Jack Kennedy

by Chris Matthews

  Twenty-two months earlier, the East Germans had stepped back from the edge of conflict and constructed the Berlin Wall, taking the city—and the watching world—by surprise. Overnight, the twelve-foot concrete-and-barbed-wire symbol of totalitarianism had taken shape as a scar on the landscape of European history. More than a hundred miles long, one section of the Wall divided East and West Berlin, while a much larger one encircled the American, British, and French sectors, cutting them off from the rest of East Germany. Where once there had been reasonably free passage between the halves of the politically bifurcated city, now there were checkpoints and guards with guns.

  Kennedy tackled the problem of addressing the beleaguered West Berliners straightforwardly. He and his country stood for democracy, and everything else derived from that simple reality. “There are many people in the world who really don’t understand, or say they don’t, what is the great issue between the Free World and the Communist world. Let them come to Berlin. There are some who say that Communism is the wave of the future. Let them come to Berlin. And there are even a few who say that it is true that Communism is an evil system, but it permits us to make economic progress. Lass’ sie nach Berlin kommen! Let them come to Berlin. Freedom has many difficulties, and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in to prevent them from leaving us. All free men, wherever they may live are citizens of Berlin, and, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’ “

  A million Germans lined the parade route, with 300,000 jamming into the square fronting West Berlin. Two thirds of the population had come out to greet JFK. His speech that day was—for both his listeners and for all those who lived in that time—the greatest of the Cold War. Seeing the Wall itself affected the president physically, shocking him probably even more than he’d expected. He looked “like a man who has just glimpsed Hell,” Hugh Sidey observed.

  Jack called the time he spent in Berlin and then in Ireland, where he flew next, the happiest days of his life. There, in the country of his ancestors, the first Irish-Catholic American president was welcomed with near ecstatic enthusiasm. Accompanied by his sisters Eunice Shriver and Jean Smith, he made a stop in Dunganstown in County Wexford, site of his Kennedy roots, and then, in Galway, was honored with the Freedom of the City. At the port town of New Ross, he told the crowd gathered to hear him, “When my great-grandfather left here to become a cooper in East Boston, he carried nothing with him except two things—a strong religious faith and a strong desire for liberty. I am glad to say that all of his grandchildren have valued that inheritance.”

  In England, before going to Birch Grove, Harold Macmillan’s residence, to meet with the prime minister, he traveled to Derbyshire to visit the grave of his sister Kathleen. The current Duchess of Devonshire remembers how the presidential helicopter affected one resident of the small rural village: “The wind from that machine blew my chickens away, and I haven’t seen them since,” the woman complained. At St. Peter’s Church there, Jack went to the gravesite and, carrying some flowers for his sister, carefully and painfully went down on his knees to pray.

  The fact that Jack Kennedy achieved this historic hat trick—the “peace speech” on nuclear arms, the epic address on civil rights, and the “Ich bin ein Berliner” moment—while enduring chronic back pain enhances the nobility of it all. You can see in the documentary footage of the Oval Office scene during the Birmingham crisis a tinge of the torture in the careful way Kennedy carries himself, the deliberate way he rocks his chair. There’s nothing easy in his manner.

  For ten days in July, Averell Harriman, who’d been the U.S. ambassador in Moscow in the 1940s, negotiated with Nikita Khrushchev a treaty to ban the testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere. During those negotiations, recalled Ted Sorensen, “Khrushchev told Harriman that more than anything else, Kennedy’s ‘Peace Speech’—which the chairman allowed to be rebroadcast throughout Russia and to be published in full in the Moscow press—had paved the way for the treaty.”

  The treaty outlawed nuclear testing by the USA, USSR, and Great Britain in the atmosphere, outer space, and underwater. On July 25, 1963, envoys from the three powers signed the document, making it official. John Kennedy considered this his greatest achievement.

  David Ormsby-Gore, the British ambassador in Washington, traced Kennedy’s determination to secure the treaty and his courage in pursuing it to his good friend’s own biography. “With all human beings, one of the things that gives confidence is to have been in extreme peril and come well out of it, perhaps on some occasions to have been near death and come back from the brink. I have always noticed that people who have had that kind of experience have a sort of calm; not quite a detachment from life, but a calm attitude to anything that life can throw at them, which is rather significant. Of course, he had had the experience on more than one occasion of being faced by death.”

  During that summer, as Jack had been traveling, Jackie Kennedy had remained at home pregnant, expecting to deliver her third child in September. Their second, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Jr., born right after the 1960 election, was now twenty months old. Caroline was almost six. On August 7, Jackie gave birth, five weeks early, to a boy whom they named Patrick. Never strong to begin with, two days later he began to fail. The father held his tiny fingers for two hours as the infant tried to breathe. He was holding them when Patrick died. “He put up quite a fight.” Then, “He was a beautiful baby.”

