Biographies & Memoirs

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

GOALS

Blessed are the peacemakers.

—Matthew 5:9

Politicians are, at different times, driven by grand notions and near necessity. Speak of the next election when they’re dreaming loftily, and you risk being dismissed as a hack. Speak of high purpose when they’re hearing the footsteps of a rival, and you invite instant dismissal.

Jack Kennedy was both an original and a consummate politician. Yet his stewardship of priorities still resembled those of a college student. With a number of classes on his schedule, he gave most of his attention to some, did the best he could with others, and let a few slide. It’s common enough. He was always most committed to what interested him. What made all the difference was the love of history that never failed to engage him.

In the first two years of his presidency, he had been making history. His accomplishments were linked in a singular way to what he most highly valued: his commitment to the Peace Corps, to peaceful competition in science and space travel, to containment of nuclear arms, to civil rights. But he also needed to be reelected. He began his third year in office pushing for a tax cut. It was an attempt to court a constituency that was resisting him: a previous year’s poll had shown that 88 percent of businessmen viewed him as hostile to their interests. However, many of them didn’t even go for his idea of a tax cut. The view then from Wall Street and Main Street both was that balanced budgets were the best thing for business.

Kennedy had campaigned on just such a principle, only to grow concerned over time that the economy simply wasn’t growing as it should. His chief economic advisor, Walter Heller, believed tax cuts would stimulate spending and investment, thereby increasing employment. Eisenhower’s commitment to fiscal conservatism had spiked the jobless rate in the fall of 1960, hamstringing Nixon’s quest to succeed him. Looking ahead to November 1964, Kennedy wanted that rate heading downward—and believed a slash in taxes would do the trick.

He also sought to correct the unfairness he saw in the tax code. Why, for example, had H. L. Hunt, the oil baron, paid just $22,000 in taxes the previous year? Why had J. Paul Getty, another ridiculously wealthy oilman, forked over only $500? When Ben Bradlee told him he paid the same amount, Kennedy said it made his point. “The tax laws really screw people in your bracket.” Hearing this, Bradlee suggested it would surely help the cause of reform if he’d release the figures on those oilmen’s tax levels. Kennedy paused before replying. “Maybe after 1964.” All he wanted at the moment was a tax cut that would juice the economy enough to get it moving before voters had their next chance to weigh in at the polls.

President Kennedy delivered three epochal addresses in June of 1963. The first was the commencement address at American University. It became known as his “Peace” speech. In it he spoke of his desire for a limited nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviet Union. The Cuban Missile Crisis, he knew, had been a terrifyingly close call.

“What kind of peace do I mean? Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables man and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children—not merely peace for Americans, but peace for all men and women—not merely peace in our time, but peace for all time.”

He was calling on the Soviet Union to join with the United States to prove that peace was possible, conflict not inevitable. “The problems of man are man-made; 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.” With these words, he revealed that his highest commitment was not to arms control alone but to human hope.

Kennedy then expressed thoughts new to an American president, ideas especially startling coming from a man who’d once been a committed Cold Warrior. What he pointed out was the obvious but unspoken fact that the peoples inhabiting the two countries, the USA and the USSR, are not that different in their needs and dreams. “For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet; and we are all mortal.” He went on to offer a gesture of respect that was even more unexpected. “As Americans, we find Communism profoundly repugnant as a negation of personal freedom and dignity. But we can still hail the Russian people for their many achievements—in science and space, in economic and industrial growth, in culture and in acts of courage.”

He continued, powerfully, to make his case. “Among the many traits the peoples of our two countries have in common, none is stronger than our mutual abhorrence of war. Almost unique among the major world powers, we have never been at war with each other. And no nation in the history of battle ever suffered more than the Soviet Union suffered in the course of the Second World War. At least twenty million lost their lives. Countless millions of homes and farms were burned or sacked. A third of the nation’s territory, including nearly two thirds of its industrial base, was turned into a wasteland—a loss equivalent to the devastation of this country east of Chicago.

