On the eve of the book’s publication, Brammer decided he had heard enough. First the Big Pumpkin and then Uncle Eliot: for years now, powerful, self-centered men had been haranguing him. “Janeway’s nicer and nicer [but] I feel kept,” he wrote Nadine. “[I] have got to get loose or I’ll lose all my resolution.”
It was time to think of himself—to assert himself—as a writer. At a “little cocktail party” thrown by the Janeways in an apartment “half the size of your living room,” filled with Picassos, Chagalls, and Mirós, “two producers asked if my book would make a play, and I had to tell them I wasn’t quite sure if it would even make a book.”
He had mighty hopes for The Gay Place’s success, though he also feared that Houghton Mifflin, “which rarely spends money promoting books,” would manage only to get him “a one column box in Publisher’s Weekly or something.” Even if royalties started rolling in, the checks wouldn’t arrive for months yet. He had begun to draft another novel, but he couldn’t afford to quit Janeway to work on it full-time. Nadine’s divorce lawyer, a man she had met at a party at Paleface Ranch, was seeking child support payments of three hundred dollars a month. She said she needed a bigger house for the kids.
So, drifting away from Janeway rather than resigning in any formal sense, he went to work for Henry Luce. “I hope Time will lead you to Life and Fortune,” Dorothy de Santillana wrote him. “The last thing he wanted to do then was work for Time,” said David Halberstam, whom Brammer had befriended. “But they had this money box in the office, and he’d just grab a handful. He’d laugh and say, ‘This may be the only time in my life I can take you to lunch.’” His political experience and his connections in DC made the Washington Bureau the obvious spot for him, so he moved again, settling into a back bedroom in the house of his friends Glen and Marie Wilson. Almost immediately, he wrote Ronnie Dugger, “I wish I could resign from the Luceville Establishment. One of the more depressing revelations which have come to me in my middle years is that people who pay you great to middlin’ wages actually have the nerve to expect recipients to work backends off in exchange, not to mention expectation of whimpering, obsequious gratitudes.” But he was reading a great deal—Talleyrand and Socrates—and he was working on his new book, a sequel to The Gay Place.
“Bill Brammer knows his people, politics, and native state of Texas, and has brought them to life Texas-style (on a grand scale) in three fast-paced novels in one book,” Houghton Mifflin announced in a series of national ads—its official launch of Brammer. Advance sales to bookstores were higher than usual. “This isn’t just another ‘gifted’ first novel to be reviewed and quietly forgotten. It’s going to be a big book—our biggest fiction book scheduled so far—and we’re excited about the possibilities,” de Santillana told him. As she expected, the reviews were almost uniformly positive, and many were effusive (including—after all—a prominent piece in the New York Times Book Review: “Brammer has an authentic, even lyrical, writing talent”). “I don’t know of another work quite like it,” Gore Vidal wrote in Esquire. “[It is] an amiable, generous-minded, unpretentious novel which I enjoyed very much.” “Mr. Brammer has crashed the literary world with a first novel worthy of careful criticism [and] wide readership,” Roger Shattuck wrote in the Texas Observer. “By the time I’d read sixteen pages of ‘The Gay Place,’ I was on the Brammer bandwagon,” said Maurice Doblier in the New York Herald Tribune. “Now that I’ve read the whole [thing] and wished there was more, I want to help drive it.” Ernest B. Fergurson, writing in the Baltimore Sun, concluded, “It is a conscientious work by a young man unafraid to make his first effort a full-scale gamble,” while Lon Tinkle, the Dallas Morning News’s respected book critic, declared The Gay Place “a first novel full of immense talent . . . Brammer can write with the best of them,” he said. “[The novel] overflows with the vitality of creative gifts.”
A student journalist at the Daily Texan remarked, “Pre-release, press notices to the effect that ‘everybody’s reading it’ raise two questions: Has anyone finished it? How many have turned to Shakespeare’s ‘Much Ado about Nothing’?” Shattuck complained that the novel’s “love duets” were “unconvincing” and that the characters could be unpleasantly materialistic. Other reviewers’ criticisms ran in similar gullies, but in each case, negative remarks were balanced by praise for Brammer’s lyrical ability and massive promise. The Gay Place earned notice equal to that of other important literary debuts of 1961: Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. It was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, along with Theodore H. White’s The Making of the President, 1960. There was talk of a movie sale—maybe up to $75,000.
Playboy magazine wrote to Brammer’s agent; the editors were “immensely responsive to the idea of recurring fiction from him,” they said. “Our readers . . . are young, highly urban, extremely well-educated, predominantly of the young executive group, and not interested in finding in our pages anything to do with family life . . . we’re a grand market for a man who has something he wants to say to other men.”