  Afterward, the president went to his room, having asked to be given time alone. Through the door, Dave Powers could hear him sobbing. Later he would kneel beside Jackie’s bed and tell her about the son he’d loved that they now, together, had lost.

  There was never a good time to try to come to grips with the situation in Vietnam, and Kennedy had been delaying it. Within days of taking office, he’d signed a national security directive stating that it was our country’s policy to “defeat Communist insurgency” in South Vietnam. By 1963 there were twelve thousand U.S. “military advisors” there. However, JFK had resisted calls from South Vietnam’s president, Ngo Dinh Diem, to send in combat troops, seeing no merit to that idea. Fully aware that there were gung ho American officers hoping he’d upgrade our status there from “advising” to actually fighting, he had no intention of letting that happen.

  “I can remember one particular case,” Red Fay recalled. “We were out, I believe it was off of Newport. I think the Blue Angels had just flown over. The president was sitting in his swivel chair in the back of the Honey Fitz, and the phone rang next to him. There were some marines that wanted to lead their unit into combat. The situation, they thought, was ideal for an attack, and so, therefore, they wanted to lead it. And, evidently, the standing orders of the president at that time were that our advisors over there were not there to lead Vietnam troops into battle. Fay heard his old navy buddy make it crystal clear that he wanted that order enforced to the letter.

  But he couldn’t abandon Saigon to the Communists and expect to win a second term. He couldn’t afford to be the president who “lost” South Vietnam, just as he’d accused Harry Truman of doing with China. The problem was President Diem. A Roman Catholic, Diem had enjoyed strong support from American Catholics, including Kennedy, since taking command when Vietnam was divided at the Geneva Convention in 1954. Diem was now conducting a campaign of repression against the country’s Buddhist majority. In June a seventy-three-year-old Buddhist monk had lit himself on fire in a main Saigon thoroughfare, having moments earlier handed a statement to reporters. “Before closing my eyes to Buddha, I have the honor of presenting my word to President Diem, asking him to be kind and tolerant toward his people and to enforce a policy of religious equality.”

  President Kennedy realized he could no longer support a regime that was fighting the Communist guerrillas and Buddhist monks. Besides this, the Diem government was viewed as hopelessly corrupt, totally under the control of Diem’s brother and sister-in-law, the notor
ious “Dragon Lady,” Madame Nhu. Feeling stymied, he had the idea to name his onetime political rival Henry Cabot Lodge as U.S. ambassador. There were clear advantages to this. Lodge lacked any sentimental feelings toward Diem. He was arrogant enough to act decisively. Most important, he wanted a victory, personally as well as nationally. He had the added advantage, for Kennedy, of making the hellish situation in South Vietnam bipartisan.

  Something had to be done. Diem and his brother Nhu were leading the country’s special forces in raids on Buddhist pagodas in Saigon and other cities, arresting monks and nuns alike. Lodge now represented a group within the Kennedy administration who wanted to back a military coup to topple Diem. The leader of that faction was Averell Harriman, who’d proven himself to Kennedy by winning Khrushchev’s agreement in July to the limited nuclear testing ban.

  On August 24, Kennedy approved a cable to Saigon authorizing American support for a military coup against President Diem. It was a cold decision, certainly a stark shift in loyalty. Kennedy had been a backer of Diem from the earliest days of the country’s division, and had been a supporter of the American Friends of Vietnam, a lobbying group. Now he was approving his former ally’s overthrow. Inside his administration, his decision was never truly cleared by either McNamara or Rusk, and it met with disfavor from Lyndon Johnson.

  The cable said: “U.S. Government cannot tolerate situation in which power lies in Nhu’s hands. Diem must be given chance to rid himself of Nhu and his coterie and replace them with the best military and political personalities available. If, in spite of your efforts, Diem remains obdurate and refuses, then we must face the possibility that Diem himself cannot be preserved. You will understand that we cannot from Washington give you detailed instructions as to how this operation should proceed, but you will also know we will back you to the hilt on action to achieve our objectives.” It was precisely what Lodge wanted: a death warrant.

  August was also the month of the extraordinary, epoch-making March on Washington, with its unforgettable “I have a dream” speech delivered with Moses-like fervor by Martin Luther King, Jr., to the crowd of 250,000. The president had done what he could to stave off the possibility of conflict at the event. His efforts had helped swell the numbers of marchers, especially whites, because he’d encouraged Walter Reuther to bring his UAW members. He’d taken steps to accommodate the crowd, reducing the chances of discord by making sure there was both food and bathroom access. And, sensibly, he drew the route from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial—not to the gates of the White House.

  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.