JFK
JOHN FITZGERALD KENNEDY WAS ELATED. He walked toward me, grinning. He wore a brown pinstripe too big for his shoulders, a rep tie, and a white handkerchief in his lapel pocket. He fingered the center coat button. His face had a springtime tan, and the sun had created reddish highlights in his thick, light brown hair. I was one of a handful of reporters who had just listened to his inspirational use of history and wit to awaken University of Maryland students to a life of public service. Senator Kennedy, replete with cheers and applause, was ready for our questions.
I was spellbound by his speaking style and sparkling humor. To illustrate the joy of politics, Kennedy had recounted the journey of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison prior to the 1800 presidential election. The two founding fathers claimed not politics but the study of flowers and ferns, birds and bees, were the reason for their trip through Hudson River Valley and most of New England. Village by village, town by town, Jefferson and Madison proved the success of personal contact with voters by winning the White House. Kennedy responded to the student roar with a toothy smile. He was the most sought after speaker of the day, with looks and style that stirred both men and women. It was April 27, 1959, and Kennedy was on the verge of his bid for the presidency of the United States.
“I do not come here today in search of butterflies,” Kennedy said. More cheering.
I understood his ambitions only vaguely that day. While a professional journalist since leaving the U.S. Army in 1957, I was enrolled at Maryland on the GI Bill. But I worked part-time for the Washington Evening Star and the Baltimore News-Post and would file stories to both newspapers on Kennedy’s speech. I knew enough to ask a serious question of a politician. And, because of his command of history in the day’s speech, I recalled the 1928 campaign of Al Smith, the Democratic presidential candidate defeated by Republican Herbert Hoover. Many say Smith’s Catholicism played a role in his defeat, I noted. Do you think it will hurt your candidacy? He had heard the question before, but I wanted my own answer. I was unprepared for his reaction. The humor washed from his face. His eyes and mouth hardened. His elation from the crowd’s applause vanished. He looked at me and then said firmly, “No, my religion will be an asset. America is a religious nation and Americans will respect my religion.” His gaze shifted to the next questioner, who was interested in pending Senate legislation. Then he shot me another dirty look before handling the new question. Who the hell is this kid? the glare seemed to say.
At that moment, I was unaware Catholicism was his political millstone. Three years earlier at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, Adlai Stevenson, the nominee, rejected Kennedy’s bid for the vice-presidential nomination. “America is not ready for a Catholic yet,” Stevenson told Jim Farley, himself a Catholic and political adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. While backing Kennedy’s bid in Chicago, Tennessee senator Albert Gore told Stevenson that Catholicism was an “insurmountable” problem for the Democratic ticket. Also objecting was House Speaker Sam Rayburn. “Well, if we have to have a Catholic, I hope we don’t have to take that little pissant Kennedy.” Most of those very same political players would leap to their feet and cheer four years later when Kennedy seized the presidential nomination in the 1960 Democratic Convention in Los Angeles.
Kennedy’s outward energy, sunny good looks, and quick tongue made him an easy choice over the dark and dour Richard M. Nixon. Kennedy won handily with the electoral vote that decides presidential elections—303 to Nixon’s 219. But the popular vote, which provides a deeper measure of American sentiment, left him with a fingernail of 118, 574 votes out of 68 million cast, the smallest plurality since the 1884 election seventy-six years earlier. Of course, Virginia senator Harry F. Byrd won 500,000 votes that year as a third party candidate. But at dawn that day of victory, Kennedy was in the minority, with only 49.7 percent of the popular vote. Former president Harry Truman was mystified. “Why, even our friend, Adlai, would have had a landslide running against Nixon,” Truman told a friend. While Kennedy’s election was a breakthrough for religious tolerance, a close look at the vote showed him the first president to be elected with a minority of Protestant voters. Voter perception of his Catholicism had undercut Kennedy once again.
The closeness of that election was never far from his thoughts while he was president and planning for his second term. Every move, every speech, every White House visitor, every presidential trip, every decision was connected to his 1964 presidential reelection campaign. For modern American presidents, the struggle to prevail for a second term begins when the left hand is on the Bible and the other in the air for the inauguration of their first term. As he prepared for reelection in 1963, events in Cuba, the civil rights movement, and Vietnam were eroding his chances for a second term. How he responded to these challenges was hidden from the world by a docile, at times worshipful Washington media. The president could count on an array of powerful journalists as personal friends in those years. There were exceptions. Frontline reporters such as Lloyd Norman, Newsweek’s Pentagon reporter, so upset Kennedy that he ordered that the Central Intelligence Agency trail Norman and embarrass leakers. David Halberstam, the New York Times reporter in Saigon, caused Kennedy almost daily fits. He pressured the newspaper’s publisher to yank Halberstam. Almost any criticism pierced the president’s thin skin. “It is almost impossible to write a story they like,” said Ben Bradlee of Newsweek and a personal friend of the president. “Even if a story is quite favorable to their side, they’ll find one piece to quibble with.” But Kennedy had no reason to complain about me. I was in the press section only a few feet from Kennedy on that snowy January 20 inauguration. Once again, Kennedy’s address and the electricity of the day enthralled me. For the next two years and eleven months, I would have a front row seat as Kennedy delivered one dynamite speech after another. There were some clunkers. But for the grand moments there were grand performances. My Irish-American Catholic background did a mind meld with Jack Kennedy.
