Much of what King Zaher and Queen Homaira of Afghanistan experienced during their state visit reflected changes instituted by the president and the First Lady. State visits had formerly been cumbersome three-day affairs, but Kennedy had cut the schedule in half so he could host more foreign leaders. Because he had decided that traveling out to Andrews Air Force Base to greet a visiting head of state was a waste of time and that the Ellipse and the White House South Lawn were more impressive backdrops for an arrival ceremony, King Zaher and his party landed in a helicopter on the Ellipse and drove to the White House by motorcade. Because Kennedy had been impressed by the soldiers in breastplates and plumed helmets lining his route to the Élysée Palace during his state visit to Paris, he decided to replicate the spectacle at the White House, so that when Zaher arrived that evening for his state dinner, marines in dress uniform lined the White House driveway. His first honor guard had represented all four services, but after noticing that the marines looked healthier, had better posture, and wore more elegant uniforms, he eliminated the other services. Guests at state dinners had customarily sat side by side at long tables, unable to converse with anyone except their immediate neighbors. He and Jackie had introduced round tables to facilitate conversation among larger numbers of guests. During Thursday’s state dinner he undoubtedly asked Zaher to sign his place card. No other president had entertained as many foreign heads of state in such a short space of time as he had, and he would have added Zaher’s card to about sixty others in a collection that Bradlee recalled him boasting about, “as pleased as a small child talking about his bug collection.”
The guests trooped outside after dinner to watch a drill team of marines illuminated by crisscrossing searchlights perform on the South Lawn, and to hear the Air Force Drum and Bugle Corps bagpipers play Irish melodies. Kennedy had recently noticed that the Jefferson Memorial was sited directly opposite the South Lawn and had asked General Clifton to find some old searchlights and illuminate it as an experiment. He drove over to inspect the memorial, liked what he saw, and ordered trees on the South Lawn trimmed so that guests would have an unobstructed view. Tonight was the first time it had been lit for a state dinner, and it provided a stunning backdrop to the festivities, “brilliantly lit, like a rounded jewel,” one guest reported. Afterward, he ordered it illuminated every evening.
Jackie had read that fireworks were the customary welcome for honored guests in Afghanistan, so the evening concluded with the first display in White House history. Because Kennedy feared that a twenty-minute display might be too long, boring his guests (and himself), he cut it to ten minutes. The organizers shot off twenty minutes’ worth of fireworks in ten, and the display was so brilliant and loud that calls from people convinced that the city was under attack jammed police switchboards. The evening concluded with a lone bugler standing in a spotlight, sounding taps.
Saturday, September 7–Sunday, September 8
HYANNIS PORT
Ken O’Donnell and Pam Turnure, Jackie’s press secretary, both urged Kennedy to persuade the First Lady to decline the Onassis invitation, arguing that Americans would view taking a vacation so soon after Patrick’s death to be unseemly. He told them, “I think it would be good for Jackie, and that’s what counts.” He was more honest with Charlie and Martha Bartlett, who had introduced him to Jackie. The Bartletts were their guests that weekend, and he made a humorous show of falling to one knee in front of them and begging Jackie not to go. She refused to budge. “When she wanted to do something,” Martha Bartlett observed, “she did it.”
It was gray and rainy all weekend, but he and Jackie, the Bartletts, and Lem Billings went out on the Honey Fitz anyway. The cabin cruiser was ninety-two feet long and had a spacious cabin and open deck, so Jackie may not have overheard him asking Bartlett, “How do you think Lyndon would be if I got killed?” Bartlett knew that an assassination was often on his mind, and had been with him when a speeding car had overtaken them and their Secret Service escort on a country road in Virginia and Kennedy had joked, “He could have shot you, Charlie.”
