Jackie was riding when Galitzine arrived, so he fixed her a Bloody Mary and joked about picking up the telephone and calling Khrushchev. In an attempt to make conversation, she raised an uncomfortable subject: what he planned to do after 1968. “You’ll be so young,” she said. “Aren’t you afraid of being bored?” He feared boredom almost as much as death and was probably not in a mood to joke about his post–White House years, which thanks to Ellen Rometsch might arrive sooner than the princess imagined, but he gamely played along, saying, “I’ll probably nominate myself ambassador to Italy.” Then he took her for a drive, stopped for ice cream, and had to borrow money from his Secret Service agents to pay for their cones.
He maintained the easy banter throughout dinner and a screening of home movies of Jackie’s cruise. “Next year, when I’m reelected, Jackie will stay at the house with the kids and I’ll come on the boat,” he joked, adding that he hoped Galitzine would join him and introduce him to her friends.
After the Onassis film, he screened one of his televised debates with Nixon. It is hard to imagine what possessed him to show it. Jackie and Billings had seen the debates live, and had probably watched the film several times. Perhaps he wanted to impress Galitzine or revisit happier times. He was suddenly no longer “the jokey, affectionate playboy” Galitzine had seen earlier that evening. Instead, he stared at the screen transfixed, reminding her of a boxer preparing to enter the ring. During his 1946 campaign, Jim Reed had noticed that he sometimes became so engrossed in a conversation that he was oblivious to his food, pulling a caramel from his pocket and chewing on it while spooning soup, or popping a marshmallow into his mouth while eating roast beef. As the film flickered across the screen, he grabbed Galitzine’s glass of champagne and drained it.
Monday, October 28–Thursday, October 31
WASHINGTON
Evelyn Lincoln wrote in her diary, “The President came in all excited about the news reports concerning the German woman and other prostitutes getting mixed up with government officials, congressmen etc. He called Mike Mansfield to come to the office to discuss the playing down of this news report.”
Kennedy’s appointment book is blank from the time he returned from Wexford on Monday until one o’clock, when he went to the pool. A note says, “Staff members conferred with the President.” The reporter Dan Oberdorfer writes in his biography of Mansfield that “alerted by the administration,” Mansfield invited J. Edgar Hoover to his home on Monday afternoon, “where a meeting between Hoover, Mansfield and Dirksen would not attract attention from reporters who were swarming around the story.” Lincoln’s diary suggests that sometime that morning it was the president who alerted Mansfield.
Bobby was given the task of persuading Hoover to see Mansfield and Dirksen. He called Hoover into his office at the Justice Department, and according to a memorandum written by Hoover, informed him that he and the president “had discussed the Ellen Rometsch case and the aspects of it which tied into the Bobby Baker case” and wanted him to meet with Mansfield and Dirksen about the matter before the Senate began its hearings tomorrow. Hoover also noted that the president had asked him to see Mansfield when they spoke by telephone on Sunday.
Hoover suggested that since the FBI had already submitted a complete report on Rometsch in July, Bobby should simply read it out loud to Mansfield and Dirksen. Bobby argued that it would be better if the senators saw Hoover personally, since they were primarily interested in any breach of security in the Rometsch case (which was not entirely true) and would give more credence to whatever he told them in person (which was true). Once Bobby had squirmed and groveled enough, Hoover called Mansfield and arranged to meet him and Dirksen at Mansfield’s home. Mansfield and Dirksen left no record of what transpired. Dirksen died in 1970, and when Oberdorfer asked Mansfield about the meeting during a 1999 interview, he would only admit to having “a very faint memory” of it. Because Mansfield had an excellent memory, and this had been the only time he and Hoover had met, Oberdorfer was skeptical, and suggested he wanted to forget what had occurred because of its “seamy nature.”
