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

by Thurston Clarke

  Monday, September 9

  WASHINGTON

  Kennedy appointed John Gronouski to the cabinet position of postmaster general on Monday even though he lacked a “postal background.” An article in the New York Times called it a repayment for Gronouski’s support in 1960, and a way of bolstering Kennedy’s support among Polish Americans. David Broder headlined his column “Kennedy Building for ’64” and compared the appointment to that of former Cleveland mayor Anthony Celebrezze as secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, calling them “pre-election investments the President hopes will pay off in the 1964 election returns.” Broder added that by naming the first Italian American and first Polish American to cabinet posts, Kennedy was seeking to blunt white backlash against his civil rights bill. If Gronouski’s last name had been Collins or Green, he wrote, and if he had come from Georgia or Colorado, Kennedy would not have chosen him.

  What Broder and the other pundits missed was that the Gronouski appointment also reflected Kennedy’s determination to make it easier for other ethnic groups to walk through the door that his election had kicked open. Nor did Broder or other commentators connect the appointment to the immigration bill that Kennedy had submitted to Congress in July, one promising the most radical transformation of U.S. immigration laws in almost half a century.

  The Immigration Act of 1924, also known as the National Origins Act (NOA), restricted immigration from eastern and southern European nations, and made it virtually impossible for Asians by restricting immigration to approximately 1,000 people a year from the so-called Asian-Pacific Triangle, an imaginary area including all of the countries from Pakistan to Japan as well as Pacific islands north of Australia and New Zealand. It set an annual quota for each nation at 2 percent of the number of its former citizens residing in the United States in 1890, a formula allowing about 156,000 yearly slots. After 1927, the quota was based on the ethnicity of the U.S. population in 1920. The large yearly quotas for nations like Britain, Ireland, Sweden, and Germany were seldom filled, while nations whose citizens were considered less desirable had huge backlogs. By 1963, Greece had an annual quota of only 308 and a backlog of 97,000, and Poland, with a quota of 6,488, had a backlog of 55,000.

  The National Origins Act denied other nationalities the opportunity that Kennedy’s ancestors had enjoyed, and no single issue troubled him so deeply for so long. While serving in the House, he had submitted numerous private bills to provide permanent resident status to immigrants in his district facing deportation.* In the Senate he fought to repeal the 1952 McCarran-Walter Immigration and Nationality Act, a bill modifying the National Origins Act while preserving its odious racial and ethnic preferences, and in 1957 he sponsored an amendment that chiseled away at the quota system by permitting the spouses, parents, and children of an alien who might have been disqualified for inconsequential reasons to achieve permanent resident status.

  Two years after the publication of Profiles in Courage, Kennedy had written A Nation of Immigrants, a slim volume published by the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith that received few reviews and little press attention, perhaps luckily for him as it is possibly the most passionate, bitter, and controversial book ever written by a serious presidential candidate. It was only fifty-one pages, more pamphlet than book, and resembled the unsparing accounts of racism and discrimination that would become a feature of left-wing alternative histories a decade later. He was also ahead of his time in his celebration of racial diversity and multiculturalism, writing, “The idea of the ‘melting pot’ symbolized the process of blending many different strains into a single nationality, and we have come to realize in modern times that the ‘melting pot’ need not mean the end of particular ethnic identities or traditions.”

  The book’s thirty-two-page photo insert was a chronicle of the dark side of American history. It included the deck plan of an eighteenth-century slave ship captioned “It took another century for freedom to be transformed into the beginnings of first-class citizenship,” a lithograph of a nativist mob in Philadelphia attacking Catholics, and another of an anti-Chinese riot in Denver. The public was not demanding the liberalization of immigration laws in 1958, yet Kennedy advocated increasing yearly quotas and allocating them more fairly, and condemned the current laws for their “strong orientation of an indefensible racial preference” and their favoritism of “so-called Anglo-Saxons.” In a caustic conclusion, he wrote, “The famous words of Emma Lazarus on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty read: ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.’ Until 1921 this was an accurate picture of our society. Under present law it would be appropriate to add: ‘as long as they come from Northern Europe, are not too tired or too poor or slightly ill, never stole a loaf of bread, never joined a questionable organization, and can document their activities for the last two years.’”

  His immigration bill redressed these injustices. It was blind to race and ethnicity and gave preference to immigrants whose skills and training meant they were likely “to add to the national welfare,” then to the relatives of U.S. citizens and residents, and finally to foreign applicants on a first-come, first-served basis. In an accompanying message to Congress he argued that it represented “the principle of equality and human dignity to which our nation subscribes,” and would “insure that progress will continue to be made toward our ideals and toward the realization of humanitarian objectives.”

  • • •

  WHEN PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT was campaigning for a third term in 1940 he had courted isolationists by saying, “I give you one more assurance. I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” Kennedy did much the same thing during an interview with the NBC news anchors David Brinkley and Chet Huntley on September 9. When asked if his administration was likely to reduce aid to South Vietnam, he replied, “I don’t think that would be helpful at this time,” adding that this course of action might weaken the Diem government sufficiently that South Vietnam would fall to the Communists. When asked if he doubted the “Domino Theory,” which postulated that if South Vietnam fell the rest of Southeast Asia would go Communist, he said, “I believe it. I believe it,” and concluded, “I think we should stay. We should use our influence in as effective a way as we can, but we should not withdraw.”

