Grace and Power

by Sally Bedell Smith

  Despite their support for the invasion, neither Bundy nor McNamara suffered any damage. McNamara emphatically concurred with Kennedy’s view of the principal lesson to be learned: don’t take the advice of the experts at face value and “do your intellectual homework.” According to Ros Gilpatric, McNamara “became so disenchanted with the military advice, he insisted on examining basic data himself.” Stricken with guilt, Bundy tendered a resignation letter that Kennedy rejected. If anything, Kennedy pulled Bundy even closer, moving his office from the Executive Office Building to a hideaway in the West Wing basement, where Bundy also established a “Situation Room” that would combine messages from military, diplomatic, and intelligence sources. Kennedy also reconstituted some of the National Security Council oversight and analysis groups he had scuttled, and he revived NSC meetings.

  Even more consequential was Kennedy’s immediate expansion of the duties of Ted Sorensen and Bobby Kennedy, placing them at his side for all further foreign policy deliberations. Bobby had appeared at an early briefing on the Cuba plan two days after the inauguration and again five days before the scheduled landing, but otherwise he had been out of the loop. “I need someone who knows me and my thinking and can ask me the tough questions,” Kennedy told Sorensen, who recognized that Bobby would be the President’s equal and Ted the subordinate. According to Lem Billings, JFK knew that “Bobby was the only person he could rely on to be absolutely dedicated. . . . From that moment on, the Kennedy presidency became a sort of collaboration between them.”

  Bobby’s entry into foreign policy had a disturbing downside, however. Beneath the radar, the United States had been engaged in murkier schemes against Cuba since August 1960, when Richard Bissell had hired Mafia operatives to assassinate Fidel Castro. Before Batista was overthrown, American organized crime had run extensive gambling interests in Havana, so the Mafia operatives had useful connections on the island. Among the men recruited for the job was Sam Giancana, the Chicago mob boss who was also having an affair with Judith Campbell, JFK’s occasional mistress.

  According to Richard Bissell, the Kennedy administration planned an assassination attempt to coincide with the Bay of Pigs operation. As Smathers said in an oral history in 1964, Kennedy had asked him a month before the invasion whether “people would be gratified” if Castro were eliminated. Talking to historian Michael Beschloss nearly a quarter century later, Smathers asserted that JFK had been “given to believe” by the CIA that “someone was supposed to have knocked [Castro] off and there was supposed to be absolute pandemonium” as the exiles landed.

  Instead of shutting them down, JFK put his brother in charge of these “black” operations, which took on a life of their own as Operation Mongoose, a series of subversive plots to unseat Castro. Before the Bay of Pigs, JFK had both mistrusted and underrated Castro. In a pre-inaugural interview with Look’s Laura Bergquist, a veteran reporter on Cuba, he had asked “some very naÏve questions,” she recalled. “He seemed baffled about Castro’s appeal. . . . I think he was cocky about him, didn’t take him seriously.” For all the sober lessons of the Bay of Pigs, the Kennedy brothers, and Bobby in particular, came away with a deep grievance against the Cuban leader. “Bobby became very anti-Castro,” said Richard Davies. “He was determined to get after this villain who had damaged his brother’s start as president. . . . Bobby was extremely protective and resentful.”

  There was no denying that Castro was a repressive dictator with designs on other Latin American countries, but the architect of the botched plot had been the U.S. government. Castro had won an easy victory against a superpower, which emboldened him as well as his patron, the Soviet Union. In a prescient memo to JFK on April 19, Bobby stated a legitimate concern: “If we don’t want Russia to set up missile bases in Cuba, we had better decide now what we are willing to do to stop it.” The trouble was, Bobby’s clandestine schemes for a “showdown” ran risks equal to or greater than the Bay of Pigs. Besides assassination attempts, Operation Mongoose envisioned what Bobby described as “espionage, sabotage, general disorder,” even creating an incident such as a bogus air attack on the U.S. military base at Cuba’s Guantánamo Bay and claiming Cuban responsibility to justify American armed intervention.

