CHAPTER 7 )
They turned the Oval Office into a shrine to American seafaring. A few days after inauguration Jackie found a beautiful overlooked desk in a state of neglect in the broadcast room of the White House. Eisenhower had used it only for TV and radio broadcasts. It was made from the timbers of the HMS Resolute, a ship abandoned by its British crew in 1854 when it became locked in pack ice in the Canadian Arctic. She had it moved to the Oval Office.
The Resolute, first called Ptarmigan before it was renamed, was one of a number of ships sent to search for members of a missing Arctic expedition led by Sir John Franklin, not heard from since 1848 when it left Great Britain on a mission to find the Northwest Passage. After the Resolute’s abandonment, the crewless barque-rigged ghost ship drifted with the pack ice until it was discovered by an American whaling ship’s crew a full 1,200 miles from where it had been left behind. The Resolute was brought to New London, Connecticut, and refurbished. Shortly afterward, in a moment of tense relations with Great Britain, the repaired Resolute was sailed to England and returned to Queen Victoria as a gift from the Americans. Years later, in 1880, the Queen presented the desk to President Rutherford B. Hayes. A plaque on the desk reads in part, “This table was made from [Resolute’s] timbers when she was broken up, and is presented by the QUEEN OF GREAT BRITAIN & IRELAND to the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES as a memorial of the courtesy and loving kindness which dictated the offer of the gift of the RESOLUTE.”
One of the Kennedy presidency’s most famous photographs is of little John F. Kennedy Jr. sticking his head out a front panel as his father worked on the desktop above his mop head.
In short order, they placed on the desk:
~ The original coconut from Jack’s PT-109 adventure, with his sos message carved in it, encased in plastic and wood.
~ Pieces from Jack’s collection of scrimshaw, one carved with an image of a great frigate under full sail.
~ A Steuben glass etching of a PT boat with the presidential seal, presented by a group of PT boat veterans.
~ Bookend replicas of cannons from the USS Constitution, or “Old Ironsides,” the last sail-powered ship in the U.S. Navy fleet. Jack’s grandfather, John F. Fitzgerald, helped save the deteriorating ship from demolition and later took his grandson to see it. Jack wrote, “as a small boy I used to be taken to the USS Constitution in Charlestown, Massachusetts. The sight of that historic frigate with the tall spars and black guns stirred my imagination and made history come alive for me.”1
~ Between the bookends copies of As We Remember Joe and To Turn the Tide, a collection of speeches and statements from the year following Jack’s election to the presidency.
~ A small plaque with the Breton Fishermen’s Prayer, presented to him by navy vice admiral Hyman G. Rickover. It said, “Oh God, Thy sea is so great and my boat is so small.”
The collection of objects on display in the Oval Office grew with the help of presidential naval aide Tazewell Shepard, who would bring objects to the White House Map Room for presidential inspection and approval prior to installation. Over time, on side tables and along the Oval Office walls, there were a ship’s clock and barometer and detailed models of great historical ships from the age of sail, including the Constitution, the Wasp, and the Saratoga. Another model, from Jack’s personal collection, was of the three-masted clipper ship Sea Witch. In 1850 Sea Witch became the first vessel to travel from the East Coast around Cape Horn to California in less than one hundred days. The Oval Office walls were lined on three sides with paintings and photographs of other sailboats great and small, along with a pennant flown on the USS Raleigh, a colonial revolutionary warship that in 1778 ran aground south of Boston while being attacked by the British navy. One of the finest paintings was an oil of the Constitution engaged in a battle with the British ship Guerriere during the War of 1812. That was when the Constitution earned its nickname, “Old Ironsides,” after cannon shot was seen bouncing off its sides. A large oil painting of John Paul Jones’s flagship from the Revolutionary War, the Bonhomme Richard, hung above the marble mantle.2
In the sitting area of the office was a high cane-back rocking chair presented to him by Captain William F. Bringle and the crew of one of the navy’s greatest aircraft carriers. It had cushions embroidered with a navy anchor symbol and the words, “U.S.S. Kitty Hawk, Commander-in-Chief.” It had a mahogany contoured back that so effectively relieved Jack’s back pain that over the years he acquired fourteen of the chairs, according to its manufacturer, the P&P Chair Company of Troutman, North Carolina.
Jack may have drawn some inspiration from a collection of naval artwork belonging to Franklin Roosevelt, on display in the summer of 1962 at a National Archives exhibit that the president himself chose to open. In his remarks he said, the prints “tell us more about a very important part of our lives—our lives at sea. We think of ourselves, I think, as land animals in a sense, but we really look to the sea—the Atlantic and the Pacific—which have defended us and have secured us and have enriched us. Our Naval history is one of the most exciting threads that runs throughout the long history of our country, and the combination of the Navy and the Maritime and the extraordinary men who served and who gave it life and thrust and thesis deserves to be recorded.” So avid a collector was Jack that he turned to the curator of the exhibit, a noted naval historian, and asked him to autograph his exhibit program.3
One tiny object that helped Jack rekindle memories of his Cape boyhood was a gift from Jackie: a simple, hand-painted, wood-carved tern, a Cape Cod seabird abundant in Jack’s youth but dwindling in population in the decades since.
~ By 1961 the imagery of the sea was evolving for the Kennedys into something that went beyond fond family memory. Jack used that imagery to describe the American story—its might, its global reach, its tenacity in the face of adversity, its destiny. The most powerful leader of the free world, a politician-writer-historian who understood metaphor and symbolism as much as anyone, used his office surroundings to tell the story of the great American voyage. Jackie’s love of literature had been supplemented by her later studies of American history, taken up with earnestness when she married a politician. So together, through speechmaking and decorative arts, they drew from tales of the sea to lead Americans into the Space Age.
