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

by Thurston Clarke

  Kennedy gave no hint to the crowd at Brooks that he had ever harbored doubts about the lunar mission. His speech demonstrated how quickly he could change his mind, and how much personal experience—in this instance, his visit to Cape Canaveral—could sway him. He told them that Americans stood “on the edge of a great new era characterized by achievement and by challenge” that called for “pathfinders and pioneers.” He recounted having seen the Saturn rocket booster that would soon launch “the largest payload that any country in the world has ever sent into space.” He reaffirmed his commitment to the space race, saying, “I think the United States should be a leader. A country as rich and powerful as this . . . should be second to none.” He said that when the Saturn rocket was launched in December, “I hope the United States will be ahead. And I am for it.” He closed with a poetic image, recounting how as boys the Irish writer Frank O’Connor and his friends would take off their hats and toss them over orchard walls that appeared too high to climb. Once their hats were on the other side, they had to follow them. “This nation has tossed its cap over the wall of space,” he said, “and we have no choice but to follow it. . . . With the help and support of all Americans, we will climb this wall with safety and speed, and we shall then explore the wonders on the other side.”

  Five minutes later he stood in a laboratory at Brooks, peering through the porthole of an oxygen chamber similar to the one at Children’s Hospital. Four airmen had been inside since November 3, living like lunar astronauts at a simulated altitude of 27,500 feet and breathing 100 percent pure oxygen. He put on a headset to speak with them, the same way he had communicated with Patrick’s doctors. After wishing them good luck, he asked the scientist in charge of the experiment if space medicine might lead to improvements in oxygen chambers for premature infants. Before leaving Brooks, he invited Astronaut Gordon Cooper to accompany him to Dallas, saying that he could use having a “space hero” along on that leg of the trip. Cooper declined, explaining that he had to be at Cape Canaveral the following day for some important tests. Had he gone, he would have ridden in the president’s limousine, sitting in the backseat between Jack and Jackie.

  Kennedy was jubilant during the flight to Houston, twirling in his swivel chair and asking if the reception would be as good as in San Antonio. Fearing that the crowds in Houston might be sparse, he had decided against a formal motorcade. Fewer people did turn out than in San Antonio, but they were equally enthusiastic. He asked Powers to estimate their number. “For you? About as many as turned out the last time you were here,” Powers said. “But a hundred thousand more today for Jackie.” Kennedy beamed. Looking at his wife, he said, “Jackie is my greatest asset.” As they pulled into the Rice Hotel, Powers noticed him giving her an adoring look.

  The hotel had stocked their suite with caviar, champagne, and Heineken beer. Before they could enjoy it, Johnson arrived for a meeting and Jackie disappeared into the bedroom. Two weeks before, Johnson had told his friend Horace Busby that when he was with Kennedy in Austin on the evening of November 22, he planned to inform him that he had decided against running for vice president in 1964 and would instead return to Texas to run a newspaper. “You be the editor and I’ll be the publisher,” he had said to Busby. “You’ll let me write at least one column a week and we are going to run all the interests out of Texas.” Busby knew that he had been trying to buy a newspaper, but did not think he was serious, and that like any “star performer” he just needed to be flattered and cajoled.

  His meeting with Kennedy was so acrimonious that Jackie could hear them shouting from the next room. Kennedy was angry because he believed that Johnson could have made peace between the warring factions in Texas. He had complained to Bobby earlier that Johnson was “a son of a bitch” because he would not “lift a finger” to settle the Yarborough-Connally feud. Nothing had happened that day to change his opinion. After Johnson stormed out of the suite, Kennedy told Jackie, “That’s just Lyndon. He’s in trouble.” He did not explain if he was in trouble with him, or because of the Bobby Baker investigation, or because he could not control Yarborough and Connally.

  Jackie admitted disliking Connally. “I just can’t bear him sitting there saying all these great things about himself,” she said. “And he seems to be needling you all day.”

  “For heaven’s sakes, don’t get a thing on him,” he said. He pointed out that if everyone on the trip ended up hating one another, “nobody will ride with anybody.”

