Berlin 1961 (32 page)

Khrushchev disagreed. He reminded his comrades that East Germany was imploding. Thousands of professionals were fleeing the country each week. A failure to take firm action to stop this would not only make Ulbricht anxious but raise doubts among its Warsaw Pact allies, who would “sense in this action our inconsistency and uncertainty.”

Not only would Khrushchev be willing to shut down the air corridor, he said, looking toward Mikoyan, but he would also shoot down any Allied plane that tried to land in West Berlin. “Our position is very strong, but we will have, of course, to really intimidate them now. For example, if there is any flying around, we will have to bring aircraft down. Could they respond with provocative acts? They could…. If we want to carry out our policy, and if we want it to be acknowledged, respected and feared, it is necessary to be firm.”

Khrushchev ended his war council with a discussion of whether he should exchange gifts with Kennedy in Vienna, according to the usual protocol.

Foreign Ministry officials suggested he give President Kennedy twelve cans of the finest black caviar and phonographic records of Soviet and Russian music. Among other gifts, his aides had a silver coffee service in mind for Mrs. Kennedy. They wanted Khrushchev’s approval.

“One can exchange presents even before a war,” Khrushchev responded.

HYANNIS PORT, MASSACHUSETTS
SATURDAY, MAY
27, 1961

Kennedy lifted off in a rainstorm aboard Air Force One from Andrews Air Force Base, bound for Hyannis Port. In just three days he would land in Paris and meet de Gaulle, and in just one week’s time he would be in Vienna with Khrushchev. His father had decorated the president’s sleeping quarters with pictures of voluptuous women—a practical joke from a fellow womanizer just before his son’s forty-fourth birthday.

Kennedy was retreating to the family compound to briefly celebrate and bury himself in his briefing books on issues ranging from the nuclear balance to Khrushchev’s psychological makeup. What U.S. intelligence services painted was a picture of a man who would try to charm him one moment and bully him the next; a gambler who would test him; a true-believing Marxist who wanted to coexist but compete; a crude and insecure leader of peasant upbringing and cunning who above all was unpredictable.

The president could only hope that Khrushchev’s background briefings on U.S. leadership were less revealing. His back pain was as bad as at any time in his administration, made worse by an injury he had suffered during the ceremonial planting of a tree in Canada a few days earlier. Alongside his paperwork, he would pack anesthetic procaine for his back, cortisone for his Addison’s disease, and a cocktail of vitamins, enzymes, and amphetamines for flagging energy and other maladies.

He was using crutches, though never in public, limping around like an already injured athlete preparing for a championship match.

10

VIENNA: LITTLE BOY BLUE MEETS AL CAPONE

So we’re stuck in a ridiculous situation. It seems silly for us to be facing an atomic war over a treaty preserving Berlin as the future capital of a reunified Germany when all of us know that Germany will probably never be reunified. But we’re committed to that agreement, and so are the Russians, so we can’t let them back out of it.

President Kennedy to his aides as he soaked in his bathtub, June 1, 1961, Paris

The U.S. is unwilling to normalize the situation in the most dangerous spot in the world. The USSR wants to perform an operation on this sore spot—to eliminate this thorn, this ulcer—without prejudicing the interests of any side, but rather to the satisfaction of all peoples of the world.

Premier Khrushchev to President Kennedy, June 4, 1961, Vienna

PARIS
WEDNESDAY, MAY
31, 1961

F
or all the adoring French crowds, grand Gallic meals, and media hype generated by a thousand correspondents covering his trip, President Kennedy’s favorite moments in Paris were spent submerged in a giant, gold-plated bathtub in the “King’s Chamber” of a nineteenth-century palace on the Quai d’Orsay.

“God, we ought to have a tub like this in the White House,” the president said to his troubleshooter Kenny O’Donnell, as he soaked himself in the deep, steaming waters to relieve his excruciating back pain. O’Donnell reckoned the vessel was about as long and wide as a Ping-Pong table. Aide David Powers suggested that if the president “played his cards right,” de Gaulle might give it to him as a souvenir.

