“I Want to Get Off”
On Monday afternoon, August 28, the President was rising from a nap when told the bad news. An American listening post had picked up a signal that the Soviet government was about to announce a new series of nuclear tests.
Kennedy scowled: “Fucked again.” At the Vienna summit, Khrushchev had assured him that the Soviet Union would “never be the first” to break the voluntary moratorium on testing that both sides had observed since 1958. He had repeated this pledge during his visit with McCloy at Pitsunda in late July.
The President was furious at Khrushchev for deceiving him and furious at himself for believing him. His scientists told him that the Russians had to have been secretly preparing this new series of tests at the very time of Khrushchev’s assurance at Vienna. Bundy and Sorensen years later felt that Kennedy was more disappointed by this betrayal than by any other Soviet action during his Presidency.
Since January, the President had courageously resisted domestic pressures to resume nuclear testing. A July Gallup poll showed that Americans by two to one thought that he should give the order, whatever the Soviets did.
Eisenhower wrote friends that he had planned to resume testing in December 1960, “assuming as I did then that Dick Nixon would be elected President,” but that in light of the election’s “unfortunate outcome” he had decided that Kennedy “should have a free hand.” The Joint Chiefs were also pressuring the President for resumption.
In early August 1961, most of Kennedy’s advisers felt that renewed American testing was inevitable if the Soviets remained so steadfast against a test ban treaty. The President wrote Macmillan that he was “not very hopeful” about delaying resumption much beyond the start of 1962: “We simply cannot be sure, without a control system, that the Soviets are not testing, and if they are testing, they can be learning important things.… What we don’t know can hurt us.”
At Thompson’s instance, Kennedy toyed with the notion of asking the Soviets to agree to a limited test ban. Banning tests in the atmosphere and underwater would prevent the wind-carried nuclear fallout that horrified the world, and it would outlaw areas of testing presumed to help the Russians more than the United States. But the President worried that a limited approach might weaken the American position: better to fight for a comprehensive ban and then accept a limited treaty, if necessary.
By mid-August, the Geneva negotiations had reached an impasse. Kennedy authorized preparations for underground testing, but he did not wish to give the order until the whole world was convinced that he had done all he could for a test ban and that Western security required resumption. On August 28, he sent Ambassador Arthur Dean back to Geneva with a new concession. The Russians showed no interest.
After the President heard about Khrushchev’s decision to resume, Drew Pearson came by the Oval Office to report on his talks with the Chairman. Distracted by Khrushchev’s announcement, the President said he wondered whether history might record “Khrushchev and Kennedy as having brought the world to nuclear war.”
Pearson wrote Khrushchev that the President was “upset” by his decision to test: “This, I’m afraid, is going to arouse American public opinion to a state of resentment which will not be easy to overcome.” If the Chairman was renewing the tests for the purpose of “pressuring Kennedy on Berlin, then please remember our conversation regarding some of the political forces in the United States.”
Kennedy recalled Ambassador Dean from Geneva and issued a statement: the Soviet Union’s resumption of testing had increased “the dangers of a thermonuclear holocaust” and shown “the complete hypocrisy of its professions about general and complete disarmament.”
After the Bay of Pigs, Robert had told the President that Khrushchev “must have thought there was something sinister and complicated behind it all or otherwise we would not have done anything quite as stupid.” The brothers now felt the same way about Khrushchev’s resumption of testing. The President said that Khrushchev was “obviously” trying to “intimidate the West and the neutrals” but he was still “at a loss” to explain the decision.
Khrushchev had announced his decision to Andrei Sakharov and other Soviet nuclear scientists at a secret Kremlin meeting on Monday, July 10, two days after announcing his Berlin defense buildup. The Chairman told them that the world situation had deteriorated; the Soviet Union must add to its nuclear might and show the imperialists what it could do.
Sakharov was certain that Khrushchev’s decision was motivated by politics. He slipped the Chairman a note saying that in technical terms a resumption of testing “would only favor the U.S.A.… Don’t you think that new tests will seriously jeopardize the test ban negotiations, the cause of disarmament, and world peace?”
At lunch, Khrushchev rose and raised a goblet of wine, as if to propose a toast. Then he put down the glass and spoke with rising fury. As Sakharov recounted the harangue, the Chairman said, “Sakharov writes that we don’t need tests. But I’ve got a briefing paper which shows how many tests we’ve conducted and how many more the Americans have conducted. Can Sakharov really prove that with fewer tests we’ve gained more valuable information than the Americans? Are they dumber than we are?
“There’s no way I can know all the technical fine points. But the number of tests, that’s what matters most. How can you develop new technology without testing? But Sakharov goes further. He’s moved beyond science into politics. Here he’s poking his nose where it doesn’t belong.… Politics is like the old joke about the two Jews traveling on a train. One asks the other, ‘So, where are you going?’ ‘I’m going to Zhitomir.’ What a sly fox, thinks the first Jew. I know he’s really going to Zhitomir, but he told me Zhitomir so I’ll think he’s going to Zhmerinka.*
“Leave politics to us—we’re the specialists. You make your bombs and test them.… But remember, we have to conduct our policies from a position of strength. We don’t advertise it, but that’s how it is! … Our opponents don’t understand any other language.
“Look, we helped elect Kennedy last year. Then we met with him in Vienna, a meeting that could have been a turning point. But what does he say? ‘Don’t ask for too much. Don’t put me in a bind. If I make too many concessions, I’ll be turned out of office.’ Quite a guy! He comes to a meeting but can’t perform. What the hell do we need a guy like that for? Why waste time talking to him? Sakharov, don’t try to tell us what to do or how to behave.… I’d be a jellyfish and not Chairman of the Council of Ministers if I listened to people like Sakharov!”
Khrushchev’s resumption of testing satisfied his growing need to impress the world once again with Soviet power. As early as his meeting with the nuclear scientists, he knew he was unlikely to achieve his maximum aim in starting this new Berlin crisis—using nuclear threat to scare the West into recognizing the GDR and allowing Berlin to fall under the dominion of the Soviet bloc.
The Berlin Wall had achieved his minimum aim: halting the East German refugee flow and scoring a minor propaganda victory by showing that the Soviet bloc could violate an agreement such as Potsdam without serious Western retaliation. Arguably Khrushchev had known all along that since he was unwilling to press his Berlin demands to the point of nuclear war, his chances of getting his maximum goal had always been slim. His aide Burlatsky recalled that, in the Berlin Crisis, the Chairman had “demanded much” but was “satisfied with what he received.”
If Khrushchev failed to win his maximum ambition, he would have new political problems. His generals would complain as in 1959 that he had embarrassed the Soviet Union by abandoning his Berlin ultimatum. They already wanted to know why he had not matched Kennedy’s new defense increases with a further buildup of his own and pressed the crisis to the brink. As Sergei Khrushchev recalled, Soviet military leaders “in their mind understood that force would not resolve the question, but in their hearts they hoped it would.”
