In addition to supplying material for JFK’s speeches, journalists vied for his attention by giving him policy recommendations—Cy Sulzberger suggesting talking points for de Gaulle, Teddy White arguing for the admission of Communist China to the United Nations, CBS correspondent David Schoenbrun analyzing the situation in Morocco. Kennedy was always “playing the game of making us feel that we were big people and very helpful to him,” said Pierpoint.
Kennedy’s closest journalistic consigliere was Charley Bartlett, a columnist for the Chattanooga Times. JFK had met Bartlett late in 1945 in Palm Beach, when JFK was poised to run for Congress and Bartlett was an aspiring newspaperman. Bartlett had served with the navy in the Pacific as an intelligence officer specializing in radio eavesdropping. They were both Catholics, and they had in common Joe Kennedy’s editorial factotum Arthur Krock, who had recommended Charley to Arthur Hays Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times, for a reporter’s job on the family’s newspaper in Tennessee.
Bartlett came from what Krock called the “Chicago industrial aristocracy,” solid Republicans with conventional values and attitudes. The family had made a fortune from a headache remedy, and Charley’s father, Valentine Bartlett, was a successful stockbroker. Charley went to Yale, like five previous generations of Bartletts. His wife, Martha, was the granddaughter of a founder of U.S. Steel and had a slightly stern manner. As a couple they were “kind of classy,” observed Katie Louchheim after a dinner party, noting that they didn’t “condescend” or “snoot.”
Affable and quick-witted, Bartlett spoke in a rapid-fire mumble and laughed in a “cosy, conspicuous way.” Charley instantly fell for the Kennedy magic—what he once described as a “kind of cheerful lightning [that] touched us all.” The two men “had the same view of life and people,” said Bartlett, “warm but rather critical. We both saw the same elements of humor, and we were both deeply interested in politics. It was a very chemical relationship, for me a very easy relationship, and I think for him too.”
Like Walton, Bartlett had a separate connection to Jackie—coincidentally through Arthur Krock, who knew her through his friend Hugh Auchincloss. Bartlett, who was four years younger than JFK and eight years older than Jackie, had dated her briefly when she was a college junior—an “intellectual beau,” said Yusha Auchincloss. She had viewed Bartlett as well meaning but straitlaced, and had mildly resented his warnings not to consort with “foreigners.”
Of the three journalists in Kennedy’s inner circle—Bradlee, Alsop, and Bartlett—it was Bartlett who most overtly abandoned his journalistic principles for his friendship with Kennedy. Pierre Salinger felt that as a result, Bartlett’s writing “became so dull” during the Kennedy years. Bartlett later admitted that “nothing mattered to me more than to have Jack Kennedy succeed as president. It did compromise my role as a journalist. My respect for the reading public is great, but it didn’t match my feeling to do what I needed to have Jack succeed, not just as a friend but as a citizen. I made a cold decision on that. . . . It was not possible to be a good newspaper man and be a close friend of the President. . . . I felt I would protect anything he told me. He had reason to trust me because it didn’t blow onto him.”
For professional as well as personal reasons, Bartlett and Ben Bradlee were openly at odds. Because Bradlee often put morsels from his dinner table talks with Kennedy into the pages of Newsweek, Bartlett considered him disloyal. “Ben had a different approach,” said Bartlett. “He put Newsweek ahead of his relationship with Kennedy.” Bradlee said he used material from his friendship with Kennedy “without embarrassment,” although he never resolved the “conflicting loyalties” he felt. Bradlee believed that Bartlett “got pleasure and reward out of giving Kennedy advice. Charley was more of a sounding board. They were fellow wonks together.”
Yet Bradlee was not immune to counseling JFK either. Early in the presidential campaign he had written a long memo on LBJ’s performance and prospects. His verdict: As a campaigner Johnson “could never make it. . . . He’s somebody’s gabby Texas cousin . . . hard to take seriously.” But Bradlee had presciently warned Kennedy that LBJ was “to be feared not as a potential winner but as a game-player” who could “try to maneuver you right out of” the convention.
The real source of the rivalry between Bartlett and Bradlee, as often happened with old boarding-school boys, was St. Mark’s, where they had been classmates in the mid-thirties. Bartlett had disapproved of Bradlee’s irreverence and ambition. “I am a little stuffy,” Bartlett admitted, “Ben was always tough.” Bradlee, who had been a keen athlete before being paralyzed at age fourteen for a number of months during a polio epidemic, recalled dismissing Bartlett for his lack of athletic talent and for being “a dweeb.”