Brammer’s trip to Texas in the spring of 1961 for book-signing events in Dallas, Austin, and Houston caused him no small anxiety. “From reading an early version of some of the book I knew I would resent Bill’s politics in the novel—both his contempt for the Texas liberals, so many I knew to be people I would go to the wall with, and his adulation, a kind of disillusioned hero worship, of his Lyndon Johnson figure, Governor Fenstemaker,” Ronnie Dugger said. Still, when the two old friends met for a beer at Scholz’s, Dugger just sighed, “You put in the good Johnson and left out the bad—and Bill agreed.” That was it. They renewed their bond together. They toasted. Dugger had not missed Brammer’s fantasy near the end of “The Flea Circus”—Fenstemaker joins the Dearly Beloved crowd to celebrate his ties to the liberals. It was Brammer’s brief dream of bringing his worlds together.
In Dallas, his mother told him she objected to the name “William” on the book cover. Darn it, we named you Billie Lee! On the experience of returning home as a “Famous Arthur,” the local-boy-done-good, he would write:
It is a wonder that I survived [the place] at all . . . One ultimately forgets . . . how Dallas reached its full urban flowering under such decisive cultural influences as . . . John Wilkes Booth . . . the Everly Brothers . . . [and] Father Coughlin . . . I am suffering from what is known today as ‘alienation’ . . . Dallas is . . . a Can-Do, Wheeler-Dealer kind of a city, where a man with vision and determination and a good line of credit can make a bunch of money and wear Countess Mara cowboy boots and get all vomity drunk at Cotton Bowl games.
Austin seemed no less strange to him, since he was not returning to a wife but rather to an antagonist in a legal case. Nadine’s lawyer was pressing him to waive his rights to The Gay Place, assigning half to her and half to his children. Nadine wanted to go house hunting for her and the kids—a house he would never live in. Not that he deserved to, he would admit whenever one of the children reminded him of his past visits. “When I was a kid, people would break into our house all the time, drunk after parties. Or they’d just show up and lose their minds,” Sidney told me. “One time, in Austin—Bill had been dragging in and out at all hours—one night, I woke up and there was a black man huddled near the radio—sleepy, unsure, I said, ‘Daddy?’”
Sidney took the dust jacket of her father’s book to show and tell one day in her third-grade class. The flap copy called the novel “an important contribution to modern bacchanalia.” “I don’t know what bacchanalia means,” young Sidney said, “but it does sound wicked.”
The Kennedy White House—Brammer’s new beat—was notoriously reckless and insouciant, but the press corps sat on the most revealing stories about it. Reporters failed to write the truth about the Kennedys for several reasons: generally, in those days, journalistic practices drew a line between public and private affairs—this was an unspoken understanding between the press and the subjects it covered. Reporters were as dazzled by the Kennedy family as the citizenry was—they wanted to play among the cool, cocky insiders along with Jack and Bobby. And finally, if a reporter did cross the line, Bobby would make him pay. Hugh Sidey, Brammer’s thirty-three-year-old boss in the Washington Bureau, discovered this fact the hard way following a White House New Year’s Eve party in Palm Beach. For months, Brammer had been telling Sidey how out of control the Kennedy bashes were. That night in Palm Beach, Sidey needed to speak to Pierre Salinger, JFK’s press secretary, and his deputy, Andrew Hatcher, about a foreign policy story scheduled to run in Time. He searched for them at the party. “Salinger was off someplace with a girl who was not related in any way by law or by blood to him. Hatcher had gone to Jamaica with a bunch of models. I went around. There was nobody. Everybody partying,” Sidey told fellow journalist Seymour Hersh. “I have to say that I did sense it was excessive and probably not the way to run a presidency. He was the leader of the free world and this was the height of the Cold War.” Sidey wrote nothing about the party for the magazine, but he did send a somewhat jokey internal memo to his New York editors describing the shenanigans: “Not since the fall of Rome . . .”
Somehow, the memo leaked to Time’s most prominent advertisers, and word of this made its way to the White House. Bobby called Sidey to his office. “He was shaking,” Sidey recalled. His aides had never seen him so furious. “If this were Britain or someplace, we’d sue you for slander,” he said. “This is the worst thing I’ve ever read, Sidey. I thought you were fair up till now.” “Bobby, I’m just reporting the feeling down there—what reporters are telling me,” Sidey said. He suspected the Kennedys never forgave him for the incident, and he wondered how many stories he lost because of it.
