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

by Thurston Clarke

  Goldwater lost to Johnson in a landslide, running so poorly that almost forty conservative GOP House members lost their seats. Kennedy would have won a resounding victory, too, although with fewer votes in the South, and he would not have benefited from the assassination factor. But like Johnson, he would have had a liberal majority in Congress that would have made it easier to pass his legislative agenda.

  First Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan led the official Soviet delegation to Kennedy’s funeral. Jackie took his hand and said, “Tell Mr. Khrushchev from me that my husband and Mr. Khrushchev would have brought peace to the world by working together. Now, Mr. Khrushchev will have to do it alone,” a comment that speaks volumes about her low regard for Johnson. Ambassador Dobrynin believed that if Kennedy had lived, relations between the United States and the Soviet Union would have improved after a second summit between Kennedy and Khrushchev, because “Khrushchev did not want a repetition of the painful and damaging 1961 meeting in Vienna.”

  Jean Daniel had been with Castro when they were interrupted by news of the assassination. A stunned Castro said, “This is bad news. This is a serious matter, an extremely serious matter. There is the end of your mission of peace.” On November 25, Chase sent Bundy a memorandum about what he called “Bill Attwood’s Cuban exercise,” writing that “the events of November 22 would appear to make accommodation with Castro an even more doubtful issue than it was.” He continued, “While I think that President Kennedy could have accommodated with Castro and gotten away with it with a minimum of domestic heat, I’m not sure about President Johnson.” When Lechuga ran into Attwood in the UN Delegates’ Lounge on December 2, he informed him that he had received a letter from Cuba (Castro himself had written it) authorizing him to discuss a specific agenda for secret talks. In a memorandum to Bundy, Chase said that Attwood did not know if the letter had been written before or after November 22, but added, “In any event, Lechuga has apparently received no stop order since the assassination. One might assume, therefore, that the assassination has not changed Castro’s mind about talking to the U.S.” He reported that Attwood thought the new administration should listen to what Castro was proposing, and that “it would be very interesting to know what is in the letter.”

  During a December 19 National Security Council meeting on the Cuban situation, Bundy described the recent contacts with Castro, and said that the initiative had been on Castro’s part “and we are essentially faced with a decision as to whether or not we are prepared to listen to what Castro has to say.” President Johnson decided not to listen. Chase wrote in a memorandum that his reaction to continuing the talks was “somewhere between lukewarm and cool.” In January, Chase told Attwood that Johnson would not be pursuing the opening to Castro in an election year.

  Bobby Kennedy sent a memorandum to Dean Rusk in early December 1963 urging him to rescind the regulations prohibiting U.S. citizens from traveling to Cuba. He argued that the travel ban, which had been imposed by Eisenhower in the final days of his presidency, was “inconsistent with traditional American liberties” and lifting it would be “more consistent with our views as a free society and would contrast with such things as the Berlin Wall and Communist controls on such travel.” His proposal was vetoed at a State Department meeting that he was not invited to attend.

  Johnson met with Lodge on November 24 and, instead of discussing a timetable for the phased withdrawal of U.S. advisers, told him, “I am not going to lose Vietnam. I am not going to be the president who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went.” Two days later, he approved a National Security Memorandum containing just the sort of language that Mansfield had cautioned Kennedy against using. It stated, “It remains the central object of the United States in South Vietnam to assist the people and Government of that country to win their contest against the externally directed and supported Communist conspiracy.” Although it also said that the “objectives” of the withdrawal of U.S. military personnel remained, no U.S. advisers were withdrawn before the end of the year.

  On November 22 there had been 16,300 advisers in Vietnam, but no combat units. During the U.S. involvement in the conflict under the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, 78 U.S. servicemen had been killed in action. After Johnson had been in office for a year there were more than 23,300 advisers in the country and 225 had been killed. By December 1965, after Johnson had escalated the war and sent U.S. combat units into battle, there were 185,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam and almost 1,600 American dead. By the end of 1967, U.S. forces numbered 485,000 with almost 16,000 killed.

  Clark Clifford had advised both Kennedy and Johnson and served as Johnson’s secretary of defense during his last year in office. He later wrote, “On the basis of personal intuition and a knowledge of both men, I believe that because of profound differences in personality and style, Kennedy would have taken a different path [on Vietnam] in his second term.” Elaborating on what this path would have been, he added, “I believe Kennedy would have initiated a search for either a negotiated settlement or a phased withdrawal.”

  Robert McNamara wrote in his memoirs that Kennedy’s comments to Huntley and Brinkley on September 9, 1963, had been an aberration and that “the great preponderance of President Kennedy’s remarks—both before and after this interview, in public and in private—was that, in the end, the South Vietnamese must carry the war themselves; the United States could not do it for them.” Walter Cronkite, whose interview had elicited one of these public remarks, wrote, “I have always believed that had he [Kennedy] lived, he would have withdrawn those advisors from Vietnam.” Senator Wayne Morse, who frequently butted heads with Kennedy over Vietnam, said, “He’d seen the error of his ways. I’m satisfied that if he’d lived another year we’d have been out of Vietnam.” In his 1970 oral history, the former deputy secretary of defense Roswell Gilpatric said, “Based on my exposure to the President’s views over that nearly three-year period, I felt he was looking for an opportunity to pull back, and it would have been very hard to persuade him to reverse course.” He admitted that it was impossible to know for sure what Kennedy would have done, but said, “my view is consistent with everything he did do and said before his death,” adding, “he would have been very reluctant to involve ourselves to the extent that the country did after Johnson took over.” John Connally wrote in his autobiography, “My guess is that Jack Kennedy would have withdrawn American troops from Vietnam shortly into his second term. . . . He was less charmed by the generals than Johnson and less susceptible to their pressures. I believe he had already concluded that the war was unwinnable.”