“The one major area of these negotiations where the end is in sight, yet where a fresh start is badly needed, is in a treaty to outlaw nuclear tests. The conclusion of such a treaty, so near and yet so far, would check the spiraling arms race in one of its most dangerous areas. It would place the nuclear powers in a position to deal more effectively with one of the greatest hazards which man faces in 1963, the further spread of nuclear arms. It would increase our security—it would decrease the prospects of war. Surely this goal is sufficiently important to require our steady pursuit, yielding neither to the temptation to give up the whole effort nor the temptation to give up our insistence on vital and responsible safeguards.

“To make clear our good faith and solemn convictions on the matter, I now declare that the United States does not propose to conduct nuclear tests in the atmosphere so long as other states do not do so. We will not be the first to resume. Such a declaration is no substitute for a formal binding treaty, but I hope it will help us achieve one. Nor would such a treaty be a substitute for disarmament, but I hope it will help us achieve it.”

Finally came the radical commitment: “Our primary long-range interest in Geneva, however, is general and complete disarmament—designed to take place by stages, permitting parallel political developments to build the new institutions of peace which would take the place of arms.”

What Kennedy had said would quickly become known to the men and women of the Soviet Union—but only because Nikita Khrushchev had dictated that it be so. According to a New York Times piece three days later, headlined “Russians Stirred by Kennedy Talk About Cold War,” the Communist daily Izvestia had published the speech in full. Reported the Times, “The decision to make the speech available to the Soviet people through the government newspaper was interpreted here as an indication that the speech had made a favorable impression in the Kremlin.”

The story then quoted a Soviet intellectual: “The speech and its publication in Izvestia show that there can be mutual understanding.” While a young woman worker was “overheard to ask a friend: ‘Have you read the Kennedy speech? It is all about peace.’ “

The previous month, however, most Americans had witnessed something they wanted no one in the world to see. It had been in their newspapers and on their television sets. The incident had occurred in Birmingham, Alabama, in early May, when Eugene “Bull” Connor—the unrepentantly racist commissioner of public safety, just elected for his sixth term—had unleashed dogs and ordered fire hoses turned on peaceful African-American civil rights demonstrators.

Now, on June 11, the day after Kennedy’s American University speech, two black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood, had attempted to enroll at the University of Alabama. Their way was blocked by order of Governor George C. Wallace, who’d campaigned on a promise to do just that. Watching the eleven o’clock news two weeks earlier with Jackie and the Bradlees, the president had grown solemn at clips of Wallace promising—in the face of a federal court order—personally to “bar the door” against any attempts at desegregation. “He’s just challenging us to use the marshals . . . that’s going to be something.”

He’d once met Wallace—whose recent campaign slogan had been “Segregation now—Segregation tomorrow—Segregation forever”—and was disgusted by the man. “Make him look ridiculous. That’s what the president wants you to do,” Attorney General Robert Kennedy instructed his deputy, Nicholas Katzenbach.

There in Tuscaloosa, flanked by an enormous contingent of National Guardsmen—his earlier experience at Ole Miss had taught him about strength in numbers—Katzenbach instructed Wallace to allow the two students to be admitted. When the governor remained immovable in the door of Foster Auditorium, the commander of the Alabama Guard, General Henry Graham, told him to “stand aside,” which Wallace then did.

Thanks to a documentary shot at the time by Robert Drew, we can see much of what happened next. Titled Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment, it shows Kennedy standing in the Oval Office and asking his top aides—Ken O’Donnell, Larry O’Brien, Ted Sorensen, Pierre Salinger, and his brother Bobby—to join him around a small coffee table. Kennedy assumed the captain’s seat, in this case a rocking chair. He did so with a subtle, two-thumbs-up gesture as if he were still a young skipper calling his crew to quarters. General Graham’s success, acting on his behalf, obviously had energized Kennedy. At that moment he made the call to deliver a major speech that night, giving Sorensen only three hours to prepare it.

In his State of the Union that January, President Kennedy had affirmed that the “most precious and powerful right in the world, the right to vote . . . not be denied to any citizen on grounds of his race or color. In this centennial year of Emancipation, all those who are willing to vote should always be permitted.” He’d followed it by endorsing a push for voting rights, backing an end to all discrimination in hiring and supporting full access to public accommodations. Now, with his own deepening conviction heightened by the confrontation in Alabama he’d just seen on television, he was ready to further speak his thoughts.