The Kennedys’ “bad boy” behavior didn’t shock Brammer—he had seen clay feet crumbling all over Washington. And this was an intensely entitled bunch. What surprised him were his old boss’s changing fortunes and his own. As vice president, LBJ found himself ignored in the White House, underutilized, laughed at. His skills on the Hill were wasted by the know-it-all Kennedys. “Uncle Cornpone,” they called him, “Riverboat Gambler.” “Every time I [come] into John Kennedy’s presence, I [feel] like a goddamn raven hovering over his shoulder,” he would grumble. Worst of all, the president was a “lightweight,” a “sonny boy,” a pup who needed a “little gray in his hair.” Brammer heard from former colleagues that Johnson’s misery led him to booze more heavily than in the past. His aides told stories of having to “lift him physically out of bed and pump his arms up and down to stimulate breathing and make him functional.” One night, said an old Johnson staffer, “he went on an incredible toot . . . wandered up and down the corridors” of a hotel and snuggled into the arms of one of his secretaries in her bed “the same way a small child will snuggle into its mother’s arms.” Meanwhile, Brammer told Ronnie Dugger that he was enjoying the delights of literary success. He had to be careful or his novel-writing days would be over, he wrote. He was spending his time bedding a “good many dark-haired ladies,” all of them in psychoanalysis. “Certain lack of tension in mah prose of the past few months . . . Art is long and poontang is fleeting, and we shall soon outdistance understanding. Are there any nice, simple, pure and uncomplicated lovers left in the world? I defer to your judgment.”
In particular, he was dating a striking twenty-two-year-old brunette, a Radcliffe graduate working for Brammer’s old friend Marcus Raskin under McGeorge Bundy in Kennedy’s National Security Council. Her name was Diana de Vegh—“Diana the Vague,” Brammer called her. East Coast royalty: Westover (a tony Connecticut boarding school), a stint at Harvard (where her father sat on economic committees). Just vain enough to be charming, often discreetly removing her glasses, without which everything was a blur, so as to appear more perfect in public. She told Brammer she had first met JFK when she was nineteen, still a student at Radcliffe. At a political dinner in Boston, “there was an empty place next to me and he came and sat down and . . . asked . . . who was I and what was I doing . . . I was just thrilled.” This made Brammer curious to know how she had found employment in Washington.
One night, Hugh Sidey, working late, was stunned when Brammer walked into the Bender Building, Time’s office on Connecticut Avenue, and told him glumly, “Hugh, this is the darnedest thing.” He had just learned that the young woman he was dating was also sleeping with the president.
“Power,” she said when he asked her why she did it. “Nothing will come of it. But he has a hold on me.”
Brammer figured literary stardom was his only hope of hanging on to this young beauty, especially since he was up against the president. He asked Elizabeth McKee to secure a contract from Houghton Mifflin as soon as possible for a second novel, but she urged him to be patient: “The second novel should be carefully thought about and planned, not rushed into . . . Now please don’t be breathless and frightened and sure that no one will like it . . . You’re a hell of a good writer and there’s no doubt that this is your career.”
More swiftly than he could have imagined, though, he went from being publishing’s hottest new prospect to last season’s biggest disappointment. In spite of the glorious critical response, and the book’s initial appearance on a number of regional bestseller lists, sales began to ebb right away. On June 20, 1961, Dorothy de Santillana told him, “Your book has sold only 36 copies since I [last] wrote you the figures . . . I am afraid you must face the fact that from now on the momentum of sales has slowed down and not to look for much further royalty. This is the natural way of a book . . . sad but true.”
She sent an internal memo to the company’s executive committee, informing its members that Brammer had “telephoned wishing more money . . . He was confused with [his] statement.” His profits from sales had diminished when bookstores returned their unsold copies to the publisher. “He is under financial pressure and requests immediate payment of all money earned,” de Santillana told the committee. With its approval she sent him a check for $250. An expected payment of $1,250 for the paperback edition disappeared when unsold returns of the hardback rose to a debit balance of $93.33. Though hope remained of a movie sale, which might revive the novel’s fortunes, and Houghton Mifflin continued to profess interest in Brammer’s second book, the literary world had moved on. “He sent me a delightful picture of himself with his handsome children,” de Santillana wrote Elizabeth McKee. But there was nothing she could do to scrounge more money. “These terms are incorporated into every contract and ubiquitously applied . . . Will you write him my personal regret that the facts are less than fancy could hope?”
In the interim, he had succumbed to Nadine’s lawyer and waived all future rights to The Gay Place. (To date, the novel has been reprinted five times.)
