But Roosevelt, who had finally received his appointment as under secretary of commerce the previous March, had his own concerns. The previous year, Onassis had done $4 million in shipping business with the Commerce Department through the U.S. Maritime Administration, and Roosevelt feared the appearance of a conflict of interest. “He said he was working on a new image,” Jackie recalled. The President reassured FDR Jr. that his presence would be perfectly proper. To justify the trip, Roosevelt arranged to attend a trade fair in Somalia.
The next weekend in Hyannis, Kennedy was still trying to dissuade Jackie. “Jack went down on one knee, begging Jackie not to go,” said houseguest Martha Bartlett. “Neither of them was giving in. When she wanted to do something, she did it.” Kennedy put on the best face, defending Jackie’s decision to Kenny O’Donnell and Pam Turnure, who worried about political repercussions with a reelection campaign imminent. “Well, I think it will be good for Jackie,” Kennedy told Turnure, “and that’s what counts.”
Kennedy nevertheless decided to hide Onassis’s involvement as long as he could. Early in September he fussed over a proposed press release stating Stas Radziwill had “secured” the Onassis yacht for the cruise. Kennedy explained to Stas that the choice of words was purposely “ambiguous” to suggest “you have possession of it during that period and Jackie is your guest and not Onassis’.”
As it turned out, the White House announcement in late September mentioned neither the cruise nor Onassis, only that Jackie would be leaving on October 1 for a two-week holiday with her sister and brother-in-law at a rented villa in Greece. A week later, a report out of Paris said that Onassis, a “close friend” of Lee, had placed his yacht “at the disposal of the princess.” On the eve of the trip, the White House said the yacht had been “secured” by Stas Radziwill. Asked if Onassis would be aboard, Pam Turnure said, “not to my knowledge.”
Jack and Jackie celebrated two milestones in the month of September. The first was Joe Kennedy’s seventy-fifth birthday at Hyannis on September 6. Eleven sons, daughters, and spouses (with the exception of Peter Lawford, from whom Pat was increasingly estranged) gathered in Joe Kennedy’s house on a rainy and windy Friday night, along with the Bartletts and Lem Billings. Rose had just arrived home after a month-long holiday in Europe. At the beginning of the festivities, “twenty-one grandchildren trooped in with birthday gifts for ‘Grampy Joe,’” Time recounted.
The Ambassador looked dapper in a blue dressing gown over his white shirt and tie, and he wore a red, white, and blue party hat perched at a jaunty angle. After dinner he laughed heartily as his children presented him with gag gifts and serenaded him with comic songs. The mood turned melancholy, though, when Jack sang “September Song” (“Oh the days dwindle down to a precious few: September, November, and these few precious days I’ll spend with you”). “He did it so well,” said Martha Bartlett. “That was a killer, the old man in a wheelchair, the son singing. You almost felt Jack knew he wasn’t going to see old age.”
Despite leaden skies and a chilly breeze, Jack and Jackie took the Bartletts out on the Honey Fitz on Saturday and Sunday. Jack and Charley talked “at some length [about] what Lyndon would be like as President. . . . He always [liked] talking about all the eventualities.” JFK specifically worried that Bobby might run against Johnson in 1968. “He gave me the feeling he wasn’t pleased,” said Bartlett. “He wanted a record of his own. I sensed that he wanted the Kennedy administration to be Jack, and Bobby was going to turn it into a succession thing. Jack didn’t want a dynasty, although I am sure his father would have wanted that.”
Kennedy also mused about life after the presidency, although he bristled when Jackie joked, “I don’t want to be the wife of a headmaster of a girls school.” “At first it used to depress him,” Bartlett recalled. But that weekend, “it depressed him less.” He pondered being ambassador to Italy, because “Jackie would like it.” His main concern was being out of the way when his successor took over—a sentiment he expressed to Bill Walton, who was supposed to be Kennedy’s front man in buying a Georgetown home. “We may spend a couple of years in Cambridge, maybe travel some, but then we’ll come back here when the heat is off,” Kennedy had told Walton.