His closest call had come a month after his election, when a retired postal worker, Richard Pavlick, packed his car with dynamite and began tailing him, renting a room in Hyannis Port, cruising past his town house in Georgetown, and following him to Florida. On December 11, Pavlick had parked outside the Kennedy home in Palm Beach, waiting for him to leave for church so he could ram his limousine and ignite the explosives. Pavlick changed his mind when Jackie and Caroline appeared at the front door. He wanted to kill the president-elect, not his family. The Secret Service apprehended him, and soon afterward Kennedy said to Larry Newman, “Brother, they could have gotten me in Palm Beach. There is no way to keep anyone from killing me.” He had been researching presidential assassinations, and told Newman that President Coolidge had once said that any well-dressed man willing to sacrifice his own life could kill a president. He also shared his research with Dr. Travell while they were sitting on the patio at Palm Beach—one suddenly less shady after the Secret Service had lopped off the fronds of surrounding palms to deny cover to an assassin.
He asked Travell, “What do you think of the rule that for the last hundred years every president of the United States elected in a year divisible by twenty [Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Harding, and FDR] died in office?”
“You don’t really believe such a coincidence can continue?” she said. “The odds against it are too great, and anyway, you aren’t superstitious.”
He raised the subject with her again a few weeks later, saying it was a relief knowing that if anything happened, “My wife will have a pension and my children will be well cared for.”
Soon after the inauguration he and Fay had been walking back from the Army and Navy Club to the White House across Lafayette Square when a Secret Service agent jumped between him and a suspicious-looking man. Kennedy admitted to Fay that an assassination was never far from mind, adding, “I guess that is one of the least desirable aspects of the job.”
After a radio correspondent burst into his box on the opening day of the baseball season, shoving a microphone into his face and rattling off questions, he asked Powers, “What would you have done if that fellow had a grenade in his hand instead of a mike?”
During a game of charades in Palm Beach he acted out his assassination, collapsing to the floor and going through his death throes as a teammate doused him in ketchup.
While attending Mass in Hyannis Port, he turned to reporters sitting in the pew behind him and said, “Did you ever stop and think, if anyone tried to take a shot at me, they’d get one of you guys first?”
After disembarking at a small airport, he scanned a crowd waiting behind a fence and exclaimed, “Boy! Aren’t we targets?”
But he still plunged into crowds and ordered his drivers to slow down so he could reach out and shake hands. A man in Rome kissed him and yanked him over a wooden barricade. When he arrived at the gates of the American ambassador’s residence in Dublin a cheering mob surrounded his limousine and forced him to walk. “Crowds don’t threaten me,” he told the ambassador. “It’s that fellow standing on the roof with a gun that I worry about.”
But he worried about more than that. While he was being driven through heavy traffic in Virginia, the lead Secret Service car passed a slow-moving sedan going in the same direction and oncoming traffic kept his own car from following it. When a boy in the backseat pointed a motion-picture camera against the rear window, he tensed, took a deep breath, and murmured, “I will not live in fear. What will be, must be.”
He often speculated about the best way to die, weighing the relative merits of hanging, strangling, and drowning. His sister Kathleen and brother Joe had died in planes, so he was sensitive to the risks of flying. As his valet George Thomas was packing Kennedy’s bags for a short trip to Ohio, the president turned to Ted Sorensen and said, “If this plane goes down, Old Lyin’ Down [Vice President Lyndon
Johnson] will have this place cleared out from stem to stern in twenty-four hours—and you and George will be the first to go!”
He discussed an interparty feud with Governor William Lawrence of Pennsylvania as they rode to a political event at Washington’s Shoreham Hotel. After Lawrence remarked that one of the warring politicians would not be up for reelection until 1968, he said, “Well, probably neither you nor I will be here then.” Lawrence said, “Wait a minute, wait a minute, that may apply to me at my age, but not to you.”
Minutes before delivering a speech to Congress proposing that the United States land astronauts on the moon, Kennedy told relatives and aides gathered in the Oval Office, “I firmly expect this commitment to be kept. And if I die before it is, all you here now just remember when it happens I will be sitting up there in heaven in a rocking chair just like this one, and I’ll have a better view of it than anybody.”
After his successful handling of the Cuban missile crisis he told Jackie, “Well, if anyone’s going to shoot me, this would be the day they should do it.”