  Walt Rostow served in both administrations, first as an adviser to Kennedy in the White House, then in the State Department, and finally as Johnson’s national security adviser. He was an unwavering hawk on Vietnam who had pushed for a more robust American commitment to both presidents. While riding a ski lift in Aspen with Marie Ridder, he said, “I’m doing better with Johnson because Kennedy wouldn’t listen to me about Vietnam.”

  McGeorge Bundy served as Johnson’s national security adviser for two years and supported his escalation of the war. In an oral history archived in the LBJ Library, he said that he believed Kennedy “would have been freer to cut loose” from Vietnam after the 1964 election because he would not have had to face the electorate again, whereas until March 1968, Johnson had been planning to seek a second term. He said about Kennedy, “I don’t think he would ever have wanted to have the ground war become our war,” dismissed as “total baloney” the argument that Kennedy and Johnson would have pursued the same policy in Vietnam because they were both advised by himself, Rusk, and McNamara, and said the three of them understood they were working for different presidents, who were making their own decisions. In 1993, Schlesinger wrote in his diary that Bundy had told him that “on reflection he did not think that JFK would ever have sent U.S. ground forces into the Vietnam War.” Bundy believed that Johnson’s decision to escalate the war was grounded in
his character. He pointed out that Johnson had also been more hawkish than Kennedy during the Berlin and Cuban missile crises, calling him “temperamentally sort of always more ‘one more regiment’ than Kennedy.”

  The military analyst Daniel Ellsberg, who would leak the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in 1971, ran into Bobby Kennedy at a Washington party in 1967 and asked him why his brother had sent only advisers when the Taylor-Rostow report was so emphatic that ground combat forces were necessary. Bobby skirted the question of what his brother would have done had he lived. “But I do know what he intended,” he said. “All I can say is that he was absolutely determined not to send ground units.” When they continued the conversation later in Bobby’s office, Ellsberg asked if JFK would have accepted a defeat in Vietnam. “We would have fuzzed it up,” Bobby said. “Would have gotten a government in that asked us out or that would have negotiated with the other side. We would have handled it like Laos.” But why was JFK so averse to combat units? Ellsberg asked. “What made him so smart?” Bobby slammed his hand down on his desk and said, “Because we were there!” He slammed it down again and, with his face contorted in anger and pain, added, “We were there in 1951. We saw what was happening to the French. We saw it. My brother was determined, determined, never to let that happen to us.”

  • • •

  JACKIE REMAINED DRY-EYED in public, and her composure and stoicism captured even hearts hardened to her husband. She maintained her self-control as she and Caroline knelt before his casket in the Senate rotunda, and as she stood on the steps of St. Matthew’s Cathedral while John offered his father’s casket the salute she had helped him practice at Wexford. She refused to cry while packing to leave the White House, even as her staff wept around her. “Now is not the time to cry, Provie,” she told her maid. “We will cry later when we’re alone.” Later that winter, a nun giving religious instruction to a class of children that included Caroline told them about a woman in the Bible who had cried until her heart broke. Caroline interrupted to say in a sad little voice, “I know a lady who cries a lot.” When the nun ignored her, she persisted, saying, “I know a lady who cries all the time.” When the woman finally asked who was crying so much, she said, “My mommy.” In the spring of 1964, Jackie told Father Richard McSorley, the Jesuit priest and academic who had become her informal confessor, “I had worked so hard at the marriage. I had made an effort and succeeded and he had really come to love me and to congratulate me on what I did for him. And, then, just when we had it all settled, I had the rug pulled out from under me.”

  She asked West to install a plaque over the mantel of the Lincoln bedroom stating, “In this room lived John Fitzgerald Kennedy and his wife Jacqueline Kennedy, during the two years, ten months, and two days he was President of the United States: January 20, 1961–November 22, 1963.” It sat below one saying, “In this room Abraham Lincoln slept during his occupancy of the White House as Presidency of the United States: March 4, 1861–April 13, 1865.” She believed that like Lincoln, her husband had been martyred because he had tried to end the injustices borne by black Americans, and that he would not have gone to Texas when he did had his approval rating not dropped following the introduction of his civil rights bill. After Nixon won the 1968 election, due largely to the Republican strategy of appealing to anti-civil-rights sentiment in the Southern states through coded statements about “states’ rights,” he ordered the plaque removed.

