WASHINGTON
The official diary of Kennedy’s engagements kept by Ken O’Donnell shows the short week following Labor Day as among the least eventful of his presidency. He did not return from Cape Cod until Tuesday morning, and spent most of Thursday and Friday entertaining King Zaher of Afghanistan. On Tuesday afternoon, during a discussion of French atomic tests and the peaceful uses of nuclear power, he filled two pages with doodles, scribbling “test,” “biological,” “megaton,” “peaceful uses,” and, evidence that his mind was wandering, “Panama” (five times), “1964,” “discrimination,” and “Cuba.” He covered the bottom of the second sheet with an eighteenth-century man-of-war in full sail.
Many of his doodles were composed of words taken from meetings and conversations, written several times, underlined, crossed out, and placed in boxes piled into towers or connected in chains. On rare occasions he would doodle his thoughts, once writing during a briefing, “I don’t understand all this.” When he drew something, it was usually a boat, perhaps because he would rather have been on it. In one of his more inventive doodles, he turned a U.S. flag into a treble clef, in another he drew the pillar of a canopy bed. He doodled when he was bored or wanted to release tension and frustration. “Vietnam” appeared frequently in his doodles that summer and fall, written down a page, put in boxes, crossed out, and underlined again and again.
The political situation there remained stalemated. The generals had suspended their plotting, and Diem was refusing to dismiss his brother. The Pentagon insisted the war was being won and recommended supporting Diem; the State Department and U.S. press corps in Saigon believed it would be lost if he remained in power. The pro-Diem English-language Times of Vietnam condemned Kennedy’s statements to Cronkite and accused the CIA of plotting to overthrow Diem. The State Department dismissed the charge as “something out of Ian Fleming.”
Roger Hilsman attended a meeting of the Far East Subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday. He reported to Lodge, and presumably to Kennedy as well, that its members had “far-reaching doubts regarding not only Diem-Nhu leadership but also advisability of continued US participation in Viet-Nam war” and were considering introducing a resolution stating, “It is the sense of the Senate that the American people are no longer willing to support a regime in South Viet-Nam that oppresses the people and religious sects. Continued support of such a regime is inconsistent with the basic precepts of American democracy.”
Kennedy missed most of Friday’s National Security Council meeting because he was entertaining King Zaher. In his absence, Bobby asked “whether we could win the war with Diem and Nhu.” When Rusk said we could not if the Nhus remained in power, Bobby replied, “If we have concluded that we are going to lose with Diem, why do we not grasp the nettle now?” Rusk called pulling out “very serious,” saying we would be in “real trouble” if the Vietcong took over. Bundy thought we had not yet reached “a moment of decision.” General Taylor pointed out that three weeks ago the administration had believed we could win with Diem, and that the Joint Chiefs still shared that view. Bobby wanted to know what they should do if it became apparent that Diem could not win. McNamara said that the Pentagon had insufficient information to answer that question. To remedy that, Bobby proposed sending a mission to solicit the opinions of the U.S. servicemen who were advising and training South Vietnamese military units.
The president joined the meeting at this point and approved his brother’s suggestion. McNamara said he would ask General Harkins, who headed the U.S. military mission in Vietnam, to begin canvassing the advisers. Taylor proposed sending Major General Victor Krulak to Vietnam to solicit the views of South Vietnamese officers. It was agreed that Joseph Mendenhall, a State Department official with extensive experience in the country, would join him and that they would leave immediately and spend two days there assessing the situation. The notion that they could fly twenty-four thousand miles in four days, spend forty-eight hours in Vietnam, and return with any worthwhile insights indicated the confused state of the administration’s policy. The public affairs officer at the Saigon embassy who briefed them called their assignment “a symptom of the state the U.S. government was in.”
Kennedy’s appointments usually filled several pages of his official diary. On Wednesday they took up only half a page. Between 10:30 a.m. and 12:52 p.m., he reportedly participated in an “OFF THE RECORD MEETING. (No list and no subject supplied),” an unusual notation since O’Donnell usually included these details. He had in fact spent these hours planning his reelection campaign, studying reports and polls, and conferring by telephone with his brother-in-law Steve Smith, who had agreed to manage his 1964 campaign, and with Bobby, who had managed his last one.
Lincoln affixed a memorandum to the notes that he made that morning, explaining that they had been written as he “was going over some suggestions on campaign strategy for 1964.” On one page he had written, “Must win the South” and “We would at this point.” This was probably a reference to a recent memorandum from the pollster Louis Harris titled “The South in 1964” that suggested he could win the region by appealing to its more enlightened governors over the heads of its congressional delegation. The most important recent development in the South, Harris wrote, had been an “industrial explosion” accompanied by an “educational awakening” that had been “hidden mostly from view over the surface manifestations of segregation and the pratings about states’ rights.” He recommended targeting dynamic Southern cities like Atlanta, Houston, and Charlotte. “You can also stick it to the Republicans and the renegade Democrats by saying that . . . the main stream of the new South is not states’ rights, not bitter end segregationist, not ultra-conservative,” he advised, “and that you are willing to take your chances with this new South.”