According to Hoover’s memorandum, the only firsthand account of the encounter, he read Mansfield and Dirksen the July FBI report on Rometsch. They asked him “a number of questions” that he answered “to their satisfaction.” He stated that the Bureau had reopened the case “in view of the current publicity,” but could “assure them there had been no breach of security.” Although the Bureau had found “no connection” between Rometsch and anyone in the White House, he said that a number of congressmen had been clients of these “call girls,” a statement he must have known would make them reluctant to pursue the sexual aspects of the scandal. When Mansfield expressed shock that immorality was so common among congressmen, Hoover suggested that he and Dirksen persuade members of their respective parties “to cut out the hi-jinks.”
Hoover told Bobby afterward, “Senator Mansfield and Senator Dirksen were perfectly satisfied and willing to keep quiet.” While Hoover was still in his office, Bobby telephoned O’Donnell and said, “Everything is well in hand.” At the end of the call, Hoover noted, “Mr. O’Donnell extended an invitation from the President for me to have luncheon with the President on Thursday, October 31, 1963, at 1:00 P.M., which I accepted.”
Bobby Baker would later claim that by accepting Hoover’s assurances about Rometsch, Mansfield and Dirksen had saved Kennedy’s presidency. “Had they not had that meeting, and had the people who had relations with Ellen Rometsch been called to testify,” he told Oberdorfer, “. . . you guys in the press would have had the greatest field day in your history.” Kennedy had visited Mansfield’s ailing father in Great Falls because he was a thoughtful and humane man. He had offered Dirksen’s Democratic opponent tepid support because he liked Dirksen, and needed his help to move his legislative agenda through Congress. Had he been a different kind of man and politician, Dirksen and Mansfield might have been less inclined to accept Hoover’s assurances, and allowed the Rules Committee to investigate Baker’s sexual shenanigans.
Every newspaper that Kennedy read on Tuesday provided an opportunity for him to ponder his narrow escape. Unaware that the Rules Committee would not be exploring the party-girl aspect of the Baker scandal, reporters and congressmen considered Rometsch big news. The Evening Star published an eye-catching photograph of “the mysterious German beauty” who had been deported for “personal misbehavior.” The New York Times ran a photograph of her underneath the headline “Baker Inquiry Is Asked If German Woman’s Ouster by U.S. Involved Security,” and reported that Representative H. R. Gross of Iowa had given a speech on the House floor Monday demanding to know “if there was any element of security violation” involved in her “speedy” deportation.
On the same day that Kennedy’s humanity and sensitivity may have saved his presidency, he displayed these same qualities in a note to George Kennan, the eminent diplomat and historian whose last posting had been as ambassador to Yugoslavia. Kennan had sent him a handwritten letter praising his deft handling of Tito during the state visit. After noting that his sincerity could be “credited” since he was fully retired, he wrote, “I am full of admiration, both as a historian and as a person with diplomatic experience, for the manner in which you have addressed yourself to the problems of foreign policy with which I am familiar. I don’t think we have seen a better standard of statesmanship in the White House in the present century. . . . Please know that I and many others are deeply grateful for the courage and patience and perception with which you carry on.” Coming from the man who had invented the cold war strategy of containment and won a Pulitzer Prize for history (and would be called, at his death, “the American diplomat who did more than any other envoy in his generation to shape United States policy during the cold war”), it was an impressive testimonial, and for a president who cared so deeply about the verdict of history, a gratifying early review. He responded on October 28, addressing Kennan as “Geor
ge” for the first time and writing, “It was uncommonly thoughtful for you to write me in this personal way,” and promising to keep his letter “nearby for reference and reinforcement on hard days.”
At an afternoon meeting on Monday, Kennedy and a majority of Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee formally agreed on a civil rights bill that would attract enough Republicans to win a floor vote. It was stronger than the administration’s initial bill and contained an FEPC provision, but weaker than what the liberals had wanted. Kennedy had to play some political hardball to achieve the compromise. When the Illinois congressman Roland Libonati persisted in raising objections, he suspended the meeting and left the room to call Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago. “The Judiciary Committee is trying to get a civil rights bill together and Roland Libonati is sticking it right up us . . . ,” he said, “standing with the extreme liberals who are gonna end up with no bill at all.”
