Grace and Power

by Sally Bedell Smith

  Not even a dyspeptic blast from Charles de Gaulle that morning could dim Kennedy’s sunny posture. The French leader had rejected the Nassau offer of the Polaris missile—which effectively scuttled the proposed multinational nuclear force—and vetoed Britain’s entry into the European Common Market. Kennedy saw neither development as a major setback for American interests. “From a strictly economic viewpoint,” he told Schlesinger, British integration into Europe actually posed problems for the United States. Nor was Kennedy enthusiastic about the multinational force, which was murky in its details. He had reluctantly recognized that France could not be dissuaded from going its own way to develop nuclear weapons. When Ben Bradlee asked about the multinational force’s future during dinner a few weeks after the State of the Union address, Kennedy “gave an evasive answer which translated meant to me that he was not terribly serious about it.”

  Kennedy declined to confront the French, but he was privately irritated with de Gaulle for his obstructionist attitudes. “What can you do with a man like that?” Kennedy would ask his aides. Kennedy “had contempt for the spitefulness of official French pronouncements,” wrote Schlesinger. In a National Security Council meeting several days after de Gaulle’s rebuffs, the President acknowledged “we have to live with” the French leader while recognizing that de Gaulle’s emphasis on French nationalism ran contrary to American interests. By early March, Hervé Alphand recorded in his journal, “During official dinners I get the cold shoulder. President Kennedy has his brother Bobby tell me that for the moment it’s best that we don’t meet.”

  Alphand was also deeply jealous of David Gore’s closeness to JFK. Cy Sulzberger concluded that the French envoy had become “bitter and emotionally anti-British, rather anti-Administration.” Alphand told the New York Times correspondent that British propaganda against France was so ingrained at the White House that Mac Bundy had come to sound like Gore: “He even uses the same phrases.” Gore well understood his advantage. “The French,” he told Macmillan, “have now been consigned to the deepest recesses of the doghouse by the President.”

  Despite the missteps over Skybolt, Kennedy’s bond with Gore had tightened—“a remarkable position,” Macmillan noted that spring, “an intimate and trusted friend. It is most fortunate—and almost unprecedented—for a British ambassador to have this position.” The principal British-American goal was obtaining a treaty banning the testing of nuclear weapons—“the most important step we can take towards unraveling this frightful tangle of fear and suspicion in East-West relations,” Macmillan wrote Kennedy on March 16.

  Throughout the first six months of 1963, Kennedy and Macmillan exchanged secret correspondence with each other and with Khrushchev about terms for the proposed treaty. Kennedy had been interested in nuclear disarmament for years, but Macmillan felt a “very deep personal obligation” to achieve a ban “before it is too late.” The British leader made it his mission to stiffen JFK’s resolve against the “rats” in the Kennedy administration who urged a more timid course. Yet for all Macmillan’s pushing, the negotiations hit an impasse over “on site” inspections to verify a ban on underground tests. When Khrushchev appeared willing to accept three such inspections a year, Kennedy said no fewer than eight or ten would suffice.

  Britain’s elder statesman was in serious political trouble in 1963. Coming on top of Skybolt, the Common Market rejection was a “devastating blow” for Macmillan—“the gravest failure of all his policies.” In late March, Macmillan’s situation worsened with the disclosure that John Profumo, the secretary of state for war, had been linked to Christine Keeler, the mistress of a Soviet military attaché. Macmillan had known since late January that Profumo had socialized with a “girl of doubtful reputation.” Schlesinger, just back from England (where David Bruce’s office had been closely monitoring the revelations), filled in Kennedy by telephone the day after the story broke on March 21. Kennedy said little, asking only for a description of the scandal, and whether the woman was a spy. Schlesinger replied that Keeler was a “sort of fashionable London call girl,” and that “espionage hasn’t been suggested.”