Calling civil rights “a moral issue . . . as old as the Scriptures and . . . as clear as the American Constitution,” he framed it in the context of the Cold War. “Today we are committed to a worldwide struggle to promote and protect the rights of all who wish to be free. And when Americans are sent to Vietnam or West Berlin, we do not ask for whites only. We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it.”

The commonsense truths he spoke that night were framed in the idiom of everyday American conversation.

“It ought to be possible, therefore, for American students of any color to attend any public institution they select without having to be backed up by troops.

“It ought to be possible for American consumers of any color to receive equal service in places of public accommodation, such as hotels and restaurants and theaters and retail stores, without being forced to resort to demonstrations in the street, and it ought to be possible for American citizens of any color to register to vote in a free election without interference or fear of reprisal.

“It ought to be possible, in short, for every American to enjoy the privileges of being American without regard to his race or his color. In short, every American ought to have the right to be treated as he would wish to be treated, as one would wish his children to be treated. But this is not the case.

“If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public; if he cannot send his children to the best public school available; if he cannot vote for the public officials who represent him; if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place? Who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay?”

Martin Luther King, Jr., declared that the speech he’d heard represented “the most sweeping and forthright ever presented by an American president.”

But it was one thing to speak eloquently in one’s own language, and another to confront an audience on foreign land. Driving through the streets of West Berlin later that month, on June 26, Ben Bradlee watched Kennedy struggling to rehearse the German sentences he intended to use in a speech. Bradlee knew his friend was no linguist. In fact, Jack was secretly taking French lessons, having resented Bradlee’s own fluency, which he’d gained years before as a press attaché with the American embassy in Paris. “Two thousand years ago the proudest boast was ‘civis Romanus sum.’ Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’ “

Twenty-two months earlier, the East Germans had stepped back from the edge of conflict and constructed the Berlin Wall, taking the city—and the watching world—by surprise. Overnight, the twelve-foot concrete-and-barbed-wire symbol of totalitarianism had taken shape as a scar on the landscape of European history. More than a hundred miles long, one section of the Wall divided East and West Berlin, while a much larger one encircled the American, British, and French sectors, cutting them off from the rest of East Germany. Where once there had been reasonably free passage between the halves of the politically bifurcated city, now there were checkpoints and guards with guns.

Kennedy tackled the problem of addressing the beleaguered West Berliners straightforwardly. He and his country stood for democracy, and everything else derived from that simple reality. “There are many people in the world who really don’t understand, or say they don’t, what is the great issue between the Free World and the Communist world. Let them come to Berlin. There are some who say that Communism is the wave of the future. Let them come to Berlin. And there are even a few who say that it is true that Communism is an evil system, but it permits us to make economic progress. Lass’ sie nach Berlin kommen! Let them come to Berlin. Freedom has many difficulties, and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in to prevent them from leaving us. All free men, wherever they may live are citizens of Berlin, and, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’ “

A million Germans lined the parade route, with 300,000 jamming into the square fronting West Berlin. Two thirds of the population had come out to greet JFK. His speech that day was—for both his listeners and for all those who lived in that time—the greatest of the Cold War. Seeing the Wall itself affected the president physically, shocking him probably even more than he’d expected. He looked “like a man who has just glimpsed Hell,” Hugh Sidey observed.

Jack called the time he spent in Berlin and then in Ireland, where he flew next, the happiest days of his life. There, in the country of his ancestors, the first Irish-Catholic American president was welcomed with near ecstatic enthusiasm. Accompanied by his sisters Eunice Shriver and Jean Smith, he made a stop in Dunganstown in County Wexford, site of his Kennedy roots, and then, in Galway, was honored with the Freedom of the City. At the port town of New Ross, he told the crowd gathered to hear him, “When my great-grandfather left here to become a cooper in East Boston, he carried nothing with him except two things—a strong religious faith and a strong desire for liberty. I am glad to say that all of his grandchildren have valued that inheritance.”

In England, before going to Birch Grove, Harold Macmillan’s residence, to meet with the prime minister, he traveled to Derbyshire to visit the grave of his sister Kathleen. The current Duchess of Devonshire remembers how the presidential helicopter affected one resident of the small rural village: “The wind from that machine blew my chickens away, and I haven’t seen them since,” the woman complained. At St. Peter’s Church there, Jack went to the gravesite and, carrying some flowers for his sister, carefully and painfully went down on his knees to pray.