The Chairman was worried that leaders of the Third World and other countries might interpret his willingness to negotiate as a tacit admission that, whatever his claims, American nuclear strength was far superior to that of the Soviet Union. If there were to be talks with the West on Berlin, he did not wish to deal from a position of weakness.
Khrushchev knew that resumption of nuclear testing might infuriate Kennedy, Macmillan, and some of the neutrals, but he knew it would strengthen the Soviet nuclear and political arsenal. He hoped any world leaders who doubted his claims of Soviet strategic strength might assume that the nation enjoying the capacity to detonate the biggest and ugliest hydrogen bombs had the capacity to control the earth.
In the wake of Khrushchev’s announcement of resumed testing, Kennedy convened his NSC on Thursday morning, August 31. Robert Kennedy thought it the “most gloomy” White House meeting “since early in the Berlin Crisis.” The President asked whether he should order immediate resumption of American testing.
Lyndon Johnson said, “I personally think it would be a good thing if you let Khrushchev take the heat for a little while. Also, you ought not to give the impression of reacting every time he does something.” He thought that Khrushchev’s move “might be a reaction to their failure to intimidate the West in the Berlin situation.”
Rusk proposed issuing a statement that the President had ordered preparations but not a final decision to resume. This would keep the President from looking indecisive without having to renew testing now. Edward Murrow complained that issuing such a statement would forfeit “the greatest propaganda gift we have had for a long time.”
Kennedy agreed with Murrow but doubted that he could long resist congressional pressure for resumption: “The Russians are not fools. They thought they would lose less than they would gain by this decision. They must believe they will gain most by appearing tough and mean.” Worried that the Chairman might now further test him with an effort to down Western planes flying to West Berlin, thus escalating the crisis, the President approved McNamara’s proposal to require such aircraft to obtain permission before firing at ground targets.
After the meeting, the Attorney General told his brother, “I want to get off.” The President said, “Get off what?” Robert said, “Get off the planet.” Robert added that he would not take a friend’s jocular advice to run against his brother for President in 1964: “I don’t want the job.”
Dictating a memo to himself, Robert mused that the Russians felt “that if they can break our will in Berlin we will never be able to be good for anything else and they will have won the battle in 1961.… Their plan is obviously not to be the most popular but to be the most fearsome and to terrorize the world into submission. My feeling is that they do not want war, but they will carry us to the brink.” He agreed with Bohlen’s late-winter observation that 1961 would be the year the Russians brought the world closest to nuclear war.
The travails over Berlin and the resumption of nuclear testing illuminated Robert Kennedy’s new place near the center of his brother’s foreign policy government. When the President gathered advisers in February and March to discuss a summit with Khrushchev and an invasion of Cuba, the Attorney General had been virtually absent. After the Bay of Pigs, the elder brother had said, “I should have had him involved from the beginning.”
When Joseph Kennedy first demanded that Robert be brought into the Cabinet, the President-elect had considered it an irritating example of his father’s tribal Irish thinking. “But now he realized how right the old man had been,” recalled Lem Billings. “When the crunch came, family members were the only ones you could count on. Bobby was the only person he could rely on to be absolutely dedicated. Jack would never have admitted it, but from that moment on, the Kennedy Presidency became a sort of collaboration between them.”
“Every time they have a conference, don’t kid anybody about who is the top adviser,” Lyndon Johnson told a friend. “It’s not McNamara, the Chiefs of Staff, or anyone else like that. Bobby is first in, first out. And Bobby is the boy he listens to.” Johnson later said, “That upstart’s come too far and too fast. He skipped the grades where you learn the rules of life.”
Born in 1925, Robert Francis Kennedy was eight years younger than the President, and his childhood was different. The older brother could remember growing up in a modest house in Brookline, summer holidays in Irish Catholic ghetto resorts, a mother scrimping for an expanding family, a father still anxious about making his first million.
John Kennedy’s early adolescence demanded adjustment to the family’s rapidly improving financial and social circumstances. During these years, the Kennedys moved from the Hibernian Boston of his grandparents and the upper-middle-class strivers’ world of Brookline to the mansions in Palm Beach, Bronxville, and Hyannis Port; New Deal Washington, in which his father was lionized as a Roosevelt crony; London and the Court of St. James’s.
John could remember a time when it was not clear that he would never have to worry about earning a living, when the family socialized mainly with other Irish Catholics and did not rub shoulders with the great and famous. This experience revealed itself in certain aspects of his adult personality—the unfeigned respect for men who had worked their way up like his father (as long as they did not cross him politically)*, his anxiety about his social position even after he became President. Jacqueline privately called this her husband’s “immigrant side.”
Lem Billings believed that “in many ways Jack still felt something of an upstart, an Irish Catholic who looked to the Brahmins for a model of how to act.” His social friends tended to be upper-class Protestants. His rhetoric and other aspects of his public style were self-consciously reserved and patrician.†
Although he frequently quoted the biblical maxim about much being expected of those to whom much is given, John Kennedy showed no sense of guilt about his privileges. As Sorensen and others have written, he always felt torn between the contending pulls of political struggle and a life of well-financed luxury, sitting on a beach.* His unabashed attitude toward his wealth was in harmony with that of his parents, which his mother once expressed too frankly during a Kennedy campaign: “It’s our money, and we’re free to spend it as we please.”
In contrast to his brother’s early experience, Robert Kennedy had been a millionaire almost since birth. When he started a stamp collection, Franklin Roosevelt sent him contributions. Less compelled to prove himself than John, he did not make grand friends in London or employ a valet at Harvard. He was certainly far more relaxed about his Irishness and Catholicism. The Brahmin poet Robert Lowell once observed, “My, he’s unassimilated.”
This sense of social and financial security perhaps gave Robert the psychological freedom to brook being perceived as an upstart. He did not share John’s outwardly conformist nature, his lack of unease with big businessmen or wealthy playboys. It is impossible to imagine Robert Kennedy saying, as John did of one of his chums, that the best thing about him was that “he really doesn’t give a damn.”†
Physically slight, as the seventh child Robert was so surrounded by sisters that his mother worried he would grow up a “sissy.” This may have made him feel more obliged than his older brothers to prove his fortitude—especially to his tenacious father.
The toughness and nonconformism were combined in Robert’s political approach. One of John Kennedy’s heroes was Melbourne; were it not for ideology, Robert’s might have been Castro. Told once that he should be in the hills with the Cuban leader and Che Guevara, he replied, “I know it.” The Attorney General was the champion of counterinsurgency, displaying a Green Beret on his desk and flying Special Forces units to Hyannis Port, where his children, nieces, and nephews watched the soldiers swing from trees and fences.
