by Ted Sorensen
At the 1963 Dinner, with no change in the situation in sight, it having been somewhat exacerbated by the Supreme Court’s decision outlawing compulsory prayers in the public schools, he summed up the measure’s chances with a realistic quip. “The Chief Justice,” he said, “has assured me that our school bill is clearly constitutional—because it hasn’t got a prayer.”
The Court’s decision on school prayers, and another on Bible-reading in the schools, threatened to raise new religious issues for the 1964 Presidential campaign. Many of the same conservative Protestants who in 1960 had denounced all Catholics—for supposedly seeking to break down the barrier between church and state, to upset the delicate constitutional balance on religious liberty and to threaten the secular nature of the public schools—were in 1963, with no sense of inconsistency, denouncing the Supreme Court for banning the recitation of formal prayers and Bible-reading in the public schools, and demanding a constitutional amendment to permit them. Most Catholic leaders, and many liberal Protestants, also attacked these decisions, as did the United States Governors’ Conference and many powerful members of Congress.
A new ugly battle loomed, with all the controversies over the Court, the school bill, the Catholic President and his re-election being twisted together. The President, however, took much of the sting out of these decisions and much of the force out of any drive to amend the Constitution. He did it by his thoughtful response to a news conference question on the prayer case:
I think that it is important…that we support the Supreme Court decisions even when we may not agree with them. In addition, we have in this case a very easy remedy and that is to pray ourselves…. We can pray a good deal more at home, we can attend our churches with a good deal more fidelity, and we can make the true meaning of prayer much more important in the lives of all of our children. That power is very much open to us.
That answer to me symbolized Kennedy’s mastery of the religious issue throughout his stay in the White House. He disappointed all critics who had warned that he would weaken the Constitution and any Catholics who had hoped that he would. His administration made clear that this country is not officially Catholic, Protestant or even Christian, but a democratic republic in which neither religion in general nor any church in particular can be either established or curbed by public act.
True to his word, he showed no religious favoritism in the selection of his appointees, no fear of ecclesiastical pressures and no divided loyalty of any kind. No ambassador was sent to the Vatican. With his support, the Federal Government quietly but extensively increased its activities in the area of birth and population control—increasing its research grants, supporting an expansion of UN efforts and offering to help make more information available to other countries requesting it. A 1962 bill providing for the censorship of obscene publications in the District of Columbia—the kind of bill his critics had assumed heavy clerical pressures would force him to sign regardless of merit—was vetoed, not because he favored such publications but because the bill had grave constitutional defects. Having told the Texas preachers that he would have no hesitancy in attending a Protestant service in his capacity as President, he flew in his first year to Texas for the funeral of Sam Rayburn.
He attended Protestant prayer breakfasts with a now very friendly Billy Graham, received various Protestant clergymen at the White House and met privately—in my office, so that even visitors in the White House could not know—with anti-Catholic pamphleteer Paul Blanshard, seeking his agreement to the inclusion of private colleges in the higher education bill, and he kept me in touch with Blanshard generally. He felt as free as any other President to visit the Pope (but did not, in keeping with his own precedents as well as the protocol applicable to heads of state, kneel or kiss Pope Paul’s ring but simply shook hands).
Partly as a result of John Kennedy’s example—and the example of another John whose brief tenure as Pope overlapped Kennedy’s brief tenure as President, but who by tragic chance died before they could meet—the Catholic Church in this country became less subject to recriminations from without and more subject to reform from within.
But the President at no time changed or downgraded his Catholic faith; he did not reduce or conceal his church attendance; and he possessed with pride a set of military identification “dog tags” inscribed with the unprecedented combination: “Kennedy, John F.—Commander-in-Chief—O [for blood type]—Roman Catholic.”
One other note might be added. To me, the least explicable religious objection encountered during the entire campaign was the fear that a Roman Catholic Mass might be held in the White House. To those who expressed this worry, I can give assurance that it happened only once—on November 23, 1963.
1 Appendix A lists the major Kennedy enactments.
2 The project was restudied but no extra funds for the B-70 or RS-70 were ever spent.
3 He still remembered, for example, which stores in Boston had accepted window signs for his first congressional campaign and which had refused.
4 The President—and a HEW-Justice Department brief—concluded that the Constitution and tradition made possible the equal treatment of both private and public institutions at the college level, where no state was required to furnish a free education to all, no student was compelled to attend, and no standards of curriculum or admission were required by law.
CHAPTER XV
THE MAN IN THE WHITE HOUSE
JOHN F. KENNEDY WAS A HAPPY PRESIDENT. Happiness, he often said, paraphrasing Aristotle, is the full use of one’s faculties along lines of excellence, and to him the Presidency offered the ideal opportunity to pursue excellence.
He liked the job, he thrived on its pressures. Disappointments only made him more determined. Only once do I recall his speaking with any bitterness about his post. It was a few minutes before he was to go on the air with his Cuban missile speech, and the Congressional leaders whom he called in for a briefing had presented a thousand objections and no new suggestions. More weary from their wrangling than his own week of deliberations, he remarked to me in disgust as he changed clothes for TV, “If they want this——job, they can have it.”