The fact that Jack Kennedy achieved this historic hat trick—the “peace speech” on nuclear arms, the epic address on civil rights, and the “Ich bin ein Berliner” moment—while enduring chronic back pain enhances the nobility of it all. You can see in the documentary footage of the Oval Office scene during the Birmingham crisis a tinge of the torture in the careful way Kennedy carries himself, the deliberate way he rocks his chair. There’s nothing easy in his manner.

For ten days in July, Averell Harriman, who’d been the U.S. ambassador in Moscow in the 1940s, negotiated with Nikita Khrushchev a treaty to ban the testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere. During those negotiations, recalled Ted Sorensen, “Khrushchev told Harriman that more than anything else, Kennedy’s ‘Peace Speech’—which the chairman allowed to be rebroadcast throughout Russia and to be published in full in the Moscow press—had paved the way for the treaty.”

The treaty outlawed nuclear testing by the USA, USSR, and Great Britain in the atmosphere, outer space, and underwater. On July 25, 1963, envoys from the three powers signed the document, making it official. John Kennedy considered this his greatest achievement.

David Ormsby-Gore, the British ambassador in Washington, traced Kennedy’s determination to secure the treaty and his courage in pursuing it to his good friend’s own biography. “With all human beings, one of the things that gives confidence is to have been in extreme peril and come well out of it, perhaps on some occasions to have been near death and come back from the brink. I have always noticed that people who have had that kind of experience have a sort of calm; not quite a detachment from life, but a calm attitude to anything that life can throw at them, which is rather significant. Of course, he had had the experience on more than one occasion of being faced by death.”

During that summer, as Jack had been traveling, Jackie Kennedy had remained at home pregnant, expecting to deliver her third child in September. Their second, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Jr., born right after the 1960 election, was now twenty months old. Caroline was almost six. On August 7, Jackie gave birth, five weeks early, to a boy whom they named Patrick. Never strong to begin with, two days later he began to fail. The father held his tiny fingers for two hours as the infant tried to breathe. He was holding them when Patrick died. “He put up quite a fight.” Then, “He was a beautiful baby.”

Afterward, the president went to his room, having asked to be given time alone. Through the door, Dave Powers could hear him sobbing. Later he would kneel beside Jackie’s bed and tell her about the son he’d loved that they now, together, had lost.

There was never a good time to try to come to grips with the situation in Vietnam, and Kennedy had been delaying it. Within days of taking office, he’d signed a national security directive stating that it was our country’s policy to “defeat Communist insurgency” in South Vietnam. By 1963 there were twelve thousand U.S. “military advisors” there. However, JFK had resisted calls from South Vietnam’s president, Ngo Dinh Diem, to send in combat troops, seeing no merit to that idea. Fully aware that there were gung ho American officers hoping he’d upgrade our status there from “advising” to actually fighting, he had no intention of letting that happen.

“I can remember one particular case,” Red Fay recalled. “We were out, I believe it was off of Newport. I think the Blue Angels had just flown over. The president was sitting in his swivel chair in the back of the Honey Fitz, and the phone rang next to him. There were some marines that wanted to lead their unit into combat. The situation, they thought, was ideal for an attack, and so, therefore, they wanted to lead it. And, evidently, the standing orders of the president at that time were that our advisors over there were not there to lead Vietnam troops into battle. Fay heard his old navy buddy make it crystal clear that he wanted that order enforced to the letter.

But he couldn’t abandon Saigon to the Communists and expect to win a second term. He couldn’t afford to be the president who “lost” South Vietnam, just as he’d accused Harry Truman of doing with China. The problem was President Diem. A Roman Catholic, Diem had enjoyed strong support from American Catholics, including Kennedy, since taking command when Vietnam was divided at the Geneva Convention in 1954. Diem was now conducting a campaign of repression against the country’s Buddhist majority. In June a seventy-three-year-old Buddhist monk had lit himself on fire in a main Saigon thoroughfare, having moments earlier handed a statement to reporters. “Before closing my eyes to Buddha, I have the honor of presenting my word to President Diem, asking him to be kind and tolerant toward his people and to enforce a policy of religious equality.”