  Before leaving the White House, Jackie sat alone in the Cabinet Room with West. Staring at him intently, she whispered, “Mr. West, will you be my friend for life?” Left speechless by this request, he nodded his assent. That summer she told Stan Tretick, whom she had battled for years over photographs of Caroline and John, “Oh, Stanley, remember how all the time in the White House I used to hate you so much? And now we are such good friends.” In the month following Dallas she spent several weekends at Wexford with Ben and Tony Bradlee. They all found it impossible to talk about anything except Kennedy and the assassination. Bradlee remembered the weekends demonstrating that “the three of us had very little in common without the essential fourth.” A reminder of her last weekend with her husband surfaced after her death in 1994, when the Kennedy Library received some of his clothes that she had stored. In the pocket of a pair of his trousers, the archivists found the sugar cubes she had given him to feed Leprechaun during their last weekend together at Wexford. She had either been unwilling to go through his pockets or could not bear to throw the cubes away.

  After buying several of Elaine de Kooning’s drawings and paintings of her husband from a gallery, she went to de Kooning’s studio to see the others. She arrived, according to de Kooning, with an attitude of “Well, here I am and I can have what I want.” She liked two charcoal drawings of him sitting on the patio at Palm Beach. In both, he wore dark glasses and had thrown a leg over the arm of a chair so that his crotch was framed in the center of the picture. De Kooning told her she was saving those two for herself. Upset at being rebuffed, Jackie said, “Well, they make him look like a fag on the Riviera.” De Kooning replied, “They look good to me,” and decided not to sell her any of her other Kennedy portraits and drawings.

  In the fall of 1964, Jackie invited Henry Brandon to her new Fifth Avenue apartment. She had just moved in, and a maid led Brandon through unfinished rooms cluttered with packing boxes to a library overlooking Central Park. He had spent most of the preceding year in Moscow, so this would be the first time he had seen her since the funeral. She was paler and more ethereal than he remembered, with a more austere beauty. Speaking in a muffled voice, as if in a trance, she said, “I often wake up at night suddenly, and then I look for Jack next to me . . . and he is not there. . . . I wonder whether I am going to see him after death?” She kept returning to his place in history, saying, “Bobby tried to console me by suggesting that if Jack had been shot after the Bay of Pigs, he would have looked like the worst president.”

  It did not strike Brandon as much of a consolation, but for Jackie and Bobby, who knew how consumed Kennedy had been with the verdict of history, it was comforting to know that at least he had not been killed before he could witness the ratification of his test ban treaty, advance his tax cut and civil rights bill, demonstrate the kind of president he would have been, show her the marriage they might have had, and marry the poetry of his speeches to the power of the presidency—in other words, before his last hundred days.

  The Truman Library commissioned Elaine de Kooning to paint a portrait of President Kennedy. She became so consumed by the challenge of capturing his “essence” in a single picture that she spent 1963 painting only him, papering the walls of her studio with his likenesses and falling, she admitted, “a teeny little bit in love with him.”

  (Alfred Eisenstaedt/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

  JFK bringing Jackie to their rented house on Squaw Island from the Otis Air Force Base Hospital on Cape Cod following the death of their infant son Patrick. Presidential adviser Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., noticed them becoming “extremely close and affectionate” following the tragedy.

  (Photograph by Cecil Stoughton, White House/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)

  The Kennedy family on the terrace of the Squaw Island house less than a week after Patrick’s death. JFK had brought more of the family dogs up from Washington in hopes that they might distract Jackie and the children from their grief.

  (Photograph by Cecil Stoughton, White House/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)

  JFK confers in the Oval Office on August 15 with his newly appointed ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge. Kennedy taped the meeting without Lodge’s knowledge, and one of the wires running from the table to the floor probably led to a tape recorder in the basement.

  (Photograph by Robert Knudsen, White House/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)

  A guest remembered the Squaw Isl
and house as being “full of sadness” during the weekend of August 24 and 25. Caroline was particularly distressed by her brother’s death, and her father was the only one who could cheer her up.

  (Photograph by Cecil Stoughton, White House/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)

  By the summer of 1963, John F. Kennedy, Jr., had become a rambunctious and personable little boy—“friendly, uninhibited, and unspoiled,” according to journalist Laura Bergquist, who sensed a “joyous, funny . . . even sensuous” relationship between father and son.

  (Photograph by Cecil Stoughton, White House/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)

  JFK meets in the Oval Office with the leaders of the March on Washington on August 28. Earlier that afternoon he had stood at an open window, gripping the sill so hard that his knuckles turned white as he listened to the strains of “We Shall Overcome” wafting over from the Lincoln Memorial and telling a black White House usher, “Oh, Bruce, I wish I were out there with them!”

  (Photograph by Cecil Stoughton, White House/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)

  JFK cruises on the Honey Fitz during the Labor Day weekend. His health that summer was the best of his presidency. One physician recalled him as “bursting with vigor.”

  (Photograph by Cecil Stoughton, White House/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)

  During a Labor Day interview with CBS newsman Walter Cronkite, Kennedy leveled his harshest criticism yet at South Vietnam’s president Ngo Dinh Diem. Cronkite believed that his comments “effectively pulled the rug out from under Diem and changed the course of events in South Vietnam.”