THE WESTERN TOUR
Despite his New Frontier rhetoric, Kennedy preferred oceans to mountains, golf courses to prairies, sailing to hunting, and swimming to fishing. He was the most widely traveled man to become president but had probably crossed the Atlantic more than the Continental Divide, and was more comfortable in Europe than in the American West. The West was also tricky for him because local dignitaries invariably presented him with cowboy hats or Indian war bonnets, and he disliked wearing anything on his head, particularly something making him appear ridiculous. When a delegation of Indian chiefs in Idaho gave him a feathered war bonnet during a campaign stop, he had finessed the situation by joking, “The next time I watch television, I’m going to root for our side,” but he was certain to face more headdresses and cowboy hats on his Western conservation tour.
No one on his staff or in the press corps believed he was motivated by a love for the region or an interest in ecology; everyone understood that this “nonpolitical” trip was entirely political, his first campaign foray of the 1964 election. Before leaving, he had armed himself against a skeptical press corps that was mocking him as “Johnny Appleseed” and “Paul Bunyan” with a repertoire of self-deprecating jokes such as “Mr. Chairman, my fellow nonpartisans,” and “It is obvious that this is a nonpartisan trip—I’m not going to a single state I carried.” But he was serious about drawing large and enthusiastic crowds, and told Jerry Bruno, who was advancing the trip, “I want the crowds—I want those crowds to be there!”
The day before he left for the West, the Senate ratified the Limited Test Ban Treaty by a vote of eighty to nineteen, a larger margin than had been anticipated and one making it easier for him to pursue more agreements with Moscow. When he embarked on the tour, the NBC correspondent Sander Vanocur thought he seemed happier than he had in months, and the test ban victory was undoubtedly a factor.
He stopped in Milford, Pennsylvania, to speak at a ceremony honoring the descendants of Gifford Pinchot, Jr., the first head of the United States Forest Service. They had donated Grey Towers, their family’s chateau-style mansion, to the Forest Service as a training center, and he had added the ceremony to his schedule because it fit with the conservation theme and Pinchot had been the uncle of his lover Mary Meyer and her sister, Tony, Ben Bradlee’s wife, and he was curious to see where they had spent their childhood summers. Both women joined him on the flight to Milford. It was the first time he had seen Mary since Patrick’s death, and Tony admitted to feeling a “little rivalry” with her sister.
He delivered a plodding speech to ten thousand spectators filling a hillside facing Grey Towers. While speaking of his administration’s creation of three National Seashores, he said, “I don’t know why it should be that six or seven percent only of the whole Atlantic Coast should be in the public sphere and the rest owned by private citizens and denied to many millions of our public citizens.” The fact that much of the remaining 93 percent of coastline was in the hands of old-money families like the Pinchots, and new-money ones like the Kennedys, somewhat undermined the nobility of his statement. After finishing, he turned to Mary and Tony’s mother, Ruth Pinchot, and asked to see her house, a summer bungalow near the estate. Forest Service officials had spent weeks preparing to bore him with a lengthy tour of Grey Towers and were crestfallen when he raced through the mansion to leave time for visiting Ruth’s modest cottage. The New Deal had made Pinchot a fierce right-winger, but he turned on the charm and she showed him what he had come to see, photographs of her attractive daughters as little girls. She told friends that she had atoned for welcoming the devil into her house by doubling her contributions to conservative causes.
He flew on to Ashland, Wisconsin, where he made a lame joke about Calvin Coolidge, and then to the University of Minnesota Field House in Duluth, where he gave a speech that Vanocur called “dreadful” and “one of the worst reporters could remember.” Even Bradlee’s magazine was critical, with Newsweek reporting, “The message that he brought to the people made heavy listening and the President’s obvious unfamiliarity with the subject was uncomfortable.” A large crowd turned out the next morning at the Grand Forks airport, pushing down an airport fence to get at him. But at the University of North Dakota Field House he droned on about conservation, a funereal atmosphere descended on the audience, and reporters ranked his speech the worst of his presidency. Jerry Bruno had turned out the crowds, but even he was disappointed by their lack of enthusiasm, calling them “unresponsive and restless.” The president would try different themes, he said, “but the sense of emotional attachment just wasn’t there.”
