CHAPTER 6

In the next weeks I discovered why those middle-aged men and women who had never done anything like it before suddenly take up mountain climbing or some other ludicrously risky sport: to prove to themselves that there is a better person in them than the one they can no longer abide. My involvement with Maggie was as implausible a risk, and performed exactly the same function.

I am sure it is difficult to believe that I had been a faithful husband for 21 years, or to understand why having an affair after that many years of marriage would be so traumatic and consequential. On the first point, I can only ask to be taken at my word; although I’d fantasized about other women, Deborah—as I’d earlier assured Maggie—had been the only woman I’d slept with since the day we married. On the second point, let me borrow an analogy from John Kennedy. He spoke of the thin protective membrane that covered and held the world together. Such a membrane, I now see, had protected my marriage—and, indeed, my life. My infidelity punctured that membrane, opened me to another world, and made me a different man from the one I had been.

Let me set aside for the moment the morality of what I had done. The act of doing it was an acknowledgment to myself that the life I had been leading—in all its aspects—would no longer be sufficient.

I write of this now with the detachment of 30 years’ perspective. But the feeling at the time was exactly what I am told one experiences in climbing a dangerous mountain. Adrenaline flows. The body shakes. The heart pounds. The mind, its powers diminished by oxygen deprivation, retains just enough sense to demand an answer to the question of what the hell you are doing here. But the spirit pushes you on.

I knew that I shouldn’t be in Maggie’s bed, that my provocation was insufficient and that I was playing with fire. But for the first time in my life, instinct and emotion overpowered reason. I wanted it; I took it. It felt good; I did it. No judgments or calculations.

The erotic component was incredible. I do not use the word idly. It is an overworked superlative with a specific, unmatchable meaning: so extraordinary as to seem impossible. It seemed impossible to me that a man in his mid 40s could be aroused to emotional and physical levels he had not even experienced in his 20s.

But that, in fact, is what happened. This was not simply an affair of the flesh; it was an affair of the heart, as well—which is why it could not be rationalized away as the experiment of a jaded, middle-aged husband looking for a sexual jolt. I had feelings for Maggie so powerful that each time I saw her, some magic substance began to course through my body, producing an exquisite feeling that left me shaking. For lack of a better explanation, I had to assume that the substance was the chemical product of love.

I loved her, no question, feasting insatiably on the banquet of mind and body she offered me. The more I partook, the more there was to partake, not simply lovemaking but attention and interest—genuine, committed, undivided interest. It went both ways. I wanted to please her more than I had ever wanted to do anything, and it was clear that I did that in the same multi-dimensional way she pleased me.

We nourished ourselves for our lovemaking on conversation as well as on food. Eating and talking mingled to the point that we digested one another’s histories along with our meals. A world—her world—unfolded for me, peopled with storybook characters inhabiting exotic, troubled lands. Trouble was Maggie’s story, in all its forms: political, social, economic, cultural. She was a crusader. If a Conrad or Herblock were to render her, it would be astride a charging horse, with a lance in the form of an oversized pen, about to level some villain.

I loved her strength, gained strength from it, and took my newfound strength to work.

The book was coming together. I lost some battles, but believed I was winning the war.

Bear in mind that I was not rewriting the entire book. There were sections that were fine as they stood. My task throughout had been twofold: first, to turn summaries into narratives in order to give the reader a sense of the cause and effect of events, and second, to discover, if I could, Kennedy’s motivation in everything he did. That, I remind you, had been the indispensable component missing from the manuscript, particularly the portion after Dallas.

Civil rights was a case in point. The material, as written, told its own story as far as the march of events was concerned. What it lacked was a sense of Kennedy’s involvement. When I pointed this out, Kennedy admitted that he had been a latter-day convert to the cause; it was his brother Robert’s newly found passion that had picked him up and swept him along, culminating in the passage of the Civil Rights Bill in 1965. It was an admission freely given, and with that same grace and self-effacement Kennedy had demonstrated when he was president.

As Kennedy traced the history of his conversion on civil rights, I realized he had an attitude toward problems I’d never encountered before. It was true, as he’d said, that he wasn’t confrontational, but when problems arose he perceived them as incentives for learning and excuses for action. This attitude reflected itself, in its most primary form, at the political level. Several times during our weeks together, he referred to a favorite maxim: “Don’t get mad, get even.” He might get upset, he said, but never to the point where he let it impair his reason. In the first months of his presidency, he recounted, he’d had occasion to ask Dwight Eisenhower to publicly endorse one of his foreign policy initiatives. The former president refused. Shortly thereafter, a representative of the Justice Department paid a visit to Eisenhower in Gettysburg, bringing with him a file on a ranking member of Eisenhower’s administration. The file contained evidence of misconduct far in excess of anything that had been made public. The Justice Department representative told the former president that no action against the official was contemplated at this time; it was simply felt that President Eisenhower would want to know about the problem. From that point on, Eisenhower signed on for anything Kennedy asked of him.

