JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President

by Thurston Clarke

  Jackie had been scheduled for a cesarean section at Washington’s Walter Reed Army Hospital in September, but because John Kennedy, Jr., had arrived prematurely almost three years earlier, the Air Force had prepared a suite for her at the Otis Air Force Base Hospital. Kennedy had asked her obstetrician, John Walsh, and her White House physician, Janet Travell, to vacation on the Cape that summer. He called Travell before flying to Otis, and she reported that Walsh had taken Jackie to the hospital and was preparing to perform an emergency cesarean. Jackie would be fine, she said, but a baby born six weeks prematurely had only a fifty/fifty chance of surviving.

  If there was ever a time when Kennedy could imagine beating these odds, it was the summer of 1963, a splendid season that his brother Bobby recalled being “the happiest time of his administration.” On June 28 he had given his Ich bin ein Berliner oration, a stirring summation of the difference between democratic and totalitarian states (and probably the finest speech delivered by an American president on foreign soil), to a quarter of a million Germans filling the future John F. Kennedy Platz. After Air Force One took off for Dublin he told Ted Sorensen, “We’ll never have another day like this one as long as we live,” but he was soon describing his visit to his ancestral villages in Ireland as the three happiest days of his life. The day after returning from Europe he went to Hyannis Port for a Fourth of July he called “the greatest weekend of my life.” After disembarking from his helicopter he had embraced Jackie, surprising reporters who had never seen them hug or walk arm in arm. The weather had been superb, three sparkling summer days. He felt healthier than he had in years, “bursting with vigor,” according to Dr. Travell. He took long swims, flew kites with John off the back of the Honey Fitz, the presidential cabin cruiser, and because his chronic back pain had largely vanished, played golf for the first time since 1961. He screened a film of his Irish trip on three straight evenings, and when he could not persuade anyone but his brother Ted to sit through it again they watched it alone, prompting his former Navy buddy Paul (“Red”) Fay to complain, “All we are getting here still is his Irish visit. . . . Jack brings the conversation back round to it and invariably shows the film which I have now seen for the sixth time.”

  He had been a detached father when John and Caroline were infants, telling Fay, “I don’t understand how you can get such a big kick out of your children. . . . Certainly nothing they are going to say is going to stimulate you.” But once Caroline began talking, they forged a closer relationship, and by the summer of 1963 John had become a rambunctious and personable little boy. When Kennedy arrived at Hyannis Port he would shout, “It’s time for Father and Son to get to know each other.” John would dash into his arms and they would fall onto the lawn so he could hold the boy in the air, tickling him and saying, “John, aren’t you lucky to have a dad who plays with you like this?” His newfound rapport with his children had increased his excitement for his next one, and as he passed Lincoln’s desk he often told her, “Soon you’ll have three coming over to get candy from your candy dish.”

  There had been rocky periods in his marriage, but Jackie’s pregnancy had brought them closer. Fay and his wife, Anita, had been their houseguests the weekend before Jackie went into labor. When Kennedy failed to appear for an excursion, Fay went upstairs and found them lying in bed, arms wrapped around each other, more intimate than he had ever seen them. Later that weekend Kennedy told Fay, “I’d known a lot of attractive women in my lifetime before I got married, but of all of them there was only one I could have married—and I married her.”

  After returning to Washington from these summer weekends, he told his friend Dave Powers how much he was enjoying his children and how great everything was. Powers was a puckish, middle-aged Irish American who had been with him since his first campaign. His principal duties involved ushering distinguished visitors into the Oval Office (he had once famously told the Shah of Iran, “You’re my kind of shah”), entertaining the president with jokes, reminiscing about earlier campaigns, swimming alongside him in the White House pool, and keeping him company when his family was away, because he was a man, Powers said, who “could not bear to be alone, ever.” During the summer of 1963 they often sat together on the Truman Balcony, eating dinner off trays and listening to songs from Kennedy’s youth, such as “Stormy Weather” and “The Very Thought of You.” The spotlights came on, illuminating the White House fountain and the Washington Monument, and Kennedy invariably said, “It gets better every night” or “This is the best White House I’ve ever lived in.” When he became sleepy, Powers went upstairs with him, sitting by his bed and talking until he mumbled, “Good night, pal,” the signal that Powers could extinguish his light and return to his own family.

  The summer of 1963 was also a high point in Kennedy’s presidency, “a remarkably intensive but productive period,” according to Sorensen. The Wall Street Journal reported in its front-page “Washington Wire” on August 9 that “White House optimism grows, little restrained by Washington’s summer doldrums. The Kennedy team feels the tide of events runs his way, at home and abroad. The President sees a chance for new accords to ease the cold war. The nation’s civil rights crisis seems to come under control. . . . Republican squabbling on issues and candidates pleases him as an omen for 1964.”