  Several days later, Schlesinger elaborated on Macmillan’s plight, writing that the impression created by the Profumo case was of a “frivolous and decadent” government where everything was “unraveling at the seams.” Schlesinger praised Harold Wilson, the newly named leader of the Labour party, for his “intelligence, self-control . . . and cool political skill,” slyly noting that criticism of Wilson’s ambition mirrored “what people were saying about Kennedy in 1960.” Added Schlesinger, “Wilson’s footwork is fancy, and it is hard to lay a glove on him.” Kennedy was suitably impressed, telling Bradlee it was “the best memo he had ever received—bar none . . . especially on the shadow Prime Minister Harold Wilson.”

  In the view of Ken Galbraith, Schlesinger had settled nicely into his gadfly role. “The papers have rather forgotten that he was meant to be the whipping boy,” Galbraith had noted in his diary at the end of 1962. Galbraith, however, was restless. Kennedy had asked him to extend his leave of absence from Harvard for another year. But the envoy to India was well aware that Dean Rusk continued to regard him as “a major inconvenience in an otherwise placid organization.” Rusk was so irritated by Galbraith’s “high and mighty ways of presenting his views to Washington” that for Christmas he sent him a cable saying, “Happy Birthday.”

  Galbraith had also grown disillusioned with Kennedy’s economic policies. After reading a speech JFK had prepared for the Economic Club of New York in December 1962, Galbraith despaired that it was “full of Republican clichés,” including the notion that “taxes were handicapping investment and undermining incentives.” Galbraith couldn’t reconcile himself to the fact that these “Republican” notions were Kennedy’s fundamentally conservative economic beliefs. He tried to change the speech, but “it was beyond retrieval and I effected little improvement.”

  It came as no surprise when Kennedy announced that Galbraith would be the first member of his inner circle to leave the administration. He would return to the United States in June to work on some projects for the President and resume teaching at Harvard in the fall. “What is interesting about Ken Galbraith is I don’t think he was taken in by the Kennedys to the extent the others were,” said Marian Schlesinger. “Ken is such a colossus. He wouldn’t care.”

  As Jack Kennedy was happily cruising in Palm Beach on his Easter vacation, the first big crisis of the third year of his presidency was unfolding in Birmingham, Alabama. Kennedy had finally submitted his civil rights legislation in February 1963. Once again he took an incremental approach, focusing only on voting rights. For civil rights leaders, the measure didn’t go far enough.

  On April 3 the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and other black leaders launched a campaign of civil disobedience in Birmingham. Blacks staged sit-ins at lunch counters that refused to serve them, and picketed department stores where blacks and whites had to use separate water fountains and toilets. Over a period of three days in the middle of April, police arrested hundreds of demonstrators, including King. Kennedy helped arrange King’s release and sent Bobby’s deputy, Burke Marshall, to negotiate with local business leaders.

  King changed his tactics in a controversial but highly effective way. When few adults agreed to march again, King enlisted thousands of schoolchildren for a protest in early May. Many were arrested, and Birmingham police commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor ordered his men to turn powerful fire hoses on the young protesters and unleash fierce attack dogs. Evening newscasts and the front pages of newspapers showed affecting pictures of the brutality, including a German shepherd lunging at a teenage boy.

  While Kennedy pressed for a negotiated settlement, the unrest continued. Finally on Sunday evening, May 12, Kennedy made a brief television address calling on the citizens of Birmingham to “maintain standards of reasonable conduct” and announcing that he had put federal troops on alert near the city to preserve order if nec
essary. But the images of violence had shifted national perceptions toward greater sympathy for racial equality. Kennedy’s aides, Bobby in particular, were pushing him to exert moral leadership by introducing a comprehensive civil rights bill.

  Jack Kennedy happened to have his legacy very much on his mind at that moment. The previous day he had toured Boston and its suburbs by helicopter and car to inspect possible sites for his presidential library. He had already met with John Warnecke, his favorite architect, to discuss possible design schemes.

  Since the beginning of the year, Arthur Schlesinger had been pressing Kennedy in a series of memos about obtaining an official record of “major episodes in your administration.” The way Kennedy made decisions was contrary to the orderly processes admired by historians: he disliked organized meetings, and preferred to make policy in private, often one-on-one, after meetings had ended. This executive style, in the view of James Reston, “made the gathering of history extremely difficult.”

