WASHINGTON, NEW YORK, NEWPORT
On Monday morning Kennedy expressed “outrage and grief” at the bombing and charged that “public disparagement of law and order”—a reference to Governor Wallace’s defiance of the integration of Birmingham schools—had “encouraged violence which has fallen on the innocent.” It was a strong statement but not a passionate one, and ignored the demand of civil rights leaders that he send federal troops to the city to protect its black population. He could have read it to reporters himself instead of having Salinger release it, or proclaimed a day of national mourning, attended the funerals, or sent a relative. His muted reaction resembled that of many white Americans. After Medgar Evers’s assassination and the bombings of black homes and gathering places in Birmingham, another bombing—even one killing four children—seemed less shocking. He praised “the Negro leaders of Birmingham who are counseling restraint instead of violence” but offered only an FBI investigation and the cold comfort of protection from the all-white Birmingham police force. He may have failed to speak out more forcefully because he would be delivering a nationally televised address urging support for his tax-cut bill on Tuesday and addressing the United Nations General Assembly on Friday, and he believed that giving a high-profile speech on civil rights during the same week would dilute their impact.
On Tuesday, the White House press office released a mendacious statement about the First Lady’s trip to Greece. The result was a New York Times story headlined “President’s Wife Will Stay with Sister Near Athens on Private Island” that reported she would spend the holiday in a house rented by her brother-in-law and sister, Prince and Princess Radziwill. Kennedy presumably hoped to mitigate the damage by keeping Onassis and his yacht under wraps until the last minute, then present the cruise as a spur-of-the-moment decision.
On Tuesday morning he asked the American ambassador to Moscow, Foy Kohler, what he thought about the possibility of U.S.-Soviet cooperation in outer space. Kohler said that his suggestion to Ambassador Dobrynin of a joint lunar mission had left the Soviets “intrigued.” Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrei Gromyko had given the idea a cautious welcome but was waiting for some concrete proposals. Kennedy admitted not having considered the details but said he wanted to proceed and believed the United States could save a lot of expense by teaming up with the Russians. “I would like to have an agreement on when we both try to go to the moon,” he added. “Then we wouldn’t have this intensive race—I don’t [even] know whether they are going to the moon.”
He did not tell Kohler that he had decided to propose a joint moon mission at the UN on Friday, nor did he tip his hand to the NASA administrator Jim Webb when they met on Wednesday to review the space program. But he did say that he was beginning to question whether beating the Russians to the moon should be a top priority and was concerned that Congress and the public had become concerned about its cost. “If the Russians do some tremendous feat, then it would stimulate interest again,” he said. “But right now space has lost a lot of its glamour.”
Webb countered that a successful lunar landing would be “one of the most important things that’s been done in this nation.” Throughout their conversation Kennedy appeared to be thinking out loud and challenging Webb to offer convincing arguments for continuing the space race. He finally asked flatly, “Do you think the . . . manned landing on the moon is a good idea?” When Webb said he did, Kennedy asked, “Could you do the same with instruments much cheaper?” Webb gave a rambling reply about inspiring American youth, searching for extraterrestrial life, and discovering how the universe was formed. He concluded, “And I predict you are not going to be sorry, no sir, that you did this.”
Kennedy remained skeptical. He repeated to Webb what he had recently said to McNamara: “This looks like a hell of a lot of dough to go to the moon when you can . . . learn most of that you want scientifically through instruments, and putting a man on the moon really is a stunt and isn’t worth that many billions.”
After meeting with his foreign policy advisers on Tuesday, Kennedy approved an “eyes-only personal” cable to Lodge outlining an interim plan that amounted to treading water. The cable told Lodge that, given the reluctance of the South Vietnamese generals to move against Diem, there appeared to be “no good opportunity for action to remove present government in immediate future.” Lodge should meanwhile “apply such pressures as are available to secure whatever modest improvements . . . may be possible.” The cable left open the possibility of a “more drastic effort [a coup] as and when means become available,” and gave Lodge permission to delay or reduce or reroute U.S. assistance to Diem, “bearing in mind that it is not our current policy to cut off aid entirely.” It enumerated a familiar list of reforms—freedom of press, free elections, and “a real spirit of reconciliation” toward opponents—that Lodge should pressure Diem to enact, adding, “We recognize the strong possibility that . . . pressures may not produce this result, but we are convinced that it is necessary to try.” The cable also announced that Kennedy had decided to send McNamara and Taylor on a mission to Vietnam to assess the progress of the war, but promised that they would confine their inquiries to military matters, assuring him that “all political decisions are being handled through you as the President’s senior representative.”