Kennedy could never say so at the time, but he saw the militancy of blacks as the indispensable catalyst for the legislation and enforcement that ensued. It not only moved the attitudes of people like himself from a theoretical to a practical plane, it provided an excuse for government intervention.

Kennedy took the same position with regard to the disaffection and disillusionment being expressed by America’s youth in the early ’60s. The demonstrations and sit-ins on the campuses, in particular, not only alerted him to the widespread alienation of young people, they provided him with a launching platform for his favorite piece of legislation, the universal conscription bill. Here, he felt, was a practical repository for all that youthful idealism.

The idea, first floated as part of the Democratic Party platform of 1964, had stemmed from Kennedy’s success with the Peace Corps. But the Peace Corps was composed of volunteers, and its domestic counterpart was based on an entirely different premise: that every able-bodied American man and woman should be required to serve the country for a period of one year on reaching the age of 18.

Who would fail to acknowledge today what a transforming effect universal conscription has had upon the country? Countless studies have reinforced the widespread impression that the year of service channeled rebellious youthful energies into constructive areas, and gave marketable skills to blacks and other minorities who would otherwise never have had them. The rehabilitated slums and parks and reforested lands and all the other projects made possible by this labor force speak for themselves.

The protracted effort to sell the program to Congress was a story in itself. In telling it, Kennedy came up with a paragraph about how a president enacts his program into law that was so succinct and insightful, in my estimation, I would later put it into the manuscript verbatim. “Any truly new idea needs three, four or five years before it can be enacted. The first step is to put it before the Congress, but without illusions. Your objective is simply to broadcast the idea, to get both the Congress and the public familiar with it and used to it. Out of the hearings you get a feel for what will fly and what won’t, and you fix your bill so that the next time it comes around you can get it off the ground. Each time you try the bill the opposition loses a little more steam and its objections seem a little bit less relevant. In time the public comes around, which makes the Congress come around if it hasn’t already, and there it is, your idea has become law. I wish the system worked faster, but it doesn’t. The important thing is that it works.”

Day by day, we worked our way through the second term, that fairytale period, after the clamor of the 1964 election had subsided, when Kennedy and the Democrats could seem to do no wrong. To be sure, the middle class became more than a little disenchanted with the emphasis on minority rights and needs, and there was some backlash from within the President’s own party. But the economy was humming so beautifully in those days that it began to seem like there might be enough for everybody, after all. In his manuscript, Kennedy had ticked the numbers off with obvious relish: Inflation ranging between 1.2 percent and 1.5 percent a year. The gross national product increasing at a rate of 5 percent a year. Unemployment down to 4.4 percent. A budget surplus of three billion dollars a year. Those controversial wage and price guidelines instituted at the suggestion of the president’s Council of Economic Advisors, led by Walter Heller, had worked so well that a worker getting only a 3 percent wage increase each year knew, nonetheless, that he’d actually gained against inflation. To Kennedy’s intense delight, corporate profits doubled, a fact he loved to mention to all the business executives who had initially railed against the guidelines. Best of all, we were winning the war on poverty. With no foreign wars to finance and a continuing budget surplus, there was money to fund the anti-poverty programs.

Prosperity, really, was the key. It took just enough of the heat out of black protests and white backlash to enable the government’s anti-discrimination programs to move forward at a measured pace. No one was fully satisfied, but the riots and confrontations that had pockmarked the early ’60s diminished in number, size and intensity, and passed eventually from the front pages.

Kennedy, who had received his education in macro-economics mostly from Walter Heller, gave me the same education, explaining why he embraced a tax cut in his first term in order to stimulate the economy, and then opted for a tax increase in his second term in order to siphon off some of the increased purchasing power prosperity had produced. “When you’ve got full employment, and you’re producing at full capacity, the only thing that money can do is drive up prices. So the only way to keep inflation under two percent a year was to take some of that purchasing power away, and that’s what I did.”

The magic continued in foreign affairs. Kennedy may well have scared many Americans by his move to achieve detente, but a majority of Americans approved it, and that majority swelled when he nailed down an agreement with the Soviets for a complete ban on nuclear testing. That agreement, Kennedy said, plus the prospect of agreements on arms reductions, probably extended Nikita Khrushchev’s time in power by a full two years, but his ouster didn’t affect U.S.-Soviet relations. Such was the momentum by that point that negotiations continued with as much success when Leonid Brehznev replaced Khrushchev, climaxing in sizable reductions of the two country’s respective nuclear arsenals.

