Conversations with Kennedy, page 5
On the subject of the dance, he rated it the best of the three to date, and solicited suggestions for an occasion to hold another one fairly soon. He thought Bobby and Ethel might be good guests of honor, when they return from their trip around the Far East. Jackie, he said, felt they perhaps should wait until the spring, and he sounded disappointed.
The conversation ended, as these conversations often ended, with his views on some of the women present—the overall appeal of the daughter of Prince Paul of Yugoslavia and Mary Meyer. “Mary would be rough to live with,” Kennedy noted, not for the first time. And I agreed, not for the first time.
* Murphy, an editor of Fortune who was a bright star in Henry Luce’s conglomerate firmament, had written about the question of to resume or not to resume nuclear testing, had come out plainly for resumption and claimed that Kennedy had fallen into a trap by proposing “one last effort” at bringing off a nuclear treaty with the Soviet Union in the closing days of his presidential campaign.
“The Jackie Kennedy Show”
FEBRUARY 14, 1962 / We watched “The Jackie Kennedy Show” after dinner at the White House, a one-hour CBS special, produced at a cost of $255,990 and watched by an estimated 46,000,000 people. Jackie used a script only when describing some very old prints, as she strolled from one room to another, describing gifts and remembering donors. “Television at its best,” said the Chicago Daily News. “A remarkable job,” said the show’s host, Charles Collingwood. The only other guests at dinner were Max Freedman, the distinguished American correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, who had been caught by bad weather in New York and made dinner only after a $100 cab ride from LaGuardia airport, and Mrs. John Randolph (“Fifi”) Fell, a New York and Long Island hostess. Jackie had brought Caroline to our house to play with our children that afternoon … nurse Maud Shaw’s day off.
At cocktails the president was in a garrulous and acerbic mood, rehashing the dance again. He was particularly irritated at a man called Watson Blair, a New York businessman, who had glowered from the dance floor sidelines all night, telling everyone he was having a miserable time. Fifi Fell asked if she could bring Blair any message, and the president said, “Damn right. Tell him he’s on the list and not to worry: he won’t be asked again.” Peter Duchin, jet-set bandleader, son of pianist Eddy Duchin, also made the list for behavior the president considered less than acceptable. He, too, had apparently been critical of something. But there was much upbeat reminiscing, too—Phil Graham’s “twist,” which had produced a six-inch rip in the seat of his pants as he took his first lesson in the new dance craze from Tony … the very proper “twists” performed by Jackie with “the Guv” (Averell Harriman) and Bob McNamara … the stable of pretty women from New York, and of course the drama involved in the Powers-Abel swap.
The president couldn’t resist bringing up the Post’s exclusive with that understatement that was so typical of his humor. Over cocktails he turned to me out of the blue and said, “By the way, who do you work for, anyway?” I wasn’t about to admit anything, and it developed that I didn’t have to. “Are you making any charges?” I asked. “No,” he smiled. “Do you have any statement that you want to make?” And I said simply, “Not at this time,” not knowing how sore he was, if in fact he was sore at all. He then said he was about to order an investigation of that leak, but thought it over for twenty-four hours and came to the conclusion that he didn’t have to.
“Plucky* gets such a kick out of tracing these leaks back to me,” the president said. “I have to be more careful.” I then asked him if he was referring to the leak on the Cuban embargo. He smiled and said, “That’s one of them.” The president later told me he had blown his stack about the premature release of that story and ordered Salinger to spare no effort in finding out who leaked it. Salinger worked like the investigative reporter he used to be for two days, and finally reported back to the president that he was pleased to be able to announce he had traced the leak. “Who was it?” the president asked, eagerly. “You,” said Salinger, gleefully. “What do you mean?” Kennedy asked, crestfallen. “Didn’t you tell George Smathers (a senator from Florida and an old Kennedy pal in their bachelor days)?” Salinger asked. Kennedy nodded. “Well, George told a friend of his on the Tampa Tribune and that was that,” Salinger said.
