Conversations with Kennedy, page 3
After dinner, in a relaxed and mischievous mood, Kennedy turned to Walton and me and said, “Okay, I’ll give each one of you guys one appointment, one job to fill. What will it be?” Walton spoke up first and told Kennedy he should replace J. Edgar Hoover, by then head of the FBI for more than thirty-six years. I had been growingly concerned about the lack of responsible oversight of the CIA, based on my experience as a foreign correspondent, and so my suggested appointment was a new CIA head to replace Allen Dulles, who had run the agency since 1953 and was the “godfather” of the American intelligence community.
Next morning, I was back in the Kennedy compound in Hyannisport to start work on Newsweek’s next cover story, “Robert F. Kennedy … The New Man to See in Washington.” I was waiting in a small room in Bob Kennedy’s house, only to learn that in the next room John Kennedy was meeting with his most intimate advisors, already at work on the transition period. Suddenly, John Kennedy’s friend and campaign worker, Lem Billings, came out in the hall. I heard him pick up the phone and say: “Operator, the president-elect would like to place two calls urgently. One to Mr. J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI and one to Mr. Allen Dulles at the CIA.” The next voice I heard was Kennedy’s, and he was telling J. Edgar Hoover how much he wanted him, was counting on him, to stay on during the Kennedy administration. Laid it on a bit thick, I thought. A few minutes later, the whole scene was repeated with Allen Dulles. Thus ended my career as a presidential consultant. Kennedy’s offer and Walton’s and my suggestions were made in jest, of course, but I never once recommended anyone to Kennedy after that, in or out of jest.
Only once was I asked to recommend someone to Kennedy for a job. The request came from James Angleton, a friend who held a top position in the Dirty Tricks department of the CIA and who was fired from the agency years later, during the fuss about CIA involvement in domestic intelligence. He called me—from a telephone booth, as is Jim’s wont—to arrange lunch with all the trimmings at the Rive Gauche restaurant, then one of the favorite hangouts of CIA executives. The man he was recommending—I could hardly believe my ears—was Cord Meyer, Jr., an old friend, once married to my sister-in-law,* and the job he urged me to propose to Kennedy for Cord was ambassador to Guatemala. The request was extraordinary for three reasons: first, this was only months after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, where the CIA had led Kennedy down the garden path to disaster, and Guatemala was one of the countries where the CIA had trained anti-Castro Cubans for their deaths; second, although I had long known Meyer, and admired him enormously when he was working for the American Veterans’ Committee and for World Federalism after returning much decorated from the war, our relations had become strained as a result of my decision to be a journalist and his derisive scorn of the people’s right to know; and finally, Kennedy did not like Meyer. Apparently when Meyer was Harold Stassen’s aide at the San Francisco U.N. organizing conference in 1945, Kennedy had tried to interview Meyer—unsuccessfully. He, too, had fallen victim, but permanantly, to the philosophy of “Don’t get mad; get even.” I never relayed Angleton’s suggestion.
Another vivid memory involves my son Dino, then about to be two. It was Thanksgiving Day, 1960, and Tony and Jackie were in different hospitals having Marina Bradlee† and John Kennedy, Jr. Kennedy had been elected a few weeks earlier, but not yet inaugurated. N Street in Georgetown was a mess, cordoned off for sightseers and the reporters who kept a permanent watch from various neighborhood houses. And Kennedy asked me if I would like to bring Dino and join him and Caroline for a drive to Virginia and tea with his mother-in-law, Mrs. Hugh D. Auchincloss. I would—despite Dino’s appearance. The day before, Dino had taken a swan dive from the top rung of the jungle gym onto the cement of Hyde playground, ending up in the emergency room of Georgetown Hospital for stitches on his forehead. The only coat I could find for him on this cold autumn day was the coat in which he had swanned, covered with blood. I didn’t give it much thought as we walked the few feet from our house to his, until the reporters and TV cameramen suddenly surged toward us—toward Dino, really, seeing a pretty good “photographic opportunity” for a slow holiday in the president-elect and his immaculately dressed daughter tooling off in a Secret Service limousine with me and my bloody, grubby, motherless child. Kennedy relished the prospect of a meeting between Dino, looking the way he did, and the formal Mrs. Auchincloss at a formal tea in the formal halls of Merrywood. During the twenty-minute ride, Dino must have crawled between the front and back seats at least twenty times, his feet and hands striking out blindly, and Kennedy couldn’t take his eyes off him. “Well, I suppose if you could have only one thing,” he said, “it would be that—energy. Without it, you haven’t got a thing.”