So began what the three men would come to refer to as their “tub talks” in the vast suite of rooms of the Palais des Affaires étrangères, where de Gaulle had put up Kennedy for his three-day stay in Paris en route to Vienna. During the breaks in the president’s packed schedule, Kennedy would soak and share his latest experiences with his two closest friends in the White House, veterans both of World War II and his political campaigns. By title, O’Donnell was White House appointments secretary, but his long relationship with the Kennedys had begun when he was Bobby’s roommate at Harvard. Powers was Kennedy’s affable man Friday who kept him amused, on schedule, and well supplied with sexual partners.

Between 500,000 and 1 million people had lined the streets to welcome the world’s most famous couple that morning, depending on who was counting the crowd (the French police being more conservative than the White House press office). Considering de Gaulle’s frosty relationship with Kennedy’s predecessors Eisenhower and Roosevelt, his warm reception for Kennedy was a departure. De Gaulle suspected that all U.S. leaders wanted to undermine French leadership of Europe and supplant it with their own. That said, he was happy to bask in the celebrity of the First Couple, whose images adorned the covers of all the major French magazines. The difference in age also helped, allowing de Gaulle to play his preferred role of the wise, legendary man of history taking this young, promising American under his wing.

At Orly Airport at ten that morning, de Gaulle had welcomed Kennedy on a giant scarlet carpet, flanked by fifty black Citroëns and a mounted honor guard of Republican Guards. All six feet, four inches of Le Général rose from his car in his double-breasted business suit as the band played “The Marseillaise.”

“Side by side,” reported the
New York Times
, “the two men moved all day through Paris—age beside youth, grandeur beside informality, mysticism beside pragmatism, serenity beside eagerness.”

The cheers grew so loud as the two men drove along Boulevard Saint-Michel on the Left Bank of the Seine that de Gaulle persuaded the U.S. president to rise in the rear seat of their open-top limo, eliciting an even greater roar. Despite a chill wind, Kennedy rode bareheaded and with only a light topcoat. He dressed no more warmly that afternoon as rain drenched the two men in their sweep up the Champs-Élysées, an indignity de Gaulle bore without complaint.

Behind all that misleading theater was a U.S. president who was entering the most important week of his presidency as a weary, wounded commander in chief who was inadequately prepared and insufficiently fit for what would face him in Vienna. Khrushchev would be scanning for Kennedy’s vulnerabilities after the Bay of Pigs, and there were plenty for the picking.

At home, Kennedy was facing violent racial confrontations that had broken out in the American South as African Americans grew more determined to end two centuries of oppression. The immediate problem revolved around the “Freedom Riders,” whose efforts to desegregate interstate transportation had won only tepid support from the Kennedy administration and were opposed by nearly two-thirds of Americans.

Abroad, Kennedy’s failure in Cuba, unresolved conflict in Laos, and tensions building around Berlin made his Paris–Vienna trip all the more fraught with risk. Kennedy was making the mental connection to Berlin even while wrestling with racial affairs at home. When Father Theodore Hesburgh, a member of his Civil Rights Commission, questioned the president’s reluctance to take bolder steps to desegregate the United States, Kennedy said, “Look, Father, I may have to send the Alabama National Guard to Berlin tomorrow, and I don’t want to do it in the middle of a revolution at home.”

It seemed just another of his presidency’s early misfortunes that Kennedy had seriously reinjured his back muscles while planting a ceremonial tree in Ottawa, and the pain had grown worse on the long flight to Europe. It had been the first time since his spinal fusion surgery in 1954 that he was hobbling around on crutches. To protect his image, he refused to use the props in public, but that only aroused more pain when he was in France, by putting even greater pressure on his back.

Kennedy’s personal physician, Janet Travell, who accompanied him to Paris, was concerned about his heightened suffering and the impact his treatments might have on everything from mood to endurance during the trip. The president had already been taking five baths or hot showers a day to ease his pain. Though Americans didn’t know it, the real purpose of his famous Oval Office rocking chair was that it helped relieve the throbbing of his lower back, into which doctors had been shooting procaine, a potent cousin of novocaine, for nearly a decade. Travell was also treating him for chronic adrenal ailments, high fevers, elevated cholesterol levels, sleeplessness, and stomach, colon, and prostate problems.

