(Photograph by Cecil Stoughton, White House/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)
Kennedy meets at the White House on September 6 with Arizona Republican senator Barry Goldwater, his likely opponent in the 1964 presidential election. Although the two had become friends while serving in the Senate, JFK relished the thought of running against Goldwater, telling a friend that he could beat “good old Barry” without leaving the Oval Office.
(Photograph by Cecil Stoughton, White House/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)
The Kennedy children and their families gathered at Hyannis Port on September 7 to celebrate their father’s birthday. There were funny hats, noisemakers, and a “Happy Birthday” tablecloth, as if they were still Joe Kennedy’s little boys and girls.
(Photograph by Cecil Stoughton, White House/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)
Presidential friend and adviser Dave Powers welcomes the actress and singer Marlene Dietrich to the White House on September 10. The year before, Kennedy had received Dietrich in the upstairs family quarters and they had slept together. This time he scheduled only a brief afternoon meeting in the Oval Office, even though Jackie was away in Newport. It was perhaps an example of his attempts to curb his womanizing following the death of his son.
(Photograph by Robert Knudsen, White House/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)
JFK and Jackie invited Ben and Tony Bradlee to Newport for the Kennedys’ tenth wedding anniversary. Jackie was not a keen golfer but gamely tagged along.
(Photograph by Robert Knudsen, White House/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)
On his way west for a tour stressing conservation, JFK stopped in Milford, Pennsylvania, on September 24 to speak at a ceremony honoring the descendants of Gifford Pinchot, Jr., the first head of the U.S. Forest Service. The family had donated its chateau-style mansion to the Forest Service for use as a training center. However, Kennedy probably added the ceremony to his itinerary because Pinchot had been the uncle of his lover Mary Meyer and her sister, Tony, Ben Bradlee’s wife, and he was curious to see where the Meyer girls had spent their childhood summers. He is standing between Mary Meyer and her mother.
(Photograph by Cecil Stoughton, White House/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)
JFK speaks in Washington State during his Western conservation tour. He began the trip by delivering dull prepared speeches, but after discovering in Billings that the crowds wanted to hear about peace and the nuclear test ban treaty rather than conservation, he spoke extemporaneously about those subjects, receiving prolonged cheers and applause.
(Photograph by Cecil Stoughton, White House/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)
Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia arrived in Washington, D.C., for a state visit on October 1, the same day that Jackie was leaving for Greece, where she would cruise with Aristotle Onassis and others aboard his sumptuous yacht. Before she departed, Selassie presented her with a magnificent leopard-skin coat and gave John a carved Ethiopian warrior.
(Photograph by Cecil Stoughton, White House/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)
JFK signs the ratification instruments for the limited test ban treaty in the White House Treaty Room. Presidential adviser Ken O’Donnell believed that this ceremony provided Kennedy with “the deepest satisfaction of his three years at the White House.”
(Photograph by Robert Knudsen, White House/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)
Jackie was determined not to spoil John and Caroline, but the moment she left for Greece, Kennedy ordered a large supply of toys so that he could give the children something when they dashed into his bedroom every morning. He played with them often throughout the day and told a friend, “I’m having the best time of my life.”
(Photograph by Cecil Stoughton, White House/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)
Jackie returned to Washington on October 18. When Kennedy reached the top of the metal staircase, she reached out with a white-gloved hand to caress his neck and draw him inside.
(Photograph by Abbie Rowe, White House/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)
After his father was incapacitated by a stroke, Kennedy initiated the custom of kissing him on the head. He visited him for the last time on October 20 in Hyannis Port.
(Photograph by Cecil Stoughton, White House/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)
During JFK’s last November weekend at Wexford, the house that Jackie had insisted they build in the Virginia hunt country, one of the ponies tried to eat all of the sugar cubes that Kennedy had been trying to feed him.
(Photograph by Cecil Stoughton, White House/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)
The Kennedy family attended a performance of Scotland’s famed Black Watch regiment on the White House lawn on November 13. The Black Watch returned two weeks later to play the bagpipes at JFK’s funeral, at which his children would wear the same matching blue overcoats.
(Photograph by Robert Knudsen, White House/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)
Kennedy with astronauts Gus Grissom and Gordon Cooper outside the Saturn Control Center during his visit to Cape Canaveral on November 16. Five days later he met Cooper in San Antonio and invited him to accompany him to Dallas the next day. Cooper declined because he was due at Cape Canaveral. Had he gone, he would have ridden in the presidential limousine, probably sitting in the backseat between Jack and Jackie.
(Photograph by Cecil Stoughton, White House/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)
Kennedy made the Secret Service nervous by insisting on standing directly underneath the Saturn rocket. Looking up, he rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet and murmured, “When this goes up we’ll be ahead of the Russians. . . . When this goes up we’ll be ahead of the Russians. . . .”
(Photograph by Cecil Stoughton, White House/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)
Prior to embarking on the longest motorcade of his presidency, Kennedy shakes hands with the crowd welcoming him to Tampa on November 18.
