30. Launched in 1962, Telstar was the first communications satellite to allow television images to be beamed across the Atlantic. On the President's forty-seventh birthday, Jacqueline and Robert Kennedy appeared from Hyannis Port (using the same CBS crew that had produced her White House tour broadcast) in an international tribute that included Macmillan, Berlin mayor Willy Brandt, and other foreign leaders.
31. In August 1963, Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Macmillan consented to a treaty to ban nuclear tests in the atmosphere, outer space, and under water. De Gaulle, eager to build his own French nuclear deterrent, refused to sign it. (JFK privately carped at the time that de Gaulle would be remembered for one thing—his failure to accept that treaty.) Despite Kennedy's large efforts, the document did not preclude underground testing, but it represented the first serious mutual effort by Americans and Soviets to control the Cold War nuclear arms competition that threatened the planet from 1949 until 1991. Especially after the almost-apocalypse of the missile crisis, Kennedy considered it his proudest achievement. He signed it on October 7, 1963, in the Victorian splendor of Jacqueline's new Treaty Room.
32. ARTHUR DEAN (1899–1980), William Foster (1897–1984), and John McCloy had all been asked by JFK to help to negotiate a test ban treaty with the Soviets.
33. W. AVERELL HARRIMAN (1891–1986) was the son and heir of one of the late nineteenth century's most famous railroad barons. He served as Franklin Roosevelt's wartime ambassador to Moscow and governor of New York before he was a high official in JFK's State Department. The President sent Harriman to Moscow to demonstrate the seriousness of his commitment to achieving a treaty and was impressed by Harriman's brilliant success. In December 1963, he lent his Georgetown house to Mrs. Kennedy for her family to use as they waited to move into their new home.
34. THEODORE WHITE (1915–1986), a friend of JFK's who had overlapped with him at Harvard and wrote the landmark book on presidential politics, The Making of the President, 1960. In that volume, White wrote that "no man proved more capable of exercising the end form of American power around the globe" than Harriman, but that "no man proved more incapable of understanding American domestic politics" than Harriman.
35. In fact, it was not the political end for Harriman. He soldiered on as a senior diplomat for the two Democratic presidents who followed John Kennedy.
36. National Archives of the United States.
37. Eminent officials of the Kennedy government attended what came to be called "Hickory Hill seminars" (named for the venue of the first), which were held in various of their homes. Organized by Schlesinger, an academic would lecture and take questions on his own expertise. The evening with the Lincoln historian David Herbert Donald (1920–2009) took place in the Yellow Oval Room.
38. After Khrushchev promised to withdraw his missiles from Cuba, JFK ruminated to Robert Kennedy that it might be the night to go to the theater, referring to Lincoln's assassination in Ford's Theatre at the zenith of his political reputation. Robert replied that if he did, he would want to go with him.
39. ISAIAH BERLIN (1909–1997) was a British diplomat and historian who had served in Moscow during World War II.
40. MAUD ALICE BURKE (1872–1948), known as Lady Emerald Cunard, born in America, was a famous pre–World War II London hostess.
41. The French ambassador was intensely jealous of Ormsby-Gore's extraordinary relationship with the Kennedys. The President and First Lady placed some distance between themselves and the Alphands also because of de Gaulle's growing resistance to JFK's overtures and efforts to keep France firmly in the Western Alliance.
42. U THANT (1909–1974) was a Burmese diplomat who served as secretary-general of the UN from 1961 to 1971.
43. Kennedy met with Macmillan for three days at the Lyford Cay Club in the Bahamas in December 1962. Before the meeting, the United States, citing technical problems, had cancelled its program to build Skybolt missiles, which had been promised to the U.K. for its nuclear deterrent force. When this was announced by the British defense minister, Peter Thorneycroft, Macmillan suffered political embarrassment—especially with Parliament critics who complained that he was too close and subservient to Kennedy. At Nassau, the President tried to bolster Macmillan by offering him Polaris missiles in return for lease of a submarine base near Glasgow. After the meeting, Ormsby-Gore accompanied the Kennedys to Palm Beach. There General Godfrey McHugh (1911–1997), the President's air force aide, made his inopportune report that whatever technical difficulties Skybolt had suffered, they had evidently vanished. Mortified to have injured Macmillan, JFK asked the Columbia political scientist Richard Neustadt to investigate the gaffe. Studying Neustadt's report with fascination in November 1963, Kennedy urged Jackie to read it.