A few days before Thanksgiving, the Kennedys had helped us out of a serious jam, involving the birth of Marina, with the world’s most highly qualified babysitter. Tony had had five previous children with exactly thirty minutes’ warning each. I had carefully practiced the drive from N Street to the Washington Hospital Center, and had it down to a tough twenty minutes. When the magic moment came at 10:00 P.M. the night of November 23, I had ten minutes to spare—and no sitter. We had a Dutch girl living in with us that year, but she was in night school and never got home before midnight. In desperation I called Jackie and asked if her maid, Provie (Providencia Paredes), whom the children knew, might be available. Provie had left for parts unknown a few minutes before. I was just about to abandon the children, when the president-elect called to ask if it were really an emergency. “You’re goddamn right, it’s an emergency,” I said. “I’ve got about a minute and a half right now, if I’m lucky.” Kennedy said that maybe he could send one of his Secret Service agents around to watch the kids, and I could only mutter “Please,” weakly, before I had to hang up and rush to the hospital. We made it with only a minute or so to spare, and when I got home long after midnight, there was Andy, age ten, sitting totally absorbed on the floor, watching a Secret Service agent* take his .45 caliber pistol apart and put it together again for the umpteenth time. It was the only time to my knowledge that I accepted free service from the United States government—at least until I rode free in a helicopter in Vietnam.
Sidewalk press conferences by the president-elect on the stoop in front of his house were common occurrences in the cold of November and December, 1960. Reporters damn near froze on the street between these conferences, and occasionally men like Al Otten of the Wall Street Journal and the late Bill Lawrence of the New York Times and ABC would drop in on us to use the john or the phone, or partake of spiritual refreshment. Lawrence once ordered up a very dry double martini in the dead of night, and we sent my stepdaughter Nancy Pittman, then age nine, in wrapper and slippers, down with it, telling her to give it to the funny-looking man with the Russian caracul hat.
One sidewalk press conference that made all the history books but that never in fact occurred involved Kennedy’s determination to name his brother attorney general. When I learned it was in the offing, I asked Kennedy how he intended to make the sensitive announcement. “Well,” he said,, “I think I’ll open the front door of the Georgetown house some morning about 2:00 A.M., look up and down the street, and if there’s no one there, I’ll whisper ‘It’s Bobby.’”
Two other incidents on N Street are still vivid in my mind, so many years later. The first occurred on January 24, the first Sunday morning after Kennedy became president. It was about eleven o’clock. Tony was changing diapers, and if the truth will out, I was in the bathroom, when Dino came running upstairs, mumbling something about “president” and “downstairs” and “lot of people.” At that time in his young life, just over two years old, we had noticed he was prone to exaggeration, to say the least, and we had often lectured him on the subject. This looked like the time for another lecture, and I was just about to start when I looked out the bathroom window and saw a large crowd. Just at this moment we heard that familiar voice shout upstairs: “Isn’t there anybody in this house who is going to greet the president of the United States?” He had not even rung the bell, and I suppose, if we had thought of it at all, we had assumed that any visit to our house by the president would have involved more planning or ceremony.
Kennedy had relished the preparations for the pomp and circumstance of his inauguration, and liked to be teased about the fact that he so obviously did relish it. The perfect tease came from a classic typo in an early edition of the Boston Globe, announcing that Richard Cardinal Cushing would deliver the invocation when Kennedy was sworn in as the thirty-fifth president of the United States.