In part, the publisher had counted on Lyndon Johnson’s visibility as vice president to stoke initial book sales, but the editors had failed to foresee how thoroughly he would vanish in the role. The Kennedy magic enchanted the public now; Johnson’s record as master of the Senate didn’t matter. “[His] image is poor. The accent hurts. Even if we assume many people would say they have no prejudice against a southerner, the fact is that in this country the Texan is partly a comic, partly a horse opera figure . . . Johnson really does not have the requisite dignity. His personal mannerisms are destructive of the dignified image. He’s somebody’s gabby cousin from Fort Worth,” Ben Bradlee (later editor of the Washington Post) wrote John Kennedy in the lead-up to the 1960 campaign; his sentiments suggested why a Johnsonian figure would always struggle to achieve hero status in American culture. But more than that, on the cusp of an incendiary new decade, there were “revolutionaries in Cuba who look[ed] like beatniks, [there were] competitions in missiles, Negroes looting whites in the Congo, intricacies of nuclear fallout . . . It [was] all out of hand, everything important [was] off-center,” Norman Mailer wrote following the 1960 Democratic National Convention. A traditional politician with a “good, sound, conventional liberal record,” laboriously working the system, could no longer ignite the body politic. The nation wanted a dazzling superman onto which it could project whatever images of its dream life flickered to the surface. Lyndon’s hangdog, basset hound visage belonged to another era. Now was the time for a man who could illuminate “the long electric night with the fires of neon leading down the highway to the murmur of jazz,” Mailer said.
The Gay Place offered jazz and speed visions of changing American dreams, but that was not the way the publisher packaged and sold it. In turn, in very short order—once the hero of Camelot was gunned down in Dallas—the culture would require much more than a superman. It would turn to shamans, gyring in swirls of psychedelic patterns, and Brammer would be there, laughing. But that is a story for later. For now, it “was a hero America needed, a hero central to his time, a man whose personality might suggest contradictions and mysteries that could reach into the alienated circuits of the underground,” Mailer wrote. Old LBJ-style anticommunists had rendered themselves obsolete: “To anyone who could see, the excessive hysteria of [1950s Red-baiting] was no preparation to face [a foreign] enemy but rather a terror of the national self: free-loving, lust-looting, atheistic, implacable—[it was] absurdity beyond absurdity to label communism so, for the moral products of Stalinism had been Victorian sex and a ponderous machine of ideology. Yes, the life of politics and the life of the myth had diverged too far.” Thus the stage was set for a hipster-president who could “reveal . . . the character of the country to itself,” for a melding of “America’s politics” with “America’s first soap-opera, America’s best-seller.”
Hell of a goddam country.
Brammer had finished off Arthur Fenstemaker at the end of The Gay Place (perhaps recognizing more than even he realized the freewheeling new America Mailer described). Old Arthur “lay abed—grinnin’, full of beans, cool and luminous, gaseous to the end . . . with a silver hairpiece, powder blue tint round the chops, stiffish in the limbs,” Brammer wrote in a draft of his intended sequel. Early on, he decided to call the new book Fustian Days—the strange word meaning, in Brammer’s political context, pompous or inflated speech: also a characteristic of fresh, hip America. The novel’s story line remained sketchy at first, but Brammer knew it would involve the attempt of “the consorts . . . [the] princes and knights-errant, poseurs and pretenders and court jesters” to secure Fenstemaker’s legacy now that the “king” had succumbed. Roy Sherwood, Neil Christiansen, Jay McGown reappeared. The fight for civil rights had been a running theme throughout The Gay Place; it is clear from early drafts that in the new novel Brammer wanted to explore broader struggles for equality, especially sexual freedoms. Sim Hester, a congressional assistant, is an openly homosexual character, strong, independent; the initial pages establish him as someone who will be called upon, in the course of the story, to perform acts of whatever passes for heroism in the compromised world of American governance.
From the start, most of the characters wrestle with self-imposed malaise, a torpor born of the helplessness they feel after Fenstemaker’s death. “A compulsive phrasemaker, Roy has devised one for his own condition: he tells himself he is Hanging On for Dearest Life,” Brammer writes—as if referring to himself, the author, in the act of composing these lines. “An unspeakable day already; he was confident it would soon get worse . . . He had begun to wonder if he would ever again recapture any of that high-flapping extravagance, the burbling, hilarious sense of well being, which had elevated and sustained him [in the past].”