Lodge was not fooled. He cabled back that distinguishing between the political and military was “quite impossible.” McNamara and Taylor would have to call on Diem, he would have to accompany them, Diem would take the meeting as a sign that the administration had decided “to forgive and forget,” and it would “put a wet blanket on those working for a change in government,” that is, the generals plotting a coup.
The press interpreted the McNamara-Taylor mission as more evidence of Kennedy’s indecisiveness. In fact, he was sending McNamara and Taylor to Vietnam not to help him decide what to do, but to make it easier for him to do what he had already decided: begin withdrawing U.S. advisers and reduce assistance to the Diem government. Schlesinger noted in his diary that the president was hoping “that their experiences there and Lodge will convince them that it is harder than they imagined to win with Diem.”
He instructed Taylor and McNamara to tell Diem, “Unless you do certain things we have described, we are going to pull out in a relatively short time.” Yet if Diem did make the requested reforms, according to Taylor, this “would make possible a termination of the situation [the U.S. troop presence] in about two years.” In other words, if Taylor and McNamara reported that Diem was instituting reforms and the war was being won, as the Pentagon was claiming, Kennedy would have a rationale for a phased withdrawal of the advisers. If they reported that Diem’s intransigence was crippling the war effort, he had reason to withdraw even sooner. Taylor wrote in his memoirs, “If further deterioration of the political situation should occur to invalidate the target date [for withdrawal], we would have to review our attitude toward Diem’s government and our national interests in Southeast Asia.” In short, Kennedy had made it clear to Taylor and McNamara before they departed that he planned to remove American advisers regardless of the military situation.
• • •
MINUTES BEFORE DELIVERING his televised tax-cut address to the nation on Wednesday evening, he became concerned that it did not sufficiently explain how his bill would benefit the average American family. As the network crews prepared the Oval Office for the broadcast, he huddled with Ted Sorensen and Walter Heller, revising the text.
Like most presidents, Kennedy had taken office with little understanding of economics, but unlike most of his predecessors, he had been determined to master the subject. Heller had spent the last two years giving him such a strong grounding in Keynesian economics that by 1963 he felt that Kennedy had become “a good orthodox economist.” Director of the Budget Kermit Gordon, who had witnessed their informal tutorials and read many of the hundreds of memoranda flowing between them, believed that Kennedy had become a good-enough economist to teach a respectable college course on the subject. He sensed that Kennedy had immersed himself in the subject not only because he thought it would make him a better president, but because he was naturally curious, “a person who liked playing with ideas,” and who “in moments of relaxation . . . would sometimes give an inordinate amount of time to matters that just happened to intrigue him.” Kennedy had also become intrigued by nuclear science, and his probing questions during an Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) briefing at a Nevada test site left the AEC’s chairman, Glenn Seaborg, convinced that he possessed “a first-rate intellect, a mind of a caliber equal to that of the best scientists I have known.” Walt Rostow, who served on Bundy’s White House staff and briefed Kennedy on foreign policy issues said flatly that “his mind was capable of grasping any idea,” and grasping it so quickly that he would become irritated if someone went on too long, repeatedly saying, “All right, I’ve got the idea. But what do you want me to do about it today?”