On the second page of his notes, Kennedy had written, “dismiss him as a second rate figure,” a reference to Senator Barry Goldwater, his likely Republican opponent. He was already making moves to counter Goldwater, and Salinger had announced that at the end of September he would be making a five-day conservation trip to ten Midwestern and Western states, visiting national parks, wilderness areas, dams, and power projects. Salinger called the trip nonpolitical, but reporters immediately put quotation marks around the word. His itinerary included states where Goldwater was expected to be strong because of his Western roots, eight states where Democratic senators were running for reelection, and six that had voted for Nixon in 1960 and that Kennedy hoped to win to offset expected losses in the South.
It was probably on Monday that he decided to appoint Wisconsin’s commissioner of taxation, John Gronouski, to the vacant position of postmaster general, making him the first Polish American to hold a cabinet position. Although Kennedy needed to solidify his support among Polish Americans, who voted heavily in major Eastern and Midwestern cities, he also had strong personal reasons for making the Gronouski appointment.
His strained flexor muscle continued bothering him, and on Thursday Lincoln noted that he was experiencing “discomfort” and had not been following Kraus’s exercise regimen. Despite having flown Kraus back from Italy, Kennedy had disregarded his advice and now wanted a fourth opinion. Unwilling to tolerate the pain of a minor muscle strain any longer, he called Carroll Rosenbloom, a family friend who owned the Baltimore Colts, and asked him to arrange a consultation with the team’s orthopedic surgeon. Lincoln reported that on Friday, “Dr. McDonald came & he reassured the President that his leg would snap out of it. He told him to continue the therapy he was getting from Dr. Kraus. The President felt much better from this reassurance.”
Kennedy fussed over the trappings of his presidency almost as much as he did over his health. He had designed the sterling-silver calendars that he presented to members of the ExComm (Executive Committee) who had met throughout the Cuban missile crisis, and he had chosen the new colors and interior decoration of Air Force One, ordering that “United States of America” be painted in large letters on its fuselage and U.S. flags added to its tail fin. He was so pleased with the blue-and-white color scheme that he asked Postmaster General Day to hire the same designer to improve the appearance of the nation’s mailboxes and the hats worn by its mailmen, and commissioned a New York firm to make recommendations for improving the look of the brochures, logos, and visual footprints of other government agencies. While walking down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Capitol with Jackie one evening, he was so shocked by its dilapidated shops that he established a commission to improve the thoroughfare’s architecture and ambience, and closely monitored its progress. He sampled the wines before White House dinners and pored over the guest lists, demanding an explanation for anyone he failed to recognize. He supervised the renovation of the White House Rose Garden, a place it was said he loved so fiercely that no one dared leave a heel print in it. He oversaw the placement of the television cameras broadcasting a ceremony bestowing honorary citizenship on Winston Churchill, directing that a fine-looking contingent of marines in dress uniform be framed in the middle of the picture, and a black marine stand in the center. He had a fondness for well-executed rituals and ceremonies (his Catholic upbringing), and understood that the design of his jet, the furniture and paintings in the White House, and a well-executed state dinner contributed to the nation’s prestige, and that in the cold war, prestige was a weapon.
Much of what King Zaher and Queen Homaira of Afghanistan experienced during their state visit reflected changes instituted by the president and the First Lady. State visits had formerly been cumbersome three-day affairs, but Kennedy had cut the schedule in half so he could host more foreign leaders. Because he had decided that traveling out to Andrews Air Force Base to greet a visiting head of state was a waste of time and that the Ellipse and the White House South Lawn were more impressive backdrops for an arrival ceremony, King Zaher and his party landed in a helicopter on the Ellipse and drove to the White House by motorcade. Because Kennedy had been impressed by the soldiers in breastplates and plumed helmets lining his route to the Élysée Palace during his state visit to Paris, he decided to replicate the spectacle at the White House, so that when Zaher arrived that evening for his state dinner, marines in dress uniform lined the White House driveway. His first honor guard had represented all four services, but after noticing that the marines looked healthier, had better posture, and wore more elegant uniforms, he eliminated the other services. Guests at state dinners had customarily sat side by side at long tables, unable to converse with anyone except their immediate neighbors. He and Jackie had introduced round tables to facilitate conversation among larger numbers of guests. During Thursday’s state dinner he undoubtedly asked Zaher to sign his place card. No other president had entertained as many foreign heads of state in such a short space of time as he had, and he would have added Zaher’s card to about sixty others in a collection that Bradlee recalled him boasting about, “as pleased as a small child talking about his bug collection.”
The guests trooped outside after dinner to watch a drill team of marines illuminated by crisscrossing searchlights perform on the South Lawn, and to hear the Air Force Drum and Bugle Corps bagpipers play Irish melodies. Kennedy had recently noticed that the Jefferson Memorial was sited directly opposite the South Lawn and had asked General Clifton to find some old searchlights and illuminate it as an experiment. He drove over to inspect the memorial, liked what he saw, and ordered trees on the South Lawn trimmed so that guests would have an unobstructed view. Tonight was the first time it had been lit for a state dinner, and it provided a stunning backdrop to the festivities, “brilliantly lit, like a rounded jewel,” one guest reported. Afterward, he ordered it illuminated every evening.
Jackie had read that fireworks were the customary welcome for honored guests in Afghanistan, so the evening concluded with the first display in White House history. Because Kennedy feared that a twenty-minute display might be too long, boring his guests (and himself), he cut it to ten minutes. The organizers shot off twenty minutes’ worth of fireworks in ten, and the display was so brilliant and loud that calls from people convinced that the city was under attack jammed police switchboards. The evening concluded with a lone bugler standing in a spotlight, sounding taps.