  The first major reverberation from the Bay of Pigs was in Southeast Asia. Macmillan worried that “the failure of the covert action in Cuba might lead to the Americans insisting upon overt action in Laos.” In fact, the opposite reaction occurred. “I was ready to go into Laos,” Kennedy told Hugh Sidey. “Yes, we were going to do it. Then because of Cuba I thought we’d better take another look at the military planning for Laos.” Kennedy still believed, as he told Lem Billings, that if the communists prevailed in Laos, “Vietnam would be next. Then Thailand, et cetera.” Yet when “we began to talk about maybe going into Laos,” Kennedy recalled, “all the generals and other people disagreed about this, and you don’t know whom to believe and whom to disbelieve.”

  Kennedy was asking those generals tougher questions than he had before Cuba, and the unsatisfactory answers steered him away from intervention—mainly because he realized the United States lacked enough conventional troops to win. “I just don’t think we ought to get involved in Laos,” Kennedy told Richard Nixon, citing the possibility of fighting “millions” of troops “in the jungles.” Moreover, said Kennedy, “I don’t see how we can make any move in Laos, which is 5000 miles away, if we don’t make a move in Cuba, which is only 90 miles away.”

  JFK’s skepticism was reinforced by Bobby, as well as Sorensen, who favored a peaceful resolution. For public consumption, Kennedy continued to make warlike noises, keeping 10,000 marines in readiness on Okinawa. But he also pushed a face-saving political alternative—a cease-fire followed by the creation of a coalition government including the Pathet Lao, with the country’s neutrality guaranteed by an international conference.

  By early May the Pathet Lao comfortably controlled half of Laos. The Soviets helped organize a cease-fire, and a conference convened in Geneva to work out the terms of a newly configured neutralist Laos. The solution was expedient and flawed, placing communists in numerous government positions and failing to prevent the Pathet Lao from continuing to quietly secure more territory. It seemed unlikely that Laos would achieve independence, but at least the United States couldn’t be accused of abandoning the country to outright communist rule.

  Legendary Parisian interior designer Stéphane Boudin was Jackie’s “primary visionary,” although she kept his involvement in the White House restoration a secret.

  “In France, you are trained as an interior architect, really. Boudin’s eye for placement and proportion was absolutely right.”

  Jackie chats with Henry F. du Pont (standing, behind the settee), her official adviser on the White House restoration, during the first meeting of the newly formed Special Committee for White House Paintings, whose chairman, James Fosburgh, sits beside her. Other notables on the paintings committee include Susan Mary Alsop (seated next to Fosburgh) and Babe Paley (standing behind Alsop).

  “Mr. du Pont was rigid, but Jackie’s charm made everything work.”

  Jackie with Caroline Kennedy in the third-floor classroom of the White House school organized by the First Lady and a group of mothers from her Georgetown playgroup.

  “Jackie thought it would be more natural for Caroline to demystify the place, to make it less cold and formidable, to have kids scampering in the long hallways.”

  Jackie leads Caroline on Macaroni at the Apple Barrel Pony Show in Middleburg, Virginia, where the Kennedys rented Glen Ora, a four-hundred-acre estate, for weekend escapes.

  “I go to Glen Ora to be alone with my husband and children . . . giving them baths & putting them to bed reading the things I have no chance to do in the W. House.”

  Stas and Lee Radziwill at the Half Moon Hotel in Jamaica, shortly before their first visit to the White House in March 1961.

  “Lee wanted to be at the White House all the time. Jackie was ki
nd and good to her, making time for Lee to get her into the loop, but Lee also meant escape for Jackie from her official life.”

  Jackie (far right) riding with the Piedmont Hunt in Virginia in November 1961, with (from left) Paul Mellon; Edward R. Stettinius, son of the former secretary of state; and Eve Fout.

  “If the mass of people knew how great people who like hunting are . . . they wouldn’t imagine it as a cruel sport of the idle rich.”

  Tony Bradlee’s sister Mary Meyer, whose affair with Jack Kennedy lasted from January 1962 to his death.

  “Mary sought attention the way a nymph rises to the surface of a stream. Wherever she went, she attracted it, and that gave her pleasure.”

  Jack and Jackie with Ben and Tony Bradlee in the West Sitting Hall on the second floor of the White House. Jackie doctored the photo by adding ink to lengthen her skirt because she worried that too much of her legs showed.

