensed their reluctance to reveal their feelings falling away as they became, he said, “
extremely close and affectionate
.”

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