Kennedy (2 page)

Across the muddy Potomac from the Lincoln Memorial a green and gentle slope rises gradually to what was once the home of Robert E. Lee. From halfway up that hill one can see on a clear autumn day most of the majesty that is Washington. The three marble monuments and memorials—to the men who forged in the Presidency an instrument of power and compassion—remind a grateful nation that it has been blessed in its gravest trials with its greatest leaders. In the distance the dome of the Capitol covers a milieu of wisdom and folly, Presidential ambitions and antagonisms, political ideals and ideologies. To the right is the stark and labyrinthian Pentagon, guiding under Presidential command the massive armed might on which hinge our security and survival. On the grassy slope itself, reminding us that “since this country was founded, each generation of Americans has been summoned to give testimony to its national loyalty,” are marked with simple stones “the graves of young Americans who answered the call to service.” And away to the left, its white sandstone hidden behind a screen of greenery, is the seat of executive power, the scene of more heroic dramas, comedies and tragedies than any stage in the world.

It was on just such a clear autumn afternoon, on October 20, 1962, that President John Fitzgerald Kennedy stood on the second-story back porch of the White House, gazing at this same panorama, and talked—as he almost never talked—of life and death. His brother, the Attorney General, was with us, as were others from time to time. In the oval study on the other side of that porch door, the President had moments earlier concluded an historic meeting. The two great nuclear powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, were faced with their first
direct military confrontation since acquiring the capacity to destroy each other. Soviet ships were to be stopped by an American naval barricade in the Caribbean. The cause was Soviet missiles on the island of Cuba, and the effect was certain to be world-wide.

Our talk on that cool and sunlit back porch was not all somber. Only three weeks earlier we had been up all night with a civil rights battle at the University of Mississippi, a battle termed the most serious constitutional crisis of the century—and presumably with reference to this and his other burdens, the President’s first comment upon reaching the privacy of the porch was: “Well, we earned our pay this month.”

We talked quietly about his decision, and about the meeting that had just ended. “You have to admire Adlai,” he said. “He sticks to his position even when everyone is jumping on him.” We talked about the political consequences of the crisis on the coming Congressional elections. The President was canceling the remainder of the most intensive mid-term campaign ever conducted by a Chief Executive, and he guessed (wrongly, as it turned out) that the crisis would benefit those Republicans who had been urging military action against Cuba. “Would you believe it?” he said sardonically. “Homer Capehart is the Winston Churchill of our time!”

In more serious tones we talked calmly of the possibility of nuclear war. As was true some sixteen months earlier in the Berlin crisis, his most solemn feelings concerned the killing of children—his children and all children, children who bore no hate and no responsibility for the errors of men, but who would bear the burden of devastation and death more heavily than anyone else. Less than two years earlier, after the birth of his son John, he had mused aloud over Bacon’s words: “He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune.” Now he was talking not only about his own but all children, including those yet unborn. “If it weren’t for them,” he said, “for those who haven’t even lived yet, these decisions would be easier.”

John Kennedy wanted no war. It was no longer “a rational alternative,” he had said a year earlier. He had devoted more time in the White House to deterring and preventing it than to all other subjects combined. Now war loomed large on the horizon. Weakness would only insure it, and strength was not certain to avoid it. A single misstep on his part could extinguish the lights of civilization, but even all the right steps could turn out wrong. Inwardly I recalled his words accepting the Presidential nomination:

Then abruptly he lightened the atmosphere once again. “I hope you realize,” he said with a grin, “that there’s not enough room for everybody in the White House bomb shelter”; and we joked back and forth about who was on the list.

A few instructions followed: on keeping his decision open until he had one last talk with the Air Force—on keeping his decision secret until he announced it on Monday night—on redrafting his address to the nation and the world. He showed no signs of either frenzy or despair, retaining the same confident calm I had seen in him always. Despite the fatiguing pace of conferences and travels that had crowded his week, his voice exuded vitality and his commands were crisp and clear. Finally, to work on the new speech draft, I returned to my office in the West Wing of the White House, immeasurably cheered by his good humor, warmed by his deep feeling, inspired by his quiet strength.

A few minutes later the President called me on the telephone. “Did you notice what Doug Dillon said about the Jupiters?” he asked. I had. Talk in the meeting that afternoon had turned to the vulnerability to Soviet attack of the American Jupiter missiles which the previous administration had placed in Italy and Turkey, and which the Soviets seemed likely to equate with their new emplacements in Cuba. Dillon, Kennedy’s Secretary of Treasury, had been Eisenhower’s Under Secretary of State; and he had interjected at that point the information that the Jupiters had practically been forced on Italy and Turkey by an administration unable to find any worthwhile use for them.

“I just wanted to make sure you got that down for the book we’re going to write,” said John Kennedy. And I replied, as I had on other occasions, “You mean the book
you’re
going to write, Mr. President.”

This is my substitute for the book he was going to write. It reflects, to the extent possible, his views during his last eleven years. It employs, to the extent possible, his words and his thoughts. It explains, to the extent possible, his reasons.

I have no doubt that he would have written such a book. “It has recently been suggested,” he said during his first month in the White House, “that, whether I serve one or two terms in the Presidency, I will find myself at what might be called the awkward age—too old to begin a new career and too young to write my memoirs.” But in several conversations he made clear to me his intention to write his memoirs as soon as he left the White House—at least the story of his Presidency, which might well have been only a first installment.

It would have been a remarkable book. Few American Presidents who made so much history possessed his sense of history—or his talent as a writer, or his willingness to be so candid. Far more than most politicians,
he not only could objectively measure his own performance but also cared deeply about how that performance would be measured by future historians as well as contemporary voters. His own recollections of public service would have made a memorable volume—carefully factual, amazingly frank, witty and wise—and none of his biographers or chroniclers can hope to do as well.