Many of the jokes he shared with Powers concerned death and wakes, but when death was real and close, it was no laughing matter. When Caroline brought her dead parakeet into the Oval Office he recoiled in horror and said, “Get it away from here!” A friend who witnessed this said, “He didn’t want to see it and he didn’t want to know necessarily about the funeral arrangement. He just wanted it out of the way.”
His sensitivity to the narrow margins separating life and death, success and failure was understandable. Had the Japanese destroyer hit PT 109 a few feet nearer to where he was standing, he would have been killed. Had he not encountered the two Solomon Islands natives, he and his men would have died of exposure or been captured. Had cortisone not been discovered as a treatment for Addison’s disease, he might have died before turning thirty-five. Paper-thin margins had also marked his political career. He had won the presidency by the smallest popular vote margin in almost a century, and had barely avoided nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis—narrow escapes that may explain why he could be so full of good humor and optimism one moment, and so morbid the next.
• • •
ON SATURDAY EVENING he and five of his six surviving siblings celebrated their father’s seventy-fifth birthday in the same way they had before he suffered a massive stroke in December 1961, leaving him paralyzed on one side and confined to a wheelchair, capable of hearing and understanding everything but capable only of grunting and saying “No!” They tied blue and yellow Mickey Mouse balloons to his wheelchair and pushed him into the living room, where they showered him with gifts and entertained him with poems, songs, toasts, and limericks. His daughter Jean Kennedy Smith and son-in-law Sargent Shriver unfurled a flag resembling the presidential one, except that it had a wide-eyed cartoon animal instead of an eagle above the words of a long-standing family joke, “He’s Always in the Bushes!”
Stoughton’s photographs show Joe Kennedy’s children standing in his low-ceilinged living room, singing and applauding. The rugs are worn, the coffee table flimsy, and the upholstered furniture mismatched, with a low dark red couch next to a pale green easy chair, near a chair covered with the same busy and flowery pattern as the curtains. At dinner almost everyone except for Jack and Jackie is wearing a paper birthday hat. The grandchildren have not joined them, but the table is decorated for eight-year-olds, with balloons, a “Happy Birthday” tablecloth, and noisemakers, as if they were still his little boys and girls. No one in the photographs—even the candid ones—looks grumpy or bored. Everyone is laughing and smiling, thin and fit, blessed with brilliant white teeth, dark tans, and glossy hair.
Jackie sat next to her father-in-law at dinner, and during the skits and present-giving she took a seat at the end of the red couch, closer to him than anyone except her husband. One photograph shows her kneeling next to him while the others stand in a semicircle behind his chair. She insisted that she loved him “more than any other man except my husband and my father.” But why she would choose to idolize a man who had been such a spectacular womanizer, and whose behavior had probably steered her husband in the same direction, remains a mystery.
Another photograph reveals that the Bartletts and Lem Billings have been relegated to a small table at the side of the dining room reminiscent of the “children’s table” at Thanksgiving. Although they are among Jack and Jackie’s oldest friends, they remain outsiders. Rita Dallas, the registered nurse who was caring for Joe Kennedy, believed that the Kennedy children were “loyal to the extreme” and saw them as a monolithic unit. In fact, their relationships had altered as they married, had children, changed jobs, and moved. The Palm Beach and Cape Cod houses were a powerful formaldehyde, but Joe’s and Kathleen’s deaths, Jack’s political career, and Joe Sr.’s stroke had shuffled things. Jack had been closest to the high-spirited Kathleen, whose magnetism and charm most closely resembled his own. After she died in 1948, he turned to Eunice, the next-youngest and most driven of the surviving girls, teasing and competing with her as if she were Joe. He often sat with her in the library at Hyannis Port, briefing her on his speeches and seeking her advice. She would tell her father afterward, “He’s pretty good, Daddy, but I could do it better.”
The eight-year difference between him and Bobby had kept them apart when they were younger, but they became close after traveling to Asia together in 1951. He spoke with Bobby more than anyone in his cabinet, and trusted him and valued his advice more than anyone on his staff, but their relationship was less intimate than many imagined. He did not include him in the last-minute White House dinners, and seldom attended social events at his home in Virginia. Bobby’s large and rambunctious family was one barrier; another was a subterranean competition that he was more willing than Bobby to acknowledge. Billings recalled times when Bobby would call and Jack would hold the telephone away from his mouth and say to whoever happened to be in the Oval Office, “I think it is the Second Most Important Man in the capital calling.”