Speaking in a garden outside the White House to students and faculty of France’s Institute of Higher National Defense Studies, Jack pointed to one of the ship models he had brought out from his office, a gift of the French minister of cultural affairs Andre Malraux, and said, “This ship that you see here was sent to me last week by M. Malraux. After his visit to us in January, when he was kind enough to accompany the Mona Lisa to the United States, and knowing of my interest in the sea, friends of the Naval Museum copied this ship, the La Flore, which was a French ship which fought for the Americans in our War of Independence. And this arrived in full sail and is in my office as a welcome reminder of our oldest alliance.”4
His presidential speeches often contained the sea imagery heard during the campaign. At a Philadelphia Democratic Party gathering on October 30, 1963, and in other speeches, Jack repeated a favorite boast about the state of the economy: “We shall be sailing this country next year on the longest and strongest peacetime expansion of our economy in the history of the United States. It is well within our reach.”5
Jack closed one of his State of the Union addresses to Congress by saying,
We are not lulled by the momentary calm of the sea or the somewhat clearer skies above. We know the turbulence that lies below, and the storms that are beyond the horizon this year. But now the winds of change appear to be blowing more strongly than ever, in the world of communism as well as our own. For 175 years we have sailed with those winds at our back, and with the tides of human freedom in our favor. We steer our ship with hope, as Thomas Jefferson said, “leaving Fear astern.” Today we still welcome those winds of change—and we have every reason to believe that our tide is running strong. With thanks to Almighty God for seeing us through a perilous passage, we ask His help anew in guiding the “Good Ship Union.”
Jack’s reference to “Good Ship Union” was an allusion to a Civil War—era poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., the Boston poet-physician who used a great ship as a metaphor for the then-young union threatened by dissolution over slavery. As a young man, in 1830, Holmes also wrote a poem about the USS Constitution, a poem credited afterward with generating the popular support needed to save the great frigate from demolition. Jack’s grandfather “Honey Fitz,” as a member of Congress, sponsored an 1897 bill to make Massachusetts the historic ship’s permanent residence. As president, Jack sought to have the ship sail to New York Harbor for the 1964 World’s Fair but was dissuaded when the navy said it was not then sufficiently seaworthy. “If anything happened, an Act of God for instance, the President would certainly bear the responsibility and Massachusetts citizens would have another Tea Party,” warned a navy adviser.6
Jack’s frequent use of metaphor was not limited to seascapes, of course. As a presidential candidate, he called for Americans to establish a “New Frontier,” an image that conjured covered wagons more than boats. But “frontier” is a word that shares with seafaring a sense of the venturous and unexplored, of voyages of discovery. Jack understood the power of great speechwriting and of the well-chosen metaphor. Space was a “new ocean.” We “sail this country.” “Tides of human freedom.”
Thirty years before he spoke at President Kennedy’s inauguration, the New England poet Robert Frost spoke of the awesome power and potential hazards of metaphor, for both good and ill.
I do not think anybody ever knows the discreet use of metaphor, his own and other people’s . . . unless he has been properly educated in poetry. Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, “grace” metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. ... I have wanted in late years to go further and further in making metaphor the whole of thinking.... Unless you are at home in the metaphor, unless you have had your proper poetical education in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere. Because you are not at ease with figurative values: you don’t know the metaphor in its strength and its weakness. You don’t know how far you may expect it to ride and when it may break down with you.7
The power of metaphor has lately caught the attention of neuroscientists and psychologists. James Geary, in his 2011 book, I Is an Other, wrote,
Metaphor is not just confined to art and literature but is at work in all fields of human endeavor, from economics and advertising, to politics and business, to science and psychology.
Metaphor conditions our interpretations of the stock market and, through advertising, it surreptitiously infiltrates our purchasing decisions. In the mouths of politicians, metaphor subtly nudges public opinion; in the minds of businesspeople, it spurs creativity and innovation. In science, metaphor is the preferred nomenclature for new theories and new discoveries; in psychology it is the natural language of human relationships and emotions.8
Stock markets are “up” and “down,” a meaningless metaphor when applied, as it often is, to one’s own investment decisions about individual companies. Geary describes the ways that psychologists pick apart their patients’ metaphors, how healing from physical ailments advances faster when the patient visualizes healthy outcomes. A runner in a marathon is coached to imagine a big rubber band pulling him closer to the runner ahead.
Ted Kennedy’s son Patrick was asked about his father’s late-in-life observation that sailing, for him, had always been a metaphor for life. Had the experience of sailing influenced the public life and political rhetoric of his father, uncles, and aunts?
“Yes,” said Patrick, “in very transcendent ways. So, you know, ‘a rising tide lifts all boats.’ The very philosophy of the Democratic Party, that through increasing the number of people who benefit from the rising economy everybody benefits at all ends of the income scale. Well, this was internalized by my uncles and my father and my family’s work. . . . ‘A rising tide lifts all boats,’ it was a way by which everybody can benefit. . . . The philosophy of everybody being part of the crew.” He and other younger Kennedys recalled the lessons learned as youngsters that they could contribute importantly to the sailing of a complicated boat, using their light weight, for example, to adjust a line without unbalancing the boat. He likened it to Kennedy family support over the decades of civil rights for people of color or people with disabilities.9
~ Did Jack’s love of the sea influence public policy? Certainly, as an outdoorsman, Jack’s interest was more in the nation’s seashores than inland wildernesses, a fact that disappointed his own interior secretary, who found him lacking compared to great conservationists like Franklin or Teddy Roosevelt. “I long for a flicker of emotion, a response to the out of doors and overwhelming majesty of the land,” wrote Stuart Udall of Jack. Unlike the Roosevelts, he was not indignant over “despoilers” and showed no “excited interest” in natural landscapes.10
Jack’s conservation legacy concerned the topography he loved most. As he approached the end of his years in the Senate, Jack sponsored legislation creating the Cape Cod National Seashore. It passed and was signed during Jack’s first year as president. He later signed a bill to protect the seashores of Point Reyes, California, and Padre Island, Texas.