Graduating from Harvard in 1948 after a war’s-end tour on the Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., Robert espoused his father’s isolationism, opposing the Truman Doctrine and aid to Greece and Turkey. He apparently did not disagree with his father’s public demand two years later that the United States get out of Korea and Berlin and let communism collapse of its own weight instead of wasting American blood and treasure.
On a six-month tour of Europe and the Middle East in 1948, Robert wrote his parents from Vienna that “everybody in [the] Embassy wants to go to war with their comprehension of results built not on history but on [their] own rather idealistic beliefs. I’m afraid they might sweep us right into war.” In a piece for the Boston Advertiser he wrote, “We can look back over the last four or five years and see the colossal mistakes that we have made.”
As a University of Virginia law student, he wrote a paper embracing much of the right-wing critique of Yalta: “President Roosevelt felt that the way to beat the Common Enemy as well as to have future peace was to stay friendly with Russia.… This was the philosophy that he and his lieutenants, Hopkins, Harriman, Winant*, etc., kept as their guiding star … and a philosophy that spelled death and destruction for the world.”
Traveling in a broad arc from Israel to Japan with Congressman John Kennedy in 1951 drew him closer to his brother than ever before. The trip exacerbated the Kennedys’ impatience with the Foreign Service subculture, risk-averse diplomats who did not speak the local language and who insisted that the only problems that mattered were those between Moscow and Washington. In India, the brothers dined with Nehru, who, looking bored, warned them that communism thrived on discontent. In his journal Robert noted Nehru’s observation that communism was “something to die for.… Must give the same aura to democracy.… We only have status quo to offer these people.”
After the trip, Robert began his legal career by investigating Soviet agents for the Truman Justice Department, then switched to the Criminal Division, where he helped to press a corruption case against two former Truman officials. Reluctantly he left the job to manage John’s 1952 Senate campaign against Henry Cabot Lodge. After the victory, Joseph Kennedy arranged with his friend and financial benefactee Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin for Robert to be assistant counsel for McCarthy’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.
“At that time, I thought there was a serious internal security threat to the United States,” Robert later said. “I felt at that time that Joe McCarthy seemed to be the only one who was doing anything about it.” John Kennedy may have thought his brother’s new job might send an agreeable signal to Massachusetts voters who thought their new Senator insufficiently McCarthyite. While McCarthy and his chief counsel, Roy Cohn, hunted Communists in government, Robert analyzed commercial statistics, finding that at the same time Chinese troops had killed Americans in Korea, seventy-five percent of ships carrying goods to China had sailed under Western flags.
He quit in August 1953 to serve as his father’s aide on the second Hoover Commission on executive reorganization. Billings found him during this period a “really very cross, unhappy, angry young man,” always telling people off and getting into fights. The next year, Robert returned to the Investigations Subcommittee as Democratic counsel and, after the infamous Army-McCarthy hearings, wrote a minority report lacerating the methods of McCarthy and Cohn.
In July 1955, Robert joined his father’s friend Justice William O. Douglas on a five-week tour of Soviet Central Asia. In their hotel rooms at Baku, Douglas loudly complained before concealed microphones that the Soviets had broken their promise to provide an interpreter; he would call Khrushchev and tell him of their wretched treatment. Soon an interpreter arrived.
Douglas found that “everywhere we went,” Robert “carried ostentatiously a copy of the Bible in his left hand.” Behaving like an investigator, the twenty-nine-year-old man irritated the Justice by incessantly asking the Russians hostile questions. Refusing Intourist caviar and other Russian food because it was “dirty,” he subsisted mainly on watermelon.
Flying to Omsk, Kennedy developed a fierce chill. Douglas felt his forehead and was sure his temperature must be at least 105 degrees. Robert said, “No Communist is going to doctor me.” The Justice said, “I promised your daddy I would take care of you.” Kennedy was showing signs of delirium when a large female doctor gave him a penicillin shot and put him to bed. When Kennedy and Douglas arrived in Moscow, they were met by Ethel, Jean, and Patricia Kennedy and dined at Spaso House with Ambassador Charles Bohlen.
Douglas later felt that the Soviet journey had brought a “transformation in Bobby.… In spite of his violent religious drive against communism, he began to see, I think, the basic, important forces in Russia—the people, their daily aspirations, their humanistic traits, and their desire to live at peace with the world.” Douglas thought the Russian trip showed Kennedy that the Russian people were not soulless fanatics but human beings and achievers, “people with problems,” and that for Kennedy it was “the final undoing of McCarthyism.”
In a lecture to the Virginia State Bar Association, Robert said that the Soviet record “qualifies as colonialism of a peculiarly harsh and intractable kind.” Unlike more severe Cold Warriors, he did not propose an American empire as a bulwark against it or suggest that African and Asian anticolonial movements were commanded from Moscow. Still, in a Georgetown University lecture, he warned that history had proven it “suicidal” to make major concessions to Moscow without a quid pro quo: “All I ask before we take any more drastic steps is that we receive something from the Soviet Union other than a smile and a promise—a smile that could be as crooked and a promise that could be as empty as they have been in the past.”
When Chester Bowles’s aide Harris Wofford began planning a Soviet trip for his boss in early 1957, he called on Kennedy, who gave him a “short, glum account of his Russian trip, warned that they spied on you night and day.… Then he went into a diatribe against the Soviet regime, which he explained was a great evil and an ever-present threat, and bid me goodbye.” Wofford later recalled that the meeting with Robert “did nothing to make me want his brother to become President.”
In August 1956, attending his first Democratic convention in Chicago, Robert helped to manage his brother’s effort to win the Vice Presidential nomination. After the defeat Robert “was bitter,” said a delegate who flew back with him to Boston. “He said they should have won and somebody had pulled something fishy and he wanted to know who did it.” Robert assured his brother that he had “made a great fight, and they’re not going to win, and you’re going to be the candidate the next time.”
That fall, he joined the Stevenson entourage, largely to school himself in presidential campaign management. By Election Day, he concluded that Stevenson had “no rapport with his audience—no feeling for them—no comprehension of what campaigning required—no ability to make decisions. It was a terrible shock to me.” He was so disillusioned that he quietly cast his ballot for Eisenhower. The antipathy was mutual: Stevenson referred to the abrupt young man as the “the Black Prince.”
Robert became chief counsel for the Senate’s new Select Committee on Improper Activities in Labor and Management, whose members included the junior Senator from Massachusetts. This was where he pursued Jimmy Hoffa for flouting democratic procedure in the Teamsters, arranging the beating and perhaps murder of union opponents, misusing at least $9.5 million in union funds, using gangsters to buttress his control. For the first time, he gained some understanding of the hidden power of organized crime over American life.