President Kennedy realized he could no longer support a regime that was fighting the Communist guerrillas and Buddhist monks. Besides this, the Diem government was viewed as hopelessly corrupt, totally under the control of Diem’s brother and sister-in-law, the notorious “Dragon Lady,” Madame Nhu. Feeling stymied, he had the idea to name his onetime political rival Henry Cabot Lodge as U.S. ambassador. There were clear advantages to this. Lodge lacked any sentimental feelings toward Diem. He was arrogant enough to act decisively. Most important, he wanted a victory, personally as well as nationally. He had the added advantage, for Kennedy, of making the hellish situation in South Vietnam bipartisan.

Something had to be done. Diem and his brother Nhu were leading the country’s special forces in raids on Buddhist pagodas in Saigon and other cities, arresting monks and nuns alike. Lodge now represented a group within the Kennedy administration who wanted to back a military coup to topple Diem. The leader of that faction was Averell Harriman, who’d proven himself to Kennedy by winning Khrushchev’s agreement in July to the limited nuclear testing ban.

On August 24, Kennedy approved a cable to Saigon authorizing American support for a military coup against President Diem. It was a cold decision, certainly a stark shift in loyalty. Kennedy had been a backer of Diem from the earliest days of the country’s division, and had been a supporter of the American Friends of Vietnam, a lobbying group. Now he was approving his former ally’s overthrow. Inside his administration, his decision was never truly cleared by either McNamara or Rusk, and it met with disfavor from Lyndon Johnson.

The cable said: “U.S. Government cannot tolerate situation in which power lies in Nhu’s hands. Diem must be given chance to rid himself of Nhu and his coterie and replace them with the best military and political personalities available. If, in spite of your efforts, Diem remains obdurate and refuses, then we must face the possibility that Diem himself cannot be preserved. You will understand that we cannot from Washington give you detailed instructions as to how this operation should proceed, but you will also know we will back you to the hilt on action to achieve our objectives.” It was precisely what Lodge wanted: a death warrant.

August was also the month of the extraordinary, epoch-making March on Washington, with its unforgettable “I have a dream” speech delivered with Moses-like fervor by Martin Luther King, Jr., to the crowd of 250,000. The president had done what he could to stave off the possibility of conflict at the event. His efforts had helped swell the numbers of marchers, especially whites, because he’d encouraged Walter Reuther to bring his UAW members. He’d taken steps to accommodate the crowd, reducing the chances of discord by making sure there was both food and bathroom access. And, sensibly, he drew the route from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial—not to the gates of the White House.

Meeting with the leaders after the speech, Kennedy immediately quoted the most memorable line to show his admiration: “I have a dream,” he repeated.

Ben Bradlee accompanied Kennedy when he went the following month to visit Jackie at her mother’s house in Newport, where she’d been staying since the loss of their infant boy. It was the Kennedys’ tenth wedding anniversary. “This was the first time we’d seen Jackie since the death of little Patrick, and she greeted JFK with by far the most affectionate embrace we had ever seen them give each other. They were not normally demonstrative people, period.”

Also in September, Jack attended the Harvard-Columbia football game. He left at halftime to head off for a secret visit to the grave of his lost son, Patrick. He told Ken O’Donnell to make sure no press people were around. When he got to the grave in Brookline, he knelt down and prayed.

It’s always difficult to penetrate another person’s religious beliefs. This would be especially the case with someone as complex as Jack Kennedy.

Back in his younger years Jack would stay in his pew during Communion because he wasn’t in a state of grace. Now, as president, he’d go to mass weekly, but also to confession. When a priest once signaled he’d recognized his distinctive accent, he had a way to evade detection. In future visits to the confession booth, he took a place in line among the Secret Service agents, assuming the confessor would not be quite sure who was telling him what.

When it came to family and loss, his faith regularly showed itself. Mark Dalton was always touched, he said, when Jack stopped by a church to light a candle for Joe Jr. There were often times when friends would catch him losing himself briefly in reveries about the older brother who’d so much paved the way for him. Dave Powers, who saw Jack off to bed so many nights, said that the president would kneel and pray before retiring. One wonders whether he ever echoed St. Augustine’s famous prayer: “Give me chastity and continence, but not just now.”

