The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (127 page)

At the same time Kennedy spent more time with Caroline and John Jr. The president had never had his father’s attitude toward his own children, though not his grandchildren, that little sons and daughters were largely decorative objects who only became interesting when they were old enough to think, reflect, and talk in rounded sentences. As much as the president saw the political advantage of having children in the White House, he also adored moments such as when his namesake walked with him to the Oval Office each morning. That had always been a pleasant diversion, but since Patrick’s death there was an intensity to Kennedy’s moments with his children. This had become time when he blocked off the world.

“I’m having the best time of my life,” Kennedy told Kay Halle, a family friend, when she came to visit. As he talked, looking at his two children, John Jr. rushed forward. “I’m a great big bear,” he said. “I want something to eat.” Halle pretended to feed the child, but the president intervened. “I’m a great big bear,” he said his voice charged with false menace, “and I’m gonna eat you up in one bite.” Little John Jr. replied in a cascade of laughter.

When Jackie was away, she wrote her husband of ten years a seven-page, handwritten letter that was an exquisite rendering of her complex feelings for him. Even her most perfunctory thank-you note always had some graceful, unique phrase. In these pages all of her exquisitely nuanced sensibilities came together. There was both an emotional intimacy and a near formality, as if
she were reaching something within herself and in her husband that neither of them had touched but that she knew she must touch now. “I loved you from the first day I saw you and if I hadn’t married you my life would have been tragic because the definition of tragedy is a waste,” she wrote. “But ten years later I love you so much more.” She wanted her husband to know how much she cherished their love. “I am just sorry for Caroline—all I will tell her to put into and expect from marriage—but if she doesn’t marry someone like you what good will it do her.”

Surely there are few things in life as unknowable and mysterious as the intimate truths of a marriage. She loved her husband, and Jackie’s letter was like a rare orchid, a flower of beauty and subtlety, but a flower that needed warmth and light and shelter.

Kennedy loved his wife, but he preferred bouquets to a single stem. He wrote his own cryptic rendezvous letter, but it was not to Jackie. Although the salutation has been clipped off the letter, it was most likely written in October to Mary Meyer, although Kennedy’s sex life was such that it could have been written to a number of other women as well.

Why don’t you leave suburbia for once—come and see me—either here or at the Cape next week or in Boston the 19th. I know it is unwise, irrational—and that you may hate it—on the other hand you may not—and I will love it. You say that it is good for me not to get what I want. After all of these years you should give me a more loving answer than that. Why don’t you just say yes. J.

There was a sentimental yearning in Kennedy these days that had long been dormant within him. In the middle of October, he hosted a state dinner for Sean Lemass, the prime minister of Ireland. During the dinner Kennedy scribbled a few notes for his eloquent toast about Ireland’s role as a beacon of liberty. The fiddlers and the bagpipers played the old Irish songs, but as so often with things Irish, it wasn’t until the hour grew late and almost everyone was gone that the evening truly began. A small group of no more than ten guests went upstairs to the family quartets, the president bringing the Irish bagpipers with them.

Gene Kelly danced an Irish jig, and the others sang, clapped, and laughed. Teddy sang too with such enthusiasm and emotion that no one cared if he sang out of tune. The greatest of Irish songs are sad ones, and the gathering was infused with a sweet melancholic sadness.

One of the president’s favorite songs, “The Boys of Wexford,” echoed poignantly through the White House.

We are the boys of Wexford,
Who fought with heart and hand
To burst in twain the galling chain
And free our native land.

When it came time to go, they sang “Danny Boy,” their Irish benediction. “The president had the sweetest and saddest kind of look on his face,” Jim Reed remembered. “He was over standing by himself leaning against the doorway there, and just sort of transported into a world of imagination apparently.”

I
n the third year of his administration, Kennedy still had an antipathy toward what he considered the prissy moral tone of American liberalism. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, the president had cooperated in an inside account for the
Saturday Evening Post,
written by his friend Charles Bartlett and Stewart Alsop. The two journalists found many top White House officials ready to savage UN Ambassador Stevenson, as long as they could do their mugging anonymously. One official said, “Adlai wanted a Munich. He wanted to trade the Turkish, Italian, and British missile bases for Cuban bases.” When Bartlett gave the article to Kennedy to read for criticism before publication, the president asked that the reference to Sorensen as a “dove” be taken out. Sorensen had been a noncombatant as a young man, and Kennedy apparently did not like the implication that a pacifist had pushed him toward peace. When it came to the devastating comments about Stevenson, however, the president uttered not a word. Instead, he called in Schlesinger, his favorite conduit of misinformation to Stevenson. Kennedy told the former professor “he understood that it [the article] accused Stevenson of advocating a Caribbean Munich.”

“Everyone will suppose that it came out of the White House because of Charley,” the president said. “Will you tell Adlai that I never talked to Charley or any other reporter about the Cuban crisis, and that this piece does not represent my views.”

Whatever weaknesses Stevenson may have had, a lack of honor was not one of them. He could have been as duplicitous as the president, calling in
his
reporters and defending himself with the truth. That would have ended the carping attacks that he suffered in the wake of the article, but it might have destroyed the American-Soviet deal, and it was not Stevenson’s way. Undersecretary of State George Ball noticed a change in the man. He went “through the motions, making speeches, yet with a feeling in his heart that it
didn’t make any difference to the world if he fell over and had a heart attack.”

Stevenson’s presence rankled Kennedy so much that it may have affected policy decisions and his attitude toward disarmament. In 1963 the president told Bobby that this was the one area in which he wished he had done more. “It was personal again—if Stevenson brought it up, it irritated him,” Bobby said. “To shock him and give him something he’d talk to his girls about, he’d say that disarmament was just a lot of public relations stuff.”

