Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life With John F. Kennedy (52 page)

49
. She refers to the storm surrounding President Eisenhower's use of the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division to compel the integration of Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas in 1957.

50
. M
ARTIN
L
UTHER KING, JR.
(1929–1968) was the best-known leader of the American civil rights movement when he delivered his "I Have a Dream" address at the March on Washington (which Jacqueline calls the "freedom march") of August 1963. When the event was over, JFK welcomed King and other leaders to the White House and said, "I have a dream." The FBI tape to which Mrs. Kennedy refers was of King and his colleagues relaxing at the Willard Hotel after the march. Hectored by J. Edgar Hoover with charges that the civil rights leader was influenced by Communists in his entourage, Robert Kennedy grudgingly authorized Hoover to tap King's telephone calls and bug his rooms, which in time produced transcripts of derogatory private comments made by King while watching President Kennedy's Capitol Rotunda and funeral ceremonies. Hoover was only too eager to share them with the attorney general, and the shocked brother of the late President conveyed their essence to Jacqueline. Thus she was bristling at King (although in 1968, despite the disturbing emotions in her that it was bound to evoke, she accompanied RFK to King's funeral in Atlanta and consoled King's widow).

51
. A
.
P
HILIP RANDOLPH
(1889–1979) was chief of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and one of the organizers of the March on Washington.

52
. In May 1963, on the hundredth anniversary of Gettysburg, LBJ had delivered a civil rights speech at the battlefield that went beyond anything the President had theretofore said about the issue in public. (This was before Kennedy's television speech the following month declaring civil rights "a moral issue.") Johnson declared, "The Negro today asks justice. We do not answer him—we do not answer those who lie beneath this soil—when we reply to the Negro by asking, Patience.'" In private, the vice president stridently complained to Sorensen that the President wasn't doing enough about civil rights, either in Congress or in his efforts to change public opinion.

53
. On Tuesday morning, October 16, 1962, Bundy told the President in his White House bedroom that U-2 photography by the CIA had revealed the Soviets installing offensive missiles in Cuba—an eventuality that JFK had assured the public the previous month that he would never accept. Midterm congressional elections were three weeks ahead. Anxious to keep the missile problem secret from Americans until he and his advisers agreed on a strategy, Kennedy tried to maintain his normal schedule, flying to Chicago for a campaign address, before returning to Washington on the pretext that he was suffering from a cold. On Monday evening, October 22, JFK gave his television speech announcing that his "initial step" would be to throw a naval blockade (euphemized as a "quarantine") around Cuba and demand the missiles' removal.

54
. This has echoes of the British royal family's determination in 1940 to remain in London through the dangers of the German Blitz.

55
. Unbenownst to Mrs. Kennedy, even had the U-2 photographed Cuba a few days earlier, it would probably have given the Americans little advantage in trying to have the missiles withdrawn.

56
. On the final weekend of the crisis came two messages from Khrushchev—the first conciliatory, the second fire and brimstone. In what scholars later called the "Trollope ploy" (in Anthony Trollope's fiction, a woman hastens to interpret a friendly gesture as a marriage proposal) the Kennedy brothers opted to treat the first one as the definitive Soviet message, which helped save the situation.

57
. R
OGER
H
ILSMAN
(1919– ) was the State Department's intelligence chief. At the height of the crisis, an American U-2 accidentally flew into Soviet airspace—legally an act of war that might have inspired retaliation that could have spiraled into nuclear conflict. A furious Kennedy said, "There's always some son-of-a-bitch who doesn't get the word!"

58
. When Kennedy made his initial public response to the missiles in Cuba (he used the more peacelike euphemism "quarantine"), some of the Joint Chiefs, such as the navy's George Anderson (1906–1992) and the air force's Curtis LeMay, thought the President was being too weak—even on Sunday, October 28, when Radio Moscow announced that the missiles were coming out to "prevent a fatal turn of events and protect world peace."

59
. By coincidence, the U.S. destroyer
Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr.
was one of the ships blockading Cuba.

60
. T
AZEWELL
S
HEPARD, JR.
(1921– ) was the President's naval aide.

61
. JFK presented a gift of remembrance to Jacqueline and those around him who had been most involved in deliberations on the Cuban Missile Crisis. Each was a little silver Tiffany calendar for October 1962, with the fateful thirteen days highlighted in bold, and engraved with "J.F.K." and the recipient's initials.

62
. C
HESTER
B
OWLES
(1901–1986) was an advertising executive, governor of Connecticut, and Dean Rusk's number two before succeeding Galbraith as ambassador to India.

63
. After the Bay of Pigs, when Bowles let it be known around Washington that he had opposed the venture, an indignant RFK poked his finger at Bowles's chest and told him that his position had henceforth better be that he was for the invasion.

64
. JFK's friend Charlie Bartlett collaborated with the columnist Stewart Alsop (1914–1974) on a
Saturday Evening Post
article claiming that during the crisis deliberations, Adlai Stevenson had "wanted a Munich." Because Bartlett was known to be close to the President, members of the Washington cognoscenti mistakenly took the piece as a signal that Kennedy wanted his UN envoy out. Stevenson himself was especially agitated.

65
. C
LAYTON
F
RITCHEY
(1904–2001) was an ex-journalist and Stevenson aide who was a social friend of the Kennedys.

66
. During the missile crisis, the vice president attended only one meeting of "Ex Comm," the ad hoc presidential panel quickly formed by JFK to fashion a solution to the problem by meeting around the clock. Other members were Rusk, McNamara, Dillon, RFK, Bundy, McCone, and Taylor. The reference to Laos is the covert efforts by both North Vietnam and America to undermine the 1962 agreement at Geneva to preserve the country's neutrality and independence.