There was something petulant about his performances, as if he were a sulky child being forced to visit some distant and tiresome relations. Not only did conservation and natural resources bore him, but he had left Washington during a busy and momentous week. The House was voting on his tax cut, liberals on a House Judiciary subcommittee were adding tough provisions to his civil rights bill, a dialogue with Castro suddenly seemed possible, two important fact-finding missions were heading to Birmingham and Saigon, and a delegation of American grain traders was meeting with its Soviet counterpart in Canada to discuss a sale of American wheat, a deal that would require his approval and was certain to be controversial. He had once said that he wanted to be president because the White House was “the center of action.” This week, when the action in Washington was frenetic, he was thousands of miles away, lecturing restless audiences in states that would probably go Republican anyway. He was also missing Caroline’s first day back at school, and while he was in Grand Forks, she and her classmates rode the Goodyear blimp, an excursion that had almost been canceled after a sniper fired .22-caliber bullets into the aircraft. When the excursion ended, Jackie told a Goodyear representative that her son was “just crazy about planes” and would probably become a pilot.
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KENNEDY ARRIVED IN BILLINGS, MONTANA, on a Big Sky day of brilliant sunshine, low humidity, and razor-sharp shadows. Seven thousand people in a city of fifty-three thousand had packed the Yellowstone County Fairgrounds grandstands. More milled around the parking lot, kicking up dust and passing a girl head over head so she could shake his hand. He thanked Senator Mansfield for introducing him by praising “his high standards of public service” and his role in ratifying the test ban treaty. Until now, he had avoided talking about the treaty on the assumption it would be unpopular in these Goldwater strongholds. But when he said that the treaty would “bring an end, we hope, for all time to the dangers of radioactive fallout,” and represented “a first step towards peace, and our hope for a more secure world,” there were loud cheers and applause, and the reporter Peter Lisagor noticed a look of total surprise on his face.
He immediately discarded his prepared text and spoke extemporaneously about peace, the treaty, and nuclear war. Suddenly, he was campaigning again, pumping his fist up and down and stabbing the air with his forefinger as he said, “What we hope to do is lessen the chance of a military collision between these two great nuclear powers which together have the power to kill three hundred million people in the short space of a day.” When he described his treaty as “a chance to avoid being burned,” the cheers and applause grew even louder. Vanocur called the speech “an exercise in political discovery,” saying that if he had won reelection reporters would have called it the moment when he discovered a winning strategy.
Throughout his career Kennedy had demonstrated a talent for recognizing and profiting from revelatory moments like this one. During his 1946 congressional campaign he had slogged through a banal speech about patriotism and the sacrifices of war to an audience of Gold Star Mothers. Sensing their disappointment, he abandoned his text and said, “Well, I think I know how you ladies feel. My mother, too, lost a son in the war.” The women wept and rushed to the podium to grab his hand and hug him. Powers thought it was the moment he won the election. It was also, like his speech at Billings, a textbook example of Walt Rostow’s observation “A politician is a communicating instrument both ways. He receives and sends communications, words, images, actions. Kennedy was awfully good at it.”
While running for president, Kennedy would read placards, study expressions, and often replace a prepared speech with an extemporaneous one that he believed would resonate with a particular audience. The students listening to him speak on the steps of the University of Michigan Student Union during the 1960 campaign were so boisterous and enthusiastic that he abandoned his speech and shouted, “How many of you who are going to be doctors are willing to spend your days in Ghana? . . . How many of you are willing to work in the Foreign Service and spend your lives traveling around the world? . . . On your willingness to contribute part of your life to this country I think will depend the answer of whether a free society can compete.” His aide Richard Goodwin, who saw the performance, believed that he had “inadvertently, intuitively . . . tapped into a still-emerging spirit of the times.” After witnessing similar moments, Eleanor Roosevelt told Schlesinger that he reminded her of her husband because both seemed to gain strength in the course of their campaigns. Great leaders drew vitality and strength from their crowds, she said, and Kennedy was the first man she had seen since FDR to have that quality.