  “You had to have a light touch to get to Jack, to get through his defenses.”

  Helen Chavchavadze (with her daughters Marusya, left, and Sasha), a first cousin of Jackie’s onetime fiancée John Husted, was JFK’s lover for most of his presidency.

  “I never knew if Jackie knew, but I felt uncomfortable about her. . . . It was not my style, but it was irresistible with Jack.”

  JFK at the Middleburg Spring Races on Saturday, April 15, 1961, shortly after he authorized the first of two air strikes to support the Bay of Pigs invasion. To the left is Jackie’s friend Eve Fout.

  “The President . . . appeared at the races that April afternoon, striding suddenly into the paddock at a Tennessee walking-horse pace.”

  Jackie at Versailles with French president Charles de Gaulle (center) and French minister of culture André Malraux, June 1, 1961.

  “De Gaulle leaned across the table and told Kennedy that his wife knew more French history than most French women.”

  JFK greeting Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev on June 3, 1961, in Vienna, moments after Kennedy had received an injection laced with amphetamines to relieve his severe back pain.

  “Out of the residence door, like a bronco-buster sprung from his chute, bounded John Fitzgerald Kennedy.”

  Jackie with Harold Macmillan in London before her husband’s conference with the British prime minister to discuss Kennedy’s difficult Vienna summit meeting with Khrushchev.

  “Our friendship seemed confirmed and strengthened.”

  JFK conferring with Joe Alsop (left) and David Ormsby Gore, the newly appointed British ambassador to the United States, in London at a christening party for Stas and Lee’s daughter.

  “He didn’t really face up to the appalling moral burden that an American president now has to carry until Vienna.”

  JFK hobbling out of a Washington ballroom after giving a speech on foreign aid in mid-June 1961.

  “I think he is suffering a good deal from his back. Certainly it is more serious than he admits or wants to admit.”

  Out on Joe Kennedy’s cabin cruiser, Marlin, off Hyannis Port in early July 1961, JFK discusses Soviet threats against Berlin with (from left) General Maxwell Taylor, his newly appointed personal military adviser; Defense Secretary Bob McNamara; and Secretary of State Dean Rusk.

  “We need a man like Taylor to give things a cold and fishy eye.”

  Jack and Jackie during a cruise on the Honey Fitz, the presidential yacht, in the late summer of 1961.

  “He never relaxes in the house, just gets out of it on the boat or else takes a nap.”

  In the summer of 1961, Martha Bartlett poses with her godson, eight-month-old John F. Kennedy Jr., along with Jackie and Lem Billings.

  “Children have imagination, a quality that seems to flicker out in so many adults.”

  David Ormsby Gore and his wife, Sissie, who arrived at Washington’s British embassy in October 1961.

  “David fitted exactly between Uncle Harold [Macmillan] and Jack Kennedy. They were all completely out of the same hat.”

  Janet Auchincloss and her husband, Hugh, sailing off Newport, where they lived at Hammersmith Farm.

  “I think Jackie was always grateful to her because she felt she had intentionally enlarged [her] world.”

  Peter Lawford stepping out in Palm Beach with Flo Pritchett Smith, a girlfriend of Jack’s in his bachelor days who became a good friend.

  “Have pretty women, attractive men, guests who are en passant, the flavor of another language. This is the jet age, so have something new and changing.”

  Jackie and Jack at Washington’s International Horse Show on October 27, 1961, with Alice Roosevelt Longworth (seated on JFK’s right), Bill Walton (behind Longworth), Eunice Shriver (behind her brother), and Eve Fout. Gore Vidal was also with the group, which had earlier dined at the White House.

  “Jackie dragged us all to the horse show. Jack didn’t want to go. He was fuming over it.”

  Flo’s husband, Earl E.T. Smith, was a close friend of Jack’s and Jackie’s who was serving as U.S. ambassador to Cuba when Fidel Castro seized power in 1959. Smith is seen standing on the patio of Joe Kennedy’s home in Palm Beach with JFK, who is wearing his special bracevisible only in privateto ease his back pain.

  “He received us dressed in shorts, his back encased in a peculiar little white corset. . . . He got dressed with difficulty.”

