Conversations with Kennedy, page 16
When we arrived, each of us went to small individual cabins. Ours was “Maple,” with a living room, one very small bedroom, one large bedroom and two baths. We rallied ten minutes later in front of the main lodge, and Kennedy drove us all to a skeet shooting range near the heliport. The president shot first, and he was as lousy as we all turned out to be. He hit about four of the first twenty, but no one else did much better. Niven made us all laugh as he explained his theory that the entire secret of skeet shooting was in the voice one used to order up the clay pigeons. Whereupon he would whisper “High Tower, pull” … and miss, then shout “Low Tower, pull,” and miss again.
We then went for a swim in the pool, heated, of course. The president gave his bathing trunks to Niven and went in in his skivvies. He wore his back brace, even for the short walk from the dressing room to the pool. His back had been giving him real trouble, he admitted but was almost “miraculously better” last night and today. Jackie told us that she had asked Dr. Janet Travell, the back wizard, for some shot that would take Kennedy’s back pain away, if only just for the birthday party. She had said there was such a shot, but it would remove all feeling below the waist. “We can’t have that, can we, Jacqueline?” the president had ruled. The president said Dr. Travell had been great for him, until this particular pain, which she had been unable to cure.
During the swim, just Kennedy, Niven, and myself, the president ranged over a wide variety of subjects: political giving, the Olympics, and yachting among them. He remarked that the only people who really gave during political campaigns now were Jews. This reminded him that Hugh Auchincloss, his wife’s stepfather, had been approached for a political donation in 1960. His “gift,” the president said with ill-disguised feeling, was a promise not to give any money to the Republicans this year, as he did normally. “Eventually the old boy came up with a magnificent 500 bucks,” he added. Dick Dilworth (Richardson K. Dilworth, mayor of Philadelphia) had once asked his old friend, Harold Vanderbilt, for a contribution when he ran for governor of Pennsylvania, Kennedy told us, and he, too, had come away with a whopping $500.
The president said he looked forward to the day when the government would give each candidate ten million dollars and leave it at that. “I spent thirteen million dollars in 1960,” he revealed, and ended up with a huge deficit. “If the government gave you ten million dollars, you could spend that and then go out and raise another ten or twenty.” As high on the hog as we were currently sitting, the conversation had a heavy dose of the unreal.
Harold Vanderbilt’s name led Kennedy to a discussion of yachting, particularly how impressed he had been by the fact that the Soviets had won the Star class races in the last Olympics, even though they had raced them for only a few years. And this reminded him of a story about how the New York Yacht Club had forced the resignation of some British lord who had falsely charged the Americans with illegally ballasting its candidate in the America’s Cup races.
After the swim, with the Nivens not yet present, the four of us got on the subject of a guest at the birthday party last night (who shall here be nameless), who had told Jackie and Tony that he had not slept with his wife for the last sixteen years. This kind of dirt the president of the United States can listen to all day long.
We adjourned for Bloody Marys on the terrace, which overlooks a sloping lawn and a valley that extends forever southward. All the presents rescued from the rain and rumpus of the night before had been piled around the president’s chair for him to open. The lovely old engraving, punctured by Clem Norton’s clodhoppers and really ruined, was the only low point of the festivity. Kennedy seemed not to understand that it had been ruined the night before. He simply put it to one side, saying “That’s too bad, isn’t it, Jackie?” and moved on to the next present. Jackie was almost as unemotional about what would have been, we felt, a disaster to most people. They both so rarely show any emotion, except by laughter.
The president’s presents varied all the way from beautiful, expensively bound books to the junkiest presents sent to the White House by strangers last week, and specially culled by Jackie for his pleasure. The hands-down junkiest was a giant pop art picture of the president printed on an ordinary bed sheet. The present he seemed to like the most was a scrapbook from Ethel, which was a parody of the White House tours with their own Hickory Hill madhouse substituted for the White House. Kennedy ripped the wrappings of his presents with the speed and attention of a four-year-old child, only to cast each aside and start unwrapping the next one.