~ Nowhere did the metaphor of the sea influence American thought more than in its perception of humankind’s first trips into space, the “new ocean,” as Jack called it. The comparisons of astronauts to Columbus and Magellan were a constant in the media. Once Jack decided to embrace “spacefaring” and called for landing a man on the moon, he could barely speak of the subject without making the comparison to sea explorers. It was visionary rhetoric when he and others used it in those years, at a time when lunar colonies and a trip to Mars seemed like the logical next steps. In retrospect it had little in common with sixteenth-century ocean exploration and world circumnavigation. Once a lunar landing was done, colonizing space and harvesting its riches proved a lot harder than most had thought.
Jack’s presidential campaign made great use of what he called a “missile gap,” the numeric and strength advantage that Soviets supposedly had over Americans. The Soviets had launched the first satellite, Sputnik, in 1957, and as a candidate Jack exploited the perception that Republicans let the United States fall behind. In a campaign speech in an Idaho high school auditorium, Jack said the nations of the world “have seen the Soviet Union first in space. They have seen it first around the moon and first around the sun. . . . They come to the conclusion that the Soviet tide is rising and ours is ebbing. I think it is up to us to reverse that point.”11 After Jack became the party nominee, Eisenhower’s CIA director traveled to Hyannis Port to give him a confidential national security briefing, where he was told the numeric “gap” was largely illusory. Photo reconnaissance by satellite and spy planes found no evidence the Soviets had either the rocket launch facilities or numeric missile advantage many believed. Fear remained real, however, and though the Soviets lacked strength in numbers of intercontinental ballistic missiles, they did have an edge when it came to rocket lift capacity. They had fewer but bigger rockets. Three months after Jack’s inauguration, on April 12, 1961, the first Russian cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, orbited the earth.
Funding to develop a new American heavy-lift Saturn rocket had been withheld under Eisenhower, and the previous month the Kennedy administration, with Vice President Lyndon Johnson’s support, had begun considering spending the money. Two days after Gagarin’s flight, Jack assembled in the Cabinet Room key advisers and NASA experts. Once again, Life magazine was present at the meeting. Reporter Hugh Sidey was given extraordinary access in exchange for constraints on what could be published. After hearing various discouraging assessments, Sidey watched Jack run his hand nervously through his hair and mutter, “We may never catch up.”
“Now let’s look at this,” Jack told the men. “Is there any place where we can catch them? What can we do? Can we go around the moon before them? Can we put a man on the moon before them?... Can we leapfrog?” After listening to advisers weigh the enormous costs and odds of success, Jack looked around the room and said, “When we know more, I can decide if it’s worth it or not. If somebody can just tell me how to catch up. Let’s find somebody—anybody. I don’t care if it’s the janitor over there, if he knows how.” He paused, looked at the faces in the room, and said, “There’s nothing more important.”12
Adding to the crisis atmosphere of that time was the Bay of Pigs disaster, which occurred the week following Gagarin’s flight. The United States had provided CIA training to a small army of 1,400 Cuban exiles who were to invade Fidel Castro’s Cuba, but the plan the president approved was poorly executed and did not provide American support sufficient to ensure victory. In two days Castro’s forces squashed the invasion, a disastrously embarrassing military failure for which Jack publicly accepted responsibility. Jackie later recalled that he privately wept over the fiasco.
As the Bay of Pigs failure ramified, Jack met again with his vice president to discuss the space program, asking him to lead a hasty assessment of options for an American response to Russian achievements. Jack had Ted Sorensen provide Johnson with a letter listing questions that needed answering: “Do we have a chance of beating the Soviets by putting a laboratory in space, or by a trip around the moon, or by a rocket to land on the moon, or by a rocket to go to the moon and back with a man. Is there any other space program which promises dramatic results in which we could win?” One presidential scholar called the memo, “redolent of presidential panic.”13
“Dramatic” and “win” were the operative words. Jack wanted a feat that could capture humankind’s imagination. Until this time the Soviets had proven their space superiority with a series of one-off feats—Sputnik, then a dog, then striking the moon with Luna 2. Shortly after Jack took office the Soviets put an actual man in orbit, returning a hero. Jack instinctively knew, and made clear in his questions about a trip to the moon, that the focus of the competition with the Russians had to change from stunts of the month to a feat for the ages. Jack eventually decided to redefine the competition as a great and epic race to the moon. This was a race Americans could win.
In the short term, however, until Americans developed heavier-lift missiles that could compete, they would continue to be embarrassed by the Soviets. Making matters worse would be repeated failures of unmanned American test launches in full public view. Missiles exploded in midair, went astray, or barely left the ground.
~ With Jack’s letter in hand, Johnson, in his role as Space Council chair, put key advisers to work. Wernher von Braun responded with an April 29 letter explaining that the Soviets probably already had the rocket power necessary to create a modest “laboratory” in space with multiple astronauts in a single launch. They were much closer than we were to soft-landing an unmanned payload on the moon, though he believed we had a “sporting chance” of beating them to it. We also had a “sporting chance” of first sending a three-man crew around the moon, though the Soviets might beat that with a one-man trip if they were willing to accept significant risk to his safe return.