Ted Sorensen offered this moral verdict on Jack. “An American President, commander in chief of the world’s greatest military power, who during his presidency did not send one combat troop division abroad or drop one bomb, who used his presidency to break down the barriers of religious and racial equality and harmony in this country and to reach out to the victims of poverty and repression, who encouraged Americans to serve their communities and to love their neighbors regardless of the color of their skin, who waged war not on smaller nations but on poverty and illiteracy and mental illness in his own country, and who restored the appeal of politics for the young and sent Peace Corps volunteers overseas to work with the poor and untrained in other countries—was in my book a moral president, regardless of his personal misconduct.”

On October 4, Jackie left on a Caribbean cruise aboard Aristotle Onassis’s yacht, the Christina. The trip offered her a chance to regain her spirits. Jack took her absence as a chance to get to know his children better, and put in time as their babysitter. Pictures taken in the Oval Office show John Jr. peeking out from under the front of his father’s desk.

In late October, Kennedy was pounding away for passage of the civil rights bill. At one point, he called Mayor Richard Daley to put pressure on a Chicago congressman who was holding up the measure. Their conversation, packed with old-school politics, was picked up on the White House taping system:

Kennedy:	Roland Libonati is sticking it right up us.
Daley:	He is?
Kennedy:	Yeah, because he’s standing with the extreme liberals who are gonna end up with no bill at all. I asked him, “If you’ll vote for this package which we got together with the Republicans, [it] gives us about everything we wanted,” and he says, “No.”
Daley:	He’ll vote for it. He’ll vote for any goddamned thing you want.
Kennedy:	(laughs) Well, can you get him?
Daley:	I surely can. Where is he? Is he there?
Kennedy:	He’s in the other room.
Daley:	Well, you have Kenny. Tell Kenny to put him on the wire here.
Kennedy:	Or would you rather get him when he gets back to his office? That’s better. Otherwise, he might think . . .
Daley:	That’s better. But he’ll do it. The last time I told him, “Now look it. I don’t give a goddamned what it is. You vote for it, for anything the president wants and this is the way it will be and this the way it’s gonna be.”
Kennedy:	We have a chance to pull this out. Billy [Green] in Philadelphia got Toll. If you can get Libonati.

Using the muscle of his political pals, the same bosses who helped get him to the White House, Kennedy nailed down Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee. By November, he had gotten it out of the committee, though stymied by the segregationist chairman of the Rules Committee, who refused to bring it to the House floor.

On November 2, Ngo Dinh Diem was killed in the military coup that the United States had signed off on in August. When he learned of the death, and the brutal manner of it, Kennedy bolted from the room in horror. Hearing the coup leader’s claim that Diem had taken his own life, Kennedy rejected it outright. He never believed that a fellow Roman Catholic would commit suicide. Ted Sorensen would later say: “Perhaps he should have guessed that, in that part of the world, the overthrow of Diem by the South Vietnamese army could well lead to Diem’s death. But I could see from the look of shock and dismay on JFK’s face when he heard the news of Diem’s assassination that he had no indication or even hint that anything more than Diem’s exile was contemplated.”

After retreating from the cabinet room, Jack called up Mary Meyer, his sometime mistress and friend. Not wanting to be alone, he spent the rest of the day with her.

Back at his desk after the weekend, he dictated a memorandum of what had happened.

“Monday, November 4, 1963. Over the weekend the coup in Saigon took place. It culminated three months of conversation about a coup, conversation which divided the government here and in Saigon.

“Opposed to the coup was General Taylor, the attorney general, Secretary McNamara to a somewhat lesser degree, John McCone, partly because of an old hostility to Lodge, which causes him to lack confidence in Lodge’s judgment, partly as a result of a new hostility because Lodge shifted his station chief. In favor of the coup was State, led by Averell Harriman, George Ball, Roger Hilsman, supported by Michael Forrestal at the White House.

“I feel I must bear a good deal of responsibility for it, beginning with our cables of early August in which we suggested the coup. In my judgment that wire was badly drafted; it should not have been sent on a Saturday. I should not have given my consent to it without a roundtable conference at which McNamara and Taylor could have presented their views. While we did redress that balance in later wires, that first wire encouraged Lodge along a course to which he was in any case inclined.”