In Washington, in the Wilsons’ back bedroom, Brammer sketched beginning after new beginning, trying to get the novel off the ground. In certain passages, the writing soars, even more lyrically than in The Gay Place at its best. He remained the singer of the Texas countryside, as in this flyover description, the view from the plane of the prodigal sons gathering for Fenstemaker’s funeral:
[Below,] the tidal meadow and the dazzling azure crescent of the Gulf. Then west a little: an unspectacular stretch of dry-lime miles toward the recalcitrant cottonfields . . . rank grades of honeysuckle and wild hibiscus, old wheel-rusted roadscapes of hills and high plains still some good ways farther on . . . Bucolic vistas, mostly, relieved now and again by awful lacquered junkpiles of cities and towns: fresh-minted cosmic jokes of . . . tarpaper paneling and bug-flecked neon . . . and in between, the ancient interior seas: great stands of loblolly pine, collard fields and scuttled oilsump and all the wornout pastures overrun with buckeye and cinnamon fur, wood violet and displaced mountain laurel and occasional black-mottled tiger lilies.
A valedictory glimpse, to be sure. The mourners have arrived in this land to “look upon one last hill country funeral in the old-style—possibly before the country itself and its old, ancestor-holifying ways were banished and rejected altogether for the randier pleasures of tall buildings and tenements and . . . wonderfully indifferent sprawl.”
The end of that passage captures the view from Brammer’s DC office window and his gloomy state of mind. In addition to the drudge-slog of daily reporting, a Time man working the Kennedy White House had to endure belligerence. Scorn. Kennedy loved to court the press, but he never trusted the avowed Republican Henry Luce. “That damn magazine,” Kennedy would say. Time’s reporters “file the Bible . . . and the magazine prints the Koran.” Luce was “like a cricket, always chirping away.” And yet he said of JFK, “He seduces me”—even he was not immune to the Kennedy charm. He assured Kennedy’s father that Time would always “look favorably on Jack as long as he held a tough line on communism.”
Kennedy was so busy seducing people that it was a wonder he got any work done at all. In Brammer’s first days on the job, the administration faced the Berlin Wall crisis (in which US government officials publicly decried the sealing off of East Germany but were secretly relieved to see a tide of potential refugees contained, the situation stabilized) and the Bay of Pigs (the chaotic planning and indecisive implementation of which were hidden from Lyndon Johnson—a sign of the Kennedy brothers’ contempt for him). In the disastrous aftermath of the Cuban invasion, Diana de Vegh’s boss, Marcus Raskin, questioned in a meeting whether the administration had learned anything from its mistakes. Immediately he was told “there must be loyalty.” He was barred from further White House discussions. His position in the National Security Council, and thus de Vegh’s, became largely ceremonial from that point on, irrelevant to any actual foreign policy planning. De Vegh did not seem to realize this. Nor did she seem to realize, quite, how many other sexual affairs her president-boyfriend was pursuing. From friends and colleagues, Brammer knew, but did not report, what Seymour Hersh would make public many years later, that “Kennedy was consumed with almost daily sexual liaisons and libertine partying, to a degree that shocked many members of his personal Secret Service detail.” Hersh said, “The sheer number of Kennedy’s sexual partners, and the recklessness of his use of them, escalated throughout his presidency. The women—sometimes paid prostitutes . . . would be brought to Kennedy’s office or his private quarters without any prior Secret Service knowledge or clearance.” Brammer also knew that Kennedy’s private physician, Max Jacobson, known around the White House as “Dr. Feel Good,” was giving the president regular amphetamine injections, sometimes as often as every six hours (Brammer recognized the fixed look in his eyes, the dry mouth). Bobby and others worried. Kennedy waved them off. “I don’t care if it’s horse piss” in those syringes, he told them. “It’s the only thing that works.”
It also made him restless. “You had to really work to keep his attention unless . . . he had something that he wanted from you. And then, boy, you were the object of extremely focused attention,” de Vegh said years later. “It’s everybody trying to be good enough [around him], smart enough, witty enough. I was trying to knock him out—to be terrific.” The same behavior was “much more criminal in the case of Bundy and McNamara.”
The writer-voyeur in Brammer was fascinated by these flirtatious dynamics. He pressed de Vegh for intimate details of her encounters with Kennedy. At the same time, he was genuinely fond of her. He didn’t like competing with this much more glamorous, powerful man. Trying to view his situation with humor, to take it in stride, he wrote one of his Texas pals in July 1961 (on old LBJ stationery), “Jack Kennedy is down in the back, and this has apparently limited his roundering for he does not often call to bug his teenaged mistress to whom I am secretly engaged. Very late on a recent evening a voice that was unmistakably our Leader’s reached me on the phone, inquiring of ‘Diaawhnah.’ (I started to say she’d gone to ‘Cuber’ for a week and a hawrf.) I informed him that she was in the bawrth, tidying herself, and he rang off rather abruptly.”
