Neither Bradlee nor any other White House reporter wrote a story on the marriage that summer. But Kennedy remained unnerved, and told differing stories about the number of times he went on dates with Malcolm. A few journalists were still snooping around, including a young reporter in the Washington bureau of Cowles Publications, owners of Look magazine, who flew to St. Louis to ask questions of the Desloge family. Kennedy, giving an interview that summer to Laura Bergquist, a Look reporter who enjoyed special access to the president and his children, suddenly brought up the magazine's continuing investigation. "I heard that somebody from Look magazine ... has been doing some snooping around about my secret marriage," he said to Bergquist, according to her 1977 oral history for the Kennedy Library. Bergquist put it directly to the president: "Were you ever secretly married?" Kennedy said, "No. I knew her and I took her to a football game, and that was about it." The president seemed "edgy," Bergquist told the library, and said that his brother Bobby had told him that someone on the magazine "was digging on this story" in St. Louis. Kennedy then warned: "You print that story and I'll wind up owning Look magazine." Bergquist tried to make light of this remark, saying, "That sounds to me like a threat." Describing the exchange to the library, Bergquist recalled Kennedy's intensity. "He was kidding, but he wasn't kidding," she said. Bergquist's interview was made available by the library in the fall of 1997.
Gossip about Kennedy's marriage, though not published in any major newspaper, would not go away. That fall, J. Edgar Hoover received three reports from FBI bureaus within a few weeks reporting that they had received letters describing "rumors" of an early Kennedy marriage; the letters all cited the Blauvelt genealogy. On November 22, 1961, Hoover raised the issue with Bobby Kennedy, who acknowledged, according to Hoover's declassified FBI memorandum, made public under the Freedom of Information Act, that "a number of newspapermen have spoken to him about it." The attorney general, Hoover noted, said that "he hopes" the reporters would print stories about the Blauvelt allegations, "because then 'we'"---the Kennedy family---"could all retire for life on what 'we' collect" in libel awards.
The tough talk did not hide the fact that Jack Kennedy was a newspaper story away from political embarrassment---if Durie Malcolm or one of his close friends, such as Charles Spalding, began to talk. His reelection in 1964 would be impossible if the American public, and the voting Catholics, believed that he had been secretly married outside the church and had lied about it.
His fear of the truth must have explained the president's sensitivity to seemingly innocuous newspaper gossip about his personal life. Time magazine's Hugh Sidey recalled his surprise when Kennedy "got furious" after Time published a brief account in late 1961 of the president's doing the twist on a patio during a society party in Palm Beach. "These little personal items began to eat away at him," Sidey told me in an interview. "They bothered him more than [published] discussions of the Bay of Pigs or what he was going to do in Berlin." On another occasion, in February 1962, Kennedy tore into Sidey after Time published a gossipy item stating---incorrectly---that the president had modeled a "trimly tailored dark gray suit" for a cover photo of Gentlemen's Quarterly magazine. Sidey, who knew nothing about the item, never had a chance to defend himself. "He picked up Time magazine," Sidey told me, "threw it on the desk, came around, shook his fist in my face and said, 'You SOBs are out to get me. You do this stuff---this personal stuff---as much as you can. You're out to discredit me. Why do you do this to me?' On and on.
"I took the heat," Sidey told me, "but I never did anything about it. I mean, it just disappeared. Kennedy passed on to other issues. He just had to blow his stack at that moment. There obviously was something else bugging him, but it came out in that bizarre way."
A few months later the Kennedy brothers were upset when they were leaked a copy of an internal Time memorandum in which Sidey described, in unsparing terms, a wild New Year's Eve party at the end of 1961 in Palm Beach. Sidey was in town, traveling with the White House press corps, and needed an official answer that evening to a foreign policy question. He sought out Pierre Salinger and his deputy, Andrew Hatcher. "Salinger was off someplace with a girl who was not related in any way by law or by blood to him," Sidey told me. "Hatcher had gone to Jamaica with a bunch of models. I went around. There was nobody. Everybody [was] partying. I have to say that I did sense it was excessive and probably not the way to run a presidency. He was the leader of the free world and this was the height of the Cold War." Sidey wrote nothing for publication, but did forward a note to his editors in New York for a weekly interoffice newsletter known as The Washington Memo; his note included lines, he told me, like "Not since the fall of Rome, et cetera." At another point in his note, Sidey quoted a caustic remark about the president's mother that was being passed around the bar before the New Year's Eve party by the White House press corps: Who was going to be Rose Kennedy's gigolo that night? Sidey thought the Memo was circulated only to employees of Time, but he learned later that the document, with its insider's gossip, was routinely provided to the magazine's advertisers.