The gifts that King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia had left the Kennedys that afternoon were piled on a table in the yellow Oval Room upstairs: a couple of suitcases full of some kind of filmy flowered material, and some clothes. The clothes were hard to believe: a small jacket for young John, the kind that sells for four bucks at Sears, and some pullover jackets that appeared to be made of thin camel hair … all of them inside out, apparently to prove that they had never been worn before. The president obviously felt that the relief map of the United States he had given Ibn Saud was a substantially better gift.
After dinner we moved into a small sitting room next to the Lincoln Room to watch Jackie on the show that had been taped a month earlier. There had been a lot of talk at dinner about how good CBS was, what a good director they had in Frank Schaffner, but ironically the president’s TV set wouldn’t bring in the CBS channel, and we watched the show on NBC, and we watched it in virtual silence. We were all impressed with Jackie’s knowledge and poise. She had really thrown herself into the refurbishing of the White House with an energy and ability that had never been used before.* There was one snicker when Collingwood broke off some bromide about how important the past was for the future. And there was movement in the small crowd when the president himself appeared—in what could at best be called a minor role. He was obviously not particularly pleased with that role or his performance in it, and Tony went so far as to say later that she felt the president was actually jealous of Jackie’s performance and the attention she got as a result. As soon as the broadcast was over, the telephone started ringing, with Tony answering. (This was quite common at the Kennedy White House—to have guests answer the phone.) One call was from Charlie Bartlett, a newspaper columnist, who was one of Kennedy’s oldest friends, and the man who had introduced him to Jackie. The president quoted him as saying that he had “cried during the whole performance,” and went on to say, “Yeah, and I cried too, over my performance.” Another call was from his sister, Eunice Shriver, who first talked to Kennedy and then asked to speak to Jackie. But Jackie shook her head, and the president said she had gone off to bed—in tears.
We teased Kennedy about calling his wife “Jackie” during the CBS special, the first time to my knowledge he had ever done so in public, and in that quizzical way of his, almost like a small child looking for approval, he asked us whether we thought “the first lady” would have been more appropriate. (He never spoke of his wife as “Jackie” again in public, as far as I know.)
On the subject of Vietnam, he had this to say: “The trouble is, we are violating the Geneva agreement. Not as much as the North Vietnamese are, but we’re violating it. Whatever we have to do, we have to do in some kind of secrecy, and there’s a lot of danger in that. The Republicans want it both ways in Vietnam, and that’s the privilege of the party not in power. It’s like Korea for them. We should have taken the enemy across the Yalu, they used to say, but it was always a Democratic war. Now the Republicans want us to defeat communism in Vietnam by any means, but when we try to do it quietly, they howl that they’re not being kept informed and that just means that we are not doing enough. Diem is Diem and the best we’ve got.”
On the subject of Gary Powers, the president did not appear to be up-to-date on how the debriefing of Powers was proceeding, or at least he wasn’t telling me. He said he did not know how high Powers was flying when he was hit. (The operating altitude of the U-2s—later revealed to be more than 60,000 feet—was a matter of great speculation at that time). “The questioning is going to take longer than I’d thought,” he said. “Up to a month.” He showed no inclination to treat Powers either as a hero or as a pariah, but, predictably, he was impressed with Powers’ courage. “Whatever else you can say about him, and he’s apparently a strange man,” the president said, “he’s got guts.” And of course guts are a big plus in the Kennedy book. Kennedy implied that Powers had been moved from a Maryland hideaway for further questioning in some new CIA hideout in Delaware. I told him about the trouble we were having in getting any member of Powers’ family to talk, specifically his sister (Mrs. William E. Hileman of Glassmanor, Md., who told us she had some letters written by Powers from his Soviet jail, and even a snapshot or two of him and his cellmate. She had also complained to a Washington Post reporter that she had been unable to pierce the CIA security system and get a message to her brother.). I told the president I was convinced Time-Life had Powers sewn up until he had written his memoirs for them. Kennedy said the United States would have “a helluva lot to say” about what Powers wrote for anybody. He said the government owed Powers between $50,000 and $60,000 in back pay, and had no intention of paying it to him unless the government cleared what he said and wrote.