Years later, Travell would recall that Paris was the beginning of “a very hard period.” Travell would give Kennedy two to three shots a day in Paris. White House doctor Admiral George Burkley was worried because the procaine soothed the president through only a temporary numbness that was followed by even greater soreness, requiring ever larger doses and ever stronger narcotics. Burkley had prescribed more exercise and physical therapy, but Kennedy preferred the quicker fix of the drugs.

Travell kept an ongoing “Medicine Administration Record” to track the cocktail of pills and shots she provided the president: penicillin for urinary infections and abscesses, Tuinal to help him sleep, Transentine to control diarrhea and weight loss, and assorted other remedies, including testosterone and phenobarbital. What she couldn’t log were the more unconventional administrations of a more unconventional medic who had traveled more secretly to Paris and Vienna.

Known as “Dr. Feelgood” to his celebrity patients, who included Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote, Dr. Max Jacobson provided injections that contained hormones, animal organ cells, steroids, vitamins, enzymes, and—most important—amphetamines to combat fatigue and depression.

Kennedy was so pleased with Jacobson’s remedies that he had recommended them as well for Jackie after the difficult November delivery of their son John-John—and again to boost her stamina before the Paris trip. On the night of their grand state dinner with de Gaulle at Versailles, Dr. Feelgood administered Kennedy his customary shot. The diminutive, red-cheeked, dark-haired doctor then wandered through the First Couple’s suite of rooms to Jackie’s bedroom, where she was choosing an elegant French gown designed by Givenchy over a dress designed by the American Oleg Cassini, to drive home her connection to the host country.

She cleared the room when Dr. Jacobson arrived, and he put a needle in her behind and injected a fluid that would help her glow incandescently through a six-course dinner in the Hall of Mirrors. Truman Capote would later praise Jacobson’s treatments: “You feel like Superman. You’re flying. Ideas come at the speed of light. You go 722 hours straight without so much as a coffee break.”

However, the potential national security consequences of these concoctions for the commander in chief were considerable coming just before his crucial meeting with the Soviet leader. Besides the addictive nature of what Kennedy was consuming, the potential side effects included hyperactivity, hypertension, impaired judgment, and nervousness. Between doses, his mood could swing wildly from overconfidence to bouts of depression.
^*

At Bobby’s urging, the president would later provide Jacobson’s concoctions to the Food and Drug Administration for analysis. Kennedy was untroubled when the FDA said Dr. Feelgood was shooting him up with steroids and amphetamines. “I don’t care if it’s horse piss,” Kennedy said. “It works.”

In strategizing for Paris, Kennedy had three primary purposes, and they all had to do with Vienna and its impact on Berlin. First, he wanted de Gaulle’s advice about how best to manage Khrushchev in Vienna. Second, he wanted to know how the French leader would recommend that the Allies wrestle with the next Berlin crisis, which he was beginning to believe was likely. Finally, Kennedy wanted to use the Paris trip to burnish his public image and thus strengthen his hand for Vienna.

When Kennedy briefed de Gaulle on Khrushchev’s threats regarding Berlin as delivered to Thompson at the Ice Capades, de Gaulle dismissed them with a wave of the hand. “Mr. Khrushchev,” he declared dismissively, “has been saying and repeating that his prestige is engaged in the Berlin question and that he must have a solution within six months, and then again in six months and then still again in another six months.” The Frenchman shrugged. “If he had wanted a war over Berlin, he would have acted already.”

De Gaulle told Kennedy that he considered Berlin primarily a psychological question: “It is annoying to both sides that Berlin should be located where it is; however, it is there,” he said.

The Kennedy–de Gaulle meeting was already off to a better start than previous U.S. presidential sessions with the French leader. Eisenhower had warned Kennedy that de Gaulle endangered the entire Atlantic alliance with his nationalist disdain for the U.S. and NATO. Franklin Roosevelt had compared de Gaulle’s vicious temper to that of Joan of Arc. “The older I get,” Eisenhower told Kennedy, “the more disgusted I am with them—not the French people but their governments.”