No one in the family had influenced Kennedy more or contributed more to his success than his father. Joe Kennedy had raised a family of ferocious competitors, weaning them on maxims such as “We don’t want any losers around here. In this family we want winners” and “Don’t come in second or third—that doesn’t count—but win.” When Schlesinger invited Kennedy to speculate as to why his father’s children had turned out so much better than FDR’s, he said, “It was all due to my father,” explaining that although he had not been around as much as some fathers, when he was, “he made his children feel that they were the most important things in the world to him,” and “seemed terribly interested in everything we were doing.” By 1960, however, Kennedy had stopped paying attention to his advice. After his father criticized him for courting union members in Michigan, he told a friend, “I’m not going to listen to Dad anymore in this campaign because he doesn’t understand what a Democrat has to do to get elected. In this country, a Democrat can only win if he excites an awful lot of people to believe their lives are going to be better if he gets into the White House.” He tipped his top hat to him during his inaugural parade but seldom invited him to the White House, and he found his advice and criticisms oppressive. But he was gentle and loving after Joe’s stroke. During Joe’s first post-stroke visit to the Oval Office Kennedy patiently explained the significance of the mementoes on his desk, and as tears of pride streamed down his father’s face he wheeled him to another part of the room and said, “This is my rocker, Dad. It looks as though we both need special chairs, doesn’t it?”
Joe Kennedy’s birthday party continued in the living room after dinner. Teddy’s wife, Joan, played “Happy Birthday” on the piano, and as if this birthday was like the others, Teddy sang “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” so loudly that the veins on his neck bulged. At Joe’s seventieth birthday, everyone had sung, to the tune of “Yankee Doodle,” “He’s the famous bear of Wall Street / Just a gr
izzly in his house . . . And he’s our Happy Birthday boy,” and they probably reprised it this night. The evening concluded with Jack singing, from the melancholy “September Song,” “O, the days dwindle down to a precious few. . . .”
“He did it so well,” Martha Bartlett recalled. “That was a killer, the old man in a wheelchair, the son singing. You almost felt Jack knew he wasn’t going to see old age.” More likely, he sang it because he liked the song and it was September, and if the mood turned sad when he finished, it was probably because everyone was afraid that the days were dwindling down to a precious few for this frail patriarch. Each of his children and their spouses leaned down and kissed him lightly on the forehead before retiring. Jack had started the custom and was the last to kiss him. “Happy Birthday, Dad,” he said as he straightened up. “And may you have many, many more.”
On Sunday, he and Jackie and the Bartletts went cruising on the Honey Fitz and discussed what he would do after the White House. He would be only fifty-one when he left office in 1969, he said, “too young to write my memoirs and too old to start a new career,” but he might like being U.S. ambassador to Italy, “because it would be good for Jackie.” During an earlier conversation on the subject, he had told Bartlett that he wanted to take the famously efficient White House telephone operators with him when he left office, although “then nobody will want to talk to me, but at least I’ll have them.”
“What are you going to do, Jack?” Jackie asked. “I don’t want to be the wife of a headmaster of a girls’ school.”
“Well, now, let’s not worry, Jackie,” he said, trying to end a conversation that was beginning to annoy him. “Something will turn up.”
He once told Paul Fay, “We could go back to the South Pacific and revisit those waters where we personally turned the tide of war. Then drift through the Greek islands, with our wives administering to our every wish.” In a more serious vein, he said he might run for the Senate, pointing out that John Quincy Adams had served in the House after his presidency, but adding, “Of course, when Bobby or Teddy becomes President then I’d probably be most useful as Secretary of State.” He was ambivalent about a Bobby Kennedy presidency, worried that it might muddy or detract from his legacy. “I’m just not quite sure that I would ever get adjusted to addressing Bobby or Teddy as ‘Mr. President,’” he told Fay. “Let’s not dwell too long on the prospect of taking orders from Lovable Bob.”*
JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President Page 19