  Joe Kennedy saying goodbye to JFK in Newport, Rhode Island, on October 20, 1961, before flying with Bobby to Hyannis Port.

  “Joe Kennedy would use indirection. He would have one of his people approach a fella and get him some business. . . . It was a matter of exchanging courtesies.”

  JFK, Jackie, and Bobby at St. Mary’s Hospital in West Palm Beach on December 19, 1961, after visiting Joe Kennedy, who had been debilitated by a massive stroke the previous day.

  “Old Joe had had several small strokes before and planned to go off suddenly. . . . He had been given decoagulants at that early stage and had chucked them away.”

  Jackie and John Kenneth Galbraith, the U.S. ambassador to India, in New Delhi, March 12, 1962, with Lee Radziwill following.

  “He makes Tish look reticent. He is always darting out to give briefings.”

  India’s seventy-one-year-old prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, applies vermilion powder to Jackie in New Delhi on March 21, 1962.

  “We never talked of serious things. . . . Jack has always told me the one thing a busy man doesn’t want to talk about at the end of the day is whether the Geneva Conference will be successful or what settlement could be made in Kashmir or anything like that.”

  Jackie and Lee atop a camel in Karachi, Pakistan, in March 1962.

  “Oh! It makes an elephant feel like a jet plane.”

  Bobby Kennedy with Peter Lawford and Frank Sinatra, who was banished by Jack Kennedy in March 1962 at his brother’s insistence.

  “[Sinatra] blamed Peter for not standing up for him.”

  Jackie with Oleg Cassini (right) and Benno Graziani, a photographer for Paris-Match.

  “Benno was the historian of le tout monde. . . . He wouldn’t think twice about flying from Paris for a party.”

  At the White House dinner honoring forty-nine Nobel laureates in April 1962, JFK chats with Ernest Hemingway’s widow, Mary.

  “Your friend Mary Hemingway is the biggest bore I’ve had for a long time.”

  Before a crowd of fifteen thousand at Madison Square Garden on May 19, 1962, Marilyn Monroe sings a breathless and seductive “Happy Birthday” to JFK, marking his forty-fifth birthday. Eleven weeks later, the actress would die of a drug overdose.

  “You think, ‘By God, I’ll sing this song if it’s the last thing I ever do.’”

  SIXTEEN

  Two weeks before the Bay of Pigs defeat, William Shannon wrote in the liberal New York Post that Kennedy was like “a lithe young diver on the high board bouncing conspicuously but never quite taking the plunge.” With his foreign adventure ending in a belly flop, Kennedy sought new ways to make a more graceful impression. On May 25, JF
K effectively started his presidency all over again, giving what he called his “second State of the Union address,” speaking for forty-seven minutes to a joint session of Congress and a national television audience. As before, he presented a laundry list of domestic and foreign initiatives.

  This time Kennedy grabbed attention with a bold proposal to spend nearly $700 million ($4.2 billion today) as the first step in a $9 billion ($54 billion today) effort to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. Space exploration, he declared, could “hold the key to our future on earth.” Previously, Kennedy had viewed the space program as an unnecessary expense, although Lyndon Johnson, whom Kennedy had designated his point man on space issues, had long been a forceful advocate.

  Kennedy changed his mind in April after Russia successfully sent a manned spacecraft into orbit around the earth for ninety minutes. Three weeks later the United States conducted its own space launch, televised live for maximum effect by Kennedy’s order. Astronaut Alan Shepard Jr. soared 115 miles into the upper atmosphere, then emerged safely after his capsule landed 302 miles out in the Atlantic. It was a risky enterprise—scientists had estimated a 75 percent chance of success—but it paid off handsomely for Kennedy. “With Shepard rode the hopes of the U.S. and the whole free world in a period of darkness,” Time observed. The Soviets still held the technological lead, so Kennedy’s moon exploration plan was a guaranteed crowd pleaser.

  Otherwise the speech failed to register as resoundingly the second time around—only eighteen interruptions for applause compared to thirty-seven times during his forty-three-minute address in January. While diplomats and cabinet members filled the galleries, members of the Supreme Court were otherwise occupied. So, most conspicuously, was Jackie, who had left for Glen Ora the night before.