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

by Thurston Clarke

  These strategies converged on November 12, when he chaired a meeting of senior administration officials overseeing the CIA’s anti-Castro campaign. Director McCone presented a dispiriting summary of the current state of play, admitting that Cuba’s military remained loyal to Castro and its internal security forces well organized. Desmond Fitzgerald, who headed the CIA’s Cuban task force, gave a discouraging update on the Agency’s efforts to topple Castro. Casualties among CIA operatives in Cuba had increased, with twenty-five captured or killed, while the willingness of Canada, Spain, and the UK to continue trading with Cuba had diluted the impact of U.S. economic sanctions. He reported that the Agency continued to support autonomous anti-Castro groups mounting sabotage operations from bases outside U.S. territory, and listed four recent sabotage operations, but offered vague statements about their effect, justifying them as ways of “keeping up the pressure,” raising “the morale of the people,” and adding to Cuba’s “growing economic problems.”

  Kennedy asked point-blank if the CIA’s sabotage program was worthwhile. Rusk criticized it as counterproductive, and argued that it might weaken support for the exile groups within Cuba and result in the Soviets increasing troop levels on the island and staging more incidents on the Berlin autobahn. Despite these objections, the consensus at the meeting was that the CIA program should continue because it was low-cost, denied Castro essential commodities, and improved the morale of the anti-Castro Cubans.

  Kennedy signed off on several sabotage operations scheduled for the weekend, but hours later he was pursuing the second track of his Cuban policy. Bundy called Attwood to deliver a message from the president that was so sensitive he said he could only communicate it orally. He told him that Kennedy wanted him to contact Castro’s confidant, Dr. Rene Vallejo, and say that while it did not seem practical at this stage to send an American official to Cuba, the administration would like to begin the conversation by having Vallejo visit the United States and deliver any messages from Castro directly to Attwood. Bundy added, “In particular, we would be interested in knowing whether there was any prospect of important modification in those parts of Castro’s policy which are flatly unacceptable to us: namely . . . (1) submission to external Communist influence, and (2) a determined campaign of subversion directed at the rest of the hemisphere. Reversals of these policies may or may not be sufficient to produce a change in the policy of the United States, but they are certainly necessary, and without [them] . . . it is hard for us to see what could be accomplished by a visit to Cuba.” Kennedy was reiterating the conditions that he had asked Jean Daniel to communicate to Castro: cease the subversion and move out of Moscow’s orbit. Attwood told Bundy he would ask Lisa Howard to call Vallejo before getting on the line himself and directing the conversation according to these guidelines. If Vallejo agreed to travel to New York, Attwood would come to Washington to receive instructions on how to handle the negotiations.

  • • •

  KENNEDY CONVENED THE FIRST formal meeting of his reelection team in the Cabinet Room on Tuesday afternoon. Attending it were his brother Bobby; his brother-in-law Stephen Smith, who would be managing the campaign; his political advisers Lawrence O’Brien and Ken O’Donnell; Ted Sorensen; John Bailey, who chaired the Democratic National Committee (DNC); DNC treasurer Richard Maguire; and Richard Scammon, the director of the Census Bureau. Vice President Johnson had not been invited.

  Lincoln had noticed Johnson’s name appearing less often on the lists of invitees to crucial policy and planning meetings in 1963. Her record of the private conferences between him and the president showed them meeting alone for more than ten hours in 1961, but for only seventy-five minutes in 1963. It is unlikely Kennedy simply forgot to invite him to the November 12 meeting, because he frequently complained about Johnson’s sensitivity and must have known he would be hurt to be excluded from the first major planning session for the 1964 campaign. Johnson had left for his Texas ranch two days earlier but would surely have stayed in Washington to attend an important meeting like this one. Sorensen believed he had been excluded because he was “not part of the inner circle and did not have the warmest relations with—or full confidence of—everyone in that room,” a polite way of saying that, as Sorensen well knew, Kennedy had little confidence in his ability to perform the only vice presidential duty that really mattered, assuming the presidency.

