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

by Matthews, Chris

  Meeting with the leaders after the speech, Kennedy immediately quoted the most memorable line to show his admiration: “I have a dream,” he repeated.

  Ben Bradlee accompanied Kennedy when he went the following month to visit Jackie at her mother’s house in Newport, where she’d been staying since the loss of their infant boy. It was the Kennedys’ tenth wedding anniversary. “This was the first time we’d seen Jackie since the death of little Patrick, and she greeted JFK with by far the most affectionate embrace we had ever seen them give each other. They were not normally demonstrative people, period.”

  Also in September, Jack attended the Harvard-Columbia football game. He left at halftime to head off for a secret visit to the grave of his lost son, Patrick. He told Ken O’Donnell to make sure no press people were around. When he got to the grave in Brookline, he knelt down and prayed.

  It’s always difficult to penetrate another person’s religious beliefs. This would be especially the case with someone as complex as Jack Kennedy.

  Back in his younger years Jack would stay in his pew during Communion because he wasn’t in a state of grace. Now, as president, he’d go to mass weekly, but also to confession. When a priest once signaled he’d recognized his distinctive accent, he had a way to evade detection. In future visits to the confession booth, he took a place in line among the Secret Service agents, assuming the confessor would not be quite sure who was telling him what.

  When it came to family and loss, his faith regularly showed itself. Mark Dalton was always touched, he said, when Jack stopped by a church to light a candle for Joe Jr. There were often times when friends would catch him losing himself briefly in reveries about the older brother who’d so much paved the way for him. Dave Powers, who saw Jack off to bed so many nights, said that the president would kneel and pray before retiring. One wonders whether he ever echoed St. Augustine’s famous prayer: “Give me chastity and continence, but not just now.”

  Ted Sorensen offered this moral verdict on Jack. “An American President, commander in chief of the world’s greatest military power, who during his presidency did not send one combat troop division abroad or drop one bomb, who used his presidency to break down the barriers of religious and racial equality and harmony in this country and to reach out to the victims of poverty and repression, who encouraged Americans to serve their communities and to love their neighbors regardless of the color of their skin, who waged war not on smaller nations but on poverty and illiteracy and mental illness in his own country, and who restored the appeal of politics for the young and sent Peace Corps volunteers overseas to work with the poor and untrained in other countries—was in my book a moral president, regardless of his personal misconduct.”

  On October 4, Jackie left on a Caribbean cruise aboard Aristotle Onassis’s yacht, the Christina. The trip offered her a chance to regain her spirits. Jack took her absence as a chance to get to know his children better, and put in time as their babysitter. Pictures taken in the Oval Office show John Jr. peeking out from under the front of his father’s desk.

  In late October, Kennedy was pounding away for passage of the civil rights bill. At one point, he called Mayor Richard Daley to put pressure on a Chicago congressman who was holding up the measure. Their conversation, packed with old-school politics, was picked up on the White House taping system:

  Kennedy:

  Roland Libonati is sticking it right up us.

  Daley:

  He is?

  Kennedy:

  Yeah, because he’s standing with the extreme liberals who are gonna end up with no bill at all. I asked him, “If you’ll vote for this package which we got together with the Republicans, [it] gives us about everything we wanted,” and he says, “No.”

  Daley:

  He’ll vote for it. He’ll vote for any goddamned thing you want.

  Kennedy:

  (laughs) Well, can you get him?

  Daley:

  I surely can. Where is he? Is he there?

  Kennedy:

  He’s in the other room.

  Daley:

  Well, you have Kenny. Tell Kenny to put him on the wire here.

  Kennedy:

  Or would you rather get him when he gets back to his office? That’s better. Otherwise, he might think . . .

  Daley:

  That’s better. But he’ll do it. The last time I told him, “Now look it. I don’t give a goddamned what it is. You vote for it, for anything the president wants and this is the way it will be and this the way it’s gonna be.”

  Kennedy:

  We have a chance to pull this out. Billy [Green] in Philadelphia got Toll. If you can get Libonati.

  Using the muscle of his political pals, the same bosses who helped get him to the White House, Kennedy nailed down Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee. By November, he had gotten it out of the committee, though stymied by the segregationist chairman of the Rules Committee, who refused to bring it to the House floor.

  On November 2, Ngo Dinh Diem was killed in the military coup that the United States had signed off on in August. When he learned of the death, and the brutal manner of it, Kennedy bolted from the room in horror. Hearing the coup leader’s claim that Diem had taken his own life, Kennedy rejected it outright. He never believed that a fellow Roman Catholic would commit suicide. Ted Sorensen would later say: “Perhaps he should have guessed that, in that part of the world, the overthrow of Diem by the South Vietnamese army could well lead to Diem’s death. But I could see from the look of shock and dismay on JFK’s face when he heard the news of Diem’s assassination that he had no indication or even hint that anything more than Diem’s exile was contemplated.”

  After retreating from the cabinet room, Jack called up Mary Meyer, his sometime mistress and friend. Not wanting to be alone, he spent the rest of the day with her.