As a Washington journalist, Bartlett “cast no shadow at all,” said Bradlee. Bartlett’s reports by definition had a limited audience in Washington, although he did have the prestige of a Pulitzer Prize he won in 1956. Bartlett had written a series examining the links between Eisenhower’s secretary of the air force, Harold E. Talbott, and a Manhattan consulting firm doing business with defense contractors. Bartlett had been helped in his probe by Bobby Kennedy, whose contacts unearthed Talbott’s client list, clinching the story and prompting the secretary’s resignation. As he was writing the series, Bartlett discussed it with JFK, who told him to “make it tough.” Bartlett believed that Arthur Krock worked to secure his Pulitzer, much as he would assist Jack a year later.
Throughout his presidency, Kennedy was frequently on the phone with Bartlett, who routinely sent him memos—what JFK called “Bartlettisms”—offering ideas on policy, personnel, and even matters of health (once advising a “Spartan diet” to help JFK’s ailing back) and image (When Charley suggested JFK wear a more folksy herringbone overcoat instead of navy blue on a campaign trip to Wisconsin, JFK snapped, “Are you trying to change my personality?”). “I’d shoot things in to Jack that I thought were important to his situation,” said Bartlett. “I functioned, let’s face it, as his eyes and ears. I was very helpful to him because you see as a newsman what you don’t see in the White House.”
Jack Kennedy relied on Bartlett, ex-journalist Walton, and other key allies in a sub rosa intelligence network to serve what JFK called his “need to know something about the people I have to deal with.” “We told him everything,” said Bill Walton, who, like Bartlett, regularly reported back what he had heard at dinner parties. During one such evening at the home of Walter Lippmann, Walton paid close attention to CIA director Allen Dulles, whom he “detested.” The next morning, Walton called Kennedy at dawn to confide that Dulles “started boasting how he was still carrying out his brother Foster’s foreign policy.” Recalling his own words the night after the election, Walton said, “See what I mean? You should have fired him,” to which Kennedy replied, “God damn it, did he really say that?”
Some reporters resisted Kennedy’s allure. Stewart Alsop called himself “Mr. Facing Both Ways” to emphasize his effort to be evenhanded. Hugh Sidey kept his identity as a “guy from Iowa” and refused to get “swept into the Kennedy social circles” that made him “uncomfortable.” But the most vexing to JFK was New York Times political columnist Arthur Krock, who was seventy-four when Jack was elected and had known him since he was a little boy.
William Manchester observed that the “impeccable Arthur Krock . . . appears and reappears in the Kennedy saga, like a benign linking character in a Henry James novel.” It was Krock who had suggested Jackie for a job at the Times-Herald, as he had Kathleen Kennedy a decade earlier. Long before lobbying the Pulitzer judges for Profiles in Courage, Krock had been an early mentor of Jack; one of JFK’s Harvard roommates, James Rousmanière, called Krock “the single major influence” during the Harvard years. Krock had seen the commercial potential of Jack’s senior thesis, suggested the title Why England Slept, and helped “work over” the book for publication. Krock even “gave [JFK] my house man,” George Thomas, who would remain with Kennedy thro
ughout his presidency—the only black Kennedy knew more than casually.
A close contemporary of Joe Kennedy, Krock admired the Ambassador’s blunt, hard-charging personality, his talent as a political strategist, and his “natural conservatism.” When Joe had harbored his own presidential ambitions in the late thirties, Krock had written favorable columns speculating about his potential candidacy. Although Krock was Jewish, he remained loyal when Joe was charged with anti-Semitism following his ouster as ambassador. Krock had accepted his $5,000 retainer from Joe to ghostwrite a booklet called I’m for Roosevelt. But he had refused the Ambassador’s offer of a car one Christmas—“a kind of bribe,” Krock recalled.
Krock had long recognized JFK’s ability, but during the 1960 campaign he took strong exception to the Democratic platform as too liberal, especially on “the racial question,” which Krock feared would “exclude the rights of the majority.” Krock knew that his views mirrored those of the Ambassador, but his coverage of Jack was so disparaging that Joe Kennedy rebuked him for it. When Krock did not finally “come out for Jack,” Joe ended their friendship of more than twenty-five years. Krock reflected later, “Probably he never liked me at all, but found a use for me. . . . I happened to be in a position of value to him.”