44. By JFK's death.
45. ROGER BLOUGH (1904–1985) was board chairman of U.S. Steel from 1955 to 1969. In March 1962, the Kennedy Administration brokered an agreement with the Steelworkers Union and industry chieftains to hold down wage and price increases that were potentially inflationary. But in April 1962 Blough told JFK that U.S. Steel was raising prices by 3.5 percent, thereby violating the deal. Most other large steel firms did the same. Furious, the President felt betrayed. He publicly denounced the steel men as enemies of the public interest. Robert Kennedy opted for what he called "hardball." He had a grand jury consider antitrust indictments, and ordered the FBI to "interview them all—march into their offices the next day" and, with the benefit of subpoena, to examine the moguls' expense accounts and other personal records for evidence of unlawful collusion. (In this effort, the FBI called a reporter at 2:00 or 3:00 a.m., which brought public complaints about brutal tactics.) Clark Clifford and other administration officials badgered the steel men to rescind their price increases. Within seventy-two hours, Blough and his colleagues backed down.
46. Jones and Laughlin Steel Company.
47. ROSS BARNETT (1898–1987) was governor of Mississippi from 1960 to 1964. In September 1962, the President and attorney general bargained by telephone with the mercurial Barnett for the peaceful entrance into the University of Mississippi at Oxford of its first African-American student, James Meredith. It failed. Kennedy had to send the army to put down the resulting riots, which left two people dead.
48. GEORGE WALLACE (1919–1998) served the first of his four terms as governor of Alabama from 1963 until 1967. In June 1963, a month after angry dogs were set upon black teenagers demonstrating for civil rights in Birmingham, the governor announced his intention to block a judicial order to enroll two African-American students at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. In a ritual choreographed by the Kennedy brothers, who wished to avoid violence, Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door, denouncing "this illegal, unwarranted and force-induced intrusion by the federal government." Deputy Attorney General Katzenbach, backed by a federalized Alabama National Guard, asked the governor to step aside, which he did. That evening, on television, JFK announced that he was sending a comprehensive civil rights bill to Congress, citing "a moral issue . . . as old as the Scriptures and as clear as the American Constitution."
49. She refers to the storm surrounding President Eisenhower's use of the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division to compel the integration of Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas in 1957.
50. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. (1929–1968) was the best-known leader of the American civil rights movement when he delivered his "I Have a Dream" address at the March on Washington (which Jacqueline calls the "freedom march") of August 1963. When the event was over, JFK welcomed King and other leaders to the White House and said, "I have a dream." The FBI tape to which Mrs. Kennedy refers was of King and his colleagues relaxing at the Willard Hotel after the march. Hectored by J. Edgar Hoover with charges that the civil rights leader was influenced by Communists in his entourage, Robert Kennedy grudgingly authorized Hoover to tap King's telephone calls and bug his rooms, which in time produced transcripts of derogatory private comments made by King while watching President Kennedy's Capi
tol Rotunda and funeral ceremonies. Hoover was only too eager to share them with the attorney general, and the shocked brother of the late President conveyed their essence to Jacqueline. Thus she was bristling at King (although in 1968, despite the disturbing emotions in her that it was bound to evoke, she accompanied RFK to King's funeral in Atlanta and consoled King's widow).
51. A. PHILIP RANDOLPH (1889–1979) was chief of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and one of the organizers of the March on Washington.
52. In May 1963, on the hundredth anniversary of Gettysburg, LBJ had delivered a civil rights speech at the battlefield that went beyond anything the President had theretofore said about the issue in public. (This was before Kennedy's television speech the following month declaring civil rights "a moral issue.") Johnson declared, "The Negro today asks justice. We do not answer him—we do not answer those who lie beneath this soil—when we reply to the Negro by asking, Patience.'" In private, the vice president stridently complained to Sorensen that the President wasn't doing enough about civil rights, either in Congress or in his efforts to change public opinion.
53. On Tuesday morning, October 16, 1962, Bundy told the President in his White House bedroom that U-2 photography by the CIA had revealed the Soviets installing offensive missiles in Cuba—an eventuality that JFK had assured the public the previous month that he would never accept. Midterm congressional elections were three weeks ahead. Anxious to keep the missile problem secret from Americans until he and his advisers agreed on a strategy, Kennedy tried to maintain his normal schedule, flying to Chicago for a campaign address, before returning to Washington on the pretext that he was suffering from a cold. On Monday evening, October 22, JFK gave his television speech announcing that his "initial step" would be to throw a naval blockade (euphemized as a "quarantine") around Cuba and demand the missiles' removal.
54. This has echoes of the British royal family's determination in 1940 to remain in London through the dangers of the German Blitz.
55. Unbenownst to Mrs. Kennedy, even had the U-2 photographed Cuba a few days earlier, it would probably have given the Americans little advantage in trying to have the missiles withdrawn.
56. On the final weekend of the crisis came two messages from Khrushchev—the first conciliatory, the second fire and brimstone. In what scholars later called the "Trollope ploy" (in Anthony Trollope's fiction, a woman hastens to interpret a friendly gesture as a marriage proposal) the Kennedy brothers opted to treat the first one as the definitive Soviet message, which helped save the situation.
57. ROGER HILSMAN (1919– ) was the State Department's intelligence chief. At the height of the crisis, an American U-2 accidentally flew into Soviet airspace—legally an act of war that might have inspired retaliation that could have spiraled into nuclear conflict. A furious Kennedy said, "There's always some son-of-a-bitch who doesn't get the word!"