Heller had persuaded Kennedy that a tax cut would stimulate demand, increase growth, lower unemployment, and prevent a recurrence of the mild recessions of 1957 and 1960. Although it would add to the federal deficit in the short term, its simulative effects would eventually produce a surplus. Kennedy had proposed a tax cut in his 1963 State of the Union speech, and then in a special message to Congress during which he made the argument that under certain circumstances a budget deficit could be healthy. Making his proposed tax cut even more extraordinary and controversial was the fact that the economy was growing, the deficit was substantial, unemployment was at 5 percent, and the business community was not demanding tax relief. Another president might have been content with this record, but he was determined to double the growth rate he had inherited from Eisenhower, preside over eight recession-free years, and leave office with the nation enjoying full employment—a record befitting a great president. During a meeting in December 1962 that he recorded, he told his economic team that the 1960 recession had ruined Nixon. “If you’re running for reelection in 1964, what is it you worry about most?” he asked. “Recession. That is what I’m worried about. . . . I don’t think the country can take another recession. Otherwise we are likely to get all the blame for the deficit and none of the advantage of the stimulus in the economy.” And so, motivated by a typical Kennedy mixture of optimism and hubris, ambition and realpolitik, he had proposed his tax cut.
It received a lukewarm reception. Conservatives in both parties and most businessmen viewed a planned deficit as reckless and unnecessary. The bill languished in the House Ways and Means Committee for months, blocked by Southern Democrats extracting revenge for his civil rights policy. After it finally cleared the necessary committees, the House scheduled a vote for September 23. Before then, Kennedy wanted to explain it to a public that seemed neither to want it nor to understand it.
Forty-five seconds before going on air he received a call from Teddy reporting that he had just had lunch in Belgrade with Madame Nhu, who was attending the same conference of parliamentarians. “This woman kicks me in the nuts,” he told his younger brother, referring to her recent comment that she did not feel “terribly safe” with him in the White House, “and the next day you have lunch with her.” Moments later, he was telling the American people that his tax cut was the most important piece of domestic legislation in fifteen years, a statement certain to unsettle the civil rights movement.
Current tax rates were harmful, he said, because they did not “leave enough money in private hands.” His cut would mean “more jobs for American workers,” “more buying power for American consumers and investors,” “new protection against another tragic recession,” and “higher family income and higher business profits and a balanced federal budget.” Decades later, Republicans would offer the same arguments to support their own tax cuts. But in 1963, Kennedy was proposing cuts to the extraordinarily high marginal rates that Congress had passed to finance World War II and fight inflation. His bill reduced the top marginal rate from 91 to 70 percent, and the lowest from 20 to 14 percent. Nevertheless, in response to his speech, the chief GOP spokesman on taxes in the House attacked him for taking “an unprecedented gamble” by cutting taxes without reducing expenditures, and for “playing Russian roulette with our destiny.”
Kennedy and Heller went to the Cabinet Room afterward so they could speak without being overheard by technicians dismantling the broadcast equipment. Senator Fulbright called to praise the speech as a model for how a president should educate the public. (After the 1960 campaign, Kennedy had told a journalist that he thought Nixon’s fatal mistake had been talking down to the American people. “In a presidential campaign,” he insisted, “you have to talk ‘up,’ over their heads.”) Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon and his wife also telephoned to praise him during what Heller described condescendingly as “a touching little call” that led to Kennedy referring to them as “dear Phyllis” and “dear Dougie.” Heller did not mention Kennedy’s praising him, a curious omission for a man priding himself on his sensitivity and social graces, particularly since if anyone deserved plaudits, it was surely Heller, whose ideas and phrases Kennedy had just articulated.
The previous month, Heller had complained to the Washington hostess and Democratic Party stalwart Katie Louchheim that Kennedy seldom praised his staff, finding it difficult, he said, “to give one a boost or a pet.” Instead, he had the curious habit of offering praise to a third party. “He said great things about me to my brother, of Kermit Gordon to his child,” he told Louchheim, adding that Arthur Goldberg had said that he never would have resigned to accept a seat on the Supreme Court if he had known how much the president valued his services as secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare. Louchheim was sympathetic, saying that she had sometimes noticed a “chilly aloofness” in Kennedy. “How warmly he greets ‘pals,’” Heller said bitterly, “leaving the official [presumably Heller] standing there ill at ease.” For pals like Powers and O’Donnell there was “the warm handshake and ‘let’s go swimming’ check [that] he never tends the help.”