(Photograph by Cecil Stoughton, White House/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)
After being presented with the official White House Thanksgiving turkey, Kennedy decided to spare the beast, saying in a mock-serious tone of voice, “It would be a shame, a terrible shame to interrupt a great line like Tom’s. We’ll just keep him.”
(Photograph by Cecil Stoughton, White House/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)
Jackie sits between her husband and Vice President Lyndon Johnson at a Chamber of Commerce breakfast in Fort Worth on the morning of November 22.
(Photograph by Cecil Stoughton, White House/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)
Jack and Jackie arrive at Love Field in Dallas on November 22.
(Photograph by Cecil Stoughton, White House/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I found the extensive oral history collections at the Kennedy Library in Boston, and the Johnson Library in Austin, to be crucial resources, not least because many of those who knew Kennedy best have recently died, and their oral history interviews offer particularly detailed and poignant memories of their last encounters and conversations with Kennedy. I was also granted access to two lengthy oral histories that had been previously closed to researchers, those of Kennedy’s close friends Paul Fay and Lem Billings (the Fay oral history has since been opened to the public). I would like to thank Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., for giving me access to the Billings history, and to Paul Fay’s son for allowing me to read his father’s oral history. In September 2011, th
e Kennedy Library released Jackie Kennedy’s oral history, and in 2012, it released the last of Kennedy’s Oval Office tapes. Both made it much easier to reconstruct his thoughts and conversations during his last hundred days. Arthur Schlesinger’s extensive journals, published in 2007, were also an important resource. His published journals, however, represented only about 15 percent of the whole, and his other entries, available in the manuscript room of the New York Public Library, proved to be invaluable.
Several authors—most notably Sally Bedell Smith, Richard Reeves, Barbara Leaming, and Robert Dallek—interviewed many key Kennedy figures in the final years of their lives, and the material in their books that is based on their interviews is an oral history in its own right, and I am sure I will not be the last author to be in their debt. Ralph Martin’s A Hero for Our Times (1983) and Seeds of Destruction (1995), both based on extensive interviews with people who knew Kennedy intimately and have since died, are also cited often in my chapter notes. Two former Secret Service agents, Clint Hill and Gerald Blaine, have recently written memoirs, both with the author Lisa McCubbin, that were important sources for my accounts of Kennedy’s trips to Tampa and Texas. John Logsdon’s John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon provided important insights into JFK’s proposal for a joint lunar mission. Dallek’s and Giglio’s books contain groundbreaking analysis of Kennedy’s health, as does Susan Schwartz’s informative biography of Dr. Hans Kraus. I am also grateful to Dr. Heidi Kimberly for reviewing JFK’s medical records with me, and explaining in detail his various illnesses and complaints. For Kennedy’s Vietnam policy I relied on the FRUS material, and books by Rust, Newman, Jones, and Porter, as well as the primary material and analysis found in Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived by Blight, Lang, and Welch. I found Porter’s argument that Kennedy was using the optimistic Pentagon reports and the 1963 Taylor-McNamara mission to justify withdrawing U.S. advisers convincing and supported by the cables and anecdotal evidence. The Kennedys: America’s Emerald Kings by Thomas Maier was particularly perceptive about the importance of JFK’s Irish heritage, and Maier was the first author to reveal the poignant conversations between Jackie and Father McSorley in 1964. In instances where Kennedy’s inaugural address influenced his decisions and approach to an issue, I relied on material from my previous book about the speech, Ask Not.
At the Kennedy Library, Stephen Plotkin and Sharon Kelly were, as usual, wonderfully accommodating and helpful, as was Laurie Austin in the audiovisual department. I consulted the Laura Bergquist Papers at Boston University and the Margaret Coit Papers at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and would like to thank the librarians at both institutions. I am also grateful to Sally Bedell Smith for suggesting that I consult William Manchester’s papers (cited in the notes as “Death of a President”), and to the librarians at the Wesleyan Library manuscript collection for making them available.
Four interviews in particular were especially illuminating, and I would like to thank Ben Bradlee, Harris Wofford, Marie Ridder, and Lee White. For my earlier book about JFK’s inaugural address, Ask Not, I also spoke with Ted Sorensen, Hugh Sidey, Arthur Schlesinger, Paul Fay, Oleg Cassini, Deirdre Henderson, and Charlie Bartlett, among many others, and I have used some material from those interviews in this book as well. Nancy Dutton has provided me with invaluable counsel and encouragement during the writing of this book and my previous one about Robert Kennedy’s 1968 campaign.