67
. Powers and O'Donnell had agreed to stay on with Johnson for a transitional period.

68
. In mentioning her husband's warning, Mrs. Kennedy was eerily prescient about the problem that would doom America's involvement in Vietnam.

69
. In other words, even if the President orders the invasion halted, proceed anyway.

70
. J
OSEPH
K
RAFT
(1924-1986) was a Washington columnist and denizen of Georgetown.

71
. H
AROLD
E
. STASSEN
(1907–2001), the onetime Republican "boy governor" of Minnesota, had once been a serious presidential contender and later ran for the job so many times and so long after he had any remote chance of election that he became a minor national joke.

72
. JFK had had to deal with a worrisome drain of gold reserves to Western Europe.

73
. By now, Jacqueline's once-benign attitude toward Johnson as leader has hardened, along with Robert Kennedy's. Later in 1964, when Jacqueline studied a draft of Sorensen's soon-to-be-published book
Kennedy
, she insisted that the author change or delete almost every favorable mention of her husband's vice president, noting "several glowing references to LBJ, which I know do not reflect President Kennedy's thinking. . . . You must know—as well or better than I—his steadily diminishing opinion of him. . . . He grew more and more concerned about what would happen if LBJ ever became president. He was truly frightened at the prospect." Refuting a Sorensen claim in the draft that the President had "learned" about campaigning from Johnson, she wrote, "Lyndon's style always embarrassed him, especially when he sent him around the world as Vice-President." In later years, however, time, distance, the end of Robert Kennedy's rivalry with Johnson, the death of LBJ, and her cordial relationship with Lady Bird softened Jacqueline's attitude toward her late husband's successor. She distinguished her objections to certain Johnson policies—especially the Vietnam War escalation, which she insisted Jack would never have countenanced—from her personal fondness for both Lyndon and Lady Bird, whom she made an effort to see during the 1980s and early 1990s when both former first ladies summered on Martha's Vineyard. In a 1974 oral history about Johnson for the Johnson Library, Jacqueline said that after the assassination, LBJ "was extraordinary. He did everything he could to be magnanimous. . . . I was really touched by that generosity of spirit. . . . I always felt that about him."

74
. JFK had appointed Johnson to chair the President's Committee on Equal Employment Opportunities, as well as his space council.

75
. In Johnson's defense, Kennedy was eager to give his vice president dignity, but—knowing his tendency to overreach if given the chance—not a great deal to do. He sent Johnson on so many trips in order to distract him from his boredom and powerlessness. As Johnson's aide and friend Jack Valenti later described LBJ as vice president, "this great, proud vessel was just simply unable to move. Stuck there in the Sargasso Sea—no wind and no tides."

76
. On this Mrs. Kennedy was absolutely right. In the spring of 1963, during a meeting when JFK was debating whether to send a civil rights bill to Congress, he asked Johnson for his opinion, and the vice president acidly said he could not respond because no one had given him enough information to have a judgment. In a 1965 oral history interview, Robert Kennedy recalled that during the missile crisis, LBJ "never made any suggestions or recommendations as to what we should do. . . . He was displeased with what we were doing, although he never made it clear what he would do."

77
. During a 1961 trip to Pakistan, LBJ invited a camel driver named Bashir Ahmed to see him in the United States. To his surprise, Ahmed took him up on his offer, and Johnson hosted him for a well-publicized visit to his Texas ranch.

78
. Before the inauguration, Johnson had made a misguided attempt to persuade Democratic members of the Senate to allow him to continue to lead their caucus. When they slapped him down by formal vote, JFK noted that "the steam really went out of Lyndon."

79
. In the last year of his life, JFK asked his friend Charlie Bartlett whether he thought the 1968 Democratic nominee would be "Bobby or Lyndon." Other sources have it that the President was vaguely pondering the liberal North Carolina governor Terry Sanford as a possible 1964 running mate, if necessary, or as the 1968 presidential nominee.

80
. The President hosted a regular breakfast with congressional leaders.

81
. E
VERETT
D
IRKSEN
(1896–1969) was senator from Illinois and leader of Senate Republicans from 1959 until his death. Although Dirksen's nineteenth-century style was so different from the President's, JFK had long had an excellent relationship with him. Not so with House Speaker McCormack, who still resented the meteoric political ascent that had enabled Kennedy to best him for control of Massachusetts Democrats. Increasing McCormack's ill humor toward the President was Edward Kennedy's victory over the Speaker's nephew Edward in 1962 for the state's Democratic Senate nomination.

82
. The "someone" was Robert Kennedy.

83
. E
DWARD
S
TOCKDALE
(1915–1963) was a real estate speculator and Smathers aide who served as JFK's first ambassador to Ireland. Reportedly grief-stricken over the President's assassination, Stockdale fell to his death from a Miami office tower in December 1963.

84
. Kenneth O'Donnell gauged senators in terms of their support for Kennedy measures.

85
. H
ALE
B
OGGS
(1914–1972) was Democratic congressman from Louisiana and House majority leader.

86
. When he appeared on the JFK 47th birthday broadcast.

1
. Kennedy and Macmillan first met at Key West in March 1961. Randolph Churchill (1911–1968) was the journalist son of the ex–prime minister and a Kennedy family friend. As JFK was preparing to leave Nassau, Canadian prime minister John Diefenbaker, whom he so disliked, arrived for his own meeting with Macmillan, compelling the President to lunch with Diefenbaker as well as the British prime minister. During the meal, JFK and Macmillan diplomatically pretended that they liked Diefenbaker, and the Canadian pretended to believe it.