“We have an excellent chance of beating the Soviets to the first landing of a crew on the moon (including return capability, of course),” wrote von Braun. “The reason is that a performance jump by a factor of 10 over their present rockets is necessary to accomplish this feat. While today we do not have such a rocket, it is unlikely that the Soviets have it. Therefore, we would not have to enter the race toward this obvious new goal in space exploration against hopeless odds favoring the Soviets. With an all-out crash program I think we could accomplish this objective in 1967/68.”14 Put another way, in 1961 both side’s space missions were mostly just puttering offshore in day-sailer rocketry. America needed to build the greatest schooner ever and aim for the moon.
~ Still playing catch-up, still risking a publicly embarrassing failure on the heels of the Bay of Pigs, the United States succeeded in launching the first American into space on May 5. Alan Shepard’s trip was up and back, with no plan to orbit as the Soviets did on their first try. Just six weeks after Gargarin’s orbit, three weeks after Shepard’s flight, Kennedy summoned Congress into session for a special message on “urgent national needs.” In it was his famous challenge: “For while we cannot guarantee that we shall one day be first, we can guarantee that any failure to make this effort will make us last. ... I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth.”15
~ He did not think of it as a scientific endeavor worth the effort, and privately said so. What mattered to him was winning the race and showing the world American technological superiority. “No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind,” he told Congress. For a man who had grown up with a thirst for competition and a hunger to win, who had pointed Victura at distant race markers and worked so intently to round them first, a race to the moon was a challenge that came more naturally to him than most. It would be an oversimplification to attribute Jack’s decision to his love of sailboat racing, but it must have added subconscious allure. Historian Michael Beschloss cites three motivations: Jack’s need for a “quick theatrical reversal of his administration’s flagging position,” vis-à-vis the Soviets; Lyndon Johnson’s grab for larger “turf”; and secretary of defense Robert McNamara’s desire to find a use for aerospace industrial overcapacity.16 Surely Jack had geopolitical motivations, for other nations were choosing sides in the Cold War. He had domestic political motivations too, as voters wanted Americans to score some wins against the communists at a time of so many defeats.
Jack saw the achievement of the boldest of human endeavors as an end in itself. The decision to so audaciously redefine the competition as a race to the moon was not one others would have made. Eisenhower wrote a friend that he thought Jack’s decision “almost hysterical” and “a bit immature.” Ike publicly called it a “stunt” and even “nuts.” When astronaut Frank Borman asked the former president to support the space program, Ike replied with a letter complaining that the moon program “was drastically revised and expanded just after the Bay of Pigs fiasco.... [It] immediately took one single project or experiment out of a thoroughly planned and continuing program involving communication, meteorology, reconnaissance, and future military and scientific benefits and gave the highest priority—unfortunate in my opinion—to a race, in other words, a stunt.”17
~ The race was the point, not the science. In November 1962 Jack summoned NASA administrator James Webb to another Cabinet Room meeting that also included other NASA leaders and his own anxious budget chiefs. After reviewing the space agency’s budgetary priorities, the president said to Webb, “Do you think this [moon mission] is the top-priority program of the agency?”
“No sir, I do not,” said Webb. “I think it is one of the top-priority programs, but I think it’s very important to recognize here . . .” and he listed other scientific and technical objectives.
That was not the answer Jack wanted, and in his words that followed are heard echoes of his father when the children put insufficient effort into a regatta:
Jim, I think it is the top priority. I think we ought to have that very clear. Some of these other programs can slip six months, or nine months.... But this is important for political reasons, international political reasons. This is, whether we like it or not, in a sense a race. If we get second to the Moon, it’s nice, but it’s like being second any time. So that if we’re second by six months, because we didn’t give it the kind of priority, then of course that would be very serious. So I think we have to take the view that this is the top priority with us.
In that meeting, whenever Webb alluded to other scientific objectives, Jack returned his focus to the task of winning the race:
Look, I know all these other things and the satellite and the communications and weather and all, they’re all desirable, but they can wait. . . . Why are we spending seven million dollars on getting fresh water from saltwater, when we’re spending seven billion dollars to find out about space? Obviously, you wouldn’t put it on that priority except for the defense implications. And the second point is the fact that the Soviet Union has made this a test of the [political] system. So that’s why we’re doing it. So I think we’ve got to take the view that this is the key program. The rest of this ... we can find out all about it, but there’s a lot of things we can find out about; we need to find out about cancer and everything else.
Everything that we do ought to really be tied into getting onto the Moon ahead of the Russians.... I do think we ought get it, you know, really clear that the policy ought to be that this is the top-priority program of the Agency, and one of the two things, except for defense, the top priority of the United States government. I think that that is the position we ought to take. Now, this may not change anything about that schedule, but at least we ought to be clear, otherwise we shouldn’t be spending this kind of money because I’m not that interested in space.
Then, still vividly channeling his father, Jack told Webb, “But we’re talking about these fantastic expenditures which wreck our budget and all these other domestic programs and the only justification for it, in my opinion, to do it in this time or fashion, is because we hope to beat them and demonstrate that starting behind, as we did by a couple years, by God, we passed them.”18
~ Shooting for the moon increasingly gained detractors who shared Ike’s view. Public support waned. Roger Launius, NASA chief historian, later wrote, “While there may be many myths about Apollo and spaceflight, the principal one is the story of a resolute nation moving outward into the unknown beyond Earth.”19
In September 1962, speaking at Rice University, Jack relied once again on the metaphor of the journeying mariner:
Those who came before us made certain that this country rode the first waves of the industrial revolutions, the first waves of modern invention, and the first wave of nuclear power, and this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space.... The vows of this nation can only be fulfilled if we in this nation are first, and, therefore, we intend to be first. . . . Our obligations to ourselves as well as others all require us ... to become the world’s leading space-faring nation. We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people.... Only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war. ... As we set sail we ask God’s blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.20
Kennedy was far from alone in comparing the great sea ventures to space exploration, but it proved a misleading analogy. Compared to space travel, it took only a few short years for Columbus’s voyage to the Americas to reap financial rewards and introduce Europe to unknown food crops that had world-changing dietary impact, particularly corn and potatoes. Popular dreams of colonizing and mining the moon and Mars never materialized. On the other hand, the gains from those objectives that Jack treated as secondary—weather satellites, GPS navigational aides, communications—in years that followed profoundly affected the day-to-day lives of humankind. The moon race enchanted and inspired billions of people, particularly young people, and it changed forever how we view our own planet. It is probably true that winning the race gave our country a lasting geopolitical edge against the Soviets. It certainly altered global perception of the two superpowers.