Roosevelt had understood that the Depression-battered American people longed for “freedom from want.” At the Yellowstone County Fairgrounds, Kennedy learned that they wanted freedom from the fear of a nuclear war. Montanans living in the shadow of the Cuban missile crisis and surrounded by Minuteman launching pads, prime Soviet targets, were not interested in hearing him pontificate about dams, conservation, and the joys of the outdoors, subjects they understood better than he did. They wanted to hear about peace.
He concluded his Billings speech with a reference to the high court of history, saying, “I am confident that when the role of national effort in the 1960s is written, when a judgment is rendered whether this generation of Americans took those steps . . . to make it possible for those who came after us to live in greater security and prosperity, I am confident that history will write that in the 1960s, we did our part.”
On the flight to Jackson Hole he told Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall that he was looking forward to running against Goldwater, whose opposition to the test ban treaty was at odds with the concerns of voters like those in Billings. It would be “quite a campaign,” he said.
The Jackson Lake Lodge had magnificent views of the Grand Tetons’ spiky peaks, but his only concession to one of the West’s great wonders was to train his binoculars on a distant moose while standing behind his cabin’s picture window. While flying to Great Falls the next morning he decided to ditch his prepared speech, a dull recitation of his “nine-point program” for resource development, and talk about peace and education. He scribbled down some ideas and facts, writing, “12 million boys and girls under 18 live in families whose total income is $3,000 a year or less.”
An Indian chief welcomed him at the airport. Each had dressed in a traditional costume: the chief in skins and feathers, Kennedy in his city-slicker regalia of white shirt with French cuffs, dark tailored two-button business suit (chosen in part because it masked the outline of his back brace better than a three-button model), white handkerchief in his breast pocket, polished handmade shoes, and a sober tie anchored by a PT 109 clasp. Politicians crossing the Continental Divide usually abandoned or loosened their ties, but Kennedy never dressed down. He had explained his reasoning to Charlie Bartlett as they were leaving Washington to fly to Wisconsin and campaign in its 1960 primary. Pointing to several overcoats, he asked which one he should wear. Bartlett recommended the tweed one because it looked “more like Wisconsin.” He disagreed. “I’ve got to take the black one because that’s the coat I always wear,” he said, “and the most important thing when you are in one of these things is always to be yourself.”
Before embarking on the conservation tour he had told Jerry Bruno that while he was in Great Falls he wanted to visit Mike Mansfield’s father, who was in failing health. Mansfield was almost moved to tears when Bruno informed him of this. “Did the President really say that?” he asked. “Would you thank him for me? Tell him I really appreciate that.” On his way into town, Kennedy stopped at Patrick Mansfield’s small wood-frame bungalow and met the nineteen Mansfield relatives who had gathered to greet him. They included Mike Mansfield’s brother Joe, a captain in the Great Falls Fire Department. After leaving the house, Kennedy said, “I wonder how many majority leaders in the U.S. Senate have had a brother working in the hometown fire department. And that fellow wouldn’t take a job in Washington for any amount of money.”
Instead of reading his prepared speech at the Great Falls High School Memorial Stadium and saying, “I am delighted to be in Great Falls, the heart of the first fully operational wing in the country consisting of one hundred and fifty Minuteman missiles,” he spoke about the dangers those missiles posed. He reminded the audience that their state had “concentrated within its borders some of the most powerful nuclear systems in the world,” making it impossible to ignore “how close Montana lives to the firing line.” In distance, they were “many thousands of miles from the Soviet Union,” but “in a very real sense . . . [they were] only thirty minutes away.” His job, he said, was “to make sure that those over one hundred Minuteman missiles which ring this city and this state remain where they are.” He praised the test ban treaty as “a step toward peace and a step toward security . . . that gives us an additional chance that all of the weapons of Montana will never be fired,” and concluded by speaking of human resources instead of natural ones, decrying the fact that children growing up in poor homes were less likely to complete high school or attend college. In his opinion, the nation should concern itself “with this phase of our resource development, our children.”
