Grace and Power

by Sally Bedell Smith

  But it was Jack himself who misbehaved in an especially reckless fashion. With Jackie nearby, not to mention Mary, Kennedy zeroed in on Tony Bradlee. “Oh, Jack, you know you always say that Tony is your ideal,” Jackie had said jokingly at dinner a month earlier. “Yes, that’s true,” JFK had replied, pausing briefly before adding, “You’re my ideal Jacqueline.” Twice since then Kennedy had urged Tony to join him on a state visit to Europe at the end of June. Both times she had refused.

  Several hours into the birthday cruise, as Tony made her way to the bathroom, she realized Jack was following her. “He chased me all around the boat,” recalled Tony. “A couple of members of the crew were laughing. I was running and laughing as he chased me. He caught up with me in the ladies’ room and made a pass. It was a pretty strenuous attack, not as if he pushed me down, but his hands wandered. I said ‘That’s it, so long.’ I was running like mad.”

  By Tony’s recollection, Kennedy was not drunk. “The atmosphere probably influenced Jack’s chase,” she said. “I guess I was pretty surprised, but I was kind of flattered, and appalled too.” Tony would eventually tell Ben, but not until much later. She never told Mary, however. At the time, Kennedy’s behavior “struck me as odd,” Tony recalled. “But it seems odder knowing what we now know about Mary.”

  The next morning Kennedy marked Memorial Day by placing a wreath at Arlington Cemetery’s Tomb of the Unknowns. At midday he, Jackie, the Bradlees and Nivens flew to Camp David for swimming, skeet shooting, golf on the front lawn, and conversation. Tony and Jack acted as if nothing had happened the night before—not a hint of either awkwardness or coolness.

  As the group drank Bloody Marys on the terrace, Kennedy tore into his pile of birthday gifts “with the speed and attention of a four-year-old child,” Bradlee noted. Kennedy laughed over Ethel’s scrapbook of a chaotic Hickory Hill tour that parodied the White House guidebook. The standout gift was a pair of drawings by Bill Walton commemorating JFK’s historic preservation efforts. Jackie told Walton she wished he had seen Jack’s delight, adding wryly, “though Clem Norton would have probably put his foot through them.” Walton’s rendering of the statue of Andrew Jackson in Lafayette Square was “the most beautiful thing—a Leonardo!” wrote Jackie, and his view of the Old Executive Office Building made Washington “seem as romantic as Venice.” Both would be hung in the West Sitting Hall “where we keep all the things we love most.”

  On Wednesday, June 5, Kennedy left Washington for a five-day trip out west. In Colorado Springs he visited a military command bunker and addressed the graduates at the U.S. Air Force Academy; in White Sands, New Mexico, he watched missiles being launched; in El Paso he conferred with Governor John Connally and Lyndon Johnson about a future fundraising trip to Texas; in San Diego he met marine recruits; in Los Angeles he spoke at two Democratic party fundraisers; and in Honolulu he sought the help of the nation’s mayors to calm their cities as civil rights unrest erupted around the country.

  But the highlight was his eighteen hours aboard the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk off the coast of California. The onetime lieutenant junior grade “sat in an admiral’s cushioned chair on the flight deck,” noted the New York Times, “puffing a cigar and drinking coffee, as jets roared overhead, missiles seared the sky, and the nuclear submarine Permit surfaced at a 20-degree angle a thousand yards to starboard.”

  JFK had been suffering from a flare-up of painful back spasms that may have originated during his overnight stay at the Hotel Cortez in El Paso on June 6. Hugh Sidey later heard from a woman in the presidential entourage that Kennedy had hurt himself in an amorous skirmish with her. “He either came into her room or he asked her to his room,” Sidey recalled. “They were sitting on the bed, and he wanted to have sex. She wrenched to pull herself away, swung her arms, pushed him against the wall and he injured his back.”

  On the evening of June 7, journalist Alistair Cooke watched for a full minute as Kennedy grabbed the arms of his chair to “force himself in a twisted, writhing motion to his feet” before two navy officers could help him to his quarters on the Kitty Hawk. In the White House several days later, documentary filmmaker Robert Drew caught JFK “moving awkwardly and pushing his knuckles into his cheek, then pressing them into his teeth, as he rocked back and forth.”