Sometime in April, Sidey said, he was summoned to the Justice Department to meet with an angry Bobby Kennedy. "He had that memo I had written" over the New Year's holidays, Sidey said. "I made the mistake of making a little joke. It wasn't funny. He said, 'If this were Britain or someplace, we'd sue you for slander. This is the worst thing I've ever read, Sidey. I thought you were fair up till now.' I said, 'Bobby, I'm just reporting the feeling down there---what reporters are telling me.' It turned out that he was more upset about his mother than anything." The attorney general was more than a little distressed, Sidey told me: "He was shaking like a leaf." Sidey eventually apologized in a letter to Bobby Kennedy for bringing in Rose Kennedy's name. Sidey told me he later heard from John Seigenthaler, one of Bobby Kennedy's close aides, that "he'd never seen [Kennedy] so furious over anything, and he never thought he'd forgive me for it. And maybe he didn't."*
In May 1962 The Thunderbolt, a racist Alabama newsletter that called itself "The White Man's Viewpoint," published an account of the Kennedy-Malcolm marriage, based on Blauvelt's genealogy. Another racist publication, The Winrod Letter, printed in Arkansas, picked up the story a month later. In September the rumor reached the mainstream press. Parade magazine, a Sunday newspaper supplement with a huge audience, recycled the Blauvelt story in its widely read letters column, "Walter Scott's Personality Parade," written by Lloyd Shearer. The Shearer account cited Blauvelt's errors and stated that Kennedy and Malcolm were never married. But it also put the rumor into wide circulation.
The president turned to Ben Bradlee, who was in JFK's doghouse. Bradlee had made the mistake of being quoted in a Look magazine article, published in August, suggesting that Kennedy's relationship with the press was beginning to erode. It was "almost impossible to write a story they [Jack and Bobby] like," Bradlee told Look. "Even if a story is quite favorable to their side, they'll find one paragraph to quibble with." In a 1996 interview for this book, Bradlee said he was "dumb" to have spoken to the magazine---and to have told the truth. The president was in a snit. "God," Bradlee quoted him as exclaiming, "You guys! You get more out of this White House than anybody did and this is how you express your thanks." After that, Bradlee told me, "I didn't see him for two or three months. Didn't answer a phone call."
The impasse ended in September 1962 when Bradlee agreed, as Kennedy surely knew he would, to collaborate with the White House to debunk the Durie Malcolm marriage story once and for all. In Conversations with Kennedy, Bradlee depicted the renewed determination to prove the story false as his idea: "I felt Newsweek could be first with the story if we backed into it by writing about the hate sheets themselves ... I approached Salinger with the idea, but told him I would need some solid FBI documentation about the character of the organization and the people involved in spreading the Blauvelt story." Clark Clifford, in his memoir, had a contradictory account: "In order to 'control' the story, he invited his closest friend in
the press corps, Benjamin Bradlee, ... to print the story in the form of a false rumor revealed, denied, and hopefully buried. At the President's request, I recounted to Ben my involvement in the story."*
Bradlee, in his memoir, said that Pierre Salinger telephoned a few days later with "the following proposition: If I agreed to show the president the finished story, and if I got my tail up to Newport where he was vacationing, he would deliver a package of the relevant FBI documents to a Newport motel and let me have them ... I was not to indicate in any way that I had been given access to FBI files." After checking with the magazine's senior editors, Bradlee said, "we decided to go ahead, despite a reluctance to give anyone, even the president of the United States, the right of approval of anything we wrote."