  Their relationship had reached a nadir that fall after Johnson aligned himself with the hard-line Diem supporters in the administration and criticized the wheat deal. He sat silently at White House meetings, offering a few mumbled remarks or becoming infuriatingly loquacious. Kennedy may not have wanted him around because he was afraid that a man who considered himself more politically astute than anyone else in the White House would try to dominate the meeting, and perhaps because he was undecided about keeping him on the ticket. Even so, it was a curious omission, since the meeting concerned a reelection campaign in which Johnson’s home state would play a key role. Kennedy even raised the subject of his forthcoming visit to Texas at the meeting, saying in an irritated voice that he would be seeking campaign funds as well as votes, and adding, “Massachusetts has given us about two and a half million, and New York has been good to us, too, but when are we actually going to get some money out of those rich people in Texas?”

  Few believed that Kennedy would lose the election. McGeorge Bundy was even thinking ahead to a possible third term, telling Jackie that there might be such a demand for him to return to the White House that they should investigate the legality of him serving another term if it were not consecutive with the first two. The respected political commentator Stewart Alsop wrote in his November 2 Saturday Evening Post column that although Washington journalists who wanted to hype the forthcoming contest were offering scenarios for a Goldwater victory, hardly anybody believed it. “Goldwater doesn’t have a prayer of beating John F. Kennedy in 1964,” he said. “Neither does anyone else.” He argued that Kennedy’s Catholicism, which had cost him so many votes in 1960, was no longer a factor, nor were his youth and inexperience now that he had become “a middle-aged fellow with thickening jowls, a tendency to lose his reading glasses, [and] the remembered fear of nuclear war written clearly on his face.”

  A recent Gallup poll had Kennedy winning 58 percent of the national vote compared with Goldwater’s 39 percent, with 6 percent undecided or voting for third-party candidates. The greatest threat to his reelection was that Goldwater would implode before taking the nomination, leaving him to face a more moderate Republican opponent such as Governor George Romney of Michigan or Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York. Goldwater had already made some gaffes, promising to sell the popular Tennessee Valley Authority, and telling an interviewer, “You know I haven’t got a really first-class brain.”

  Kennedy made it clear at the November 13 meeting that he intended to micromanage the Democratic convention, just as he had state visits and the design of Air Force One. He wanted a livelier convention, and said, “For once in my life I’d like to hear a good keynote speech.” He also wanted a color film about the last four Democratic presidents. Only NBC broadcast in color, most Americans did not own color sets, and a color film would be more expensive, but he thought it would impress the delegates. “We’ll run on peace and prosperity,” he declared. “If we don’t have peace we’d better damn well win the [cold] war.” He went on to assess his chances in each state, showing a detailed knowledge of the key players and demonstrating that he really could have driven down that street in Boston and recalled which stores had displayed his posters in 1946.

  He sounded less sure-footed when he shifted to the big picture. As if thinking out loud, he said, “But what is it that we can make them decide they want to vote for us, Democrats and Kennedy—the Democrats not strong in appeal obviously as it was twenty years ago. The younger people . . . what is it we have to sell ’em? We hope we have to sell ’em prosperity, but for the average guy that prosperity
is nil. He’s not unprosperous but he’s not very prosperous. . . . And the people who are really well off hate our guts. . . . There’s a lot of Negroes, [but] we’re the ones that are shoving the Negroes down his throat. . . . We’ve got peace, you know what I mean, we say the country’s prosperous and I’m trying to think of what else.”

  He passed out copies of Homer Bigart’s article about poverty in Kentucky and said that as part of his prosperity theme he wanted to mount an attack on poverty. He would remind Americans that most poor people were white and would schedule photo opportunities with white coal miners in Appalachia and poor Negroes in Northern cities.

  “I wouldn’t do that, Mr. President,” Scammon interjected. “You can’t get a single vote more by doing anything for poor people. Those who vote are already for you. I was thinking of photographs with policemen in the cities. Then you should go to the new shopping centers on the highways. The votes you need, your people, men with lunch pails, are moving out to the suburbs.”

