CAPE COD AND MARTHA’S VINEYARD
Kennedy had met the author William Styron at a 1962 White House dinner honoring Nobel Prize winners. Styron’s first novel, Lie Down in Darkness, had won critical acclaim and prestigious awards, making him the kind of intellectual celebrity Kennedy liked to cultivate, and so on Sunday he and Jackie cruised to Martha’s Vineyard to collect Styron and his wife, Rose, and give them lunch aboard the Honey Fitz. Styron was anticipating an afternoon with a man he considered “the glamorous and gorgeous avatar of American power at the magic moment of its absolute twentieth-century ascendancy.”* He was not disappointed and would describe Kennedy as “lethally glamorous,” and possessing a “beguiling and self-effacing modesty.” The food on the Honey Fitz was another matter: stone-cold hot dogs in soggy buns, frozen beer, and runny or rock-hard oeufs gelés, with a pitcher of stiff Bloody Marys the only saving grace.
They discussed Massachusetts politics, race, and whether Alger Hiss was guilty (Kennedy thought he was). He asked Styron if he had read “The President and Other Intellectuals,” an essay by the New York literary critic and all-purpose intellectual Alfred Kazin that had appeared in the October 1961 issue of The American Scholar. Kazin had conceded that Kennedy possessed “the sex appeal of a movie hero” and “as much savvy as a Harvard professor,” but then dismissed him as a poseur and “would-be intellectual.” He peppered his essay with snide comments about his “restless ambition” and “determination to succeed,” and criticized Profiles in Courage as devoid of “any significant ideas” and resembling “those little anecdotes from the lives of great men that are found in Reader’s Digest.” He concluded that his most essential quality was “that of the man who is always making and remaking himself,” belittling him as “the final product of a fanatical job of self-remodeling.”
Schlesinger heard prepublication rumors about the article and persuaded Kazin to come to the White House for lunch, hoping that meeting Kennedy might change his mind. Afterward, Kazin added a few grace notes and praised Kennedy’s “freshness of curiosity.” He kept the most wounding passages, however, and told Schlesinger that most New York intellectuals agreed with him that the president was “slick, cool, and empty, devoid of vision.” Kennedy tried making light of it, telling Schlesinger, “We wined him and dined him, and talked about Hemingway and Dreiser with him. . . . Then he went away and wrote that piece.” Kazin was unrepentant, and in his 1978 autobiography he spoke of Kennedy’s “wistful need for more confident learning than he possessed” and his “need to charm,” and called him “a personality under construction,” as if that were a crippling flaw.
Carefully keeping his voice neutral, Styron admitted to having read Kazin’s article.
“Well, what did you think?” Kennedy demanded.
Styron felt as if he had been passed a conversational hot coal. He had found the article tough and caustic, but thought Kazin had made a case that Kennedy lacked the intellectual voltage usually ascribed to him. As he was struggling to formulate a diplomatic response, Kennedy posed a question that showed how deeply the article had wounded him, asking, “What qualifies a critic [i.e., Kazin] to make an assessment of a work if he himself has never created one?” Styron thought, “Boy, Alfred’s really got Kennedy’s goat,” and told him that the critical and creative faculties were different talents, and not necessarily interdependent.
Styron had stumbled upon something more complicated than a New York intellectual getting the goat of a thin-skinned president, although Kennedy was certainly that. In 1961, he had become so exercised over the New York Herald Tribune’s biased reporting that he had canceled the White House subscriptions. After some one-sided articles appeared in Time, he had ordered an aide to compare how the magazine had covered his first year in office with how it had treated Eisenhower’s first year.* He and Ben Bradlee had been friends for almost a decade, but after an August 1962 article in Look quoted Bradlee as saying, “It’s almost impossible to write a story they [the Kennedys] like. Even if a story is quite favorable to their side, they’ll find one paragraph to quibble with,” he refused to speak to him for several months. Making his reaction to negative press articles so puzzling was the fact that in other respects he was a tough-skinned political warrior capable of shrugging off brutal ad hominem attacks. Presidents Johnson and Nixon would also be sensitive about criticism, but they were concerned about its short-term political consequences. Kennedy had his eye on history, and he understood that articles in newspapers like the Herald Tribune were its rough draft and that future historians might weigh the opinions of critics like Kazin.