On the tape, the listener can hear the voices of John Jr., who was almost three, talking with his father. Caroline, six, joins in at the very end:

Kennedy:	You want something? Say something. Hello.
John:	Hello.
Kennedy:	Why do leaves fall?
John:	Because it’s winter.
Kennedy:	No, autumn.
John:	Autumn.
Kennedy:	And why does the snow come on the ground?
John:	Because it’s winter.
Kennedy:	Why do the leaves turn green?
John:	Because it’s winter.
Kennedy:	Spring. Spring.
John:	Spring.
Kennedy:	And why do we go to the Cape? Hyannis Port?
John:	Because it’s winter.
Kennedy:	It’s summer!
John:	It’s summer.
Kennedy:	Say your horses . . .
Caroline:	Your horses.

“I was shocked by the death of Diem and Nhu,” Kennedy continued his dictation.

“I’d met Diem with Justice Douglas many years ago. He was an extraordinary character. While he became increasingly difficult in the last months, nevertheless over a ten-year period he’d held his country together, maintained its independence under very adverse conditions. The way he was killed makes it particularly abhorrent. The question now is whether the generals can stay together and build a stable government, or whether . . . the intellectuals, students, et cetera, will turn on the government as repressive and undemocratic in the not too distant future.”

The following day he gave Maxwell Taylor, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, a clear signal of his intentions in Vietnam, offering what he viewed as the limits of American commitment in-country. “He is instinctively against introduction of U.S. forces,” Taylor would report. Jack made a similar comment to Arthur Schlesinger. “They want a force of American troops. They say it’s necessary in order to restore confidence and maintain morale. But it will be just like Berlin. The troops will march in, the bands will play, the crowds will cheer, and in four days everyone will have forgotten. Then we will be told we have to send in more troops. It’s like taking a drink. The effect wears off, and you have to take another.”

Yet his exact thoughts about Vietnam remain a mystery. What we do know is his early understanding of the fighting. Motivated by nationalism, the Viet Minh had fought the French, and he’d grasped what was at stake. Why would he make a different assessment of the Viet Cong war against the pro-American Diem? Ken O’Donnell said Kennedy told him he was determined to get out once the election-year politics were behind him. But it’s not that simple. Ted Sorensen believed his boss could never have the cynicism about war and human lives that the conflict in Vietnam would turn out to mandate. “I do not believe he knew in his last weeks what he was going to do.”

At about this same time, Kennedy called members of the House Rules Committee to the White House. He was interested in getting their insider knowledge about why his legislation, which included the Civil Rights bill, was stalled. Tip O’Neill remembered being asked to come for a drink afterward when Jack spotted him stranded without a ride. The two of them chatted about the old days. Jack was curious about how some of his old boys were doing, the ones who’d been with him in the beginning. He asked about Billy Sutton, Mark Dalton, Joe Healey, John Galvin, and the others. He asked Tip to make sure Billy had a job up in Massachusetts.

The Kennedys spent the Veterans Day weekend with the Bradlees down at their friends’ new getaway in Virginia. Jack told Ben he didn’t like what he’d heard about Dallas, where he was soon headed, about the way Adlai Stevenson had been spat on, heckled, and jeered when giving a United Nations Day speech there. He felt, he told his friend, that the “mood of the city was ugly.” In a front-page editorial, the Dallas Times Herald had pronounced the city “disgraced. There is no other way to view the storm-trooper actions of last night’s frightening attack on Adlai Stevenson.” Governor John Connally called the affair “an affront to common courtesy and decency.” And Mayor Earle Cabell pointed out that the demonstrators were “not our kind of folks.” Jack allowed White House photographers to take pictures of the family that weekend. One film shows Jackie rehearsing with John Jr. a salute he was practicing, perhaps for when he joined his father that Monday at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

The following Thursday, Jack had invited the film legend Greta Garbo to the White House. Lem Billings had met her on a recent European trip and was thrilled at the prospect of introducing her to his pal. Jack, meanwhile, ever the practical joker, had hatched a plan. The evening was arranged so that Garbo would arrive before Lem, giving Jack a chance to chat with her and lay the groundwork for his scheme.

Kennedy’s idea was to convince her to act as if she’d never before set eyes on Billings. The pair of them carried it off for a quite some time before finally taking Lem out of his misery. It is a perfect example of Jack’s taking the time, as he often did with his closest friends, to give them a little trouble. Though mildly sadistic—Lem devoted himself to trying to get Garbo to remember the various outings they’d had together, only to have her stare at him blankly—the prank also showed, in an odd way, that Jack cared. And cared enough—he, a president of the United States—to concoct a scheme that was at once so silly and yet so intimate. He’d done such things all his life.