“Richard Cardinal Cushing today accepted the invitation,” the Globe story read, “to deliver the invocation at the inauguration of Saint John Kennedy as President of the United States.” We called him Saint John for a few days after that.
One future visit—the only other time Kennedy ever visited our house—sure as hell did involve planning and ceremony. I had asked the future president a long time earlier for only one favor—that he and Jackie come to dinner one night to meet my father and mother, and they did, a few weeks after they were in the White House. My father was a wonderful, strong, and witty man, but he was a lifelong Republican, as were all Bradlees since my great-great-grandfather and namesake, Benjamin Williams Crowninshield, ran for Congress from Salem, Massachusetts—and lost to my great-great-granduncle, Rufus Choate. The first political anecdote I ever heard in our family concerned my cousin Frank Crowninshield (known as “Bad Frank” to distinguish him from “Good Frank” Crowninshield, the founder and editor of Vanity Fair magazine). It seems that in the mid-thirties Bad Frank literally had a pain in the ass of sufficient discomfort to require an X-ray. Just as the machine was lowered into position over his posterior, so the story went endlessly, Bad Frank turned to the X-ray technician and told her: “Make it a good likeness, nurse, so that I can send it to that goddamn fool in the White House.”
My father had known Joe Kennedy very slightly, first when the future ambassador to the Court of St. James was coaching the Harvard freshman baseball team, and later when my father was working for thirty-five dollars a month as a secretary to the president of a bank with whom Kennedy senior had business. My father had been fascinated by all my stories about Jack Kennedy, and since he couldn’t stand Mr. Nixon, it looked very much as if he were going to throw caution and tradition to the winds and vote for a Democrat—as he did. The day the Kennedys came to dinner, it snowed like hell, and I stayed home from work for a few hours to shovel off a small section of the sidewalk. It didn’t seem right somehow to let the president and the first lady slosh through the snow. While I was breaking my back, I noticed three guys across the street, leaning on their shovels, just hanging around watching me. Of course, when I was finished, they moved across and shoveled our sidewalk for thirty feet on either side of the house. They had been sent by Captain Kennedy of Number Seven Precinct, who in turn had been alerted by the Secret Service. Captain Kennedy and Secret Service types arrived a few minutes later, asking for more information than we had about the guests (Harry Labouisse, who was being considered for some job in the Kennedy administration, and his wife, the former Eve Curie; and Walter and Helen Lippmann, old friends of my parents) and the people helping Tony in the kitchen, especially the redoubtable Mary Booten, who had been with us since we returned to Washington from Paris.
I can remember only two things about the dinner. First, my old man didn’t have too many martinis before dinner, which he had been known to have; and Kennedy made us tell the story about how we had been unable for two years to get our daughter, Nancy, accepted into some posh dancing class, despite references that had included Mrs. Borden Harriman, Mrs. Gifford Pinchot, and a host of other acceptables. Kennedy loved that story, because in Boston, he said, people like the Bradlees had kept people like the Kennedys out of many more significant institutions than dancing classes. At the end of the story, he turned to my father and said, “If that had happened to Dad, he would have moved the whole family out of Boston.”
In the First Hundred Days, we were seeing the Kennedys occasionally with some regularity, except for the time around the Bay of Pigs disaster, and Kennedy and I would talk occasionally on the telephone. Gone were the regular Saturday morning telephone calls, which he used to make to me in my office before he assumed the presidency, checking on next week’s Periscope items, and ready to share gossip if an urgent, last-minute call for better items had come from Newsweek in New York, as it so often did Saturday mornings.
When we did talk, Kennedy more often than not was preoccupied with foreign affairs, particularly Laos and Cuba. During his campaign, Kennedy had not stressed foreign affairs for several reasons. First, it was not his particular field of expertise, and Nixon was claiming foreign affairs as his own best bailiwick. Second, there were not all that many foreign policy issues kicking around. Quemoy and Matsu was perhaps the major foreign policy problem. Planning for the invasion of Cuba was well under way, but Kennedy didn’t learn about it until after he was elected, and Nixon couldn’t bring it up during the campaign. But after Kennedy had been in office four months, forces pushed his nose into foreign policy issues, particularly that mixture of foreign policy and military issues that ultimately forced Lyndon Johnson to leave the White House.