One committee witness was Sam Giancana, who had employed an electrical workers’ local to seize the Chicago jukebox and vending machine business. While Pierre Salinger of the committee staff read out charge after charge, the gangster thirty-three times took the Fifth Amendment. Robert hectored, “Will you tell us when you have opposition from anybody that you dispose of them by having them stuffed in a trunk? … Will you just giggle every time I ask you a question? … I thought only little girls giggled, Mr. Giancana.”
In a best-selling book, The Enemy Within, Robert wrote that “the gangsters of today work in a highly organized fashion and are far more powerful now than at any time in the history of the country. They control political figures and threaten whole communities.” He and his brother called for a National Crime Commission as a central clearinghouse for intelligence on criminals. Speaking for both, Ken O’Donnell complained in 1959 that “the FBI has never been aggressive on big crime. It went after Communists and stayed there.” This criticism did not please J. Edgar Hoover.
In July 1959, the younger Kennedy wrote Richard Nixon that the Labor Rackets Committee was disbanding; would the Vice President like to hire one of his excellent investigators? Nixon did not even consider the request, which his aides suspected to be an effort to slip an agent into the enemy camp.* A member of the Nixon staff scribbled on Kennedy’s letter, “Part of their spy system!!”
John McCormack of Massachusetts once said that Joseph Kennedy advised his son, “When you get to the White House there are two jobs you must lock up—Attorney General and director of the Internal Revenue Service.”† Unhappy at the prospect of starting his term amid charges of nepotism, the President-elect enlisted his lawyer and friend Clark Clifford as well as George Smathers to talk his father out of the appointment.
The day before the announcement, Sam Rayburn sent a warning in his spidery handwriting, the letters one inch high: “Dear Jack—Be careful about your Attorney General—Too much talk.” Lyndon Johnson told a friend that Senator Richard Russell of Georgia was “absolutely shittin’ a squealin’ worm. He thinks it’s a disgrace for a kid who’s never practiced law to be appointed.”* Bundles of mail to the Democratic National Committee ran one hundred to one against Robert’s appointment.
Ken O’Donnell felt that “Bobby did not want to be Attorney General” because he “loved his brother so much that he didn’t want to hurt him.… The President wanted Bobby with him because they loved each other as brothers, and Bobby’s another that’s never going to screw him.”
For their first three months in office, a distance was created between the brothers by Robert’s absorption in learning how to run the Justice Department. It was accentuated by the President’s sensitivity about the nepotism charge and his awareness that he had passed into a new league. At the start, especially in foreign policy, Kennedy turned for daily advice not to his brother but to those with statutory responsibility. Robert’s exposure to Soviet affairs during the early months of 1961 was limited mainly to the Justice Department’s work on counterintelligence.
After the Bay of Pigs, frustrated by unsound advice received from men he had barely known, the President discarded any qualms he had had about openly using his brother on matters outside Justice. Eisenhower provided something of a precedent: he had leaned on his devoted youngest brother, Milton, for confidential counsel, ordering installation of a special White House telephone line and flying him in by chopper from Baltimore, where he was president of Johns Hopkins University. But Milton had remained a shadowy figure to the American public; under his brother he never held a full-time government post and had almost nothing to do with implementation.
On the contrary, Robert Kennedy became his bother’s trouble-shooter, lightning rod, spokesman, adviser, no-man, eyes and ears (“Little Brother Is Watching”), whiphand overseer of the FBI and CIA, and tribune of presidential wishes and thoughts that the President would not let himself be heard to speak. Lampooning the cliché of the time, the President would cover his telephone receiver and say it was “the Second Most Important Man in the Capital calling.” He told Robert that “there’s only one way for you to go, and it ain’t up!”
The Attorney General served as a conscience on matters like civil rights and poverty for a brother who had little use for mixing emotion with political action in the manner of their Boston Irish grandfathers. Billings recalled that when Robert gave a civil rights speech at the University of Georgia in May 1961, the President “wasn’t too happy.… He said it wouldn’t do him any good to bring that kind of civil rights talk directly into the heart of the South.”
Robert did not feel compelled to behave like more orthodox Cabinet secretaries, who were in greater danger of exhausting the President’s goodwill. Concerned above all with results, he once said, “Let Jack be charming with them.” Over dinner at Hickory Hill, his estate in McLean, Virginia,* he once asked Averell Harriman, one of the villains of his law school dissertation on Yalta, about a directive he had asked for. Harriman said he was planning to get to it soon. Kennedy slammed his hand on the table: “You get on that first thing in the morning!”
In 1962, when the Gallup poll recorded the “bad things” Americans most frequently heard about the President, one was “too many Kennedys in public life.” (Another was “too many parties, swimming pool dunkings,† running around too much.”) Eisenhower’s friend William Robinson, formerly of the New York Herald Tribune, complained to the General about “the little bully who is now Attorney General” and his “thinly veiled and arrogant intention” to have the Kennedys “take over complete control of the lives, activities, and destinies of the American people.”
Admirably, the Attorney General refused to exempt men like the unscrupulous foreign agent Igor Cassini and Joseph Kennedy’s old crony and former Harvard Law School Dean James Landis from prosecution because they were family friends. If the mastiffs of organized crime felt they had extracted some sort of tacit campaign pledge from the Kennedys to soft-pedal prosecution, this was strenuously contradicted by Robert’s pursuit of the Mafia, which he fought more aggressively than any previous Attorney General.
After the Bay of Pigs, Robert Kennedy was not his brother’s chief adviser on the Soviet Union; that portfolio remained with Bohlen and Thompson, to whose experience he could not pretend. But he was the man assigned to scrutinize and regroup his brother’s counselors so that a Bay of Pigs could never happen again. The President now realized that Robert was his only adviser who operated almost purely from the presidential point of view and with only the President’s welfare at heart, undiluted by the aspirations of State, Defense, or the NSC staff.
As the President’s back channel to the CIA, Robert was probably the only man other than his brother who knew virtually the full range of covert actions the President had approved and how Kennedy considered them to serve his foreign policy. The Kennedy brothers were the only two men in the Administration who knew everything that was said between Robert and Georgi Bolshakov.
For a man who had been so emotional about Soviet communism in the 1950s, the Attorney General was surprisingly nonideological about the subject once in power. He secretly met with a known Soviet agent without apparent discomfort. During Berlin and later foreign crises, he often proved to be the least militant man in the room. But on other matters, such as Castro’s removal from power, no presidential adviser was more fierce.
He shared the President’s strong preference for crisis management over the kind of planning and forethought that must be grounded on some pattern of ideology. With their deeply held convictions about Soviet motivation and behavior, Acheson and Stevenson required little self-searching before counseling Kennedy whether or not, for instance, to negotiate with Khrushchev over Berlin. Robert instead took the role of helping the President to seek and exhaust all available advice, questioning assumptions, demanding action-oriented conclusions.