  Back at his desk after the weekend, he dictated a memorandum of what had happened.

  “Monday, November 4, 1963. Over the weekend the coup in Saigon took place. It culminated three months of conversation about a coup, conversation which divided the government here and in Saigon.

  “Opposed to the coup was General Taylor, the attorney general, Secretary McNamara to a somewhat lesser degree, John McCone, partly because of an old hostility to Lodge, which causes him to lack confidence in Lodge’s judgment, partly as a result of a new hostility because Lodge shifted his station chief. In favor of the coup was State, led by Averell Harriman, George Ball, Roger Hilsman, supported by Michael Forrestal at the White House.

  “I feel I must bear a good deal of responsibility for it, beginning with our cables of early August in which we suggested the coup. In my judgment that wire was badly drafted; it should not have been sent on a Saturday. I should not have given my consent to it without a roundtable conference at which McNamara and Taylor could have presented their views. While we did redress that balance in later wires, that first wire encouraged Lodge along a course to which he was in any case inclined.”

  On the tape, the listener can hear the voices of John Jr., who was almost three, talking with his father. Caroline, six, joins in at the very end:

  Kennedy:

  You want something? Say something. Hello.

  John:

  Hello.

  Kennedy:

  Why do leaves fall?

  John:

  Because it’s winter.

  Kennedy:

  No, autumn.

  John:

  Autumn.

  Kennedy:

  And why does the snow come on the ground?

  John:

  Because it’s winter.

  Kennedy:

  Why do the leaves turn green?

  John:

  Because it’s winter.

  Kennedy:

  Spring. Spring.

  John:

  Spring.

  Kennedy:

  And why do we go to the Cape? Hyannis Port?

  John:

  Because it’s wint
er.

  Kennedy:

  It’s summer!

  John:

  It’s summer.

  Kennedy:

  Say your horses . . .

  Caroline:

  Your horses.

  “I was shocked by the death of Diem and Nhu,” Kennedy continued his dictation.

  “I’d met Diem with Justice Douglas many years ago. He was an extraordinary character. While he became increasingly difficult in the last months, nevertheless over a ten-year period he’d held his country together, maintained its independence under very adverse conditions. The way he was killed makes it particularly abhorrent. The question now is whether the generals can stay together and build a stable government, or whether . . . the intellectuals, students, et cetera, will turn on the government as repressive and undemocratic in the not too distant future.”

  The following day he gave Maxwell Taylor, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, a clear signal of his intentions in Vietnam, offering what he viewed as the limits of American commitment in-country. “He is instinctively against introduction of U.S. forces,” Taylor would report. Jack made a similar comment to Arthur Schlesinger. “They want a force of American troops. They say it’s necessary in order to restore confidence and maintain morale. But it will be just like Berlin. The troops will march in, the bands will play, the crowds will cheer, and in four days everyone will have forgotten. Then we will be told we have to send in more troops. It’s like taking a drink. The effect wears off, and you have to take another.”

  Yet his exact thoughts about Vietnam remain a mystery. What we do know is his early understanding of the fighting. Motivated by nationalism, the Viet Minh had fought the French, and he’d grasped what was at stake. Why would he make a different assessment of the Viet Cong war against the pro-American Diem? Ken O’Donnell said Kennedy told him he was determined to get out once the election-year politics were behind him. But it’s not that simple. Ted Sorensen believed his boss could never have the cynicism about war and human lives that the conflict in Vietnam would turn out to mandate. “I do not believe he knew in his last weeks what he was going to do.”

  At about this same time, Kennedy called members of the House Rules Committee to the White House. He was interested in getting their insider knowledge about why his legislation, which included the Civil Rights bill, was stalled. Tip O’Neill remembered being asked to come for a drink afterward when Jack spotted him stranded without a ride. The two of them chatted about the old days. Jack was curious about how some of his old boys were doing, the ones who’d been with him in the beginning. He asked about Billy Sutton, Mark Dalton, Joe Healey, John Galvin, and the others. He asked Tip to make sure Billy had a job up in Massachusetts.

  The Kennedys spent the Veterans Day weekend with the Bradlees down at their friends’ new getaway in Virginia. Jack told Ben he didn’t like what he’d heard about Dallas, where he was soon headed, about the way Adlai Stevenson had been spat on, heckled, and jeered when giving a United Nations Day speech there. He felt, he told his friend, that the “mood of the city was ugly.” In a front-page editorial, the Dallas Times Herald had pronounced the city “disgraced. There is no other way to view the storm-trooper actions of last night’s frightening attack on Adlai Stevenson.” Governor John Connally called the affair “an affront to common courtesy and decency.” And Mayor Earle Cabell pointed out that the demonstrators were “not our kind of folks.” Jack allowed White House photographers to take pictures of the family that weekend. One film shows Jackie rehearsing with John Jr. a salute he was practicing, perhaps for when he joined his father that Monday at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

  The following Thursday, Jack had invited the film legend Greta Garbo to the White House. Lem Billings had met her on a recent European trip and was thrilled at the prospect of introducing her to his pal. Jack, meanwhile, ever the practical joker, had hatched a plan. The evening was arranged so that Garbo would arrive before Lem, giving Jack a chance to chat with her and lay the groundwork for his scheme.