  The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Maxwell Taylor, had known what he called “many President Kennedys.” They included the masterful leader of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, the “supremely confident” man who emerged during the summer of 1963, and the president shaken by the “Bay of Pigs,” shorthand for the bungled attempt of CIA-trained Cuban exiles to overthrow the Communist regime of President Fidel Castro in April 1961. The Eisenhower administration had planned the operation, Kennedy’s civilian and military advisers had endorsed it, and he had approved what amounted to an amphibious landing on a hostile shore attempted by amateur Cuban soldiers overseen by American amateurs. He shouldered the blame but was furious with the Pentagon and CIA for a fiasco that he feared had mortally wounded his presidency.

  As he and a friend drove out of the White House a few weeks after the catastrophe, he smiled and waved at a group of cheering supporters while muttering, “If they think they’re going to get me to run for this job again, they’re out of their minds.” He told his best friend and former prep school roommate Lem Billings that the presidency was “the most unpleasant job in existence,” and that he doubted anyone would want to build a library for what was promising to be “a rather tragic administration.” He remained pessimistic well into the fall. When the NBC correspondent Elie Abel asked him to cooperate on a book about his first term, he said, “Why would anyone write a book about an administration that has nothing to show for itself but a string of disasters?” But by the summer of 1963, following his successful resolution of the Cuban missile crisis, a strong showing by Democrats in the 1962 elections, and healthy economic growth, he had become almost as happy and confident as President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Like Roosevelt, who had faced the Depression and the Second World War, he was contending with two grave threats to the nation’s survival, a nuclear war and a racial conflict. On two successive days in June 1963 he delivered speeches addressing each one that represented a sharp departure from the caution marking his first two years in office.

  Contrary to his public image as a dashing and decisive chief executive, Kennedy was, in fact, in the words of his economic adviser Paul Samuelson, “an extremely hesitant person who checked the ice in front of him all the time.” Winning the White House by about 113,000 votes out of the 69 million cast, the narrowest margin in almost a century, had encouraged his caution and pragmatism. There had been much ice checking during his first two years in office, leading the columnist Joseph Kraft to say that his motto could have been “no enemies to the right.”

  At first, Kennedy had avoided challenging the hard-line cold warriors in either party and resisted engaging the Soviet Union in serious disarm
ament talks. He changed his mind after the Cuban missile crisis demonstrated how easily a misjudgment by either side could start a nuclear war. The crisis had started in October 1962, when Kennedy learned that the Soviet Union was installing missiles armed with nuclear warheads in Cuba capable of attacking the U.S. mainland. He ordered a naval blockade of the island to prevent the arrival of more Soviet arms, and demanded that the Soviets remove the missiles and bases. For almost a week the two nations teetered on the brink of a nuclear war. The crisis was averted by a deal in which the Soviets agreed to dismantle the missiles and close the bases in exchange for a secret undertaking by Kennedy to do the same with U.S. missiles in Turkey. Kennedy’s friend David Ormsby-Gore, who was serving as Britain’s ambassador, observed that after the crisis, “he finally realized that the decision for a nuclear holocaust was his. And he saw it in terms of children—his children and everybody else’s children. And then that’s where his passion came in, that’s when his emotions came in.” The risk of radioactive fallout had worried him since 1961, when the Soviet Union unilaterally decided to resume atmospheric nuclear tests, forcing him to do the same. When he asked his science adviser Jerome Wiesner how fallout returned to the earth from the upper atmosphere, Wiesner explained that it came down in the rain. Staring at the rain falling in the Rose Garden, Kennedy said, “You mean there might be radioactive contamination in that rain out there right now?”

  He used a June 10, 1963, commencement address at American University to announce his own unilateral suspension of atmospheric nuclear tests and to propose negotiations in Moscow aimed at drafting a treaty banning nuclear testing in the atmosphere, underground, underneath the oceans, and in outer space. The speech was a dramatic break from eighteen years of cold war rhetoric by Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, and himself. He blamed both sides for the arms race, called on Americans to “reexamine our own attitude—as individuals and as a Nation,” acknowledged Russia’s wartime sacrifices, declared that “no government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue,” and reminded Americans that they and the Soviet people “breathe the same air,” “cherish our children’s future,” and “are all mortal,” expressing these truths so eloquently that one British newspaper called the address “one of the greatest state papers of American history.” Soviet newspapers reprinted its entire text and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev praised it as the best speech by any American president since Roosevelt.

  The next day Kennedy delivered a nationally televised address on civil rights that James Farmer of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) lauded as the “strongest civil rights speech made by any president, Lincoln included.” After saying that “race has no place in American life or law,” he announced that he was sending Congress a comprehensive civil rights bill guaranteeing all citizens the right to be served in hotels, restaurants, retail stores, and other public facilities. If passed, it would represent the most dramatic advance in civil rights since the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education declared separate public schools for black and white students to be unconstitutional. As in his American University speech, he asked Americans to exercise their moral imaginations. After reminding whites that black citizens could not eat in public restaurants, send their children to the best public schools, or vote for their representatives, he asked, “Who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place?” When he finished, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., told a companion, “Can you believe that white man not only stepped up to the plate, he hit it over the fence!” The next day King sent him a telegram praising the speech as “eloquent, passionate and unequivocal . . . a hallmark in the annals of American history.” King and Farmer would have been even more impressed had they known that all of Kennedy’s senior advisers except his brother Bobby had opposed him delivering a speech framing the issue in moral terms, and submitting a civil rights bill to Congress.