~ By all accounts, Jack enjoyed the personal company and conversation of his great new mariners. He invited them to the White House and to Cape Cod, peppering them with questions. John Glenn became a family friend and a frequent visitor to Hyannis Port and Hickory Hill years after Jack was gone.
Even before Glenn’s famous first orbit, while he was preparing for his flight, Jack invited him to the White House and asked detailed questions about the upcoming mission. Glenn recalled,
It was just a very cordial get-together. He just wanted to talk about what was planned on the flight, and I went into some details of what we expected to experience. In fact, later on after the flight when I came back, he recalled quite a number of these things I had said in this pre-flight meeting. . . . He evidently had remembered all the things we talked about that [preflight] day.
He was interested very much in the anticipated G level during launch, what kind of sensations we expected during the launch, what kind of control we had over the booster during launch, were we actually going to drive it like we did an airplane or were we pretty much at the mercy of the guidance systems until we were in orbit. Problems of that nature—what pressures we would be operating under; what we would do if the pressure in the spacecraft failed. He was interested in real detail.21
After Glenn returned, Kennedy peppered him again. “He wanted to know about things that occurred on a space flight—what I saw, what things looked like, how I felt during reentry, was it hot or wasn’t it hot, how did I feel when it banged down on the water, how did it feel when I got out. He seemed to be more interested in what had occurred on a personal experience basis rather than the scientific details of the event. What did it feel like to me as a man.”22
Alan Shepard, whose suborbital flight preceded Glenn’s, had the same experience. “I never have been able to analyze completely why he reacted this way to us, why he provided the time to be with us on these occasions and essentially on a very informal basis—access which I suppose not too many people had.”
Shepard said his wife had a theory. She said he wanted to be “associated with you as a group and as individuals because of what you’ve done, not because of any great abilities but I suppose because of the one ability to recognize a challenge and to be willing to meet the challenge.”23
Glenn did not think Jack’s questions were rooted in concern about the feasibility of the mission. “I took it, and I think he meant it, as an interest in one human being to another—as one ‘guy’ to another, if you will, if you can put the president in that context.”
At a ceremony, bestowing a medal on Glenn, Jack said, “Some months ago I said that I hoped every American would serve his country. Today Col. Glenn served his. . . . We have a long way to go in this space race. This is the new ocean and I believe that the United States must sail on it and be in a position second to none.”24
Before long Glenn was sailing the old-fashioned way too. When he was a guest of the family at Hyannis Port, Ethel Kennedy invited him out on Victura. The president and first lady were not present at the Cape, or so Glenn thought. “I didn’t feel qualified to take [it] out in the twenty-five-or thirty-knot wind blowing this particular day,” said Glenn, a Korean War jet fighter pilot who only months earlier orbited the planet. “Ethel said, ‘No, no, that’s all right. We’ll go sailing; we can take care of it all right.’”
“It was a blustery, blowing day,” Glenn recalled. “Well, when my family walked from the house down toward the dock with Ethel, we could see someone working on the Victura. They were wearing leather jackets and old clothes, and as we got out toward the end of the dock it became a little more apparent who these people were. It was the president and Mrs. Kennedy, rigging the sails. Any doubts I had had about sailing in that weather were somewhat alleviated.”
The weather was extreme enough that Jack chose not to strain his back working the tiller. Helmsman’s duty went to Glenn’s son, Dave. “Dave had to brace his feet and really pull on the tiller to keep things under control this particular day, and the president would give him instructions as to what direction he wanted to go and exactly how to handle things.” Back and forth they went across the same harbor—the president, the astronaut and their young families—where Jack himself learned to sail, same boat, same waters, Jack’s father’s house ashore.25
~ In early 1963 the famed rocket scientist Wernher von Braun found himself at the annual Presidential Prayer Breakfast seated next to Jack’s brother Ted, then the junior senator from Massachusetts. “It seemed from the way Senator Ted Kennedy spoke that the Kennedy brothers had one favorite topic when they were among themselves and that topic was spaceflight!” von Braun said shortly after Jack’s death. “He was very well informed about our program and asked several questions that were amazingly similar to the questions the president himself had asked. So I can only conclude that there must have been quite a bit of discussion among the brothers on the subject.”26
A few months later, when Jack toured Cape Canaveral and, with von Braun, saw models of rockets, he picked up one of the smaller ones and said, “So this is the Redstone.” It was an early rocket, the one that got the first Americans into space but not high or fast enough to achieve orbit. To the right of the twelve-inch Redstone model was another: the Saturn V moon rocket then under development, standing nearly six feet tall. “Are these models to the same scale?” Jack asked, as von Braun and the others there nodded.
“Gee looks like we’ve come a long way!” said Jack.