  When he returned to Washington, Kennedy gave speeches on consecutive days that set in motion two of the most significant diplomatic and domestic achievements of his presidency. The first was delivered June 10 at American University’s commencement. The address, which Newsweek later called “historic,” came to be known as Kennedy’s “Peace Speech.” Secretly in the works for several weeks, it was meant to break the deadlock over a nuclear test-ban treaty. As usual, Sorensen had been Kennedy’s principal collaborator, but Mac Bundy, Arthur Schlesinger, Walt Rostow, Carl Kaysen (Bundy’s deputy), and Tom Sorensen had chipped in ideas as well. According to Schlesinger, Kennedy had deliberately excluded Dean Rusk until only two days before the commencement.

  Not only did Kennedy call for curbing nuclear weapons, he proposed a searching reexamination of Soviet-American relations. To that end, he announced that the United States had suspended atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons and would send a delegation to Moscow to discuss a comprehensive test ban. “In the final analysis our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet,” Kennedy said. “We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future, and we are all mortal.”

  The pacifist and Unitarian imprint of Sorensen could be seen in the emphasis on mankind’s ability to solve man-made problems, rather than relying on the power of the Almighty. “Probably some of my language helped commit him to the idea,” said Sorensen. “I was writing some things I hoped he would share. Every speech writer knows how sentiment is expressed is as important as the sentiment itself.”

  Less than a month later, during an appearance on July 2 in East Berlin, Khrushchev announced he would accept a limited nuclear test ban. The Soviet leader had actually retreated from his earlier proposal for a comprehensive ban with three annual on-site inspections. After Kennedy’s insistence on more frequent monitoring, Soviet hard-liners had forced Khrushchev to pull back from a total ban.

  Still, the “Peace Speech” had persuaded Khrushchev that Kennedy was serious about securing a treaty and improving relations with the Soviet Union. Although Macmillan was disappointed that Khrushchev had ruled out a comprehensive ban, he told Kennedy that “even the second prize may turn out well worth having and would certainly be fatal to lose.” All told, there had been 336 nuclear explosions in the atmosphere by the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union. Banning them would reduce pollution from radiation and set a precedent by establishing a binding legal obligation. Kennedy regarded a limited ban “as more of a beginning than a culmination,” wrote Sorensen. It was JFK’s hope that such an accord could help curb the spread of nuclear weapons and pave the way for future disarmament.

  American and British negotiating teams convened in Moscow on July 15. With no need to haggle over underground tests and on-site monitoring, they made rapid progress. The negotiators took just ten days to reach agreement on a treaty banning nuclear tests in the atmosphere, the oceans, and outer space.

  On July 26, Kennedy went on television to explain the treaty and build support for its ratification by the Senate. “Yesterday a shaft of light cut into the darkness,” he said. He acknowledged that nuclear stockpiles would remain intact, but said the treaty would “radically reduce the nuclear testing” that had “so alarmed mankind.”

  During the eventful summer of 1963, Kennedy also had to contend with the ongoing civil rights crisis. A crucial ally in developing the administration’s strategy turned out to be Lyndon Johnson, who rallied to the cause after hitting bottom psychologically in his third year as vice president.

  “Lyndon is fat and greyish and emotional,” Katie Louchheim wrote after hearing Johnson speak at the Mayflower Hotel not long after Kennedy’s buoyant State o
f the Union. A reporter from Time asked Orville Freeman what had happened to Johnson, implying that “he certainly had not lived up to expectations and almost faded away.” The magazine followed up with a withering story in early February headlined “Seen, Not Heard.” “Power has slipped from his grasp,” Time concluded. While LBJ still appeared at meetings and White House functions, “he is free to speak up, but nobody really has to heed him anymore.”