  Schlesinger cautioned—seemingly with unintended irony—that a “house historian could become a nuisance if he tried too zealously to record things as they happened.” Kennedy agreed, and shot down the idea of an official historian as well as Schlesinger’s proposal to import “ad hoc specialists” to write up specific events. Kennedy also rejected taping conversations after “major episodes” to capture the details before memories had faded. “I plead for you to consider this,” wrote Schlesinger.

  But Schlesinger’s appeals went nowhere, perhaps because JFK believed his secret taping system would provide a sufficient historical record. Kennedy knew that Schlesinger, Sorensen, and probably Bundy at the very least would write their own accounts of his administration, and his view of their efforts seemed ambivalent. When Charley Bartlett once asked Kennedy about rumors that Emmet Hughes, who had written a book on the Eisenhower White House, was coming to work for Kennedy, the President replied, “Don’t worry, I have enough biographers around here already.” In conversations with Bradlee, Kennedy referred to contemporary historians as “bastards” who were “always there with their pencils out.”

  Yet Kennedy had encouraged Schlesinger to keep his own journal and had told Sorensen he might collaborate with him. “I just wanted to make sure you got that down for the book we’re going to write,” Kennedy said to Sorensen at one point during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

  Kennedy remained equally preoccupied with what Philip Graham called “the first rough draft of history”—the work of daily and weekly journalists. “The only thing I regret,” David Bruce noted in his diary on February 21, 1963, “is that the President is such an omnivorous reader of newspapers, foreign and domestic. I think he takes their pontifications too seriously, not appreciating that journalists focus primarily on crises of the moment. I believe he is oversensitive to their criticism.”

  Coverage of Kennedy continued to be overwhelmingly adoring, which didn’t diminish his focus on the critics. “At least once a night, our conversation turns to the news business,” Ben Bradlee observed in late March. Kennedy’s bugbear that spring was the accusation that he was cynically “managing” the news. Arthur Krock had led the charge in the March Fortune magazine, describing how Kennedy used “social flattery” and “selective personal patronage” with reporters. After “intimate background briefings,” Krock wrote, “journalists . . . emerge in a state of protracted enchantment evoked by the President’s charm and the awesome aura of his office.” New York Times correspondent Hanson Baldwin offered a similar critique in the Atlantic Monthly.

  Kennedy’s carping to Bradlee about the charges led to a Newsweek cover story on “Who Manages What News?” that largely debunked the notion that the White House was orchestrating press coverage. If nothing else, the mere publication of the article showed how adept the White House had become in steering journalists in sympathetic directions. “Krock,” the story noted, “deplored the way the President . . . blurred . . . critical faculties with his charm (as if he could be deliberately dull).” Both Krock and Baldwin were “outs” in Washington, declared Newsweek, denied the sort of “inside contacts” they had enjoyed with previous administrations.

  Kennedy told Bradlee the cover story “was the best thing he had read on the subject,” although the President was disappointed that Newsweek had not sufficiently “tucked it to Arty [Krock].” Bradlee felt they had done enough by calling the “former friend” of Kennedy “old and out of it.” Kennedy also let slip to Bradlee that he no longer spoke to either Lippmann or Reston. “He said he had answered Reston’s request for an interview,” Bradlee noted, “by suggesting that Reston interview Krock, who was posing as an informed observer of the Kennedy Administration.”

  No journalist or publication had supplanted Henry Luce’s Time Inc. either in its importance or its power to annoy the President. The depth of JFK’s continuing irritation was clear in a phone conversation he had with Bobby in early March. Kennedy boasted that he had just blistered Luce for forty-five minutes over Time’s coverage only to have Luce turn around and invite the President to the magazine’s fortieth birthday party in May. “They’re just mean as hell up there,” said JFK. “Bastards,” said Bobby.