  He doodled on a sheet of hotel stationery, drawing a sailboat heeling slightly in the wind. He put a diamond-shaped figure above it, perhaps one of the kites he and John had flown off the back of the Honey Fitz the previous summer. The doodle was unusual because there was not a single word on the page. Most of his scribblings communicated impatience and boredom. This one was evocative and serene.

  He and Jackie dined in their suite with the publisher of the Houston Chronicle. A poll commissioned by the paper showed Kennedy losing Texas to Goldwater by about 100,000 votes if the election were held that day. He told Kennedy that as a courtesy he would not be publishing it until he left town. Kennedy was impressed that the poll showed Connally running ahead of him, and Yarborough winning by the largest margin of all.

  The atmosphere was more cordial when Lyndon and Lady Bird came into their suite after supper. When Lady Bird asked what he would like to do at their ranch on Saturday he told her that he wanted to ride, a request that must have surprised Jackie since he was allergic to horses and never rode in Virginia. But he was serious enough to order riding breeches sent overnight from the White House. Perhaps he was rewarding her for coming to Texas by doing something that he knew would please her.

  David Broder would write in the next day’s Evening Star, “Mrs. Kennedy, on her first official excursion outside Washington since her husband’s election, unleashed her dazzling smile, her demure charm and her dashing wardrobe on the obviously impressed citizenry of San Antonio, Houston, and Fort Worth.” Jackie also counted the day as a success. As her private secretary Mary Gallagher was brushing her hair, she said, “Gosh, Mary, you’ve been such a great help. You’ll just have to plan to do a lot of campaigning next year.”

  Before driving to the Houston Coliseum for the testimonial dinner honoring Congressman Albert Thomas, the Kennedys stopped in the hotel ballroom to address a meeting of the League of United Latin American Citizens. He introduced her by saying, “In order that my words will be even clearer, I am going to ask my wife to say a few words to you also.” She delivered some well-practiced sentences in Spanish, beginning, “I am very happy to be with you and part of the noble Spanish tradition which has contributed so much to Texas.” There were cheers and shouts of “Olé!” Lady Bird thought the president looked “beguiled,” and Powers noticed them exchanging another loving look.

  Jack Valenti, one of Johnson’s aides, had helped organize the testimonial dinner and was crouched below the stage when Kennedy delivered his speech. From this vantage point he could see his hands shaking as he spoke. It was not a minor tremor but a violent shaking, and Valenti was amazed that someone who appeared so relaxed when he spoke extemporaneously could find it so daunting to deliver a prepared speech. Nerves may have caused him to flub a line and say that the United States was about to fire “the largest payroll” into space. He quickly corrected himself, saying “payload into space.” Then, demonstrating how quickly his mind worked, he quipped, “It will be the largest payroll too. And who should know better than Houston. We put a little of it right in here.”

  He and Jackie arrived in Fort Worth shortly after eleven that night and checked into a small three-room suite at the Texas Hotel that the Secret Service had chosen because it had only one entrance. Mary Gallagher should have preceded them so she could unpack Jackie’s suitcase and lay out her nightclothes, but she had taken the wrong motorcade car and arrived late. Kennedy chewed her out for a slip-up that, like the erroneous weather report, he considered
a threat to Jackie’s happiness and her willingness to campaign the next year.

  They could not sleep in the same bed because the special hard mattress that he brought on trips covered only half of the king-sized box spring and the hotel had neglected to provide a single mattress for Jackie. She was so exhausted that instead of calling housekeeping, she decided to sleep alone in the small bedroom. They embraced and he said, “You were great today.” She went next door and laid out the pink suit and pillbox hat she would wear the following day.

  Friday, November 22

  FORT WORTH AND DALLAS

  Kennedy woke to hear George Thomas knocking gently on his bedroom door. He said, “Okay,” his signal that Jackie had slept in a different room and Thomas could come in, pull the curtains, draw his bath, and drop off the morning papers.