The Jockey Club in the Fairfax Hotel near Dupont Circle—a place to see and be seen for the young political set—was one of de Vegh’s favorite spots. Brammer would treat her to dinner, try to impress her with stories of his burgeoning literary success (avoiding his doubts and disappointments): his tremendous progress on the new novel, the tantalizing prospect of a movie deal for The Gay Place. Then they would retire to her little house in Georgetown to spend the night together. She would share with Brammer some of her pillow talk with the president. Brammer kept a notebook filled with details of her experiences and some of the word-for-word dialogues she reported to him (“Title for a memoir by Diana: ‘Balling Jack’”). He encouraged her to be as accurate and thorough as possible (and urged himself “really to write, as beautifully as she talked it”). These late-night confessions seemed to bring her relief. They heightened the amorous tension between the two of them. Brammer referred to Kennedy as Tiger. Tell me about Tiger, he would say. He learned that while Kennedy was campaigning for the presidency, he would send a limo to pick her up at her Radcliffe dormitory; his aides finally told him this was causing talk on campus. “I thought he was a big joke at first . . . I had only contempt for politicians . . . But my god he just kept selling himself,” she told Brammer. “Some evenings it was just one wild chase after another . . . Like a goddamn steeplething . . . He can also be very persuasive and charming when he wants to be. Makes you think you’re the only person he’s been thinking about for months.”
Then he got elected. Brammer recorded de Vegh’s story:
Visiting the house on N. St. a few days before the Inauguration: Secret Service . . . reporters . . . huge crowds . . . embarrassment as she identified herself, ducked her head and headed up the stone steps . . . He was late to a dinner party by 2-1/2 hours, and afterwards, heading out alone and down the street, wandering aimlessly through the frozen snow-garlanded Georgetown streets, she turned a corner and simultaneously heard the swelling chorus of cheers as the limousine sped past her and pulled to a stop midway down the block. And there he was again, descending from the gleaming car, being hustled past police lines, giving his little goodhearted tailback’s stiffarm gesture to the whooping crowds. She turned round and headed back up the street, thinking she was away from it for another week, two or three weeks, a month or so, but the phone was jangling when she reached home.
On a moment’s notice, she said, the president would invite her to the Lincoln Bedroom in the White House, the big, high-canopied bed: “[He] wants to know what I’ve been doing, who seeing, have I any lovers . . . Asks about . . . other girls.”
Brammer captured the following exchange he had with de Vegh:
What does he want from you?
Just to come running when he calls . . . When he needs me . . .
Like the other night on Berlin?
Yes.
What would happen if I married you—or rather if you got married?
He’d probably think that was just devine [sic] . . . Very good thing for his little [set-up] . . . and he’d just keep on calling.
I don’t know . . . I honestly don’t know. Perhaps I might . . . Just keep on running over when I get the signal?
What the hell is it that holds you? Sex? Is it that good?
My heavens, no. Might have been once, just after the first time . . . But no—I can’t recall a time when one of our lovemaking sessions didn’t find me at one point or another, either in tears or hysterics or both . . . I don’t know what you’d call it . . . Fascination, maybe . . . conditioned on the man himself and how he’s grown . . . Perhaps there’s even some of that grisly business of simply wanting to be close to power or history or influence . . . I couldn’t care less about any conventional middle way of life . . . I want either to stay close to this thing, you know really see what’s going on, feeling his lousy masterful presence at all times. Either that, or disengaged entirely . . .
She told Brammer the poor man couldn’t make it from his bathroom to his bed without wearing a back brace.
He would ask her to come over; he would spill the news about some international crisis, and then he would expect her to make love to him to calm his nerves. “You know Sunday night when you . . . asked me if he’d called and I said no?” de Vegh told Brammer one evening. “Well, fifteen minutes afterwards he did . . . I had dinner there . . . You know, you heard, I guess, that the Russians announced resumption of nuclear testing . . . They test the super super bomb, the million megaton bomb, we’ve had it . . . That’s what he told me . . . We’ve had it, he said, and he made about a dozen phone calls: Rusk, Stevenson, McNamara; Bundy came by, all the others. They’ve got to decide what to do in a few days. Then he said, come on Diana—just like that—and I said oh, no and burst into tears, and he said oh what’s all this? Oh don’t be that way, dear, come lie beside me, so I lay down with him and it was just impossible.”
She wondered why she kept going back—“it’s all such an ugly business.” Surrounding him, “such terrible people, so many really ghastly people.” Was she just a victim of the “Cinderella culture” that encouraged everyone to seek romantic fantasies—“dime-store folklore”—or “do I want to be around the inner circle when the bomb comes? I rather doubt they’d take me along in their helicopters to wherever it is they’ll be going for the underground shelters.”