  Historians and Kennedy’s advisers have struggled to reconcile these statements with those he had made to Cronkite the week before, and with what he had told Mansfield, Hilsman, Harriman, and others. In fact, his statement to Huntley and Brinkley bore no more resemblance to his real intentions than Roosevelt’s pledge not to involve America in the Second World War did to his. Kennedy wanted to placate hawks in the Pentagon and Congress just as Roosevelt had wanted to placate the isolationists. He also knew that minutes after NBC aired the interview he would be meeting with Senator Henry (“Scoop”) Jackson of Washington, the most implacable and influential cold war hawk in the Democratic Party, and a man whose support for the test ban treaty vote he considered crucial to winning a decisive ratification vote in the Senate. The last thing he needed was to face Jackson moments after telling Huntley and Brinkley that he might withdraw U.S. advisers from South Vietnam.

  After reminding Kennedy that former president Harry Truman had recently criticized his tax cut bill, Brinkley asked, “What do you think about cutting taxes while the budget is still in deficit?” He mounted a spirited defense of his bill, saying that a tax cut would reduce unemployment, “give the stimulus to our economy over the next two or three years . . . [that would] provide for greater national wealth,” and “get our budget in balance quicker.” After the interview Kennedy told Evelyn Lincoln, “I think they should shoot everyone over seventy.” He was thinking of Truman.

  He met with Mansfield and Dirksen on Monday afternoon to discuss the test ban treaty ratification vote. Dirksen confirmed that he would be supporting the treaty but said that some s
enators were still on the fence because they feared it would leave the United States “disadvantaged by the Soviets in the nuclear field.” To allay those senators’ fears, Dirksen and Mansfield had drafted a letter for Kennedy to sign, an action Dirksen admitted being “a little presumptuous.” Kennedy read the letter out loud, agreed to sign it, and said he hoped it would be read on the floor of the Senate. Dirksen reminded him that he himself was paying a heavy price for supporting the treaty and mentioned attacks by the right-wing Chicago Tribune. Kennedy replied that at least he was fortunate that no one had written a book about him like Victor Lasky’s JFK: The Man and the Myth. Lasky, a former Nixon campaign aide, had recycled some old stories illustrating his shortcomings while ignoring his successes, making just two brief references to the Peace Corps and devoting a single sentence to his handling of the Cuban missile crisis. The reporter Tom Wicker, no Kennedy idolater, had savaged the book in the New York Times as “an exercise in political assassination.”

  During their meeting, Senator Jackson told him that he remained undecided about the treaty, and then exploited his pivotal role to complain about what he called “nutty characters” in the Arms Control Agency who believed, he said, that “peace is breaking out all over and are ready to make all sorts of proposals.” (He was unaware that the president was among these nutty characters and was about to propose a U.S.-Soviet lunar mission.)

  Kennedy reminded Jackson that he had appointed a number of hard-liners to key positions—naming McCone, McNamara, and Dillon—and flattered him by implying that he was presidential material, saying, “I think you may learn when you sit here that there’s a helluva vested interest in proving any Democratic president to be wrong or soft on communism.”

  Jackson urged him to send combat units to Vietnam.

  “Helluva place to intervene.”

  Jackson said he did not believe that the question of intervening militarily in Laos was settled.

  “I think it is,” Kennedy replied.

  He urged Jackson to support the test ban treaty out of patriotism, pragmatism, and party loyalty, pointing out that it could be “of some significance” to the Democrats in the 1964 election, adding, “All I want to say, Scoop, is I think you can make a hell of a difference in this debate and, I think, having gone this far and having signed this [the test ban treaty], if we get beaten on it we’ll find ourselves in a much worse position than if we hadn’t brought it up.” It was his “guess,” he said, that the Chinese Communists would test an atomic bomb in a few years, forcing the United States to reconsider resuming atmospheric testing. He was telling Jackson what he wanted to hear, pretending the treaty was a strategic political move that could help Democrats in 1964, not a first step toward ending the cold war. In the end, Jackson voted for the treaty and Kennedy gave him nothing in return—no military intervention in Laos, no combat troops in Vietnam.

  Kennedy feared that the concessions he had made to placate the Joint Chiefs and cold war hawks like Jackson had so diluted and weakened the treaty that it risked becoming an anomaly rather than a landmark agreement initiating an era of détente. To remedy this he decided to address the United Nations General Assembly on Friday, telling Harriman, Stevenson, and Schlesinger during a Monday meeting, “The treaty is being so chewed up in the Senate, and we’ve had to make so many concessions to make sure it passes, that we’ve got to do something to prove to the world that we still mean it. If we have to go to all this trouble over one small treaty, people are likely to think we can’t function at all—unless I can dispel some doubts in New York.”