“There was something like a boyish enthusiasm about him,” said von Braun, “at the same time deeply sincere and very charming.”27
~ Neil Armstrong, the man who set foot on the moon just six years later, died about fifty years after Jack held the little Redstone model in his hands. Eugene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon in 1972, said Armstrong was never prouder than when he received his wings of gold, the pin he and Cernan both earned—as did Jack’s brother Joe—upon first becoming naval aviators. Armstrong was buried at sea in 2012. “Maybe the sea had always made him think of endings, of the final acts of great Odysseys,” wrote Ross Anderson in the Atlantic. “You can picture him, those 43 years ago, watching the Earth shrink in the window of the lunar module, seeing it hang, a strange moon in the abyss, a goddess robed in life-giving oceans, as blue as any seen before or since. Imagine his relief upon returning to Earth three days later, his landing cushioned by the Pacific Ocean. How good it must have felt to bob and sway in the waves that day, not even a week removed from touchdown in the Sea of Tranquility. It’s hard to imagine a sweeter way to go home.”28
~ Jack and Jackie’s son, John, was born just a few days after the 1960 presidential election. About a year later Jack’s father suffered a stroke. Joe lived another eight years, badly debilitated, unable to speak. “Old age is a shipwreck,” Jack said then of his father.29 Short vacation breaks at the Cape in the summers of 1962 and 1963 became occasions for the president and first lady to spend time together with both their own young children and the ailing patriarch. Rose’s health remained good, and she could still enjoy the rapidly growing family of grandchildren, dominated above all by the ever-fertile Bobby and Ethel, whose children would, by 1968, number eleven in all.
As much as they loved returning to the Cape, Hyannis was never to be the same thanks to the crush of tourists, the invasive press corps, and the hovering of Secret Service agents and their security measures. Half a mile down shore from the big house, Jack and Jackie rented a house with hilltop view of the sea and more seclusion from visitors and security risk. It became the summer White House.
The summer of 1962 had several memorable Cape days in it. On one July afternoon, after a family party off Great Island, a short distance east of the compound, Jack returned on their powered yacht Marlin with his father and brother Ted to the harbor at Hyannis Port. The wind was blowing thirty knots, waves three feet.
“There, straining at her hawser and dipping her bow invitingly was the Victura, the twenty-two-foot [sic] sloop that the Kennedy boys used to race,” reported the New York Times. “As soon as the President had seen his ailing father ashore, he and his brother Edward—together with other members of the family unidentifiable through binoculars from the press boat half a mile away—dropped into the Victura, set mainsail and jib and cast off.”
“With the President at the tiller, the boat scudded out beyond the breakwater on the starboard reach. As soon as she cleared the jetty, she heeled over sharply with her port gunwales awash.” After a while Jack turned the tiller over to an unidentified young boy. They returned to the harbor, dropped off the rest of the crew, then Jack and Ted headed seaward once more.
“The President has been favoring his back for some time. Today’s turn at the tiller indicated that it was considerably improved,” said the Times.30
A few days later Jack took Caroline out on Victura, then returned to board Marlin with Joe Sr. They anchored off Egg Island, no more than a sandbar connected to Great Island along the east side of Lewis Bay, which connects Hyannis’s harbor to the Sound. The small party swam and picnicked on the sand and were eventually joined by a larger contingent of Kennedys, arriving in a flotilla consisting of Victura and The Rest Of Us.31 Egg Island would for years come to be an almost daily summertime destination for Ethel Kennedy and a crew of children and friends, often arriving in another Wianno Senior, Resolute, the sister boat to Victura.
As news accounts of those days suggest, carloads and boatloads of reporters commonly trailed Kennedys wherever they went on Cape Cod and the islands. The coverage was friendly enough, with the occasional exception, but their constant presence was robbing the family of the refuge the place had always offered. Instead of courting Life photographers, the Kennedys took to dodging them and their professional brethren. The disparaging term “paparazzi” first came into usage in 1960. The family could scarcely have imagined then how Jackie, young John, and other Kennedys would spend the rest of their lives stalked by them.
~ In mid-July 1962 Jack and Jackie invited the writer William Styron and his wife for a boat ride around Martha’s Vineyard, where the Styrons had a home. Styron described the voyage to his father in a letter:
We were sitting around a big table in the open cockpit and occasionally [Jackie] would put her feet up in JFK’S lap and wiggle her toes, just like you’d imagine the wife of the President to do.... We picked up Caroline (who had been taken ashore swimming with her little cousin while we ate) and she came aboard shivering her teeth out, a cute kid, as they say, with Irish written all over her. By this time, word had gotten around and the harbor was jammed with boats filled with people trying to get a look at their Excellencies. . .. We were about to pull into the Edgar-town Yacht Club (membership composed of the blackest of black Wall Street Republicans) when all of a sudden JFK called to the Captain: “Better not put in there. Go to the town dock.” And he said in an aside to me: “There’s not a Democrat within three miles of heah. They’d resent it for weeks.” Thus I saw, even in such a minor matter as docking a boat, the constant politicking that goes on in the Presidential mind.32
~ In the same month was an incident where a private sail became publicly vexing for the president. After a Sunday sail in Victura, Jack awoke the following day, boarded Air Force One for the return to Washington and opened the morning papers. Members of the press corps were aboard, as usual. Shortly after take off, the portly presidential press secretary Pierre Salinger, round faced with a Frenchman’s nose, came rushing up the aisle, distressed, eyes darting around for United Press International reporter Al Spivak. The president was in a rage, Salinger told Spivak, and pointed to the UPI story only he could have written appearing on page 1 in that morning’s Washington Post and in other papers.
