“Does this mean you’re president, Bunny?” Jackie Kennedy asked her husband. “Why don’t you give up?” someone else in the room exhorted the face on the television screen. “Why should he?” Kennedy jumped in. “I wouldn’t in his place.”
Jack was done for the evening. “What am I going to tell the press?” Pierre Salinger asked. “Tell them I went to bed,” came the answer. “Wake me up if anything happens.” With that, he walked out into the Cape Cod night, headed for his own house. When he awoke, he was the next president.
Ted Sorensen beat Salinger to him with the news. That morning they watched intently as Herb Klein, Nixon’s press secretary, read the telegram Nixon had sent from California, before flying at dawn back to Washington. “I want to repeat through this wire the congratulations and best wishes I extended to you on television last night. I know that you will have the united support of all Americans as you lead the nation in the cause of peace and freedom during the next four years.”
Nixon wasn’t playing by the rules and Jack resented it. It had been a close election, yet here was his opponent denying him the courtesy of a televised concession. It was part of the ritual, and yet he’d ducked out at the climax, leaving his press secretary to do the job. He, Jack Kennedy, would never have behaved in such an unsportsmanlike manner. Once he’d known he’d lost the vice-presidential race in 1956, he’d raced to the podium.
As he greeted and thanked his top political aides O’Donnell and O’Brien, he now struck them both as a different man. The battle had been hard fought and won.
When the Secret Service detail arrived at Hyannis Port at 5:45 a.m., the agents knew the names, faces, and roles of each of Kennedy’s people. Seeing Ken O’Donnell at the Kennedy compound that Wednesday afternoon, the chief of the Secret Service unit approached him as he got out of his car. “Mr. O’Donnell, the president has informed the Secret Service that we will now be reporting to you and that you are now our boss, in charge of the Secret Service for the length of the president’s term of office. What would you like us to do right now?” It was the first indication that Kennedy intended him to come to Washington.
President-elect Kennedy’s plans did not include appointing a chief of staff. He, Jack Kennedy, was going to be at the center. Everyone else, including O’Donnell, now a special assistant, and Sorensen, special counsel, would be arrayed around him, each spoke of the wheel competing for his attention. Jack would design a White House operation to match his compartmentalized personality. No one would control him. He would, in that fashion he loved, have things under control.
Still, before he could relax in his triumph and enjoy his cresting euphoria, Kennedy needed to secure the victory against any doubters. The problem was that the historically close tally had left questions about certain state results. Those in dispute were in Illinois—especially Cook County, where Chicago is located—and in Lyndon Johnson’s Texas. It remained unclear in the first days after the election whether Richard Nixon intended to demand recounts or otherwise challenge the results. In order for John Kennedy to be able to move forward as chief executive, an extraordinary measure was required: someone must indicate, clearly and convincingly, that he had, without question, won the election. The person who needed to do so was Dick Nixon.
It fell to Joseph P. Kennedy, a master at the deal and knowing whom to call, to figure out the way. A longtime friend of Herbert Hoover, he was able to pick up the phone and quickly reach the eighty-six-year-old former president. The message he delivered to Hoover was a straightforward one: it was in the country’s interest for the newly elected president and the defeated Nixon to get together. Hoover listened and understood. He’d once lost a presidential election himself, and survived. Plus, over the years Nixon had come to regard him as a political father figure. For both these reasons, Nixon would listen to him and respect his counsel.
The Saturday after the election, the excitement and fatigue of the campaign had faded from the fallen candidate. Defeat, both dull and cruel, had taken hold. The loyal Herb Klein could see it plainly. “Nixon was, in my opinion, more unresponsive than at any time I had known him. He was completely depressed and had finally realized, four days later, that he’d lost the election.”
Nixon and his retreating corps of advisors were assembled that night in Key Biscayne, Florida. It was there he took the call from Hoover and heard the big-picture case for getting together with Kennedy. “I think we are in enough trouble in the world today that some indications of national unity are not only desirable but essential.”
But, as always in such moments, there were dimensions that existed beyond the easy explanations. After talking to Hoover, Nixon’s glum mood suddenly lifted. “It was the difference between night and day,” Klein said. While Nixon was on another phone calling President Eisenhower for guidance, Klein took a call from Kennedy, who hadn’t wanted to wait for Nixon to ring him. The upshot was the two men agreed to meet the following Monday in Key Biscayne.
The meeting accomplished just what the Kennedys intended: providing a photo op to showcase the image of loser meeting winner. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Jack Kennedy told the press, “I just wanted to say that the vice president and I had a very cordial meeting. I was delighted to have a chance to see him again. We came to the Congress the same day fourteen years ago, and both served on the Labor Committee of the House of Representatives. So I was anxious to come here today and resume our relationship, which had been somewhat interrupted by the campaign.” Had the two discussed the campaign during their hour-long meeting? “I asked him how he took Ohio, but he did not tell me,” Kennedy joked. “He is saving it for 1964.”
The vote count would turn out to be incredibly tight—Kennedy: 34,226,731; Nixon: 34,108,157. But now the results had been validated by the face-to-face meeting on Nixon’s own turf.