Jack was careful to maintain cordial relations with the influential “Mr. Krock,” although he did urge Bradlee to criticize the columnist in Newsweek. “Bust it off on old Arthur,” said Kennedy. “He can’t take it, and when you go after him he folds.” In the first few months of his presidency JFK socialized with Krock a couple of times—once at the White House in the company of Arthur Schlesinger, Sam Rayburn, Alice Longworth, LBJ, and William Fulbright, where Kennedy preserved “his easy domination of the evening”—as well as at a small dinner at Krock’s Georgetown home arranged by Charley Bartlett. But Kennedy flashed his pique over brandy and cigars when he joked, “How does such a benign-looking fellow write such mean bullshit?” Krock continued to “jab” the President, and JFK kept fretting about it. “It was very very hard on Jack,” said Lem Billings. “Jack always read everything he wrote and always felt badly and just couldn’t understand why he was doing it.”
According to Sorensen, Kennedy “rarely saw” those he considered “hopelessly unfriendly” in the press, but he “kept trying with Time” because it was the most influential American publication of the day, with a circulation of nearly three million. “I read that damn magazine,” Kennedy told Hugh Sidey, “and I don’t care where I’ve been in the world, I go into the Ambassador’s office, and he says, ‘As I was reading in Time.’” Kennedy also believed that no other publication had such sway with the “swing opinion” that decided elections. In its depth of analysis, colorful texture, historical details, erudition, and overall comprehensiveness, Time far surpassed the coverage of even the best daily newspapers.
Time, like its founding editor, Henry Robinson Luce, was Republican in its outlook, but Jack Kennedy had strong connections to Luce, sixty-two, and his beautiful fifty-seven-year-old wife, Clare. Harry Luce had been a classmate of Hugh Auchincloss at Yale, and a friend of Joe Kennedy for several decades. Clare Luce, a mesmerizing journalist, playwright, diplomat, and congresswoman, had an even closer relationship with Joe. Writing in her diary, Clare once hinted that she and Joe had been lovers (“JPK in bedroom all morning”), but Tish Baldrige, who worked for Clare for four years, insisted that it was a “political power relationship,” defined by spirited talk on issues and personalities. “Give me a half an hour’s conversation,” Joe once wrote to Clare, “I will know more than I will reading twenty magazines.” Rose also appreciated Clare’s sophisticated intelligence, particularly her talent for the “devastating remark which is both comic and still pregnant with meaning.”
At Joe Kennedy’s request, Harry Luce wrote a glowing foreword to Why England Slept, which gave the book an important boost. When Jack made his vice presidential run in 1956, the Luces were houseguests of the Kennedys on the Riviera, and Harry cabled his editors to expand Time’s coverage of Jack as a “considerable national figure.” Both Time and Life gave the Kennedys extensive play in their pages, and in 1960 Luce told Joe his publications would look favorably on Jack as long as he held a tough line on communism. Life gave Nixon a tepid endorsement, and Luce welcomed Kennedy’s victory. Putting his Republican principles aside, Luce knew a Kennedy presidency would be a dynamic story for his publications. He also knew that Kennedy as chief executive would be more cautious than his rhetoric.
“He seduces me,” Luce said, when asked to explain his attraction to Jack Kennedy. JFK was equally fascinated by Luce—“like a cricket, always chirping away”—as an individualistic self-made man who reminded him of his father. Clare admitted to falling for young Jack’s charms—“no doubt my feminine weakness,” she told Baldrige—and gave him a “sacred medal” for good luck in the navy. As time went on, JFK and Clare became scratchy. “They liked each other in the way that two tigers like each other,” said Sorensen. When Kennedy was president, Clare didn’t hesitate to write what Lem Billings called “mean and bitter” articles in various magazines and newspapers (not Time or Life) expressing her disappointment.