  Kennedy had already cut the cord with Clare Luce following a luncheon with her in October 1962 before the missile crisis. She told him then that great men could be summed up for history in one simple sentence, and she wondered if Jack would be strong enough to “turn the world tide of communism.” When Hugh Sidey arrived at the White House to retrieve her, he realized that they had finished considerably before the appointed time. Kennedy “was sore as hell,” Sidey recalled. “She was lecturing him. He said, ‘This is the last time I am going to see that woman.’” Clare was angry as well. “I have never been treated this way,” she complained. “He wouldn’t let me finish my dessert. He cut me off.”

  Kennedy declined the invitation to the Time fete. He told Sidey that people would call him a “sap” for playing up to Luce by attending. In the message he sent to be read at the dinner, JFK hailed Luce for his creativity, observed that Time had “instructed, entertained, confused and infuriated its readers,” and ventured that the magazine in middle age showed a “mellowing of tone . . . greater tolerance of human frailty” and an “occasional hint of fallibility.”

  The same might well have been said of Kennedy himself. On his forty-sixth birthday several weeks later on Wednesday, May 29, his staff threw a surprise party with an array of gag gifts: a tiny rocking chair, boxing gloves “to deal with Congress,” a basket of dead grass presented by Jackie on behalf of the “White House Historical Society—genuine antique grass from the antique Rose Garden.” In the evening, Jackie arranged a dinner cruise on the Potomac with two dozen guests aboard the Sequoia, most of them family and close friends: Bobby and Ethel, Sarge and Eunice, Teddy, the Fays, Bartletts, and Bradlees, as well as Reed, Walton, and Billings. Also included were George Smathers and his wife, Rosemary, British actor David Niven and his wife, Hjordis (soigné members of “Hollywood Royalty” who had been friendly with the Kennedys since the mid-fifties when they went dancing together at Manhattan’s El Morocco), Clem Norton (an old-fashioned Boston pol who came with Teddy), Fifi Fell, Mary Meyer, and Jack’s new friend Enüd Sztanko, identified only as “Teacher, Georgetown U.” Although they were on the guest list, Steve and Jean, Peter and Pat, and Chuck Spalding didn’t appear, nor did Joan Kennedy, who was nearly seven months pregnant. None of Kennedy’s intimates in the administration were invited, not even McNamara, whose birthday gift was an expensive antique engraving of Mount Vernon that Kennedy had admired.

  Jackie instructed everyone to wear “yachting clothes” for an 8:01 departure, and Kennedy wore his nautical blue blazer. After drinks on the fantail, dinner was served in the cabin—beginning with roast fillet of beef and ending with 1955 Dom Pérignon champagne. It was a hot evening, with thunder, lightning, and torrential rain. The mood was raucous and boozy, especially throughout the toasts, which were greeted by jeers in typical K
ennedy family style. Commanded to make a speech, Sztanko “felt absolute panic” before she said “Happy birthday” and “Best wishes” in Hungarian “as if it was a perfectly normal thing.”

  A three-piece band played—mostly twist music that Kennedy kept requesting for the dancers. He had been suffering from especially severe back pain, prompting Jackie to ask Janet Travell if she could give him total relief for his party. The only shot, Travell told her, would “remove all feeling below the waist.” Cracked Kennedy, “We can’t have that, can we, Jacqueline?” Whatever palliative Travell provided, JFK later said that he had felt “miraculously better” all evening. He even commanded the captain to take the cruiser five miles upstream four times, which kept the festivities going until 1:23 a.m.

  “It was a wild party,” Tony Bradlee recalled. “People were shouting and laughing.” David Niven was “whispering in my ear all night, three sheets to the wind,” recalled Martha Bartlett. “I loved it!” Red Fay sang his signature “Hooray for Hollywood” as well as “Me and My Shadow.” Everyone was “more or less drenched,” Ben Bradlee recalled. Teddy was “the wettest,” and during some “fairly strenuous Kennedy games,” he lost the entire left leg of his trousers—“ripped off at the crotch,” Niven recalled, “with white underpants on the port side flashing.” Clem Norton got so drunk he fell onto the pile of gifts, stomping on a rare engraving from Jackie showing a scene from the War of 1812. With her characteristic “veiled expression,” she avoided dampening the mood by saying, “Oh, that’s all right. I can get it fixed.” Tony could see clearly that “Jackie was distressed.”