• • •
Jack Kennedy’s ultimate trophy had been won by virtue of the truth he’d grasped about his country, one that Richard Nixon had failed to see. “He had done it by driving home the simple message of unease,” Time reported, addressing “the things left undone in the world, where a slip could be disastrous.” The historian Arthur Schlesinger enlarged on the same point in his diary. “He wisely decided to concentrate on a single theme and to hammer that theme home until everyone in America understood it—understood his sense of the decline of our national power and influence and his determination to arrest and reverse this course. He did this with such brilliant success that, even in a time of prosperity and apparent peace, and even as a Catholic, he was able to command a majority of the votes.”
Victory confirmed, Jack could focus anew on those ideals of peace and heroic leadership that had inspired him since youth. The new president had a favorite quote from Lincoln that he liked to carry with him on a scrap of paper. He’d used it in speeches, but now it spoke to him personally. “I know there is a God, and I know He hates injustice. I see the storm coming and I know His hand is in it. But if He has a place and a part for me, I believe that I am ready.”
31. Swearing in, 1961 Inauguration
32. Meeting with Khrushchev
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
LANDING
He who learns must suffer, and, even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.
—Aeschylus
John F. Kennedy, the youngest man ever elected to the White House, understood how incredibly close the race had been. He also recognized the meaning of his slender margin, a victory that was far from a mandate. Both he and his rival had sought to show the strength and the will with which they would confront the Soviets. Now that he’d triumphed, little, really, had changed. Except that now the task was at hand.
A critical first endeavor involved the reassurance of two important government officials: both J. Edgar Hoover and Allen Dulles—the FBI and CIA directors, respectively—had to be told their jobs were safe. To have done otherwise
would have unsettled the country. Therefore, urgent phone calls were placed to each man in the earliest hours of the interregnum. For JFK, retaining Hoover offered the premium of putting a lid on, among other prospects, the troublesome “Inga Binga” material in his files.
President-elect Kennedy put a pair of Republicans in top cabinet posts, naming Douglas Dillon, who’d been Eisenhower’s undersecretary of state, to run the Treasury Department and placing the Ford Motor Company president, Robert McNamara, at Defense. The clubby Dillon, with his old-money connections, appealed to Kennedy the man. McNamara, showing no lack of toughness, made a point, when they discussed the job, of asking Jack whether he’d written Profiles in Courage himself. An air corps lieutenant colonel by the end of World War II, McNamara had a Harvard MBA and at Ford had been one of the famous “Whiz Kids,” a group of ten returning veterans who came in and revitalized the company.
Looking to the liberal faction, which he needed both to acknowledge and include, the president tapped Adlai Stevenson to be his United Nations ambassador, Walter Heller as chief economic advisor, and Arthur Schlesinger as all-around Renaissance man.
Now, as always, concessions needed to be made to the senior Kennedy. It was, after all, the tribute Joe’s money and support deserved. Since his sons’ futures were of the utmost importance to him, posts for both younger Kennedy brothers were part of the bargain: Bobby would be attorney general, Ted would get Jack’s senate seat once he turned the required age of thirty.
Jack laughed with Ben Bradlee at the absurdity of the youngest president ever elected picking his brother, eight years younger than he, as attorney general. When Bradlee asked him how he planned to deliver the news to the press, his probable course of action had a familiar ring. Kennedy said, “I think I’ll open the front door of the Georgetown house some morning around two a.m., look up and down the street, and if there’s no one there, I’ll whisper, ‘It’s Bobby.’ ” There was no getting around the appointment for what it was: sheer, unadulterated nepotism.
“I think he hadn’t really thought about how to run the government until he got elected,” Ken O’Donnell said. “He was a very single-minded person. Politically, each battle he fought one at a time. There were very few things that were clear when he was elected.”
Kennedy’s “spokes of the wheel” approach had been championed by the presidential scholar Richard Neustadt, but such an organizational principle, in fact, followed his natural inclination. Unlike the former army officer Eisenhower, who appointed a strong chief of staff to run his agenda and team, Kennedy refused to have anyone between him and his advisors. Shrewdly, he set up two doors to the Oval Office, one manned by O’Donnell, the other by his secretary, Evelyn Lincoln. This system worked well: cabinet members had to fight their way past O’Donnell, while pals could whiz past Lincoln.
There was little camaraderie among Jack’s chosen men, and several ongoing rivalries. O’Donnell resented the partnership Sorensen assumed with Jack. Ben Bradlee, the Washington sophisticate, failed to see the appeal of Lem or Red. Bobby, meanwhile, resented how much his brother reached out to Torby. As couples, the Bradlees and the Bartletts hardly ever saw each other for the simple reason that as couple-to-couple friends to Jack and Jackie, to invite them at the same time would create a redundancy. Thus, they were asked over on different nights. Together, of course, all of them had a purpose, to keep Jack company, to ensure that he was never alone, never bored, never stuck.