“He’ll vote for it,” Daley promised. “He’ll vote for any goddamned thing you want.” He asked Kennedy to pass the phone to Libonati so he could deliver the news in person. Kennedy balked at such naked steamrolling and suggested that Daley call him later. “That’s better,” Daley agreed. “But he’ll do it. The last time I told him, ‘Now look it, I don’t give a goddamned what it is, you’ll vote for anything the President wants and . . . that’s the way it’s gonna be.”
“That’d be good,” Kennedy said.
After the Judiciary Committee left, Caroline and John came into his office to model their Halloween costumes. “Do you think he will know who we are?” Caroline asked Lincoln. She assured them he would be fooled. “Why, it’s Sam and Mary!” he exclaimed. He called his father in Hyannis Port and handed them the receiver so they could shout “Trick or Treat!”
Cecil Stoughton took a photograph. It showed the president seated at his desk laughing. Caroline was a witch and held a live black cat in one hand. John was a panda, “Peter Panda.” Their costumes were cheap plastic ones, the kind sold at Woolworth’s that any middle-class kid might wear.
• • •
LINCOLN WROTE IN HER DIARY that Tuesday had “started off with a bang.” There was a Legislative Leaders Breakfast, a final bipartisan meeting of House leaders prior to the Judiciary Committee’s vote on the civil rights bill, and a cabinet meeting during which Kennedy scrawled “POVERTY” in a bold hand on a yellow legal pad, repeatedly circling and underlining it.
The Democratic and Republican House leaders agreed to support his compromise civil rights bill, and the Judiciary Committee approved it by a vote of 23 to 11. Fourteen Democrats and 9 Republicans voted in favor; all but one came from the North. (Despite Daley’s arm-twisting, Libonati voted against it.) The bill faced more hurdles in the House and had to clear the Senate, where Southern Democrats were threatening a filibuster, but Kennedy had won an important battle. Faced with choosing between a bill that stood little chance of passage but would have made him a hero to the civil rights movement and liberals, and one that was imperfect but might be enacted, he had chosen the pragmatic course. Anthony Lewis praised it in the New York Times as “a notable political achievement,” and the Boston Globe called it a victory in a “showdown battle . . . for a compromise civil rights bill.” It was also a victory for bipartisan cooperation and a president who had deftly engineered the compromise, but Halleck was the biggest hero. Some Republicans excoriated him for rescuing Kennedy’s bill on the eve of a presidential election year and dealing a setback to the GOP’s emerging Southern Strategy of opposing civil rights legislation in order to win formerly solid Democratic seats in the South and pick up white backlash seats in the North. An anonymous House Republican told a Washington Post columnist, “Kennedy’s going to get whatever credit there is for passing a bill, so why should we get him off the hook? This will cost us ten to fifteen new members from the South . . . and prevent us from getting any benefit from Northern white reaction against civil rights.”
Kennedy called Halleck that afternoon to thank him. “I got a lot of mad people up here,” Halleck said. Kennedy commiserated, saying, “I got a lot of mad Negroes that are ready to come and throw rocks at me, but that’s all right.” Halleck said that he might not win reelection as minority leader, “but I don’t give a damn.”
That afternoon Kennedy convened an all-hands-on-deck meeting of his Vietnam advisers in the Cabinet Room that would prove to be his last opportunity to derail a coup.