There was another reason, as Bradlee also wrote: "I wanted to be friends again. I missed the access, of course, but I missed the laughter and the warmth just as much." In his interview with me, Bradlee described the FBI file as disappointing. "There were a couple of classified documents, not that many, but a couple," he said. "Mostly they were [newspaper] clips." He and a colleague "went up to some motel in Newport and we were given the documents at five o'clock and we gave them back at nine o'clock the next morning. I hadn't seen the president for a long time. And I walked in to show him the story at Newport and he said, 'Oh, hello.' Like that. He looked at the story and just gave it back to me."
Bradlee's story, published September 24, 1962, in Newsweek, debunked the rumors as well as the hate groups and gossip columnists who were continuing to spread them. There was praise for the newspapers and magazines that had refused to publish anything. "Scores of reporters, working independently before the story was ever publicly printed, have found no evidence to support Blauvelt's statement" as published in his genealogy, Bradlee wrote. "But irresponsible groups keep printing it to this day, thus putting the President into a position where he is damned if he denies the story and damned if he doesn't."
The Bradlee account quoted one of Blauvelt's relatives, not by name, as saying that the Malcolm entry was "just one colossal mistake. It was likely that the old man formed the idea in his head" after seeing a gossip column about the Kennedy-Malcolm friendship. "The family hadn't seen anyone famous for a long time." In a 1996 interview for this book, Sue Waite, Louis Blauvelt's granddaughter, took issue with the notion that Blauvelt, who died before Kennedy's election, was a sloppy researcher. "He was a history buff, and a member of the Genealogical Society of New York and the New York Historical Society," she said. He also was a veteran of the Spanish-American War who had a great respect for the presidency and "never would have wanted this to happen." The family had been contacted in 1961 by Pierre Salinger, she said, who asked them to review her grandfather's files. The fact that they found no evidence of the marriage in his files, as Salinger was told, did not mean that the family considered Louis Blauvelt to be wrong. Her own personal view, Waite said, was that Louis Blauvelt was probably right. But his evidence, whatever it was, no longer exists.
Bradlee's Newsweek story was reprinted in full by the Washington Post and cited in newspapers around the world. Time, in its account, added a categorical denial, her first, from the elusive Durie Malcolm; she was found vacationing with her husband, Thomas Shevlin, in Italy. "It's absolutely false and ridiculous," Mrs. Shevlin was quoted as saying. "I know the President's family well and have known him for a long time, and saw him years ago at Palm Beach and once went with him and his family to an Orange Bowl game in Miami. I've rarely seen him since."
The Bradlee story did its job, Clark Clifford noted in his memoir: "As the Kennedys had hoped, ... once the falsehood had been exposed to public light, it was reduced to a curious footnote to the Kennedy legend. I remain to this day convinced that the entire affair was nothing more than the result of an error made by an old man who was not careful in checking his facts."
Ben Bradlee found himself in good standing once again at the White House. His ostracism had been painful. "From regular contact," he wrote in Conversations with Kennedy,"---dinner at the White House once and sometimes twice a week, and telephone calls as needed in either direction---to no contact." "Maybe the exile is ending," he noted in an entry dated November 6, 1962. "Jackie invited Tony [Bradlee's wife] over to the White House to play tennis today, and then invited the children over for movies and supper. Just before leaving, the whole clan ... trooped down to the president's office, shouting, screaming, and licking lollipops." Three days later the Bradlees were invited to a dance and the president had a long discussion with Tony, Bradlee wrote, "about the difficulties of being friends with someone who is always putting everything he knows into a magazine. Everybody loves everybody again."
Jack and Jacqueline Kennedy had become close friends in the 1950s with a Georgetown neighbor, John Sherman Cooper, the distinguished Republican senator from Kentucky; the Kennedys enjoyed going to dinner and movies with Cooper and his second wife, Lorraine. The relationship continued into the White House, and Cooper, though a Republican, remained a trusted confidant. Lorraine Cooper, as few in Washington knew, was Thomas Shevlin's first wife. One evening, years after the assassination of Jack Kennedy, Maxine Cheshire, than a society reporter for the Washington Post, was at dinner at the Coopers'. "We were eating soft-shell crabs in her dining room in Georgetown," Cheshire said in a 1995 interview for this book, "and Lorraine told how Jack would laugh [at a dinner party] and say, 'Lorraine and I are related by marriage.' And then the two of them would die laughing, and nobody else knew what they were talking about."