Kennedy led me through the delicate negotiations with the Chinese, complicated, he recalled, by our progress with the Russians. Ever so gradually, even that problem was overcome, and the rapprochement was accomplished in stages, first some trade agreements, then an exchange of ministers, and finally diplomatic recognition.

With Castro moved to the sidelines, Kennedy solidified his gains in Latin America, pushing the Alliance for Progress wherever he could, despite the formidable opposition of the Latin American Establishment, and by the end of his second term could—and did in his manuscript—cite some impressive economic gains.

In all this, of course, he had the help of his brother, the secretary of state, and it was those foreign policy successes, more than anything, that heightened the public’s awareness of Robert Kennedy as a candidate to succeed his brother.

At last, John Kennedy and I came to that controversial question.

In the manuscript, Kennedy had acknowledged the schism within his own group of advisors over the advisability of giving the nomination to Robert. Some were for it on the grounds that, if Robert were elected, the New Frontier policies they had helped to formulate would be perpetuated. Others opposed Robert’s candidacy on the grounds that it would diminish JFK in the eyes of the people, exposing him to charges of attempting to perpetuate a dynasty.

JFK’s arguments were totally practical. He pointed out that the mere possibility his brother might be the candidate of the Democratic party, let alone president, removed all lame duck problems from his own second term. If Democrats in Congress didn’t cooperate with the John Kennedy administration, Robert Kennedy would fix their wagon during his first term.

“Didn’t the ‘dynasty’ criticism bother you?” I asked at one point.

Kennedy waved his hand, as though flicking away a fly. “That’s not something to worry about. The question is, what works? Could Robert Kennedy be elected? And if elected, would he make a good president? I’m biased, sure, but I felt the answer was yes on both counts. Let me tell you a little story. In 1962, when Teddy decided he wanted to run against Eddie McCormack, the nephew of the speaker of the house, everybody was saying, ‘What’s he running for? It’s going to ruin Jack’s base.’ Well, we took a poll, and the poll showed that while George Lodge, the Republican candidate—the son of the man I beat in 1952 for the same seat, incidentally—would beat Eddie McCormack, Teddy had a 50-50 chance. So I said, ‘I don’t want to lose a seat in the Senate. Teddy runs.’ In my opinion, both Fritz Hollings and Robert Kennedy were splendidly qualified to be president of the United States, but the polls showed Hollings dead even with Rockefeller, Scranton or Hatfield, and edging Nixon by a point. Bobby, on the other hand, was six to eight percentage points ahead of the first three, and he positively buried Nixon. So the choice was pretty obvious, not just to me but to everyone in the party. Disqualifying Bobby because he was my brother was nonsense—if only because it took Nixon out of the picture. Besides,” Kennedy said, breaking into a grin, “I rather liked the idea of a dynasty.”

“When you offered Hollings the vice presidency, did you set any conditions?”

“No. None.”

“You didn’t ask for assurances that he wouldn’t run for president in ’68?”

“Absolutely not.”

“You didn’t put him in charge of the administration’s civil rights task force to dirty him up a little?”

Kennedy’s face was expressionless. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. But the twinkle in his eyes gave him away.

“Did you ever discuss ’68 with Hollings?”

“What are you after?”

“A believable explanation of why the vice president of the United States didn’t run for president in ’68.”

“I think it was just as obvious to him as it was to the rest of us that Robert Kennedy had a better chance of winning the election.”

“Did you make any promises to Hollings about ’76 if he wouldn’t contest your brother in ’68?”

“Ease off, Ash,” Kennedy said. But his look was not unfriendly. “You can say that the Vice President and I did discuss his political future. We recognized that in 1976 he would still be a relatively young man. I felt that I could support him with enthusiasm if he were interested in the presidency at that time.”

“So Robert runs unopposed in ’68,” I mused.

“Yeah. He sure had an easier time than I did. Imagine: no primaries.”

“One more question about ’76. When you gave Hollings your commitment, was it with the knowledge of your brother Ted?”

“Teddy’s got plenty of time.”

He made that statement shortly after noon on March 31st, our 35th working day together. A silence followed, so prolonged that I became aware of the chattering of the birds in the garden, greening up now in the spring sunlight, and already alive with blooming dogwoods and azaleas. We both sensed, I think, that we were nearing the end of the story. It was obvious by the mixture of pleasure and relief in Kennedy’s face that the prospect delighted him.

But I wasn’t at all delighted. To the contrary, I was profoundly saddened at the thought that I would soon be leaving Washington. And I was distressed by what I’d thus far failed to do.

Kennedy and the publisher would be more than pleased, I was certain, by the new draft I would give them three months hence. Only I would be disturbed by the knowledge that the autobiography I abetted didn’t fully portray my subject.