He had meant his warning to Massachusetts state legislators that “at some future date, the high court of history sits on judgment on each of us,” and he imagined himself surrounded by current and future historians constantly taking his measure, telling Bradlee, “Those bastards, they’re always there with their pencils out.” In Profiles in Courage, he had been the one delivering the verdict, praising eight senators for possessing “the breath-taking talents of the orator, the brilliance of the scholar, the breadth of the man above party and section, and, above all, a deep-seated belief in themselves, their integrity and the rightness of their cause”—all qualities that he was cultivating in himself. By calling his scholarly brilliance a sham, Kazin was threatening what he cared about most: a favorable judgment from history’s high court.
All presidents govern with an eye on history, but not all care equally. If historians ranked presidents by ambition instead of achievement, Kennedy would be near the top of most lists. He was swinging for the fences from his first day in office, determined to be ranked alongside or above Lincoln and FDR. Even joining the pantheon of great presidents was not enough; he wanted to be celebrated as a great man who had shaped his times. For this he looked for inspiration to de Gaulle and Churchill, men who had worked at becoming heroic figures (“making and remaking themselves”) and had proved that greatness can be fashioned from a convergence of willpower and historical circumstance. When the French statesman Jean Monnet told Schlesinger that one of de Gaulle’s most remarkable features was “his precise and persistent concern with the figure he will cut in history,” and that whenever he considered a decision “he wonders how it will look in the history books thirty years from now,” he could have been describing Kennedy.
Jackie knew how much he valued history’s judgment, and her famous post-Dallas “Camelot interview” with the journalist Theodore White was an attempt to preempt the historians. Referring to a journalist who had written some unflattering lines about her husband, she told White, “Men are such a combination of bad and good . . . and what is history going to see in this except what Merriman Smith wrote, that bitter man.” White decided that she had agreed to the interview because she did not want her husband “left to the historians.” After recounting the events in Dallas, she likened his presidency to King Arthur’s mythical Camelot. Most of Kennedy’s knights would dismiss the comparison as the kind of sentimental claptrap he would have hated, but they overlooked the rest of her interview, during which she delivered a passionate exegesis of his love of history. In a stream-of-consciousness monologue, she told White, “But Jack loved history so. But history to me was about Jack. But history made him what he was . . . this lonely sick boy . . . he sat and read history . . . scarlet fever . . . this little boy in bed for so much of the time . . . all the time he was in bed this little boy was reading Marlborough, he devours the Knights of the Round Table . . . history made Jack that way, made him see heroes.” Returning to her memories of Dallas, she punctuated them with “history,” the one-word refrain that explained him: “History . . . everybody kept saying to me to put a cold towel around my head . . . my whole face splattered with blood and hair . . . I wiped it off with Kleenex. History.”
Kennedy was not shy about his ambitions. He told Billings that his goal was “greatness.” He advised Sidey to “go for the top. If you aim for second you will end up there,” leading Sidey to conclude that he was gripped by “the romantic conviction that he was astride history.” The diplomat Charles (“Chip”) Bohlen, who had known many of the century’s great leaders, was impressed by Kennedy’s fierce determination to be numbered among them and sensed an “unknown quality” that “gave you infinite hope that somehow or other he was going to change the course of history.”
During a White House dinner on the eve of the Cuban missile crisis, Isaiah Berlin had noticed that whenever Kennedy spoke about Churchill, Stalin, Lenin, and Napoléon, “his eyes shone with a particular glitter, and it was quite clear that he thought in terms of great men and what they were able to do.” When Berlin returned a few weeks later, Kennedy admitted that he had worried that the Bay of Pigs “would always be this fearful stigma which historians would always note.” Berlin decided that he had never known anyone “who listened to every single word that was uttered more attentively,” and his “remorseless attention” reminded him of Lenin, another man who could “exhaust people simply by listening to them.” Like Lenin, Kennedy was “on the job all the time,” Berlin said, and spoke “like a man with a mission or some kind of calling . . . [and] as if there was not much time and great things had to be done.” He decided that his ambition was “terrifying but rather marvelous.”
His terrifying ambition to be judged a great man was an obsession that, with the possible exception of sex, trumped all else. He ran for Congress and the presidency at a young age, and fussed about his health so much because he feared dying before he could leave his mark on history. When he discovered that Bradlee had been keeping a diary, he made him promise not to publish anything without his permission until five years after the end of his administration, to prevent him scooping his own memoirs. He made Arthur Schlesinger a special assistant because he had written acclaimed books about Andrew Jackson and FDR, and he hoped he would write a more sympathetic account of his presidency if he co-opted him.* He kept a watchful eye on Schlesinger, and after he appeared to be claiming in a newspaper article that he was responsible for giving him crucial advice during the Cuban missile crisis, he swore and told Fay, “Look at that damn interview. Schlesinger sounding off that it was his advice that got the President to change his position he previously held and accept Artie’s advice. I’ll tell you what Artie can advise on. He can devote all his mental capacity to advising Jackie on the historical significance of the furniture she puts in the White House.” It was another idle threat.