“President and Family Run Aground in Sloop,” was the headline the New York Times used for Spivak’s story. “President Kennedy and other experienced sailors in his family ran aground today in a twenty-two-foot [sic] racing sloop while docking at a pier. To add to their embarrassment, the mainsail of the sloop Victura collapsed and fell overboard after the boat had been pushed free of the mud.”33
The Boston Globe was even harder:
President Kennedy, who in schooldays used to race his sloop Victura in summer regattas, found his seamanship a little rusty yesterday.
Heading back in the Victura towards his father’s pier here, the President missed the dock and grounded the yacht in a mud bank.
The mainsail collapsed and fell into the water as the boat was being pushed free by a secret service jet boat.34
The president was furious, Salinger said. The captain of America’s ship of state well understood imagery and knew critics couldn’t resist snarky comparisons to his presidential leadership. The president denies it ever happened, insisted Salinger, and he demands a retraction. “Spivak, are you trying to cost me my job?” The reporter saw both fear and anger in Salinger’s face.
Spivak would not retract an accurate account, but he did offer a solution to Salinger’s problem. He reached into a bag and pulled out a glossy photo of Jack and his crew, standing waist deep or deeper in water, trying to push Victura off a shoal. Salinger brought the picture back to the chief executive. Nothing further was heard about it.35
~ As that summer of 1962 came to an end, Jack and Jackie traveled to Newport, Rhode Island, to dine with Australian and American diplomats and sailors gathered for the America’s Cup race. It was one of the few places where Jack’s soul searchings about the sea could be openly expressed to an understanding audience. He was both picture painter and philosopher:
I really don’t know why it is that all of us are so committed to the sea, except I think it is because in addition to the fact that the sea changes and the light changes, and ships change, it is because we all came from the sea. And it is an interesting biological fact that all of us have, in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch it, we are going back from whence we came. Therefore, it is quite natural that the United States and Australia, separated by an ocean, but particularly those of us who regard the ocean as a friend, bound by an ocean, should be meeting today in Newport to begin this great sea competition.
He then offered a toast to the competing crews, the Australians sailing Gretel, and the Americans aboard Weatherly. “As the Ambassador said so well, they race against each other, but they also race with each other against the wind and the sea.”36 The Weatherly was skippered by Bus Mosbacher who, nineteen years earlier, sailed for Dartmouth to win the 1943 MacMillan Cup, the prize Joe and Jack won for Harvard in 1938.
On that September day in 1962, though Jack might have preferred to sail the Weatherly, he instead joined the first lady and boarded the USS Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. to watch Mosbacher secure the cup for America. The following month the Kennedy sailed for Cuba.
~ The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, the Kennedy presidency’s greatest challenge and, in the opinion of many, the closest the world ever came to nuclear war, was on a personal level for Jack an event during which childhood memories strangely intermingled with some of the most momentous decisions any human adult ever made. One handwritten page of notes attributed to him shows the words “Blockade Cuba!” and “Castro” scribbled in pencil above a sketch of a gaff-rigged sailboat. Betterrendered and authenticated Kennedy sailboat sketches, also gaff rigged, appear on another page from a yellow legal pad of those days. From those meetings came the decision to establish a naval “quarantine,” thought a less militarily provocative word than “blockade.” Though the conflict was over airborne nuclear-armed missiles, it was militarily played out at sea. When the time came for a U.S. warship to physically board and inspect a ship bound for Cuba, the Lebanese merchant freighter Marucla was chosen. The task of executing the “first quarantine interdiction” was given to navy destroyer Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr.37 This is a ship that, when launched in 1945, was “sponsored” by Jean Kennedy, Joe and Jack’s youngest sister, sponsorship being a kind of feminine blessing that all male-crewed vessels received. Aboard the Kennedy for its 1946 shakedown cruise was apprentice seaman Robert Kennedy, who in October 1962, despite domestic duty as attorney general, was also his brother’s closest and most valued White House adviser, one who could be completely trusted during the crisis.
~ In the summer of 1963, for reasons of security as well as to favor his back, Jack did little or no racing in Victura. Instead, he watched his youngest brother, Ted, the junior senator, compete. On several occasions they anchored or drifted aboard his father’s Marlin or the presidential motor yacht Honey Fitz, just to watch Ted race Victura. On July 19 they cheered Ted on to second place in the Edgartown Regatta, an impressive feat according to a local journalist, who said Victura was “not one of the better Wianno Seniors and she may be one of the worst.”38
On Labor Day weekend, Jack and Jackie took Caroline, five, and John Jr., two, on Honey Fitz for the thirty-five mile crossing to Nantucket from Hyannis Port. Jack and Jackie lunched on the boat while their two children and five other youngsters, accompanied by four Secret Service agents went ashore to tour the Brant Point coast guard station and tower. They all then motored back in time to watch Ted race Victura, this time finishing “a strong first in his class.” That evening, easing back into the realities of official responsibility, the president entertained Vice President Lyndon Johnson at the summer White House.39
~ At the end of the 1963 sailing season, Victura made its annual sail back to Crosby Yacht Yard, where it was kept in winter. But before going into storage, it was brought out onto Nantucket Sound one more time at the request of three Kennedy sisters—Eunice, Patricia, and Jean. They had an idea. They had seen a painting of sailboats that Jackie had given to Jack as a gift in 1960. The painting had appeared in Sports Illustrated, where Jackie first saw it. Jackie tracked down the artist, Henry Koehler, bought the original, and shortly afterward wrote the artist, “It’s by far the prettiest picture in our house and by far the only one I have given him that he actually likes.”
Wanting to duplicate Jackie’s success, the sisters contacted the same artist and commissioned him to create three paintings, one each of Jack, Bob, and Ted and their wives, each sailing Victura. The three sisters would give the paintings of Victura to their three brothers—the president, the attorney general, and the senator—at Christmas.