  To Schlesinger, LBJ had become “a spectral presence at meetings in the Cabinet Room. . . . The psychological cost was evidently mounting.” Johnson frequently escaped to his ranch in Texas on Thursdays, returning to Washington the following Monday, “laying low” as Charley Bartlett put it. “He would get depressed,” said George Christian, one of his aides, “but he would fight his way out of it. Every now and then he would engage in self pity, but it wasn’t a constant thing.” Down at the ranch, Dale Malechek, Johnson’s foreman, kept his boss company during long games of dominoes. LBJ was so needy that once when Malechek was milking the cows at 4 a.m. he looked up to see Johnson in his bathrobe, watching him intently.

  In May 1963, Johnson and Kennedy both appeared in New York at a Democratic fundraiser. Afterwards, Earl and Flo Smith had a party at their Fifth Avenue apartment. “Like a fool I went,” Johnson later told Harry McPherson. “The President was there, sitting in a big easy chair, and everyone was in a circle around him, leaning in to hear every word. I was leaning over too, and suddenly I didn’t want to do that, be in the back of the circle, listening.”

  Johnson retreated to a spot in front of the French doors overlooking Central Park. When Flo Smith saw him standing alone, she approached a pretty young friend named Jeanne Murray Vanderbilt, who was with a group of prominent Democrats. “Will somebody go and talk to the Vice President?” Flo whispered. “I’ll talk to him,” Vanderbilt replied, “but what can I talk to him about?” “Don’t give it a thought,” said Flo. “She was right,” Vanderbilt recalled. “He never stopped talking, and he was so charming.” After several hours the Vice President offered Vanderbilt a ride home. As they parted, Johnson said, “I’ll never forget how nice you were to me tonight.” Recalled McPherson, “It was so moving to think of this massive figure, reduced in his eyes and the eyes of others.”

  Yet by then the equal rights issue had already begun to bring back the old Johnson. Starting in the spring, he had ventured out to North Carolina and Florida to make a series of speeches on the subject. “I want [blacks] on the platform with me,” he announced to local officials. “And if you don’t let them, I’m not coming, period.” Under Johnson’s pressure, blacks appeared with him—a moral victory.

  On June 3, Johnson sprang to life during an extraordinary phone conversation with Ted Sorensen—a preview of LBJ’s lightning grasp of the presidency after Kennedy’s assassination six months later. With demonstrations spreading from Birmingham to other cities, Jack and Bobby had begun to fashion a framework for a new civil rights law. Not surprisingly, Johnson had been kept out of the loop. “I’ve never seen it,” he told Sorensen. “I got it from the New York Times.”

  Now Johnson took charge, dictating a civil rights blueprint to Sorensen. “I think I have the feeling the Negro has in this country,” Johnson told him. “I’ve been talking to a good many of them.” He proposed five steps: improve the proposed legislation, have JFK talk to black leaders directly, enlist Republican support starting with Eisenhower, line up Democratic committee chairmen, take the case to the Deep South by making speeches. “We got a little pop gun,” Johnson said, “and I want to pull out the cannon. The President is the cannon.” Kennedy needed to “be the leader of the nation and make a moral commitment to them . . . the Negroes are tired of this patient stuff . . . this piecemeal stuff.”

  Johnson cautioned Sorensen that “we run the risk of touching off about a three- or four-month debate that will kill [Kennedy’s] program and inflame the country and wind up with a mouse.” LBJ also warned that “these risks are great and it might cost us the South” in 1964, “but those sorts of states may be lost anyway.” Hearkening back to his own techniques in 1957, the Vice President said Kennedy should make his case directly in Jackson, Mississippi: “If he goes down there and looks them in the eye and states the moral issue and the Christian issue, and he does it face to face, these Southerners at least respect his courage. They feel that they’re on the losing side of an issue of conscience.”

  Johnson had been burned too many times to take the lead publicly within the Kennedy administration. “I’m as strong for this program as you are, my friend,” he told Sorensen. “I don’t want to debate these things around fifteen men and then have them all go out and talk about the Vice President. . . . I haven’t sat in on any of the conferences they’ve had up there with the senators. I think it would have been good if I had. I don’t care. . . . But if at the last minute I’m supposed to give my judgment, I’m going to do it honestly as long as I’m around here, and I’m going to do it loyally.”