Heller, like many in the administration, had fallen in love with Kennedy. It was a platonic affair, but romantic nonetheless, and his complaints sounded like someone bitching about a callous lover. The White House aide Walt Rostow spoke of an “unspoken but very powerful affection—going both ways” between Kennedy and his staff, and the CIA director, John McCone, a Republican, claimed, “Never in my time in public life have I known a man who drew so much affection from those with whom he closely dealt.” Schlesinger was also in love. In the summer of 1960, he had condemned Kennedy’s choice of Johnson as a running mate as “evidence of the impressively cool and tough way Jack is going about his affairs,” calling him “a devious and, if necessary, ruthless man,” and saying, “My affection for him and personal confidence in him have declined.” Kennedy invited Schlesinger to Hyannis Port three weeks later and seduced him all over again. After a four-hour cruise complete with Bloody Marys, swimming, and target shooting, Schlesinger was describing him as “warm, funny, quick, intelligent and spontaneous.”
• • •
AT THE TIME OF THE BIRMINGHAM BOMBING, the civil rights bill had been stalled in the House Judiciary Committee, where liberals led by the chairman, Emmanuel Celler, were threatening to add amendments that would make it unpalatable to moderate Republicans. During a mass meeting in Birmingham on Monday, civil rights leaders had urged the government to send the Army into the city to protect the black community. King had endorsed their request, calling the city “in a state of civil disorder” and accusing Wallace of fomenting “an atmosphere of violence.”
If Kennedy refused to send troops to Birmingham, he would embolden the House liberals insisting on a tougher civil rights bill, but occupying it with federal troops would smack of a second Reconstruction, leaving its white population still more embittered and hostile. He believed that the only realistic solution was to facilitate communication and accommodation between leaders of the black community and moderate white businessmen and politicians, presuming they existed. To promote this, he decided to send a two-man committee to the city to mediate between the communities. Bobby’s first choice for the assignment had been Earl Blaik, a sixty-six-year-old retired West Point football coach whom he had recruited the previous year to resolve a feud between the NCAA and AAU that was threatening the U.S. Olympic effort. Blaik had persuaded General Douglas MacArthur to join him and they had quickly settled the dispute. Bobby hoped they could perform the same magic in Birmingham, but this time Blaik refused to involve MacArthur on the grounds that the assignment was too taxing for an eighty-year-old man. He suggested General Kenneth Royall, who had supposedly integrated the troops while serving as Truman’s secretary of the Army. Bobby called Royall, who agreed to serve if Blaik joined him. Bobby pressed for an immediate commitment, explaining that the White House wanted to make an announcement within the hour, before the president met with a delegation of black leaders. Had he and his brother been in less of a hurry, they might have discovered that instead of presiding over the integration of the Army, Royall had fought it, telling a congressional committee that he did not believe the armed forces should be turned into “an instrument for social evolution.” The black journalist Simeon Booker, who would soon expose Royall, would also reveal that in Blaik’s eighteen years as head coach at West Point he had never had a single black player on his team. As with Kennedy’s other mistakes, his impatience and his preoccupation with public relations lay behind this one.
Dr. King opened the White House meeting by declaring that the Negro community in Birmingham was reaching “a breaking point.” He warned that without “a new sense of hope and a sense of protection” there could be “the worst race rioting we’ve ever seen in this country.” Kennedy asked if there was any hope. King said there were “many white people of goodwill,” and agreed that troops could not solve the problem. He suggested that the attorney general visit the city and attempt to open lines of communication.
Kennedy announced that he had asked Mayor Albert Boutwell to send a delegation to the White House on Monday, and had appointed Royall and Blaik, “two very good men,” as his personal emissaries. If the situation continued to deteriorate despite these measures, he would consider troops. He urged the leaders to consider the larger historical picture. “If you look . . . at any of these struggles over a period across the world, it is a very dangerous effort,” he said. “So everyone just has to keep their nerve.” If they responded with violence, they risked losing the support of whites of goodwill, and once that happened, “we’re pretty much down to a racial struggle.”
The leaders praised the Blaik-Royall mission at a press conference, with King calling Kennedy’s pledge not to allow the property and rights of Negro citizens to be trampled, “the kind of federal concern needed.”
Kennedy flew to New York that evening. While he was dining at a friend’s apartment, two men in a station wagon hurled a paint bomb at his parked limousine, spattering it and hitting a Secret Service agent. It was not known if they had been targeting the president. He did not leave the Carlyle for the United Nations until late the following morning, allowing time for him to cross Madison Avenue and spend several minutes in the basement of Klejman’s gallery, staring at the floodlit statue of the handsome Greek athlete.