In early November the young artist, Henry Koehler, traveled from his New York City studio to Hyannis Port. Victura was brought out from the Crosby boat shed and two boatyard workers sailed it out into the Sound, where it met the Marlin. Aboard the latter were Koehler and Joe Sr. Despite the ambassador’s incapacitation from his stroke, the family knew Joe would enjoy a boat ride and the opportunity to watch Koehler make sketches as Victura sailed back and forth for the benefit of the artist.40
~ On November 4, in the Oval Office, Jack picked up a Dictaphone to record for the historical record his thoughts about a coup in South Vietnam leading to the overthrow and death of President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother. In the middle of his recording he was suddenly interrupted by his son, John, almost three. The audio betrays no difficulty transitioning from beleaguered leader to patient father.
“Do you want to say anything?” Jack asks, holding up the Dictaphone. “Say hello.”
“Hello.”
“Say it again.”
“Naughty, naughty Daddy.”
“Why do the leaves fall?”
“Because it’s autumn,” John answers.
“Why does the snow come on the ground?”
“Because it’s winter.”
“Why do the leaves turn green?”
“Because it’s spring.”
“When do we go to the Cape? Hyannis Port?”
“Because it’s summer.”
“It’s summer.”
John Jr. started laughing and then said, inexplicably, “your horses.”41
~ Henry Koehler returned to his New York studio and began work on his three paintings, classical music playing on the radio as he worked. Later in November a Kennedy sister came by his East Forty-Ninth Street studio to check on his progress. Recalling the story fifty years later, Koehler could remember only that it was either Pat or Jean. “Not Eunice,” he said. Preparing for the appointment, Henry turned off the radio so the conversation would be undistracted. The sister arrived, inspected his work, approved, and encouraged him to keep on. Christmas was a little more than a month away.
The Kennedy sister left and moments afterward, Koehler’s phone rang. It was his fiancée.
“Do you have the radio on?” she asked.
The Kennedy sister had walked too far from the studio for Koehler to rush out and find her. What direction had she walked? He learned later that as she continued down the sidewalk someone recognized her and told her the news Koehler’s fiancée had just relayed. The president had been shot in Dallas.
Fifty years later when Koehler was in his mid-eighties, he still recalls with regret that he let the Kennedy sister leave his studio. Perhaps he could have helped her, kept her safe, alerted the Secret Service to her whereabouts.42
That was the same morning that another sketch of Victura, by a less skilled artist, was being discovered by the housekeeping staff at the Rice Hotel in Houston where Jack stayed the previous day.
~ At that hour Ted was fulfilling a freshman senator’s obligation by presiding over a dull session of the Senate. A press aide rushed to him and guided him from the podium to a nearby Associated Press teletype machine that was clacking out the news. Bobby was at Hickory Hill at lunch with Ethel when FBI director J. Edgar Hoover called.
Jack was the third of the nine children of Joe and Rose to die young. Ted called his mother at Hyannis Port. Rose already knew. Joe was asleep, so, by helicopter and jet, Ted hurried home to tell his father to his face. At Hyannis Port Ted found the house filling with relatives and close friends late into the night. He still hadn’t talked to his father when he went to bed for an awful night’s effort at sleep. He told Joe in the morning. Ted said decades later that still “the memory of that conversation brings me to tears.”43
~ With the enormity of that tragedy, Koehler figured that was the end of his commission. They wouldn’t want his paintings now, he thought. But in a few days the phone rang. How were the paintings coming along, the caller wanted to know. “Just fine,” Koehler said.
“I painted with both hands” to get them finished in time, he said.
The Kennedys had their Christmas of 1963, and the paintings were presented. Later, Koehler received a letter from Jackie about the painting of Jack, which depicted her by his side: “Dear Henry, you will never know how much the painting of the Victura means to me, and I shall treasure it forever. You are right in saying it will serve as a constant reminder of happier days.”
The letter was typewritten. Some time later Koehler received another note from Jackie, handwritten and oddly betraying a different state of mind. It rambled a bit. Jackie’s secretary, Nancy Tuckerman, told Koehler the grieving widow had taken to staying up late and writing things she would normally not write. “Just don’t even acknowledge the letter,” Tuckerman said. Jackie’s letter asked Koehler if he would repaint the picture, take her out of it entirely, and recast Jack as “vague and far away.”
Koehler did not respond.44
~ A week after the president’s death the New Yorker magazine appeared on newsstands. Less than 20 years earlier the New Yorker was first to publish John Hersey’s tale of PT-109. Now its cover was a painting of simple sailboats at dusk docked in front of a boatyard dock house, beneath a bridge carrying New York commuter trains over a river. The boat sketches had the simplicity of one of Jack’s doodles. Inside the magazine, E. B. White’s reflection on Jack stated, “When we think of him, he is without a hat, standing in the wind and the weather. He was impatient of topcoats and hats, preferring to be exposed, and he was young enough and tough enough to confront and to enjoy the cold and the wind of these times, whether the winds of nature or the winds of political circumstance and national danger. He died of exposure, but in a way that he would have settled for—in the line of duty, and with his friends and enemies all around, supporting him and shooting at him. It can be said of him, as of few men in a like position, that he did not fear the weather, and did not trim his sails, but instead challenged the wind itself, to improve its direction and cause it to blow more softly and more kindly over the world and its people.”45
~ Jack once said, “I always come back to the Cape and walk on the beach when I have a tough decision to make. The Cape is the one place I can think and be alone.”46
In the days that followed Jack’s death, Ted took many long walks there. “I was out of sight of anyone else,” he said, “just the sea on one side of me and the sand on the other, that I would let go of my self-control.” As for his brother, Bobby’s grief was so deep it frightened Ted.47