“In the entire first (FDR) Roosevelt campaign,” the president told me at this time, “foreign affairs were mentioned only once, and then in one paragraph of one speech on the last day of the campaign.” But on the anniversary of the first First Hundred Days, Kennedy expressed concern about the national capacity to solve problems like Laos and Cuba, which he had not defined in his campaign. “We can prevent one nation’s army from moving across the border of another nation,” he said. “We are strong enough for that. And we are probably strong enough to prevent one nation from unleashing nuclear weapons on another. But we can’t prevent infiltration, assassination, sabotage, bribery, any of the weapons of guerrilla warfare.” Kennedy said he had learned a new, and discouraging, math: “One guerrilla can pin down twelve conventional soldiers, and we’ve got nothing equivalent.” He spoke to me several times of “the six or seven thousand guerrillas” poised in North Vietnam, ready, willing, and able to present him with his next foreign crisis.
The Bay of Pigs shook his confidence—almost beyond repair—in the CIA and in the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Right after the fiasco, and after he had quickly accepted responsibility, he was philosophical. “Presumably,” he said, “I was going to learn these lessons some time, and maybe better sooner, than later.”
Cuba taught him something else, which was probably more significant in the long run: that elevation to this high office inhibited the free-flowing informality between President Kennedy and his associates in a way that it never did between Senator Kennedy and his associates. He made this point one night by telling how he once asked Dave Powers during the campaign in some jerkwater hotel to hand him his shoes. “Get them yourself, damn it,” the president quoted Powers as replying. “You’re not my commander-in-chief yet.” Jackie weighed in with another story about “Mugsy” O’Leary, another Last Hurrah type from Boston, who cut a considerable swath through Georgetown as the Kennedys’ chauffeur. Jackie said she had been dawdling around one day, late for an appointment to meet her husband somewhere, when Mugsy had shouted to her: “Come on, Jackie, for Chrissake move your ass.” Old “Mugs” wouldn’t be putting it so bluntly now, we all agreed.
* The most dramatic decision of this kind in my knowledge was thrust on Richard Harwood, then a Washington Post reporter, now editor of the Trenton, N.J., Times, in June of 1968, when he held the dying Robert Kennedy in his arms on the floor of the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Harwood had been assigned to cover Kennedy by me (perhaps because I knew something about the charm of politicians in general, and of Kennedys in particular) since he had been outspokenly skeptical of Bobby. But they had become friends. As Dick told it months later, “I looked down at that poor man with his head on my lap, and for thirty seconds I wondered, ‘What the hell am I—a friend or a reporter?’” At the end of those agonizing seconds, Harwood called his office, his decision made in favor of journalism.
* I did have my troubles with Robert F. Kennedy, notably in early 1964. One day I spent sixteen hours seated next to him, lined yellow pad on my lap and pencil flashing, starting in the gray of the morning at his home, flying to Kansas City and points west to dedicate a Catholic home for the aged, and ending up in New York City well after dark. The upshot of this day was a story under my byline in Newsweek saying that Bobby Kennedy wanted to be Lyndon Johnson’s vice-president, which he did and which he said he did. The story made a lot of ink flow as the French say until President Johnson ruled out his entire cabinet as potential vice-presidents, thus manufacturing a formal excuse for not naming Bobby. When the story appeared in Newsweek, Kennedy’s press secretary, Ed Guthman, first denied the story, claiming that I had not even seen Bobby. Later, in that most castrating of journalistic put-downs, he admitted we had seen each other, but claimed the whole conversation was off the record, which it was not. Later I came to have the greatest respect for Bobby Kennedy’s commitment and compassion and ability.