He told the UN General Assembly, “Today the clouds have lifted a little so that new rays of hope can break through,” and that although “the long shadows of conflict and crisis envelop us still, we meet today in an atmosphere of rising hope, and at a moment of relative calm.” Speaking of “a pause in the cold war,” he said, “If we can stretch this pause into a new period of cooperation . . . then surely this first small step [the test ban treaty] can be the start of a long and fruitful journey.” He proposed “agreements on measures which prevent war by accident or miscalculation,” “further measures to curb nuclear arms,” and a treaty “to keep weapons of mass destruction out of space.”
He waited until the end to spring his surprise. “Finally, in a field where the United States and the Soviet Union have a special capacity—in the field of space—there is room for new cooperation, for further joint efforts in the regulation and exploration of space,” he said. “I include among these possibilities a joint expedition to the moon.” After asking, “Why . . . should man’s first flight to the moon be a matter of national competition? Why should the United States and the Soviet Union . . . become involved in immense duplications of research, construction, expenditure?” he proposed sending to the moon “not the representatives of a single nation, but the representatives of all our countries.”
He concluded on a note of grandiloquent optimism that reprised his American University speech: “I believe the problems of human destiny are not beyond the reach of human beings.” The test ban treaty might not end war, resolve every conflict, or bring freedom to every nation, he admitted, but it could be a lever, “and Archimedes, in explaining the principles of the lever, was said to have declared to his friends, ‘Give me a place where I can stand—and I shall move the world.’ My fellow inhabitants of this planet . . . let us see if we, in our own time, can move the world to a just and lasting peace.”
The usually dour Soviet foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, was smiling broadly as he stood in the receiving line. When he reached Kennedy he held up the line for several minutes to deliver a personal message from Khrushchev. When a reporter asked if this new spirit of détente would last, he replied, “It must last.”
Kennedy’s proposal had caught everyone, including most in his own administration, by surprise. A boldface, front-page headline in the New York Times proclaimed, “Kennedy Asks Joint Moon Flight by U.S. and Soviet as Peace Step.” The Washington Post banner headlines said, “Kennedy Urges Joint Moon Trip” and “Air of Optimism About Cold War Marks U.N. Talk.” His proposal was described as “a sudden reversal of the Administration’s position on the ‘space race’” and “the first step toward pulling out of the costly ‘moon race.’” Like his civil rights speech and his American University “Peace Speech,” his UN address had been a closely held secret until he delivered it.
Before Kennedy left the United Nations, Adlai Stevenson briefed him on a memorandum he had received from William Attwood, a member of his staff who had recently completed a tour as U.S. ambassador to Guinea. Earlier that week the Guinean ambassador to Cuba had informed Attwood that Castro resented being pushed around by the Russians and might be prepared to reach an accommodation with the United States. After hearing similar comments from other African diplomats, Attwood, who during his career as a journalist had held a groundbreaking interview with Castro, wrote Stevenson a memorandum asking for authorization to contact Cuba’s UN delegate, Carlos Lechuga, with a view to determining whether Castro was willing to participate in a secret dialogue.
Attwood had been two years behind Kennedy at Choate and knew him well enough to craft a memorandum that would catch his attention. He opened by saying that he was proposing “a course of action which, if successful, could remove the Cuban issue from the 1964 campaign.” Instead of offering Castro a “deal,” he recommended “a discrete inquiry into the possibility of neutralizing Cuba on our terms,” and argued that the present policy of isolating Cuba was leaving America “in the unattractive posture of a big country trying to bully a small country,” and aggravating Castro’s anti-Americanism. Given this, he said, “We have something to gain and nothing to lose by determining whether in fact Castro does want to talk and what concessions he would be prepared to make.” He offered to solicit an invitation from Lechuga and travel to Cuba as a private citizen. His diplomatic rank was high enough to guarantee that his conversations with Castro would be serious, yet he was not so well known that reporters would notice his absence. Their meeting would be “purely exploratory” and the president could decide afterward whether to pursue more formal negotiations. “At the moment,” Attwood wrote, “all I would like is the authority to make contact with Lechuga. We’ll see what happens then.”