The next weekend marked Jack and Jackie’s tenth anniversary, which they celebrated at the scene of their marriage, Hammersmith Farm, with a candlelit dinner for ten on Thursday the twelfth. Cocktails were served in the spacious “Deck Room,” with tall French windows overlooking Narragansett Bay and high, vaulted ceilings ornamented by ribwork of dark beams. This time it was an Auchincloss crowd, and the outsiders were the Bradlees and Sylvia Whitehouse Blake, a Vassar classmate who had been a bridesmaid.
“It was a happy sort of evening,” recalled Janet Auchincloss. “I felt that all their strains and stresses, which any sensitive people have in a marriage, had eased to a point where they were terribly close to each other. I almost can’t think of any married couple I’ve ever known that had greater understanding of each other.” Ben and Tony Bradlee had a similar reaction when they witnessed “by far the most affectionate embrace we had ever seen them give each other.”
Jack and Jackie opened gifts during cocktail hour. She gave him a gold St. Christopher money clip from Tiffany’s to replace the one buried with Patrick, and he gave her a gold ring with emerald chips—an expression of Jack’s “Irish mystique”—for her to wear on her little finger in memory of Patrick. Jackie also presented Jack with a set of brass buttons for his blazer with the insignia of the Irish Brigade he had seen during his European trip, and a scrapbook of photographs chronicling Bunny Mellon’s transformation of the Rose Garden, annotated by quotations on gardening, many written by Joe Alsop, which JFK read aloud.
Jack scattered an array of presents for Jackie on a large circular carved table, with a list of descriptions and prices from the Klejman antiquities dealer in New York: antique Greek and Italian bracelets, pre-Christian and Etruscan sculptures, as well as drawings by Degas and Fragonard. “Now don’t forget, you can only keep one,” Jack repeated. Jackie picked at least two—a drawing and a gold bracelet coiled like a serpent.
For the next three days, the Bradlees and Kennedys cruised on the Honey Fitz and swam at Bailey’s Beach. Jack had worked himself up to thirteen holes of golf, which he played twice with Ben at the Newport Country Club. As the two couples headed to their rooms one night after dinner, Jackie grew tearful and said, “You two really are our best friends.” Bradlee considered the remark “forlorn . . . almost like a lost and lonely child.” It is difficult to believe that if Jackie had suspected her husband’s affair with Mary Meyer, she could have voiced such sentiments.
But Jackie’s most revealing comments were to Charley Bartlett in a letter written a week after the anniversary. She told him that the weekend could have been so much happier if Patrick had lived, but that it also could have been tragic. Jack made the difference, Jackie told Charley, because he had helped “re-attach me to life” and to appreciate “all the lucky things” they shared. She thanked Charley most of all for the thoughtfulness of his matchmaking a decade earlier. She said that Jack could have enjoyed “a worthwhile life without being happily married.” But without Jack as her husband, she told Charley, her life would have “all been a wasteland, and I would have known it every step of the way.”
TWENTY-NINE
Following a summer that turned from promise to tragedy, Jack Kennedy’s final autumn had an uneasy drifting quality. “Somehow missing from the White House is that sense of electric excitement,” Time observed in mid-September. “Somehow gone from the President’s words, both public and private, is that man-the-barricades urgency.” Even Kennedy’s liegemen became more fractious—“taking turns cutting each other and their boss up,” wrote Katie Louchheim.
Jack and Jackie may have reached a new level of what she described as “understanding, respect, and affection,” but they were apart two thirds of the time in September, October, and November—forty-two out of sixt
y-three days. (The previous year they had been away from each other during the same period less than half of the time, and in 1961 less than a quarter of the time.) “I was melancholy after the death of our baby and I stayed away . . . longer than I needed to,” Jackie later confessed to the Reverend Richard T. McSorley, a Catholic priest, when she was deeply despondent over her husband’s assassination. “I could have made [Jack’s] life so much happier, especially for the last few weeks. I could have tried harder to get over my melancholy.”
Kennedy’s popularity sank to a low of 57 percent in October (compared to his peak of 82 percent after the Bay of Pigs), his high-profile tax cut and civil rights bills were stalled in Congress, and a series of missteps led to a foreign policy debacle in South Vietnam. With the help of Bobby, he also managed to extinguish a scandal that came within days of scorching his presidency.
After avoiding Vietnam for eighteen months, Kennedy became entangled in an ominous fight between South Vietnamese factions and essentially lost control of the situation. “No doubt he realized that Vietnam was his great failure in foreign policy,” wrote Schlesinger.