But moments later he was once again full of determination and drive; and at all other times he made clear his pride of office. When I handed him a letter from my eight-year-old son Eric, who volunteered the information that he liked the White House and would like to live there someday, the President wrote on it in reply: “So do I…sorry, Eric, you’ll have to wait your turn.” When asked at a press conference, in reference to his brother Teddy’s comment on the unattractive burdens of the office, “whether, if you had to do it over again, you would work for the Presidency and whether you can recommend the job to others,” he replied, “Well, the answer…[to] the first is Yes, and [to] the second is No, I don’t recommend it to others—at least for a while.”
Without minimizing the difficulties of the office, he made clear in a variety of other press conferences and interviews that he was very happy in his work:
This job is interesting…. It represents a chance to exercise your judgment on matters of importance…. I find the work rewarding…the Presidency provides some happiness (under Aristotle’s definition)…. There are a lot of satisfactions to the Presidency…. You have an opportunity to do something about all the problems…and if what you do is useful and successful…that is a great satisfaction…. This is a damned good job.
Life was not all satisfaction and happiness, even in a damned good job, but it was personal adversity that affected him more deeply than any political attack or policy setback. He wept over the death of his infant son Patrick, the first child born to the wife of a President in office in this century. The President, more at home and involved with his children in the White House than he had ever been before, had looked forward with special pleasure to the arrival of this child; and he seemed even more broken than Jacqueline when a lung ailment took Patrick less than two days after his premature birth in August, 1963. �
�He wouldn’t take his hands off that little coffin,” said Cardinal Cushing, who presided at the Mass. “I was afraid he’d carry it right out with him.”
For the grieving father, rushing in vain to reach his wife’s side before the baby was born, then flying back and forth between her hospital bed on Cape Cod and the Boston hospital to which Patrick had been taken for special treatment, those few days were like a grisly nightmare. But he was due to send to the Senate that week his special message on the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty—a message of hope—and nearly every day during his ordeal it was necessary for him to discuss the message with me by telephone in a downcast but factual manner. Presidents have little time for formal mourning, and President Kennedy was soon back in the swirl of office. But he also took time out the following October for an unpublicized visit to Patrick’s grave.
Earlier in his term another family tragedy had struck, and this, too, temporarily broke his spirits but not his stride. On Thanksgiving, 1961, he expressed concern to me about his father’s health, and the following month he received word in the White House that the Ambassador had suffered a stroke in Palm Beach. Moving swiftly to the Presidential plane, “Air Force One,” he asked me to continue en route the review of the 1962 legislative planning we had barely begun.
It was with difficulty and incredible self-discipline that he engrossed himself in our work on that sorrowful flight. The mutual bonds of affection and admiration between father and son had not diminished in the White House, and Joseph P. Kennedy’s subsequent Inability to communicate freely to his son removed a welcomed source of encouragement and cheer for the President. Saddened to see the old man suffering both physical and mental agony in his permanently crippled and virtually speechless condition, the President later wondered out loud about the decision facing doctors who work desperately to keep alive any man hovering between a peaceful death and a fraction of life. In the months that followed his father’s stroke, he continued to return in full all the love and loyalty his father had for so long lavished upon him, frequently talking to (not really with) the Ambassador by telephone, visiting him at Palm Beach and Cape Cod, and inviting him for long stays at the White House.
His own physical pain was the other chief source of personal stress. More fit than ever in every other way, a picture of health and vitality, he was still plagued by his aching back. The rocking chair was moved over from his Senate office and more rockers were acquired, becoming a nationally recognized symbol of the traditional values, reflective patience and practical informality prevailing in the White House. A cloth brace, three hot baths a day, rest on a heating pad after lunch, prescribed calisthenics before supper and daily swims in the heated White House pool all helped, but the pain was almost always with him. “He never complained,” said Dave Powers. “You…might have an idea by some of his silences that maybe his back was bothering him, but he never ever complained.”
His injury was aggravated when he planted a tree in the capital city of Canada on his May, 1961, visit. It was not until later that month, as I watched him ease himself slowly and carefully into an ornate bathtub upon his arrival in Paris, that I realized the pain he was in. Back in Washington, he was forced to use crutches around the White House, although, still opposed to evidencing any physical weakness, he stoically put them away when talking to outsiders or departing the grounds. But he had to deliver one speech seated in 1961, and had to cancel a few others.