He handed his memorandum to Stevenson on Thursday. Stevenson liked the idea but said, “Unfortunately, the CIA is still in charge of Cuba.” He nevertheless promised to raise it with Kennedy. Averell Harriman, who happened to be at the UN mission at the time, said he was “adventuresome enough” to favor the scheme and suggested running it past Bobby Kennedy because of its political implications. Stevenson briefed the president on it while he was at the UN, and Kennedy approved Attwood’s request to arrange a chance social meeting between himself and Lechuga.
After a week that had seen Kennedy proposing to end the space race, sending a high-level delegation to South Vietnam, lobbying a skeptical public to support his tax cut, persuading Dr. King not to demand troops in Birmingham, and authorizing secret negotiations with Cuba, he arrived in Newport in a slap-happy mood.
To mark National Library Week, the White House had just released a list of his twelve favorite books. Ten were nonfiction, and nine of those were biographies, including Margaret Coit’s John C. Calhoun. (Jackie believed he liked biographies because he was “looking for lessons . . . from history.”) The only novels were Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, an early-nineteenth-century work about the ambitious son of a carpenter whose attempt to crash Parisian society resembled Joe Kennedy’s struggle to win the acceptance of Boston, and Ian Fleming’s From Russia with Love, the best of the James Bond novels. Kennedy liked Fleming’s books so much that he was attempting to write his own Bond-style thriller involving a coup d’état masterminded by Vice President Johnson. There are no notes for the book among his personal papers, so he was probably keeping the plot in his head. He called Chuck Spalding periodically to bring him up to date, recounting that in one chapter, “Lyndon has tied up Mrs. Lincoln and Kenny O’Donnell in the White House closet and he’s got a plane to take them away.”
While cruising on the Honey Fitz on Saturday afternoon he persuaded Paul and Anita Fay to act in a Bond homage that would be filmed by Chief Petty Officer Robert Knudsen. He assigned everyone parts before docking at the private pier in front of Hammersmith Farm, not realizing that the reporters Frank Cormier and Merriman Smith were shadowing the Honey Fitz in a speedboat and watching some of his amateur dramatics through binoculars. Their article reported that Fay had “stretched prone on the long pier . . . clowning with Mr. Kennedy for the benefit of a government photographer.” The president then walked down the pier and “laughingly put his foot on Mr. Fay’s stomach.”
Jackie persuaded the Secret Service agents to play supporting roles. “We’re making a film about the President’s murder,” she told them, “and we’d like you and the other agents to drive up to the front of the house, then jump out and run toward the door.” The agents agreed and followed in their car as the president and his friends drove up from the pier. When they arrived, she said, “Look desperate, like you heard shots and are concerned that the President might be hurt and you need to respond fast.”
Luckily for Kennedy, Cormier and Merriman witnessed only his film’s tamer scenes. Knudsen recalled that at one point in the filming Kennedy clutched his chest and fell flat onto the pier. While he was down, Knudsen said, Jackie and her friend Countess Vivian Stokes Crespi had “simply stepped over the President’s body—as if he were not there.” They were followed by Fay, who stumbled and fell on top of the president. At that moment, Kennedy spewed out some red liquid (probably tomato juice) that he had been holding in his mouth. Knudsen shot the scene several times, with Fay taking a turn at playing the corpse, and later wondered if the president had experienced some kind of “premonition.” More likely, the skit reflected his high spirits after a successful week, his love of the Bond thrillers, and a rich but carefully concealed fantasy life, a Walter Mitty streak he revealed only to his closest friends.
He was so furious with Cormier and Merriman that he stopped addressing Cormier by his first name. Two weeks later, Cormier dined with Salinger and O’Donnell at a lodge in Jackson Hole during Kennedy’s Western tour. Salinger chewed him out for being a “Peeping Tom reporter,” and said that writing about what he had seen in Newport had been “in terrible taste.” Cormier replied, “Well, if it was in terrible taste for me to write about it, it was in terrible taste for the President to do it.” O’Donnell, who seldom criticized the president, said, “I agree with you.”