  He shaved, bathed, and put on his back brace—pulling straps, fastening buckles, and wrapping a long Ace bandage in a figure-eight pattern around the brace and his thighs that left him sitting up ramrod straight on his bed. Then he slipped on the white shirt with narrow stripes that he had ordered from Pierre Cardin in Paris after admiring it on Ambassador Alphand.

  His bedroom did not face the parking lot where he would be speaking at 8:00 a.m., so he tiptoed into Jackie’s room and looked down. Several thousand people had already gathered in the half-light in raincoats and under umbrellas. “Gosh, just look at the crowds down there!” he exclaimed. “Isn’t that terrific?” When Larry O’Brien arrived to discuss how to persuade Yarborough to ride with Johnson in today’s motorcades, he led him to the window and said, “Just look at the platform. With all those buildings around it the Secret Service couldn’t stop someone who really wanted to get you.”

  He showed O’Brien the front page of the Dallas Morning News. A banner headline proclaimed “Storm of Political Controversy Swirls Around Kennedy on Visit.” A headline farther down the page said “Yarborough Snubs LBJ.” “Christ, I come all the way down here to make a few speeches—and this is what appears on the front page,” he said, adding in a harsh voice, “I don’t care if you have to throw Yarborough into the car with Lyndon. Get him in there.”

  He flipped through the newspapers and found a more encouraging article in the Chicago Sun-Times. It reported, “Some Texans, in taking account of the tangled Texas political situation, have begun to think that Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy may turn the balance and win her husband the state’s electoral votes.”

  He asked Dave Powers if he had seen the crowd downstairs. “And weren’t the crowds great in San Antonio and Houston,” he added. “And you were right, they loved Jackie.”

  He had been told to expect 2,500 people at the early morning rally. Twice that number cheered as he mounted the flatbed truck serving as a platform. He disliked overcoats as much as hats and shook off the Secret Service agent offering him a raincoat. He shouted, “There are no faint hearts in Fort Worth!” and the crowd roared. The rally had been scheduled early because many in the audience would be union members who had to punch time clocks. He looked down to see clerks and housewives, men in work clothes, and nurses and waitresses in uniforms—a crowd like the one in Boston that had prompted him to say, “These are my kind of people.”

  He made a joke of Jackie’s absence, saying, “Mrs. Kennedy is organizing herself. It takes longer, but, of course, she looks better than we do when she does it.”

  He praised the defense industries that employed many of them and promised his commitment to “a defense system second to none.” He spoke about space, another field where he would not accept second place, announcing that “next month the United States will fire the largest booster in the history of the world, putting us ahead of the Soviet Union in that area for the first time in our history.” Achievements like these, he said, depended “upon the willingness of the citizens of the United States to assume burdens of citizenship.” He concluded, “Here in this rain, in Fort Worth . . . we are going forward!”

  The audiences in Billings and Salt Lake City had proved that he had anticipated their weariness with the cold war. The cheers and applause in Fort Worth confirmed that he understood that working-class Americans hungered for a noble cause. As he left for the Chamber of Commerce breakfast in the Hotel Texas ballroom, he told Henry Brandon of the London Times, “Things are going much better than I had expected.”

  As Jackie walked into the ballroom, the businessmen and their wives leaped to their feet. Some stood on chairs, cheering and filling the room with deafening whistles. Kennedy said, “Two years ago, I introduced myself in Paris by saying that I was the man who had accompanied Mrs. Kennedy to Paris. I am getting somewhat that sensation as I travel around Texas.” The head of the Chamber of Commerce gave Jackie a pair of boots, and presented him with a ten-gallon hat. “We couldn’t let you leave without providing you some protection against the rain,” he said. Someone shouted, “Put it on!” He smiled, waved it in the air, and said, “I’ll put it on in the White House on Monday. If you come up, you’ll have a chance to see it there.”

  Jackie was so delighted by her reception that she told O’Brien, “I’m going to be making a lot of these trips next year.” Back in their suite she said, “Oh, Jack, campaigning is so easy when you’re president. I’ll go anywhere with you this year.”