I had joined the Washington bureau of United Press International in September of 1960 and soon gained unimaginable power and influence. Journalism was the intersection between politicians and their voters. The UPI A Wire stories sent by teletype over telephone wires at sixty words per minute were delivered to the editor of newspapers around the globe. The first time I heard CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite, a UPI veteran, read the exact words I had written—well, it was a trip. Clippings from newspapers including the New York Times and the Washington Post swelled my ego. My perceptions of a news event were in direct competition with those from the Associated Press. My dispatch was delivered well ahead of other Washington bureau reporters. Often their editors would demand facts matching or better than Sloyan’s UPI account. At UPI, we doted on Kennedy, who seemed to dominate our daily report. My colleague, Helen Thomas, elevated his wife and children to a news category reserved for Britain’s royal family.
Three months after his inauguration, Kennedy made a decision that haunted his presidency. His approval of the April 17 Central Intelligence Agency invasion of Cuba turned into the Bay of Pigs fiasco that left American-trained invaders unprotected as they were killed and captured by Fidel Castro. Kennedy took responsibility for the failure in a town where buck-passing is an art form. At a news conference—an almost weekly event in the new administration—he held off questions placing blame. “There’s an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan,” Kennedy said. “I am the responsible officer of the government.” Once in the White House, Kennedy ordered the CIA to form standby assassination teams. They were after Castro until Kennedy’s final day in office.
Pretty quickly, reporters found Kennedy to be both naïve and reckless in approving the CIA plan, which, on casual inspection, was ridiculous. “How could we have been so stupid,” Kennedy confessed to Time’s Hugh Sidey. Still, his voter approval rating rose in polls at home. Abroad, his refusal to employ a U.S. Navy armada within striking distance of Castro indicated weakness to Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev. Perhaps it emboldened the Soviet leader, the hardened commissar of Stalingrad, to test the forty-five-year-old American. In 1961 in Vienna and in 1962 in Cuba, Khrushchev threatened Kennedy with nuclear warfare. The world-shaking confrontation in October 1962 ended when Kennedy’s brandishing of U.S. superior strategic weapons forced Khrushchev into a humiliating retreat. At least that was my perception along with other journalists who told the world how the Soviet leader blinked when he was “eyeball to eyeball” with the cool but daring Kennedy. But this was all cunning manipulation by Kennedy. Instead, he secretly followed Khrushchev’s path away from nuclear confrontation. In fact the Russian leader achieved his objective of eliminating fifteen U.S. nuclear warheads in Turkey only minutes from Moscow. Kennedy and his handlers would hide the truth from the world for more than thirty years. In doing so, they covered up Kennedy’s finest moment as president when he ignored his top advisers to avoid the first step on the way to nuclear warfare. In-house historians perpetuated the fabrication that it was Khrushchev, not Kennedy, who was rolled. As late as October 10, 2013, the Washington Post recounted how “Kennedy coolly stared down Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and barely averted the war.”
In many African-American homes, particularly among the poor, there is often a picture of Martin Luther King Jr. flanked by a photo of Kennedy and even of his brother Bobby. The place of honor stems from news accounts by me and others that the Kennedy brothers took up King’s cause against racist hate and segregation. This perception is not quite accurate. In hopes of retaining Southern voters, Kennedy opposed civil rights legislation and had a hostile relationship with King. Both brothers hoped to halt what became the historic March on Washington. Kennedy and brother Bobby, the attorney general, ordered telephone wiretaps and the bugging of hotel rooms in an effort to intimidate the civil rights leader. But King refused to bend even after the FBI, in the most extensive federal smear campaign in history, circulated recordings of him and other women.