At an afternoon groundbreaking for the nation’s largest nuclear power plant, in Hanford, Washington, he said that he had strongly supported the test ban treaty, and “it may well be that man recognizes now that war is so destructive, so annihilating, so incendiary, that it may be possible . . . for us to find a more peaceful world. That’s my intention.”
Salt Lake City had voted overwhelmingly for Nixon in 1960. Its mayor had endorsed the right-wing John Birch Society, and its most prominent political leader, former secretary of agriculture Ezra Taft Benson, was an elder in the Mormon Church and a confirmed Birchite. Kennedy was presumed to be so unpopular that his decision to speak in the Mormon Tabernacle to a largely Mormon audience was being compared to his appearance at a 1960 convention of Protestant ministers in Houston, during which he had explained why his Catholic faith should not disqualify him from the presidency. Yet the largest and most enthusiastic crowd of his trip cheered him as he rode through downtown Salt Lake City at dusk in an open limousine, and eight thousand people had filled the Tabernacle to capacity and a similar number had packed a nearby hall and the Temple grounds, where loudspeakers would broadcast his speech.
He received a five-minute standing ovation when he took the podium. Instead of pandering to this conservative audience, he delivered a blistering attack on Goldwater’s simplistic foreign policy, receiving sustained applause when he criticized his “black-and-white choice of good and evil.” He urged these conservative Mormons to recognize “that we cannot remake the world simply by our own command,” and asserted that “every nation had its own traditions, its own values, its own aspirations. . . . We cannot enact their laws, nor can we operate their governments or dictate our policies.”
The applause was even louder when he proclaimed that the test ban treaty meant a “chance to end the radiation and the possibility of burning.” He mentioned that he had just flown over the Little Big Horn, where Indians had killed General Custer and several hundred of his men. After calling it “an event which has lived in history,” he reminded them that in the case of a nuclear war, “We are talking about two hundred million men and women in twenty-four hours,” adding, “I think it is wise to take just a first step and lessen the possibility of that happening.”
Among those applauding had to be people who had heard him deliver a hawkish cold war speech here in 1960, during which he had called Khrushchev “the enemy” and excoriated the Communists for seeking “world domination.” Tonight, he quoted Brigham Young’s commandment to his followers to “go as pioneers to a land of peace.” When he finished, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir burst into the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” thunderous applause shook the hall, and the cheers were the loudest Bruno had ever heard him receive. While he was still on the stage, the United Press International correspondent Merriman Smith rushed up and said, “That was a great speech, Mr. President.” Peter Lisagor overheard Smith and thought his praise was unseemly and unethical, but admitted feeling the same way.
Like Billings and Great Falls, Salt Lake City had demonstrated that the test ban treaty had support across the political spectrum, and that peace could be a powerful issue in 1964. Bruno thought that the best political advisers in the world could not have persuaded him any better to run on a peace-and-disarmament platform. Vanocur concluded, “If JFK had any doubts about his reelection—and I think he had none—they were dispelled by this trip.”
He was ebullient throughout the rest of the tour. At an airport ceremony requiring him to push a button activating a generator at a dam 150 miles away, he joked, “I never know when I press these whether I’m going to blow up Massachusetts or start the project.” While waiting for a disembodied voice to announce over the loudspeakers that the generator had engaged, he said, “If we don’t hear from him it’s back to the drawing boards.” When the announcement finally came, he deadpanned, “This gives you an idea of how difficult it is to be president.” He arrived at the lodge in Lassen National Park in such a good mood that he allowed himself to be photographed feeding a tame deer—the kind of staged scene he usually avoided—and gave the deer so much of the bread in his cabin that there was no toast the next morning. After a speaker introducing him in Tacoma praised Mount Rainier, he invited everyone to travel east and marvel at “the Blue Hills of Boston, stretching three hundred feet up, covered in snow.” He told another audience, “I do not think that these trips do very much for people who come and listen . . . but I can tell you that they are the best educational three or four days for anyone who holds high office in the United States.”