After lunch, the president retired for his ritual nap and Niven and I played golf on the front lawn. There is one green, with four or five tees tucked into different parts of the surrounding woods. Then we joined his wife, Jackie, and Tony, who were working on yet another bottle of Soave. The Nivens had to leave at 4:00 P.M., and we drove them down to the heliport to see them off.
Back in the main lodge Kennedy was up, and we went for another swim. After the swim, cocktails; after cocktails, dinner; and then after dinner instead of spending the night as planned, the president announced he had to return, and we all flew back to Washington.
“If the Russians want to build Skybolt, good luck to them”
JULY 6, 1963 / I called the president this morning and reached him in Hyannisport, the first time we had talked since he had returned from his trip to Germany, Ireland, Britain, and Italy. He said he wished we had been in Ireland, but he talked only briefly about his trip. I had spent the Fourth of July holiday in the slums of the south side of Chicago polling with Lou Harris, and told Kennedy all about it, at his insistence, as usual.
I asked him if he could shed any light on reports we were hearing of a “megaton” scandal brewing in Great Britain, but got nowhere. I told him we had heard that plans for the Skybolt missile left by Bob McNamara in December with the British had found their way to the Soviets. The president’s only comment was “If the Russians want to build Skybolt, good luck to them.” Otherwise he had nothing to add or detract from the story.
I also asked him for a little “guidance” on a story by Walter Trohan of the Chicago Tribune and Mark Childs that he and Khrushchev had exchanged some forty secret letters. “That’s a lot of crap,” Kennedy replied quickly, but I’m not so sure Trohan and Childs aren’t at least technically correct. The president said that since the first of the year (1963) there had been maybe four or five or six letters. There had been five or six involved in Cuba alone, the previous year. The existence of all the letters, he thought, was public knowledge, even though the contents might not be public. And he said there was nothing startling in any of them that still might be secret. But later the president said that if by forty letters people meant twenty separate exchanges, and if routine greetings and congratulations were included, it was possible that the figure forty was “pretty accurate.”
“You could carry Bombay the way you carry Boston”
SEPTEMBER 12, 1963 / We went to Newport with the Kennedys for a long weekend today, flying up in Air Force One in his luxurious private compartment. Air Force sergeants stand ready to bring you anything you want to drink or eat, the latest copies of all magazines, and every edition of several papers. Claiborne Pell (the senator from Rhode Island) and the two Rhode Island congressmen rode up front with the Secret Service. The president arrived thirteen minutes late, timidly carrying a felt hat. I had never seen him wear a hat, but he told us “I’ve got to carry one for a while … they tell me I’m killing the industry.”
On the way up Taz Shepard slipped him papers from a large black folder, and the president slipped me a few here and there. One was a letter from Chester Bowles, never a particular favorite of JFK’s, who had been under secretary of state and was now the American ambassador to India. (Kennedy had once told me a story, with relish, about Bobby and Chet Bowles. It appears that Bobby had heard Bowles quoted as saying he wasn’t sure he was with the administration in their handling of the early days of the Cuban missile crisis. When they next met, Bobby went over to Bowles, grabbed him by the coat collar and said “I want you to know something. You’re with us in this all the way, right?” It had apparently been tense.) Bowles was reporting on a poll taken in New Delhi by an organization friendly to V. K. Krishna Menon, India’s minister of defense, and therefore not particularly friendly to the United States. The poll showed that 43 percent of those polled felt that the U.S. was the country they most admired, with 13 percent for the United Kingdom and 11 percent for Japan and the Soviet Union. Another poll showed that 37 percent of those polled said Kennedy was the man they most admired, compared to only 33 percent for Nehru and 8 percent for Khrushchev. “You could carry Bombay the way you carry Boston,” Bowles concluded. “You can use that one anytime, Beniy,” Kennedy said generously.