South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem had long disquieted Kennedy and his chief aides. McNamara considered Diem “autocratic, suspicious, secretive, and insulated.” The American government felt even deeper misgivings about the Vietnamese leader’s two principal advisers, his younger brother Ngo Dinh Nhu and scheming sister-in-law Madame Nhu—“a true sorceress,” in McNamara’s words. All three were strict Catholics who stifled dissent and imposed their religious teachings on the Vietnamese people to replace the laws of the Buddhist majority.
Yet since the mid-fifties, the United States had supported Diem’s regime with some $300 million a year ($1.8 billion today, less than the $3 billion the United States gave Israel in 2003, but more than the $1.7 billion sent to Egypt, the second largest current recipient of American aid) and assisted his army in fighting Viet Cong guerrillas allied with communist North Vietnam. Kennedy admired Diem for holding South Vietnam together and maintaining its independence “under very adverse conditions.” By November 1963, Kennedy had raised the stakes by increasing the number of American troops “advising” the South Vietnamese forces from 2,000 to 16,000.
Within the administration, the harshest critic of this policy had been Ken Galbraith, who had sent JFK a series of memos about Diem’s incompetence and the damaging effects of the American presence as a “colonial military force.” Back in March 1962, Galbraith had written that the Russians “couldn’t be more pleased than to have us spend our billions in these distant jungles where it does us no good and them no harm.” Galbraith urged a political settlement even at the risk of displeasing “fighting Joe Alsop,” one of Washington’s most vocal hawks. Above all, Galbraith cautioned against committing any combat troops: “A few will mean more and more and more,” he wrote. “Then the South Vietnamese boys will go back to the farms. We will do the fighting.”
But Kennedy was preoccupied with other matters, content to be guided by the optimism of his military and civilian advisers in Saigon. Vietnam was a “marginal thing . . . not much of an issue in the Kennedy years,” Schlesinger recalled. In April 1963, at Kennedy’s urging, Charley Bartlett had written a column saying “the experts dare at last to say that the West is winning this insidious war.” Barely a month later, Diem launched a campaign of political and religious repression. During a peaceful rally by Buddhists in the provincial city of Hue, Diem’s forces killed and wounded scores of demonstrators. To protest the Diem crackdown, a Buddhist monk doused his saffron robes with gasoline and ignited himself in the middle of Saigon. Two months later, on Sunday, August 4, a second monk immolated himself.
With Diem arresting protesters by the truckload, a group in the State Department led by Averell Harriman argued that the United States could no longer support his despotic leadership. On Saturday, August 24, Kennedy was in Hyannis Port still grieving over Patrick’s death, and Rusk, McNamara, Bundy, and McCone were also out of town. Back at Foggy Bottom, Harriman, State Department official Roger Hilsman, and Bundy deputy Michael Forrestal drafted a cable for the new American ambassador in Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge. The wire authorized American support for a military coup against Diem.
Forrestal and Under Secretary of State George Ball consulted Kennedy and read him excerpts from the cable. The President gave his okay subject to agreement by Rusk and Gilpatric. But in a classic bureaucratic screwup, each of the absent officials notified by Forrestal signed off thinking everyone else had approved it. McNamara later characterized their hasty endorsement as “one of the truly pivotal decisions concerning Vietnam made during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.” Kennedy deeply regretted the cable, and in subsequent telegrams attempted to “redress the balance,” as he put it. But the Vietnamese generals now had their justification for removing Diem, and they set in motion a course of action to achieve that. Averell Harriman, the hero of the nuclear test-ban talks, never regained Kennedy’s confidence.
In subsequent weeks, American officials tried to press Diem to institute reforms. But they had deep differences about how involved the United States should be. “My God, my government’s coming apart,” Kennedy told Bartlett after one acrimonious meeting. Back in Washington for consultations in September, David Bruce described attending a “melee over Vietnam.” After still another tough session, Kennedy found himself in a meeting to promote the hat industry—a setting somewhere between incongruous and darkly comic. As he begrudgingly tried on an assortment of headgear, he asked Salinger, O’Donnell, and several other advisers to pick their favorites. Each chose a different model. “You remind me of my Vietnam advisers,” JFK cracked.