Anyone aspiring to that task, moreover, must begin with the knowledge that Kennedy was not only a scholar of history but a severe judge of historical and biographical works. He was a Pulitzer Prize winner in biography in his own right, and during his research on
Profiles in Courage
he expressed surprise at the paucity of good biographies. During his years as President he remarked more than once that history depends on who writes it. The consistent inaccuracy of contemporary press accounts caused him to wonder how much credence they would someday be given by those researching his era; and when the Mississippi legislature prepared an official report on the 1962 clash at its state university, placing all blame on the hapless Federal marshals directed by the Kennedys, the President remarked that this was the kind of local document that scholars a generation from now would carefully weigh—and “it makes me wonder,” he said, “whether everything I learned about the evils of Reconstruction was really true.”

The sternest tests of all, not surprisingly, he applied to works about himself. Before he was President, when he had some choice in the matter, he was very particular about who wrote his biography. Most of the books and magazine articles about him, he noted, inevitably copied each other, repeating the same myths, mistakes, quotations out of context and allegations previously disproven. (A particularly flagrant example was the constant repetition of charges concerning statements Kennedy had allegedly made as a young Congressman to a Harvard seminar, charges still being circulated a decade after they had been thoroughly discredited.) In 1958 he waged an intensive effort with his contacts in the publishing world to prevent a projected biography by a writer inaccurately representing himself to potential publishers as a Kennedy intimate—a man whom Senator Kennedy in fact regarded as uninformed, unobjective and unsound.

Part of this reaction was an oversensitivity to criticism. But an equally large motivation was his concern as an historian that history portray him accurately. Thus he agreed in 1959 to make all files and facts available without condition or limitation to Professor James MacGregor Burns for the only serious pre-Presidential biography published—not because he assumed that Burns would write a panegyric (which Burns didn’t) but because he believed that Burns’s ability, and his standing in the liberal intellectual community, would give the book stature among the audience we hoped it would reach.

His concern for history continued once he entered the White House. He gave considerable attention to the library which would preserve his papers. He was accessible to the press and other writers, candid and articulate in public and private, and determined to elucidate, educate and explain. At the urging of the eminent historian on his staff, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., he agreed that procedures should be established to record the firsthand recollections of participants in crucial events while our memories were still fresh.

But he never found time to do it. He arranged for the comprehensive transcription of major deliberations, and at times he dictated memoranda of conversations for the flies. But he communicated many of his key decisions by voice instead of in writing, by telephone instead of letter and to one instead of many. Of the record he did leave in writing—his speeches, messages, cables, letters and memoranda—comparatively few were based on first drafts he had dictated or written out himself.

He was, moreover, in some ways deliberately elusive in his approach. While those on the inside knew far more than those on the outside, no one—no single aide, friend or member of his family—knew all his thoughts or actions on any single subject. My particular responsibilities in his Senate and White House office enabled me to know a little bit about a lot of things, but by no means everything about anything. His motives were often unknown or unclear to others, for he resisted the obvious and the easy; and he was usually too busy with the next decision to take time to explain the last.

At times he talked as if he wanted us to be preserving important conversations through memoranda in our files. His rule against future “backstairs” memoirs (which stemmed from a friendly warning offered by Margaret Truman) applied to the household staff, not his professional aides. Yet at other times he made it clear that he would not feel comfortable in confidential talks if he thought one or more participants would be rushing to record their interpretations of his views.

He was the kind of President who would want a great book written about his administration—but he was also the kind who would want to write it himself. He assumed Schlesinger would be writing a solid book—but he otherwise expressed disdain for the reliability of most government memoirs and diaries. He thought that Emmet Hughes, a part-time speech-writer for Eisenhower, had betrayed the trust of Republican officials by quoting their private conversations against them. “I hope,” said Kennedy, “that no one around here is writing that kind of book.”

This is not that kind of book. It is not even a neutral account. An impassioned participant cannot be an objective observer. Having formed a strong attachment for John Kennedy, I cannot now pretend an attitude of complete detachment. Having devoted nearly eleven years to advancing his interests and explaining his views, I cannot now cloak my
partisanship as disinterested scholarship. This book, let it be clear at the outset, praises John Kennedy and what he has done, not merely out of loyalty and affection, but out of deep pride and conviction.

Nevertheless he both deserves and would have desired something better than a portrait that painted him as more herculean than human. In life he did not want his counsel to be a courtier, and in death he would not want his biography confined to eulogies. Making no claims of omniscience or infallibility, he freely admitted imperfections and ignorance in many areas. He credited luck with many of his achievements, and he would have willingly applied to himself what he said of Winston Churchill: “Accustomed to the hardships of battle, he [had] no distaste for pleasure.”

While legend recalls our martyred heroes as beloved by all and defeated by none, John Kennedy had enemies as well as friends, and disappointments as well as achievements. He recognized these facts more openly and more clearly than either his admirers or his detractors. His delight in poking fun at the pompous and the preposterous included a refusal to take himself too seriously. It included an ability to laugh at exaggerated claims that were made on his behalf—including some he made himself.

“You are obliged to tell our story in a truthful way,” he said to his Voice of America employees, “to tell it, as Oliver Cromwell said about his portrait, with all our blemishes and warts, all those things about us that may not be so immediately attractive.” He said the same to a group of foreign students. I believe he would have said the same to me. Proud of his work, he would be pleased to have this book or any book admire it, but he would want it to be admired with the same candor and objectivity with which he admired it himself.