Kennedy believed that peace in the nuclear age would be won by hard men speaking tough truths, not by what he considered gushy overwrought men of public virtue. In June 1963, the president finally made the issue of peace his own, and he did so at American University in one of the seminal speeches of his time. The graduating seniors heard an eloquent address that pandered neither to the American people nor to the Russians. Kennedy took a bold step forward, announcing that the United States would unilaterally not “conduct nuclear tests in the atmosphere so long as other states do not do so.”

Kennedy described peace as “a process—a way of solving problems.” It was a process in which he wanted to involve his nation, the Soviet Union, and the world. The president talked about the nature of Soviet communism, but beneath that he expressed an underlying belief in the commonality of humankind and the hope that the threat of nuclear weapons might in the end draw the world’s people closer, not further apart.

The young people in that audience were living at a time when many Americans feared that the world’s problems were overwhelming and intractable, with the shadow of nuclear war hovering over everything they did. Giving in to despair, however, was not what Kennedy had been brought up to do, and as much as his speech was about a strategy of peace leading toward nuclear disarmament, it was equally about the spiritual armament and strength that would be required in this world.

“Our problems are man-made,” Kennedy told the students. “Therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable—and we believe they can do it again.”

No one listened to the president’s words more attentively, and analyzed them more closely, than the Russians, who had their own goal of “peaceful coexistence.” In late July, Khrushchev announced that he would agree to a limited ban on nuclear testing, ending all but underground tests that could not be verified by off-site testing. This was just a way station to a broader peace, but it was a way station that was reached in part because Kennedy had made such a deep, brave speech.

W
hile President Kennedy sought peace in the world, the Reverend Martin Luther King sought freedom at home. During the spring of 1963, the civil rights leader staged a series of demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama. He was continuing his politics of moral witness, seeking to confront evil segregation with the olive branch of nonviolence. The television cameramen and newspaper photographers were often the unwitting carriers of King’s messages, and when they capped their cameras, his voice was not heard. It was not heard beyond Birmingham until May 2, when King sent one thousand children marching out of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church to confront segregation by their presence in the restaurants and lunch counters where they were not allowed.

Sheriff Eugene “Bull” Connor sent out the bearers of his message too—dogs and fire hoses. The animals bared their teeth, and the sheer force of the water drove the protesters back, seemingly washed away into the streaming gutters. And while this one-sided confrontation went on, the television cameras rolled and the cameras clicked. Within a day the nation and much of the world knew Bull Connor’s name and bore witness to his deeds. With those images blanketing the world, Birmingham, Alabama, became synonymous with oppression. Hoping to restore Birmingham’s proud image, the city leaders agreed to begin desegregating the city’s restaurants, movie theaters, and other public places. The agreement was punctuated not by handshakes but by dynamite exploding both at the motel where King was staying and outside his brother’s home. The Reverend King preached nonviolence, but in a dozen cities across America there were confrontations that seemed to threaten the very fabric of civil society.

Bobby knew no more what to make of the rising black militancy than did most of his fellow white citizens. He asked the writer James Baldwin to set up a meeting with a group of blacks to talk about the situation. The Kennedy attitude was that when you had a problem, you found the most prominent experts, brought them together, heard their opinions, and took the best of their ideas. Then after solving that dilemma, you went on to the next problem. There seemed to be no better expert on race in America than Baldwin, who in November 1962 had written a passionately apocalyptic essay in
The New Yorker
(published the following year as
The Fire Next Time).
In the controversial work, Baldwin condemned Bobby for his “assurance that a Negro can become president in forty years” as a prime example of the white American attitude that “they are in possession of some intrinsic value that black people need, or want.”

Baldwin assembled a group of what he called “fairly rowdy, independent, tough-minded men and women” and brought them to Bobby’s apartment at
the UN Plaza in New York City. The attorney general began by detailing what the administration was doing for blacks, and those in the room replied by saying that it should do more. This was all part of the civilized nomenclature of traditional American politics. Then a young man spoke out. “You don’t have no idea what trouble is,” he told Bobby. “Because I’m close to the moment when I’m going to pick up a gun.”

The speaker, Jerome Smith, bore the scars of the beatings he had received when as a Freedom Rider he attempted to enter the white bus depot in McComb, Mississippi, and had spent time in a Mississippi prison. By anybody’s account, he had paid more dues than these artistes and scholars who filled Bobby’s living room, and he intended to be heard.

“When I pull the trigger,” he stammered in rage, “kiss it good-bye.”

For all Smith’s profound feelings, if there were indeed a “fire next time,” it would burn the black minority more than it would the whites who dominated the country and ran the machinery of oppression with a firm hand. In Baldwin’s own essay he had accused white liberals of being full of “incredible, abysmal and really cowardly obtuseness.” In 1963 many liberals enjoyed being humiliated for their sins and accepted whatever penance was meted out as their due, but even they had only so much skin to be flayed. Despite whatever hidden racism may have darkened their souls, they were the natural allies of a revolution of equality. And it was perhaps not wise to alienate them. Bobby was not a liberal, and he listened to Smith’s nearly incomprehensible, raging sermon while feeling no compulsive need to flagellate himself.

Baldwin was the impresario of this drama. He sought in others an authenticity he perhaps did not have in himself. He had grown up gay in New York City, a morbidly sensitive young man. He was feted and dined at the well-set tables of highbrow liberalism, his presence an immunization against charges of racism. Like a prosecutor who knew how his witness would answer, Baldwin asked the young activist whether he would fight for his country. “Never! Never!” shouted Smith.

“How can you say that?” Bobby asked. This relationship between blacks and whites was a deeply troubled marriage in which the whites bore the brunt of the blame. But the largely blameless partner did not appear to realize that there were nonetheless certain things that could not be said, or threatened, without changing the relationship forever.