I am grateful to Thad and Sarah Beal, and Harry Spence and Robin Ely, for their hospitality and friendship during my frequent trips to Boston. Every winter, Sandy, Stephanie, Lily, and Isobel Carden have welcomed me into their family and home in Florida, and some of my best work has been done while sitting on their pleasant terrace. I am also indebted to George Whitney for hosting me in Florida and Massachusetts, and reminding me that not everyone shares my fascination with JFK. My wife, Antonia, again came to my rescue with some fast word processing and eagle-eyed editing, and my daughters, Phoebe, Edwina, and Sophie, gracefully endured three more years of hearing about the Kennedys. Ben Weir tracked down a copy of Irene Galitzine’s book while spending a junior-year semester in Italy and translated it. He also gave my manuscript a careful and insightful read, proving himself to be a much better editor than any twenty-two-year-old has a right to be. I was sorry to lose Nick Trautwein when he moved from Penguin Press to The New Yorker, but fortunate to be handed over to Ginny Smith, who has been everything an author could want in an editor: sure-footed, enthusiastic, and nurturing. Her able assistant Kaitlyn Flynn has flawlessly handled the many tasks involved in turning my manuscript into a book. I am also grateful to Stefan McGrath and Josephine Greywoode at Allen Lane, my British publisher, for their encouragement and perceptive comments. While this book was being written, the Robbins Office was staffed by a talented and skillful group of professionals that included Karen Close, Katie Hutt, Ian King, Arielle Asher, Rachelle Bergstein, Micah Hauser, and Louise Quayle. I have dedicated the book to my agents Kathy Robbins and David Halpern, with gratitude for their wisdom and enthusiasm over the years.
NOTES
ABBREVIATIONS
ES: Washington Evening Star
FRUS: Foreign Relations of the United States
JFKL: John F. Kennedy Library
JFKLOH: John F. Kennedy Library Oral History Collection
JFKPP: John F. Kennedy Personal Papers
JFKPOF: John F. Kennedy Presidential Office Files
LBJLOH: Lyndon B. Johnson Library Oral History Collection
LOC: Library of Congress
NYPL: New York Public Library
NYT: New York Times
WP: Washington Post
DECEMBER 31, 1962
“What makes journalism so fascinating”: Bradlee (Conversations), p.12.
“a stunning resemblance”: “Shining a Light on the Other de Kooning,” NYT, November 21, 1993.
“gray, sculptural”: Slivka, p. 201.
watching as he nervously riffled through papers: Ibid.
Caroline . . . with her own easel: Lincoln Papers, Box 6, January 3, 1963 Diary entry, JFKL.
“Is this pose all right?”: Munro, p. 256.
She was intrigued: Slivka, p. 202.
She told friends: Hall, p. 230.
He was larger than life and smaller: Ibid., p. 229.
After running out of space: Bledsoe, p. 33.
“heavily forested interior”: Persico, p. 96. Sherwood admitted, “I could never really understand what was going on in Roosevelt’s heavily forested interior.”
“a shrinking from ostentation or display”: Gullion, JFKLOH.
Laura Bergquist of Look: Bergquist (Knebel), JFKLOH.
“different parts of his life”: Sorensen (Counselor), p. 102.
“the remote and private air”: Norman Mailer, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” Esquire, November 1960.
“No one ever knew John Kennedy”: Reeves, p. 19.
“very introverted man”: Strober, p. 51.
“a simple man”: Rose Kennedy Papers, Box 82, JFKL.
“a romantic”: Ibid.
“to reveal yourself is difficult”: Ibid.
He took French lessons: Hirsh, JFKLOH.
He sent a friend abroad: Hersh, pp. 431–33.
asked a neighbor: Martin (Hero), p. 499.
“that of the man who is always making”: “President Kennedy and Other Intellectuals,” The American Scholar, Fall 1961.
“Can’t you get it into your head”: Von Post, p. 103.
Mailer wondered: “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” Esquire, November 1960.
Bergquist detected a vulnerability: Martin (Seeds), p. 371.
While attempting to seduce: Coit, JFKLOH.
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 7–SATURDAY, AUGUST 10
“It was involuntary”: Adler, p. 53.
when he looked up from his papers: �
�John F. Kennedy and PT 109,” JFKL Web site.
“In ’forty-three, they went to sea”: Anthony (Kennedy White House), p. 239.
All of which may explain why: Bradlee, author interview.
He called Travell before flying: Travell, p. 421.
“the happiest time of his administration”: Guthman and Shulman, p. 384.
“We’ll never have another day”: Beschloss (Crisis Years), p. 608.
the three happiest days: Turbidy, JFKLOH.
“the greatest weekend”: Powers Papers, box 9 (interview with Vanocur), JFKL.
“bursting with vigor”: Travell, p. 442.
“All we are getting here still”: Maier, p. 442.
“I don’t understand how you can get such a big kick”: Fay, p. 58.
“It’s time for Father and Son”: Ibid., p. 232.
“John, aren’t you lucky”: Ibid., p. 243.
“Soon you’ll have three”: Lincoln (My Twelve), p. 282.
When Kennedy failed to appear for an excursion: Fay, JFKLOH; Sally Bedell Smith, p. 390.
“I’d known a lot of attractive women”: Fay, p. 183.
After returning to Washington: Powers Papers, Box 9 (Vanocur interview), JFKL.
“could not bear to be alone”: Ibid.
During the summer of 1963 they often sat together: O’Donnell and Powers, p. 375; Powers Papers, Box 9 (Vanocur interview), JFKL.
“a remarkably intensive but productive period”: Sorensen (Counselor), p. 328.
JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President Page 45