  In Profiles in Courage, his Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of eight U.S. senators who had chosen principle over political expediency, he had written about men who, much like himself until 1963, had “sailed with the wind until the decisive moment when their conscience, and events, propelled them into the center of the storm.” His two June speeches represented just that moment, and some of the remarks he made after delivering them sounded as if he were nominating himself for a chapter in his own book. After the test ban treaty was initialed in Moscow, he told Sorensen he would “gladly” forfeit reelection to win the sixty-seven votes needed to ratify it in the Senate. After a Gallup poll reported that 50 percent of Americans believed he was moving “too fast” on civil rights, he told a reporter at a press conference, “Great historical events cannot be judged by taking the national temperature every few weeks. . . . I think we will stand after a period of time has gone by,” and said to his secretary of commerce, Luther Hodges, a former Southern governor, “There comes a time when a man has to take a stand and history will record that he has to meet these tough situations and ultimately make a decision.” During a White House meeting with civil rights leaders he pulled a scrap of paper from his pocket containing the results of a poll showing his approval ratings falling from 60 to 47 percent since his speech and said grandiloquently, “I may lose the next election because of this. I don’t care.”

  His June speeches had been a decisive break from the past: one offered the first concrete proposals for limiting the spread and testing of atomic weapons since the beginning of the cold war; the other represented the first time an American president had identified civil rights as a moral issue. They condemned racial discrimination and nuclear war as immoral, stressed the common humanity of whites and blacks, and Americans and Russians, and were profoundly optimistic. At American University he had said, “Our problems are man-made; 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.” The following evening, he declared that passage of his civil rights bill would enable America “to fulfill its promise.” The author and peace activist Norman Cousins, who had been serving as a clandestine intermediary between Kennedy and Khrushchev, spoke of “a new spirit of hopefulness” abroad in the world that summer, writing, “Nothing is more powerful than an individual acting out of his conscience, thus helping to bring the collective conscience to life.”

  The political scientist James MacGregor Burns had concluded his 1960 biography of Kennedy by writing, “Kennedy could bring bravery and wisdom [to the presidency]; whether he would bring passion and power would depend on his making a commitment not only of mind, but of heart, that until now he has never been required to make.” Kennedy’s two speeches answered Burns’s criticism and honored a pledge he had made to the poet Robert Frost. During a visit to the White House two days after the inauguration, Frost had presented him with a signed and handwritten copy of the poem that he had composed for the ceremony but could not read because of the glare from a dazzling winter sun. As Frost watched, Kennedy read the poem, which amounted to a challenge to display the kind of courage that he had celebrated in Profiles in Courage and concluded by predicting,

  A golden age of poetry and power

  Of which this noonday’s the beginning hour.

  “Be more Irish than Harvard,” Frost said as they parted. “Poetry and power is the formula for another Augustan age. Don’t be afraid of power.” At the bottom of a typed thank-you note to Frost, Kennedy scrawled, “It’s poetry and power all the way!”

  There had been poetry in his early speeches. In November 1961, he warned students at the University of Washington that “the United States is neither omnipotent nor omniscient. . . . We cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity.” During the Cuban missile crisis he spoke of a nuclear war “in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouths,” and said, “Our goal is not the victory of might, but the vindication of right.” But it was not until June 1963 that he finally began to
be more Irish than Harvard, governing from the heart as well as the head, harnessing poetry to the power of the presidency without checking the thickness of the political ice, promising in his American University speech, “Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave . . . not merely peace for Americans, but peace for all men and women—not merely peace in our time but peace in all time,” and the next day calling civil rights a moral issue “as old as the scriptures and . . . as clear as the American Constitution.”

  • • •

  JACKIE GAVE BIRTH to their son while Kennedy was in the air. He sat silently during the flight, staring out a window. Another passenger remembered seeing the same stricken expression on his face on November 25, 1960, when he had flown back to Washington from Palm Beach after learning that Jackie had gone into premature labor with John. He had been tense and perspiring then, and was overheard muttering, “I’m never there when she needs me.”

  Jackie had suffered a miscarriage in 1955 and had become pregnant again the following year. Her physician had urged her to skip the 1956 Democratic Convention, but she felt obliged to attend because her husband was a candidate for the vice presidency. She went to her mother and stepfather’s estate in Newport afterward while he flew to Europe for a holiday. While he was cruising off Capri with what one newspaper called “several young women,” she went into labor and gave birth to a stillborn baby girl they planned to name Arabella, after the tiny ship that had accompanied the Mayflower. He did not hear about the tragedy until three days later and decided to continue the cruise, leaving Bobby to comfort Jackie and bury Arabella. He flew home after one of his best friends in the Senate, George Smathers of Florida, told him during a transatlantic call, “You’d better haul your ass back to your wife if you want to run for president.”