* * *
*The minicrisis did not prevent the Kennedy brothers from going all out to get Marilyn Monroe to appear at a May 1962 Madison Square Garden rally in honor of the president's forty-fifth birthday. Monroe was then shooting Something's Got to Give for 20th Century-Fox; the film was over budget and far behind schedule, essentially because she repeatedly showed up late and unprepared. Milton Gould, by 1962 a highly regarded New York attorney, was asked that year to serve on the board of 20th Century-Fox and, he recalled in a 1995 interview for this book, "clean up the company." Gould decided the president would not get his way: he ordered Monroe to continue working on the film in Hollywood. Bobby Kennedy telephoned and asked Gould to waive his objections. "I said, 'Look, General, in no way can we do this. The lady has caused all kinds of trouble. We're way behind budget. I just can't.' 'Come on,' Bobby said." Gould continued to say no. At some point, Gould recounted, Kennedy "got very abusive. I said, 'Forget it, we're just not going to do it.' He called me 'a Jew bastard' and hung up the phone on me." Bobby Kennedy "never apologized" for his outburst, Gould said. Monroe defied Gould and flew to New York; her breathless rendition of "Happy Birthday" to her lover became one of the most widely remembered events of the Kennedy presidency. Hugh Sidey was assigned to the White House press pool that night and had a close-up look. "It was quite a sight to behold, and if I ever saw an appreciation of feminine beauty in the eyes of a man," Sidey told me, "it was in John F. Kennedy's eyes at that moment."
*Bradlee, who went on to fame as the Washington Post editor in charge of the paper's brilliant Watergate coverage in 1972, always seemed unclear about the crossover point between journalist, friend, and campaign adviser when it came to Jack Kennedy. In May 1959 Bradlee covered an early campaign speech by Lyndon Johnson in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and later wrote a personal letter to Kennedy about it. The letter is on file at the Kennedy Library. "My own response to Johnson is that ... he could never make it," Bradlee wrote. "The image is poor. The accent hurts. Even if we assume many people would say they have no prejudice against a southerner, the fact is that in this country the Texan is partly a comic, partly a horse opera figure ... Johnson really does not have the requisite dignity. His personal mannerisms are destructive of the dignified image. He's somebody's gabby cousin from Fort Worth ... None of it adds up to President ... Having seen him, I'm more convinced than ever that he's engaged in a hopeless effort from the viewpoint of advancing himself. That, for you
, is not the real danger ... What is to be feared is that he will come to Los Angeles with a block of 300 or more delegates and hold them off the market for three or four ballots ... If at the outset you are in a commanding position, this tactic will avail him nothing ... He's to be feared not as a potential winner but as a game-player who might try to maneuver you right out of the contest in Los Angeles." At the time, Jack Kennedy had not yet announced his candidacy for the White House. Bradlee himself recognized his ethical dilemma. "At issue, then and later," Bradlee added honestly in the opening chapter of his memoir, "was the question that plagued us both: What, in fact, was I? A friend, or a journalist? I wanted to be both. And whereas I think Kennedy valued my friendship---I made him laugh, I brought him the fruits of contact with an outside world from which he was now shut out---he valued my journalism most when it carried his water."
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MISSILE CRISIS
John F. Kennedy's greatest triumph as president came in the missile crisis of October 1962, when, as the world watched in fear, the United States and the Soviet Union moved to the edge of nuclear war. Nikita Khrushchev had been caught in the act of arming Fidel Castro with Soviet nuclear missiles and, confronted by the steely young American president, backed down and agreed to take them out. "We're eyeball to eyeball," Secretary of State Dean Rusk said at a meeting to deal with the crisis, "and I think the other fellow just blinked." The quotation, cited all over the world, seemed to summarize the American victory. Jack Kennedy, in discussing Khrushchev with his friends, had his own summary: "I cut his balls off."
The Dark Side of Camelot Page 40