  One week later, in the hours after his Peace Speech, Kennedy faced a volatile new confrontation in the Deep South. His antagonist was Alabama governor George Wallace, who had vowed to “stand in the schoolhouse door” to prevent integration at the University of Alabama. On May 21 a federal judge had ordered the university to admit two black students, setting the stage for a showdown on June 11 between Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach and Wallace.

  The question at hand on Monday, June 10, was whether Kennedy should take to the airwaves to talk about race relations. The possibility of a nationally televised address had been debated for days. At a dinner party the previous Thursday, Ted Sorensen had emphatically declared, “He should not go on unless there is crisis.” Kennedy’s special counsel did not believe the President needed to educate Americans about civil rights or make an impassioned plea. “Ted wants him off,” wrote Katie Louchheim.

  Lyndon Johnson’s exhortation to “pull out the cannon” had failed to persuade Sorensen, or for that matter the President, who shared his aide’s caution about political consequences. It took Johnson’s nemesis Bobby to make the difference. Bobby had been seeking the upper hand on civil rights over Johnson for several months. Most memorably, the attorney general had gone on the attack in May during a meeting of the Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity chaired by the Vice President. Although the committee had used its clout to increase black employment in the federal government, RFK had castigated Johnson for taking insufficient action. By early June, Bobby had staked out his position “on the side of the angels” in a “just cause,” observed Cy Sulzberger.

  As filmmaker Robert Drew rolled his cameras on Monday afternoon in the Oval Office for an ABC documentary about the integration crisis, Bobby pressed his brother to go on television. Kennedy couldn’t make up his mind. The next day Katzenbach faced down the implacable Alabama governor—also in front of a Drew camera crew. Kennedy federalized the state’s national guardsmen, who forced Wallace to yield, allowing the two students to register. “I want to go on television tonight,” said Kennedy after watching a replay of Wallace’s defiance.

  So on June 11, Kennedy gave the second of his historic speeches. He, Sorensen, and Bobby scrambled to pull together the President’s remarks in the five hours before airtime. In his eighteen-minute prime-time talk, Kennedy improvised brilliantly on an incomplete text. He insisted that “the rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened. . . . We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.” He said blacks could no longer be second-class citizens in a nation preaching “freedom around the world.” He noted that “the fires of frustration and discord are burning in every city,” but the remedy could not be “repressive police action” or “token moves” or “increased demonstrations in the streets.” It was the government’s obligation to pass new laws to ensure that “revolution” and “change” be “peaceful and constructive for all.”


  Kennedy’s improvisations, Sorensen later wrote, “drew on at least three years of evolution in his thinking, on at least three months of revolution in the civil rights movement, on at least three weeks of meetings in the White House.” Kennedy had exerted moral leadership at a crucial moment. “Circumstances sort of caught up with [JFK and Bobby],” said Missouri congressman Richard Bolling, a liberal ally of Kennedy’s. “The political situation changed. It became clearer that there was going to be a real reaction if they didn’t move.”

  Eight days after the speech, Kennedy submitted his promised legislation to Congress. The bill forbade any private organization that served the public—whether a school, college, hotel, restaurant, store, theater, or sports arena—to engage in discrimination based on race, religion, ethnicity, or sex. If equal access either to services or accommodations was denied, the federal government could use the courts to force compliance. The Justice Department was also given the power to order school desegregation and to mandate equal opportunity in employment. The bill incorporated as well the provisions of the more limited civil rights legislation Kennedy had submitted in February to outlaw discrimination in voting.

  The violence in the cities abated, and Kennedy worked through the summer months to reach out to leaders of the equal rights movement, who were busy planning a March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28. To build support for civil rights legislation, he held a series of meetings with opinion leaders at the White House. In these sessions, Kennedy was “controlled and terse,” Johnson was “evangelical and often very moving,” and Bobby was “blunt and passionate,” wrote Arthur Schlesinger. Katie Louchheim attended a meeting with three hundred heads of nearly one hundred women’s organizations in mid-July. “I watched the President’s face while the Vice President made a long good speech, even talking about how women could not go to toilets cross-country if they were colored,” she wrote. In his more muted way, Kennedy asked the women to “support our legislation” and “integrate your groups.”