Another news report I helped fabricate was Kennedy’s opposition, surprise, and dismay over the assassination of President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam. As an editor on the night desk at UPI, I had developed an interest in Saigon chaos. When connections blocked Neil Sheehan of the UPI Saigon bureau from reaching New York or Tokyo, he would call me in Washington to file his dispatch. As a result, I followed Vietnam events in both Saigon and Washington. The day Diem was killed, the following went out on the UPI wire to clients: “I can categorically state that the United States government was not involved in any way,” said State Department press officer Richard Phillips. “It’s their country, their war and this is their uprising.” Few believed him. As the Washington Star editorial said, the people who did believe him, “would fit in a very small phone booth.” However, it would be more than forty years before facts showed the depth of Kennedy’s involvement that left Diem’s blood on his legacy and opened the door for the involvement of 8 million Americans in ten years of the Vietnam War. Diem’s influence and a reluctant military in Saigon forced Kennedy to personally organize and execute the overthrow of government in the midst of the hottest battle in the cold war. Kennedy bribed the key officer who enabled reluctant generals to overthrow Diem. And Kennedy set the stage for Diem’s assassination, which Kennedy knew was likely weeks before it happened. The dirty work was handled by Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., a Republican given a free hand in Saigon as U.S. ambassador. Lodge refused to rescue Diem two hours before he was murdered. Lodge’s closest aide likened it to a gangland slaying. Kennedy’s brother Bobby sought to blame Lodge with the whole bloody business. Diem’s death may seem a blip in the scheme of things. I now see it as the destruction of the stability of the Saigon government, which led American combat troops into a jungle slaughterhouse. The U.S. Army was corrupted and defeated by a war that divided American citizens to an extent not seen since the Civil War. From Washington, I watched the American government lie and squirm for eleven years while the war tore away the American soul.
As a reporter, I covered the White House closely from the end of Lyndon Johnson’s tenure to the end of William Clinton’s term. One thing I learned is that when a president’s words are in quotation marks as having said something pithy, nasty, insulting, or even angry, rarely did the words come directly from the president. Some third party—a senator or a press secretary—has provided the reporter with the quotation. Hearsay, of course, does wonders for history. In this book, I have strived to quote only words that actually passed the lips of Kennedy and his advisers. There are some secondhand quotes, but these are minimal. A sharper focus on these events in 1963 come from White House tape recordings Kennedy made secretly in the Cabinet Room (a microphone in a light fixture and beneath the table) and the Oval Office (a microphone in his desk well). Kennedy, a student of history, was organizing a record of his presidency. None of those recorded knew of Kennedy’s taping system, which he turned on and off at will. There were hidden switches in the Oval Office and a third beneath the Cabinet Room conference table. Contrast that with Richard M. Nixon’s voice-activated tape recorder, which captured the vindictive, angry, boozy, paranoid president trying to lie his way out of the Watergate scandal. Nixon could easily forget history was listening, but not Kennedy. Hours of Kennedy recordings are still classified even though most of the participants are dead and the secrecy labels have lapsed under federal law. The Kennedy family and his presidential library continue to hide the darker side of Camelot. Kennedy’s actual words during the Cuban missile crisis, the civil rights struggle, and dealing with Diem offer insight into an inspired, devious, ruthless man, more pragmatic than principled—in other words, a politician.
Kennedy’s illnesses, drug use, and serial seductions I have left to others. Instead, my focus is on presidential machinations as Kennedy duped me and other journalists into misleading readers, librarians, schoolteachers, historians, and filmmakers. Many are still unaware of how Kennedy handled these major issues in the final year of his life. That reality was buried with him at Arlington National Cemetery. I was there for that, too. With his burial, myth overtook reality. This is not a mea culpa, although it may sound like it. Actually I am just cleaning up my early accounts from fifty years ago. Another lesson I learned at UPI was how to handle news or facts as they changed over time. On an important story used by newspapers and broadcasters around the world, there was an early version. As new facts came along, there was a “first lead,” perhaps “first lead (correct)” (which identified and eliminated a gross error). By the end of day, after many new leads, there was a write-through—including a note to editors—with facts freshened, a little better writing, and logic that would satisfy critics on the other end of the teletype clicking out the truth. At UPI, we never made mistakes—at least ones that we couldn’t eventually clean up.
So this book is a write-through of President Kennedy’s last year in office as he prepared for the 1964 reelection bid—in effect, his last campaign. Cuba, the civil rights movement, and Vietnam were akin to a Wack-a-Mole game at the White House. Just as Kennedy focused on the political erosion of Vietnam, civil rights would explode on television to undercut him with conflicting ideologues. Killing Fidel Castro was high on his agenda. Kennedy’s last campaign is a story of a desperate politician determined to overcome events conspiring to erode his chances for a second term as president of the United States. Assassination and smear became the tools of the responsible officer of government.
Patrick Sloyan
Paeonian Springs, Virginia
July 2013