At times the pain was worse, at times better. “It depends,” he said, “on the weather—political and otherwise.” But at all times he approached climbing stairs, stooping and lifting somewhat gingerly. He was cautious about his annual ceremonial duty of throwing out the first baseball of the professional season, but never satisfied with less than the best in any endeavor, he secretly practiced on the White House lawn. He golfed more rarely than he desired and lifted his children less frequently than both he and they would have liked. The Presidency was by no means the same physical endurance contest as the campaign. But the Kennedy Presidency required of both the man and his aides long hours, relentless activity and steady concentration, and John Kennedy rarely slowed his pace to ease his pain.1
The rigorous series of calisthenics he practiced daily under the direction of Dr. Hans Kraus of New York after the 1961 injury helped immensely. They not only strengthened his back but made him more muscular and trim. At times his vanity was still hurt by pictures showing him puffy in the face, but his weight finally stabilized at 175 pounds. He dieted frequently, once asking the chef to cut out his favorite chocolate soufflé until a forthcoming television appearance was over. He also acquired a few more lines on his face and a little more gray in his hair, and, as Dave Powers put it, “he looked more like a President every day.” To save time both his barber and his tailor worked on him in his office.
He still favored dark-colored, lightweight, two-button suits, with a monogrammed shirt and a PT-boat tie clasp. Not surprisingly, most of his aides did also. Even at Palm Beach and Hyannis Port he felt that the dignity of his office required him to don a coat and usually a tie whenever he was to be photographed at work, and on more than one occasion he handed out coats and ties to his aides before our pictures were taken with him. (He also smilingly chided us at Paris that our button-down collars were out of place in that capital of fashion.) Averell Harriman, reporting at Hyannis Port on his return from Moscow and the Test Ban Treaty negotiations, was touched when the President insisted on his taking a swim, and a Kennedy shirt and tie, before meeting the press.
Neither back pain nor bad luck could ever dim his sense of humor. The public saw part of it at his press conferences. The press saw more of it at their various annual dinners, where he invariably stole the show. Around the White House we saw it every day, on every subject. It was never forced or feigned, and far funnier than it was in public. It flowed naturally, good-naturedly, casually. It was dry, wry, ironic and irreverent. His humor was largely an integral part of his own thinking rather than a deliberate attempt to amuse others. He did not pause before his witticisms for effect or afterward for appreciation, but simply dropped them as part of his comments. Sometimes one could see the eyes twinkling and the smile breaking as he deliberated whether a particularly biting barb should be cast.
At no time did he show disrespect for his office or country, but no other subject was spared. The Attorney General and others thought it almost sacrilegious for him to parody his own solemn Inaugural at a Democratic anniversary dinner, but he went ahead:
We observe tonight not a celebration of freedom but a victory of party. For we have sworn to pay off the same party debt our forebears ran up nearly a year and three months ago…. If the Democratic Party cannot be helped by the many who are poor, it cannot be saved by the few who are rich.
He kidded his staff, his wife, his brothers, his critics, his opponents, foreign leaders, Congressional leaders, columnists (“I’d rather be Fleesonized than Krocked”), everyone without regard to race, rank or relationship. His delicate relations with Prime Minister Diefenbaker of Canada could not restrain him from saying, upon his arrival in Ottawa, that he was less reluctant to try a few words in French after listening to the Prime Minister try it. He good-naturedly razzed Pierre Salinger about his weight, Evelyn Lincoln about her Methodism and me about an obviously borrowed dinner jacket. When Ken Galbraith complained that the otherwise favorable New York Times profile of him as the new Ambassador to India had called him arrogant, the President responded, “Why not? Everybody else does.”
Above all, he could still laugh at himself—at the solemnities he pronounced, at the praise he received, at the setbacks he suffered. He still took his problems seriously but never himself.
“I used to wonder, when I was a member of the House,” he told one dinner in the presence of the previous Democratic President, “how President Truman got in so much trouble. Now I am beginning to get the idea. It is not difficult.”
Addressing the 1961 graduating class of the Naval Academy at Annapol
is, he might well have dwelt nostalgically on his days in the Navy, or lectured them sternly on the fight then raging over the military in politics. Instead, he was himself. “In the past,” he told the Midshipmen,
I have had some slight contact with this service, though I never did reach the state of professional and physical perfection where I could hope that anyone would ever mistake me for an Annapolis graduate…. I know you are constantly warned…not to mix…in politics. I should point out, however…that my rapid rise from a reserve lieutenant of uncertain standing to Commander in Chief has been because I did not follow that very good advice.
He assumed that we all would have to live indefinitely with national and international tensions and imperfect humans and solutions, and he was blessed with qualities which helped him to prepare to make the best of it. The discipline of his mind and emotions was of a piece with his self-knowledge and his knowledge of his time and trials. He never self-consciously thought of himself as “courageous,” but he lived by the Hemingway definition with which he had opened Profiles: “grace under pressure.” (He could even rib that definition, saying it also described a girl he knew by that name.)
The sobering education and searing experiences of the Presidency obviously contributed to his growth but did not otherwise change him. Looking back, I am even more amazed that the White House did not alter his personal qualities. Upon his election, everyone about him automatically became more deferential, his life became more privileged and powerful, his every word became history. Yet he remained natural, candid, measuring his own deeds and words with doubt and amusement as well as pride. He entertained no delusions about himself or others, neither affecting nor accepting any pretensions of grandeur.