  Scammon’s analysis fascinated him, and he asked how these new demographics might play out in 1964. Scammon spoke of Catholics buying suburban houses and suddenly becoming concerned about their property taxes.

  He immediately got it: preventing these new suburban Democrats from turning into Republicans would be key to winning a landslide in 1964. He asked Scammon how many Democrats retained their party affiliation after moving to the suburbs, and at what rung on the social and economic ladder a Democratic family became Republican.

  “It might be less than ten thousand dollars a year. I’ll try to find out,” Scammon promised.

  “It’s going to be a new kind of politics,” he said.

  “It’s a new kind of country.”

  Wednesday, November 13

  WASHINGTON

  Kennedy stopped at Lincoln’s desk to chat as she was reading the memorandums from the previous day’s campaign meeting. She told him that staging a convention as electrifying as the one in 1960 would be difficult and that the next would not be as exciting because everyone knew what would happen.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “There might be a change in the ticket.”

  The White House electrician and dog handler Traphes Bryant had noticed an increase in the barbed comments about Johnson that fall. He overheard a staffer saying that because FDR had dumped Wallace for Truman and still won reelection, voters would not hold it against Kennedy if he did the same to Johnson. Another asked, “How would you like to work for him?” Another said, “We’ve got to get that Texas cornpone out of here before he uses the vice presidency as a springboard into the White House in ’68,” and another claimed that even Jackie wanted the president to drop him, adding, “Jack won’t pay any attention to her, of course, but for once she’s right.”

  Kennedy had dismissed the rumors about Johnson being replaced at his October 31 press conference, and when Bartlett raised the possibility with him he angrily denied it. But if he was considering replacing Johnson, he would certainly not have announced it at a press conference a year before the election, or tipped his hand to Bartlett, Bradlee, Joe Alsop, or any of his other journalist friends. But Lincoln was in a different category, and he had such faith in her discretion and loyalty that she not only knew about his lovers but had acted as an intermediary, receiving their billets-doux at her home address.

  After examining Kennedy on Wednesday, Dr. Burkley noted that he weighed 170½ pounds, had complained about “a slight ache in his right groin after resistive exercises,” but insisted that he felt fine after taking a swim and using an anesthetic spray. He concluded that “his energy is excellent . . . and [he] now reports that he has resumed his full number 1 exercise program with 12½ pounds of weights.”

  Kennedy chaired an afternoon meeting to finalize his new program to alleviate poverty in eastern Kentucky that was attended by the state’s governor and U.S. senators, the secretaries of agriculture and labor, and Undersecretary of Commerce Roosevelt. They agreed on an enhanced school lunch program, more public health services and surplus food, and initiatives to provide jobs and housing grants. The only proposal requiring congressional approval was an accelerated public works program. A week later, Roosevelt sent Kennedy a memorandum from his new office in Kentucky, reporting that the first emergency medical teams would be in the state by the end of the week, a survey of school lunches and a county-by-county survey of surplus food supplies would be on Kennedy’s desk by December 5, food was being rushed to needy areas and distributed by surplus vehicles supplied by the federal General Services Administration, and the Kentucky Highway Commission and U.S. Forest Service would be hiring eight hundred men by the end of the month. It was testimony to how quickly a president can use his executive powers to ease suffering.

  Later that afternoon, he and Jackie appeared together at a White House function for the first time since Patrick’s death, watching a performance on the South Lawn by the Royal Highland Black Watch for an audience of underprivileged children. The commander of the Black Watch presented him with a ceremonial dagger and said that their motto was “Nobody wounds us with impunity.” He replied, “I think that is a very good motto for some of the rest of us.”

  The family watched the piping and marching from the second-floor Truman Balcony. Caroline and John wore matching powder-blue overcoats with black velvet collars, the same ones they would wear when the Black Watch pipers returned to Washington twelve days later. Caroline threw her arm around her father’s neck, and John crawled in and out of his lap. Afterward, Nanny Shaw brought them into the Oval Office in their pajamas to say good night. Kennedy lay on the rug so they could swarm all over him. Lincoln walked in and asked, “What would the people think if they saw the President down on the floor?” Looking up from the floor, he said, “After all, Mrs. Lincoln, I am also a father.”