On the question of Pryor (Frederick L. Pryor, an economics student from Michigan, who disappeared into the Soviet sector of Berlin in August, 1961, was released by the Soviets along with Powers, even though he was a prisoner of the German Democratic Republic), Kennedy felt audibly different. “I wouldn’t have busted my ass to get him out of jail all by himself,” he said.
* Pierre Salinger, Kennedy’s press secretary, came to be widely known as “Plucky Pierre,” after he was asked at a press briefing if he was going to go on one of those 50-mile hikes, which the Kennedy macho had popularized at the time. Salinger’s answer: “I may be plucky, but I’m not stupid.”
* My father had combined his new admiration for the Kennedys with his old love of antiques and had offered the White House a beautiful sideboard desk built in the early nineteenth century for Daniel Webster, with his initials “D.W.” carved on the inside. The Kennedys accepted it, and it was used as the private dining room sideboard throughout the Kennedy, Johnson—and Nixon—administrations, and still is as of this writing.
“Better than defeat”
MARCH 2, 1962 / I called Kennedy at the White House after his speech announcing the resumption of nuclear testing. (Although they were made as much to solicit information on any subject the president was willing to discuss, these congratulatory calls are actions I would not take now. Any information that I might receive no longer seems to me worth the price of appearing to ingratiate.)
After spending all of three seconds thanking me for my call, the president said: “You know what I liked about your magazine last week? After you really busted one off in us about the urban affairs vote (the Kennedy administration tried unsuccessfully to get the Congress to pass legislation which would create a Department of Urban Affairs in the cabinet, and with it a black secretary-designate, Robert C. Weaver), three or four pages later I read the story about the Negro reaction”—how the Negroes interpreted the vote in Congress as a vote against Kennedy’s idea of a black in the cabinet, and how the issue was bound to help Kennedy and the Democrats politically in the 1962 by-elections.
“That’s better than defeat, I’ll tell you that.”
“The coral reef … building up”
MARCH 3, 1962 / The president called just after noon to gab—mostly about the resumption of nuclear testing, which he had announced in his speech the night before. His mail was running about even this morning, he said, but that seemed to him to be a good sign. It had been running twenty to one against resumption just before his speech. How did he explain the switch? “First, probably because of the fact that we took a long time to arrive at the decision. Despite what Scotty Reston says, the wrong way to have done it would have been to announce it in November.”
Explaining the history of his decision, the president said: “November (the announcement in November 1961 that he was proceeding with preparations for a resumption of testing) was a pretty definite commitment. But there was always a chance that if we could make a deal on Berlin, or if the Soviet tests had been unimpressive, we could have called it off. Of course, we got no place on Berlin, and the results of our analysis of the Soviet tests showed they had made considerable progress.” The final decision was reached Tuesday, February 27, at a meeting of the National Security Council, he said, though apparently not all NSC members were present. The president said that about ten persons were there, meeting in the Cabinet Room. Kennedy went around the table asking each person for his recommendation. The vote to resume was unanimous, he said, but he did not announce it at that time. First, he returned to his office to deliberate alone, then reached his decision later that afternoon. He called Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, a man he liked and admired, to inform him. Macmillan asked for a one-day delay so that he could inform his own cabinet, and the president quickly agreed.
In trying to pin down the precise moment in which he reached the decision to resume testing (newsmagazine editors go crazy for that kind of precision), I tried to get him to cooperate, but he wasn’t buying. “You have to look at November as a decision of a kind,” he said. “I was always reluctant, unless the case for resumption was clearly established. If you had asked me in December, backed me against the wall, I would probably have said ‘Go ahead and test.’ But there was no real need for a decision in November or December. We were going ahead full speed on the preparation, so there was no drive to decide. There was no real straw that broke the camel’s back. It was just a question of the coral reef … building up.” The way the resumption was announced, Kennedy said, was in line with Gaitskell’s advice (Hugh Gaitskell was then the leader of the Labour Party opposition in Britain), but it was also in line with earlier advice he had received from his advisors, notably McGeorge Bundy (his national security expert)—advice he said he really didn’t need because he felt the same way himself. Gaitskell reinforced the president’s own conviction that an announcement in this way—with one final offer to the Soviets—would be very helpful.