One day she read in Life magazine how “Mrs. K . . . always goes to the Lincoln bedroom for inspiration, and I nearly flipped. If she only knew what’s been going on in that bedroom! What a riot!”
Brammer jotted into his notebook another of de Vegh’s reported exchanges with the president:
Baby, don’t be a problem now . . . I’ve got too many problems.
That’s the whole point. We’ve both got enough problems now.
Look, sweetheart, I’ve had troubles since all this started. My God, I couldn’t begin to tell you—all the things—everything—that went to hell because of you. So much has been endangered during the last couple years . . . Godalmighty, any one of them could have meant the end of my career. Scares hell out of me to even contemplate . . . But Jesus, I’ve never thought of it being any other way. It was worth it—you’re worth it.
I think we’re causing each other too much trouble.
No, Baby . . . Forget it . . . Relax and be a good girl. You’re absolutely all I want.
He would weep and tell her they had to stop meeting for a while. Jackie was returning to town now after a lengthy vacation, Jackie needed attention.
Then he would weep and ask her to come back. “Told him we had to break it off, and he immediately asked if there was someone else. I said yes, and that I was thinking of marrying him . . . this one instance of love I’ve found has only made me conscious of how disproportionate, how distorted, my perspective had become . . . All he did was cry a little and ask if I was really in love . . . Then he offered to send me away, like some jealous Papa, and then he asked that we make none of it final until dinner next week . . . So there I was again . . . and the next time it was as if nothing at all had been said or promised, not only at his sexual beck and call, but apparently he wants me to procure for him, too . . . he just lunged [at me] . . . I was just a sack of potatoes . . . Finally I rolled off the bed and got dressed . . . and so here I am . . . all horsewhipped, like you say.”
At one point, Brammer typed into his notebook: “waiting for d. and wondering about the differences between d. and n[adine]. Why no screaming sexual jealousy? more sophisticated now? no think so . . . no, can’t really be sexually jealous in this instance, only concern for d’s welfare and my own need to be always informed.”
They all knew Ellen Rometsch—everyone who had worked with Bobby Baker through Lyndon Johnson’s office. Rometsch was a Liz Taylor lookalike from what was now East Germany, with an astonishing capacity for partying and entertaining men. Baker would often bring his “girls,” including Rometsch, to the Quorum Club, a hideaway on Capitol Hill where lobbyists and legislators unwound together after hours and where Baker frequently made legislative deals on behalf of LBJ and others—deals that often included private introductions to his “girls.” “I must have had fifty friends who went with [Rometsch],” is how Baker once put it, “and not one of them ever complained. She was a real joy to be with.”
As President Kennedy soon discovered. Brother Bobby understood that her East German ties risked exposing the president to charges of consorting with a communist spy, should word of his dalliance ever leak to Republicans. Bobby worked to get her out of Washington and to purchase her silence. Brammer knew her; he had heard rumors about her nights with JFK. Whether de Vegh knew her, he didn’t know. Diana didn’t want to hear of her lover’s other conquests. Brammer said nothing on the subject—and respecting the journalistic ethos of the day, he didn’t expose John F. Kennedy’s secrets. At first, his Washington stories for Time—pieces he reported, filed by Hugh Sidey—remained solidly focused on public matters (“Beneath the suntanned surface, when U.S. citizens thought of their country there was uneasiness and discontent”). But Kennedy was too charismatic to be profiled, for long, in the traditional manner. Sidey had learned from his encounter with Bobby that certain lines could not be crossed; nevertheless, the handsome young president cried for personal asides, even in a hard-news context. Brammer’s observational prowess (as well as his private knowledge) came in handy here. Time began to report revealing details: “The President moved easily, showing no signs of his recent back injury, and he half-smiled his recognition to White House regulars. Yet his face appeared puffy, and lined by new wrinkles, and his hands seemed to tremble slightly as he shuffled the papers before him.” And: “Even in the midst of briefings, the President sometimes ceases to listen as he stares into space—apparently searching for the answer to some nagging problem.” Hints of complexity, vulnerability, a life apart from the pressroom podium—incrementally, in the pages of a mainstream news magazine, the president was taking on the shadings of a character in a novel.
At one point, Willie Morris gave Brammer space in the Texas Observer for a satire on the administration. Entitled “Glooey,” it takes the form of a one-act play, and it is the closest Brammer came to publicly revealing the White House’s daily routine. As the play begins, the First Lady says, “He’s been in the pool since the crisis started.” A newsman wants to know, “What crisis she talkin’ about?” “You got me there,” answers the president. Kennedy did, in fact, spend many hours a week in the White House swimming pool, accompanied by a woman or several women, sometimes joined by his brothers Bobby and Teddy. The water was heated to ninety degrees to soothe his back. Jackie was not allowed near the facility when her husband made use of it. “When the president [takes] lunch in the pool with Fiddle and Faddle, nobody goes in there,” said one JFK staffer.