  Lincoln and Shaw took the children into the Rose Garden. While John chased one of the family dogs, Caroline stared into the night sky and recited, “Star light, star bright . . .” but could not remember the rest of the ditty. He appeared silently behind her as she went on: “Star bright, star light . . .”

  “First star I’ve seen tonight,” Lincoln prompted.

  “Up above the world so high,” Kennedy said. “Why don’t you go over and say that to Mommy?”

  • • •

  PRINCESS GALITZINE HAD MET the reclusive screen star Greta Garbo on a previous Onassis cruise and had renewed their friendship when Garbo attended a showing of her fashions in New York. Garbo had declined several invitations to dine at the White House, but after learning that Galitzine was coming on Wednesday she accepted on condition that the event would be small and discreet. Jackie invited her sister, Lee, and the Washington socialite Florence Mahoney. Kennedy asked Lem Billings, who had met Garbo in 1962 and claimed to have become her great chum while accompanying her on a driving tour of the Riviera the summer before. Ever since then, he had been regaling and perhaps irritating Kennedy with paeans to her beauty and humor.

  One of Kennedy’s least-appealing attributes was a fondness for practical jokes and a tendency to let them continue too long. A prime example was his treatment of Stevenson in Newport the previous year. The sky had been threatening, the seas rough, and the winds strong, but he summoned Adlai from Washington anyway. Oleg Cassini, who was his guest that weekend, had protested that it was a terrible day for flying. “Good. He’ll be airsick,” Kennedy said. Stevenson was green and mopping his brow as he disembarked from a helicopter. Kennedy proposed they talk while taking a cruise, a suggestion that Stevenson received with what Cassini called “horror in his eyes.” The seas pitched and rolled, lightning flashed, and Kennedy sat with him in the stern, braving the weather without a jacket and forcing him to follow suit. When they docked, he said, “Well, Adlai, there’s your helicopter waiting.” As it strained to gain altitude, Cassini said, “Mr. President, that is truly cruel and unusual punishment.”

  “He co
uld use it,” Kennedy replied. “It’s good for his health.”

  The previous weekend at Wexford he had persuaded Bradlee to participate in a prank on Torby Macdonald. At his urging, Bradlee had called Macdonald and, as Kennedy listened on an extension, warned him that Newsweek was preparing to run a Bobby Baker story that would link Macdonald to a minor lobbyist named Micky Weiner. As Macdonald became increasingly frantic, protesting that he barely knew Weiner, Kennedy put his hand over the mouthpiece and said, “Torb’s hurting. Tuck it to him some more.” Bradlee continued tormenting Macdonald, and Kennedy collapsed on the sofa, helpless with laughter.

  Kennedy had invited Garbo to come early so he could brief her on the prank that he planned to spring on his best friend. When Billings arrived, he bounded over to Garbo and exclaimed, “Greta!” She turned to Kennedy with a puzzled look on her face and said, “I have never seen this man before.” Billings was too mortified to eat. He listed everywhere they had been together, but she insisted she had never met this “Mr. Billings.” As he became increasingly upset and disoriented, Kennedy was solicitous, suggesting that he might have met someone resembling Garbo. When he finally put his friend out of his misery, everyone laughed uproariously. Billings grinned, trying to be a good sport, but later called the prank “one of the worst things I ever went through in my life.”

  Garbo became inebriated and shouted, “I must go!” But she stayed and stayed. Jackie gave her a tour of the White House, and she took off her shoes and sat on Lincoln’s bed. She refused an invitation to stay overnight because she feared it might have entailed what she called “a visit from the President.” Kennedy usually retreated to his study after dinner. Tonight he remained at the party, pointedly telling Garbo that he never stayed with guests this long. Before she left he gave her one of his prized pieces of scrimshaw, prompting Jackie to remark, “He never gave me a whale’s tooth.”