During a 1949 debate over federal funding of low-cost housing for veterans, he had shocked his fellow congressmen by denouncing the American Legion for opposing the measure because it wanted to curry favor with real estate and construction interests, declaring on the floor of the House, “The leadership of the American Legion has not had a constructive thought for the benefit of this country since 1918.” His staff and friends had urged him to apologize and retract the statement. Instead, he attacked the powerful Legion again. After veterans and even Legion members rallied around him, he told Powers that the experience had taught him that “more often than not, the right thing to do is also the right thing politically.” His Western tour had taught him that ending the cold war might also be the right thing politically.
He spent Sunday in Palm Springs relaxing at the singer Bing Crosby’s ranch. He swam, watched football, and probably also watched an interview with Everett Dirksen on ABC’s Issues and Answers. Asked what issue was most likely to “sink” the president in the election, Dirksen named the budget, specifically “a recurring deficit” and “public debt.”
While rehashing the trip with his advisers around Crosby’s pool, he asked Bruno how he had turned out such big crowds. “It’s because they really like you, Mr. President,” Bruno said. (After Bruno returned to Washington, he asked Lincoln if Salt Lake City had pleased him. She replied, “Jerry, he is very, very happy.” When Mansfield returned he told his secretary, “Thank God, he got out of the state without being harmed.”)
The darkest immediate cloud on Kennedy’s horizon was Jackie’s cruise. Angry letters were deluging the White House, attacking her for vacationing so soon after Patrick’s death, feeling well enough to travel but not to resume her duties as First Lady, and not choosing to holiday in the United States. While at Crosby’s ranch, Kennedy drafted a press release that portrayed the cruise as a wholesome family excursion, writing, “W.H. announced that Mrs. Kennedy would join Prince and Princess Radziwill, her sister, on a cruise in the Mediterranean. Mrs. Kennedy will be accompanied by her son John—and the Radziwills by their two children. They will travel on the _______ owned by Mr. Onassis which has been secured by Prince Radziwill.” Very little in his draft was or would prove to be true. She was not bringing John, nor were the Radziwills planning to include their children. Saying that Prince Radziwill had “secured” the yacht implied that he had chartered it and that Onassis would remain behind.
Back in Washington the next morning he edited the release so that Salinger could deliver it at a noon briefing. When he finished, it read (with the passages he had crossed out in brackets, and his handwritten additions in italics) “while Mrs. Kennedy is visiting Greece she will accompany her sister and brother-in-law Prince and Princess Radziwill on a [ten day] cruise in the Eastern Mediterranean aboard the yacht Christina. [Mrs. Kennedy will be accompanied by her son, John Jr., and the Radziwills by their children.] The yacht has been secured by Prince Radziwill for this cruise from her owner, Aristotle Onassis. [The cruise will begin October 1st.] Mrs. Kennedy plans to depart tomorrow evening at 10.”
It was more accurate than his first effort but still gave the impression that the cruise was a Radziwill production, with Onassis merely supplying his yacht. Pamela Turnure joined Salinger at the briefing and said it was “possible some people will join the cruise,” but because the list had not been finalized she would not be announcing their names. Asked if Onassis would be on board, she replied, “Not to my knowledge.”
That morning Kennedy scribbled the kind of to-do list that people compile after being away. Underneath a reminder to tell Lincoln to “get moccasins darkened,” he wrote, “Study of Cuba—previous administration,” evidence that he was monitoring the conversations between Attwood and Lechuga.
He ran into Arthur Schlesinger as he was heading upstairs with Jackie and the children for lunch. After Caroline curtsied, John copied her, leading Jackie to say, “I think there’s something ominous about John curtsying,” and John to protest indignantly, “Mummy, I wasn’t curtsying, I was bowing.” Kennedy generously praised Schlesinger’s Salt Lake City speech even though he had discarded most of it. Later that day, Schlesinger handed him a memorandum describing a proposed agreement with Harvard University for his presidential library. Kennedy objected to its stipulation that Harvard would turn over the land whenever “the President” requested it. Despite his successful Western trip he was taking nothing for granted. “What if I’m no longer president?” he asked Schlesinger. “We’ve been assuming this would be a two-term proposition. What if it isn’t?” Schlesinger assured him that Harvard would turn over the land even if he served only a single term, but he still insisted on changing the language so it read whenever “President Kennedy” requested it.