Another letter was from Seymour Harris, a professor of political economics at Harvard, to Kermit Gordon, Kennedy’s budget bureau director, suggesting that the government examine its expenditures on the basis of the number of jobs created per dollar spent. Some expenditures of billions create comparatively few jobs, Harris was saying, while other expenditures of only a few hundred million create many more jobs. (Newsweek made small stories out of both of these letters.)
We arrived at Quonset Naval Air Station, where Kennedy warned us as he got up to leave the plane that he had a “little toe dance to do” with Rhode Island’s Republican governor, John Chafee, who was meeting the president at the airport. He suggested we go right to the helicopter waiting to take us to Newport, which we did, and when he joined us he was steaming at Chafee. First, because he had given the Kennedys a rather tacky, uninscribed, unadorned silver-plated bowl for an anniversary present, for this was the Kennedys’ tenth wedding anniversary; and second, for making him go through the entire welcoming ceremony, speeches and all, twice. The TV cameraman had been accidentally shut out of the first ceremony. “Boy, he learns fast,” the president said to us and to Pell. “I didn’t have that much brass until I’d been in Congress five years … pushing a president around like that.” All weekend the president steamed about the incident, and kept trying to think of diabolical ways to get even, or “put him in his place.”
The helicopter took off in a dark overcast for the jump across the bay. Halfway across, the president spotted the crew of a carrier lined up at attention along the deck, presumably in his honor, and asked the chopper pilot to circle low over the carrier to show that he was aware and appreciative of their respect. The Navy has a special hold on him, irrespective of his rank as commander-in-chief. We landed on the lawn of Hammersmith Farm, in a scene that was half space-age pomp and half Wuthering Heights. The wind whistled from the helicopter blades, but the light was the dark yellow light of a New England fall evening, and that great barn of a house could have been brought over intact from a Brontë moor. This was the first time we had seen Jackie since the death of little Patrick, and she greeted JFK with by far the most affectionate embrace we had ever seen them give each other. They are not normally demonstrative people, period.
As we sorted ourselves out in the main hall, the president offered the tacky silver bowl he had just received from Governor Chafee to his mother-in-law, saying that he had long wanted to give her a token of his undying affection. Mrs. Auchincloss cooed like a Helen Hokinson dove, completely convinced that Kennedy was serious … even when she gazed in dismay at the bowl itself.
Presents—anniversary presents this time—were opened at cocktails before dinner with the Kennedys, the Auchinclosses, Jackie’s stepbrother and sister, Yusha and Janet Auchincloss, Sylvia Blake, the Newport wife of Bob Blake, a foreign service officer then stationed in the Congo, and ourselves. We gave them a pair of antique tole trays—fifty bucks worth—which Jackie seemed to like but which left the president comfortably cool, we felt. The Auchinclosses gave them a fancy metal tree which held a lot of candles. Sylvia Blake gave them some place mats with ships on them, and Yusha gave them some books, but the pièces de résistance were their presents to each other.
Kennedy produced as his present to Jackie a letter from Klejman (J. J. Klejman, the New York antiquities dealer) listing all the unique antiques he had in stock, with a description (and price) for each, telling his wife that she could have any one she wanted. None cost less than $1,000, and though he didn’t read out the prices as he read the descriptions, he would whisper to us “Got to steer her away from that one” as he came to those that were particularly expensive. There were some Dégas and Fragonard drawings, but mostly there were pre-Christian statues and Etruscan objets d’art from the second century B.C., an Egyptian head, two necklaces, a Thai bracelet. She finally chose a simple coiled serpent bracelet.
Jackie gave the president a scrapbook of before and after pictures of the Rose Garden at the White House. On each page there was a picture of what the garden had looked like that day, plus a thermofax copy of his schedule that day, plus a quotation in her own handwriting, often from Joe Alsop’s landmark column on gardening,* and occasionally a press headline. The president read all the quotations aloud, pausing to admire Joe’s ornate prose. He relished notable writing, and has ever since he started collecting examples of good prose and putting them in a bound book, which he was still doing when he started running for president.