His ambition explained why he had read a compendium of presidential wisdom, Sayings of Great Presidents, the day after he won the election; kept the current issue of History Today on his night table; and pressed historians to explain what made a president great. When he heard that the Princeton historian and Abraham Lincoln expert David Herbert Donald was scheduled to speak at Bobby’s house, he moved the event to the White House and asked Donald: Where would he rank various presidents? What separated a great president from a mediocre one? How did a president acquire greatness? And what about Lincoln? Would he have been regarded as a great president if he hadn’t been assassinated? He argued that Lincoln’s assassination had saved him from the problem of Reconstruction, and Donald agreed that Lincoln may have been lucky in his reputation to die when he did. Donald left a private meeting with him unimpressed by his understanding of American history but fascinated by his determination to become a great man, writing a friend, “This is a man determined to go down in our history books as a great President, and he wants to know the secret.”
Every month brought another hundred-year anniversary of a crucial Civil War battle or Lincoln milestone, making it impossible for him not to keep a competitive eye on Lincoln. He asked Sorensen to study the Gettysburg Address and determine its “secret” before writing a first draft of his inaugural address. He invited the poet and Lincoln scholar Carl Sandburg to the White House for a private tutorial, and must have been pleased when Sandberg said, “There has never been a more formidable set of historical conditions for a president to face since Lincoln.”
He made Churchill his template, borrowing or emulating his phrases and constructions. He titled his first book Why England Slept, an homage to Churchill’s While England Slept. Churchill had opened his 1922 study of world leaders, Great Contemporaries, “Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities.” He opened Profiles in Courage, “This is a book about the most admirable of human virtues—courage.” Kay Halle never forgot visiting him in a hospital room when he was twelve to see him hidden behind stacks of books, immersed in Churchill’s The World Crisis. When he was a young congressman, his legislative aide Mark Dalton found him sitting up in bed in Hyannis Port, reading one of Churchill’s early books. “Just listen to this,” he said in an excited voice. “This is one of the most interesting things I have ever read.” Referring to a leader in the Middle Ages who had to make a fateful decision, Churchill had written, “At that moment, all history stood still.” After repeating the passage out loud, he asked Dalton, “Did you ever read anything like that in your life?”
While he was in Florida in 1955, recovering from a risky operation that had not only failed to alleviate his chronic back condition but had almost killed him, he had spent hours rereading Churchill’s books, copying and memorizing passages. He was channeling Churchill when he told an audience at the National Press Club that America needed a president “who is willing and able to summon his national constituency to its finest hour.” The call in his inaugural address for the United States and Soviet Union to renew the search for peace “before the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science engulf us all in ruin” was a wordier version of Churchill’s warning about a world “made darker by the dark lights of perverted science.” His summons to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend” replicated the cadences of “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields.” His warning to the newly independent nations of Asia and Africa that “in the past, those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside” was an homage to Churchill’s remark that “dictators ride to and fro upon tigers which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.”
He opened a 1961 speech to a gathering of historians in Washington by quoting Churchill’s statement that history would judge his role in World War II favorably because he intended to write it. Behind his decision to tape certain White House meetings lay his determination to write the definitive account of his administration. He was selective about what he recorded, choosing meetings and conversations that promised to be historically significant. The tapes would give him a huge advantage over Schlesinger and other historians, and because he was the only one in the room who knew a meeting was being recorded, he could also engage in some historical stage-managing.*
Because he viewed history as a competitive enterprise, Kennedy approached the task of becoming a great president with the same spirit that he and his siblings had brought to swimming contests, sailboat races, and touch football. When Bradlee and Cannon asked during their 1960 interview if he had a lot of “super competitive” spirit, he replied, “I think I do have a lot of it. I don’t know if it is out of my family or what it is,” and praised ambition as “what moves the world.” He was concerned about being compared with FDR, once telling Schlesinger, who had praised FDR effusively in his New Deal trilogy, “That’s the trouble, Arthur, with all you historians! That’s what you did to Roosevelt and his crowd. You made all those New Dealers seven feet tall. They weren’t that good. They were just a bunch of guys like us.”