As a politician who wanted his brother reelected in 1964, Robert never forgot that the President had to sustain support from a party that included an Acheson wing opposing serious negotiation with the Soviet Union as well a Stevenson wing that demanded it. Like the President, he always kept one eye on the American Right, which since the mid-1940s had policed the anticommunism of Democratic Presidents.
Always looking for ways to demonstrate American moral superiority over the Soviet Union to the world, the Attorney General saw the Soviet resumption of nuclear testing as a superb opportunity. “You see, I was nothing but a troublemaker,” he recalled. “I thought it was outrageous that … there weren’t parades and demonstrations and people throwing bricks through public relations offices at the Russians—as they would have if we had started testing.
“I thought if we could … use the elements within American society and have them get in touch with their counterparts in other countries—businessmen with businessmen, lawyers with lawyers, labor unions with labor unions, students with students … plus what we could do with our own government, although we didn’t have such a thing as an internal political party, as the Communists did … we still could do a great deal more.”
On Friday, September 1, the Russians fired off their first nuclear blast in three years, a huge fireball over the central plains of Soviet Asia. Gathered in Bundy’s basement office, Arthur Dean and John McCloy wanted the President to announce American resumption immediately. Kennedy’s science adviser, Jerome Wiesner, preferred a statement asking for world condemnation of the Russians, as did Murrow, Bundy, and Schlesinger.
Kennedy was in his bedroom, resting after a noontime swim. Since his Senate days, the President had used this hour for a full nap. When Bundy and his colleagues knocked on Kennedy’s bedroom door, he emerged after a moment’s delay, wearing a bathrobe. Obviously tense and annoyed at being disturbed, he listened impatiently as Bundy asked what they should do about the Soviet resumption. McCloy told the President that they must not keep standing still while the Communists kicked them in the teeth.
Kennedy said he was not inclined to announce resumption now but did not know how long he could hold back. Bundy showed him two possible statements. After reading and tearing them apart, the President dismissed his aides.
In the Oval Office that afternoon, Schlesinger found him “much more relaxed.” Of their earlier discussion, Kennedy said, “McCloy was certainly reverting to Republicanism—and to think that only a few days ago, he was all over Khrushchev!”
In Paris, Charles de Gaulle told the American Ambassador, General James Gavin, that the Soviet resumption of testing was just another sign of the continuing Soviet military buildup: “It would be a grave mistake for the West to run to the U.S.S.R. asking for negotiations.” At the end of their talk, the French President asked Gavin to give Kennedy a “personal” message:
“I understand full well, better than anyone else, the weight and scope of President Kennedy’s responsibilities. He is the head of the state in the West which is the most powerful. Therefore everything depends, more or less, on him.… If the state of affairs turns from bad to worse, we will enter a catastrophe. If such a catastrophe occurs, France will enter it together with the United States.… If there is to be no catastrophe, it will have been important for the West to have shown firmness.”
On Saturday, September 2, in a last effort to avoid American resumption, Kennedy called Rusk from Hyannis Port to suggest that he and Macmillan propose an immediate atmospheric test ban with no inspection. This would be a serious concession; until now, the West had always insisted on controls. An Anglo-American note was sent to Moscow.
The next afternoon, General Clifton called the President back to shore from a Marlin cruise; the Soviets had fired off a second nuclear test. Arriving at his house by golf cart, Kennedy said, “Get Dean Rusk on the phone! Get my brother!” Carl Kaysen of the NSC staff suggested that the President exploit the situation by piously refusing to play the Russians’ dirty game. Kennedy replied, “They’d kick me in the nuts. I couldn’t get away with it.”
Neutral and nonaligned nations meeting in Belgrade refused to censure the Soviets at the same time as they passed their usual resolution against Western colonialism. Kennedy responded with profanity.
In the Oval Office on Tuesday, Bundy reported that the Soviets had conducted a third nuclear test. The President’s patience was exhausted. He gave the order for resumption of American nuclear testing, but only in the laboratory and underground, which would yield no fallout. “I had no choice,” he later said. “I had waited two days for an answer to the message that Macmillan and I sent to Khrushchev. That was plenty of time. All they did was shoot off two more bombs.”
He told Rusk the reason the Russians were showing so little interest in negotiations on Berlin was that “it isn’t time yet. It’s too early. They are bent on scaring the world to death before they begin negotiating, and they haven’t quite brought the pot to boil. Not enough people are frightened.”
When Stevenson complained about the decision to resume, Kennedy said, “What choice did we have? They had spit in our eye three times. We couldn’t possibly sit back and do nothing at all.” Stevenson replied that America had been ahead in the propaganda battle.
“What does that mean?” asked the President. “I don’t hear of any windows broken because of the Soviet decision. The neutrals have been terrible. The Russians made two tests after our note calling for a ban on atmospheric testing.… All this makes Khrushchev look pretty tough. He has had a succession of apparent victories—space, Cuba, the Wall. He wants to give out the feeling that he has us on the run.… Anyway, the decision has been made. I’m not saying that it was the right decision. Who the hell knows?”
In a private memo to Newsweek colleagues, Ben Bradlee reported the President’s belief that “the foul winds of war are blowing” and that “Khrushchev is really moving inevitably toward the brink.”
Bundy recalled the late summer and fall of 1961 as “a time of sustained and draining anxiety.… There was hardly a week … in which there were not nagging questions about what would happen if … or what one or another of our allies would or would not support, or whether morale in West Berlin itself was holding up.” When he later read Robert Lowell’s poem “Fall 1961,” he felt it captured his own emotions:
All autumn, the chafe and jar
of nuclear war;
we have talked our extinction to death.
In early September, after a conversation with the President, James Reston wrote in his New York Times column that Kennedy was frustrated by his failure to “get down to rational discussion” with Khrushchev about Berlin. If the Soviets wished to negotiate an “honorable accommodation,” the President was “ready to go along.… He will negotiate in good faith but he will not be bullied. He has been trying now ever since Vienna to make this clear to Khrushchev without success.”
Khrushchev used his own Times columnist to send a message to Kennedy. At the Kremlin on Tuesday, September 5, he told C. L. Sulzberger that he was ready for another summit. At Vienna, they had “felt each other out.” Now they must both be “prepared to relieve tension and reach agreement on the conclusion of a German peace treaty, on giving West Berlin the status of a free city, and especially on the more important problem of disarmament.”