  “How about California in the next two weeks?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “Did you hear that?” he asked O’Donnell, who had just walked into the room.

  He opened the Dallas Morning News and saw a full-page advertisement placed by a right-wing group calling itself the “American Fact-Finding Committee.” It was bordered in black like an obituary, headlined “Welcome Mr. Kennedy to Dallas,” and listed twelve charges against him framed as questions, among them: “Why have you scrapped the Monroe Doctrine in favor of the ‘Spirit of Moscow’?” “Why did you host, salute and entertain Tito . . . ?” and “Why has Gus Hall, head of the U.S. Communist Party, praised almost every one of your policies . . . ?”

  In 1961, the publisher of the Morning News, Ted Dealey, had come to the White House for a conference and accused Kennedy and his appointees of being “weak sisters,” telling him to his face, “We need a man on horseback to lead this country, and many people in the Southwest think that you are riding Caroline’s tricycle.” Kennedy fired back that the difference between them was that “I was elected president of this country and you were not and I have the responsibility for the lives of 180 million Americans, which you have not,” adding, “I’m just as tough as you are . . . and I didn’t get elected president by lying down.” He answered Dealey again in a speech he gave several weeks later. Knowing that Dealey had not fought in World War II, he said that he had observed that men tend to like the idea of war until they have tasted it, and speaking of people on the fringes of society (like Dealey) who looked for scapegoats and simple solutions, he said, “They call for a ‘man on horseback’ because they do not trust the people. . . . They equate the Democratic part with the welfare state, the welfare state with socialism, socialism with communism.” The solution, he said, was to “let our patriotism be reflected in the creation of confidence in one another, rather than in crusades of suspicion.”

  He handed the Dallas Morning News to Jackie, open to the nasty advertisement. “Oh, you know, we’re heading into nut country today,” he said. “But, Jackie, if somebody wanted to shoot me from a window with a rifle, nobody can stop it, so why worry about it?”

  Some residents of “nut country” had woken this morning to find a flyer on their doorstep with two photographs of Kennedy, straight on and in profile. They resembled police mug shots and announced that he was “Wanted for Treason.” He was accused of “betraying the Constitution,” “turning the sovereignty of the U.S. over to the Communist controlled United Nations,” giving “support and encouragement to the Communist inspired racial riots,” and appointing “anti-Christians to Federal office.”

  Paci
ng around the room as he spoke, he said, “You know, last night would have been a hell of a night to assassinate a president. I mean it. There was the rain and the night, and we were all getting jostled. Suppose a man had a pistol in a briefcase.” (At this, he pantomimed someone pulling out a gun and pointed his index finger at the wall, jerking his thumb to simulate a trigger.) He continued, “Then he could have dropped the gun and the briefcase and melted away in the crowd.” The performance was more Walter Mitty than Hitchcock, probably an attempt to put Jackie at ease by making fun of the advertisement.

  He and Jackie had been in the suite for almost twelve hours but only now did they notice that they had been surrounded by original works of art, including paintings by Monet, Picasso, Dufy, and Van Gogh. They had also overlooked a catalog on the coffee table titled “An Art Exhibition for the President and Mrs. John F. Kennedy.” It listed the titles and provenance of the artworks and explained that they were on loan from local collectors and museums. The Kennedys had arrived late and exhausted and had been busy that morning, but it was still odd that a president who had made the arts a signature issue and a First Lady who had studied art history had failed to recognize that, for example, Dufy’s whimsical Bassin de Deauville, with its gaily colored sailboats zipping across a harbor, was an original and not a print. “Isn’t this sweet, Jack,” she said. “They’ve just stripped their whole museum of all their treasures to brighten up this dingy hotel suite.” The wife of a Fort Worth publishing executive had organized the show, and he could have easily written her a note after returning to Washington. Instead, he grabbed a telephone book, looked up her number, and called. After they spoke, he handed the phone to Jackie, who said, “They’re going to have a dreadful time getting me out of here with all these wonderful works of art.”