It was a dinner to remember: Jackie, Jack, and Lem—and Garbo. But it would always be a sad memory for Lem. It had taken place on November 13, 1963.

That month, Kennedy hosted his first major campaign meeting for 1964. Included were Bobby, Ted Sorensen, Ken O’Donnell, and Larry O’Brien. It was the same team that had met in Palm Beach and later in Hyannis Port in 1959. Once again, his brother-in-law Steve Smith was to take charge, overall. The effort would be run from the White House, and the theme would be “peace and prosperity.”

Kennedy looked forward to running against Senator Barry Goldwater. He was convinced that the conservative Arizonan was just too candid for a presidential candidate and would quickly self-destruct. His bigger worry was Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York. Told that “Rocky” liked him, Kennedy said it didn’t matter. Politics would change that. “He’ll end up hating me. That’s natural,” he said, remembering, perhaps, his own change of heart over Nixon.

President Kennedy was confident. But he also knew that he needed Texas and, perhaps, Georgia—not easy states to get in his corner, given the growing rage of white Southerners against him for his strong stand on civil rights. The polling showed that two thirds of them were deeply hostile, not an easy situation for a man looking to nail down Southern support. It was going to be a tough election. He needed to begin raising money and rousing those yellow-dog Democrats who’d been raised with the party and might still be won over.

Jack spent the next weekend in Palm Beach with Torby Macdonald, now in his fifth term as a Massachusetts congressman. It was a bachelor party fueled by enough bonhomie to induce JFK to croon “The September Song” with extra feeling. That Monday, November 18, he traveled with George Smathers to Miami and Tampa to deliver speeches denouncing Castro and his regime.

“A small band of conspirators has stripped the Cuban people of their freedom and handed over the independence and sovereignty of the Cuban nation to forces beyond the hemisphere. This, and this alone, divides us. As long as it is true, nothing is possible. Once this barrier is removed, everything is possible.”

With the trip to Texas ahead of him, Kennedy worried about the South. “I wish I had this fucking thing over with,” he complained to Smathers. He also told him, “You’ve got to live each day like it’s your last day on earth.”

On November 22, having spent the night in Fort Worth, he agreed to meet outside, before breakfast, with a good crowd of union people. Despite the early morning drizzle, the crowd was warm and enthusiastic. Inside, as the business leaders sipped their coffee, he gave a tough speech on Vietnam. “Without the United States, South Vietnam would collapse overnight.”

Whatever concerns he had in the long run, whatever hesitation kept him from committing combat troops, he had those eighteen thousand “advisors” there on the ground. He was also thinking about an exit strategy. The day before, he’d asked his national security aide Michael Forrestal to “organize an in-depth study of every possible option we’ve got in Vietnam, including how to get out of there.”

On the way from Fort Worth to the airport later that morning, Jack grilled Congressman Jim Wright and Governor John Connally about the strange difference in politics between the city he’d just left and the one he was about to enter. Why is Fort Worth so Democratic and Dallas so angrily right-wing? It was his usual curiosity abetted here by fresh reason to wonder. After all, he’d just been given a hero’s welcome by the people of one city but remembered only too well Richard Nixon carrying Dallas with 65 percent in 1960. Now, there was the pall cast by the recent ugly treatment of Adlai Stevenson.

While Wright laid some of the blame on the conservative press, especially the Dallas Morning News, Connally offered a more sophisticated assessment of the difference between the two Texas cities. He said it could be traced to their different economies. Fort Worth was still a cowboy town. Dallas, on the other hand, was a white-collar town where people worked in high-rise office buildings. They identified with the folks on the floor above them, not the guy or woman working next to them in the stockyard or factory. They voted like their managers because they wanted to join them. This explained the shift of the city to the Republicans, a change that Connally understood and that was a precursor of his own ambitions.

Jack was just trying to figure it all out. He was out there in the American landscape, doing what he’d come very much to love, perhaps even more than the public service it allowed. He was on the road, doing the work of an American politician. He had goals, and he needed to be president to reach them.

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