The Chairman complained that Kennedy was “too young. He lacks the authority and the prestige to settle this issue.… If Kennedy appealed to the people, if he voiced his real inner thoughts and stated that there is no use fighting over Berlin … the situation would be settled quickly.” Had Eisenhower said this, “no one could have accused him of being young, inexperienced, or afraid.” But if Kennedy did, “the opposition will raise its voice and accuse him of youth, cowardice, and a lack of statesmanship. He is afraid of that.”
Under the atmospheric test ban proposed by Kennedy and Macmillan, France would still have been free to keep testing on NATO’s behalf. The West had carried out many more nuclear tests than the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union had a “moral right” to catch up. “What the hell do we want with tests? You cannot put a bomb in soup or make an overcoat out of it.” He would test the new Soviet hundred-megaton bomb and “make would-be aggressors think twice.”
When Sulzberger’s transcript was cleared, the Russians asked for two important changes that softened its effect. Instead of linking a Kennedy- Khrushchev summit to progress on disarmament and Berlin, Khrushchev wished to say that he would “always be glad to meet” with the President. Instead of threatening to test his hundred-megaton bomb, Khrushchev wished to say that the Soviets would simply test the bomb’s detonator.
At a Kremlin reception, the Chairman thanked Sulzberger for the way he had handled the interview. Sulzberger daringly replied, “You know, we must have had to cut down twenty thousand spruce trees in Canada to print all that crap.” Khrushchev roared.
Before the end of their interview, the Chairman had asked Sulzberger to take a secret message to Kennedy: “I would not be loath to establishing some sort of contacts with him to find a means, without damaging the prestige of the U.S., to reach a settlement—but on the basis of a peace treaty and a free Berlin. And through such informal contacts, the President might say what is on his mind in ways of solving the problem.”
Sulzberger had told Khrushchev that the fastest way to send such a message was through Thompson. Khrushchev said, “Thompson is very able, but he is an ambassador. He would have to send such a message to Secretary Rusk. Rusk would tell Kennedy what was wrong with it … and Kennedy would end up wearing Rusk’s corset. Kennedy could not get a fair initial reaction, and Rusk is just a tool of the Rockefellers.”
Walking in the Spaso House garden, away from Soviet eavesdropping devices, Sulzberger told Thompson that Khrushchev had put him “in the embarrassed position” of sending a message to Kennedy that the Chairman had asked him not to divulge: as soon as he sent it, he would ask the President to inform Thompson of its contents immediately.
Sulzberger flew to Paris, sealed Khrushchev’s message in an envelope, and sent it by special courier to the White House. Kennedy read it and said it was “hard to figure” out just what it meant.
In the Cabinet Room on Wednesday, September 13, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Lemnitzer, briefed the President on secret plans for general nuclear war against the “Sino-Soviet bloc.”
Using new satellite information, he reported that while the Soviet Union could pulverize Western Europe with short- and medium-range nuclear missiles, it had only ten to twenty-five missiles on launchers capable of striking the United States. The Soviet Union had roughly twenty-eight nuclear-equipped submarines and roughly two hundred bombers that could be put over North America in a first-strike attack. It posed “a great threat to U.S. urban areas” but a more limited danger in the months ahead to American nuclear striking forces.
Little of the Soviet force was on alert. The ICBMs and bombers could take an hour or more to launch. Few of the submarines were thought to be able to launch warheads immediately against the United States. Lemnitzer warned Kennedy that even if the United States were to launch a first strike against the Soviet land mass, he had to expect that “some portion of the Soviet long-range nuclear force would strike the United States.”
The bottom line: the United States enjoyed vast nuclear superiority, but it was not invulnerable. If the President learned of an impending Soviet surprise attack, he could almost instantly launch 1,004 delivery systems carrying 1,685 nuclear warheads in a preemptive first strike against the Soviet bloc. The United States would have to tolerate perhaps two to fifteen million American casualties, not to mention European deaths in the “low tens of millions.” Nevertheless Soviet society would be much destroyed.
Lemnitzer said that if the President ever launched a “bolt-out-of-the-blue” first strike, without the provocation of impending attack, as some strategists and Pentagon officials had openly demanded in the 1940s and 1950s and as Khrushchev always feared, the imbalance of terror would be even greater.
Kennedy was scheduled to deliver his maiden speech to the United Nations in late September. Still fuming about the neutralist failure to condemn Soviet resumption of testing, he wondered whether Nehru, Nkrumah, and other nonaligned leaders would be in New York: “Khrushchev certainly drew the pick of the litter.”*
He asked Stevenson, “What do you think of the idea of moving the UN to West Berlin?” Such an idea, which had originated under Eisenhower, would help to prevent a Russian attack on the city and keep world attention focused on the embarrassing Wall. Stevenson replied that, as the host country, the United States should not call for such a move: it would lend the Soviet bloc prestige and make the UN almost a hostage behind Eastern lines.
While drafting his UN speech, the President considered presenting a four-point plan to reframe the Berlin problem in favor of the West: submit the legal aspects of the dispute to the World Court, put the Autobahn to Berlin under UN control, let Berliners decide how they should be governed by UN plebiscite, consider moving the UN to Berlin. Kennedy said in private, “There are two possibilities about Berlin: war, or losing West Berlin gradually to the Communists. I don’t think enough of the UN not to be prepared to trade it for a nuclear war.”
Using the press once again to send a new message to Khrushchev, the President told his friend James Wechsler of the New York Post for publication that he might one day have to run the supreme risk to convince Khrushchev that conciliation did not mean humiliation: “If Khrushchev wants to rub my nose in the dirt, it’s all over.” Wechsler told his readers that for Kennedy nothing was nonnegotiable “except the dignity of free men”: “There can be full negotiations about the future of Germany and of China and almost any explosive area if Mr. Khrushchev is ready to negotiate rather than to dictate.”
At Hyannis Port on Monday, September 18, the President awoke to learn that Dag Hammarskjöld’s plane was presumed to have crashed in the Congo. He said, “It couldn’t have happened at a worse time.” Then word came that Hammarskjöld was dead. Kennedy knew that Khrushchev would now find it easier to replace the Secretary-General with a troika.
Kennedy had already asked Rusk to feel out Gromyko at the UN about the possibility of talks over Berlin. The next day, the Secretary of State tried to buttonhole the Russian after a General Assembly session, but Gromyko escaped down an escalator into a crowd of reporters. Unwilling to seem as if he was chasing after the Foreign Minister, Rusk turned away.
Bohlen arranged for the two men to meet over luncheon on Thursday, September 21, in the Waldorf Towers’ seedily elegant Windsor Suite, so named for its frequent tenants, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Rusk told Gromyko that serious negotiation on Berlin was “difficult, if not impossible, while the air is full of threats. On the other hand, if the atmosphere can be improved, we are quite ready for businesslike and constructive discussion.”