  Kennedy’s idea was to convince her to act as if she’d never before set eyes on Billings. The pair of them carried it off for a quite some time before finally taking Lem out of his misery. It is a perfect example of Jack’s taking the time, as he often did with his closest friends, to give them a little trouble. Though mildly sadistic—Lem devoted himself to trying to get Garbo to remember the various outings they’d had together, only to have her stare at him blankly—the prank also showed, in an odd way, that Jack cared. And cared enough—he, a president of the United States—to concoct a scheme that was at once so silly and yet so intimate. He’d done such things all his life.

  It was a dinner to remember: Jackie, Jack, and Lem—and Garbo. But it would always be a sad memory for Lem. It had taken place on November 13, 1963.

  That month, Kennedy hosted his first major campaign meeting for 1964. Included were Bobby, Ted Sorensen, Ken O’Donnell, and Larry O’Brien. It was the same team that had met in Palm Beach and later in Hyannis Port in 1959. Once again, his brother-in-law Steve Smith was to take charge, overall. The effort would be run from the White House, and the theme would be “peace and prosperity.”

  Kennedy looked forward to running against Senator Barry Goldwater. He was convinced that the conservative Arizonan was just too candid for a presidential candidate and would quickly self-destruct. His bigger worry was Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York. Told that “Rocky” liked him, Kennedy said it didn’t matter. Politics would change that. “He’ll end up hating me. That’s natural,” he said, remembering, perhaps, his own change of heart over Nixon.

  President Kennedy was confident. But he also knew that he needed Texas and, perhaps, Georgia—not easy states to get in his corner, given the growing rage of white Southerners against him for his strong stand on civil rights. The polling showed that two thirds of them were deeply hostile, not an easy situation for a man looking to nail down Southern support. It was going to be a tough election. He needed to begin raising money and rousing those yellow-dog Democrats who’d been raised with the party and might still be won over.

  Jack spent the next weekend in Palm Beach with Torby Macdonald, now in his fifth term as a Massachusetts congressman. It was a bachelor party fueled by enough bonhomie to induce JFK to croon “The September Song” with extra feeling. That Monday, November 18, he traveled with George Smathers to Miami and Tampa to deliver speeches denouncing Castro and his regime.

  “A small band of conspirators has stripped the Cuban people of their freedom and handed over the independence and sovereignty of the Cuban nation to forces beyond the hemisphere. This, and this alone, divides us. As long as it is true, nothing is possible. Once this barrier is removed, everything is possible.”

  With the trip to Texas ahead of him, Kennedy worried about the South. “I wish I had this fucking thing over with,” he complained to Smathers. He also told him, “You’ve got to live each day like it’s your last day on earth.”

  On November 22, having spent the night in Fort Worth, he agreed to meet outside, before breakfast, with a good crowd of union people. Despite the early morning drizzle, the crowd was warm and enthusiastic. Inside, as the business leaders sipped their coffee, he gave a tough speech on Vietnam. “Without the United States, South Vietnam would collapse overnight.”

  Whatever concerns he had in the long run, whatever hesitation kept him from committing combat troops, he had those eighteen thousand “advisors” there on the ground. He was also thinking about an exit strategy. The day before, he’d asked his national security aide Michael Forrestal to “organize an in-depth study of every possible option we’ve got in Vietnam, including how to get out of there.”

  On the way from Fort Worth to the airport later that morning, Jack grilled Congressman Jim Wright and Governor John Connally about the strange difference in politics between the city he’d just left and the one he was about to enter. Why is Fort Worth so Democratic and Dallas so angrily right-wing? It was his usual curiosity abe
tted here by fresh reason to wonder. After all, he’d just been given a hero’s welcome by the people of one city but remembered only too well Richard Nixon carrying Dallas with 65 percent in 1960. Now, there was the pall cast by the recent ugly treatment of Adlai Stevenson.

  While Wright laid some of the blame on the conservative press, especially the Dallas Morning News, Connally offered a more sophisticated assessment of the difference between the two Texas cities. He said it could be traced to their different economies. Fort Worth was still a cowboy town. Dallas, on the other hand, was a white-collar town where people worked in high-rise office buildings. They identified with the folks on the floor above them, not the guy or woman working next to them in the stockyard or factory. They voted like their managers because they wanted to join them. This explained the shift of the city to the Republicans, a change that Connally understood and that was a precursor of his own ambitions.

  • • •

  Jack was just trying to figure it all out. He was out there in the American landscape, doing what he’d come very much to love, perhaps even more than the public service it allowed. He was on the road, doing the work of an American politician. He had goals, and he needed to be president to reach them.

  39. Bobby, Jack, Joe Sr., Teddy, and Joe Jr.

  40

  41. At the London embassy

  42

  43.