I asked Kennedy if he felt every member of the administration was happy about the decision, not just those present at the February 27 meeting. “I suppose if you grabbed Adlai by the nuts, he might object,” he said. (Adlai Stevenson was then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and a man whose popularity with liberal Democrats Kennedy resented.) Then with instant enthusiasm he asked me why I didn’t call Stevenson and find out how he felt about the resumption of testing. “I’d really like to see what he says.”
“How about Weisner (Jerome B. Weisner, the president’s scientific advisor)?” I asked. “Jerry’s all right,” Kennedy answered. “He’d probably have to say there was no real excuse for not testing.”
Kennedy, characteristically, closed this conversation abruptly after two pungent observations:
On Nelson Rockefeller, then running for a second term as governor of New York: “He’s not doing so well, Lou Harris tells me,” and the president was obviously not crushed.
On Robert S. McNamara, his secretary of defense: “He’s one of the few guys around this town who, when you ask him if he has anything to say and he hasn’t, says ‘No.’ That’s rare these days, I’m telling you.”
“Who said Freund?”
MARCH 29, 1962 / Kennedy called shortly before 6:00 P.M. to pass the time of day. First I asked him to confirm the unlikeliest rumor—that he planned to fill the Supreme Court vacancy with Eddie McCormack, nephew of the venerable Speaker of the House and Massachusetts attorney general, who had just announced he would run against Teddy Kennedy in the primary for the Senate, billing himself modestly as “one of America’s great legal minds.” This produced a snort of derision. In the best of times, the Kennedys and the McCormacks treated each other with polite resentment. But the president wasn’t ready to talk about the Supreme Court vacancy. First, he wanted to chew me out for Newsweek’s coverage the previous week of Jackie’s trip to India. “That wasn’t one of your better efforts,” he started out, critical, this time, not just thin-skinned, “was it? She’s really broken her ass on this trip. You know damn well you can always find some broken-down Englishman or some NBC stringer to knock anything. I don’t get all this crap about how she should have been rubbing her nose in the grinding poverty of India. When the French invite you to Paris, they don’t show you the sewers; they take you to Versailles.”
His displeasure exhausted, I edged the subject over to the tax vote, which he had won that afternoon after it had been languishing in the House for more than a year. With the Supreme Court apportionment case (making federal courts potential arbiters in redistricting cases), the steel strike settlement (two weeks after Kennedy had been instrumental in getting negotiations resumed), and now the tax bill, it was the first really good week he’d had in a long time. “I never saw them look sicker,” Kennedy responded, referring to Larry O’Brien and his legislative liaison colleagues at a conference the night before in the president’s private living quarters. “Charlie Halleck had the votes to recommit the bill and that would have killed it.” Recommittal would have meant defeat on the first of the New Frontier’s three big bills, and would dim the future of the other two. He described the problems as “tremendous,” and the first problem was the GOP discipline. “We didn’t get one single Republican vote on the motion to recommit, and only one on the final vote itself. Second, there was nothing in this bill for anybody. Nobody was lobbying for the tax bill. The banks and the savings and loans put on a terrific letter-writing campaign. Jim Delaney (congressman from New York) got 800 handwritten letters in three days. And there we were … just pro bono publico all the way. We weren’t doing anybody any favors. We were just taking it out on somebody’s ass wherever we turned. We turned the tide by calling in every chit we had. Twisting, promising, cajoling. I made a few calls, but the leadership really did it: Hale Boggs, Carl Albert, Wilbur Mills” and, as a muted afterthought, “John McCormack.”