  His advisers brainstormed all week about what form of cooperation with the Soviet Union he could propose at the United Nations. Rusk suggested an “Alliance for Man,” in which the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Nations would pledge to achieve breakthroughs in health, nutrition, and agriculture. After canvassing government agencies, Schlesinger dismissed Rusk’s idea as trivial compared with the dramatic possibilities of a joint space mission. Unaware that Kennedy had already proposed a joint lunar venture to Ambassador Dobrynin, he included it in his first draft of a proposed General Assembly speech.

  The next day Kennedy received a personal message from Khrushchev, expressing his hope that the test ban treaty would “lead to a real turning point and the end of the cold war.” He replied, “The President wishes Mr. Khrushchev to know that he shares his view that the signing of the test ban treaty and the recent exchange of views with the Soviet government is encouraging and he hopes it will be possible to proceed with the solution of other problems.”

  Thursday, September 12–Sunday, September 15

  NEWPORT

  After Air Force One landed at Quonset Naval Air Station in Newport, Kennedy warned Ben Bradlee and his wife, Tony, that he needed to spend a few minutes doing what he called “a little toe dance” with Rhode Island’s new Republican governor, John Chaffee. He was livid when he rejoined them in the helicopter taking them to Hammersmith Farm, the waterfront estate of Jackie’s stepfather, Hugh Auchincloss. Chaffee had given him a cheap silver-plated vase as an anniversary gift, an obvious all-purpose present accompanied by a printed card announcing, “The Governor of Rhode Island.” Kennedy, who was scrupulous about writing notes and observing the social graces, was appalled that Chaffee had not bothered to sign the card. Even worse, the official cameraman had failed to capture the welcoming ceremony and Chaffee had grabbed back the vase and insisted on running through everything again, speeches and all. “Boy, he learns fast,” Kennedy said. “I didn’t have that much brass until I’d been in Congress five years . . . pushing a president around like that.” He mentioned the vase all weekend, each time suggesting a new way to get even with Chaffee and “put him in his place”—threats as hollow as posting the Otis officer to Alaska or making Ambassador McCloskey restore Mary Ryan’s yard.

  He landed at twilight on the lawn in front of Hammersmith Farm. As he disembarked, Jackie came running and greeted him with an embrace that the Bradlees thought was the most affectionate they had ever seen them exchange. As he entered the house, he handed his mother-in-law Chaffee’s vase, calling it “a token of my undying affection.” Missing his sarcasm, she thanked him profusely but eyed it with dismay, probably wondering for how long she would have to display it. He finally admitted that it had been a present from the people of Rhode Island, and asked, “Don’t you think it was a funny thing for the governor to hand it to me this way?”

  Twelve hundred guests had attended the Kennedys’ wedding reception at Hammersmith Farm in 1953, dining and dancing under a vast white marquee. The New York Times reported the event on its front page, describing the guests as “the cream of society and important government officials,” and saying that no marriage had elicited such intense public interest since the famous Astor-French nuptials of 1934. Twelve people had gathered to celebrate the Kennedys’ tenth anniversary. They included a former bridesmaid, Jackie’s mother, stepfather, half brother and sister, the Bradlees, and Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island and his wife. Over cocktails, Jackie gave Kennedy three scrapbooks titled “The White House Before and After,” “The President’s Park,” and “The Making of a Garden.” One chronicled the transformation of the Rose Garden and contained well-chosen quotations about gardening written in her hand, accompanied by photographs showing how the garden had looked on a particular day and his schedule for that day. The White House head usher, J. B. West, who had watched her laboring over these scrapbooks for months, compared them to “fine art books.”

  He reciprocated by reading out loud a letter from Klejman listing the antiquities he had brought from Washington. They included a Greek statue, an ancient Egyptian head, and some bracelets. Nothing cost less than a thousand dollars, and some items cost much more. He omitted the prices and told her to choose what she wanted, but repeatedly said, “Now, you can only keep one; you have to choose.” The expression of faint alarm crossing his face as he proceeded down the list m
ade it apparent that he was reading it, and the accompanying prices, for the first time. As he came to the most expensive items he whispered to Bradlee, “Got to steer her away from that one.” She chose a gold bracelet resembling a coiled serpent because, she said, “It was the simplest thing of all and I could see how he loved it.”

  Her gift to him had required months of thought and labor. His had been organized at the last minute with a single phone call and was almost as hurried and impersonal as Chaffee’s vase. He redeemed himself when they exchanged their more personal gifts. When he had knelt at her bedside weeping after Patrick’s death, she had begged him for something that would remind her of their son. Now he gave her the gold ring with green emerald chips symbolizing that their son had fought like an Irishman to live. She reciprocated with a gold-plated St. Christopher medal fashioned into a money clip that she had ordered from Tiffany’s to replace the one he had slipped into Patrick’s coffin. After the anniversary she would write Charlie Bartlett an effusive letter, telling him that Jack had helped “re-attach” her to life following Patrick’s death, and made her appreciate “all the lucky things” they shared. She believed that he could have lived a “worthwhile life” without being happily married, but without him, hers would have been “a wasteland.”