Since he had told Lodge on August 15 that he would leave everything in his hands, he had made so many conflicting statements and vacillated so much that his advisers must have been uncertain whether he welcomed or dreaded a coup. He had approved the controversial cable of August 24 green-lighting a coup, but attempted to rescind it two days later. He had told Walter Cronkite that if Diem did not enact reforms and dismiss his brother, the United States might cease supporting his government, and then told Huntley and Brinkley that his administration would continue providing military and financial aid to Diem regardless of what he did. He had sent Krulak and Mendenhall to Vietnam to determine if Diem could win the war despite the political turmoil, and when they failed to agree he had sent McNamara and Taylor. The generals plotting against Diem had signaled that a coup was imminent, and then developed cold feet when he pulled back from the August 24 cable. They were encouraged by his public criticism of Diem to Cronkite, then discouraged by how quickly he retreated from it. But after he announced the withdrawal of U.S. advisers and took steps to curtail several assistance programs, they took heart and resumed their plotting.
Throughout all this he never questioned the morality of encouraging a coup against a long-standing U.S. ally. Instead, he pressed for continual, up-to-the-minute assessments of the odds that it would succeed, and if those odds were poor, how he could stop it. He had told Lodge in his August 28 “Eyes Only for Ambassador” cable, “We note that you continue to favor the operation; we also assume your concurrence . . . that if this operation [the coup] starts, it must succeed. But it remains unclear to us that balance of forces in Saigon yet gives high confidence of success, and we need daily assessment from you on this critical point. . . . More broadly, we are assuming that whatever cover you and we maintain, prestige of U.S. will necessarily be engaged in success or failure of this effort. Thus we ask you present estimate of latest point at which operation could be suspended and what would be consequences of such suspension.” This cable was scarcely different from the one that Bundy, speaking for Kennedy, would send Lodge on Tuesday, October 29, following hours of discussions that afternoon.
Kennedy recorded the October 29 meeting, activating the hidden microphones in the Cabinet Room as William Colby, chief of the Far Eastern Division of the CIA, was reporting that the pro- and anti-Diem forces in and around Saigon appeared evenly balanced, with approximately 9,800 troops on each side. Bobby added to his brother’s anxiety by saying, “We’re putting the whole future of the country and, really, Southeast Asia, in the hands of somebody [General Don, the intermediary with Lodge for the plotters] that we don’t know very well.” Rusk said that if there was a substantial number of senior Vietnamese officers who believed they could not win the war under a Diem government, then the United States assumed a “heavy responsibility” by thwarting them. Taylor disagreed, saying he had found “absolutely no suggestion the military didn’t have their heart thoroughly in the war.” The CIA director, McCone, thought that even a successful coup “would seriously affect the war” and “might be disastrous.”
Kennedy steered the conversation back to what really concerned him: the odds that a coup would succeed. If the forces in the Saigon area were “almost even,” he said, then a coup was too risky and Lodge should discourage it. McNamara pointed out that Lodge would resist this change in policy, “since we have . . . rightly or wrongly, I think, led him to believe that we would support a coup, or at least that we would keep hands off.”
When the meeting reconvened later that afternoon,
Kennedy said that since forces were almost equal, “there is a substantial probability that there’ll be a lot of fighting—”
“Or even defeat,” someone interjected.
“Or even defeat,” he acknowledged. “We think it would be disastrous to proceed unless they can give us evidence that indicates that the majority strength is still in there.”
The rest of the meeting was devoted to drafting a cable to Lodge that expressed his reservations, and his insistence that the chances of a coup succeeding must be high for Lodge to allow it to proceed.
McNamara pointed out that they could not ask Lodge to guarantee “a sure thing.”
“That’s right,” Kennedy said, “and I understand that. But, I mean, we ought to have it that he is more convinced than not that it’s going to [succeed].” Referring to Lodge, he said that if there was a bad outcome, it “looks to be his ass [because] he’s for a coup.” Based on Lodge’s past performance, he acknowledged that he would probably resist or ignore any instructions from them to discourage a coup. “He’s for it for what he thinks are very good reasons,” he said. “I say he’s much stronger for it than we are here, but well, I admire him his, his nerve if not his, his prudence.”
JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President Page 33