Rusk said that “our basic objection is to the Soviet threat to end our rights in West Berlin.” America would “surely fight” for the three essential rights outlined by the President in his July address. “Our presence in West Berlin rests fundamentally not only on occupation rights but on the will of the people of that city. We are for what they are for.” Gromyko replied that war over Berlin would be folly: “Unthinkable and unnecessary.” Afterward Bohlen said, “There may well be some real give in the Soviet position.”
At a return luncheon, Gromyko gave Rusk a package of Russian cigarettes before noticing that the brand was called Troika. He apologized: “Pure coincidence.”
At Hyannis Port, the President spent the weekend sailing with Jacqueline and working with Sorensen on his UN address. Weekend guests at what the press now called the “Kennedy Compound” included the Dominican playboy Porfirio Rubirosa, Rubirosa’s latest wife, and Frank Sinatra.
The White House press office specified that Sinatra and Rubirosa were visiting Peter Lawford and Edward Kennedy—not the President. Joseph Kennedy’s chauffeur saw Sinatra arrive “with a crowd of jet-setters and Beautiful People” for a “big party.… The women they had trucked in that afternoon had looked like whores to me.”
On Sunday evening, the President and Lawford boarded a noisy Air Force propeller plane for New York. The noise forced Kennedy and Sorensen to crouch in the aisle as they collated pages of his speech. At the Carlyle, the President took the unusual precaution of reading the address aloud for criticism by Rusk and other advisers.
Salinger had arrived at the Carlyle the previous evening. Georgi Bolshakov had called him and said it was “most important” that he dine with Kharmalov, who was in town with Gromyko. Salinger agreed to dine with the Russian in his hotel room on Sunday evening.
Half French, half Jewish, the President’s press secretary was bluff, jovial, grandiloquent, and plump, fond of wine and brandy, food, women, music, and politics. Theodore White thought that with ten or fifteen more years of age, Salinger could have been “mayor of any Burgundian village.” Robert Pierpoint of CBS recalled that Salinger “could drink and carouse with the best—or worst—of correspondents, and frequently did.”
Watching Nixon’s spokesman, Herbert Klein, conceding the 1960 election on television, Kennedy said, “He looks more like a New Frontiersman than you do.” Later he told Oleg Cassini that Salinger seemed to have the “best life,” spending “every other week in Paris, eating at the best restaurants, and smoking Cuban cigars.”
Peter Lisagor of the Chicago Daily News recalled that in terms of “sitting down and talking to Pierre about presidential attitudes toward NATO or toward the New Frontier domestic programs, except where they spilled over into politics,” Salinger was “not very useful” because the President was careful about what he told his spokesman: “Kennedy often felt … that he’s his own best press secretary—he’ll decide what goes out and how it goes out and when it goes out.”
Salinger was born in San Francisco in 1925. His father took the family to Toronto, where he worked as a mining engineer, and Salt Lake City, where he worked as an impresario. The son studied piano, composition, conducting, and violin, but since he “had no friends of my own age, and had rarely swung a baseball bat or thrown a football,” he gave up hopes for a concert career at eleven. After serving as skipper of a Navy minesweeper in the Pacific and graduating from the University of San Francisco, he served as night city editor of the San Francisco Chronicle and was working on a Teamsters exposé for Collier’s when the magazine folded on Christmas 1956.
Out of work, he received two calls—one from the Teamsters, which tried to hire him as its publicist, and one from Robert Kennedy, who was setting up his Senate labor rackets investigation. On Salinger’s first day on the labor rackets staff, Robert took him to Hickory Hill for dinner. Salinger was startled that, when he asked for a glass of wine, Robert said he did not have any in the house. By Salinger’s account, Kennedy was “more than a little surprised” when he returned from his car with a bottle he “had in reserve for just such emergencies.”
At Robert’s behest, John Kennedy hired Salinger as campaign press secretary, although the two men barely knew each other. Salinger so gained the confidence of candidate and press corps that Theodore White wrote that “no one who followed the Kennedy campaign through 1960 remembers Salinger with anything but respect and affection.”
After the Bay of Pigs, Salinger was the victim of the President’s sudden interest in government censorship: “The publishers have to understand that we’re never more than a miscalculation away from war and that there are things we’re doing that we just can’t talk about.” Salinger replied with a suggestion he later regretted and would never have made, had he had more national experience: a presidential speech on the subject of press self-restraint on matters of national security.
Speaking to publishers in New York, Kennedy declared that “if the press is awaiting a declaration of war before it imposes the self-discipline of combat conditions, then I can only say no war ever posed a greater threat to our security.… For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence.” Editorial writers and columnists howled at what they saw as a presidential effort to divert blame for the Bay of Pigs onto the press.*
Following Salinger’s careful instructions, Bolshakov brought Kharmalov to a side entrance of the Carlyle. A Secret Service agent took the two Soviets upstairs in a back elevator. Salinger opened his door. Kharmalov beamed: “The storm in Berlin is over.” Salinger was dumbstruck: “Over?”
Kharmalov asked him to tell Kennedy that Khrushchev was willing to have an early summit and consider American proposals on Berlin. He would leave the timing up to Kennedy because of the President’s “obvious political difficulties.” But the summit must be soon. Socialist nations were pressing the Chairman. The danger of a major military incident in Berlin was great. Kharmalov said that Khrushchev “hopes your President’s speech to the UN won’t be another warlike ultimatum like the one on July 25. He didn’t like that at all.”
Salinger left a message for the President, who was said to be dining in his apartment upstairs with friends. Kennedy sent for him at one o’clock Monday morning. When Salinger arrived, the President was sitting up in white pajamas in bed, reading and chewing on an unlit cigar.
Salinger gave him the message from Khrushchev. The President rose from his bed and stared out at the glittering Manhattan skyline: “There’s only one way you can read it. If Khrushchev is ready to listen to our views on Germany, he’s not going to recognize the Ulbricht regime—not this year, at least—and that’s good news.”
Kennedy called Rusk, who agreed that since Khrushchev had not put his message on paper, he should reply the same way. The President dictated some sentences, which Salinger wrote down on Carlyle stationery. Then Kennedy took another look at his UN text in light of Khrushchev’s warning against a “warlike” speech. He did not change a word.
Early the next morning, by his own account, Dr. Jacobson was summoned to the President’s suite where, he noticed, there were “half-empty glasses and full ashtrays strewn about the room.” Still in his nightclothes, Kennedy “greeted me with a whisper so hoarse that I could barely understand him.” By Jacobson’s account, he gave the President “a subcutaneous injection slightly below the larynx.… I can still see the surprised expression on Kennedy’s face when he could speak again in a normal voice.”
Jacqueline Kennedy had not planned to attend her husband’s UN speech but changed her mind at the last minute. She could not have been disappointed. Its literary quality surpassed the high standard of most of Kennedy’s presidential addresses.