Dinner was on the dicey side. Jackie’s stepfather is not exactly a swinger, and the toasts were pretty much in his image. We were high on the hog again, with much wine, caviar, and champagne, but we all went to bed soon after dinner. Just before we retired Jackie drew me aside, her eyes glistening near tears, to announce that “you two really are our best friends.” It was a forlorn remark, almost like a lost and lonely child desperately in need of any kind of friend. She repeated the message a couple of times to Tony during the weekend, citing particularly our letters to them about the baby’s death. I had forgotten what I had written—it had been a bad summer for our friends, with Patrick’s death and the sudden, jolting suicide of Phil Graham, whose light finally burned too bright and destroyed him—but Jackie said it was a description of an instant of love we had seen between a father and a small baby, parting in Naples. They are the most remote and independent people we know most of the time, and so when their emotions do surface it is especially moving.
The next day we went out for a cruise late in the morning. Kennedy would occasionally check large ships that we passed to see if they had collected the crew at attention to pay him proper respect. The biggest yacht any of us had ever seen let us pass unnoticed, and the president insisted on knowing the name of the ship and the name of its owner, and with mock indignation the president vowed to “get him.” Unfortunately, the captain of our ship was unable to identify the owner. (But the president got a report from his naval aide later that night. The ship belonged to Daniel K. Ludwig, the enormously rich shipbuilder.)
The president and I played golf one afternoon at the Newport Country Club, and this is always a harrowing experience for me. In the first place, if you play golf with a president you are apt to play at some fancy country club whose code of dress requires clothes that I do not have in my wardrobe … like golf shoes, for openers. As a result I hit off the first tee in old sneakers, and I feel like three down before I hit a shot. In the second place, if you play golf with a president you are dead sure to be watched by a crowd of people who either play golf better than you do and therefore you know they’re going to laugh when you shank the ball, or line the roads and shout to be recognized by your partner. In any case, that’s another two down. In the third place, there are Secret Service men all around you, carrying guns in dummy golf bags, and that doesn’t do anything for your game. And finally, if you play golf with this president, his patience is so limited that you can never stop to look for a lost ball, and that doesn’t suit my game at all.*
But Kennedy is fun to play golf with, once you get out of sight of the sightseers, primarily because he doesn’t take the game seriously and keeps up a running conversation. If he shanks one into the drink, he could let go with a broad-A “bahstard,” but he would be teeing up his next shot instantly. With his opponent comfortably home in two and facing a tough approach, he might say “No profile needed here, just courage,” a self-deprecating reference to his book Profiles in Courage. When he was losing, he would play the old warrior at the end of a brilliant career, asking only that his faithful caddy point him in the right direction, and let instinct take over. He could play TV golf commentator as he hits the ball, saying, “With barely a glance at the packed gallery, he whips out a four iron and slaps it dead to the pin.” He is competitive as hell, with a natural swing, but erratic through lack of steady play.
Jackie once gave the president a golf course for his birthday. It was at Glen Ora, the estate of Mrs. Raymond Tartière which they used as a weekend retreat during 1961 and 1962. It consisted of about 9,000 square yards of pasture, filled with small hills, big rocks, and even a swamp, quickly dubbed “the water hole” by Kennedy. Jackie persuaded a hunt-country friend to reduce the wiry grass from about sixteen inches to four inches with a bush hog and in each corner of the pasture they cut small plots down to two inches. These are both the tees and the greens, which require a five iron instead of a putter to negotiate.
I played on this “golf course” with the president when he shot the course record, a thirty-seven for four holes. “It was a pasture for a hundred years,” he said, “and it still is.”
On this day I teed up trembling at unheard snickers, but managed to hit the longest, straightest goddamn drive of my life (“Jesus, Benjy,” the president said, “I never saw anyone hit a ball that far on this hole. You must be hungry”), but it was so far I couldn’t find it and Kennedy wouldn’t help me look for it. So I lost the first hole. Later in the round I actually sank a five iron, but instead of pausing to relish and to be congratulated (even cheered by the people lining the road?), the president simply picked up his ball and raced to the next tee. It really isn’t fair.