JFK compounded the confusion over his Vietnam policy with two television interviews he gave in early September, the first to Walter Cronkite on CBS and the second to Chet Huntley and David Brinkley on NBC. In each he offered a mixed message about American intentions that tilted toward a stronger American commitment in Vietnam. “In the final analysis, it is their war,” he told Cronkite. “They are the ones who have to win it or lose it.” Yet he also pledged that the United States would continue to help. “I don’t agree with those who say we should withdraw,” he said. “That would be a great mistake. I know people don’t like Americans to be engaged in this kind of effort. Forty-seven Americans have been killed in combat with the enemy, but this is a very important struggle even though it is far away. . . . It doesn’t do us any good to say, ‘Well, why don’t we all just go home and leave the world to those who are our enemies.’”
To Huntley and Brinkley, Kennedy acknowledged “a kind of ambivalence in our efforts. . . . We are using our influence to persuade the government there to take steps which will win back support.” And again he said, “Americans will get impatient and say because they don’t like events in Southeast Asia or they don’t like the government in Saigon that we should withdraw. That only makes it easy for the Communists. I think we should stay. We should use our influence in as effective a way as we can but we should not withdraw.”
The Kennedy administration vacillated about whether to support Diem or an alternative leader. Lyndon Johnson, who had spent time with Diem two years earlier, spoke strongly against supporting a coup. “In Texas we say that it’s better to deal with the devil you know than the devil you don’t know,” he said.
Kennedy rejected the idea of a coalition government incorporating communist representatives, which he concluded had not worked in Laos. Indeed, circumstances in Laos had enabled the North Vietnamese to use the Ho Chi Minh trail as a supply line to aid the Viet Cong. McNamara believed that JFK “confronted with a choice among evils . . . remained indecisive far too long” over Vietnam. It was as if Kennedy’s crisp management of the missile crisis had evaporated.
In late September, Kennedy sent McNamara and Maxwell Taylor to Saigon to analyze the situation. After McNamara met for the last time with Diem, he reported that the South Vietnamese military campaign was succeeding but
that Diem had to be replaced unless he moderated his policies. At least initially, the replacement regime would need to be “strongly authoritarian” to ensure order. To put pressure on Diem, McNamara recommended that financial support be withheld; to signal progress in creating Vietnamese self-sufficiency, he urged that one thousand American advisers be withdrawn at the end of the year. Kennedy accepted the recommendations, and Salinger announced the administration’s intention to withdraw the troops—but stopped short of saying the plan would definitely be carried out. The unrest continued on the streets of Saigon, and the West Wing was paralyzed by indecision.
McNamara’s stock remained high with Kennedy as Rusk’s continued to drop. The defense secretary was so dominant at the Pentagon that the press was referring to the “McNamara monarchy.” At the same time, rumors had begun to circulate in March that Rusk would be the “first to be replaced.” Adding to the unrelenting criticism of the secretary of state from Schlesinger and Galbraith, Dillon offered his opinion at Kennedy’s request. “In the summer of 1963 when Kennedy mentioned Rusk to me he was sort of exasperated,” Dillon recalled. “He said, ‘He won’t do anything himself. He won’t take any responsibility.’” Dillon told Kennedy that McNamara was “a good candidate to be Secretary of State.”
In the White House, Bundy was jockeying for that position as well, although in early August Charley Bartlett observed to Katie Louchheim, in “one of those authoritative intonations,” that Bundy would “never be Secretary.” Bartlett had harsh words as well for O’Donnell, telling Louchheim’s dinner guests that he was “strictly the appointments secretary and nothing else. He’s the only one who has gotten too big in the head. He’s really inflated.”
O’Donnell was also feuding with Salinger, one of several White House insiders whose marital problems were attracting unwanted attention. In October, Ted Sorensen’s divorce splashed across two columns of the Washington Star, along with photographs of himself and his estranged wife. “It is no fun to be the President’s alter ego and get your name in the paper over a divorce,” noted Louchheim. Salinger’s wife had finally left him, and the press secretary was flagrantly “playing around,” Louchheim reported to a friend, adding that Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Hatcher “disappeared on the President’s advance trip to Europe—left Rome with a Negro model and wasn’t heard from in ten days.”
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