Scrawled on his reading copy were the words “Deep … Slow.” He began by noting that while Hammarskjöld was dead, the United Nations lived. “Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind. So let us here resolve that Dag Hammarskjöld did not live, or die, in vain.”* Kennedy argued that the dead man’s place could be better filled by one man than three: “Even the three horses of the troika did not have three drivers, all going in different directions.”
Today “every man, woman, and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.” He would “challenge the Soviet Union not to an arms race, but to a peace race.”
On Berlin, “we believe a peaceful agreement is possible which protects the freedom of West Berlin and Allied presence and access, while recognizing the historic and legitimate interests of others in assuring European security.”
Kennedy and Sorensen had each written a peroration and then woven together the best parts of both. Speaking in distinct phrases for emphasis, the President closed by saying, “We in this hall / will be remembered / either as part of the generation / that turned this planet / into a flaming funeral pyre / or as the generation that met its vow / ‘to save succeeding generations / from the scourge of war.’ / The decision is ours. / For together we shall save our planet—or together we shall perish in its flames.”
To ensure that no one mistook this rhetoric for weakness, Robert Kennedy had gone on Meet the Press the previous day and warned that if Khrushchev miscalculated, “the world could be destroyed. I would hope that in the last few weeks he would have come to the realization that the President will use nuclear weapons.”
While the President finished his speech to the General Assembly, Kharmalov and Bolshakov went to Salinger’s room at the Carlyle, where the press secretary orally gave them Kennedy’s reply to Khrushchev. He said that if the Soviet Union was ready to honor its commitments on Laos, a summit on the much more difficult question of Germany would be more likely to produce agreement. The President was “most encouraged” by the Chairman’s willingness to reexamine his position on Germany.
The presidential entourage flew to Newport, where the Kennedys were to spend a week at Hammersmith Farm, the seaside summer home of Jacqueline’s mother and stepfather. By courier Bundy sent the President some “special intelligence material” from Richard Helms at the CIA suggesting that “we are in a calm before a further squeeze” on Berlin.
On Friday afternoon, September 29, Salinger returned from golf to answer a call from Bolshakov in New York. The Russian told him they must meet “immediately.” He would charter a plane and fly to Newport that evening. Salinger asked Bolshakov to do nothing until he heard back from him.
He called the President and Rusk, who both guessed that Bolshakov had Khrushchev’s response to the President’s secret message. With two dozen White House correspondents in Newport, Salinger feared that Bolshakov’s sudden appearance might cause a “minor sensation.” He suggested a meeting at three-thirty the next day at the Carlyle. Bolshakov said, “If you knew the importance of what I have, you wouldn’t keep me waiting that long.”
The next morning, Salinger flew to New York. Rusk told him that he wondered why Gromyko couldn’t have given him Khrushchev’s response when they had met earlier that day. At precisely three-thirty, Bolshakov appeared at Salinger’s Carlyle room with newspapers under his arm. Concealed inside them was a thick manila envelope. He opened it and pulled out a sheaf of pages: “You may read this. Then it is for the eyes of the President only.”
*Like most of Khrushchev’s stories, it was not the first time he told this one, which appeared in slightly altered version (Cherkasky substituted for Zhitomir) in the biographical material sent to Kennedy by the CIA before Vienna.
*One example was Henry Luce: “I like Luce.… After all, he made a lot of money through his own individual enterprise, so he naturally thinks that individual enterprise can do everything. I don’t mind people like that. They have earned the right to talk that way. After all, that’s the atmosphere in which I grew up. My father is the same way.”
†In his private life, as if throwing off these constraints, he almost exulted in behaving in ways that would have outraged the Establishment. This mirrored Joseph Kennedy, who guffawed with his New Deal chum Thomas Corcoran about the time in the 1930s when a Washington dowager arrived at his rented Maryland mansion for tea. Walking down the stairs to greet her, he had made no effort to conceal that he had been upstairs in bed with a young woman and enjoyed watching the old woman’s discomfort.
After the Boston Globe revealed in 1962 that Edward Kennedy had cheated on a Harvard Spanish test, the President told Ben Bradlee, “It won’t go over with the WASPs. They take a very dim view of looking over your shoulder at someone else’s exam paper. They go in more for stealing from stockholders and banks.”
*He once greeted an Oklahoma playboy as the man who “lives the life we’d all like to lead” and seemed to mean it.
†This referred to Smathers.
*John Gilbert Winant, who was Joseph Kennedy’s successor in London.
*The Nixon staff did this themselves in 1960, when John Ehrlichman served as a chauffeur in Nelson Rockefeller’s entourage, sending regular reports on the New York Governor’s doings and whereabouts.
†As early as 1957, the Ambassador had predicted to a reporter that John would one day be President and Robert Attorney General. A chief reason for the elder Kennedy’s ambition may have been to place Robert in direct supervision of J. Edgar Hoover and, he would have hoped, of Hoover’s files.
As Ambassador to London, Kennedy had seen how involved Franklin Roosevelt’s attorneys general Frank Murphy and Robert Jackson had been with diplomacy. This experience may have shown him that, more than other Cabinet posts, being Attorney General would enable Robert to straddle both domestic and foreign policy and thus be of maximum help to the President. The elder Kennedy told Mortimer Caplin, whom his son had appointed as Director of the IRS, that he had “the third toughest job in the United States.”
*Russell came to feel that Robert was “by far the smartest of all the Kennedys, but definitely lacked the personality that Jack had.”
*The house had belonged to Robert Kennedy’s predecessor, Robert Jackson, and was the Civil War headquarters of General McClellan, whom Robert did not admire because “McClellan didn’t press!”
†A reference to the many garbled stories of an overpublicized Hickory Hill dinner at which Ethel Kennedy’s chair slid off a catwalk into the pool and Arthur Schlesinger dove in to rescue her. To show his distance from the New Frontier in-crowd, Dean Rusk later proudly noted that he had never been “pushed into Ethel’s swimming pool.”
*Later that month, Rostow wrote the President about “Nkrumah’s plans to send 400 cadets to the U.S.S.R. for training.… The British have already helped knock the number way down, but he’s a great little fellow.”
*Despite or because of this reaction, Kennedy tried again. He suggested to news executives in the Oval Office that they appoint someone to come to Washington as their “adviser on information affecting the national security.” If news organs were uncertain about whether a story would betray secrets to the enemy, they could submit it to the adviser, who, after being given a full briefing by the White House, CIA, State, or Defense, could suggest whether or not the story should run. The newsmen were unmoved. As Salinger later said, Kennedy saw “the futility of further overtures.”
*Perhaps unwittingly, Sorensen paraphrased this line when he drafted President Lyndon Johnson’s first address to Congress on November 27, 1963.