The Kennedys excluded the Luces from their inner circle (contributing at least in part to Clare’s venom), yet JFK remained obsessed with Time. He and his top aides, especially Bobby, gave continuous access to Sidey, at age thirty-three one of the younger journalists covering the White House. Each Sunday night JFK received the latest issue of Time by special messenger directly from the printer. Most weeks Kennedy would call Sidey at home to complain “in cheerfully profane style.” With his folksy midwestern personality, Sidey was difficult to dislike, so Kennedy railed that the editors “who lived in Greenwich and ate at ‘21’” twisted the Washington reporting. (Kennedy once told Bradlee that Time’s reporters “file the Bible . . . and the magazine prints the Koran.”) Sorensen was even more outspoken, decrying Time as “slanted, unfair . . . inaccurate.”
Although Time was more consistently critical than Newsweek, it did not lose to its smaller rival on important stories. Despite Bradlee’s social access, Time editors “never worried about Newsweek,” said managing editor Otto Fuerbringer. A dozen times during his presidency, Kennedy summoned Luce to the White House to needle him about Time’s coverage. Luce would hold his ground while attempting to keep the peace, but would not direct Fuerbringer to change his approach.
“We were never anti-Kennedy by any means,” said Fuerbringer. “We were critical when there was something to be critical about, or if he did something for political reasons.” Kennedy “took all praise as his due and reacted with anger to any criticism.” (When Time made JFK “Man of the Year” at the end of 1961, the Kennedys asked Sidey, “Has anybody been Man of the Year eight times in a row?”) Still, after Dwight Eisenhower, who didn’t read Time, Luce and company were pleased to have a president who “paid attention to everything, knew about everything, and cared about everything going on, policy and serious matters and also gossip,” said Fuerbringer. “It was one of the liveliest presidencies to cover. It was more fun, more interesting than any other.”
The fact was, Kennedy’s admirers and critics alike enjoyed playing the game with him. Visiting the Oval Office a couple of months after Kennedy took office, Teddy White was tickled by the President’s appealing informality. Kennedy stood in his underwear as they spoke while his tailors fitted him for a suit. Yet White also saw that beneath the bravado, the new president “was groping . . . strangely uncertain”—until Kennedy shifted gears and began spouting foreign policy ideas, showing his “sense of the reporter’s craft,” even asking White if he should write a letter to Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai about problems in Southeast Asia. White couldn’t help feeling pleased, knowing that Kennedy was “saying what he felt I needed for a toga clad portrait.”
TWELVE
Early one evening after the Kennedys had been in the White House for a few months, the phone rang at the home of Franklin
D. Roosevelt Jr. in Washington’s Spring Valley neighborhood. The Kennedys felt like chatting. “Here they were in that house that wasn’t their home, and they had the evening off, so they were calling their friends, just to talk on the phone,” recalled Suzanne Roosevelt. “That really got to me because of the circumstances. They were in the White House.”
Jack and Jackie never lost their eagerness to stay connected to people and events beyond what Harry Truman called the “Big White Prison.” “Jack missed things,” said longtime friend Vivian Crespi. “He was always saying, ‘What’s going on out there?’” In part, he wished to be diverted, but Kennedy knew, as Marian Schlesinger observed, that “historians are great gossips at a high level.” He used information about personalities to take the measure of both enemies and friends, and to understand the ebb and flow of human relations, all with a slightly sardonic eye.
JFK “took the opinion of everyone within range,” said Joe Alsop—from Pat Hass, the mother of one of Caroline’s friends, whom Kennedy quizzed about “what people were thinking at the Safeway,” to Jackie’s New York hairdresser Kenneth Battelle, who could report on the chitchat among ladies under the hair dryers. “It was light, but not idle,” recalled Kenneth. “He was interested, he wanted answers.” Kennedy even “liked to meet friends of his friends,” Bradlee recalled, “provided they were involved in vital fields—‘out there on the cutting edge,’ he once called it.”
Kennedy tapped certain friends for Manhattan gossip, and others for the latest Hollywood news or Palm Beach tittle-tattle. When Solange Herter reported that “Liz Taylor would scream four-letter words out the chalet window” in Gstaad, “Jack loved that,” Herter recalled. He dutifully inquired about the business world where he had few contacts and about which he knew precious little. But discussing journalists was another matter. It was one of Kennedy’s “all-time favorite subjects,” said Ben Bradlee. “It is unbelievable . . . how . . . clued in he was to their characters, their office politics, their petty rivalries.” Kennedy’s interest in foreign leaders was similarly voracious—from policy to peccadilloes. “Who does Castro sleep with?” Kennedy asked a disconcerted Laura Bergquist of Look. “I hear he doesn’t even take his boots off.”
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