58. When Kennedy made his initial public response to the missiles in Cuba (he used the more peacelike euphemism "quarantine"), some of the Joint Chiefs, such as the navy's George Anderson (1906–1992) and the air force's Curtis LeMay, thought the President was being too weak—even on Sunday, October 28, when Radio Moscow announced that the missiles were coming out to "prevent a fatal turn of events and protect world peace."
59. By coincidence, the U.S. destroyer Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. was one of the ships blockading Cuba.
60. TAZEWELL SHEPARD, JR. (1921– ) was the President's naval aide.
61. JFK presented a gift of remembrance to Jacqueline and those around him who had been most involved in deliberations on the Cuban Missile Crisis. Each was a little silver Tiffany calendar for October 1962, with the fateful thirteen days highlighted in bold, and engraved with "J.F.K." and the recipient's initials.
62. CHESTER BOWLES (1901–1986) was an advertising executive, governor of Connecticut, and Dean Rusk's number two before succeeding Galbraith as ambassador to India.
63. After the Bay of Pigs, when Bowles let it be known around Washington that he had opposed the venture, an indignant RFK poked his finger at Bowles's chest and told him that his position had henceforth better be that he was for the invasion.
64. JFK's friend Charlie Bartlett collaborated with the columnist Stewart Alsop (1914–1974) on a Saturday Evening Post article claiming that during the crisis deliberations, Adlai Stevenson had "wanted a Munich." Because Bartlett was known to be close to the President, members of the Washington cognoscenti mistakenly took the piece as a signal that Kennedy wanted his UN envoy out. Stevenson himself was especially agitated.
65. CLAYTON FRITCHEY (1904–2001) was an ex-journalist and Stevenson aide who was a social friend of the Kennedys.
66. During the missile crisis, the vice president attended only one meeting of "Ex Comm," the ad hoc presidential panel quickly formed by JFK to fashion a solution to the problem by meeting around the clock. Other members were Rusk, McNamara, Dillon, RFK, Bundy, McCone, and Taylor. The reference to Laos is the covert efforts by both North Vietnam and America to undermine the 1962 agreement at Geneva to preserve the country's neutrality and independence.
67. Powers and O'Donnell had agreed to stay on with Johnson for a transitional period.
68. In mentioning her husband's warning, Mrs. Kennedy was eerily prescient about the problem that would doom America's involvement in Vietnam.
69. In other words, even if the President orders the invasion halted, proceed anyway.
70. JOSEPH KRAFT (1924-1986) was a Washington columnist and denizen of Georgetown.
71. HAROLD E. STASSEN (1907–2001), the onetime Republican "boy governor" of Minnesota, had once been a serious presidential contender and later ran for the job so many times and so long after he had any remote chance of election that he became a minor national joke.
72. JFK had had to deal with a worrisome drain of gold reserves to Western Europe.
73. By now, Jacqueline's once-benign attitude toward Johnson as leader has hardened, along with Robert Kennedy's. Later in 1964, when Jacqueline studied a draft of Sorensen's soon-to-be-published book Kennedy, she insisted that the author change or delete almost every favorable mention of her husband's vice president, noting "several glowing references to LBJ, which I know do not reflect President Kennedy's thinking. . . . You must know—as well or better than I—his steadily diminishing opinion of him. . . . He grew more and more concerned about what would happen if LBJ ever became president. He was truly frightened at the prospect." Refuting a Sorensen claim in the draft that the President had "learned" about campaigning from Johnson, she wrote, "Lyndon's style always embarrassed him, especially when he sent him around the world as Vice-President." In later years, however, time, distance, the end of Robert Kennedy's rivalry with Johnson, the death of LBJ, and her cordial relationship with Lady Bird softened Jacqueline's attitude toward her late husband's successor. She distinguished her objections to certain Johnson policies—especially the Vietnam War escalation, which she insisted Jack would never have countenanced—from her personal fondness for both Lyndon and Lady Bird, whom she made an effort to see during the 1980s and early 1990s when both former first ladies summered on Martha's Vineyard. In a 1974 oral history about Johnson for the Johnson Library, Jacqueline said that after the assassination, LBJ "was extraordinary. He did everything he could to be magnanimous. . . . I was really touched by that generosity of spirit. . . . I always felt that about him."
74. JFK had appointed Johnson to chair the President's Committee on Equal Employment Opportunities, as well as his space council.
75. In Johnson's defense, Kennedy was eager to give his vice president dignity, but—knowing his tendency to overreach if given the chance—not a great deal to do. He sent Johnson on so many trips in order to distract him from his boredom and powerlessness. As Johnson's aide and friend Jack Valenti later described LBJ as vice president, "this great, proud vessel was just simply unable to move. Stuck there in the Sargasso Sea—no wind and no tides."
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