He understood that presidents are always compared closely with their predecessors and was fascinated by how historians were already judging Eisenhower. In the summer of 1962, the Sunday New York Times Magazine carried a long article by Schlesinger’s father reporting on how seventy-five distinguished historians had ranked the presidents. The article included a photograph of Kennedy, hunched over a table with his back to the camera, captioned, “President Kennedy in his White House office—How will he be rated by historians.” The article was encouraging. The historians had picked Lincoln, Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Wilson, and Jefferson as the five greats, in that order. Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., summarized the eight crucial qualities of a great president this way: (1) “Each held stage at a critical moment in American history and by timely action attained timeless results.” (2) “Each took the side of liberalism and the general welfare against the status quo.” (3) “[Each] acted masterfully and farsightedly in foreign affairs. All cared profoundly about keeping the country out of war.” (4) They were “not only constructive statesmen but realistic politicians.” (5) [Each] “left the Executive Branch stronger and more influential than he found it.” (6) They “offended vested economic interests and long-standing popular prejudices.” (7) They “were more deeply loved than they were hated. The rank and file of Americans re-elected every one of them to a second term.” (8) They “possessed a profound sense of history. . . . Essential as it was to win approval at the polls, they looked as well to the regard of posterity.”
Kennedy possessed all eight qualities. He prided himself on being a realistic politician, and had offended “vested economic interests” during his handling of the 1962 steel crisis. He had a “profound sense of history,” was “loved more than he was hated,” and was governing during a “critical moment” in the cold war and struggle for civil rights. He had kept the country out of war during the missile crisis, taken the side of liberalism as opposed to the status quo of the Eisenhower years, and made the Executive Branch more influential and powerful. Judged by these criteria, he needed only to win reelection and attain “timeless results” by ending the cold war and passing his civil rights bill.
He told Schlesinger that he was surprised his father had ranked Woodrow Wilson so high, ahead of Truman and Polk, but delighted that Eisenhower was twenty-second out of thirty-four.* “At first I thought it was too bad that Ike was in Europe and would miss the article,” he said, “but then I decided that some conscientious friend in the United States would probably send him a copy.” After Eisenhower criticized him for his handling of the Cuban missile crisis he speculated that the historians’ poll was behind his attacks. “For years Eisenhower has gone along, basking in the glow of the applause which he has always had,” he told Schlesinger. “Then he saw that poll and realized how he stood before the cold eye of history—way below Truman; even below Hoover. That is what is eating him now. He hates me because I am his successor; but his real quarrel is [with] what he now fears may be the judgment of history. That is why he is going around the country trying to defend his administration and to blacken us.”
During a 1960 campaign stop in Philadelphia he had proclaimed that when historians assessed the next decade he wanted them to cry out, “These were the great years of the American life, the nineteen sixties. Give me those years!” He had taken office at a time when America was prosperous, the civil rights movement in its infancy, and his biggest campaign issue, a supposed “missile gap” between the United States and the Soviet Union, was a fallacy, leaving him a prospective great man in search of great challenges. The Cuban missile crisis finally provided his Churchillian moment—“when all history stood still”—and convinced him that in the atomic age, great men avoided war rather than leading their nations into it. The Birmingham demonstrations gave him his great domestic cause, and by Labor Day his “romantic conviction” that he was astride history and that historians might someday cry, “These were the great years of the American Republic!” seemed within grasp.
After lunch, he handed Styron an expensive Havana cigar encased in a silver tube. (Before ordering a ban on Cuban imports he had told Pierre Salinger to cruise through Washington and buy up every top-grade Cuban cigar.) As he put it in his pocket, Styron thought of Castro and decided, “Of all the world’s leaders, the Harvard man and the Marxist from Havana were temperamentally and intellectually most alike.”
Styron had heard that Kennedy hated being bored, so he offered only the briefest summary of his work-in-progress, a novel about the Nat Turner slave revolt in Virginia. But Kennedy was fascinated and pressed him for details, mounting what Styron called a “bright and persistent interrogation.”
As they steamed into harbor at Martha’s Vineyard, Kennedy noticed that they were heading straight for the Edgartown Yacht Club. He quickly ordered his captain to reverse engines and steer away from that WASP bastion to the public pier, “My God! They’d have my hide if they learned I’d just barged in there without permission,” he said. Running a hand through his hair, he added, “I’ll bet there’s not a Democrat within five miles of here.”