Setting the scene of his play, Brammer writes, “Visible [in the] pool is a young man, surpassingly beautiful . . . also unimpeachably naked.” The unusual second adjective here suggests, perhaps, Brammer’s bitter attitude toward unfair privilege. JFK’s recklessness was so worrisome to many members of the Secret Service, and to members of the press corps, that a sense of dread thickened the West Wing air. Additionally, Kennedy’s amphetamine use had started to make him thinner. In Brammer’s play, the president says, “Sometimes I see me dead in the rain.” The First Lady responds, “Oh darling, don’t talk like that.” The vice president, standing to one side, contemplating “walking on the water,” pipes up, “What’s so awful about talkin’ like that? Go on . . . talk like that some more.” In just a few words, Brammer had captured the true dynamic of Camelot.
Johnson, well aware of Kennedy’s sexual profligacy, sulked and seethed. “You know what he does at night?” he told Harry McPherson one day. “He gets in a convertible and he drives to Georgetown to see one of his girlfriends.” He said Kennedy was “driving the Secret Service crazy. They are right behind him.”
On another occasion, Johnson told Brammer, “J. Edgar Hoover has Jack Kennedy by the balls.” CBS president Frank Stanton recalled LBJ exclaiming that “he was waiting for someone to blow the whistle on Kennedy. But the press was completely in Kennedy’s hands and Johnson knew that.” It is tempting to wonder whether the history of journalism might have been altered slightly—if the code of official silence might have shattered earlier than it did—if Johnson and Brammer had still been working closely as a team. But Johnson had been conspicuously cool to his former aide since the appearance of The Gay Place.
“You are dealing with a very insecure, sensitive man with a huge ego. I want you to literally kiss his fanny from one end of Washington to the other,” Kennedy told his staff regarding LBJ. “I can’t afford to have my vice president, who knows every reporter in Washington, going around saying we’re all screwed up, so we’re going to keep him happy.” Kennedy also decided to get his second-in-command out of the way as often as possible so that Bobby wouldn’t be tempted to joke about the man’s “gilded impotency”—in turn, Johnson cursed “that little shitass,” the president’s brother. Kennedy arranged numerous foreign jaunts for LBJ, ceremonial visits centered on flying the flag. Johnson didn’t want to make these trips—particularly to Vietnam, where Kennedy had just approved a nearly 300 percent increase in the number of American military advisers assisting the South Vietnamese army, along with an operation code-named Ranch Hand, a plan to spray herbicide defoliants in the countryside to deny Vietcong guerillas food and cover. Johnson told Kennedy that he didn’t want to fly over there and get his head blown off. Kennedy laughed and said it was all part of serving his country.
Johnson took his spleen out on his staff. En route to Asia in May 1961, he ordered Horace Busby off the plane for some oversight the hapless aide had committed. “But we’re over the ocean,” Busby said. “I don’t give a fucking damn!” Johnson exploded. Lady Bird prevented the poor man from being ejected midair. Overseas, Johnson broke every cultural taboo, manhandling women and children in public (including a “few fingerless lepers,” according to his biographer Robert Dallek), telling confused crowds they could all be as rich as Texans if they would adopt the American way of life. He seemed genuinely happy only once, discussing rural electrification with Prime Minister Nehru of India.
Back in the States, he flew to Texas for a meeting with Dwight Eisenhower at the ranch. Brammer was among the reporters assigned to cover the event. Both men’s destinies had altered radically, rising and falling, in a very short time. Their personal worlds, as well as the world at large, were about to make even more unpredictable twists: the period’s discord would soon be crystallized in a comment made at a rock-and-roll concert by something called a Beatle: “The next song . . . is our latest record or our latest electronic noise depending on whose side you’re on.”
On the flight back to Washington from the LBJ ranch, Johnson, melancholy, miserable in his secondary role, mused to gathered reporters that he missed the massive staff he had commanded when he served as majority leader in the Senate. Nobody respected him now. Nobody ever stuck with him. “Billy abandoned me,” he said suddenly, pointing at Brammer. “I picked up your book the other day but I couldn’t read it. You had too many dirty words in it.”
Brammer didn’t answer.
“When’d you write that book?”
“When I was in Washington.”
“When you were working for me?”
“At nights.”
“You should have been answering my mail.”
This particular press conference ended. The plane landed. The two men never spoke again.