Harris Wofford, Kennedy’s civil rights advisor, described insightfully how he and the others fit in. “The president-elect was a complex political leader in a complex situation. He was not anyone’s man—not Stevenson’s or Bowles’s, and not Mayor Daley’s or John Bailey’s, not the Civil Rights Section’s, and not the Southern senators’; not his father’s and not Bobby’s. He had one foot in the Cold War and one foot in a new world he saw coming; one hand in the old politics he’d begun to master, one in the new politics that his campaign had invoked.”
Kennedy picked Clark Clifford, who’d been President Truman’s counselor, to be his liaison with the outgoing Eisenhower staff. An astute observer of men and power, Clifford recognized early on John Kennedy’s ability to detach himself from himself. You’d see him sitting at meetings, Clifford once told me, and you could almost imagine JFK’s spirit assuming a form of its own and rising up, the better to look down on the group and assess its various members’ motives and agendas. It was the same uncanny detachment Chuck Spalding had seen in Jack on his wedding day.
Not all the people in the U.S. government, even at the top, owe their positions to the president. This remains one of the challenges of being chief executive in the American system. The reality of that limited control over people dawns eventually, if not right away. There’s also the need to lay down clear presidential orders.
Take the time JFK and his aides gathered around a swimming pool in Palm Beach, with dark-suited agents wearing sunglasses crouched protectively around them. JFK told O’Donnell, the White House official he’d personally posted to oversee the Secret Service, to have the agents back off. He wanted them to change to sports shirts and lose the fighting stance. “Nobody’s going to shoot me, so tell them to sit down and relax a bit.”
More than one Kennedy friend commented how happy he seemed in those days, making decisions while enjoying the Florida weather and waiting for Inauguration Day. Feeling buoyed up as he did—so thrilled and excited about his new circumstances, and proud to have pulled off what he had—he determined to stay fit as president. Said Charlie Bartlett: “I remember he told me, ‘From now on I’m really going to take care of myself.’ ” Bartlett also heard him make a different sort of commitment to the future. It had to do with his marriage. “ ‘I’m going to keep the White House white.’ He said it right out there on that terrace.”
Kennedy and Ted Sorensen had been devoting a good deal of that Palm Beach time to writing Jack’s inaugural address. Composed in the tropical air, it was delivered on January 20, 1961, when the Washington temperature hovered in the low twenties and eight inches of snow had fallen that morning.
Given the ongoing challenge of the United States–USSR relationship and its immense significance in the election, that theme would command the heart of the speech. Its focus was on strength—not as a prelude to war, but as an instrument for peace. “Man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life.”
The Churchillian notion of peace through strength had echoed throughout Jack’s adult life. “We dare not tempt them with weakness. For only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed.” America would arm not to fight, but to parlay its power into protection. “Finally, to those nations who would make themselves our adversaries, we offer not a pledge but a request: that both sides begin anew the quest for peace, before the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science engulf all humanity in planned or accidental self-destruction.”
Those decisive phrases have not lost their resonance. “Let both sides, for the first time, formulate serious and precise proposals for the inspection and control of arms—and bring the absolute power to destroy other nations under the absolute control of all nations. Let both sides seek to invoke the wonders of science instead of its terrors. Together let us explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease, tap the ocean depths, and encourage the arts and commerce.”
The one domestic policy reference would be Kennedy’s commitment to “human rights” at home as well as abroad. At the end came the words that passed into the world’s consciousness: “And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.”
To some who’d once been at Choate and paid attention in chapel to the words of Headmaster St. John, a lightbulb flickered. The irony is that Jack Kennedy, the Mucker now grown up, was appropriating the very rallying cry from which he’d felt so alienated as a rebellious student.
The act of asking, in fact, marked the passage of John Kennedy through his public life. Most politicians make promises. They tell people what they will do for them, dangling the prospect of jobs, or government spending, with elections and “pork” irrevocably intertwined. That approach was certainly politics-as-usual for Lyndon Johnson, who always sought ways to find a person’s “button”—that thing he wanted, or feared—that would put him in his power. Kennedy was never like that. From the very start, he called on people to come out, to join, to be active, to be part of something larger than themselves. At the beginning, when Jack was little known, it had been a necessity, but it evolved into a grander vision, one that changed lives exactly as George St. John once had preached.
In Moscow, the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, had been sounding a different call to arms, in his case a boastful one. The progress of the international Communist cause, he’d told his countrymen on January 6, had “greatly exceeded the boldest and most optimistic predictions and expectations.” Encouraging “wars of liberation” such as the one under way in South Vietnam, he then emphasized the crucial position of Berlin in the struggle being waged against Marxism’s enemies. “The positions of the USA, Britain, and France have proved to be especially vulnerable in West Berlin. These powers . . . cannot fail to realize that sooner or later the occupation regime in that city must be ended. It is necessary to go ahead with bringing the aggressive-minded imperialists to their sense, and compelling them to reckon with the real situation. And would they balk, then we will take resolute measures. We will sign a peace treaty with the German Democratic Republic.”
Chris Matthews Complete Library E-book Box Set: Tip and the Gipper, Jack Kennedy, Hardball, Kennedy & Nixon, Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, and American Page 70